Also not dumb. Made me laugh though. Cheers and thanks to sex workers, pornographers, transsexuals, and all the girlies.

(Unlike a year ago, when tumblr was a fount of dumb shit, currently it’s Bluesky — though Jay is doing her best to be a str8wyt tech bro. Babe, they’ll never love you.)

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy died yesterday, Monday, October 13^th.

still fucking here! and Telling It Like It Fuckin’ Is.

House of gg’s Post.

Lucky last. This is the last month I got government money to spend on jewellery, clothes, trees, porn — as well as obligatory things like rent, food, the endless findom of German insurances.

Eight months. What a ride. It’s been very good for me. From Ramadan back in March, moving to a new home and leaving the full-time job I had, to impending unemployment in October. Amazing how a mere 2,000€ a month makes all the difference and allows me to do the things I’m good at. If this was a proper job, rather than artist work, I’d be getting paid more than that and it’d be unremarkable, but here I am, remarking on how a regular income as a precarious freelance artist for a minuscule eight months has profoundly affected me and my life.

I was editing a couple of chapters with the actually quite scary Anan (or Aroush, when she’s doing afterlife Angel of Paradise stuff). She was having a long yarn about why she loves violence. I originally wrote her in the first novel, which is a few years ago already, so it’s not like I’m writing fiction on current affairs. And yet my life has always been current affairs. While I was doing the editing on those two chapters, a US nazi caught a bullet in his throat and all the white liberals — including some white trans women — tripped over themselves to compete for the best eulogy. The nazis used his assassination to get busy with reifying their long-previously declared ‘transgenders are mentally ill terrorists’ policies. The UK is sort of doing the same from a slightly different ‘protecting biological women‘ approach, but ultimately it’s the same.

As much as this affects all trans people, non-binary people, and cis people who get read as trans, the language is specifically directed as trans women, girls, and femmes. So I’m writing Anan who’s a trans woman who fucking loves violence, and I’m acutely aware of how that is read in the current (always been this way) climate of these countries. And I include Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the rest of Europe, can’t think of anywhere not poisoned by this extreme hatred and vilification of trans women.

The reasons why Anan loves violence are a direct response of the powerless to that political violence done to us — political violence in collaboration with media and policing, which manifests in daily violence everywhere in our lives. Anan offers violence as the last answer we can give, when we have begged and pleaded and still it is not enough.

I have absolutely been thinking of that line from Born in Flames all the years I’ve been writing these novels, All oppressed people have a right to violence. And I’m gonna tell you something, it’s like the right to pee. And the hadith, Fear the prayer of the oppressed, there is no barrier between it and Allah.

Late in September, Assata Shakur died in Cuba, where she’d had political asylum since 1984, free and about as close to old age as a lot of us get. She was put on the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list back in 2013. She said a lot of things which sound like what Anan says, like Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.

Speaking violence feels like a very risky thing to do, yet anything which would make a difference, which would stop genocide, is also met with the immediate full violence of the state — for that matter, anything, no matter how innocuous, which questions the state’s participation in genocide is met with violence.

I worry that even what I write on here about Palestine is enough to get a midnight visit from the cops, get my residency revoked, fall under the specific gaze the state reserves for not good immigrants. And the conflation — in germland as well as across Europe and it’s colonies — of Palestine with Muslims, Muslims with Brown people, Brown people with not good immigrants, with anti-semitism (which is what the state sees anti-zionism as), all the way round back to Palestine. I know I get clocked by white Germans as not one of them though I don’t get clocked as Muslim or as one of the aforementioned bad immigrants (I guess?), but that’s substantially because Europe, unlike say Australia, Aotearoa, South Africa, Canada has a profoundly narrow experience of what and who is a Muslim. The thing about not passing, getting clocked, getting sprung — the first thing is, it’s always happening in your head.

As I’ve been writing the second novel, I’ve been doing the same laps of my apartment going, "Yeah, but what’s it about??? Tell meeee!!!" And just like I don’t have the requisite one-liner to hook readers (literary agents, publishers, etc) on the first novel, neither do I have one for the second novel. But as I’ve been writing it, I’ve been seeing both of them — especially the second novel — as a long conversation on ongoing grief and loss. Surviving grief and loss when they are never in the past, never done, always ongoing, always waiting in the future, is honestly a fucked way to live. And it’s about anger, wanting revenge, wanting to make all those who’ve hurt us experience some consequences.

I saw Sinners the other day. So many ways it’s brilliant. Can’t even begin to be eloquent on how fucking good it is. Fucking vampires. Besides Mahershala Ali maybe never playing Blade being one of the travesties of our time, some of the costumes from that unmade movie allegedly did make it into Sinners. And the repping of the original Blade in the post-credits scene, absolute chef’s kiss.

There is a movie called Sinners without the vampires that could have existed. A story of Black sharecroppers being murdered by white Klansmen for having the audacity to think they could buy an old farm building and have a night of dancing. Very straight, very dry, white audiences would eat it up. Some commenters of a certain demographic did ask why the vampires were necessary. I can’t explain why. You either understand with your whole being or you can’t be helped.

Why am I writing sci-fi? Barely sci-fi. Third novel goes fully sci-fi — unless in the process of writing those stories get pushed to the fourth novel. Without the sci-fi, without the mythological deity shit, it’s a story of multiethnic transsexual prostitutes being murdered by white cops for having the audacity to think they could wait at a bus stop for the bus. Very straight, very dry, cis audiences would love it.

