Pride 101. “I knew, deep in my bones, that I was among my people.” I am glad you felt this. You should feel this. Because you can. Many of us who participated in marches from the past, never felt we were with our people because there were no people. What we were was afraid. What we were afraid of were young men beating people with baseball bats in a Pride Parade. We were supposed to run. Instead, we stood there and watched as the living, breathing thing – indifference – asserted its success as a standing ovation. Such manly men. A destroyed teenager. I covered him with my body. I was screaming my guts out while they worked me over with the baseball bats. Hospital was not an option. The medical community is legally compelled to follow through on hate complaints. There was no such thing as a hate complaint. You just thought there was. Still, I would not go to the cops. There was no such thing as a rape kit for a man. They demand ID. I repeat over and over, No Weapon I Am Reaching For My Wallet Please Don’t Shoot Me Don’t Shoot Anyone. I am beginning to attract attention. which pushed me into becoming a photographer. I learn the hard way. Video camera suspicion. Heavy. I never had a single friend. No lovers. No life. Trauma IS the hard way. It was not a community. It was terrifying. I participated in the Dan White riots. I have joined Antifa. Summers are riot to riot on my dirt bike while America burns. There is too much to see, to feel, to understand we never can. The unfathomable is exactly that. The universe is expanding, and that expansion is accelerating. But what is causing that to happen? The leading hypothesis is a repellent force that astrophysicists refer to as “dark energy,” which pushes everything away from everything else. So how does it work? What does it mean for our future? And how sure are we that it even exists? Do we exist. Existential luck.

The “dark” in the name doesn’t mean that it’s literally dark. It’s more of a hotel reservation system that indicates that we really don’t know much about a lot of stuff. Why would a coal company funnel cash to a Save the Whales Org. Why is so much of what we turn out to be, baked greed into the cement of events like revolutions are far far away, but how much is far. In the same vein as the equally mysterious, dark matter. The main thing we do know is that somehow, this energy is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Away we go. Can Homo sapiens do it. We were out of time about a decade ago. Now, fucking what. Who wants to fight. Not me. If we could do something substantial, you would have hundreds of thousands committed to what. What is the there there. Culture. Civilization. Government. Corporate Indifference. To name a few. The last time the West had gone through a drought like the one we are still on was gasoline gluttony. Look far. But no. No one knows how far far is.