Entries from The Obstinate Plains

Storytelling through photograph and written word. A performing artist in the Rocky Mountain west, finding faith and purpose on the stage and in life. Side Blog: @theaterarchive Joseph | CO

[thewesternthespian]

(Re)Starting Point

Working on an introduction or an overview of your own little corner of the internet can be good in a structured sense, building a linear narrative with a starting point. It can also feel lousy and appear more than a little self-indulgent. You’re one more internet rando who nobody really cares about or legitimately needs to hear from.

Beyond going to the trouble of setting the tone for a blog, there’s the business of generating content and posts. To me it feels a bit like skimming stones across a lake. Some, with tactical and intended precision, will remain on the surface and visible for a brief period. You’ll generate ripples each time, even on the failed attempts to do more than you actually accomplished. All of them will sink beyond notice as quickly as you send them out.

In my life as it currently is, I’ve become preoccupied with preservation and archivist work. A symptom of unresolved trauma and wanting desperately to not lose anything more than I already have. I don’t know how else to explain or justify starting this blog other than this unrelenting urge to present and preserve. Maybe all this will end up being is a time capsule. Maybe for me, maybe for whoever it’s meant to find. A long distance signal to the hearts that beat with a broken rhythm like mine. A shared guidebook to a level of reality that’s only visible to and traversed by those who have hit their lowest point and end up walking through Hell to get back to something familiar only to find nothing feels the same anymore.

As of December 2023:

I’m just starting this blog. My drafts folder is filling up with things I want to write about over time. I’m sure reblogs will happen too, just not obsessively or without any real rhyme or reason. I've had side blogs in the past that focused on specific things, each of which I tried to keep as organized as possible. I am a fan of the tag system here and I'm glad the Tumblr staff increased it from 10 tags per blog because that was not a practical number. The goal here is to curate, time will tell if I can actually stay committed.

I'm headed back to my university for the unteenth time in the hope of actually making it across the finish line with a Bachelor's degree in hand. At face value, you would probably see this as a lesson in persistence but its actually a matter of limited prospects and the road least resistant.

I'm on a grief journey following the untimely loss of my mother and feeling more lost and lonely than I ever have before. I will probably post about grief and mental health struggles. For the record, therapy works and more people should explore it, especially men.

I'm very politically engaged and expect to be volunteering for President Biden's re-election campaign after my Spring semester wraps up. I’m a big believer in making politics a less toxic thing and emphasizing the necessity of being engaged and informed as a citizen instead of avoidant or apathetic about the process because there are too many groups and individuals who are counting on your lack of interest in order to legitimize their undercutting of democracy. I've been told by friends and family that I explain things in a way that makes things make sense and feel approachable. I want to continue to do that for anyone who could be helped by it.

What else is there to say? Welcome? Thank you? I'm sorry?

Maybe all of the above?

Here's to the great unknown...

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Beware Trump’s Talk of Coming “Emergencies”

Far-right rhetoric is suffused with dark talk of impending calamities. It’s a favorite trope of autocrats who are, themselves, the calamity.

Katherine Stewart at The New Republic:

Even before he took office, Donald Trump spoke of emergency: America is in the grip of a “woke” and weaponized federal government, he warned. Then came the catch: With the nation in such a state, the normal rules weren’t going to apply anymore. In the weeks since he has taken office, they haven’t, and we’ve seen the result: The president has set up opportunities for grift through meme coins and other means; he has violated administrative laws and usurped the power of the purse from Congress; he appears to be turning the Department of Justice into his personal legal team; and his billionaire co-president, Elon Musk, is involved in decisions related to agencies (supposedly) regulating his businesses, just to name a few. The goal posts have shifted so far that they can no longer be spotted on the playing field.

