“Tell your story…”

What I previously perceived to be a welcoming invite now feels more like a glorious eye-roll; the three dots stare at me condescendingly, almost as if they are patently aware of the delusion with which I operate —that the world needs the perspective of yet another white and privileged male on black issues.

But that characterization — “black issues” — is strikingly false. These are categorically white issues — issues brought on by white individuals, and perpetuated by them. And I will not pretend that I do not play a role, consciously or subconsciously, in that perpetuation; in fact, it must be my duty to recognize that and act on it. It has to be all of our duties.

We must even resist the urge to laugh at the word “duties”. Objectively, that is a hilarious word. It sounds like “poops”. That’s classic fucking comedy. But we have to be better than that.

The subject itself, however, has become a sort of daunting taboo. I’ve hit several key words so far — “privilege”, “perpetuation”, “racism” (as well as the mere mentioning of black individuals) — that have made Conservative penises slowly inch back into their body and sprout up into their esophagi; Trumpists proclaim these notions to be snowflake falsehoods whilst gargling their own infertile semen, wiping their mouths with their precious American flag as they exclaim this country’s greatness and let you know that they, too, have black friends.

This ideology, of course, is not exclusive to the right-wing (although that did feel good to get off my chest). Others deem the subject to simply be “uncomfortable”; but to ignore a subject, particularly one that deals with human lives, simply because it might make you uncomfortable — that is also a position of remarkable privilege.

So let’s fucking talk about it.

To be clear, in no way am I providing newfound insight into racism in America, white allyship, or any of the related topics — these should be topics on which, by now, you are well-educated (or, more accurately put, topics on which you are actively educating yourself). If I am your primary resource for gathering information on these issues, you are doing something obscenely wrong. Don’t go to a butcher to get your hair cut — the results will be deeply inadequate, and also you’ll look like a fucking moron (see below).

Oof.

I have always considered myself to be outspokenly liberal. Many of my friends will tell you the same, but replace “outspokenly” with “unbearable”, “staunchly stubborn”, or “a throbbing pain in my ass” — all of which are sincere compliments to me.

I have recently been questioned, by a close friend, as to why my Instagram stories are not as populated with information as other individuals they follow. For someone so typically boisterous about politics, why have I not been as loud?

It is this point that I’d like to speak on.

But I’d like to address something first: by no means do I consider this issue to be a “political” one. Giving something such a connotation inherently implies, particularly today, that there are two sides of the isle to stand on.

There are not.

This is not a matter of opinion. To utilize that excuse is cowardly, dangerous, and, quite frankly, wrong.

Opinion is defined as follows: “a view or judgment formed about something not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.” I could have the opinion that the Earth is flat — I’d be wrong, and I also might have incredibly slick handles with a basketball. I could have the opinion that women deserve less pay than men, or that black individuals deserve to be treated with less respect than their white counterparts — again, I’d be wrong. On a factual, ethical, and moral level, opinions are not infallible. Americans need to stop pretending that they are.

More intelligent (but not wiser) individuals will attempt to utilize, then, what they perceive to be factual. Take this Wall Street Journal article by Heather Mac Donald entitled “The Myth of Systemic Racism”, for example.

Also, I didn’t misspell her last name. There’s a fucking space between the “Mac” and the “Donald”. It’s fucking infuriating. What if Mike McCarthy was actually called Mike Mac Carthy? How dumb would THAT be?

Anyway — her piece was the top read story there this past week. Several friends told me it was “comforting” to read.

Mac Donald’s article is a picture-perfect example of this manipulation — of twisting data and facts to support your already biased point.

If you Google Heather Mac Donald, you will find the first result to be her profile on The Manhattan Institute’s website. Article titles listed on their website on June 9th were as follows: “Today’s Protests Aren’t Like 1968, and Immigration Is One Reason Why”; “Does Expansion of Charter Schools Harm Nearby District Schools? My New Study Finds That No, It Doesn’t”; and “Defunding the NYPD Is Madness After the Thousands of Black Lives They Have Saved” — the last, another article by Mac Donald.

I did not make those up. They are not Onion headlines. Those are real.

The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research is a conservative (Wikipedia’s definition; SourceWatch says “right-wing”, while they are self-ascribed as “free market”) 501(c)(3) non-profit think tank. I think it is worth looking into some of their more notable contributors (donations of over $1 million):

1. The John M. Olin Foundation. Olin Industries is a chemical and munitions manufacturing business founded by, you guessed it, John M. Olin. You can find his Winchester Model 21 Shotgun in the NRA Museum here. Yes, there is an online NRA Museum.
2. The Searle Freedom Trust. In 2014, The Guardian released evidence that grants offered by this organization were coordinated with the State Policy Network to advance a conservative agenda, including but not limited to tax breaks, Medicaid opposition, and defunding public education.
3. The Claude Lambe Foundation. Created by a Koch brother and dissolved in 2014, the CRLF provided $24,643,414 to groups denying climate change between the years of 1997 and 2011.

It goes without saying that research funded by conservatives, which is then used to fund conservative agendas, is not exactly unbiased. This is what I mean when I describe opinions hidden behind facts— but let’s dive into those “facts”. I will pretend that Mac Donald is a completely unbiased researcher, and ignore any supposed motivations she might have for debunking systemic racial bias in the police force (like, for example, how munition companies that donate to her institute may profit off of weaponizing policemen, or, for example, how defunding police forces could go to education and teachers’ unions). For the sake of argument.

Mac Donald posits that racial bias in the police force is a myth. She concretely states that there is no evidence, whatsoever, of widespread racial bias. Let’s examine how she backs this up:

In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015.

