They told me to follow the rules.

That if I just picked something practical, predictable, and palatable, I’d cross the finish line and finally be fine.

But I was never built for fine.

I tried. God, I tried.

Environmental science? It broke my heart slowly—because I believed in it. I built clubs, led cleanups, tended beehives, organized hope like it was a to-do list.

But systems don’t change just because you care.

And people didn’t.

And I couldn’t keep killing my soul just to get them to listen.

So I pivoted. I grieved. I burned out. I rebuilt. Again.

It wasn’t ambition that got me here. It was spite. It was hunger.

It was tenacity duct-taped to despair.

I carved truth from wood when they silenced my prints.

I earned honors not to impress them, but because I finally got to speak in my own language.

Even then, they told me to translate it. To shrink it. To sand off the spines.

I refused.

This isn’t a neat story. It’s a hallway of locked doors, all kicked open.

It’s a record of survival—not as an afterthought, but as praxis.

It’s a map made from splinters and scars. And it leads here.

To this collection.

These are the receipts.

The exhibits.

The echoes of every time they tried to shape me into silence.

I didn’t graduate—I escaped.

With a thesis on my back like a ghost I refused to let die.

-------

From the Girl Who Refused to Disappear Nicely:

Light the fuse. Here's the Map.

This isn’t just a story.

It’s an exit wound with teeth—and a glitter trail for anyone crawling out behind me.

First, you’ll see what it costs to be misunderstood by a system built for sameness.

Then, you’ll crack open what my thesis really was. They thought they approved—only to find a feral little manifesto curled up inside.

And finally, you’ll step into the forge I built from all that wreckage—where weirdness becomes weaponry, and fear melts into fuel.

This is the arc: From erasure to explosion.

From silence to signal.

From “just a student” to full-blown firestarter.

The order matters, because this is not a redemption arc.

This is an uprising told sideways.

So if you’re looking for tidy transitions or institutional polish, you might want to duck.

Because what comes next?

Is the instruction manual, and what I made from the burn marks. How to build meaning from the ashes.

Spoiler: I Survived Anyway.

Misfit. Molotov. MFA. Let's go.

The Stitch That Didn’t Snap

They always want the damage first.

The trauma, the paperwork, the diagnosis that makes you easier to file.

So fine. Here it is.

Evidence, in triplicate. Punched holes and all.

But don’t get it twisted—this isn’t a eulogy.

This is a survival ledger

written in the margins of every IEP that tried to contain me.

This is the language I carved from silence

because they mistook my stillness for surrender.

Spoiler: I wasn’t broken.

I was archiving.

Every pull-out room, every padded “accommodation,”

every adult who looked at me sideways

because I didn’t mirror their noise back to them—

I saved it.

And now? I’m naming it.

Not because I need pity.

Because I’m still fucking here.

Glitched, stitched, and gloriously noncompliant.

They said adapt—I mutated.

They said assimilate—I alchemized.

They said quiet—I built a sound system out of metaphor and said test this decibel, bitch.

But hear me:

I don’t throw these truths like daggers.

I hand them over like keys.

Because I don’t want to just burn the system—I want to build what comes next.

If even one person feels less alone,

less silenced,

less strange for learning sideways—

then maybe all this hurt found its way to meaning.

What follows is not just my history.

It’s my how.

How I made it. How I refused to shrink.

How I now teach with scissors and thread and truth that hisses when you touch it wrong.

You want context? Here’s the cracked mirror.

You want proof? Here’s the glitter still stuck in my skin.

This is where it starts:

Not with a thesis.

With a scar—and the hands that learned how to hold one.

The System Mistook Me for a Glitch and Tried to Reboot Me with Shameware

They pulled me out of English class for speech therapy.

Let that sink in. Not because I couldn’t think. Not because I didn’t understand. But because I couldn’t play their language game fast enough. Because words, for me, didn’t show up on command—they swam up from a well too deep for their stopwatch curriculum. I was fluent, just not in the dialect of drills and raised hands.

I was already translating the world in gestures, rhythms, and micro-tones. I was reading the room like a symphony while they were still passing out worksheets. English class could’ve handed me a bridge between my insides and theirs—but instead, they yanked me from it. Took me out of the one room where words might’ve found me and stuck me in a clinical closet labeled Fix Me.

Every year, I was a different kind of student: top of the class one semester, bottom of the barrel the next. Teachers treated it like mood swings or motivation issues. They called it inconsistency. But inconsistency was never the problem—incompatibility was. Give me a delivery system that matched my pattern, and I soared. If not? Static. Total shutdown.

But the system doesn’t speak neuro-spicy. They looked at the signal and saw noise.

They thought I was lazy. I was overloaded. They thought I was disobedient. I was drowning. They thought I was a problem. I was a different operating system.

