May never fails to be one of my favorite months of the year. I think I enjoy the dawny sweat of its position in the calendar. We haven't completely compromised the summer months yet; winter may have never existed; indeed the ice breaks some time after March and there's no looking back.
And there's always something to have a nervous stomach about, this year being no different. Right from the very first day, as a matter of fact (e-mail pro: they're always dated) I had started a sort of correspondence that's lasted the better part of the month. I hadn't exactly experienced before the fine tuned and surprisingly intimate benefits of letter writing as a means of exploratory courtship and most recently I've had a conversation with a friend of mine about just how compelling it can be.
Alas, who knows where it will go. Maybe it's too much. Sometimes I see myself as a gross consumer of thrills. The past thirty days have been right on the mark in terms of the elated ups and cynical lows. And I don't want that static canicular day to come when I've all but gone to fits. I don't really want to lose this but I'm trying to keep my lesson learned that I should never ever hold on to anything, gravity does all the pulling I should need. It would just be nice to have this stick around a while. Am I really so rootless.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Crumble to the Sea
Last night at a good old fashioned backyard BBQ (backyard for Cambridge, anyway) we joked about gender division. These were good folk but there was still that small twitch in me when it was brought up that the "women" were inside while the "men" stood semi-circle, beers in hand, watching coals burn. The comments were made mostly ironically and our very awareness of embodying such roles implied an immediate dismissal of them. That's all we really have left, I think, a comical awareness of engaging in activities the way we've been shown is the norm. When we're not entirely deviant us twenty-somethings become a pastiche of our parents' generation. And their parents' postwar attempt at classic middle-class life.
Later in the night I had a conversation with a girl and she was kind enough to listen patiently while I spewed on and on about queers and marriage. We ended up having a good conversation about how societal pressures to be a certain way, have certain things, and have accomplished certain achievements (i.e. supportive consumer, 401k + baby, college diploma) are directly related to age and aging and the formulas our elders used are completely useless and irrelevant. We are the generation that's been told we can do anything and now it seems most of us have no idea what to do. Furthermore, that puckish sentiment isn't substantiated by the irresponsible, discriminatory pandering of our government. The old paradigms aren't going to work for us but we're being told it's our only chance. Get that Roth IRA in place, buy your house, grow that baby! or else when you're 45, 55, 65 you're going to be fucked. Maybe it's true, but the solution is not for all of us to find a tidy little 9-5 and small boxy house; rather, somehow we need to make the system meet our needs. Obviously this is a painfully old idea, changing the system to help the people instead of the people folding, squeezing, and transforming to fit into its parameters has been part of the general progressive agenda for decades. But what the hell, MA now insists on health care yet does little to make it affordable to the poor and working classes; higher education is ridiculously expensive and especially for us Liberal Arts kids the going really gets tough when we hit the job market. Makes sense I suppose, why would the US want to give high wages to people who've made it their job to think critically about the world around them? Big money is in Big business is on the Web and in your Big car. Good thing about the web though, it's still, for the most part, up for grabs. So grab it and shake it and paint it something ugly.
Later in the night I had a conversation with a girl and she was kind enough to listen patiently while I spewed on and on about queers and marriage. We ended up having a good conversation about how societal pressures to be a certain way, have certain things, and have accomplished certain achievements (i.e. supportive consumer, 401k + baby, college diploma) are directly related to age and aging and the formulas our elders used are completely useless and irrelevant. We are the generation that's been told we can do anything and now it seems most of us have no idea what to do. Furthermore, that puckish sentiment isn't substantiated by the irresponsible, discriminatory pandering of our government. The old paradigms aren't going to work for us but we're being told it's our only chance. Get that Roth IRA in place, buy your house, grow that baby! or else when you're 45, 55, 65 you're going to be fucked. Maybe it's true, but the solution is not for all of us to find a tidy little 9-5 and small boxy house; rather, somehow we need to make the system meet our needs. Obviously this is a painfully old idea, changing the system to help the people instead of the people folding, squeezing, and transforming to fit into its parameters has been part of the general progressive agenda for decades. But what the hell, MA now insists on health care yet does little to make it affordable to the poor and working classes; higher education is ridiculously expensive and especially for us Liberal Arts kids the going really gets tough when we hit the job market. Makes sense I suppose, why would the US want to give high wages to people who've made it their job to think critically about the world around them? Big money is in Big business is on the Web and in your Big car. Good thing about the web though, it's still, for the most part, up for grabs. So grab it and shake it and paint it something ugly.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Down Boy
It's really no wonder I'm drinking tea and honey by the litre trying to shake off nerves. Leisure time has become something of a swelling up of some of the more sensational anxieties I have living in this environment at this point in my life. But before I digress into the reasons and causes for my still being here after exactly one year I'd rather take a moment to comment on, try to bring words to, what I have so much trouble explaining to my family and a few of my friends. The actuality of human displacement and the gross occupancy of so much space by corporate convenience marketing, chemical landscaping, and the general homogeny of human experiences in media (with the absence countercultures creating an entirely new public "reality" people breathe, buy, and poop in here in Suburbia). In other words, feeling left out in the midst of CVS, TruGreen Lawn Care, and family movie night with Comcast On Demand.
