What the actual fuck? I’m actually writing a piece for The Pickup Truck Diaries?
What year is it?
Right, it’s a new year. Sure. Okay! We’d best get to it then, because clearly there are too many prompts for this one episode of The Pickup Truck Diaries to contain in the mere three-thousand-word rough cap I try to keep on these damn things.
So today let’s talk about shit like: “Having a public persona,” or; “What are the scales of celebrity – and the appropriate responsibilities alongside them?”
I like to think about this deep shit a lot, as any frequent reader of this series already knows. I was literally just joking with a counsellor yesterday about how the biggest barrier to me going for any Master’s or PhD was merely the prerequisite courses and the dredge upon time and money they would be, before I got to the real meaty stuff I wanted. I went for a width of knowledge across many different fields through my two Bachelor degrees, rather than hyper-specializing, all due to my ADHD need for new information.
I literally shot myself in the foot – forgoing courses like Shakespeare or English heavy disciplines like Creative Writing, those I could have easily gotten straight As in and had decades of experience with, to thereby keep a stupidly high artificially inflated GPA. Fool I was in hindsight – not starting upon such strategies until my final years, I ignored scholarships, higher opportunities, etc. in my pure selfish greed for my own gluttony unto knowledge. In my World Serpent hunt for new knowledge, wisdom, or information to add to my vast hoard of data, I opted to take dumb shit like Philosophy, Psychology, Linguistics, or Anthropology, etc. I even took Latin and had to withdraw just before halfway through the year at the prompting of my professor, all because I wanted to learn a cool old dead language, and avoid doing more French, which I had already moved mountains to catch up on at the end of High School.
Inverse to that, I told the counsellor, in paraphrase: “I have zero idea how people struggle to find Thesis Topics for dissertations and shit. I could write nothing but thesis after thesis on so many niche areas of research, along both quantitative AND qualitative lenses, until I croaked! My Rainbow Bible could be a fucking Master’s Thesis at 62,000 words! But it’s on a stupid fucking game like Magic: The Gathering! Thus it would never be taken seriously by any Academic, regardless of all the old Sociology books I read about World of Warcraft and shit!”
In my own will and way through the world across these decades, I have obviously made many choices at my own expense like this – which in myriad ways, contributed to my own growth or development and subsequently my enormous width of experiences. If I hadn’t chosen to not go home, and remain in the city through the summers working a shitty minimum wage Chef job, I wouldn’t have had the experience of helping to cater the Davis Cup – which I didn’t realize was a big deal until long afterwards. Funnily enough – The French Tennis Team sent back an entire pyramid tray of Steak Sandwiches, like fifty of the damn things! I think like three had been taken, and a few had only one or two bites taken out of them.
Apparently they had complained.
Talk about an awareness of capitalism and different classisms, eh? I was getting paid eleven bucks an hour to be shit upon by some French tennis fucks.
I love a good Tennis Rally myself, but as with all fucking sports, I much prefer playing to watching, most often. I am well aware what the required level for professional athletes is in terms of athletic level and skill, not that I’m knocking such talents. Hell, I remember playing against this Norwegian Exchange Student Badminton Pro back in my teaching days, when my colleague buddy ran an afterschool club. After like a month, I felt accomplished when I could rally him to like 11/21, even as he practised his trick shots like backhand stealth returns on me.
Good kid! Hope he’s doing well out there in Norway. Always liked the kids from Norway, they were usually kind and polite, and weren’t entitled little rich pricks like some of the German and Swiss kids.
These French Tennis Team fuckheads make a perfect example for this edition of The Pickup Truck Diaries, an old timbit tidbit from the University Education my closest kin always shit on:
Once you get to a certain point of diminishing returns within Capitalism, having more money, being say, a Billionaire, doesn’t change 99% of things being available to you already anyways. As a subsequent result – public appearance, displays of wealth, all of the Sociological pieces, they suddenly become worth more to a wealthy individual than the actual currency itself. Perception usurps finances as the very most important thing.
