NOBODY PASSES, darling

Wait-- is it my imagination, or is Saks Fifth Avenue satirizing the gay marriage agenda?

2009-07-05T18:28:00.001-07:00

Left display window: mannequins in Diesel underwear (and one with a hat, one wearing bow tie, and the other sporting a bandana), and the slogan -- EQUALITY IS THE BOTTOM LINE

Middle windows: a (fisting?) glove hanging from the ceiling prepares to dial numbers for various male names on post-its -- Jon? Chad? Carter? Dick? The slogan: CALLING FOR EQUALITY

The final window: mannequins in designer underwear (not only Diesel now, I think I spot some Calvin Klein!), wearing tie, bandana and hat (and those cute socks!), and yes, the slogan -- EQUALITY IS THE BOTTOM LINE

Somebody give that window designer my number!

That sounds good

2009-07-05T00:29:00.000-07:00

When I was 12, my father called me down into his office and told me about the accounts he created to save for my sister and I to go to college: $100,000 already in the one for me, maybe $60,000 in the one for my sister because she would need it later. He showed me where he kept the bank statements, don’t tell your mother because then she’ll want to spend it. Who was the wife, and who was the child? There were differences: my mother could leave, but chose not to.

You know when I stopped eating, right? When my father looked at a photo of me when I was two, framed in my grandmother’s apartment, and said: most fat babies grow up to be fat adults. My mother was always on a diet, and my father was always taunting her. But let me stop here, before the transition, to focus on this office visit: I can remember the sound of my father opening the desk drawer where he kept his bank statements, that loud sound of metal rolling, why is it that desk drawers are louder when they’re wooden -- teak in this case, of course -- something about metal against metal must be smoother. Anyway, I want to frame this moment, a moment when my father trusted me and did that mean I trusted him?

Twelve was when they sent us to sleep-away camp. This meant I was stuck in a cabin with 12 other boys who each taunted me in a different way. I wrote a letter to my parents every night: please let me come home. Please. For three whole pages. I don’t know exactly what they say; I asked my mother to make copies of the whole shoebox full of letters, and then the shoebox disappeared. Was I there one month, or two? At least 30 letters and sometimes, when I couldn’t stop crying, the camp administrator let me call my parents but all they did was send more candy. Sour balls. Salt water taffy. Lemon drops. Firecrackers. Bazooka chewing gum. Bubblicious. Chiclets. All this candy in my mouth -- that’s how you know this is before, before I stopped eating. Before I’d do anything not to go back to their house, because here I was trying to do anything to get back. Maybe I wanted both: never, and always.

Maybe a few years earlier they’d dropped me off for my first soccer practice and I remember standing on this hill, in my mind now that hill is the size of an entire city, an empty city of green grass and I’m just a little dot in the center with tears of clarity. They would never rescue me, but I still hoped for it. So if sleep-away camp was before I stopped eating, before I threw away my glasses, before I started drinking, before I went to therapy, how does this relate to all the kids from Florida at this camp in West Virginia, running outside in crazy joy at a summer hailstorm, thinking it was the first time they had seen snow?

I always hated summer, and loved the snow, unless I was at the beach. Sometime after sleep-away camp, after my father told me most fat babies grow up to be fat adults, maybe even after I threw away my glasses but before I started drinking or smoking because that one time in the fallout shelter would not be the last, maybe I was in therapy or maybe this was before, do you see how there is no one time and I keep trying to find it? There was one time in the car, I was telling my father about school I liked telling him about my day but he wasn’t listening he never listened he just said mm hmm, that sounds good. So I said: I’m just going to get off right here and lie down in the middle of traffic, and he said mm hmm that sounds good.

A monocle

2009-07-04T00:10:00.000-07:00

Part of this transition is about eyeglasses. I decided I couldn’t wear them anymore, I wanted contacts but remember what my mother said about vanity? I wasn’t allowed. I would break my glasses on purpose, drop them off escalators; for a while in seventh grade, I would hold them up in front of my eyes to see the bulletin board like a monocle because one of the lenses had fallen out, the teacher said isn’t it more important to see?

I’d always liked teachers, except for the ones who didn’t like me. But sometimes they said the stupidest things. Eventually I got contact lenses, then I lost one but they were expensive and I didn’t want to tell my parents because then we would have to argue more, for maybe a year I closed my right eye a lot.. This is when my parents decided that I needed therapy. I wasn’t telling them anything. Most of my friends were girls. I refused the clothes they picked out for me.