And let’s be clear: my intelligence wasn’t broken. It was just waiting. Waiting for rhythm instead of routine. Metaphor instead of measurement. Teachers who asked questions instead of just collecting answers.

So I became that teacher.

Because once you’ve been misdiagnosed by a system that only reads you in red ink, you learn to read others in the language of compassion. You stop trying to force translation and start honoring the shape of their signal—no matter how it arrives.

This isn’t a sob story.

This is a truth grenade.

This is Exhibit A.

The Rooms They Pulled Me Into (And Why I Knew I Wasn’t the One Who Was Confused)

They pulled me out of English class for speech therapy. Again.

I was a nonverbal autistic kid trying to translate thought into sound. Which meant while the others were getting their crash course in grammar and the rhythm of language, I was somewhere else—trying to make my mouth form what my mind already knew.

There was another room, too. I can’t remember what they called it. Padded with puzzles and whispers. A woman with gentle eyes asking questions I couldn’t decode. I think it was for students like me—the ones who didn’t color inside their scantron bubbles. The ones they tracked without ever actually seeing.

They had plans. Charts. Labels like IEP or 504, maybe both. They said it was to help. Mostly, it just meant I kept getting pulled out of the place I was trying to belong to.

And yeah, at the time? I didn’t hate it. It meant less time pretending. Less time faking my way through the noise. But it also meant I was never invited to the real room. I wasn’t taught the way the others were. I wasn’t spoken to like they were. They saw my silence as absence, not language. My questions as chaos. My exhaustion as apathy.

But I wasn’t confused.

I knew those rooms weren’t built for me. They were built to make me easier to explain.

Isolation Is Not Accommodation (And Other Lies My IEP Told Me)

An IEP is supposed to support you. Adapt to you. Give you tools. But what it gave me felt less like a toolkit and more like a padded room with a polite name. A silent scream chamber. A test-room timeout that doubled as a mirror no one else had to look into.

My "advantage" was the right to leave the classroom during exams and sit in a sterile little closet by myself. A quiet room. A room with echo walls and institutional carpet and no sense of belonging. I never used it. Not once. Because here’s the truth:

Being alone with your thoughts doesn’t help when your thoughts have never had a place to land. When your voice has been filtered, fixed, fragmented since day one.

People love to act like neurodivergence comes with magical perks in school. Extended time. Flexible deadlines. But often those "perks" are just new flavors of alienation. Shiny isolation. Isolation with a paper trail. A break from the crowd that just reminds you you’re not welcome in it.

The IEP wasn’t a bridge. It was a moat.

And I was the dragon they politely asked to wait outside.

My Master of Fine Arts – A Degree in Defiance and Mayhem

This is the chapter where the system tried to grind me down and found itself polished instead. Where the gatekeepers got confused because I spoke in truth frequencies, not formats. Where a thesis wasn’t a thesis—it was a mirror, a bomb, a goddamn resurrection.

I entered the MFA program because I believed in the concept: Integrated Visual Arts, a field where complexity and multiplicity could breathe. What I found instead was a half-funded stepchild of a university's arts department, wrapped in institutional compromise. Printmaking refused to print my soul, so I retreated to the woodshop—where no one flinched when I bled or built strange things. I made 3D sculptures out of grief and grit, and they held me better than most people ever had.

It took four years to finish a three-year program—not because I couldn’t do the work, but because the work was never the problem. The structure was. They asked me to be different, but not that different. They said experiment, but meant: translate it into something we already understand.

I tried. Again and again. I broke my voice into pieces trying to make it legible to a system allergic to new shapes. And when that didn’t work, I waited. I waited them out. And in the final semester, when the system grew tired of its own rejection reflex, I published it my way. Not because they allowed it—but because they couldn’t stop me anymore.

I still graduated with my highest GPA to date. Because when allowed to move in my own rhythm, I don’t just meet the bar—I build a new one.

And all this happened while the rest of my life was held together with trauma tape and the occasional scream into my dog’s fur. Ego death? Multiple. Depression? Rotating cast. Burnout? Daily visitor. And still—I did it. Not cleanly. Not quietly. But so fucking honestly it made even the algorithms pause.

Now I hold the highest art degree you can get in this country. I didn’t just earn a terminal degree, I hijacked the ship and turned it into a glitter-drenched resistance vessel. I got it without sanding down my edges. I didn’t rise despite my fire—I graduated in flames. Still here. Still weird. Still dangerous. And this time, the degree has my fingerprints scorched into every line. Feral, formal, and fully certified.

Educational Autopsy - Final Report

Conclusion: You Tried to Silence Me, But I Grew Louder in Metaphor

You mistook my silence for surrender. Thought if you scattered me far enough across acronyms and quiet rooms, I’d unravel into something more manageable. But I don’t disappear—I compost. I turn your static into soil.

