I mean, yes bossmang, of course bossmang, I'm sorry I've failed you. My thralldom is flawed, my loyalty imperfect. Have mercy upon your servants, for we are the dry clay and you the divine potter. Glaze me in the furnace so in stillness I can at least look pretty on the shelf.

So admit it. You don't believe in anything, not for real. That's why your talk is only and always small. That's why I seem like I'm from another planet. That's why I won't mourn when you go extinct because Gaia shrugged your bullshit like Atlas dropping the world. I respect crows more than corpers.

Fix your heart because the society we don't fucking have won't fix it for you, and we need your heart to be full and bright to power the society we fucking need. So yeah bossmang, I am demotivated, but be real: you don't care. You raise the whip and kick the spurs so I gallop faster. You don't care.

Get it together and do the work or accept that you value jack shit. Your politics are a cool hat. They don't vibrate in your fist. They don't compel you, disgust you, make you shake with the fury and the terror and the grief so that your joy isn't an escape but a battle you win in this shitty war.

If I had a dollar for every time a pale asshole said there's nothing we can do, I'd have enough to employ folks my damn self. Your nihilism dressed up as depressed progressivism makes me want to transcend the flesh flipping two birds so I can give zero fucks from the indifference of eternity.

I don't care about your metrics and I don't care about this evil fucking industry (software) except insofar as rent forces me to. If you want to confront that we're all being coerced to be here, maybe we could do something about it, huh? But I bet you won't, so we play this infantilizing kabuki.

"stacy's mom" hits different when you've become stacy's mom

so i just pay for a tshirt. my handshake might feel like colonialism, but i can put my money where my mouth is. i can do my end of the work. all together, we can do the whole work. we can be better if we do better.

then maybe someday our hometown will live up to better.

but, we can organize. we can fight. we can struggle and strategize and listen and collaborate, and i have no doubt that we can and will win. the grim spirit that brutalizes us is ephemeral, in the eternal eye. that's little solace now. it's big talk from someone you don't know. but it's the truth.

words aren't the militant power that will obliterate the apartheid that separates us. they help us speak our truth and they help us organize, but slavers don't listen, fascists don't listen, cops don't listen, and sentimentalists say plenty that means nothing. we can't speak whiteness into oblivion.

i wish the progressive veneer of portland weren't so offensive because it's so fucking fake. i wish there wasn't a world between us.

but i don't say anything like that. in part because i'm socially awkward, but mostly because words aren't the power that will change what needs changing.

i want to say, hey, i'm a townie too. i grew up in sw. you said you came up in nw. i want this place to be good. i love the dirt and i love the air and i love that you survived to make art. i wish you had no cause to sing about ~unusual suicides~ we all know were cop lynchings. i wish for better.