pinch your nose discreetly when you walk by me
I never thought the word Tolerance was strong enough when it came to pushing for a larger collective acceptance of social deviates (most often labeled so because of the nearly seamless pervasion of standard and institutionalized "normal" behaviors and values in American society).
So when during the 10.3.08 VP Debate Sarah Palin emphasized her willingness to tolerate "adults in America choosing their partners [and] choosing relationships that they deem best for themselves" it really makes me queasy to imagine anyone would readily identify this as anything but a meaningless, prudent, homophobic, and conservative act of ignoring not only GLBTIQ culture at large but also ANYONE who deviates from Mainstream Americanism through their sex/gender/class/race/sexuality/profession et cetera. How nice to know I'm going to be tolerated like a screaming child in public or a rancid stench on the street.
I also think it's important to note her specifically locating her so-called tolerance to "adults" which, admittedly, could be a result of the context being in relation a question posed about Civil Rights/Gay Marriage; but it could also be indicative of a more worrisome sentiment: that Palin is ready to actively prevent queer youth from having programs and resources and ultimately choices and a voice and in their place promoting conservative Christian values that shame queer youth and criminalize their natural development.
Joe Biden more markedly addressed his Campaign's promise to "making sure that committed couples in a same-sex marriage are guaranteed the same constitutional benefits as it relates to their property rights, their rights of visitation, their rights to insurance, their rights of ownership as heterosexual couples do."
First of all, he made an error. He didn't mean Gay Marriage he meant civil rights as he later clarified he supports those over "redifining from a civil side what constitutes marriage." Regardless, he COMPLETELY fails to identify that Marriage is both a religious and social/political/economic institution rooted in patriarchy. He fails to address how promoting civil rights or even marriage to "committed" same sex couples still leaves the rest of queer culture unprotected, ignored, and compromised.
I don't support Gay Marriage because I don't support the larger institution of Marriage and the role GM has played in mainstreaming queer politics and encouraging an assimilationist attitude towards the very act of living life.
Behave exactly like us and we'll probably accept you and let you in to the party. We will tolerate you!
Piss on that. I happen to think (and I know I am not alone) that the Dems and the Reps are hardly different at all. They're just taking shits in different parts of America's back yard and desperately trying to uphold the same kind of racist, sexist, queerphobic fence. So I would recommend that all of us challenge, push, expand, and define this supposed Tolerance and demand a more inclusive notion of equality across the board. I enjoy the idea of flaunting our deviant behaviors while smartly and unshakingly demanding and promoting rights and liberation. I really don't want to preach in this blog but I'm hoping to at least ruminate, consider, and voice defiance when I feel assertive enough in my positions.
There's a lot of hype about Obama being the next great liberator: America's truely versatile and progressive hope. I'm really not convinced. I've been told I have anarchist leanings but at this point I am very unwilling to identify to any word or set of words (label) that can possibly distract people from having the courage and fortitude to consider the very possibility of change because of misunderstood or lost histories. That said, I am concerned that more and more of my progressive-minded friends can't seem to bring themselves to question the Obama-Biden campaign and the inevitable failure of the two-party political system. I'm sympathetic to the desperation behind this movement, too. After a gross number of years of international descent we're all looking for some kind of transcending hero and it's easy to indulge in that myth. To believe that one person or even one administration can initiate and actualize national and international change where each individual experiences a profound liberty. I certainly don't have all the answers; I have thousands of questions and more importantly an eagerness to engage in conversations that consider and question the issues I've put forth. So respond, call, write, rant, scream-sing-kiss openly and publically and without reservation.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Monday, August 25, 2008
Objects
on moving
It seems I'm what you'd call a natural when it comes to forgetting, intentionally or not, the reappearing part of my disappearing act. But the past 5 weeks have been fast. I can hardly remember where I've been. I only vaguely understand where I'm going.
