i blink big blankness, blue and brightly bent

omnidimensional yet as flat as everything else

no shadows only that spot that’s always sneaking, the smear you say you see but know, sentiently, isn’t something

isn’t anything at all

that spot is the sense of all that isn’t sinister

to me, all of my adroitness is formed shapelessly 

is blinded by only my own laziness, droops or drops or doesn’t mind

my right limbs are strong but when i am exhausted their strength is a menace and i wish they were as feeble and slow to act as the limbs which i have left. i disassociated and let my strong foot slip down and a car roared into life, leaving me screaming and then scrambling to lie, while my right eye saw nothing and my left hand flapped in the air, distressed but useless. an entire half of the world is left out by my body, by some process seemingly intended, which i can drive, can override but usually am a passenger to anyway. instead the blankness sometimes asserts itself to me, a spot which either smears out the center or makes a cyclops of my field, a view of blue blue sky, laying the grass with half your face smashed forever into the dirt. 

“you little fool” she hissed “don’t you know, you’re supposed to just agree, and say it back sometimes so they hear it too. ooo! now it looks like i agree with you, and why do you want trouble for everyone!”

“but i don’t agree. saying it would make it true, in some ways, and my saying the contrary doesn’t mean...what you said...i don’t want trouble for you”

“none of do,” tiana interrupted “not really anyway, but if one of us says that they think we’re talking about it being a lie”

but we are aren’t we?

not me! not me. i need to agree, else they punish me too. i’d rather eat than be right, girl, and what you do with your belly is only your business. 

my feet elbows knees toes eyeballs hurt, indistinct exhaustion that tastes like dehydration, and all those things but yet i don’t want to sleep, too cozy in my delight, drifting in the sparkling sea and effortless.


we none of us grow up really, we just are ourselves for longer and longer, the surprise is found in the cycle instead of the self, the love is never lost if perhaps just shown to make missteps now and again: the mistake is not the step but the logic of causal relationships—the stone which awakens and thus demands it flies.


and yet



i’ve been insulated from the worst damages of life, partly from privilege, partly from wit, partly from the lifelong type of luck which turns me away at the moment of the blow. but can more than one thing go right at once please, or perhaps i mean that the grinding effects of multiple vectors of failures and mishaps and generationally maladaptive self reliance are culminating into a general stance of stroking my joys gently, from the distance of belief that i must protect others from the foundational erosion, swanning through the halls of a sandcastle on a pacific shore, lifting skirts to dance over the sinkholes, brocade growing heavier every step from salt and braken and the infinity of the encroaching sea.


“what do you want from me” it whispers, but i curl my toes against its chill and light another cigarette.

“why did you build your home so close to the deep” it sighs, and i shuff my heel against the rug rolling over the uneven ground.




“i see you see me” it murmurs, but my vision is already blurred from a single drop of boiling water.

the table is always a metaphor

was talking with a student today about institutional accommodations and gatekeeping of access to said inst, and we developed an interesting analogy which I expanded on and will now share with y’all:

Imagine society is a table. it’s That Table, where all the cruft and keys and lighters and deodorant and todo lists and daily pocket lint ends up, piled on each other and everywhere, to the point where it’s hard to see what’s table (the load bearing concept of society itself) and what’s incense ash (side effects of the society functioning). So you decide to pick up the place a bit and you look at the table and it’s time to make some decisions. Some things you want to keep are balanced on top of weird garbage that you realize you only kept in case you needed it later, and you’d like to use the table top itself. It’s sturdier than precarious cruft, and you probably want to leave a corner for when you make a cup of tea and immediately forget about it after setting it down.

 So you have some decisions to make! 

You might find that the things you want to keep have somehow become defined by what they’re sitting upon, even if that itself is something that really should have been binned originally. It’s taking up space, but you really want the stuff atop it and they’re not really seperable any more. 

