I haven't thought too much about what the right thinks of me. I'm a failure, outcast, and permanent loner. That's the life I chose, intentionally, and I live it without regrets even though I know it's killing me. Today, however, I saw someone repost something an alt-righter said about what all of the left was like, and I was stunned to find out they think everyone on the left is like me. Which makes no sense because if everyone on the left was like me, I wouldn't be friendless. I know, sense is lost on these people. 

    This is supposed to be when I talk about what I saw them say and what it says, symbolically, about them and their movement. As someone who lives the way they do on purpose, though, that's not what I keep coming back to. What I keep coming back to is this image of someone begging me, Kristen Eliker, for help. They're lost, they're alone, they don't know what to do, and everyone keeps telling them that I have to power to fix things. I know that makes no sense, but for at least a decade I've had visions of being thrust into an endless abyss by evil, heartless beings who feed off of fear and sadness, blaming me for the horrors they've created. To me, this doesn't just feel cruel. It feels personal. It feels like the demons eating our reality want me to suffer specifically. I bear no ill will to those who chose to live in society, but I've never understood why they'd want to. I've always thought that society made you a victim at best and a mindless robot at worst. Seeing what the right thinks of the left, I feel as though I'm being told that I'm the destroyer, even though I have no power in reality. 

      So I've decided to embrace it. I don't know how long it will take for Kash Patel to read this and lock me up, but I'm not going to let that stop me. Not when I have nothing else to live for. Not when I, alone, among the left have any power to change things. The right gave me this power. They made me a symbol. They turned me into their personal devil. I am everything they know to be wrong with the world, and whether they like it or not I now have the power to control them. But most of us aren't so lucky. We didn't know this would happen when we chose to be good people as toddlers. So to anyone who isn't me, those on the left who are good, honest, decent people (i.e. ninety percent of the left) I beg you to leave no while there's still time. Fear is the only thing these people understand. If you can't accept that, you don't belong in the United States. 

     For those who don't know, Charlie Kirk was a founder of Turning Point USA before he was shot in a college shooting this afternoon. My only problem with it is that it was him and not Donald Trump who bit the dust. Otherwise, I don't think it could have happened to a nicer guy. Yet most of the Leftists I see seem to be more concerned with trying to avoid the attention of the Alt-Right than celebrating the death of someone who intentionally caused so much pain and grief to so many of their own, especially at his own hand. I have to ask; why do we care what the right thinks of us? They've decided they want us dead, and if we don't give them a reason to kill us they'll pull one out of their ass. All the bland platitudes in the world aren't going to convince them that we're nice, normal people who just want to live our lives in peace, and staying invisible is just going to make it that much harder to tell when we've gone missing. Shouldn't this be the moment we say, "Fuck It," and make a point of telling the right that we're done being nice? The death camps are coming, we can't avoid that no matter how hard we try, and I don't think that protesting will stop Trump and his cronies from killing us where we stand. At this point our only choices are to leave this place or go down cursing it for existing. 

A Taste of Fame

    Fame.

    It was the background noise of the twentieth century. You saw it on every screen, in every house, in every store of any type. Fame was the backbone of the media machine most millennials have at least some small remembrance of. Everyone my age has at least one name that stuck out at them. Britney Spears. Lindsay Lohan. Miley Cyrus. You couldn't escape it, and it bred two types of insanity: the kind where you followed fame wherever it went, and the kind where you hated fame so much you couldn't stand to be in a place where it would follow you. Fame did not infect our world; fame was our world. 

    My identity was built around fame. Being a Dreamer in the '00s longing for a public career meant that you had two options; conform to the expectations of the world or be your own person. I chose the latter. I would achieve whatever small amount of fame I could under whatever terms I set. After all, I had plenty of role models. Going into the '10s, the internet was dominated by people convinced they could be their own person whilst upholding society. Everyone had an opinion which everyone else was supposed to share like crazy. I know the criticisms, but I still miss it dearly, I dreamed of the day I'd be confident enough to be able to sell myself on sheer vibes the way that everyone else was doing. Did the person on the other end know what they were talking about? Who cared?! All that mattered was that we were having fun. 

     Until the day we stared doing it with a straight face. 

