tonight we eat pears
juice dripping in rivulets
skin upon wet skin

I’m intimidated by the prospect of writing about happiness.

* I had two opportunities to raise my hand in response to questions from Bradford. The second time was when he said, “So is the room queer?” Pretty sure mine was the only hand in the air. Either he didn’t see it on account of the six-footer in front of me, or it wasn’t a good enough hand. It was a gorgeous concert and I’m curiously happy (if hungry) for someone who has a class in six hours so I’ll go with the former. Then he inquired whether any of the guys skateboarding outside were cute.

The first: He asked if anyone had swine flu. He saw my hand that time (again, the only one I noticed). And I kept “that shit the fuck away,” just like he asked.

* Really really wanted to hear River Card.

* Satisfied with a slow Walkabout, followed by Shelia and Quarantined (so, so beautiful).  The first and second had quite a different sound live.

* A lot of unexpected rocking-out on an electric guitar.  Plus harmonica bits.

* Spent 15 on a ugly shirt.

* Surpise of the night: The Selmanaires, the super-late opener-opener/back-up band. Dancey fun. I wasn’t really in the mood to mosh with a bunch of (albeit closeted) fellow flu victims to a Doors cover, but doin a little shake in place to their originals was my kind of good time.  (They didn’t actually play that song in the vid, btw.  I just want you to check out the animal cut-outs.)

I’ll add some pictures of shizz I found on the internet later.

Last night, the GSC/Sexuality and Gender Activism (SaGA)/the wonderful Susan Chambers hosted Selves in Motion, a series of coming out stories, many of them anonymous submissions (like one I read), many of them not about sexuality or gender exactly but abuse or homelessness or doubt or loss or guilt or fear, many of them occurring in an open mic session that lasted the second 40 minutes of the night, 40 minutes built in blocks of tense silence each of which climaxed in applause as one person rose from the crowd and told us why they were there, what they needed to say, what was real to them right then, right now, and then minutes of silence, and then another story, then silence, then a story, a few sentences, some rambling narratives, the words (and I paraphrase) “this is really terrifying, because no one else knows this” from one person.  And then another.  And then applause, and in the applause but also in the silence these waves of validation and acceptance and community.  These things come in waves.  You can feel them.  And did I mention the Oles?  They were there.  A busload of ‘em.

I did not prepare anything for Selves in Motion.¹ Nor did I speak during the open mic.  And maybe the fact I didn’t feel the need to share anything means that I had nothing that needed to be shared.  I feel no burning need to do so now.  But maybe that’s because I experience few things in terms of “burning needs,” and maybe the things that need to be shared I experience more like a dull void, if that makes sense, a suffocating cushion, doubt and a sense of inevitability wound so tightly together that it’s not like what I could say would actually change anything for me (or anyone else) in the long run, like I would only alienate myself and this isn’t the way to face these things anyway.

Maybe I was worried about status, whatever status I have to lose.  You know.  Since the cool uncomplicated acceptance of friends and the possibility of dating are great.  And I’m paranoid enough about what people might say about me behind my back.

So, here’s the disclaimer I thought of before the tone of the open mic session felt too light and when I still didn’t know what exactly I might talk about:

“I’m not sure what I’m going to get out of saying these things now, but what the hell.”

We could try a few things I would have no problem telling most people, given the right context:

I want you to know that it’s okay.

I will not judge you, categorize you, assign you a place.

I want you to feel at home.  I believe I can speak for others when I say that.  We want you to have a community, to have support, to have friends who can relate to you.

I want you to speak with your own voice without worrying what secrets it might betray, what burdens it might disclose.  I want you to be comfortable with questions.  I want you to grow, I want all of us to grow, without fearing the personalities we are coming to own.

Maybe there are problems with those of us who have been out for so long we’ve lost touch with our closeted selves.  Maybe we’re too quick to forget vulnerability, doubt, fear, the pain of being scrutinized.  Or at least their previous intensity.

Maybe I’m not as empathetic as I would like to be, maybe it’s been too long since hearing someone say if he had a gay kid, he would beat the gay out of him, or hearing someone else impersonate a ‘homo’ or a ‘faggot’ (or my favorite, a ‘homogayfaggot’) as weak, and vain, and motivated only by desire for (receptive, and therefore, in the homophobe’s mind, feminine) sex.  Maybe I was too successful at developing a defense tactic that avoided most of the emotion these ideas could trigger: the thought they’re not talking about me.  Even as I went back to staring at this guy or that in class.

Maybe it’s been too long since someone asked me if I’d heard about Jesus, or knew who went to hell (or since I spent hours on religioustolerance.org).  Maybe it’s been too long since I took the separation of church and state very, very personally in ways I couldn’t confess to anyone.  Maybe it’s been too long since I played smear the queer.  Maybe it’s been too long since the last time I told my dad someone I knew (and he’d met) just came out as gay or bi, and he told me he wished I hadn’t said that.  Maybe it’s been too long since I went to bed each night with the mantra ‘I’m not gay, God.’  I think I still did this for a while after I declared myself agnostic.

Maybe we need each other, because many of us, queer, bi, gay, out, ‘out,’ or otherwise, continue to feel isolated now and then.  But each time we see someone else begin to feel comfortable with themselves, it means something.  It means something to me, anyway.  And I will try not to lose sight of the places we are coming from, even as I don’t want them to hurt us anymore.

* * *

From time to time I will plug others’ writing I like here.  This is by Lenelle Moïse, a short piece I transcribed from a CD purchased during her 2007(?) to Carleton.

