Iran Teaches America How to Lose a War in Thirty Days

 At the writing of this post, it has been nearly a month since Israel and America began their savage aerial assault on Iran, and the Islamic Republic has been throttled and decimated in nearly every way conceivable. The massacre began with the brutal assassination of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei along with most of his immediate family on February 28 and by February 29 most of his nations political and military leadership lie dead with him. As we speak, so do about 2,000 Iranian civilians.

The Zionist American Alliance has not only laid siege to pretty much all of Iran's military capabilities, including thousands of members of the Revolutionary Guard, they have also done the same to most of Iran's civilian capabilities as well. Over 12,000 bombs struck over 2,000 targets during the first 18 days with 3,600 bombs dropped on Tehran alone. The targets have not only included dozens of hospitals and schools but nearly 20,000 civilian buildings and at least 81,000 residential units. Iran as we once knew it has essentially been reduced to the world's largest open-air burn unit, and yet no one but Donald Trump seems to be foolish enough to believe that America is actually winning this war.

Iran may be devastated beyond belief, but someone is still fighting like hell from the smoldering ruins and the imperial machine tasked with swiftly containing this undead menace before the American people can smell a quagmire is beginning to show signs of desperation as they lose control of the narrative. You can see it written all over Donald Trump's leather face as he attempts to make sense of the havoc in real time, declaring victory over and over again before announcing another escalation of violence, bragging about negotiations that Iran denies having any interest in as thousands of American troops are positioned in the region for an invasion.

Meanwhile, Israel seems to be much more concerned with ethnically cleansing Southern Lebanon while announcing that they'll keep bombing Iran on the side regardless of any mythic peace deals.

So, just what the fuck is going on here? 

To put it succinctly, America is still fighting this war like it's 1988 while Iran and to some extent Israel are showing our beloved imperial behemoth how wars will be fought in 2028. Some call it fourth generation combat, some call it asymmetric warfare, but what it all amounts to is a smaller and supposedly weaker party using unconventional tactics to prolong and expand a conflict in order to drain their much larger opponent of its will power and resources. 

In many ways, the Islamic Republic was designed for this kind of battle. There's is a nation forged in blood, building its foundation amidst an apocalyptic American sponsored invasion from Iraq that grinded away throughout the first decade of the Republic's existence only to be followed by decades of threats, sanctions, assassinations and sabotage from the Great Satan and its burgeoning toadies in Israel. 

What Iran built on this grave shaped foundation was a mosaic defense structure set to respond to even the most devastating of decapitations launched against its military leadership by automatically delegating power down to increasingly decentralized and autonomous military units capable of operating independently of any central command. 

Iran has also formed a loose nit alliance with every Shia tribe America and its various quisling states have fucked over the last forty years of forever wars, creating another expanded mosaic of autonomous militias that surround every American base surrounding Iran. 

The result being an army of ghosts moving seamlessly about the smoke of a thousand Patriot missiles, taking swipes at the devil's Achilles heel every time he turns around, bleeding him dry, one drop at a time.

The entire Middle East has found themselves lost in a swarm of cheap drones and second-hand rockets coming from every direction at once and striking any nation providing comfort to the American Empire. Over a dozen nations across the region including all 6 members of the Gulf Cooperation Council have been peppered by a seemingly bottomless barrage of toy planes sniping at the oil and gas infrastructure that keeps them rich but more importantly soaking up the expensive American missiles that are supposed to be capable of protecting this wealth, leading to what is known as a munitions trap.

Your average Iranian Shahed drone costs about $20,000 dollars and can be constructed in a fucking cave from garbage. Your average American Patriot missile costs upwards of $2 million dollars and requires factories the size of Lindsey Graham's congressional district. The result is America burning through $11 billion dollars in the first week of this bloodbath and spending about $2 billion dollars every day since. The result has also been a live demonstration for every nation on earth on exactly what the cost of an alliance with a dying empire amounts to. 