Mostly this isn’t true, and you figure out ways to move the things you want onto the more stable surface, or stack them with intention to beauty or function rather than as need arose. You’ll find that the more begrudging pieces seem more out of place than before and you try to minimize the aesthetic damage or gain a desperate bravery and bin them anyway, not wanting your table layout to be defined by the garbage, always routing around it or crowding away. To not do this part isn’t really cleaning up, after all. It’s just shuffling the trash around. 

How does one determine the difference between what’s wanted and unwanted? Through the process of using the table, of cleaning it a few times? Of recognizing and evaluating the origins of one’s desires (why do you desire? is a big question my goodness)? 

But lacking a desire to clean the table is to say that you don’t care to distinguish between the wanted and unwanted, and you’ll either chew yourself to anxiety trying to use it or be reduced to no longer seeing it all. 

platonic

sos strange how much of a hurry i’ve always been in rushing dancing tripping toward what i could not say, saying it anyway to hear what it’s like and find the parts i broke in my haste, wasting the beauty to hope for higher pleasure later on, the divine pleasure of knowing already so you can just be radiant in that truth and very very still. stillness is valued by the cultures who have remained quiet on truth—then there are ones who shout it it frantically shaking their fists below their waistline running, ass hurting from their assertions, here we are still gathering armfuls, bushels poking our lips and eyes as we run like waddle footed children to the windmill we can’t even see for our thrushes. but love is like bread, you grind it and heat it and feed it to each other again and again says the wisest woman i know, who sat so still, hands politely composed, while i shuffled my boots, trying to flap pages hard enough to to catch the meotic truths, splitting my tongue relative to the haste only i could see. but what she didn’t say was that bread requires so much stillness while it grows in place, rising ready for the final stolid weight, we confuse the frenetic hunger and consumption with the end but it is made again and again and the stillness remains in the ontology. and love, made and bereft and made again, love is truth because truth is goodness and we can roll that dough into an ouroboros with only our lips, surrounded by the calmness of air lifting up the fact, synthesizing the base into the divine, stretching out infinitesimally lengthening wrapping all the disparity into a stolid finite pattern. we must wait, always, before truth may cross our lips, born between those barbicans of bone to smack our lips over it, coat it in grease and roll our eyes and feed each other crumbs until there seems to be nothing left, and again we must wait. 

eulogic 

so much of the anger is distant, a bell ringing in the fog from some ship or another, they are indistinguishable, indistinct from land here but still some sound shaking the air still some wave passing through me, inhaled through salty wind or trickling, a trickster stream, drinking deeply before i know what i’ve consumed. a place not even my own, never his, never again. who is to blame for blurring them together? such a crime, a greatest fear, becoming invisible to wear another’s face, yet we are not so different from all of us, any of us here, categories only i know, distinctions in a tilt or glint or inhale or caress (was there a caress? do you remember any soft loving glances? was there a softer word than you had spoken? who can say that they even know?) truth forged in memory as much as by mold, an angle of furniture. photographs taken while lagging behind find love in shoulders and hips where it was always missing in eyebrows and lips, rhyming there and there again to see the absurdity of naivety in my desire to mend what only i could break, over and over once more-- so i hear his bell out in the ocean, i smell their scent in cold gas stoves, i hear their breathing before they speak, but it’s long faded, scratching only the very back of my throat and no normative claim surfaces from those sounds baffling me from the colder wind. i crouch in the forest trembling, turn my head in the forest pacing, press my hand into the moss and blink to clear my nerves for the sound of birdsong and the rustling of small, bright creatures farther to the east.

So I thought it might be useful or edifying somehow to have a record of my experience getting spayed (haha) via a bilateral salpingectomy, both for myself and for anyone else who is considering having the surgery. I've wanted to have a permanent form of birth control since I became sexually active, so this experience is decidedly colored by that 20 year desire! I'm still on pain meds, and the immediacy of this surgery was definitely informed by the political situation, so forgive me if this account is a bit slushed :)


