I Do Not Like Green Eggs and Taylor Swift

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Why quit when you can fight on? Why die when you can live?  I wrote this piece a few weeks ago, and I was going to publish it, but I had this feeling, I don't know why, that Taylor Swift and Jane Galt really don't like each other. I haven't heard anything about the two of them in the media, but it is just my intuitive impression, and you know girls. 

I thought, I would like to marry Jane, or at least work for her, or at least meet her to investigate the possibilities. And by now, I have reason to be pretty sure that Jane knows about me, knows about this blog, probably knows about my previous one. So I found myself thinking she might not like it if I posted this extensive essay on a girl she dislikes while I'm still referring to her by a pseudonym. 

But last week, I thought for several reasons that Jane was finally going to say something, but that moment passed. So, I'm going to publish this. I wrote a whole book about Jane Galt. Whenever she is ready, she can get in touch with me and I'm anxious to share it with the world.  If she can't stand my writing one essay about Taylor Swift, she is not the girl for me. There are some things about Taylor that need to be said.

Like everyone who pays attention to the music industry, I first heard of Taylor Swift when she was 14. I didn't pay her much attention because I don't really follow country music. There are a few country songs that I love, Bryan White's Rebecca Lynn, for example. One of These Days by Tim McGraw. Garth Brooks' In The Life of Chris Gaines is one of my all-time favorite desert island albums, although I guess people debate whether it is truly country.

But even though I love that country musicians touch on a much wider variety of topics than any other genre of music, and I do like a lot of the "new country" stuff, the typical country music sound doesn't appeal to me, and the typical country music accent always reminds me of southern racism. I may be wrong for that, but that is the response that I feel. So while there are songs here and there, I don't really follow the genre the way I follow pop, rock, jazz and hiphop.  I don't really follow R&B since the turn of the millennium, or heavy metal.

But shortly after Taylor had crossed over into popular music, while she was still in her teens, I think, I read, or rather skimmed a magazine interview with her. I think it may have been in Rolling Stone, but I don't recall for sure. The article gave me the impression that she was a highly intelligent, incredibly driven spoiled brat who inexplicably felt the whole world was against her when the world was rolling out the red carpet for her, and didn't appreciate that she was one of the luckiest people on the planet.

There is this movie that I love, and I'm SOOOO looking forward to being able to sit down and watch it with some Jewish girls, because I think most girls from Christian backgrounds would find it uncomfortable. It is called The Great Satan, and it is a brilliantly edited and hilarious collection of clips from Christian televangelists, Christian kids shows, and bad religious-themed horror movies. It is so hilarious and I can watch it over and over again, and I do.

There is this one clip where a young blond preacher in casual clothes is talking and says, “There will be a day that 2 Live Crew gets on their knee and says Jesus is Lord. Ted Turner will bow his knee.” I felt like this was how Taylor Swift was, that she wanted everyone up to and including figures as random as 2 Live Crew and Ted Turner to bow down in front her and tell her how great she was, and that like evangelical Christians, she would never be satisfied until EVERY knee had bowed. I perceived Taylor as this level of egomaniac and I knew I was not alone. And I knew Taylor was not alone, because when I was her age, I was just like her.

Taylor Swift is 29 right now. When I was 29 in 2005, and I had just started B-Wing Entertainment, rolled out of bed and wrote the first screenplay I'd ever even tried to write, finished the first draft in two weeks, and a bunch of people went apeshit over it. I was driving 150 miles per hour down the Silver Strand in Coronado in my Australian-built GTO, renting luxury cars for trips to stay the Venetian in Vegas. Telling old friends to basically go fuck themselves because we had disagreements. Eating at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse about once a week at times. I was expecting to be Steven Spielberg within a few years. I was just like the song by Taylor's nemesis Kanye: Can't Tell Me Nuthin'!

That isn't quite literally true, because I always listen to the smart people around me, and I bet Taylor does too, but where I think we are alike is that when I feel that I'm SURE I'm right about something, that's when I flip into Kanye mode and won't take the opinion of anybody above my own. I completely and totally rejected the idea of joining anything or following anybody. I was going to create my own reality. It seems like Taylor is the same way.

But there were so many things that caught my attention in the Taylor Swift media universe that made me think she was a total bitch. I mean, the constant beefs with other celebrities seemed juvenile, even though her comebacks were always amusingly brilliant and devastating. She was like young Floyd Mayweather in the media ring. You couldn't lay a hand on her, but when you swung and missed, she would hit you with a devastating unforeseeable counterpunch. Taylor has a way of saying out loud things that people don't think others can't get away with saying about them out loud, but she crafts her statements in such a way that she gets away with it. She's brilliant at that, but she seemed so petty that it was unbelievable. Every statement that I heard her make seemed to be about herself.

Taylor and Selena Gomez were BFFs for a long time, but when Selena was going through her health issues, I didn't see any pictures of Taylor Swift by her bedside. I didn't hear any statements from Taylor Swift wishing her a speedy recovery. Maybe that happened and I didn't see or hear it because I'm not plugged into pop culture, but Taylor's got a big enough microphone that when she wants to make sure everybody hears something, she can. Of course, perhaps Selena asked her not to do that. It's none of my business really. But I can't be the only one who saw all those pictures of Selena and the friend who gave her a kidney in the bed next to her, and wondered, "Hey, where's her supposed BFF?" But it seemed that the only things Taylor ever wanted to make sure everybody heard were about HERSELF.

Beyond that, Taylor got famous in country music, but I never saw her performing or doing collaborations with any country music artists to help raise their profile. Again, maybe she did and I missed it, but as far as her public persona goes, she seemed to have completely distanced herself from the genre that made her famous.

It seemed to me that if she wasn't a pretty girl, Taylor would be perceived and treated much the same way the media and public perceives and treats Justin Bieber, who I actually like, but has mostly negative press and is viewed negatively by most people outside of his fans. Taylor was mostly being praised everywhere but had this persecution complex to where she always thought everyone was hating on her. And surely, some people were, but much of that she brought on herself by never being able to let anything roll off her back, so IRL trolls gravitated to her because she was so easy to provoke. But the general tone of her press was overwhelmingly positive.

