Right now, Amazon is deciding where to build its second headquarters based on proposals from countless US cities. Considering many US businesses (I’m talking 285,000 according to The New York Times) have fake addresses in Delaware in order to not pay taxes, or do things like Apple does and move their entire headquarters to increasingly remote places whenever asked to pay the billions they owe in taxes, this is kind of a plot twist.

An American company with not only 1, but 2 American headquarters? As in, an American company building a real new HQ in a state that isn’t just a tax haven with a queer beach town tacked onto it? In America?

Novel.

Cities across the United States spent a chunk of 2017 begging for Jeff Bezos’ attention in some ways that seem so weird it kind of makes you feel like capitalism has become a parody of itself, or that maybe nothing is real. It kind of seems like I’m lying when I say things like this, which is why I always provide links, my guy. I’m not gonna go through all of them, but here are my top 3 weird things cities did to try and seduce Amazon.

Tucson, Arizona hauled a 21 foot Saguaro cactus all the way to Amazon’s Seattle headquarters by truck, only for Amazon to be like “What the fuck? Is this cactus full of Trojans or something?” and reject their gift cactus.

Kansas City, Missouri mayor, Sly James, wrote 1000 reviews on Amazon. Every review was 5 stars and included some kind of clumsy segue pimping Kansas City’s many virtues.

Birmingham, Alabama had giant buttons installed around town which, when pressed, would sexually harass Amazon on Twitter with flirty tweets.

Over 200 cities of all sizes submitted themselves for consideration, and pretty recently Amazon narrowed that list to their top 20. As a Philadelphian, I was vaguely aware that we probably submitted ourselves, but was mostly under the impression that it was kind of a joke and would not go anywhere. Philadelphia is one of the largest cities in America, and yet still nobody really knows where it is, what it’s about, or what the fuck a cheesesteak is. Let me clue you in, it’s disgusting. And it’s perfect. It’s not thinly sliced Kobe beef on a brioche bun with vegetables and black garlic on top. Half this city is a goddamn food desert. We don’t eat vegetables here.

Look, a few months ago CNBC graded potential bidders, and Philly failed in every category other than having a lot of motherfuckers here. We got an A+ in population, but failing grades in every other category, including location and talent. As somebody who lives here, I can 100% vouch for this. Nothing works in the city of Philadelphia. It’s the kind of city where there is more trash on your porch after the trash guys come than before they did. That’s who we are.

I read that article and I breathed a sigh of relief, but that relief was destined to be crushed I guess, because Amazon just released its top 20 potentials and Philly is on there.

Here’s the list:

Atlanta, GA
• Austin, TX
• Boston, MA
• Chicago, IL
• Columbus, OH
• Dallas, TX
• Denver, CO
• Indianapolis, IN
• Los Angeles, CA
• Miami, FL
• Montgomery County, MD
• Nashville, TN
• Newark, NJ
• New York City, NY
• Northern Virginia, VA
• Philadelphia, PA
• Pittsburgh, PA
• Raleigh, NC
• Toronto, ON
• Washington D.C.

If you are a normal person, you have probably read so far and thought that Amazon could probably do my city some good, because it sounds like a terrible and gross place. It is. And that’s why I love it. And I don’t want a bunch of tech bros coming in here and leveling it so it can be replaced with a Soylent manufacturing plant. I don’t want to sit in an Uber pool with a guy and his sex robot girlfriend one day, if I can still afford to live in this city at all. I don’t want any motherfuckers coming here. We are doing fine without you. Two nights ago I was woken up by gunshots in the middle of the night. I love it here.

Being glib aside, Amazon is a shitty company that seems to ruthlessly swallow its surroundings, making it both internally and externally a creature I personally imagine being like The Blob. It seems as if Amazon has transformed Seattle from the city which brought us Nirvana to the city where talented men go to be ground into paste by Jeff Bezos. It seems like a city where these men can get all the cultureless bland luxury they want on their one day off a month, but none of those benefits particularly touch the majority of the inhabitants, who are being forced out by rents which double and triple faster than you can blink.

For me, Amazon coming to Philly does not represent opportunity, but is sort of a grim ultimatum. If they come here, me and millions of other people, who are as poor or far far poorer than me, will be displaced. Where will we go?

Seattle is also famously a city where no one talks to each other. Where it is impossible to make connections. I didn’t invent the famous Seattle Freeze, y’all. This is not just me being an asshole. Academics have studied and written about it, coming to the conclusion that Amazon dropping a bunch of antisocial male nerds in an unfamiliar city, working for a company with a notoriously poisonous culture that’s famous for torturing its employees and is probably killing these men slowly, has probably turned that freeze into a frostbite.

My question is, how are the actual majority of Philly locals, who are not rich, supposed to benefit from Amazon shipping in a bunch of dudes from Chicago and Boston and Los Angeles and Kuala Lumpur or wherever, and giving them a huge paycheck? How are we supposed to benefit from rising housing costs and an added 50,000 people clogging up our tiny streets, crumbling infrastructure, and barely-functional public transportation system?

We don’t. And even if we did, the price of that six figure paycheck would be working for a company which offers little benefits, is famous for firing people experiencing life crises because they aren’t productive enough, expects you to work around the clock, once a year ranks employees and cuts everyone below a certain number, and fosters an environment where employees strategically scheme to cut each other down so they can survive to the next payday, like something out of “The Hunger Games.”

The average length a person lasts working for Amazon is one year.

Does that sound like a sustainable life path to anyone?

And that’s not even talking about the lower paid workers, those in Amazon warehouses, many of whom live on food stamps and work in grueling conditions, while the CEO of their company is deemed by many to be the richest man in history.

So, long story short. As somebody who is not rich, and doesn’t have plans to kill myself to make room for “progress,” I don’t want Amazon making their HQ2 in my city. They could go to a town which has infinitely more space, a less strained housing market, and where dropping 50,000 people suddenly would not cause massive issues. Cities like Raleigh or Columbus are in a way better place to handle that sudden influx than many of the already overcrowded east coast cities on their list, for example.

Damn, I wish I knew that getting Amazon Prime 3 years ago and forgetting to cancel it ever since was me handing my money to a company that might make me homeless.

Bummer.

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Isadora Teich is a freelance writer and traveler. They’ve written social media copy, tabloids, news, erotica, opinion pieces, quizzes, have worked on film scripts, and do some ghostwriting from time to time. Isadora lives for artistic experimentation and is working on a novel.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glamthane/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GlamThane

 

Hey y’all, I know it’s been awhile since I provided any content for you to either approvingly nod at or call bullshit on.

I call everyone else out all the time, but I am also not afraid to admit when I have fucked up. And I have really fucked up.

I impulsively fell in love with this guy who said he wanted to build a life with me. He then bailed via text message. He was under pressure from his family after his relative, who had apparently stalked me, took him to a festival in the woods and screamed personal information about me at him until he promised to leave me.

So bottom line, I’m pretty pissed off and bitter right now, and I’m ready to come back at you full force, unless that guy’s family has me murdered.

This all has been really great for my anxiety.

Today we’re going in on 5 lies countless millennials have absorbed from older generations. I know a lot of people who have struggled, or are personally being tortured by these toxic beliefs right now! I know I’ve wrestled with some existential despair because of the belief that I “wasn’t doing it right,” because I couldn’t make these things true, regardless of how hard I tried.

Let’s Get Started!

