My mom's smile

(That's all.)

I will only say this once

Macs are better.

Case in point. When working on something at your computer that you don't want your family members, house guests or coworkers to see - for example a, uhm, birthday surprise, yeah that works - you need only one hand to push any one of a number of key commands (apple + tab, apple + m (for righties), apple + w, apple + q) to hide your, eh, work.

On a PC this is a two handed ordeal, and usually a two step one as well (alt + f + oh shit, does this program use eXit, Quit, or Close, fuck, caught red handed).

As an avid mac user I have come to start thinking in mac key commands.

One time I couldn't find my car keys. I said to KC, "I wish I had an apple + F command for my life."

KC isn't big on key strokes. She asked, "A fit to window?"

I took this as a bit of a slam on the size of my ever-expanding gut and spat back, "No a find command, a-hole."

Recently, I gave my boss the old apple + q. It felt good. He is a hopeless PC user. I would like to make a t-shirt with the apple graphic and the letter q, but I now have no money for such things. (Imagine a sad faced emoticon here.)

Stihdjia

I recently drove up to Ithaca to visit a gal I knew in high school. She is a prodigious talker. If there was a competition for talking like there is for hotdog eating - she would win, hands down. I arrived in Ithaca close to 11pm and she talked pretty much constantly until 4am.

The next morning she was waiting for me when I woke up. When I finally crawled out of the guest bedroom she unleashed all the things she had been wanting to say while I slept. Later, as I was leaving (she had a haircut to get to) she just couldn't stop herself. She talked faster the closer I got to the door. When her mom gave her the gabby hand signal (you know, thumb to four fingers like a crocodile mouth) she turned to me and said, "Sorry, I just hate it when my friends have to leave."

In some people this rampant talking might be annoying. But in Emily, my friend, it is simply charming. She may not have brevity but she sure makes up for it in gravity. Suffering, oppression, love, sex - there is no catty gossip. There are no blanket generalizations. She relays experiences and stories in copious detail as if to protest the stereotypical nature of language itself. In short - she most definitely calls it like she sees it. That is to say; precisely as she sees it.

In a my encounters with Emily over the past few weeks I have come to love her dearly. She is the kind of gal who would stand defenseless between you and a dragon saying "bring it on big boy." If you were, that is, to somehow find yourself face-to-face with a great dragon, as I was when I went to see her.

I have a couple other friends with this noble way about them, Liz, Danielle, my sister. They are brilliant, all of them, floating atop dragon fire with speech, while calmly restoring your sense of worth and peace with knowing glances and small hand squeezes.

I myself am a watcher, a thinker, a writer. I only unbridle my feelings in great moments of tragic passion. I dance like a madwoman alone in my living room. I belt out some knee slapping, twang banging country music in my car. I write the things in my blog I wish I could say aloud. I hide my deepest feelings in stanzas and iambs. I push my most visceral repugnances and sexual desires into canvases. And, well there is sex, though, that only comes along once in what seems, for me, a great while.

I guess you could say I am broken like a horse. I direct all my longing to run free and be myself into the most subjugated of possible avenues: running circles around a track with a crop to my backside and a little man on my back. But I do so love my wild friends with what Neko Case would call electric-wire-tongues.

Perhaps the most endearing thing about these friends of mine is that they have no idea how great they are. Could it be they think their honesty and righteousness a weakness? I do remember Emily talking herself into a few cauldrons back in our high school days.

For some reason these women look at me as if I am wonderful. This, I try to understand, but it takes a lot of conjecture and postulation. Perhaps they think me strong for being able to put all my emotions into a ball. But this isn't greatness. It is the only way I know how to survive when I fight the dragons alone, waiting with my sword, after years of preparation - waiting to find the one weakness I can exploit.

But really, sometimes, most times, I would rather just let it all out.

Yet another amazing cultural document brought to you by the good folks at Camel

I was a bit surprised when I received a package from Camel Cigarettes in the mail today. I opened the fancily constructed box to find three more boxes. These were boxes of matches featuring scantily clad ladies. I am not sure if this was an attempt by the fine folks at Camel to reach out to me, a potential Camel smoker of the queer persuasion, but I felt oddly appreciated.

It is far more likely that some guy in a bar who was hocking free smokes mistook me for a dude and checked the "send copious amounts of free matches with shamelessly misogynist images on the cover" box next to my name, but still, one can dream . . .

The Midwestern Bottleneck

Okay, so, I am so happy to be going to a place with a live music scene, interesting speakers and an art scene in general. Here are some must-sees for the first few weeks of my Lawrence homecoming:

Daniel Libeskind, Architect/Designer of the Freedom Tower
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
7:30 PM Woodruff Auditorium - Fifth Floor Kansas Union

John Cuneo, Illustrator
Monday, Sept. 25, 2006
Hallmark Design Symposium Series
6 p.m., Wescoe Hall (Free)

Poetry Reading: Professor Emerita Elizabeth Schultz
Friday, Spetember 28, 12:15PM
Spencer Lobby (Free)

Calexico / Oakley Hall
Saturday, Sept. 30, 9 p.m.
The Bottleneck, 737 N.H., Lawrence
$14

KU Women's Soccer vs. Texas
Friday, October 06, 2006
04:00 PM | Jayhawk Soccer Complex
$4

KU Women's Soccer vs. Texas A&M
Sunday, October 08, 2006
01:00 PM | Jayhawk Soccer Complex
$4

Kurt van Dexter
Monday, Oct. 9, 2006
Hallmark Design Symposium Series
6:00 PM, Alderson Auditorium (Free)

Kaki King (pictured at top)
Monday, Oct. 9, 9 p.m.
The Bottleneck, 737 N.H., Lawrence
$10

David Sedaris
Friday, Oct. 13, 8 p.m.
Lied Center, 1600 Stewart Drive, KU campus, Lawrence
Cost: $20 - $36

Brazillion Pictures, animation production company
Monday, Oct. 23, 2006
Hallmark Design Symposium Series
6 p.m., Wescoe Beach (Free)

The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder
Friday, October 27, 2006 07:30 PM - 09:30 PM
Crafton-Preyer Theatre, Murphy Hall
$$

Jolie Holland
Sunday, Oct. 29, 9 p.m.
The Granada, 1020 Mass., Lawrence
$10

One for the family photo album

Iniquity is the essence of sexy. Inequality is the essence of despotism.
(I said that.)



Every relationship is about power. One person is always going to be the stronger one, the richer one, the more attractive one, the better endowed one, the more creative one, the leader, the harder worker, the more responsible one, the more honest one. In most relationships this creates a power teeter-totter where one partner's good qualities balance out the other's. While your mate is thinking, "I can't believe this rich, beautiful, cool person loves me," you are in turn thinking, "I can't believe this funny, smart, caring person loves me." Or at least, "I can't believe she wants to fuck me." And that is so goddamn hot.



A few days ago I stumbled across an ad posted by a domme, as in a dominatrix, looking for a submissive.

As a young person the only sort of nuance in my intellectual stance on sadomasochism came about when I was trying to decide what was more laughable: being a sadist, being a masochist or being a switch.

But now I am older. I answered the personal ad.



I don't know if we will ever actually meet. But, here is what is great about S&M. I have the opportunity to have a relationship with a woman who is attractive and creative, who knows what she wants and who communicates her needs very very clearly. (Yes!). When I don't fulfill her needs, instead of internalizing problems and waiting for the right moment to bring things up, she hits me, hard, and I know to do better next time. (Yes, Mistress!). In turn, she is looking for me to be willing to do whatever she asks simply because it turns me on to satisfy her. Sweet deal, if you ask me.

S&M or no, if I like someone enough to have sex with them there is a 100% chance that I am willing to do just about anything they need or want me to. All you have to do is ask. But that is just me.

There are a couple of key exceptions. I will not do anything that is physically unhealthy (cutting, burning and fecal-oral contact in particular). I will not do anything that has the potential of harming either of us psychologically.

Besides that, if you want me to call you 'master' and ride a horse naked while shaving my big toe and kissing a baseball bat, you got it. Know in turn that I may ask you to wear a red hat and smoke a cigarette in an old-fashioned, long filter while alternating between reciting poetry and kissing the back of my neck.

I digress, back to the leather stuff.

