The Gun Vote

I'm trying to figure this out.

So people want guns because they feel mortally threatened by the things out there in the world. They want the guns so they can defend themselves. They have this notion of defending themselves because they believe they are someone worth defending, worth keeping around - of value to the world. They're willing to stand up and fight and, quite possibly, kill in order to maintain their place in the world.

Yet I can't help but think of how these sorts of gun-stroking citizens really do nothing remarkable for the world around them. They're so far up in their ego-worship that they believe they're of such uber-importance that they've gone around the bend and now think that everyone else either wants what they have, or is willing to jealously harm them because of what they have (and these less-thans, presumably, don't have).

Also, I imagine these people's thoughts being comprised of nothing more than a Gregorian chant of fart noises.

Touched in the head

I recently had to edit something that included a Q&A between two very successful French-trained chefs and the denizens of a certain technology company - not naming any names, but you definitely use this tech company's wares.

During the Q&A, a couple of these technorati asked about why can't these two chefs, who had recently published a book, come up with something that would just let people create recipes or dishes based on the ingredients they already have at home. Another went into more detail, asking why the chefs weren't writing a book about teaching people what foods and tastes go together.

The second person to ask a question even whined about why there wasn't a technology where you can just use a tablet, because "using a cookbook is hard."

He actually said that.

My initial contempt for the two questions was simple: these two questions basically illustrate the importance of something like a culinary school, of learning a craft and really understanding it, not just something you can fetch from the internet, use, dump, and then repeat the next time you need the knowledge. While I do think that there are some things that you can learn from using only books and the internet, there is also something to be said, at times, for the value in experiential learning and in-person instruction. Culinary school, for one, is an example of that.

One of the chefs, though, in his response to this techie, was that while this tech company might be on the high tech side, he considered his side of the pairing - the cooking side - to be "high touch."

High touch. While the oomph of that phrase may be lacking, the sentiment is spot-on: an evolved explosion of sensory information. The importance of touching, and not just touching, but for getting a feel for something - both literally and cerebrally. To feel is to start to get to know something, and allow that something more deeply embedded to who you are. We crave to be close to things we like, that intrigue us. Sexually, geographically, historically - it doesn't matter. To touch is to truly know.

Meanwhile, to hear these tech cranks opine, you get the sense that they hope our primary somatic sensory cortex will hopefully go the way of the vestigial tail and the appendix.

These tech dweebs desire to repudiate any need for touch because, really, why touch something? What do you think the point of Google Glass is? It's directly engineered so that people will never have to touch anything every again. You literally get to wear a Google search engine on your face so you never have to ask another question of someone else, never get lost, never do anything, really, except exist in a wholly sterile world. I hope that at next year's big gala, they'll announce Google Bubble: the nano-animated personal now-time EXPERIENCE ORB that lets you roll your blobby life around without ever having to experience anything tangible ever again. Just roll around in your front yard! We'll make it just like you were spear-fishing in the Amazon!

If it's not going to become a part of you in some way, you can just keep your distance as much as you like. And by not touching something, by not really dwelling on a thought or subject for any prolonged amount of time, you free yourself up to go do the next Google search or click on the next link, and find something else.

I don't want my brain to simply become a card catalog of websites to defer to when I don't know something. Fuck that. What an embarrassing, wasteful use of not just a brain, but of humanity.

Listening to these future Bubble early adapters talk about why cookbooks are so hard, it occurs to me that maybe the entire generation that seems to be diagnosed with ADHD isn't actually to do with attention, and instead, everything to do with retention and experience. We just never move any information out of our active, nee short-term, memory to our long-term, persistent memory. Why should we? We can just Google it if we forget it.

We just don't learn anymore. We read, but we don't absorb. We might search, and we might discover things, but less and less, people don't feel as obligated to grasp what it is they've found. We don't even write, we just type and - actually, I was going to say push a pen, but I doubt that's going to be around much longer (it was good knowing you, cursive script).

I might be able to Street View most of the world, the pits of the ocean, and even the surface of the moon, and that's all amazing, because I wouldn't get a chance to see any of that kind of stuff so up-close without that technology. But it's as meaningful to touch and learning for me as cotton candy is vital to my body as a source of iron and vitamins.

This goofy technology is fun. But at the same time, though, it doesn't supplant the need for experience and memory and learning. It doesn't efface the need for still touching something.

I'm lucky that I was born at such a time that permitted me to now stand in the division between old world learning (I don't know what else to call it) and this new world surface-learning. I like that I at least got to grow up with an appreciation for touch, for actually retaining the things I learn, and not rendering myself as an intellectual halfwit crutched up by the ever-dependable Google.

However, I also feel lucky that I will die before nobody touches anything anymore. I don't live in a world I'm not touching beyond what my stupid fucking wearable technology tells me it feels like outside.

Happiness is a warm patriarchy

Lest we forget the reason for the season.

Eau de Truck Nutz

I almost got t-boned today by a huge F150 truck with Truck Nutz. The ingrate bastard had the gall to honk and then scowl at me because, I don't know, he was mad that he was the one that ran a stop sign?

The incident took up all of 3 seconds of my day, but I fixated on the near-hit for nearly 15 minutes. I was murderous.

It wasn't until I had to actively wrested my attention away from the Truck Nutz almost-incident that I was finally able to let it go. For some reason, always remembering that even the most offensive, brutish, hate-deserving, mean, dickless idiot is still, impossibly, somebody's son. Some woman, some man, or maybe some couple raised this person - regardless, this cretin was a child to somebody, and no matter how much I want to forcefully lodge his own Truck Nutz down his throat, somebody in this world would miss him.

It sucks, but it's true.

That asshole is important to somebody out there. And that somebody, or somebodies, would miss him.

I wasn't ever in any danger of going full-on berserk and actually hurting this guy - hell, I didn't even so much as yell back at him. But upon remembering that he's adored by some parent or wife or child in this world, it was a real bummer.