You Can Be Anything You Want

If you’re like me, you grew up wanting to be a rockstar-ancient-egyptian-magic-practicing-paleontologist-vampire in a polyamorous marriage to Esmeralda, from the animated Hunchback of Notre Dame Disney movie, and Duncan MacLeod from Highlander. Or maybe you just wanted to be a duck. Or be a basketball player. Or a princess. Or a fireman. Or a doctor. Or an artist.

While it’s ok to tell a 5 year old who thinks they’re gonna be the next Van Gogh that they are gonna make it, at some point you have to get real with your kids about managing expectations. You gotta tell them about bills. We all know a tone deaf person verging on middle age still trying to make it on Broadway. If you’re a millennial, there is a chance your parent kinda lowkey raised you to be that guy.

I’m not saying that unless you come from a well-connected wealthy family who will bankroll your soul quest that you have been priced out of having goals bigger than basic survival. But without the right connections and endless capital on hand, you’re gonna face some serious obstacles you might not otherwise.

The fact of the matter is, you often can’t just be whatever you want. There are often complications, extenuating circumstances, and all kinds of real life issues which can get in the way of you attaining your ideal dreams. Real life is often about compromise and surviving sticky situations.

Sometimes your dreams are just dumb. That’s ok. Having some fantasies in you is good. Not enacting all of them at all times doesn’t mean you are an empty husk of a person.

Going To College Is The Only Path To Success

Like I said, I call bullshit on a lot of things. I’ll also be very honest with you about how I have fucked up. I 100% fell prey to this one. More so than probably anything else on this list, this one has fucked up my entire life.

If you, like me, were a scared mentally ill 18 year old kid, looking to escape a toxic family situation, or just trusted your well-meaning parents, or were just basically a kid and didn’t know fuck about anything, you most likely also ended up going tens of thousands of dollars in debt and wasting roughly four years of your life on a degree you didn’t really need and don’t use.

This one is actually the easiest to break down.

There are a ton of well paying secure jobs that you don’t need a college degree for. You, like me, unquestioningly fell in line with the classicism that had been hammered into your parents.

And by classicism, I mean the idea that there are real jobs and fake jobs. There are jobs and pay grades where you deserve to be treated with basic respect, and your humanity gets to be recognized, and jobs and pay grades where you get a little less of both. Then there are jobs and pay grades where you get none. Your salary and prestige give you humanity points.

People want to get Big Macs, but for some reason they want the people making them to be punished. They want them to starve. They want them to die of treatable illnesses. They want them to know they don’t matter. Hell, even the stress of poverty can fucking kill you.

Between being a respected doctor making 6 figures and having your humanity generally accepted, and being a person in a customer service position who makes peanuts and whose humanity is generally denied, there are all kinds of “respectable” jobs that don’t require a college degree.

For example, 60% of federal workers don’t have college degrees. Here are 10 jobs that will land you a stable middle class life and do not require a bachelor’s degree. Here’s a list of dozens of skilled trade jobs, ranging from Welder to Film Editor, many of which have no bachelor’s degree requirement. There is hardly a job on this list that makes less than $20 an hour.

Hell, over the summer I went on a date with a nearly 30 year old guy who went to trade school out of high school and is now the boss of an oil refinery. He has a car and house he owns, kids, and a wife he’s in an open marriage with.

I’m only a few years younger than him and have no kids, own nothing, live in a crumbling roach infested hovel, and am like $50K in debt.

I have that degree tho.

If You Don’t Love Your Job You’re A Failure   

It would be great if all of our passions and interests were valued under capitalism, in a way where we could focus on them and still afford to eat.

That’s not the world we live in.

Do not judge yourself for failing to live in some unrealistic dream world where we always get what we want.

Sometimes a job is just a job. And there’s no shame in doing what you have to do so you can stay off your parents’ couch.

While I was building my freelance writing jobs up after college, I worked as a dog walker, I lifeguarded at 3 pools, and I worked at a Panera Bread. I didn’t even get a single freelance gig until 9 months after graduation. For the first 5 months I wasn’t even trying to do anything else. I was just on that grind because student loans are real.

I picked up dog shit. A pitbull almost took a chunk out of my leg. I got insulted by shitty rich old women who didn’t want autistic adults to share the pool with them, and got mad at me when I told them that it was a membership based facility, so anyone with a pass could swim there. I scraped bloody tampons off floors. I would bring a huge backpack to work and stuff it full of old bagels and rolls because all my money was going to paying off a parent plus loan. I was sleeping on couches.

Honestly, I’m not really killing it as a freelancer. If I had any real responsibilities, didn’t live in a disgusting row home with two other people, and if the most expensive thing I owned wasn’t a shady third-hand old macbook air, I wouldn’t be selfishly following my dreams either.

Hell, every 3 months I say “fuck this,” and try to learn how to code.

Look, if you are hustling, and you’re surviving even though it’s hard out there, don’t let anyone tell you shit.

We Get What We Deserve  

I never believed this, because I grew up believing the universe was actively malevolent, and now I think it’s just indifferent. However, I know a lot of people who seem to be really butthurt by the idea that they deserve better than they have gotten.

I know a lot of people that are deeply angry, because they feel like they are owed a whole bunch of things they haven’t gotten. As if life has handed everyone else a pot of gold, and them, a chamber pot.

The bottom line is, no one innately deserves anything.

You don’t get extra points for being a good person. In fact, shitty people often appear to be rewarded in the cosmic shuffle while good people get untreatable cancer. Look, our president is ridiculously unqualified for his job, a rapist and a Twitter troll. It’s like we are living in some kind of dark propaganda comedy North Korea churned out about the US government. Nothing is real.

No one deserves anything. No one is looking out for you. No one is guaranteed anything. Luck and chance decide most of your life, and put most of its events in motion. If you are like me, even your birth was an accident, and shit has not become any more concrete since. While your birth may not have been accidental, every part naturally born to you is pure chance, and most of your life and personality is incidental.

While you can, and should, fight for what you want, and work smartly toward your goals, that fight and work will not always guarantee the result you intended.

No one owes you anything. Unless you are well connected, no one will hand you anything. Your free spirited friend, that studies Shakespearian literature and lives in a gorgeous loft apartment, and really found themselves in Tamil Nadu last summer on a trip their rich aunt bankrolled, isn’t innately more deserving of happiness and personal growth and exploration than you. They just happened to be born to a family with more money in it. That’s just chance. A lot of things are. There is no deserving in it.

If A Relationship Doesn’t Last Forever It’s A Failure

I promise, this one isn’t just a vehicle for me to vent about my idiot ex-boyfriend. The idiot ex-boyfriend who told me he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me impulsively; even though he had to know on some level that it would not be possible— who then outed us to his terrifying Indian family impulsively, and then backtracked instantly under family pressure, and wouldn’t acknowledge that it was fucked up of him to put me in any of those positions emotionally, or the one where his relative stalked me.

It’s definitely not.

To be real though, the idea that all relationships are only valid if they end with the death of at least one of the people involved, and anything else is failure, is insane.

People grow. People change. Sometimes they grow together. Sometimes they grow apart. I would argue that staying with someone you hate forever, and steadily growing more miserable by the day is failure.

I would say that leaving a situation that does not suit you, enrich your life, fulfill you, or is not healthy, even if it is not easy, takes a lot of strength, and is ultimately a personal success.

Of course, if you jump ship on a significant other every time they say something you don’t agree with, or do something you don’t like, or things get tough, you are gonna be through a bae a day, but there is a big difference between small issues and relationship-ending mega-problems.