Take Maslowe’s Hierarchy of Needs and figure that shit out, eh?
I guess this was always obvious to me – not just from the various indoctrinations of media across decades, but from how Billionaires and Oligarchs act. Who has the biggest yacht? Who has the most expensive sports car collection? Who has the biggest estate or mansion? Who looks the best in the hottest fashions and expensive jewellery or accessories? Who has the most private jets and can use them for the most frivolous pleasures or utilities?
I might be some “Dumb Disabled Logging Family Kid,” but I remember pretty clearly how the various millionaires and billionaires courting my father’s favor acted towards him when he was in the process of selling his old Dry Land Log Sort waterfront property. Granted, for some above-a-milly number prior to decades of Inflation. The family business frequently did up to four million in revenue during the better years, again pre-inflation, so such numbers despite the insane margins and feast or famine profits seemed ordinary at the time.
These millionaires and billionaires who wanted that waterfront property? They used their obscene wealth as a smokeshield of sorts, trying to bedazzle my father and us, his immediate clan, by bringing us into their kajillion dollar Whistler homes. Simple extra creature comforts like a stone waterfall feature in the entrance or multiple indoor hot tubs, saunas, and pools constructed entirely of Red Cedar, an expensive type of timber, blew my childhood self away. To this very day I joke that when I finally own a fridge that makes me ice in the door automatically, I’ll have finally made it!
An Air Conditioner is on that list, too.
The joke kinda gets funnier when one realizes that the only ice cube makers I have in my house at this very moment are Whiskey Ball molds, and I’m pretty much 98% California Sober aside from one or two drinks a year maybe!
No wonder people see me as a fucking eccentric weirdo, not that I really deny it…
Even falsely.
Similarly, I never realized how powerful the people my father was engaging with were. And this is coming from me, who has since met (and screamed at) Premiers, Ministers, Celebrities, Politicians, and Billionaires. Yet my father, undiagnosed 64 year old autist as he is, he would speak to these various rich or powerful people with the frankness of a savant – pure logic and quantitative data. He frequently sat on committees or local working groups elbow to elbow with the richest motherfuckers in the entire province!
Rich bastards that owned entire Sports Teams.
To my old man, fame or celebrity never meant anything much, I think. Only knowledge, experience, words and actions. The things he could quantify. He’ll never read this, so he’ll never be able to tell me more, most likely.
I guess I’ve stolen this outlook from “McRae The Elder” despite my own interesting adventures over the years. We’d often sit down as a family to watch “Cousin Ricky” when he was on TV – usually in some made for TV D-List rag of a show. I was, and still am, largely unimpressed. Such relations make for good comedy punchlines though, I guess.
I remember Dwayne Johnson looking particularly annoyed at me when I interrupted him mid-lunch on set to give some twelve year old kid wrestling fan his autograph. I guess he did have a wrap sticking out of his mouth at the time. (I didn’t tell him that I thought Stone Cold Steve Austin, the Undertaker, Kane, and hell, even Rakishi were my favorites over him. I learned to do the Worm because of Scotty 2 Hotty, even!)
As much of my poetry confirms, unlike my old man, I see fame or clout as a tool, rather than an object of desire or any measure of one’s worth. There are plenty of folks with fame and clout that are garbage Humans, after all. I always come back to that old shit of power equating equally with responsibility. Some people treat it like a measure of their self-worth or self-esteem, which is so fucking toxic, I can’t even begin to unpack that.
One of the reasons perhaps that I’m begrudging in ever pursuing that Counselling Masters!
We have to remember – The Zeitgeist is an evolving, changing thing. Both across eras, mediums, and generations. The Queer Zeitgeist vs. The Disability Zeitgeist, vs The Human Zeitgeist. They’re all very different things!
Go google what a Transatlantic Accent is to see this “Zeitgeist” shit in action!
The rest of us can wait while you catch up, don’t worry. I’ve got an iced coffee and a croissant, so I’m gucci.
