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When I was sixteen years old I broke up with my first boyfriend, Jesse Case. But before the real break up we had a week long break, break-up during which I went for a walk to the half-shell and then therapy with his best friend John Munch. I think we talked about being freaks at school and The Eagles. Someone was committing infidelity of some kind. Then Jesse and I got back together and then we broke up for real and he started calling me and saying some pretty mean stuff which I think I mostly ignored. Whenever I would engage him to defend myself or to try to hear him out or comfort him, our exchanges would devolve into pure pain. His. Mine. Eventually he discovered the thing that would get to me. He wrote me an email that read: Dear Rebecca, I’ve been talking to my friends about you and everything and we’ve decided that you need serious help.
I was devastated. I was also a little confused since his friend had actually walked me to my weekly appointment of serious-help just a few days earlier. After a lot of crying and worrying about it, hating myself, and believing I would helplessly repeat all of my parents’ relationship mistakes I did a funny thing. A funny thing that in almost every other situation has been a major mistake but this time actually panned out. I went to my father. I told him what Jesse had said and without taking even second to think about he explained that Jesse was just upset and was trying to get to me. This just hadn’t occurred to my optimistic, 16 year old mind.
I was still trying to protect Jesse as much as possible and felt horrible for wanting to break up. There wasn’t any real reason to break up. He didn’t do anything terrible or even unkind or boring. In fact, our relationship had been a pretty healing one– for me, I know, and I think for him as well. He had lost his father a year before we started going out and we talked about it a lot. He wrote me three songs on his keyboard– all in different keys with violin interludes and some charming forever-love type lyrics. We watched The Abyss and ate a lot of Chinese food and had sex. And then it was over. I just didn’t really desire him anymore and I desired other people and that love we had had was over. I felt selfish about wanting to be out of our relationship but decided to break up with him even though it was the selfish thing to do. Even more selfishly I wanted to maintain a different kind of love so that all the healing we had done wouldn’t be unmade simply because we weren’t going to get married and go around together forever.
Now it’s been about seven years and I’m doing it again. Breaking up, I mean. And I know a lot of you already know it. If not because I’ve told you or the internet has told you but through intense radio-silence buffered only by midnight bleatings of all sorts.
A series of invectives and accusations has been launched and I don’t know what to do. I could rebuff each one. Defend, explain, and apologize. That seems to make it worse. And today we reached that tipping point where I got an email akin to “my friends and I have all decided that you need serious help” and it was all I could do not to think about Jesse. It would never have occurred to me to lob the particulars of his father’s death, his own traumas and histories, at him. Even now, even though I meant to write more specifically about them, I can’t. Even though Jesse does not read my blog and even if he did, he might not care. I’d rather maintain the possibility that that healing was actually healing and that means not chasing him around with accusations of my own. Even though our relationship did not last forever I am still faithful to the confidences we shared then. Without knowing where he is with all of it it would feel like a major betrayal to post them on the internet. In a way I’m not doing it now to prove that I was serious then. Which I was.
I mean, I wasn’t going to do any of this really. I was just going to keep diligently working on an essay I’m writing about butch/femme and break-ups and privacy and healing and confidentiality and concealment. You would have liked it. It was also about the 1780 shipwreck HMS Ontario which was recently discovered under 500 feet of water in the great lakes, remarkably more intact than it should have been.
And look where I am now. Doing all those things. Even kind of talking about The Eagles.
The monster child– the unbearable.
We’re leaving for Morocco in just one week. In Arabic, I’m informed, Portugal (or “Bortugal”) means “orange.”
The flavor or the hue?
You must try getting up from the table
And sitting down relaxed in another country
Wearing red suspenders
Toward one’s own space and time.
After I was dead I lost my taste for raspberries. Other fruits, too, but raspberries stood out. We had stopped once to pick them on the side of the road in California but had been disappointed to find that the bushes had been picked clean. Probably by children and black bears. In just a few steps I watch those same bushes blossom, the hips of the flowers swell into round, green pockets and the soften—turning read, pulling on the branches until they dipped to the ground. Time has been smoothed the same way into a discrete, watery, orb—ready to burst, ready to drop, ready to be swallowed whole. Not, By Whom? Don’t. I have seen baskets of them grown and eaten and lost by now.