While if your relationship ends because you cheated, or neglected your partner’s needs, or did something cruel, then that is definitely a failure on your part, a relationship ending in itself is not innately a failure. For the person leaving your shitty nonsense, it’s a win.

A breakup can also be two people being honest with themselves and each other about how they’ve changed and what they need, and are now making constructive positive changes by splitting up.

There is a lot of pressure, traditionally specifically put on women, to get a man and to keep him at any costs. To keep the family together. To use him as a symbol of her own worth, because she alone is not worthy. Hell, being a monogamous couple is held at such a high standard that some people choose that shit over and over again, even if they hate it and it doesn’t work for them. Being in a relationship is not inherently a success. And being single or leaving a relationship or getting left is not inherently a failure.

Girl, fuck that shit. Don’t let them do it to you. Any of these 5 things listed. Don’t buy into any of it at your own expense.

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Isadora Teich is a freelance writer and traveler. They’ve written social media copy, tabloids, news, erotica, opinion pieces, quizzes, have worked on film scripts, and do some ghostwriting from time to time. Isadora lives for artistic experimentation and is working on a novel.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glamthane/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GlamThane

 

I’m not the first whiny bitch to notice that working in this country overwhelmingly sucks.

While many people out there do their best to make it look like the economy is booming, I would like to present a different sort of argument.

An argument from an actual economist, and not your Uncle Greg who has had the same job for 25 years and doesn’t know what Microsoft Excel is.

Take a walk with me. I want to ask you some big fucking questions.

If our economy is secure, why did many of our major corporations need to be bailed out after almost crashing in ‘08?

If our economy is healthy and sustainable, why did it crash in the 1930s, crash in 2008, and average a downturn every 4-7 years in between?

Why does every president run on the platform of taking us out of some kind of economic lull, if our economy is so damn skippy?

If you can do so without stabbing yourself in the fucking leg with the nearest sharp object, think back to the last presidential election. So much absurd shit happened that I 100% don’t blame you if this slipped through the cracks. I didn’t even consider it until Professor Richard D. Wolff, the “actual economist” I mentioned, brought it up.

There are a lot of narratives attached to politicians, and not all of them are true. According to the common leftist narrative, hadn’t our economy flourished since the crash under Obama? Hadn’t everything improved under him? Isn’t Obama an A+ stand up guy with an administration that didn’t sic drones on defenseless Middle Eastern children? More people weren’t being deported from America than at any time in history at all, right? Hadn’t America become safer? Our president was slow jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon. Everything was great!

Then the 2016 election came on stronger than the black fucking plague, and suddenly that narrative goes up in smoke and we’re living in some kind of jobless Hunger Games style hell with enemies on every front.

Outside of the drama, and going straight for the numbers, had things actually gotten better or worse under Obama?

No shade, no tea, how have things been going for the average American person and family in this economy?

In a word: shitty.

In a bunch of words: Over the last 10 years there has been an overall decline in the standard of living. Half of those that lost their jobs during the crash have rejoined the workforce with shittier jobs that don’t offer security, benefits, or livable pay. The other half haven’t even bothered to go back, and many have turned to illegal shit to stay afloat in this late capitalist hell world.

The median income of the vast majority of families today is lower than it was 10 years ago. Unless you are obscenely wealthy or dealing drugs, there is a good chance that your wages have stagnated.

So, in other words, capitalism is functioning exactly as it is supposed to. The rich are getting richer. Did you know that the 68 richest people on earth have as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion collectively? If you’re lucky, your wages are stagnating. If you’re unlucky, you’re dying of a treatable illness in the same country where Bill Gates is on his way toward becoming the world’s first trillionaire. If you’re even unluckier, you are one of the people being tortured putting his shitty computers together.

I promise, we are gonna get to how we can potentially fix this, but before we can get to the fix, we gotta understand the problem. What is at the heart of this system which enables a sort of weird reverse socialism, where corporations get bailed out over and over when they’re sick, but my mom’s first thought upon getting diagnosed with breast cancer was, “ How am I gonna keep working through chemo so I can pay bills?”

How come no one out here is calling AIG a welfare queen for taking EIGHTY-FIVE-FUCKING-BILLION DOLLARS OF TAXPAYER MONEY to stay afloat, when a single mom can’t buy fucking diapers for her kid with food stamps?

It’s because of how corporations are run.

If you’ve ever done any work for a corporate employer, whether that’s Panera Bread or Geico, you know that you do what you’re told, and that’s it. There’s a lot of decisions that are made, but depending on how big the company you work for is, you probably don’t know who’s making them. In fact, there’s a decent chance it seems like no one knows. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, and the brains of the company are so far removed from the hands, that occasionally they seem to fucking slice a fingertip off out of sheer whoopsy-daisy!

What you earn isn’t decided by you, what you work on isn’t decided by you, and what is done with the money you earn isn’t decided by you. And it’s not decided by your manager. It’s not decided by the district manager. Who makes these calls?

The board of directors and the shareholders make all of those calls. Depending on the size of the corporation, that may be 10-20 people tops, making decisions that affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, with no checks or balances.

If these 10-20 people decide that they would make more money destroying the environment and destroying entire cities (LOOK AT FUCKING DETROIT MOTHERFUCKERS) by outsourcing, automating, relocating, or employing slaves, they’ll do it. They’re doing it right now. They used to shove little kids’ fingers in heavy machinery in the 1800s before a bunch of gay snowflake socialists got pissy about it and made them stop grinding up children’s hands for profit.

Unsurprisingly, despite doing none of the actual work themselves, these people continue to elect skimming more and more out of their company’s overall profits for themselves, at the expense of their workers, their country, their fellow humans, the environment, and the world itself, year after year.

The world is being destroyed by individuals who are making over 350 times what their workers do, as they alone benefit off of a system which requires massive instability and inhumane inequality.

Many Americans will tell you they live in a democratic country. Does your life and livelihood being controlled entirely, by give or take a dozen strangers, with zero accountability, sound like a fucking democracy?

So, now that I’ve confirmed that we are in fact living in a dystopian hell (chances are if you even read this far you agreed already, probably) how the fuck do we come out of this?

Is it by voting?

Noooope.

The uber wealthy have corrupted our government so extensively that even long after America has sunk into the polluted swell of the rising sea, Mitch McConnell will still be trying to repeal Obamacare on the behalf of his donors on that Texas-sized pacific trash island.

That will be his home. He will rule it with an iron fist.

Despite ruling the island, standing in a clam shell of discarded six pack rings like a saggy Venus, jowls quivering with desperate seafoamy froth, he will still be unable to repeal Obamacare.

Is it by armed insurrection?

If I said yes, I’d be put on a list.

They’d come for me.

So, no!

What if I told you there was middle path here, between trusting the process and dismantling the process, board by board?

I mean, maybe.

It turns out, there is a whole other way to do business, where workers democratically decide what work is done, and by who, and how the profits and resources are used and distributed. The people whose lives, and families, and health depend on the decisions, get to have an active hand in making them. They aren’t decided by a coven of far removed enclaves of money obsessed sociopaths, who don’t care who dies or suffers as long as the piles of money they don’t use continue to grow.

IT’S CALLED A CO-OP.

A MOTHERFUCKING COOPERATIVE.

And if you think that’s some high falutin’ theoretical shit, a bunch of hippies decided would be nice mid orgy, but no one has ever actually managed to accomplish, YA WRONG.

SO SUCK IT ADAM SMITH YOU MOTHERFUCKER.