I always find morbid amusement the most inside of internet circles and communities, as The Internet is a fascinating mass that is simultaneously part of the greater Zeitgeist and yet also a beast and smaller Zeitgeist of its own.
Indie Comedians speaking to crowds of five or six digits – speaking as if they are an almighty voice of the people, worthy of worship, respect, and reverence! The Internet can make you famous worldwide, without ever having to speak to your neighbours or the real world whatsoever. Sure, maybe they’ve got jokes. I’m not knocking talent, but often the bravado of boasters and braggarts – for rather small, passionate audiences.
Naw, dude – chill the fuck out with that ego shit.
You’re just another funny guy on the internet.
There are lots of those.
Calm the fuck down.
Hell, Even with like 10 minutes of screen time in a fucking bit role, I’ve had more national TV exposure than some fucks. And that was fucking Reality TV! The trashiest and most garbage evolution or form of modern entertainment.
Jokes and prodding of fragile egos aside, the most awkward thing about The Zeitgeist and the smaller specific Zeitgeists of public art or media awareness that make up the larger one, is that everything is interpreted differently, and with different intersectionalities or perspectives involved. Everything is subjective.
That’s part of why I value my Infamy so much – In that I can utilize people’s hate to warp reality and Zeitgeist far more easily and with a different type of reach, than if I were merely seen as another faceless talent. The small town Logger bullshit comes into play a bit here, as do multiple intersectionalities – which is where we can have a little chat about specific communities.
One of two of my blanket identifiers for myself, despite being pretty Masc a lot of the time in addition to my Enby fluidities, is obviously “Queer.” I’m mostly attracted to Femmes, but Demisexuality, Aphobia, and all that hot garbage can crop up too.
Immediately, if we’re talking about levels of influence upon The Zeitgeist, which is kind of how fame and celebrity are often measured – I instantly alienate the bigots who will hate me for being ANY type of Queer. They likely don’t understand the difference anyways between my Non-Binary Identity being about Gender, and my Demisexuality being about Sexuality. They likely have zero clue that those are separate things, let alone “things” in the first place. The demographers can break it down further from there – telling me where there might be specific places (Cough* Cough* Florida* Alberta* Cough* Cough*) that I should avoid if I want to dodge as much daily hatred as I can.
I also identify as neurodivergent and disabled, which I gotta tell you, coming from a shitty small logging town – I sure did have a lot of “R Slurs” thrown my way!
Those two things alone start to play into the intersectionality of specific smaller communities versus the wider majority – that “bell curve” of Humanity right smack dab in the middle. (Yes, they are often as stupid and uneducated as you might think.)
So, Queer people and Disabled folks might accept me, seeing the solidarity in all of us marginalized or vilified communities. But North America is also over 50% self-identified as Christian, so not only are people like me often excluded from that half of the population, but we’re actively vilified by those sorts of folks as all sorts of untrue heinous horrible things, on many varying scales of lies.
This is where you can start to crunch some numbers, Sociologists out there! Voila: Research Topics for Centuries! Go make Judith Butler proud!
Interestingly enough to me in that same morbid fascination and analysis, this sort of aggression to my very existence has played out in all sorts of shitty ways – leading to me eventually saying: “Fuck It!” and adopting a Cartoon Supervillain stage persona to satirize or parody the attacks.
Seriously, I’ve had people who I thought were friends shit-talk me around town, and even go as far as to build a dossier of my tweets and shit to send to my then-employer to try and lose me my job. Then it got even WORSE when the fucking Superintendent took it like a rabid dog and hate crimed me and my disabilities a bunch more.
And that was BEFORE I came out as Enby and even changed my name! I was just Demisexual and Neurodiverse at that point!
I constantly kick myself – considering if such a years-long court battle for equity and equality justice back then would be worth the millions I would certainly gain from it, via victory or settlement.
At the time, I was under so much Anxiety, Depression, and Stress, that I just wanted it all to go away. I chose not to fight.