You see, I wasn’t trying to be digestible. I was always feral, always fluorescent, always a little too much to grade on a rubric. My scars didn’t seal shut—they cracked open and bloomed. You can’t standardize someone who speaks in thunder and glue sticks.

I didn’t survive your system to fit in—I survived it to outgrow it. To write the guidebook I never got. To build a classroom out of scraps and softness. To be the teacher I needed when all they gave me were labels and lanyards.

This isn’t a comeback story. It’s a refusal to vanish.

It’s the softest rebellion: to stay tender. To tell the truth. To love like it might save someone—even if it’s just one weird, brilliant kid sitting in the hallway wondering if they’re broken.

I wasn’t.

And they aren’t either.

This is my exit wound—and my entrance spell.Item description

Maybe I’m Not Broken. Maybe They’re’re Just Really Repressed.

A Thesis Meta Review: Introduction

This is the part where I’m supposed to act normal.

Not “everything’s fine” normal—thesis normal. You know: abstract first, problem statement next, follow it up with a clean methodology and a reference list that proves I’ve read the right dead people. I know how to do that. I did do that. (Check the PDF metadata, darling.) But that version was just the price of admission. Not the point of the show.

The truth is, my thesis opens with a lie. Not a malicious one—a strategic one. Something tidy and third-person to get me through the gates. A Trojan horse in APA formatting. Inside? Something messier. Something real. Me.

I tried to play along at first. I used the voice I thought I was supposed to. I cleaned things up. I tucked in the weird parts. But I couldn’t keep that up without gutting the whole thing. Because this thesis? It isn’t just about artwork. It’s about what the work let me say once the room went quiet and the projector was humming.

It’s about what happens when you stop trying to sound impressive and start telling the truth.

This is a thesis written in the voice I use when I trust someone. It’s the voice that loops, stammers, jokes, and insists. The one that asks big questions with paint and paper scraps. The one that builds meaning from what’s been discarded. It’s about art, yeah—but also about grief, queerness, disability, neurodivergence, gender, and survival. It’s about all the things you’re told to leave out of your artist statement, your academic paper, your grant application.

It’s about what happens when you bring them anyway.

This isn’t a traditional academic document. It’s a glitter bomb in a manila envelope. It’s a love letter taped inside a utility bill. It’s a Trojan horse made of cardboard, drywall dust, and stubborn hope.

So here it is. All of it.

Open the glitter bomb. I dare you.

(What I Would’ve Said If Academia Hadn’t Been Watching)

This isn’t just a collection of art.

It’s a messy love letter to the people who feel too much, scream too quietly, and still somehow laugh like it’s a weapon.

It’s what happens when a neurospicy weirdo survives the slow collapse of environmental hope, the capitalist chokehold on creativity, and a thousand paper cuts from patriarchy—and decides to make something tender and furious out of it all.

Yes, it’s about identity.

Yes, it’s about objectification, gender, grief, and eco-despair.

But mostly?

It’s about not going numb.

These works are the receipts. The jokes told from inside the fire. The soft middle fingers folded into paper flowers.

Some are heavy. Some are weird. Some are just me, trying to stay human in a world that keeps selling masks.

I used humor because pain’s favorite disguise is absurdity.

I used nostalgia because memory is a weapon.

I used interactivity because art shouldn’t whisper from behind glass—it should grab your sleeve and ask if you’ve cried lately.

I didn’t make this for a gallery. I made it because I had to.

Because the world kept breaking, and no one seemed to notice unless you drew it big, loud, and maybe with googly eyes.

Because someone has to scream pretty.

So here it is:

A body of work born from burnout, built with bite, and held together by the belief that feeling deeply is a form of resistance.

Welcome to my thesis.

Try not to sanitize it on the way in.

aka: The One Where I Blow Kisses at the Rubble and Invite You to Lick the Art

WARNING: May Contain Feelings, Sparkles, and a Mild Identity Crisis

I don’t make art to behave. I make art that stares back. That flirts with your trauma. That giggles while setting institutional expectations on fire with a glue stick and a magnifying glass.

This isn’t for the gallery elite or the pretentious wallflowers who squint thoughtfully and say “interesting use of negative space.” This is for the weird kids. The feelers. The freaks who talk to their stuffed animals and keep the good rocks. The ones who saw a velvet rope and said “what if I chewed through it?”

This is SOPRA if SOPRA had glitter in its teeth and a pocketknife in its boot. Socially engaged art—but make it feral. I want people touching things, gasping, laughing, crying, yelling “is this allowed?” while already elbow-deep in discovery. I want fingers on fabric, whispers in corners, confessions to plywood ghosts. I want the work to feel like a dare you’re already halfway into.