Mac Donald consistently employs data in her argument that seemingly speaks volumes to her point, and makes for — to the uneducated reader — a rather convincing argument. But these are nothing more than statistical fallacies designed to thwart your perception of reality.

The question at hand is whether or not there is widespread racial bias in the police force — and the variable Mac Donald selects as the crux for her disproval of that bias is fatal shootings. But to be abundantly clear, the data on police killings is fucking nonexistent. Our government collects data on police homicides via a voluntary FBI program; between 2005 and 2012, 6.1% of America’s 18,000 police forces even reported one justifiable homicide. 6.1%.

I want you to think for a moment about how preposterous that concept is. Imagine a world in which you could commit obscene crimes, but you had the option of whether or not to admit to committing them. In what other social structure would this even be moderately accepted?

Let’s say a Church passes around a collection basket and asks for donations, but also leaves you with the option to take the money as well — their rationale being that they assume anyone who stole would come to a confessional. That’d be a very poorly run Church (which is saying a lot for institutions that cover up pedophile rings). Someone has to hold these men accountable, and that person cannot be, and should not be, fucking God.

According to Statista, there are currently around 687,000 police officers in the United States. Assuming that each individual shooting (around ~1,000 per year that we know of) is committed by a unique officer, approximately 0.14% of officers will fatally shoot someone per year. Pew Research conducted a study of over 7,400 of these officers, and found that only 27% of them have ever fired their weapon in the line of duty — across their entire careers.

The point I am trying to stipulate here is that it is incredibly rare for officers to engage in the use of lethal force, or any force at all, with their gun. It is something they do maybe once in their lifetimes. So it is deeply erroneous to draw conclusions about systemic racial bias around a variable with a) incredibly insufficient data and b) an absurdly small sample size. If you want to investigate racial bias across the board, you should look at everyday policing — not rare and/or undocumented police events.

Let’s say the HR department at your company wanted to discover whether or not you were a racist. Would they sit you in a room with a black individual for an hour and wait to see whether or not you said the N word? No — that’d be an absurdly easy test to pass, and a deeply inadequate assessment of your character. They’d look at how you communicated and worked with black individuals over the course of your career.

The Stanford Open Policing Project did just that. They investigated over 100 million traffic stops by United States officers between 2011 and 2017; note that not only does this variable have an incredibly robust sample size, but it is also significantly more indicative of what a police officer’s day, and career, looks like. The clip in that hyperlink is worth watching — and the findings are horrific:

Black and hispanic drivers are ticketed, searched, and arrested at higher rates than white drivers, even after controlling for location, age, gender, and year — on the basis of less evidence.

That is the literal definition of discrimination. And it directly points to widespread racial bias in the United States police force. Nationwide.

One can see this bias further by simply expanding Mac Donald’s criteria for violence; if the police are an in any way violent, it is nearly 3x more likely to result in death if that individual is black.

Mac Donald goes on to cite another study that claims to find that there is “no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police”. That article has since received two rebuttal letters, one for the inaccuracy and impossibility of its mathematics, the other for its misleading conclusions.

Lastly, she takes advantage of what I call Tucker Carlsonism: a phenomenon in which one pretends to care about one subset of individuals strictly to support their further oppression. She cites black-on-black violence as America’s real issue, one that liberalism seems to ignore — and one that should be receiving our undivided attention.

But to ignore one problem and focus on another still leaves you with two problems to solve — and there is nothing to say that you cannot care for both. Sure, 90% of black murder victims are killed by black assailants. But 83% of white murder victims are killed by white assailants. Violent crime is committed within racial groups, not between them. The difference between black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence is that the former faces prosecution and accountability, while the latter does not. That is the issue at hand. Pretending like you give a shit about black-on-black violence is just a racist distraction, a means by which blame can be placed back on the black community.

It is also worth mentioning that George Floyd did not die at the hand of a gun. Neither did Eric Garner, nor Sandra Bland, nor Emmett Till. To name a few.

But even after I’ve broken down and pissed on every crevice of this shitbrained hitpiece, conservatives will still point to the looting, the rioting, and the damage caused by the protests. They’ll point to local black businesses that were robbed and put on a facade of disgust, a mask that is easy to wear when the true rationale for their somber demeanor is the thought of their Robert E. Lee statues being thrown in the local river.

Motherfuckers, just stop it.

White people coped with the prospect of losing their right to own other human beings by starting a war.

So just fucking stop it.

The point I am making with this in-depth sidetrack is that educating yourself with material that strictly serves to confirm your bias is not education at all — it is quite literally the opposite. Proper education challenges you; it will not be easy, comfortable, or quick to explore. And trying to educate others on the same topic will be correspondingly burdensome.

Let’s say your buddy just smells like shit. All the time. Like literal feces. Telling him he smells like shit all the time isn’t doing enough — his primary reaction, actually, may be to take offense to your claim. He may even try to rationalize it: “well, this is just how I smell”. Or worse: “my whole family smells like this, and we’ve never had a problem with it before.”

But if you take a different approach, perhaps the reaction might be different. You might have a case study conducted by you and your friends in which you ask his local community a simple question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the odors emanating from an Abercrombie and Fitch store and 10 being the stench of a sewer rat’s anus, how bad does Timmy reek?” If the average score is a 9.6, you might open his eyes. You can even provide him with some resources — perhaps some deodorant, or a nice cologne. And you can tell him that you still love and respect him despite his stench; up until this point, he may have not even been aware that his smell was vomit-inducing. It does not necessarily make his odor okay, as others have suffered nasal damage at his expense — but awareness is the first step.

