THE VAULTS OF EMBARASSMENT!!!

Any of this ringing a bell?!?!

To begin with, the Internet came to represent a place where everyone could be themselves. A place where people could put their unadulterated truth out into the world anonymously, without fear of persecution. It was a place where we could run wild and free. Free from the social constructs of day-to-day life. Free from the impossible expectations of society. A place where we could admit to being who we truly are, and voice what we truly think.
What happened!?!

With so many people already irrevocably invested in this always-on, always-connected atmosphere we've become accustomed to in the last couple decades, Edward Snowden exposed that the "National Security Agency" intercepts virtually all telecommunications, and even claimed that any smart device that fits in your pocket can be remotely turned on and start recording.

The world was shocked! But not shocked enough to turn off their phones... So, in the years since, we've all been slowly subdued by this knowledge of surveillance into silently accepting this disturbing reality that nothing we do or say is safe. Nothing is secret. Some people are even beginning to accept that this is "just the way it is". It's been called a "privacy tax". The idea being that your privacy is the price you pay to use a smart phone.

But it's not just your privacy. As facial recognition and voice recognition technologies are rapidly improving, "opting out" has become increasingly complex.

For instance, did you know you can get tagged on Facebook photos even if you don't have a Facebook account? Then, at a later date a facial recognition AI could be trained to recognize you using those photos. All without consent. All whether you choose to participate or not.

There is no longer anywhere you can go where #Skynet can't reach you. Thinking we're being watched, we begin to watch ourselves more closely. And since it's become increasingly difficult to do or say anything without someone eventually knowing who did or said it, it's also becoming much harder to resist the status quo without consequences catching up to you. We're becoming more afraid to resist "business as usual".

And all of this is playing out subconsciously, while consciously we try to cobble together a narrative that's less truthful, less painful... In reality, we've been silenced. It just doesn't feel like it, since we're allowed to keep talking - so long as our conversations remain in the realm of pointless, superficial mainstream garbage that doesn't upset any filters, or trip any red flags. This is what's called the "chilling effect", also known as the #mindprison constructed by the #n$@.

On top of that, focus groups have given marketers and propagandists an increasingly accurate picture of how to manipulate the minds of the public over the last century. And now Facebook has become the largest focus group ever created, compiling massive amounts of statistical analysis on everyone, every day, as well as mapping everyone's social ties, and making a record of all activity that is virtually permanent.

Facebook has even openly admitted to manipulating the emotions of their users in the infamous "Facebook Experiment", wherein they filtered status updates with happy words out of people's newsfeed and in turn observed those people themselves using fewer happy words in their own status updates. Which means Facebook has the ability to send a ripple of depression out into the world - in fact, they already have. And that is just the manipulations they are admitting to.

To put this all in perspective: this surveillance apparatus has become so huge, and so automated, that the N.S.A. intercepted every email that the director of the C.I.A. ever sent to anyone, both work related and personal - by accident. Which begs the question, who is this machine really serving if it is messing up the lives of those who uphold the machine? And as whistleblowers sacrifice their lives one by one to try to warn where this machine is taking us, we are beginning to see the bleak bigger picture. If those who are running the machine want out, and will sacrifice themselves to warn others about where it is taking us, then this machine isn't really serving anyone. Instead, it is us who are serving the machine. And in return it is taking control of every aspect of our lives, with no intentional outcome, driven mindlessly forward by the profit motive to perpetuate all the destructive systems and processes we've previously set in motion. #skynetishere---mastadon-link

So it is that we have finally arrived in the era of humans versus the machines that movies like The Terminator and The Matrix warned us about. To the people living in the belly of the beast, places like the U.S.A., it's a more subtle, psychological war, rather than physically fighting machines. But for some, they are already at war with predator drones, and it seems like it's only a matter of time before drones, too, become too automated and eventually come down harder on all of us.

Yet, there is an ironic backdrop to all this surveillance. The information counter-culture. The open-source movement is the people's movement working to free people from hidden agendas that closed-source software can conceal by offering free, open-source alternatives to proprietary software. Most notably, the open-source movement gave rise to GNU/Linux, one of the more robust and secure operating systems, and the one that is most often used on the servers behind websites, earning it the title "the backbone of the Internet". It has also inspired the open-hardware movement, which could potentially free us from hidden recording devices. The ethic behind these movements is one of indignation for the hoarding of knowledge. The restrictions of copyrights and patents. The secrecy of corporate-funded science and government agendas. And so it was this same open-source movement open-source movement that coined the phrase "Information wants to be free" - ironically this might as well be the slogan for the #N$@. And so we find that this isn't so much a demand, or some principle upheld by one group or another, but rather it is a simple recognition of something that seems more like physics than philosophy. Information, once it is in existence, tends to spread.