I'll just start at the beginning. The first week of December 2016, I went in for the pre-appointment at Swedish OB/GYN (Woman's Center) to meet the surgeon and sign the paperwork. This appointment was pretty short and mostly comprised of her wheedling with limpid eyes "Are you SUUUUUUURE you don't want baAAAyYYAAbies?" which was obviously irritating but also legally required. There's a long history in the US of involuntary sterilization, only ending officially in the 1970s, and though I am not in the primary historically targeted groups the medical community has made up for this by swinging hard the other direction by needing assurance that the patient in in a sound state of mind, is not being coerced by ignorance or outside forces, and is capable of considering alternatives. I hate all the alternatives and also hate babies, which I made sure to repeat at every opportunity. She was sad but let me sign the paperwork stating that I understand I'll never be pregnant again. I don't know whether having had an abortion before, about 15 years ago, made any difference to the outcome of gaining permission. It was strongly implied that having given live birth, being unhealthy overall, or being older than 33 would have made this a a smoother process, but who really knows. Since this is a voluntary procedure they do technically have the right to refuse, but it doesn't seem particularly likely. This visit is also where I found out that it is now common practice to actually remove the tubes in entire, rather than seal them. It is more effective and has the amazing added benefit of eliminating all but the barest chance of ovarian cancer! Since approximately 1/70 ovary-bearers will have some form of this in their lifetime, that's a lovely side effect.

Once you sign the paperwork that, in essence, informs the patient that she cannot sue the doctor for the procedure being permanent, apologizes for the genocidally racist history of the medical community and directs you to the standard "what it means to consent to surgery" plate, you are legally required to wait 20 days before the surgery can even be scheduled. This is to officially give you time to change your mind. Irritating, since I was hoping at the time to have it done by Christmas but there yah go. I'm glad on a certain level that they are extremely concerned with patient agency and allow for processing time, since rational ethical decisions are oftentimes made in slow motion (compared to the speed of apparent causality!), but this was a decision that I'd formed over the course of many years and had only never acted on it due to lack of funds, fear, and honestly laziness. It's still good to see others being protected as a point of legal policy!

This visit, where they wheedled and whined and went over the whys and I signed a piece of paper, took about 40 minutes and cost me $170 after insurance. I haven't paid that bill yet, and they did the procedure, so we shall see. NO TAKE BACKS! I will say that Swedish OBGYN is clean and lovely, all of the phone support people are helpful and friendly, and if you can afford to have gynecology done there it's thousands of light years better than Planned Parenthood. I love you, PP, but you are always understaffed.

After the 20 days they started calling me to try and schedule the surgical, which I found pleasantly proactive. Less so was the attempts to actually figure out when the surgery would be possible. I don't know whether it's just Swedish, but they were incredibly booked out for many months and we were trying to find a surgery slot for sometime in March...April...June? The procedure itself is very short (more on that later), and I wasn't restricted to only working with the surgeon I spoke with, but the doctors prefer to only have 3-4 in a day and there literally wasn't any available times. I got the appointment as early as I did because a person named Rickie at the front desk was AMAAAZING and put a cancellation notification alert on his computer. He called me within a week with this late-in-the-day cancellation for January and celebrated on the phone with me. I heart you Rickie. Let's be friends.

So from there, I dealt with a lot of confirmation calls from people who seemed to only be available when I was in class, and all the assorted phone tree bullshit, but the en result was that I was sent a presurgical packet (that didn't arrive until the day before) with general info about how to prepare the flesh for being mutilated. I started to feel the depression/disassociation really strongly around this, since I'd never had anyone cutting into my flesh without incense burning and psychosexual electronic music and plenty of illegal drugs and depression, so the associations are not particularly professional. It felt like I was being coerced to reduce myself to a pile.of meat rather than taking actions toward a goal associated with my personhood. Of course, this is all standard surgery concerns and it's useful to know this about myself. The anesthesiologist front desk woman at Swedish Cherry Hill was the only humanizing force in all of this preparation. She has an outrageously sexy voice and was interested in the answers I gave to her questions in a personal way, asking follow ups when they clearly weren't necessary and generally making me feel human.

Every single medical professional I spoke to once I had an appointment asked me to tell them, using my own words, what procedure I was having done and what the results of it would be. Hopefully they actually logged the entirety of my response, which usually ended with a "...and I'm so excited to never EVER MAKE BABIES" but probably not likely.