This must be why victims always say they have a family at home when pleading with their captors, to appeal to an understanding that life and the world and everything goes way beyond whatever gory outcome might be about to happen.

It seems like the biggest cinematic cliche, but that sort of shit would totally work on me. It'd work on me in a heartbeat. As angry as I may get, and as much as impassioned and justified I might feel to beat Truck Nutz to death with his own Truck Nutz, one reminder that this person is somebody's mother/daughter/father/son/husband/wife/etc, and I totally lose any resolve for wickedness.

And then I'm stuck in a moment of wonderment, trying to understand how anybody really follows through with violence without being crushed by the awareness of what they've just taken away from the friends/family of their target.

What a bad Filter song that was

I got to thinking earlier about some of the goofy photoshop abominations I'd create when I wrote for this blog a while back. The writing was middling at best, but making some of these dumb pictures to run with my articles was easily my favorite part of the job. I wouldn't be surprised if the amount of time I wasted making those images was one of the reasons I eventually ended up the butcher's block. Oh well. My posts were at least the most eye-catching.

I've gone back and culled some of my greatest hits. It was odd, though. Going back and seeing all of the posts that I wrote for this blog - it was a tech/internet blog - immediately made me swallow back some vomit.

But the pictures, they were fun.

More!

Tolstoy's Undergarments

I suck at languages.

More specifically, I suck at learning new languages. Maybe I'm stuck in what I've always heard spoken as truth, that it's much harder to learn a second (or third, or whatever) language when you're older. I can only speculate that there is some truth to that, as I seem to never have any trouble recalling the first ten numbers in Spanish, which I learned in kindergarten. But the Spanish I learned in college? Eh, that's less reliable.

For all I know, maybe it's a greater difficulty with memory and age. I certainly can fairly easily rattle off some old nursery rhymes I read or a lullaby my mother would sing me from my early childhood, but I have more difficulty reciting Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" monologue - and I've seen the latter more times and more recently. It's hard to make sense of any of that, especially considering that I've spent lots of focused time on remembering what Hamlet says.

The problem might be less general and more specific to my own memory, and how my brain keeps shoddy storage of memory. I don't know.

The lack of deftness when it comes to learning non-English languages is not just vexing for the practical reason (that being to talk to people in that language). It's more bothersome to me as a reader, and what that limits to me in terms of literature. I like reading. It's less an activity for me at this point and more a way of life. I cannot imagine a meaningful life without reading. There are times in my life where I am positive that my capability to escape inside of a book has saved me from hurting or killing myself.

Aside from the buoy that reading has provided me in my life, I also do it because I like learning. I like changing, and I like being more aware of the world, whether it's fictional or real (or as objectively real as a book can present this reality). Being only proficient in one language, I'm immediately disadvantaged in terms of what material I can read in this world. Sure, there are translations, but I have difficulty in trusting the translator's authenticity to the original text.

When talking about the translations of various books from the 19th century Russian literary canon, Nabokov said that the only way to truly grasp the majesty of something like War & Peace was to read it in Russian.

Uh. No shit. Not all of us have the luxury of being natural polyglots. But thanks.

That he said that about 19th century Russian texts is more personal to me, though, because as an epoch of literature, it is my favorite literary enclave. Well, I suppose it is my favorite - I enjoy all that I've read, but how can I be so sure that what I'm reading is truly how Dostoyevsky, for example, intended to convey his story? I don't. So I have to rely on the translator's caprice.

As prickly as he may be on the subject, I do wish that Nabokov were still alive to assess the quality of the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations. Apparently the duo have recently wrapped up translating all of Tolstoy's major works, which was cause for me to revisit why I don't like their translations. Their two-step process of making a literal translation, and then brushing that up with a more ornate eloquence is suspect to me.

Translation methodology aside, the Pevear and Volokohnsky translations have always bothered me for a less linguistic reason. While most of the criticism of their translations has been directed at their alleged failure to preserve the authorial voice of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, or even have neglected to retain the dark wit of the authors, my concern with their translations has always been about the preservation of cultural markers within the texts.

I was first alarmed of this when I was reading Anna Karenina for a Russian Lit class in college. I unintentionally read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, while the rest of my class read the Constance Garnett translation. There was a passage I remember being discussed, something going on with Anna and her children in St. Petersburg. My classmates were going back and forth about a part of the text. Someone happened to mention the detail of that Anna's children were eating pudding while something more important was going on. The mention of them eating pudding was only relevant in the classroom discussion because it was a marker for which part of the book we were talking about, like "But when they were eating the pudding, Anna was doing xyz..." That was it.

Everybody seemed to be on the same page, so to speak, except for me. I couldn't find where in the book the event was happening while the kids gobbled up their pudding. Then it occurred to me: my text didn't say "pudding." It said "cake."

This has always bothered me about the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations, because it seems like a strange license to take with their translation, and one that may be disingenuous to the culture of 19th century Russian aristocracy. Who knows, maybe "cake" is the more accurate translation of Tolsty's original text. But in a class of people where several of the students were reading or had read Anna Karenina in Russian, I would expect that at least my instructor would have pointed out that it was indeed cake they children were eating, and not pudding.

Although I'm hung up on the very real difference between cake and pudding here, in the greater scope of Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation, such a detail might be trivia. Yet, it still feels worrisome to me in that it's altering the societal or class habits of certain people - details that are important for accurately constructing what life was like for certain types of people (such as rich kids in Saint Petersburg, for example). Let's suppose I write a book, and in my book someone is eating a hamburger. My book gets translated into Russian, and then the translator comes to my hamburger-eating passage and decides to translate "hamburger" as "hot dog." Not a terrible different, really, but my decision to say "hamburger" may very well have had intentional purposes meant to comport certain between-the-line details about my character. Hot dogs are associated with specific things in America, and they're not always evenly interchangeable with hamburgers. Hot dogs are cheaper, often eaten at specific places (ball parks, carnivals) or at certain times of year (like summer, when people are more likely to grill out).

It might not even be so embedded with meaning. Maybe that's simply how I saw the character: a hamburger man, not a hot dog man.

