The Bogeymen

I'm an imperfect person. I'm certain most people intellectually understand that about themselves, but also maybe as many as 2% of the human population believes the earth is flat, so maybe "intellectually" is doing way too much work in this sentence. Or maybe the problem word is "understand." It would make more sense that the flaw is in the verb rather than the adjective. You can describe yourself any way you want to, but inevitably, the clarity is in the doing. The action. You might think of yourself as a "selective horse-fucker" but nobody is going to get hung up questioning your level of taste and discernment there.

Obviously the idea of horse-fucking is unpleasant, distasteful,* included here for puerile and infantine shock-value. A way to end an otherwise conventional paragraph on an arresting visual than doing something as boring as making a cogent point. But it's a risk to include it because now, forever, it exists on the internet. I know I publish this thing without my name on it, but there's a non-zero chance the author is known to most of you in some capacity, and even if not, it only takes one to completely yank off the cloak of anonymity. So far the only people I've told about this are people I trust implicitly, but who knows what could make this public? Maybe they could just share it with one wrong person, who shares it with one other, etc.?** Or maybe it could just take one wrong, careless post to prompt them to call you out publicly on social media or something. The wrong tone or the wrong topic... would it be so hard to imagine one person responding to his very post like: "you know, I was OK with the crack about 1950s Ukrainian fisting art photography, but I don't hold with horse-bothering. That's where I draw the line." And then all my Boomer aunts and uncles on facebook would find this thing and know exactly what I thought about them and their terrible politics. So yes, I guess there would be an upside.

I have to go into this understanding that the reckoning always comes. It came this week for a professional football coach based on emails he wrote in some cases 10 years ago, but that's low-hanging fruit. The clue there is in "professional football coach." What other class of American swaggers around with so impenetrable a demeanor of unearned macho disregard? They are, all of them, fuckers. Even the "God and family" ones. Which is simultaneously a trap, a lazy-ass point and a joke because, haha, they're all "God and family" ones.

There's lots up here now, in this blog and my old one (look at the front landing page on the right side for access to all that shit), some of which might be usable to make me look a certain way. The chicken-shit-ness of my anonymity has allowed me to take some swings, some earned, some total cheap shots. And my rhetorical style lends itself to sometimes approaching the edges of problematic language, though in every case (clearly, I hope) to parody, attack or defang it. But look, I also explicitly and repeatedly used the phrase "horse-fucking" in this very entry. I'm inviting some kind of scrutiny, even if it's only for some unfortunate google search-engine cross-linking.

I recognize the bullshit in the mincing prevarication, the pre-emptive hedging in the previous paragraph. I don't even know what you'd be mad about in particular, but I already want you to know: I didn't mean it like that. Because nobody ever does. The apology always starts with "I'm an imperfect person," and then usually proceeds to aggressively waste the time of anyone unfortunate enough to listen with walkbacks and halfheartedness and an undercurrent of resentful defiance beneath the grim, lawyer-crafted, eyes-down statement reading. Then the person goes away for a while maybe, but nobody is ever really satisfied. The incident is probably either indicative of or (way more tragically likely) covering up something a lot fucking worse, best case for the industry in question but probably, wincingly, for our entire rotten fucking culture. I know I'm supposed to be concerned about all the canceling. And worried for myself. This is the message to white men everywhere: oh no, they're coming for you! But I can't think of anything more useful than a bunch of white dudes being scared of something.

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*Unless the conversation is with a horse breeder I suppose, but even then you want to be careful in your listening comprehension to make sure he's talking about two horses.

**This actually used to be the ideal model for how blogs worked. Like a Ponzi scheme, but for your sweet, precious time.