lb_lee | Edward Cullen, alas, isn't aphasic at all

Mori: Just as well I got that aphasia zine done; Rogan lost his words again yesterday. We'll see how long it lasts this time!

You might've noticed I done been cranking out a bunch of little zines, just noodling and experimenting around. I feel like Rogan was getting too bound up in perfectionism, like now everything had to top All In The Family, even though that's stupid and a recipe to never get anything done. (I hardcore believe in cranking out stuff like it's sausage and just letting the crap fall away by the wayside, rather than treating every project like some precious gem that must be ABSOLUTELY PERFECT for some invisible audience who may not even care. That's a recipe for resentment like, "how dare the public not care about my 800-page exhaustively-researched tome on perler bead technique throughout the 1990s? After how hard I worked???")

Despite all that, it's like I inherited some of Rogan's bullshit as I was working on the aphasia zine! I only wanted to make a little thing about a weird thing we were experiencing and how we were dealing with it, and then Edward Cullen, the sparkly vampiric voice of self-hate, popped up with all sorts of nonsense like:

"You fool, you can't just MAKE a little sixteen-page-zine about your personal experience! It has to be some huge well-researched thing that could pass an academic board! Don't you know that zines are BIG FANCY AND LEGIT???"

"You can't call it aphasia! Even though it totally is aphasia! Inappropriate! You have to call it something else, but I don't approve of any of the terms you want to use either. Because that would require admitting the actual scope of the problem, and self-hate never accepts anything but villification of the victim!"

"You haven't been dealing with this for nearly long enough to justify making a zine about it. He's only been silent for a few weeks. You're only allowed to make a stupid little perzine about it if you've spent at least... well, if I give you an actual timeframe or you'll hold me to it, so let's just say MORE. You have to spend MORE TIME first."

And I'm like, WTF, Edward, you're not even MY self-hate, you're Rogan's! Get the hell out of here, you little vampire turd! Who asked you?

I wanted to make this zine, you know? All the shit I was finding was stuff for like, parents of Special Needs children, which was the OPPOSITE of my role in all this. Rogan is my big brother acting in loco parentis, and infantilizing him would just honk BOTH of us off. He's still just as smart and adult as he was before; he's just lost his ability to use grammar! (Which also meant he couldn't use Grey's workarounds of signing or writing. She really is just selectively mute; voice is what wears her out. But sign language and writing use grammar, which means Rogan has the same problems with them that he does with spoken language.) (Luckily, our cards can do double duty for Grey, which is good, because she's an elegant old lady and inflicting that preschool-primary-colored stuff on her was just... insulting.)

I LIKE cranking out my little sausage zines and throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it sticks. It's fun. Go pound sand, Edward Cullen. I ain't gonna adopt you.

Current Mood: accomplished

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

talewisefellowship

[John]

"You fool, you can't just MAKE a little sixteen-page-zine about your personal experience! It has to be some huge well-researched thing that could pass an academic board!

Lol I feel called out by this

From:

lb_lee

Mori: Edward Cullen sees deeply into the souls of everyone. EVEN YOU.

From:

talewisefellowship

[John]

He can mind his own business, there's nothing for him to see here

From:

starfallhaven

I also feel called out by this. -Artemis

From:

lb_lee

Mori: man, is THIS why so many multis make stuff like we swallowed the most pretentious of dictionaries?? Is it truly all Edward Cullen???

...that would explain a lot.

From:

pilotsofanewsky

We have taken up blogging and definitely relate to that. Can we please just write a method for handling a problem without trying to think of ALL the edge cases and giving 10000 disclaimers?

From:

lb_lee

Mori: I like to think we're retraining our audience to understand that just because the ad industry has devoted horrifying amounts of money to customizing ads that follow people everywhere doesn't mean such customizing is normal and good.

Not everything is for every person! Sometimes, we just have to shrug, go, "darn, that is completely unrelatable," and move on without it becoming an identity crisis or a sign of evil hegemonic forces out to crush us.

From:

the_broken_tower

Can relate so hard to this. Making a Museum to share things only we know about? CLEARLY it has to pass the bar-up-ass of Western academic writing.

- Mike (he/him)

From:

lb_lee

Mori: even though we all done read godawful academic writing! Who wants to emulate that FOR A ZINE?!

From:

the_broken_tower

Imagine having three panels just full of citations.

- Cypress

From:

lb_lee

Lolcry

From:

the_broken_tower

Can I interest you in some extra-special glitter-proof already-on-fire stakes? They are diamond-tipped for piercing the hearts of annoying glittery vampires.