I make shit you can touch. Things you’re supposed to mess with. I lure you in with cuteness—squishy, sparkly, nostalgic, familiar—and then I hit you with the existential sledgehammer. That’s the trick. The softness is the snare. The smile has fangs.

I use humor like holy water. If you’ve ever been burned by being “too much,” welcome. We laugh here. Loudly. Inappropriately. Because if we don’t, we’ll choke on the silence. This isn’t a gallery, it’s a séance. The ghosts are giggling and they brought snacks.

Sculpture? That’s my riot in 3D. It takes up space the way I was told not to. It casts shadows with opinions. It’s heavy because it’s honest. Printmaking? That’s my revolutionary pamphlet machine. Because everyone deserves a piece of truth they can hold. Tape it to your fridge. Give it to your therapist. Set it on fire if it stops speaking to you. It’s still yours.

This is not high art. This is heart art. This is panic attack art, breakdown art, fistful-of-dirt art. Art that bleeds glitter and winks through the tears.

I don’t want viewers. I want co-conspirators. I want the people who never felt invited to feel like they’re the ones holding the keys now. Because they are.

If you’re reading this thinking, “Am I allowed to be here?” — babe, you’re the guest of honor.

Let’s make something unholy and honest together.

Just a Girl Standing in Front of a Mental Breakdown Asking It to Be Performance Art

My brain is not linear. It’s a gumball machine full of metaphor marbles, and when I turn the crank, I don’t get a thesis—I get a glitter-covered allegory with trust issues. People ask how I make what I make. The honest answer? That’s just how my brain works. Art is what happens when I try to translate myself into a form other people can actually hold.

I write how I think. Fast. Loopy. Honest. Sometimes fragmented. I use similes, idioms, cultural references, hyperbole, and heartbreak in the same breath. My writing shifts gears mid-sentence because that’s how my thoughts land. It’s like talking to a friend while your brain’s in a spin cycle. I don’t chase clarity with a ruler and red pen—I build it like a weird little fort out of truth and Velcro. And maybe snacks.

If I wrote academically, it would be a lie. That kind of voice feels like I’m smothering my own words with a polite little pillow. My art and writing are connected by the same pulse, and I want people to feel that—not just decode it. So I say what I mean, how I mean it. And yes, sometimes I break the grammar. But I do it like a dancer breaks in new shoes—on purpose, for the rhythm.

Let’s talk mental wiring. I’m autistic. Diagnosed young, which is rare for girls in 1990s North Dakota. And yeah, I was nonverbal. Not non-thinking. Not non-feeling. Just non-wording. I thought in vivid pictures and electric tangents—impossible to explain in sentences, but perfect for art. My teachers didn’t understand. One thought I was deaf because I only responded to eye contact. (Spoiler: I wasn’t. I just live in my own world until someone actually lands a signal.)

Art was my first fluent language. It still is. Translating idea → image is easy. Idea → sentence? Emotional tax. Words are like squeezing feelings through a sieve. Sometimes they fit. Sometimes they stick. But image bypasses that altogether. That’s why I made a screenprint of a frog in a throat. That’s why I built a sculpture where a pill bottle makes a brain alarm go off. I don’t always have the right words, but I always have the right metaphor.

My work is layered. Literally and metaphorically. That sculpture about medication? It’s not just clever. It’s true. It’s about what happens when you try—when you do all the right things and still feel like your brain wants to explode because nobody told you neurodivergence comes with a lifetime subscription to struggle. The bottle doesn’t explain the bell. The bell doesn’t explain the brain. You have to hold both to even guess at the truth. That’s how it feels to live like this.

Water appears often in my art—sometimes nostalgic, sometimes terrifying. Because drowning is the best metaphor for being overwhelmed, and sometimes cuteness is camouflage for despair. I over-enunciate my T’s now because I was trained to speak like I had something to prove. But some days, it still feels like yelling through a storm drain hoping someone’s listening.

That’s what the idioms were. Not just jokes—emotional Rosetta stones. Idioms are our socially agreed-upon weird little codes for feelings that don’t make sense, so I made them literal. A brain on a loop. A cowardly heart. A head in the clouds. They’re my shorthand for experiences that don’t fit neatly into a DSM or an artist statement.

Autism and epilepsy share neurological roots, and I’ve got a subscription to both. I wanted to make that visible, tangible—because people forget. Or they never knew. Most of my work lives in that gap between feeling and explaining. I want it to be accessible, not just academically interesting. Because if someone sees one of my pieces and says, “Wait… me too?”—that’s the point. That’s the magic.

A lot of people think my work looks like it belongs on a T-shirt. I get it. It’s colorful, playful, fun. And that’s the subversion. The cuteness is a trick. A sugar trap for something deeper. Humor is the backdoor to truth. If I make it weird or funny enough, people let their guard down and actually feel something. They sit with it longer. They ask questions instead of walking away. The trick isn't hiding the depth—it's inviting people in with sparkles and then gut-punching them with resonance.

