Y'know, I'm pretty sure I've never denied being bitter about a wide variety of past circumstances, unless it was in the context of sarcasm.

I'm thus not sure what reaction people are looking for if they have a go at me about being bitter.  I really have zero inclination to say "no I'm not," and a pretty unhesitating reflex instead to say "yeah... and?"

There are a lot of bitter people in this scene.  I don't judge anyone's reasons for being so, as it seems to me that different events affect different people in different ways, and healing times should thus be expected to vary. 

That said, I think my reasons for being bitter tend not to be that hard to understand.  I mean, how would you feel if (these are in random, not chronological order):

And speaking of the suckitude of high school - of grade school in general, in fact - I just remembered something potentially relevant to current personal reflections I'm engaged in, so wanted to put down here lest I forget it again:

I remember that a recurrent theme in my writing in junior high and high school was the destruction of innocence, accompanied by the idea that this was a good thing rather than a bad one.

This was so, I think, because by my teen years I'd decided that 'childhood innocence' was pretty much entirely a bad thing, since

a) for me, it meant having been fed simplistic comforting delusions about "the way things are" only to be taken off-guard by various evils of the "real" world, and
b) for others, it meant that I have to put up with their petty cruelty regardless of how much suffering it's causing me because they are "just kids" and "don't know any better."

Hence, best to destroy all innocence, because then

a) I gain knowledge, which is power, and
b) others must be responsible for the harm they cause to others, including that done to myself.

Not sure whether or not this at some point fed into my disdain for actual children though. Need to think about that one more when I'm more awake.

Disclaimer: the following contains a mixture of analysis and anecdotes from a long, long time ago which hence are unlikely to involve anybody actually reading this. You can therefore rest assured that whatever you may read here, regardless of what it may sound like, is not 'about you' - if anything it's explicitly 'pre-you' as far as my life goes. The ideas/issues may be familiar to some of you, but what I'm doing here is recontextualizing them in light of some incidents from a long time ago that I've only recently remembered/thought about (partly due to that recent letter-meme-thing). The question being: how have those ancient-history incidents - most of them from elementary school - affected how I think about friendship, loyalty, etc.?

So here are a few anecdotes that I'd mostly forgotten about until I purposely tried to recall them over the last few days:

This is funny. I just did a search in google for "gothstapo," and the first page that came up that was in English (about 4th on the list) was my play, An Experiment in Malice. How cool is that?

In related news, I just remembered a time back in 1998 when I was in the Rebar with one of the cuter and more pleasant members of the fashion police. He was wearing some fancy coat with long white lace bits coming out of the sleeves, which I remember being impressed with. In conversation I recall gleefully confessing that I had gotten more into Switchblade Symphony and a bunch of other bands I'd heard on compilations.

Which probably got some kind of "okay, so maybe you're not a totally pathetic little mansonite"-patronizing-but-nice type of response. Or so it seemed at the time. And I was all "I got approval from some pretty boy who will probably never be interested in me, yay me!" Confession and absolution... Sure it's all pretty silly and pretentious, but it was definitely a fun little episode in its way.

I also remember another occasion when said individual was kicked out of the Rebar due to ridiculous bar intrigue of some kind. I wasn't there at the time but I recall being told about it, and thinking in response, "but how can they do that when he so obviously outranks everyone else involved?" At one time I may have been a kindergoth pest in more ways than one, but at least I always respected my elders.

All of which is interesting in that it suggests maybe there was precedent for the Inquisition in my novel prior to the event that I usually cite, namely a time at Nemesis when a certain unpleasant gothhawked young man proudly boasted to me that if he stomped his feet beside the DJ booth throughout Manson's "The Beautiful People," he could fuck up the whole thing so that no one could dance. Between that and his tendency to interogate my friends ("Why are you hanging out with her?), him and I hated one another for years afterward.

Fun, fun, fun... I am bemused at how nightclub melodramas can breed fine villains in my imagination.

I got to thinking about DJing today. When I first started DJing, I had a curiously strong urge to play two rather disparate portions of dark music territory: goth/deathrock on one hand, alternative/industrial rock on the other.

Back in the Nemesis days, I had this billed as 'pure and impure gothic,' meaning on one hand, music which historically counts as goth/deathrock/post-punk/etc. (e.g. Bauhaus, Christian Death, Specimen and whatnot) and on the other hand, music which the current generation has been trained by the media to refer to as 'goth' (e.g. Marilyn Manson, NIN, Tool and so on). I figured hey, let's lure the kids down here first and worry about straightening out their semantics later. I never really had anything against playing EBM, electro, industrial and so on, but at the time it seemed to me that those genres were getting adequate play without my help, so I didn't feel as impelled.

