Now Playing. "Castle in the Cave (Blaster Master Area 2 Failright Mix)"
from Chou Wakusei Senki Mettafaito by Naoki Kodaka
First of all, "phoneasel" is a contraction of "phone easel", obviously. It's easier to write that way. A phoneasel is, as it sounds, a thing you use to prop your phone up on a surface so you don't have to hold onto it all the time.
Essentially, a phoneasel is what's left behind after you've emptied a desk calendar. I'm not too sure that Andrews McMeel Publishing doesn't actually plan for people to use their calendar stands in this manner because of the shape of the stops. Some calendars have 2 stops, one at either end, allowing you to set a phone down horizontally, like a computer screen; some have one wide stop in the middle, letting you set a phone down vertically. Some have a single stop that spans the entire width of the stand, letting you alternate between orientations. And that's a good idea, really; it satisfies the 1st and 2nd bits of that old mantra, "reduce, reuse, recycle". Reduce waste by making something that can be reused.
Anyway, I have 9 of these. This is representative of 9 desk calendars, each one beginning on 1 January and ending on 31 December. Admittedly, 1 of these is still being a desk calendar; it's my 2024 Peanuts one. Currently, Charlie Brown is losing a baseball game because Lucy refuses to catch the ball. It's not late enough in the year yet to use 2024 as a phoneasel ("Phoneasel Day" in my house occurs on or around about 12 August, whenever enough pages are gone that I can set my phone on the stand), so technically, I only have 8, which is still representative of nearly a decade's worth of desk calendars. I remember each one as though its pages were still getting torn off to reveal the next one every morning...
2023: Peanuts again
2022: Jeopardy!
2021: The Joy of Painting
2020 and '19: Garfield
2018, '17, and '16: Dilbert
I didn't know about Scott Adams being such a racist, imperialist turd until his strip got cancelled 2 years ago, and so I'd been getting my mum Dilbert desk calendars that she could set out on her desk whenever her coworkers were being annoying. Prior to that, she'd been getting planner notebooks instead, but we couldn't find one for 2016, so...
For me, time stopped in 2016 when Donald Treason got elected. I don't know precisely why, but it still feels like 2016 to me. By looking at my collection of phoneasels, not only can I see with my eyes that time has passed, but I realise just how much time has passed. It's a long-ass time, spuds. It feels like only last month that I was chatting with lilacwaterlily on tumblr, starting a joke blog where I pretended to be an alien from the planet Mezzar Prime, coming up with tiny little snippets of Star Trek fanon with stillboldlygoing, following people who were posting about Devo, recording South Park radio theatre on my iPhone 6, and writing Fairlight CMI songs in Hydrogen. I was halfway through my penultimate Dilbert calendar when I wrote that Blaster Master cover, but I still remember doing it. I remember writing tracknames like "Lead Stop" and "Melody A01", auditioning samples I found in the Super Mario Sunshine sounds rip, mixing it all down in Audacity. But none of that happened recently. Indeed, real live actual people are alive now who did not exist as anything more than a fertilised cell back then. 19-year-old university students in 2016 are now 27-year-old husbands or mothers of 3. 25-year-old composers with receding hairlines and goatees back then are beautiful, voluptuous 33-year-old media pirates now. Time has passed, spuds, and I don't know how to feel about that.
I guess the problem is that I'm seeing all of this progress around me; kids growing up, people getting married, people having children, people moving out of my flat, others moving in; and I'm comparing it against myself. Without doxxing myself, I haven't been able to work in an office setting since 2020 so I've had a lot of time to just sit here and think. For me, that's dangerous. I was left alone with my thoughts during summer break when I was working for the after-school programme in 2019 and I had the worst existential crisis I'd had at that point since I started the job in January and drew Rocko a whole bunch of times. While I was working during the school year, I didn't have the time or the inclination to stop and think about how inferior I was. The same thing in 2020; while I was working, I was doing the exact kind of busywork my autistic brain needed, leaving no time or inclination to think about inferiority. For the first time in recent memory, working at my office job, I felt human. I felt like I actually existed. A bus would stop for me, an door would unlock when I passed my lanyard in front of it, my boss asked me questions and expected responses; I felt human. And now, what do I have?
The only thing that keeps me going is the fact that I'm trans and I refuse to let the radfems win. If I kill myself, that's another notch in their autographed Harry Potter wand case. By staying alive, I'm an immovable stumbling block on their road to puritanical fascism. But, at the end of the day, that's all that I have.
Sorry, I'm just a bit lonely today is all.
--17 June 2024--