Petrocalypshit

Post Election Blue Explained

2004-11-05T00:59:42Z

Hey Postqueer, I wrote this for my mental health journal to explain how I'm feeling after the election. Hope it's insightful for readers here.
------

One woman, writing about her feelings after the election, said that she felt like she'd had her purse stollen, and kept remembering things she’d lost. She knew her credit cards were gone, and her drivers licence, but Oh! those photos she’d just had developed, and Oh! the spare set of keys hidden in the side zip-up compartment. I’ve been doing my best to steer clear of the election post-mortum blogs (on the “Internets"), but what little I read since the die was cast left me with a similar feeling.

That feeling came up a few minutes ago when speaking with my friend Kittykat. Kittykat is a friend and fuck buddy of mine who I met when he smiled at me at a bus stop several months ago. Kittykat is just past his year point recovering from heroin addiction. He was coming back from the welfare office, and called because we’d planned to meet today. The bitch at GA had just kicked him off welfare because he started going to school for Nursing, and was receiving a paltry ammount of financial aid. She told him that it looked to her like he was trying to “pad his bank account” on the government’s dime. As if he had a bank account to pad (neither of us do, never enough to put in one), or was doing anything other than trying to drag himself out of poverty and addiction by learning a socially useful trade. Kittykat said that he feels like shooting up each of the five times he’s seen her in the last two month’s.

Hearing this ugly news today, I think about how it’s horribleness is situated in the larger context of the election. If Kittykat is having this hard a time as a queer, black, ex-florist, recovering-addict in San Francisco today, imagine how the slope of his climb is going to change in the next four years under the Bush administration. Do you think he’s going to have an easier or a harder time as he struggles to turn his life around? I fear for him, and for myself. We both have displayed toughness and endurance in our lives, but both are, essentially, of delicate sensitivities. We were intended for lives where we are nurtured, pampered, and allowed to explore aesthetic spaces and imagine new constructs. We’re wasted trudging against the tide of our societies’ hostility, like spent jellyfish rolling along a beach. It is too much for us to bear.

My housemate deals by completely and utterly shutting out any political news. He didn’t read about the election beforehand. Any news he gets is overheard unwillingly. When he saw me looking shellshocked on the couch yesterday, it didn’t occur to him that my despondency might be related to the election. My mother uses this same defence mechanism. I cannot.

I remember watching television sitting at the foot of my parents bed, as we did then. It was the movie “Coma", a medical thriller about hospital administrators who put patients into a coma while they’re under anaesthetic for surgury. The body disappears after the “unsuccessful” surgury and they are stored suspended from their bones by fishing wire (so they dont’ get bed sores) in vast warehouses and sold for their parts. Anyway, there’s a scene where a hit man starts up a conversation with a janitor in the basement of the hospital, and then pushes him into a wall full of electrical switches electrocuting him spectacularly.

Upon seeing this monsterous act as a child (maybe 12-13 years of age) I snapped and ran out of the room, aghast that anyone would want to hurt the janitor, and even worse would pretend that he was just having a pleasant conversation, while knowing he was just waiting for a way to make it look like an accident. I was furrious with my parents for watching such a horrible thing as if it were entertainment. It took them some time to calm me down, and to this day, I remember it vividly. I can’t say I’ve changed my opinion about it.

Sometimes when I’m sad or depressed someone, in conversation, will question me why I feel that way. Often I’ll brush away the question by pretending I have no idea why I feel badly. Sometimes I’ll make an attempt to explain something of the context of my sentiments. When I do people will often look at me pathetically, incredulous that “politics” would be something that could make me feel horrible. Their derision is wearying to me.