Over time, I have gradually drifted back into these genres as far as my DJing goes. And not just because someone is complaining about a lack of "stompy-ness" in the music choice of the moment - I like stompy fine myself at times, as those who may have noticed my tendency to overplay certain Flesh Field songs may have guessed. Thinking back, I sometimes regret that I may not have been clear about this in the past. That is, I never meant to imply by playing different genres than other DJs - or, more to the point, by not playing 'their' genres - that I was putting down the DJs in question or their music. There have been few or no 'dark' DJs in Calgary who haven't played at least some music that I really liked. Rather, what I was aiming for at the time was to play genres that other people were not willing or able (i.e. due to lack of music selection) to play, but which I nonetheless sensed some demand for, as well as enjoyed myself.

As with many other DJs I know, however, for me these days DJing is less about other peoples' 'demands' and more about what I want. I don't want to bitch about the exact reasons why here and now. As far as what I'm about these days though: I think every DJ is somewhat defined by what they're not willing to play as well as by what they are, and in my case what it boils down at present is: if it sounds spooky and/or evil I'll play it of my own accord, and if it sounds happy I'd rather not play it but within reason would accomodate requests.

The reason for this stance is that, due to living in the UK for a year, I'm a bit tired of the whole kids-in-neon-cybergear-dancing-to-happy-sounding-borderline-rave-music and calling that goth-industrial bit. Call me old-fashioned and/or pedantic but that does bug me. Beyond that, these days I'm just as happy to play Suicide Commando as Bauhaus. Probably not one after the other - although I would be interested to see in such a case whether anyone other than me, were I dancing, would remain on the dance floor for both - but still.

One last thought: I've sometimes wondered, and others have speculated, as to whether I had/have a 'theme song.' I'm tending to go with Voltaire's "When You're Evil", as it just seems to fit somehow. That, and if you go just by what I will always most-reliably play when DJing, the song you're likely to notice is "The Curious Pediatrician" by David E. Williams, and that just sounds too dodgy even for me.

Note: title of this entry is from the Voltaire song I just mentioned. Hmmm... I just thought of yet one more reason why it suits me, but I'll keep that to myself for now.

Today's random thought inspired by the poetry digitization project mentioned below:

It is very disconcerting to find near-perfect descriptions of something you've only recently encountered in poetry that you wrote a decade ago and had since completely forgotten about.

Furthermore, if you've seemingly been writing love letters to a vile, poisonous, insectine demon-entity ever since you were a sixteen-year-old virgin, you really shouldn't be so surprised if, ten years later, said entity shows up on your psychic doorstep and proposes to you.

So yeah. For the most part I'm revolted, but I guess I'm ever-so-slightly touched too.

Still working on digitizing the bad goth poetry. Determined to keep it all no matter how embarassing it is. But still, is there no end to this pile of shite? Seriously...

Some random observations:
1) Boy was I ever stunningly displeased with a certain Mormon friend back in '95.
2) Boy was I ever Satanic back in those days.
3) Boy was I ever twisted considering that I was a virgin back then.

Gah.

(title of this entry contributed by Morbid Angel, the only death metal band whose lyrics I ever liked much. Hail Satan. )

I was feeling spaced out tonight, so I thought I'd do something productive yet easy, namely continue my digitize-and-discard project with regard to various old documents. On this occasion, this involved sticking my head into the putrid mire of angst which was my poetry from about 1994 to 1998. I have decided to keep pretty much everything, because I figure what it lacks in artistic talent it makes up for in psychoanalytic value.

That, incidentally, is why I don't go around mocking 'bad goth poetry'. Sometimes us sensitive folk get upset about peculiar things, and having a muse is one way of coping with being overwhelmed by emotions that you know any human being you talk to is probably going to dismiss out of hand, probably by calling you oversensitive, defensive or something equally useless in that it is impossible to refute without 'proving' the accuser right. But never mind my how-can-people-suck-so-much-at-having-empathy rant... the point I'm getting at is:

1) I realize that my 'bad goth poetry' is bad art, in the sense that it lacks original imagery and often sounds like a rant with poor sentence structure. That is why none of it will ever be posted here. And I do sometimes wish that other goths would also consider things from this perspective before posting poetry in a public space like the Internet. But at the same time,

2) My feelings at the time were real, regardless of what sparked them, and writing the poem was therefore therapeutic. For this reason, if I see 'bad goth poetry' on someone's journal, I'm more likely to say something like "sorry to hear you're feeling that way" than "quit moping and get over yourself," because it should be glaringly obvious to anyone who isn't a complete fucking monkey that the latter response is not helpful to someone who, for whatever reason, is in emotional agony. (Or are you too much of a coward about your own emotions to put yourself in the other person's pointy-toed-boots for a minute? For fucksakes... )

Oh yeah. I said I wasn't going to do that rant. Banish with laughter. Anyway, on to the more interesting part, namely connections between the old poetry and recent events...

