Elisions and Traces

Yes, I'm a beast (and I feast when I conquer)

2011-11-07T23:43:00.000-08:00

Tonight I am hungry.

Tonight I wrote out of rage.
And love.
And fear.
And guilt.

I got out about 2 1/2 solid pages.
Beginning to clear the brush out of the way of my fire.
I will burn this shit down!
And I won't last on kindling.
I need cold, hard, wet boughs.
So much arrogant timbre to reduce to ash.
Ha!

Still hungry.

(you gave me strength, gave me hope for a life time)

How could you let yourself down like this?
How did I help with that?
Why didn't I see beyond myself?
(I'm a bitch)
How could I not see beyond myself?

Tonight I tried to write a distance between my success and your failure.
(I can feel myself giving up)
I tried to project myself, into words, into a future where I write myself out of the pain of this attachment.
(this time...)
But, I have no taste for such efforts.

A hunger that begins to eat itself.
(Alone, all these riches...)

Where are you?
(I drove for miles)
Did I bury you?
In what?
the sloppy cement of expectations?
the moist soil of intimacy?
the ungiving steel of knowledge?
(I never was satisfied.)

Did I fuck you up?

No amount of pages write away this gnawing question.
No distance is global enough.
No pop song reassures.
A hunger that cannot be exorcised.

Here, then:
the pyre of my ambition.
(to find myself)
In the flames of a memorial?

Is it only possible to honor you in the form of a sacrifice?
(can't silence these voices in my head)
A past in need of redemption.
(('save me'))

2011-08-03T01:04:00.001-07:00

Today I found myself wishing I were in a public stall while I took a shit so I could imagine the Writer next to me, beating off to the obscene noises I was making.

A strange way to say you've been missing someone.

Reading Massumi and reading Arendt and reading Deleuze and reading Bifo. Fuuuuuck.

I miss my friends.

I feel like Reagan or something. That's what post-alpha means? Suturing the semi-automaton, half-a-person amputee status of life into the desire for completion. Still, always wondering: where is the rest of me?

How many of us are just bad actors, then?

Autistic, like.

I have to figure out a way to write a paper I feel I've read myself beyond. It feels like regression, an anachronistic in-folding to imagine myself writing it.

Chew.it.up. SPITITOUT!!!

catches, snags, stickiness, chalky rustiness. A tear, a rip, a shlop or a creak. All betray the machine is running.

The ball as part-subject: the foot as transductor, the field and polarizing goals as inductors, the ball as catalyst: the play of the game... moves.

I wanted to hear more about the rules. Autistic as I am, I wanted to know more about the rules. Not because I'm, like, a queer negationist (the negative of my oppressor is my freedom, whatever that means), trapped in the logic of repression (transgression yields pleasure, pleasure is unruly, unruly is freedom), but because I'm one of these queer kids stuck and creaking, snagged and caught, between text and image, between new and old media, unable to quite yet synthesize a bridge--or better still, a logic--that would render rule-making fluid (again), playful (again), loose and easy (again?).

I like you to s.p.e.l.l.-i.t.-o.u.t. and then I like you to let me rewrite it back to you. to get the ball rolling. To begin a relational correspondence.

The conjunctive language of the body is often discovered as a "missed connection" ad. I read it too late. I'm looking for a connection. FASTER!

SLooooW down.

Slow down? I feel like a zombie. Like a classical zombie. Not a contemporary zombie, tweaking and speeding, ravenous, rabid. A pre post-alpha zombie: somewhat pathetic, slow, hungry, but not quite there. (the beauty of "Zombieland": classical zombies, contemporary post-political world.)

I was so obvious, it seems, in that class. She read me... (like a book?)

the email that needs editing (story of my life?)

2011-07-28T19:06:00.000-07:00

Dear XXX and XXX,

Thank you so much for your respective guidance! Unfortunately my computer crashed and I was (literally) disconnected until just recently. Please pardon my regrettably delayed reply!

This paper, in the mean time, has just been stewing in my head!

@XXX: thank you so much for the references! I actually found your deployment of Barthes' very helpful for my own project (i.e., his schematization of an affective, amorous "Image-Repertoire" in _LD_). I was also thinking of Genet--initially I was going to draw on Bersani's _Homos_ (reading his "Gay Daddy" against Genet's _Querelle_), but that is probably better-suited for a larger project. I'm am absolutely tickled that you sent me to Hocquenghem--he was the joint that led me to booting Deleuze/Guattari (as it were)--I'm in the thick of Massumi's _Parables for the Virtual_ (an excellent read!).

Before my computer crashed I'd been pursuing the historical link between Freidkin's film "Cruising" and a collection of interviews Foucault gave in the early 80s--one in particular conducted in concert with an "A. Wilson"--who, to be best of my ability to track this person down, seems to have also written a critical, Marxian-influenced review of Friedkin's "Cruising" (attached). It is in this context, I want to argue, that S/M becomes relevant for Foucault as a politically salient practice of the ethics of the care of the self as a modality of cultivating and "using" pleasure.

(This paper is also a first effort at pushing-back on the general assumption that there is an enigmatic schism between Foucault's 'early, political' work and his 'later, ethical' concerns--such an interpretation, I want to argue, is only sustainable to the extent that these 'gay' interviews are ignored.)

I'm keen on amplifying the role that institutions play for Foucault in these interviews--both the specific spaces of the gay leather/S&M scene (clubs, theaters, parks) as well as broader institutions like the family, the police/law, and even the 'public sphere' as a realm permeated with "sex" (in the way Warner/Berlant cast "sex in public"). I want to ultimately argue that Foucault's "ethical" concerns are misunderstood if not appreciated within the context of a political project that, as it were, is engaged in "queering" institutions rather than eliding their importance.

On a 'textual' level, this concern is dramatized in the film "Cruising": absent meaningful alterations in mass-mediated cultural circulations of 'gay desire' the relays that loop queer to criminal and criminal to (sexually) pathological and sexual perversion back to queer sexuality (etc.), the potential over-ripe in the rhizomatic nodes of S/M pleasure cannot actually constitute an enduring political challenge. These loops produce the killer, police brutality, and ultimately 'pervert' Pacino's 'gay desire' into the paradigm of the Repressive Hypothesis (i.e., prohibition and transgression, a dynamic animated by the affective experience of _punishment_). Crucially, these loops operate "within" the scene of cruising, 'infecting' the flow of (gay) desire by routing it through these nodes of affective intensity, and are not easily 'external' to them--they are, as it were, 'supplemental' (i.e., they 'haunt' but are not determinative of the scene--there is never any one differance).

Of course, Foucault is keen to resist the project of liberal assimilation--he demands the cultivation of new legally forceful protections at the same time he proposes the "inverting" or "queering" of pre-existing institutions (i.e., when he proposes inverted adoption as a recognized form of intimate relationality). That is, he is attentive to the important function hierarchical (sovereign) institutions play in the capillary circuits knitting together a micro-physic of power. Further, he is eager to figure S/M as a practice of pleasure that is _creative_: one does not 'punish' the desire for perverse pleasure in S/M (in which case S/M--to the extent that it is a performance of this desire for punishment and the satisfaction of this desire--is itself a perverse practice); instead one 'cultivates' pleasures--as if outside the rubric of prohibition/transgression. (On this front I'm influenced by Eve Sedgwick's introductory remarks to _Touching/Feeling_, esp. as she inveighs against a Lacanian figuration of desire and jouissance).

On a 'meta' level, then: the protests that, as it were, ''haunted'' the film's production (you can hear the protesters blowing whistles underneath the dialogue track, for instance), are symptomatic of a certain political _failure_ that, today, is couched theoretically as 'homonationalism'--the protests perform the refusal to publicly demand formal (legal) institutional protection of marginal and precarious subjects of desire, demonstrating through an identification with 'normal' (the politics of respectability) the desire to secret away 'shameful' members of the (gay) community. That is: the protesters approach the leather/S&M scene with the same set of I-R resonances as the police and the killer in Friedkin's film (i.e.: the loops that suture queer to criminal to pathological to sexually perverse to queer again).

I want to argue that it is in _this_ context, then, that Foucault's treatment of S/M becomes politically salient: rather than a politics that encourages the proliferation, and 'endurability,' of queer(ed) institutions, the (American) Gay Liberation project falters before the demands of the Law (to be 'acceptable,' 'recognizable,' 'patriotic,' 'non-threatening,' etc.). In other words, S/M is a strategic node of resistance for Foucault in these interviews to the extent that these practices, those who perform and enjoy them, and the spaces that enable them to complicatedly confront _both_ a hetero-normative imperative to "normalize" _and_ the political tendency amongst queers to respond to this demand, rather than to the potential to cultivate novel institutions "outside" the norm immanent to the practice of S/M.

I'm hoping this all holds together. Anyway, thanks again to both of you for your respective leads, advice, and simply for your responsivity--I greatly appreciate it! Perhaps once all is said and done I can send a draft along to you?

The Gods Gifted (Poisoned) Me With a Wrath So Great, Its Power Unspeakable...

2011-06-23T23:16:00.000-07:00

(...but it was only potent against that which I loved.)

I've been neglecting the medium I am attached to most: the written word. These dead letters, so many corpses of meaning, compiled and assorted, lining ditches cut by paragraphs, amassing around so many miscarried intentions, the significance of which is forever buried (while these ghastly bodies lay exposed and naked on the bare page).

I'm southbound to Marion, crafting my handwriting, a little bit funky, but over-laden with melancholy.

I am killing myself with the thick soup of nostalgia, spoonful by spoonful, choking on What-Could-Have-Been.

Good. I want to paint it black. I want to see it bleed. It. Me. That IT I can't bear to bare any more. Fuck me.

But IT is tethered to this cluster of events that wear your skin and bare your teeth when I see them seeming to smile. You would tear my face off. A cynical smile. You think it flashes love, but I see only the explosion of a muzzle. And that after I feel the tenderness of your insincerity rip through my chest. First the feeling, then the sight, then then sound.

It is deafening, the noise that floods the space between my desire and your dispassion. It is torrents of static and calamitous waves, hurling boulders. You don't hear it over the bubbling of your laughter. You can't feel it, so blithely leaping from foothold to foothold, the rush of wind against your thick, impenetrable hide. Those impermanent foundations are pouring out of my hemophilic body! Thin-skinned and paling, I can only watch your movements. You no longer fly into the wound you open, into this terrible space you've punched through my body. Away, and up--or down, no matter: still just away--your lurching body is frantic and harried, tired too, but hungry for escape.

How many scenes of your leaving must I die before IT dies, too? And trapped here in these miserable confines--these atrocious symbols! A, B, C, D, E, (F-this)--these scenes multiply and amplify and ricochet and intensify until... what? will they ever COLLAPSE?! What obscene power is this, animating this hateful form?

It Took Time (fine for now)

2011-05-18T21:26:00.000-07:00

"Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral."--Threepenny Opera

But we, we are so gluttonous, over-full, over-ripe, bursting, so rotund, fleshy, massive, just so much of this excess! The sculptor's chisel is glistening, humming precision, fresh from the whetstone, ready to philosophize with a hammer!

(We're all faltering. How'd I help with that? If it's all or nothing, then let me go.)

To be so amorphous, massive, excessive. To be so ready for the striking imposition of form--to lust for such deprivation!

On Being Boring and Stuff

2011-04-23T18:34:00.000-07:00

I am deriving a cruel delight from being able to turn away from you.

Not only in those moments when I am solicited by you. But also in these moments when I am tempted by my own sentimentality, tempted, too, by the desire to turn against myself, turning toward you.

And so I turn away from this impulse, and turn toward the work before me. Which comes before me, and which will come after me, even if I turn away from it.