We find ourselves at a crossroads. What does it mean that information wants to be free? What do we want it to mean? As people argue over the facade of privacy settings on Facebook, we seem to be more concerned with preventing people we know from uncovering our secrets than we are concerned with governments and corporations digesting all our data, even our most personal exchanges, and using it however they see fit.

And so the machine is coming to understand us better than we understand ourselves. Yet, as our heroic whistleblowers have shown, the cogs in the machine are only complicit as long as they don't understand what it is they are doing. Only as long as they don't see the bigger picture. So how can we all gain access to this bigger picture? Simple. By speaking unadulterated truth to each other about everything.

We live in a time where we are called upon to be fearlessly truthful, like all the whistle-blowers who have come before us. Rather than nursing our insecurities to avoid sharing the truth of our experience on Earth, we should be sharing every detail of our inner and outer lives. In this day and age these details are destined to be observed by someone or other eventually, anyways, and if we don't make this leap we could be forever funneled into a mind prison of epic proportions. A world where not a single thought or action is genuine, but a calculated effort to remain below the radar. So, as a whistle-blower of the human experience, allow me to share with you my life, in full intimate detail. A life experience which I believe to be incredibly symbolic of my time and place.

NOTE: Anonymity is still possible, it's just difficult, and often requires playing characters which are so distant from who you really are that you'll start to wonder whether the essence of who you are has been destroyed. Anonymity is great for popping in and out to quickly drop a data leak and disappear, but for an ongoing online presence, anonymity has it's limitations. For instance, you could never show up in person. You could never invite people you know irl to join your website. And you could never let your gaurd down, always changing the details in your stories to prevent doxxing yourself. It's even a good idea to change the whole way you speak, so you can't be doxxed through the use of stylemetry.

This statement may be a bit misleading. In truth, I'm attracted to lots of women. LOTS! I've fantasized about a lot of things done with a lot of people... I've even fantasized about my Grandmother! And probably every female teacher I ever had. But I think this is an important truth to present, because it is so taboo, yet it is probably incredibly common. At least according to Freud. Which makes it a great example of the distance between the illusion and the truth.

It is also a necessary detail in my tale of how #mindprisons are formed, and how one can become based on another. But that will become more apparent as you scroll down my rabbit hole...

This was always an eye-opening position for me to be in. I couldn't help but wonder if everyone was attracted to their Mom, like Freud suggested. Perhaps we were just in a sort of cultural hysteria of widespread agreement that this universal truth must never be uncovered, because then we would ALL feel awkward around our Moms... It also made me ponder how "motherfucker" is such a common insult, and I wonder if it's because mother-fucking is more common than we let on... as if its more important that we "color inside the lines" of the social program, than it is to expose how things really are.

It was also eye-opening to discover how difficult it was for me to ever tell anyone, even though I suspect it's pretty widespread. Are we really all going around feeling ashamed for something we actually have in common? And even if we're not, it still makes you consider how such a widespread lie could possibly be perpetuated just because everyone is too embarassed to be the first person to admit to the truth.

But of course the weirdest part is how I might never manage to uncover the truth of the matter, because I could never bring myself to bring it up with anyone (irl). And even if I did, they might just lie about their own attraction, anyways. It's like there's two solid layers of lies between me and discovering the truth - the wall of a lie that I uphold by never admitting to my own mom-attraction, and the wall of a lie that others uphold by never admitting to their own mom-attraction. Out of sheer embarassment, the truth is buried by us all.

So, yes, I'm attracted to my Mom. I've had my fair share of fantasies about it. But I don't think I should feel bad about it, as long as I don't act without consent (duh).

This is not something you would share with your family, amirite!? But it's so strange, because so much of what caused me to have a belly fetish seemed spurred on by my family. In fact, to this day the same myths and mannerisms around food in my family continue to influence this secret side of my sexuality, turning me on, and encouraging me to gorge myself to my secret sexual delight. But this is a strange experience, indulging to excess, and getting turned on by it - especially with family. I'm not sure I like it, even though I absolutely lust for it. Yet, the very people having this influence on me are the very people I could never imagine talking to about it...?

