Joseph Massey and Chase Geiser dissect cancel culture's stifling effect on poetry, citing a trigger-warned poem using African-American vernacular as proof of inhibited discourse. They debate NXIVM brainwashing claims, reject cultural appropriation as contradictory to natural blending, and explore separating art from artists like Jim Morrison. Massey details his memoir process, confronting online harassers for closure while navigating death threats and identity politics. Ultimately, the dialogue suggests true artistic freedom requires resisting performative correctness to preserve critical thought. [Automatically generated summary]
I was talking to, I can't remember who it was I was talking to about this.
I think it was, I can't remember.
I just mentioned I do so many of these every week and I can't remember.
But we were, it was my buddy Eric talking about how since everything has gotten so political, no one's really talking about anything else.
And that was one of the reasons why I wanted to reach out to you is because, you know, I was interested in all sorts of things that were completely apolitical growing up and into young adulthood and even into college.
Like I was reading Kerouac when I was 14.
The Dharma bums totally changed my life.
Tristessa, I think, is his best work.
I mean, I went through that whole entire phase of being interested in poetry and making music when I was in high school and having sort of a general, a genuine pursuit of understanding the human condition.
I was having a human experience.
And now that everything's gotten so political, and necessarily so, I suppose.
I mean, it's a fought that needs, a fight that needs to be fought.
But it's really a shame because we're not talking about like what movies are moving or what art is resonating as a society.
We're just sort of bitching at each other.
And I thought maybe having you on would be sort of a re-inspiration to, or a way to kind of get back in touch because I think part of what it means to be American is to it's not just an innovative country in terms of technology and business.
It is those things, but it's also a great place of cultural development traditionally anyway.
And I don't know.
I just wondered kind of what you thought about that.
Yeah, well, I mean, most discussions of art or, you know, movies or books or whatever, painting, poetry, those discussions are severely inhibited by these politics that are so pervasive.
And to the point where, at least in poetry, and I'm sure in other mediums, other fields, but you really aren't permitted to be critical of anything, particularly if you're white and straight.
I know I'm probably going to get crap for that, but it's the truth.
You have to either say nothing or heap praise.
And that's all that's acceptable.
I've seen in poetry where, I mean, this is like a, I saw it coming.
And sure enough, it's here, where poets get bad reviews, bad as in critical.
You know, this book didn't really do it for me, or just, you know, critical in the sense of not just lavishing praise.
And they see it as a kind of violence.
They're offended by their bad reviews.
And they think they've terrified critics in that way.
I won't name it.
I won't name names because it's such a small world, the poetry world, but critics who were once considered major critics, kingmakers even was a word that was used to describe one critic, a kingmaker.
Well, the kingmaker was the editor of a very large national magazine that has a poetry section.
And they published a poem that when it first came out and the poet put it on Facebook, everybody loved it.
It got like 300 likes.
But within 24 hours, it was accused of appropriating culture in the sense that it was using African-American vernacular English, I think is the term.
so we could watch that but we can't watch some and i i think gondolin's a terrible movie for lots of reasons um It's just boring as hell, and I was forced to watch it.
It's fucking boring, dude.
Yeah, it's way too, I mean, it just goes on forever.
That would probably be a really good article, like a sarcastic sort of conceptual James, you know, James Lindsay, like trolling article about why we need to cancel The Wizard of Oz.
But, you know, one thing that the Wizard of Oz gets right is it recognizes inherent white supremacy and that the man behind the curtain, the Wizard of Oz, is an old white dude.
So the interesting thing to me about censorship, particularly with the arts, is that it's sort of always been a problem going back hundreds of years even.
And if you look at like Hal, for example, I know you had some correspondence with Alan Ginsburg.
How it was censored for sort of its explicit nature, right?
And, you know, we don't see censorship today for things that are explicit, but we see it for things that are offensive.
And that sort of shifted.
But censorship has sort of always been a problem for the arts.
And I think it's because maybe one of the purposes of art is to push buttons and cross lines that need to be crossed.
Well, you know, Lawrence Ferlinghetti passed away recently, the publisher and the man behind City Lights Books, the publishing house, and the bookstore.
And, you know, he went to court over Hal because he published it.
And, you know, the artists defended the artist who was being, they were attempting to pulp his books and to ban Hal.
And it was abhorrent to the poets within Ginsburg's milieu and just, I think, across the board at that time.
