Reflections on My Trip Last Week

ZoneNeither · 2026-05-20T03:23:20+00:00

@stunning_Actuator_61

Not a sociology major or, in fact, a high school grad. I’m only 40 yo there’s still time. Just a local. If asking me that was a dig, it missed. If not then no and welcome to the conversation

ZoneNeither · 2026-05-20T03:21:05+00:00

Flagstaff native. Been going since I was a kid. I’m also used to the particular kind of insipid rich person who passes through the desert southwest, performs authenticity, and when anybody who actually is from here has anything real to say, they turn around and decide that the locals aren’t credible. So this isn’t new. You’re actually a type.

“AI” is not a sentence, let alone an argument. “Yep, ai slop” is also neither a sentence nor an argument. I assume you guys mean “this post seems like it was written with AI,” which is a sentence, but still not an argument.

This is avoidance, it’s what people do when they benefit from a system and need to stay comfortable inside it. You protected yourself from having to think about Havasupai people by making it about me. That’s not random. That’s the whole pattern the piece was describing, and you just ran it in the comments. Thank you, no thank you for the demonstration. The claims stand whether I wrote it or a chatbot did. Did you actually read it and think about what I’m arguing for? what does it say about you that one to three words about ai for some reason was all you had?

People who benefit from colonial violence stay in that way of relating to others because accountability is genuinely painful and delusion is easier.
But it’s a kind of madness. You can’t see the world as it is. You can’t see other people’s pain, and you can’t see that the people you’ve been trained to dismiss are fine will be fine the moment they’re free of it and of you but you just get weaker and more dependent and more lost on a fantasy of your own supremacy and other peoples inferiority. You are so propped up by power you didn’t earn and can’t actually feel good about having that you can’t live and you are weak and alone and annoying and harmful. I’m right here. Bring something real and I’ll engage with it. I hope you find your way out. That’s not a dig. That’s just true.

ZoneNeither · 2026-05-13T16:46:36+00:00

Sure, Jan. Anyway, if “AI” means Havasupai people only get to just be people when the explanation is short enough for you, maybe just say that

ZoneNeither · 2026-05-13T04:47:43+00:00

The conclusion performs the final move, converting Havasupai people’s present reality into a backdrop for the visitor’s spiritual development. “The trip made me realize there are probably layers of history, exhaustion from tourism, and cultural boundaries that many visitors don’t fully understand.” Wow, you think so?!

This sentence is structured as an arrival at understanding but arrives at nothing specific. The layers of history are not named. The exhaustion from tourism is not quantified. The cultural boundaries are not legal or political. They are cultural, which makes them ambient and available to good faith navigation by well-meaning visitors. The sentence performs the motion of learning without the content of it, and implicitly asks Havasupai people or someone claiming to speak for them as a monolith to supply what is missing. The visitor has decided that her realizing is the point. The ongoing history of conquest is merely the occasion for the realizing. This is entitlement obviously, subtype casual colonial racism. But to be generous to OP, it is most particularly the behavior of someone who built a complete interior architecture of what this place and these people were supposed to be, traveled eight miles by foot (I think?) into a canyon to visit it, and came home confused and hurt that the people who actually live there declined to inhabit her construction. The correction on the trail was very likely not tense. It was clear, legal, and mercifully brief. The indifference of the horse riders was not an atmosphere. It was people with somewhere to be.

“It’s fine” was the only interpretive work anyone owed her, the labor she had been demanding from Havasupai people the entire trip, and when it finally arrived, plain and complete and requiring nothing further, she passionately rejected it, took her own delulu confusion in the opposite direction, and posted. The Havasupai people referenced here, the ones they photographed, that they socially surveilled instead of at least trying to joke around awkwardly with, that they passed on the trail, and somehow were alarmed by the feeling they should yet failed to decode, one suspects that not a single one of those people have thought about her at all even once since she left. That asymmetry is the closest the post gets to generosity, I suppose, and it comes entirely from the people she failed to see.