Last winter I tried writing about what seemed to be the most obvious demographic being sold to via Holiday TV commercials. I actually watched television for the purpose of making notes on the advertisers' manipulation of images, cast ethnicity, and historically capitalist notions of the American Dream mainly in order to determine if (and subsequently how and what) gays were being sold to. No significant piece of writing came from the exercise but I know that it was spurred by the sense of being alienated in every context I had available to me living in a middle-upper class town where gay community must be logged into with a name and password on the internet. And it was no wonder that that dark, callow, fiber optic space did little to palpitate any part of me looking to pulsate a little. I also remember feeling conflicted about my status as a white mid-twenties male with a college diploma and slew of past experiences made easily attainable due to unearned privilege. I did not, and still don't, want to approach criticism of the world around me with the name tag of "Victim" and I especially do not want to exaggerate my experiences, reactions, and sense of displacement knowing full well that mine is FAR from the saddest story. But I also maintain that being part of a privileged demographic often does not mean that the privileges/acceptance of that group means shit. Ultimately, I think I never wrote anything very intelligent about Christmas Commercials and the Gays because I ultimately didn't care that I didn't see queers being sold diamonds, folgers coffee, and cars.
So here I am, a few months later, not exactly concerned with having no sense of place in the midst of chemical lawn applications but lonely as hell and somewhat incapable of explaining to my family that I love them and I love that they love me but that I am grossly dissatisfied with the reality they participate in and the reason we cannot agree on what movie to watch is because it makes me sick to my stomach to see another disgusting portrayal of human experiences as told through heteronormative, classist, racist, and sexist paradigms of mainstream cinema. They think I'm extreme in my politics enough that I'd probably just alienate them further from the common ground I'm struggling to create by explaining that I'm sick and tired of the male hero, white people, heterosexual love stories, the re-imagining of history with blatant western capitalist undertones, and violence that is unrighteous, loveless, and practised not for saving the world but for saving the American notion of the world (save the nuclear family, save Jesus, save Constitutional freedom). So I end up playing the Hammond Organ while they turn on the Red Sox.
This whole situation has recently been exacerbated by a brief stint in Maine where I felt more myself than I have in months. Friends old and new offered conversation that made absolute sense to me and I didn't even need to explain something like patriarchy or the word queer in order to begin, rather I had the enormous pleasure of being around people I can learn from which, for me--it doesn't really get any better than that. I turned good dirt and I wasn't shy my nails were dirty and it was somewhat like being back one year ago when I was in a position to feel like there was ample room for me to exist, coexist, and evolve without hesitation or restriction. My family accepts me unconditionally. My friends accept and understand me unconditionally. The difference is significant at a time when I'm itching to evolve and talk about books and music and vegetables and men and women and cocks and fire.
Where will I go from here, where I am at this hour. I'm not sure. Maybe a co-op but they haven't written back since our first exchange and I don't know enough about them yet except they're all vegetarians too and make lovely dinners. That's it for now.
Last winter I tried writing about what seemed to be the most obvious demographic being sold to via Holiday TV commercials. I actually watched television for the purpose of making notes on the advertisers' manipulation of images, cast ethnicity, and historically capitalist notions of the American Dream mainly in order to determine if (and subsequently how and what) gays were being sold to. No significant piece of writing came from the exercise but I know that it was spurred by the sense of being alienated in every context I had available to me living in a middle-upper class town where gay community must be logged into with a name and password on the internet. And it was no wonder that that dark, callow, fiber optic space did little to palpitate any part of me looking to pulsate a little. I also remember feeling conflicted about my status as a white mid-twenties male with a college diploma and slew of past experiences made easily attainable due to unearned privilege. I did not, and still don't, want to approach criticism of the world around me with the name tag of "Victim" and I especially do not want to exaggerate my experiences, reactions, and sense of displacement knowing full well that mine is FAR from the saddest story. But I also maintain that being part of a privileged demographic often does not mean that the privileges/acceptance of that group means shit. Ultimately, I think I never wrote anything very intelligent about Christmas Commercials and the Gays because I ultimately didn't care that I didn't see queers being sold diamonds, folgers coffee, and cars.
So here I am, a few months later, not exactly concerned with having no sense of place in the midst of chemical lawn applications but lonely as hell and somewhat incapable of explaining to my family that I love them and I love that they love me but that I am grossly dissatisfied with the reality they participate in and the reason we cannot agree on what movie to watch is because it makes me sick to my stomach to see another disgusting portrayal of human experiences as told through heteronormative, classist, racist, and sexist paradigms of mainstream cinema. They think I'm extreme in my politics enough that I'd probably just alienate them further from the common ground I'm struggling to create by explaining that I'm sick and tired of the male hero, white people, heterosexual love stories, the re-imagining of history with blatant western capitalist undertones, and violence that is unrighteous, loveless, and practised not for saving the world but for saving the American notion of the world (save the nuclear family, save Jesus, save Constitutional freedom). So I end up playing the Hammond Organ while they turn on the Red Sox.
This whole situation has recently been exacerbated by a brief stint in Maine where I felt more myself than I have in months. Friends old and new offered conversation that made absolute sense to me and I didn't even need to explain something like patriarchy or the word queer in order to begin, rather I had the enormous pleasure of being around people I can learn from which, for me--it doesn't really get any better than that. I turned good dirt and I wasn't shy my nails were dirty and it was somewhat like being back one year ago when I was in a position to feel like there was ample room for me to exist, coexist, and evolve without hesitation or restriction. My family accepts me unconditionally. My friends accept and understand me unconditionally. The difference is significant at a time when I'm itching to evolve and talk about books and music and vegetables and men and women and cocks and fire.
Where will I go from here, where I am at this hour. I'm not sure. Maybe a co-op but they haven't written back since our first exchange and I don't know enough about them yet except they're all vegetarians too and make lovely dinners. That's it for now.
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