DF had a whole pint of them washed and waiting for me for our birthday dinner. How Was Your Walk? She asked as I sat down, exhausted, at the table. I immediately wished I hadn’t come. I’d rather be at home, asleep by now. But DF is insistent about maintaining birthdays and this isn’t the way to break her heart. She spoons the raspberries onto my plate and I know she means them to look velvety and decadent but they fall short. The plates are too large for that kind of richness and some of the drupelets are squared and leaking from travel. I push them around with my fork and they leave enviably fuchsia trails along the plate. I Wish I Could Puddle Like That. DF isn’t taking her fair share of the berries. It seems she wants me to eat them all—either because she likes the elegant pile or because she, too, has lost her taste for them.
DF has been dead six years and one month longer than I have and that fact we both remember. For our birthdays we go on like it never happened. Remember That Year I Wanted To Pay For Your Coffee For Your Birthday? I do. I wouldn’t let her. You Mean Your Last Year. Well, Look At You, All Doom And Gloom. She slipped a five dollar bill between the cup and the single-ply corrugated coffee sleeve and then failed to catch me when I tossed out the cup on our walk home. I’m still sick about the five dollars I accidentally threw out. I Still Want To Pay You Back, I plead. Forget It, It was Your Birthday! She says again. Well, I Want to Give You The Difference At Least. My coffee hadn’t been five dollars. On My Birthday. She tells me. I nod. The words seal the fruit like a toast and we begin to eat them solemnly.
I can leave once they’re gone, I think, and continue to pick them off. But once their gone DF tells me that there is still more. Much More. I have to contemplate the bloody mess on my plate until she is done with me. It’s the least I can do.
I think Nora was taken aback by how much pain. We watched a bike with one white rim and speculated about the owner. I had a throat full of steelies that I would forget about for a few minutes. But you can’t get very far into any sort of dialog without being affected by a mouthful of heavy, marbles– so close to slipping without warning. Our conversation would hit some secret hold– some gentle, felt, indentation to a drain and I had to violently tip my words away from it because I knew they would fall in. Do I swallow them hard? Do I spit them– indecorously on the table and cry out? I am no longer curious about what’s inside. They are silver, heavy, carcinogenic, reflective, dense, slippery, and wet. I inhale hard and think it would feel better to suffocate on them. After a while my neck got sore from twitching it upwards and away as if to incline the field and loose the marbles from their ill-fated orbit.
Elsew/here: I don’t know how you’re feeling. I think you are dyadic, precarious, longing. On Sunday I thought that you’d simply come out of it. That this was some wild, ridiculous moment that you could escape from. We would pass through it and work on it later. I misunderstood. I think I know better. You are Halfway absorbed with some other thing (work) and then fall, sometimes, to thoughts of me but not like I do. You are not sucked and dropped– but instead flip yourself over as if you’ve finished the page and are now interested in attending to the next one. I live in a pothole universe. For you– something linear. It isn’t (like me) that your stomach drops out and you have to tip the tray. You go into it on purpose, stepping into me and then immediately you claw and panic for air. I wish I didn’t make you feel dropped in a well. We’re both drowning of different things. You feel compelled to finish the book, to check sources, to array the translations and read all the criticism available. Then you want to produce something original and incisive. At the same time, you would be relieved if you could close the text and hurl it hard enough that it wouldn’t come back.
This, suffused with dire sadness, is about as appropriate as I can get. PythagoraSwitch! Indeed.
You’re right. Suffering is so 2007.
Text Message from NY: “Sat in on brother’s religion and sexuality class. Phrase of the day: ‘forced, but not in a rape way,’ re: spousal (non) rape.”
Please stop. Please stop. Please stop!
In case anyone was in danger of forgetting my awesome storming style, I made a dramatic exit from my religion in American film class this morning. I know some of you are probably nostalgic for my old antics. Who could forget the semester I walked out of a presentation on gender in Tribal Africa (as gleaned from one film by six, white, American girls) , a scintillating experiment about what it was like to be a tranny in Dorchester (performed by a male student in sad drag), and a play about trafficking women all in one, glorious, semester! I had almost forgotten it was something one could do.
It was the least I could do after a conversation about Edward Norton’s movie Keeping the Faith turned into a full-scale defense of Perfect Rich Jewish New York and the charming race-relations that make the city “so great.”