Those who study autocracy will tell you: All this talk of emergency is an emergency in itself. The road to authoritarianism is paved with this trope—the dire pending calamity that only the strongman has seen, and which only he can solve. The idea of a shared predicament adds gloss to the unthinkable, so that it starts to seem reasonable: Your pets aren’t safe living in the same neighborhood as Haitians, so 20 million people need to be deported, posthaste. The emergency, should it come, may not be entirely real. What is real is that before you know it, this rhetorical bait and switch has cleared the way for the further consolidation of authoritarian rule. It’s never been a more important time to learn to recognize this trick, and learn to decode it. Even as we speak, the preparation appears to be underway. President Trump recently earned another cycle of disgust by posting a paraphrase of a quote traditionally attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Whether or not Napoleon said it, he certainly meant it. He came to power in a 1799 coup on the pretext that the French republic faced an emergency. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist, meant it in the same way, when he invoked the quote to justify the mass murder of 77 people, most of them young people at a summer camp.

The rhetoric of the emergency has been a part of MAGA from the beginning. In an influential essay published pseudonymously in the Claremont Review of Books in 2016, the essayist and former speechwriter Michael Anton described the Clinton-Trump contest as “The Flight 93 Election.” A triumph for Clinton, he intoned, would be the moral equivalent of a terrorist attack on the United States. In the face of such a threat, any and all means of resistance were called for; it was time to rush the cockpit. Anton was recently confirmed by the Senate as Trump’s nominee for director of policy planning.

The same language showed up again in Project 2025, the 900-page blueprint for a “conservative” administration coordinated by the Heritage Foundation. The federal bureaucracy has been weaponized, the document warns, and the wokesters are on the cusp of seizing power. The next president has at most two years to save the country. Appearing on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and a leader of the project, menaced that the country is in the midst of a “second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” An internal document prepared by staffers and fellows at the Center for Renewing America, the think tank where Russell Vought prepared for his return as Trump’s director of Office of Management and Budget, listed as top priorities “promoting Christian nationalism” and invoking the Insurrection Act as a means of mobilizing the military to put down domestic protest. The radicalized intellectuals behind MAGA didn’t just fall into this kind of authoritarian claptrap on their own steam. The trope of the emergency has a long history, upon which they’ve ably drawn. It’s all there in the annals of the Claremont Institute, a think tank with deep connections to MAGA and the Trump administration. (Claremont board member John Eastman, for example, was “co-conspirator 2” in the charges special counsel Jack Smith laid against Trump for conspiring to commit election fraud in 2021.)

Two twentieth-century political philosophers figure centrally in the backstory of the Claremont Institute and allied intellectuals at the Heritage Foundation, the Center for Renewing America, and elsewhere. The one they don’t mind talking about is Leo Strauss. A German-Jewish political philosopher who fled Nazi Germany and eventually landed at the University of Chicago, Strauss is important to the men of Claremont chiefly for the distinction he draws between “exoteric” and “esoteric” political philosophy. The exoteric stuff, as the men of Claremont appear to understand it, is what you tell the masses, that is, the people who show up at rallies and sit in the pews of conservative churches. The esoteric message, they seem to believe, is for the initiates, the Ivy-educated cadre that may be expected to assume command of the machinery of the state. But the thinker who arguably matters more in understanding the radicalized MAGA intellectual is Carl Schmitt. A conservative Catholic with a sex-addiction problem who managed to get himself excommunicated from the church, Schmitt defined a genuine sovereign as “he who decides on the exception.” Which is a nice way of saying “he who is above the law.” Schmitt also articulated the importance of the “state of emergency” as a means of separating out the genuine sovereign from the effete liberals who would otherwise betray the people and give in to the enemies of the state. He associated these woke wimps with the rationalist German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whom he accuses of trying to base the legitimacy of the state on reason and liberal values. All this is music to the ears of Claremont intellectuals, who vie with one another in their condemnations of Hegel and the rational “administrative state,” which they associate with the dread evil of wokeism. For example, Charles Kesler, the longtime editor of the Claremont Review, implicitly follows Schmitt when he identifies the administrative state with all that is bad in America. It is helpful to know that Schmitt was a full-on Nazi. When Hitler declared an emergency and seized control of the government in 1933, Schmitt was exultant. At last, the ghost of Hegel has been killed off, he enthused. He lobbied hard for a position as adviser to the Nazi government, and he did his part to condemn the work of Jewish scholars.