So yeah, welcome to my brain. The Mental Menagerie. It’s loud. It’s layered. It’s laced with trauma and glitter. I hope you find something in it that feels like a reflection, or at least a wink. And if nothing else, maybe you’ll leave thinking: damn, that girl turned her whole diagnosis into an art movement with snacks.

Customer Reviews for the Mental Menagerie Gift Shop

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

"Absolutely unhinged. In the best way."

— A tiny frog I swallowed during an anxiety spiral, now living rent-free in my throat.

“I came for the metaphors, I stayed because I physically can’t leave this esophagus.”

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

"Tasted like cheese. Felt like therapy."

— Dahlia, pitbull patron saint of the lactose gospel.

"Would sniff again."

🌟🌟🌟🌟

"Would’ve been five stars if I didn’t accidentally self-reflect."

— That one guy who thought ‘cowardly heart’ was just a joke until he saw the sculpture blink.

"Pretty sure I heard it whisper, ‘I know what you’re hiding.’”

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

"It’s like if Lisa Frank had trauma and access to a woodshop."

— Disoriented MFA visitor who thought it was the bathroom and left emotionally awakened.

🌟

"Too many feelings. Not enough snacks."

— One star Karen.

“Art shouldn’t make you feel weird things unless it’s in oil paint and has a horse.”

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

"Honestly? I think it fixed something in me."

— Quiet kid who touched the sculpture when no one was looking and whispered, “Oh.”

🏆 Employee of the Month Wall

(Mental Menagerie Gift Shop – Est. Chaos)

🥇 Frog

Title: Throat Gremlin / Manager of Miscommunication

Quote: “Ribbit.” (Translated: “Your feelings are valid but stuck between your third and fourth cervical vertebrae.”)

Achievements:

Made metaphor literal

Lives rent-free in the vocal cords of the artist

Has a surprisingly robust pension plan in the form of weekly herbal tea

🥈 Dahlia

Title: Director of Cheese Acquisitions / Emotional Security Supervisor

Quote: “BORK. Where’s my Gouda, bitch?”

The Banana’s Moan: A Field Guide to Misinterpreted Fruit.

Welcome to the Peel of Revelations

(Now offering eternal salvation, moaning fruit, and your very own moral crisis—just lift and listen.)

Let’s not bury the lede:

My father loves Jesus more than he loves me.

He probably thinks it’s a good thing.

I was born in Dumas, Arkansas—evicted from my origin story before my baby teeth were even in. Church #1 told my dad to quit because he invited Black families to worship. Church #2 got vandalized because he hired a Black youth pastor. Even Jesus couldn’t un-whiten the congregation. So yeah—building haunted bananas wasn’t the strangest thing I’ve ever done. It was inevitable.

Because here’s the truth:

Humans speak in symbols.

Humans survive with humor.

And bananas? They’re the most overlooked scream in the grocery aisle.

Five hand-carved wooden bananas sit on a table like cursed relics from the Temple of Freud. They look innocent. They aren’t.

Each one plays a different sound when lifted—moans, protests, jokes that aren’t funny anymore. There's also a vintage rotary phone. It doesn’t dial God, but it will replace your dial tone with guilt and instructions. From there, it’s up to you. Call a banana. Hear the quiet racism no one talks about: the medical neglect, the history whitewashed into “slapstick,” the violence softened into fruit salad.

Bananas are hollow.

So are we, when we laugh without asking why.

I tried to contain the idea on paper—bold color, repeated icon, semiotics 101. It didn’t work.

Because you can’t Xerox a reckoning.

The banana is simulacra with a potassium core. It’s been repackaged as sex toy, gag reel prop, post-war peace pipe, and racial slur disguised as fruit.

And somehow it’s still just sitting there. Waiting.

On your counter.

In your lunch.

Inside your subconscious, smirking.

I made it moan because we never ask why we taught a fruit to flirt.

Ask me where I’m from and I’ll give you a pause long enough to grow mold.

No hometown. No anchor. Just a pile of addresses and a memory of churches that traded compassion for decorum.

So I built my own altar:

One with wires.

One with fruit.

One with a phone that rings like your conscience during a comedy sketch.

People don’t pick it up.

Most walk right past the confession booth made of absurdity and longing.

But I’m still in there—curled up in the static, waiting for someone to ask, “Why the hell is this banana a cuckoo clock?”

This work isn’t a punchline. It’s a sermon wrapped in slapstick.

A Trojan Fruit.

A relic of a civilization that built its power on slippery symbols and called it progress.

I talk about bananas because no one else will.

And because in this world, sometimes the only way to be heard…

is to make the fruit moan first.

