DIARY OF A COFFIN DODGER CHAPTER A

CHAPTER A

The day started as most did, with a cup of coffee. But nothing else was usual about that day. Nor that I did not drink the coffee as I sat on a step.

A cold, damp concrete step at the top of a flight of seven.

I looked down the flight of steps to where the bottom step abutted a yard. A yard with a despondent vibe, deepened by the morning's paltry sunlight.

A grey, soggy, overcast morning, like an absolute downer of a mood.

That mirrored my frame of mind as I looked across from the step towards a fence yards away from where I sat. A dilapidated wooden structure adorned with a vine's scrawny brown tendrils.

A sagging ruin that marked the boundary of the backyard of a house.

My house whose back door I rest against as I sat on that chilly top step and grasped my cup of coffee, like clinging on to a lifebuoy. A means of remaining alert so as not to drift back down into sleep's soothing billows.

But this morning, I am disinterested in the drink's effects.

My heart is pounding and I am hypervigilant since I climbed out of bed this morning. Thoughts of the day ahead keep me from nodding off in sleep's gentle rocking cradle.

With a feeling of despair, as I look over the yard, I wonder what aching depths of human misery and hopelessness the sun had shone its beams over.

I thought about corners of the world where sunlight had illuminated those acres of unhappiness.

Unnerving light-filled scenes while night smothered my house and the parts of the world where I live in moonless darkness and I lay in bed sleeping in fits and starts.

I have now lost interest in drinking the coffee. I stand up and throw it away.

The hot liquid spreads out over the yard and coats the scraggy remains of a lawn as I turn and open the back door.

I enter the house and pick up the car keys and my backpack. It's time I faced the day and what it will bring.

I leave the house and climb into my car and start the engine.

As I drive away from the house, my house mates go about their morning routines. Tasks which follow a comforting pattern.

There's little about the task which I face today that is comforting. Though there will be room for happiness and celebration at its achievement. A task for which I have planned. But a plan that will be subject to the whimsical violence of ego-centric men.

I am a coffin dodger and, over the years, my time-wasted body has been in spaces where the encounters with men have not been pleasant. Now, I can't stand the bastards.

I keep losing focus as I drive, distracted by fears about the task. I therefore turn off the road and enter the car park of an oval.

I park the car and, while children kick a ball around the oval, I reach into my backpack and take out my notebook and pen. I will make notes for my Diary about my reflections on men.

Thoughts on my life and its engagement with the myriad way men's violence targets women and girls. I will use my memories of the time, decades ago, I worked at an asylum as a template to illustrate that violence.

A simple tale, beginning with this chapter, that will tell of the many sadistic, venomous ways men stymie the life choices of girls and women.

Vindictive thoughts, deeds, and language directed against any woman or girl who attempts to impede men’s puerile, childlike self-entitlement to build the world according to men's needs, fantasies, and desires.

An internet tale for you, in particular, the male reader, who will stuff up the narratives in my diary in the mendacious ways you are skilled at.

 But I don’t bloody care.

Do your fucking worst, keep braying to the world your misogynistic expletives while I ignore any shit you spray my way. Your mendacity will not silence my voice.

So, you, the male reader, because you have choices and freedoms men deny to girls and women, you have two options: (1) piss off.

The siren call of your ego sings to you of your membership of that elite group of men, masters of the universe. Therefore, the world and this diary teach you nothing that you don’t know. 

Or (2) read on.

By doing that, a light will glow, however faint, in that unfathomable darkness of your childlike intellect. A spark of illumination as you gain an insight into why so many of us resent the outsized space you take in our world.

However, option (2) comes at a cost.

In reading my Diary's chapters, you need to face a cruel struggle as you dim the blazing lamp of your fantasy world.

Wrestle that lamp's beam away from the openings into which you want to shove your dick.

If that struggle is beyond your powers of proficiency, bugger off then.

Go to a porn site and let blood surge along the vessels and arteries of your loins. Focus the laser beam of your degenerate fantasies on scenes of debased and exploited humanity.

Yes, I reference that wrinkled piece of meat between your legs. The way it stands to attention when your fantasy world conjures up an image of a young aperture where no man has shoved his penis.

According to your sperm-soaked dreams, it's a space for you to shove your dick in as the deluded outcome of your pipe dream. The eternal heterosexual male fantasy of jiggling your cock within a virginal female's hole.

A gorging of your horrifying imagination on a virginal female. A female whose age or relationship to you is no impediment to the sordid workings of your fantasies as you heed the swelling urgency of your penis.

That’s right, if you decide to read this Diary, you must stop thinking about sex for at least a minute and concentrate.

By doing this, you will take your first wobbly, scary steps, like a baby learning how to walk, into a world light-years away from yours. A universe where girls and women are more than a series of holes.

Because that is what they are for you and your heterosexual ilk.

Only a series of openings within a package.

A parcel which, as a heterosexual male, you will assess according to the only important criteria: its physical attractiveness.

If you consider the package spunky, you will assume an entitlement to enter its holes with any object or any appendage whenever you wish.

Social media informs me that this depraved, non-knowing of women and girls receives a sly imprimatur of male authority in several American educational institutions.