I'm not quite sure that I am turning toward myself, per se. But I am turning toward something that I can live with at least. It is workable.

And some how, being able to put you aside, for long enough to get on with what is in front of me, is a cruel pleasure. I'm being my own best Daddy.

Next week is going to be really crazy, and really stressful. Apply for jobs, looking for a place to live. Writing another paper (though this one will be much, much easier I am pleased to report. I am able, I think, to approach it with a more generous spirit of inquiry than I was before). I want to be a good standing member of my community, which sounds so cheesy to write out loud, but I suppose is true. I've been slow on this one, and it's been a mistake. I've nothing really pulling me so terribly strongly up here. I'm leaving, after all.

And it's strange, I suppose I'm ready to leave, too. Last night, for the first time with real fervor, I listened with resentment to the drunken gaiety of the 2am roamers making their ways from one bar to the next. I didn't like feeling it, and so I took it as a sign that I had brought myself to a place where I was ready to leave. Best to recognize it, and not make the matter moral. I'm still just very nervous about the whole thing. I think I stayed in Btown for as long as I have in part because I was afraid of having to make new friends and start that whole thing over again. But, seeing as I effectively ruined most friendships I had simply by making my relationship with J. disproportionately predominant, it is as though nothing really other than work and the allure of the nightlife keeps me here. And both are insufficient reasons.

I think I am going to be able to write something rather punch-up for my MA. It'll be nice to finally redress this issue.

Finders, Seekers, Merciless Cheaters

2011-04-21T21:50:00.000-07:00

Right now, I want you. Your voice to answer mine when it calls, and your body to come when I arouse it.

An exercise in causality, the desire for something necessary. And familiar.

This paper is killing me. Coming in fits and bursts, a torturous delivery.

I saw you on a4a last night. You'd changed one of your pictures, and I stared at it longingly, wondering how many other boys were, too. Wondering which one you would have over, or were already entertaining.

You'd texted me earlier. "I just wish I could talk to you =("

I followed our pre-arranged script: I said nothing, I ignored you.

And then you texted me again, almost two hours later: "wanna have sex?"

And I again followed our pre-arranged script: "Fuck off, J. This sucks."

"ok sorry," you replied.

And then I saw you on a4a and I seethed with longing. A kettle full of evaporation, nothing but hot metal.

I did not hide that I was looking at you, I did not "delete the trace" of my cruise.

I did not want to hide my desire for you, from you.

And now, after being flaked out on three times--and after doing it twice over myself to other boys--I am desperate for you. Some one as desperate as me. Perhaps you'd even be desperate for me.

Interior of a Dutch House

2011-04-20T22:20:00.001-07:00

I wanted to call you twice tonight, and to text you 5 times through-out the day. I checked a4a 3x for you. I was on Grindr hourly, looking for the golden glow of the trace of your prowl. I never took my finger out of my Facebook newstream (even though I knew you wouldn't appear--I looked anyway, as if for a miracle, a glitch).

I didn't find you and I wouldn't let myself seek you out thoroughly enough. I'm writing this instead, so I don't obsess about what you were doing, while I was was staring at the green dot of your activity. Nonchalant chatting with another boy only made the murmur of my longing more insufferable. I was suddenly scrolling through an archive of what amassed more recorded fights than I thought even existed, and which made me cringe with embarrassment as I read them. You delete your chat history, as if by impulse. A willful forgetfulness, a will-power to healthfully swallowing-down and passing-out the past. But that mechanism is miscarrying somewhere because you sometimes get wicked sick and I've seen it, a ball of writhing snakes in the pit of your stomach.

The most awful part of my lapse into memory was how vividly I remembered the intensity of the particular feeling I was suffering, and yet also how relatively insignificant it seems in light of how melodramatic I was over it. At least now, reading back on it. This isn't what's awful though. No, what's awful is that I don't know if I am simply equivocating because I am feeling lonely and distracted and jealous (imagining you happier than me, more sufficiently selfish), or if I'm realizing that I was brash and impulsive.

But as I draw near to that possibility, my senses return, my clarity of purpose thrusts its way forward again, proud and insistent.

That's all.

And I hate getting haircuts. It's not that it's bad, it's just not what she said she would do. And now some of my plumage is shorn, not like a Samson, but like a peacock, I may be striding more imperiously.

I can't say no to you

2011-04-19T22:24:00.000-07:00

... Say nothing.

Finally made some headway on the paper. I asked it to come.

Often I find this is the case with men I entertain, I have to ask them to cum.

I asked for it to come, so I could share it with the world. In a form fit for its appearance. We needed to work it out, and I was being a slut, giving pieces away here and there.

Why is writing like the great amassing of forces, as in a deep inhalation?

This, I think, has been my struggle: One of transitions, or translations, from one paradigm (the Dionysian) to another (the Apollonian)--these being crude dichotomies.

My desire is to explain corporeal experiences predicated on the loss of the ability for coherence.

And to defend these experiences, and those who practice them, against a morality that would cast them as evil and socially irresponsible, and with a blink from an evil eye, cast them into prisons, asylums, and reformatories: the criminal, the maniac, the sinner.

But to make these experiences somewhat comprehensible I must already efface them through their reductive subordination to language. Dionysian excess in Apollonian fetters?

We scholars of the linguistic turn, we love to lacerate ourselves for this compromise: we lament what is cleaved off of phenomena in its becoming-signified.

It's like the repetition compulsion only makes sense as writing. Language weaves its own labyrinth, perpetually deferring what is promised, namely something different (something other than the grammar of existence).

This may be Nietzsche's problem: he kept writing. But he writes around--around the curvature of a body of ideas that are never properly identified, they are never named. By remaining so, beyond the strictures of language--appearing only in their absence--this body of ideas, this cluster of affects, of regulating principles corporeally suffered, generates powerful desire. Nietzsche calls this, "Will-to-Power," and against the physiologists of his day who insist upon "self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being" he maintains: "A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength - life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results." (BGE, #13) There is a yearning for cathartic release. The question is, then, how is this release suffered?

It is plausible that for Nietzsche this sort of release took the form of writing, that he composed himself through his body of works. This is in keeping with certain claims advanced by Nehamas and Conant. However, if what this composition orbits around is the unspoken affirmation of a will-power, then this is more a compost than a singing-and-dancing song, reeking of morality, of an ascetic resentment.

Which unspoken desire?

Must I say it?

Yes, of course, by disciplinary imperative.

Electric Counterpoints, or: Another Aborted Attempt (again)

2011-04-13T19:50:00.000-07:00

I type, “I want to…” and thus already subvert this essay: the venture founders. “I-will” is a by-product of the metaphysical idea of “I-think,” which in turn posits an “I-am”: being. My language tightens what I attempt to sneak out from the grasp of… language ensnares—me? I am in a labyrinth.

This is Nietzsche’s problem: the limits of language, the limits of which circumscribe the arena of experience. Nietzsche longs to write, “the body…”—but this, too, is far too discrete. For the boundaries he wishes to dissolve are corporeal. We are no longer minds. We do not think, we feel. But what we feel cannot be isolated: affect pulses, races, wanders, drifts, surges and recedes, climaxes and builds, and always manically. Even in its depressive valleys this energy ricochets.

Every verb resonates with explosive possibility, every noun begs for eruption. This body quivers with anticipation. For innocence. Again.

YOU ARE, or: yet another aborted attempt.

2011-04-13T18:58:00.000-07:00

This essay takes its starting point from the treatment of Nietzsche offered by Leo Bersani in his polemical work, The Culture of Redemption.[1] It is well known that Nietzsche’s project is ‘narcissistic’ in the pejorative sense; if truth is only a move in a game of (will-to-) power relations, then under Nietzsche’s regime of subjectivism, egoism, or radical relativism (‘perspectivism’) reduces everything to a violent play of force. Where narcissism is ascendant, Truth is lost. This is because narcissism is here figured as a reentrenchment of the self as a manifestation of a domineering will-power. Bersani, however, figures narcissism from a different slant, from a psychoanalytic lens. He writes, and I quote at length,

The narcissism pointed to in the first pages of Freud’s essay on narcissism is a self-jouissance that dissolves the person and thereby, at least temporarily, erases the sacrosanct value of selfhood, a value that may account for human beings’ extraordinary willingness to kill in order to protect the seriousness of their statements. The self is a practical convenience; promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is the sanction for violence. If sexuality is socially dysfunctional in that it brings people together only to plunge them into a self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance that drives them apart […], it can also be thought of as our primary, hygienic practice of nonviolence, and even as a kind of biological protection against our continuously renewed efforts to disguise and to exercise the tyranny of the self in the prestigious form of legitimate cultural authority. (CT, 4)

On this model, sex-negativity—as opposed to an embrace of self-dissolving sexual jouissance—is the moral standard. Evil are those who refuse to cum.

... back into the labyrinth. Fuck.

[1] Bersani, Leo. The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). Henceforth cited parenthetically as CR.

Pulses, or: many aborted running starts

2011-04-13T17:56:00.000-07:00

Overcoming as Undoing: Vivifying the Body through Sexual Passion

By XXXXXXXXXXXXX

One learns to wander because the earth itself is lovely.

On April 6^th, 2011 World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan used the occasion of “World Health Day” to announce to the human populace of the earth the discovery of “drug-resistant bugs,” and with the announcement of this discovery, made in 2008 in the slums of New Dehli, ushered man into a “post-antibiotic era.” The implications of this announcement cannot be understated. In Dr. Chan’s own words, “The world is on the brink of losing these miracle cures.” Nearly half a million cases of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis were detected last year, along with cases of drug-resistant malaria. Even strains of HIV are emerging that are unresponsive to antiretroviral treatments. The global spread of these bugs is, simply, inevitable. Yet, the Director-General cannot affirm this conclusion. Instead, she sounds an alarm: “In the absence of urgent corrective and protective actions, the world is heading towards a post-antibiotic era, in which many common infections will no longer have a cure and, once again, kill unabated.”

This episode is only the most recent, yet for this reason no less terrible, of many moments comprising the history of Western metaphysics. It dramatizes a central contention of this essay, namely, the impossibility of Socratic rationality to therapeutically cure the ‘suffering’ of life itself. It further dramatizes the unwillingness of those steeped in a therapeutic culture of redemption to confront this impossibility; on display, by contrast, is the impulse to place one’s faith all the more in the very method of ruin that brought us to this point in world history. In order to develop this claim I look to Nietzsche, who first diagnosed this eerie compulsion in The Birth of Tragedy. Indeed, Nietzsche’s unrelenting mockery of the philosophical tradition’s prejudices, its faith in the corrective power of rationality, is a thread that weaves his corpus together in interesting and unexpected ways. In this paper I argue that Nietzsche was aware of the impossibility of turning, re-turning, or inverting the traditional conception of man as he is predicated on the Socratic, rational ideal. Nietzsche knew full well that each tact leaves in place the contested term, threatening to entrench it all the more securely as a necessary point of opposition. For this reason he sought to reach beyond the conceptual discourse available to him to describe human experience. This, however, is a project that, as many have observed, works itself up into a referential labyrinth of mythical epic heroes and spiraling snares of metaphysical cosmology.

This essay, then, does not attempt to untangle the knot of Ariadne’s thread so much as bring to bear upon it a critical edge. My blade is not a physician’s scalpel, nor a hero’s sword: it is a prostitute’s stiletto. This methodology does not “cut,” does not dissect and sever, separate or partition; it is penetrative. As it enters the corpus, it passes through many layers of text: it is archeological, and Nietzsche’s body is an “opus incertum”—laid with irregular, imbricating stones. The density of Nietzsche’s corpus, the resilience of his hide, makes this operation a pain-staking delight; the scholar becomes a seducer, soliciting the softest, most voluptuous and tender point of entry. The scholar masks a prostitute, a masked seducer, concealing also the mask of a murderer. He becomes alive as war. He delights in “how closely lust and cruelty are related.” (Venus in Furs, Sacher-Masoch.)