Think how upsetting it was for me to behold the fate of the janitor in “Coma". Now think of how many people are going to be affected by four more years of Bush. You can say that who’s president makes no difference, that they’re all the same, and that it’s not worth worrying about it. But that’s not really true, is it? It’s true that republocrat or demublicans – both are parties of the rich and enemies of the people (like the hit man in “Coma"). But they are different to a degree. And that 2-3 degree slice of difference widens out here by the pie crust to hit a rather wide swath of people. With George Bush et al, those 2-3 degrees of difference from Kerry mean a huge amount of destruction and suffering. This suffering will hit everyone, even the rich who benefit from it financially (they need clean air and reality-based commentary too), but mostly it will affect those in the underclasses, then the working class, then the managerial class, in that order of magnitude.

So while I could possibly make the same choice as my housemate and my mother to avoid considering this destruction, except in specific incidences (say for a client or friend), to do so would be to live with blinders on, to shut down my humanity, and to live in forced ignorance and coldness. I am able to shutdown this way to a limited extent, but I can’t keep my mind off my people. I am one of the people who think about such things. I’m a considerate person in that way. It’s a point of sanity that I do consider such things. Psychologically, my problem is not my refusal or inability to shut out the suffering around me, but in my inability to bear what I see.

Alas, poor Oberin, I knew him well Queertoast

2004-10-16T04:34:33Z

Hey Y'all. I haven't posted since last year. It's nice to be back. I wrote this in response to some postings by Queertoast who goes to school at Oberlin College where I grew up. This is a bit of nostalgia on my part triggerd by his writing. Aparently he used to be chair of the LGBT-PDQ Union or whatever they call it now. It used to be the Gay Union. (Inclusion is a beautiful thing except linguistically.)

I'm sad, sick, and bored tonight, and looking for some perking up. Decided to force myself to read LJ, which I generally don't have the patience to do. I was hit by a blast of pleasant nostalgia hearing Queertoast talk about his life and gripes with Oberlin. I'm a former Oberlin Townie and Faculty (nay Administration) Brat. I was there from 1972 to 1987 or so. Been back once or twice. Dream about it alot. Miss the egg chairs at Mudd Library. Remember when Mudd was being built. Got my first start on the Internet in the Irvin E. Houck computing center. Faculty had "F" accounts, Students had "S" accounts, and a few of us facbrats had "Z" accounts on the vast an aincent Xerox/Honeywell Sigma 9 computer which took up a room the size of the bridge on the Enterprise D. Our accounts we cherished with all our hearts. They allowed us to play the original colosal cave adventure game on aincent Anderson Jacobson AJ860 terminals which spewed reams of fanfold computer paper for each command. I typed letters to friends on the old card punch machine. It took a stack of cards to make a letter which had to be red one line per card. We had LiveJournal style communities back then too. We would whittle our afternoons away madly e-mailing each other with gossip, fantasies, flames, and profundities.

When I was still in high school (OHS) I spent all my time after school on campus with my College friends. I remember the first time I set foot in the Gay Union. I was probably 15 or so. Must have walked around and around the floor in Wilder where the office was. Kept passing the open door, vastly too terrified to make the actual entry. Finally some woman in the Gay Union office noticed me looking suspicious and asked if she could help me. "I'm looking for the Gay Union" I stammered with a reddening face. "Uh, this is it," she replied looking at me with either suspicion or pity. I went inside and looked around awkwardly before sittting down. The people inside glanced at me uncomfortably before continuing their conversation.

I eventually became comfortable being there, and met my first "experience" there. He was an Episcopalian seminarian, so I thought I'd try some of his. He snuck me beer at the Tap House (one of three legal places to drink in our dry town) before snogging gloriously til 4am when he walked me up the frosted tree-lined Prospect St. to my house.

As part of my self-education in the ways of gayness I ordered a book from the Alyson publications catalog at the Gay Union and called "One Teenager in Ten". Since I couldn't have it sent to my house, I had it sent to the Gay Union. This turned out not to be such a hot idea either, because I failed to consider that my dad, being an Associate Dean of Students, was the guy who ran the Student Union in Wilder Hall and advised all the student groups including the Gay Union. Some poor workstudy peon at the front desk was sorting the mail one day, and said out loud to his co-peon, "What is Clark Drummond's son doing getting mail at the Gay Union?" My dad just happened to be walking by, and said, "I'll take that."