I am trying to understand the societal hang up about BDSM. I think it stems from confusing symptoms with a disease. The disease is abuse of power. The symptoms are at times bondage, corporal punishment and humiliation. But, if a person happily subjects themselves to being tied up, beaten and degraded as a testament to their willingness to satisfy another person, that is a completely different situation. There is no abuse of power in that type of relationship, in fact all of the power resides in the bottom.

It strikes me as ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous, that as a society we can justify the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of other human beings for oil, but that we can't stomach the idea of sadomasochism. We will allow our young men to play disgusting, ultra-realistic video games where they can beat women to death while raping them, but we won't let them be openly sexually expressive towards their girlfriends or boyfriends.



I wish that for a week there was a world-wide reprieve during which no one was allowed to speak or think about morality. (Ethics and civil law are still okay.) I have an inkling that at the end of that week the world would be a very different place. A better place.

I have been criticized recently, by a person I am quite close to, for being capable of "meaningless" sex. I guess there is something morally abhorrent about the idea of meaningless, ie love-less, ie sex-for-sex's sake, sex.

I just don't believe in meaningless sex. I think being able to be intimate with someone is never meaningless. It may be fleeting. It may be imperfect. It may even be harmful, but it is not meaningless. Most of the time, in my experience, adult consensual sex is quite nice. It is compulsory sexual relationships that scare me.



Dammit, If I can't have the person of my dreams, if there isn't a long-hauler out there for me (and there might not be), then I am going to find joy and compassion and human contact where it comes. Love is great but elusive. Power is great and omnipresent. So tie me to the bedpost.



The images in this post are the work of Jenny Holzer, one of my art heroes.

Ted Baker Friggs - $398

Not to be completely obsessed, but man, I might be willing to kill for a pair of 9 1/2s of these:

Bent

Ressurection, erection, Jesus falls the second time. Jesus falls the first time. The world happened in reverse. The universe is shrinking. The sun circles around the moon. Don't worry about your regrets. Their causes haven't happened yet. There is still time to be born. Your father is come back, can I stay, and come again. Mom likes it that way. Turn that smile upside down, and give me less than more. Race yourself. Pull up your straps by the boot. Put your head off sideways. For God will say, "Let there be light." And everything will be dark again.

Fall Fashion

If I had about $3000 laying around this is what I would be wearing this fall:

Dear Soccer Moms,

Having trouble talking to your daughters about their coach's gender issues? Here is a soft introduction to the subject for young people.

Films
Mit liv som hund (My Life as a Dog) (1985)
Antonia (Antonia's Line) (1995)
Ma Vie en Rose (My Life in Pink) (1997)
Beautiful Boxer (2003)
But I'm a Cheeleader (1999)
Fried Green Tomatoes (1992)
To Kill a Mocking Bird (1962)

Books
King and King
Aquamarine
Crush
Fnding H.F.
What Happened to Lani Garver

Ave Marion: My Miseducation

I can name the things that taught me what America is. I read A Dream Deferred in 7th grade. I watched Roots in 8th grade. I read Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer in 9th grade. I read their Eyes Were Watching God in 11th grade. In 12th grade I read the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. I saw the images of the dead at Wounded Knee as a history of photography student in college. I walked around exhibits of folks like Cyndie Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems, Walker Evans, etc. I heard Laurie Anderson's O Superman lying with my head in my lover's lap. And one day I turned on the car radio to "Ave Maria" sung by Marion Anderson.

I wonder, in earnest, what the rest of my education was about. Why we were asked to read text books? How is it that as a young person I got off from school for Martin Luther King day, but never sat and listened to a recording of I Have a Dream? How is it that we learned about the Scopes Monkey Trial without ever listening to the Americana music recordings about the case?

My point: my education on the whole wasn't very liberal or artsy. If it weren't for a few moments, mostly outside of class, when I connected with a work of art I would have no concept of the country or the world I live in. No concept of what it might mean to be a human, or to be black or a woman or a person who lives in anyplace other than my house and my town. Of all the things that we droned on about in school, all the gross generalizations and glossy scene setting and the outlines for Regents essays, the things that really moved me where the things that were considered peripheral; original texts, paintings, photographs, songs and moving images.

Does anyone else remember the painting of George Washington crossing the Potomac? Of course. How about the diagrams for how slaves were to be packed into ships? John Hancock's signature? These things should be the primary texts our young people learn from in school.

What I would like for my children is this. Each day they go into class. The teacher puts up a picture on the wall and introduces a subject. Then my kid listens to some folk songs, or audio recordings or watches film reels, then they are asked to write or draw or act out something about what they have learned. It works for math too, why not talk about Euclid while learning geometry? That is my dream. That my child will grow up with the image of Marion Anderson singing in front of the Abraham Lincoln Memorial to a crowd of 75,000 people. I dream that she or he will know that Miss Anderson wasn't allowed to sing in Constitution Hall and that the bi-sexual first lady wife of a polio-stricken womanizer organized a free concert in the nations capitol so that anyone could hear her voice in beautiful protest. And when she or he stands to sing the national anthem it won't be because of some juvenile nationalistic sentiment, but rather it will be out of the sad-joy (there is a word for this in german) that comes with knowing that we are imperfect, capable of great beauty and great sorrow.

Slugs v2

The effort it must take to lubricate
the world crisscrossing forgotten
things strewn in the yard

One day two people
will pause in conversation:
What is the old gal up to?
She passed.

And they will pickup where they leftoff
talking before the short lived thought of me

But the slugs, the slugs will attend my grave
clearing away excess particles of digestables
exacting their revenge on my murdering feet

Coach

My little peanut butter girl
Worrying if she is as smart as she is pretty
Writing metaphors about me
Her best friend

She wonders if she will grow up at all
Everyone else in the fifth grade has a pet
She hears her mom crying at night
She writes me letters from her secret heart

She heals me with kindness and clever things her dad says
She plays the piano so that she can be a drummer

The next time I see her she will be so tall
And in sixth grade

Undercurrent

You rode me like a wave that never crested.
We reached land and puttered out.
And went our separate ways.

I don't think I have another go in me.

Can we adopt waves like children?
Can we buy the tide, make love to the moon?

I am treading water, waiting for the world to move me.
It needn't be a big thing, just the natural flow of moving back to shore.

Can Jesus Save Me

Do you remember the first time you read:

Miracle Ice Cream

Miracle's truck comes down the little avenue,
Scott Joplin ragtime strewn behind it like pearls,
and, yes, you can feel happy
with one piece of your heart.

Take what's still given: in a room's rich shadow
a woman's breasts swinging lightly as she bends.
Early now the pearl of dusk dissolves.
Late, you sit weighing the evening news,
fast-food miracles, ghostly revolutions,
the rest of your heart.

(Adrienne Rich)

I remember driving in that car, late night, with my oldest friend. He lamented not being able to describe the way the black hills look against the black sky. I loved him for his humanity. It may be the reason we have remained friends through all these long periods of isolation.

A night like this, nearly a hundred years ago, I laid in the dew in the grass and looked up at the gray sky. I knew. I just knew. There was only one person in the world who cared. She is still the only person who cares. I wish for all the world she was still sitting in her secret palace on California Street with our dead dog, my best friends, the two of them.

I laid in the dewy grass again tonight and the world came creeping up against my skin again in so many tiny molecules of wet cloth.

Do you remember the first time you ate a concord grape? I am waiting for the return of romantic poetry. I want to be a romantic flea. I want to watch you make love to a gentleman who feeds you concord grapes. I want to live blushed cheeks and the smell of grass on the soccer field.

Remember Mary Curtain? I catch myself too late at wondering what she is doing today. If she has found love.

There are many things I would like to say to you, but I don't know how.

After all

You are my Wonderwall.

Waking

Do any of you know the person of my dreams? S/he keeps eluding me in waking life.

I am ready. I swear I am. I know how to be good, now. I won't make the mistakes of the past. No more waiting for the other person to love me first. No more clever intellectual posturing. Oh, I am so awake I can hear my own mind humming.