Finally watched "Bowling for Columbine" yesterday. And afterward I was cranky for the longest time... reminded me of a bad memory I have from that time.

I'd gone to New York City not long after that particular event, along with a bunch of other co-op students from Nortel. Whereas I had thoroughly checked out where I was going at night and what I was doing for Friday and Saturday, I had no specific plans for Sunday, and thought it would be nice to do something with the mainstream folks for once - not realizing that, being typical young, naive people with the delusion of invincibility, they had figured they could just wander around New York and find something instead of planning it ahead of time.

Not surprisingly, the result of this was that we all got out of the cab at an intersection in some self-evidently bad area and were shortly approached by various people. I freaked out, flagged down another cab, and left. Because you see, after Columbine, the American news media made rather a lot of the so-called 'goth' shooters as being racists, so I'll be damned if I'm going to stick around in an area with a bunch of rough-looking ethnic folks in my typical bar wear. I mean, I'm sure they are probably nice people normally, but I didn't want to take any chances re: being mis-recognized as 'one of those white-supremacist Mansonites.'

But if that scare wasn't bad enough, once the rest of the students got back to the hotel this one black guy totally chewed me out for being racist. This is one of the few things that has ever happened to me that still pisses me off thinking about it, even though it was almost five years ago now. It's not that I couldn't see where this guy was coming from - in retrospect I certainly could - but at the same time it makes me really angry that it wouldn't occur to the guy that a large black jock man and a small sort-of-white goth girl would have different perceptions of danger in this situation.

Now this is not to say that "all black men are criminals" or any such bullshit, because I certainly don't believe that. I am very open to the accusation that I am sexist (i.e. against men), in that it was the presence of males in a bad area that made me nervous. (And moreover, women in the same area would also make me nervous, although for different reasons, so really I guess it's the socio-economic prejudice that is primary. Still - come on people, it's New York City, is it wrong to be a little paranoid re: the possibility of desperate people here?)

But beyond what I said before about it having occurred to me that ethnic folks might mistake me for a 'white-supremacist Mansonite,' (and by the way, we have such people in Calgary - they are not just a media myth), skin color was incidental. I can forgive the guy who told me off for thinking otherwise, but it still pisses me off that he just assumed the worst of me without even really knowing or talking to me, when I can at least see where he's coming from in part.

(Note: I really do think that lack of returned-empathy is a big cause of cynicism and ultimately misanthropy amongst the sensitive people I've known. Personally I could empathize just as easily with single mothers or spoilt rich brats, George Bush or Osama Bin Laden, regardless of whether I 'agree' with the person involved. But after awhile it gets really fucking tiresome when you make the effor to understand people and they don't seem to ever grant you and/or your demographic any credit. I understand why they don't, but that doesn't make me any less frustrated at the fact that these people seemingly cannot, as a certain sensitive-and-misanthropic friend of mine once put it, adjust the screens in their heads.)

Anyway though, re: "Bowling for Columbine," I'd say it was pretty well done and I enjoyed the Marilyn Manson interview and the cartoon history of America especially. On the other hand, I find Michael Moore to be a bit obnoxious at times, and I disagreed with aspects of his portrayal of Canada.

Specifically, I thought the Canadian woman on there who's been burglarized multiple times but still doesn't lock her doors is not the fearless-citizen-of-an-idyllic-country that Moore makes her out to be, but is, rather, an idiot. I mean, it's one thing to buy into the American culture of fear by going so far as to shoot anyone who comes on your property, but to me locking your door is not so much paranoia as just common sense - why make it easier for people to come in than it needs to be?

Linking this to thought my aforementioned memory: why the hell can't people distinguish between an unreasonable level of terror and a responsible level of caution? Or put another way: granted the media exaggerates threat in x,y and z, circumstances, I think that even if the threat is small the smart thing to do is still to consider that it could happen - not to dwell on it or let fear run your life, but to at least take it into account and take whatever relatively-unobtrusive steps might be taken - e.g. planning ahead when travelling, locking your doors - that may minimize it even further.

I'll stop here though before this rant gets any longer. For more on my absurd views about personal responsibility, see the 'industrial hell planet' entry below.

Read on for some interesting background re: my dressing up as the villains from my creative works. I think it's interesting anyway, raging narcissist that I am.