In the film Ben Stiller and Ed Norton play a charismatic rabbi and priest, “the God Squad,” who are refreshing everyone’s feelings about faith by divorcing it (except not really) from religion. Jenna Elfman plays the female lead. The boys’ friend in childhood, she returns as a high-powered executive who is goofy, smart, and sexy. Both men fall for Elfman and she dates the rabbi, causing problems with his family and congregation. For the priest, Elfman’s character is deployed as a test of faith. In the end everything is resolved when Elfman, fearing her ticking biological clock, converts and the guys open up a Jewish/Catholic senior center in an old gay disco.
I could have said a lot of things. And by that I mean I could have just talked about some Backlash b.s. or I could have brought up the homo-erotic? closeness between the two men and the implications of moving religious seniors into ex-gay space.
I should have known I was in trouble when I mentioned that the romance and comedy obscured the underlying Doctrine of the Normative Family and my classmate said:
“Well, but this is what women want. Everyone wants to get married and have children. Don’t you?” And since I was already involved I had to say, No. And she said, “Well, that’s abnormal. Don’t you think that’s coloring your misinterpretation then?”
Which would have been okay. Stupid, sure. But fine. No, no, no. She has to go on to tell everyone that as a New York Jew she understands this movie better than anyone. That we don’t understand how nice it is to take the train uptown and see black guys playing basketball with rabbis and priests confiding in Muslim-Catholic-Sikh bartenders. The professor productively tried to shift our perspective to wealth, asking us if everyone seemed rich.
Of course She answered: “No, there’s that little Spanish boy. I think he shows that the Jewish community is rich and the Catholic congregation is poor. I mean that’s what they trying to communicate when they put in that off-the-boat kid.”
Really. I’m not joking.
Someone else tries to save it, “There are a lot of bilingual people in the U.S. and that doesn’t mean they’re ‘off-the-boat.’”
She persists. The movie is NOT fucked up, she tells us, because it’s perfectly politically correct. She cites this scene as proof. She argues that this scene is great because it’s just what Chinatown is like. “They go there because it’s cheap!” She explains. (No, I’m not sure how this explains ANYTHING.) I argue with her for a little while before she tells everyone to hold on and then addresses the only Asian student in the class. She asks him if he was “personally offended.” And then says if he wasn’t offended then obviously this is just really funny and also more proof of how charming and close-knit and mixed New York is.
I made one final attempt when she pointed out that at the very end one very minor character comes to an event with a black date, thus proving that this is a film about everyone.
F: That doesn’t prove anything.
S: What you want her to come with a woman?!
Professor: If she came with a woman no one would understand it was a date. Or it would just be in there as titillating.
F: Right, so we should maybe think about why that is. Why it wouldn’t be legible as a date if it were a woman. But that’s not even what I’m talking about. That guy she is with is wearing a sweater vest and khakis.
S: It was a nice event! That’s what you wear!
F: No, that’s what the Jewish guys are wearing! You’ll notice she didn’t come with one of those basketball guys.
S: That’s because it’s a nice event. THAT is what you wear.
F: You can wear other fancy clothes to dress-up. Her date looked like a really palatable, educated, rich, black man.
Several more slurs are thrown. Bilingual-defense guy tries to tell her about how people code language between communities.
[exeunt]
Abrupt isn’t as queer as you think it is. Did it feel good for you too, baby? I think you did it for me. By that I mean, I’m getting accustomed to it, it hardly surprises me anymore and I don’t know if my sedation belongs to a history of abrupt or a history of mellowing abrupt down around the edges until it’s a row of soft, white, neat packages to line up– hide: Pack: expel.
In middle school I was voted (euphemistically? ironically? by dint of hanging chad?): Most Talented.
I’ve refined it now and realize I haven’t changed at all (popularity! irony! fraud!):
I award myself Most Denotative Use of Anal.
On election day, a coincidence, I polled you about what mythic/fantastic creature you would be in order to compensate for an assignment. The answers rolled in.
Nora: mermaid (she defends: no shell bra! majestic centaur of the sea!)
Sam: windigo (at least someone cops to carnivorous desires if not to blatant carnivorous tendencies)
Ken: not a centaur, centaurs are played out. A ___? Instead.
Femmephane: a centaur (no shell bra!). Fallback: vampire (my motivations clarified– camp)
Galen: “A goat creature? No. A Kraken. The Kraken is really metal.”
J: Cyclops
( F: No! Please, not a cyclops! I wouldn’t be with you!
J: I would be a big monster. I would make you!
JimmyHank: You wouldn’t be able to catch her without depth perception.)
In honor of elections (in allegiance to OneCountry) I elect Jimmy Hank: Most Talented.