The seemingly untouchable sheiks of the wealthy Gulf States have seen their skyscrapers go up in flames like crystal-colored roman candles as America scrambles to rip apart THAAD interceptors promised to other "allies" and drag them to the defense of an entire industry that can be held hostage by the simple geographic realities of the Strait of Hormuz. The empty promises of the Abraham Accords have become worth their weight in toilet paper. Meanwhile, Pax Americana's globalist economy is in freefall due to its dependence on such a massive centralized "free" market. 

20% of the global oil supply goes through the Strait of Hormuz and it has been effectively locked down by RC planes and fishing dhows loaded up with mines. Brent Crude has gone up over 40% in less than a month, peaking at nearly $120 dollars a barrel, carrying the rest of the oil and gas industry to hell with it in what the International Energy Agency has called "the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market." If this disaster goes on much longer it could very easily lead to a global recession. All because the "free" world bows to the dollar and the dollar is dependent on non-renewable dinosaur goo needed to keep suburbia chained to Walmart and Amazon.

The Iranian Revolution was launched as a confrontation between young Muslim leftists and the shallow sadistic decadence of Western Civilization. That revolution lost its way over decades of Westphalian statecraft but seems to have found itself again in the rubble amassed by its old foes in the other Babylon slouching towards Wall Street for another late-term abortion. With layers of Mullahs wiped out, Iran is once again a young, angry and desperate nation forced by imperialism to recognize the revolutionary nature of its true power, the power of an ancient culture unwilling to let a globalist enterprise dictate the narrative of its future.

Whether America invades or cuts a deal, it has already lost the war to define the future of the Middle East. Sadly, the same cannot be said for their partners in Israel who have quite skillfully practiced their own school of fourth generation warfare with a militia of lobbyists and pedo baiting spies hoodwinking a collapsing empire into throwing its bloated carcass on every grenade they pull the pin on. Israel could care less who wins the war in Iran as long as someone else's children does most of the dying and they can use it as an excuse to expand their territory another hundred miles in any given direction without a Mullah left alive to protest it.

However, Israel is playing a very dangerous game, one that no gambler can win forever. They may be willing to cut a deal with any wannabe empire in the neighborhood but any empire that replaces a disgraced American behemoth is likely to lack the resources to defend Greater Israel in the zealous, white supremacist ways that they have become accustomed to. China will continue to rely on a far more complex web of economic alliances over the blunt force military strength they still can't quite afford, and this will include backroom deals with other aspiring world powers like Turkey who will undoubtedly continue to cultivate their longtime connections to Islamic fundamentalists in order to balance the scales.

But the worst-case scenario for Israel, whether they realize it or not, would actually be the mass murder-suicide of an American ground invasion of Iran which would only serve to explode the Islamic Republics mosaic defense structure and unleash scores of heavily armed Shia militias across the Persian Gulf, setting the stage for what could very well become a kind of Twelver ISIS with a score to settle against a fanatical Zionist hegemon governed by a nuclear powered Manifest Destiny. Whoever actually survives such a fate may wish they hadn't.

The best-case scenario, however unlikely it may be, is for a coalition of radicals to unite against an increasingly unpopular war right here in the belly of Babylon. 

A diverse coalition of libertarians, anarchists, socialists and libertarian socialists devoted not just to creating a new counterculture but a sort of mosaic populist counter government capable of dismantling America's long dead tree of liberty with a controlled demolition of secession, panarchy and radical decentralization, hopefully destroying the various multinational industrial complexes driving the west off a cliff into a war that no one can win in Iran in the process.

Maybe it's a longshot, but if a shattered army of Basij bastards can decapitate the Great Satan with a Shahed drone in thirty days then maybe anything is possible.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs That Influenced This Post

* Shush by Tori Amos

* Condemnation by Depeche Mode

* Flea by St. Vincent

* Rooster by Alice in Chains

* Getting Closer by Nitzer Ebb

* Savage Good Boy by Japanese Breakfast

* Raining Blood by Tori Amos

* Broken Man by St. Vincent

* Hearts and Minds by Nitzer Ebb

* Paper Planes by MIA

The Art of Coping with Unfathomable Rage in Infuriating Times

 A wise man once said that rage is merely depression turned outward. I don't know what that motherfucker's name was, but I'd like to rip his fucking head off and kick it through a stained-glass window because outward is exactly where my depression belongs right now more than ever before. 