Tyrant 47’s talk of “emergencies” as a tool to use to stifle freedoms should be a serious concern.

[thewesternthespian]

Reblogging this again in preparation for tomorrow’s primetime address where he’ll be ever the habitual liar and fascist.

[thewesternthespian]

I’ve been experimenting with graphics and iconography in order to convey emotional narratives. While always busy being the social media director for The Crow, I also have to be my own social media director. I’m currently reading my through books by Ryan Holiday and Austin Kleon (my full TBR list is forthcoming). The Ryan Holiday books on Stoic philosophy are a result of insistence and guidance from my mentor. The Austin Kleon books on artistry come recommended by Ryan Holiday himself on his podcast “The Daily Stoic” and on his social media accounts. Both writers insist on the importance of establishing a routine.

I currently do not have any routine to speak of. I do make myself daily and weekly to-do lists in order to not feel like my life is entirely out of my control but as I’m often reminded by my therapist, things cannot be expected to be linear. Some days, I am brimming with motivation and get everything checked off of my to-do list for the day. Other days, I barely get half the list done. If I’m having a chronic pain day or struggling mentally, even less gets accomplished.

I started streaming on Twitch a year ago as a means of establishing an unorthodox income stream for myself. I picked up a handful of followers, one regular subscriber and then I got busy but also…I kinda lost the plot.

I’ve wanted to stream for years. In a storage closet, I kept a large tub marked “streaming someday?” and filled it slowly with tech that would go on sale once or twice a year. The keyboard I wanted. The monitor I’d researched. The microphone, the lighting setup. Everything lived in that tub until I felt the opportunity to execute the plan had truly opened up.

Making that decision was a difficulty in and of itself. By the time I had really committed to the plan last year, buying the PC and the desk, I needed to actually make room for the desk and the streaming setup waiting in storage. That required me to move something in the house in order to establish a designated streaming space. My grief has dictated that nothing should be moved from where my mom last placed it and walked away, not knowing she’d never again be able to revisit rearranging that room on an uneventful Saturday like she’d done throughout the house nearly every weekend since we moved here in ‘93. But, now I was invested, financially and otherwise.

So, I, on the verge of tears the entire time and with help from my sister, moved a desk that Mom had directed the two of us to place just a month before the wreck that changed our lives. We moved it needing to make room for the Christmas tree, not knowing we wouldn’t be gathered around it on Christmas morning. I was at odds with myself. What was worse? Disrupting part of the downstairs common area that Mom had planned out every detail for just so I could indulge in a personal hobby/side hustle? Or keeping one of the scenes of the crime intact like a museum curator, diligently preserving the evidence of a family life no longer experienced and fearing the severity of the nightmare would be downplayed or diluted if the casual observer assumed it could be so easily overwritten by cleaning house?

I’m prone to psychologically hashing these things out in my dreams, arguing or pleading with a version of Mom that my therapist says is not a spiritual visitation from the real deal but rather a subconscious manifestation of every aspect of her character, personality and expectations that I’ve been intentionally considering before acting on anything in order to avoid flying in the face of them.

After I did get set up, I had to work through the awkwardness of sitting and talking to myself while playing a game until actual people to talk to would occasionally trickle in. Once class, rehearsals/performances and legislative efforts took priority, I’d come home too tired to want to sit down and be “on” for an audience on Twitch. Again, the lack of a routine meant that I was being too heavy-handed with some things and not making space or time for other things. I recently came to the realization that part of why I didn’t remain more committed to something I’d wanted to do for so long was that it didn’t feel like it fit who I was and I didn’t know how to make it fit.

I knew I needed to actually have some kind of brand if I wanted to be taken seriously (can you take a Twitch streamer seriously) at what I was trying to do. Nothing felt honest, no graphics, no overlays, no templates seemed to speak to who I was or how I wanted to be perceived and as good of an actor as I truly commit to being, I don’t want to be a pretend version of myself. That’s exhausting just to think about.