And if your friendship with someone ends simply because you told them they reek of shit, that probably wasn’t much of a friendship anyway.

This shit-stained metaphor does have a point to it — to be outspoken on an issue and to work on correcting it are two patently different things, and they can come with two patently different results.

So, finally, we return to the subject of these Instagram stories.

Social justice in the age of social media is a double-edged sword; the widespread solidarity expressed after the brutal murder of George Floyd was undoubtedly beautiful — but if it was just solidarity, and only solidarity, it accomplished virtually nothing.

The amount of people who posted a black square on Tuesday, June 2nd, was over double the amount of people who signed the Justice for George Floyd petition. And I say this as someone who also posted a fucking black square. So please do not take these critiques I offer as personal slights — I acknowledge that I am also part of the problem, and not some holier-than-thou model of perfection.

Social media induces an immense pressure to post — simply because other individuals in your feed are also posting. By no means am I suggesting that anyone who has posted on various forms of social media are doing so just for the sake of doing so; I have found an incredible amount of resources, donation pages, petitions, and links as a direct consequence of social engagement on these platforms. Social media can enable collective social action in ways previously unforeseen and unimagined, and it is this phenomenon that gives me hope that perhaps this time will be different. Perhaps change will come.

I am merely suggesting that perhaps our priorities with social media and social justice need to be realigned.

I will put it like this: if there is a social cause that you care about, your primary motivation should not be to demonstrate to others that you care about it.

I am not saying that sharing information and resources is not important — it is crucial. I am simply trying to say that that sharing is not enough, or is deeply inadequate, if you have not first acted on behalf of what it is that you are sharing.

You should not need to receive vindication from anyone, on any platform, for acting on behalf of black lives.

Let’s say that you’re reading a work by Toni Morrison (Sula, or Bluest Eye) that provides you with some beautiful yet heartbreaking insight into the black American experience. Perhaps, instead of sharing an image of you reading the book on the beach, you can share a link to a local black-owned bookstore that sells copies and implore others to take a look (you can click that hyperlink for a local, black-owned Chicago bookstore that sells Toni Morrison’s full collection).

I have also seen an abundance of posts that go along the lines of this: “10 things you can do, watch, read, listen…” These are awesome and powerful pieces with wonderful information you can utilize; but we have to remember to do those 10 things ourselves first, and acknowledge that checking those 10 boxes is not enough.

This battle is ongoing — but already the fervor on these apps is slightly waning.

The number one way in which you can keep this fervor alive is via your power to vote. Not just this November, or the November four years from this one, but in Congressional races and state and local elections as well. This is where change happens. Change does not happen on the same platforms in which you tweet a high thought, or Instagram a sunset, or argue with your racist uncle on Facebook. Change is a gradual and painstaking process, one that needs your constant and undivided devotion.

So I was wrong about one thing — this actually is a political issue. As my friend Brendan Pedley eloquently states: “As much as some people don’t want to admit, racism is as much a ‘political issue’ as it is a cultural problem. When state and federal institutions have mostly reinforced racial inequality through policy and funding disparities for centuries, the elected officials in charge of contributing to and upholding the racist effects of those decisions bear responsibility. But the good news, as you have all recently demonstrated, is that literally anybody can get involved with fixing political issues!”

You can adopt a state here, register and stay informed here, and fight against racial discrimination in voting here. You can donate, as I have, here, here, here, here, or any one of these 115 causes here. If you are not in a financial position to donate, you can help out in ways listed here.

I also realize the ultimate irony of myself saying all of this in a blog post I made for public consumption. I can only hope that I broadened your horizon — that my perspective helped to open yours.

But it is not up to me to decide for you, to donate for you, to educate you, or to vote for you. And it is certainly not up to the black community to hold you accountable. Only you can do that.

So do it.

-Fromm

-J.D. Salinger, A Catcher in the Rye

“Did you just finish?”

The answer is, of course, quite obvious; like the people of Pompeii, her stomach is littered with the fiery liquid of a grotesque explosion from Mount Vesuvius (if Mount Vesuvius was a tiny, bitchy little volcano with huuuuge fucking testicles). Her question was based more in raw exasperation, stunned not only at how quickly the sex ended but at her complete and utter dissatisfaction.

She slaps me in the face and spits on me before turning, leaving, and calling me a “prepubescent little fuck”.

It deeply arouses me. I finish again.

Whether you’re a woman graced with the displeasure of a steamy, 17-second bout of missionary intercourse, or a recent college graduate, time becomes unapologetically sudden.

In other words: life comes at you fast.

(Note the brilliance of that pun, by the way. It’s been like two years since I’ve written one of these things and I haven’t lost a fucking step.)

I sat down to write this blog on May 12th of 2019 — the day after UW-Madison’s spring commencement ceremony. I had the title picked out, the obscure quote from one of the few books I read as an English major, and the basic premise. Upon reaching one of life’s most significant milestones, how did it feel to finally be grown up?

The problem with that is that I didn’t.

So I waited.

I waited until my job started.

I waited until I was three months in. I got promoted.

Did you get promoted? Probably fucking not. Loser. Oh so what, someone quit and I took the role. Big deal. Get off my ass.

Then six months in.

I got demoted.

Now ten.

The impression behind growing up is that, at some point, you’re supposed to be grown up. You’re supposed to be wiser. More mature. Socially apt. Every television show or movie I’ve ever seen seems to end on this crucial life stage without elaborating on its progression; the character arcs are complete, the guy gets the girl — what more is there to display?