I know this much about my dream lover. We are meant to live in an apartment and cook crazy vegan fare. This tastes the way the woods smell after it rains and the streams swell. We love listening to music sitting across from each other on the bare floor with the lights off, not talking. This feels like wearing converse sneakers without socks. I like to put my hands under the back of his/her t-shirt. This is like eyelashes brushing your cheek. S/he loves piggyback rides, which I give out liberally. This is like running with horses through the tall grass. All the things I have to say come flowing out in continuously lucid paragraphs when we are together. This is like the wind that sweeps you up while standing next to a speeding train. S/he knows when I am being too serious and I know when s/he is being too indignantly righteous. This is like using your leg muscles to stop your end of the teeter-totter from crashing on the ground. We love each other. We want to grow up together. This is like holding sweaty hands with your best buddy in kindergarten while crossing the street, unconscious of hands or sweat.

I am making room for you. From now on I will buy everything for two, like a pregnant woman. I will plan on growing in unexpected ways like a tree with grafted limbs. Cut me open and tie yourself to me. It won't hurt a bit.

The Lost Ingredient or The Price of Salt

About a year ago I began to radically change my diet for health reasons. I eat a low glycemic, vegetarian, mostly organic diet. And now that I am completely immersed in a different way of thinking about food I would like to share a few of my own personal discoveries.

Healthy food taste better.

There are some foods that I realized this past year I haven't tasted in a long time. Peanuts. I love them. When I stopped getting salted peanuts and switched to organic, sugar-free peanut butter I suddenly remembered what the little buggers actually taste like. Oatmeal, do you remember what real 40 minute oatmeal tastes like? Oh, it is heavenly. The crap that comes in little bags that you throw in the microwave doesn't hold a candle. Etc.

I was addicted, literally, to sugar. I was unable to maintain a blood glucose/insulin stasis. I would eat things like white bread and sport drinks to combat headaches, mood swings and cramps, not to satiate my hunger. The sugar in these foods would cause me to spike and then drop dramatically. So, I would eat more high-sugar food to combat the drop, just like a heroine addict.

I think many people are addicted to sugar and transfat. Be honest with yourself, do you like frosting because of the way it tastes, I mean really tastes or because of the endorphins your brain releases when it hits your tongue. Think about it. Healthy food does not produce the sugar high that unhealthy food does. Therefore instead of getting off you can actually taste the food. Is it spicy, is it bitter, is it savory, is it sweet, is it SUBTLE?


Healthy food makes you feel better.

Okay so there are the obvious benefits of more vitamins, less refined carbs, less transfats, less unnatural hormones, etc. But there is another psychological benefit. It feels good to do something healthy for yourself. This will sound cheesy as all hell, but I like checking out at the grocery store with my healthy food. I like putting all my vegetables and bulger and buckwheat and tofu on the counter for everyone to see. It makes me feel good to look at it all sitting there. I love it, love it, love it when the checkout person comments on the healthiness of my food. It also makes me sad when the checkout person says that they could never eat this stuff, it is so good. Anyhow, my dream is that some day a righteous, punk, artistic, queer babe will come up behind me in the grocery store and see the way I eat and know right then and there that she is in love with me. Dream on, I know, but it would be great.


Healthy food opens up social doors.

Okay, so this may sound weird, but bear with me. In addition to babes in the grocery store, I have noticed that recently there is a certain subculture forming of healthy eating. There are cool people in the vegetable aisles! These same people are often also found in the fair trade coffee houses and the new world restaurants. Now here is where it gets interesting. These people also seem to frequent cultural events, political meetings and other intellectual gatherings. They aren't hippies, it isn't a fashion, they are smart people who make educated decisions about how they interact with the world. If this sounds like the kind of friends you want to have, then eat smarter. You'll meet them all over the place when you do. It will start with an ally at work who notices that you brought portobello sandwiches for lunch instead of burgers, then it will mushroom, hehe.


Healthy food is better for the environment.

I won't go on about this. It is just true. There are a couple of books on my reading list, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Fatal Harvest Reader. They both talk about the role industrial farming plays in the deterioration of our habitat.


Healthy food is better for the economy.

Okay, if you just don't care about the other stuff at least think on this. The American farmer is a dying breed. Every year dropping food prices make farming less and less financially viable. The ONLY growing sector in the food industry in the United States is in organic food. Everything else has been on the decline for years. Organic food helps us maintain our economy by supporting farmers.


Healthy food brings the family together.

I have noticed, since I have started eating healthier that my family and friends have started as well. Now this may just be a part of a trend, but I think I have had a little bit to do with it. 8 months ago my mom would roll her eyes when I picked up the organic milk at the market. Then we talked about it. I told her that hormones fed to lactating cows are known to be a factor in an increased rate of poly-cystic ovarian syndrome, something I am currently suffering from, and she now buys organic milk and eggs on her own accord. We can eat together and talk about how our food tastes and how it makes us feel. Okay, so sometimes we try something and it sucks, but even then we laugh about it and make a mental note: no more rice flour pizza crusts from scratch.

The Greatest

My sister, the advertising executive, posted a comment to my last blog with a blurb about Cat Power's newest album, The Greatest, from her magazine.

The saga of Chan Marshall continues. Though in fact, Marshall's career as Cat Power is two tales: one of a recording artist possessed of a knifelike haunting beauty, and another of a performer so stultifying that there's little to differentiate the songs from the diffident shuffling between them.

The tip-off that The Greatest could be Marshall's finest work is that, unlike her past three albums, its effect is not quite immediate. At first blush, the pairing of this shiveringly lovely singer with a couple handfuls of loose-limbed Memphis veterans (including Al Green's guitarist "Teenie" Hodges, who co-wrote "Love and Happiness") sounds aesthetically off. More a spectral presence than ever before, Marshall's spun voice seems to ema-nate from some other dimension, one where sadness and love supplant oxygen and carbon as base elements; but the spare swing and bounce of the opening track and (especially) the second song, "Living Proof," are nothing if not earthy. Still, it isn't alchemy that resolves this fundamental asymmetry—just a few listens. Singling out songs or lyrics seems silly; the record drifts along like a rootsy fantasia shot in one take, not a note out of place. And in the end, the Memphis connection is beside the point. The Greatest is simply Cat Power music: devastating and sustaining in equal measure, mysterious, affecting and knowing. Whether Marshall's new bandmates can spark her flatlining stage show is all there is left to wonder about.

Uhm, yeah, that was . . . interesting. I seriously have a college degree and no idea what that guy was trying to say, though he used some cool words. Not sure how any of that would help you decide whether or not to download Cat Power's newest album or go to see them in concert.

So here is what I would have written about the album.

The Greatest gives words to the spirit of a broken athlete, a faultering artist, or perhaps a shy singer and invisible guitarist. It is an album dedicated to the spirit of a person who has stood at the edge of greatness, but finds themselves at the end of a mediocre career just about to fade into the other side of life.

Chan's voice is pushed so far back into the mix of the music that it takes careful listening to tease out the words from the melody. It is almost as if she is disappearing from the songs, just becoming another anonymous piece of the whole. It is haunting in the way that running into the star quarterback from your high school football team in Wal-mart is haunting. The only semblance of the physical being, the thing of beauty and joy he once was, comes through in subtle flashes when he tosses toilet paper or tv dinners into his cart.

As a general rule, The Greatest seems to be about the settling of middle life. Everything is a bit muted. The album begins with the words, “Once I wanted to be the greatest. No wind or waterfall could stop me, but then came the rush of the flood . . . it laid me down.” The second song, Living Proof, accuses, “You are supposed to have the answer you are supposed to have living proof,” without ever kowtowing tonally to the weight of such a demand, it remains mellow, but upbeat, a new sound for Cat Power. The third song, Lived in Bars, reminds me of my mother telling stories of partying in the 70’s when she gets home from a dance at the VFW around the corner. It is a slow-dance-song about younger, wilder times. There is none of the grit of earlier works like Mr. Gallo and none of the unquenchable desire of Satisfaction or Still in Love With You (both covers). But it is just as moving and insightful in its quiet reflectiveness.

The exception to this formula on the CD is the song Hate, which is a suicidal cry, "please DON'T help me." I was a little disappointed when I read the liner notes. I thought the lyrics said, "There are no laws or rules to enchant your life," pure brilliance - there is no magic in the code of our lives. But according to the notes she is saying, "There are no laws or rules to unchain your life." Still moving, but you get the idea.

This brings me to another point - don't believe the liner notes. They are often misleading. One of the most amazing things about Chan's singing is her ability to be verbally ambiguous. Did she say, "Oh Chan or Ocean?" I believe this is intentional. I have a friend who caught an unadvertised show of hers down in Florida several years back. She spent the evening singing variations on one song. My friend described it as brilliant, like the Pieta, only more ephemeral.