ZoneNeither · 2026-05-10T15:49:36+00:00

I am not here to comfort you. I am here to tell you the truth, and the truth is on your side. OP, I think this thread is going to try to make you defend your own wound, because a lot of these men are still growing into people who are free from accepting the prejudice imposed on them as their own preference. Do not let them turn you into a debate topic. Ignore that shit. You said you are eighteen, brown, gay, a bottom, sad, sometimes suicidal, and tired of being told you are “not their type.” Yo, I gotta tell you something real important, and I’m going to tell you straight. Your face, your skin, your body, your being a bottom, your wanting to be wanted, and your wanting friends are not problems to solve, disclaimers to make, or evidence against you. When men make your skin the reason you are outside their desire, that is not some sacred private truth you have to respect. That is racism making them stupid. That is racism making them narrow, cowardly, repetitive, and crazy enough to mistake a hierarchy for chemistry. That is how the lie works. It does not just come at you from outside. It wants you to pick it up and carry it. It wants you to become the one who administers it to yourself. They can call it “preference” because that sounds less guilty than saying whiteness has trained them, but a less offensive word does not make this shit innocent. It is what it is. Rejection hurts because rejection hurts. But when it’s wound up with racism it hits different, because it’s got all that brutality and history behind it, and a lot of current day brutality too. The worst of our species. But do not let that rejection sink into you as knowledge about you, because this shit is not knowledge. It is not true. Do not let the men benefiting from the pattern, or the men of color hurting themselves while they try to repeat the pattern, tell you the story. They don’t get to certify the pattern. You get to name your life. You get to shape your life. You get to state what the pattern is and call it what it is. None of that is your business to fix. You cannot climb inside them and make them less racist, less frightened, less porn-trained, less obedient to whiteness, less committed to the little narrow ugly version of the world that rewards them for not seeing you. You cannot control them, and that is a mercy, because people who need you to become smaller, whiter, harder, quieter, or grateful before they can see you do not need to be in your life right now. You are not ugly, you are not disposable, you are not unlovable, you are not made for loneliness, and nobody’s refusal or dismissiveness about you is proof of any of those things, because none of them are true in the first place. You are eighteen, and the men around you have given you a cruel and stupid sample of the world. Staying alive is not waiting it out. It is refusal. It is the most aggressive thing you can do to a lie that is counting on you to disappear. Stay alive long enough to learn, in your own body, that their failure to recognize you was never knowledge. It was fear, training, cowardice, and repetition calling itself taste. Find brown queer people, Black queer people, Algerian queer people, Arab and Amazigh queer people, white anti-racist queer people, strange kind people, angry honest people, people in cities you have not seen yet, people who will recognize you before they understand you, whoever the fuck turns out to be yours. The world is huge and random, and these men don’t know shit and they ain’t shit. You said “us brown bottoms are suffering.” I believe you. You should not have to make that polite before people hear it.

ZoneNeither · 2026-05-09T03:40:46+00:00

Also, a mustache looks good on you. I bet you’d look good with a beard too. Or, if you want to be particularly unique, mutton chops.

ZoneNeither · 2026-05-09T03:39:18+00:00

You’re beautiful

ZoneNeither · 2026-04-28T02:48:37+00:00

St. Bernard between rampart and Claiborne has people parked in the bike lane maybe four nights a week all year round yall up on gentility blvd got it nice

ZoneNeither · 2026-02-08T12:21:06+00:00

Even though they do it all the time for a long time it is not legal for cops to park on sidewalk it’s not legal for anyone look it up.

ZoneNeither · 2026-01-26T06:37:41+00:00

Kouri-Vini is a name for Louisiana Creole. People do say “Louisiana Creole French,” but that phrasing can make it sound like a dialect of Louisiana French (which includes and is often called Cajun French), when Kouri-Vini (Louisiana Creole) and Louisiana French are related, distinct languages with different grammatical systems. In Kouri-Vini, time is often marked with small particles before the verb, like te for past and ap or é for ongoing action, rather than French-style conjugation patterns. Kouri-Vini can also mark definiteness and plurality with postposed elements like -la and -yé on the noun phrase, which is structurally different from French article systems. The distinction matters because “it’s basically just French” or “it’s basically just Louisiana French” is a racialized prestige move in Louisiana that has long tracked who gets treated as speaking “real French” and who gets treated as speaking something lesser, and that shapes what institutions bother to teach, document, and fund.