You're supposed to stop drinking liquids 4 hours before check in, which was scheduled 2 hours before the surgery time, but I read the official statements from the anesthesiologists association of america who, with multiple per-reviewed studies, have determined that 2 hours not only is better for patient happiness but also helps find veins (dehydration sucks). So I stopped drinking coffee around 10:30 am,  day of, with a 12:30 check in. Aspiration is hugely overstated and is based on garbage medical assumptions from the 1950s. I trust recent peer review, thanks science.

After I checked in, and it was established that the person with me was going to be my emergency contact and would drive my doped ass home later, we waited for about 30 minutes. As a side note, I did not inform my parents that I was having this surgery done. My mother is perpetually in a state of waiting for her grandkids and disbelieving my desire to be childfree (and my father would tattle on me). I didn't want to hear anyone telling me I was making a mistake. It's not that I thought I'd change my mind, but that I knew I had to be steadfast to prevent myself from putting this off again. It's important to me, once I've started a process, to carry through. Otherwise I tend to sink back down into depression lies about my incapacity to do anything properly, and I absolutely didn't want that to happen in this case.

Went to the back once my name was called and changed into a hideous gown and sticky foot socks. I was attached to a blood pressure monitor, asked to urinate (for a pregnancy test, though they didn't tell me that at the time) and then they came to take my blood. I neglected to inform them that I have a vaso-vagal response to blood removal and passed the fuck out, but that's normal for me. MY BLOOD I NEED ALL OF IT.

Once I stabilized, we walked to pre surgery where I waited for a little over an hour, bored out of my mind and starting to get freaked out. At this point, I was still permitted to have my buddy with me, which helped keep me feeling like a human and not a neglected medical experiment, Some head nurse types came and put a needle in my hand for the saline solution and gave me a cocktail of OTC pain meds for inflammation so I'd be nice and plumped up for surgery, and once that bag emptied after about 20-30 minutes, they switched the plug for the first round of drugs and wheeled me away to surgery. This is the point where you can't have buddies, but I was instantly fucked up on magical liquid valium so I didn't care.

They gave me more drugs and told me it would be fast. It was.

Woke up in recovery and was super weepy! I felt unloved, existentially meaningless and generally lonely in the universe...
(Here's an edit: I'm finishing this more than a year and a half later, I didn't remember feeling weepy so clearly I've lost some nuance, and my care buddy is now my moderately-loathed ex, so it's gonna get a little terser from here.)
 ...Until of course the recovery nurse rolled over and asked if i wanted more Fentanyl. Once I kinda worked that one out (UM YES DUH I LUV OPIATES WILL I BE IN TROUBLE OMG this is the one time i wont be in trouble!!! "umm yes?") i think things go better. Flashes of laughing with the other recovery nurses, being wheeled to the car and giggling on the way home, staggering to my bed, and noticing i can feel my insides. I don't like feeling my insides, time for pills!

It took about a week before walking around was comfortable at all, but I got super tired from hip-leg-back movement and sitting up was pretty uncomfortable. The pain was clearly monstrous, but I'm very good at staying totally incapacitated with meds and cannabis. The teeth only bit me once or twice, and it felt nothing at all like cramps except that snapping rubber band sensation, piNGG. I was very nervous about my first period after the surgery, which would normally be about 9 days after, but it was very normal (i.e., painful and miserable, but hooray Percoset!!!) even though I'd been throwing out some real blood that whole time between. I would absolutely have been in a bad place if nobody had been around to help me do things like (stand up long enough to) prepare food, buy weed, empty the catbox, but I was alone for most of the day so it's not like I was reduced to infant state even in the first week. It would have been posh if I had a loving partner, but even with just a self centered junkie fuckboy neighbor it was fine. Worst part was the massive bruising around the entry wounds and the "swelly belly" which is severe inflammation from abdominal surgery that springs out when you exert the abdominal muscles like, at all. Swelling always feels gross, and swelling below your navel is super disheartening. I had to be "careful" about that for about 3 months, but that might be because I was doing things like walking around a shop after work when I was supposed to be off my feet almost entirely. That's recommended for 4-6 weeks, so 3 months was my wages of sin.