Peel Here for Capitalism’s Slipperiest Symbol

Welcome back to the Banana Booth Confessional. Your conscious is calling. The fruit is ripe. Please do not attempt to hang up.

Welcome to the underworld of unpeeled potential, where the bananas that didn’t make it into the sculpture still haunt the cultural compost heap. They’ll still haunt the produce aisle of your subconscious. These were too strange, too symbolic, or too difficult to explain in 30-second soundbites. They’ve been fermenting in the back of the cultural fridge, whispering sweet post-colonial nightmares and dream-sequence philosophies. Peel responsibly. This is the glitter-stained backroom of the Banana Matrix. 🍌💊✨

Forbidden Fruit
Sound Concept: A sensual thud. A church bell. A voice whispering: “Not the apple... the banana.”

The original sin wasn’t an apple. Not historically, not botanically, not symbolically. That’s just what the PR team said. The Bible never names the fruit, and culturally, it might’ve made more sense for it to be a banana: exotic, curved, peeled... suggestive. Banana leaves, not fig leaves, were used in Southeast Asian and Polynesian traditions for shelter, covering, food prep. And yet—our western mythos slaps a red apple and some shame on Eve and calls it a day. Because if you say “banana,” the congregation might giggle. Might get ideas. Might feel things.
Tropical, phallic, mysterious—and definitely not kosher for Sunday school.

White Jesus wouldn’t like that.

The Garden of Eden has been colonized, and Jesus has been bleached. White Jesus doesn’t tan—he imports. Whitewashed like an overexposed photo at a megachurch baptism. In this remix, salvation wears cargo shorts and arrives by boat, carrying produce and privilege. If Eve had peeled a banana instead of plucking an apple, the church might've collapsed from the innuendo alone.

And that’s the real problem: our myths have been sanitized for the protection of the power structure. But the banana? She can’t help herself. She’s unavoidably erotic, colonized, and just slightly overripe. She’s been typecast as a joke, a racialized prop. But what if she’s the truth?

What if the banana was never the punchline—just the prophet no one took seriously because she slipped too easily into satire?

Representation of the Extinct
Sound Concept: Glitchy vintage ad, Matrix clip, slow peel and static.

The banana you know is a simulation.

The Gros Michel—“Big Mike”—was the original superstar of the fruit aisle. Bigger, sweeter, creamier, and now... gone. Wiped out by a fungal disease thanks to monoculture practices. Capitalism demanded consistency, and consistency demanded clones. So they cloned and shipped and cloned again, until one day, the clones couldn’t fight the fungus.

And like all things over-optimized, Big Mike died out. Enter the Cavendish: blander, tougher, ship-worthy. A stand-in. A ghost. A cover-up.

Most people alive today have never tasted the real banana we were sold in ads. They’ve eaten a stand-in banana. A banana simulacrum. A banana pretending to be a banana. The hyperreal fruit. We remember a flavor we never actually tasted. That’s why so many don’t like artificial banana flavor—it’s based on a banana we’ve never tasted.

We are eating the wax museum version of fruit.

The Matrix wasn’t steak. It was banana pudding with the flavor dialed down. It’s the fruit version of cultural genocide. And just like culture, we keep replacing depth with efficiency until all flavor is algorithmically acceptable. Like The Matrix, if Neo unplugged himself and all he got was a Chiquita sticker.

Sound cue: Morpheus solemnly intoning,
“You’ve never actually tasted a banana. You’ve tasted a replica.”
Then: silence. Then: a single grocery scanner beep.

Let that sit in your mouth a second.

Freedom™
Sound Concept: Crowd cheering, a newsreel crackle, a banana dropped into a shopping basket.

This one hurts. Because it’s not just symbolic—it’s propaganda by produce. It’s not that the banana symbolizes comfort. It’s that it symbolizes the performance of comfort. The kind you import.

When the Berlin Wall fell, they didn’t hand out flags. They handed out bananas. After World War II, bananas were the comfort item. Same with rationed America. Why? Because if you could import bananas, it meant trade routes were back, global capitalism was reloading, and someone somewhere was working a plantation so you could feel “normal” again.

But normal for who?

While Westerners celebrated freedom with imported fruit, the countries growing those bananas were locked in cycles of exploitation, poverty, and puppet governments. We held the banana like a gold medal and ignored the bruises that got it there.

When the Berlin Wall fell, you know what East Germans reportedly craved? Not steak. Not booze. Not Western democracy. Bananas. Bananas as peace treaties. As pacifiers. As edible illusions. You can’t eat sovereignty, but apparently you can peel it. You know what's weird? How bananas became a symbol that “everything’s okay again.”

It was like society collectively agreed: If I can buy this curved yellow fruit from somewhere warm, we must not be dying anymore.