Here’s an example.

I’m not sure if anyone reading this has ever watched One Tree Hill. I’m not saying I have, like of course not. I’ve just, you know, read things from people who have watched it. Apparently its heartwarming and genre-defining. From what I’ve heard.

In the fourth season, the cast graduates. (Allegedly. Once again, this is just from what I’ve read.) The fifth season jumps four years into the future. Why?

The daunting reality is that there isn’t much entertainment in that same cast entering the corporate world, in working 9–5, for the next fifty years of their lives. Routine is mundane and unadvertised; it is controlled, predictable — it is everything that those past four years weren’t.

College seeks to answer the age-old question, one turned from childhood fantasy into cold and bitter practicality: What do you want to be when you grow up? Aspiring astronauts walk a beat instead of on the moon; washed-up athletes turn to journalizing about other athletes they wish they could be, or to training on them (or to gambling on the spread in the hopes that they, after all, still got it); eager actors turn to local news, ambitious scientists to research lab assistants. Growing up comes with the reality that most of your wildest dreams were merely losing scratch-off tickets, and at some point you’re left to cash in the scraps.

A depressing thought, until you realize that life will always be depressing compared to winning $500 million.

I realize that my pessimistic generalizations are simply just that — generalizations. You should be proud of what you do. If you love what you do, I commend you. (I also call you a fucking bullshitter behind your back, because you’re a fucking liar, but that’s only behind your back. So carry on, asshole.) I am merely suggesting that, for the vast majority of people, your life did not pan out the way you initially thought it might.

And that’s okay.

You give an eighteen-year-old a blank sheet of paper and tell them to make a blueprint. They turn 22, and it’s time for construction. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the tools to make a house yet.

The only thing college concretely taught me is who I want to build it with.

(Oh, and it also taught me that the proper phrasing of that sentence is “with whom I want to build it.” But I’m not going to be an asshole and just throw the word whom at you. College also taught me to not be a dick.*)

(*too big of a dick.)

The inherent paradox of growing up lies in the fact that not everything else grows with you; not in the biological sense (although my penis did shunt its growth around my third birthday), but in the personal. The more you grow, the more you lose; you lose the people and places that defined you, the people and experiences that made you who you are.

Can you delineate, in one sentence, what you learned in college? Your answer would not point to a lesson in biology, or economics. You’d point to what and who you learned to love, and not your love for anything that you actually learned in a classroom.

That’s the lottery that you won.

And, instantaneously, its the same one that you lost.

Growing up comes with an unavoidable cost; the people and places that molded you turn into memories that, albeit still being tangible, visitable, textable, will never exist like they once did — a perfect embodiment of life’s beauty, while simultaneously encapsulating its cruelty.

Now am I Einstein, boldly rediscovering the theory of relativity? Of course not. But the true depth of time only grasps you retroactively; you find yourself holding onto seconds that previously would mindlessly surpass you. You look back at moments that made you laugh, focusing not on the “why” of the laugh but rather at how long ago that laugh was. Frustration at life’s rapidity quickly turns to self-criticism for your lack of its appreciation; you yearn for things you can never have again, constantly questioning why you didn’t fully appreciate those things when you had them.

But you did.

The man who stares at the slow ticking of a clock probably has much longer days than the ones who never look at it at all — but what an uneventful life that man lives.

And finally, I’ll address this inevitable counterpoint:

But Peter, you’re still so young.

To those who tell me this, I beg you to go make a garden. Buy the soil, the fertilizer, the plants. Water that shit, and whatever the fuck else you do in a garden. Cultivate crops — specifically, I implore you to grow cucumbers. Grow many cucumbers. Make the largest cucumber known to man. And once you have that one, glorious, magnificent cucumber — shove it up your ass, and then put it in a salad, and eat it.

I realize that, yes, I’m merely 23. Perhaps I’m only a quarter of the way done with my life. (But let’s be honest. If you know me, I’m probably slightly below halfway. I bet lung cancer takes me at 48. If I’m alive at 70, just run me over with a bus.) I can still, however, comment on what it feels like to rapidly lose my youth in the moments where that feeling stings the most, and you can still fuck off.

So that leaves us with one last question: where do we go from here?

And the answer is simple: we’re going. Life moves on, the world still rotates, the clock still ticks. You can cherish the past, you can look forward to the future — but revel in the present.

And for the love of fucking God, just stay the fuck inside.

Now if were using the metric of “how many penis references did Peter put into his blog” as our scale for maturity, I guess me only using two is a sign that perhaps I have.

Maybe I have grown up.

The only thing I know for sure is that I had no say in the matter.

-Fromm

The real question is, would I recommend the drink to someone else, as my waitress recommended it to me? (I lied. Just now, to your face. It wasn’t recommended to me. I traversed the entire two-page menu of drinks and that’s what I fucking chose. Holy shit I hate myself.) I probably wouldn’t, but the premise is interesting — what do I recommend, to you, my reader?

1. I find that if you tell the girl before sex that you like to role play as Avengers characters, she finds it much less weird when you scream “HULK SMASH” right before you finish.
2. Although intimidating at first, revelations can be found upon exploring the depths of your own assho —

Wait, stop. Jesus Christ.

A tip: write your title after you’ve finished your piece. Not before starting. Otherwise you might, say, make a title, come back to your piece later, assume its about guidance in the ways of intercourse, and proceed from there.

So no, this isn’t fucking advice, as in advice on how to fuck. It’s just some fucking advice, you big fuck. And besides, a magician never reveals his secrets! Especially if that magician is bad at magic (has a small wand, always performs the same tricks, cries immediately after performing, etc.)