My parents wanted me to see a therapist so then the therapist would tell them what was going on. Since my parents were therapists, I knew this was unethical, but kids aren’t part of ethics unless they do something wrong. I didn’t want to be part of kids.

The first time I tried smoking was in the basement of the building where my psychiatrist had an office, the same building as the pediatrician but you got to go through the front entrance like you were living in an apartment. I liked that part. I also liked the basement -- it was a fallout shelter, which I never really understood. In the case of a nuclear war, could you really go into a random basement with a cigarette machine and a sofa to escape? I decided to try Benson & Hedges Menthol because the package looked the most sophisticated. I put the cigarette in my mouth, it tasted bitter not minty like I’d expected but I lit it anyway and then inhaled through my nose.

Of course I started coughing: if this was smoking, I didn’t want any. I liked going into the laundry room too, just because it was the laundry room in an apartment building. Sometimes I would walk back and forth, but what was I doing in the basement? My psychiatrist had a waiting room, but usually I arrived early and all he had in the waiting room was the New Yorker, which I thought was the most boring magazine ever created, and public radio that mostly just played classical music. At least my father had Time and Newsweek. Maybe that’s also what I didn’t like about the waiting room -- it was kind of like waiting for my father. The therapist even had a beard, do all psychiatrists have beards? And the same furniture in his office -- teak wood, brown hues -- but his mother wasn’t an artist because there must have been something on his walls, but I can’t remember it.

At first I was angry about therapy, another attempt by my parents to control my life so I made up dreams. I talked a lot about the beach and the way the water was always coming over the cliff that I was holding onto. I know I haven’t even told you about the beach yet, but maybe that comes later. These were dreams: maybe I was a lobster, hopefully not the one my parents were going to cook for dinner. This was when we would have battles at the table, I didn’t want dinner.

Maybe I was 13 when I started drinking, Gilbey’s gin from the basement liquor cabinet, it was useful that my parents had so much liquor but they only drank beer. Gin really burned -- everything -- my throat, my stomach, my eyes. But oh that feeling in my head, oh.

I remember I brought that bottle of gin one time with me to Baltimore, after I discovered that Steve and I both liked to drink I mean before that we didn’t have that much to talk about, we were both our father’s sons and that was supposed to be enough. He liked baseball and looking for lizards in the alley and anything relating to science and I didn’t even understand Baltimore, not surrounded by the striving of the international bureaucratic class it felt almost empty. The Daniels parents were both schoolteachers and the kids each had their own room and a sandbox and swingset in the back but they went to public school and each parent drove a beat-up Volkswagen bug that was always breaking down and all their pillows were flat; my father said they were middle class, and we were middle class, so I knew he was lying.

Floating

2009-07-03T00:48:00.000-07:00

1984 might be a better year because sometimes I smile in the pictures, although this one’s with my aunt and the other one’s with her boyfriend, people I didn’t know. 1986 doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist in these pictures and that’s when I had my bar mitzvah, at the service someone said I should be a preacher and I didn’t think Jews had preachers. Sara Kaplan said: now that you’re a man, and I blushed. People I invited who weren’t really my friends drank at the party afterwards, but I didn’t really understand what was going on.

But wait -- here I am with Robyn on our sixth grade camping trip, shortly before she broke up with me; she said she wanted more, I knew what more was supposed to mean. I liked talking to her, and hugging her soft sweatshirts, but more seemed like suddenly I would never breathe again. Except sometimes that’s how I felt anyway.

We were one of the first couples in our class, or at least in my head. The other couples were the one who everyone thought was a slut, with two different guys, and then the four others people said were the most popular. Much later, the one who everyone thought was a slut said to me: no one could understand it, because they knew you were a faggot. Wait: did she really say that to me? Later, I mean after the end of everything that we could imagine, for me at least, I would become a slut, and then we would be even, but she would never know that.

In the background of this photo is one of the guys who all the girls liked, or soon they would like him. One of the guys who used to call me faggot, but that was all of the guys who the girls liked, I mean the girls who didn’t like faggots. I fantasized that all those guys would drag me into the woods somewhere and then make me suck their cocks one by one. I look distant in this picture too, and Andrew in the background looks tough and angry, I don’t really recognize anyone else. Probably I didn’t recognize them then either, all boys and this was the time when I would look at boys and only see monsters. Except for the one or two who were my friends but mostly I preferred the adults who pretended something different on the outside.