I’m not saying my self-entertainment in the form of writing overly long novels is comparable to Sinners. Except I am saying there’s something in the decision for vampires, and musician deities merging across time and geography (you know the scene I’m referring to), which resonates deeply with me for my decision of pre-Islamic deities merging across time and geography. It needs this. I need deity shit. I need fucking incomprehensible stuff I can’t explain in a clear way and yet I know it’s internally consistent and makes absolute sense and without it I’d at best be writing self-indulgent, mediocre memoir.

In the straightest, driest interpretation, a lifetime of ongoing grief and loss and anger looks an awful lot like mythology and science-fiction. Epic stories of deities who perved at the mortals and said, "We’ll have some of that," then spent the next many mortal lifetimes regretting that poor decision is very nearly indistinguishable to me from remembering being a young transsexual in 1980’s Aotearoa and seeing nothing has changed across generations and countries and hemispheres.

I’ve been jumping all over the place in editing and rewriting everything up to a ‘first draft’ (yeah I dunno either what that is). I had plans for September, and those plans met the ‘hold my beer’ of my ‘process’. I thought I was going to finish the opening chapter, which I had to split into two chapters, both of which are so long I don’t even care anymore, it’s what they are. Various bits got sliced off and moved elsewhere and other bits from elsewhere got sliced off and moved in. A lot of the last six weeks has been looking at whole parts and being pretty certain they’re irredeemable and might as well just cut them but hacking away at them for days and eventually they just sort of slide together in a way nothing like what they came from.

I also thought I was going to write all of Amaya, the youngest sister, up to that ‘first draft’ whatever, but having got past ‘irredeemable’ now I’m wondering if the two or three current chapters I’ve got might get pushed to novel three for a whole pile of reasons, or maybe ... fuck the gruesome thought occurred to me on the toilet this morning, maybe this is how novel writers end up barfing out short story collections. Because I have a stack of stuff I’ve written that I keep pushing to the next novel and maybe there is no place for this, maybe scraps need to go together.

Which leaves the vampires of the novel. All the sisters dead in some sort of afterlife-adjacent hell where Anan goes out of an evening for some murder, and all the consequences for the sisters turn up. A lot of this is written and a lot of this is chapter-length contusions of notes. Yeah I totally know what I meant when I wrote that reminder to myself two years ago.

I think, I think another month for that part and it’s done. Done-ish, semi-done. Done enough I can do the next thing which is read the whole thing from start to finish. Then the next next thing is shuffle the chapters around, do a massive amount of edits, rewrites, and stuff, and then, maybe, if it survives another read-through, if I read it next to the first novel and I’m not all, "Yeah fuck babe you had one good novel in you and it’s not this," I’ll have to get someones to have a read of it. Fuuuuck.

Sometimes shit’s just beautiful, fucking beautiful, eh. It’s sunny out, got a good breeze, the streets are busy with everyone enjoying Tempelhofer Feld, I’ve been doing my deadlifts and squats, got my bike ready for a lazy ride, the whole apartment is full of the scents of a deer meat tajine slow stewing on the stove and there’s bowl of fresh figs to go with. Like fucking unbelievable how beautiful some days can be. That’s all, just small beauties.

Walked home from Hermannstraße via Tempelhofer Feld, 26° and sunny and all of Neukölln and Kreuzberg was there. It’s beautiful and simple, heaps of people all over having a good time, cooking up big feeds, reading books, and everything in between.

Two years ago, I wrote:

There’s been a slow, inexorable genocide since the Nakba 75 years ago. [...] After decades of being squeezed and under a total blockade, where will they go? Not to Egypt, who’ve closed the Rafah border crossing. Not to the airport, destroyed by Israel twenty years ago. Into the ocean?

Into the ocean.

Al-Jazeera posted this video a couple of days ago.

Seen in Graefestraße and almost pranged my bike stopping to gawk. This is upsetting. 1st generation Mazda MX–5 done in the most beautiful muted green like a Cambridge Blue ((追記) midnight thought: (追記ここまで) might be RAL 6000, Patina green), slammed and stanced on these wild 8–spoke RS Watanabi rims with blue locking nuts, stretched Toyo Proxes T1R tires (I cried right here), completely de-badged, and besides the blue sticker of the old GarageStar tuning shop, there’s nothing to identify it. It’s exactly the kind of custom whip the TüV hates and I reckon they hate it more because it passes inspection every time. Immaculate. Seriously, I think this is the most beautiful car I’ve seen in Berlin. Habibi eating lunch nodded in approval at my desires. "See man driving a German Whip."

(追記) Addendum: (追記ここまで) The next day, September 20^th, Tom Matano, the designer of the MX–5 Miata, died.

Further to spending government money on trees and porn, I bought another tree. And terracotta pots all round. My Pōhutukawa is pretty and sprouting new leaves, but looked kinda lonely. So now we have a Mānuka. I looked out my kitchen door to the newly potted trees and said (heaps Kiwi accent), Aw, yeah, very restful on the eyes, eh. Two trees straight out of Aotearoa. Decolonising my balcony two rākau at a time.

Not writing about the genocide across Palestine here doesn’t mean it’s not in my heart every day.

Call it what it’s always been: genocide. Name the perpetrator: Israel. Name the enablers: Germany, Australia, United States, UK, and the usual ‘International Community’.

There’s another genocide going on in those enabler countries against trans people, specifically trans women and girls. And there’s the racism, Islamophobia, anti-immigration, and misogyny.

These all are connected and part of the same ideology sprung from the same poison source.

Mana motuhaka
Always was, always will be
From the river to the sea
Land Back