oh, you pretty things
the sonder of the redacted Janes
My daughter was four going on five in oh nine. The kid who talks you dizzy for hours then goes somber moody silent for an hour in the backseat before unloading questions about the lyrics to running up that hill out of the blue. The girl who says there’s no such thing as goth Fridays.
The girl who says she misses the plants who wanted to be zombies. I don’t know she says I just do. The girl who tells her mother while she’s doing her makeup before work umm hey momma you know that ouchie looks like a million baby spiders might come out of it.
The girl who tells the barista she comes from a long line of pirates.
The same kid who tells you all about the little pony cutie marks what they mean and why they matter. The girl who tells every kid in her pre-K class there’s a bad word she learned from Mumford and Sons it’s a very bad word that you’re not supposed to say it rhymes with duck.
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One night past eleven not yet midnight in oh nine I came upstairs to find the house humming buzzing with origami dreams her mom brother nephew all asleep but sister is in the hall bathroom standing on a stepladder at the sink wearing a party dress she wasn’t wearing when she went to bed and she’s got a dozen barbies lined up she’s washing their hair and singing the opening verse to black parade when I was a young boy in haunting perfect kid acapela echoing in dark night she’s a cool blade in the square of gold light in flat pale dark will you be a savior of the broken will you defeat your demons can you see a lifetime in the flat circle of blowing up a kid’s red balloon will you be the phantom come next come summer.
If the barbie’s black dream parade happened now odds are it would be on video, it would long ago be loaded to the cloud.
I’m glad it’s been tucked so far gathering bright in my head and daughter she loves that story, I tell it to her under black stars telling stories to fill her sky on night rides in the car. There is something special about two thousand nine. Something about that particular mark in time, that timestamp. The last gasp of halcyon. The long uneasy gloaming of the analog. Something still lives there something not dead yet still walks adrift in that bruised haze among the ghosts of myspace from before we disappeared into touchscreens.
You and your brother are the kids of yesterday. These are the lights you make. How you live forever.
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Those memories those details your memories will be precious if you can gather one black parade story explodes another and my daughter stands in that square of light forever. The thing about telling the barista she came from a long line of pirates, that came from the bedtime stories. After we had read all of the books she wanted to read I would spin up stories from the ether and one of those stories was about a family that was our family living on a pirate ship. The pirate story was her favorite. She liked to imagine she lived on that ship. For a few years we did live on that ship. That boat had wings. Daughter liked to doze off in the crow’s nest drift the still waters float out there flying above the ocean inside dad’s mind in the safe warm liminal that is bedtime in a kid’s mind, the same rosy box of gold space light that becomes the end of day sanctuary in the solitary what have you behind the black nighttime mind’s eye of an adult
or god help us if we ever want to sleep to fly safe be at peace in the yawning when you shut your eyes.
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The academy of coma rapists should boil your blood. Calling it rape academy sounds like something someone like Epstein thought was cute. Oh snap isn’t that clever how droll. Presumably that was the users’ name for it. Calling it rape is too kind. These shadow creatures walking among us have a necrophilia kink. They sold access to their wives and to their girlfriends and no doubt some of their daughters while they were sleeping, while they were drugged into the limbo of coma dreamspace. They allowed customers to assault their bodies while unconscious and others to pay money to watch. To livestream the shit.
That is slave trade level evil.
The press should stop calling it the academy, they should call it what it is. The coma rapist porn mongers with a necrophilia fetish. Call it trafficking if it qualifies. And be aware this same thing happens at hospitals and morgues more often than anyone wants to know. I have worked psych wards various hospitals and floated ERs and ran the dead to and from final destination. The bowels of big city hospitals are dark. There are all manner of demon and freak out there who sell access to patients in comas and to bodies of the departed.
The necrophilia jones leads to serial killer curious behavior.
Ted Bundy explained all of this in his own words pretty clearly. And if anybody thinks this one coma rape site exposed by CNN that surely it was or is the only one, please. Rule 34. The underbelly of the internet is terrifying. And call it a hate crime for god’s sake, something I’ve never said before because of the slippery slope to Orwellian edicts and things like pre-crime and the ministry of truth. I’ve never been fierce either way on the death penalty as it gets misused a ton but how much hate must you have in your heart to do this to someone who trusted you enough to marry you. To sleep beside you and be vulnerable with you.
The dude on twitter saying they spun the numbers is the reason they choose the bear.
I hope these guys get buried in prison. I hope they know they will not be safe in protective custody.