My parents taught me I better finish my plate, and my grandma would be offended if I didn't have seconds or even thirds! And I better have room for dessert! I remember being simultaneously embarrassed, guilty, and turned on all at the same time when I stood up after dinner and felt how swollen my belly was. And I couldn't suck it in or hide it no matter what, at that point. It was like every meal was BDSM to me, where my parents or grandparents are the dom, and I'm the sub, "forced" (out of trained obligation) to overeat according to their feelings rather than according to my own satiation. Then, to top it off, my body is transformed by it, like they've left their mark of dominance on me, and then it feels like some sort of forced-exhibitionism when dinner is over because I'm supposed to sit around the living room and chat with them for an hour or so, knowing that I can't hide my belly, and I'm just sitting there looking fat for everyone to see, although no one would dream of mentioning it.

And my own mother had her own difficulty with eating too much, too. Which is somehow tied up in the reason I was attracted to her in the first place. Because sometimes her appetite would win her over, and she couldn't stop, and she would eat and eat until her belly was noticeably bigger. Again, it's out there for everyone to see, but no one would dream of mentioning it. Her struggle with food and appetite went back and forth. She would try different diets, but then she would just eat a ton of the few healthy things she was allowing herself to eat, anyways. Then she would try measuring portion sizes, but slowly the portion size would slide up again, or one day she would just give in and eat a massive amount. At times she would ask us to hide candy from her. Other times, on holidays like Halloween, she might take away all our halloween candy (for our own good?) so that she could give it to us one at a time, one candy per day - but then she couldn't help herself and would eat most of it (if we caught her, she would tell us it was so we didn't eat it... for our own good...). I mean, food really seemed like a drug growing up. Again, this struggle my mom went through was like some sort of BDSM theatre for me, where my mom was the sub, and the dom was... food?

This fetish has been quite a learning experience. And quite a confusing ride. I feel like I could write a book about it. Maybe I'll just write a blog about it.

Having a belly fetish was liberating, at first. It showed me that the mainstream idea isn't always right. "They" say that everyone likes skinny girls, and that's clearly not true, so I had this direct experience of how the mainstream was just this illusion cobbled together out of some sort of focus-grouped equation of averages that finds the lowest-common-denominator to appeal to most people, most of the time. It gave me more empathy for other outcasts and people whose persuasions were looked down upon, like homosexuality. I felt as if I had "woken up" from the Matrix, and saw through the illusions. You can fool most of the people most of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time! And, of course, I imagined myself to be one of the "woke" ones. I realized that fat isn't ugly - and neither is skinny! Beauty is subjective, not objective! Beauty is in the eye of the beholder! It's all just a matter of perspective! This was, of course, what the Anonymous phenomenon online was teaching me at the same time, too, in the context of exposing that all things mainstream are inherently built upon the illusion of the popularity formula. It all fit neatly into this narrative that I was some progressive fellow that was not as shallow as all these people who liked skinny girls. I was not as molded by the mainstream. I was liberated! I wasn't afraid to be different, and know what I liked! Although, I was afraid to admit to it until I left for college... at least around family.
But that probably has something to do with #truth003...

But what I once considered a liberating rebellion, I slowly realized may be just another mind prison, as I learned more about how complex and nuanced the world really was. Focus groups had decided skinny girls sold more products, so that was all we were given. We were starved of the voluptuous feminine figure, to the point that we lusted for it like wild animals. And as I realized the general trend that the U.S.A. is getting fatter and fatter, and that being fat is becoming more and more acceptable, and more lusted after, I started coming to terms with what I had really been involved in this whole time. A cultural zeitgeist driven by marketing to drive us into a lustful worship of consumerism... A story for a later truth box...

One day, out of nowhere, my oldest and boldest brother asked point-blank: "do you like fat girls?"

What would you do!?

I was way in over my head, at the young age of 13. I had all this psychological baggage, and insatiable lust, and was just desperately trying to repress it and deny it to blend in with the biofam. The worst part of all was being attracted to my Mom. She's there all the time, eating, telling me to eat, I practically feel like I'm having sex with her already. I just don't know how to wrap my head around these feelings. I just don't know how to suppress it. I'm starting to look up more and more pictures of fat women on Google images at this point, and I hadn't yet discovered that this was a fetish other people shared. I just looked at the images right there on Google, with searches like "fat girl" and "obese woman" and "pregnant" and one of my favorites that I was proud that I had thought of: "I ate too much".

So he looks straight into my eyes and continues saying something like, "I can't believe when fat girls think they're sexy, they're so gross, aren't they?" Caught completely off gaurd by this, I just stammered "y,yeah." And just like that, I had agreed. Of course, what I really heard in that question was the whisperings that maybe some fat girls do think they're sexy, and that maybe I'm not such a weirdo for liking fat girls, but I had already agreed out of the fear of embarrassment, and validated the mainstream thinking.