* From Johnson, Barbara. “Nothing Fails Like Success,” A World of Difference. p 15.
I implore you to stop thoughtlessly using expressions like:
“…which is exactly what the Judeo-Christian faith, at least, promotes…”(names have been changed to protect the person in my Lit Theory class)
What do you mean by Judeo-Christian faith? In this case she actually means the major monotheistic theological beliefs which she feels comfortable talking about. But how about using “religion” instead of faith. Or how about saying Jewish and Christian instead of Judeo-Christian. Judeo-Christian has become nothing but a handy hyphenation to throw around when we want to swiftly reference the moral and legal structures that we feel are implicated in something mysteriously related to religion.
While we’re at it can we please refrain from referencing the following TERMS as if they are the PRINCIPLES ON WHICH PRACTICE IS FOUNDED:
Virgin/Whore Dichotomy - your way of referencing why life is hard for women
Honor/Shame Society - your way of explaining why MENA has those familial structures. Oh! Those!
I’ve only had cable for a few flu hours but, thanks to jazzy dancing pharmaceutical logos, I already know:
-which contraception I would use (were I at risk for spontaneous pregnancy)
-what might actually be wrong with my vagina (whenever I feel a pesky itch as I shop with my girlfriends)
-how to get rid of raw chicken related odors and leave my kitchen worthy of my cleaning timid husband and sons (should that contraception fail)
*from a fortune cookie
Okay. I feel a little guilty reporting this fact to you, public. But it IS available to anyone Googling.
It recently came to my attention (and here I’ll leave the chain of contact out) that Diesel’s new cafe, Bloc 11, is a little more unfortunately named than I had originally thought.
Block 11 was the name of the prison ward at Auschwitz.
This seems particularly dangerous given the extreme likelihood that innocent strangers will search for Block 11 instead of Bloc 11.
I am hoping that, however difficult it might be, the owners will be pursuing a name change. Whoops?
True to form I received a letter “to the parents of [Femmephane]” from the J.Crew ad I call my school on the day after Thanksgiving:
Looking for the best Christmas gift for your graduating student? Want to get him something practical that he’ll really love? Want to get him something he’ll really need after he graduates?
Because it was coming from University himself and not, say, BalfourClassRings– I indulged. These are, after all, the same people who tell me when my classmates die tragically and when they’re retroactively hiking tuition.
What does he, the graduating Tufts student, need need need? A bigger cut of Southampton in the Will? A Hybrid with four-wheel drive for those ski trips when he just didn’t want to borrow the Benz? Perhaps some castration?
Anyhow. The answer: a $318 diploma frame from UniversityFrames.
Included in the envelope was an alarming little notecard, folded in half, which read “A note from mom…” in some gentle Baskerville italics. Inside was a heartwarming anecdote about just how grateful one mom’s daughter had been to be the first of her friends to receive her diploma frame. “It really meant something to her that she was the first person she knew to get one. She had it waiting for graduation day in December!” And I’m excited for her, too.
I also think it’s a nice touch to include “a note from mom…” in a letter addressed to “the parents of,” ensuring that the only students who receive the message are people who don’t have mothers to receive (let alone send) Baskerville Old seasons greetings.
Dear fakeHipster-friends,
This year for the winter holidays I will be buying you all P.L.O. scarves! I know most of you already accessorize with them but one can never have too many cheap and mindlessly trendy political apparel, right?
In case you’re new to the Urban-Outfitters-Just-Puked-On-Me look and need something to make the outfit seem more plausible just let me know. I picked up a couple of Che shirts at the GAP and now have nowhere to put them.
Seasons’ tidings,
Femmephane
Studying for the GRE using the Barron guide continues to enlighten.
I’ve now learned that the antonym to carnal is spiritual. Predictable, if annoying, perhaps. At least something I can figure out and select from the multiple choices, given the fact that we are thoroughly imbued in a Judeo-Christian (whatever that means) U.S. of A.
But I was a little baffled to learn that the GRE-certified synonym to buxom is plump. We’re really not going for precision of language here, are we? My book suggests “Once you read the definition, use the word in a sentence to help you remember it.” Okay…. eh-ehm: “My, what a healthy-looking baby boy you have. He is so pink and buxom! Does it sleep through the night?”
But what I could not have anticipated. The antonym to celibate is:
a. investing
b. retired
c. commodious
d. dubious
e. married
The answer is e. married.