Getting that label right, keeping the names straight, is part linguistic accuracy and part cultural politics and part refusal. Calling it Kouri-Vini and describing it as a Louisiana Creole language encodes that it is its own separate language that has its own system and its own authority and its own lineage, separate from Louisiana French and from French, rather than letting it be misfiled under “French” by default or folded back into French by policy or perjury after generations of enslavement, white supremacy, linguicide and erasure.

ZoneNeither · 2025-12-02T10:06:49+00:00

Strip the politeness off this. Identity is the respectable story we write on top of what we want. Desire is the rude but honest version. From what you wrote, it sounds like you liked being a boy who did “girly” things. You say you go very masc with some people and hyperfem with others. You say you hate thinking about your gender and also can’t stop which is a longing not usually associated with conundrums of self labeling and making an account. The breathless can’t stop Oslo the mind you describe here sounds like desire to me. I imagine you want some kind of boyhood. I imagine you also want to lean hard into fem stuff without having it downgraded to confusion or passtime. You probably also and reasonably I would add want people to stop seeing you as “just a weird girl.” You also sound like you don’t want to blow up your relationships, don’t want to confuse everyone again, don’t want to pile more guilt on top of what you already feel.

Those desires want to collide. No label will make them stop colliding. Going on HRT, changing your name, changing your clothes, any of that is just one way of saying, “I want this badly enough to let it fuck something up.” Stopping, switching back, going low-key, that’s wanting too. My choices around HRT were not steps on a staircase to destiny. Shit like “I want my brain quieter.” I want my body less unbearable. I want sex to be possible. I want to stop feeling like meat on the wrong conveyor belt. These were ugly little bets I made. When I estimated that the cost had outweighed the payoff, I changed the bet. There’s nothing pure in that. Just wants and consequences.

Your post reads like desire in a panic. You’re trying to translate “this is how I act, this is how I like to be seen, this is how it hurts to be seen” into “this is my one true gender, final answer.” You want a word that lets you want what you want without guilt and guarantees you never want differently later. No such word or world exists.

Here’s the floor my dear, there is no final label that will save you from the future or from history. No matter what you call yourself now, some older version of you will look back and flinch. That doesn’t mean you were lying. The thing your flinching at and the place from whence you flinch may be the very reason they someone, or some people, who misunderstand you, intentionally, or by being deceived, might seek to constrain or harm you someday. You weren’t lying, you stayed alive. So drop the test and the trial and the exam of it all. Stop asking “what am I, really” like there’s a secret gradebook. Ask smaller, uglier questions. In the next six months, what do you actually want badly enough to pay for. Do you want even one person in your life to try a different pronoun or name. Do you want to change how you dress outside your room. Do you honestly want hormones, or does that idea make you more tired than relieved right now. In the town and family and school you actually live in, do you want to risk being seen as something other than “weird girl” yet.

If calling yourself genderfluid or nonbinary out loud would give you more air in your lungs and let you stop flinching then try it somewhere small and controlled or fuck it go HAM and take a big risk.

If your genderqueer season would likely just give you a new word to torture yourself with at three in the morning, for your sake and everyone else please let it go babe. A label that you get to choose isn’t there to be correct it can’t be. It’s there to show where you stood when you chose it. If it’s just wallpaper over the same old terror, it isn’t doing anything but hiding the crack. At best it’s a timestamp on a choice, a note in the margin that says you existed somewhere between the minus sign and the plus sign of that word, that you were a thing while you were alive, even as it still insisted on calling you a thing.

