The seductive thing about nicotine is it calms you down but doesn’t dull your mind. To a degree it actually improves concentration and deep thinking. But today, just now, I only needed some calming. The stress was really getting to me. It’s probably not doing my heart any good either. 

There are certain kinds of crimes against youth that really get to me. They press all my buttons, and I have to find some way to distract myself from it. Maybe it’s just the natural adult reaction to monsters who hurt kids. But my reaction is so intense I wonder if I don’t have a suppressed memory in there somewhere from way back when. I just get too angry about it. Maybe there is no suppressed memory, it’s just I can see it could easily have been me.

So I continued watching the second season of the Disney+ Percy Jackson series. Maybe work on finishing the book I’ve been struggling to read. I should read more books and do less doom scrolling. Stories about ICE ripping apart young married couples and kids from their parents isn’t helping my mindset either. But this is about one specific book that started nagging at me again for some reason I can’t pin down. It’s still pushing my buttons after all these years.

I should go ahead and buy another copy of it, second hand, and put it in my collection of homophobia, because it’s really about that author’s disgust of his gay kid, and his need to punish him for it. You have to dig into the homophobia that runs through everything he ever wrote to really see it, but then you can’t unsee it. It’s like how Wagner’s anti semitism runs through all his operas, or Rowling’s cheapshit prejudices her stories and it surprised people when you point it out because they like listening to or reading that crap. It has a different impact when it’s about people you.