Over Pakistani food in SF, my friend told me about her recent HMO-related troubles. I am writing about it now, a few months after the fact, because I have recently had more than my fill of hmo-nightmare womb stories. But let’s take them one at a time.
My SF friend had gone to the ob/gyn for a routine pap smear and check-up. After waiting for several hours she was asked to change into a gown. She was left in the exam room for almost another hour before the doctor came in, told her to put her feet in the stirrups, and slid his stool between her legs.
Doctor: “Oh, by the way, am I supposed to have someone else in here while I do this?”
Friend: “Uh— I don’t know. I don’t know the policy.”
Doctor: “Well, I don’t really know,” [both silently look at each other for a moment before the doctor continues,] “It’s not like I’m not going to do anything funny or anything.”
Friend: “Good.” [Exam proceeds for several minutes, an unnaturally long amount 0f time for the doctor to then inquire...]
Doctor: “Um–has anyone ever had any trouble finding your cervix before?”
Patient (truthfully): “No. Is something the matter?”
Doctor: “Well. I’m just having a lot of trouble finding it.”
My friend could hardly believe she took off the day from her meager-paying job to wait several hours (and pay for the parking privilege) just to have an exam that couldn’t be trusted to accurately clear her ob/gyn health.
I asked her if she’d ever been to this doctor before and she told me that Kaiser’s clinic always had a new person working there. She never gets to see the same person twice, no matter how often she goes. As is typical of clinics, they also treat her like she’s there fore the first time, every time. Every time she goes she has to bring every piece of identifying information she has just to reregister so that they can open a new file for her. It takes a trip to the intake office just because her insurance is in her father’s name. I bet I could more easily get access to her credit information that she could sign into a doctor’s appointment.
At the same Kaiser clinic a few years ago she told her doctor that she was not and had never been sexually active and the doctor still told her that her sniffles were “probably HIV.”
Friend: “Even if my mother doesn’t have it? Even if I’ve never had a transfusion or used any drugs?”
Doctor: “Yeah, probably.” He told her, glibly– only providing her an HIV test after she requested one.
He was, of course, gone by the time she phoned to follow-up.
I think my brother might be the only person my mother talks to recreationally. Besides that, I think, she just talks to church people and a new set of coworkers at a new defunct nursing home every few months. So I guess she doesn’t have anyone double-checking the vocabulary she picks up and sometimes just repeats things my brother says. Which is alright… except my brother is an 18 year old person full of slang.
I couldn’t help but laugh to myself when my mother reported informationally, “Your brother is doing fine. He’s had a couple of really sick lacrosse games. He said if his playing continues to be so sick, he’ll probably make the team.”
When asked why he was taking an English seminar on Virginia Woolf, one student explained that he “had been to the first day of Lee Edelman’s class and gotten really confused by all the talk about what understanding post-modernism through a modernist lens meant” so he thought taking a Woolf class might help him understand Lee Edelman.
We are living in a cruel and unfair world.
But don’t worry. Yesterday he threatened to drop the class if Ginny’s novels don’t turn out to be plotty enough.
*Motion to call the fact that Virginia Woolf would probably not be too happy to hear about her name on a blag Part: i
By extorting “the personal” out of me and into public forum, my final women’s studies seminar is going to exhaust me. I arrived at the three-hour block last week expecting we might be talking about … well… Doing the Feminist Research that the class entitled “Doing Feminist Research” vaguely alluded to. Honestly, I expected a 3-hour weekly waste of time which would leave me a little angry about privilege at University. Boy, was I wrong. The real effect: I am exponentially more frustrated with class than poverty. I take WS and America Studies classes despite the people in them because I want the information. And usually the information is as personally rewarding as– say– talking to someone who understands poverty, hegemony, sex, and sex work.Within the first hour, I was regaled with the story of one of my classmates who was so poor this summer that she had to “go online and buy a bike and then drive all the way out to Natick to pick it up because [she] really couldn’t afford gas to get to her job.” Everyone nods, almost excited to be frowning, and then next horrible tale-teller picks up while I calculate: a car, a computer, internet-access, gas to get to Natick, money for a bike, a steady job? Yes. You definitely know what dire means.