So what I’ll provide instead is a list of tips I wish someone had given me before I went abroad (or, more accurately, the tips I received and blatantly ignored) so that those who follow in my footsteps will not make the mistake of, well, following in my footsteps.

But Peter. What if I’m not going abroad? If I didn’t go? What if I’m like, 65? Or your grandmother? What are we doing here?

Good question. First off, grandma, if you are reading this — fuck. I mean, fuck. It’s like that time you went to Ted with grandpa, thinking it was a movie about a cute teddy bear and his best friend (true story). But all of a sudden, he’s ripping a bong, and then a stripper shits on the floor. Not sure if there’s a more apt characterization of my life as a 21-year-old. The prayers didn’t work Grammy. Leave the theater early again. I love you.

For the rest of you, this experience will be like an unwanted pregnancy. Did you need it? Or ask for it? Of course not. But did you have fun getting there? Undoubtedly. And lastly, can you stop it? Yes. The metaphorical abortion pill is the red X on the top left, and it’s your fucking right to click it.

#feminism

I’d like to begin this column by starting at the end (David Ershon style: https://youtu.be/vk7OGX-s0aI?t=26). More specifically, the time period around two-three weeks before you depart wherever it is that you are. I’ll set the scene.

You’re taking a nice little stroll down one of your popular city streets. You take a moment, and you stop. The sun peaks majestically through the trees to lightly radiate upon your skin; but you know what, you shine right back at that bitch. People bustle to and fro, hurriedly, yet in a manner that oddly manages to relax you. You inhale that Juul that mom sent you from home. You take a deep breath.

This city. This city is mine!

Meanwhile, an individual on the verge of ISIS conversion sees you, and yup, that settles it, he converted. Local residents stare at you, absolutely livid that you’d just stop in the middle of the fucking street like a clueless pigeon. “Worthless American trash”, whispers a homeless woman who just pooped herself. An old man deliberately bumps into your shoulder with surprising force, mumbling the equivalent of “cuntbag” in his native tongue.

But wait. You ask yourself — what would this moment be, if it wasn’t posted on a social platform? Were you even there? If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, what filter would you use to make your spray tan look natural?

Important questions. Important questions indeed.

So naturally, you whip out your rose gold iPhone. It’s Instagram story time, motherfucker. You find that angle that would make Pythagoras stiff as a brick, and you snap a shot of that famous monument (probably La Sagrada Família, you basic bitch) that you’ve posted enough times to make Bill Murray believe he was in a Groundhog Day sequel. You swipe filters until you’ve found the one that’s juuuuuust right (“Leprechaun Rainbow Jizz”), hit them with a geotag (because God knows I couldn’t survive if I didn’t know where you were), and, finally, you smack a caption on there.

“Never leaving”.

Don’t.

Don’t do this.

Please, FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK, don’t do this.

Asides from having unprotected sex with Magic Johnson, this is by far and away the quickest way for anyone to contract AIDS.

It’s like me going to a graveyard, taking a selfie with a tombstone, and captioning it “omg haha never dying!”.

Let’s be clear — you do leave. So don’t be fucking stupid. And also, for the record, you die too. Sooner than you think. Oh, and God isn’t real. Religion is a myth. The afterlife is sheer blackness. Unconscious and eternal nothingness.

Hell probably exists though. Rot in it.

See what I just did there? I expressed my religious beliefs freely. Did the manner in which I did it trigger some priests? It probably would have, but luckily, I’m not friends with any priests (too old for them I guess). Earlier, I expressed my thoughts on abortion. You see people, religious freedom in America does not mean that you can force others to live by those religious beliefs (credit: Barack Obama) — you have the right to practice whatever bullshit it is that you believe, and I have the right to say that it’s bullshit, but that doesn’t mean that I have the right to hurl actual bull feces at you when you enter an abortion clinic to stop it from happening.

It’s like a ban on me taking shits at work. Ignoring the fact that shits aren’t 9 months (but it may feel like it), extremely painful (at least relatively), and a completely life-altering decision (depends, I mean have you ever had two Chipotle burritos in one sitting?) — imagine the illegality of it anyway.

I love to take shits at work. 15–45 minutes on the can? Are you fucking kidding me? That’s a hell of a lot of me time, and it’s precious. And yes, Karen may walk in there after me and she may hate the scent (and possibly vomit) (she’s at least gagging I promise you that), but she has no right to tell me what I can and cannot do with my body. And if she does, I’ll shit right on her face. Right on your face Karen.

But in today’s day and age, a difference in political opinion means an intolerance of it, and action to altogether eradicate it. And such thought is propagated by the modern-day Pennywise that occupies the Oval Office, a man so narrow-minded and divisive that his time is best spent delegitimizing the truth and the media that relays it so that he can more easily push an agenda based on lies.

Too serious? Too serious. Let’s use a metaphor.

You see, Trump is like a child you give your iPhone to because that little fucking brat won’t shut the fuck up about wanting to play with it. So you give the little fucker the thing and open up Candy Crush, and say, “here, play this!”. But the thing is too fucking stupid to figure out that you just have to match the colors, I mean it’s so simple but babies are so, so fucking dumb, so the baby clicks out of the app and goes to text your ex.

(The thing can’t swipe up colors but it manages to text “I miss you”? The younger generation is so fucked.)