Maybe it's simple and I've just lost my knack for moving. I've never lived anywhere for more than a year since I was 19. Even small moves across portland required a regrouping and a regathering of my things and I was able to sift through most of it and be on my way. Before I left for Barcelona I spent the summer relishing the idea of living a lifestyle that allowed me to pack up and leave, every posession in one car, in a twenty minute time frame. Like some domestic prisoner of war or a young Algonquin. In my mind some brutish man with a moustache tells me I have twenty minutes to decide what will be part of my life and I can choose it all, i've duped them, because I'm so simple and minimal, all I really need and all I really own is this tshirt, these old jeans, a kazoo, and a solid well-read copy of The Poetics of Space!
Prepping for my move to Somerville (which is happening right now), it's laughable, really, to think that I'll ever really achieve a possessionlessness. Instead I pack my books in boxes and wrap old bottles in newspaper and plant lavender in terra cotta pots and fill my old wooden bank crates with old letters and rocks and tins, all in preparation of transfering the objects and things my mother says make me me. I'm equally intrigued and repulsed by the idea of being defined and characterized through objects and spacial aesthetics ("who said that life is not objects? I kill him with one" thank you terita.) Intrigued because I buy it. I understand the reflective abilities of the spaces we create and the political and poetic qualities they embrace or reject. I'm hugely interested in this. Still, when it comes to me and my little room in something of a tree fort in Somerville, MA, i'm queezy with the idea of my things making me who I am. As if without them I am a black slate rubbed over with a wet cloth. Maybe I am. I'm constantly informing myself of who I am by, more often than not, exposing myself to books, materials, images, sounds that enhance what may otherwise be mere tiny seedlings of an opinion or belief. I suppose I'm caught up lately with the idea of redefinition. I want my descriptions to be liquid. Today my nouns are verbing all over themselves and the adverbs run amok and my adjectives hesitate inbetween contexts.
It seems I'm what you'd call a natural when it comes to forgetting, intentionally or not, the reappearing part of my disappearing act. But the past 5 weeks have been fast. I can hardly remember where I've been. I only vaguely understand where I'm going.
Maybe it's simple and I've just lost my knack for moving. I've never lived anywhere for more than a year since I was 19. Even small moves across portland required a regrouping and a regathering of my things and I was able to sift through most of it and be on my way. Before I left for Barcelona I spent the summer relishing the idea of living a lifestyle that allowed me to pack up and leave, every posession in one car, in a twenty minute time frame. Like some domestic prisoner of war or a young Algonquin. In my mind some brutish man with a moustache tells me I have twenty minutes to decide what will be part of my life and I can choose it all, i've duped them, because I'm so simple and minimal, all I really need and all I really own is this tshirt, these old jeans, a kazoo, and a solid well-read copy of The Poetics of Space!
Prepping for my move to Somerville (which is happening right now), it's laughable, really, to think that I'll ever really achieve a possessionlessness. Instead I pack my books in boxes and wrap old bottles in newspaper and plant lavender in terra cotta pots and fill my old wooden bank crates with old letters and rocks and tins, all in preparation of transfering the objects and things my mother says make me me. I'm equally intrigued and repulsed by the idea of being defined and characterized through objects and spacial aesthetics ("who said that life is not objects? I kill him with one" thank you terita.) Intrigued because I buy it. I understand the reflective abilities of the spaces we create and the political and poetic qualities they embrace or reject. I'm hugely interested in this. Still, when it comes to me and my little room in something of a tree fort in Somerville, MA, i'm queezy with the idea of my things making me who I am. As if without them I am a black slate rubbed over with a wet cloth. Maybe I am. I'm constantly informing myself of who I am by, more often than not, exposing myself to books, materials, images, sounds that enhance what may otherwise be mere tiny seedlings of an opinion or belief. I suppose I'm caught up lately with the idea of redefinition. I want my descriptions to be liquid. Today my nouns are verbing all over themselves and the adverbs run amok and my adjectives hesitate inbetween contexts.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Smoke Bone Salt
Yesterday I went to the ocean. And they were all right, she was right, one feels like a real being, invisible, an amoeba that rides in spit. We can disappear so completely in it, it's like a heavy wing, a great hand of undoing.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Dumb
One week ago I was happy to find myself sitting cross-legged eating a pancake. I take them plain, mostly, without butter or syrup. This one was grainy and had chopped almonds in it, the color was a warm barkish brown and I did not make it. Then I drove and drove for a while--apparently through the town where Stephen King found his bearings in the 1950s and learned to identify hard woman and had the whole echo chamber inside his head blown out more than once.