In colleges and universities where the hypocritical beams of a patriarchal, sanctimonious female pledge of virginity scorches the life choices of female students, blokes know the pledge applies to one hole only.

Women and girls have another opening that male students and staff, for whom virginity is never an option, assume an entitlement to violate with their boners. That hole, however, isn’t a female student’s mouth.

I trust I have pissed you off.

Therefore, is it to be a wank to relieve feelings of anger or is to be trolling to express that anger?

You are an A-lister in fucking up a woman's or girl's life with your words, aren't you?

An unthinking option, as you enhance your toxic, polluting presence in the world by being a gutless wonder. A wonder that other alpha males on the internet appreciate. Join them because the denigration of women and girls brings in the dosh.

It's an inspiring, awesome way to earn money, isn't it by stripping away the personhood of girls and women by trashing their lives with your manly keyboard skills?

Females like your mother, sister, niece, girlfriend, fiancee, wife, daughter, or any female close to you. Poor bastards.

Don't they also have lives that are there to be trashed by internet alpha males? And isn't each one of these females a parade of holes?

Similar to those of other females. Those whom you and other alpha males in countless contrived situations have stupefied, deceived, threatened, and/or choked.

Undertaking whatever you think will work without harming you to gain access to those females' openings.

These contemptible cowardly undertakings fuel your bragging-rights, don't they, eh? The ones used to trick out your ego.

The heroic deeds, when on the internet, you regale your alpha mates with.

The big-man talk of a loathsome creature who immerses himself in dank, slimy internet pools with the excrement that oozes from the orifices of his imagination.

But beyond your imagination, out there in the real world, scores of females do not recognise you and your alpha mates as puppet masters.

Women and girls who will not perform to the strings you pull in the theatre of your misogynistic pageantry.

Females who stride through the world on their terms, who create their own narratives about how they relate to the world and how they like to be known.

I trust the nightmarish imagery conjured up by these last three passages, so pisses you off you chuck things around a room.

Nothing unusual about that. I trust also I have added fuel to your anger by not saying much about myself.

This is my story, my narrative.

You have no entitlement to know any more about me than what I choose to reveal.

I haven’t asked you to read my Diary. If I’m not addressing matters as you want them to be addressed, stop breaking things, and bugger off to your fave cesspits on the internet. 

At those sites, you will continue to waste your spineless life by desecrating the lives of females by trolling them. It's your life's one successful achievement. 

If you don’t clear off, and continue reading, you will find the narrative presenting information in the way I, not you, want it to be ordered.

There’s a high probability, therefore, you will lash out at any female close to where you are.

Damaging women and girls within the purview of your visual perception reveals the fragility of your ego.

You can't accept the notion that this Diary won’t be your marionette. A reality that cracks that ego wide open and triggers a flood of your infantile tantrums within your chickenshit world.

Frustrated rage escalated by this narrative's use of big words that tire your tiny intellect.

Poor little diddums, you are in a bind.

If you don't have access to a female upon whom to unleash the scarifying malicious power of your lashing out, you'd better lie down and have a wank.

Feed your onanism with sordid fantasies of what you want to do to females. Experience tells you that you will feel better by doing this.

It's fair to suppose the meaning of those words 'lashing out' is beyond your egocentric mind’s scaly grasp because you have never done that, have you?

Because, of course, being an alpha male, you have never thought about the vehemence with which male nastiness targets women and girls.

The maltreatment which you regard as justified chastisement for any female who lives her life independent of men's needs, fantasies, or desires.

I paused while writing these reflections in my notebook.

The sound of a whistle blowing disturbed my concentration.

I looked up from my writing.

A man was running around with the children on the playing field and blowing a whistle as the children kicked a ball. I thought about the man Joseph. A bloke whose attitudes towards women was light years away from yours. A bloke who had task to either ditch his missus or stay with her. I wonder which option he chose?

A nastiness we find in the story of Jesus’ birth as narrated in the Gospels of Mathew and Luke.

Removing the accretions added to that story for multitudes of theological and marketing reasons reveals a distressing disdain for the lives of females. A portrayal conveyed by the story's mangling of women's and girls' life journeys in the hideous ways men know well.

The perversion of a woman’s life story, the minimisation of the ways women care for each other, and savage reactions from men when they feel threatened by women frame the narrative and corrupt the underlying story.

Casting bright rays of humanity, however, throughout these women-defiling Gospel narratives are stories of women's lives. Lives of kindness and courage; lives that offer protection and comfort to other women. Stories narrated by girls and women. Accounts of life's journeys with the God of the Judaeo-Christian faith tradition.

A God whose presence does not demand acknowledgment. A presence attested to by the movement and power of that God in people’s lives throughout centuries since the recording of the first Biblical narratives.

Power and movement as seen in the lives of men who get to know themselves in a new and radical way when they turn away from the patriarchal, misogynistic world into which they are born.

A movement from that dominion to a position where men recognise and encourage the right of women and girls to live their lives free from the intentional, malicious shit that men and boys splatter over the lives of females.

A miracle confirmed by Joseph.