To penetrate Nietzsche’s text is to abandon the methodology of rhetoric sanctioned by Plato’s Socrates in the Phaedrus, where cleaving the ligaments of a text through dialectical slashes is supposed to reveal the truth of a given logos: the philosopher wounds, tortures, the truth into revealing itself. This is a divine moment of dismemberment, inspired by a god. The same god, Socrates says on his deathbed, inspiring philosophy (Phaedo, 69d).[1] And under the regime of this “true eroticist” we all know which member is banished first, condemned to exist as a free-floating signifier in the world of metaphysics: bodies without organs, organs without bodies; either way: “sensualists without spirit, specialists without heart.”[2] This is because the dialectic is the weapon of the metaphysician; a methodology predicated on lack, on negation—even on the negation of the negation. The dialectic sublimely careens towards death, towards nihilism, toward asceticism. This is because Socrates, the true eroticist, never actually loved, knowing only the absence of it—thus under his resentful gaze eros became this awareness, and the pathos of its affect. Socrates is moved: his hand lifts-up-and-away (aufhebung) what he wants: in his self-denial he is “spiritualized.”

[1] What? These cunning, jealous philosophers inspired by—Hera?

[2] In a preface to Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, Richard Howard remarks the notable absence of an amorous discourse in English, “we have either the course or the clinical.” I think this an admirable way of capturing the predicament.

And if you complain once more...

2011-03-26T09:36:00.000-07:00

... you'll meet an army of me.

My goodness what self-indulgent nonsense that was.

all wake from their slumber to debut in the Bacchanal...

2011-03-06T17:19:00.000-08:00

...come to the light, the invisible light

Tonight is Madonna-Rama at my favorite ever nightclub. It's increasingly a less and less safe space for me though. I find it haunted by the caresses, kisses, insinuations, overtures, gestures, moans--the entire repertoire of seduction--that J. has expended on boys other than me. It is becoming, in my mind, his space now. And I lament this loss as much as I rage against his conquest. This whole fucking neighborhood is. I can't wait to get the hell out. Leave it to him, a playground of decay. I hope he rots in it.

Last night, I learned, he managed to smuggle his 'friend' in. His fuck buddy. Who he fell in love with under my nose. Despite my pleadings and desperate ultimatums.

Oh and my rage is legion! I am a ball of ugliness and I can't even stand to give expression to all of it. To any of it. How cruel and miserable he is. How petty and indifferent. I buckle and break and then not enough of either because I still draw enough breath to feed this surging desire to rip out my hair or claw open my chest or bash my fists against metal rails until I can't feel knuckles splinter and fail.

I hate him.

I hate how I let myself become so crippled under his reign. How pathetic I've become, submitting to a promise of nothing but more lies, more secrecy, more half-speak. I hate how badly I still cling the fantasy that enough time will cure the ills that ruined us, or that the proper phrasing of my complaints will finally allow him to FEEL how I feel, or that my fists could beat his wandering desires out of him and the desire for me back into him.

I hate how he feeds these fantasies, like a pusher, stringing me out on false hope.

Oh and doesn't he smile so very sweetly when he kicks me out of his apartment, like it pains him?! He kicks me out to make space for his 'friends' visiting for the weekend, smuggled into what was once my favorite nightclub. With an air of moral self-righteousness that is unrivaled. I 'abuse' him with my complaint. He shall not stand to hear it! Get out! GET OUT! He smacks my face. (That I actually appreciate, he's touched me for the second time... I think of William Carlos Williams: a sweet caress)

My queer healer tells me to process, not to ruminate, but not to deny or disavow the feelings--"They have to go somewhere or they just cycle, right?" I agree, because of course he's right. I count myself very lucky to be able to turn to him for advice and to just spew my bile onto. Ugh. I need to love him more. Otherwise it's just exploitation. And then I'm just repeating cycles of trauma: transference, displacement, projection. Fuck.

Nietzsche writes in Zarathustra that we hurt with what hurts us. I think he's right. I don't think we mean to, obviously. But it's bullshit to exploit my friend so I can feel comfortable, to cast on to him my anxiety so I can feel more secure. Isn't that, after all, what J. did every time I attempted to confront him about what was going on? Always my fault, my failures, my short-comings, my 'heteronormativity,' or my jealousy...

So I finally agree with him: I am a failure at being with him in the way he says he needs me to be, and so I've stopped trying. I give in: I'm giving up. I hate my limits in this context. I hate that there is some Gordian Knot that I cannot loosen in my mind, and which I do not have a sword sharp enough to slice in half. But then, the one who could have supplied the whetstone was him, and he never bothered until it was too late, once the gesture was itself empty and pitiful. More often, he mocked me as a I hacked away at myself, encouraging me to think I couldn't do what I wanted so badly to accomplish, mocking my efforts at comprehension, fostering the sense of an inevitable fatality that I finally actualized, as if he wanted me to.

Unmoored, with bits that I'm left with from a past I can't rightly make any sense of, I just move on. To what, I suppose I'll discover. But back to basics. Back to being a good student, and back to spending time with friends. Back to matching my deeds to the words I offer up--which may be an incitement to a return to a practice of silence. Back to writing. And all of these (re)turns are just so many preparations for a new beginning:

"'Too bad! What? Isn't he going--back?'

Yes, but you understand him badly when you complain. He is going back like anybody who wants to attempt a big jump.--" (BGE, 280)

Teach to world to sing in perfect harmony...

2011-02-28T17:00:00.000-08:00

(a symphonic blank stare--it's not designed to make you care!)

I had a dream last night that I was pulled aside by a professor who, having taken a number of courses with while an MA student, went on to give me good advice about something or other. I can't remember the details. The dream moved very quickly from one space to another: first in a college building, then outside in some strange sort of landscaped garden. I lost my phone in the manicured brush. He helped me find it, all the while scolding me for being so careless. It was a bizarre dream.

I find I am having more of them. Perhaps because I am drinking less. Or smoking less. I don't know. I had one about an orgy erupting in the locker room after ballet class. I haven't been back since. That was 3 weeks ago. "What are those men doing ing my head, having sex with me?" I asked a friend who I related the story to. How fucking pathetic. For all my talk about wanting to arouse the bodily pleasures the very idea, vivid and visceral, felt, makes me retreat.

J. never actually came to the club. I felt robbed of my chance to act and feel differently when confronted with an event that would stir powerful feelings of jealousy and inadequacy. I went home with my friends and we fucked instead. Wrestled in the hallway first, and then fucked. I wonder, though, if I just needed someone, anyone, to pull my ass out of the muck of disappointment that seeped up over not seeing him. Part of me thinks that those nearly 2 weeks of not seeing him were necessary--I almost long to have them back again, for the clarity of my position: I'm not with him anymore. Seeing him, sleeping with him--all of this was so much like what I wanted it to be, but not: it is not us getting back together, it is not us falling back in passionate love, it is not us making promises and compromises. Yet, I don't know what it is, and to the extent that all of the possibilities are not ruled out, I can't stop wanting to see him. I can't ask him for clarity, though: that would force the issue and I am afraid of what he would say. My cowardice on both sides presses me into a paraplegic listlessness.

In other news, my paper on Grindr is a go. I have departmental support for it. It is the paper I'm to present at the conference in Napoli. Professor "Just Dashing" thinks it's a great idea, and actually said I don't need to take the exam for his class since I'll be working on the paper. And he wants to me to work on it with the conference in mind, too. FINALLY! I am SO grateful that someone in my subfield is interested in one of my intellectual projects.

Of course, now I have to deliver, and a substantial part of me seriously doubts my abilities. I'm distracted and restless, my thoughts wandering so often to hover around the endlessly multiplying "what-if" questions that threaten to permanently shroud J. I don't know how to stop them except to muscle through. It took me almost 2 weeks of nearly insane flight-from-myself (fucking, drinking, dancing) to actually begin to feel like I didn't need to think about him all the time. I am like a freight train. It takes me almost forever to stop, and I can't turn on a dime. But fuck all, I can haul ass. I need, in such moments, to be my own saboteur. Ka-BOOM go the tracks, and crunch goes my "all steam ahead." Haha, I SO need a new paradigm!

And I have a meeting with my MA readers in about a month, which will be wonderful. I need to go and print out the fucking thing. Blah. 56 pages. But I managed to get them both to agree to meet, and considering the fact that I haven't been able to get that kind of response before, I'll take it. Now I just hope that the project holds and I don't walk into a meeting where the essay is drawn and quartered. If that happens, think I'll just scrap the damn thing and write a completely new project over the summer with professors who I will work with on a dissertation, using the MA as a chapter. I doubt that the meeting will go that way. But who knows. I just am SO sick of this essay at this point that if I had to devote serious attention to it again I wouldn't think it worth the effort.

(Prof. Just Darling accidentally called me "Gabriel" in class and when I showed-up at his office later was he mildly self-deprecating about the mistaken appellation, so I ran with it: "It must be my angelic face..." to which he says, "Your new haircut does show more of your cherubic face." I melted, putty in his hands...)

Anyway: he is SO prolific, and in part because, like me, he just gets BORED with a project if he has to dwell on it too long. I agree with him whole-heartedly: it starts to stagnate, putrefy, and become noxious to creative thought. He said to me, "Stop thinking about it, just start doing it." He's so right. And now I have someone to encourage me in that direction (i.e., productivity!) so I am super-excited. And goodness, he's just SO darling!

Future Plans:

1) WRITE PAPERS!

1a) Nietzsche paper: letting Bersani and Nietzsche have at it, conceptualizing the Ubermensch as a 'post-human' subject viz., beyond notions of selfhood idealized by Enlightenment moral philosophy; refiguring ethics as relations of disinvestment of the unified subject: the role of pleasure, plurality, fragmentation (engaging: Arendt, Deleuze, Agamben, Berlant).

1b) Social Movements Paper: Anonymous as a social movement organization? Thinking through the implications of collective political action as mediated by technology, esp. internet. 2/3 of the paper=BORING lit. review of social science blah on social mov't organizations. Then: interesting stuff on new media and political desubjectivization (Gladwell v. Cheyfitz, Deleuze, Agamben).

2) Cigars w/ the Writer (remember him? he's now, more properly, the Psychologist, but I can't really bring myself to change his name...) He'll be in town mid-March and we will get to spend yet another St. Patrick's together, only this time hopefully with good gin and not crap bourbon. Two years ago we did this, too, but it was his birthday, and I was wildly in love with him. He read the Rimbaud's "The Stolen Heart" ("My sad heart slobbers at the poop..."). How could I resist?! Well, two years does wonders. Who knows, maybe all I need to do to get over J. is remember I got over the Writer. And that doesn't stop me from loving him, just from being incapacitated in my loving. (Of course, part of getting over the Writer entailed finding and falling for J.... haha how twisted these strands become!)

3) Dental insurance!

4) Visit Gramsy and get a tan!

I'm not the percent you think survives

2011-02-26T18:57:00.000-08:00

(I need sanctuary in the pages of this book).

The upcoming syllabus of the course on Hannah Arendt's THC has been quasi-leaked, and sports the following authors:

"Plato, C. Wright Mills, Allan Kaprow, Martin Heidegger, Herbet Marcuse, Roland Barthes, Arlie Hochschild, Karl Marx, Leo Strauss, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Aristotle, Tim Ingold, Thucydides, André Gorz, Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer..."