A lot of the girls were different too, so I liked them better. I don’t remember what Robyn and I talked about, but I know that I liked to give her huge bags of Skittles, they were her favorite candy and I’d slip them in her backpack in between classes: I wanted other people to eat, somehow that made it easier for me not to. Here in the picture there are maybe 10 of us and she’s the only one who looks present enough to give a smile that’s almost not fake. I mean she’s the only one smiling at all, maybe girls were supposed to smile.

Back to 1985, even in my best moments it’s like there’s someone else in the room with someone else. But I can read one of the titles on my bookshelf this time: Butterflies. Oh, and up top: at least 19 Agatha Christies and a large volume that probably contains several more. Three four-leaf clovers in tiny gilded frames, no wait in one frame there are three so that makes five total. A big spool of gold sewing thread; a blue globe just above my head, which one is floating?

I am floating, we all know that. If I float long enough then I can figure out how to float away.

Pink Saturday: party or police state -- in the SF Bay Times!

2009-07-03T00:39:00.000-07:00

Here it is, pretty much the same as my post -- the editor sent it to the Sisters for a response, so we'll see what they come up with...

On the red carpet...

2009-07-02T16:40:00.001-07:00

High five

2009-07-02T00:29:00.000-07:00

What is it about people who acknowledge unconventional glamour on the street and then require you to recognize them for approving your existence? I mean I’m all for acknowledgment, okay -- but I don’t necessarily want to shake random people’s hands, just because they’re holding them out to me. I mean it hurts to shake someone’s hand. Some people even demand a hug for their praise, cigarette in one hand and beer in the other and they’re coming towards me. At least then I can dodge.

But lately there’s the problem of the high-five. The other night it was some drunk WASPy dyke insisting on the gesture, even after I said actually, I have a lot of chronic pain issues. It was like she was praising my flamboyant attire, and questioning my masculinity at the same time. At least then I was with Randy, did Randy give her a high-five? Her friend was embarrassed.

Today it’s this aggressive drunk straight guy, yelling give me a high-five, give me a high-five! I hold my hand out lower, and he looks at me in that angry drunk masculinist way: you get dressed up like that, then you can give me a high-five!

I’m not sure I understand the connection, but I hold my hand up for his smack anyway. Then I get this burning sensation in my forearm, like the tendons on the bottom of my wrist are ripping, actually I didn’t expect it to hurt this much and then I get angry, angry at myself for not just walking by, angry at the things people assume anyone can do and really I should be angry at that moron for demanding my participation in his covert harassment. Or wait, I guess it wasn’t exactly covert because there he was yelling at me on the sidewalk -- I guess it’s harassment masquerading as acceptance, I’m not sure whether that’s better or worse than a regular old angry stare.

A brilliant article on gay marriage, by Yasmin Nair...

2009-07-01T21:55:00.000-07:00

While the gay and lesbian community is widely seen as a liberal/progressive one, its rhetoric around marriage often mirrors the discourse of the Right on the need for marriage as a stabilising force. Gay marriage activists have taken to deploying the strategies of the Right in asserting that marriage is necessary to cure a host of ills, for instance even going so far as to claim that not having marriage increases the social stigma faced by the children of gay couples. But surely we live in an age where the children of unmarried straight people are not considered “bastards,” and are not disallowed from inheriting property or from receiving parental and state support because their parents were not married. In such claims to moral standards, gay marriage advocacy hearkens back to the conservatism of the 1950s and earlier eras. It’s this conservatism that allows for a blinkered distraction from the other, and more pressing, issues that face queers who are not, after all, immune from the ravages of the world.

Here's the rest...

But wait... (yes, all at once!)

2009-07-01T18:28:00.001-07:00

A chocolate heart glossy clock? Oh, right -- that's just what I was looking for...

2009-07-01T18:26:00.001-07:00

Before, or after

2009-07-01T00:38:00.000-07:00

I’m wondering when I started associating the beach with freedom, and I’m guessing it was right around when I started drinking or maybe before because we could walk around by ourselves in a way not possible back at home, my sister and I or my sister and I and Steve and Cynthia, the Daniels kids. But maybe that was around the same time as when we started drinking.

