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• 1 2018-10-13T07:19:06-07:00 the go fund mes never end 28 By Alex Rafaelov gallery 2020-08-02T17:28:36-07:00

  Most of my friends are drug addicts and alcoholics, 
  They kill them selves over and over again 
  They say waking up every day is their worst nightmare 
  But they wake up anyway 
  I’ve never seen anyone more happy or alive then them 
  They all have pretty pictures of them selves up on their Instagram but talk about how much they want to die on their finstas 
  They have the best laughs and the warmest smiles 
  I see myself in them 
  They probably see themselves in me 
  We see ourselves in each other as a way to make us whole 
  Anis father killed him self a couple months back 
  cancer tucked jesses mom into bed at night then forgot to wake her up  
  Lillie’s mom died when she was little and she was left with 
  her father who used to touch her 
  I still don’t know the whole story 
  Xavis dad beats her  
  And we all know someone who’s killed them self or a friend who died 
  I saw how Dina killed herself when I was 13 
  I’ve been playing hide and seek with my emotions ever since 
  The blood didn’t splatter 
  And there was no Big Bang as the train split through her neck 
  At that point you couldn’t tell what was troat and what was neck everything was inside out 
  Just like this life that I’m living 
  The memory’s I have are made out of nightmares 
  I wish they were nightmares 
  I don’t want it to be real  
  I talk about my traumas on my finsta account hope to turn these memories into stories 
  We all sit around the pit fire that is the internet and exchange ghost stories of our past  
  Hope to turn these please for help into prayers and then into miricals 
  I’ve been linking too many go fundmes to my instagram account 
  All the money in the world and there still isn’t enough to pay the funeral costs 
  I’ve been reposting pictures of missing children who wandered off to the moon and never came back 
  I hope they 
  Come back 
  And if not 
  I hope they land somewhere amongst the stars 
  We drink and drink and drink like coke and rum came from the fountain of youth 
  We don’t feel real 
  When the world is dancing beneath your feet and your head is too fucked up to to notice the difference between dirt and the sky anything feels real 
  People say they get fucked up to escape reality but we lost reality’s definition long ago 
  We know nothing about it 
  Everything seems like reality now even when it isn’t 
  Even when I’m disassociated from life 
  It doesn’t feel like the world isn’t there it feels like I’m not there like 
  Like I’m the one who’s not real 
  It’s normal for me to not feel real 
  That place in limbo is almost like my second home 
  I was scrolling through my twitter feed the other day and every other post is 
  A political hoax or a missing kid 
  Sometimes I want to believe the government is some giant allusion made to scare us like the boogie man 
  Sometimes I wanna believe all those kids ran away and came back home after a day or too 
  But go fund mes never end 
  And we just keep adding up the funeral costs 
  We share our grief and condolences in the comments section and virtually tell the world things will get better 
  But at the end of the day 
  I go home to empty bottles of wine and empty some more just to pass the time 
  I go home and wonder if I’m really alive 
  I’m lying in my bed wondering if maybe I just really wanna die 
  My phone goes off again 
  It’s a twitter post notification from god 
  He said “@alex You’re already dead” 
  Sent from my iPhone
  
  By Alex Rafaelov

  This poem is a response to hardtruth #74:

  #74, stay open to contradictions and power #offline
   

  See Alex Juhasz respond in Podcast form to hardtruth #74:

  "Black Lives Matter: Stay Open to Contradictions and Power #offline"
• 1 2017-10-23T18:56:05-07:00 #74, stay open to contradictions and power #offline 9 April 1, 2017 plain 2020-08-02T17:29:36-07:00 On March 30 and 31, I made good on my 2nd pledge @50: “to share this project, for its final #50hardtruths, through a one-to-one, person-to-person effort (via email or IRL), thereby connecting my truths to a person, or people, who I know, or who I can see and talk to, and who might truly want, need, or use it (otherwise why would they be there?) I will ask them to do the same.” I gave two live talks about the project (still in process! I’m only at #74, I have a month more to go …) The first presentation was held at Recess‘s Public Opinion Laboratory about fake news, Faked/Out, organized by Adam Lambert and held at his “office and operational hub,” Fake Out News Incorporated (FONI). Then the next day I spoke about the project at the CUNY at the Crossroads: Diversity and Intersectionality in Action Conference. As I had hoped, the project transformed #offline.
  