It will be interesting to see how these thinkers are all woven together--or not. Sometimes the best courses are the frenetic ones, that sort of bounce all over the place. When what is experienced is the buoyancy and flightiness of thinking as an activity:

"It is like seeing two mountain climbers standing before a wild mountain stream that is tossing boulders along its course: one of them light-footedly leaps across it, using the rocks to cross, even though behind and beneath him they hurtle into the depths." (N. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks)

Finally finished and sent out a nearly final draft of my MA thesis "Please/Forgive: On Natality in Arendt and Nietzsche". As I almost wrote to my readers, "I often wanted to scrap this essay and start from scratch, but since that impulse didn't prevail, here it is!" Well, I may have undersold it, especially since I think it is quite good at moments. But, as I also said, if I had to address the question of forgiveness again I would approach it from a totally different angle. I think there is an effort in the text to try and consolidate a heroic, no doubt melodramatic subject of superhuman 'overcoming.' To the extent that Nietzsche's incisive observation holds that every philosopher constructs his own system out of a moral prejudice, that essay was an autobiographical testament to the desire to get my shit together.

But I've recently been taken by the COST of such a project. In multiple sense of the word, but mostly in this regard: the projection of that kind of superhuman confidence is bullshit--that is, it is the occasion for a sort of hypocritical event, the closure of the gap between the plurality of experienced, felt selves: this leads to a hysterical overdetermination of subjectivity I think, of a reactive posture.

Lauren Berlant recently wrote about the "combover subject" and I love the figure! How would Nietzsche have felt had he started to bald?

Tonight will be an exercise in embracing, that is, restylizing, my combover. J. is going out w/ a boy he's met (i know, i know, old news by now--sorry for being so repetitively boring!) and it is inevitable that we will see one another out. Our mutual friend is gonna be there with a boy I no longer talk to because it got really out of hand so I don't have him to spend the night with, getting drunk at the bar, being distracted and reassured. And the boy I wanted to spend the night with just bailed on me, and made it sound like he isn't really that interested in seeing me again. Whatever. It's lame that boys get so stupid. <= see how I did that! As if I were now "Man" or "Girl" or "Woman" or wolf or bug or moon rock and not one of these stupid boys myself! hahaha...

My former boss--an amazing queer theorist and personal hero--tells me about this woman Catherine Millet who writes this amazingly torrid tell-all (The Sexual Life of Catherine M.) that rivals Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. This same fearless author finds out that her husband has been having an affair and is overcome by jealousy, and her next book, Jealousy is all about dealing with it. This queer-theorist friend of mine says, "Even I still feel jealous... X will say something about one of his dates and it hits a nerve!" and I am so relieved! I'd always felt like a failure for not being able to face my jealousy and dominate it into submission to my desire to be cool with an open-relationship. It was a terrible feeling: letting myself down was also letting J. down, who would then rip into me for being such a failure... People keep saying to me, "Maybe you just can't do it," and I say to myself, "My grandfather went into Catholic elementary school a lefty and graduated Catholic elementary school a righty: I believe in the utter plasticity and discipline-ability of the body." Foucault did, too. The gay Foucault--though, if he had lived longer he would have, I think, been quite pleased with the rise of queer theory--even felt we could begin to exercise these practices on ourselves: askesis baby: practices of pleasure! (Enter Bersani...)

Who knows. I'm confident that I will see someone cute to dance with, and who knows, go home with. (duh!) And I'm also confident that I will be cool with seeing J. out with this boy. That he's going out with someone else doesn't foreclose the possibility that I will see him again. I need to stop feeling like every time I see him will be the last. It over-loads our time together, blocks it up with an affect of inchoate disappointed expectation. Mostly, though, J. WANTS to see other people, and I should be happy for him that he is. (It isn't always easy...--duh...) But that it is easier to default to a position of wounded pride or an offended sense of propriety is no justification for the dominance of that posture in my repertoire of responses. When I was struggling with J.'s relationship with M. not too long ago I had to admit to myself that there was a part of me that was turned on by it, and so I couldn't really be angry or put off: I was pleased by the situation even as I was terrified by the possible implications of it all, and in my better moments I was able to amplify that feeling of pleasure, to take comfort in the pleasure that was somehow of a kind with the pleasure that was felt by J. and M.--that we were somehow doing something hot and caring together, and my role in it was to understand, to encourage, and to be strong enough not to feel threatened. (I failed on that front, which is why we aren't boyfriends... but, whatever...)

Ok, time to get the fuck onto a dance floor. Tomorrow I do my taxes, but will only file them if the government is giving ME money. Otherwise, I'm taking a page out of Henry's book and I'm gonna resist out of probity and principle... and rage.

Which leads me to my final thought of the night:

and...

(Both charts are courtesy of Mother Jones.)

I press trigger, I don't press people button..

2011-02-25T11:59:00.000-08:00

...like how I have 22--now ain't that something? (10 are for you, so who's gonna get the next dozen?)

Walking to the train this morning I was listening to Robyn, which isn't new: I've been succoring my emotional malaise with her eminently danceable tunes. There is a song, though, that makes me start to cry every time, even when I'm on the street walking to the train. So there I am, hurting with every heartbeat, choking down sobs, walking to the train. And I don't look back...

It is 7.30ish, by the way. So I am fraught, emotionally fried, physically exhausted. Cf. last post. Ugh. So fucked up.

Thankfully the song ends before I wheel around the corner into the Addison Red Line terminal, which is where, after slipping my CTA card though the turn-stile, I find my hand in Rahm Emanuel's. His smug little face is grinning back at mine. I wonder if he is enjoying his own reflection in the sheen of my knock-off Gucci shades.

"I think you're a prick," I say. It doesn't register at first I don't think because he says, "Thank you, sir."

But I don't let it go.

"No!" I yell as I make my way up the escalator: "You sold us out to private corporate and financial interests while you were in the White House and you will do it again as the Mayor. Fuck you!"

Now he has heard me, and he scoffs, smug prick that he is. A flare of rage flashes across his face, but another wave of commuters washes through the turn-stiles and he is distracted. And I risk getting arrested if I keep yelling, seeing the thugs with their ear-pieces and semi-auto side-arms getting a little too restless for my comfort. I shut up and let the escalator swoop me off. The people around me are shooting looks of puzzlement, disbelief, repugnance, curiosity... I turn up the volume on my headphones.

Well, what was this stunt anyway? A "thank-you" meet-and-greet for the rich, white population that got him elected. No thank you, I'm disidentifying from that crowd! The crowd that drives me off the road when I'm biking? Who sneer or blush when they see the dildos I sell through the windows when they walk by the place where I work? Yes, that crowd who moved into Lakeview because it was (finally) a perfectly bleached shade of boring--save those pesky faggots, but they are easily enough assimilated/co-opted/bought/priced-out... Oh, this crowd of yuppie fucks who descend on Wholefoods every Sunday with their wide-load strollers! How could I love this city if I gave myself over to the people who cannot tolerate the diversity that makes it interesting? 6% population decline in the city of Chicago, and we all know who's going, and why. (I love Arendt's rationale for executing Eichmann: It's because you had the audacity to attempt to determine who to share the world with, that is, that you offended against the plurality of the human race you forfeit the right to keep company with any of us.) Sometimes I wanna roll out my guillotine. Even if a mini one... for another of Rahm's fingers: let's really shut him the ____ up. hahaha...

I'm moving out of this neighborhood anyway. Not that I don't love it, but I've seen the lines shift: the gay men come here to play these days, while the rich white straight yuppies come here to live. I've seen the evolution of the neighborhood in Kit Kat as a microcosm of the phenomenon: what was once a cocktail bar for gay boys and girls to sing along with and lavish love upon the performers has become a tranny revue for bachelorette parties. Yuck!

A friend and I are talking seriously about being roommates, and I'm excited about it. I've never had a roommate in any real, meaningful sense. I'd always been dating someone, and so it was never two people sharing a space, it was a couple and a guy sharing a space, and that rarely works. In fact, in never did. But, the joy of spending so much time with J. and his roommate was seeing how they negotiated their relationship. It works, not always perfectly, but always 'lovingly.' It made me want to try. So I'm giving it a shake. Plus, saving some money is never a bad thing. Uptown, here I come!

Ok, back to the Rahmifications of my outburst. I was instantly struck with the ambivalence of my sentiments. My rage, mixed with my longing... what was 'legitimate' to feel? Did I lash out at a politician because I was listening to a song that made me miss J.? Is there just beneath or barely discernible within my desire a profound anger? That is: just how symptomatic was this event? I want to claim discrete affective states: longing evaporated with my prehension of Rahm, giving way to indignation. But I should know better, right? That's just a nice dream, right?

Well, either way I was productive today. I registered for classes. Only one, but at a ghastly hour of the morning. If it were anyone else, teaching anything other than Arendt's THC I would say fuck it. But I cannot say no to the class that, no joke, I have been yearning to take since 2006. It was, after all, the idea of being at this school, in a classroom with this professor, reading this book with him, that filled my youthful soul with just so many fantasies of the nobility of Academic pursuits. I feel oh so very disabused now. Perhaps I am hoping that this course will be redemptive, perhaps curative of whatever intellectual fatigue has been plaguing me.

I suppose it's that I lack the conviction that my intellectual efforts are actually meaningful in any substantial sense. Who the fuck will ever read what I write? Goodness knows that just getting someone to read a draft of my MA thesis has been dispiriting--nearly 3 months of silence, and from someone I wanted to work with no less. I never know with these things: I default to a personal inadequacy: if it was good, it would have been read, and I would have heard from her. But after the first 2 pages interest was lost, and so... blah blah blah. So for 3 months I say nothing either. Fortunately I was successfully laughed out of that way of thinking this afternoon by our department guru. Thank goodness for her!!! A million and one thanks!!!

Today was just a good day I guess. It all went smoothly, you could say. Except I keep getting snagged, hooked, caught, on J. I return again and again to thoughts of him, perhaps enjoying the feeling of running my mind over that jagged point. Obsessional neurosis as the psychic equivalent of cutting. I may be seeing him later tonight, and I'm exhausted. Tomorrow if I see him, I will be seeing him out with a date--a friend of his. He reproached me for calling them tricks. He described my language as 'tired'. I'm trying. I wonder if he appreciates how tiring it is to learn new languages: we exhaust one another when we speak. The last time I saw him out with another boy who he went home with I cried myself to sleep. I'd never actually done that before, and that night especially I thought it impossible because I was so tweaked out I didn't even think I could fall asleep, and then low and behold, I woke up the next morning. I don't know how long it took, but it was agonizing. Or was it? What, exactly, hurt about the crying? I'm not sure. Maybe it didn't hurt at all, maybe I'm just scared of crying--that other bodily experience of loss of control.

It's so funny to have been awake at this point for 12 hours--a full day! At this time 12 hours ago I was shouting down Rahm Emanuel! Hahaha, how ridiculous. Sometimes I just can't take myself seriously. It makes it hard to think anyone else does. But then, I suppose, if I didn't take myself seriously, I wouldn't have something? I don't know... maybe that was a reckless, rude, over-determined effort to prove my words mean something. Blah. I can't go on with this any more. Ok. Done.

BGE #200

2011-02-24T21:53:00.000-08:00

"Such human beings of late cultures and refracted lights will on the average be weaker human beings: their most profound desire is that the war they are should come to an end."

This is the mantra of the man I am: please, just some rest... from myself.

J., who no longer is mine--who never was, never will be mine!--demands of me a new relationality, one without fixity, no telos, no limits: no end.

I should be so ek-static. I am not. I am launched into myself. Horrified and lonely. Interiorized.