At best, the decision of Pevear and Volokhonsky to use "cake" instead of "pudding" may have been a topical error. At worst, though, I worry that the decision was more deliberate, possibly in an attempt to make the setting something that it wasn't. To the middle and upper middle classes of America, cake is thought of as more opulent than pudding. I mean, that's why we have such a gastro-fetish with all these reality shows about ultra-ornate cakes and bakers, and not so many shows on "America's Pudding Boss."

With this in mind, I worry that Pevear and Volokhonsky may have intentionally swapped certain words in order to make the text more Americanized. Doing so would make it easier for American readers to appreciate the wealth of Anna's family, but it fails to preserve the cultural difference between what it is to be rich in America and what it is to be rich in Russia (in the 19th century, no less).

It's ironic, too, that some of the criticism of the Garnett translations is that her translation not only makes every Russian author sound the same, but that they sound Edwardian. That's probably a fair criticism, but at the same time, it's odd that I haven't seen similar critiques of the culture represented in the Pevear/Volokhonsky translations.

The thing is, though, is I have no idea what's more accurate. Short of taking up the onus of studying the habits of 19th century Russian and become fluent in Russian - with a focus on the verbage of that specific era - I'm left to the whims of those who have the resources to translate things like Anna Karenina. It's frustrating to read discussion forums of people debating the quality of the translation, but only after adding the caveat that they don't speak Russian. Useless.

As much as I want to blame Oprah, I don't think it's her fault. However, she did call Anna Karenina the "harlequin romance of their time." So maybe it is her fault.

I wish I could resolve this problem on my own. I wish I could become fluent enough in Russian that I could read something like Anna Karenina in its native tongue, and then simply make my own conclusions. Really, I don't want to read Pevear/Volokhonsky, and I don't want to read Garnet. I want to read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Gogol, and not be troubled with the potential inaccuracies of their scripts as retold by an intermediary.

But I suck at languages, and short of undergoing a lengthy language immersion program in Moscow, I'm likely just going to be at the mercy of translators.

Accepting that this is simply how it's going to be makes me uncomfortable because I become very uncomfortable by any situation that makes me feel helpless. And the limit and inaccessibility to other languages makes me very helpless.

Financial Times, late edition

I've spent the better part of the afternoon working on a budget. While I have most of the amenities in order to pass as someone who appears to be making ends meet, it's hardly that simple. I'm terrible with money. Rather, when I had a reasonable income, I was terrible with money. Now, I just don't have any. I hardly make any, relatively speaking. Chalk it up to lack of discipline or forgetfulness or malice or capitalism or whatever - in the end, the result is still going to be the same, and I'm still going to be broke. Combined - the lack of reliable income and my persistent habit to "waste" money - I'm essentially stuck in the shit. Always.

In previous periods of my life, I'd most likely say my undisciplined spending ways were why I was always living paycheck to paycheck. Fun came first; at least, it came ahead of financial planning.

Christ, that phrase. "Financial planning." As two words, they're fine, but it's that phrase that conceals an institutional construct that exists to index people's failure or success as, well, people based on how well they plan their finances. By this regard, I suck at being somebody. My credit score is so low it can be found stuck to the bottom of Satan's spittoon. I barely scrape by (I always run out of money at the end of the month). I have a whopping $0.05 in my savings account. Even plotting out my expenses per month against my monthly income is a ghastly contrast to how mired in semi-poverty I currently am.

The whole idea for comparing income and costs, and for making the budget in the first place, is because I'm going to begin saving money toward a pricey purchase this year. It's not even for any tangible product that would make me a better owner and, therefore, a better American. It's simply to go on a trip, to reunite with my love, and do and see some things I'd like to do and see.

Based on my cost of living, however meager, and how much I'll need to save before September, I'd essentially have to be surviving on a Gulag diet. I'd probably have to reel back and rely on Gulag-quality sources of entertainment, too, for what it's worth.

But if that's going to be the quality of my life for the next four months (sometimes that sounds like forever, sometimes it seems like no time at all), what toll will those living conditions take on my mental health, which is already sensitive and prone to life-ending depression? Again with the cost-benefit analysis.

To undertake this kind of budget and actually have it work, I now will have to actively cope with my depression and keep myself from sinking too far down that hole. I've never demonstrated the will power required for that, but I suppose there's no time like the present to try and muster it. Additionally, the incentive of my trip may prove to be a potent motivator to summon the will power required to maintain a moderately healthy affect.

Knowing this and enacting on this are hardly the same, though. They're not comparable. Knowing earth has a moon doesn't necessarily mean that I'll go visit it one day if I really want to. The consideration and coping applied to my mental health during this time will likely be the more difficult item in my life to budget. So I guess there's that.

I'm tired, though, of the financial dilemmas. And while I don't desire to have some kind economic comfort that would buttress a care-free spending spree throughout my life, it would be nice to have a little more flexibility when it comes to the options I'd like to have. It's maddening that I may not have enough money to go to Peru simply because I neglected once or twice to buy the store-brand meat that was on sale (and it was only on sale because it would be rancid in another day or two).

Sitting down today to plot out a budget for the next four months also produced a troubling realization: making a budget is only possible if you have enough money to redistribute and, in some cases, save. "Budgeting," in my case, is a careful allocation of what little income I have just so I don't starve. There is little room for rearranging my money, and even less for saving. I also can't "cut out" things from my spending. I spend my money on rent and food, and on the occasional bit of alcohol - the latter expense I justify as necessary to help me sometimes escape the misery over how broke I am. I can only roll back the amounts I'm already spending on those items. Since I predict - and reliably at that - my landlord won't be so agreeable to me spending less on my rent per month, that leaves food and entertainment on the chopping block. That's it. Goddamn dreary.

I do realize that, above all of this, I do have the option of picking up a second job in order to add to my income, even if it is a job that I plan to drop in September like a burner mob phone. And I probably will do that, but still. That doesn't make it any less frustrating. I'm always aware that my situation could be much, much worse.

