#the interventionists

[outbronx]

[habrown]

I don’t know how

I don’t know how to explain away and dismiss what feels like a series of persistent assaults on my liberties, on my privacy and personal space.

I don’t know how to explain away what feels like harassment and bullying by members of the NYC gay men’s community online.

I don’t know how to dismiss that which feels like anguish to me. I don’t know how to  deny my experience of mental abuse, psychological trauma, sometimes physical suffering.

I don’t know how a patient with a serious mental illness ups and snaps out from self-medicating and addiction, as you demand, to walk right on into ...... ?

To those who would argue I’m strong enough, tough enough, smart enough, brave enough, and that I should stop with the pity party, stop feeling sorry for myself, to these individuals I would ask this question: would you tell a cancer patient he’s strong enough, smart enough, cut the pity party and stop feeling sorry for yourself?

While some of you might, I don’t believe most of you would ask the cancer patient such an inappropriate question.

Addiction is a disorder of the brain, a medical condition from which someone just does not snap out from under.

[fuckyeahpsychogeography]

“Meanderings may seem fairly leisurely and not the least bit political, they propose the radical idea that ways of being in physical space (particularly in the cities) are political acts. The confluence of the détourne and the dérive manages to territorialize the visual. The spectacle is a territory. The city is a spectacle. Both tactics, dérive and détourne, take trespassing as their essential character. They must cross into the territory of others, whether these are the advertisements of Nike or the orderly storefronts of Paris, to produce new meanings.”

Nato Thompson ("The Interventionists")