Obviously they would have fought me tooth and nail the whole way, as governments and government organizations usually do. I’ve eavesdropped on some of the times my parents took the Provincial Government to court back and forth, winning and losing. No government wants a settlement established via the courts: That Public Governments and their representatives could suddenly be penalized properly for breaking Human Rights Acts with impunity. (Such irony that Governments wrote the bills into existence, then frequently try to avoid following them, eh?)
So as I transitioned away from the Education field for my own mental and physical health, outside of just keeping my old teaching resources for sale, I really leaned into the Villain persona.
Infamy, as stated before, gives me a “bigger stick,” in a sense – as I have more people wanting me to fail, than to succeed – both from that small town with all sorts of bigotry problems, and from the very Christian greater North American context. Some of these through-lines continue across most religiously-dominated countries. Queer people get stoned to death in many countries even now in the 21st Century, barbaric and archaic as such practices have always been..
Some people close to me know well enough about the batshit crazy and anonymous four thousand word hate emails ripping apart my books in close readings, or the people using false names to leave fake hate-comments on my 5e Resources. Even real life is shitty at times – every single one of my Vinyl stickers around my neighbourhood has been scratched out viciously, even right next to online shop ones with Balaclavas on the branding. Old white and asian people here in Greater Vancouver glare at me openly with scorn for my painted black nails as if I’m some fucking degen. I’m currently more Buddha-Bod than when I was running a half marathon every week some short years ago, and the pretty privilege or lack thereof on top is pretty blatant in the numbers these days, forcing me towards getting back in shape just to minimize daily negative experiences. Will such microaggressions really reduce the attacks on my identity, applying the privilege of my “ugly beauty” against their lust or desire to minimize queerphobic bullshit?
No clue!
Fuck any pity party though. I can stand aloof pretty stoically and interpret that the general message would be: “Don’t be a Queer, Disabled Artist Who Uses Your Real Name On The Internet,” perhaps?
Or maybe: “Fuck your Queer, Disabled Artistry, because we’re tired of the ‘woke’ crowd attacking us!”
I have no fucking idea. I just know they’re hateful bigots, so I fucking lean into the cartoonish infamy as hard as I can to push back against the shittiness with satire and parody to take the teeth out of them.
At the same time, I don’t want to be one of those fucking artists or talking heads that abuses identity politics to force commercial capitalist success, you know? Feels gross to me, despite how frequent such things are in reality, and how frequently they are expected from the outset. Do I want to win a contest based on my having disabilities and not my merit, even if my disabilities have a prominent effect on my art and creation processes?
Some of my poems or pieces along these lines are about being Queer, or Disabled, sure. But I refuse to make any one thing about myself my entire place in any Zeitgeist, for fear of becoming influenced, distorted, or ever becoming anything akin to milquetoast or not “myself.”
I’d rather be known as an Anarchist Poet or Writer first, you know? That’s a better judge of my values or beliefs at my very core. Acceptance and freedom for all identity or expression comes with that territory already, insofar as nobody is getting hurt without consent! (And yes BDSM community, I know you’re a fucking thing, okay?)
Remember: “Nazi Punks FUCK OFF!”
Punch any Nazis you see. Remember the Paradox of Intolerance.
I find myself constantly disappointed in how people use or abuse their power and privilege as a result of their fame or clout. From the clickbaity titles that misconstrue topics for rage or drama farming for selfish growth, to the general lack of truly breakout talent amidst the fucking mob of nine billion Humans, you know? Everybody and their fucking parents wants to be a fucking Youtube or Twitch star or some shit!
God I wish Meritocracy was a real thing we could actually achieve, and not a corruptible system prone to Nepotism, Cronyism, and the like. How nice would that be?
Some of my beliefs stem from truly believing that Education is the solution to pretty much most cultural divides. We have all these lovely Academics out there after all – that I’ll subsequently be feeding various Thesis Topics to!
Research and Data is always invaluable to creatures of logic, reason, and Empirical Method like me. I’m always happy to work hand in hand with my homie “Science.”