But now artists are censoring other artists.
They're ganging up to censor artists that they dislike for ideological reasons.
And that's terrifying to me.
And it's happening at a greater and greater frequency, it seems.
I know in the poetry world anyway, and just the literary world in general, it's almost becoming normal to cancel an author or a poet for whatever reason, to demand that their books be taken out of print, etc.
And that's the major difference.
Artists fought for other artists.
Artists fought for freedom of speech during that time period in the 50s.
But not anymore.
The whole idea of free speech is completely mangled and screwed up by, for lack of a better way of describing it, woke ideology.
I don't even know what's going on, man.
I mean, it's like it's happened.
It seems to have happened so quickly.
I mean, I can remember.
I'm not terribly old.
I can remember when poets were not censoring other poets and when they were actively.
And he basically was commissioned by the Supreme Council of Scottish Rite Freemasonry to scour the wisdom of the world for the lost degrees of Freemasonry.
And he wrote Morals and Dogma and put together the fourth through the 33rd degree rituals.
And he's like, these are them.
Yeah, I'm sure he massaged them and rewrote some of them.
So he didn't like rediscover the hidden scrolls.
It wasn't like, you know, national treasure or something like that.
But he basically did as much research as could be done in the late 19th century and tried to figure out what the hell happened to some of the old secret ceremonies.
And then my cousin, his first cousins, I guess my third cousin, he was, I don't know what they, what do they call the leader of a lodge?
He was like the, he was the forceful master.
Yeah, yeah.
And he had a, he had a Masonic funeral and everything.
But I think because I grew up with being kind of Freemasonry adjacent, it hasn't been an area of a lot of interest.
Freemason adjacent, yeah.
Well, I don't, you know, some people think if you're if you even if you're just Freemason adjacent, you're you're like uh tainted by the Illuminati or whatever.
Yeah, I had a I had a guy with dreadlocks when I lived in Humboldt County and everyone's high all the time.
I wasn't.
And we visited this guy, my girlfriend and I, and she would, she would buy weed from him.
I wasn't interested.
I just went for the ride.
And I told this guy that my dad's a Freemason.
He pulled a sword on me and pointed it at my neck.
You know, obviously the Masons were heavily involved with the revolution in the United States.
And so I think that coupled with their advertised secrecy has just made certain conspiracy-minded people very skeptical and paranoid about the organization.
But ultimately, it's just a group of guys that get together and practice the degree work, which is highly symbolic about how to become a wiser person, how to become a better person, what it means to be a man.
Yeah, I think there are a couple of things that influence that.
The first thing, the first problem they had is similar to that of Scientology, though I think Scientology actually has real problems.
But when you have a bunch of celebrities or powerful people that are involved in any organization, it immediately draws attention.
There's incentive created for district attorneys, prosecutors, investigators.
Everybody wants to catch those guys, right?
It's like that scene in the Wolf of Wall Street when the FBI agent is on the boat with Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Jordan Belfort.
And he's like, I just can't wait till I take this boat back to the bureau.
And it's like the same thing I think happened with Nexium.
They thought everyone's ambition sort of to get these guys because they knew it was going to be such a huge story, coupled with the whole entire bullshit that was the Me Too movement.
Just sort of, it was just a bad, wrong place, wrong time for an organization like Nexium, in which you have a semi-controversial leader who happens to be sleeping with several of the members.
Yeah, bad place, wrong time for that group, and bad place, wrong time for journalism, because what counts as journalism these days is, I mean, so much of it is just activism.
And I heard a interview with, I think it's the Times Union.
It's the paper in wherever Nexeme's located in New York.
They were writing lots of stories about them.
I heard a podcast with him, and he was just so snarky, and it was clearly like making it very personal, you know, mocking like that they would play volleyball at night.
Like, why is that necessary?
You know, if they've committed these crimes, you're saying that they're very suspicious.
Why don't you just stick to facts?
Stick to those, you're journalists.
Aren't facts your thing?
But it's just, it's editorial commentary all the time.
Yeah, and what I don't understand about it is, you know, it's sort of like a Marilyn Man or a Charles Manson thing, rather, where, you know, Charles Manson never actually murdered anybody, right?
But he was convicted because he was sort of part of this conspiracy.
He was this inciter, right?
This cult leader, so they say.
