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thePartialist

baby-eating godless writer
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Lo Siento

1 min read
People ask me all the time if there's a single phrase I know in all the languages I've dabbled in.

This usually comes after an evening of me insulting folks in Russian, their mothers in Cambodian, hitting on them in Italian, French, Hindi, Spanish, and yeah, English (fuck you, I'm lonely), drinking in Japanese, and begging off in, I don't know, Base-10.

What I do, when people pin me to the corkboard with this accidentally unnerving question, is what I would expect anyone to do: I lie right the hell through my smile bones.

"Oh, it's just more hitting on people, all the way down," or the like.

But really...

For reasons most of you should already know...

(But also, seriously, fuck you if you just guessed...)

Yeah, okay, fine...

It's, "I'm sorry," and I'm up to 27 distinct languages.

Stop me on the street some time and ask for one. Smart money says I owesky, anyhow.

Ti Voglio Bene,
-zhou doucette
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Jack: "Dad, are we atheists?"

Me: "No. I am."

"Well, what am I?"

"You're you. You're Jackson. What else could you be?"

"Well, I'm not a Christian, right?"

"There are something like 2,800 religions practiced on earth."(I've since looked it up, it's closer to 4,200. I updated Jack just now.) "A christian is someone who thinks that 2,799 of those religions are false, and that their religion is true. An atheist is someone who thinks that all of them are false- or at least that they all fail to provide compelling evidence for themselves."

"Okay, then I think I'm an atheist."

"It's fine for you to call yourself whatever you like, but I want you to remember that you can change that at any time, as many times as you like, for any reason.

My only goal in this area is to help you discover the best ways to learn, and the best and worst reasons to believe something.

You're not my property. I don't get to tell you what to believe, or not believe. You're a whole, complete person. You have been since you were born. This is important. You'll find that people think of you as a person-in-training - who should believe what tall people say without asking why-  rather than a person. That human-but-less-human idea is the source of so many kinds of suffering. It's just-"

"Can I play xbox?"

"Yup."

-----------------------------

My children and I have indirectly discussed religion many, many times. It usually only arises in the context of why people would vote to keep rights away from this group, or why they'd have a problem with that group in the first place, etc. It's pretty beneficial to remember that most people are generally good, feel that they're spreading or defending good, and believe that they're doing so for good reasons. Knowing these reasons has assisted me in not giving in every time to cynicism, or fully giving up on discussion.

I actually find it quite surprising (and I  imagine many of the people who glance twice at my posts would agree) that today - a bit over 7 years into his very bright and inquisitive life - this is the very first time Jackson and I have ever directly discussed atheism or religion. I honestly didn't realize what had happened until I was reflecting later on the narrowness and brevity of my definitions.

I've received some startling and often vitriolic push-back from some of my fellow unbelievers, in the past. Presumably this is due to the view that religious indoctrination of children is child abuse, and so they equate my failure to 'armor' my children against religion with that same abusive practice. I've seen it on other issues as well - most notably my continued support for religious studies in US schools as early as 3rd grade.

(Before anyone starts searching for my email address - jdozat@gmail.com - let me clarify the above statement:

Religions have been with humanity from the beginning. They have influenced art, shaped history, and informed philosophy and science. For these reasons, I think that comparative religious study at a young age is a justifiable part of a complete education. Also, it may be the only chance that some children have of hearing that others believe differently from their parents.)

However, I would argue that 'armoring' against religion is exactly what I'm doing, only more so. I'm committed to teaching my children that there are objectively good and bad reasons to believe something. Religion is is truly a wealth of bad ideas being believed for even worse reasons - but it holds no monopoly. Pseudoscience, alternative medicine, and the host of psychics, mystics, gurus, and other charlatans on Twitter prove as much. For maximum effect, this commitment absolutely has to extend to what I hold to be true and how much of it I discuss with my children. I won't let our relationship in these vital, early years be another example of lazy intellectual dishonesty: Dad expecting them to believe what he says, for the bad reason that he's Dad.

Your children are not your property any more than your great-grandmother. If you're going to try to tell them what to believe, I hope you at least have enough courage to ask yourself the following:

Why do I believe this? Why do I need my children to believe this? Would I consider teaching my children about beliefs that compete with mine?

If your answer to this last is no, it's almost certain that your answers for the first two aren't very good.

Try raising people who think for themselves, and who question their own conclusions as readily as the beliefs of others. It's a pain in the ass much of the time, but parenting isn't about making life easier for yourself - at least not until your children can help out with chores.
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The Marines on the bus,
Devil Dogs, they call themselves,
they drink your Jager with you
in exchange for some THC pills.

The dancer, Texas,
with the knife scar from her right eye
to just below her mouth,
she gives you a phone number and a smile,
and asks why no one has any marijuana.

Nik, the hyperactive
half-dead punk from Seattle,
he's moving to LA,
and he wants to know how to ask
people on the street for 'black' or 'white.'
He's never shot china before,
but he's sure he will before the weekend.
He gives you a Seattle cell phone number
on heavy sketch paper
and an unused sharp from a Wal-Mart 10-pack
and probably, odds are,
since you shared your whiskey with him,
he gave you Hep, too.

Eskimo, from right by Humboldt,
the raver-turned-model,
she gave you email addresses
and web addresses,
on the back of Nik's number.
And she showed you her knife,
and told her your story,
while you got drunk
and waited for the pills to kick in.