At the time it was just a quick and easy answer to get out of the conversation. But little did I know at the time, these sorts of agreements can become so much more. I had signed the dotted line on an unseen contract, and now I was defined in the collective psyche between me and my siblings as NOT being attracted to fat girls. Why this came out of nowhere at me I'll never understand, but that was that, and all I had to do after that was never mention it again and that definition would remain.

"Of course I don't like fat girls... who would...?" I never said anything like that, but, then, I didn't have to. It was implied forevermore.

Now I REALLY had to look over my shoulder when I looked up pictures of fat girls. And I better not forget to clear my browser history every time!!! It's like I had joined the fat fetish underground...

And I'm not alone.

Finally, I found #feederism, or #feedism as "we" now prefer... Tbh, I don't think it was even called "feederism", yet. Let alone "feedism". It was called BBW, belly fetish, fat fetish, belly stuffing, belly inflation, and "pretending". Pretending was one of my favorites for a while, which was mostly pictures of drunk girls pretending to be pregnant or fat by pushing out their bellies. Purposeful weight gain wasn't a big topic, back then, although there were whispers of it in the wind. Perhaps it was my own internal filters that kept me away, telling myself that was too extreme, since it impacts your health.

Where I found my fat fetish home on the internet was the belly inflation forums of BambiBlaze - before BambiBlaze took over the forum moderation. I can't remember what it was called. I get it confused with "ebaumsworld" so it probably started with an "e". And I must have somehow found it through my Google image searches.

It was a fat fetish forum, where fat fetishists came to feel a little less like weirdos. We were happy to find we weren't alone. It was somewhere we didn't have to hide our thoughts and feelings on the subject. We could share our fantasies, and read other people's fantasies. People even shared real life stories for each other's enjoyment. I remember one story in particular where a man and woman in Germany met at an all-you-can-eat buffet, completely unplanned. They started telling each other to put more on their plate while they were up at the buffet, until they were piling food onto each other's plates as a challenge. He ended up going back to her hotel room, and fed her all night, until she couldn't even fit in her pants anymore, and her belly was just unimaginably huge. He said he was actually worried for her at some point, maybe she was eating too much, and her belly was making all sorts of strange noises. She assured him she did this all the time. When she wanted, she would go to an all-you-can-eat buffet, and try to find someone the same way she found him, and end up going back to a hotel room to binge eat and fuck. They parted ways in the morning, never to hear from each other again. The story made an impact on me. How many people are into this, that she can find someone to do that with, whenever she wants?

At this time, so much of what was being shared was still words, and images were only just now starting to become more popular. And the images were rarely of the person who posted it... Mostly they were just random pictures of fat girls from all over the internet. They were usually clothed, and in hindsight those girls may have been horrified if they found that someone had reposted a picture of them specifically because they looked fat in the photo.

For the most part, people were still just timidly posting things like "I like girls with a bit of a belly, too..." downplaying it as if they were still coming to terms with it themselves. Most people were just lurking. This is where I first learned the term "lurker" and started feeling a bit of social pressure through the interwebs that maybe I should start expressing my own thoughts a bit... maybe I should say something... I remember when you posted on this forum, it said how many posts you had ever posted right next to your username, which almost felt like a way to shame people into being less of a lurker. Whether or not this was the purpose of it, it seemed to create a social dynamic where people were recognized for being there longer and posting more.

You really got to see behind the curtain through this forum. Some people had crushes on a fat girl at school, but they just couldn't bear the social embarrassment of asking out a fat girl. Some people were married, and still hadn't even told their wife the truth about their fetish, even though they thought she was super fat and sexy. They just couldn't bear to tell her. They didn't know if she could handle it. Could it really be that some women would rather not be reassured how sexy they are to their husband, just because they couldn't bear to be told that they're fat, even though that's so obvious and impossible to hide from anyone but yourself? These types of stories seemed sad, in a way, and we encouraged each other to pursue our fat fantasies and "come out of the refrigerator" to our lovers - especially if they're fat! It almost seemed like we were here to help each other live life to the fullest. We were going to help each other figure out how to navigate all the awkward conversations, and pursue our heart's desires.

But are these the desires of the heart? Or are we just unleashing the beast of lust in each other? Things developed where someone would be telling the tragic story of the fat girl they have a crush on, who they weren't sure would want to be adored for their fat, and people on the forum would offer all sorts of tricks and techniques to broach the subject more softly. Maybe take them to an all-you-can-eat buffet for their birthday, and keep encouraging them to eat more, but keep pretending it's just because you want to "get your money's worth"? Perhaps you could cook a huge meal for her, and tell her you can't eat all of yours but you don't want it to go bad so... could she help you finish it? But in many cases we're dealing with people who may lack self-control over their appetite to begin with, so although they might enjoy giving in to this sort of encouragement, it didn't prove that they were confident about their fat body, or that they would be OK with being purposefully fattened up. It could be no different than enabling/encouraging an eating disorder. The line between fantasy and reality blurred, and the difference between gently broaching the subject and just quietly fattening up your significant other got a bit lost in translation...

