Let Me Introduce Myself

Pictured: me, introducing myself

(Based on my very first post uploaded to WordPress on February 16th, 2020. This post has been modified from the original to update it for my new audience on Squarespace.)

Hello Internet!

I'm a twenty-something New Yorker on the autism spectrum who has decided to take up blogging to make up for his inability to actually say what he thinks needs to be said. I have opinions have I, for one reason or another, do not feel comfortable expressing verbally. Also, for someone who graduated from college with a Bachelor's in creative writing, I don't feel like I've done as much writing as I would have liked since I left that broken mess America dares to call an education system in December of 2018. Well, aside from that fantasy novel I've been trying to develop for the last few years now. But we'll talk more about that later.

For now, I'll say that I am simultaneously excited and terrified to be undertaking this journey. I'm excited because putting myself out there could potentially open up new opportunities for me. But I'm also terrified because, as someone on the autism spectrum, I have a natural paranoia about how people may react to what I have to say. Still, I'm a big believer in taking risks, even if I'm not exactly the most spontaneous person in my everyday life. So, here I go, I guess.

First, let me tell you a little bit about myself. I'm on the border between the millennial and Generation Z divide. I was born in the mid-90s to a very normal, albeit conservative Christian family in northern New York. My life has been relatively unremarkable, with very little drama to speak of. Many of my problems have come more from my autism than not. I got through Pre-K down to college without much difficulty (outside of... shudder... math). My home life has been very stable, barring the usual spats with my siblings when I was younger. Besides the A.S.D., I was a pretty normal young boy obsessed with everyday young boy things like dinosaurs, classic rock, and action-adventure movies.

Basically, I'm here on Squarespace to make as much use as possible of my creative writing degree, or at least feel like I am. There are quite a few subjects I'm interested in discussing here. Such as:

1. Arts and Entertainment

I know, big surprise, a creative writing major likes to talk about art. Well, maybe not talk, because I don't have many friends, and my family's tastes and mine barely overlap, but anyway...

I have a somewhat eclectic taste in music, film, television, literature, etc. My favorite genres are action-adventure, fantasy, science fiction, Western, and historical/war dramas. In music, my big three are country, rock, and metal, although I also like a little Celtic folk, new age, classical, and soundtrack music on the side.

My greatest love in the entertainment world right now, though, is animation. I think the biggest reason I've been obsessed with this medium since high school is because, at least in my home country, animation has had this stigma for at least half a century that it is only a genre of children's entertainment, which is annoying, because animation, in both mine and many other's opinions, can take stories in places where it is literally impossible for live-action entertainment to go. o believe that this "Animation Age Ghetto," as T.V. Tropes calls it, is finally starting to die off, but I still think we have a long way to catch up to Japan as far as that is concerned.

You can expect me to try my hand at reviewing some of my favorite and least favorite pieces of entertainment. However, I may be somewhat limited in this regard since I'm not fully financially independent from my parents. For example, I have been interested in checking out the filmographies of what some might call more "arthouse" directors like Terrence Malick, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Ingmar Bergman, but their films are not readily available on the streaming sites my family currently uses (Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime). The latter offers an app on their service based around the Criterion Collection, though that has gotten a few complaints from users saying that it needs the latest model of Firestick or something like that to work.

Oh, Jeff Bezos, why do you have to be such a money-grubbing asswipe?

Of course, HBO Max has been good about getting more older movies in the spotlight with its partnerships with Turner Movie Classics and the Criterion Collection, but who knows how long that will last with the way Warner Bros. C.E.O. David Zaslav’s been gutting it lately.

Still, if the greatest dinosaur movie of all time taught me one thing, it’s that life finds a way.

2. Personal Stuff

This part covers stuff like my struggles with ASD, as well as my fiction writing. I may discuss how I've coped with my developmental disabilities and try to dismiss some myths that have been spread about people on the autism spectrum over the years. I will also discuss my fiction writing projects, both past and present. I'm especially eager to discuss the biggest project I'm working on, a fantasy saga that I've tentatively titled The Divine Conspiracy.