And you see this thing with Keith that I think is interesting is that, you know, he was charged with a number of things.
But one of the main things was he was accused of basically brainwashing these women in order to perform sexual acts and get other women through collateral and brainwashing to perform acts as well, right?
That was the accusation.
But then on the other hand, they go and they sentence Alison Mack for to three years.
And it's like, listen, if she was brainwashed, then she's not culpable.
And if she's culpable, then she wasn't brainwashed.
So it's like, you can't really convict both of them.
Well, you have to be willing to be brainwashed at a certain point.
I mean, you're participating in it.
I don't, I mean, I know with hypnosis, I'm no expert on hypnosis, but the people who are able to be hypnotized and like quack like ducks or whatever, you know, that kind of showmanship style of hypnosis.
Carnival hypnosis.
Yeah.
Those people have to be really willing to be hypnotized.
They have to be into it.
You can't hypnotize somebody who does not want to be hypnotized.
Actually, it was probably a week or two after all this cancellation stuff with me started and life was just falling apart from under me on all sides.
And a friend of mine who's a hypnotist, professional hypnotist, called me and took me through a hypnosis thing to relax, you know?
And it worked.
It was basically like a guided meditation.
But if I didn't want to go there, I wouldn't have gone.
I guess there is a line.
You can draw a line with people who have diminished intellectual capacity or who have been like, you know, I don't know, horrifically taken advantage of in certain ways.
So they're psychologically in a state where they can be, you know, directed.
But that's different.
That's different than the hypnosis we're talking about.
Yeah, I think so much of it has to do with the way, because the way I was raised, very abusive households, I became adept at protecting myself by going within.
And that coupled with the training I've had in meditation over the last seven years or so, really saved me, really kept me from spiraling out of control.
There are any number of ways I could have spiraled out.
I could have freaked out on social media, just posting crazy shit, or could have started drinking or killed myself, which crossed my mind many times.
But there was something, call it grace, I don't know, but it swept in immediately when all of it started happening, and it kind of kept me grounded enough to not completely lose it.
Even though I was completely losing it, I was aware that I was completely losing it.
And the awareness of that awareness provided me with some stability and continuing to write poetry defiantly because I'm not going to let these people take that from me.
They can't, you know.
And yeah, it's been three years and it still flares up.
It flared up today.
Somebody wished death on me.
They said that I should overdose on pills and die.
And this is a poetry world person.
He used his real name in an account that he just created like yesterday just to fuck with me.
But that kind of discourse is acceptable in the poetry world and I think in the arts in general, if you're seen as, as he called me, a crypto Nazi.
And you're calling for my death because of an ideological difference that most of which you're just kind of fantasizing about because you don't really know what my politics of your conservative leaning.
Because it all stems from me tweeting that I'm more conservative than not these days.
It started when I saw what was happening in the poetry world with identity politics and the absolute cowardice displayed by so many poets who wouldn't give any pushback to what was happening.
Specifically, and this is before even identity politics became a phrase that's used all the time.
This is like, I don't know, five years ago or something, six years ago.
And I'll make this very short, but a poet who's a conceptual poet, he doesn't really write poems.
He takes texts that already exist and then reframes them in a certain way.
Well, he did that with Michael Brown's autopsy.
Why he did that, I don't know.
I think that was certainly in poor taste, but this guy revels in poor taste.
He did this, he performed it, and then a group of poets calling themselves the Mongrel Coalition sprung up.
And they just started bullying poets and editors, demanding diversification.
And from what I could tell, most major poetry journals were already diverse in terms of having different...
I tend to write in notebooks and with pen and paper.
And after a period of time, whether it's a day or a couple days or a week, I go back to the notebook and mine it for things that are useful.
And then I work with it in Google Docs, just toying with the language, you know, revising it in all sorts of ways until it starts to sound, has a particular sound that feels finished, as finished as it could be.
And I like it to feel like it's outside of me at a certain point.
You know, there's no longer, there's no self-consciousness there anymore.
It's some other voice.
It's mine, but it's also beyond just this, you know, small self sitting here talking to you.
It's something bigger than that, which may sound very delusional and psychotic.
Would you say that creativity is something that the mind actually generates or something that the mind picks up?
Because I often think of the mind myself, and I don't want to say this in distort your response if you think differently, but I often think of the mind as more of an antenna than an actual vehicle that generates anything new.