Deleuze: "If you put thought into contact with the exterior, it assumes an air of freedom, it gives birth to Dionysian laughter. When, as often happens, Nietzsche fiends himself confronted with something he feels is nauseating, ignoble, wretched, he laughs--and he wants to intensify it, if at all possible. He says: a bit more effort, it's not disgusting, it's a marvel, a masterpiece, a poisonous flower; finally, 'man begins to become interesting.'" (Nomad Thought)

Nietzsche continues: "But when the opposition and war in such a nature have the effect of one more charm and incentive of life--and if, moreover, in addition to his powerful and irreconcilable drives, a real mastery and subtlety in waging war against oneself, in other words, self-control, self-outwitting, has been inherited or cultivated, too--then those magical, incomprehensible, and unfathomable ones arise, those enigmatic men predestined for victory and seduction, whose most beautiful expression is found in Alcibiades and Caesar...."

The man that I am and the man I wish to (cunningly) become draw life from the same well-spring: a body that has in it "the heritage of multiple origins, that is, opposite, and often not merely opposite, drives and value standards that fight each other and rarely permit each other any rest."

To put to sleep, to bed, to knock-out--one way or the other--by hook or by crook!--let us try and give these drives what they so yearn for, at least for now: to finally give them... some rest.

Anti-Social? I'm all apologies...

2011-02-24T11:15:00.000-08:00

Above the coffee station in the 7-11 there now hangs a huge flat screen TV running adverts for all the little toxic goodies you can buy for what one almost wants to say is cheap (until the actual cost of the destruction of your body is considered). And its loud. Bright and loud. And I'm like a mosquito or a fly with one of these things. It just becomes light and humming and I am sucked into the mind-zapper. I stood underneath that damn TV for like five minutes until I became self-conscious, afraid drool would start slipping out of the crease of my gaping, dumb-struck mouth. The TV is really scary. So is the Redbox station outside the 7-11. (When did 7-11 become purveyors of the most junky crap ever?).

When I finally peeled myself away from the TV I was offered a .50cent (BANG! BANG!) sausage biscuit. I giggled and politely declined, but really, how freakish! I say to the guy behind the counter, "You must hate these things! How long before you just wanna..." and I pantomime pump-loading a shotgun before desperately shooting the screens. He sorta lets a queasy smile flicker across his face, and I say, "Because it must play the same stuff again and again!" "And it's loud..." he mutters. "It IS loud!" I say. I break out my miming skills again but his smile doesn't get any less queasy. Now my smile is queasy, too. Or at least limp. So I thank him, sorta pissed at the whole fucking experience. And as I walked out there was the manager, not in uniform or anything, doing the books. He'd been hidden from sight behind a register, hunched over his invoices.

Well, that at least explained the poor bastard's queasy smile. "Please don't say you want to explode the bosses new TVs--he's RIGHT THERE!" That's what his smile was saying... hahaha how ridiculous. I can't imagine the boss really wanted those TVs either, though: they are loud. (Well, maybe he does, but not in order to play these fucking advert loops. Maybe a film or satellite-beamed TV show from home. It's funny to think that people wouldn't want to see a movie from another country in a 7-11--why not? How else would you see cinema from X country?) And I only stayed for part of the loop--I can't imagine how horrible it must be to listen to the damn thing again and again and again. It's a sort of neoliberal torture.

And that's why I when I finally put my headphones back on, as if to break the spell of the TV, I had to dance a bit, to get myself back into my body. And if I am always losing my body and needing to catch it. I suppose I am, in some strange sense, feeling my body escape me. But most of the time it feels like my body is being snatched away. I feel robbed. But that's silly, because it's like a seduction scene. An abduction! (Cf. Araki's "Mysterious Skin" for the ways trauma can manifest itself literally. Still--thinking of Delezue on Klein in "Nomad Thought": give me your intense, lived experiences, and i will translate them in to fantasy--the psychoanalytic contract, and why Freudianism is still a bourgeoisie ideology--even the great Klein, theorist of the partial object, succumbs.) Wickedly difficult to think through. Taxing. Unjustly so. I want to pantomime a shotgun and make the TV screen in my brain cower a bit. No such luck. I grimace, and then dance again, and greet the guy behind the counter with a smile, my coffee cup in hand. "Sausage biscuit for only .50cent more," he says to me.

(Has the light gone out for you? Because the light's gone out for me... It's the 21 century. It can follow you like a dog. It brought me to my knees.)

So I have less patience with those kids who start to shoot their mouths about us anti-social kids who sit on the train with their headphones on listening to music, totally zoned out. Like, what, paying attention to you is better?

I'm trying to learn a new style. Take this example as a case in point: At Irving Park and Clark there is no bus shelter, despite this being a major intersection. Even if it isn't a major intersection, its far more major than the bus stop half a block down the street--the one in front of the retirement home. So the geezers get a shelter while the rest of us freeze and get rained on or snowed on. But, of course, if you're gonna catch the Clark bus going south, you just walk down to this shelter to catch the bus there. This is the practical thing to do. I'm the sort, though, who will bitch about corrupt Aldermen and the undue influence the elderly exert on politics, especially at the expense of the (racialized) poor. But J. doesn't do this. He just writes "poop" in the snow in front of the shelter.

Kids these days! But what else were we to do? The thing is the way it is, and no amount of bitching would change it. So, here we were confronted with privilege, and we made it suffer our little spectacle. "Hey, Gramps! This is what we think of you getting a shelter when no one else does: POOP!" Not that anyone asked, and not that it will ultimately change something. But we laughed, and in the face of freezing and feeling like no one gives a shit about kids like us needing to get to a pervy public sex show, it was enough, and more than that, too.

I've been seeing J. more regularly again, and it's unsettling. I feel out of place with him. I need to find a new sense of familiarity with him. I think I've been confusing comfortability with familiarity. My dear friend turned 29 yesterday, and she is advancing admirably on her dissertation, working on Cicero. She's deep in "On Friendship." "You must read this!" she says to me, "because he is challenging the Platonic notion of desire as lack." It sounds promising. We will see. Still, the idea of loving what is common, or the same, is part of Bersani's project in Homos and I'm into it. He even went to the Phaedrus, which is the least Platonic account of desire Plato gives for precisely this reason: you fall in love with what is properly speaking your own in some weird way, and not what you lack. I think J. and I have been figuring out what it's like to be ourselves again, but there is a lack that compounds this: I miss him, and he misses me. It is not an intrinsic lack, of course, but it is hard to feel self-sufficient when these impulses confront and must negotiate the longing for companionship that he provided. But not well enough--that's the point, I suppose. I wasn't a friend enough to myself to be sensitive to the ways he was friendly. Still, in it's ideal rhythms, the temporal prioritization of self/other dissolves, and the boundary of I/You really is just a practical convenience.

We Carry On

2011-02-15T12:22:00.000-08:00

(The taste of life. i can't describe. its choking up my mind...)

Over the summer--oh the summer, the heat, the passion, the comfort of his body (even when I ached over its absence!)--I ran into a professor randomly on the street walking w/ J. to the CVS. I was mortified, stoned as I was, afraid of making a fool of myself. She took one whiff of us and, laughingly, referred us to Araki's "Smiley Face" when I said we were getting snacks for our movie (it was Araki's "Totally Fucked Up"). Her suggestion was far more on point, which isn't surprising. I told her what books I was reading for the queer theory component of my Political Theory exam and she said, "oh Judy and the boys." I said, "well, you, too." I was just afraid of sounding like a sycophant, and so I left her out. On purpose. Leaving out the people who I actually care about. (...and heaven knows I'm miserable now.) It's some sort of bizarre haughtiness: "Well of course I care about you! I'm talking to you, aren't I?" But I also think it's a thing like this: it's very Gaga (a la Poker Face): I refuse to tip my hand, for fear of...

It's funny though, because a friend who is a colleague related a story where precisely this same professor found it rather hard to say, "Good job!" to him, yet did not hesitate to esteem his performance to his partner. My friend goes, "WTF?!" We laughed because of course it all makes sense: the erotics of pedagogy. And so too the psychical violences of erotics haunt the hallowed halls of the Academy. Duh: the institution is named with all the aspirational hopes of a civilization claiming a mantel (Plato as the founder of the cannon, as the adopted Father--an inverse relationship [how gay!], almost as if Plato were behind Socrates the Scribe)--a mantel it could never avow, could only every affirm in the manner of a disavowal. And this, still, a double disavowal: the influence of the East on Greece, and the homoerotics that fueled the cultural generation. (Nietzsche recovers both in the figure of Zarathustra.)

I was lying in bed the other night, really turned off by a friend's Facebook status, which somehow suggested that visiting Auschwitz was more enjoyable than whatever little petty drama he was engaged in. It prompted me to go off on the myopia of so many people, especially the so called intelligentsia. And then I paused, and said, I wonder what I do that is absolutely, ridiculously, obviously obnoxious, the thing I do which aggravates other people, but which I am blind to... and the boy lying next to me just says, "Breathe, it's ok." I laughed, because there it was: this horrific propensity to over-think everything. To follow a wormhole of insane speculation. Undisciplined thought, I suppose. Or just, under worked: My mind isn't being worked hard enough, and so it just hums incessantly rather than roaring into a project so it may rest and simply live. My brain is like my libido: it is must be relieved, or I am pitched into a dull hum: the low-burning expenditure of water-laden fire wood: lots of smoke, but little fire, little heat.

At least I was smart enough to listen to his advice, to shut the fuck up and close my eyes and fall asleep.

Today I deactivated my Facebook until the end of the quarter. I feel like something of a hypocrite given how much my own work wants to argue that social media is not detrimental to the soul. And, indeed, it isn't--I just think that there is a way in which, like all social spaces, cyber-sociality is an excellent distraction. Social spaces can be the dwelling place of the rabble (Nietzsche's contention), or they can be the figurative mountain peaks (what Nietzsche fails to fully appreciate as a social space). Facebook, I suppose, was becoming more like one of my speculative wormholes. And, it's precisely because I don't believe that Facebook is "creepy"--I think the idea of the profile is beautiful: it is a profile, an always already limited in dimensionality casting of a figure--I can turn away... so as to see with different eyes, as it were, and from a different perspective (because it isn't as if being "in-person" somehow gives a complete picture of the Other--perhaps more perspectives on the profile, but we always already view the face of the Other from an ANGLE).

I grow increasingly disgusted with the pretensions of Academia. Which is what I started this post with. No: I started with the joy over seeing my professor--my once professor. And the relief that even my heroes are capable of the sorts of things I am. But this made me think of the depths of the culture of negation, its pervasiveness and seeming naturalness. This same professor once said to me, "Nietzsche isn't right about everything, you know?" (I thought at the time: that can't be right... how naive and desperate for certainty!) But what I think he does get right is the pervasive force of the culture of negation. Reading Nietzsche with new eyes entails this: looking for what he himself denies, since he is embedded in this culture of denial as much as we are. (If she is, he is... as I am: resisting!)

It's like the boys at the Robyn concert last night (which was amazing!): they stand still, lip synching! I think to myself: I'm at a concert, I know these words and I love the way they work together with this beat, and how this couple seduces my body into movement, into rhythms and undulations! I say to one of them who gives me a particularly severely dour look, "Baby if the architect had wanted to put a pillar here, she would have, now DANCE!" That was easy enough, he laughed and was, as if by magic, released of the shame felt over dancing by the shame over not dancing: may he learn to dance for fun, and not for shame! But the boys dressed to the nines, looking like they feel off the cover of an album: these boys measured their devotion through lack of expressed enjoyment. I can't stand any of it. So I dance it, and quite quickly I am done standing anything anywhere: I am dancing, and transported. I look to the stage and Robyn is moving in this beautiful jerky, emphatically bouncy way, spinning and throwing her arms in the air (she and Thom Yorke dance alike). I danced WITH Robyn last night (I'm done with idols--this is their twilight--I want dancing partners!): and we had a great time! So did all these kids around me--trendy fags, sporty dykes, trixy bytches, hipster queers: we had a great time! (We dance to the beat...)