I have spent most of my life feeling like a possessed pervert because the same priests who raped me as a child taught me that my gender identity made me a sexual predator just like them and now it turns out that every billionaire financing campaigns that teach the public the same horseshit was also raping kids with Jeffrey Epstein and probably getting blackmailed by his Zionist masters into bombing little girls for playing hopscotch-while-Arab in the process.

I would argue that rage is actually a perfectly healthy response to the depths of depravity that we dare to call "civilization" right now. We are living in a world governed by competing cabals of bloodsucking vampires, bleeding us all dry of our dignity while they set fire to the rainforest and break the innocent for kicks by the firelight. This is not normal, this is not OK, and I am getting more than a little tired of people telling me to calm down while they traffic in sedation as 'self-care' during apocalyptic times.

I am very well versed in the martial art of self-care. The abuse I suffered at an appallingly young age forced me to divide myself into five distinct dissociative identities as a means of coping with the danger I was in. The intellectual elites over at the DSM have the nerve to call this state a "disorder" but it is actually a lot closer to the kind of disciplined spiritual self-care practiced by Tibetan Tulpamancers for thousands of years in the isolated monasteries of the Himalayas.

 I exist in constant communication with a cadre of grievously wounded inner children. I spend hours every single day engaged in deeper levels of self-care than you armchair psychologists could even begin to comprehend and the number one problem that I deal with is the fact that everything in the news right now leads us straight back to the smalltown rectory where we were defiled. 

In case you haven't noticed, our president is a literal pedophile who kills children. Not only do I feel like I have every fucking right to my rage, I feel like anyone still capable of staying calm in this situation is the sick one and that their apathetic sickness in dire times might actually be getting people killed. 

I can just hear them now; "Stay calm and vote blue no matter who, the woker section of Team Epstein will clean up this mess!" Fuck you, you Chicken Noodle Soup reading mental insect. Where the hell did I put those lesbian kicking boots? This town has too many stained-glass windows with cowards praying for peace beneath them...

Fuck yes, I wanna hurt people and burn shit. I wanna roast Tel Aviv like a smore over the charred carcass of the Vatican. I wanna smash the hands of every adult who has ever made someone feel small for fun with a mallet and then force feed them the shards of their own diddling fingers. But I'm not going to. I just need to say it out loud without some do-gooder twit trying to tranquilize or censor me. 

This isn't to say that my lust for revenge is purely rhetorical. It's actually what fuels my activism and helps me to organize fellow survivors of the vampiric predator class against them. So, while I would very much like to smash some smug predator's face in like a Jacko lantern and I'm not totally convinced that I wouldn't be perfectly justified in doing so, I don't because I know that the vampires would very much like me to do this as well and I'm not about to hand them an easy win.

The vampire class of Zionist Pax-Americana thrives on this kind of reaction. They like nothing better than a good old fashioned lone nut "terrorist attack" so they can practice feigning empathetic and play the victim without even having to put down the Uzi, and I used to be more than willing to give this to them on a flaming platter. I used to be a hardcore Leninist, totally down for Foco Theory, dreaming big about building a little vanguard of professional arsonists to fuck shit up and get even. I believed it because it felt good. I believed it because I needed to believe it.

But how does that story end? How does that story always fucking end? With a pile of dead bodies and everything else exactly the same. Even in the few successful, best-case scenarios, the vanguard merely succeeds in overthrowing the Czar only to replace him on his thrown of skulls. Van Helsing becomes the vampire and the abyss stares back. It doesn't fucking work, but that doesn't mean that I don't know exactly how every one of those made-for-TV lunatics feels. I have a great deal of empathy for the Fox News prescribed monster-of-the-week and I want to help.

The best advice I can give is don't repress your rage; express it and deal with it.

I express it through my writing. Not just in epic tirades like this but in the two splatterpunk novels I never seem to be finished working on, both of which feature genderqueer victims of sexual violence getting even with powerful forces to the tune of smashing skulls and broken teeth. Find an outlet. Some place where even your darkest thoughts are free to play out entirely. Write it down, draw it, paint it, perform it, but get it out there and let it leave a mark. Make it real without letting it destroy you and other innocent bystanders who are probably just as pissed as you are.