I like that description that one of my favorite poets, his name is Jack Spicer, and he had a whole theory about Martians and that his poems came from Martians, from the outside.
And I don't think he really believed that they came from Martians, but it was just an analogy, yeah, that the poems come from the outside and the poem or the poet is the caretaker of those messages and kind of like the curator of those messages.
Yeah, the poet is a receiver.
But it's what really separates poets from just people who rant on Greyhound buses and all that, who I believe probably are receiving messages from the outside.
I don't know if you've ever ridden Greyhound, but people...
Well, that's well, that's, you know, people who would like to cancel Ezra Pound, let's say, they have no sense of historical context.
They're offended to even have that introduced to the conversation because they don't want their righteousness to be diluted by facts and by the truth.
And it is true that these things that Ezra Pound said in the 30s, we're in a historical context that we really aren't able to fully grasp.
We're not there.
So the woke people will look at these historical situations and look at people, look at these people from the past who may have said something abhorrent or whatever.
And they'll look at it through the lens of today.
It's like all time collapses into the now of social media buzz and hype and anger and hive mind reactivity.
And I think that's a terrible thing.
It's a terrible thing for art.
They were protesting Picasso recently because he was mean.
And to really appreciate an artist's work, well, I'll put it another way, your appreciation can be richer and deeper of any artist if you know a bit about their biography, the context of where the work came from.
It enriches the work in that sense.
But to condemn a work, I mean, there could be a movement.
We could start one actually to cancel Jim Morrison posthumously because you saw it in the Oliver Stone film.
It's about understanding that art's made by human beings.
But art is also hopefully transcendent enough to be better than the artist.
Not in some corny, you know, feel-good like chicken soup for the soul sense, but just at least when I, the poetry that I read, I know that that work is inspired and the poetry I like.
The work is inspired and does transcend the human being who's writing it.
You know, it's an expression of the best of what a human is capable of when working with these materials that they're given, whether it's language or paint or whatever.
And for the reader, it's a way to participate in that, not an ideal state, but a state that can be aspired to in a sense, you know.
And it vivifies the world, you know, like great art.
Great.
And I hate using generalizations, but I read a beautiful Wallace Stevens poem.
So I often think of art as a coping mechanism, especially music.
I guess all art, but music is the one that comes to mind because it's so accessible.
Both a coping mechanism for the consumer as well as the artist.
And it seems to me, and this could be off-base, so I'm totally interested in your thoughts.
It seems to me that in order to have the discipline and the motivation to make incredibly good art, which is often not lucrative, even if you're amazing, in order to have that sort of discipline and motivation, it seems to me reasonable that you have a greater demand to cope with something or you have something bigger that you need to cope with.
So it would inherently follow that there's an increased likelihood for really good art to be made by really fucked up people.
It bears true in the biographies of poets who are truly great, who've stuck around for whose work continues to be read, like Wallace Stevens.
Yeah, he said some very cruel things to people.
By all accounts, he was just kind of a weirdo, you know, he was like, he would be considered creepy these days.
Like he probably would end up on some list as creepy.
You know, he would have been me too, certainly.
But yeah, it's, and I think for so many artists, too, I mean, this might take us down a whole that I'm not equipped to go to go down, but I think it starts for so many artists, the artists I love and that I've studied, it starts in childhood.
And there's a wound there.
And the creative act is not only a way to reclaim agency, but in a way to kind of put the world and all of its chaos into some kind of order, or at least into, you know, a kind of song, a kind of way of making sense of it, you know.
And then that matures into wanting to make sense of the human condition in general or just wanting to address the human condition.
And, you know, and by doing that, you bring others with you into that greater understanding of what it means to be human.
Like you mentioned Kerouac earlier.
His demons were right on the surface, you know, and he wrote.
And I just, I feel like sometimes I laugh at Silicon Valley when they like, they start doing these things in the name of enhanced productivity.
And you heard a lot more about it before Trump was elected and everybody just talked about Trump exclusively.
But, you know, they were micro-dosing LSD for increased productivity and comparing the performance on Medafanil versus Adderall and trying meditation in order to calm their mind so they could be more productive on doing a software binge.
And there was like this sort of like idol worship of maximum productivity of intelligence in the Silicon Valley software tech startup thing.