The story is an epic urban fantasy narrative centering on Peter Banks, an agent for a secret society that investigates paranormal phenomena, and his fraternal twin children, Ariel and Ronan, who inherited magical powers from their mother, a succubus who was sent from Hell to murder Peter but fell in love with him instead. After their mother is hunted down and murdered by the evil forces she abandoned, the twins decide to join the secret society, helping their father hunt down malignant supernatural entities while searching for answers about the true nature of their powers, trying to stop a new war between the forces of light and dark from destroying the world as we know it, and confronting temptation, existential dread, and questions about the nature of God, the Universe, and their own seemingly insignificant place in it.

I'll try to keep you posted to see how that goes... that is, if it doesn't collapse under the weight of its ambition first. My plan so far is to post my fiction writing to DeviantArt, but that could also change at some point, so, as I said, I'll keep you posted. Oh, and speaking of the paranormal...

3. The Supernatural

This category should be relatively self-explanatory. Among my childhood obsessions were ghosts, cryptozoology, and other urban legends. Basically, anything that may be the subject of stories that begin with, "Once I knew this guy who knew this guy who knew this guy who knew this guy who knew this guy..."

…who knew this guy’s cousin…

Nowadays, I am a bit more skeptical about such fantastical claims as lake monsters and government cover-ups of UFO activity...

Seriously, Loch Ness is only 22 square miles. Finding Nessie shouldn’t be this difficult!

...but I'm still not entirely convinced that mere misfires of the human brain or wayward woodland critters can explain all supernatural occurrences. Maybe it's because I'm a pretty spiritual person, but I have a hard time believing that the material world we see before us is really all there is.

While I will be talking about paranormal phenomena in this category, I also wish to shed some light on what the skeptics also have to say since I feel like they are somewhat neglected by the often sensationalist media of our day and age.

4. Religion and Spirituality

Whereas I would refer to the paranormal phenomena in the previous category as micro-level or physical, here is where we talk about the supernatural on a macro or metaphysical level. Well, technically, the former can't be called physical since ghosts are (possibly) the souls of dead people who didn't move on, and UFOs could be coming from entirely different universes than ours that may not have the same type of matter as we do... never mind, I digress.

First of all, let me explain my personal beliefs. As I said above, I grew up in a Christian family. From roughly until college, I was an orthodox Christian who went to church every Sunday (although my childhood obsession with dinosaurs destroyed any chance I had of becoming a creationist). In addition to no longer being a regular churchgoer since the COVID pandemic, in all honesty, I only remain Christian inasmuch as I believe that Jesus was a divine messenger of God. This is mainly because, even though the people at my church are relatively good and honest, I became aware of things like the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church and the right-wing fundamentalism eating away at my country's civil liberties as I grew older.

I also became interested in how other religions worked as I grew older and increasingly became skeptical that Christianity was the only true religion. These doubts grew as I looked up the various spiritualities grouped under Western esotericism, like Hermeticism, Kabbalah, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Neopaganism, and Gnosticism, an early form of Christian faith that is probably closest to the beliefs I have now.

Except maybe the part about the evil lion-snake god thing. At least on a literal level.

If you are sitting there at your computer with a confused look on your face, don't worry. Since Western esotericism is, by its very definition, esoteric, I will probably have a lot to say about that subject. I'll also examine the more mainstream religions of our time like Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and others, maybe debunking myths about them here, talking about how they influenced my beliefs there, or talking about how my research into the esoteric influenced The Divine Conspiracy.

Before you say anything, I know talking about religion on the Internet is significant flamebait. But wait until you see what I have to say about my final category...

5. Politics

Yes, yes, I know. I can hear you groaning from your keyboards as I type this. But if there is one thing about autistic people like myself that is true above all others, it's that our passions enslave us. And trust me, I've become extremely passionate about politics ever since this brain-dead fascist pig somehow failed his way upward into the White House.