I can be incredibly interior; which is why during that drive where I imagined Stephen King, yes he, with his penchant for developing characters across and between the thresholds of life and death, the living and dying, it is why I thought that that man understands what it can really feel like to hear the dipteran humming of maine in the summer. And I sat almost completely silent headed towards Portland, my interiors collapsing and reconstructing themselves like living buildings, architectural species transforming corridors and stairwells based on some intrinsic impulse. Similar to this, only more fantastic. Less hydraulics.
Regardless, it's not that I'm oblivious to my surroundings and the company I keep while deliberating intercourse between beetles, but one week ago I was particularly wordless in the morning and would have been happy to lie down, fully conscious, all day, beneath a fan. Not alone, but curled up and bent this way and that. Sometimes I keep the characters in my entries unseen because it feels selfish and too forward to also describe how I appreciated their heavy look while our road matched up with the river and they stretched on for a while, side by side, looking quite similar and neither caring anything of it.
I can be incredibly interior; which is why during that drive where I imagined Stephen King, yes he, with his penchant for developing characters across and between the thresholds of life and death, the living and dying, it is why I thought that that man understands what it can really feel like to hear the dipteran humming of maine in the summer. And I sat almost completely silent headed towards Portland, my interiors collapsing and reconstructing themselves like living buildings, architectural species transforming corridors and stairwells based on some intrinsic impulse. Similar to this, only more fantastic. Less hydraulics.
Regardless, it's not that I'm oblivious to my surroundings and the company I keep while deliberating intercourse between beetles, but one week ago I was particularly wordless in the morning and would have been happy to lie down, fully conscious, all day, beneath a fan. Not alone, but curled up and bent this way and that. Sometimes I keep the characters in my entries unseen because it feels selfish and too forward to also describe how I appreciated their heavy look while our road matched up with the river and they stretched on for a while, side by side, looking quite similar and neither caring anything of it.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Bear, Bore
This isn't self-deprecating but: I'm a bore. At least as an inter-text. My seldom yet lofty submissions are usually entirely self-absorbed and esoteric. I'm constantly rehashing and reminding myself of the goals I have in maintaining a blog. I want(ed) to:
1. make comments on my surroundings that may be appreciated/cerebrally encouraging to my 1.5 readers, perhaps leading to discussions or exchanges that will allow me to be an even more thorough and informed critical onlooker.
2. allow myself a space for deliberations and communication that didn't have the pressures or standards of academic writing. Exercises in writing that left room for error in a cosmetic sense while stilling helping to keep the chops up.
3. maybe, just maybe, click with other pensive furrow-browed twentysomething cutes.
So I say I'm a bore but most random blogs I read are just as tedious as mine. My friends write clever, engaging, and completely accessible blogs that always offer something easily relatable. I'm thoroughly amused by their commentaries and often hysterical observations. Their links are there --->
-
I've been overwhelmed with the word Bear. It started in March when I read Faulkner's The Old People and then immediately jumped into The Bear. I enjoyed becoming so tiny a figure in his old semi-infiltrated landscapes. I'd close the book feeling damp and musty. But the image of the Bear kept on. Soon after I kept seeing images of Bears at random. And then I watched a Joanna Newsom video of her performing Monkey and Bear, and then there's always the verbs. To bear, bore. A bear, a bore, my bare, my boar. It's amazing. Sounds, letters, tenses, all changing and mixing, a rubik's cube of meanings. How gorgeous.
1. make comments on my surroundings that may be appreciated/cerebrally encouraging to my 1.5 readers, perhaps leading to discussions or exchanges that will allow me to be an even more thorough and informed critical onlooker.
2. allow myself a space for deliberations and communication that didn't have the pressures or standards of academic writing. Exercises in writing that left room for error in a cosmetic sense while stilling helping to keep the chops up.