A lot of people might have called her a diva, but I didn't even see her as that. Divas want adulation and attention, but Taylor already had plenty of that. It seemed like she wanted us all to SUBMIT. It was like she was trying to seize control of the world by force, like the Hottie Highlander, trying to defeat everyone in public media combat until she was the last one left.

But she had a slippery way of making herself seem to be a sympathetic character, without ever apologizing for anything. A perfect example is this recent article I saw online, with this quote over her picture: “When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world.”.

Now despite the artistic beauty of that line and the fact that I wish I'd written it, and maybe she has a future in literature, it is wonderfully vague and ambiguous. What exactly does that mean? It sounds like it might kind of be Taylor being accountable, but on the other hand it could be more blaming the world for being too hard on her. Maybe the article explains more thoroughly, I didn't read it. I don't have time to read every Taylor Swift article that comes out. I'd starve to death because I wouldn't have time to eat or sleep. But I know Taylor is savvy enough to know as I do that headlines “echo” farther than content. So, my general view of Taylor Swift was easily summarized: DISLIKE!

But despite all that, Taylor Swift wasn't really in my universe. I didn't think about her very often at all.  These were all thoughts I would have about her when I saw an interview or saw her on a magazine cover. I never listened to the radio, so I didn't really hear much of her music. She was a high-profile artist who I didn't follow or listen to, but couldn't help hearing about all the time, much like Nicki Minaj or R. Kelly. That was until the incident with Kanye West...

I never ever said too much about Taylor Swift, publicly or privately, because I had no to reason to. But after the Kanye West thing, suddenly Taylor, who had been completely off the Black community radar and mostly off my radar, was a topic of discussion and people, Black and White, were asking me what I thought about the situation. Given my historical dislike of Taylor, and my general affinity for Kanye, I felt uncomfortable talking too much about it. It was, for me, such a complicated situation what happened between them, and when asked I would usually avoid in-depth discussion by just saying, “Kanye is an idiot sometimes”. But now I'm going to talk about it.

Kanye West is one of my favorite musicians, and as successful as he is, I still feel that he doesn't get enough credit. I would argue that Kanye has single-handedly revolutionized the sound of popular music three times, going back to the turn of the millennium when a lot of people, including me, thought his name was “Kayne” and he was creating unique beats by modulating the sound of instruments in creative ways. Then he pioneered the use of vocal samples as instrumentation. And then he pioneered the sort of spacey stadium sound that is still the popular music standard today.

I believe that history will record that Kanye is one of the most important figures in the history of popular music, like Phil Spector, though I hope Kanye doesn't go down that road, or even Bob Dylan. That is a hard pill to swallow for most because of Kanye's personality, and the fact that a lot of people still don't take hiphop music seriously even though it is now the most popular genre of music. But if he was as cool and suave in public as Jay-Z is, I don't think that would be a controversial opinion.

But Kanye's public behavior is often inexcusable and what he did to Taylor Swift at that show is one of the dopiest, most insensitive things I've ever seen someone do in that kind of setting. It was truly appalling. I would not have thought it too severe if they banned him from all music award shows for like five years, or even for life. Or make him sit in the balcony and let Kim come get his awards for him. But at the same time, as foolish as it was, Taylor's reaction to it threw me back into thinking the same thing that I thought when I read that magazine interview. Taylor Swift is always acting like everybody's trying to spoil her party, but her life's been a nonstop party of praise since she was 14.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Taylor Swift has had to navigate a host of trying real-life obstacles in her career, in addition to dealing with all the real-life obstacles that every person faces. And I know that very few attractive young women can get through a career in the entertainment industry without having to run a gauntlet of sexual and financial predators. But in the big picture, she is living a dream that very few people get the opportunity to live: to be able to share her talent with the world and be appreciated for it. But, compared to so many of the other girls in her position, she often doesn't seem to appreciate it, and worse yet, to me, doesn't seem to be enjoying it. Taylor seemed to think she was going to get all the perks of stardom without any of the downsides.

There are a million ways that Taylor could have brushed off what Kanye did in a way that was light-hearted and funny, and it would have made him look even more pathetic, and humanized her. She missed her moment to become a sympathetic figure. And there are memes she could have gotten surrogates to start that would have been really devastating if she was truly mad about it, for example, “You know, Kim Kardashian and Jay-Z should have questions about why Kanye is so passionate about Beyonce's video.” I wondered and wrote that myself, though out of respect for Kim and Jay-Z and Beyonce, I never said it out loud to start any rumors. But now, I think its harmless at this point.

It was further complicated by the fact that I love and respect Beyonce, who is from Houston like me, seems to be a great woman, and is an artist I really enjoy while I don't like a single Taylor Swift song. Well, okay, I kinda like Shake It Off. It's cute. I was asked by an acquaintance in prison to listen to the album of the guy that Taylor let record 1989, which I actually thought was spectacularly cool of her to do and was one of the first things that made me start thinking maybe she wasn't exactly who I had been thinking.  While I liked his voice, I still couldn't stand her music and lyrics.

Look, I'm not saying Taylor's music is bad. She is obviously a talented artist. Her music is very well crafted even though I don't find it interesting, and she has a good enough voice even if she's not Adele or anything. Her stuff is just not for me. But on the other hand, even though I've never bought a Beyonce album, I have a bunch of her singles and I like just about all her songs except, ironically, Single Ladies and Put A Ring On It. It's not because I object to their lyrical content. I just don't like them musically.

I realize now that I always forget Beyonce is a MAT Girl too, and I need to go back to add her to my favorite Gentile MAT Girls list. From the brief clips I'm seen, Beyonce and Taylor both usually have pretty good videos, but I don't recall offhand what the Single Ladies video was. I haven't really watched music videos since the mid-90s so I have no idea whether there was any merit to Kanye's stated beef, but that is beside the point. In any case, I highly doubt Single Ladies was one of the “greatest videos of all time”, given all the great ones that come out back during the golden age of music video in the 80s. You know, I only realize it as I am writing this, but there is something that makes what Kanye did even worse...

It would be one thing if Beyonce was the Susan Lucci of music and had been constantly passed up for awards. But Beyonce is a highly acclaimed artist, almost as big and successful as Taylor, and given what appears to be her personality, I very much doubt that she cares too much about whether she wins a particular Video of the Year award. And now that I think about it, Beyonce is more on top of the world than Taylor Swift. Why do I say that?