I have no problem making sacrifices, or even forgoing one thing in order to work towards a more desired goal. I just wish the options weren't so goddamn extreme.

~

Walking home today, I saw a dead squirrel in the middle of the road, presumably killed by a passing car. It's brains had spurted out of the top of its head, near its ear.

A block further down, I saw some starch-collared religious youths going door to door. I crossed the street and kept my head down to avoid them, but I did manage to hear how they knocked upon the door of the house across the street. The boy knocked the way a pediatrician would knock on the patient's door before entering the room in order to administer a child's first suppository.

Somehow, both of these are held as proof of god's work.

Full-on Anxiety, This Time

Anxiety is not drowning. Anxiety is not burning alive. By whatever deliverance, those fatal miseries end. They end because you're saved or you're not and you die. Either way, you don't have to go on too long with the panic. Your suffering in the moment, for better or worse, ends.

Anxiety is not that benevolent.

Anxiety is drowning even though you can reach the surface. Anxiety is burning even though there is no fire. Anxiety is having to suffer through those experiences in your head without the experience itself. Worse, you know you will survive it. You'll survive because madness will make sure of it.

Anxiety is not depression. Anxiety is parasitic. It will take over the host and dictate actions in the zombified body that used to be yours.

Anxiety does not usher you into the rightful deliverance of death. Instead it makes you immortal while thriving like a tapeworm, consuming you from the inside and leaving only enough of yourself behind to ensure you don't die. A studied parasite. You don't die unless you choose to push through that door but if it's only anxiety, you won't. It's better to just suffer on this side of the doorway.

That's what the parasite wants, at least.

When you don't die from it – and you won't – anxiety goes on eating through you, subsisting on your joy and your excitement and your fear. Only anxiety isn't a parasitic worm harvesting whatever you dump into your guts. Anxiety has become you, the you turned against yourself and every chance you have of action.

Anxiety is yourself as the long shadow cast forth in your shape under a late sun: stretched out upon the torture rack of the sidewalk, stretched beyond your body's natural shape; emaciated and dark, unrecognizable to yourself even though it is your self.

Anxiety is the ellipsis interjected inside of your sentence, guiding the eyes toward an unfinished thought and never finishing the statement with anything else but the panic of having to go on. And you will go on.

Anxiety is going to war and dreading that you will come back. It becomes your personal moment in Normandy, in your Fallujah, in your Mogadishu. You worry less about not coming back and more how you could ever come back.

If sorrow was Kierkegaard's castle, then anxiety is the rotted bridge that you can never finish crossing. The moat yawns below you with each step.

Anxiety isn't sorrow and it isn't depression. Anxiety wants to keep you alive, to keep the misery going. It accelerates your mind, races you toward a future that you don't want where you are decaying and dreadful but still alive. Depression would just as soon see you dead.

Anxiety is dreading the life to come after survival or, better, fear of survival; of living marked, cursed, never the same again. Anxiety is wearing the cage of rats around your head in Room 101, torturing you to the point that you desperately scream, “Do it to Julia! Not me!” except there is no Julia and there are no rats. There's no one to sacrifice for your peace of mind, no one to relinquish the fear-torture. You are your own Room 101 and after the torture, you can only stare a stare into something in a mirror that looks back and says without words meant to be forgiving or understanding, “I betrayed you.”

~

I remember the first time I felt it. I was in the 4th grade and called one of my friends an asshole under my breath. They didn't hear me but that didn't matter. I'd said a bad word and bad behavior like that was a punched ticket to Hell. The panic of having sinned, having trespassed against another human, of having done something that would curse my life from here on out was relentless. I worried all night about it. I prayed about it—back when I still felt that prayer could affect the human condition—and hoped salvation could be within reach later in life.

I was in fourth grade and already felt my life was over. Because of a word. Because of anxiety.

Excepting its occasional dormancy, anxiety has been cycling through me like that ever since. Expecting my life as I know it is over. Expecting the very worst possible ending.

~

Anxiety isn't always the fear of not being noticed. Sometimes it's the fear of being noticed because it confirms that you are not, in fact, invisible. All it takes is one person to remind you that you exist and that existence is plagued by anxiety. When other people notice you, you feel you must perform your best for these other people. It's the fear of having to perform and impress and pressured to do something that you know will fail. Beyond rejection, anxiety warms the face every time you have to perform because you know everybody will recognize in your crestfallen expression the moment you realize you have failed.

You can't help but betray yourself.

~

Anxiety is spending a lifetime dying even though death has forgotten you. Again, anxiety makes you immortal but without giving you any divine gift for survival other than waking up to another day to find anxiety waiting for you under your pillow like some demented tooth fairy's prize.

Anxiety makes a miracle of science out of you. In my own experience, I have been terminally diagnosed with everything that makes you dead and miserable and tainted yet I have survived seemingly unscathed except for the desperation anxiety leaves in its wake. I couldn't begin to tell you how many times I have been desperate: I have beaten cancer, I have overcome AIDS; chlamydia, toxoplasmosis, schizophrenia. I have survived blood parasites. I have survived them all.*

I have beat them all because they have all – and always – been in my head.

And all of them were only ever there because of my anxiety.

The irony that anxiety thrives on is that, my mental illnesses aside, I am a healthy adult male. I have never had so much as an allergic reaction in my life. Through risky decisions and stupid decisions, ranging from eating a raw egg to having unprotected sex, I am still somehow healthy (with the medical charts to prove it).

In spite of that gold medal track record, anxiety convincingly told me I was never going to be the same after any of it. Anxiety put the diseases in me and made me live through them long enough to survive them until good sense and medication kicked in. And then it was on to the next terminal condition.

I didn't get a physician's examination after every occasion because I didn't want the confirmation that my life was over (nor do I want to spend every waking moment of my life in a doctor's waiting lobby). Somehow, I illogically thought that I'd live longer if I didn't know I was dying. Through this terrible judgment, anxiety preserved me and I eventually no longer had the illness I feared I had. Anxiety is never wanting to know because knowing is the death knell, the toll for whom everybody mourns by you.

