Hellraisers and other obsessions

Over the years, I’ve amassed a small mountain of notebooks—teetering stacks of half-formed thoughts, metaphysical dilemmas, and impulsive lists. Despite coming of age in the heyday of LiveJournal, I managed only two brief forays into blogging. These scrawls, for the most part, are love letters to fleeting obsessions and obscure histories I stumble upon—passions so ephemeral they’re rarely revisited, let alone reread. I often find myself tangled between sharing these obsessions and the discomfort of offering them up to be consumed, as if something precious rots in the process. Absurd, really. As if I’m safeguarding anything in my fixation on the subtle art of worm grunting (have you ever heard two words more poetically curious?), Ulrike Ottinger’s travelogues, or the market value of “creature cock” fantasy sex toys.123 And so, I’ve experimented with sharing. The first blog was called Raw Pussy (don’t google it—it’s gone, and the results are definitely NSFW). It ran from 2011 to 2014 and focused on essays about political and cultural outsiders. The project also included a razor blade distro, a limited run of DIY stick-and-poke tattoo kits (sold at punk gigs—don’t worry, no infections), and free reprints of some of the century’s most controversial and bizarre manifestos.

The second blog, Unmother (2015), is still archived online. It was where I wrote about the days leading up to my first abortion and the surreal experience of taking abortion pills. To my surprise, Unmother went viral—perhaps because, back then, abortion was rarely discussed openly. When it was, the stories we heard were either clinical or tinged with religious guilt, never the messy, mundane truths of what it feels like—or the unshakable certainty of having no regrets. I’m not sure how much has really changed since then, except that now, depending on where you live, sharing your abortion story could lead to someone’s arrest.

Since then, I’ve stumbled my way through a handful of op-eds, popped up in a few documentaries, directed a film, had two more abortions (one broadcast on live TV), overshared far too much on social media, and somehow settled into a quieter rhythm—organizing, making things, and figuring out how to get by. Along the way, I’ve racked up a series of fever-dream experiences: satanic rituals, a death-match challenge from Alex Jones, and that time Stormy Daniels used her glorious breasts to pluck a $20 bill from my mouth. Somewhere in the chaos, I stepped back from writing publicly—partly because my work became more hands-on, and partly because I discovered there’s a hard cap on how many death threats a person can receive before spiraling into perpetual anxiety. The relentless urgency of it all drained me in ways I didn’t fully notice at the time. And then there’s the quiet terror of being vulnerable—of watching your precious, private obsessions get flattened into grotesque, disposable content.

Now, in 2025, we’re living in the kind of dystopian cliché I imagined in my teens: late capitalism, widening economic divides, rampant consumerism, and unbridled surveillance—not that these forces weren’t present then, but now I can see them more clearly. All systems fail. All systems harm.4 Political and ecological destabilization feels both glaringly inevitable and hauntingly imperceptible at once. There’s a strange tension between the forced participation demanded by social media and the isolation it breeds—a surveillance state masquerading as connection, leaving us more isolated than ever in a moment when our very survival demands solidarity.5

Writing has been the throughline—steady, if sometimes faltering—through all the years of flux and absurdity. I’ve kept writing. But lately, as we edge into what feels like an increasingly precarious era, I’ve been thinking about what it means to share some of the things I’m wrestling with—not as polished ideas, but as a way to be more open, more vulnerable, more curious in public. Truthfully, I’ve been grappling with the weight of human suffering and the quiet dread that none of it—neither the suffering nor the attempts to alleviate it—might truly matter, that all efforts dissolve into nothing, or worse, are reduced to pure performance. And yet, sharing a few thoughts—unfinished and imperfect—feels like the only thing left to do. Not because it’s a solution, or a way to make sense of things, but because it’s something, however small, in a world that seems to require everything to be bigger, louder, and more final than it can ever be.

So here we are. What I’m offering is something imperfect, outside the unnerving pull of algorithms and the way they shape everything we see and do. Expect essays, historical context, cultural reflections, readings, and resources—tools for navigating a hostile world.

I don’t want this to be a one-sided conversation. You’ll have the opportunity to ask questions, share your thoughts, and help shape this space with me.

Welcome to Hellraisers. Thanks for being here.