Again, the conversations spilled over into my therapist’s office and my mentor’s gym. One thing that always seems to set me off when I go looking for inspiration when it comes to content creation is the guys out there making decent videos who always offer up the line of advise of “you have to romanticize your life, bro”. When approached with the question of how I respond to that advice, I answered with admitting I immediately say out loud “and YOU need to shut THE ENTIRE FUCK up” before chucking my phone at the end of the bed. That answer prompted my mentor to double over with laughter and my therapist to make notes. I would continue on a rant about realism versus romanticism and how I felt there is nothing about my life that justifies or validates romanticism. Instead, this life calls for hard-eyed realism, taking in the entire nightmare for what it is without any narrative frills.

I used to listen to music 24/7 in my old life. Now, again, I don’t want to gloss over the silence and what it means I’ve lost. The only music I’ve brought myself to listen to is Lady Gaga’s “Mayhem” album and a playlist I built on Spotify of insane classical music arrangements that I’ve titled “Complicated Main Character Soundtrack”. For Gaga’s Mayhem Ball, she leaned into her theater kid roots and conceived a chaotic opera house, inspired by Andrew Loyd Webber’s opera house phenomenon, in which she goes to battle with the darker side of herself, insane classical music serving as the intro to a list of her hits in which her light and dark halves share the stage. At the end of the tour, ever the performance artist, Gaga embraced Death as a form of shedding and renewal. She arranged an actual New Orleans style funeral march down the streets of Los Angeles to announce that Mayhem was dead.

I finally realized after obsessively watching camera phone footage of a concert that Ball Arena admitted was too large and elaborate for them to facilitate and therefore I never got to see, that maybe what I was missing from my brand was an embrace of the darker aspects of my artistry and my life experience. I finally told my therapist that maybe the reason why I become so hostile towards any recommendation of “romanticism” is because if I was to do any romanticizing, the story would get dark and weird and heavy real quick.

“I’m not gonna be Mr. Sunshine and Rainbows about any of this shit”, I told him. “Who’s asking you to?”, he said in response. “I think you’re right. Maybe the reason you’re opposed to utilizing romanticism as a means of storytelling or content creation is because you know the story isn’t for the faint of heart but this is not about operating within someone else’s expectations, that’s been your whole problem of obsessing over what your mom would want. Where is your comfort zone? What are your expectations?” My mentor told me “Life is a dance. We all have to find the style and rhythm we’re each comfortable with. If right now yours is macabre and mayhem too, then lean into it. You’ll know when the dance is done”.

So, I deleted every bit of content I made in an effort to market myself as someone I didn’t feel like. Every graphic, every template, anything that was too slick, too polished, too normal looking, too “come watch my stream, I’m a super cool and very normal person”. I’m not. I’m a very broken, very disturbed, very anguished, very haunted person. I wanted to tell that story and found clip art and icons and pieced it all together like a collage. The marketing goes harder than my actual content ever will. I’ll be playing a cozy and relaxing game called Disney Dreamlight Valley most of the week which does not at all go with the aesthetic of Midwestern Gothic meets Witchy Theater Person that has poured out of me.

So, here comes my routine. Every week, I stream, I game, I build something out of a long-held passion. And maybe I learn to romanticize things even if the romanticism isn’t on the lighter side…

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

i think what makes tumblr great now is that nobody gives a shit? Like, there is NOTHING to be gained from being on here except the pure joy of making stuff for people and with people?

If you're on twitter or threads or reddit, and you say, "Oh, I had a terrible experience with Delta Airlines. They canceled my flight and then booked me into a hotel room with a stranger," and you tag Delta, there's a chance Delta Airlines itself will come and apologize. Maybe even give you some SkyMiles or something.

But if you complain about a terrible airline experience on tumblr, all you can hope for is that someone might come along and write slash fiction about two guys who get booked into the same hotel room by Delta Airlines.

You can't gain social capital by being here. Nobody knows who you even ARE because your user name is, like, some randomly generated phrase or else an obscure reference to hockey sex books.