Okay, stop me if you've heard this one before: A Russian spy, a sexual predator, and a billionaire walk into a bar...

At the risk of sounding like an unoriginal bastard with this Bill Hicks paraphrase, it's not that I disagree with Trump’s policies or anything like that. It’s just that I think he’s the spawn of Satan sent to ruin everything that's actually great about America to enrich himself and his billionaire cronies while leaving the rest of us to suffer and die, either by climate change, targeting by white supremacist skinheads or from a hail of bullets in our schools because the NRA has convinced us that the right to bear arms extends to military-style assault rifles!

*takes a deep breath* Yeah, I'm slightly to the left regarding these issues.

It wasn't always this way, though. Like I said above, my family was, and still is, politically conservative, and that definitely rubbed off on me during my high school years. There was even a time when I watched Glenn Beck's show on Fox News every day at 5:00 until he left to form the Blaze. However, even during the days when I was farthest right, I still had a hard time with the right-wing views on abortion, LGBTQ+ issues, and the environment (even if I was on the climate change denial bandwagon for a while).

By the time I graduated from college (and afterTrump's antics destroyed my faith in the conservative movement), I was calling myself a libertarian, primarily because while I believed in things like feminism, gay rights, and systemic racism in the law enforcement system, I still thought that these problems could still be solved within the parameters of free-market capitalism. However, I think in reality, I was what author Robert Anton Wilson would call a "frightened anarchist" because it wasn't long before I discovered several left-wing channels on YouTube like Contrapoints, Innuendo Studios, Renegade Cut, and Philosophy Tube that advocated for an end to capitalism in favor of a more egalitarian leftist system. Still, it wasn't until I read the book After Capitalism by Dada Mahesvarananda that I fully converted to libertarian socialism.

So yeah, if it hasn't become clear to you by this point, let me state this as plainly as I can... I CANNOT FUCKING STAND DONALD J. TRUMP OR THE REPUBLICAN PARTY!

I think they are only interested in obtaining as much power as they can for themselves by giving tax cuts to the rich, letting them hide as much money as they can in offshore tax havens while leaving next to nothing for the poor or middle class. That way, they can insulate themselves from the worst effects of the climate change they created while leaving us to fight for scraps of food in the barren hellscape they left behind for us. They insist that hard work alone determines how well you do in life, even as the capitalist system leaves minorities in squalor. Most rich people these days only become rich via inheritance or loans from their already-wealthy parents.

They also tend to be fundamentalist Christians who let the world descend into war-torn chaos because they are convinced that Jesus' second coming is imminent, so what's the point of fixing our broken systems if our lord and savior is going to rapture us all to Heaven anyway? Well, except enforce apartheid in Israel because Muslims aren't God's chosen people.

Don’t let the supposed innocence on the faces of these godless heathens fool you! Those popsicles are dyed with the blood of Christians!

I could go on and on about how much I hate what my country is becoming, but I think I’ve gone on long enough. I’ll end here by saying that I’ll be using this category to explain to people all the problems with both Donald Trump and the Republican Party, why the left doesn’t want to literally turn the United States into a carbon copy of the U.S.S.R., and, probably most important at the time I’m writing this, why billionaires absolutely are not entitled to literally every cent they’ve earned.

It’s all gonna trickle down any minute now! Trust me!

In Conclusion

So, yeah, that's what you can expect from this blog.

Like I said above, I'm a little scared to open myself up like this, especially since I've never told my family about my real feelings about Trump and conservatism. Still, I know I can't keep it a secret forever, and I can't let my fears get in the way of getting my feelings out there.

If you're wondering what I'll be writing about first on this blog, I have dozens of posts archived on my old WordPress blog, so expect a lot of posts based on those. For example, I may start with a movie review I wrote comparing the 2017 film adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Tower with the book series it was based on, explaining how, in my opinion, the film failed to capture the spirit of the books.

I hope this second iteration of Preston Posits will be much more successful than the last. I like sharing my thoughts in a space where I have complete control. I hope all of you are genuinely interested in what I have to say. See you soon!