Beyonce has Jay-Z, who would appear to be a good husband, and their three children. Taylor Swift is a young childless woman still searching for the right man for her, and based on her music has endured a great deal of heartbreak and angst in that journey. Beyonce seems like the kind of girl who knew exactly what kind of man she wanted, and she went out and found it at a pretty young age. Her music and her public persona would seem to show a person who is balanced and happy. There are a lot of people who don't like Taylor, while Beyonce is almost universally liked. The more I think about it, maybe Taylor wasn't mad enough!

And come to think of it, Kanye is an apparently happily married man, too, and to someone who is a really nice girl from all I hear, and unfairly mocked by so many people, so much so that I don't even want to state the obvious about a comparison between her accomplishments and Taylor Swift's. So while Taylor Swift might be the biggest success of the group as an artist, in the big picture of life, Kanye was punching DOWNWARD at Taylor Swift in a sense.

I mean, Kanye and Beyonce, they've got happy homes and families, as far as I can tell from the outside. All Taylor has is her cats, and some boyfriends that come and go but clearly aren't fulfilling her needs. It doesn't even seem like she has too many friends anymore since I don't see her and Selena Gomez together all the time these days. Can't she have a little damn video award?

They are all living the dream, and when you step back from the racial and genre differences, and the age difference which is not insignificant in that Kanye is much older but he was the one acting immature, the five of them, Taylor, Kanye, Beyonce, Jay-Z and Kim have more in common than not. But the dream's not fun if you're lonely, and Taylor's the only one in that group that would seem to be.

I hadn't thought about all of this when it happened. It was Kanye doing something stupid, but who's gonna cry for Taylor Swift?!? It is a weird situation when someone you like does something totally fucked up to someone you don't like in an effort to defend someone else that you do like. And it is made further complicated when that person you like is a Black man publicly doing a stupid fucked up thing to a White girl, and something that has a hint of physical intimidation to it, and you're a Black man who realizes how damaging that is to the cause of racial harmony.

But then I heard the rumor that Kanye had written the song Runaway to do with Taylor Swift in an effort to make a reconciliation, and she refused to do it. I don't know if that is true or not, but when I heard the song, I thought, it actually would have been great if she had done it, and it probably would have been one of the biggest popular music hits of all time. Hey, if Jay-Z could do a song with Nas after the stuff he said in Ether, Taylor could do a song with Kanye. Listening to Runaway, the idea that it was written for Taylor Swift certainly sounded plausible and I felt that it was angsty, and immature and short-sighted if she didn't see the value in doing it outweighed whatever animosity she had toward him for what he did.

But then recently I read an article where Taylor was talking about the entire situation, and revealed more dopey behavior by Kanye that she hadn't mentioned in the past. And look, Taylor may be an egomaniac, she may be self-centered, she may be a lot of things, but I don't think she is that kind of liar to make up shit like that. No, I haven't heard Kanye's side of the story, but when you have a long history of saying and doing dopey shit and she doesn't, who am I going to trust?

And I mean, the song lyric quoted in that article, which I'd never heard because I haven't caught up on Kanye's music since Dark Fantasy, “I still might have sex with Taylor, I made that bitch famous” or whatever. Huh? Man, you might not be paying attention to the world outside of hiphop, but that girl was world famous before most people outside of the hiphop world even knew what you looked like. When you say shit like this, it makes everybody wonder, what the hell is wrong with you?!?!

And now I see articles saying that Kanye is having a feud with Jay-Z, which I didn't even know about, or what the issue is. But I thought Kanye's song Big Brother way back when was out of line. For all the opportunity that Jay-Z gave him, he really shouldn't have anything bad to say about him, over the fact that he didn't get left some concert tickets?!?!? When somebody is a huge part of making your career happen, it should only be a major genuine slight that leaves you having anything other than gratitude.

But yet, Kanye is an artist, and I do listen to his music, and artists tell you how they feel. You can't just listen to one song. If you listen to all of his stuff, he's not a bad guy. His heart is in the right place, and much of his music is actually very very thoughtful and inspiring. But what gives with his public behavior? I think I know...

Contrary to popular perceptions, people who work in the entertainment industry are by and large highly intelligent people. Kanye is a musical genius to be sure, but in the social realm, while I don't think Kanye is dumb for an average man on the street, I think most of the people around him in the industry are far smarter and more mature than he is, and it makes him look dumb, ironically just like George W. Bush. I can actually see in the expression on Kanye's face most of the time that he is struggling to keep up and understand what is going on around him. He has this kind of deer in the headlights look, especially when being interviewed, and then he just says anything. Taylor mentioned having dinner with him in that article. Trying to talk to him for her must have been like trying to talk to a hamster.

Kanye is a person that should hire a good publicist and just say, “My music speaks for me” and not make any public statements. If he is going to do an interview, he should do it with someone like Larry King, who people mock for giving soft interviews, but what Larry actually does is give us a chance to hear from people who don't have the media skills to navigate tough interviews. He asks questions in such a way to help them say what they are trying to say. There is nothing wrong with that. But rather than taking this route, Kanye insists on continuing to try to have a big public voice when he's no good at it.

So when Kanye did what he did to Taylor Swift, I don't think it was a mean or hateful act. It was the impulsive act of a child who wasn't thinking about all the implications of what he was doing. He just thought he was standing up for a friend, and he had dehumanized Taylor Swift to the point that she didn't matter.

It was in large part the Kanye thing, I believe, that started the internet meme that Taylor Swift is a racist, which on the surface seems absurd to me. Hey, you never know. There are racists in the world. Or maybe some Black guys did her like they did Madonna, and someone overheard her say something about it and started that ball rolling. I don't know anybody's true feelings on this unless I know them. There are some people who don't have any Black people visible around them who wish they knew how to cultivate relationships with them, and on the flip side, there are people who surround themselves with ethnic people so no one will know they are bigots inside.

But we can turn it around and ask, would Kanye have EVER done that to a Black female singer, if say, Rihanna had won the award? I'd bet never. So there is the better case for Kanye being a racist in that situation. We as Black people often point out that racism without power is not as harmful as racism with power, and that's true, but Kanye West has power. He made a song about how much power he's got! The fact that he did that to Taylor and basically got away with it is proof of his power.