Meanwhile, we’re all supposed to be sharing anecdotes in response to an article about how traveling is easier for couples. “This article acts as if gender isn’t an issue, what about traveling as a woman?” the class asks. Bike R Car pipes in again to tell us how once, in Spain, her parents wouldn’t even let her go out salsa dancing. THAT’S how hard it is to travel as a woman. OHHH. That’s how hard. And what I want to know: In what fucked universe is it acceptable to start a WS course by asking everyone to recount their tales of international travel?
Because I was silent through that one (go fucking figure), the professor called on me first to respond to an article about the pay gap. Yes, folks. After four years, it’s come to this. Statistics about pay gaps and completely disjointed analysis of newspaper articles on luxury lifestyles. “Isn’t it terrible,” I began, abstracting my reflection as far the fuck I could from my own reality, “that people who have the power to give you raises base the raise-amount on what they feel you need. Women are considered second-incomes and men, sole breadwinners.” But that wasn’t enough. They needed me to expand. “It happens with age too, like, if they think you don’t need the money or assume you’re subsidized by your parents or something, they’re less like to give it to you.” Read the rest of this entry »
Dear Leonard Nimoy,
L’shanah tovah! I’m so sorry it’s taken me this long to get back to you. I miss you. I do. Really. But every time I get a chance to write or call, I realize I also owe all our mutual friends calls, too, and I know how you know everyone and I just don’t know who to start with. And now somehow it’s already New Years and honestly I’m writing you to ask small favor. But first: whats up how are you I’m well I do miss you what are you up to these days let’s have lunch soon. I found this great picture of the whole gang around the time you made Catlow. Remember that time we rode around in kiddie-size trains with Yul Brenner and I tried to get into the back seat of your sedan from the front because I thought it was a two-door vehicle? I’ll make you a copy. 
Anyway– I have this friend (I can’t remember if you met her at my last shindig) but she’s moved away and I feel like I should do something special for her. I thought of you because I just keep remembering that line from your poem “I believe in hopes, dreams, and decency.” Was that in Warmed by Love? Then that other one “Rocket ships are exciting/ but so are roses.” That one really haunts me. And I think either my friend or I might also believe in hopes, dreams, decency, roses, or rocket ships but we’re not very good at expressing our feelings to each other.
She’s a teacher and really busy and probably won’t even pick up if you call.. but I was just wondering, could you call her and tell her happy new year for me? Possibly you could send her one of your arresting photographs of nude women draped in tefillin or an exculpatory copy of one of your autobiographies
(either I am Spock or maybe I am not Spock, I just can’t tell which would be best because they’re both so different.) I’m sure she’s read them both but it would be a nice gesture. Just use your judgment on this one.
All my love and take care!
-Femmephane
p.s. If you reach her at home and you hear some commotion in the background that might be her roommate. FYI it’s his birthday today so many you could just say “hey” if you’re going to be calling them anyway. He’ll be reading my blag a lot today so I think it’s only polite.
Oh, just one more quick thing while I have you– thought you’d be the one to ask. Tinsel: neutral winter holiday trimming of the future? Or, achingly reminiscent of Christ-child?
Last night, in an attempt to outweird our last RI weird date (return of the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies in a smoky, white-stout-breeder packed, electronic slots casino ten minutes northwest of Providence) J and I ate at Texas Roadhouse.
J managed to find the only way to be déclassé in national chain steakhouse with peanut shells on the floor: she ate her ribs with a knife and fork.
We followed it up with a MacBook screening of a film her father billed as a documentary about firefighters– which turned out to be the boxoffice flop Ladder 49 featuring Joaquin Phoenix and John Scientology-Pie Travolta. Halfway through J realized that her father describes most movies as if they were documentaries. I thought about the magical way my mother transforms every plot into something between historical fiction and tragic melo-crime-drama. Snow Falling On Cedars, as you can imagine, is her favorite book/movie.
And just to top it off, I learned who River Phoenix was. Information J was shocked to discover I did not already know. Wikipedia has always been my best source of cult-related information on the web. Just to top it off, it turned out that yesterday was River’s birthday. I’d go as far as to say I’m a little blue about his death, too. Who can resist such a girlish cult-raised boy? It’s so American!
Speaking of which, word of warning to those of you traveling to the Bay Area. J and I drove over to San Quentin and I know that I should have been filled with some sadness and some rage about wrongful imprisonment and then some confusion about capital punishment. But all of those feelings were overcome by sheer terror at my proximity to Charles Manson. You would have been frightened too if you had no aversion to seeing really, really bad movies and consequently believed Manson looks like he did in Thir13en Ghosts.
