Weekly Zephyr #114: Freaks in Exile

April 14, 2022

Yes, that’s correct, you can’t see it.

The image up top is an image, and it is there. Tiny color slash, left side, that’s the one.

I edited the image, see. What you’re looking at is a bunch of adorable freaky pixelated monsters who have been asked to leave by the color white. They didn’t leave, they’re still under there, all nine of them. They’re simply unavailable for viewing. I used the “markup” function in the photo editor on my phone and I marked them up to death.

I’m happy to describe them for you a bit. One has tall lime green flame hair and a mossy teardrop-shaped body. One has curved black spike hair and an aubergine tendril skirt and a torso with a hole in it. A particularly ferocious motherfucker who is not having any of anyone’s nonsense, who’s totally ready to go, has a swirly lilac beehive, tan pants and a gold belt. The others are good, too. Antler heads. Shark mouths. Ominously dripping tunics.

I want you to want to see them, I want you to know you can’t, I want you to be bothered by it, I hope it’s working.

Everyone on Earth is a freak with no exceptions—NONE, DAMN IT—and we are not getting the proper show. Only a few of us have not marked ourselves up to death.

I do not include myself on that noble list of unapologetic freaks! I am absolutely the apologetic kind. I’m aware that I’ve been edited and that I’m still being edited, that somebody began the job, I took over at some point, and then I couldn’t stop. The picture I present to the world on a daily basis is inaccurate, but in what way? What’s plain privacy and what’s more like a lie of omission? and what do I simply not know about myself? I’m far bloodthirstier and driven by more bonkers desires than I have any idea, but for what? And are these desires a problem, whatever they are? Can’t I at least see all of them?

Isn’t this information we need? I’m shaking you by the collar!

I feel robbed, robbed of color, robbed of sensation.

Are we really going to finish out our time on this stage half-here and apologizing in advance? I want to see what you look like! I want to see what you do! I want to hear the sounds you make, your real ones!

I’m yelling! There’s zero way to write about this without yelling!

Danger, too, danger!

You know and I know that what gets squashed finds a way out. Small violence and large! Desires that can’t get air don’t just slink off into the mist because we refuse to see them. Anger stuffed down on repeat comes out berserk, especially when we’ve had no chance to learn how to drive it.

And my god, simply even taste! Matters of absolutely harmless taste! Fashions of dress and speech! These are fraught and WHY? Someone steps out of the bounds of conformity—and, hilariously, we might even think in modern times that we’ve set these kind of wide! Ha!—and enters a threat zone. You know the zone, you can feel it.

Some of you will have been physically harmed for presenting in a nonconforming way. Livelihoods suffer, livelihoods, you know, the thing most of us require to remain alive. Worse happens, the worst happens. Lives taken. All the time on Planet Earth.

Matters of taste and matters of deep core identity meet.

A few years ago, I found an excerpt of a transcribed lecture that my grandfather gave back in 1926. His name was Fritz Kunz. He knew.

The lecture was called “Sex Concepts for the New Age”. Here comes the excerpt:

All sorts of adjustments will come in the New Age. We are going to have this queer, intermediate sex that is now appearing very rapidly, the liberation of women from their long skirts, and their swaddling clothes mentally as well. Men will maybe change their lives also but they are not making nearly as great an advance as the women are. That is a fact. Everyone knows that this approach to an intermediate sex is upon us. What will you do? Are you going to dam back the minds of your children when they want to know, or are you going to meet them halfway? Are we so ashamed of our sex life that we can't talk about it to our children? Or is it possible for the whole of us here tonight to make a resolve that we will welcome these revolutionaries that are appearing, and sympathize with them? You know it is the first duty of the child to educate the parents. If you do that you will see a wonderful sight. Tramping down out of the invisible worlds is marching a whole host of new souls that will be born in the bodies of the new race, brave and noble men and women, better than ourselves. They will make us look antique, antiquated, obsolete, these young people with the sun of the dawn in their eyes and the breath of spring in their hair; boys and girls that don't know they are boys and girls, that only know they are souls. These are the youth that are coming.

These revolutionaries.

1926, he said it.

So that’s specific to gender identity, beautifully. I’m talking about something wider but our gender revolutionaries are always holding the door open for all of us in all things pertaining to self-expression, and at such cost.

If I don’t point immediately to Black trans women in particular, their heightened risk of murder, I’m useless.

What I want is to find where we all live together here, how we’re all involved.

When I use the word freak, that’s a crude stand-in for what I mean.

The strange beauty of genuine expression.

A shock of truth spoken into a room.

The open channel that allows these things.

One who has the strength, the skill, the talent, the will to keep the channel open.

We’re all something like radios. The above are frequencies. We participate in the global holding of these frequencies. We make it easier or more difficult for each other to hear, accept, emit, survive.

That’ll be why I was yelling, I think.

I’m enormously grateful to all of you who have become paid subscribers. Thank you from the bottom of my heart! If you missed it, The Weekly Zephyr is going to continue to be a free newsletter for everyone but I’m offering the option now to support the WZ with a paid subscription. You will miss no Zephyrs if you don’t or can’t become a paid subscriber. Sharing the Zephyr is one great and free form of support! However, the flood of gratitude I’m feeling for my paid subscribers and your impact on our lives here tells me that I’m going to do a little something outside the normal WZ for you from time to time. Surprises.