About

I’m a Johnny Taylor. And I’m a proud vegan, heathen, “deviant.” But it’s that last identifier that I continue to take issue with – hence the quotes. Not that I have problem with the word deviant, I can own my own departing from the usual or accepted standards/ behaviors, rather it’s the second a pin-dick uses said term in reference to my disability that I have big problems with. “Fuck the bozo’s!”

I’m also a self-described progressive dreamer, terribly mixed up in this increasingly regressively acting excuse for a civilization. Welcome to my little corner of the internet. Take from this whatever you feel you must.

More than fine, damn fine in fact

My life may not always be convenient or easy — whose is? — but you have to keep things in perspective. I’m still alive and doing damn fine considering.

I recognize my fortune. There are many, many more individuals living everywhere under much worse systems of oppression and control than I do. For the record, I’m referring solely to my body in this particular instance, I am still a white man after all. But having been witness to everything I’ve lived through I know what truly deserves priority.

When you’re different you see the world differently. I know, much too well, what it feels like to be discriminated against, or in the very least judged, based on something that cannot be changed. I’ve been witness to life from both ends of the figurative spectrum, by living in each a position of privilege and one of “disadvantage” (which really still isn’t all that disadvantageous, hence the quotes, but I’ve experienced enough discrimination to become sensitive to other forms of it on a broader scale).

Pay people some effort

I can see the wheels turning in a person’s head as they try to figure me out prior to my either getting shunned or seeing the effort it takes to engage me. I’m not dismissing such behaviour. Hell, I even understand it. I can’t say for certain I’d have acted much differently than a person who chooses not to interact with me if I’d come across me in my former life.

But you can’t judge anything based on snippets of things you interpret to be “true” and realistically expect a subsequent interpretation to be accurate. Of course that’s not an absolute statement, everything is relative, but in my experience (trust me, I’m no authority) that statement is true far more often than it is false. You have no idea what a person has to deal with every second of every hour of every day until you have lived it without the safety of your reality to return to. We all have no fucking clue. Try and live your life like you half get that and stop being such a selfish asshole!

After all, when everything is said and done, this planet (or, so unfortunately, what is bound to be left of it) will continue to orbit the sun without you. And very likely without anything you’ve ever done. Chances are pretty damn good especially if you’re a white, “able-bodied“, heterosexual, cisgendred, human, male, living in a Western “democracy” today’s worries really won’t matter tomorrow…

For further reading about me

Check out what I have blogged about myself on this weblog, or elsewhere on the web at my other virtual home, Abledaccess (where I focus the bulk of my attention on the accessible matters of the web). For some quick context, read some of my not so frequently asked questions, where I’ve answered a lot of the questions I’ve been asked over the years.

“It never hurts to ask. It always hurts to assume…”