And then uh-oh, it’s gone into your photos, and FUCK, IT’S FOUND THE PRIVATE FOLDER WITH YOUR BOYFRIEND’S DICK PICS, AND OH MY GOD THEY’RE THE ONES WHERE HE TOOK THAT WEIRD ANGLE

(ballsack upwards)

AND HOLY SHIT IT’S SHOWING DAD, FUCK, FUCK ME, MAKE IT STOP, OH I KNEW AUNT CAROL SHOULD’VE ABORTED THIS THING GOD DAMNIT —

America!

Trump is that baby. And he’s stumbled upon Obama’s dong pictures to Michelle, and gotten incredibly insecure about the size of his Trump Jr.

So he’s changing everything Obama instituted to make up for it, from immigration policy to Obamacare to environmental protections to Constitutional interpretations, and we’re left to watch as Brett Kavanaugh and the rest of his puppets fuck up the world as we know it. Because to be a contrarian is not enough; for Trump, there can only be one man left standing (and therefore one penis, so he can claim his is the largest) — and this, my friends, absolutely demolishes democracy.

All because of a picture of an enormous penis.

Thanks Obama.

Now, have I managed to offend every person, at least slightly, who reads this? Several of you are thinking no, of course not, you fucking hypocrite — you have not demeaned liberals. But no! About five minutes back I made a slight joke about lesbians tasting like tea (honestly a backhanded compliment), and the really fucking annoying liberals who get offended at everything definitely got a little triggered.

Also, Karen voted for Hillary, and I pooped on her.

You played yourself.

Regardless, please, go vote.

Now I did promise abroad advice, and, like my penis after 10 shots, I did not come through for you. But low and behold, it’s the morning, and I’m hard as a rock! So here:

1. Where to study: go where you fit best. That’s one soft piece of advice, and something that may be impossible to determine, but the absolute last thing you should do is have someone else decide for you. Anyone who tells you that you absolutely just have to study where they did is probably the same person who moans every time they have pizza because it’s not “Italian enough”, the same person who says “omg haha free water!?!?!” every time you’re at a restaurant, and the same person who posts those cancerous Instagrams about wanting so desperately to go back, because, by golly, America blows. You could go with the flow and go to Barcelona, or not go with the flow and go to Thailand (and subsequently go with the flow with your soccer coach and end up in a cave), but make sure you go with you. Essentially, my advice: do not listen to advice on this. Also, don’t go to Russia.
2. Money. You see that number in your bank account? Look at it. Print it out for me. Make it into a nice, triple-ply piece of toilet paper. And then swiftly wipe your ass with it. It’s gone. There’s nothing you can do about it. You can be an annoying hardo and make a real nice Excel sheet about a proper weekly spending plan, but then oops, a club promoter comes up to you when you’re blacked out and offers you an 80 euro bottle of Grey Goose and I mean who the fuck are you to say no?
3. Plan trips early.
4. Be aware that you won’t do number 3. And a 7-hour, 30 euro bus ride actually is better than a 400 euro, last-second flight.
5. Travel with friends.
6. Take a trip alone — you’ll learn a lot about yourself. Mainly, that you don’t like to travel alone.
7. Step outside of your comfort zone. Meet new people. Try something new! Food? Skydiving? Language? Anal? The world is your oyster.
8. I’m not going to say that you should get addicted to cigarettes but open up your mind to them. Little bundles of fucking elixir. (But rip off the package first, they have disgusting images of dying people that really ruin the mood.)
9. Take pictures.
10. Call your parents at least once a week. Everything is new with you, and absolutely nothing is new with them (except maybe dad bought a 5-iron, and maybe mom bought a new Keurig, and hopefully the cat died). At the very least, text them what you’re doing or where you’re going. If you’re lucky, your father will respond with a “Love, Dad” at the end of the text like a fucking imbecile. Oh really dad? I thought this was Gandhi.
11. Go the “most viewed in ________” category on PornHub. I mean I don’t know about everyone else but Spaniards are into some really weird shit.
12. Be safe. Never walk home alone.
13. That being said, have at least one near-death experience.
14. Try you’re hardest to avoid being American. But know that everyone else is supremely conscious of it, so going to Starbucks when you’re hungover really won’t be the death of you.
15. When someone on the street offers you coke or weed, offer them heroin. That’ll rattle ‘em. If they say yes, run.
16. Write.
17. Fall in love with wherever it is that you go.

-Fromm

Suddenly, your eyes lock with her. One of the most beautiful girls you’ve ever seen. She whispers to her friend and they start giggling.

Is that kid with the glasses gay? I can’t tell haha

But you didn’t hear that. If anything she just told her friend that you were cute.

Alright fine. Yes. I’ll admit it. She’s also drinking a vodka cranberry. So is her friend. But if anything that’s just a bonding point for you guys now. And fuck it we all end up getting drunk so why not just drink what tastes good? If drinking Smirnoff Ices casually was socially accepted I’d have two at breakfast.

Anyway. You know a girl like that isn’t going to come up to a guy like you. So what’s your next move?

This, right here, is the essence of speaking Spanish. Not the vodka cranberry part. That was just a vital issue I needed to get off my chest. But the girl part, and for several reasons:

1. There are an extremely low amount of scenarios in which I go up to this girl and introduce myself. Gun to my mother’s head? 40% chance. Probably less than that. I’m just being generous since I know she’s reading this.

Every way you look at it, it’s a lose-lose for me. I either sputter like an ape and shit my pants, therefore ruining a perfectly good pair of khakis, or succeed momentarily in conversation, only for her to discover that, when the conversation began, I shit my khakis.

Do I soil myself every time I speak to someone in Spanish? No. Normally I’d be pretty comfortable with it. The real problem is the Sevillan accent.