A professor writes to me: your prose is overwrought. I write back (but have yet to send this): you are absolutely right: I am out of shape. I'm afraid of admitting it, because that makes it true, and that makes it a mark against me (as if it weren't obvious: my prose is 'overwrought'--this is polite for 'barely coherent')... My prose needs to become choreographic again. Tight, fluid, poetic. This entry as a first essay...

... don't you forget, caught in a trap (it never ends: it's my life!)

2011-01-21T18:07:00.000-08:00

"Quite generally, only music, placed beside the world, can give us an idea of what is meant by the justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. The joy aroused by the tragic myth has the same origin as the joyous sensation of dissonance in music. The Dionysian, with its primordial joy experienced even in pain, is the common source of music and tragic myth." (B/T)

Ok. And doesn't S/M also have this queer blending of what Nietzsche calls 'dissonance'--of joy and pain combined to create a new force, or new forces, that is/are (a)rousing?

I'm back at my cliff, still throwing things off...

2011-01-20T00:59:00.001-08:00

J. has a roll of photos on his iPhone that just go and go. They comprise little more than the various facial expressions he has managed to contort the muscles in his cheeks into fashioning, into pressing his lips and brow into the most delightful variations of Surprise! or Ponderous? or Excited... What is fascinating is just how many of this photos there are. It reflects, I think, the sheer joy he felt at the vivid capture of his own image, of his capacity to conjure and capture (fort/da) his own gloriously beautiful face, even when stretched to cast the most obscene and ludicrous visage. I love the nearly inexhaustible narcissism of the gay man, especially when in the throws of his own rapturous auto-transport.

I listened to Bjork's "unison" for the first time in a season. I forgot how formative it was. How reassuring, and how helpful to think about an anti-Christian, joyful, musical ethos ("one hand will love the other"). I'm reading Peter Sloterdijk's _Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism_ and it is immensely helpful for through some of the hard knots in _Birth of Tragedy_. More to read tomorrow, but I'm enjoying it. Oh, the vexing question of the spirit of music!

J. and I cruised side by side for the night. We were supposed to see a movie, but instead we just sat next to one another watching, advising, joking, comparing, having fun. It was actually kinda reassuring. I get wildly anxious at idea of him with another guy, though, less so now. It used to be really bad. But it is never as bad as I think it will be. Which is to say: It isn't bad, except in the expectation of its badness. The power of human potentiality, I suppose, lies in precisely the ability to actualize what is imagined (duh, Aristotle says in the _Ethics_, but these days one will be charged with 'voluntarism'!), and this, Freud argues, is evidenced in the analytic setting of projection, transference, and counter-transference. Anyway, we had fun, and we totally have plans for the weekend.

Is ballet Apollonian or Dionysian?

Well, You Needn't

2011-01-17T15:36:00.000-08:00

"Return, once again, to the body. Imagine it as a fold of flesh, pressed, like linen, impressed but not creased--an inclination, an arc, a gesture, a fold.
In motion the body turns on points of opposition. Like discus competitors, the body as vortex, winding up and releasing such immense energy.
The unfurling, distending salute: the casting--that which is simultaneously frozen and suspended in the idealization of memory (the Image Repertoire of Barthes's Lover), and that act of casting-away as in a pair of dice.
(The democratic practice par excellence of drawing lots as a queer combination of an abnegation of personal responsibility--no one will choose to lead, but each will submit to fate--and the acceptance of conditional agency once office must be suffered.)"

Restless, Getting into Trouble

2010-12-06T16:48:00.000-08:00

Deleuze and Guattari riff on Rimbaud regularly. Season in Hell. I have a weird little signature in my copy next to a poem read aloud by a friend on his birthday.
The orphan of the inferior race, "the beast, the Negro!" (to presage Patti Smith.)
What is amazing is the frenetic, dense language of the text: they are on the cusp of articulating what they want, but they are stranded in a conceptual desert: their language thirsts for new shores.
The machine, the factory, desiring-production.
The body-without-organs.
It seems that they get right the way in which Oedipus is an interpretive black hole sucking everything into it. The double bind: to renounce Oedipus is to resecure Oedipus.
I think this is why Nietzsche spent so much time on forgetting as an active condition of the healthy body. Forgetting is a kind of rebirth.
Depression as a sleepless exhaustion. The inability to begin or end anything--not a present so much as a "perpetuation."
What am I to do, though?
In a dream he had his Grandmother heard his confession, coerced from him by (M)other. He woke crying. He slays his demons with such chivalry, like he's wounded himself. And of course, he has: this is the violence of interpretation?
I'm getting sick of getting skewered.
I've been full-up with bile and finally relief is in sadness, which oozes out of me like so much muck. It smells like so much aspirin chewed in your teeth, so much grinding in grinding in grinding in and so much away you spat/spit and the slick of milk still can't coat (so much!) resentment.

Gonna Go OUT! (to see my man, cuz i'm nothing but this movement, my orbital existence)

2010-10-10T19:26:00.000-07:00

I'd like to try to once again to delimit my discomfort regarding the aspiration to glean meaning from the scrupulous establishment of an historical context.

I'm taking my lead from Derrida's deconstruction of Marx(ism), especially the insistence on an historical present structured by schismatic heterogeneity: time is literally out of joint.

Riffing on Blanchot's "Marx's Three Voices," Derrida writes,

"With the sober brilliance of an incomparable density, in a manner that is at once discreet and dazzling, their utterances [i.e., Marx's 3 voices] are less the full response to a question than the measure of that to which we must respond today, inheritors that we are of more than one form of speech, as well as of an injunction that is itself disjointed." (Specters of Marx).

I think this passage, while admittedly dense, still resonates with a number of concerns that were raised in class, namely, and as Derrida puts it in _Spurs_ (the text Skinner takes as representative of deconstruction), namely: "...it is always possible that the <> detached as it is, not only from the milieu that produced it, but also from any intention or meaning on Nietzsche's part, should remain so, whole and intact, once and for all, without any other context. The meaning and the signature that appropriates it remain in principle inaccessible." (Spurs, 125)

...inaccessible to one another--the meaning and the signature which attempts appropriation, through a stylus = Björk's hands (loving one another) v. Christ's hands (not knowing one another)--but also to a 3rd party observer (why the desire for appropriation? why this manner? why this undermining ambivalence, this auto-erasure?)... all of this leading to a deconstructionist affirmation of the fungibility of language as an economy of the failed appropriation of meaning. Which is to say, and anticipating Strauss's methodological commitments a bit as well, one will never derive a Real sense of the context from the content of a text, nor content from context--the being-with structuring the text is precisely that which is denied--the 'style/us' of the West, i.e., aspirations to sovereignty! (cf. Of Grammatology)

By this I take Derrida to mean language is always already structured through such dis-joining, and this is the second moment of the operation of disavowal, the 'double gesture,' if you will: "The signature and the text fall out with each other. No sooner are they iterated than they are secreted, separated, excreted. They are formed from the enormous cleavage that decapitates them, into the scaffolding of a headless trunk. Their iteration is the expropriation that initiates them. And what it erects, it also marks with the structure of an _etron_. " (Spurs, note 21)

Thus, I take every utterance to be something of a spectral remainder which haunts ideologically closed systems of meaning through its inaccessibility, what becomes, therefore, the persistently different. Derrida acknowledges that Nietzsche's utterance is perhaps a "misfired" illocutionary speech act, but as argued in the essay "Signature, Context, Event," speaking in the language of "successful" speech acts presupposes language to be confined to an ontological functionalism which swiftly makes sense of itself (hears itself speak) only by silencing non-serious language (aesthetic utterances) while simultaneously excluding what else language may be doing while it 'simply' 'functions.'

Perhaps, then, it is suspect to take Derrida 'at his word' (perhaps this betrays a desire to hold him to 'the letter of the law') but still, I find it crucial that Derrida avows _Spurs_ to address the questions of STYLE and WOMAN, which is to say: in the face of the arbitrary appropriation of meaning through phallogocentric speech, a certain style which can be called "Western" in its most fundamental sense, woman stands as the remainder of a system, refusing its assignment of proper place--the lack, the 'sheath' of meaning, which is filled-in/up like/with an empty signifier--by, as Derrida argues in "Choreographies," affirming a certain style of performative innovation. This (sexual) skin of _Spurs_ is barely grazed--let alone penetrated--with the considering dalliance of Skinner's 'umbrella', or, in technical terms: his style/us-of-Being, or pen-is; or: Derrida's text on the question of sexual difference is castrated by consecrating this (sexual) dimension of the corpus of an(y) author to an (virginal) absence or disappearance, an archive/tomb which will, by it excessive emptiness harbor, or sheath, the canon, the 'pillars' of civilization: these flaccid texts.

This profound failure to attend to the context of Derrida's attention to the seemingly 'non-serious' or 'marginal' concern of sexuality and sexual difference is perhaps telling. What it _does not_ tell, however, is that I KNOW what Derrida really wanted to say in _Spurs_. Nor does it suggest that I know what Skinner wanted to convey through his amplification of certain moments in _Spurs_ at the expense of others. Rather, and to pick up the trace of Prof. Pitts's suggestion that a skeptical or 'negating' posture towards the interpretation of (the) history (of political thought), I can signal the overdetermination of certain dimensions of Derrida in Skinner's reading, which is to look at what is _not_ being paid attention to, and to ask after what remains.

Ok: so I wish now to register three complimentary complaints or cautions. I find that the desire to hermetically seal the illocutionary act from its perlocutionary effects smacks of a desire for presence to oneself. The conceit of this posture is the self-actualized, sovereign subject whose speech acts may "misfire" but not due of failure of intention (a sort of Kantian moment). The other side of this impulse is the elision of the horizon against which, into which, and through which any speech act is itself always responsible to, a veritable erasure of the polyvalence of of the necessary co-terminal operation, namely differance, or the self-negating "other side of the coin"--the psychoanalytic death-drive, the entanglements of power and desire, or quite simply: other people with whom we 'act out'. Relatedly, 3) Skinner cannot imagine the non-oppositional third term, the imaginary or the unconscious, which is the logic of differance, or of specters (namely, an original which is a repetition--as in Communism, which is to say: a time when every property is divested of itself as property).

Don't get sentimental it always ends up drivel...

2010-10-02T17:50:00.000-07:00

I walk through walls. I'm not here.
This isn't happening.
The drugs coursing through my blood are beautifully refreshing. Not too much, nor too little. Comfortably numb.
Why are we lamenting this?
Somewhere, I think in Zarathustra, Nietzsche says something to the effect of the valor of knowing when it is right to die.
We have microcosmic examples of this: the 'hospice' care industry is essentially a limbo stage in western moralized mortality: death is itself sedated, incapable of leaving last words for the tongue is restricted by feeding tubes, and too heavy anyway to actually form sound, let alone give voice to meaning. Out of focus, easy becomes hard (the sentimental effusion of what is properly mournful).
But if living feels like vivisection, if 'liveness' means something like the excruciating pain of the torturers knife, the horrible sight of skin cleaned from bone and body, the first fresh separation of skin from muscle, like a Band-aid off skinned-knees, and then the searing, clotting pain of pure loss, of exposure, of a shame that cannot be covered-over... if this is life, then why do we revere this fetish idol? If life is intensity, the sporadic, eruptive bursts of sensory over-load, of pain... whatever. Do you care?
No.
Time, chronology is my nemesis, Father Time.
I hurt so im-mediately (that is: so much so fast, so amplified so quickly, such humming so loudly) that the dialing down seems so prolonged, such a protracted intervention, that I barely can believe only one hour has passed.
Only 1 hour!?
One cursed hour.
And now I enter my second. But I want out quick. One more gin, one more toke, one more pill, one more, more, more, more, more...!!!!!!!
I fucking love this pill.
Sleep.
Now.
After gin. After.Juice. After deciding I cannot deal> tomorrow gets my distortion, my noise, my AHHHH!!!!! and sobs.
Oh!: hospices as a dignified way of dying in the Nietzschean sense; psycho-pharmacology as living the dignified life of an honorable slave (one who, at least, will BE DONE! without much hassle).
Bed.