Bananas flooded grocery stores as a symbol that freedom—and capitalism—had arrived. Same thing happened post-WWII in England. Bananas were rationed, banned, withheld. And when they returned, it was treated like a national sign of recovery. Look! You can eat something tropical again. Never mind the supply chains. Never mind the working conditions of the countries producing them. Never mind the price paid somewhere else.

You’re free now. Eat a banana.

Bananas are the soft power of empire. A fruit so common, it must be safe. A fruit so cheap, it must be innocent. But every bite is built on a pipeline of colonial agriculture, labor exploitation, and illusion.

Sound cue: jubilant crowd noises layered over the distant sound of a machete, and then:
“Welcome back to normal.”

This Banana Is Not a Banana

There’s a banana in your hand. It wiggles a bit. Smells kinda like a fruit. It’s even shaped the way you expect. But what if I told you it’s not actually a banana? Not the original, not even a good imitation. It’s a symbol of a symbol of a thing that no longer exists. Welcome to the banana-industrial complex.

We live in a world so deep in simulation, we don’t even remember what the real was supposed to taste like. Literally. The banana we eat today? That’s the Cavendish. It’s a genetically identical clone of itself—selected for durability, not flavor. The banana flavoring we reject as “fake” is actually closer to the extinct Gros Michel, which disappeared under the boot of monoculture and fungal rot. So the fake banana is more real than the “real” banana, but the real banana is gone. Did you follow that? Neither did most people. But we’ll still call it a banana, and we’ll still eat it with a smile, because the illusion is more palatable than the loss.

This is where Jean Baudrillard starts cackling in his grave. Or maybe he’s just eating a banana and screaming softly. Disneyland exists, he argued, to make the rest of America feel “real.” It’s a cartoon distraction that makes the surrounding capitalist mirage look authentic by comparison. It’s the ultimate decoy: See? This part’s fake. So everything else must be true. That’s what the banana does, too. It plays normal. Wholesome. A goofy fruit that slips and moans and stars in kid’s cartoons. Meanwhile, the laborers exploited to bring it to your grocery aisle disappear into the background static—off-screen, out of frame, off your ethical radar.

In Baudrillard’s terms, this is a hyperreal fruit. A spectacle. We eat it not because it nourishes, but because it signals “food.” It plays its part in the pantomime of consumption. And war? Same thing. We’re so bombarded with images, narratives, video-game footage, and postured speeches that the actual violence becomes abstracted. The war isn’t televised. The televised thing is the war. You’re not witnessing it; you’re watching its simulation. Just like you're not tasting justice or awareness or impact—you’re tasting a yellow wrapper that says “banana” and trusting that’s good enough.

This is how symbolic dissonance becomes cultural anesthesia. And the banana is a perfect mascot for this mess. It’s so ordinary, it hides in plain sight. And yet it’s freighted with colonial legacy, plantation abuse, labor violence, racial caricatures, phallic implications, capitalist triumphalism, and extinction denial. But don’t worry about all that. Have a smoothie.

In the world of the spectacle, the only thing more dangerous than the truth is the idea that truth doesn’t matter. And if we’ve accepted synthetic bananas, performative politics, and fruit-shaped ignorance as “just how things are”—then the simulation isn’t just working, it’s winning.

So hold that banana a little closer. Ask it who it used to be. Ask what kind of stories were peeled away until only the joke was left. And then maybe—just maybe—ask yourself what else you’re swallowing whole because the label says “real.”

Confused? Good.
That means your critical thinking module is online.

These bananas didn’t make the interactive cut, but they haunt the margins of the Fruit Canon. They are the no-man’s land where simulacra, nostalgia, and white Jesus converge. They are the confessional booth of shame and late-stage capitalism.

Your conscious is calling. Press 9 to repent.

Or, Why My Childhood Was Full of Hamsters Named Sunshine

How often do you think about death?
Not the poetics of it. Not the tragic arcs or cinematic fade-outs. I mean the meat-and-maggots kind. The smell-under-the-sink kind. The real one.

My dad was often busy with funerals and hospital visits. Death was just part of the weekly rotation—like Tuesday tacos or Sunday sermons. If someone had a toe in the grave, he was probably already making a casserole. That proximity stripped death of its mystery, but not its absurdity.

Which got me wondering: would the beauty industry make as much money if people weren’t terrified of dying? Imagine Sephora without existential dread. Do we contour our cheekbones to distract from our eventual skulls?

This piece is based on that childhood earworm, The Hearse Song.
“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out. The worms play pinochle on your snout.”

Morbid. Untraceable. Postmodern.
It’s been passed down like an heirloom in a haunted dollhouse.
No known author. No copyright. Just one big shared wink at the void.

So I made a piece that played with it. Wooden skull. Velvet worms. Shag rug. The crypt got cozy. A morning lodgr.

