No Ragerets

I should let you know this story might get me fired…

But let me tell you, "I regeret nothing."

I hated homework because I couldn’t read for more than 5 minutes without thinking about my own stories.

I wanted to make reality better because my life was the hardest, and no one would ever understand me. So I would daydream in loops of my own making about everything that wasn’t- and question everything that was.

My feet would run-dizzy to find my brain. My gut would leap out of my eyes and look for clues about questions I didn’t even know I was asking.

I got lost all by myself. All on my own. Alone. In the cave of conscious over-conscientiousness.

I could forget what I was thinking one moment, then carry on into the next moment wholeheartedly believing I would never forget what I was thinking for the rest of my life. A new memory every few seconds… My eyes caught more stars than hpv has ever caught genes.

People in high school would ask me things like, “Are you high or is that just your face?”

My high school enrolled students by putting our names into a bingo machine.

When the balls rolled out, they accepted students based on who could hold their breath the longest while reading backwards.

Also see:

(They accepted students based on bribe-clout and cocaine.

They accepted students based on hot dads.

They accepted students based on a risk vs. reward teenage pregnancy scale.

They accepted students based on a hula-hoop pissing contest.

They accepted students based on gang affiliation and amygdala size.

They accepted students based on a sliding scale of forehead to big-toe ratio.

They accepted students based on historical trauma and favorite “ethnic” foods).

I didn’t know the option to check off taking honors English was a real box; I just thought it was some kind of suggestion, like crosswalks or intimacy with Uber drivers.

I’ve always felt dumb-smart.

Not smart enough for school, but smart enough to make me feel dumb when someone called me smart.

I had a low self-image and high self-esteem.

My self-esteem would say things like, “You’re skin can stretch around the whole world.”

But my self-image would say things like, “You’re the forgotten foreskin of humanity that should never be found.”

A delightful contrast of half-baked, lopsided confidence. I really wanted to believe in myself; I just didn’t know how. You could tell me how to gain confidence, but I never experienced confidence as it was happening. Even when I did experience confidence, my brain had this great trick of skipping to the end of the stories I was telling myself. The end was dark, twisted, and never enough to want to re-tell my stories.

This is how my secrets became my anxiety. How my muscles stored gremlins of my self-destruction.

When I tell you I have rarely felt as dumb-smart as I did sitting in that cold, lifeless honors English classroom, I am only revealing a partial truth.

I couldn't sit still. My legs crawled underneath my desk like spiders looking for their glasses. My thoughts would fight with my pencil about what time it was. I would fake read and dream up ideas. I would picture myself teaching and daydream within dreams of dreams. This is when my daydreams had meshy frontal lobe layers for my developing senses to hide in.

I wrote a poem about a pig nuking themselves and everyone thought I wanted to kill myself.

But it was just my senses. I was really in tune with my developing senses. I’d hear and faucet dripping and think I could make a song out of it before the dream was over, and everyone was watching me staring at the facuet.

The voices in my head had wings back then.

Age finds its way to clip these wings over time. This is why we love kids out of unchanging worth, rather than morality, because morals can be stagnant reflections of our darkness, but unchanging worth never leaves and is still flexible enough to let kids have wings.

The joke in Honors English was all on me. I loved English. I loved writing. I loved stories. All of it. Everything we talked about was cool.

Those fake blind men we talked about told false stories, and everyone believed them so much that it became a whole genre and basic structure of most books.

“The journey… man,” cough-cough.

Odysseus got to let his wife bake for decades while he became everyone's favorite coming-home placeholder. The story structure of the hero's journey teaches us so much about what we learn “in-between” the beginning and end of all things.

Back in the Oddeseous times, society prayed their sky daddies would be close but not too close, because the ambiguity of myths and legends always left room for the common person’s truth. These days, we treat our idols differently. We want Queer Jesus in our pocket, on both shoulders of our consciousness and Daddy to tell us what we do.

Queer Jesus is a myth in society not unlike Elvis’s dance moves, steal culture, recycle, rinse, repeat and make it something old new so we can never tell the difference between dream and ideal.