Sleep Tight.
It happened for the first time. Sure, I’ve heard myself use my mother’s expressions, seen short clips of myself where I look and sound like my father. In pictures, the resemblance can be uncanny. But this morning I woke up and immediately realized:
“Wow, I sleep naked all the time now. I’ve turned into my parents.”
Diesel Cafe, a dyke-owned/operated coffeeshop in Somerville’s Davis Square, is spawning. Earlier this year Diesel made public their plans to open another store in Somerville’s Union Square, this location called Bloc 11. One of the only remaining historically African American neighborhoods Somerville, Union Square is also currently home to working class communities of Brazilian and Korean people. In recent years Union has become increasingly popular for young, predominantly white, mostly college-educated, queer and non-queer people looking to move to a cheaper area. Because Union Square is not yet accessible by the Green Line, gentrification has been a little slower– the bus-phobic caving to “pay a little more than they can afford” to live elsewhere. Most of the businesses in the area– a cafe included– are locally owned and operated.
Diesel Cafe’s invasive move is unethical and irresponsible. It will endanger other businesses in the area, attract more and more students and former students who can afford to pay more rent than families already living in the area, and drive people and businesses out. Beyond these obvious and material changes are another set of (equally obvious) disavowed changes. Colonizing one community as another population’s recreational area is divisive to the original population.
And as if it weren’t outrageous enough, Diesel Cafe’s owners have planned to open a large art space above Bloc 11. As if the cafe weren’t imitation-highbrow enough on its own.
It isn’t the responsibility of the people already living in Union Square to mitigate the divisive effects of Bloc 11, despite Diesel’s assertion to the contrary. First it is the responsibility of the owners of Diesel Cafe– who have already clearly demonstrated their unabashed racism and disregard for ethical decision-making. Second it is the responsibility of queer people to not contribute to this sort of thing. Not contributing to the gentrification being the absolute least one can/should/must do. Especially it is the responsibility of white, middle-class people– who are not off-the-moral-hook just because they can identify that what Diesel Cafe is doing is wrong. Recognizing privilege and feeling guilty about it isn’t actually enough.
I was already going to blag about Bloc 11 today when I received a disturbing article from my ladywife on insanity-watch at home. For those of you who don’t know Boston– Dorchester is a densely populated group of neighborhoods, (still) working-class Irish, African American, East Asian and Southeast Asian. But uncomfortable white queers, fret no more, developers plan to turn it into the next Southend– with “upscale” shopping and “classy” restaurants to draw in the gays. Just another opportunity for queer people to engage in the “time-honored tradition” of gentrification with a dash of progressive lip service before we scamper away to latte land.
I didn’t know about the bee trouble. They’re flying off and then not going home. “They get disoriented,” J told me. But I had more questions. Why aren’t they going home? To which she had blanket answers like Maybe Global Warming and Or It Could Be Cell Phone Related Radiation. “Sick bees don’t go home when they’re sick. They can’t find the hive. They just keep going and then die, I guess.” I guess she’s right.
I suggested that maybe the bees didn’t want to go back to the hive. They’ve been out in the world and have a new life now. “Maybe it was women’s lib!” I told her.
It’s a big deal because bees are used to pollinate crops– and without them… agricultural nightmare. First the almond crops and then and then.
For corroboration I found this article in the New York Times. I guess it’s honest rather than foreboding that I’m getting my nature news from the business section.
Meanwhile, across the country, my nearest and dearest are abuzz with trauma and possibly wondering where home is.
2. Cause: Sleepwalking. You go out the front door and stand in the snow. Someone comes to get you and they learn to lock up at night. Treatment: Restraint.
4. Cause: Wide-eyes. In 13 years you will forget why it started happening– but remember all the same wresting energies. Although it is smarter than to be fooled by common remedies: hot baths, keeping the bed a sleeping place, Valerian, relaxation techniques– it can be treated with more innovative methods until it adapts. Discover by trial and grave, grave, error. Treatment: Hypothermia. Close the door and open all the windows in the middle of the winter. It is well below zero and somehow your little room is cold enough to pour drafts down two floors and across the house. Your father comes in to say, “What are you doing? There’s a three-foot snow drift on your bed,” and you later regret not opening your eyes to see the snow for yourself and always wonder about the texture of snow blown through a screen. In the summer sing in a loud whisper to yourself and enjoy the sound of your own, out-of-tune voice.
