bloodporn and slavemongers

words are alchemy

The possession of child porn arrest reports are stacking your news feed lately, never not blurring together. Teacher in Mississippi, congressman’s aide from wherever, youth pastor in the Florida outback.

possession of child porn.

four words that fail to summon the proper darkness.

If you zoom in the idea that we still call it child porn or pornography at all is itself fucked beyond recognition. How and why because we spent the past two or three decades on a parallel track normalizing the word pornography. By rightfully sticking up for consensual adult sex workers such that now the word porn snags in the visual cortex and you may have to remind your weird neighbor that yes dude while the word porn conjures boogie nights and disco chicks doing blow on rollerblades and wonderland images of actors on a film set with fluffers gaffers craft services and such but

not all pornography is created equal.

Possession of child porn is indeed vile shameful loathsome deserving of fierce intervention

prison rehab therapy

but possession of it is not the crime against humanity.

That some failed football coach now substitute teacher in the sticks has possession of it is troubling and the congressman’s aide having possession of it is a party scandal and the pastor in the closet having possession of it does not confirm or condemn any theory about the church but the horrors of the conversion camps. The possession of child porn is not the end of story.

The beginning of the story is when the evil shit happens.

The freak now outcast having possession of blood porn is worrisome but the distributing of it the making and the facilitating of it is the crime against humanity.

The existence of so much of it should freak us all the fuck out.

The humans doing these acts on the ground in the room are the monsters moving among us.

The humans violating the involuntary flesh of children and the other humans holding them down and holding camera are the evil. The torturers are the ones need hunting, not just the freaks and end users in the cloud.

Those kids are not actors. They are not sex workers.

I’m not sure what alt word or image needs summoning but words matter

words are alchemy

we need to empower a word more sinister more poisonous more untouchable than pornography.

Torture is such a word. Slavery is another. Bloodporn was the word we used for snuff films in the nineties.

How many private islands are out there.

Veteran newsroom staff get the full size honorary mockup bloopers and legends farewell cover page when giving up the desk, when they retire or move on to chase green pastures elsewhere.

If you give it up voluntary.

Quoted at bottom is one of my old headlines from the likely to get you a what the hell dude call from publisher definitely from the ad director for going too near the far edge collection. For too on the nose, for too much sunlight. My head and slug lines during my days as copy chief and news editor in Santa Barbara were pretty much the same as my work here.

This one was regarding an incident where police if I recall shot and killed a dude speeding on the freeway after a stop gone bad. His car contained to be honest in retro a box of pirated girls gone wild videos on VHS sticky unmarked clamshell cassettes stolen cell phones and an unknown quantity of crystal meth and maybe I was on one that day.

Deadline days you hold and catch fire in the palm of your hand and you are Prometheus on the rock when a crime story breaks hours or minutes before going to press.

There is nothing like that rush.

That was two thousand four or five.

That photo was for the goldfish crackers in the ashtray story, we used it for the hell’s half acre tour with Clevenger.

Are we still on the same timeline or stuck in amber.

you left that dream gig to go work on a psych ward in Tennessee.

cops shoot cell phone porn monger speed freak

smooth near perfect

economical

does what it says on the tin

could have gone harder

cops flip cell phone pimp murder speed freak porn monger

but went easy.

The fuck dude advertisers hate you.

Too much sunshine is never enough.

I wrote hundreds if not thousands of razor haiku one paragraph crime report news briefs in those four or five years I was on staff as either editor or writer. I edited revised parsed arranged and cut hundreds of murder and sex criminal feature and cover stories. I wrote thousands of seventeen syllable captions in the heat of deadline chaos throwing dimes on the fly that cut glass. I was ruthless with both words and column inches and it made you learn to slash and burn, to trust your ear and eye and to be precise.

I also tend to memorize everything I’m editing and those stories lived in my head for years after.

Fifty-two issues a year five years on the news and copy desk becomes hundreds becomes thousands of dumb and dumber Florida man crime stories and a startling number of dark as dark gets murder kidnap rape torture child and blood porn stories trailing past in a churning heartbeat.

Florida man roams wild everywhere in California same as Tennessee. Florida man is the American factory setting. Florida man is exponential. Florida man is all of us. Florida man exists on whim and bender. The monsters and serial killers hunt our friends and neighbors, they disappear our sons and daughters moving like ghosts in his muddy slipstream.

Florida man is never not a damaged white dude.

The final boss Florida man now lives in the people’s house.

I was lucky too, fortunate that my editor in chief Marianne Partridge formerly of the Village Voice and Rolling Stone was a pit bull when it came to words and journalistic ethics, a woman who once edited Hunter Thompson in the ‘70s and lived to tell of it and she loved me. Marianne protected her writers like a mother lion, you fucked with her at your peril.

The matriarchy on the ground is real.