As far as dealing with it goes, I always return to my history books to remind me that karma isn't just a bad name for a gay bar. Every empire, every kingdom, every cartel, every cabal of vampires has always ended the same way; with collapse, with the most powerful people on earth exposing themselves to the public for the decadent monsters they are and ripping each other's throats out while the peasants gather at the gates. They all think they're exceptional. They all think that they're oligarchy is unique. And they all die defamed and humiliated with little more than broken ruins in their wake.

The more of these true stories you read, the more you start to see them playing out before your eyes with the current masters of the universe. Donald Trump making a spectacle of himself while he humiliates his fellow elites with his grotesque antics like Nero at the eclipse of the Ceasars. Benjamin Netanyahu marching his IDF death squads directly into the gnashing jaws of a feral Axis of Resistance just like Hitler's Stormtroopers conquering their own graves in the ruins of Stalingrad.

The screws turn. The last grain of sand drops. And every king becomes another decorated piece of meat in the grinding gears of history. Sadly, it may end in apocalypse this time, but it will end, and I have to believe that there will be survivors amidst the ruins and that the fiends who built them will not be among us. Maybe this isn't the cooky cutter happy ending promised to us by Pixar, but it beats dying alone in some prison cell as an unwitting patsy of the anti-terrorism-to-state-terrorism pipeline.

If the above knowledge still isn't enough, and believe me when I tell you that it isn't always enough for me either, I have only two more suggestions; the forest and the dungeon; survivalism and S&M. I know, I know, I'm fucking nuts, I've heard but trust me and try it. 

There is something very liberating about firing a weapon in the middle of the woods and there is something equally liberating about exchanging complete and total control with another consenting adult in a soundproof room with a safety word. Both remind us that even in the darkest times, we as human beings still hold more power over our individual destinies than polite society has fooled us into believing.

As for me, I wrote this unhinged piece of Gonzo journalism and published it. I'm still pretty goddamn pissed off but I feel just a little bit more free for saying it out loud and knowing that somewhere in the pits of hell, a couple of priests are probably being forced to carve it into each other's asses.

Survival is the greatest form of revenge, dearest motherfuckers. Keep yourselves alive.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs That Influenced This Post

* My War by Black Flag

* Shitlist by L7

* Sin by Nine Inch Nails

* Kids by Sleigh Bells

* Territorial Pissings by Nirvana

* Stigmata by Ministry

* Teenagers by My Chemical Romance

* In a Lake by Mitski

* Motion Sickness by Phoebe Bridgers

* Sheila Take a Bow by the Smiths

* I Don't Live Here Anymore by The War on Drugs

* Keep Yourself Alive by Queen

The Ghost of Ali Shariati Dances with the Epstein Empire

 Trump has seriously fucked up in the Middle East this time and even he knows it. In the first two weeks alone of Bibi and Donald's latest savage bombardment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, neither regime has been able to keep their various stories straight for longer than fifteen seconds. 

First, we were supposedly doing this because the Iranian people were just one airstrike away from returning the Shah to power in a popular uprising but after slaughtering half of the nation's leadership from the Ayatollah down to the dog catcher, the Iranian people seemed more supportive of the fundamentalist hand that barely feeds them than ever before. 

So, then the story changes to a strangely familiar narrative about weapons of mass destruction, weapons that Trump himself insisted repeatedly that he had heroically obliterated in the Ten-Day War last year. And that old gem was followed rather swiftly by yet another narrative about some inevitable plot by Iran to take over the Middle East in a week at any given second unless we helped Israel massacre their daughters in daring daylight raids on elementary schools. Now, they mostly just point at the mess they made and say, "Now, you see, with nukes that would be way worse."

The only thing that seems to change more than Trump's chickenshit excuses for setting the region on fire is the timeline for when V-day is supposed to come. Two weeks becomes four weeks becomes four months becomes four weeks again after oil prices spike. Believe it or not. all of these rambling narratives actually do tell the same story. The story of a vane and ignorant empire that opened Pandora's Box by assassinating a nation of 90 million's god-king and then completely lost control of the expanding global horror show that followed. 