This is the charm of Cat Power. It is alive and it defies category. There is no refrain, no sing-a-long predictability. It isn’t timeless or reproducible. The only thing you know for sure is that they are going to do something unexpected with the sounds that they make and the way they interpret the meaning of words. The Greatest is no exception.

Of course, that was probably way too many inches of copy to get into a hip-happening zine.

Animal magnetism

Several days ago I was shocked to stand up from my computer, turn around and see a feral cat slinking its way across the living room. Pippa the Circus Dog was sound asleep behind my chair while I was writing. As I stood, she awoke and looked at the cat as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a wild cat to be prancing around her house.

The two of us peaceably walked the cat, which was skinny as a pancake, missing large patches of fur and had a tail that was broken at a 90° angle, to the back door. It has been hanging around ever since. I haven't fed the rascally looking thing. But I haven't actively tried to scare it away either.

Two nights ago Pip and I went out for late night potty break. The cat was waiting at the back door. The two of them sauntered off under a bush and hung out there for about 20 minutes. I am not positive that they were making out, but I have no way of disproving it, so that is the story that will stand.

This morning I went to start my car and the cat was curled up in the back seat on Pip's blanket. (I had cracked the windows the day before. She is extremely skinny.)

This, I guess, is how it came to be that my Heinz 57 Circus Dog has been going around with a feral cat. I am not one to judge. Hey, you find warmth and compassion where you find it.

Behind the curves

My little sister is a big awesome ADVERTISING executive for a big awesome arts and events magazine in a big awesome city. She has told me, numerous times, to let her know if there are any concerts I want to attend in the city because she could get me tickets and write them off as business expenses.

Since I am moving back to Kansas in a month I decided to take her up on her offer. I asked her to get me tickets for DeVotchKa and Cat Power who are playing a couple of weekends from now at separate venues.



When she was trying to pilfer free tickets from her "connections" one of them said, "DeVotchKa, that band was so two years ago. I don't handle them anymore." How a band could be two years ago without having disbanded or died, I'm not entirely sure, so I took the feedback in stride. I insisted that I was a fan of their new work, which is true seeing as how I just discovered them about a month ago.

Then my sister said, "Oh yeah, Cat Power, we cover them a lot in the magazine. Isn't that some kind of country music." No. Cat Power is Cat Power and I love it. There is no reason to put it into a category. It is transcendent, end of story.

But this sent me on a little bit of an unknown artist odyssey this week. I was embarrassed that I didn't have something more obscure or radical on my mind as an ideal concert going experience. So, for the past three days I have been downloading free music from little known bands on myspace. This has been a great way to pass time between writing chapters in my novel. Not only am I ahead of a musical curve, that admittedly may never crest, I can chat directly with the musicians who are, for the most part, queer women with guitars, accordions, cellos and so on and who are excited to have a fan from outside of their regular stomping grounds.

So here are some of the rocking musicians I have found on myspace this week:



Bluebook (pictured above)
This one-woman band consists of Julie Davis teasing her upright bass, vocals and other soft instruments into haunting and playful melodies. My favorite song is Invertebrate, which is free to download. The lyrics are smart and available from her myspace site.

The Jen Korte Band
This two-person group consists of Miss Jen Korte singing and strumming her acoustic guitar and the occasional percussion-al accompaniment of Morgan Coley. I like all of her songs, which again are free, but I am particularly fond of her version of Wonderwall because I have always felt it was a good song, but I don't enjoy the way OASIS sounds, so kudos Jen for reinvigorating a previously doomed song.



Main Squeeze Orchestra
Okay, so I am a little behind the curve on this one. But, if you are looking for something different. Really different. Check out this all-girl, NYC based, all-accordian group. Their free version of Love Will Tear Us Apart is so unbelievably post-modern it hurts.

Ud
Ud seems to defy definition. It is an odd, sometimes tonally off, Americana reassemblage. I like it. This is yet another one-woman show run by Brigid Mcauliffe, with guest appearances from instruments and friends. Arching Down is on my playlist.


Why do we like to see musicians before they are huge megalosupernovastars?

First, the combination of musical abilities and underbelly-rocker personalities make them sexy.

Second, it is blissful to see people of great musical talent up close.

I remember the first time I saw Neko Case with my good buddy, Nick. His sister called us from Indianapolis and said that we had to see her, that she was amazing. She just happened to be playing at the Bottleneck a few nights later. Holy cow. She WAS amazing. We were 5 feet from her. It was intimate. At the time she was this sorta shy, a wee-bit frumpy, knock-kneed gal. She looked like any other person on the street (at least in Lawrence) but she blew us all away when she opened her mouth. A far cry from the photos of a skinny, dare I say almost anorexic, knockout on her current publications. I don't say this to be judgmental, just to set the before she was famous scene. There were about 20 people total there that night. Some people were playing pool instead of watching the concert. I don't know Neko Case, I don't want to go through her trash or read her diary. I like her damn music. It is wonderful. We talked to her after the show while she hocked her own t-shirts.

When we left we felt as though we had been part of a small handful of people who had seen this amazing singer give a fantastic concert. We immediately tattooed our free Bloodshot Record stickers to Nick's car and my art-school supply tackle box. We were in awe of her (her band is pretty damn good as well). We listened to her cd for a year pining for the day we could listen to her sing again live because, as you can probably guess, the CD really didn't do her justice. And we did go to her concert again, three times at the Bottleneck before she outgrew it and moved on to be a headliner at Wakarusa Fest.

So, I can't wait to take some trips to catch these gals in person because it is worth a little digging to have a night when someone stuns you with what they can do. You know it isn't just singers. Actors, athletes, lovers, children with their amazing outlook on the world. These are the things that make life feel great.

notmyspace

This is from a group of 14 friends I stumbled across by clicking on the "cool new people" pictures. I would normally say enjoy, but it doesn't seem fitting. Also, I have been very true to the spelling actually used on these pages.


About Clyde "I am just a cowboy."

---

About me:
Hey, my names Clyde, and im 22. my hobbies include trucks, driving, horse riding, hats, and chicks. I moved here recently after my online friend of two years, Ambrose told me of some cheap apartments. I was originally from arkansas where I lived with my mom and 4 siblings. I didnt like them anyway. so now Im starting over in california with new friends. im not a big fan of black people. go back to africa.

Who I'd like to meet:
Garth Brooks

comment from ambrose to clyde:
Hahah Clyde! I'm at your house right now and you're watching some faggot ass tv show in the other room. That was hella funny today when you threw your milkshake at that nigger!

comment from lucille to clyde:
you're just as rude as Ambrose is. You guys are such perverts and bigits!


About Ambrose "I hate fags"

---

About me:
Hey. My name is Ambrose Jolt and I hate fags!! Yeah!! Jolt Family!!!! REPRESENT BITCH!

Who I'd like to meet:
you. except if you're a fag.

comment from Lucille to Ambrose
ambrose ill fucking hit u with a shovel, fuck off!

comment from Clyde to Ambrose
ya partner! niggers + milkshakes = fune

comment from Tucker (RIP Corey "Purple" Mason) to Ambrose
fags r gay!

comment from Peter aka Jolt to Ambrose
You are the biggest closet case I know. What business do you have asking Lucy how many times we've had sex? We're not even dating anymore douche bag! I can't tell you how many nights I've listened to you wake up, go into the bathroom, pull down your pants and prod at your shriveled package with the butt-end of the Pert Plus bottle.


About Lucille "With death cums darkness with darkness cums chaos"

---

About me:
(some skull graphics) I am a unique sorceress of UC Davis college. There is no one more unique than I am. I am highly involved in drama, theater, and I play the tuba. My hobbies are tarot cards, palm reading, video games, and celtic mysticism. This profile was edited with Thomas' myspace editor™ V2.5

Who I'd like to meet:
Shagrath, Geldar, Bob the Builder!!!!11 lol

comment from Ambrose to Lucille
how many times have you fucked my brother?

comment from Tucker to Lucille
lol ive been hella horny, u?

comment from Clyde to Lucille
I'm not a biscuit, whore. I heard whut u did with Peter and ur just a lil kinkyslut.

comment from Ambrose to Lucille
haha lucy u fag



Whew. So this makes me think that it would be interesting to get together with some friends and create fake personas for ourselves and then invent myspace pages and put on a little friendship drama for others to read, sort of like an online griffin and sabine. Anyone game?