Kanye and his wife are, as a couple, billionaires I believe. Beyonce and Jay-Z as a couple are billionaires. Hell, Kanye's sister-in-law Kylie Jenner is a billionaire! And Kanye has social and professional relationships with dozens of hundred-millionaires. Thirty years ago, people were saying, “the only color that matters is green”, and there has been a lot of progress on racial issues since then. Kanye is more powerful than 99.99999% of the White people who have ever existed on this planet. As an individual, Taylor is more powerful than Kanye, but Kanye and his friends and family are more powerful than Taylor and hers.

So in context, it is hard to argue against the idea that Kanye West was actually the oppressor in that instance, although obviously, ultimately a video of the year award is not an extremely serious matter. It was more like...one of all the little indignities that we as Black people should know better than to ever inflict on someone else, even if its a little rich White girl who comes off as self-absorbed and angsty and entitled. But maybe it could be a serious matter...

A lot of young girls look up to Taylor Swift. What if there was some little girl in Iowa or Texas watching that show and rooting for Taylor to win that award. Maybe it was the first award show she had ever watched. And Taylor wins, and...”Who's that Black guy?” That could affect the way that girl sees Black people for the rest of her life if it happened for some reason to be a formative moment in her life. Maybe it was her birthday. Maybe she had just bought Taylor Swift's album and it was the first record she ever got. Or both. And the memory she'll carry forward isn't Taylor Swift, but Kanye West pushing her aside. But people who don't think ahead don't foresee consequences like that. That shit echoes through the canyons of the world.

If Taylor Swift was seriously racist, she would have been even madder at Kanye than she was, and believe me, Taylor's got enough power she could have put a major dent in Kanye's career over that if she wanted to go to Infinity War with him. If for example, Kanye had been hit with a couple of sexual assault allegations in the wake of that, he would have been FINISHED. Measures that drastic wouldn't have even been necessary though. Taylor would have won, even as big as he is. And she is, or was, BFFs with Selena Gomez so we know she doesn't hate Latinas. So it was like a stupid thing that someone else did to her ended up making some people accuse HER of being the bad person. While I didn't feel her reaction was the IDEAL one, she didn't do ANYTHING wrong in that situation.

But you never know what the history between two people is. These days, when I see an incident like that, even despite Kanye's history of off-the-wall behavior, I always think there may be something more behind it than I know, like that Taylor had made Kanye feel slighted in some way before that, and this was his method of retaliation. But as time went on, I began to feel I understood what it was about Taylor Swift in particular that would make someone feel comfortable doing that to her. I still saw her as a spoiled, whiny entitled little girl. But then one day, that began to change.

So what happened? I am a rare hardcore popular music fan who doesn't like live music. I don't like going to concerts. There are a couple of amphitheater type venues that I like, places with plenty of personal space that serve fancy food and wine. But I hate being in a crowd of screaming jumping people where I can't move.

I also don't watch music award shows. I like what I like, so I don't really care who wins music awards, and am not entertained by pyrotechnic light shows and dance routines. I care somewhat about awards with the movies because it has a much greater impact on an artist's career in that industry. But when I was in prison, I decided out of sheer boredom to sit down and watch a music awards show. I don't know which one it was; the one where Taylor Swift did the performance in the black sequin bodysuit.

I was watching Taylor Swift's performance, and I noticed two things. There is something that I talk about in my book, The Clockwork Test. As human beings, we are constantly measuring one another's intelligence in various ways. Amongst highly intelligent people, this is an important part of the social culture. There are little things you can look for to measure a person's calculating and reasoning speed. And there are other ways, The Clockwork Race, where you can measure another person's speed against your own. A person can credibly sandbag and pretend to be slower than they are, and a lot of people do, but you can't really fake intelligence you don't have without using parlor tricks that are detectable to someone of a similar intelligence level.

In watching Taylor Swift's performance, I realized that she had a level of precision to every single little thing she was doing that requires a heightened state of awareness, and a brain that runs like a Bugatti. I hate Taylor Swift's music, but I enjoyed watching her perform because of how amazingly good at it she is. I bet Taylor would be a REALLY good actress if she tried it (I've since learned that she did try, and was good). Some would argue based on her public persona that she's been acting all along.

I noticed something else in that performance. I had always recognized that she was a cute girl but not really my type. Too thin. Too young-looking. Too much of a cliché. She looked like a made-up teenage girl to me, which maybe for a lot of the years I was thinking that, she was. During that show when I saw that she is a probable clockwork genius, it was the first time that I ever looked at her and thought, “Wait a minute, Taylor Swift is smoking hot! No, I don't want that to be true!” I had just realized that she was probably a little genius, and suddenly she was really beautiful when she hadn't been before, and knowing myself, those two things are related.

You can't have cigarettes in prison anymore, so the main (legal) currencies are jars of instant coffee and ramen soups. But a tertiary currency is magazines. They've banned girlie magazines, which to me is absurd and speaks to the puritanical nature of American culture, especially in the arena of law enforcement. They even banned the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue because there are photos where you can see parts of nipples! I'm not kidding.

As with anything in prison, money can overcome any restriction. People would often come around selling hardcore pornographic pictures, or disturbingly, snapshots that appeared to be pictures girls on the outside had sent to their inmate boyfriends, many of them appeared to be years or perhaps even decades old. But I wasn't interested in that...

The magazines that were most popular were Us and People, and while I never looked at those in my free life as an adult, in prison, I read them to remind me of my life before. I was able to acquire about a dozen issues of Vanity Fair which were instrumental in keeping me sane. There was a picture of Bella Thorne and Odeya Rush in one of them that I would like to have as a giant print on the wall of my house...if I ever have a house and if my wife if I have one allows it. Every now and then a Vogue or Cosmo would show up, usually with most of the pictures cut out. There was a guy who had a bunch of Architectural Digests, but he wouldn't sell them to me, but he did let me borrow one from time to time.

But the main ones were Us and People. Of course, you can hardly find one of those magazines without pictures of Taylor in it. She has this certain way she almost always looks at the camera, sideways with that little grin, and the next time I saw a picture of her, it was as if she was looking right at me and saying, “Did you have something you wanted to say to me?” But there was another layer to what I felt, like she was grinning because she still knew something I didn't. She probably knows a lot that I don't.