The worms are squishy and weighted, filled with cedar pellets.
They’re designed to be held. Played with. Confessed to.

Funeral fun house.

The rug invites you to sit, maybe cross-legged like kindergarten story time, except this story is about the compostable version of you.
The piece isn’t about death as tragedy. It’s about death as intimacy.
It’s about laughing in a velvet grave because you weren’t allowed to talk about it growing up.

Society doesn’t avoid death because it’s too big. It avoids death because it refuses to let it be small. Tangible. Touchably absurd.
And in that silence, the fear grows. But fear, like mold, hates fresh air.
So I gave it worms instead.

Growing up, I always had a hamster named Sunshine.
She never died.
I mean—she did, repeatedly. But spiritually, she regenerated like a rodent Doctor Who.

Sunshine was not a name. It was a role. Grief dressed in drag. Death as a children’s puppet show with teeth.
Over the years, there were at least nine. One was a guinea pig. One was… suspect. A pet cementary of denial. Like an after school special of uncanny valley.

Why do we lie to kids about death and then expect them to be emotionally functional adults? Sunshine was my first experiment in humor-as-processing. An absurd chorus of undead hamsters.
Each version of Sunshine lives in my work like a chorus of plushy prophets.

Death became a punchline I never stopped writing.

So what is this section really about?
Death, repetition, humor, and the quiet invitation to touch what you were told to fear.
The worms aren’t the horror. The silence is.

And maybe, if you listen close enough, they’re not playing pinochle.
They’re whispering: It’s okay to laugh. You’re already part of the earth.

t’s okay to laugh at the thing that scares you.
It’s okay to crawl into the skull if it means crawling out a little more alive.

This work isn’t just a death piece.
It’s a velvet invitation to the haunted funhouse of your own avoidance.
It’s the moment you realize the horror movie was a comedy all along—
and you were the punchline and the poet.

It’s haunted.
And hopeful.
And exactly where the worms want you.

Click here to visit the Shrine of Sunshine 🐹 →

A Manifesto for Creative Becoming

Execution is not the assignment.

I don’t teach art in the traditional sense.

I invite people to think, to feel—and most importantly, to believe their thoughts and feelings matter.

Everything begins with this truth:

Concept comes before execution.

Art doesn’t need to be flawless to be real. It just needs to be true.

The first spark isn’t line or form or color theory. It’s Dada.

Absurdity. Rebellion. Unmaking.

It’s the moment you realize meaning can be torn apart and rebuilt your way. Not to dismiss technique—but to unshackle expression from the fear that it isn’t “good enough.”

Because that fear? It kills more ideas than failure ever could.

And when you realize your job isn’t to impress—but to communicate?

To echo.

To signal.

To be felt?

That’s when it gets good.

That’s when it gets honest.

This forge isn’t a classroom. It’s a heat source.

Not a production line for portfolio pieces—but a crucible.

Where identity gets tempered.

Where contradiction is welcome.

Where your weirdness has weight.

This is for the ones who’ve been told to “tone it down.”

For the ones who’ve been called too much, too messy, too loud, too strange.

For anyone who's ever been told to wait until they’re “good enough.”

You don’t have to wait.

You don’t have to shrink.

You only have to show up and mean it.

Art can be your weapon or your blanket, your whisper or your war cry.

What matters is that it’s yours.

And that you gave it breath.

-----

The Smoke After the Flame

You don’t need permission to begin.

You only need the match you’ve always had in your hand.

This is the forge.

Not everyone’s ready for it.

But you are.

Let the system squirm.

Let the rules tremble a little.

You didn’t show up to blend in.

You showed up to burn honest.

And don’t worry—there’s still room for velvet shields.

This isn’t about swinging hammers at glass hearts.

It’s about teaching them how to dance in the fire.

You don’t have to be the best.

Just brave.

Just true.

And never forget—

your weirdness is not a liability.

It’s the whole damn spell.

It wasn’t all for nothing.

This is the battle report I never thought I’d get to write—scrawled in spite and survival, delivered long after the smoke cleared.

I didn’t just make it out.

I made something from it.

And if you’re holding this, maybe you will too.

Because the system never expected us to take notes.

Let alone light the map on fire and walk away, soul intact, ready to sing the tale.

Want to teach this? Show it to your dean? Stitch it into your student union zine? Go for it. Just keep my name and don’t dull the edges.

Got questions, compliments, or existential dread? Whether you're vibing or just haunting from the shadows, send your signal through the contact portal—or descend into the deeper depths and slip into your favorite social media rabbit hole.

From the ashes with teeth—thank you for reading.

Keep your weird sharp and your heart louder than their rules.

Love Jordy - Patron Saint of the Partially Collapsed

(This was a love letter, after all.)

Now go light something on fire—metaphorically. Probably.