A place to begin that narrative is the original record of the time in his relationship with his betrothed when Mary confirms the truth of the village-whispers Joseph has heard. Yes, she has had sex.

Men who despised women and girls edited these texts of that original record spoken and written by girls and women. Texts that told of women's resilience, compassion, and power. Writings that were corrupted to become the Christian's so-called Christmas story.

These women-detesting men were eager to give a veneer of male uprightness to that story. They defiled that original narrative by editing out the rape of Mary, a shocking act of male violence.

Men celebrate rape. A gross example of the abusive power men exercise over women and girls.

For the male editors of the Gospels of Mathew and Luke, their celebration of rape follows the pattern of rape narratives recounted by men on the internet.

The rape of a female by a male is a demonstration of male power over a woman or girl. Therefore, any connection with that female is only on the man's terms as he savages her individuality, her personhood. She becomes a mere marionette in the ego-centric male retelling of this horrific assault.

Hence, while stripping away Mary's personhood, the editors of the original narrative created an image of Mary acceptable to men. Mary becomes the male ideal of femininity, a compliant female willing to obey whatever men's orders are.

She is not to be the angry, hacked-off woman whose voice rages through the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55).

This is a section of the original narrative spoken and written by girls and women who record Mary's fury after the sexual violation of her body, her mind, and her spirit.

However, for their own devious reasons, including the craft of the fiction they are creating, the male editors of the original narrative are unwilling to name the man who raped Mary.

Instead, these male editors do something so fucked-up their fable moves in to the realm of the diabolical.

They name the 'The Most High,' a code word for the God of the Judaeo-Christian faith tradition, as the perpetrator (Luke 1:35). 

This accusation is one hell-of-a spew-inducing horror.

A sickening travesty, way outside any understanding of the kindness and love brought into this world by the God of that tradition.

A ghastly overreach by editors focused on their dodgy ethical notion that the end justifies the means. As if the raping of females is ever justified by the outcome of those assaults.

The end justifying the means, however, suits the craft of the yarn these editors are spinning.

In pushing their line that their guy, Jesus, is the Messiah, they trash the notion of rape being inflicted on a flesh-and-blood woman.

Because, heh! Look what the outcome is?

However, it's unlikely many women will join in a celebration of the occasion in which they were raped.

Instead, thoughts of suicide flood the minds of females whose sexual violation is the source of much that brings happiness to the twisted hearts of those alpha males.

Raging thoughts of self-harm for women like Mary.

However, after the rape of Mary, the male editors, having discarded Mary’s individuality, have tried to trash any sympathy for Mary's thoughts and feelings.

But here, again, that section from the original narrative, labelled by those editors with the word 'Magnificat' screams Mary's rage at that unsought, unwanted horrendous assault.

Now the male editors of the original narrative in spinning their tale that Jesus, was the long promised Messiah, had to concoct a scenario where Mary is divinely impregnated and therefore carries the Christ child.

Their perpetrator had to be a spiritual being.

They had available to them the women's original narrative of the rape of Mary.

They twisted this account, using the rape narrative trope of coercion, in an artful way.

In the waffly, opaque, ambiguous way men speak when they are up to no good, the male editors introduce their spiritual perpetrator.

'The holy spirit will come upon you,' replied the angel, 'and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.' (Luke 1: 35)

In Mary's faith background were many stories of God's wrath when a person, a tribe, a city, or a nation defied God's commands. Mary, aware of these stories, now faced a similar fury if she did not obey the words put into the mouth of an angel by the male editors.

These editors use the image of the archangel Gabriel, a figure familiar to Mary because of her faith, as an enabler of the sexual assault of Mary. In Mary's faith tradition, the archangel Gabriel appears in at least one narrative as an emissary of God (Daniel 9:22).

By using the imagery of the archangel Gabriele in this way (Luke 1:27-35), the male editors gave an imprimatur of Divine authority to the rape of Mary. 

They, in a vicious, nasty way, had boxed Mary in.

The male editors used Mary’s faith background to strip a sense of agency from her. A variation of the techniques men use to disempower women as men recount their narratives of rape.

If Mary disobeyed the archangel’s decrees, she faced the fury of a slighted deity who, according to terrifying stories of Mary’s childhood, unleashed catastrophic violence (The Flood; Sodom and Gomorrah; Pharaoh's defiance of Moses; etc.) on those who did not follow His commands. However, to obey meant the violation of her body, mind, and spirit. 

She chose the lesser of two evils, and, according to the male editors, opened her legs. 

Which meant for the male editors and the art of the yarn they were spinning, Mary was divinely impregnated, lending a dash of legitimacy to their claims regarding the birth of Jesus.

There are echoes here, in these editors’ accounts, of the Nephilim (Genesis: 6:1-6; Numbers:13:33), known to both the editors and Mary because of their shared faith backgrounds.

However, there is little that is heroic in the sexual congress that the editors contend Mary allegedly agreed to. Neither are there giants involved.

Instead, this time, according to the Gospel of Luke, we have the sly insinuation that the God of the Judaeo-Christian faith is the perpetrator.

A horror compounded as the accusation somehow makes rape ‘okay’.