Some people might raise their eyebrows at the statement given my academic background, but, number one, the proof is in the pudding when you look at her success, and number two, understanding how to play and compose music is the only thing in my life that I have tried to figure out and I couldn't do it. I've done quantum physics and rocket science (academically and recreationally, though not professionally), but I can't do music. When you really think about what a band is doing, the precise timing of it, all the sounds that are interacting and have to be perfectly coordinated, and the process of writing those layers of sound to interact perfectly with one another, its astounding. We call it art because they do it by intuition, but it is advanced, complicated math, equations I can't solve and I can solve Einstein's equations.

A few days later, I happened to see one of her videos on television, and it confirmed what I saw in the live performance. Taylor Swift is like a shaolin monk in the level of precision of her ability to control the movement of her body, and awareness of her position relative to the audience and the camera. But I also noticed something else...

In interviews, both in print and live, Taylor comes off like a person who is a stick in the mud. I would use the other saying but it's rude given that she's a girl. I'd use it if I was talking about Miley Cyrus, because I know she wouldn't mind, but that's why the saying doesn't apply to her. Well, I bet maybe a few times in her life it has...Sorry, I couldn't pass that up.

But Taylor Swift talks like a politician—a good one. But watching that particular video—I don't know what song it was for but if I saw it again, I would recognize it—it looked like she had the ability to loosen up far more than I ever would have expected. And thought, it it possible that...that...that Taylor Swift could actually be cool? That Taylor Swift might actually know how to have fun instead of just knowing how to appear to be having fun? No fucking way!

After that, every time I was flipping through a magazine and saw Taylor's picture...“Did you have something you wanted to say to me?” I'd had similar experiences with a couple of other people about whom I had radical transformations of opinion—Tim Tebow, Ryan Reynolds, Scarlett Johansson—where every time I saw a picture of them, I felt shamed for what I used to think of them, and I felt like they were looking right at me telling me so.

When I got out of prison, for the first time I actually looked up Taylor Swift's biography. As is the case with most celebrities, I actually knew very little about her background. I remembered reading that she had moved to Nashville as a fourteen year old to pursue her music career, but I didn't know from where....

I'd always wondered who Taylor Swift's core audience was. I mean, you get super-popular pop artists who end up being listened to by just about everybody who listens to popular music, but when you have someone who gets to Taylor's level, they usually have a passionately devoted core audience. But I never ran into anybody who talked about Taylor Swift. I would hear young girls talking about other girls, Disney Channel vets like her friend Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Miley Cyrus. Older women in most cases seemed to kind of dislike her and I have a story that is typical of how they speak about her.

So Taylor is on cover of the September issue of Vogue, looking ridiculous hot in a very cool photo where she is pointing at the camera, and like her pictures in People, it feels like she is pointing at me calling me out for hating on her for so long. It's like a photographic indictment of me, but I don't mind accepting it because, OMG, that's the cutest picture of her I've ever seen.

After much resistance and thinking I was safe because it was gone from the newsstand, I saw it there today and, damn you Taylor, I finally bought it and its sitting here on my couch next to me right now. And its one of those pictures where, from any angle, it still appears that she's looking and pointing right at you. Taylor Swift is like gravity. It takes millions of pounds of thrust to escape her.

Last week, I was in line at the grocery store, and I don't know if Taylor knows stuff like this, so I will tell her how much weight she carries: That grocery store normally doesn't have Vogue by the checkout lines. I'm not sure they even have a full magazine section or typically have Vogue at all. But I guess because Taylor is on the cover, they had Vogue by the registers when I never saw it there before.

There was a woman in line behind me, probably about 30, White or possibly Jewish, very attractive, and based on how she spoke, well-educated, and based on how she was dressed, reasonably affluent. There was no divider to put down on the conveyor belt after my stuff, and when the cashier finally gave me one, and I put it there so she could put her stuff down, she said “Thank you”.

She seemed engaging so I pointed to a divider sitting on the adjacent closed checkout lane and said, “I was going to go steal that one but that is a long walk.” Right above it was the Vogue cover and I added, interested in seeing what she would say, “Plus, Taylor Swift is right there pointing at me as if to say, 'You stay over there.'” She said, “You have to give that girl her space.” I don't want to put words in her mouth, but I interpreted her tone as “Taylor Swift needs to grow up.”

So I couldn't figure it out, because no girls in my orbit seemed to be particularly Taylor Swift fans. Then in her bio I see that she is from Reading, Pennsylvania, and it all makes sense. Her music makes sense, her success makes sense, and maybe, for the first time, her public persona makes sense.

I realize that the audience Taylor Swift is speaking to is poor and working class White girls dreaming escape from small towns, slaving away late nights waiting tables, and more often that not being treated with disrespect and disregard by the men that pass through their lives. She started out in country music because that is the audience a lot of country artists speak to, but that microphone wasn't big enough. There were girls she couldn't reach that way...

These Taylor Swift ruminations are not all recent as she was a brief topic of discussion in the book about my encounter with Jane Galt that I've almost finished. Months ago, I was trying to figure out her success, and I noticed something. There is this particular style of shoe that has been around for a while, but Taylor Swift has made it super popular, the high-heeled boots with peep toe. I started noticing who the girls wearing these shoes mostly were. Some affluent, older girls. But mostly it was young, working class girls, store clerks and waitresses, college students and the like. I saw very few shoes of this style in Nordstrom, but cheaper stores were full of them.

And it occurs to me, maybe Taylor's relentless defense of herself in the public sphere isn't because she's insecure. Perhaps it is because she's trying to let these girls, her fans, know that it’s alright to stand up and fight back. Maybe that's why she never lets anything go...because that's how it starts. You let one little thing go, then there is another, and another. Today your boss is rubbing your shoulders and you don't say anything, tomorrow he's grabbing your ass. Today, your boyfriend doesn't appreciate you and you stay with him, and tomorrow you've been taking twenty years of it and you're wondering where your life went.

Taylor Swift appears to be from a relatively affluent background, but she would have seen the plight of others around her in the dying cities and towns of Central Pennsylvania, and all those girls that she passed on that way to stardom, like an Army Ranger she came back for them. It made me think more about her music too. It occurred to me for he first time that maybe Taylor Swift is something that is rare in popular music. Maybe she is like a hiphop artist. Let me explain...