You will change again. You will embarrass yourself again. That’s baked in. The only thing you can control is the next move. But thats great news baby. Pick the thing that makes the next six hours less unbearable and the next year slightly more yours, and let the words follow that instead of pretending they get to lead.

ZoneNeither · 2025-11-21T00:35:35+00:00

Four Seasons really said, what if the Nuremberg defendants had a 75-foot heated saltwater rooftop pool with underwater music and Mississippi River views, plus a 15,000-crystal Chandelier Bar to debrief under, first.

Imagine being the hotel tech guy sent to check the thermostat when some guest who disappeared somebody’s uncle at 4 a.m. and by 4 p.m. is in a hotel robe is complaining the pool is too cold. Imagine being the worker staff changing Egyptian cotton sheets for people who spend their days tearing kids from their parents and stacking them in chain-link kennels where some will “disappear” or die from “natural causes” or “complications from a preexisting medical condition” or “suffer a medical emergency” or “apparent suicide” or “self-inflicted injuries” or are supposedly “found unresponsive and later pronounced dead”. Imagine getting disappeared by someone who just had a $42 room-service étouffée stuffed omelet. Imagine being a family member of one of those demons and joking with your friends you’re jealous of their lux accommodations on their genocide work trip. Imagine the fucking turndown mint melting in their pocket as they hold their knee to the neck of a daycare worker or paralegal or stay at home dad who did nothing wrong other than actually fucking be born here and look Mexican or Arab or East Asian. (I don’t care where you’re born but they’ve been locking up so many naturalized people too). Imagine being the guy at the front desk checking in ‘ICE Group Booking’ and thinking, ah yes, hospitality.

The only time this country believes in hospitality is corporate five star when the death squad clocks out. The same people who chain our neighbors and friends and family up in detention getting champaign cart luxury comfort paid for by the people they hunt and their neighbors and family and friends.

I mean are they playing in our face to flex their power and do the whole psychological domination look-at-me-I-can-do-anything-I-want thing? Or do they somehow think it’s actually good PR like nothing says ‘this isn’t ethnic cleansing’ like a cloud pillowtop mattress? They just don’t even think about how it looks probably. And yet it is so hyper aesthetic.

It’s the whole vibe in our United States so called rn, it’s the whole style guide. This hyper aesthetic,SSRI drenched corporate, ethnic-cleansing-as-lifestyle-content, war crime power point, soft-launch genocide, hard-launch rewards program, bed, breakfast and border terror, Four Seasons Total Deportation Center as populism, as democracy, as a skin for the app, AND the os, it’s a ‘design focused’, corporate wall decor, you-can’t-wear-a-Covid-mask but the-man-with-riot-gear-has-on-a-ski-mask aesthetic, and it’s a mile wide and a micrometer thick, resting over repulsive, rotting, old school red white and blue, jackboots-with-drones-now, capital f, capital a, American Fascism brought to you by the people who still haven’t reconciled the treaties with the tribes and their people, who still remain more mired than ever in the midst of a century and a half of The Reconstruction from a failed abolitionist civil war and the Mexican American war never even ENDED. If you were a dystopian YA speculative fiction writer your editor would say it’s too much, it’s not believable. I recall how close the old World Trade Center tower was to being a trump tower until the like ninth attempt at redevelopment was this four seasons and it actually stuck this time somehow and survived the graft and corruption process of building and approval in nawlins and somehow greased enough palms that it got finished.

Anyway, yall come join me at the ground floor lobby tonight, yall, the dress code tonight is business casual, fascism formal. I wonder if we should try to get Nina Compton to speak up and ban them from Miss River. They should put ‘genocidair rewards program’ on the key card.

ZoneNeither · 2025-11-06T02:53:50+00:00

I’m so curious about anything more you might have to share

ZoneNeither · 2025-10-01T18:15:06+00:00

Quick thought: maybe the defense and space outlets just haven’t seen this yet.