You might think I’m being too hype about this. Listen, I’m a dramatic bitch. But I’m a dramatic bitch because there is a whole other system by which we can conduct business and thrive, that doesn’t crash, that doesn’t burn, and that doesn’t enable the suffering of billions for the pleasure of the few.

Like, do you really buy that an unstable and inhumane economic system, that tortures most of those living under it, is the best we can do? Do you think that a way of organizing production, where billions of people are helplessly subjected to the whims of a few hundred, is the sole option?

Is that really what you want?

Let me tell you a tale of two Spains.

Spain Uno: Livin’ la vida late capitalism. You can still get an AirBnB in Barcelona for a week for the cost of a piece of cruelty free gochujang glazed soy bison in a Brooklyn pop-up bar. The country spent over a decade in economic crisis. It looks like it’s just starting to come out of it, but that’s how capitalism functions. It booms, it busts. It has casualties. Over and over again.

Spain Dos: Mondragon Corporation. This massive co-op, in the Basque region of Spain, includes industry, finance, and retail enterprises. The co-op member-workers own and direct the decisions which affect their own lives and their business. They democratically elect their representatives within the business. So instead of a boss hiring workers, MC worker-members collectively hire and fire their boss equivalents. They democratically make decisions and rules.

For example: Top paid worker-members can earn no more than 6.5 times more than the lowest paid workers.

Unlike in America, where there is no ceiling, and CEOs earn over 350 times what their lowest paid workers do.

AND THEY ARE ONLY GONNA FUCKING MAKE MORE NEXT YEAR.

Mondragon Corporation is no joke. As of their 2010 annual report, they employed 85,000 worker-members. It’s the largest corporation in the Basque region, one of the top ten largest corporations in Spain, and has grown every year since 1956, all while enabling greater stability and income equality than capitalist Spain, which hit unemployment rates as high as 25% a few years back.

And Mondragon isn’t alone. There are so many successful co-ops that you can check out a list of the top 300 most successful ones globally, if you like.

All of them are doing better than Bear Stearns.

I’m just one person, and so are you, but there are things we can do to reject capitalism that are effective without being extreme.

You don’t have to set yourself on fire. You don’t have to seek refuge in the woods and eat only what you can forage with your bare hands.

Unless you fucking want to. In that case, eat all the rocks you want, bruh.

#Taoistvibes

There’s practical shit we can do to take back the power the wealthiest have taken from us. This isn’t about arguing purity or ideology or any of that shit. It’s not about neoliberal prick waving.

Here’s what we can do.

We can start co-ops, we can work for already existing ones, and we can opt to spend money at co-ops, rather than businesses with traditionally exploitative corporate structures. Most co-ops look exactly like regular businesses from the outside, so you can get the same bananas you would at your typical corporate grocery store, for example.

Do a Google search, my friend. Start small. See what is in your area and pick one thing in your life to shop co-op for. See what is within your price point and fits into your lifestyle.

It’s not gonna happen overnight, and it’s not gonna be easy, but each and every one of us doing what we can, to further a vastly more ethical alternative to capitalism, is a matter of fucking survival.

Also, the fact that co-op bought bananas are actively fucking over rich people that would step over your dead body on the way to their meeting with their hedge fund manager, makes them taste even sweeter.

Trust me.

Support Isadora’s writing on our site by subscribing to our newsletter on this link, Subscribe here!

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Isadora Teich is a freelance writer and traveler. They’ve written social media copy, tabloids, news, erotica, opinion pieces, quizzes, have worked on film scripts, and do some ghostwriting from time to time. Isadora lives for artistic experimentation and is working on a novel.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glamthane/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GlamThane

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hi, I’m Izzy, and a back injury put me out of commission for about a year and a half. Over my entire 24th year of life, I didn’t fuck, didn’t even think about fucking, and maybe went on two first dates; both that went nowhere. I was mostly just in pain and tired.

While my back still isn’t 100%, I’ve definitely gotten back in the game over the past few months. And as a polyamorous pansexual with an internet connection, who is just looking to meet people and have a good time, the sky is the fucking limit.

By polyamorous, I mean that I am capable of being romantically and/or sexually attracted to more than one person at a time. I would say that more people are this way than not, which is why 30%-60% of married individuals are statistically expected to cheat on their spouses, and definitely a part of why over half of marriages end in divorce. We’re animals. What we want and need changes all the time as we grow and gain new experiences. We’re horny AF. It’s nbd.

I mean, it is a big deal, because a big pillar of society is that if you don’t only fuck one person of the opposite gender until you die, and love it, you’re a bad person, and that’s still haunting a lot of people, but it ain’t haunting me. No chains of heterosexual monogamy rattling on my porch in the wee hours. No, sir.

And by pansexual, I mean sex, gender, and gender identity don’t define for me who I should be attracted to and who I shouldn’t. While, I of course notice these things, a thought like “Wow, she’s a woman so I can’t be attracted to her” is just not a part of my thought process. I have experienced within queer spaces, that some queer people are suspicious of trans, gender non conforming, or bi and pansexual people like me, sort of on principal. They don’t want to fuck us or really even respect us. They think we’re shady or playing some kind of game. For me however, thoughts like, “They are trans so I shouldn’t be into them” or “I can’t date this bisexual person because they identify as bisexual” aren’t really how I think.

Unless you are also polyamorous and pansexual, you probably read those last few paragraphs as me buttering you up to let you in on my non-stop pornography grade bacchanalian sex fest, a la Tinder. You probably think I’m guest versing in threesomes for straight couples left and right, shouting “Mr Worldwide” like some kinda lubed up Pitbull. You’re probably thinking I moonlight as a pair of left handed scissors and daylight as a ball rest for a wealthy older gentleman.

For the record, I don’t really. I think Tinder and Bumble have been as kind and unkind to me as anyone else. We’re talking the Led Zeppelin song “Good Times, Bad Times” or maybe even “Dazed and Confused,” and not all the other ones about wreckless good old fuckin.

Straight and gay men and women always tell me they wish they could be like me, because it must be so easy to be ok with getting fucked by anybody and as many at a time as possible.

I’m not actually a walking perpetual gangbang machine, you guys.

Just because sex and gender don’t define my attraction, and I don’t think enforced monogamy works, doesn’t mean that literally nothing matters to me when it comes to who I date or fuck, or that I’m building a harem. Let me tell you, I have been on enough bad dates with all sorts of people (like, will go in my future stand up special bad) to know that there are a lot of things that don’t work for me. Tbh, I think the most important part of dating is finding out what doesn’t work for you, regardless of your sexual orientation. And this can be a super shitty process.

Over July-August I have met five men off Bumble and Tinder. One of them was incredible. One I thought was incredible, but turned out to be a dick. One is a dick, but he’s very open about it, and I respect that. One was haplessly immature in a way so common, that if you’re a millennial, you know at least 18 dudes just like that. And one I only hung out with for about 40 minutes, before he ran out of my house crying because he was having performance anxiety.

Definitely a mixed bag, am I right? We’re talking two different countries and an age range of 22-40.

If I were a man writing this, that would definitely be read as a brag. Since I’m a biological female writing this, the intent is less clear. Do I want to shock you? To disgust you? To tantalize? To make you feel concern? Or envy?

If it helps, I’m just tryna tell you some shit I seen. You can sort out however you want to feel about it on your own time. I’m not responsible for that. I’m just one human being that spent over a year in a sexless marriage with my TENS unit, who’s tryna have a good time and figure out what I like and what I don’t.

