…let the games begin! 🃏

ACTIVE MASON, or, On The Joys of Interracial Cruelty

In May, my mother gave me a ring. I had admired it when my grandmother wore it, and after she passed away and I was off living abroad in the early ‘naughts, I asked my mother for the ring in memory of her. My mother never wore it or took an interest in it but I found the oval design and intricate detailing intriguing. The family was auctioning off my grandmother’s goods and I had neither a house nor a reason nor the finances to transport bourgeois-style furniture or early American paintings. I was living in communist-style block housing designed even without closets. Nor was I much into accumulating things. And nobody asked me anyway.

She demurred. Then, a few months ago, around my birthday but not on it, she gave it to me, perhaps two decades after my request. She also told the story of the ring, which, as it turns out, belonged to my great-grandmother. I had vaguely heard the family lore but never connected that it was the very same ring. My great-grandfather had proposed with a solitaire in a four-prong setting which prompted my great-grandmother to have a tearful fit so unsatisfactory did she find the ring’s design. She cried for hours, slung over the bed, inconsolable—so the story goes—and was torn up about what to do (impossible that she would wear it!) so much so that she consulted his sister and they plotted to convince him to get another one. This ring, and its not quite forgotten drama, is now mine. It is much too large for me—her ring finger significantly wider than even my center one—so I considered altering it but instead bought a cheap ring adjuster not at all worthy of it but suitable for my purposes as I decide what to do.

I suppose gazing at it I became curious about the man who had bought it and when. I believe it is from 1918 or so. Last week I found an obituary and was unpleasantly surprised to learn that he was “a veteran of WWI” — that part I am fine with — “and an Active Mason.” That part — not so fine with. First of all, I thought these things were supposed to be kept secret, not published in newspapers. Secondly, and most importantly, it is the first black-and-white in my face evidence that I am somehow related to Freemasons. Eh gad! I had grimly suspected my great-great-grandfather of it as he seemed to be head of one (or five) too many various institutes but even so I didn’t have any Actual Proof. And here I am out in internet-o land issuing evacuation orders to whom I monikered The Bozo Grovers. Most probably because I am sometimes in their proximity and thus can be considered an occasional neighbor. Do I ask myself how or why I ended up near them? Yes and no. I feel a claim to even the surrounding territory such that I should be entitled to the right to be annoyed by their presence and leverage their eviction. Perhaps I have generational marbled, kobe-level beef of which I myself was not even consciously aware.

You will not be surprised now to learn that my great-grandfather was President of a Bank. Yes, it’s true! In a bustling steel town. The man my grandmother (his daughter) eventually married had turned down his college invitation to be in a secret society and didn’t really attain any high position in his life; she left him to marry a man who probably was in these secret groups—a man who worked on RFK’s ill-fated campaign. It’s ALL true! The conspiracies must be true as I have no other explanation. And while I haven’t gone much down the Freemason rabbit hole, I gather the God they worship is not the same one I do. And yet it somehow leads to the top end of a materialist’s pyramid, at what emotional cost we must all wonder.

Thus, yesterday, I decided to finally open and read a letter I had found, or, rather, another family member had found and given to me, that I managed to put off reading for, oh, a good couple of years. Written by my grandmother sent from Washington D.C. to my mother in San Francisco, probably after one too many gimlets, on a lonely Xmas Eve (one would imagine given the ruminations) most probably on learning that my mother was pregnant again (another one!) with my sister. It’s difficult to read her handwriting. The meanness of the letter can only be said to be tempered by its cruelty, and even so, it has its own level of erudite thoughtfulness to it, a bitter sort of charm. It’s difficult to say if my grandmother is merely being racist, as it is more emotionally complex than that (a mother feeling abandoned, a narcissist losing her grip), although there’s definitely a solid base of that here. Oddly enough—as an aside — more than a decade later while the O.J. Simpson trial went on, which fell heavily on racial lines (at least in D.C. with white people generally believing him to be guilty and black people wanting to see him walk free) — she studiously followed the case and even wrote her own mini-thesis on it. She was wholly convinced of his innocence. Perhaps, then, it was not just that my father was dark, and spoke with an accent but—even worse in her eyes—he was short.

To receive a letter such as this from one’s own mother, while pregnant?

““B—— was raised to marry within his tribe, i.e. not even a neighboring one. And there you both are, attempting to stake our common life as entirely disparate antecedents.”

“If you need a room without a view, well and good. But that is a reality that has little to do with me. Nor can I contend with it, except in the most superficial way. For I too have emotional limits as to adaptability.

If you were hurt because I did not stay for Asmara’s birth and other matters, there will be more of that, I am afraid. For I am as unable to follow where you seem to want to lead me, as you seem unable to follow where I might lead you.”

Eventually, my mother did tow the antecedent line, just not natally. (But she towed us along with her.) She went back to D.C. She went back to her mother, and her lifestyle. Sort of. These were the days of shoulder pads. (Later, my grandmother would carefully instruct me in the harms of feminism and even bought me The Rules as a teenager—I mean the 90’s one with time-tested secrets about capturing Mr. Right). Thus, unlike her mother, mine worked and did so daily—showing off her calves and her security clearance badges in equal measure. She remarried. She had her inside-the-beltway dinner parties with insiders.

Oh the bicoastal schizophrenia of faux-elites, so determined to serve a predatory culture it seems programmed into their (our?) genes—but who is the programmer?

I am quite the anomaly in all of this—a renegade byproduct of an unknown, yet forked, arcane and archaic aegis.

i am an excelerationist.

PORT OF CALL? DEPENDS!

so…i guess the diaper swaddled commando-in-chief won’t be satisfied until the pyrrhic victory of navy service members (warfighters?) sporting Depends.

i see legos, mocking. i suppose i imagined an empire collapsing with more bravado—this is so inelegant.

BURN.HAM: “So, after fires 🔥 … come floods.” 🌊

perez hilton.

1://blackhat/blackjack/21.orca^2