And I think that it was just funny to me how these people who I don't typically consider to be spiritually enlightened were kind of commercializing everything that was good about something that really has nothing to do with commercial success.
It has to do with personal fulfillment and self-actualization rather than external.
Yeah, that is interesting because when Kerouac became involved, like the story of the Dharma bums and Jaffe Ryder is Gary Snyder, and they're discovering these Buddhist texts.
They're doing Zen meditation.
Philip Whalen is in that book as well under, I forget the name of his character, but he went on to be, yeah, he was the, what do they call the leader of a Zen ashram?
But they, they, they, they found these teachings right when they were introduced to to Western culture, or at least in the popular like American sense, because Alan Watts was contemporary with them, and his writings were influential to these guys.
And Haiku was just starting to become a thing, was being published in English.
You know, he never fully became, you know, I'm a Buddhist.
That's never, he never, I don't, he never said I'm, I don't, he may have, but he was always a Buddhist and a Catholic, and I think more of a Catholic than a Buddhist.
But, you know, if you read Golden Scripture of Eternity, I think is the title of one of his Buddhist-inspired texts.
He was kind of not imitating, but kind of writing in the style of Buddhist sutras and stuff like that.
It's totally sincere, you know, and I think my impression is some people view his interest in Buddhism as a kind of corny cultural appropriation thing, you know, and certainly was not.
I mean, a lot of like the real mystic Catholics, they're way there.
Well, Catholicism is already too far out for most Christians anyway, you know, but the mystics, and I'm thinking even of like Thomas Merton, there's a poet named Robert Lacks who I don't know if he'd identify as Catholic, but he may have been Catholic, but he was a good friend of Thomas Merton's.
And I don't know.
They were just, they were, they were very radical, aesthetically speaking.
I mean, Robert Lacks was.
His poems would consist of just repeated words as a kind of mantra, you know.
But I don't know.
I guess it kind of ties back into Kerouac because Thomas Merton and Robert Lacks and others have seen the relationship between Christianity or between the teachings of Christ and something like Buddhism or the great wisdom teachings of the East.
And I love that.
I love that approach.
I was baptized Catholic and thought about becoming Catholic.
I was going to the, whatever they call those classes for adults.
So the problem that I have with Catholicism and other denominations of Christianity is I think that Christians lean too much on the veracity of the magic, right?
So when I was going through RCIA, one of the guys is like, you know, one of my problems as I struggle with this decision is I'm not really sure that I believe that Jesus Christ literally came back from the dead, you know, and everyone's like, oh, no, there's, here are the reasons why we believe that, you know, at the end of the class, I pulled him aside.
unidentified
I was like, listen, I was like, it doesn't matter if it really happened.
You know, and what I mean to say is, if you look at like Old Testament stories in particular, and there's that famous story where they're moving the Ark of the Covenant, which you were not allowed to touch, right?
And they had to move it on this like platform, just like Indiana Jones.
And one of the guys slipped and the guy behind them put his hand on the ark so it wouldn't fall off the platform that they were carrying.
And as soon as he touched it, was hit with a bolt of lightning, right?
And if you believe that literally happened, you walk away thinking, do whatever the fuck God says or you're fucked.
But if you think it's a metaphor, then maybe the meaning is don't do the wrong thing for the right reasons.
Maybe it's a deeper meaning.
Maybe it's an anti-Machiavellian story that the end doesn't justify the means, right?
And maybe you'd be a better person if you could adhere to the metaphor of the story, the actual meaning, the theme of the story, than adhering to it as if it actually happened literally.
And I think a lot of things in the Bible, I think, actually happened, okay?
So don't get me wrong.
I don't think the whole thing's just made up, but I think an awful lot of it is intentionally allegorical because it forces you to discuss it with your peers, to think about it, to ponder it, and come to conclusions about what it means to be a good human being that you wouldn't come to those conclusions if it was historically just a, you know, a text.
You know what's crazy about that is if you're spending long enough, if you spend long enough time, I swear to God, if you spend long enough time in the belly of a whale, the digestive fluids will bleach your skin.
So it's like, you know, yeah, I don't know if it's proof or not, but it's just, it's just funny that, you know, like you read it and it comes off like a miracle.
Like he was blessed and he came out of this whale, like resurrected.
unidentified
And it's like, or maybe he was just fucking bleached.