As someone who has been socialized as a woman, I feel like I’m doing something really important for me right now. Many women grew up reading magazines which told us how important it was to get bae, and keep bae, and be all you can be for bae, but no one ever really asked us what kinda things we wanted in bae. We’re told that if you aren’t hot or thin or white or whatever enough, you have to be grateful for whatever bae you get. If any man pays any kind of attention to you, hold onto him and never let go, because that’s all there is for you. And if anything goes wrong it’s your fault.

And that’s just not real.

Over this month I have learned so much about myself and what I like and what I don’t, that I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Even that one time where that guy I barely knew ran out of my house crying. Shit happens. If an ex-performer turned real estate agent in his late 30s cancels on you last minute, because he’s having issues with his divorce, don’t make it about you, man.

Just keep swiping.

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Isadora Teich is a freelance writer and traveler. They’ve written social media copy, tabloids, news, erotica, opinion pieces, quizzes, have worked on film scripts, and do some ghostwriting from time to time. Isadora lives for artistic experimentation and is working on a novel.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glamthane/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GlamThane

Before we get into this, I want to say that I am not entirely sure if I consider myself a feminist or not. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and I am honestly leaning toward maybe not. This is definitely a controversial stance to take, and if I was a man and expressed that I was not 100% behind modern feminism, or had a lot of problems with mainstream feminism, in any kind of public way, there would definitely be the 2017 guillotine in my future: a viral twitter post mocking me and maybe even doxxing me.

It’s a complicated thing. I think most people don’t even know what feminism is anymore.

I think that modern feminism is narrow, myopic, non-inclusive, and has been largely co-opted by Pepsi and Hollywood figureheads to make their brands seem authentic. Emma Watson and Taylor Swift drop the F word all the time to applause and big money, meanwhile American black women can barely get a hashtag when they’re killed by police and die in childbirth at higher rates than women living in third world countries.

Despite feminism being so mainstream, it seems like nobody still gives a shit about most women. How are we living in a society where I can buy the word feminism on a mug, a sweatshirt, a necklace, and a throw pillow right now, and have them delivered to me by next week if I want, but a man who is known for sexually assaulting women is my fucking president?

There’s also a whole group of “feminists” dedicated just to hating trans women. How are you gonna call yourself any kind of feminist if you point blank hate any kind of woman? What the fuck is that? Speaking of what the fuck, companies and celebs make bank off of faux empowerment chic fashion, like sweatshirts that have “Feminist” emblazoned across the front, which are worn by “Woke AF” western liberals who congratulate themselves for being so cosmopolitan, all while these clothes are being pieced together by tortured women in third world countries.

Feminism is supposed to be radical. It’s about dismantling oppressive power structures. It’s about looking deep inside yourself and actively trying to be less shitty. It’s not about buying a slave labor made Forever 21 denim jacket that has pizza and cat patches on the front and “male tears” written four times in ombre pastel font on the back, so you can get the feeling of jerking off without getting your hands sticky. It’s not about telling femme women they are betraying their sex by visiting Sephora. It’s not about bragging rights for doing literally the bare minimum of being a decent person.

How watered down, decontextualized, and totally meaningless mainstream feminism has become is largely illustrated by a lot of its critics, who claim that it has ruined women, ruined marriage, ruined America, and also ruined their chances of getting laid. It’s also illustrated by a lot of the people who claim they are feminists. Both groups of people seem to actually have no fucking idea what feminism means.

Like this motherfucker.

If you don’t spend your life on the internet watching Space Ghost Coast To Coast and inundating yourself with memes to numb your existential terror, you may have missed the “I love this woman and her curvy body” meme.

Basically, a skinny guy with a statistically thin, average looking wife, wrote an Instagram post congratulating himself for being woke enough to want to stick his dick in her, even though she’s fat. It went viral. A lot of assholes other than me had a lot to say about it.

In case you are wondering, that is not what feminism is, and it didn’t take long for people to rip him a new asshole. Wanting to fuck a woman who is not a size 0 doesn’t make you a fucking radical feminist. It just makes you a pragmatist in a country where the average woman is a size 16-18.

Here’s the original post, where you can take a look at his wife’s “thick thighs, big booty, cute little side roll, etc.”

As a legitimate fat bitch, this bothers me for a few reasons. If you want confirmation that I’m a real world fat bitch and not one of those thin girls that announces I’m fat every 20 minutes because society has successfully conditioned me to constantly seek validation that I am not totally disgusting, take a look at my Instagram. I’m really fat. I’m really not even average looking probably. And I’m really not sorry about it.

I’m just gonna go through a few points from Robbie Tripp, “The Paul Revere Of Chubby Chasing,” “The Magellan of Fupa Circumnavigation,” “Alleged Fat Chick Connoisseur Who Apparently Has Never Seen One Before,” and talk about everything I think really shows he doesn’t get anything he is actually talking about.

“I love this woman and her curvy body.”

Nice. If only he had stopped there.

“As a teenager, I was often teased by my friends for my attraction to girls on the thicker side, ones who were shorter and curvier, girls that the average (basic) bro might refer to as “chubby” or even “fat.”

While I really vibe with making the word fat just another descriptor, like “tall” or “brown-eyed,” that’s not what he’s doing. He’s also making her body about him. A man setting the stage to go out of his way to remind people that other men find his wife’s body gross, but not finding her gross elevates him as an enlightened man, is grosser than even my side roll, probably.

“Then, as I became a man and started to educate myself on issues such as feminism and how the media marginalizes women by portraying a very narrow and very specific standard of beauty (thin, tall, lean) I realized how many men have bought into that lie.”

If you really got feminism, you wouldn’t be posting an essay congratulating yourself for fucking your fat wife, who is not even fat. Discussing women’s bodies like they are some kind of anomalous thing is actually a huge part of the problem. Acting like women who are larger than a size 2 are fat, and that fat is the worst thing you could be, is a problem. The average American woman wears a size 16 or 18. I actually wear the same jeans size as the average American woman.

Despite being the average, I can’t get that size in many stores, I still consider myself fat, and so does everyone else. Robbie Tripp’s “curvy wife” is actually most likely statistically thin, for an American. The fact that this educated feminist felt the need to qualify and defend his wife’s statistically thin body and his attraction to it in a pretty gross Instagram essay about her “big booty” is kinda messed up.

“A real woman is not a porn star or a bikini mannequin or a movie character. She’s real. She has beautiful stretch marks on her hips and cute little dimples on her booty.”

Again, feminism is not about stacking women against each other to prove points, or deciding what is real based on your own convenience or ideals. While mannequins and movie characters are not real women, porn stars are actual people. And maybe I have just watched more porn than this guy, but I have seen weirder shit on porn actors’ bodies than I have ever seen on a real life person. And as somebody who has slept with people of a number of genders and ages throughout my life, I have seen some shit on peoples bodies, let me tell you, my dog. You can enjoy both your average wife and Sasha Grey. You don’t get “I’m Not Like The Other Guys” points for making a spectacle of your wife’s body.

Also, I take issue with having to pretend that all naturally occurring marks of surviving on this hell planet have to be romanticized. We get scars. We get stretch marks. Even though we as a society have decided to pretend that only women get cellulite, men get it too sometimes. Can we all please calm down and accept the inherent grossness of our meat suits? Men, women, and others out there listen to me, not every aspect of your body has to be sexy or perfect to be valid. We are dumb cosmic mistakes that get lumpy and weird and saggy over time. Don’t worry about it. Come watch TV.