     This realization has been slow in coming. For a while now, I've kept seeing people with huge subscriber counts online, who you would think would be famous yet never seem to leave their niche of the internet. Call me old school, but some one with hundreds of millions of followers shouldn't be obscure. I didn't notice the tabloids disappearing from the cash registers, or if I did I attributed it to the rise of eBooks and online articles. It wasn't until John Green pointed out that he'd noticed the same thing that I realized that I wasn't going crazy. Something about our world has changed in the decade that I've been online. Fame, as I understood it, is gone. 

     You would think this would be a victory, and perhaps I should be screaming with joy, but all I actually feel is a deep sense of emptiness. When I was a kid, fame was something real that you could push against to know that you were still you. Now it's just an illusion, a holdover from a time that no one misses. I don't think many young people know what fame even is, or at least what it used to be. I have nothing to rebel against any more, so I've gone from being a nobody with principles to just a nobody. I'm left as someone seeking fame for reasons that don't even make sense anymore. 

      It's no secret that our world destroyed the nine-to-five job. It's also no secret that the gig economy has ruined hobbies. What I didn't reckon with is how both of those factors, plus the saturation of social media, would make me long for a day where not being famous was a legitimate path to take. We weren't avatars, were were just people writing our own story and carving our own path. A path that, in hindsight, was built on a context we didn't see until it wasn't there any more. People sacrifice everything for a taste of fame even now, bound by the belief that someday they'll make it. But how can you be famous when nobody can see you? 

    AI has completely destroyed reality.

    At least, that's what I think happened. I'm not sure. Like everyone who isn't a reporter themselves, I have no clue what is or isn't real anymore. I could be getting AI slop pushed at me all day, and I'm not sure I'd even notice the difference so long as it aligned cleanly with what I knew back when our world was real. 

    Like everyone else in my position, I've spent the past few years looking for something to believe in. That something is Infinitelism, the viewpoint that reality is only real so long as we collectively believe that it exists and that our world is only as strong as its weakest believer. Like everyone else who believes they've found the answer to all of life's big questions, I'm amazed that no one sees what I see. It's gotten to the point that I'm shocked more people on the left don't talk about the fact that we need something to believe in. Surely the high sales of books on spirituality would be something of a clue. 

      I've decided to spread the world on Infinitelism. It's time for people to learn about why they're so vulnerable to this new thing that keeps popping up. It's nobody's fault that no one knows what's real and what isn't, and until we accept that we won't be able to move forward. I've been holding off out of fear that I'd attract a rabid cult, but with how quickly things are falling apart I'm not sure that I've got any other choice. 

The Dreamer

      I don't remember my mother. 

     It's been a long time since I left Estellia for good, even longer since I gained enough power to manipulate all of its key components individually. I live in my temple now, dedicated to the Dreamworld and the stars in the night sky, connected to every part of the world that I'm now in charge of, a world on the fringes of what other Dreamers have built. Most of my life happens in my head. Fragments of Memories that happened, or did not, depending on whether or not  I believe them to be real. I believe that my mother and father hated me for my weakness, trapping me in an endless slumber, a nightmare I could not wake up from. I believe that I encountered all four of our Gods, fought them off, won endless power over an endless world, then ascended so they could never have control over me. I believe that somewhere, somehow, Estellia is going on as it always did, without me in it, as my predecessor would have wanted it. I also believe in a mother who looked after me and loved me as a child, a father who taught me about the stars and their meanings, a village who loved the lost child in their midst. I truly do not remember the truth. Too much of my life has been spent wandering the stars in my Dreams. 

    The only thing that I do remember is Estellia's Gods, though I don't remember how I first learned about them. Maybe, as a little girl, my mother told me in a story that, "There are four races of Nightmare: Shadow, Fairy, Monster, and Sorcerer. Each representing a fear of the Dreamer. Shadows represent those who live in the darkness and operate in the unseen and unknown. They hold all of the positions that grant one power automatically. Fairies represent unrestrained fun, the kind that pulls you in and will not let you go. It is said that they harm no one, but time after time humans have gone into their carnival and found they could not leave no matter how badly they wanted to. Monsters represent the things we must keep hidden, such as weakness and cruelty. Despite their name, they are not truly evil, merely incredibly dangerous. Sorcerers represent unchangeable truths, a world that cannot be believed in because it is always there, so it must instead be dealt with, though I'm told that they decide what can and can't be changed themselves. Do not hope to become one and escape the pain they inflict on us. Hope instead that you will one day be strong enough to fight back. But you cannot fight all of them, and there are four Nightmare's that you could never hope to defeat. They are our gods. They are worshiped, but also feared, and their power flows through their avatars into each of their domains. Do not take them lightly. Or else they will kill you where you stand."