To give a little more perspective on what it is to be a fat fetishist, we live in a sort of a confusing world to navigate for fat lovers. The world is fatter than ever, but no one wants to admit it. Many fat women feel so ashamed of their belly, that even if you explain your lust for fondling their fat belly, they still won't let you touch their belly. They don't want any attention down there. It's an interesting paradigm to work within, where fat itself is so taboo that it is not supposed to get any attention, good or bad. As if you're supposed to just pretend no one is actually fat. It seems to me that this is a big part of what draws our lusty attention there to begin with. The taboo of it all. The untold and untalked about wants and desires that hide beneath the surface. Like how we got fat to begin with, even though we "didn't mean to"... but... some part of us must want to... This secretive quality of fat can easily lead one to conclude that whether you get to indulge in this desire to have a fat lover, perhaps even a growing lover, may have to be decided completely within the realm of the unspoken, and can never be communicated directly. You can get with a fat girl, but you can't let her know it's because she's fat - she doesn't want to think of herself as "fat", and she doesn't want you to like her for her body. You can watch her gain weight and encourage her to eat all she wants, but you can't let her know that you're doing it for sexual reasons... Of course, although this might be the sexy taboo that drew us in to begin with, it also feels like a liberating rebellion against this secretive quality to finally come out about it and be open about it, which is part of what made this forum so awesome.

I remember one girl posting on there, who was still in high school, who said she would sit in the back of the class and swallow air until her belly was really round. When she walked out of class, she said she would look almost pregnant, but no one would dream of mentioning it. As liberating as it was to overcome this secretive quality on the forum, it was still one of the guilty pleasures of the fetish when it came to meatspace (irl). People rarely mention how fat someone else looks, no matter how fat they look. For the most part, it's such a taboo subject that no one will touch it. So you can just shamelessly overindulge in this taboo pleasure right in front of everyone, and no one can say a thing. It's almost like you can have sex in front of people, and they won't even know it's happening - or if they do, they still won't say anything. It almost feels like there's an element of... "how fat do I have to get before someone is going to stop me!?" And no one will stop you, or even mention it. It's something some women I've been with since have actually appreciated, too. In the surface social program, a fat belly is not considered sexy, so I can put my hand on their belly in public without anyone saying anything. Something you could never do in public with breasts! Or they can come up and give me a hug, and push their belly into me without anyone else seeing anything, but it's secretly driving me crazy!

One of the strange things about this fat fetish underground was how efficiently it normalized all this taboo stuff. It felt good. Liberating, even. We shouldn't feel guilty for getting fat, or adoring fat on others, right? We shouldn't feel like obesity is so bad. Maybe being fat isn't such a health risk as some people say. Maybe being fat and healthy is totally possible..? Maybe we are like revolutionaries breaking the mold so that people are free to be as fat as they always wanted...

This feedist subculture arose from a collective lust, and a chorus of agreement. Gosh, talk about an echochamber... and this was long before facebook algorithms! An underground trend of binge eating and getting fat had begun. What we thought was just the innocence of young horny fetishists finding that they weren't alone began to take on a life of it's own, and started pushing our collective psyche in one direction... toward getting fatter, and encouraging others to eat to great excess as well.

Because I had such a strong lust for fat and bellies, which I considered part of a healthy rebellion to the mainstream programming, I couldn't shake the idea that "right" and "wrong" wasn't so clear, afterall. An obvious example is the conflict around whether to accept homosexuality, which seems like a no-brainer considering it's just a sexual preference within which everything can be done with consent. So I ended up questioning a lot of assumptions we make about right and wrong. And a lot of assumptions we make, in general. For instance, I developed the idea that there was no such thing as free will, and that our first-person perspective of our lives was sort of like a cosmic joke being played on us, where we are just watching our life play out with the experience of controlling it although none of it was truly in our control. I remember imagining I could be friends with everyone, even a murderer, because I could see how everyone was just a product of their environment acting on similar impulses as everyone else.