“Girls, don’t ever fool yourself by thinking you have to fit a certain mold to be loved and appreciated. There is a guy out there who is going to celebrate you for exactly who you are.”

The fact that he has spent this entire thing talking about how fat his statistically thin wife is really undermines the authentic love message he’s trying to express. Also, women are told they have to do very specific things to be valid and attractive. We aren’t fooling ourselves buddy.

Question: Is taking pics of your wife all day, and tagging them with every plus size related hashtag you can find for follows on Instagram, a genuine and pure celebration of her body?

Am I a bitter curmudgeon if I am skeptical?

Does anyone else find Robbie Tripp’s whole deal kind of gross?

 

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Isadora Teich is a freelance writer and traveler. They’ve written social media copy, tabloids, news, erotica, opinion pieces, quizzes, have worked on film scripts, and do some ghostwriting from time to time. Isadora lives for artistic experimentation and is working on a novel.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glamthane/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GlamThane

 

Is Donald Trump really a salesman if all of his businesses result in failure, and legal action against him and his patronage took down Atlantic City?

Is he really president if he and his party have accomplished almost nothing half a year in because he genuinely believes policy on the international and military stage is crafted and implemented in 140 characters or less?

I mean, I can say I’m a fucking jalapeno pepper, but am I? Do I perform the functions of a jalapeno pepper? Am I good in salsas? If you fry me and stuff me with cream cheese will I suddenly be a bar food staple?

What Donald Trump did to Atlantic City, he would probably do to this country if left unchecked. Of course, it is way more complex to tank the entire US economy than 15 shitty casinos on a medical waste soaked beach, and I’m not saying he’s gonna manage it all alone, but I genuinely do believe that Donald Trump is probably the single greatest threat to the US economy in our history.

While he rails against trans people in the military and sick people for being such a drain on America’s wallet, he is poised to wreck us from the inside out by being generally ignorant, offensive, and wholly detached from reality.

As a jalapeno pepper, I have an excellent grasp on reality.

I’m gonna tell you some shit you already know that it seems Trump doesn’t. And it’s that your connections are everything. Who knows you, who likes you, who respects you, who feels they owe you, who will help you out, and who wants your respect is everything. It defines you. Being able to effectively network is almost the only skill that matters in the modern world.

If you can interact with other people constructively, collaborate, and appropriately leverage your relationships in life you can do whatever the fuck you want. And you can do it faster than Trump can swollenly tweet “cofveve” in his bed in the middle of the night with one tiny hand wrapped around his dusty chode.

Trump is burning bridges like a preteen boy in 1975 who got his hand on his dad’s box of matches.

I’m guessing that’s what kids did before iPads, right? Arson?

#MakeAmericaGreatAgain

I want to take a minute to highlight one expensive bridge Trump has taken a fucking blowtorch to. This is by no means all of them, or maybe even the most severe, but it does set an interesting precedent. Turns out that if you are untrustworthy, unhinged, and blatantly an idiot, people don’t want to do business with you. Mexico will definitely not be the first to try and jump off of the SS United States before it fucking sinks into the quickly rising ocean.

Turns out Mexico wasn’t too thrilled with Trump declaring them a country of rapists. We all know that.

But what a lot of us don’t know is that Mexico buys mad corn from our country every year. In fact, it’s our top agricultural export to them. There’s a whole portion of the Midwest called The Corn Belt, where the same farmers that voted for Trump because brown people make them nervous have made a chunk of their living selling corn to Mexico for generations.

Let’s be real: complex interwoven international economic precedents don’t just dissipate instantly over a few shitty remarks. On top of this, Trump’s wild claims to overturn complex trade agreements he clearly does not understand, at the drop of a hat, have made Mexico nervous enough to start looking into buying corn from other countries and growing their own, rather than buying it from us.

One Mexican senator even introduced a bill to try and completely eliminate his country’s purchase of American corn over the next few years.

That’s probably not gonna happen, but the fact that our president is such a fuck up on the world stage that countries are already trying to figure out how not to do business with us should be enough to make some people wonder what the fuck they’ve done.

I’m not even mad on my behalf. I’m writing this at 1 pm, naked in my bed in my crumbling row home in a major city, with a glass of red wine in one hand. It affects me 0% if Mexico doesn’t want to buy Slim Jim Jones’ family corn. In fact it benefits me, because I’ll get paid to write about how ironic it is and how smug I am.

Full disclosure, even if Mexico rejects our corn outright in the future, it is just an economic drop in the bucket if you only give a shit about numbers. In the grand scheme it’s not exactly the most harrowing eventual option in the kaleidoscopic mess of potential impending dystopian futures. However, it does not change the fact that a country wants to stop doing business with us because our President is a wreck.

Also, let’s forget about numbers for a second.

Actual hard working Americans are potentially having their livelihoods threatened by this shit. Like real people.

Trump is well on his way to ruining our country’s relationship with every other country on earth. Before he was even president, news sites were churning out lists of all of the other countries he’d offended.

My personal favorite Trump fuck up was him supposedly handing the Russians classified intelligence from Israel. My other favorite is him totally proving that he’s trying to make our government look like the Batman Rogue’s Gallery by bringing in Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci as communications director. Or maybe Putin having his fist deeper inside him than a fucking sock puppet.

This shit is not sustainable.

It’s not good government.

It’s not good business.

It’s just not good.

 

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Isadora Teich is a freelance writer and traveler. They’ve written social media copy, tabloids, news, erotica, opinion pieces, quizzes, have worked on film scripts, and do some ghostwriting from time to time. Isadora lives for artistic experimentation and is working on a novel.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glamthane/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GlamThane

 

I have been conned. And so have you. As Americans, we’ve all been conned. It’s like an Oprah episode, only instead of getting a copy of a book you’re never going to read or a car or some shit, you just get ripped off forever.

What am I talking about? If you’ve read anything else I’ve written, you know where this is going. A lot of the problems of our country, many which seem totally unrelated, all boil down to the fact that capitalism implies winners and losers, and the winners have Jedi mind tricked y’all into thinking you can catch up with their centuries of money if you deserve it and/or work hard enough.

You probably can’t, and that’s not just my opinion as a slutty black magic practicing communist and enemy of the moral order or whatever.

You almost definitely can’t.

Let me run a scenario by you.

Two babies are born. Both white. Both male. Both have little tufts of tawny hair and big blue eyes. They are plump, healthy, and fairly chill babies. They have those cute little baby toes. You know the ones I’m talking about. That’s the good shit.

One is born in an affluent suburb near New York City to some old money motherfuckers. One is born to a poor family in rural Pennsylvania that burns their own trash, because no municipal trash services are available. The only WalMart is two towns over. There is no grocery store.

Old Money Baby’s dad is an alcoholic and a fuck up by all accounts, but he’s also an heir, so it doesn’t matter that he is unable to provide for his family or himself, or do any of the things that anyone of a lower class would hate themselves for being unable to do. Despite earning nothing for himself, he has several houses, a number of cars, and dresses impeccably.

Because he’s drinking scotch and IPAs instead of PBR, it’s classy. Because he’s rich, his cruel neglect of his son in favor of being constantly fucked up is fine. He’s just distant and showing him tough love. He’s not mentally ill. He’s not an addict. He doesn’t have to address anything. He doesn’t have anger problems. He’s fine.