And lucky too that ever watching my back the wing on my shoulder was my best friend and mother of my daughter. Penelope Huston my wife was the ad director ringing on the other line, the once and future publisher of the Independent if she wanted the gig and she was fielding those what the fuck calls in real time and she always provided me and my reporters necessary cover fire.

Santa Barbara was exactly how you might imagine the late nineties in southern California, glorious and maddening. Terrifying and cool as fuck, always coming to a boil. Too much of everything shiny and jagged and never enough. Mulholland Drive and the second season of True Detective nail it clear as day. The early two thousands were exactly like that, you were always on the 101

you were suicidal on the 405

if you were out on a story in the churn in the desert lost in Ventura county with a dead battery two cigarettes and piece of shit flip phone

zero signal

you were on your own

Ninety miles north of LA

ninety miles of blind curves and lost highway between you and where you needed to be and a story was never not breaking.

The crime desk was never sleeping and the hills were always burning.

Editorial and ad were back then and ever ought to be church and state by the way, there were plenty of junior staff had no idea we were married but Penelope was a journalist first, she was an editorial soul who crossed over to run the classifieds in the wild west days of the middle nineties.

The days when the back pages of weekly papers were the dark web in the physical cloud before the cloud, the open air liminal where the predators, traffickers and monsters lived breathed and did their dirty work in code in plain sight on those back pages.

We walked from our dream jobs and came home to Tennessee so that our kids could grow up in the south, to know their people and where they came from, to learn the same rhythms and know the same stories, to know the same landmarks in space and time, and now Penelope is communications director and guardian angel at the mayor’s office.

She is the beating heart of this fucking town.

I’m proud of her and most days she’s proud of me.

We chose Memphis.

I walked onto the psych ward voluntary.

It left its mark on us both.

you saved lives yes. you soothed and protected patients and staff. you stepped between violence against friends family and strangers on the unit.

you wrote thousands of grim dark incident reports.

Damage was done. The word voluntary leaves a mark. I failed my best friend and our marriage broke apart.

But still she saved my life when it needed saving. Penelope brought police and fire to my door for a wellness because she could feel it on the air and I was code blue two hours later in the the ER not in my driveway not in my bathroom. We still are best friends, still watch each others’ backs, still call each other family. The kids both turned out much cooler and wiser than they might have done only knowing the phantom lush life of southern California.

We made the right decision.

time is a flat circle

If you don’t see the darkness how do you chase the sun.

It was growing up in the south that made us who we were. To come of age along the Mississippi River you always know where the sunset is, you learn to always look for the near and far edge of water, to keep the water at your back. The south facing beach in Santa Barbara was a dream inside a dream, the most golden most alive most perfect by far the most in love most happy seven year loop of life. There was no better place on this dusty rock to be and we were together we caught the sun for the last days and dying light of the analog.

In some lifetimes some timelines seven velvet years is all you get and if you’re awake you recognize you’re lucky you’re gold you’re impossible to kill and you walk bright and live fierce inside every minute of it, you memorize everything every blade of light every spider’s web because the next life the next run through might be nothing but slogging through hell

you may never find the sun.

I’m thankful we had those seven gold years near the ocean but sometimes it’s more fun to dream of California than to exist there.

The land of sunshine can be a cold dead place too and you’re never not aware that it doesn’t have enough water for ninety million people.

call it child sex slavery.

call it possession of child torture.

call it bloodporn.

call it bloodporn slavemonger for possession or trade.

How many untouchable words or acts are left to this version of reality.

Everything worse is still yet to come.

There are endless dungeons and kill boxes out there.

Do we really expect that all the serial killers morphed into mass shooters and online predators. That they became incel lurkers wankers frustrated tinder trolls on 4chan, please spare me.

Or did they stay off the grid from the jump.

They were ready for the shift because they were paying attention. They were listening to Uncle Ted and they already moved in shadows.

The sex dungeons in the dark cloud are not just for kink, not just for voluntary submission or domination by fetish. Dungeons for self inflicted bartered and consensual bondage and pain are a thing, this is true. We play with that word but in the same dark corners and hazy spaces of the big churn of cosplay porn and florida man chaos in the dark glittering edges of the slipstream are dungeons for slavery and torture.

Words matter. They throw shadows, they become matter.

Words are alchemy.

Bloodporn was what we used in the nineties when referring to snuff films and torture porn geeks. It was the tag we gave amputation fetish videos but what is more violent than enslaving children to make porn for the dark cloud.

I have an old short story written as a three act play called blood porn somewhere on one of these laptops from the Denver yellow cab days.

you’ve been thinking about this nightmare shit since forever.

rule thirty four

Cannibalism is always happening somewhere out there. Humans hunting other humans for sport is never not happening.

Now is the time of monsters and children are never not in dungeons.

peace.

photo by paul wellman

for more about the psych ward see the eleven year loop

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