Hiphop is baffling to a lot of people because they don't really understand its history. Hiphop music started out in New York City, where DJs started bringing their turntables out to parks to play music for block parties. It is debated who was the first DJ to do it and where it happened, and I don't want to get shot by guys from Queens or Brooklyn over something that unimportant. It really doesn't matter. But eventually, people got microphones and started doing little spoken word performances with the music. It was initially an evolution of a ritual from slavery times...

Everyone by now has probably played the group introduction game, where you say, “My name is Taylor, and I'm the best, I'll destroy you in the press.” etc. This arose because slave life was so transient, with people coming and going, it was a quick and memorable way to introduce yourself, and tell people something meaningful about who you are. Basically this, put to music, is what hiphop originally was.

But as the art form grew, it developed into more extensive poetry and telling more elaborate stories. A critical moment came when artists departed from just speaking their own personal stories to telling stories about the experiences of other people in their neighborhoods. So you have two types of rappers—those who are actually recounting their own experiences, and those who, like actors, are storytellers recounting the experiences of others from a first-person perspective.

A lot of your gangster rappers are like me—they've never touched a gun or sold drugs. But they are telling stories about things that go on in Black urban communities. But the pressure exerted by fans for artist to “be real” like those who really did live a street life and are telling their own stories is so strong, that these artistic, poetic nerds pretend in public to be gangsters, creating the image of hiphop artists as a bunch of thugs when most of them are shy people who only feel comfortable expressing themselves through poetry, and only a few of them are real gangsters.

If you grow up in a poor Black neighborhood, everybody's going to have some gang member friends. At least in the past. Black gang life has really died down in most areas. But I had friends who were Crips and Bloods growing up, but I never participated in any gang activity, and knowing who my dad was, they probably wouldn't have let me. So these rappers may know gangsters, but they are not gangsters themselves. They're artists.

So I started to wonder, could it be that Taylor Swift's lyrics are not actually her personal feelings and experiences, and that her much publicized problems with her boyfriends are...well, not completely staged, but media narratives that have been massaged to speak to what the girls in her audience are going through? Could it be that the real Taylor Swift has never been seen in public, but that she is trying to be a beacon for all those girls who are still in the trenches struggling to make it out?

Lately, I see clearly that Taylor is making a concerted effort to humanize herself, but it doesn't seem to be working, and she's probably really frustrated by it. Like this “Drunk Taylor” video she posted, which is cute, but I so caught you, Taylor. You are not drunk in that video. Drunk people don't repeat with exact precision the same mechanical set of motions in that way. Stand, walk, sit, stand, walk, sit. That's what autistic people do. I'm kinda one and I bet you are too, especially after I skim-read that Vogue interview. I couldn't read the whole thing. A man can only take so much Taylor Swift in one day.

But yes, I think Taylor Swift is a little bit autistic. The way she performs is certainly indicative of that. Her tendency to look down while being interviewed. We never think about people with great verbal skills as potentially being autists, but some are. They can speak better than most, but inside they are still at an emotional distance from other people. Taylor Swift...and me.

I point out saying this that I have a theory that autism is actually a positive stage of evolution, not a disability. So I'm not insulting Taylor Swift or other autists. I actually think the autistic people who are non-verbal and non-social are reacting to an intuitive assessment that our society is dangerous to interact with as it is. And they would be right.

I generate most of the ideas for my writing when I'm out and about, and then I translate the ideas into words when I'm at my computer. One afternoon a few weeks ago, I was driving around thinking about this piece, and coming to grips with the fact that I'm now a little afraid of Taylor Swift. Why? I'm afraid I might like her too much, and I don't want to like that girl too much, because I cannot foresee any possibility that we would get along. And that wouldn't bother me, except that there is a massive power differential between us, and that girl uses nuclear weapons to put out fires.

That's a real thing. The Russians did it to stop a gas fire. You see, the way a nuclear bomb works, when it goes off, you first get a radiation wave, which moves close the speed of light. The atmosphere slows it down a little, but not much. This radiation wave, or heat wave, sets everything on fire. This isn't your ordinary orange and yellow fire on your stove as its much hotter than that, like surface of the sun fire, but its fire.

After that comes the pressure wave or blast wave, which moves much slower relatively speaking. But the force of the pressure wave, along with the fact that the air in it is oxygen-depleted, blows out the fire, and also blows away the structure which has by then been burnt to cinder. So the fire is out, but everything is destroyed. That's the Taylor Swift approach to beef. Scooter, man, quit and apologize for whatever you did to piss her off. Even if you don't think you were wrong, she won't quit and this won't end well for you. You don't have potentially ten billion dollars or more of future value to the industry.

I'm also afraid of how cute she is. The last person in the world I want to have a celebrity crush on is Taylor Swift. Number one, it’s the ultimate cliché, right? Number two, I'm supposed to like Selena Gomez if I'm going to like one of the two of them: the cute Mexican girl who seems really nice and even survived the same health crisis that I did. But honestly, the only thing that stops me from going all gaga over Selena Gomez is that this girl I love from my real life looks kind of like her, but to me is cuter, and she's all I think about when I see Selena. Plus, devout Catholicism is a non-starter for me, which might be the only thing that keeps Jewish girls above Latinas on my love list. Number three, I know that the idea of me would appeal to Taylor Swift exactly zero percent. I am not Taylor Swift's type. I might even be her ANTI-TYPE. I might literally be the opposite of everything she's looking for, except I guess I'm probably tall enough. But that thought scares me too...

You see, there is an attitude I've had my whole life that I now realize is dangerous. I've felt comfortable assuming that certain girls would NEVER like me, and that thus, it was safe to say anything about them, or do anything around them, because short of my actually making an effort to be mean, there would be no way Taylor Swift's feelings would ever be hurt by anything I said or did. But this is the universal dysfunction in our society that often makes us insensitive to the humanity of celebrities.

My insecurities about my own desirability have often led me to inadvertently hurt a girl's feelings, because I didn't think her feelings would ever be affected by me. But still, I'd walk to the sports book window at the Aria in Vegas and place a large bet, perhaps go all-in, that if Taylor Swift ranked all the men in the world in terms of their desirability to her, I wouldn't make the top million. But you never know. And that is scary. Especially writing this. I don't want to write it. I don't want to have to talk about Taylor Swift. But if I think truth is important, I can't hold back.