The Marines, they'll probably be dead soon,
but that's their job.
Texas/Alyssa, she's going to be fine,
when she gets where she's going-
back to the guy who cut her.
Scars never killed anybody.
Nik thinks he escaped his 3 warrants,
and the 18 months of treatment,
they promised him.
Maybe he did, but for sure
he didn't escape Nik.
Eskimo, she trusts the 45-year-old Sicilian
she's going to phoenix
to meet and let photograph her,
and that's why we'll never see
or hear from her again.

Nik's needle went in the trash
with the empty pack of smokes,
the empty bottle of Seagram's
and some pieces of paper
that said "call me" or
"email me." and ended with
"your friend," and a name.

You don't have any friends left
by the time you step off at Long Beach.
They're all of them, well into
their respective futures now.
And they're all of them just about dead.

No need to change the names
or try to protect the innocent.
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lists

3 min read
Zoloft Diaries Pt 2

I don't wear a wallet anymore. I have no idea where my identification credentials are, but I'm pretty sure that all the money I have is in the jeans I've been wearing since Saturday.

When I did have a wallet, I made lists. I'd make lists that all went kind of, but not exactly, like this:

"Joe Dozat in Five Years:

1. First off, it's Joseph now. Not Joe. Joseph is an adult. Joe was a kid.

2. Joseph Dozat is a happily married Buddhist.

3. Joseph Dozat speaks three languages besides his native tongue- Japanese, French and Russian.

4. Joseph is still in college, because he wants to keep learning and growing.

5. Joseph only does drugs occasionally, and doesn't drink very often.

6. Joseph has lots of friends who, coincidentally, only do drugs occasionally, and do not drink very often.

7. Joseph is still writing and recording music. He spends his downtime at his job, which he has held for three years without incident."

At some point, perhaps at several, the lists became unnecessary. Goals and dreams became unnecessary. Changing became unnecessary. Promises, ditto.

Or so I thought.

I promised Woody Harrelson, when I met him, that I'd never, ever shop anywhere owned by the Shell Oil Company. Wood said they were probably behind the hangings of three of his friends in Africa. This was a great big promise, because I love Woody Harrelson.

Last week, I promised Kate a few days of no whiskey. Kate, she says I have to be here for her, in a real way, and the whiskey doesn't help. This is still a great big promise, because I love Kate.

What you should know is the view from the front door of the house goes like this:

Left on 13th- Albertson's Grocery store. Across the street is the Liquor Barn, where you can get, if you're so-inclined, good, cheap whiskey.

Right on 13th- Shell Gas Station.

What else you should know is beer is not whiskey. In the Midwest, it's not even alcohol.

Yesterday, I mumbled a quiet prayer of apology to Woody, and I went right on 13th for beer.

When three homeless people asked me on the way home, I gave them each a Miller Lite.

I'm confident that Woody would call it a wash. Besides, my promise to him never made it on any list.
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la mer

3 min read
I wasn't there, but you hear things.

The March wind was blowing hard the day they went to scatter Grandpa Smith's ashes into the yawning Pacific. The wind made messes out of everyone's done-up hair. Cigarettes burnt down twice as fast. When she cried, Grandma's tears tracked black eyeliner down her face, but not straight down. The wind, it streaked Grandma's makeup more and more to the right side of her face, as the tears rolled down big and heavy and black.

This was- had been- my grandmother's father, and what was left of him was going into the ocean, in accordance with his wishes.

The concensus was that no way could she open the urn and just dump him out, scattering him on the wind, and probably across a half-mile of the Emeryville, California landscape. The plan was to drop the whole urn into the ocean and just let it float, float, float on out to nowhere.

That was the plan. A resolution, firmed and made solid and real in her head, didn't make it any easier.

But she did it. Grandma dropped the urn that held her father into the Pacific and watched for awhile, crying, as he sailed away.

If you're a kid who grew up in California, this is the ocean that you were taught to fear and respect.

I was married once, a lifetime ago, on this ocean. It didn't work out. Love and ties and relationships that would never end, did, and the ocean rolled on, relentlessly apathetic about the whole affair.

Last year there was a tsunami in Indonesia, which caused my brand of clove cigarettes to go up fifty cents a pack. As a result, last year Robert and I spent hours drunk at the beach wearing armor and stabbing the heart of the ocean with every sharp object in reach. Rakes, knives, my neighbor's lawnmower- they were all ammunition in our raids on the Great Blue Enemy.

Children from the neighborhood wore a lot of bandages that summer.

I haven't seen the ocean since then, but we're going back on Friday to scatter Grandma's ashes in accordance with her wishes. The memorial was yesterday, and there was beer and whiskey and wine and champagne and my cousin, Vanessa.

Vanessa brought a near-complete smile and she brought some news in a big, pink bag.

Two days after they committed Grandpa Smith's ashes to the Pacific, Vanessa's dad, my grandma's brother, got a phone call.

The ocean, the thing we're taught to fear and respect, it brought Grandpa to rest between some rocks on the shore of some little town north of San Francisco. Dry and intact, the urn full of my dead grandmother's dead father is with us today, in a big, pink bag.

Mom and I and everyone else who can get the day off, we're going to the ocean together on Friday.

In just two days, Grandma and her dad are going home. Together.
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