Yeah, I brought it up as an example of maybe something in the Bible that didn't actually happen, but was used as a teaching tool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's a lack of a better word.
It's an enlightened way to approach Christianity and especially Catholicism.
I find a lot of value in Catholicism and in the saints and in a life of devotion and in the ethics that are conveyed and established within Catholicism, despite all of the nightmarish things that have happened.
Well, I guess there's no way to tell if priests were engaging in that kind of abuse, you know, before recorded history or before anything like that would be thought of.
So I'm just imagining that many years ago, century ago, a priest was probably, he was the center of the village or whatever.
There was a much more community-based thing.
And that's even true going back before Catholicism started to take a downturn because the town I grew up in was mostly Catholic and it was a very community-based thing.
I just think that there's way too much stimulation in the modern world for people to live a celibate life.
And when they're trying to live a celibate life and they're surrounded by what they're surrounded by, I think it causes major distortions in the mind, you know, and someone's wired.
Apparently, the priests have denied themselves any sexual gratification for so long that it started to mess with their psyche and they expressed that psychological stress in unhealthy ways on other people, the most vulnerable.
I think that has something to do with it, but also that there are priests who became priests to prey on kids.
There was like a case here locally recently, the priest, this guy was abusing kids from the very beginning as soon as he put the cloth on.
And, you know, yeah.
But it's nothing I just said, do I absolutely believe?
Because I don't know.
And I wonder, too, why is it so pervasive in the Catholic Church?
I don't think it's as easy as just saying the modern world is overly stimulating and to the point where trying to live this devout and celibate life will warp someone.
But it seems maybe plausible to me in some situations.
Well, if you think about the if you think about the widespread cultural use and acceptance of pederasty in the Roman civilization, and you think about the union of Rome with the Catholic Church through Constantine and those cultural influences, you know, after the fall of Rome as a state, it's still, the culture still existed in the church.
And, you know, they were speaking Latin at Mass until the 70s, right?
Or the Vatican II was.
And maybe it's just the case that it's a hangover from a culture 1500 years ago and those traditions kind of stuck around in a sort of secret kind of we don't talk about away and we just kind of discovered it.
And I mean, these cases of priests that have like, you know, done horrible things to many children, they were moved around from parish to parish to parish.
It was someone he was abusing, and no one, he didn't go into detail about why he did it, and he was using very cagey language, but enough to let the police know that he did it.
But he took him down to the river and bludgeoned him with a rock and threw him in the river.
So when I first started writing the memoir, I didn't know about what was going to happen because as I was writing about my childhood, I found myself becoming very irritable, depressed.
I was sitting at a picnic table in town here in a park, just like writing a notebook, and some drunk guy was screaming the word faggot and stuff.
And I just stood up and walked right over to him and told him, shut the fuck up.
And I normally wouldn't do that.
I would just avoid confrontation, just, you know, whatever.
He's drunk.
But I realized that I was still in that.
I was in the frame of mind or in the space of childhood again.
And I was hearing this man screaming and screaming faggot, which I was, you know, I grew up in a working class area.
Yeah, so really it upset me, and I went over to him, but it's like, why did I do that?
It didn't really click until later in the day or the next day that when I'm writing about any period of time in the past, something happens psychologically where I'm put back there.
Even when I'm done writing, a part of me is still there.
And the memoirist Mary Carr wrote a book called The Art of Memoir.
And she talks a lot about that.
And when I read that, I was like, oh, God, now I really understand what's happening.
And she basically says, if you're writing a memoir, if you can't handle that, kind of the emotional wear and tear of working on such a thing.
Like she said, after she turned in a memoir, she got the pneumonia.
One guy, another memoirist who's popular, he relapsed.
Lyme disease.
That only happens when you're writing bad poetry.
But yeah, so that part's been as much work as the writing itself, the mitigating the side effects.
But at the same time, it's been a wonderful way to process so much stuff, so many things that have happened.
And it's, yeah, and it's led to forgiving, you know, many of the people who were terrible to me as a kid and forgiving the people who were behind ruining my life, you know, for scurrilous reasons.
I mean, just completely vague bullshit reasons.
You know, I admit I've fucked up in the past.
I was a weird, bad drunk.
But a predator, a serial abuser, groomer of women, groomer.
They use the word groom.
Who did I ever groom?
They've never, you know, it was a year-long campaign.
They never had any receipts.