Violently Happy (Because I'm in Love with You)

2010-09-22T12:59:00.000-07:00
Listening to ecstatic music. I was reading this queer theorist of the performative, Jose Esteban Munoz, and he writes about Heidegger's notion of ek-stasis, the ecstasy of time. It's actually just sexy to think about. The movement of time as arousing, as a re-placement of oneself within a temporal context, apart from the indictment to fear the openness of time's unpredictability. Like wind on the skin when sun bathing on a nude beach, the movement of time is a stimulating sensation, not for 'narrative' or standardized linearity, but for unexpected occasions of ecstasy...

grrr 1

2010-09-10T19:46:00.000-07:00
These are the moments when I would ease open my tie with the gravity of a man aping a film noir antihero, lean back into my chair with the same weighty seriousness and roll a cigarette, nonchalantly, but still purposively. These are the moments when I would feel the itching of my skin tightening, like new teeth breaking through, or a distant but discernible thin slipping of air, a 'draft' of something uncanny, a haptic 'smell'. Everything knots tighter.
Back to work.

a reply

2010-08-30T22:07:00.000-07:00

Dear Mom,
Thanks for the Sandburg collection--I didn't know about him, but his work is very apropos my own easing into Chicago as a city that is now home, with a history that is beyond my own, but which still seems familiar and recognizable. Poetry is a wonderful genre in this regard; it's capacity for hyper-distillation of meaning, and through this compression affect the production of a new resonance, encourages one to "read between the lines"--a feat only possible if you are 'in' on the multiplicity of referents and the significance of the contingent and particular relationship strung together in the metaphorical sign-chain of the rhythmatics moving the verse.
J. and I saw one of his professor's debut a dance/performance piece, and part of the debut included mounted artworks, a musical open-mic-type deal, and a poetry reading. The punch in the fridge was a 'creeper' and gave you a hang-over before you even knew you were drunk--beautifully blended quality whiskey and pineapple juice w/ a sprinkle of cinnamon and 2 lrg ice-cubes.
The only male member of the troupe--Jesse's prof was just able to double her 'company' thanks to a grant from the State, a still paltry sum, an embarrassingly obvious attempt at a buy-out, precisely by making you buy in: because she must still work, she is still neutered, but so cleverly that it looks like she is being assisted... Anyway, the only male member of the troupe is this beautiful gay man, my age, and in absolutely suburb physical condition. His body moves in ways that are simply captivating to watch. "To watch" is too verbial, too active: rather, I was taken over by the masterful fluidity of his form--the question of, or concern over, content makes no sense when speaking of movement, precisely because the principle of movement is nothing more than the perpetuation of movement: movement is the means in and of itself (for movement never asks the question of "ends," which is antithetical to its own internal logic of perpetuation).
Hannah Arendt makes a rather strange prioritization of the "freedom of movement" when critiquing the racist logics of nation-state formation (the nation: the 'blood,' the 'race,' language, sexuality, and origin myths of "natural" national identity; the State: the legal guarantees of belonging enshrined in founding documents and their amendments, as well as the performance of their authority through enforcement of and adherence to them). She argues that the vacuity of the "Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man" is anticipated by the explosion of the moral, political, and legal protections opened by post-WWI "displaced persons" or "internally displaced persons" (the up-dated version of this applied by the State Department when speaking of the 1million+ Iraqis whose lives have been rather radically and violently up-rooted by American imperial exploits). Namely, expelled Jews from the east, who were "illegal" because they were not covered by any formal law, were infinitely vulnerable to all sorts of political abuses because they were not formal citizens of their new nation-state 'home,' nor were they of the 'nationality' of their new neighbors.
From my interested perspective, I'm concerned with the way we speak of ourselves as subjects in the lexicons of movement--'entering into' a contract, 'leaving' a job, 'moving-on' from or 'getting-over' a bad relationship, ect., ect. When thinking of what 'queer' ultimately means, the emphasis is on a certain commitment to the principle of movement aforementioned. This is, of course, slightly problematic (some might object) in that if one never 'stops to think' about what we're doing, we may run into all sorts of problems, including genocides, Orwellian super-bureaucratized States, or banally phantastic capitalist-Christianity. But it isn't queer that all of these logics of domination are only substantial through the freezing or deadening of (now) stereo-typified Others, floating signifiers of difference and non-belonging who are 'filled-in' (like a coloring-book cartoon) with the fear, vitriol, and rage of a bleached, generic and ever-reproductive position of 'unmarked' abstract or universal 'In-ness'.
It is not at all difficult to adjudicate questions of consequence--indeed, it never really was: Scottish 'Enlightenment' philosopher David Hume presumed to disprove theories of causality, but he only further clouded the issue, which as Nietzsche reminds, is always one of morality: the simple fact is that one is able to, without much difficulty, entertain and then decide upon one of multiple accounts of the 'unfolding of events' without having a) an existential crisis or b) collapsing into an essentialized diagnosis of 'origins'; neither is judgment an immediate indication of prejudice, just as it needn't be a hyperbolic or ahistorical claim to privileged knowledge. Rather, the dis-ease evoked upon confrontation with a strong judgment is symptomatic of a precariously maintained distance from disruptive forces, powers, drives, or desires for change or difference. It is, as Nietzsche argues, turned inwards, into the guts of the dis-eased, rigid animal, the human-all-too-human example of a desire to evade responsibility taken to its most self-destructive extreme.
This is a banal truth now: the zero-sum-game of (Christian) moral purity is evident in Cold War MADD foreign policy; less obvious: how this obscene commitment to an end-all, be-all cause (the fictional Enlightenment autonomous, sovereign, rational subject) authorizes "proxy" wars waged on the terrain of trivial, meaningless locales--meaningful only by virtue of repetition of service as a staging ground: Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cuba, Argentina, and Israel; just as the Oedipal comedy repeats the same exhausted tropes on the petty trivialities of the ordinary. It is queer to think of an alternative game, where the loser wins, that might resist a logic of inevitable repetition; but it is naive to demean the ordinary violences of the everyday suturing of fractured and plural publics into a coherent whole simply because the normalcy of such spectacles would seem to warrant ceding the plane of contestation to this hegemonically ascendent configuration of conservative ideology. What is conserved is that which is never really in existence: it is a fantasy of a future that will mimic a past that never was; policing adherence to this fantasy is the stakes of the politics of the 'culture wars' that have set the terms of debate since the supposed 'silent majority' was spoken for by the Evangelical Right. Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush jr. and Obama as a continuous stream of apologists for and enablers of White American exceptionalism, unregulated private capital, and reactive, compulsorily heteronormative morality.
The logics of the future (which are claimed to be, by both sides of the ideological debate, the logics of the 'now') will, we may say, emerge out of the logics of the present tense, the now, the I in the active and passive voice; and it is only a willingness to continually begin again, to augment the trajectories continuously inaugurated, that opens the possibility of a future: out of this commitment to futurity seeps the life-blood of pleasure. This is not about a figuration of life predicated on a continuation or reproduction of a tradition; rather, queer specifically aims at the rupture of traditional genealogies, seeing in such reconstructed histories the violence of exclusion (not only of what is forgotten or censored from the narrative, but in what and who is valued in the narratives: this is the logic of nostalgic ideology: what is desired from a non-existent past is cast as the horizon of a utopian future). In this way, the future is already foreclosed as being a priori determined by an attachment to a phantasmic object of pleasure, the fetishization of any old object or condition or relation promised as a total panacea. Inaccessible to the present tense, the promise of happiness is projected onto the future; failure to properly pursue this promise of happiness is read as discontentment, disorder, dangerousness: a cause for concern. In turn, the failed aggression of the middle class white bourgeoise, and the disappointing products of suburbia, is "transcoded" into an ideology of defensive victimization under assault from the manic efforts of deviants, criminals, and political activists.
The spectacle of bourgeois opulence, the excess of resources which lay idle, the superfluousness of gluttonous corporeal mass itself--the comfortable padding indicative of the particular privilege mediocrity bestows--all this and more attests to the bog-like cultural climate of the planned settlements, out-posts of White Flight from the too 'urban' metropolis, that comprise the matrix of snobbish pretension on the one hand, and utter ignorance and aggravated disinterestedness of the bourgeoise on the other. Anything that pulses with life, a city, a subway, a gregarious or exasperated address, a cry of (failed) defiance--all of this will be coded as cause for concern. And again, the impulse (which is _privative_), is to normalization, which itself is a projection outward, of others, and oneself, onto a plotted flow-chart; a banalization of care transformed--more nearly, _de_-formed--into a silencing through parentalized intervention: the nanny state, the patriarchal former-colonizer, the analyst in the throws of counter-transference. Psychic disturbances are thrown-out, Freud writes, and treated as though arising from the 'outside', external to the subject. This is a mode of defense for what we cannot bear in ourselves. Our own pathology, our own sinthome (the peculiar knot bundling the subject), made Other, radically, a Sophie's Choice calculus performed daily, hourly: deaden this, kill that, ignore, ignore, ignore! And what cannot be ignored or killed, we sedate, poison, speak-for--anything to silence.
Like the thought of a cock in my asshole, which may explain the absence of any reference to my boyfriend in your 'concerned' email. Or, perhaps, that was what bothersome, what was nearly intolerable, was not having to change plans, but your profound inability to even entertain the possibility of alteration. Our (mine, J's--ours) vacation was wonderful, actually. We pitched scenes (as Barthes calls them), but ultimately, it was the ordinary kinks arising from encountering newness (my friends, mentors, former-lovers), and not knowing exactly how to negotiate the particularity of my history with each of them, or, more to the point, how those histories bear upon my relationship to him. I love him all the more for his willingness to suffer expanding his understanding of me.
The city pulsed with life, and my friends were generous, loving, and just like I wanted to remember them--which is to say, they have changed into the people we wanted to become. You missed all of that, but then: you didn't want to experience any of it. So, keep your concern, in your entombed enclave up and away: I already was taking care not to need it.

"Hey XXX,
I just wanted to drop a note to let you know we are thinking of you. Hope your trip back home went smoothly. It seemed your trip, though I am sure fun to see all your friends and hang out in Brooklyn and Manhattan, was stressful in that your plans kept changing. It didn’t seem like a relaxing vacation. By the time we saw you, you seemed very agitated and I have been concerned about you. I am hoping that since you have been home, back in your own territory and routines, things have settled down for you. I know you are very busy with work both at the store, and more importantly, with the prep for your comps, and I would wish for you to be at your best. Be well… and I’ll continue to keep you in my yoga intentions.
Love ya!
~Mom"

The Face of a Defiant Woman

2010-08-24T23:37:00.000-07:00

It's rather adorable, because most men fail to achieve the particular softness of feature that makes the posture of principled, mindless resistance lovable. Perhaps even redeeming. The chin slightly raised brilliantly displays the iridescence of play captured in the schema of an earnestly heaved gesture that vaunts from the sloping churlishness of a smirk that seems to beg for a kiss. Not from the man she's with, of course. Though she has kissed him. (Fucked him, too, duh.) But not from the man _this_ photograph is for, either. That man, who aroused such defiance, such principled abandon, has nothing to do with this drama any more, and so a kiss from him would be meaningless. She is begging for a break. She is covered in tattoos, by the way, and that this guy is a tattoo artist (the new one, that is, not the one she is defiantly divorcing) and just inks her up... seems like a Mel Gibson snuff script. Because she's also Christian, and most of these tattoos profess this truth. There was always a certain defiance, I suppose: Christians like their torture to be more private, more "internal" or "intimate." The spectacle of a mutilated body, scarred and stained, cut and mortified, profaned and punished, bloodied... All of this comes too close to the spectacularly masochistic carnival of torture: penance. And yet, a the tattoo is also a mark of distance from the traditional Western subcultures of painted peoples: whores, sailors, criminals, deserters, homosexuals--the entire menagerie of Genet's oeuvre. She's married in an ill-fated decision, on Halloween, the Devil's (un)holiday. The day is bucolically consecrated under the structuring trellis of an ambivalent sign.