Old Money Baby goes to a good school, but grows up traumatized and deeply angry because his father is an emotionally distant drunk that spent half of his childhood shooting lions in Africa and the other half screaming at him. His mother has been at brunch with some other housewives for ten years straight.

He gets into drugs in high school, and gets caught, but it doesn’t matter because his dad is friends with the judge. He goes to Columbia for no real reason, other than that he can and most of his family has, and spends most of his time there drunk, and despite never really putting effort into his education, he’s been passed through so many high quality educational institutions that some of it sticks.

Old Money Baby graduates college too fucked up and miserable and drunk to hold down any job, but it doesn’t really matter. His family money carries him through. At the age of 40 he hasn’t held a job down for more than a few months ever, but lives comfortably. It’s fine. He’s not mentally ill either. He’s also not an alcoholic. The cycle is not continuing. It’s all fine.

Ok, so let’s talk about what happens to Baby Pennsyltucky, after growing up with a deadbeat alcoholic father, and a mother who doesn’t have time for him.

Baby Pennsyltucky goes to an unfunded rural school where there isn’t a textbook that isn’t from before 1975. He lives in a crumbling house with parents who work three jobs between them, but can afford nothing. There is no computer in his house. There’s only electricity about half the time.

His parents can’t afford a lot of the most basic shit, like even laundry detergent. Many poor families have only two kinds of soap in their house; bar soap for washing your ass, and the cheapest industrial tub of dish soap, which is used for literally everything else. Baby Pennsyltucky’s clothing is washed with dish soap. His parents can’t afford to buy him deodorant. He smells like shit all throughout school, and because of that the other kids fucking torture him.

He’s tortured by other kids at school, and at home by his family members, because it turns out no one really reacts well to the constant pressure of existing on the edge of complete desolation.

His dad is either at work or home drunk and unconscious. He sees his mother every few days, and it’s clear that she regrets having him, because how could she not? None of them really know each other.

It’s no fucking secret that there is an opioid crisis in this country, and whether you believe it’s a terrible accident or yet another attempt by the lizard people to cull the herd, we all know it’s happening. There’s whole streets you walk down in my city and can find needles sprinkled everywhere, like the world’s most fucked up confetti. It’s so fucked up that librarians are learning how to handle overdoses.

Baby Pennsyltucky learns no skills and absorbs nothing from his underfunded school where he is isolated and tortured, because the school isn’t really there to teach anyone anything; just to tick off some boxes so the powers that be can pretend they tried.

Baby Pennsyltucky ends up overdosing on heroin at age 16. He almost dies. There’s no money and no safety net. There’s no one to smooth things over. His parents kick him out and he hops between friends couches for awhile until their generosity dries up. Somewhere in there he drops out of high school, but it doesn’t really matter to him. When he gets mixed up in drugs there’s no one to back him up,and there’s no one to bail him out; there’s no nothing. He goes to jail, where he is further traumatized, but this is never addressed.

No one cares. He’s another degenerate, alcoholic, addict, scumbag that just can’t do anything right and doesn’t deserve anything, right?

Like many prisoners, he goes in and out of jail for years. He’s more or less homeless in between, because employers won’t hire ex-convicts to do upstanding over the table work in many cases, regardless of what their charges actually are. And when he does get hired he’s too deeply scarred and angry and mentally unstable to hold a job for long. But because there’s no old money backing up Baby Pennsyltucky, that makes him an irredeemable piece of shit in the eyes of our society. He’s someone who doesn’t deserve the very basics of a minimally non-miserable existence.

Baby Pennsyltucky and Old Money Baby are both white male American citizens born in the same country. They actually don’t even live far from each other. Let’s say that Baby Pennsyltucky lives in the Shippensburg, Pennsylvania area, which has a median income of about $31K, and Old Money Baby lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey, which has a median income of over $150K.

Both of these assholes only live about 200 miles from each other. According to Google Maps, you could drive from one of their hometowns to the other in about 3.5 hours. This is less time than it takes somebody to watch the extended edition of the Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

In the time it takes you to watch Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn go from a dirt and sweat caked sex god who looks like he would somehow smell worse before fucking you raw than after (!!!!!!!!), to some old guy in a dumb crown who probably bathes and would fuck you ok (…..), you could experience the vast chasm that exists between rich and poor America. In an afternoon basically.

Of course, there are vast intersections which influence just how far you can get in America, but right now I’m hitting it straight from the economic angle. While occasionally somebody Mad Max Fury Roads the shit out of a barrier, that does not negate an entire network of oppressive systems torturing millions of people.

When we have such vast disparities on multiple levels, including this one, why are we all pretending that everyone has the same opportunities for success? For most Americans, you only matter and deserve anything if you can prove it by having a lot of money. We believe this deeply about ourselves and others. So deeply that we are probably about to kill millions of our own citizens and not bat an eye.

It is for this reason that the Republicans might just manage to jack health care from over 20 million people. As Americans, a cornerstone of our culture is that you are only worth as much as you have. Your humanity is tied entirely into how much you are worth to your boss and how much you earn. Money lends you grace and buys your humanity, even if you didn’t do fuckshit to earn it. We don’t believe that life is innately important, even though we want to think we do. This disregard underpins what it means to be an American. To insinuate that people might need one another and have moments of “weakness” is offensive.

Do not buy into the fallacy that you are self made if you have anything, even if it’s not a lot. Don’t let them play you. Rich people who have done nothing to inherit their money, or maybe even did rad and respectable shit, but want to pretend they didn’t have a lot of help, have invented this self made bullshit. People who come from money will do wild leaps in logic to pretend they are self made. This can be seen everywhere from Ivanka Trump’s latest book to that song by Drake.

Almost nobody who got anywhere really started at the bottom.

Drake comes from a family of successful musicians and grew up rich in Toronto, eh.

We are all products of our environments; both good and bad. We are our parents, we are our class, we are our race, our sex, our gender, our connections, our family. A lot of this has nothing to do with us. While we all have agency, it’s a lot easier to exercise that agency when you aren’t a starving child, and the President your parents voted for out of blind desperation and anger wants to take the one guaranteed meal you get a day from you.

We need to take the value off work and off money in this terrible system and put it back on people. Having cities full of empty rotting houses while homeless people die in the streets, because having anyone under a certain tax bracket living in them would make the money sad, is insane. Having two towns a few hours apart in the same country, be oceans apart economically, is crazy, and also probably a big part of the reason Trump won and the final season of America is so wild.

In Detroit, where capitalism has already notoriously failed, citizens are devising their own kind of economy, which responds to the needs of the people rather than prioritizing numbers and idolizing the fiction of hard work in exchange for things.

Why the fuck do our lives revolve around money and jobs, instead of ourselves?

Why aren’t we taking care of each other?

What are we doing?

 

 

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Isadora Teich is a freelance writer and traveler. They’ve written social media copy, tabloids, news, erotica, opinion pieces, quizzes, have worked on film scripts, and do some ghostwriting from time to time. Isadora lives for artistic experimentation and is working on a novel.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glamthane/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GlamThane

 

Maybe I’m kinda late on this and no one cares anymore, but honestly, I can’t let it go.

It haunts me.

Every generation has its symbols and stereotypes and generalized flaws and accomplishments, but the idea of a fruit on a piece of bread being symbolic of the apparent wastefulness and lascivious overindulgence of my generation—  is insane to me.

Remember when representations of affluence were like, having a car? Or wearing fucking gold?

Oldheads are mad we don’t buy cars. They’re mad we don’t buy houses. They’re mad we don’t buy diamonds, and they are mad many of us have realized we have been priced out of having families of our own, and so are not doing it.