3. maybe, just maybe, click with other pensive furrow-browed twentysomething cutes.
So I say I'm a bore but most random blogs I read are just as tedious as mine. My friends write clever, engaging, and completely accessible blogs that always offer something easily relatable. I'm thoroughly amused by their commentaries and often hysterical observations. Their links are there --->
-
I've been overwhelmed with the word Bear. It started in March when I read Faulkner's The Old People and then immediately jumped into The Bear. I enjoyed becoming so tiny a figure in his old semi-infiltrated landscapes. I'd close the book feeling damp and musty. But the image of the Bear kept on. Soon after I kept seeing images of Bears at random. And then I watched a Joanna Newsom video of her performing Monkey and Bear, and then there's always the verbs. To bear, bore. A bear, a bore, my bare, my boar. It's amazing. Sounds, letters, tenses, all changing and mixing, a rubik's cube of meanings. How gorgeous.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Independence Day
I thought I'd get ahead on what I expect to be a full on assault from my fellow queers, jeerers, reformists, and bull-horned progressors on the ridiculous hypocrisy of Independence Day celebration and the annual 1812 overture cannon blows that sound throughout Boston and the televised world. There are millions of topics we can explore regarding this one day, its history, our (alternative) histories, globalization, faggotry, the dead made into fireworks (really!) notions of independence and interdependence, mass media, nationalism, transnationalism, etc. Where will my wailings lie? Let's talk the family BBQ.
Every year my brother is host to a 4th of July backyard BBQ with all the traditional fixins. Paper plates, american flag cakes with blueberries and strawberries used as the stars and stripes, meats cooked in beer, and a firework finale that costs thousands of dollars.
So: every year I find myself in the sticky situation of taking part in a kind of day long ritual I avidly rip to shreds in appropriate settings and compromising my political self with my loyalties to my family. Said brother is fucking amazing. His smile can be infectiously kind and its a true sign of his utterly unpretentious and childishly unjudging character. His goal is to offer a day of gathering; a celebration not steeped in bogart nationalism but rather built on the corporal pleasures of food, summer lawns, drink and socializing. I enjoy the gathered company of family (and some friends) but also hate the ways it makes me feel like my integrity is put on the back burner. Manning the so-called Veggie Hut or Tofu Tent doesn't exactly allow me the kind of relief I desire from mainstream american 4th of July celebration dogma. Still, should there be an alternative celebration hosted by people looking to dismantle the hypocritical trash celebration of Freedom For All! and create an alternative foreigner/immigrant/tranny/queer/manwomanchild/animal/everythingeverythingeverything friendly environment, I'd still have to choose my family on this day. Where my political and philosophical ambitions/beliefs disrupt my commitment to my family I am terribly compromising. Because from them I have received endless love and hardly any judgement. They would kill and die for me and it transcends political context. So on the 4th (I avoided discussing our lack of Independence from corporate America and people who have to work on this day, I might have to) I will be cooking my tofu Pups on the grill and encouraging thoughtful conversation about Americanism when appropriate (I am in the process of trying to re-embody America and American because I am exhausted by the idea of giving up. A firm critic of nationalism I still have spent my life in this system and fuckall if I'm going to join the Move To Canada airplane. This is a country not entirely gone to waste and I want to claim these words and emblaze them in the context of my faggoty little self, more soon!). I won't enjoy everything, I will be grossly frustrated, I will feel somewhat compromised, but there it is, the family.
Every year my brother is host to a 4th of July backyard BBQ with all the traditional fixins. Paper plates, american flag cakes with blueberries and strawberries used as the stars and stripes, meats cooked in beer, and a firework finale that costs thousands of dollars.