And just like that, Donald Trump has managed to do the seemingly impossible and out-neocon the neocons he was originally elected to replace with a seemingly pointless adventure in reckless regime change in a nation even Bush was smart enough not to bomb. All of which begs the question of what exactly was the real fucking goal here?

Donald Trump's approval ratings were already in the shitter, and this war was hugely unpopular with his own base long before he even dropped the first bomb. This man clearly isn't the brightest psychopath to ever stumble into the White House from Wall Street, but he isn't a complete and total imbecile either. He is also way too pathologically self-serving to take one for anyone's team. 

So, then, and I repeat, what in Ronald Reagan's putrid corpse could have possibly convinced this man that a suicidal quagmire in halal country was a good idea during a fucking election year? I can only give you a guess, but I do believe it to be a fairly educated one.

Two things happened the week before Trump finally decided to end his will-he-won't-he relationship with regime change in Iran. The first is that Benjamin Netanyahu told the Donald that Israel was going to whack the Ayatollah with or without him and that the results would be identical either way. Iran would retaliate by dumping literal tons of drones on the American bases that encircle it throughout the region and Trump would be duty bound to prove his manhood with blood.

The other telltale thing that happened that week was that evidence surfaced from the heavily redacted Epstein Files that appears to show multiple sources corroborating the failed lawsuit of Katy Johnson; an anonymous plaintiff who accused our current president of raping her with Jeffrey Epstein at his side and then threatening to murder her if she spoke.

What do these two events have to do with each other? Considering the growing evidence of Epstein's connections to Israeli intelligence, they both amount to blackmail. The Ashkenazi Duce of a nation that Donald Trump must at the very least suspect has evidence of his dalliances with pedophilia essentially used American soldiers like hostages and said, 'if you don't, we will.' It's a reckless gambit even by Israeli standards but Benjamin Netanyahu has always been a reckless motherfucker even by Israeli standards. This was after all the man who kept arming Hamas even during the First Intifada just to splinter the PLO.

So, while Donald Trump struggles to conjure up new excuses for jabbing his tiny prick into a wild hornet's nest, Israel continues its revanchist expansion project, swallowing up even more territory in Lebanon to build a Greater Israel in the hallowed name of their pilfered wealth amidst the increasingly volatile neighborhood that jacking that loot made possible in the Middle East.

The good news here is the bad news here. Regardless of who engineered it, the project to reign in the regional Shia opposition to Israel's Epstein facilitated collection of final solutions in the Holy Land has become a very loud and violent disaster. Iran had actually been rendered rather docile by so-called peace deals like the JCPOA and the Mullahs' flirtations with those decadents at the World Bank. Now, the nation's hardliners have more power than ever over a half-crippled drone factory with an atomized Islamic Guard that has no moderate commanders left to tell them 'No.'

Israel may have finally bitten off more than they can chew and Donald Trump definitely has, as any further disintegration of the Islamic Republic will likely simply loose a colossal stockpile of artillery onto Shia militias across the region. Militias that Iran actually did more to contain than arm. 

When Gaddafi fell to NATO intervention in 2011, his arsenal spread from Boko Haram to ISIS and destabilized half of Africa for a generation. Iran's stash is ten times the size and its military was designed to decentralize into smaller and smaller autonomous units as the chain of command continues to break down. What all this blood on the temple walls spells out is that a newer and more terrifying Axis of Resistance committed to smashing Zion above all else may be upon us.

At the risk of committing political suicide (again), I say good fucking riddance. As the American Empire continues its long, inevitable decline into the age of Orange Ozymandias, Israel appears to be making a move to elevate its status from a regional menace to a burgeoning empire in its own right. Go ahead and laugh. The British did when a bunch of rogue slave rapists decided to start up their own Mafia family in the "New World" and by the beginning of the Cold War they were doing the Washington Family's bloody laundry for chump change. 

Israel has learned from the worst. Much like the US of A, these colonialist pigfuckers have developed their own distinctly nasty strain of white supremacy called Zionism along with a biblically justified Manifest Destiny calling for nothing short of complete control of every grain of sand between the Nile and the Euphrates along with a pact to commit mass suicide by nuclear holocaust if they fail. 