We starve for certainty and neglect the uncertainty that creates room for our truth to move.

This is why Queer Jesus is so sexy now, because they’re a reflection of the culture we’ve recycled.

It’s no coincidence that mullets are back or that body hair is poking out of tank tops or that our vitamins are in cereal.

You follow the culture of apologies and you just may see how power moves the social structure of our society.

Don’t worry, Queer Jesus is only gay not Jewish(In America).

He’s Canadian-looking but never would admit it, with thick brass balls, hairy-toed sandals, and that classic long wavy hair that doesn’t exist without a little faith in dry shampoo and putting non-white people's hair on white looking person.

Queer Jesus not only smokes weed but tells you how much you’re not doing it right. He comes to visit you in your dreams through symbols and feelings of your prophesied intuition.

He is the solution to your insecurities.

When you look at the space between your hands and fingers, “Yea dude, that’s how much Queer Jesus loves you,” is what your Queer Jesus will tell you with the light, pressure, sensation, and heat bouncing off your skin.

Gods have always been gay, just needed to be fully leaned into.

We’re all 1 dick away- when bulging-compulsive-thought-thinkers are the only thing keeping us straight.

We all sit down and eat the fax that life is just a journey of lies.

Personality means a mask, and you think you're always telling the truth?

Everyone has a sprinkle of autism when they try to be more sexy than they feel. Like the Odyssey of me not being gay enough until I became a literal poster for the gay agenda.

It’s my resistance against totally not being gay that made the gays quiver. So I leaned in, fell in love, and now I don’t even need an arrow to quiver, because I’m a gay giver.

I know what sticks me, now.

In high school, and most of my youth I didn’t want anyone else to know how dark I was because I thought the big surprise of my personality had nothing to do with what people could see, so apparently, on the outside of my face.

My inadequacy was a mask for the good and bad people had to give me.

It was also a mask for the good and bad that I felt internally.

I wished in high school and the early parts of college especially that I would eventually be able to read a book start to finish, and then puff-poof-poof I’m telling everyone about this awesome book and my awesome dreams, and then we share these dreams like they never had the shapes we created until we made them together. I mainly wanted to see my dreams in action, instead of losing control within them.

I thought I was so good at hiding darkness. But I was hiding so much truth, that inherently I now see everyone has.

When I thought about stories, I went places, and I was beginning to realize how alone I was sometimes, when my stories felt personally unfinished.

You can only skate on so many ideals in 9th grade until something just has to get done.

So tell me how you’d tell a joke that would get a room full of bug kids, who willingly attend choir, and get good grades despite the divorce- how to laugh like they didn’t know everything?

As a white person, telling race jokes is like finding a dollar bill on the ground. You have to keep it tight in your pocket until the right moment comes to cash that bitch in-clean.

Because when there’s no dollars left in your pocket, people will take that to the bank and say it’s their opinion that you ain’t got the sense to say that shit.

I’m white. Indigenous. Ioway tribe, Bear clan. Squad.

But if you saw me, you’d see me as white. It’s not even close. I wish I had more clout in this game. But I just have cloud. Stay tuned for that one to take sense…it’s a floater.

It was a day in my life, sitting in Honors English, that our teacher was talking about Indigenous peoples who lived in the Americas. My people. Not her people. Her people were Jewish. I didn’t say shit about them(Kanye was still making good music back then with subliminal messages about racism that would take a decade for me and my friends to decipher. It's very interesting for a scapegoat to tell the tale of their own destruction without realizing it, because power and a lack of vulnerability and empathy have given them a new mask to wear. Money and power rarely know their true names).

I don’t know what the teacher was saying at all because I wasn’t paying attention. I was too busy trying to grab followers to form my new cult of protesting the system. It was my duty to make these nerds young again.

They had lost their senses and merely relied on their willpower, structure, and pain.

It was my duty to gaslight them with lies of their truth.

The teacher was saying some shit like "Blah-Blah- Indian Americans— bleh. Blew–blah.”

I bumped this guy's shoulder next to me, “That's my people,” I told him. “I’m native. Get off my land.”