Thirty Days to Literal Greatness

I started writing my first thirty-day novel today. This is the most brilliantly-fun thing I have worked on in months. I absolutely love it. The idea is to write a 175-page, 50,000-word book in thirty days. The way this is acheived is by refusing to edit, restructure, prestructure, etc. You just sit down and write as quickly as you can (some level of coherent trains of thought are good). Now, I am currently unemplyed and that sucks because it means I am poor, but on the up side I am already well over 5,000 words into my first novel. So, I would like to give a big shot-out to the craptacular bigots in the world that made me realize that I wanted to do something more important with my life than deal with their infantile phobias about queers. For those of you that have those things called jobs and families, have no fear you only need to write about 1,500 words a day. That is nothing. It is like whipping out a crappy three-page, 12 point, double-spaced paper for a class ON ANYTHING YOU WANT. Hello, trust me, write yourself a novel. It feels good.

Also, it is possible that I am manic, or maybe slightly manic-depressive.

I'm not the only one with body image

So, my sister read the post from yesterday, "The Ties That Unbind Us." And she cried at work, in front of her coworkers, which to be honest was an anticipated thrill I had from writing it. I knew there would be a call or an instant message today along the lines of "you are an asshole, but I love you too." So, I would just like to point out that the most immediately touching line from my essay for my sister was when I called her "thin." This killed me because she has always been thin and I said so many more important things about her. But it is true. If someone called me thin, or honestly better yet, muscular, in their blog that would be the thing I would latch onto to. Apparently, we all already know we are good people. What we really need our friends and families to tell us how goddamn attractive we are.

So, this brings me to a genuine idea that I have been mulling over for, oh, about a month and a half now. I really, really, really want to make an alternative women's and trans-centric fashion magazine. I think this is something that could have a profound influence on young people. To see the women in print as teens and young adults that I see on a regular basis as an adult in lesbian nightclubs, gay bars and, heck, in small Midwestern towns. Women who have some how managed to create their own visual identity. And hear me straight, visual identity, the way you dress has very significant meaning, it is not shallow or stupid. If younger people could see this I think it would open up so many doors for them both in terms of their gender and sexuality (straight, gay or anything in between, tangential, skew, etc) but also just in terms of their comfort in being personally expressive and individually creative.

Who's with me? I need a team. Photographers, writers, editors, designers, publishers, vendors! let's get to work, people! I want pictures of women with healthy body weights, tattoos, piercings, scars, every kind of clothing, strap-ons, softies, boobs, no boobs, you name it.

Seriously, I think I might actually be able to pull this off. I don't know why I think that or how I will do it, but it is just worth it.

The Ties That Unbind Us

My mom had a few years of living wildly after her mother died and her father emotionally abandoned her and she graduated from high school and before she had us, her children. It must have been amazing. The world was new to Stevie Nicks and free everything. She met a handsome, quiet boy. They had a world of their own. They were 22.



This is a photo of my mom on her honeymoon. As a young woman I myself recently graduated from high school and free for the first time of household and familial obligations I used to look at this photo and long to be like her. I wanted that contrapasto, hand-on-hip, uber-sexual, self-assured adulthood.

Her love affair with my father was turbulent and short-lived. Under other circumstances, I think it would have been a relationship she could have gotten over and moved on from. But, I think she had really loved him, and she had me, and a year and a half later, my sister, Julia.

It couldn’t have been easy for her, once to have been unencumbered and growing out of her own painful childhood to be suddenly alone and poor with two children of her own. Me, a constant reminder of an ill-fated relationship. She never once treated me with any kind of resentment or ambivalence. And it couldn’t have been easy when it became obvious that as a youngster I so wanted to be a boy, and my little sister, by contrast who so wanted to be a girl. It must have seemed like she had given birth to a couple of aliens. One all too painfully not right in her own skin and the other completely enamored with the very traditional vestiges of girlhood that my mother had rebelled against so adamantly in her free years in the late seventies.

I complain a lot about my mom. We all do. It is human nature. It is how we learn to be better parents, or at least we think we will be better. But, really what could my mom have done better? It is important that we talk about these things now. Straighten things out.

I moved home 8 months ago with this intention after 9 years of living away and ignoring the problems of my childhood. Or silently crying while my mom talked on the phone to me about my sister.

When I got here I had my first-ever panic attack. It hit me how emotionally delicate this situation was for both of us. As the reality of what it meant to be living with one’s mother started to sink in it became obvious that we were never going to have the kinds of conversations I had envisioned. The past is over and off-limits.

I went to visit my sister in the city. We had talked some before I came home. She knew I had a lot on my mind. We had a little bit of a strained relationship after I left for college. It is sad really, because there is no one in the world that knows me better than her, even with the big time gaps. We are so very different on paper. I am a chubby, genderqueer, ex-athlete who has spent the past seven years working towards a silly undergraduate degree in a small Midwestern city. She is a tall, thin, successful businesswoman.

I decided one night while I was visiting her that it was time for me to unload my brain. There had been a birthday of mine that my mom and her had fought through while we were in high school. It was symbolic of my role in our nuclear family, spectator to the clash between my over-worked mother and my free-spirited, strong willed sister. I have developed, for whatever reason, genes, youthful experiences, etc a tendency to put my feelings and desires aside. I have kept a very low profile most of my life and I have decided that I would like to have a little more fun. In order to do this it was important that I learn how to stop being the spectator, the quiet reflective one in the back, watching the drinks and coats while others dance and sing and carryon.

So I gently began unleashing some of the wellkept secret feelings I have had since childhood. There at dinner with my sister, I spoke candidly about my childhood fears and tragedies, about things that had tortured my little adolescent psyche, about insecurities, injustices, sexual desire and about death and to my surprise she looked me in the eye and we both laughed uproariously about these things that had troubled me for so many years. We laughed until we cried. We laughed the whole walk to the subway station. We laughed entering the train. We laughed until I couldn’t see for the tears in my eyes.

Here is a snippet from my journal entry:

On the train ride home Julie told me a very funny story about a sad poem she had decided to read for a public speaking class at BCC. She had rehearsed it in he mind but had never said it out loud. Well, when she started reading it in front of the class she busted out in tears and spoke in broken, unintelligible phrases. She looked up an saw that some of the other students were crying too. She said, “There was no way they understood what I was saying.” They were crying out of compassion. She was so distraught that she decided to stop the poem short at a natural point about half way in. But in her state she lost track of her place and had to keep stammering though the whole thing. She ended the story by saying, “I could have read anything I wanted: A happy poem, a letter, the back of a cereal box! But I chose a poem about death. Well, at least I got a B+.”

I think Julie and I are more alike than we know.

The best part of the storytelling was that there was a young girl of perhaps ten or eleven sitting with her mother on the train right across from us. Julie and I were both laughing so loud and hard we were both crying and leaning into each other. This young girl was listening to Julie's story and laughing along. She looked at us like we were great. She looked at Julie as if my sister was just what she wanted to be when she grew up. And I felt so happy.

We are more alike than we know. How can I explain how meaningful it is to me that there has always been a little person by my side, and such a wise cracking fire-cracker at that? How can I explain how in awe I am of her? That she has grown up to be such a funny, smart and wonderful person who has forgiven me of every trespass I have committed against her (and trust me there have been many) and has accepted me just the way I am, even when it required a lot of work on her part. She is probably the most important person in my world, and I am happy to say once again, my very best friend.



I love you, Julia.

As of mid-2006

So, today (actual date not important for posterity's sake) I spent a fair amount of time (I lost track of actual hours, seconds, minutes) looking for a lost leather-bound, quad ruled notebook given to me by my illustrious friend, Lisa J W, who, I think still considers us friends even though she never returns my calls or reciprocates on emails or postcards. The reason I think she still considers me her friend is because she warned me that this would happen but begged me to continue sending things anyway.

So the book is a document of sorts detailing my trip across the country after I left my lover of seven years herein referred to as the mistress on what we would amicably agree were bad terms.

Upon opening this book a few things hit me.

One.

After living in Lawrence for, what, 5 years. There were only seven people whose names and addresses I copied down on a page entitled: People I Used to Know. Seven people. I was befriending something like 1 and 1/4 people a year. That is bad. Five of them were coworkers. I would like to blame this on the mistress but this seems unfair. Nick E and Nina I are not listed, neither is the mistress or her family.