Backing up to school, sixth grade and I liked to say that I didn’t need alcohol, because I was so happy. Did anyone believe this act? I’m looking at a picture from that time, just around my 12th birthday -- Memorial Day at the beach, actually -- and I’m standing frozen in the camera’s gaze, one shoulder up way higher than the other and I’m rail-thin, hair in an overgrown bowl cut and I guess the scary part is the way I’m standing, like in shock almost except this is a pose, a pose for the camera, relax!

And then my eyes: so distant like I’ve already left, this is my body I’m not here this is. Smile.

Somewhere there’s the transition from the kid who always looked scared unless answering a question in school but that kid always got the question right. Kids noticed the fear but adults just commented on the intellect unless they were teachers and they worried about the wrong things, never the parents. If you’re reading every book you can find to escape, that’s good behavior.

This photo is before the transition from trying to disappear to trying to appear. Here I’m still in those first 12 years when I wore the exact same clothes as my father, in the picture that means corduroy OP shorts, Izod shirt, bronze-rimmed eyeglasses literally the same shape as my father’s, the only difference is that somehow I got away with wearing a women’s watch with the skinnier band, maybe because my wrist was too small for the men’s watch. Probably they didn’t call it a women’s watch; sometimes people would call me she. Probably a children’s watch, that’s what they would call it. Was this before, or after I stopped eating?

I think it’s after, because now I’m looking at another picture from that same period, probably slightly earlier because my hair is shorter but they both say 6/85 on the back. I’m so glad pictures used to come with the date imprinted like that, it’s helpful now. In the second picture I’m standing in the exact same position, the light even reflects off my glasses in the same way, rose almost -- maybe it’s the metal. It’s like I’m standing at attention, no one was ever getting me ready for the military but it almost looks that way. This time I’m wearing a beige Izod shirt instead of the green one and it makes me look paler, like I’m going to fade into that shirt except for my chapped lips. I’m pretty sure this is after I stopped eating because my belt is wrapped high and tight around my waist like maybe I could get smaller. It makes the jeans hang strangely around the hips.

This picture takes place in my bedroom: there’s no way that I could know that one day I’d sit here trying to read the names of the books on the shelf behind my younger self, what is that wooden box on the desk? That vertical rectangle against the wall that looks like a hard drive but this is way before something like that -- oh, it’s the world atlas, another book I liked to disappear into.

I forgot that I liked plants then too, the rubber plant doesn’t look like it’s doing too well because all the leaves at the bottom are gone but the pine tree looks healthy, would it make sense that I got that pine tree as a tiny little sapling someone was selling around Christmas and it wasn’t supposed to grow? But I kept it.

So here I am standing in front of the plants, straighter than the vertical blinds behind but more distant. Maybe I want my belt to pull tighter. After the picture I’ll go back to reading, or wrapping fingers around wrists -- thumb to middle finger, thumb to ring finger, can I reach thumb to pinky? I worry about the skin I can squeeze, too much fat. I remember doing this in Hebrew school, where everyone called me Mental and they didn’t mean it as a compliment, sounded like my Hebrew name and I tried to disappear into more words, letters shaped differently: I didn’t know what they meant, but I could sound them out more clearly than anyone else in the room and they hated me for it.

Lostmissing #35

2009-06-30T00:48:00.001-07:00

Lostmissing is a public art project -- I’d love it if you’d participate.

And here's what lostmissing #35 says:

A few days later someone came up to me, one of your old roommates from around when we first met and she said she couldn’t believe you were in nursing school, you’d make a good nurse. A good nurse. That interrupted the narrative arc I was building here. I don’t feel calm anymore.

Pink Saturday: party or police state?

2009-06-29T00:38:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I actually kind of like Pink Saturday, the night before pride when the Castro gets blocked off to traffic and people wander around getting smashed and dancing to terrible music blasted from sound stages in the street. I like it because it’s more honest than any other pride event -- no one’s pretending to do anything but wander the streets getting smashed, walking back and forth in a never-ending international gay suburbanite runway gawkfest. In all of its disastrousness, it is kind of fun to watch.

Over the last few years, Pink Saturday has gotten younger and younger, probably because San Francisco has never been a great place for queer youth, since there’s nowhere for queer youth to go. Except on Pink Saturday, when the bars are turned inside out so that the street is where it’s happening and inside just feels like a bad view. Oh, and the other thing about Pink Saturday is that it’s probably the only day of the year when dykes outnumber fags in the Castro, since the Dyke March ends right at Castro and Market and that’s usually where the main stage is placed. So there’s this crazy intersection between every dyke in the Bay Area and beyond, queer youth of all races flooding in from the suburbs, and the usual gay tourists and yuppies.