- Mike (he/him)

From:

lb_lee

Mori: haha, he's a pain, but Edward Cullen truly is on our side. It's useful to pay attention to what he says, long as we don't believe him!

From:

the_broken_tower

Like that one person in every horror movie who has the absolute worst judgment. 'Hey guys, let's split up - one of us can take the basement, one can take the crawlspace, and two can go into the dark woods!'

Edward Cullen is like personified bad tape?

- Cypress

From:

lb_lee

Mori: I am not familiar with this term "bad tape." Explain?

From:

the_broken_tower

I was going to get you an online definition but uh, it looks like it's more of a specialized/niche phrase than I thought.

Tape as in tape recordings. Bad as in negative. It's all the bad things people have said to you, about you, bad habits, harmful conditioning and thinking patterns. Even something you started doing yourself that is detrimental. Playing in the background like an audio tape.

A lot of people from rough backgrounds have internalized something or other like that and start saying it to themselves. Recognising it as bad tape - something that someone else said, and you're now repeating - can help separate it from your own self-worth and personal narrative. To know that it's background noise from a bad point in time, and isn't reflective of you now. And recognising it can help a person understand where current issues of theirs come from, and where more might be.

It seemed like Edward Cullen might be something like that for you guys.

- Reki (he/him)

From:

lb_lee

Mori: ohhhhh, that! I mean, yes, but there's also a protective function of Edward Cullen! We have a saying here, that all the shit in our head, no matter how unpleasant or self-defeating or violent, is on our side. (Well, except the family god so far. But it's an exception.)

Edward Cullen, at the end of the day, is trying to protect us from things, be that possible consequences of failure or deeper terrors that he can distract from. For example, his "you can't use aphasia" isn't just parroting bad tape. It's trying to protect us from the deeper terrors of what Rogan having aphasia would truly mean about our health, our brain, and his ability to do things. Brain damage is scary! But if Edward Cullen makes it into languagewank, he can distract us from that seriousness with comparative trivialities, which seem comparatively safer to deal with. ("What if we took this big scary thing you might have to deal with the rest of your life... and made it about jerks on the Internet instead?")

The reality of "oh shit, Rogan got aphasia" is way scarier than, "you're just exaggerating to make yourself feel special." The latter, we can solve by becoming a better person! Aphasia, though... there's no easy fix for that. And Edward Cullen knows it.

He's a jerk, but he's trying, in his own sparkly way.

From:

who_is_page

Be Gay Do Zines, as the kids say! Fuck yeahhhh!!!

From:

lb_lee

Look, I recently got a shitload of punk zines on making your own tent heaters and treating gunshot wounds and IT DONE INSPIRED MY ASS

Mori

From:

sorcyress

I hardcore believe in cranking out stuff like it's sausage and just letting the crap fall away by the wayside

YES YES YES GOOD YES!

I purchased a little self-pubb'd book last winter with the title "shit art is better than no art" and it's meant as a manifesto to get excited and make things and I love it dearly. Perfectionism is a horrible disease!

Back in my pre-career adult days¹, I used to draw a series called "Let's Make Art in our Artbooks". Each was made from one sheet of 8.5"x11" paper, cut and folded to be eight pages (or six and a front and back cover). They were not zines in the classic sense, in that I never made copies or tried to distribute them, they were mostly just chances for me to draw around a theme.

I should make more of them, because they were a really wonderful use of an hour or two. And they make a nice form of journaling, something that's probably a little incomprehensible to other people, but I can look back on and remember what's what in my life.

Anyways, I really like the idea of you doing small zines as well as bigger comics. Creating is good!

~Sor

1: When I became a full time classroom teacher, I stopped writing fiction and I stopped drawing as much, I think because suddenly the creative energy parts of my brain were directed towards lesson plans and classroom activities, and also because teaching is Fucking Exhausting. I have accepted that this is the cost to have a career I genuinely love, but I do miss sometimes how I would create things more back in college and when I was a substitute teacher.

Postscript: I've got three of the artbooks here on Flickr (CW: emo about not drawing enough), and I did two more nsfw ones for Sexy Self-Comics Day, a comics jam my friend used to run: 2013 and 2015 (CW: nudity, sex acts, masturbation, kink references)

From:

lb_lee

Mori: that book sounds super cool! Any chance we could meet up and look at your copy sometime?

Also stone asexual is a great term and I am glad you told me it exists.

Also, some of the stuff we've made that people like most just got cranked out! And even the "failures" taught us something useful or gave us something worthwhile to do!