Let's face it, this is a sickening menace that needs to be stopped before it can commit another sixteen Nakbas before dinner and a riled-up regalia of Islamic militias appear to be the only people willing to stop them. The sad thing, well, one of many sad things, is that the Iranian opposition to the Mullahs was totally based, even if it was being influenced by bad actors like Mossad and the Pahlavi Dynasty still hiding out in Beverly Hills. 

The Islamic Revolution was an unfinished popular uprising that had been launched not only against western materialism and a brutal American backed monarch but against Persia's long corrupt clerical order as well.

It's true ideological leader wasn't even the Ayatollah, but a former Marxist academic named Ali Shariati who preached a radical school of "Red Shiism" that advocated for a return to Islam's roots as a vehicle for social justice and an alternative to western capitalism. But Shariati died mysteriously in exile before the revolution ended, allowing the Mullahs to hijack and ultimately destroy the revolution, building a kind of crony capitalist Shiism that allowed the clerical class to fatten themselves behind a veneer of religious fundamentalism.

I honestly believe that these fuckers would have been chucked out decades ago and probably by the remaining revolutionaries in the Islamic Guard if it wasn't for the constant intervention of western imperialism, beginning almost immediately after the fall of the Shah with the brutal invasion of Washington's then-toady in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, which forced revolutionaries and clerics alike to fight side by side for their lives in gas infested trenches.

Iranians find themselves in similarly existential straits right now beneath the steel rain of the Epstein Empire. This is why they have largely gathered around Khamenei Jr. Not because he's an heir to another heretical dynasty but because he is an orphan and a widower. He is a largely blank slate ready to be painted by the anguished rage of a people who have grown accustomed to being routinely traumatized by Zionism.

It is my hope, maybe my only hope, that these people somehow succeed in humiliating the predator class in both Washington and Tel Aviv to the point of collapse and then bring the war home to an Iran bereft of central leadership so they can form a network of decentralized roaming governments similar to that of fellow Shia militias like the Houthis, Hezbollah, and the Sadrists. That and that maybe just maybe, with a lack of western Westphalian supremacy over the globe, those civilian regimes can form their own school of Red Shia anarchism not unlike what existed in this region before the West intervened.

Either way, Trump and his increasingly sadistic Zionist masters need to be stopped more than any Mullah, and it should probably be the neighborhood they've tortured the worst that finally stops them.

This one's for all the Katie Johnson's out there. Death to the Epstein Empire that feeds on the flesh of the innocent. Your whirlwind is just around the corner now.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones

* The Wild Ones by Suede

* Riot Rythm by Sleigh Bells

* Fight the Power by Public Enemy

* Hell Awaits by Slayer

* My Body is Made of Crushed Little Stars by Mitski

* Dirty Boots by Sonic Youth

* Justine Go Genesis by Sleigh Bells

Save Misfit Manor: A Queer Anarchist Homestead Needs Your Help

 I think a lot of people take words like 'home' and 'family' for granted and I suppose I was one of them. I grew up in what I thought was a pretty stable home, a three-bedroom house with loving parents who never actually hit me. But I didn't know what safety felt like until I was 33 because the stable suburban existence of my seemingly idyllic childhood was dependent on the secrets I kept. About the confusing gender identity that the church my family revered promised eternal damnation for. And about the terrible things that uniformed agents of that church did to that vexing body of mine when I was too small to comprehend it, let alone defend it.

I didn't even feel safe enough to consciously confront these heinous truths until I met my now girlfriend Lily and we were taken in by our dear friends Archie and Em along with their child Al. I still remember the first night I spent at the rural homestead they inherited from Archie's grandmother, sitting around a campfire surrounded by nothing but untouched Appalachian wilderness and other Queer people who understood the unfathomable. Other neurodivergent, gender diverse people who grew up with secrets and the violence they concealed. By the end of that evening, I felt downright high even though I hadn't inhaled anything stronger than charred marshmallows. 

It took me a moment to recognize this euphoria to be a simple sense of security; my body unclenching like a fist for the first time since I was five years old, and it would take me another moment still to recognize just how many years I had waited to exhale.