I'm not saying it's perfect, of course. It's a super toxic hellsite that eats the ashes of its former self to survive. But it beats twitter any day, and not only because twitter is owned by a raving mad white supremacist fuckchild.

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

congrats to guns on becoming Woke, joining the NFL, the Bible, Bud Light, and the concept of empathy.

[nothorses]

Nazi interrupted a college class and immediately got chased down by all 100-ish students.

Bonus: porn fridays

[naamahdarling]

[thewesternthespian]

And it’s all been glorious to watch on TikTok. I would have kicked the piss out of him myself but they’re clearly better people than I would be in that moment.

[thewesternthespian]

250 posts!

Okay, Tumblr. Way to manage my behavior. I’ll start posting more.

[thewesternthespian]

Complexity of Competency: Why a drunk driver, accused of killing 2 people in Jefferson County, might walk free

Roughly 3 years after the fatal crash, the case's complexity is on display at the courthouse as his attorneys argue he's not fit to stand tr

I’m trying to make more of a conscious effort to utilize this space I’ve created on the internet. Tonight, I can’t think of a better way to utilize it than to draw as much attention as possible to a crime that has been a nightmare to my family for three years. We were hit by a drunk driver just before Christmas in 2021 and my mother would ultimately succumb to her injuries. I meanwhile am now disabled and suffering a slew of mental health issues as a result. What’s currently causing me distress is that the man responsible may get to walk away without any sort of consequences.

I want as many people to know about this case as possible, please share the video/article linked above.

[liberalsarecool]

Chris Kluwe is righteous. 🤜🏻🤛🏻 🇵🇸

[sparklejamesysparkle]

Paul Newman in a publicity portrait for the Paramount Pictures/Martin Ritt western drama Hud, 1963.

[marmot-bee-person]

is John green actually on tumblr or not

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

Who cares about that weirdo's social media profiles but his new book about tuberculosis fucking rules; you should preorder a signed copy now at everythingistb.com.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Beware Trump’s Talk of Coming “Emergencies”

Far-right rhetoric is suffused with dark talk of impending calamities. It’s a favorite trope of autocrats who are, themselves, the calamity.

Katherine Stewart at The New Republic:

Even before he took office, Donald Trump spoke of emergency: America is in the grip of a “woke” and weaponized federal government, he warned. Then came the catch: With the nation in such a state, the normal rules weren’t going to apply anymore. In the weeks since he has taken office, they haven’t, and we’ve seen the result: The president has set up opportunities for grift through meme coins and other means; he has violated administrative laws and usurped the power of the purse from Congress; he appears to be turning the Department of Justice into his personal legal team; and his billionaire co-president, Elon Musk, is involved in decisions related to agencies (supposedly) regulating his businesses, just to name a few. The goal posts have shifted so far that they can no longer be spotted on the playing field.

Those who study autocracy will tell you: All this talk of emergency is an emergency in itself. The road to authoritarianism is paved with this trope—the dire pending calamity that only the strongman has seen, and which only he can solve. The idea of a shared predicament adds gloss to the unthinkable, so that it starts to seem reasonable: Your pets aren’t safe living in the same neighborhood as Haitians, so 20 million people need to be deported, posthaste. The emergency, should it come, may not be entirely real. What is real is that before you know it, this rhetorical bait and switch has cleared the way for the further consolidation of authoritarian rule. It’s never been a more important time to learn to recognize this trick, and learn to decode it. Even as we speak, the preparation appears to be underway. President Trump recently earned another cycle of disgust by posting a paraphrase of a quote traditionally attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Whether or not Napoleon said it, he certainly meant it. He came to power in a 1799 coup on the pretext that the French republic faced an emergency. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist, meant it in the same way, when he invoked the quote to justify the mass murder of 77 people, most of them young people at a summer camp.

