A Secant Query

Between Pretty and Useful

Wherein I float in a void this moment...

Between Pretty and Useful

📕 Weapons of Math Destruction - Cathy O'Neil

I wonder what might intiate lockdown in my life. Effort and willingness expose each other to more annually-blooming viruses than feel useful. Fight, flight, freeze never giving way to rest and digest.

A Poem

Under the title "oh! oh!", whales grow back their arms and legs to work in factories, and flowers want to work in factories too, they feel weird just sitting around, being beautiful and smelling good.

I read the poem. In a special water issue of a local publication, I find it. I am in the summer kitchen of a hostel I work at for bunk space in the bunk house. I am trans, homeless, teenage, and never forget this poem.

I come from a homeland and background of weapons mathematicians; at my most useful, my most effortful, I make weapons.

Adapting, I cherish not the useful. And I cherish not the useless. I cherish the anti-useful: spoon down, drink down, workaholism down; I cherish digestion, doing nothing.

Many relationships I have see "shutdown is hard work" as mixed metaphor, at best. So I compost the term:

Keep trying, heaven; you're still horizon. Still not here. Show up. Happen. That's what you leave me to do. I can't be more than Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (2022). Not by working harder: that's not a thing. I'm either everything here or I'm nothing missing

In The Flesh

People fail to satisfy some vision. Worship hypocracy like as fit, living what it defines. With distrust, they judge. Flesh magic afire, holy presence speaks breath to testament. Dance trancestors dream of comforts here. Live wire lives like candle, burning both ends for end's meet.

At least one body of nervous systems grow between child and community. As technology blows out the young's nervous system like speaker, the dangers of living might not serve pain brought on by the dangers of safety.

I am this body. Me.

– The World

When the first danger of safety is mutually-assured destruction ("My safety or your scorched earth"), what's actually happening is so feirce cognitohazard exists as a word. So feirce books are banned. So feirce thoughts can hurt. So feirce this moment is barred from existence: whatever word exists for barring what's actually happening from existing.

Staying Sane

In 2025, the word Overton window crawls its way toward me more times than I'd ever heard it, in all years previous. Exploding like firecracker on contact with a certain quality of attention, this word crowns my social context.

A lot in 2025 left people out of their depth, their Overton window (their sanity). Others refused to go insane, calling insanity via severe world order change and upset expectations a "trope" and "boring", expanding their Overton window as though tsunami pushed back from town for just long enough to invite the impossible: evacuation.

Richest few ask every social group accelerate harder, and as though cars on freeway - going with the flow of effort - groups oblige. Driven. Hustling.

Sanity Strikes Back

Set to established frame, sanity gets school terms that can't adapt to medical findings which recognize teens don't have a functioning body until noon.

Sanity is how a putrified greeting remains in service. Sanity is forcing kids to stick to one name as though to calcify them in one builds character - independant of sanity, that's abuse.

Slow the world down, and you can have "What's your name?" back. Until then, your naming ceremonies can only isolate. Kids change their name as they adapt, as they learn what world they are in. As no person found it fit to make the universe portable for them.

Say a name. How often I with that name have changed since you last saw me might be an indicator of just how keeping that name is for but your sake?

What must I think of you?

Not My Intention