This was the night that my friends became family and their one-acre property, lovingly dubbed Misfit Manor, became home. I have written about this place before; the ramshackle homestead tucked deep inside a central Pennsylvanian holler standing defiantly for the unsung cause of Queer rural autonomy in a bastard age of climate apocalypse and imperial collapse. And I've written about these people before; my hacker weeb bestie who I accidentally fell in love with during our overlapping gender transitions; the high school sweethearts who flipped genders, had a child who defied all of them, and took in another longtime friend named James as the missing piece in their polyamorous marriage. 

They often form the silver lining in my Queer tribalist tirades against vanilla civilization, but today I speak of them with a tremble in my throat and glass in my chest.

You see, dearest motherfuckers, a couple weeks ago, what appears to have been a freak electrical fire caused by ancient wiring burned Misfit Manor to the ground. Lily and I still live with our elderly parents most of the time, but Archie, Em, James, and Al barely escaped with their lives and the flames took nearly everything else; the house, the shed, the ducks and chickens, two charming cats named Toast and Horus, and an abused but impossibly gentle pitbull named Pomni...

All gone. Up in smoke. I drove down the moment I heard and the strongest people I've ever met took turns falling apart in my arms while everything they worked for lay in a smoldering heap beside us.

None of it was insured. Archie's grandfather had built that house with his bare hands from a dilapidated barn decades ago. They own nothing but the land. However, that fire stole so much more than property. It robbed all of us of a dream of turning that acre into something more. A self-sustaining, off-grid, Queer autonomous zone. One island in what I had hoped would become an archipelago: a confederation of Misfit Manors stretching across the rural rust belt; allowing neurodivergent, gender bending hicks like us (the kind of people the cosmopolitan pride parades left behind) to build a stateless community not unlike that of our Amish neighbors; a sanctuary that  would allow us to never have to rely on another straight institution ever again.

In other words, I dreamt of proliferating the safety I found one summer night around the swirling embers of a campfire and turning it into a weapon against isolation and assimilation.

I'm not going to tell you that we ever came close to this dream. I'm not going to tell you that Misfit Manor was some kind of utopian paradise before the flames cruelly turned against us. We are poor people who come from trauma and like a family of porcupines, we have stuck each other in close quarters many times without even trying. Holding this thing together has been a constant struggle from the beginning and it has never been easy.

However, I can also tell you that nothing tastes better than homemade bread after three rips of cheap gas station weed. I can tell you that Al taught me how to trust myself after decades of parochial indoctrination just by trusting me to be their "Auntie Anarchy". I can tell you that I spent the best Thanksgiving of my life playing Cards Against Humanity forty minutes from the nearest Catholic Church. I can tell you that I saw the face of God one summer in a forest shimmering with the lights of a thousand fireflies. 

I can also tell you that Archie, Em, and James are the hardest working people I have ever met in my life and that they have taught me more about anarchism through their selfless kindness than any dead Russian professor ever could. And I can tell you that I am not about to allow this dream to die without a fight.

We will rebuild Misfit Manor from these ashes, but we need your help. 

We have put together a pretty bare bones GoFundMe account, and we have managed to raise enough money on it to dig a new well and put in the basic electric infrastructure, but we still need a used single-wide trailer which will likely cost us at least another forty grand. We could also use some livestock, a couple shipping containers, and some solar panels so, I can't tell you exactly how much we're asking for, probably more than we'll ever get, but we have managed to make about twenty grand in donations of less than a thousand dollars so, please give anything and we will be beyond grateful, but the greatest thing you can give is to simply spread the word far and wide. 

Repost this article or the GoFundMe page attached anywhere and everywhere.

Please, help my family save our home and our dream of a Queer agrarian future amidst the ruins of a post-traumatic civilization. Help us save Misfit Manor.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs Influenced by This Post

* Come to God by Indigo De Souza

* Silent All These Years by Tori Amos

* Not by Big Thief

* Our Town by Iris DeMent

* All Apologies by Nirvana

* Ruined by Adrianne Lenker

* True Blue by Boygenius

* Mary by Big Thief

* Laughing With by Regina Spektor

* If I Ever Leave This World Alive by Flogging Molly