The wounds were honestly a little weird, one entry point was directly above my right hipbone and it still itches sometimes. There were clearly rollable scar tubes on both sides for nearly a year, and I could actively pick at them for most of that time, but 18 months on the scars are just little Philips head blemishes. Not being able to become pregnant, uterine or ectopic, is the best thing. All of the other sterilized people I've met since then see us as being in a cool kids club, which is fun, and I spent about a year being intensely delighted every time I remembered--it's like stepping outside of biological time, becoming something post-mammalian, post-evolution and I have the photos on my fridge to prove it. When I picked up the forementioned photos in my follow-up appointment, the doc also pointed out that my liver looked very healthy, so it's overall worthy of raising a toast to barren spinsterhood!

That's all I got really.

heat, light, fallen angels

contrived maybe.

"Evening provides nothing helpful- death, decline, old age, sultry slides into immorality and velvet lust...but the dawn is both cold and bitterly renewing, amoral and constitutional, impersonal- yet deeply alone with itself. A dawn shared does not always bode well, but it does always mean well..."

Community living, local economies, elimination of the culture that relies on unchecked consumption...

beautiful but naive. we need to find the mean.

The internet and other networks as a non-human valuer- can this attribute intrinsic worth?

Notes:

Rolston's intrinsic value-holder view (non human valuers that can be harmed or benefitted) in relation to the internet isolating “damage” and working around it- adapting to a changing environment to benefit itself.
Does the internet/networks have intrinsic value? Can it defend itself against damage in ways that make sense to consider as holding value?
Does the internet/network value anything instrumentally?

Crazy rant/master's thesis? (ha ha):

The demarcation between human and non-human valuers- specifically, how we can discuss a non-human valuer in terms not of consciousness or awareness, but instead under a notion of non-anthropogenic intrinsic value- has led me to a somewhat startling conclusion. Before I fully support my view, I will attempt to discuss the meaning of intrinsic vs instrumental value, the relationship between these concepts, and the extension tentatively to non-human beholders of these values. I will draw heavily from Holmes-Ralston's piece “Value in Nature and the Nature of Value” and than extend his views to see whether the internet could be considered a non-living organism capable of value-judgement and, thus, intrinsic value.
Intrinsic value was fully developed under the Kantian ethics, which I ill only outline as briefly as possible and recommend that my reader will go learn of this in more detail himself. In essence, it defines intrinsic value as the sense something beholds about itself- terrible english there, but wait. If an individual can conceive of themselves as being harmed in someway, and if the individual can also conceive of themselves as a self in this nature they are granted intrinsic value. “Granted” is a sloppy use, as intrinsic value cannot be granted or removed- it is inherent, irreducible and irrevocable. The easiest form of the Categorical Imperative made use of this idea elegantly- Only treat beings as ends in themselves, never as an ends to a means. Intrinsic value grants some rights to the bearer, and these rights are simply rights of existence and interests. Instrumental value, on the other hand, is the value attributed to something being used as an ends to a means- for example, a hammer pounding in a nail. I am not hurting the hammer by using it in this way, and in fact it would be meaningless to say that I could hurt it. Not because it has no feelings, mind, but because it exists only for this purpose (a human hammering nails into things) and I would be thoroughly meaningless to say I should use it for purposes of its own interests. This is where you should go read Kant now. I'll wait.