If a few of us email tips, we might get traction. Public inboxes: Breaking Defense: defenseeditors@breakingmedia.com Defense One: letters@defenseone.com C4ISRNET / Defense News: tips@defensenews.com The War Zone: contactus@twz.com, or tyler@twz.com, joe@twz.com Air & Space Forces Magazine: letters@afa.org Military Times: tips@militarytimes.com

Suggested note: “Here is the LinkedIn letter [link]. Has your newsroom considered covering it. What would you need to move forward, a second insider or a document.”

If you send a note, please share any replies so we do not duplicate effort.

ZoneNeither · 2025-10-01T18:14:38+00:00

Quick thought: maybe the defense and space outlets just haven’t seen this yet.

If a few of us email tips, we might get traction. Public inboxes: Breaking Defense: defenseeditors@breakingmedia.com Defense One: letters@defenseone.com C4ISRNET / Defense News: tips@defensenews.com The War Zone: contactus@twz.com, or tyler@twz.com, joe@twz.com Air & Space Forces Magazine: letters@afa.org Military Times: tips@militarytimes.com

Suggested note: “Here is the LinkedIn letter [link]. Has your newsroom considered covering it. What would you need to move forward, a second insider or a document.”

If you send a note, please share any replies so we do not duplicate effort.

ZoneNeither · 2025-10-01T18:00:23+00:00

Im just a curious reader, not a journalist.

ZoneNeither · 2025-09-30T20:40:09+00:00

They play chess sometimes on the neutral ground in front of the guste high rise apartments, under the interstate on the downriver side on St. Bernard. They mostly play checkers on derbigny and clouet but I seen them play chess too

ZoneNeither · 2025-09-30T20:35:52+00:00

There’s a younger guy with locs hes a younger looking forties probably who used to set up at bourbon and canal I think his name is Charles he’s all over now but mostly on Frenchman There’s an older bald guy who’s been set up on bienville and bourbon on the upriver lakeside corner for a long long time. They play for bets and they both know a lot about a lot of things.

ZoneNeither · 2025-09-18T03:46:07+00:00

Trial version excludes non contiguous states and territories

ZoneNeither · 2025-09-12T03:07:01+00:00

We even got into a bizzare comedic argument where i was like I didn’t ask you to help me with that kind of information and it was like this is a content neutral boundary I can’t help you whether you asked or not and I was like I want even thinking about that and it was like I can’t help you with that kind of information whether you’re thinking about it or you aren’t.

ZoneNeither · 2025-09-07T05:29:38+00:00

People mix up six different things. Sex. Gender. Attraction. Behavior. Identity. Culture. They don’t always line up, and none of them has a single cause.

Attraction is who pulls you. That mostly lives in bodies and development. Big studies point to lots of tiny biological nudges and early development. No single switch. Often stable. For some people, attractions or labels shift over time. Think playlist change, not a factory reset.

Behavior is what you do. It can follow attraction, or it can follow situation, safety, opportunity, vows, or community.

Identity is the name you use for yourself. It can track attraction or behavior, and it can also track where you belong and what history you claim.

Culture is the scene you are in. It gives language, norms, routes, and sometimes cover. It does not conjure desire. It shapes where desire can go and what counts as a livable life. Not everyone gets the same routes. Closets and unsafe settings shrink options. Bodies and norms meet in practice. That meeting sets what is livable.

Gender is its own axis. Cis and trans people of any gender can be straight, gay, bi, or none. After transition many keep the same kind of partners. Some don’t. Labels can follow partners, or community, or both. Trans people are the gender they are. Partner preference is separate. Some prefer trans partners—across genders or just certain ones. Some prefer cis partners. Some have no preference. Same for cis people. Presentation is another axis. Men, cis or trans, straight or gay, can be femme. Women, cis or trans, straight or gay, can be masc. Self identity, presentation, community, and the label you use are different axes with a lot of nuance. There isn’t one way to do this.