I don't expect to meet Taylor Swift, unless she makes me meet her. But after all the unrequited love and unreturned affection heartbreak I've experienced, its uncomfortable for me to not be able to stop myself from liking a girl who doesn't like me even if I'll never meet her and she's thousands of miles away (I don't know where Taylor lives these days). For some reason, its different with Jane Galt now.  I was afraid of her in that same way a while ago, but I got past it.  I know of many things the two of us have in common, much more so than Taylor, who I don't feel the public knows at all.

Plus, I have decided that until I can confirm the disinterest of Jane Galt, I'm not going to talk to or even THINK about another woman for a relationship. But Jane is going to fuck up if she is interested and thinks she can watch and wait forever. Eventually, I'll give up on her. I can't get in touch with her. Given my present predicament, that could get me in all kinds of trouble. She has to be the one to make contact. I hope she does soon, like I don't know, maybe TODAY!

I'm mad at Taylor for being able to intrude on my thoughts of Jane Galt even a little bit. Thank G_d Taylor Swift is not Jewish! But then I think of something that scares me even more.  The popular public perception is that Taylor Swift likes bad boys. I've seen pictures of some of her boyfriends and they look more like good guy types to me, cute little White guy teddy bears, but who knows. But then I remember how certain things I've done in my life could look...

The frightening thought occurs to me that if someone tells Taylor legends about some of my run-ins with members of the Deuce-Fiver gang in prison, or shows her the police report that claims I crashed my Mercedes CLK doing 140, and that I crashed another CLK two months after that, if she likes bad boys, she might like shit like that. I'm mortified that these Jewish girls will hear about these things and think I'm an irresponsible person and be afraid to get in a car with me. As a rule, Jewish girls don't go for irresponsible men. I'm not irresponsible. But you can't keep secrets in this world, so you might as well own it.

First of all, Taylor, I was NOT doing 140. And the particular prison gang members in question would probably lose a fight with One Direction. I didn't get into ANY fights in prison. One drunk guy with whom I had no problems took a swing at me thinking I was somebody else, barely grazed me and apologized later. But I did drive 150 MPH down the Silver Strand in Coronado. That story is true. But that road is flat and straight and had no traffic on it at the time I did that, and I would never do any shit like that with a girl in the car. The last thing I want on my conscience is killing a girl in car crash, much less one who is so important to so many people.

But the frightening thought is, “But what would I do if Taylor Swift did like me?” I'm not sure how many Black men have stood up to defend Taylor Swift. That might mean something to her. I hate to say it, but I hope it does. I want Taylor Swift to be happy, like I would wish to see everyone happy. And she doesn't seem happy. But no matter what mistakes we might make or flaws we might have, we all should be told that we're right when were right. Everybody should know that there are people willing to do that, even if they have to call out one of the their favorite knuckleheads who is a part of a circle of people they respect and the social group to which they have belonged.  Everyone has the right to know that the people who have disliked them can come around.

If I found myself living in an alternate reality where Taylor liked me, what would I do with that situation? Well, if Jane Galt shows up and wants to marry me, its a non-discussion. But what if Taylor were to beat Jane Galt to meeting me? What would I do with a shocking moment like that? Why would I feel like dating Taylor Swift would be some kind of failure in life? Why am I even talking about this? Because I'm so desperately single right now, that I can't talk about any single woman without asking, “What if...?”.

Part of it is that Taylor Swift's public persona is such that I would suspect that it was a publicity stunt, that maybe she was bothered by people saying that she was racist and I was the perfect means of dispelling that myth. That she would know that she could get me to go HAM on Kanye publicly and that might be her sweetest revenge. I don't know what she would have to do to convince me she was serious. It would be like the reverse of the typical gender roles, as most of my interactions with women have been, where like a rich playboy trying to convince a poor girl that he was serious, Taylor would be a rich playgirl trying to convince me that she was serious.

It's like what they say, your mind won't allow you to see things that you don't believe in. I can believe in a Jewish actress liking me. I'm a Black screenwriter. Black people and Jewish people share many things in common, though we have handled our adversity in very different ways. That isn't too much of a stretch. But Taylor Swift's not Jewish, I don't think, and she's not in the movies. I'm a huge fan of music, but I don't really have any professional skills in that arena, except that I understand general marketing principles.

But why should I find Taylor Swift scary and intimidating?  I mean, when I was in Sweden, I was hoping to run into Princess Madeleine in the street and I would have talked to her too. I always wanted to be the male Meghan Markle, a Black person who marries into European royalty (a girl beats me to EVERYTHING!).  Yet another reason why Prince Harry is one of my living heroes for having the courage to marry her. Right now, I think England might be better off with William and Harry in charge than some of the people in their government that I've heard talking. But I digress...

So I was contemplating trying to meet a Swedish princess—that is a funny joke to one girl—but yet, Taylor Swift is intimidating. I'm trying to figure out, am I like in a school boy mode where I don't want to admit that I like her because I don't think I'd ever have a chance, or am I doing what I always tend to do, and trying to be faithful to Jane Galt even though I haven't formally met her yet? If Jane Galt and these two girls I know from real life before prison weren't interested, is it actually the case that Taylor Swift would be next on my list and I don't want to face that fact because I believe I would be immediately proceeding to the next item down?!?! Dating Taylor Swift would sure be a clean break with Black America.  But at this point, I'm not trying to "date" anybody.  I want to get married.

You know what the other thing is? I have to be honest about this. I always wanted to be with a woman who really needed something I had to offer. I mean, really needed it. Not because I want somebody to be dependent upon me. That is the LAST thing I want. No, because I really want to be able to give someone the gift of having a long-standing problem in their life solved. I want to be a resource, a solution, because I know how good it feels when I find one.

From here, it doesn't look like Jane Galt has too many problems. Taylor Swift looks like she really really needs love, and really really needs someone in her life that she knows she can absolutely trust and rely on.  Somebody to defend her in the press so she doesn't have to always do it herself.  Somebody to say,"You can sit down and relax, Taylor.  I'll take care of this."  She needs that.  And I'm the type of person that when I see that, I can't help but want to do something about it. And because I see so many ways in which I suspect we are alike, and I can't see why she would still be single unless she is as weird as me, or maybe has some private problem that she doesn't want everyone to know, I fear that I might be put to that decision. I do like cats, though I'm allergic to them. But, would you take Taylor Swift and Claritin if they came in a package together?