Back already? Good. Instrumental value does not presuppose that the value-ee is unconscious, as someone can hold both instrumental and intrinsic value. A student in a classroom pays the bills of the teacher, but also has value in of themselves both in and out of the classroom. In addition, the student holds the teacher to have instrumental value, for obvious reasons. This is where Rolston's view can be applied. There is a relationship between the intrinsic value-holders and the instrumental value they are gaining. Both of our valuers- the student and the teacher- have goals toward which they apply the instrumental value of each other (but not only using...you went and read Kant when I told you to, right?). This use of instrumentality (no, not Evangelion. Go back to your hole. I'll write a piece on that later) presupposes that the valuer holds an intrinsic value. How? Because when you use something as an ends to your means, you have means...a purpose. A sense of intrinsic value which drives you to seek fulfillment of those desires to better yourself. To value something as useful requires an end towards which it is useful. Non-human entities can hold these values as well- animals seeking food, as an example. Rolston used this argument to extend the boundaries of non anthropocentric (human based) or anthropogenic (originating from humans) value to animals, plants, ecosystems. A holder of value must also defend its values in order to fall into the category of intrinsic value- ie, a tree is benefitted by water, and in times of drought will send roots out to seek water needed to sustain the life it holds. The defense of value proves that the organism has interests (which do not have to presuppose consciousness) and will use things instrumentally to defend themselves and their intrinsic value. Whoosh.
So, instrumental valuing requires a valuer. Conscious or not, the valuer should value things instrumentally to further the reductionist intrinsic value. How does network appear to do this?
Quickly, I am going to define the way in which networkers use the word intrinsic. From what I can determine, it is a network separate from any other input- the network in-of-itself. This is a similar definition to intrinsic moral worth but should not be used interchangeably. Someone correct me on my definition, please, because this was a 2 minute google definition as opposed to a fundamental understaning.

Asides...aside, how does a network (and specifically, the internet) exhibit behaviour that appears to grant it intrinsic worth? There has been talk of the internet as acting like a living organism- it appears to recognize damage, isolate it and work around the damage until that section “dies”. This is not a sufficient condition for life, however, so this tendency is best left to the hand wavers and proponents of AI (of which I am both, but will never claim is a rational argument. If wishes were terabytes, etc). In fact, this tendency is not even a cogent argument for consciousness, as the mechanics of this damage-reduction originates from conscious beings acting intentionally- and the whole is not primarly the sum of its parts... however much that would do for any number of undergrad's arguments. So the network has no conscious mind to defend value with. However, it can be given abilities to defend itself against harm that, one started, act with little to no interference from the initial ... watchmaker (as it were). Virus HK programs are the obvious example in this case, as are firewalls. So, the network mechanicalistically protects itself from harm, and uses a variety of defenses to this end. Harm? How can it be harmed if it cannot be benefited? All things containing nothing but instrumental value cannot be harmed or benefited, they simply are. It would be nonsense to speak of a chair being harmed, because there is nothing that is good for the chair. It cannot protect the interests of itself. But a network...there is benefit and harm for a network, independent of the instrumental value attributed to it by the human valuers ( in the same way of a tree)- though it has no wants exactly, it has a state of good and a state of harmed (good, of course not being conventional moral sense, but almost). It avoids damage, adapts to a changing environment to ensure the health of its constituent parts, seems to flourish whether a human is taking part or is not. Is this true? It looks like humans have to participate for the internet to have any moral worth. However, humans are the environment in which it operates. A tree removed from soil, air, sunlight and all the other parts of the forest would be a dead stagnant thing as well. A human removed has consciousness, and as such cannot be physically divorced from their own sense of moral worth- take that consciousness away and you have...the internet without individuals. A dead, stagnant thing without change or reaction, goals or desires.
But a valuer with intrinsic worth (and, hopefully, you see that is redundant) needs to value things instrumentally. What does the network value? To put is less anthropomorphically, what does the network defend and preserve, and what does it attribute negative value to by rejecting and isolating?it needs input, as we see, the same way a tree needs water and a human needs consciousness. The tree's value of water (to further the means of life and growth) as well as a human's value of consciousness (which provides the human with intrinsic moral worth) are seemingly sufficient conditions for value. The network rejects attacks that undermine its infrastructure and avoids them with tools it was given. It can use these tools only in proscribed ways, however. It lacks creativity. This does not remove the intrinsic value of the network, only the possibility of consciousness (for now. The future remains to be seen, of course) since the network utilises what it has to preserve its own existence. Humans, in this view, may be purely instrumental to the internet, as it cannot recognise intrinsic worth!

Cool, huh?

Discuss!