TOP TIER REPORTAGE FOR A MUMBLING ELECTORATE
by Tracy Denholm
As an adult who has, for the most part, been required to sort out their own mental health issues, developing a fondness and respect for crying has been crucial. Despite this, it feels unreasonable and exclusionary that I’m not welcome to cry wherever I feel the need - that my requirement for crying is subordinate to the mild discomfort other people will feel if they see me bangin’ one out (a lake of tears) in the supermarket aisle. It’s like self-imposed Jim Crow laws for the sad.
Do you know what’s even more stigmatised? Vomiting. In our society there are exceptionally few places where I feel encouraged, welcome or even able to vomit freely. People who imminently need to vomit are incredibly marginalised as it is, that they feel excluded from key venues in the city is shameful, reactionary and prejudiced especially considering the warm welcome provided to the sneezing or bleeding.
Listen up policy makers, you think I choose to vomit? No way José. But my body does it anyway and I’m proud. Proud and excited. When I feel the bile rise I start smiling, because I love who I am and I love what my body does unconditionally.
LET. ME. GET. SICK. ON. THE. BUS.
Voting
by Carlos Rudd
You vote with ballots? I vote with my feet. I vote with my potato gun out in the green. I vote with a slingshot and a tomato and a cheeky grin. I vote with a small, newly militant group right through the windows of the local police station.
I’ve taken over the Greggs on Fargate and declared it a sovereign state. I’ve got a crossbow and enough pasties to last me a month. Utopia is now. Come at me, pigs.
|Staff Post
We’ve got insanely good election choices this year: Nyarlathotep the crawling chaos, a litany of cabbage patch dolls, and a kind man who fell in a bin.
It makes you appreciate the limited scope of a lot of horror fiction that they didn’t think to include the perils of democracy. Imagine the greater depths Texas Chainsaw Massacre would have if Leatherface enjoyed a constitutional mandate and a significant majority of the Home Counties actively voted to give him a codified position of power, provided that the actual running around with a chainsaw stuff was localised to the North of England.
Image Godzilla, except the shrieking crowds below not only have to dodge the rubble of disintegrating high-rise buildings and streaks of fire-lightning randomly soaring across busy intersections, but now they also need to comprehend that this screaming lizard has been elected with a constitutional majority, that the Overton window of acceptable political discourse has been shifted towards walking through infrastructure, standing on humans, and dodging questions about child poverty statistics by hibernating in the sea.
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