I like to sit in front of Harvest Market, eating vegan soup and watching the crowds, gasping at the outfits, and cruising the fashion masculinity fags I wish I wasn’t attracted to. Over the last few years, this has been a tradition I’ve shared with my friend Hilary, who is usually visiting from LA, but now she’s just moved here -- in fact, this year we actually decided to call it a tradition, and made a plan for 9:30 pm in our usual spot.

I decide not to take the underground to the Castro, since it’s always so crowded on pride, but then I regret my decision since the bus is so slow. It looks like Market Street is blocked off earlier than usual, since the bus is taking about 10 minutes per block, so I get out just after Church Street and sure enough there are all sorts of people sprawled out in the middle of Market and it kind of feels festive. I walk towards the barricades, and can’t figure out why exactly they go all the way across the sidewalk -- usually there’s a place where the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence harass people for “donations,” but only several blocks up. This time some guy in an orange security t-shirt starts yelling at me from behind the barricades that this isn’t an entrance, I have to stand in line over there, and he points to the other side of the street where there are hundreds of people crammed together, trying to get in. I say oh, I’m just going to Harvest Market, right over there, but he yells at me that I have to stand in line, so then there I am, in line with hundreds of suburbanites and teenagers, and suburbanite teenagers.

One of the Sisters is standing on the median in the middle of Market yelling through a bullhorn that we all need to stand in line, and I yell: why don’t you just open the fucking barricades? Then the blonde woman next to me, red-faced with booze, turns to me and says: do you think we should rush the line? I say not a bad idea, but people would probably get hurt, and she looks surprised and sad for a second, decides against that idea.

Get this: the security staff yells at us that we need to form separate lines for “men” and “women”-- I kid you not! Binary gender lines at a queer event in San Francisco, organized by a bunch of queens who dress as nuns. The security staff is frisking people and making people throw away water bottles, asking us if we have any drugs or sharp objects -- wait, I thought this was a public street, I didn’t realize we were visiting our friends in the tank at 850 Bryant.

As far as I can tell, pretty much everyone who’s working security is straight, and aggressive, and way behind the security line are the Sisters, standing with their donation buckets and acting like they don’t notice the screaming hordes. My turn and the security guard pulls my bag out of my hand and tells me I have to get rid of my water bottle. My water bottle is one of those overpriced metal things that I carry around so that I don’t have to waste plastic everywhere -- I don’t want to just throw it away, so I’m arguing with him and he says I’m not even supposed to let you bring your bag in, you’ll have to get in the back of the line, so finally I just throw the bottle to the side, in this pile of discarded plastic bottles, and then I walk through the financial checkpoint so enraged that my eyes are almost closed and it’s a good thing no one says anything to me because otherwise I would just rip them to shreds.

Over at Harvest Market, there’s no sign of Hilary and I’m worried that I’ve missed her because now I’m 45 minutes late. But no, turns out she got stopped at another checkpoint and they made her go home to return her backpack. Are you kidding? What the hell is going on? When did Pink Saturday turn into a police state? Not just security at the gates, but roaming around inside are dozens of uniformed SFPD officers. And probably a few hundred of the security monitors in orange shirts, almost all of them straight black men. Did the Sisters consciously make this racialized choice, or did they hire an outside contractor to do their dirty work? Triple Canopy? Dimecorp? Xe/Blackwater? Or, perhaps a local favorite like Bechtel Corporation.

You can’t even piss on any of the side streets, because then you have to go through another checkpoint. I go into a restaurant to use the bathroom and they stop me, I say I don’t mind buying something, but apparently that’s still not okay. The waitress points me in the direction of port-a-potties, and there they are with maybe 85 people in line.

Back at Harvest, the owner is working the register and I figure maybe he’ll have some insight, I say when did they decide to move the barricades so far back? He says I guess this year. I say what the hell is the point of all this security? He says oh I’ve seen it much worse -- he’s probably talking about Halloween, when roaming straights show up with baseball bats and a few years ago the police decided to shut the whole neighborhood down instead of letting anyone in. I say what do you mean, nothing has ever happened on Pink Saturday! He says it’s to keep away the outsiders. I say what the hell are you talking about -- 95% of these people aren’t from San Francisco!