1. Cause: Heat. Your first summer in Massachusetts you stay in a brick box on the fifth floor with no window or fan. Every hour or so you wake up gasping for air and wonder if anyone’s ever reported suffocation by heat. Death isn’t scary enough yet so you can go back to sleep with ease just by looking at the chapel tower and finally being alone. Treatment: Company. Sleep on an extra-long twin bed with someone else instead. Preferably a bunk-bed so that there are three of you in close quarters. His roommates will get used to seeing you naked when he goes to class in the morning. Stay awake all night fucking and walking around and only go inside to check in for curfews. If you have to be alone, be sure to have sex all afternoon and then sleep in public next to other teenagers who are smoking all night on the bridge over Mass Ave.
4. Cause: (pre)Occupation. Night jobs. Treatment: Don’t sleep. The insomnia will treat itself and you will find yourself, always, miraculously tired. It will be the biggest relief of your life.
5. Cause: Worry. Fret yourself hard until you are cross-hatched with fraught. You know you’re doing it right when you can hear every movement of your gurgling stomach– or, at least, you will know that your stomach is gurglingly in motion. Treatment: Divide all your food into rations and write up lists detailing the exact amount of food you can filch from roommates. Figure out how many days you have to skip the subway in order to afford something besides rice and rice. Plan to steal vitamins in the meantime. Think about how sleeping is the mature solution to hunger and calculate how much you can save just by spending more time unconscious then solve all your problems by doing the responsible thing.
7. Cause: Disturbance. Life is elsewhere and your dreams are equally terrifying. Keep all your options open to safeguard against terrors. You’re having recurring dreams about inanimate objects that swell and threaten and then chase you. They’re things without legs or wheels and most of the dream is caught up with being afraid that they are about to come after you. You run through a maze and shoot the thing to bits until a whole field is covered in the parts. They wobble and explode into growth and come at you in droves. One night it’s the button-eye of a doll and the next, two glass blobs stacked up like 2/3 of a snowman. You tell your shrink but there’s only so much you can do about being obvious. “In the dream, where are you?” “Inside the castle walls, and I know that if I only get out– but I’ve also done the dream before so I know how it ends.” Treatment: Cultivate obscure information fetishes. Look up the lengths of books and fact-check rumors. Image-search film stars of the 1930s and lesbian pulp. Compile lengthy documents and plan very long jokes that rely on the convergence of a high number of unlikely factors. Fine-tune your punchlines so they’re ready when the chance arises.
Ms EM cooked us a lovely dinner last night and we had a long talk on her porch. I met some new root vegetables– beets mixed with carrots, which tasted just like carrots but had the same exotic appeal as blood oranges. Anyway who doesn’t like to eat blood-colored things? Answer me that. I don’t need to recap the talk because Nora, currently traveling through the South reportedly topless, told me that her first discovery on the road is that there are only six topics of conversation: gossip, confusion, racism, sex, consumption (see wiki for disambiguation as always), and mechanics. I would hate to disprove her hypothesis so early on.
Ms EM and I kept it mostly to two of the six: racism and what Minohla Dargis and A.O. Scott described in the NYT as “girls, an altogether different chamber of secrets.”* Because I’ve been spending a lot of time between the gym and my bed, I’ve had a lot of time to come up with various ethical dilemmas, inane questions, cute and corny straight lines, and saucy retorts to inflict upon the stationary and tipsy. All my best questions were thwarted, however, when, after giving a long preamble-anticipatory-excuse to a straight-forward question that I wanted EM to take the immoral/unethical/better/easier side on, I opened up my first beer to be jeered with “Lies are slippery, like eels” printed on the lid.
I didn’t know beer was in the habit of giving advice these days. What happened to the Magic 8 Ball, Ouiji, and the all-knowing Snapple? All legitimate but out-moded forms of divination?
The old stand-by, word of the day got me but good anyway.
presential, adj.
Now rare. 1. Of or relating to presence; having or implying actual presence with a person or in a place; present. 2. Having presence of mind; attentive to the matter in hand, alert; = PRESENT adj. 4. Obs. 3. a. Grammar. Relating or having reference to the present tense.
DERIVATIVES
presentialist n. Obs. nonce-wd. a believer in the Real Presence; see REAL adj.2 2b.
San Francisco in just a handful of days. Will be happy to have the world mock me in a new, cooler, time zone.
“Harry Potter and the Four Directors.” New York Times, July 15, 2007.