The very worst part is trying to distinguish between the voices of anxiety and good sense. They sound so similar in my head yet I have to find a way to discern between panicked response and educated response. I might have been right so far about what I suspected illnesses I've been examined for, but I don't go for every one of them. In this sense, anxiety may very well be killing me because it is increasingly difficult to determine what is legitimate and what is simply a product of my own corrupt mind.

That is anxiety. If you haven't survived it, you don't know it. It makes you desperate and bends you over backwards, forcing you to see the world in a way it really isn't. If you haven't felt the whisper of fear from depression's closest companion, you haven't known anxiety. Anxiety is not depression and it's not death, but it does enjoy masquerading as death's false harbinger.

*Thanks to anxiety, the author has also miraculously survived: HIV, brain cancer, syphilis, gum cancer, the clap, appendicitis, rabies, stomach cancer, herpes, multiple aneurisms, blood clots in the lungs, lung cancer, IBS, breast cancer, melanoma, MRSA, tuberculosis, histoplasmosis, kidney failure, testicular cancer, cirrhosis, anal cancer, multiple strokes, cardiomyopathy, several heart attacks, thyroid cancer, asphyxiation, some weird thing when he was eleven years old and couldn't get the smell of match sulfur out of his nose, lymphoma, throat cancer, and tonsillitis to name a few.

Windows and Mirrors

I made a Johari window, whatever good this is. I'm not exactly sure what the point of it is, but if you want to look at it and contribute to it, here it is.

Back from the dead, perhaps.

Zero Fun

Seems many in my online community are blogging less these days. I really haven't devotedly kept up on any exercise of the sort in years. I start one, might post a couple of times, and then you end up with something like this: a post about once a month.

Oh well. I started a Tumblr, too, so that I can have something else to look forward to neglecting. I figure if I'm going to be an absent writer, I might as well cover all of my bases.

Hm, what else.


Oh, yeah. Election's coming up. Great.

Only the second asshole I have

This is the face of a small, furry terrorist who thinks he's won.

A little Q&A

I recently responded to a questionnaire about masculinity. If you're not already gender-sick of this blog after my recent post about masculinity, I'm reposting some of the questions and answers here.

~

I will preface all of my answers with this: whenever I contrast the experience of men and women in my answers, it's worth keeping in mind that I'm speaking of my personal experience as someone living in a wealthy, industrialized society.


Do you think that it's the 'End of Men' - is traditional masculinity at an end? And is that a good thing or a bad thing?

I don't think it's at the end. Maybe as a behavior it's waning ever so slightly, but as an institutionalized way of politicking and economics, no. It's not ending anytime soon, unfortunately.


What are the biggest problems men face today?

The biggest problems men face are not much bigger than what any human, man or woman or anyone else, is facing. In fact, despite any problems troubling men, they are typically less hindering than the problems harassing women. Of course, the problem is much more complex as you get into issues of race, class, geography, etc., but in general, men really shouldn't whine too loudly. Any additional grief compounding men's problems exist because of masculinity and the way in which other people, most likely men, try to control the behavior and expectations of other men. The fact that something such as seeing a psychiatrist for depression or not knowing enough about cars can be used to assail a man's identity demonstrates how deeply masculinity's dysfunctional roots grow.


How important is your gender identity to you?

Personally, I don't think about my gender identity too much. I spent most of my 20s being mistaken for gay (I'm not) because I don't subscribe to masculinity as a basis to make important life decisions. In other words, my gender identity is what it is. I'm comfortable in my own skin. The identity people try to project onto me tells me more about them than it does about myself.

How does sex affect your experience of being a man?

Having only had a hetero sex life, I try not to have any expectations from women in regard to having sex. If she isn't a fan of oral sex - in either direction - or anything else I might be interested in, it's highly disrespectful to try to talk her into doing it. It's not as simple as disagreeing on whether to get green peppers or green olives on a pizza -- we're talking about somebody's own agency over their body. I think we'd be horrified if we truly knew how many sexual encounters were a result of coercion. So, with that, I am mindful of how I navigate into sex and never assume any woman is the same.


When do you feel most vulnerable as a man?

I've spent my whole adult life depressed. When am I not vulnerable? It sucks. Interpersonally, there's always some vulnerability that has to be given with someone you're dating or sleeping with. If not, who wants to spend time a person who is willfully constantly detached?


What, in your opinion, does 'being a man' mean in this society, and how has that changed over the past two generations?

Here.


Time for the opposite question: what does 'being a woman' mean? How do you think things have changed for women over the past two generations?

I feel women have so, so much more bullshit to contend with than men. The commodification of a woman's body that starts when she's merely days old - if not before she's even born - is unlike anything I had to deal with as a male. I simply cannot imagine how hard that must be to contend with.

Things, I should hope, have gotten better in the past two generations. Feminist scholars like Susan Bordo, Andrea Dworkin, Carol Tarvis, and Joan Jacobs Brumberg (to name but a scant few) have done a lot to get the public to reconsider what we're doing to women and their bodies with the way culture projects insidious expectations onto them. However, just when I feel confident that it's gotten better, some dickbag like Rep. Todd Akin comes along and states his belief about women's bodies and it's like, "Christ, really? Still?" People like him are like cockroaches with their misogyny: for every one that you see/hear in the open, it probably means there's a hundred just like them hiding in the walls.


Are you a feminist? What can feminism do for men, and what can men do for feminism?

I'm cautious about applying the term "feminist" to myself because I am a man. It's a tricky question, because while I do agree with feminism and endorse the philosophy devoutly, I don't want to take away the agency of feminism from women. However, if that kind of exception were universally accepted, I recognize that saying only a certain type of person can be a feminist threatens to belie some important tenants of feminism. Again, it's a slippery question. If someone wants to describe me as a feminist, I welcome it. Asked to describe myself, I may say that I caucus with feminism. If given a forced opinion question and someone asked, "Yes or no, are you a feminist?" I would unwavering check the "Yes" box.