In terms of hot girls at a bar, the Sevillan accent is your Meghan Markle — you stand absolutely no chance. Well maybe that’s a stretch, considering she’s engaged to the byproduct of Ron Weasley and Bob the Tomato from VeggieTales.

I bet you didn’t expect that to be so fucking spot on. But it was. Up yours.

Anyway. When Sevillans speak, they go Bruce Jenner on everybody. By that I mean they drop the D, so with words like “depende” (“it depends”) they really say “depene”, or “de pene” — which literally translates to “of the penis”.(especially ironic, seeing as I just referenced Bruce Junner). But you could see where things get confusing.

Did you notice that that’s already the second time I’ve mentioned male genitalia, in under 500 words? Stay tuned.

Sevillans also drop the S from words, and most often just the endings of words altogether. To top it off, they combine words and phrases into one (the English equivalent of turning “see you later” into “slater”, or something like that).

So this brings me to extended-metaphor reason 2: If I see an avenue out of the situation, I’ll simply revert back to what’s comfortable. I could go up to the girl and introduce myself, but it’s much more likely that I end up snuggling with my friend Garrett in my twin-sized bed and watching Good Will Hunting for the 114th time. The same goes for Spanish — as much as I want to be comfortable speaking it, I’ll more than happily speak English if I’m given a way out.

Once again, however, we run into problems.

For starters, let’s say I’m giving it my all and attempting to speak Spanish to the locals (this means I’m either drunk, or, actually nevermind, there’s really no second option, I’m drunk, hence another reason, probably the most essential, of why flirting and speaking Spanish are so alike). I’m fully torqued and ready to go and I’ll start things off with an emphatic “Hola”.

Hello. How’re you?

Right out the gates I’m fucking rattled. I come in hot, with the male accent equivalent of Sofia Vergara, and I get rejected with some cold hard English. It’s like going up to that hot girl at the bar, commenting on your vodka cranberries, and her calling you a pussy for not having a rum and coke. But as I said earlier, I’m resilient.

“Muy bien. Y usted?”

Good. What would you like to order?

It’s a pointless back and forth. I am unequivocally American, and there’s nothing I can do to avoid or hide it. It’s like having a really small third nipple that everyone just fucking knows about. You’re skiing in the Swiss Alps, under layers of winter gear, and some dude just points at you and goes “damn look at that dude he for sure has a third nipple”. And you know what? He’s right. You do.

On the other hand, most Sevillans you run into don’t speak English at all. Such is the case with my host family.

I live with a 79-year old couple, Alicia and Emilio. They remind me of my grandparents, in that they are both really old.

Alicia is an angel. In terms of hot girls at a bar, I really can’t make any allusions here without crossing some serious lines. But back in the day she definitely made your head spin. I see the way she looks at me sometimes; that sparkle in her eye in undeniable. Foxy, to say the least.

Alicia makes coffee in the morning, cooks two great meals a day, and does my laundry every week. She also, like most Sevillans, speaks at the pace of a coked-out hyena. I say on a good day I pick up about 20% of what she puts down. Most lunches and dinners consist of her talking about God knows what for 20–30 minutes while I sit there helplessly, praying that “Ahhhh sí” is a sufficient response to whatever the fuck it is she’s blabbering about.

The best part about her, in all seriousness, is how hard she cares for her husband. And let me tell you, the clock is ticking for this guy.

In terms of the bar flirting scene, he’s the old guy who fell down the stairs on his way in and died.

Emilio is ungodly old, and, therefore, he lives a pretty simple life. He exists in two spaces, the first of which is a rocking chair in front of the television. He spends his entire day watching old re-runs of failed American crime television shows (Rizzoli and Isles, The Mentalist, CSI: Rhode Island, etc.). I mean if they played this shit in Guantanamo Bay it’d probably be considered too harsh for torture. It’s just so fucking bad.

But once again this dude is so old I don’t even think he knows what he’s watching. The other day I sat down in the living room to watch some cable with him (horrible waste of time), and, suddenly, he picked up the remote. Finally, I thought. There’s hope for the geezer! He was going to surprise me, turn some Spanish porn on or something wild. I could feel it.

He pressed a button. Channel changed.

Didn’t have time to process what channel it was on until he changed the channel again.

And again.

And again.

After 12 switches, this bastard ends up on the same fucking channel we started with, and proceeds to hold the television remote up to his ear and start talking.

As you can imagine, no one responded to him, because a remote it quite fucking obviously not a telephone. But I was so pissed at him that I let it happen for at least three minutes.

The other spot he lives at is the dinner table, about 30 feet from his rocking chair. Make no mistake though, it takes him about 45 minutes to 6 hours to walk there. He makes crawling babies look like Usain Bolt, and Kirk Douglas look like Macauley Culkin.

The other day I sat down at the dinner table, and it was just me and him for about five minutes. And he just stared at me. The entire time. After about the third minute I wondered if it was a tad sexual, so I shot him one of my looks, but he didn’t budge. After the fifth minute I realized he simply didn’t know who I was, and he was intently trying to figure out who the intruder in his home was.

When Alicia came in, he asked where the cat was. They own a bunny.

Also, I’d say around twice a week, Emilio chokes on soup. I mean who the fuck chokes on soup? It’s soup. It’s liquid. Almost impossible to choke on, some might say. But Emilio, he finds a way. So he’ll be sitting there, choking, dying, going purple in the face, while Alicia gets up and gives him the Heimlich. Meanwhile I sit there helpless with my soup (drinking it with ease because I’m not incompetent), trying to not be disgusted by the fact that soup is coming out of this guy’s nose three feet away from me. Utter chaos.