      Perhaps that was what happened. I don't know. I do remember defeating them, as all Dreamers must in order to ascend. I do remember the names of their avatars; James, Emily, Alex, Nina. I fought all of them. Alex was the strongest, James the weakest, and I don't remember much other than them coming together to try and force me back into an endless slumber, but whether that was because they saw me as a human or a Dreamer is beyond my recollection. 

 Holy Crap, I'm thirty years old today. 

    Something I can't help but notice is that the media tends to talk about protests with the same energy they talk about disasters. Earthquakes happen because a fault shifts, tornados happen when pressure differentials get too high, protests happen when people are angry at the government and want to vent their frustration. It's not treated like a power grab, not talked about as though it were a potential shift in the political landscape. It's just, "People are angry, therefore they must punch up."

     Let's not pretend the media believes in non-violent protest. If it did, every picture of a protest we saw would be one of people calmly talking to the media, not of random assholes punching police officers. If the media believed that non-violent protest was possible, they wouldn't just warn you about protest with all the energy of a news anchor reporting on the morning commute, they'd tell you where the nearest protest was happening, how you could join, and what you should do to be on your best behavior. They do none of that. All protests are violent and all violence is inexcusable. 

    When put like that, is it any wonder opposition movements resort to violence so often? They want (or often times need) things to change, the leaders aren't listening (since nine times out of ten injustice doesn't affect them personally) and every time they do anything to try and get people to listen to them, they're branded as scofflaws and disreputable ingrates. They're fighting a battle that they can't win and they're often trapped in a system very explicitly designed to kill them. Why should we expect anything other than violence? 

     This is the part where I'm supposed to say "I don't condone violence in the name of pursuing justice." Except that isn't true. At all. I think any action in the pursuit of justice is valid, especially when you're living under fascism. But right now I'm willing to listen to the center if they're willing to consider that maybe the descent into violent conflict is entirely their fault. Maybe the best way to stop violent protest is to encourage the explicitly non-violent kind and publicize it loudly when it happens. Or maybe, just maybe, you don't want that to happen because secretly you want a world where the national guard can kill innocent people in your cities without question just because the president decided that he didn't like you that day. 

Back From Vacation

     I’m back from my break, though I don’t know how much of a break you could call it since I spent most of it moving. Right now, my room is still full of boxes I’ve yet to unpack or boxes full of things that I need to put somewhere. For now, I’m catching up. 

     Since we’re trapped in a fascist hellhole, I have a lot of things that I could write about here, but I’ll focus on the thing I really want to talk about; RFK Jr.’s terrible views on Autistic people. Let me state that I think everything that needs to be said has been said by this point; Autistic people can and have done all the things he said they can’t and even if they couldn’t that doesn’t mean they aren’t humans who don’t live deep internal lives. That’s all that needed to be said about those statements. But it’s not the thing that bothers me the most about them. The thing that bothered me the most about them is that when I first heard them, I didn’t even register just how awful they were because I’ve heard rhetoric like that constantly for my entire life. Everyone has. It’s only noteworthy because the “President” is so awful that everyone is in hyperawareness about all of the things that him and his cabinet are doing, like deporting kids with cancer to die in the gulag. I think, though, that we’re so focused on how horrible these people are that we’re ignoring the fact that their rhetoric proceeded them by decades, sometimes even centuries. If we don’t recognize that, the next Trump will only ever be an election cycle away. 

Reset

 Now is the time
For the world to remember
What it has longed 
To forget.

Now is the moment
When we must accept
That we are ephemeral.

Now is the moment
When we must let go
Of the past,
And embrace the world to come.

I want to believe
That there's a new world
Beyond the light
Engulfing my soul.

I want to believe
That the future is as bright
As the visions I see in my mind.

I want to believe 
That when I'm finally ready,
I can shape the future 
Into something worthy
Of existing.

For now,
Though,
However much it hurts.
I must say goodbye. 

Because now is the moment
My heart must accept
That tomorrow will not arrive. 

     I'm taking the month of April off. I need some time to think about what, exactly, I want to do with the blog going forward. Not making any big promises, just hoping I'll feel better about the world once May roles around.