Spare the rod
Welcome to Hella Immaculate, I love you.
I’m Dave, a comedian and budding abolitionist. I love making light of heavy shit and taking frivolous things too seriously. Hella Immaculate is my existential, spiritual, political, creative-process-and-culture-obsessed alt-weekly.
You can support my work by sharing it or paying me to keep making it! Do that through Patreon, and you’ll get hella goodies and other chances to connect.
My parents spanked me. I grew up evangelical Christian, and that was the culture. I remember one traveling minister to our church had a merch table that included bespoke “rods”—smooth, small wooden paddles with beautiful wood grain patterns. My parents bought one.
I don’t resent them. “Spare the rod, spoil the child” was the culturally selected Bible verse to support spanking. I know now my parents, if they could go back, wouldn’t spank me and my siblings. But it’s just so hard to question the culture.
Last night, I attended a meeting as a member of the leadership body of my political home (these specifics don’t matter, but I’m happy to share them one-on-one). It was a special meeting to decide what to do about a member who had recklessly tweeted something that got them doxxed and endangered group work. Six days after they did it, they resigned from leadership.
Here are my opinions on the situation in the order they occurred to me:
I strongly disagreed with the action (defacing a temporary memorial to a recently deceased cop) despite agreeing with the sentiment (abolish the police).
Tweeting the shit was dumb as hell.
Even so, this person didn’t deserve to be doxxed by right-wing fascists and cop lovers (and no one does).
We need to keep this person safe.
It sucks we had to cancel actual abolitionist work (tabling for our Defund campaign) as a result of this.
This person should take responsibility for individually deciding to do and post something that affected the group. Hopefully resign.
They resigned! Thank God, now we as leaders can focus on the underlying issues—how to be disciplined in our posting, what actions are worth the risks and how to decide those collectively, and how to protect each other from the inevitable security breaches in the wake of those worth-it actions—instead of pointing all our attention at this one person.
Problem is, at this meeting last night, a bunch of these other full-grown adults added an 8th step. They wanted to Punish our peer who resigned with public statements about how they harmed Our Movement and enforcing bans on them being in leadership again.
It was fucking disturbing, man, this focus on making this person pay, when we had real harm to the group we needed to repair. We didn’t come away from the meeting with anything concrete to repair that harm.
And I get it! I’m resentful as any motherfucker there is. It’s hard to resist the pull toward vengeance and lashing out when you feel threatened. I don’t have the anthropology to back me up, but I’m sure the impulse is evolutionary. It’s definitely cultured. It’s so hard to question the culture.
And yet. That is our job, if we take up the mantle of abolition (I don’t assume you do, but certainly you can apply my awakening to similar ones in your life). It’s a radical fucking job. It’s Christian, in a way, taking Jesus literally about turning the other cheek kind of shit.
We have to be willing to take all the shit life and other people throw at us and NOT spit it back. We have to see the biggest, most fundamental picture. That indicting Elijah McClain’s killers will not spread the kind of love Elijah McClain brought to the world. That pointing to the hypocrisy of conservatives flouting mask mandates pushing to roll back abortion rights does nothing to help the people who need abortions.
Abolition requires us UTTERLY REIMAGINING our world. It demands we not anoint ourselves judges just because we got elected to leadership of a political organization for a year. It asks we not foam at the mouth seeking Punishment but focus on the scary, tender work of helping the harmed.
Yet abolition is not all restraint! It encourages creativity. We get to indulge and stoke our imagination. It dares to suggest we can actually make the world a better place, right now. It’s hard to question the culture, but isn’t it worth it?
THIS IS MY PODCAST, THIS IS YOUR AFTERLIFE
My guest: Connor Shioshita Pickett, Neo-Futurist.
We talked: Tbh lot of casual suicide talk (hopefully it’s helpful and not triggering), funeral pranks, life being a hassle, not having a “coma” moment, and the thrill of performing in the nude.
This is legit my favorite promo I’ve ever made, and you’ll see why when you watch (not just listen) to it.
THEY’RE JUST, LIKE, MY SUGGESTIONS, MAN
Watch No Limit Chronicles (you can buy a one month BET subscription via Amazon Prime to watch all five episodes. Normally, I wouldn’t suggest supporting Amazon, but man is this series worth it). It’s like a DIY record label story but with millions of dollars. So many good anecdotes of believing in yourself and boundary setting. Cannot recommend this music doc highly enough.
Donate to an abortion fund. They need it.
I donated $10 to split between 10 abortion funds in Texas. You can do the same here. I’d give more but I’m very cash-strapped at the moment. Consider matching or beating me by a couple hundred percent. Reply with what you donate to any fund, and I’ll announce our total next week.
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MAY I PLAY YOU A SOUND?
Poet, writer, playwright, and rapper Kae Tempest has the kind of career I envy: hands deep in multiple mediums and working at the top of their game in all of them. Writing a new translation of Sophocles that plays at London’s National Theatre. Writing a book of “reflections on numbness, connection, empathy, accountability, the depths, the times and creativity.” And releasing genre-twisting albums like The Book of Traps & Lessons, which I heard for the first time this week.
“Firesmoke” is the most sentimental the album gets, and it hits even harder in the context of a bleak record about the world falling to shit and questioning what we can even do in the midst of it. It’s still lovely alone, though. I hope you enjoy it.
Firesmoke
My visionary is a vision
I watch her dancing by the window
And it rips my flesh to ribbons
And the whole world is just ripples
In the middle distance
I listen to her hips
I push my kisses to her lips
We move like we were born to move
The night is teeth and pistons
And there is something in this tenderness that makes me want to live
Firesmoke
Her mouth sets free this captive
Come close to me
Free me
Let me untangle the madness that knots you
I drop to my knees and crawl across you
I tell you I’ve got you
It’s firesmoke
So go on, give me three days of your body and mine
Time is a blind eye and I see your mind in my mind’s eye
You make me immortal
You take me to space
You are a planet
A place I’ve not known
Your body is home to rare gods
I kneel at their temple
I’m blown to bits, gentle, ferocious
We are open
Explosives have nothing compared to these sparks
So let’s fall apart
And then lie with me, breathing in the den of the dark
It’s firesmoke
Your mouth sets free this captive
Come close to me
Free me
Untangle the madness that knots me
You drop to your knees, you crawl across me
You lick your lips softly
It’s firesmoke
The fire rises between us
And makes us get on the wrong trains
Walk the wrong way
Makes strangers smile greetings on Lewisham way
I bathe in this fire
It warms without burning
Compels without force
And it turns without turning the world
So, please, you keep your purpose
Your poise and your journey
I'll be by the fire
Thinking, nothing I’ve learned can prepare me
For everything else that needs learning
Is this how it feels to feel certain?
’Cause for so many years my love’s been a burden
But now comes this fire to cleanse and restore us
To fuel us and calm us and push us both forwards, forwards
Warming without burning,
DM