At least Hilary and I can be angry together. For some reason the cops keep coming over and staring at people’s ginger ale bottles, telling people they can’t be drinking that in public. This is ginger ale! But, guess what -- you’re not allowed to drink anything that’s not in a plastic cup -- even if you’re sitting on the benches provided by Harvest Market, drinking something that you bought inside.

This is crazy. Earlier someone pointed out the huge disco ball hanging in the middle of 16th and Market, but somehow I didn’t notice that it was suspended by an enormous crane. Who the hell paid for that? I go closer. Oh, no -- it’s sponsored by some new vodka called Blue Angel -- I guess it’s like those U.S. Navy fighter jets that terrorize US skies to get people all excited about blowing up Iraqi or Afghani civilians -- drink Blue Angel, and double your pleasure -- get bombed, while you’re doing the bombing!

I forgot to mention that one of the other things I like about Pink Saturday is that it doesn’t usually have any of the corporate sponsorship -- at least not for the last several years. Way back I remember maybe it was sponsored by Budweiser, and was an official SF Pride event, but I never remember security checkpoints on all sides for blocks around, and right in front of us is a huge booth dispensing Popchips -- “Never Fried or Baked -- Love. Without the Handles.” You can even get your picture taken in a free photo booth -- as long as you’re holding a bag of Popchips. No doubt to use in their promotional materials. But can I guzzle my Blue Angel at the same time as I’m chomping on chips? Pop!

Then there’s a huge video screen suspended from the corner in front of the giant disco ball, Hilary and I are watching it to try to figure out what it’s advertising but we’re not sure. The dance stage, sponsored by corporate gay dance radio, starts playing Michael Jackson -- everywhere in the world, they’re probably playing Michael Jackson right now in one kind of corporate-crazed ritual or another. And then we spot the Budweiser truck parked on the corner -- oh, no! Sure enough, walking further we discover a huge booth, just like the ones at Pride, selling overpriced beer and cocktails and bottled water. Oh, that’s why they had us confiscate our bottles -- so that they could make more money-- they don’t even do that at pride!

What are the Sisters doing with all this money, I mean all the money that doesn’t go to Budweiser or Blue Angel or Red Bull, sponsor of the tables in front of the Budweiser booth, decorated with the Sisters insignia and featuring maybe 20 bartenders pouring drinks. And, of course, across from the Budweiser booth is an enormous booth selling Polish sausage and ribs -- this all explains why most of the neighborhood businesses look relatively abandoned. Supposedly the profits go to nonprofits -- I love that phrase, so let’s repeat it: the profits go to nonprofits. I love nonprofits that enforce a security state, how comforting!

But there’s more -- just as Hilary and I are trying to make our way through the crowds to get to one of the exit checkpoints, we spot a few friends, and guess what? This year, the Dyke March got stopped at 17th and Sanchez, stopped by the line of straight male security guards who demanded that all the dykes walk single-file through the frisking station. That’s right -- on the one day of the year when dykes actually flood the Castro, it’s important to make sure there’s extra security! Outsourced security, no doubt.

Track six

2009-06-28T01:38:00.000-07:00

There’s that morning moment, before eating, track six and I’m looking out at the light onto buildings and for the first time I can see exactly which window panes are warped, track six open up my hips the sky not that smoggy sky outside but this one right here I can open up my arms and just hope this is how I’m feeling today. I’m cleaning the cutting board and I actually like cleaning the cutting board, chopping beets and brussel sprouts and wait this is fun this is fun this can be fun!

Let me try that again with my hips -- oh, no -- track seven! Okay, rewind. I don’t want to tell you what it’s called because electronic musicians choose such cheesy names for such beautiful beats, I would call it When I Notice Which Window Panes Are Warped, but okay it’s called Fly Hawaii -- see what I mean? Someone should hire me to write song titles, please hire me.

Okay, I’ll admit that that sky is already lost, now it’s the sinus clog from last night at Blow Buddies, the smoke coming in from outside mostly pot smoke I always think I’m going to leave faster. The beginning was the best part -- when it was so crowded that people were gathering in those groups of desire so often lacking these days, later I was talking to someone about the music you see talking about music is one of my favorite things I said these are good beats, ’96, you don’t hear these beats much these days, I mean the song’s kind of cheesy but I like these beats. Turned out he produces music, also likes the songs that knock you down.