He looked at my face, white as Swiss snow, and shook his head. His chest creaked rigidly, like his lungs were calling out for dopamine or some strong morphine. It was a painful laugh that managed to overshadow the guilt of his consciously inhibited brain development that he would keep a secret until later in high school when he got laid and the vulnerability of his true voice melted on this young woman's lap.

It’s how someone screams that’s closer to how they cum than how they talk.

Remember that much after you hear someone stub their toe

It was as if he was clenching his butt-cheeks to keep what innocent joy was left inside of himself whole until he found the right 1(and lost the w-last 1).

Talk about a tense crowd in this honors English classroom.

Part of the joke for me was that the class, as a whole, didn't know that I was Native. I was too wrapped up in it being funny, regardless.

If anybody called me racist, I would call them white. If the few non white people called me racist I was fucked.

Being Native was a pretty keen detail to lean into. This is why when you read stories and go places, take people with you…

“She’s Jewish,” I told my classmate next to me, referring to my teacher. “I figured she’d understand.”

I don’t think this kid registered what I said, but the teacher definitely understood and pulled me out of the classroom.

“You should apologize to the class. That was racist.”

“But I am Native,” I proclaimed on my land.

“Really?” She said, taking my proclamation away with the power of Abraham.

“Yeah- why do you say the N-word when we read To Kill a Mockingbird?”

“Because-Indian, I don’t look as white as Hitler,” she said.

So I went back into the classroom and apologized for actually being who I say I am, just like Jesus did when they wouldn’t let him be Jewish anymore.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I actually am- like actually Native.”

Like-like-like, I said like- like a lot.

Big stutter-er-er.

Big word-edger.

Keeps ya guessing.

“Like… like… I do have a native card, though. It’s my tribal ID. Technically, it's my only form of photo ID. Kinda messed up if you think about it. My family's culture got whitewashed down to numbers. I don’t even have a driver's license yet. My 4 greats-grandfather was a chief of the Ioway Tribe. His last name was Cloud. Chief White Cloud. My 4 greats-grandmothers' last name was Pigeon. Her name was Strutting Pigeon. Their pictures are hung up in the Smithsonian museum.” (This is one of the least exaggerated parts of this story- believe it or not.)

I sat down, and then we read “To Kill a Mockingbird”.

“Black people, too, have their own race cards,” my teacher explained. “They’re called food stamps and mixtapes.”

Then she said the N-word more times than Kramer.

That's also what I learned in Honors English. I really should have just read more.

I love reading.

My English teacher knew I resented her for knowing I liked English. So I gaslighted my angst and dropped the class later on. I had to fake a permission slip for my dad to sign. It was a whole thing. This teacher became my dads favorite teacher when I gave him the full run down.

I even gaslight all of this tension into creating a character of my own guilty conscience. But no teacher needs to get fired over this. We don’t need a cancel-search team looking for a Jewish teacher saying the N word……. or do we?

I moved into normal English. I really liked my teacher there. I started writing more after she told me, within the unedited mess of my paper, about the American Dream and The Great Gatsby, that I sounded like I loved to write.

I think more about the principle of all this, more than the lost learning I may or may not have been granted by keeping the class. I told myself I wasn’t good enough to be smart at something I loved, so I ended up procrastinating on one of my favorite passions until I finally gave in and started reading more. Even though I wasn’t “good” at it.

This lesson might seem obvious, but think about what makes you cry? What makes you laugh? Have you accepted your imminent death?

Are these questions hard to answer because of the pain they bring, or more so… because of the genuine love, vulnerability, and courage that is required within you to meet them?

Vulnerability is the bridge to accountability, regardless of your answers. Vulnerability is the stretch of the journey. It’s why people love Odysseus. Accountability is the hard lines that people label and police about.

Tell me about how easy it is to do something you’re not good at because you love it. It’s love, sometimes, that makes vulnerability so scary, not fear.

Fear is the mask love won’t ever tell you about because love doesn’t even know fear's name.

The invulnerable always miss the journey. Our names can only tell us what we hang on to.

These days, books are having more sex than Gen-X.