What about women as sexual/romantic partners (if relevant) - what role does that sort of relationship play in your life?

I like being equals. One cooks, the other cleans up; one mops, one dusts; one can shower first, the other can get the coffee started. These are hypothetical examples, but really, I don't like being put on a pedestal and I don't want someone to be my idol. I don't want to be a care-taker and I don't need a fixer. I want somebody who can challenge me without needing to be less or more than me.


Have you ever been sexist? In what way? Has the way you treat women changed?

I have no doubts that I have been sexist, but I cannot recall any immediate examples. Even the thought of doing it, and likely in a mindless manner, makes me cringe. I hate this goddamn culture.


What about sexual consent? Why do you think rape and sexual violence are so endemic in our society?

Because of masculinity and how it teaches men to be insensitive marauders when it comes to women's bodies. Masculinity teaches men that they deserve things, whether it's nice jobs or buxom women, and that it's okay to be as aggressive as necessary to secure those possessions.


What's your relationship to porn? Do you think it has affected the way you behave sexually?

I like porn but, Jesus, it's difficult to watch. Why does every goddamn scene have to end with a close-up of some disembodied enormo-cock ejaculating all over a woman's body (likely the face)? Whatever one's opinions of facials, why must the scene end upon male climax? If this is the sexual pleasure metric that porn is teaching men, then it's a wonder that any women anywhere would still want to sleep with us. At all.


When do you feel most 'masculine' and why? What things that you do make you feel masculine?

I really don't ever feel masculine. If I did, I would hope I have a friend who loves me enough to kick me in the grapes.


Do you ever worry about being misunderstood or misinterpreted because of your gender? When and why?

I do, but that's to be expected to an extent.


Do men experience sexism? In what way? Can you give examples from your own life?

I don't know, probably, but I'm not sure it's actually sexism and not just some knee-jerk butthurt feeling because someone, either a man or a woman, didn't recognize their masculinity and immediately kowtow.


How does race affect your experience of gender?

Being a straight white male in America is kind of a joke. As I've said previously, I feel like there's little to legitimately complain about insofar gender identity.

~

It's odd that I'm actually using my college education - the actual content I studied, wrote about, and was graded on - more in the past couple of weeks than I have probably since I graduated. Can wheels turn backward yet project a forward motion?

Anxiety

Anxiety is dreading the life to come after survival, the pangs of despised love, the haunt of living a life tainted, the cage of rats fitted over your head. Anxiety is being tortured in Room 101, punishing you to the point that you desperately scream, “Do it to Julia! Not me!” except there is no Julia and there are no rats. There's no one to sacrifice, no one to relinquish the fear-torture. You are your own Room 101 and after the torture, you can only stare a stare into something in a mirror that looks back and says without words meant to be forgiving or understanding, “I betrayed you.”

Something given, something submitted.

When I was a boy, I remember hearing “Walk Like a Man,” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, on the regular rotation of my parents' radio. I wasn't alive when the song debuted in 1963, but it's the music my parents listened to when I was young so, by proxy, I grew up listening to the same music they enjoyed growing up. I thought it was a fun, goofy song in spite of the irony I'd come to later recognize in how the singer claims he's going to “walk like a man” although he espouses his determination in a catchy falsetto.

On Friday night, a friend of mine was mad at me and in an attempt to coax me into speaking with him, he told me to “talk to him like a man.”

49 years separate the release of that Frankie Valli song and my friend's brash challenge, yet why does this masculine demand of doing something “like a man” persist? My copy of How to ____ Like a Man seems to have been lost in the mail so if there is a positive implication that accompanies this phrase, it's lost on me. All I hear in that phrase are the rabid growls of embattled masculinity.

While I'm still unclear on how a man walks or talks it out, I do know that the connotation of such a phrase is that if you're not doing something like a man, then you are something else. Something less, an Other. Like a woman? A ladyman? A pussy? To whichever of those less-than-man assignments the phrase points, the application of being something not-man is meant as a pejorative as well as an attempt to admonish that behavior based on the biologically defined role of masculinity (spuriously assuming such a thing even exists). Simply, if I'm not acting like a man, I must be acting like a woman and that is construed as a bad thing.

Beyond what this corrosive definition of masculinity is teaching men and boys about women, one man accusing another man of not doing something “like a man” perpetuates the notion that there's only one way to be a man. If you're not behaving according to this ur-masculine philosophy, then you're doing it like a not-man/woman and if you're doing it like a not-man/woman, then you're doing it wrong.

The specter of not living up to masculine designations pervades every aspect of our culture from grade school recess to national security. That men will try to use masculinity as a way to control other men is not constructive nor is it valid to defend this notion with questionable support from a Darwinist vantage. An argument that relies on such a paradoxically primitive notion to support masculinity doesn't do much in the way of convincing anyone how humans are supposedly more evolved than orangutans and mockingbirds. However, if we're truly that unevolved, I imagine it will be acceptable in the near future for guys to start tongue-bathing their genitals in public (I do not look forward to the subreddit cataloging these occasions).

Recommending that a man do something “like a man” is anachronistic if it was ever really useful in the first place yet you don't have to look far to see it still used, and in public forums no less. Living a life beholden to what is or isn't masculine as prescribed by society begets a life of anxiety and anger. It will make you vulnerable, insecure, and easily provoked. If you allow yourself to play into this role, whether you are the accuser or the accused, there will always be someone else out there who is “more masculine” than you and the path to being genuinely comfortable in your own skin will only grow longer with each step.

The militarized image of what a man is supposed to do or say is so rigid that it obscures the primary qualities of what we should all be striving toward: being an emotionally intelligent human being. If the singer of “Walk Like a Man” wants to cry because a woman has rejected him, that's okay. Heartbreak is hard. Being human is hard. But all of us, whether you are a single grown man or a father charged with raising boys that will one day be men, are subjects to compassion and depression and pride and loneliness so don't let threats to your masculinity deter you from those sensations.