Two.

There is an urgent list of songs to download scribbled across the front page in very definitive I-am-driving-and-can't-look-at-the-pen scrawl. It says: Lola-Kinks, Break Down, Go Ahead and Give It To Me, American ?? Volume II.

Three. (a.k.a. Cee)

There is a mysterious blank business card in here on which I have written "Lego Genius" in one corner by hand. I don't know what I was thinking at the time, but this strikes me as absolutely marvelous now and I am thinking of using this as my actual business card.

Four.

A series of lines, which I, of course, immediately recognize as a map, but other folks might mistake for a drawing of the underside of a lactating cow with the various udders labeled things like: Tulsa (ODP Tourney), Little Rock, Memphis (Sleep, Beale, Trolley, Katrina Refugee), Nashville (Wow, Hatch, Arnold's 3 and 1), Smokies, Asheville (420 Kids, Rosetta’s, Early Girls). And can I say Early Girls was f-ing fantabuloso. I had a fried green tomato eggs benedict thing. It was heavenly.

Five.

Asheville has it's own page in the book. It begins with eatery recommendations from the mysterious Courtney C: Asheville Pizza and Brewing Co., Rosetta’s Kitchen, Early Girl, Ultimate Ice Cream. Then there is a section labeled "Cute Asheville Girls" which is basically a list of lesbian hangouts: Smokey Tavern, Gypsy Moon, and some other places I am having trouble reading due to the fact it was raining when I was standing outside of this restaurant taking notes on where to cruise chicks (by cruise I mean wish I had the courage to talk to) while sharing names with some local kids who I ended up spending the rest of the night with.

Luckily I wrote down one of their phone numbers, Miss Mandy G. She was adamant that I should stay in Asheville and attend Thanksgiving with her family who believe it or not are all 420 friendly and vegetarian. Apparently there is such a thing as turkey-shaped tofurkey. I watched these kids (all of whom were over 21) smoke a seriously prodigious amount of weed. I am not into weed. I am scared it would make me dumber than I already am. So, I drank a warm peach Lambic (yummy, lambic, too expensive for me right now).

Mandy G. told an amazing story. Apparently she and her mother have a sort of cross-generational competition going on to see which one of them will get the most marriage proposals. Mandy G.'s mom had something like 13 men propose to her. If I remember correctly Mandy G. will get a car if she gets more than 13 by a certain age.

I realized today, which by the way is not the day I wrote the rest of this, that I will probably never get married. I went to a friends wedding yesterday. It was very nice, the people were nice, the bride and groom are wonderful and great, but it just isn't for me. I have never had a marriage fantasy except once as a small child, maybe in second grade, we were asked to draw a picture of ourselves receiving the seven sacraments. Marriage is a sacrament and I drew the bride and groom from behind. The teacher commended me on how realistic the drawing was and how it was interesting that I had drawn it from the POV of the pews in the church. But really I drew it that way because I was having trouble picturing myself married until it dawned on me that I could be the groom. Well of course, I couldn't let the teacher know I was fantasizing being a groom and having a lovely bride, and more importantly a lovely suit, so I drew it from behind and everyone assumed I was the bride when really I was the groom. I sent it to my dad. Not really sure why. Maybe I was hoping he would understand.

One more thing about Asheville: Everyone I met was very outdoorsy and even the heavy people owned a kayak. I like this town.

Six.

While eating dinner in Asheville I started writing an excruciatingly detailed account of my life. I started with and didn't make it past describing the apartment on 522 Chenango Street.

Seven.

Some lines from other bits of journal-esque scribbles have attracted my attention: "There were Indians there originally, of course." 'If you pluck a rubber grape and deflate it slightly you can make it stick to the end of your tongue." "She had a bowl of macoon apples cut up for me and I also ate some garbanzo beans." "I never want to be fat again." "I think Julie and I are more alike than we know."

Eight.

Detailed drawings of an architectural feature I built for a friend.

Nine.

Ah, finally, the poem. The reason I went searching for this darn book that ended up being in my mom's garage in a box with a bunch of chai tea, a Ted Kooser book and some white canvas sneakers.

People always talk about how great and meaningful road trips are. And they are great, but mostly when you are on them. Most of my road trips have been alone and I don't ever really feel the need to talk about them, like the way i don't feel the need to talk about the sunset or my last bath.

I think the reasons people like to go on about road trips are two fold: first, they are usually taken with a great friend or a perfect stranger and so there is a natural deepening of a realtionship that occurs. Second, they take people through places they wouldn't have otherwised visited (say if they had gone by plane or train). So there is also some inherent deepening of understanding of place. And, most folks know that most people they run into are unlikely to ever go to that same small town or rest stop or even national park. So, these stories are valuable.

On my solo road trips, however, I became acutely aware of my self, my own thoughts, fears, and ambitions. I didn't have to laugh off any urge I had to go somewhere or do something or sit and do nothing, to do it naked, to smoke and do it, to drink in the morning. You get the idea. I didn't have to compromise, for the most part. And I think I was truly aware of how I fit into everyplace that I went dually as a traveller and as an individual. But, did anything of great significance happen on this particular trip? No. I ended in a different place from where it started.

I can say this though, the last time I felt that anything truly meaningful in my life happened was when I touched a 3,300 year-old tree (which was on a more recent road trip), and before that was when Amie B was playing with my hair while I typed on the computer and my dog started sleeping on the bed next to me. Before that, about 8 months ago my sister and I ate dinner together in SoHo and laughed until we cried (for the first time in almost a decade) on the subway. Before that little 11-year-old Hannah R. told me I was her best friend. And that accounts for one year of meaning.

So, what did I learn from my trip to NY from Kansas. Hmm. I am a loser. I am dying to be hip, but I always get distracted by practical concerns and never follow through on anything that is great and my own. I always go the extra mile at work and it never enriches my life. I like driving. I am good at meeting new people. I just rarely meet people I want to hang on to for long. As in hardly ever, as in once a year. I need to let go of the things that are weighing me down. And I think I have started, but there is a paradigm shift that needs to occur so that I can be the happy-as-pie, never-do-well I envision myself being at 25, oh shit I am already 27. Fuck. I have two and 1/2 years to be a fucking 20-something. I am not going to spend another day worrying about soccer or what my mom thinks of me or MONEY. I am going to eat dirt and air and laugh and drink moonshine and two buck chuck and enjoy random hook-ups and get in fist fights and pick pockets and meet fast women and COWBOYS COWBOIS COWGIRLS and loose that last 30 lbs and get a freakin tattoo of something completely meaningless while wearing more hats, boots and less clothing. Because there is a decent chance I may not make it to 30.

Remember

"Remember when you were small how people who seemed so tall always had their way?"

I am 5'11" tall. I can bench press more than most women weigh. I have a degree from a very competitive program at a well-respected university. I have travelled all over the country and a little bit abroad. I recently had a serious, long-term relationship with a very intelligent and successful partner.

But, I feel small. No amount of physical prowess, legal finagling, justice talking or even popular support will fix it. There is no certificate or degree or trophy that will rectify my smallness. I am afraid I will simply always feel small no matter how many wonderful things I do, no matter how big I act (for I simply must be bigger than the situation) no matter how much I travel, how tolerant I am, how well versed in the mysteries of the world - I will always be a hobbit, a titmouse, a wren.

I took a great criss-cross-country road trip - A trip I have wanted to take for years - where I was completely alone (with my dog) camping, hiking and seeing new places. When I got back to my hometown, let me reiterate, MY hometown, I was brought into a meeting where I was told in so many words that some people feel that I am a person who is inappropriate to work with 13-year-old girls because, in short, I am gay. Never mind the quality of work that I do. Never mind the positive way I interact with the girls. Never mind the way I have carefully albeit imperfectly crafted myself into a "good" role model. I am a little person who must get squashed like a bug. They are big. I am little. They simply must squash me, they must. Human nature.

What do I do? Seriously. Do I make it easier for them to dismiss me by playing the angry dyke (and let me be clear, I am angry)? Do I silently confirm their worst unfounded fears by leaving my job and sulking in my bunker? Do I stay and continue to work with, for or around people I am devastatingly disappointed in and be miserable?