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My daughter is in her third year of university now that keeps me alert perhaps. But yesterday I mentioned the academy story to five people in the real and none of them had heard of it yet. All those redacted janes are washed away in the slipstream of war and Epstein by genocide in Gaza and part of it is the memefication of everything and the idiocracy the tiktokification against the backdrop of flood the zone with evil and always the alt facts operating system of nothing’s real the netflixification of dreamy serial killers the sensory overload of porn everywhere only fans the desensitization of everything that flowed downstream from grab ‘em by the pussy somehow being ah whatever dude but America started speedrunning the descent of man twenty years ago or whenever pornhub first came on line.
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I crossed into adolescence in the 1980’s and while I had read every not for kids title on my parents’ shelves Deliverance The Stranger Dracula by age thirteen and all the same Are You There God It’s Me Margaret books as all the girls and saw movies like Taxi Driver and Last Tango in Paris by fifteen or so and did the average amount of foraging for penthouse and playboy as the next white boy, I don’t think I saw my first grainy porn video until I was in high school. I saw my second and third when I was 24 and working at the cool independent video store in Boulder, the store that had all the anime and sci-fi, the french films and the obscure art house films and a back room of pretty dank truckstop porn behind beaded curtains.
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The twist was we were the only video store in town that delivered and all of the calls for delivery were either porn going to some shady dudes doing whippets at 11 am or the Little Mermaid going to some stressed out mom at a kid’s birthday party. When the female staff complained about having to deal with the creepy phone calls asking for details about the redheads in our porn catalog the owner’s son my boss once said what do you think keeps the lights on here Bladerunner and my own private Idaho no son it’s Disney and porn, same as it ever was.
This was 1994 the setting of dead Goku and the midget porn geek story told elsewhere on velvet when I started with hell’s half acre and rule 34. How every darkest unthinkable perversion anyone can imagine is out there somewhere. But look after growing up with black and white TV reruns that couldn’t show a married couple kissing in bed together in their pajamas because of the Hayes act or whatever and the zodiac killer while I was on a mountain bike delivering porn to creepy dudes and going home to write noir short stories moody violent suicidal love stories as the internet bubbled to life I still honestly did not think the government would fail so miserably when it came to regulating what passes for entertainment in the cloud. As a journalist and fiction writer I flinch at any sort of censorship but how did no one consider what pornhub might be doing to millions of twelve year old boys and the girls they would later cross paths with.
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What of the girl whose middle name is Jane.
The girl who when she’s seven tells her friend daddy has trouble getting along with society. His pillow is on the couch because that’s his bed sometimes when she’s eight she shrugs and tells her mom she might smoke cigarettes one day when she’s big enough if she feels like it she might when she’s nine how big is big enough to sit in the front seat when band of horses comes on daughter she turns it up oh I love this song who’s only ever coming up to pull you under always waiting for the funeral momma makes me turn it off in her car says it makes her cry does she cut you with your own eyes in the side mirror or her momma’s are those your mother’s ocean eyes in the knife blade man that’s my daughter she’s flashing her own blue black stars she has been since day zero.
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Sonder is the realization that the other humans have their own interior lives.
The world needs to recognize the sonder of the redacted janes. The thousands of Epstein survivors and the thousands of coma rape survivors and all the redacted Janes, they all have their own sonder. The guys who don’t get this who don’t have sisters who don’t somehow grasp their teachers the babysitter random girls on the bus these janes they have their own interior worlds. Their own anecdotes and reference points. Their own silly bedtime stories and dumb jokes. Their own hazy daydreams. Their own found footage of bad dreams and walking nightmares. When you’re asleep and dreaming you are meant to feel safe. To be safe. When you fall asleep listening to your dad tell a story about pirates or your husband talking about the yard or football or the party tomorrow night you are meant to feel safe. To not just feel it but to be safe. To sleep and dream easy. To be assaulted in the dreamspace in the place where you expect to feel the most safe, next to the person you are meant to trust, the damage must be unthinkable. The unconscious mind deals with a lot of important life stuff while you’re busy with living and processing day to day real world business. The unconscious mind is what protects you from the unseen, from the never not, from the upside down. The damage done to the minds of these women is beyond words. The destruction done to their sonder is beyond compare and they will walk in the ruins forever.
This is the time of monsters.
peace.
note. I tell my daughter all the time call your momma she’s the reason we’re both alive she’s the reason you’re so cool
daughter’s chemical romance story was sparked by Sterling’s black parade story of surviving a coma on the burn unit.
thank you sterling.
if you haven’t read Sterling what are you waiting for.
go now.
ur riffing is always potent but this one hits.
singular voice - great work.
Off by one year, Pornhub was started 19 years ago, May 25th, 2007.