The rhetoric of the emergency has been a part of MAGA from the beginning. In an influential essay published pseudonymously in the Claremont Review of Books in 2016, the essayist and former speechwriter Michael Anton described the Clinton-Trump contest as “The Flight 93 Election.” A triumph for Clinton, he intoned, would be the moral equivalent of a terrorist attack on the United States. In the face of such a threat, any and all means of resistance were called for; it was time to rush the cockpit. Anton was recently confirmed by the Senate as Trump’s nominee for director of policy planning.

The same language showed up again in Project 2025, the 900-page blueprint for a “conservative” administration coordinated by the Heritage Foundation. The federal bureaucracy has been weaponized, the document warns, and the wokesters are on the cusp of seizing power. The next president has at most two years to save the country. Appearing on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and a leader of the project, menaced that the country is in the midst of a “second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” An internal document prepared by staffers and fellows at the Center for Renewing America, the think tank where Russell Vought prepared for his return as Trump’s director of Office of Management and Budget, listed as top priorities “promoting Christian nationalism” and invoking the Insurrection Act as a means of mobilizing the military to put down domestic protest. The radicalized intellectuals behind MAGA didn’t just fall into this kind of authoritarian claptrap on their own steam. The trope of the emergency has a long history, upon which they’ve ably drawn. It’s all there in the annals of the Claremont Institute, a think tank with deep connections to MAGA and the Trump administration. (Claremont board member John Eastman, for example, was “co-conspirator 2” in the charges special counsel Jack Smith laid against Trump for conspiring to commit election fraud in 2021.)

Two twentieth-century political philosophers figure centrally in the backstory of the Claremont Institute and allied intellectuals at the Heritage Foundation, the Center for Renewing America, and elsewhere. The one they don’t mind talking about is Leo Strauss. A German-Jewish political philosopher who fled Nazi Germany and eventually landed at the University of Chicago, Strauss is important to the men of Claremont chiefly for the distinction he draws between “exoteric” and “esoteric” political philosophy. The exoteric stuff, as the men of Claremont appear to understand it, is what you tell the masses, that is, the people who show up at rallies and sit in the pews of conservative churches. The esoteric message, they seem to believe, is for the initiates, the Ivy-educated cadre that may be expected to assume command of the machinery of the state. But the thinker who arguably matters more in understanding the radicalized MAGA intellectual is Carl Schmitt. A conservative Catholic with a sex-addiction problem who managed to get himself excommunicated from the church, Schmitt defined a genuine sovereign as “he who decides on the exception.” Which is a nice way of saying “he who is above the law.” Schmitt also articulated the importance of the “state of emergency” as a means of separating out the genuine sovereign from the effete liberals who would otherwise betray the people and give in to the enemies of the state. He associated these woke wimps with the rationalist German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whom he accuses of trying to base the legitimacy of the state on reason and liberal values. All this is music to the ears of Claremont intellectuals, who vie with one another in their condemnations of Hegel and the rational “administrative state,” which they associate with the dread evil of wokeism. For example, Charles Kesler, the longtime editor of the Claremont Review, implicitly follows Schmitt when he identifies the administrative state with all that is bad in America. It is helpful to know that Schmitt was a full-on Nazi. When Hitler declared an emergency and seized control of the government in 1933, Schmitt was exultant. At last, the ghost of Hegel has been killed off, he enthused. He lobbied hard for a position as adviser to the Nazi government, and he did his part to condemn the work of Jewish scholars.

Tyrant 47’s talk of “emergencies” as a tool to use to stifle freedoms should be a serious concern.

[liberalsarecool]

Evangelicals don't have a problem with Elon's serial abortions.

[liberalsarecool]

Media is incapable of providing context.

Trump's first impeachment, abuse of power, is all but forgotten five years later.

[thepersonalquotes]

[ginger-by-the-sea]

[thewesternthespian]

I can see this being where the days begin and end. Tying my kids’ shoes and making sure they have their coats before running out the door. One of us carrying groceries and the other carrying sleepy kids from the backseat. The place to direct everyone to hang up their coats or toss them on the bench during a dinner party.

[cannibalchicken]

[thewesternthespian]

It has saved me from not eating at all because depression often says that’s the way