I don’t expect anybody out there to immediately turn around and become some radical Anarchist like me overnight though – demanding such broad things as “Justice” or “Equality” across all Humanity. I’ll write other articles about Anarchism, Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism one day. Being 25% Ukrainian and 50% Scottish might have some pretty obvious effect on my bias for freedom and self-autonomy. (I’m one of those people that wholeheartedly believes in “Land Back” initiatives and self-determination from Geopolitical Colonial Governments… But of course you’d likely already expect that from an Anarchist Ecosocialist, wouldn’t you?)
At the end of the day, I can try to educate you as an audience as best I can, and hopefully provide some small self-reflection and self-awareness within the framework of each topic we hit – in this ever-ongoing series. Feels like a good way to actually apply and utilize all this hoarded knowledge and wisdom from several decades of living and dying.
However, that’s the lovely thing about autonomy, eh?
It’s your decision and choice on what you do with what I tell you or teach you afterwards. I can’t do much if you subsequently go off and become a Wasteland Warlord, eh? (Although some might argue ethically it would then be my personal responsibility to put you down myself for hurting innocents.)
I’d hope you feel a sense of weight in all this, too. A way of shouldering a shared responsibility. An evenly distributed load across our species, and as many people as we can get on board with us to make things easier for everybody. We all have a duty of some altruism and Humanism, don’t we? I’m real fucking tired of greed, selfishness, shortsightedness, and corruption. And that’s coming from an Incarnation of Gluttony, you know? Infinite Hunger and all that. Dopamine Deficiencies, etc.
I always boil it down to that ancient wisdom: “Leave things better than you found it.”
That applies across hundreds of different scopes and scales.
So, what can we say with our dwindling time and length here?
Well, we can try to reflect on our own levels of privilege – especially if you’re a person with any sort of public face or persona in the media or entertainment sphere. I sure do think I have a responsibility too, as somebody with a public platform, to do the right thing as best I can!
I see a lot of fuckheads like my cousin, who get into the inner workings of the machine, rife as it often is with Nepotism and Cronyism and Oligarchy, and then become entrenched in it, as most humans are unfortunately short sighted, selfish, and/or greedy. There’s a great old study that explains big cheaters are rare, but also that small cheaters are constant and consistent. People try to get away with what they think they can reasonably sneak through, and the small cheaters exponentially eclipse the big cheaters!
I want better from you. A sense of self awareness that eclipses your sphere of influence, and manages it like a well tended garden. Not in the sense of you having fucking PR people to keep your “Brand Cleanliness” levels appropriate and shit, but in the sense of using your power for greater goods, whichever the ones you choose. Tackle something to help “leave things better as you found them,” using the fame and clout you currently possess.
Let’s start calling out people when they get too big for their britches, or abuse their clout or fame for other seedy trash. I know it can take a lot of courage, but standing up for the right thing doesn’t mean you have to go full Cartoon Supervillain like me and actively try to stand in the way of the harm being done like some Human Shield. That’s my own Martyr Complex to chain up. But it could mean providing safe spaces or emotional support for those other creators or artists in your life with less than you have.
(After all, everybody knows Writing is dead and obsolete with the advent of better machine learning and the growth of Artificial Intelligence, right? I’m already a living fossil! We all also know reading is rather passe, so I can hardly ever expect to outpace or eclipse musicians, actors, or even entrepreneurs in any level of Fame or Infamy!)
Maybe one day, the artists and creators of tomorrow can at least be better than me, in that I’m already jaded and embittered: Expecting nothing but bigotry, hatred, and harm from most other Human Beings. Maybe they can keep hope, when I’m always assuming ignorance until happily surprised otherwise.
Fuck Fame. Fuck Clout. Fuck Audience. Fuck Demographics. Fuck Infamy, even.
Let’s be Humans, instead. I’ll be me. You’ll be whatever you want to be.
Because you can be sure as hell I’m going to speak to even the most powerful people on this planet with the same blunt truth any of us bags of meat and bones should reserve for one another!
I don’t give two fucks about their fame or their clout.
Just like my father.
Now, let’s get the fuck out of here!
-McRae
www.McRaeWrites.com