So: every year I find myself in the sticky situation of taking part in a kind of day long ritual I avidly rip to shreds in appropriate settings and compromising my political self with my loyalties to my family. Said brother is fucking amazing. His smile can be infectiously kind and its a true sign of his utterly unpretentious and childishly unjudging character. His goal is to offer a day of gathering; a celebration not steeped in bogart nationalism but rather built on the corporal pleasures of food, summer lawns, drink and socializing. I enjoy the gathered company of family (and some friends) but also hate the ways it makes me feel like my integrity is put on the back burner. Manning the so-called Veggie Hut or Tofu Tent doesn't exactly allow me the kind of relief I desire from mainstream american 4th of July celebration dogma. Still, should there be an alternative celebration hosted by people looking to dismantle the hypocritical trash celebration of Freedom For All! and create an alternative foreigner/immigrant/tranny/queer/manwomanchild/animal/everythingeverythingeverything friendly environment, I'd still have to choose my family on this day. Where my political and philosophical ambitions/beliefs disrupt my commitment to my family I am terribly compromising. Because from them I have received endless love and hardly any judgement. They would kill and die for me and it transcends political context. So on the 4th (I avoided discussing our lack of Independence from corporate America and people who have to work on this day, I might have to) I will be cooking my tofu Pups on the grill and encouraging thoughtful conversation about Americanism when appropriate (I am in the process of trying to re-embody America and American because I am exhausted by the idea of giving up. A firm critic of nationalism I still have spent my life in this system and fuckall if I'm going to join the Move To Canada airplane. This is a country not entirely gone to waste and I want to claim these words and emblaze them in the context of my faggoty little self, more soon!). I won't enjoy everything, I will be grossly frustrated, I will feel somewhat compromised, but there it is, the family.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
The Thief
Seemingly significant alterations in my mood are affected by small accomplishments, all of which I can not realize without the help of things like oxygen, the family, castor oil, my body's ability to process B12, and our planet's particular fix in the solar system. Despite these wonders, though, I'm a grump.
A waspy critic, though I don't meant that how I would have 2 or 3 years ago when I subversively eyed the WASP looking to memorize it's technique for organizing a spice rack or edge the walkway. Nowadays I feel like a slightly darker, perhaps more alarming bug on the screen though ultimately you can buy an aerosol can of something off-putting and I will go away and be sad in a gutter. I find it difficult to always be specific. My frustrations disassemble into dreamy poetics. I hate Target and the tidal wave speed of commercial plaza construction. I look on, jaded, and think: "I will come back at night and I will steal their shrubbery, and make a garden of love and war." Television is 99% let down so I don't watch it and when I've lived on my own I simply didn't own a tv (how easy!). Still, it's not always easy to compliment my ideals and actualize my politics. I'm an impulsive thinker and can never stand by any one moral with die hard strength; possible fluctuations in circumstance are a regular part of my deliberations and so my equations are always changing. Shape-shifting: perhaps there is nothing I approve of completely and nothing I condemn entirely. Does this make me wishywashy? A weak character? I usually regret operating solely off of impulses because the next day I can scarcely stand by my old convictions, there's been a shift, chances are I've lived another day and slept another night and nothing in the world will ever be the same again.
A waspy critic, though I don't meant that how I would have 2 or 3 years ago when I subversively eyed the WASP looking to memorize it's technique for organizing a spice rack or edge the walkway. Nowadays I feel like a slightly darker, perhaps more alarming bug on the screen though ultimately you can buy an aerosol can of something off-putting and I will go away and be sad in a gutter. I find it difficult to always be specific. My frustrations disassemble into dreamy poetics. I hate Target and the tidal wave speed of commercial plaza construction. I look on, jaded, and think: "I will come back at night and I will steal their shrubbery, and make a garden of love and war." Television is 99% let down so I don't watch it and when I've lived on my own I simply didn't own a tv (how easy!). Still, it's not always easy to compliment my ideals and actualize my politics. I'm an impulsive thinker and can never stand by any one moral with die hard strength; possible fluctuations in circumstance are a regular part of my deliberations and so my equations are always changing. Shape-shifting: perhaps there is nothing I approve of completely and nothing I condemn entirely. Does this make me wishywashy? A weak character? I usually regret operating solely off of impulses because the next day I can scarcely stand by my old convictions, there's been a shift, chances are I've lived another day and slept another night and nothing in the world will ever be the same again.
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