The truth is, I feel sorry for Taylor Swift. The entertainment industry is mostly like a family. They fight like families do, have ups and downs, public feuds, but there is a reason why so many celebrities are estranged from their families. When you have great talent, it makes it very difficult for those who don't have it to relate to you, even if they are your relatives. So entertainers have created a surrogate family of their own, and it works better than most biological ones.

Jane Galt seems to have an army of friends in the movie industry. I can see it on the faces of the people who are interacting with her. They love that girl. I saw it in the body language of the woman that was walking with her in Vegas, who seemed to be saying, “No matter what happens, I have to protect this person”. And I felt the same way just looking at her. But the way she was, she wasn't waiting for others to fight for her. She reminded me of Milla Jovovich's line in The Fifth Element, “I protect you.” I felt that if that building had fallen down around us, she could have held it up long enough for everyone to get out, and she would have. And that's probably why people love her.

But Taylor seems like an outsider, for whatever reason unable to find her place in the social world, even as she has solidified her place in the history of music. It's easier in some ways to be lonely if you don't live a public life. You can sit alone with your misery and nobody has to know. But Taylor has to stand in front of microphones to be interviewed day in and day out.  She has to go out and perform in front of thousands of people night after night, and smile and dance and sing, and they expect her to be perfect every time. And she wants to be perfect every time, because she knows that people might have emptied their piggy banks, or worked extra shifts for a month to get those tickets, and that it is something that they will remember for the rest of their lives. Every night she has to try to send thousands of people home happy, and then go back to a hotel room alone. It's not fair.

But that is why I think this is so important, important enough to write what I guess is the longest piece on this site about this one insufferable girl. I know how it feels to be alone. She's had boyfriends that have come and gone, and maybe she's got one right now, but none of these guys has followed Beyonce's advice, or she hasn't liked any of them enough to accept if they did. And when people who have struggled to find love have the right person in their life, you see them change. Taylor is not changing.

This is important because lonely people are dangerous, and don't think a beautiful young woman can't be. Taylor seems to live for her fans, but fans are not friends, and certainly not lovers. I don't expect Taylor Swift to turn into The Joker, but if she's suddenly 39 and never married, still lonely, she might be at risk of becoming like Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons, the typical manner in which angry women vent their frustrations upon the world. I don't want to see that. I feel like I would turn by back on everything else, all of these projects that I'm trying to get off the ground, rather than leave Taylor Swift alone out in the cold. But nobody can make her do anything, least of all me.

So as I was working on this in my head, I'm driving down Wightman Street here in San Diego, and just as I'm thinking about the fact that if Taylor Swift likes bad boys, my car crash story might appeal to her, I arrive at the intersection of Wightman and...Swift Avenue. There is a chapter in my book about all the strange things like that have happened in my life lately that have made me feel that universe is talking me, though I don't know why it would be talking to me about Taylor Swift. Perhaps to make me write this sort-of apology.

But while I've come to be more open to ideas like that than I was in the past, I'm also a scientist, and things like this are often easy to explain. Swift Avenue is in my neighborhood. I drive down it or past it all the time. How many times in the last year had I arrived at an intersection with a Swift Avenue street sign? The number that pops into my head is 917. That would be an average of a little less than three times a day, which sounds reasonable, considering that while I don't pass Swift every single time I leave the house (its east of me and I'm usually going west), if I drive a mile down Swift, which I've done many times, I might arrive at a dozen intersections with Swift signs.

So given that Taylor Swift is in the air everywhere and about as easy to escape as sunshine at high noon in the desert, it really isn't all that statistically unlikely that I would arrive at a Swift Avenue sign at the exact moment that Taylor Swift is on my mind, especially while I am working on a book about the social and professional group to which she belongs. To quote my movie alterego Billy Costigan, it's not supernatural. At least, I don't think so...

I also have a theory that human beings might be able to subconsciously pick up radio waves. The brain is electromagnetic after all, and this would explain the phenomenon most of us have experienced where you're thinking of a song and you turn on the radio and its on. If my theory is correct, we'd all have Taylor Swift on the brain all the time. I was radio channel surfing and that James Dean song was playing on THREE stations at the same time! Radio waves propagate forever out into space. When the aliens get here, they won't say “Take us to your leader”, they'll say “Take us to Taylor Swift!”

I don't think I would want to marry Taylor Swift, even though she's soooo cute, but just like with Jane Galt, if nobody else likes me and she does, how stupid would I be to not consider that? But I don't think Taylor would want that for publicity or any other reason. I think what Taylor Swift really needs is a friend. I don't think she has any. She seems like a loner. She's got people who want to be aligned with her in public life because she has an audience of millions, invaluable in business, politics, and activism. She's got tons of guys I'm sure who want to date her because she's smoking hot and famous. But does anybody really know who Taylor Swift is?

If Taylor had a real friend, she could iron out all the thorny aspects of her personality, and then she could find the right cute little James Dean lookalike for her, and have an American royal wedding and live happily ever after. I'd be happy to see that and a lot of other people would too. Then she'd have to come up with some new music though. Maybe Kanye could help her with that, if he wants to grow up. If those two got together and made and album...Not just a bunch of songs thrown together, but if they sat down and crafted a common artistic vision that incorporated the best elements of both their music, and new elements they created together, it would set the world on fire. They'd have to stop pressing other people's albums to make more of theirs.

That is really what I want to do in this world—resolve divisions, bridge gaps, end beefs, between artists, between cultures, between nations. To be the spark if I can, to help us all learn that we can do anything if we work together, and that the things that we allow to divide us are less important than what we could accomplish together. But I realize in that moment, I have to stop fighting the truth and accept it: Even despite the fact I can't stand her music, Taylor Swift is one of my favorite MAT girls now, and I hate saying that because she is so frustrating. But consider her story...

She is from a small middle America city like me. At fourteen, she left home to go to what is in terms of being a country music artist if not in terms of population, the Big City. She established herself in one genre, and then crossed over to become one of the biggest stars in history in another. There isn't even any point in counting anymore how many records she has sold or awards she has won. She's made probably half a billion dollars or more for herself, and probably a few billion for other people. It feels like she's been around forever. She's only 29 years old. In his twenties, Alexander the Great conquered the known world. Taylor Swift has conquered the whole world. He had an army. Taylor Swift is all alone.

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