This, I think, is what people don't understand about marginalization. It is not that there is a big-bad dude (or dudette) out there who says and does horrible things to little guys and gals. It is a group, an accidentally powerful group, that gives a less powerful group shit until finally the little people say "uncle" and move away. It isn't overt discrimination that is the most devastating it is quiet, unchecked fear, the things one cannot discuss and grow out of (because it is not politically correct to discuss such things) that keep others down. Who would want a job where you are arround people who hate you? The boss may not be able to fire you, but there are worse things than being fired.

It happens too at family get togethers. Aunts and uncles gush over your sibling's spouse but barely say boohoo to your partner.

I am tired of sitting at the kid table. I feel forced to find a new home, a new job and a new family. And at the risk of sounding like a petulant child; It isn't fair.

Extra Terrestrial (Contains Nudity)

Some things are a long time coming.

When I was four-years-old my mother took me to the movie theatre for the first time. For a first flick my mom really couldn't have picked a better show: ET.

I was scared and thrilled out of my mind.

My mom has since told me that she was really afraid that she had taken me to see a movie that was too heavy for a four-year-old because I didn't say a word after it was over. I walked quietly to the car with her. Sat in my seat. Got buckled in. Deep in thought. She kept an eye on me in the rearview mirror (much of our relationship has happened through the rearview mirror). And it wasn’t until she saw me hold up my index finger and examine it at length then plunge my longest two fingers into my bag of left-over Reese’s Pieces and pull out a candy examine it and pop it into my mouth that she knew I was okay.

Why was ET so engrossing for me? I won’t feign the ability to step back into my four-year-old mind. It is a good movie. I like it to this day. There are a few obvious parallels to my own life: absent father, single mother, younger sister and a misunderstood youth. But, it was more than that. This is a movie that was at the core of my personal cannon as a child.

Why? I loved everything about young Elliot. Everything. I wanted his freckles, his blue jeans, his multi-speed boy bike complete with basket, his dark disheveled hair, his voice, his bedroom, his thermal undershirt and especially his zip-down red sweatshirt. How I pined for my own red sweatshirt. For six years of my life few things would have pleased me more than having thermal underwear and a red sweatshirt, like Elliot. I envied him horribly for having an extraterrestrial friend that understood him, for having a mother who cajolingly accepted his boyish stalwartness and for having an older brother whom he earned the respect, admiration and physical protection of. I wanted to be just like Elliot.

I wanted to be a boy.

My mom for a long time was at wits end with me because I begged her for a “boy haircut,” for “boy swimsuits” and for “boy sneakers.” I cut the hair off of all of my dolls. I gave them black and blue eyes with ball-point pens. I wanted a sailor’s outfit. I snuck off with her fancy silk scarves tied around my waist with a makeshift sword tucked in the knotted-side to play Sinbad.

My mom was very disturbed one day when I asked her whether it was more respectful to clean off your sword after cutting someone's throat or to leave the blood on it. I then went about slitting the throats of all my dolls (complete with lipstick blood) and only stopping to do the messy work of deciding which ones had merited a sword cleaning and which had not.

My birthday requests for cap guns, toy swords, baseball bats, boy bikes and GI Joes were always answered with Barbies, books, dresses, pink bikes and board games. I think she was scared to indulge my personal interests thinking she might encourage me to do things she would later have to break me of. I think, too, she couldn’t stand the thought of her daughter opening a treasure-trove of boyhood in front of all of her friends and family.

She walked a fine-line, indulging my interests in space and nature but over-riding my desires to play male-dominated sports, cross-dress and play war. At the clothing store I would stealthily cross over into the boy section. Avoiding the gaze of my mother and the other adults. I would secretly plant the boy clothes on the girl racks and pretend to come across them there, lift them up and exclaim something like “I found a 6x, mom.”

More than slightly terrified by me, I think my mom was grateful when I started Catholic School and had to wear the stereotypical jumper (as in a skirt) every day. It is hard to put this feeling, which I well remember, into adult words. I was humiliated, embarrassed and devastated. I have often thought that it may well be because of the years of being forced to wear a skirt with my sex constantly exposed to cold winds and lewd boys that I have such a strong aversion to dresses of any kind today. I even find myself losing interest in dating a particular girl once I see her in a skirt.

You can imagine how popular I was in school. Or maybe you can’t. The other children ridiculed me. The teachers taunted me. The rules degraded me.

I routinely got in trouble in school for the following:
1. Wearing illegal shorts or pants under my jumper.
2. Fighting (some people might call this self-defense).
3. Being too out spoken, especially in math and science class.
4. Refusing to participate in religious events.
5. Doing generally unladylike things. These usually were things that were tolerated for the boys.

In 3rd grade I was moved from the accelerated class into the "slow" class. This had nothing to do with my scholastic performance as I was routinely one of the top 5 students in my grade. It was strictly for behavior. I felt I had lost what little I had going for me in school, namely a class I was challenged to learn in. I found myself surrounded by kids who picked their noses and smelled each other's farts. One day a kid in our class stabbed another kid through the ear with a pencil for looking at him funny. I withdrew, literally. I would go to school and leave my coat on and zip it up over the top of my head. I would push my desk to the back of the room and draw fantastical pictures of dinosaurs and dragons. A classmate later told me she thought I was the coolest person in the world because in third grade I had already had enough and said fuck-all to this stupid school.

Unfortunately, I had to continue on in that stupid school until the end of eighth grade. I was regularly beaten up on the playground. My mom gave me private lessons in how to take a punch. And when I got sick of taking it I got in trouble for hitting boys (never did it matter that they had hit me first). I frequently had weekend detentions. I cannot say I ever had a friend in school after 3rd grade. Even my younger sister openly mocked me at recess. I am embarrassed to admit that I am crying as I write this.

The principal at our school suggested my mother get me psychological counseling. Instead she got counseling for herself. I am sure this helped us both, but I sometimes wonder if I might have been happier if I had someone to talk to, especially someone who might have become an informed ally.

I somehow managed to continue to be one of the top students in my grade. Sometimes I think it was through shear luck. I don't remember ever reading a single schoolbook or doing much homework. I read science fiction and historical fiction and I read science books and watched movies about boys. I guess I was just incredibly intuitive because I rarely got less than a 95% on any test or report card and I regularly scored in the 99th percentile on national standardized tests. This last fact eventually saved me from the slow class, though I honestly think that some of my teachers despised me so, and would have liked to see me turnout dumb.

Things continued to go badly through junior high school (which was in the same building). I couldn't understand boy/girl crushes and slept with some boys at a very young age purely out of curiosity. I didn’t know how to dress and we didn’t have much money anyhow. I was extremely competitive, especially with the guys in my class. I luckily got involved in athletics where I felt people genuinely valued my brains and my competitiveness. Towards the end of junior high I had disturbing dreams where I would be a man having sex with a woman or a man having sex with another man or I would switch back and forth from one gender to another in a dream where I was falling or flying and I would wake up thinking I was a boy who could bound over buildings . . . for a minute.

In high school I decided that I was just a radical feminist and that all of my gender problems had been caused by an overly religious society that placed too much importance on traditional gender roles and marriage. I was part right. High school was little bigger, instead of 50 people in my class there were now 100. Unbeknown to me at the time I won the admiration of a lot of people. As a top student and a successful athlete I had a lot of ins with the popular crowd, and though I was never invited to do anything with them socially I was so busy traveling to sporting events and competing for a spot on ever more prestigious teams that I hardly had time to worry about my lack of a social life. But I did worry about it. And I began to write about it in my journal.

The only place I ever felt slightly comfortable in school was in English class and art class where I could talk about my feelings in metaphors and allusions confident that no one understood. If it hadn't been for soccer and basketball where physical contact was mandatory and a little guy I babysat (who was also my best friend) I might have gone the whole four years without ever touching anyone outside of my family.

In the past year several of my classmates have written to me or come up to me someplace and told me how much they always envied ME. Just yesterday I went to the wedding of a gal I went to HS with and she introduced me to her Lesbian mother as one of only two people she had any respect for in HS. I was floored.

Things changed a little when I went to college. I became more adamant that gender stereotypes were harmful to society, but I never seemed to be in a position to actually do anything about it. As a college athlete I was scared of playing into the stereotype that all jocks are dykes. I had a terrible crush on a girl who treated me somewhat callously.

