Now Playing.
"Daily Pilgrimage to Scooter's" (MIDI version)
I'm running out of patience here. My whole life, people have told me to be patient while I've waited for things to happen; waited for people to get done in meetings, waited for documents to show up in the post, waited for mum and gran to leave the charity shops; waited for consideration, for understanding, for people to do things, and I think I've been exemplary in my patience. But now my patience is running out.
Within the past week alone, I've felt increasingly as though I have no control over my life. First, my car breaks; not in a way that impedes its ability to function, but just enough for it to make a lot of noise every time I turn a corner. Then, my mattress breaks, and my own bed threatens to give me sciatica. Then, the carpeting underlayment under my studio desk breaks. Then, my television breaks. All of this breakage and I don't have enough money to get the least of those things fixed. I find that it would cost exactly the same to get the television repaired as it would to get it replaced; the maintenance guy tells me I have to move all the furniture out of my studio before he can even think about repairs to the floor; my mattress needs replacement, but the only vendors around here are shady as fuck; my car needs $1.700 worth of work done to it, but not before I give it $45 worth of petrol to even get me to the shop.
I guess it took me until this week to truly grasp the consequences of quitting my office job in June 2020. In exchange for partial protection from COVID-19, the corporate feudal state has demanded my sense of stability. I wasn't making a lot of money, but I could afford things without worrying too much; car repair, VSTi plugins, the occasional pilgrimage to Scooter's (if not a daily one), things I needed, things I wanted. When I quit my job, I had a plan in place for making money as a voice-over artist and a composer, not realising that, in 2 years' time, voice acting would be wrenched away from me by generative AI. I wasn't making a lot of money as a voice actor, either; it was a bit leaner than my job, but it was something. So now, all we have are non-options. Going back to work: not possible because everyone's resigned themselves to the idea that COVID-19 is the new flu that never goes away. Getting a work-from-home job: yeah, like I'm gonna let a corporate keylogger install itself onto my computer.
Even Tumblr has been taken away from me. Between a huge corporation more interested in absorbing ad revenue and a trans-hating trustfunder with a shrine to Elon Musk in his walk-in closet, I'd take the huge corporation. I know how to control my information going into a corporate feudal aggregator, but Matt has a personal grudge against transwomen and non-zionists, before we even talk about the AI Scraping for Fun and Profit. It's as I feared; Matt caused an exodus of transgender people from the website; not just women, but men and non-binary people too. Not only did this send the message that it's okay to bully people off your website, it also caused many of the people I followed to leave. I don't know where they went, but it wasn't Cohost and it wasn't Neocities. The predstrogen debacle is shaping tumblr into another fascist stronghold on an internet full of fascist strongholds.
The rest of it is too personal for the website. All I can say is that, over this past week, I've been keenly aware of just how far beyond me my entire generation and the one immediately after it has advanced. I'm still here in my personal time-warp while the rest of my graduating class is off in far-flung locations, playing house. Sure, some of them might be tied up in divorce proceedings, others might be in jail, most are probably in profound debt, but they're living, while I'm just existing. I'm not interested in "trading lives" with anyone, because whoever I trade with will probably go mad and kill themselves after a day or two of my life; I just want to know where they went to figure out how to be functional human beings.
--Weed Day 2024--