Disillusioned with everything at a young age, I always gave an open mind to the things I came across on the Internet. I remember reading an in-depth love story about a person and a dolphin that made me question whether beastiality was always wrong. In the words of the author, it seemed like a completely mutual experience, where the dolphin developed a relationship with them over days or weeks, and then invited them to have sex with them. Of course, it's always hard to know how much of it is embellished. Or if the story was at all true to begin with. (Although, I have learned since that dolphins are one of the only other species that has sex for pleasure, which made me look back on this story and wonder if maybe it was true after all...) Another time I remember chatting with a 13 year old boy in an AIM chatroom who said he had a sexual relationship with an older man. He even sent me a picture of the old man standing behind him while he was on the computer. I felt a little weird about it at first, and asked if they were in love, or if he felt like it was a good relationship that he was happy with. He said he was old enough to make his own decisions. He didn't feel like anything was forced upon him, and he claimed to be quite happy with the relationship. I was 13 myself, at the time, so of course I figured that since I could surely make a mature decision about what's right for me, why question this other 13 year old's ability to make a mature decision for himself? (I later learned that there's also a chance this was just some pedophile pretending he was a 13-year-old, to try and normalize pedophelia and keep the pedophilia industry going, by implementing their own sort of #preprogramming.)

Honestly, I really couldn't figure out why anything was the way it was, growing up. It seemed like all the adults were under some sort of extreme duress all the time, but trying to pretend everything is fine, which was quite bizarre and even a little frightening. What the fuck is really going on around here? In all this uncertainty, without any ground to stand on, I figured the only thing left to do was basically indulge whatever desires you have. Like, that's freedom, right? That's happiness... right? The right to the pursuit of happiness, etc, etc? Needless to say, struck by this disillusionment and moral relativism, I guess I adopted an "anything goes" sort of mentality...

So then #truth005 culminated in #truth006...

Other than a stale suburban environment, and a bunch of fake friends who never wanted to hang out because they wanted to run home and go on the computer, I was essentially immersed in this digital environment I described in #truth004. Real life wasn't delivering anything but the painful emptiness of feeling like I was trapped in the Matrix. Like I was just an accessory in the lives of the rest of my family. Only the Internet set me free. And I associated the freedom to pursuing the depths of my lust through the web browser as somehow emblematic of this whole idea of escaping from the Matrix and the mainstream manufactured illusion that you're supposed to be straight, you're supposed to like skinny girls, you're supposed to want lots of money, you're supposed to pursue a career, and a family... etc. Bleh. I questioned all of it. If liking fat girls is wrong, I don't want to be right! And while I'm at it, maybe nothing's wrong... homosexuality... incest... age differences... beastiality... I mean, who is to say?

So with what was basically the equivalent of a full time focus group, almost like a personal fat fetish intelligence agency, working to help me pursue my darkest fantasies, I got the idea that perhaps I could sort of trick my Mom into pushing her belly out for me or something. I wasn't trying to sleep with her, I guess I couldn't imagine that happening anyways, but I was still young enough that I figured I could use my child-like charm to pretend I was just messing around - like children do! You know, totally innocent...

There was always a couple hours we were home alone together after school, before my Dad got home, and I would usually just go on the computer or finish my homework. But the idea really started growing in my brain that maybe I could finagle something in this free time. I was inspired by all the progress I saw other's having on the forum, pursuing their desires, and I thought maybe it was not so bad to pursue a little desire now and then... I came up with the idea of playing with my own belly around my Mom, to see if I could get her to play along. I would drink some water, and get it to make a sloshing noise in my stomach, and act like I was just really fascinated by it, and then hint at the idea of her trying it... With the manifestation powers of a kid who hasn't yet learned to stop believing in magic, I basically just visualized it happening, imagined it working, I pictured the future and believed in it... and it came true!

For better or for worse, I eventually got my mom to play along. It was like I was leveraging this secret knowledge that fat had become this intangible unspeakable thing. If she didn't say "yes" to an innocent game of pushing out her belly and trying to make a gurgling noise with her belly, it was like she was admitting that she's fat, and ashamed to show off her belly. It was like I had put her different angles of #cogD at odds with itself. The only way she could continue denying that she's fat, is to push her belly out and show what "fat" really looks like... And if she tries to back out because it feels somehow too sexual, then it's as if she's the one introducing the sexual thoughts to the situation, which is creepier than just innocently interpretting this as nothing more than child's play, so it's actually kind of creepier to NOT do it. I'm not sure how my Mom ended up thinking about it, exactly, but I had an endless list of these ideas in my head of how I had basically backed her into a corner where it was almost weirder not to do it, than to do it.