Back outside into a heat wave night, how could it have gotten so warm just my body or the air too, and today my sinuses really don’t seem worse than they would be from the smog I can see outside powder blue sky fading into tan the air is still and I’ll keep thinking about track six.

Two paragraphs earlier

2009-06-26T22:58:00.001-07:00

I’m in that place between complete exhaustion and a little bit of energy, I guess I should appreciate this space, especially since an hour or two ago I was going to write: will there ever be a time when I’m not so exhausted? I still don’t know. Maybe in a few minutes, maybe never again. Here it is, the exhaustion, and I don’t know where this sentence goes. I mean where I am in this sentence.

Here I am: I left the house early today, I mean before 5 pm to get some bloodwork done and then I was in Union Square watching the tourists but not as many as I expected, barely a hint of the Gay Tourist Onslaught, even. Maybe they were already in the Castro, or maybe they arrive later, after work. On the way home, I stopped to get a prescription for thyroid hormone, for my new strategy of dissolving one pill in a tincture bottle of water and taking a few drops a day, so that I’ll be taking something like a hundredth of a pill each time almost like homeopathy. A doctor suggested this strategy a while back, he thought the hormone would just wire and drain me otherwise, and sure enough that is what the smallest dose did, so I might as well try a hundredth of the smallest dose, right?

They need a half-hour, so I come back home and accidentally watch the trailer for an MTV pilot from someone’s blog and then it’s too late to get the prescription but I kind of have energy, maybe that’s why people watch tacky TV but you already know it doesn’t last long because soon enough I’m two paragraphs earlier in that place between complete exhaustion and something else or just complete exhaustion again and I’m waiting.

Bending toward oblivion: My interview with Martin Duberman in the San Francisco Bay Guardian

2009-06-26T00:09:00.000-07:00

Here it is...

And feel free to tell me what you think...

Uncovering Feminism: Emma Bee Bernstein and a few questions about suicide

2009-06-25T01:07:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I’m looking through the Seal Press catalog for the second time, just to see if I’ve missed anything interesting, and what calls my attention is the bio of one of the editors of a book called Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism, and I can’t necessarily tell whether the interviews will be challenging and provocative or dull and fawning -- but what I do notice is the bio for co-editor Emma Bee Bernstein -- right after her name we see the years marking her life, 1985-2008. But nothing telling us how she died. So I know it must not be what is generally considered a tragic accident (car/plane crash) or a noble battle (cancer), and I go online to find out how she died at age 23.

Suicide. But I can’t figure out why. All the available accounts -- her parents, her coeditor, her parents’ friends -- point to a particular narrative where here she was, something like a child prodigy born into a New York family of artists and writers, publishing interviews at age 12, drawn to dreaming and strident visions, traveling cross-country after finishing college at the cloistered University of Chicago to work on this new project about feminism and the future with her camera as accessory to her vision, filled with so much hope and possibility and yet overwhelmed by a monster, a monster of depression that she finally succumbed to.

I’m suspicious of this narrative. She killed herself inside the Peggy Guggenheim collection in Venice, Italy, where she was working in a prestigious internship program. What did this final gesture mean to her? Did she leave a note? What was this depression about? Where are the cracks in the story, and why does everyone insist on sealing them up after her death? If her death means anything, can’t it at least mean that her life becomes revealed in all its complications? Would she have wanted that?

I also don’t believe in this vision of depression as a monster that challenges the hopefulness of a feminist visionary. We live in a horrible world where violence covers violence covers violence and here we are wrapped in it, no matter what. Feminism, or any intense analysis, means that you see all of the horror, you uncover all the layers, and yes you try to figure out a way to challenge the violence but you rarely succeed and you keep trying. You keep trying but sometimes it’s not hopeful, you are not hopeful and you try to act with hope anyway but really what is hope if you’re still surrounded by violence, this world, your role in it?

My question is this: how do we know that Emma Bee Bernstein didn’t kill herself because of her feminism, not in spite of it, and what would it mean to think about this gesture, in all of its sadness and yearning, as something she wanted us to pay attention to, not to cover up like an aberration?

Okay, what exactly are they saying here?

2009-06-24T00:46:00.001-07:00

The next book?!?!

