this is very ramble-y because i wrote this just before i passed out, so bear with me. i'm going to start a lot of points but i won't finish most of them and the ones i do probably won't make much sense.
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i'm reading and watching a lot about the 2018 Parkland shootings. i remember when it happened, both of us do. we were born after the year 2000. at the time, i understood it was a big deal, but i didn't know there was videos of the shooting itself until today, if that drives anything home - as in, i never bothered to dive into that. plus, i'm Canadian, so it wasn't exactly pressing. what caught my attention more was the response to it: March For Our Lives. at the time, i was very much in support of it, but now, my feelings about it are more complicated.
it all seems so antiquated now, the whole of the Trump era. you and i both know we're no were near out of the woods yet - naively supposing Trump was what got 'us' into the 'woods' in the first place - but the iconography of pre-COVID America burns like a stain now that it's gotten worse, or more numb, naively supposing those things are different from each other. that's what is so interesting to me about the Parkland shooting, it's kind of a perfect portrait of that point in history: the violence, the music, the parties involved, media's pornographic spectacle of death, the kids on the streets, "from my cold dead hands!", X González, Marco Rubio, south Florida, Raider Klan(1), Alex Jones, Vice Media, Rick Santorum, Zachary Cruz, "saw an early screening of the movie 'I Can Only Imagine' a few weeks ago. great movie! inspiring message!", the futility, America itself: everyone and everything. it's my era, to be honest. that's a part of the appeal to me. i may always think of myself as a 2010s kid, and i know what you're thinking - "what about 'nostalgia is the ultimate cowardice', dipshit?" well, i can hold two contradictory views at once because i am a God damn human being.
i think about when E----- held a walkout but gave you a list of people she wouldnt mind getting shot up. i don't know how to begin to express how meaningful that is to me (i emphasize 'to me' because i know she's just a bitch and i shouldn't attach incredible importance to her simple hypocrisy). that back-and-forth is exactly what i mean by the futility of it all. it sums up my feelings about the entire situation at this point in my life, perhaps it's its ultimate expression. as in, what does it say when an organizer of one of the rallies is just as indifferent to life as the people she's supposedly organizing against? is she just one person (yes, she's an asshat) or result of the situation itself? is she just one asshole who saw a chance at clout (again, yes. don't overthink this) or is the subject of that clout, being the situation, what let her be an asshole in the first place. however, that is not to excuse her, fuck her.
i know my heroes Marx and Hunter Thompson and Burroughs would not have let their guns be taken from their cold dead hands and shit, which is the position i've more or less drifted to, but i honestly find American gun culture totally fucking repugnant. i, unfortunately, am a lot like my parents: i don't like crowds, i was antagonistic to house parties. i don't like the prideful, and i'm not crazy about diesel or four-strokes. i'm a praire boy, but too pale to be a redneck, and my appreciation of them is pretty arms-length. so, i'm not gonna be a chud about guns, but it's not like i don't understand it. we're all crackers here, we're coming from the same place. we're all Eurotrash who got off on the promise having our own land to control once our countries got too full and the richest amongst us wiped the New World slate clean of the indigenous millions already living there, so we jumped to the gun when we got here, because the gun represented our control. we weren't serfs anymore, the kings were far away, so they couldn't draw their weapons on us. the only weapons around were ours. we were pioneers and this was our land.
as the centuries added up and North America got older, our countries started to get crowded again. half a billion people can't all be pioneers. the land is starting to all get bought up by the new richest amongst us, so the rest of us are out of it. we're no longer all landowners, we're tenants again. the symbolic power of the gun is waning as it seems we're losing the guns themselves, along with the land we affirmed we once owned with them, which to me is what the Parkland shooting and March For Our Lives is really about: the New World is old now, so we have to act like it. our salad days are gone. regardless of politics, the NRA doesn't know how to deal with that if the only path is to move onwards.
i want to apply this interest somewhere, like, i want to write about it. i feel like i have something to say about it but there's like a million novels and movies about school shootings already: Hey Nostradamus!, The Dirties, Elephant, We Need To Talk About Kevin, The Triflers, Sabrina(2), etc. it's kind of a redundant topic, especially nowadays. how many times can America and death be summarized before it stops feeling like the real thing, making it pointless to even try it?
(since there's no footnotes in Wattpad, i'm resorting to this.)
(1) i know Raider Klan had nothing to do with any of this, but whenever i think of a region, i think of their music. so, there's no way i'm talking about south Florida in the late 2010s without talking about Soundcloud and Raider Klan.
(2). Nick Drnaso's Sabrina is not about a school shooting. it is about a woman who goes missing and how the people close to her become retraumatized when she becomes the subject of conspiracists. i include it because the bit about conspiracy theories fit into shootings well enough.
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a quick vent:
thinking about how i've never been an industrious reader at all, or worse yet, that i may have always been a poor reader, makes me very, very insecure. it's kind of silly to dwell on, though. it's been so long since i had a problem with reading, and since then i'm at least thought of as being super proficient with words in general. i don't understand why this still bothers me. again, it's been so long. but, even with all that said, i still worry about it. knowing how good you are at it (or how good you were at it, as you would tell me) makes me think, like "shit, i'm an idiot". i don't mean that to guilt you or anything. you have nothing to be guilty about. i'm just hatin' cuz you winnin'. sucks to suck, right?
i'm being annoying sensitive about this stupid ass bullshit, which makes me feel stupider about it. i just had to get it out somewhere. i felt too stupid to write, so i wasn't going to tonight, but i can't help it anymore. i have to now.
maybe i do have ADHD, if it even exists.
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if my followers found my Wattpad, i would die, or i wouldn't. who gives a shit? fuck them.
