Issue No. 0: Started From The Bottom
Today marks one year since the death of Jeffrey Epstein. Not really any significance there in regards to this specific blog– I doubt I will ever write of him again– however his death did mark, personally, some temporal significance. First, it began what would become the worst year I’ve spent on planet earth so far. I don’t mean to personalize the COVID-19 crisis, recent racial justice inspired uprisings or other difficult moments of 2020, although they’ve certainly played into my personal experience of the year. In fact neither has affected me as much as many considering my class and race identity. I wonder though, if others also felt the latter half of 2019 as a melancholy preface to our shit show now. A difficult freshman year of college was good practice for quarantine.
The second way in which Epstein’s murder is important is that his ethos will without a doubt run through this blog. I feel quite connected to his evil and feel as though his disgusting story runs parallel to myself. Incidentally dropped into extreme wealth (over-simplification but whatever), where I have favored communist self loathing, he engaged in hedonism and violent violent enforcement of a global capitalism ruled by the CIA. I guess not the same, but both varying degrees of perverted, and he was a reasonable well dressed Jew so I rest my case.
Point being here, that I, at what I hope is the end of one of the worst year of my life, have, and pardon the cliche, two roads diverged. One, flailing aimlessly with guilt about my family’s money with no direction of how to assist in a working ruling class (this would be heavily aided by drugs, Tinder, HBO, etc.). The other involving reckoning, building my life’s work around class consciousness, and *buhbuhdabummmm* engaging in my hobbies positively. In effect, I must, pull myself up by my bootstraps!
This is what I want Bootstraps to be: catharsis on neoliberal notions of “bootstraps,” cultural commentary on music and fashion– literal bootstraps, and finally, an outlet for me to actually realize passions and shit out all of the feelings weighing me down in the emotional sense, from pulling myself up.
So that’s basically it for now. No promises besides daily uploads and some of the hottest god damn takes you eva heard in yo fuckin life.
Until tomorrow!