It was as great as I thought it would be... maybe even better. I managed to talk her into it a few times. Then, I'm not sure if she caught on to the sexual energy, or if she just decided on her own she didn't feel like doing it anymore, but she basically told me she wasn't comfortable with it anymore and it never happened again. Except one time... it seemed like it was her way of calling my bluff about it. She brought it up and tried to get me to do it around a bunch of other family. I was super embarrassed, and made up something about how I hadn't drunk enough water to do it. Maybe that was when she caught on... anyways.

One of the really interesting psychological undertones of all this is the way I was emboldened to pursue these desires precisely because I had already allowed my family to believe that I do not like fat girls or big bellies. Otherwise, it would be immediately obvious that this impulse was somehow sexual. Instead, I was free to continue building more lies on the foundation of this first lie, allowing me to get away with these controversial things. But it also meant, especially after all of this had transpired, that I better REALLY keep it to myself that I like bellies, or else all of this will be exposed for what it truly was! So, at least until I left for college, it seemed pretty important that I'm not too honest about my belly fascinations... Just like that, I had built a little #mindprison for myself, not yet understanding how those things work...

I like to call this my "kegel exercises rabbithole".

At first, it seemed optional. Not everyone was doing it. Sure, some people had live journal, but that was mostly for people you didn't know in real life to read. Wasn't it? Well I guess it depends on how you use it. But then, along came MySpace...

Slowly but surely, all of my friends got on MySpace. People started telling me to get on it. I didn't want to... it seemed too public. MySpace was the first time people started really posting pictures of themselves online, and honestly I didn't really want that much attention. I also didn't like the idea that a lot of the conversations were happening out in the open. I'm a big fan of one-on-one conversations, and this seemed like the antithesis of that. So I refused to join.

But the invitations kept coming!

At this time I was already online with my friends all the time. It was sort of bizarre. It was really hard to get my friends to hang out in person, anymore. They were all full of excuses. They had homework... They had to do something with their family that night... But then I would go home, get on AIM, and everyone was online! So there was something else going on... It had to do with the feeling of hanging out with everyone and no one at the same time. I could never enjoy hanging out with all of these people at the same time in person, but I loved to chat with everyone at once in separate one-on-one conversations! I was never a group chat type of person, just like I was never a MySpace type of person, so I remained in my little sectioned off one-on-one conversations on AIM completely unaware that people were starting to create hive-minds of group chats and MySpace friend groups.

Then, slowly but surely, my friends began getting more wrapped up in MySpace. AIM was more instantaneous, so it didn't replace AIM, but it started filling another role without me even realizing that it was happening (since I wasn't on there). People started using it as a tool to coordinate get-togethers. Of course, that was problematic for people who weren't on MySpace. They started creating these group events, and just clicked "invite all my friends" or whatever the button was. "All my friends" started to take on character of it's own. It became the "everyone". It was assumed that "everyone" was a part of this "everyone". Of course, how could I be, if I'm not on MySpace? But sure enough, people kept talking about what was going on, on MySpace, as if I should know what they are talking about.

Everyone was there, why weren't you? Why wasn't I where?aont us t,0rrcqq to be continue...

unfinished...

I remember when I heard the story of how, toward the end of the Roman Empire, people were living in such excess that they would just binge-eat, then puke, just so they could eat even more. Of course, the idea kind of turned me on, but I didn't see the connection at first...

My first thought was about bulemia. I had heard of this "eating disorder" where people binge eat, and then puke it up. Generally, you think of a super skinny girl starving herself until she can't handle it anymore, then eating a ton of food, but then puking it up so that she doesn't gain any weight. But I wondered if this was somehow the same phenomenon, in a slightly different form. While the story from Rome seems to imply a gluttonous lack of inhibitions about the sheer enjoyment of corpulent excess, bulemia on the other hand seems like this fucked up self-hatred and lack of impulse control. But what really sets these two things apart? It isn't the degree of self-control, because clearly neither story exemplifies much self-discipline. All that really sets them apart is whether or not you feel conflicted about what you're doing.

Living in a fat society like the USA, and growing up with the understanding that it's rude to draw attention to how fat anyone is, it almost seemed like we were on the verge of being as excessive as Rome was at it's "peak", except that we have some sort of internalized shame about how fat we're getting. Which isn't really a meaningful difference, it just means we are at that same point in our society, but we don't want to admit it. At first, I thought we must not be there, yet, because our culture seemed to still be invested in looking skinny. What I didn't realize at the time is there may be a slight delay where a society is in denial about how fat they are, then they come to terms with it in secret, and then suddenly the whole of society accepts it at breakneck speeds. Just a theory...

unfinished...