That’s my life. My Spanish has improved for sure. I’ve traveled to a bunch of places, done some stuff, but honestly who gives a shit. I know you don’t, because I don’t, and I nearly get lupus every time I scroll through my Instagram feed. You want to see pictures? Google “pictures of places in Europe”, photoshop some girls you know into the picture, think of the douchiest and most horrendously cliché caption you can muster, and, low and behold, it’s the same shit.

Oh, I know you’ve been waiting for it. The clever political innuendo I’ll suddenly dive into that’ll knock your socks off. But I’m tired, and I already spent a good portion of this blog bashing a debilitating 80-year-old old fucker.

-Fromm

I’m not exactly sure what a root canal entails. No one does. Not even dentists. If you’re sitting there thinking, “I know how it works!”, you probably floss. Translation: you’re a sociopath.

The basic gist of a root canal is essentially a repeated stabbing. Your dentist will jam a 20–25 inch Samurai sword up your gums repeatedly for a few hours until he figures you’ve bled juuuust enough to push you to the edge of death. Obviously I wasn’t exactly prepared for this kind of procedure, so upon his first plunge into my gums I muttered something along the lines of “fuck me in the face” and then seized a little bit.

“Oh, did that hurt?”

It’s like asking someone if they cried after watching Marley and Me. The answer is pretty fucking obvious and pretty fucking simple. So my dentist would apologize, and then afterwards he’d apply a pretty heavy dose of numbing medicine.

But every once in a while he’d pull out a 40–50 inch machete to cram up my cheek, and then, after observing my wince and trickling tears, he’d ask me if that hurt. Well, yes, you fucking masochist. So he’d apply more numbing medicine.

This process went on for hours. It was like getting kicked in the balls again and again and again, until finally you couldn’t feel anything down there anymore. I’ve honestly never been kicked in the balls consecutive times like that but I’m just going to assume that’s what happens and not run any diagnostics on it.

This process, to me, is the Trump presidency.

We’re numb.

It seems to me that the most universal response to his recent attack on immigrant’s home countries is a shrug. I mean no doubt at first your jaw dropped; it hit you in the face like a dentist’s surgical tool, but within minutes you realize it’s nothing new. This is apparently the way things are now. We’ve overdosed on numbing medicine, and we sit hopeless as we watch that numbness slowly turn into complacency.

I’ll pause here.

I get it, you’re probably a little taken aback. You expected to open up a travel blog and read some cute little story about how I found my home away from home in a quaint Spanish village. No. That’s not what this is. If I get the chance to cram my liberal agenda up your ass then that’s exactly what I’m going to do. You’ll be sitting at my funeral when all of a sudden someone slips in a line about the beauty of universal health care in my eulogy. You can’t run or hide from it. Stay on your toes, asshole.

With that being said, I should still probably provide you with something legitimately related to travel — since theoretically that’s the point of this whole thing. So, I hereby wish to start a campaign to change the name of LaGuardia Airport to Trump International.

Look, we’ve already started naming airports after presidents. To Trump this would be a huge honor, and I have no doubt that he’d splurge on the opportunity. So let me explain why.

No one on earth has ever had a positive experience at LaGuardia. It’s like a trip to the dentist. Have you ever seen a flight plan on your calendar to fly into or out of LaGuardia and go, “oh fuck yes! Finally! Let’s fly motherfucker!” No. You haven’t. And it’s understandable. But you’re ready for it.

If you know something is going to be really really fucking shitty, then you can mentally prepare yourself for how shitty it’s going to be. Like a tequila shot. You know how much it’s going to blow, but fuck, you gotta do it to get from point A to point B. So for the time being, you suck it up.

But then it happens. You wait 2 hours in a security line. Your flight gets delayed 7 hours. The Caesar salad that tasted like the inside of your dog’s asshole and the shot of beer that came with it cost $34. You baby barf a little bit of Patrón. And you get pissed. You KNEW this was coming — but you’re really really really pissed off that that’s the way it has to be.

So Trump calls African nations “shithole” countries, or says that all Haitians have AIDS. You can’t say you’re surprised, like it shocks you in any way, but the reality of having a legitimate racist in office still hits you like a ton of bricks.

But we all move on with our day. We go from point A to point B, and even to point Q. Now we’re focused on Trump’s medical report, or on analyzing his first year in office, or on where I’m going to travel next weekend.

So for a moment I’ll regress — both in time and in moral values. I’m going to operate and think like I believe a Republican would. So let’s say that I agree with Trump; from a practical standpoint, the countries that he’s identified can indeed be deemed “shitholes”, if by “shithole” you mean economically, politically, socially, or opportunistically inferior to these oh so great United States. Doesn’t it stand then, that people in those “shithole” countries — living in a terrorized or less advantageous state — might want to leave that shithole? And come to a place, say, that isn’t a shithole?

That logic is problematic for millions of reasons, and it isn’t one with which I operate. But in order to deal with a man like Trump — say, a shithole — maybe you have to think like one. But doing so assumes that these countries and their people deserve less respect, that they should not be afforded the same dignities and rights as people who are white or American. It legitimizes racism and the man who spews it. And finally, it assumes that our country hasn’t been made a shithole itself.

But it has. We’re a shithole country, run by a shithole, who was voted to office by a bunch of shitholes and is currently still supported by a bunch of shithole shitfucks.

But our economy is doing well.

In the meantime I’ve left this shithole, to go explore the many reasons why these other countries aren’t. I’ll keep you updated as I go.

-Fromm