I was home when he got back that day. I was acustomed to dropping whatever I was doing when mom or dad came home. I scanned my memory to see if I had done the vacuuming or whatever chore was mine. I prepared to look busy. Instead of heading to his room, I heard him veer toward mine. Alarms went off in my head, but I couldn't think of anything I'd done wrong yet that day. Then I saw the package in his hand. This is how I came out to my parents.

He came in and showed me what he was holding. My life flashed before my eyes. I realized I had about 1500 miliseconds to decide how I was going to handle this. Did I come clean or lie furiously? I decided to lie, but by that point I only had ~450 miliseconds left before I had to respond and I couldn't think of anything convincing. He asked me if I was gay, and I said "Yeah" like it was no big deal. Like I thought he already knew. Like I couldn't imagine it would be an issue. My words were defiant despite the fact that I felt like a fallen soufle on the inside. And I was still searching for a convincing lie.

Mom came home shortly afterward from her job as psych nurse at the county mental health center, and she got in on the fun. It felt like the Nuremberg trials. They didn't say "You're a dirty sinner and you're going to get AIDS and die", but they said the liberal parent equivelent... something about them not wanting me to "limit my options". This meant the same thing--"Don't be gay". Things were awkward for awhile, then they got over it. And we're still close. Telling them I'm HIV+ was worse in most ways.

Oberlin is one of those places where all the geeky kids, whom nobody liked in high school, suddenly realize they have social options. In my time they all glommed on to each other forming one sticky, messy uber-clique. Ours even named itself, the "Kinsey Group". One statistician amongst us even went so far as to screen t-shirts with all our intitals, our Kinsey scale rating (0-6 homo-hetero), with a nice graph showing the mean, mode, and average. We had group gropes on a bare matress in the basement of Keep Co-op. We had giggle fests in the lounges of South Hall. We checked our e-mail everyday (this is 1984-86 mind you) eagerly awaiting the latest issue of "Pulp" one of our members ongoing fantasy serial relating mostly to us and our shenanegins of course. I met my first boyfriend, I called him my soulmate, Matt. He was a geeky pianist from Syracuse who loved Mahler and me. I would sneak him into my parents house and we would cuddle on my bed, or in his bed, or in the practice rooms at the Conservatory, or in the listening rooms at the Conservatory Library, or the egg chairs at Mudd Library, or ... you get the idea.

I remember being fourteen and doing periodical searches for "gay" and coming across a Gay rag from Toronto called "the Body Politic". It was one of the pioneering gay newspapers, but I didn't know that. I would ferry stacks of these up to the egg chairs and avidly scan each issue looking for pictures of gay people. There's one. "Oh my God, is that what gay people look like?" I would ask myself. I had recently decided that I was a homo, but I didn't know if I was gay or not. I wanted to see what gay people were like. Seems reasonable to me both then and now. I've since decided that I'm pretty much a homo, but I'm only part gay.

For me there were several stages of dawning realization of my queerness or whatever you want to call it. The first stage was fantasizing about guys and realizing I had better not let anyone know. Then I realized that I didn't feel a part of all the flirting and bragging going on with my school mates. I was not a part of their scenes and I didn't respond to their cues. Then I made the connection between being called faggot or gay and the fact that I fantasized about guys. These two phases let to a sort of void of identitylessness. I realized I was different and it felt alienating and lonely. I didn't think of myself as gay, or really know that was anything other than an insult. I just knew I wasn't like everyone else.