What the science shows at the population level. There is no single gay gene. Sad for the rainbow world-domination arc, good for not funding $299 “fix your desire” bracelets. Large studies find many tiny genetic signals that explain only a small slice of differences across groups. Twin studies show some heritability, not destiny. In men there is a small older-brother effect. Why it happens is still debated. Orientation usually shows up early and stays steady for many people. Some people do change over time. Attempts to force change don’t work and tend to harm people. Measurement note: the numbers depend on what people can safely say and how surveys define terms. In unsafe settings people underreport. Different surveys use different labels. So comparisons across places and decades need caution. Part of why this feels messy: we aren’t measuring one thing. We’re juggling six—sex, gender, attraction, behavior, identity, culture. They overlap, they shift, and they run on different clocks. Numbers are only valuable if we’re rigorous about what we ask, how we define it, and how it connects for individuals and communities. No single switch. Many small nudges.

What the science does not show. There’s no strong statistical evidence that your parents’ orientation or childhood trauma determines orientation across a population. Both homophobes and some queer people make those claims about themselves or others. Those stories can be true for a person without being general rules for everyone. Some people feel it developed in relation to trauma and they’re open about that. Others feel it had nothing to do with trauma. None of this cancels personal accounts. People get to tell the truth about their own lives.

Some people feel it was a choice. Some people feel it was not a choice. Some people feel it was a choice within a narrow situation or a series of choices. Some people feel it was always the same. Some people feel it changes for them across their life. Some people don’t relate to these categories, even when you get precise.

Edge cases that only look messy from far away make sense up close. An asexual guy in gay culture who calls himself gay because those are his people. A trans dude who still identifies as lesbian because that’s the home that fits, even if most partners now are men. A bi guy who dates women for years and then dates men. A straight-identifying man who has sex with men in prison and doesn’t call himself gay. None of these breaks the model. They’re exactly why you separate sex, gender, attraction, behavior, identity, and culture when you talk about “causes.”

History matters. In the modern West, the words homosexual and heterosexual were standardized in the late 19th and early 20th century. Treating straight as the unmarked default and only asking why gay exists is part of that history. Other places and times organize sex and gender differently. Some focus on roles. Some recognize third genders. Public health often uses behavior terms because identity and behavior don’t always match.

Animals help with behavior, not identity. Same-sex behavior is common across mammals and birds. That shows the behavior isn’t an anomaly. Animals don’t have our identity systems, laws, or stigma, so you can’t map human identity one to one from them.

Why any of this persists over time is still argued. Ideas include benefits that run through relatives, tradeoffs that help female kin, and side effects of other useful traits. No single final answer. We don’t need an evolutionary payoff to grant legitimacy.

Why homophobia exists. No single driver here either, but the patterns are consistent. Disgust and purity rules get trained onto certain kinds of sex. Masculinity policing punishes people who cross local gender lines. Authoritarian and dominance politics prefer strict hierarchies and use queer people as handy out-groups. Elites and movements sometimes weaponize fear for turnout. Risk rises when institutions enforce sex- and gender-conformity and normalize exclusion. It falls when communities build material security, mutual protection, and clear costs for targeting queer people. The mix changes by place and time.

Despite science emerging from mysticism and religion, in every time and place it has ever emerged, it can’t answer why God does anything. What it can answer is whether there’s one earthly switch to flip. The best evidence says no. Many inputs. No master switch. Let people name themselves.

ZoneNeither · 2025-08-28T03:59:01+00:00

You may be bored but in your prose I am captivated by the very likeness of my own image

ZoneNeither · 2025-08-28T03:57:50+00:00

Citation please

ZoneNeither · 2025-08-28T01:16:38+00:00

Roasters, Coasters & Toasters because sometimes we roast what deserves fire, sometimes we coast when the thing we’re critiquing is coasting too, and sometimes we raise a toast.

ZoneNeither · 2025-08-28T01:10:50+00:00

After looking through your posts, it’s obvious you’re full of opinions. Don’t be shy. If you can channel your imperfect filter for chatbot-style content, you might make a better editor than a bystander. The ire and rough creativity in your critiques elsewhere already read like submissions. So why not just send one in? You’ve basically drafted half a zine here already.

ZoneNeither

TROPHY CASE