  “12 skeptics enter a room … ” (a #100hardtruths by Moira Tierney. It is the first of several shared with me by the twelve FONI correspondents who engaged with me on March 30, some of whom are pictured below. My attempt to bundle their #100hardtruths-#fakenews in the post that follows also honors of one of my own: “Our usually small, succinct online one-offs become more culturally and politically productive when bundled, and even better, when used purposefully towards stated goals.”)
  At the end of my presentation about the project, I asked the attendees, “can we be here together beyond proto-being?” My question honored the possible intersections of Lambert’s more idealistic hopes for FONI with my own more bleak findings about my experiences working on the project online and within social media, and my linked hopes for its possible real-world connections.
  Lambert explains:

  “FONI [is a] a news service very much concocted for the present moment. Rather than go on the attack and decry the fake as a malice, this project operates from the premise that fakeness and fake news can provide an optimistic space for wish fulfillment and self-actualization. Facts must always be interpreted, and they beg to be questioned. Alternative facts and alternative fictions are possible daydream spaces that might serve as portals to hopeful futures and unobtainable realities. Why subscribe to false agendas when we can make our own? And finally: Does accepting fake news as a given rather than a problem provide us with the impetus we need create the world we want?”

  And I wrote this as part of #100hardtruths #55, choose to be digitally productive rather than reactive:

  “Having this place for expression, ‘audience,’ friends, interaction, validation, non-validation, the production and consumption of knowledge and culture, feels like something. It’s not a nothing. Yet, I know it is a sorry substitute for the building, engaged, place-based, interactions that sustain me and other people and movements. I have often called it (the production, movement, and connecting to and through well-made digital words and images) proto-political, a step toward well-being and world-changing but not those things themselves. But here I’ll go farther, and name it is a kind of proto-being, a half-life pointing to great possibility. Thus, the real use and value of producing internet content is the potentiality written into words and images and their reception: mine, yours, and ours.”

  “12 skeptics enter a room … ” and two hours later expressed these sentiments about #fakenews, and many more, unrecorded, maybe remembered, and certainly encountered:
  • there is more face to face interaction, more organizing and protest, right now in NYC, than there has been in many years, perhaps since the 1960s and 1970s. This follows a period of particular quiet (outside of Occupy). From Sherry Millner and Ernest Larsen
  • ever more skeptical of the internet and its media (social and mainstream), ever more isolated, we seek and understand the power, draw, and possibilities of the face-to-face (the 12 skeptics.)
  • “Tiffany Trump is dating a democrat.” Chloe Jones and Tony Christian
  • the composition of one’s online tone via what one posts versus what one reads is exhausting, deceptive, and also leads to possibilities of disruption, if you step outside your tone in a moment of crisis. From Ali Burstein and Alexa Smithwrick
  • the perception and declaration of this as a crisis reveals deep deceptions. Most of the world suffers tyrants and their abuses of truth and media, and here in the US, there has long been mystification. From Masaha Godovannaya and others
  • there is something refreshing and also horrible in the Trump administration’s bald honesty about its brutality, greed, and violence. Nilita Vachani and Masaha Godovannaya
  • Non-digital technologies—newspapers, clocks—allow for visions, frameworks, juxtapositions, multiplicities of temporarlity that are somehow harder to find in digital spaces. Jeanne Liotta and Moira Tierney
  • Many young people get their news from WorldStarHipHop. From Ernest Larsen.
  • Recently “science” became a blue state truth, and stopped requiring skepticism. Alexa Smithwrick
  • Engaging offline allows for a physical distance between what you say and what you hear. It allows you to listen. Masaha Godovannaya
  • In the 1960s, leftists got their news from Liberation News Service, the Village Voice, at the time a local paper, and alternative media sources. The mainstream media was dominant, and few others had access to making news.
  • The twelve skeptics in the room get their news from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Democracy Now, NPR, Fox News, The Guardian, longer-form journalism via magazines, and through their Facebook and Twitter feeds. They are often doing something else while reading it.
  • Skepticism and mistrust are the dominant modalities of perception for this time. We hunger excavations of deeper truths through scholarship, art making, investigative journalism and the honoring and depiction of our own subjective truths (the 12 skeptics).
  This bundle of #100hardtruths does not sit or work well here; does not do the experience justice. Affect flees; complexity flattens. As we “work towards qualities of principled encounter or use over quantities of bogus reception for our internet expression” (another of my more recent #100hardtruths) by engaging together in thinking about social media in real life, we must gracefully accept that these encounters will refuse to be sharable or representable in the languages of social media even as and because they are so inter-subjectively true.
  
  See More:
  • Feministonlinespaces, Alexandra Juhasz
  • ev-ent-anglement, Alexandra Juhasz
  • #100hardtruths-#fakenews: an online digital primer

  To see a poetic response to this hardtruth:

  the go fund mes never end
   

  See Alex Juhasz respond in Podcast form to hardtruth #74:

  "Black Lives Matter: Stay Open to Contradictions and Power #offline"