I remember a seemingly interminable period of my adolescence where I would haunt the campus like a ghost watching the happy, studious, stressed, giggling, or flirtatious students going about their routines. I felt so far away from them. The seemed so self-posessed, so confident, so capable and directed. I would sit behind rows of them at the dollar movies (one of my dad's many contributions to Oberlin life) at Kettering or performances at Finney Chapel or Hall Auditorium and watch them as close as I could get. I would observe their banter, their stride, their shifting from cheek to cheek as the movie wore on. I would smell them, listen to them, and silently, achingly lust after them. One time I nearly reached out to touch the thigh of one of them. It was so close in the folding auditorium chair. There was no glass between us. It would have been so easy. But I stopped myself from doing this by the excercise of an intense burst of will. I knew somehow that this would be a bad idea.

Slowly I made the connection that people who fantasize about other guys are 'gay'. It came as a surprise to me that I might be a gay person. I had no idea what gay people were like. That's why I was so interested in the pictures in the Body Politic. I scaned each face and body for clues as to what I would become. I showed equal avidity for photos of myself. I would search my own face to see how I looked to other people in the hopes that I could learn who I was by how others saw me. Identity is such an arbitrary and slippery thing. By the time I found the Gay Union I had already established myself as a gay person to myself. Now I commenced meeting other gay people and learning about the political and social meanings of a gay identity.

My sexuality blossomed after I found the Gay Union and the Kinsey Group. I came to see myself as a savior of sorts for all the pitiable and over-worked and over-caffienated careerbound students. I wasn't quite chicken soup for their soul, it was more like chicken dinner in my hole. I remember bathing, as I was wont to do, and pouring my mother's vanilla extract overmyself in the bath. I then put on my softest chamois shirt and would langorously haunt the hallways of the library, dorms, and conservatory. When I found a cute guy, I would plop myself down near him and waft in his direction while looking up too many times. I don't think I ever got any dates that way, but I do feel that psychicly I had an impact. It was a strike against uptight academicism in favor of boundless sensuality. At age 36, I'm still on a mission.

Short Story: Anibal Creature

2003-12-30T20:51:25Z

I was lying on the futon couch in Anibals livingroom, waking up slowly to my hangover after a late night bar crawling. I heard a unususal sucking sound from his room, so I knocked on the door to see what it was. After recieving no reply, I opened the door to behold Anibal being unseamed at the abdomen by a glistening brown tentacled creature that had aparently been living unbeknownst to me in Ani's body. The creature pulled itself outside of Ani's still hot insides, leaving Ani's soft amber skin lying on the wet bed like a used condom. I was surprised that there was so little blood, just a wet mucous covering the bed and now drying and flaking. It seemed to late for Anibal, I couldn't imagine him surviving the experience. I decided I had better monitor the creature, perhaps it's continued existence represented some hope for my friend.

I was relieved that the beast took little interest in me. It quivered on the bed for 20 minutes or so gathering strength before striking out across the hardwood. It quickly had a runin with some dust bunnies which seemed to irritate it's newly exposed skin. After picking the lint off itself, the thing moved differently, higher in the air so as to avoid anymore problems. It moved like a inchworm by reaching and contacting. It turned into the livingroom and toward the light on the porch. After making a mess on the sliding glass door, it figured out how to slide it open. It moved into the open air on the porch and inspected the potted plants, sampling a few leaves which it spat out, and trying a few escargot snails which it seemed to like. It attempted to climb over the railing but was either afraid of heights, or of the plants in the garden below. I suspect it was afraid of the plants, because it could have easily tentacled it's way down the side of the building.

It came back inside and explored the kitchen, looking worse than any bad dog on the counter as it pored through the cabinetry and refridgerator. I felt a twinge of hunger myself as it pawed through my yogurt. After eating it fell into repose in the sink with the water runing. I was forced to intervene to prevent the sink from overflowing. It was disturbed by my movement, and attempted to go out the back door but was intimidated by the egun, who aparently had experience with such creatures. It tryed the front door, but was cowed by esu and the Pomba Gira. It settled on the throw rug in the bathroom and fell asleep.

I decided I'd better find another place to live and gathered up my stuff. It's strange how you can be friends with someone for years and never know what's really inside them. I have hope that this will turn out to be just another life transition for Ani, and that he will come back to a place where we can be friends again.