Then, I met KC. After my playing career ended I decided to major in the creative arts because I had this undying urge to say something about myself, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was I needed so desperately to say. As a design student the projects I was given were conservative and focused on professional practices. But I wanted to talk about real things, about oppression, about loneliness, about compassion and kindness and social change. But instead I made a shitload of logos and business cards and websites. And worked, constantly.

And I dated KC for seven years. And we were not good together. And a large part of it is my fault for taking so long to turn around at look at myself and talk from my heart.

So this week I read this book, Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs. I don't know why I picked it up at the bookstore, really. I liked the cover. And I have a friend right now who is a transmale, female to male transsexual, and I think in part I wanted to understand him better. Not the best book in the world, but a personally significant one. There it was in story after story; A young girl who wants to play with tin soldiers, toy trucks, basketballs, who wants to be strong and brave, who is a boy.

And all of a sudden my brain cracked open and out came this little 7-year-old boy, in love with Elliot and stealing gold from dirty pirates. "Hey there, remember me? Remember how happy we were? Remember all the adventures we were going to have? Let’s play. On Guard! Off with your boobs!"

How many times have I written of this overwhelming feeling that I had been asleep for years? I am just now having my first real sexual experiences - as in my first honest sexual experiences. And my ex-partner, KC, who did have real flaws just like the rest of us, has always taken my ambivalence, my detachment and my lack of anything to say so personally, internalizing my own comatose emotional state and assuming it was some deep-felt dissatisfaction with her. But it was me. We would argue for hours without looking each other in the eyes. I had been sleep-walking through life. Feeling invisible, feeling as though I didn’t exist.

So here I am in my hometown again, 27-years-old, alone and just finally ready to go through a real adolescence.

This is Loren Cameron, a famous transsexual body builder, photographer and author. When I saw these photos my soul whimpered, ". . . and I could be like that, too." And it made me happy to not have to feel so envious of male bodies anymore, to know that if a day came when I wanted to work towards becoming something different, I could, but I don't have to, I can do whatever I need to do to be myself.

I resigned my job as a college and youth soccer coach this past week. Some parents had complained about my gender identity (and driven by my house and circulated emails about me and so on and so forth).

I met some nice people tonight. Smart, queer people, in Binghamton! It was a small miracle. And at the end of the night came the big Question. “So, please don’t take this the wrong way, but are you transitioning?” Am I transitioning?

I don’t know. It seems as though there are a lot of things settling on my mind. I don’t have a strong desire to go through hormone treatment and painful repeated operations. But, in a year from now, who knows? I may feel differently. I know a few things for sure though. I am done with this charade. I don’t feel the need to spare anyone else’s feelings anymore. I want my own feelings. I am going to be a boy and a girl. AND I am going to go to graduate school. I am going to work on projects about gender and some day, maybe, the young people I would otherwise love to be working with won't have to wait until they are 27 to find role models they want to emulate.

After a Night in the Meat Market v1

Afterwards, she stood there holding my saran-wrapped face. Weighing it against another face in her other palm as if she had some type of internal system of pulleys and levers that could decipher some all-together hidden value not clearly marked on packaging we come in. She poked the plastic wrapping and my deboned flesh squished together and reinflated slowly clinging to its final protective covering while discharging pent up fluids into a small square odor-absorbing pad in the bottom of my dish. She ran her finger over the plastic and inspected the coloring of my skin. "A little blotchy here and a hair or two I will have to remove before serving her to my guests. She doesn't look like she was a young bitch, this other one is fully grown and had fewer blotches and less hairs, but she is a good 1/8 lb short of meeting my recipe for good face pie." Of course my shopper will have also have to remove cartilage from my nose, unless she is planning something ornamental, and there is the matter of a small once-recurring cyst on the inside of my cheek flesh that will give her guest an unexpected salty-squirt if she doesn't remove it. She throws me into her cart next to potatoes, celery, carrots and we are off to get pie crusts and later from my private bag inside the trunk I can hear the unique ting-a-ling of champagne bottles.

I don't know if you have ever had the experience of being prepared and seasoned before. There was a game my mother used to play with my sister and I as small children. We would be fish and swim around on the carpet in the middle of our bedroom. My mother would sit on the bed looking off into the sky and then all-of-a-sudden swoop down and catch one of us. She would play at deboning us, removing scales, filleting and then my favorite part: salt and peppering us with her fingertips before putting us on the frying pan surface of the bed next to her where we were expected to sizzle-sizzle-sizzle before she lifted us out with a one fisted fork, set us down on her lap plate and gobbled us up ticklishly, then threw our leftovers back into the ocean where we magically became whole fish again and swam around.

Well this is a bit different, because it is for real. And madam is in a hurry. And unlike my mother she doesn't enjoy preparing meat. Starting where the underside of my lip greets my gums she jabs a dull shiv into my mouth and begins prying away the skin from the meat. Skillfully she makes rhythmic back and forth motions just like those used by tenth graders dissecting fetal pigs. Loosen the skin. She has to roll up the sleeves of her fitted white shirt once she gets up to my cheeks and then around to the underside of my ears. She stops there to carefully remove the ears, intact, for later use. She does opt to leave the nose in place as a center piece of the pie. She then lays my fully removed and flattened out face bloody-side up and proceeds to sew my mouth into an inside-out side smile. This is a truly artful touch. She then bludgeons the flesh gently and evenly to make it tender. Then, finally, salt and pepper and some spices too. The rest of my face flesh is blanched and then pulled and stuffed into the crust with potatoes, celery, carrot. My somewhat heavy, but now more pliable and stretched-out skin is laid on top of the filling. She coats the seasoned borders of my visage with a thin layer of egg and then pinches the edges of my face into the lip of the pie pan sealing up the fast. After cooking the final touch is two hard-boiled eggs skillfully wedged into my eye sockets and viola: good face pie!

Homecoming v3

the crackling groan of the hallway stairs
suddenly stirred back to consciousness

it reminds us of life
and of past lives

of travelling and sleeping
under clear moons
under birds of prey

nocturnal passages
untouched by time
unmoving

the train that is always gasping in
the cold valley
jogging in place
breathing thick white air
caught by moonlight
shining off of snow-capped hills

waiting in motion

i came back in some small part
because i knew you were dying

and i wanted to again touch you with my hands
and laugh with you again
and eat food with you and feel the warmth of your home
against the cold night

and move
around
again

before we settle back into this room
forever still in our places
with turkey and carrot soup
to forever be followed by
pumpkin pie and coffee
untouched forever
anticipating food
but never again eating

tick tock

I expect nothing to ever happen again but this:

That we eat until we are full
And then eat some more
pumpkin pie and coffee
that we laugh away the night's black frost

haunted, yes, still,
by the unmovable darkness of our youths
and still, by the dark failures
of our futures in their unmovable certainty

and tonight when we are full
of ourselves and of living
and alone once more
the old tree stairs in the hallway
can mock us away to our dreams

tut-tut

More Poems to Come

I have been slow to put poems up. Forgive me. I will post a whole bunch sometime this week.

Guts v2

Here is what I know I will remember when I am dying
My grandfather pinching the sheets of his hospital bed and later
Fingering the soft line of wet hair at the back of your naked neck
then, hot panting puppy glued to naked side
Until finally, Kim's hands saying goodbye to missing hair

Guts v1

the last time it was just me
and i felt you slipping away
but i was fooled by niceties
you playing with my hair
why does that always get me?

Kim v1

you never called. i drove myself out of gas. fantasized the ability to selfishly delve off of river bridges. couldn't bring myself to eat or work. slowly faded into the plaid pattern of the couch. and woke up a different person. detached. uncaring. alone.

Disease v2

Tanned skin rubs off after a bath.
I remember when I first learned this.
I Worried I had an incurable disease
and began instantly suffering it alone
to save mother's heart from breaking.
It was a disease, just like being tied up
and my fear of confined spaces.
I would invent childhood games.
Let's play pirate. Lets play cops.
I guess I will let you be the pirate.
You be the cop. Tie me up.
Throw a net around me,
Tie my hands around my back
Threaten to peel my skin off
Force me to do things I don't want to do.
It is what I want to do. We were 5 or 9.
These games always went too far.
And my innocent, unknowing cohorts
would get in trouble for torturing me
and I would feel ashamed that I had
misled them thus for my own lusty pleasure.