Instead of being a man, just be you. Be decent and be kind. Be surprised. Be mad sometimes and be wrong sometimes. It's all going to happen whether you like it or not. No action or reaction a man has should not be comported into some superficial expectation of what a man is supposed to do. If you're a man, whether your walking or reading or fucking or praying, you're already doing what a man does. So let us agree that it's time to not only retire but refute the regressive notion that there is only one way to be “like a man” and start moving beyond the constrictions of masculinity.

Time Marks

By the Julian calendar, I was born near the end of the calendar year. If my culture were to maintain the arbitrary designation of holidays and keep Christmas Day at the end of the year, I likely would've been one of those unfortunate kids whose extended family gave him one present and attached the condolence, "This is for both your birthday and for Christmas." It's funny how people's consolidation of gift events, to say nothing of their penny-pinching, proves how meaningless our special days are. If it's that much of a hassle to observe two instead of one, why do it at all?

I would have been born in 1980 instead of 1981 (I think, although I'm not going to get into the variance of assigning a number to our years). When I was a kid, I always imagined my friends born in 1980 as perpetually larger than me, more mature. Cooler, even. I felt like I'd just missed some inexplicable opportunity to have belonged to an elite class of human beings. 1981 felt like a tag-along. Someone picked for a team after all the better players had been selected. The passenger instead of the driver. The appendix dangling from the large intestine. It's foolish now, but back then I was never the first to arrive anywhere; the 1980 kids had already gotten there before me and I felt cheated of my chance for discovery.

This self-applied hierarchy didn't apply to my friends born in 1979, although I did carry with me a quiet judgment on the immaturity of those friends born in 1982; or, rather, I maintained I was forever ahead of them in the maturity race.

In the end, it wouldn't have mattered. I'd still be the same age as I am now. The marks of months and important dates are the calandrical equivalent of those puzzle boards where you must slide around one tile at a time in order to assemble the complete picture. Finished or unsolved, there's always one empty slot leftover. Room for revision. Or, an option for the bold who feel like Picasso-ing the intended picture. People seem to need the complete expected image, though. I did. I tethered the quality of my existence to it. I don't anymore, but that's because my chronological abscess has deepened. I'm fool enough now to commit to the Proustian idleness of wondering where all the years have gone and alternately ignoring or dreading the years ahead.

None of this thought-wandering ultimately matters. I actually suspect it's a mechanism of my depression, an Ouroboros exercise that provides the sensation of moving without ever getting anywhere. Whether the world would be a remarkably changed place had we used one calendar over another, had I been born in 1980 instead of 1981, it's an amusing meditation for my morning but it doesn't matter. Just as the uncles and aunts who cheap out and combine two nearby calendar events so as to only buy one gift, all the meaning ascribed to time is what we have created or not created.

That said, I do really look forward to my mom baking my favorite cake for my birthday every year.

MAD

This will be the lo-fi lullaby for the plant nursery I open up. When I've retired. After I've found a career from which to retire.

That's the last time I start reading a J.G. Ballard book before bed. More notes on it later as my synapses stop sizzling.

My body is so tired but my brain continues to taunt it with thoughts from the novel. Sleeeeeep.

American Assholes Need a Bidet

I started watching the X-Files last night. Yes, for the first time. Yes, I realize that the show is nearly 20 years old and just now getting around to watching it - especially given I was an adolescent during its run - is tantamount to admitting that I'm only now learning to wipe my ass (more on that in a minute).

There's something endearing about watching a show that "old" given the technological changes the first-world culture has undergone in that short amount of time. How many times did it occur to me "Oh, that'd be different now that everybody has smartphones" whenever Mulder raced to find a phone. Or the warmly familiar sound of Scully's computer literally dialing up to the internet when some hacker was thieving her reports. How many nights did I sit around in my parents' office as a teen with that digital nocturne as my lullaby?

Given my nostalgia for the technology of 1993 (I didn't even know what an Internet was back then), it served as a perfect reflection for how quickly the digital age has grown in a very short span. Smartphones, 4G LTG explosiery, cloud here cloud there, none of that stuff hardly scratches the surface. The Large Hadron Collider, insectoid drones, stem cell livers, Cassini images of Saturn's moons, laser hair-removal, a Starbucks in every bathroom, a complicated eye gesture that will transmit your credit card information to said barista so you don't have to suffer the grueling task of taking out your wallet - it would seem that we can't even keep up with science these days.

And if for any given moment you ever believe that humans are keeping up with technology, I implore you to look no further than behind you to prove yourself wrong.

Immediately behind you. Your behind, even. There: that fleshy coral of a skin-knot hiding between the two plushy hams of fat you call your ass. Yes, I'm talking about your anus. Butthole. Asshole. Rosette. Brown eye. Whatever you want to call it, that little stinky wad of dermis that makes shit deposits for you (if you're lucky) is why this technological age will never impress me.

Well, it's not exactly the asshole; it's how we react after having shat out of the asshole. Scientists talk about discovering the so-called "God particle" and building a colony on Mars yet here we are, still tending to our freshly shat-out asses no better than we were before we ever came down from the trees. The only difference is we've moved from folding up maple leaves to now counting out squares of Charmin Ultra. The fact remains that at least once a day (again, if you're lucky) you still have to stick your hand between your asscheeks and literally wipe and rub away at the dangling, unseparated shit hanging out of your anus with a wad of tissue until it literally is rubbed so thin against your ass skin that you can't wipe away anymore.

Why is toilet paper still acceptable let along considered to be the most fucking hygienic or even effective method for a post-defecation ritual?! Jesus, can you imagine if we treated other bodily functions with such carelessness? Wash your hands with dog saliva instead of soap. Brush your teeth with cauliflower. Substitute a handful of crushed up saltines for a condom. WE'D NEVER SURVIVE IT. Each and every one of us would instantly become a walking capsule for anarcho-noroviruses that would effectively rend this planet habitable only to the creatures that already thrive in shit: pigeons, squirrels, flies, cockroaches, etc.