March 21, 1996
Age: 18 yrs., 1 month, 13 days

My little brother and I slept in the car our first night away, his body all crooked over the armrest, his head against my chest. Cars aren’t bad places to sleep, so long as you can find a spot away from strangers and away from cops who’ll tap on your window and ask you questions and write down your plates and your vitals and retreat back to their car to call just the people you don’t want and then send you home to your parents or a shelter or force you to make the tough decisions when really, all you want is to make a peace with the last tough decision you made, the first big, really big thing you’ve ever done.

We’re in the ‘88 Accord I bought with a little help from Mom six months ago. Years of summer jobs and Walgreens translated into a tape deck and no A/C. You develop this keen and selective discipline when you find a purpose. I knew a guy who saved up for a pistol. Last time I saw him was winter of junior year. Maybe the last time Mom and Dad’ll see us was yesterday morning. We all have our decisions to make. Some of us are just better at commitment than others.

After I picked up Jake and we came home for extra sandwiches and hidden suitcases, I considered swiping some of their tapes from the living room cabinet while he busied himself locating winter clothes and exchanging parting words with stuffed animals.  Five minutes into sorting through Michael Jackson and Willy Nelson and Tina Turner I realized all of this would have to stay behind. I kept my books, my binders, this cloth-bound Mead Five Star notebook — a “composition” book really, but I hate that word — all these things in my L.L. Bean backpack, ever the packrat. I looked at the house, paused in my doorway, hesitated with my hand on the doorknob before their empty room. Then we left. A page ripped from this notebook, the message simple, left folded and tucked beneath the phone on Mom’s kitchen desk.

late august wind
and god’s given us nothing to do but
drink on the porch in frumpy second layers
eyes fixed on puget sound
tonight like every night
watching the sun blow up, all cinematic and poignant
speaking of superheroes and reconstituted dreams and childhood things as
ferries punctuate
our silence

So a few weeks ago I came across some Morrissey interviews and began drafting a post about depressing music, or music of depression, or anyway music that I’ve sought out when not chipper or that can induce states of unchippertude. I was going to give a brief(?) overview of my relationship with music by a few artists — say, Cat Power, Joy Division, Radiohead, an old fave Velvet Underground track, the Mountain Goats — and then end with something cathartic about how we need people like Morrissey who wave flowers in the faces of demons, theirs and ours. Like THIS.*

Buuut I don’t really feel like it. Maybe some other time, minus the element of surprise and all that.  Instead, I want to share some songs that have made me truly happy in the last few months. Some of these are new to me, some I’ve been listening to for ages, just when I’ve needed them.  The list starts … nnnnnow:

Boy Toy - Starfucker (Jupiter)

God, I love this. Just listen to it. And just look at these guys, all hipstered the fuck out. How can you not love them? How can you not love these lyrics?  How can you not love yourself?

*

Snookered - Dan Deacon (Bromst)

Sure, the lyrics may not be Deacon’s perkiest, but stick around. Stick around for the section beginning @ about 4:48.

*

Diamonds Dub – Tangoterje (remix of Paul Simon’s “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes”)

PLUS

I’ve got a near-spiritual relationship with a few songs on the original album (referenced here). But when I heard my roommate playing this for the first time, I must have jizzed in my pants or something. All this warmly swirling intoxicatingly danceable swirlingly warm sound. I think I just described a toilet. This is not a toilet.

*

14.8 morning

When you spend so much of your day alone with plants you realize how few of your favorite songs you actually know. You cycle through the refrains, perhaps a striking verse by a favorite artist, but it’s really not much. What sticks with you more than anything else are radio standards, comfort songs, nostalgia tracks. You try classic rock and confront the fact it’s been maybe seven years since you got the Led out. You turn to reggae, or Bob Marley rather, and for thirty minutes there are these three little goddamn birds on your hypothetical doorstep (yours is always concrete, a one-story house, w/ or w/o exterior doormat), saying ‘this is my message to you-ou-ou.’ That and the chorus, as it turns out, is all you can remember.

You sing, nonetheless. You sing. Funny how we either have to be enclosed with (in a shower) or surrounded by the elements (outdoors) before we feel comfortable singing. Even in your apartment, you sing a bar or two just short of full-volume and then catch yourself, cognizant of neighbors or outsiders somewhere just within earshot, and then volume and range and pitch and lyrics all go as one. Now that you’re outside, alone with the aforementioned elements — specifically, dirt to shovel — you have free rein to belt it to your heart’s content.

Every now and then, it’s folk tunes, sea shanties, the occasional Irish drinking song. Or maybe just the only Irish drinking song you know.

||: Ohhh, McTavish is dead and his brother don’t know it.
His brother is dead, and McTavish don’t know it.
The both of them dead,
And in the same bed!
And neither one knows that the other is dead! :||
(Each verse 10-15 bpm faster than last, until someone combusts.)¹

But today it’s snippets from this collection of obscure phrases you haven’t thought about in years, one of those albums that you had trouble listening to once upon a time because every note resonated with thoughts of one person. (Music has such an emotional grip on you, stronger and more immediate than any other medium.)

Standing on the seaweed water
Semen stay-ains the mountaintops
Semen stay-ains the mountaintops

Sometimes you feel ashamed about your attachment to the album’s most puerile track, what’s perhaps the least metaphorically intricate, but it’s just so … catchy, the way only two-minute songs you want to repeat forever can be.

—

–Hey, Erik.

–Hey dude, what’s up?

–Not much. Just, uh. Frying some tofu.

–Tight.

–Yeah. You?

–Nothin. Just chillin.

–Yeah. That’s cool. I’m … I’m kinda bored dickless.

–I’m sorry to hear that, dude.

–It’s cool.

– …

–Um.

– …

–You wanna like … drink?

–Yeah, okay.

–Cool.

–Cool.