We can’t. Even if we desperately wanted to.

And instead of listening to us when we say it is impossible to meet your standards of success on the wages you pay, hot and fresh out the debt mill you created, some motherfucker wants to make it very clear that it’s not a chaotically systematic clusterfuck designed to bleed dry anyone that’s not on Trump’s constant golf holiday.

It’s our love of avocado toast, according to Australian property mogul and millionaire Tim Gurner.

Well, I’m here to make it very clear that given the choice, I would choose a single fucking slice of avocado toast over owning an entire house. I’m not interested in meeting a single standard set up by a generation of sociopaths, who have destroyed the world around them without compunction.

Whether we are talking some fancy shit with fennel, radish, and lemon or just some avocado mashed onto a piece of toast with a fork with salt and pepper, I think that avocado toast is great, and owning a house is dumb, based on what they do for you.

So, what exactly does avocado toast do for you that a house does not?

On a basic level, avocados are actually incredible for you. They offer over a dozen vitamins and minerals, which are good for everything from your eyes, to your blood pressure, to your skin, to cell repair. How well we live and how fast we die is tied to how well our cells repair themselves. Basically what I’m saying is that if you eat enough avocados you will live forever.

Yeah, science!

On a more bullshitty “I have a liberal arts degree level,” avocado toast is really being used in this context to generalize a fascinating shift in what counts as indulgence and valued action in our culture, how it functions, and what it means. Tim Gurner is picking up on the fact that we don’t give a shit about what he values and what he is.

So, what the fuck am I talking about?

As I said before, indulgence and success and taking care of yourself used to mean very different things. In the old days you got a house, you got kids, you married ASAP, you ate steak every night, you hired poor people to do your exercise for you, and you worked a pointless job to acquire objects that would mostly just rot in your basement.

You would be expected to do things like put time, energy, and money into maintaining a lawn, which is functionally useless, while driving your gas guzzler to the supermarket to pick up overpriced borderline nutritionless produce picked by terribly paid immigrants.

All of these things are performative. We know now that eating steak every night will kill you, and staying with someone you hate forever, sucks (and now that we are no longer held economic prisoners to one another, we don’t have to!).  Also, never moving will kill you, and relationships and meaningful work and human connection will do more for you than having 15 cars and a breakfront full of fine china no one is allowed to ever use will.

We indulge in experience, each other, and ourselves, often through eating healthier, physical activity, and doing things to benefit our communities. We often make shit money working terrible hours for nonprofits because helping others is worthwhile to us. We are doing our best to care for ourselves and each other in big and small ways as older people hold the world hostage out of spite, seemingly unaware that they actually exist on the same shitty planet they are plunging headlong into oblivion to spite us.

So to summarize, avocados: the complete key to immortality. We like ‘em ok. We are living in the age of avocado culture. It’s like the age of aquarius but it doesn’t have that song at the end of “The 40 Year Old Virgin.”

So, what does a house do for you then?

Home ownership is one of the main parts of the American dream, which is pretty much dead, and may not have ever been a thing in the first place. I, personally, cannot afford one, and am not sure if I ever will be able to. Even if I magically won the lottery tomorrow, I’m not entirely sure I would immediately sink that money into a home for a few reasons.

For one thing, spending money to not only buy, but constantly maintain a structure against entropy and termites seems like an uphill battle that is ultimately pointless. When I die, will it matter that I renovated my kitchen every 7 years? Will living in a room painted blue rather than one painted red dramatically improve my life? Will putting all of that focus into maintaining an external and ultimately slowly degrading structure rather than myself and the people around me yield all that I hope it will?

I’ve seen people desperately pour money they didn’t have into their nice homes while their elementary school aged children sat on the floors of their big individual bedrooms slicing themselves hip to ankle; death their first real flirtation.

BUT HEY, THE NEW FOUNTAIN OUT FRONT WILL MAKE THE NEIGHBORS JEALOUS.

People pour countless thousands into their homes. The decks, the paint jobs, the driveways, the useless lawns, the cleaning – all of it. Something breaks every 14 seconds and it’s on the owner to pay for its replacement. That’s on top of your mortgage, insurance, and property taxes. Even in 30 years, after you pay the damn thing off, your stuck with property taxes forever whether you like it or not.

Homeownership keeps you stuck, preoccupied, and constantly in debt. People are who are in debt are less likely to fight back. What are you unaware of if you spend all your time fucking weeding and working overtime to just take up space somewhere?

Unless you are a young person with an endless supply of money at your disposal (let’s be real, all those people are too busy taking Molly in Ibiza in their indie brand swimsuits to read this), owning a home is probably not only out of your reach, but maybe not the best call even if you can swing it. Homes can limit your opportunities. Get offered a great job somewhere across the country? Fall in love with someone who lives far away? Good luck selling your house in this market, buddy. If you don’t like where you rent for any reason, you can leave at any time.

I want flexibility and I want freedom. I want limitless opportunities for self-cultivation. I want to take care of myself and those around me. I come first. A house does not.

While conservatives have kinda ruined “Fight Club” for me by constantly misquoting Tyler Durden— calling us all a bunch of snowflakes for wanting to have the same standards of living the rest of the first world has, they really wouldn’t like almost anything else the character had to say; like that whole thing about how “The things you own end up owning you.”

So, to summarize:

Avocado toast: Tasty

Homeownership: Sold to you as tasty, but actually eats you.

Bye.

 

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Isadora Teich is a freelance writer and traveler. They’ve written social media copy, tabloids, news, erotica, opinion pieces, quizzes, have worked on film scripts, and do some ghostwriting from time to time. Isadora lives for artistic experimentation and is working on a novel.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glamthane/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GlamThane

I’m the kind of millennial that would be in a conservative joke about millennials. That’s if they could stop misquoting Tyler Durden by calling us all snowflakes long enough to make actual jokes. I’m 25, bisexual, genderfluid, live in a crumbling house with two other queer people and a cat, and make my living writing shit on the internet for money. I don’t make a lot doing this, have zero job security, zero benefits, and can lose jobs as fast I get them. I depend on a revolving door of start ups, mysterious funding from weird companies, contacts who need help or want to throw an opportunity my way, and the work just being there.

Sometimes it’s just not. Sometimes I’m an arbitrary restructure away from getting the axe. My lifestyle would probably be enough to give a responsible person that gives a shit about anything, four coronaries a week.

You might be wondering why anyone would elect to do this.

[Read more…]

Ok, so before we get into this, some disclaimers:

• I’m getting into this because I really want to believe that we, as the young, hip, full of shit, touchy feely generation, can make a genuine and concerted effort to do better. For ourselves and for others. A big part of doing better starts with being real about what you need to fix. I’m going to be very real with you.
• I am not going to be present in most, or most likely any of your actual life situations. If a guy is coming at you with a fucking knife, or you feel impending violence on deck, that’s not the time to get witty. That’s when you fucking run. And if you’re white, probably when you call the police.
• This is 100% anecdotal. It’s shit that’s happened to me. It’s a tactic I’m trying out. There’s no scientific study. There hasn’t been a peer review. I’m just spitballing here. Take this with a grain of salt. It’s not fucking gospel. I’d rather you toss it out than try it in the wrong situation and end up dead.

If you think I’m being overdramatic, here’s a handy list of over a dozen women who died because they didn’t make themselves available for some total lunatic’s sexual and romantic whims.

[Read more…]