Longer About

I figured I'd make one of these, but man, it is hard to write about myself. I have to fuck with this page pretty regularly because within just a few months of finishing it, I inevitably change so much that half of the shit here becomes either obsolete or something I just don't feel is worth sharing. keeping it up is a good exercise though, forces me to think about who I am in a way that matters.

I'm Casper Mario Valentine, yes I picked it out myself. I'm a genderqueer guy and a fagdyke. the word "nonbinary" sometimes slips out of my mouth but I really prefer to call myself genderqueer because I'm queering my gender and I don't think there actually is a gender binary, even for cis people. I lean more towards the combination-of-everything androgyny than the neutral androgyny, so I'm all about those neopronouns and weird gendered terms. I'm Msc. Casper Valentine when I have to use an honorific, a boifriend to everyone I'm dating, and a niephew to my aunts. are some of the words I use for myself kinda stupid sounding? yes. do I care? no. I'm also polyamorous, dating a guy that lives in my head named Frey along with a girl outside of it who may or may not have partners of her own.

I currently live in a big city in the Northeast USA, and while I didn't grow up here, I've always been in New England. I hate quantifying my age with a number, so I'll just say I'm old enough to have graduated college and have been renting my own place(s) for years. my degree has nothing to do with writing, though I don't regret getting it. as only partly a tongue-and-cheek reference to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, I consider myself a holistic storyteller. I view my own life through the lens of character-driven narration and can create worlds with their own people and complex relationship dynamics kind of on the fly. at one point, those skills were tied up in maladaptive daydreaming and a pretty significant dissociative disorder, but life's been good ever since I found a way to make it work for me. I am still plural, though :P

the whole storytelling thing I have going on is directly tied to the interconnectedness of all things, which is why I call it holistic. I've been a spiritual guy ever since I almost died and essentially witnessed the spiritual force of the universe firsthand. there are signs and symbols that appear all around us, connected not by causality but something we can't measure or explain, and I'd like to think I'm getting better at deciphering them when it comes to my own life. my precognition comes to me through visions that feel like random memories if I'm not paying attention enough, dreams, cartomancy, and automatic writing, which extends to the stories I create. I don't have much connection to spirits, but my retired service dog, Rosemary, became my spirit guide after she passed. in terms of religion, I'm a Unitarian Universalist and I go to a UU church every Sunday.

when I'm not writing or having weird psychic experiences, I'm either creating some kind of art or learning about something new. the most succinct way of describing my interests is saying that I like stuff and people—I am obsessed with all matters of artifacts and I want to consume as much of culture as a possibly can. I learn best through play, so I usually use my writing as an excuse to do things that I'd otherwise never do, like learning how to speak Spanish again or watching a bunch of films in a genre I've never bothered with before. of course, having the ability to develop new complex skills only on my own terms doesn't neatly fit into any traditional job, so I'm basically unemployable until I become a published author, yippee!

I'm a socialist because capitalism is fucked and an anarchist because the justice and healthcare system are fucked. psychology was a special interest of mine and I used to treat it like gospel, but all those years of research eventually led to me being anti-psychiatry—the cracks start showing when you notice that the difference between one diagnosis over another similar one is often how sexist/racist the diagnosing clinician is. my feelings on the complete abolition of psychiatry began with prison abolition, because what makes psychiatry wrong is that it upholds the same things prison does rather than some nonsense about how mad people should be spared from marginalization while it's fine and dandy to marginalize the "undesireables" that the justice system so graciously disappeared for all the civilized middle class whites. capitalism is the source of most of society's problems, including the material conditions that leads to "crime" in the first place. the only way we can progress is by decoupling someone's ability to work from their ability to live, along with using a restorative justice model for any harm that isn't prevented by doing so. also, all cops are bastards and it's always correct to punch a Nazi.