There was never anything really specific aside from one or two incidents.
And they just, you know, they magnified those to the point where that's who I am.
No, no, I've never had that thought because I don't know how he would have, I don't know how he would have continued to live in the way that he was living.
People might be watching or listening that don't know anything about the essay I wrote, but he was, I think, closeted homosexual and he did very, he abused me.
I don't know, he may have abused other people too.
Yeah, but he was very closeted and lived in a very homophobic environment.
He lived with my grandmother, who was all, you know, it was, yeah, faggot.
You know, that word was just being thrown around the house all the time.
So I don't know how he would have survived his life anyway.
So I don't really, I tend to not think about it because it's so bleak to me.
But the forgiveness is, it's never about letting someone off the hook.
It's never about, you know, justifying his behavior in any kind of way.
It's just no longer hanging on to the anger that keeps me attached in this way that is ultimately damaging to me, you know, to him.
Like just, you got to cut the cord, you know, and let him go.
It's more about releasing the anger, no longer holding that anger towards that person because you're only damaging yourself, whether that person's alive or dead.
And forgiveness, too, doesn't have to be done.
You don't have to tell somebody you're forgiving them.
You don't have to, some people you do.
But in the case of my uncle or my grandmother or these people who I don't even know who are attacking me and trying to really actively destroy my life, I'm not going to email any of them and tell them I forgive you.
But I'll be damned if I walk around with resentment and anger that literally would cause me health problems.
Like I'm not giving that to them.
Like I'm, you know, you're a really fucked up person.
You know, you must have, not you, Chase.
I understand.
You know, you got to be really, you got to be really messed up to, say the least, to go after somebody in the way that they did and the tactics they were using, the things they were saying.
One of them, a couple of them I see in town because two of them live here in the town I live in.
see him every now and then walking around and yeah they just look very lost very broken very
sad i'm not walking around like that you know so do they just like avoid eye contact they totally avoid eye contact they totally avoid it but the the one this guy who was a male feminist at the time during me too he put it in his bio he's like a poetry world guy he really came after me with everything and i i don't know why i barely know the guy never did anything to him but he walked by me about two years later and uh tried to just walk right past me and
i said hey so and so and uh you had a lot to say about me online why don't you say it to my face and he immediately got irate as a defense person on the defense would like what are you talking about he said what are you talking about yeah he said what do you talk he said what are you talking about and i was like you know what i'm talking about because you spent a year harassing me emailing my publishers he said it to his if he said it to your face if he was like all right what would you how would you have reacted
um i
i would have i would have countered it with with um well i did end up count because he event after he simmered down at you know in the beginning he started throwing things at me he said you're thuggish you're uh this he called me thuggish like and i said i just i just stopped him i said what what do you mean thuggish can you give me an example of my of my thuggery like how have i behaved thuggish he was like caught in the headlights and it just it was like seeing it in person like
how it's all about the charged language that they throw at you there's doesn't have to be substance around it you know but it's different when you confront somebody face to face and they realize they have no substance and so he said let's go on a walk and we went for a walk two hour walk he admitted things to me that i told him i wouldn't repeat and i'm not but i i'll say though that it was an orchestrated thing that went on he
apologized and i i forgave him i told him i forgive you i said and if you ever have any problems if you need to talk to somebody let me know because he reeked of alcohol and i know he had just got a divorce and um that really that was closure so when i see him walking around here
i don't have any reactivity towards him you know that's awesome that you had the opportunity to do that you know it's really seldom i think everybody in their life has two or three people that really hurt them and it's very very uncommon to have the opportunity to work that out it was a gift it was a gift as difficult as it was because i mean at certain points it was you know i i had to really
mindfully keep the rage down you know like really had to kind of just not go there because i'm walking next to somebody who i mean hundreds hundreds of tweets emails to my publishers to the person i was worked at school i was doing work for um yeah it was uh brutal i mean he would mock me relentlessly you know he would it was um really bad yeah that's it that's it
Some of them I don't even know what they look like.
But I can still forgive them in the sense that I'm not going to carry around bitterness and resentments because that would also fuck up my writing because I can't write if I'm full of bitterness and anger that hasn't been processed, you know?
Sometimes anger can give you momentum when you're writing, but that kind of anger, that kind of resentment, there's a kind of entropy to it, and it's not conducive to creative activities.