2009-06-23T00:28:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I printed out the first draft of my new manuscript -- the one that starts with visiting my father before he died and then it goes into trying to regain a sense of hope in my own sexuality, the overwhelming the everyday, relationships that end, the end of my hopes for San Francisco, and childhood -- maybe in that order, but really I don’t know. The part about my father is the tightest -- the rest is just everything that I’ve written over the last 2 1/2 to 3 years, most of it on this blog -- I’ve kept it all in one document because I didn’t want to direct what exactly I wrote about, because I’m not exactly sure what this book will be, right?

So I printed it all out, and guess what? It’s 411,000 words, which is about 1100 manuscript pages -- don’t worry, I printed it out singlespaced and double-sided, so it’s maybe about 300 sheets of paper, but that’ll be a lot of turning of the pages, oh no for my hands! Just to give you a sense of how much 411,000 words is, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly is about 90,000 words, and Pulling Taffy is about 50,000 or so…

First I have to get it bound, and then I can start looking through it -- I’m kind of excited, but I’m not excited about the pain. A lot of it will be easy to cut cut cut, or least I’m hoping. And then a lot of what I want I’ve barely even started writing -- especially the parts about childhood. I’m not even sure this is one manuscript, but it’s funny how I used to write so little, and now I have so much -- this next book will be quite an adventure!

Liniment

2009-06-22T00:08:00.000-07:00

There’s something seductive about the repetition of something you weren’t trying to repeat -- like the word something, right? No, I’ll give you more information. I’m in the bathroom, putting on more Posumon -- I know it’s more, it’s just that I don’t know that it’s more, right after more. I mean I’ve already put more on, and I don’t realize it until I’m washing my hands, and I remember oh, I just washed my hands. And now my fingertips kind of hurt, dry skin from too much soap, water. Soap, water.

Should I put on more Posumon -- it does freshen my sinuses, no not my sinuses but the feeling around them -- my sinuses are cracking from the dancing, the dancing that made me kind of high for a few minutes, pushing through my head like a board, board head into that bright hello, runway, literally runway in my house music hallway but now it’s my head pushing through me. At the Nob Hill Theatre, when he says he likes the way I smell he doesn’t mean the Posumon he’s talking about my armpits. I know, because he says I like the way you smell right after his nose lifts from, yes, my armpits. I am a detective, but I’m not that kind of detective.

Everyone sweats. Everyone smells. But not everyone puts on medicated liniment 37 times in one day, one hour, one moment just waiting for the next menthol cinnamon eucalyptus cassia moment no wait that’s the toothpicks what’s in the liniment please more liniment, please more just don’t dry out my hands.

When revolution was right around the corner from the corner store...

2009-06-21T21:57:00.000-07:00

Yes yes a delicious interview on Against the Grain about Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation, the new book edited by Tommi Avicolli Mecca -- the juicy conversation features Tommi, and contributor Paola Bacchetta.

To be continued

2009-06-20T23:01:00.000-07:00

Okay, I’m just going to make some notes because it’s the beginning of the day and I don’t quite have energy but I have ideas and I want to put all those ideas down in some form just so that I remember them and usually I would do this in a list with a pen but last night was it last night I was doing that and it destroyed my right hand and I don’t want to destroy my right hand so early in the day but now that I think about it it might already be destroyed so okay I don’t want to destroy it more.

So much happened in my sleep no it was not good sleep but so much happened so to me that means that this might be a good remedy -- the new homeopathic remedy, that is -- it’s called China, and I don’t know what that means. I’m guessing something to do with porcelain, but really I have no idea. I do remember I took it at some point before, but I can’t remember if it was a good fit but even if it wasn’t a good fit then it could be a good fit now.

Okay, the disadvantage of doing this instead of writing a list is that I’m writing too much, I mean I’m spending too much time and I’m going to run out of energy and forget everything I wanted to mention. The other disadvantage is that I keep having to go back and make corrections, because the voice software doesn’t always write the right thing, although now that I’m talking about the voice software it’s doing much better -- oops, not now -- you didn’t see that, but I did, oh no!

I didn't spill the beans, but I did spill the buckwheat...

2009-06-20T22:53:00.000-07:00

Soon, hopefully, I'll be out of bed for long enough to write something...

2009-06-20T00:32:00.000-07:00

Worse, not better -- ouch my stomach ouch!

2009-06-18T22:37:00.000-07:00