One Christmas my Mom gave me a refrigerator magnet that said "My life's over, my Mom's on Facebook!". We all had a laugh, and we put it up on the fridge, where it stayed for years. But there is a painful truth to this magnet. A truth that stings every time I read it. It's not really a joke. It's not really that funny...

When Edward Snowden exposed the NSA revelations, the world was shocked. People spoke of the "chilling effect" that it would have on our conversations to know that we were being watched. They're right, of course. Even when we aren't aware of it, when we know we're being watched we tend to subconsciously alter our words and actions to suit the social environment. So all of these same criticisms could also be made about that fateful year when our parents joined Facebook...

The Internet represented to me a place where the truth could finally come out. We could speak truthfully to people around the world, speaking far more candid than we could irl. With the carefree spirit of a pre-surveillance Internet, I wrote freely whatever came to mind. On IRC or AIM chatrooms, and on any website I found where you could interact live or on short delay. It seemed like something magical was happening. People were exposing who they truly were. Baring their souls to the world, under pseudonyms so that the social pain would never make it back to them. Anonymous was born. The truth was out. We weren't so different after all.

When I first got on Facebook, registration was only open to college email addresses. It was college students only! It seemed almost like an official part of becoming a college student. But it wasn't so much for connecting with teachers, as it was for connecting with peers, so it had the feeling of the Internet in it, that we were separating from the mainstream program to build a new world together, without the restraints of the broader society. At least, this is how I thought of the Internet, so this is how I thought of Facebook. Just another way to connect with more of the Internet generation so we could continue to break away from the old paradigm. Then, all of the sudden registration was open to everyone. And even our parents began to join.

To illustrate the carefree openness I was experiencing at the time, one of the things was an essay about Molly and raving. I was trying to talk about my drug use, not hide it, because I wanted more people to find these beautiful healing drugs that were an entirely different category from addictive hard drugsblabablo continued...s

unfinished...

...

I like to call this my "kegel exercises rabbithole".

I was super in love with my first girlfriend. She was amazingly kind, nurturing, and loving. But she didn't have much of a libido, and it was hard to get her off in bed. Of course, being so head over heels for her, I wanted nothing more than to please and pleasure her. It wasn't like this is what I staked the whole relationship on, but I figured while I was at it, it sure would be nice to try and give her an orgasm now and then...

So I set out into the Internet to find out what more I could learn to get her off. What tricks were out there? Well, the biggest trick I learned was that kegel exercises could help you last longer in bed. The best thing about this exercise is that you can do it anywhere because it doesn't look like anything. It's essentially the same muscles you use to hold your pee. So I would just hold it for 30 seconds at a time, anywhere, and at any time. And so I developed quite a bit of strength in this invisible set of muscles.

So how did it serve me? Well, it didn't work. I mean, it did! I could last a really long time in bed. But I still didn't manage to get her off. Of course, this dynamic meant I just kept trying to strengthen these muscles more and more in an effort to do the impossible. Eventually, I learned how to hold it just enough to orgasm without ejaculating, as well as averting an orgasm altogether. Either way, as long as I hadn't ejaculated, I could keep going. Until I was just too exhausted to continue, anyways...

At the same time, I was reading a lot of Buddhism, as well as tripping on psychedelics and listening to the philosophising of Ram Dass and Terrence McKenna, among others. I considered how the want for an orgasm is just another empty desire that doesn't really deliver anything other than a dopamine high along with a shot serotonin and oxytocin. I had also read a lot about the gift economy, and why it was that sharing wasn't catching on despite the world becoming hyperconnected through the Internet. I read about the ways that capitalism derailed attempts at a more collectively beneficial way of life. I read how so many methods of circumventing the greed of capitalism ultimately fell to the same greed. ay yi yi this is too much... I need another truth box.

I like to call this my "kegel exercises rabbithole".

I like to call this my "kegel exercises rabbithole".

For example, when "I LIKE BIG BUTTS AND I CANNOT LIE!" came out with a music video for MTV, did you know it was the first video to go on the "banned" list for MTV!? Not for language, but because there was some paper mache sculpture in the background that vaguely looked like a naked fat ass... supposedly. Although, I bet if they said those same paper mache bumps were breasts, they might have allowed it. This also ties in the racial influence of white culture having been funneled into this hysteria of worshipping an image of beauty that practically represents a pre-pubescent boy, skinny and hairless, while other cultures held on to the image of the voluptuous feminine figure. The cultural war that ensued is still being fought to this day, and with lots of strange incidental affects, such as equating obesity with body positivity on fat fetish forums. Another thing to come out of all this is the power of Nikki Minaj's ass. But that's a story for another truth box...