Let's Talk About Sex!
Inside of you are two wolves. Inside of me is one horny monkey. We are not the same.
General News
POV: It’s Monday night, 12 hours after your weekly newsletter has gone out to your 24 loyal subscribers (ilysm). You’re winding down for the evening and thinking to yourself, “Surely, nothing news-worthy will happen a week before the next newsletter.” You open up Bluesky whilst your dog is pissing in the grass. You see…this. At first, you start to feel upset over the sheer stupidity of it all. Then, you want to laugh because there’s just no way that’s real. After fact-checking it and picking up your dog’s poop in a plastic disposable bag, you begrudgingly open your laptop and start drafting the newsletter for next week. Here we are! Happy Monday!
Pack it up, trans medicalists! Turns out you never needed those prescriptions and surgeries all along. Suck on that, Big Pharma! (You can’t see this, but my head is in my hands as I make this joke; oscillating from Violently Depressed and Deliriously Enraged). This line of thinking reminds me of a TedTalk that I won’t share (because I hate that I’ve already shared something from Fox News) about how “you can elevate your testosterone levels if you just stand in Power Poses.” It fills me with a special kind of fury and anger. I have to manage, though. It’s literally only April of Year One. What’s another three and a half years of this shit anyway, am I right?
Look, I’m not doing Economics Discourse this week. I don’t even want to try to keep up. The only thing I’ll say is that China is Based. Now, I do want to share with y’all something that I do consider significant and worthy of our attention. Porn Discourse. Well, specifically, Porn Addiction Discourse, and how the “addiction” doesn’t exist at all. Not only am I excited about this subject because I genuinely love Sexuality Discourse, but I think that the linked article pairs well with something that I mentioned in a previous newsletter. This study may be a few years old, but I think that it points to something that I've always been saying: sexual repression is a tool of the religious conservative right-wing in order to control people. If you make people feel ashamed and disgusted at themselves, they’re easier to manipulate and exploit. Kind of like how the Catholic Church guilt-trips the Masturbators and Homosexuals.
Not only have I been saying this, but I’ve been seeking literature on the Sociological and Psychological Overlaps Between Religious Cults and Fascism. Do you wanna know what falls into that overlap? You guessed it, Sexual Repression! In a religious cult, you can maintain structures of power and control by sexually exploiting your followers. Just ask that one guru that my parents followed for the first twenty-ish years of my life! Telling your loyal followers to “relinquish their worldly attachments” in pursuit of “spiritual salvation” is akin to an abusive partner saying, “I’m the only person that you need and can rely on, everyone else is wrong and will betray you.” Or it’s akin to the Orange Comrade saying, “BE COOL! The economy is about to burst, but we’ll Ascend into Greatness!” Also…I don’t want to talk about this, but it has to be linked for the sake of the Discourse. I keep trying to tell y’all, it’s all connected! Political and spiritual manipulation are not that different! I feel like Charlie in that one episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Never trust anyone who claims to have all the answers, folks! That’s how we ended up here in the first place. Anyway, if you live in Chicago, I have some more opportunities for you to do some good. I’m just going to make a List because trying to link all of these in one paragraph looks messy. We’ve got our work cut out for us here in the Windy City.
Back to the News, this absolute menace to society was finally caught. Fuck him. The Orange Cumrag continues to halt funding for important academic programs and research. It’s only a matter of time before academia completely collapses. I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t get into any PhD program, isn’t it? Illinois passed a bill banning move-in fees for renters, which is a great start to making housing more affordable and accessible. I may be forgetting something…oh! Yeah. Students at the University of Chicago had their visas revoked. It’s happening everywhere. (Shout out to NTDaily, where I wrote articles in 2016…ignore my deadname). I’m just going to leave this here. This isn’t news, but it’s something worth taking note of. If you need a good laugh right now, I recommend this news about the UFC Fighter Who Could (Not). Every day, we slip further and further into a fascist hellscape.
Personal News
POV: You don’t know where your future is headed, so you start Career Planning. You find out about a Certificate in Metropolitan Planning and Urban Development at a local university and apply. They grant you admission. You think about it and you say to yourself, “You know, if I’m gonna go back to school, why not go for the program that I’ve always wanted?” You turn down the offer and wait for the admissions cycle for the program that you really want. You pour everything into that application. Trump gets elected. After his inauguration, he puts DOGE in charge of slashing funding, which causes a slew of academic institutions to rescind offers and reject more students than ever before. Ergo, your dream program denies you admission. Not only are you hurt by the rejection, but you’re scared for your future. You’re back where you were before, trying to Career Plan. (In this economy? Get real!) One whole calendar year later, you submit the same application to the same certificate program at the same place where you declined admission. You don’t know whether to scream or laugh. You do neither. Instead, you write about it in your newsletter.
Applying for jobs has been fun, I guess. I have an interview next week for an Office Assistant job with a Union. Definitely looking forward to making more money than I currently make, but mostly excited to pivot away from the Non-profit Industrial Complex. The last thing I want to do with my one wild and precious life is be a fucking manager. Finger’s crossed that the interview goes well. What else has been going on in my life? I’ve been dealing with a random sinus infection. Being sick in bed granted me plenty of time to watch movies, which was nice. Nothing worth reporting–wait, just kidding! I need to talk about Monkeybone. Truly an allegory for Carl Jung’s theory of Individuation. I can’t stop thinking about this. [Insert a meme that’s like, “Inside of you are two wolves, inside of me is one horny monkey, we are not the same.”]
New Beirut album out Friday! Talk about a Good Friday, am I right? I’m really looking forward to this album, y’all. The tiger imagery feels especially significant to me, as if he is communicating to me specifically. Truly wish this were the case. Some of y’all don’t know this about me, but I like to rock out. I’m looking forward to a new album by Volbeat in June. The singles they put out are pretty sick. Fun fact: I saw them live in 2012 (I think) with “Jimmy Cash” (image caption above); they were opening for Megadeth and that was my very first concert. Jimmy and I shared a lot of firsts. Anyway, Pissed Jeans seems to be putting out some new stuff? Half Divorced was such a fun album. To be honest, I’ve been putting off listening to A Day to Remember’s latest album. I just really hated their previous one, You’re Welcome (2021). I’ll get around to it. I’ve kind of been riding a synth wave lately. Cannot get enough of Polo & Pan. It’s tough having such a wide range of taste. One minute, I’m listening to Rammstein, then the next its synth-covers of Bach…then, also, this…
Poetry
POV: You’re still helplessly in love with your High School Sweetheart–who you know lives about a thousand miles away from you and you know you haven’t seen in about seven years, but he’s appeared in many of your dreams over the past decade–and you can’t seem to shake off this feeling that perhaps you’ve been struggling to find True Love because you already found it with him.
Nobody yearns like I do, I can guarantee you that. Anyway, this High School Sweetheart and I had a back-and-forth in a shared Google doc about philosophy (-ish) recently. The discussion brought me back to a poem that I’ve held dear to my heart for a very long time. Every time I read it feels like the first time. It’s a poem that speaks to the spirit of Fucking Around and Finding Out. This week’s poem is brought to you by living poet and professor Melissa Studdard. I met her once in San Antonio at the 2020 AWP Conference. She signed my copy of her book, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast (2015). I also went to the Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville when I was there. (Jimmy Cash, if you’re reading this: What if we kissed at the Margaritaville on the San Antonio riverwalk?)
P.S.
I got Chris Kluwe to read last week’s newsletter. I know this because I replied to a post of his on Bluesky with the link to the newsletter and he “liked” my reply. I hope he subscribes. Being unhinged on main is so fun, y’all should try it some time.