In fact, we're lucky we haven't incurred such a fate already given how carelessly we've continued behind this fantasy of toilet paper.

That technology has neglected this bio-bomb just waiting to go off is shocking to me, especially given that there is at least one technological alternative that currently exists: the bidet. Yes, it is a strange fucking sensation to feel what is virtually a commode pissing up your asscrack. Yes, it's been completely maligned in the francophobic American culture as some strange, emasculating semi-fetish that threatens the socially destructive chromosome in Americanism known as masculinity. But who cares. I'm tired of this shit. Literally.

Why stop at a bidet, though? Today even that seems as antiquated as a telegraph. We have moved beyond the atoms and into the realm of the subatomic, so bring our ass habits up to speed. Hell, car washes have more advanced washing technologies than we've reserved for our own asses. Why hasn't Proctor & Gamble come up with some type of non-touch dung removal pressure light that steams off the dingleberries and converts them into a nice aerosol possessing the scent of lavender with a hint of mint? Aromatherapy and healthy bowel movements. You'd never again feel embarrassed about taking a shit in the only bathroom at a well-attended party. People'd probably thank you for dropping a load, really.

Yet, we do not have anything close to this. That the developed world, and especially America, has resigned itself to the disgusting habit of manually sandpapering mushy pebbles of shit off their asses is embarrassing and unforgivable. If a regular if not bi-daily (if you're lucky) hand-to-sir-reverence contact is what keeps you an American, fuck that. I renounce any citizenry if it means I'll get to live well past the rest of you assholes once you've succumbed to volcanic eruptions of hepatitis A. Keep your shitty hands to yourself and let me inherit a world less swollen with your crap-spawned diseases.

Dropping Physics

I'm scared to write. Not just to put one word after another and perform some carpal locomotion with a drop or two of fetid brain drippings stirred in, but actually write. For the past seven months, I've written foolishly, meaninglessly in a trajectory that has put me back to the end of November in spite of summer's relentless pursuit these past few weeks.

Ideas aren't lacking. I've got too many ideas, ideas that cycle and reproduce and make new ideas that I still never follow-up on. The ideas are fresh; my writing is sclerotic, wasted.

(There are too many beetles to even focus here.)

(Moved, better.)

My hands even began to shake as I worked open the computer and started a page. A blank page, a mirror that has no reflection unless you force one into it. All I see looking back at me is nothing, fearful nothingness that urges me to retreat to my bed.

Pull the covers over my head, hide from the big, blank monster that still looms between the folded-up innards of my notebook.

Hold a ball, drop it. Physics will take care of everything else. I don't have to be responsible for the ripples in the water, but only for dropping the stone.

While I was organizing words - I still restrain myself from saying that I was writing - my Writing fell off the radar, a scant word here or an occasional attack on a napkin with a ball point, but nothing serious. Now that I'm left with the writing again, the writing seems harder than ever in spite of the ample time I allowed very good ideas to steep.

In the time away from writing, I began to reevaluate my language, the over-voice that hums without end as I amble through the days. That Voice might sound different now, or worse, might not be something I recognize anymore. Maybe it needs to change, to molt, to mutate, to cut something off to spite its tongue. Maybe it will be better, maybe it could be worse. It's one of those things where I'll never know until it's too late to do anything about it.

I've drank enough coffee today to sterilize a whale. Can't tell if that's working for or against me.

I call it your park although it only is so in namesake. Still, it is your park, pregnant with manufactured hauntings that are fitting for someone still aching for another person as I am for you.

I call it your park because it's a cheap gift shop souvenir that reminds me to remember you, to not pull the hook from my lip and set myself free. It's less of what you've done to me and more of what I've done to myself using you as my awl. Facts don't matter when imagination doesn't need them.

The thing I want from you I don't even know anymore. It's no more a want than a sky can want light or air; it simply has them and it is what it is. Mine is the void sky, a canvas that rejects all cyan and canary hues alike, something lacking but impossible to fulfill. Hunger that cannot be fed. Thirst that cannot be doused.

I call it your park because it is your park. I had been here before you, without you, but it ceased to be a place I knew of my own after I knew you. You skipped line, you came first. You who with stake and spade made this park over in your own image and then left me to flit across it with the beetles and the dead leaves.

We met unexpectedly at the corner. Your dress gray like February, your hair black like walnut oil, your shoulder bag as broad as your frame. Standing six feet from each other, the only reason I looked at you was because I was wearing sunglasses. I looked at you but I'm clueless as to what I saw because your own eyes plotted behind a pair of large, bug-eyed sunglasses. No smile, no smirk, no kink in the corner of your mouth. But you were facing me.

I counted cars as they passed. I counted down with the hazy orange numbers of cross-walk sign. I counted on you to say something but then the orange numbers disappeared leaving only the open-palmed orange hand.

"This is about to get somewhat awkward," I said.

You waited, as if I'd spoken to someone behind you, mistakenly to you as someone I thought I knew, to anyone except you before the pause hastily burst and you replied, "What?"

The crosswalk hand reached out. The cars slowed to the traffic light.

"This. We're about to cross the street and now we have to see who's going to take the initiative to walk quickly and who will try to lag behind so neither one of us aren't stuck awkwardly walking next to a stranger as we cross street."

"Oh, that," you started with a smile. "That always is a little weird, isn't it?" You said it with sincerity, as if we'd just been taught a secret handshake no one else in the world knew. It was a welcoming reply.

"Well, if you want, I'll let you get a head start," I offered. Even with the rest of the face easily visible in the afternoon barrage of sunlight, though so much could be divined from every other part of your body, that your eyes remained concealed behind sunglasses left me wholly in the dark about you. My offer hung like a "Marco" that must wait until "Polo" finally arrives.

I will write and re-write stories until I finally have something that doesn't make me want to shove my head in the oven. But I will write no matter what. Eventually, hope I'll carve off the shittier parts.