Rabid Sharks
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Prison Blog

In which Possum recounts his experiences as an offender in the system.

Possum Bones is autistic. He has identified as a dirty kid in the past, and he’s attended multiple rainbow gatherings. He has several years left to serve in the Washington Correctional system.

He has been making art since he could sit up. He communicates better in writing than speech. If you are interested in the experience of an autistic person doing prison time, check out his Prison Blog. If you are a fan of comic art, underground/outsider music, Lovecraft, Clarke Ashton Smith, Murakami, Cixui Liu, etc.

Parasitic Images 11/9/18

There was a stupid pep rally in the auditorium that day. A girl asked me to come with her parents and her to this cabin in the woods She’d be really bored, she said.

I don’t like to remember it.

I could not be in jail. I could be a billionaire with no criminal record and I still wouldn’t like to remember those days. But. We have ways of breaking our inner horse.

All that those memories are, are emotional images. Hardly more than a falsehood. It doesn’t matter what feelings an image invokes. That image is still just as much a reproduction and those feelings are just the consequences of human neurophysiology. That’s what I say to myself, to try and avoid falling into a feedback loop of bitterness and regret.

The thing about love is that the circumstances don’t matter. It could be pure evil or self-administered torture, if its motivated by love, even Yoda would struggle to say no. In that way, love’s worse than hate. Hate rarely goes so far as to jeopardize it’s host. That, by the way, is what emotions are. Parasites that don’t play nice with each other. They fight for domination of the host.

Some are more or less symbiotic. Pleasure, fear. Love is by far the most parasitic emotion, in that there is the least benefit to the host compared to the potential harm.

Supposing you hate someone because of something they did to you. You avoid them or behave confrontationally. This is a vestigial defense mechanism. (Vestigial because, as sapient beings, we are capable of using logic to determine whether avoidance/confrontation is necessary to defend ourselves from a perceived threat [whether physical or political], so we don’t need hate.)

Now suppose you love someone. Yet, yet, you could argue there are examples that don’t fit my model; for the purposes of this experimental paper, fuck off. Anyway. You love them because. Why? Can you answer? Can you then explain what purpose is serves vis a vis your survival? No, it only serves to (maybe) benefit the survival of their person that you say you love. There is of course, love for people you’re closely related to. This may improve the survival of your DNA. But you know and I know that isn’t the same as your own survival. You might as well join Greenpeace. (That was a joke.)

I think I’ve made my point. Fuck love.

Elisa Carlson