My boyfriend executes this look with a subtly and grace that is simply atrocious... It is a performance, the performance of an history which I am not privy to, and which does not refract my gaze. It was a plea for help which dare not speak, which is to say it circumvented the necessities of speech by striking the difference with a pose, a sculpture, a routinized interface. I see this, and I see it's strategic deployment and I am hurt: I can see you are posturing, I want to yell, you're full of shit when you do this! And my aggression is another form morphologically protean anxiety takes when it fears it has too much to lose: a symptom of a foreclosure of futurity is the overdetermination of the present. It's as if I constantly yell, AM I GOOD ENOUGH?! half pissed to be still asking the question, the other half the result of failed defiance. I lack the specifically feminine softness that makes defiance completely neutralizing. Paralyzing. This is the femme fetale, Socrates, Rosa Parks... Politics requires a certain capacity for neutralization. This is also what is called, 'persuasion.' An argument is arresting. I am impeded, immobilized. As if by magic. And he does this with his face, not using a word: words do not fail him, they are beneath his talent, not worth their weight in water (or gold). The gesture is skin-tight and nothing gets through, for words are slippery, words collapse, things begin to fall apart; the whisper of doubt is impossible to properly appreciate: it is either a weak draft that does no harm, or it is what is forced through otherwise reinforced repressions--if the latter, opening the door is eradication--and so in this way even the slightest tickle of dis-ease becomes the sure portent of catastrophe. This, I imagine is a certain kind of crisis mode. It could be allegorized in a story about a survivor of post-Katrina New Orleans fleeing to the mountains so as to never live near rising tides again, a man for whom even too much rain is aggravating.

Silence was his guarantor against this inevitable confrontation with the sound of things falling down around him: he did not speak, disarmed speech by silencing it's perverse polyvalence. But I think it's because he enjoys the polymorphous perversity he's inciting in himself, and in me, that got in the way of the injunction to avoid the mess of speech. He's risking the compromises of speech, though, and that means he's parting with the iconicity of victimhood the defiant gesture is captured in. Mercurial, a herald of things to come, giving signs... my darling little faggot is becoming a queer.

the mighty multinationals have monopolized the O2//so it's as easy as breathing 4 us all 2 participate...

2010-08-22T10:18:00.001-07:00

It's been somewhat confusing to me, as a student of an archive wherein futurity is precisely the stakes of politics, to encounter in contemporary queer theory a regular de-meaning of the future. The bizarre title of Edelman's "No Future" alone strikes me as slightly obscene. (I know, I know: how homonormative of me, to attempt to regulate obscenity in the name of the future!) I think, however, that there is a strikingly shallow (not superficial) understanding of futurity, one which acquiesces to dominant configurations of the temporal horizon (Christian Millennialism, liberalism's perpetual deferral of meaningful change in the name of "progress," fin de siecle messianism ... ect) and therefore can only strike a reactionary, which is to say, profoundly unimaginative and limited, posture.

LB is right to note how Reaganite conservatism (which, ironically, does not exempt the Gore's or MacKinnon/Dworkin) perverted concepts of citizenship into one of an infantile or "fetal" comportment to the hegemonic images of a "present tense" so thoroughly corrupted that it must be battled against in the name of a pristine new beginning. The fetus, the peripheral character of a farcical culture wars waged by pro-life antagonists and pro-choice protagonists, is the perfect symbol for the vulnerability of being marked by subaltern critique as bearing a particular corpo-reality (on the one hand), while also quite literally serving as a (not-so-free-)floating signifier of purity, possibility, ideality. Of course, the paradox is evident: the fetal symbol cannot stand as a signifier of pure possibility precisely because it is meant to be the symbol of a "freed" possibility, namely freedom from particularity, a freedom to return to the comfort of universality, the privilege of supposed neutrality--as evidenced by conservative outrage that now-Justice Sonia Sotomayor dare speak from a position of particularity (the "wise Latina"), rather than don the fantastic position of "objectivity" (i.e., White, male, heterosexual, wealthy, ect...). The fetus as symbol of "jouissance"--the lost pleasure that can never be regained because it was never possessed (which is what makes Lacanian critique a useful intellectual tactic of exposure: the sought for and sincerely mourned lost past, the Eden of pleasure, is an ideological edifice just like any other, and the power of the critique is to illuminate the methodology of unconscious dis-ease as it flattens the contradictions generated by desire).

Further, by investing the fetal symbol with such redemptive power (which, in the service of preserving, preparing the way for, or defending against external, cold, metallic, unfeeling invasion authorizes a host of brutalities against difference) the present tense can be negated in the name of the future. It is not surprising, then, that the idealized subject position is one of ontological muteness, life-less constancy, and hypostasized imaging. Thus, the fetus is spoken-for (in the metaphors of slavery, patriotism, ect...); the fetus is radically and unendingly dependent on a mother--no longer a "woman" whose unruly feminine cupidity threatens the sanctity of the uterine sac; and the fetus is captured and frozen in the photographic optics of the sonogram. Again, a paradox, a political parallax: it is the "silent scream," the stages of development, and the cinematic documentation thereof which give life (and thus value) to the fetus: the unmoved mover of American political discourse, indeed.

But if an inversion of this temperamental domineering of the temporal stakes of political action is all that can be mustered by queers then perhaps the future is foreclosed in a profoundly disappointing sense. I write with a certain optimism--I can afford disappointment, not despair--because, in part, there is "no future" for the sorts of reductive reading of futurity that has become so posh. This does not imply, however, an absence of attributable responsibility for the consequences of what is written, what is authorialized by queer exemplars, and what is legitimated by sheer circulation in discursive relays (scholarly, activist, and most importantly, colloquially, among young queers succored on the accepted wisdom of the transmitters of culture, tradition, and style; in other words, what Arendt refers to as the physiognomical recognizability of norms spanning generations). Simply put: while wrong-headed, and in my opinion politically irresponsible, what is written cannot simply be ignored (mainly motivated by the conviction that denigrating the human capacity to inaugurate new beginnings presents itself an offense against the common world which, politically speaking, is temporally structured by an anticipatory orientation towards the future. Unless traumatically imposed and symptomatically sustained over-determinations of the past interrupt and make stammer the articulation(s) of a sought after future the present is the stage of most serious play; the moment of the present tense has the 'greatest weight' of the accursed and blessed voluntarism of freedom.

Futurity requires, then, courage and cupidity: desire and boldness; love shares with politics a certain blindness: what is most precious, most terrible (in the sense Rilke continues to confound me with) is what is most obscured, gazing at objet a, the moment of parallax. (Isn't this the point of queer/ning politics?) Politics, then, shares with sex, too, a marked abandonment, a release to the pleasure of futurity, or again the delight and dread at discovering who one is (to become in the face of who one was). Quite the contrary to a denial of future, the strictures of a present tense organized around a negation of this release are precisely those the stultifying regimes of identitarian culture wars. Perhaps it is wholly disingenuous to assert that the catalyst of action, the "cause" of desire, is a denial of futurity; perhaps, too, it is reductive to claim thereby that a desire to negate the demands of the future has as its negative wounded attachments to a present tense compulsively structured around repetition of a traumatic past; and, while a truism, no doubt the dyspeptic inability to "get over it" is indicative of a socialized normalcy inclined to hyperbolize the mole-hills of the trivial (the inanities and vulgarities of tabloid print media, hysterical news broadcasts, remedial establishments like the New York Times (policing through enactment the borders of what is fit to print), or Disney sitcom culture. "It" (where ever I'll be next, there is was--the question isn't one of time, so much as what and how to perform once catching up to the trace) renders desire untimely, rendering the pursuit disjointed, anachronistic--my genealogy is so narcissistic, so unerringly true to itself that time comes to slip into a counter cosmology of an eternal return of the same: a curiosity re-coded/re-corded by an age-old story-teller: queers fancying themselves the originators of the democracy like they were characters in an old Gregg Araki film about a pomo Harmodius and Aristogeiton.... the greeks got anti-social, or something... whatever.

This is the story of how the notion of time in "queer politics" gives the lie to both the purported and so repetitively proclaimed 'queer' commitments (yes: queers have commitments... you just won't know what they are before hand, that's the fucking point, prick!), and the pretensions to politics. Without risking what is ultimately the undecidability of the future, political action dis-appears. Here emerges an overt imbrication of the logics of sex and the logics of politics: risking having to rise to the occasion, to stand attentively, of opening to the persuasive influences of others; to venture exposure, vulnerability, pain; to express in the musculature of unrelenting moans the joys of asymmetry, of being fucked or of fucking; to defy the putative gaze and gossipy whisper of the State apparatus of police, snitches, 'private interests,' and worst still: do-gooders; and more: to get over it by getting on it, to ride it, to play power-bottom and cum, or piss, all over its face. (You're shoot will miss: IT has already been gone; that's the fucking point: politics, like pleasure, never exists in the present tense of the symbolic realm, nor in the ideality of the imaginary, but rather in the refusal to iron out the differences between them when encountering the generative contradictions of their intimacy; politics is not about pursuing the real of jouissance (that's death, stasis, immobility, reification, 'recognition'--that's why it's called a 'death drive'): politics is about anticipating the orgasm and so risking the cruise.

Desire takes place in the present tense: it is the 'real' of the complications arising from the unconscious in motion; but for this reason it is only ever what is returned to, once politics is done; when Aristotle said there are deeds done for their own sake he lists flute playing, and all manner of performing arts, but he would have been equally well-served by simply citing: queer sex. Desire thus appears as an affective 'reactivation' of movement, of anticipation. This is why desire seems to have the bizarre characteristic of longing for what is seemingly remembered (jouissance?). "In the beginning was the deed..." (or at least the anticipation, which dare not speak its name... "wanna go for a drive? need a lift? what are you doing? you free? can i buy you a drink? a/s/l? #boi4u2nite?)

JT walks out, into his living room where I am currently looking like a character out of a Bruce la Bruce slasher porno: zombie-fag! He would laugh at this, but he's exhausted and pissed at me for not getting the sleep I need. And he's jealous of my time, of my body, and selfishly keeps me tightly bound: my soul is an inverted comet, full of nooks and crannys, crooks and fairies.

I Dream of You Draped in Wires and Leaning on the Brakes

2010-07-09T16:31:00.000-07:00

Well, I have quit smoking. Astonishingly easily, as well. I take one little blue pill when I wake up and then another one around midnight and that's that. I have been a bit more bytchy I suppose, but then, I'm quitting smoking. The worst part has been the evacuation of my lungs--about 11 years of crap has been coming up, and it hurts to be perfectly honest: my throat is hoarse from the dry hacking.

I still am completely incapable of managing money. J. and I somehow spent (collectively) roughly $1,000 in less than a week (food, drugs, dancing, movies, whothefuckknowswhatall). At least I am smart enough to make sure my bills are paid before I binge--or is it vomit?--money. We are kids with money burning holes in our pockets (or at least I am--but then, out of nowhere one day the b/f just drops a bunch of money on a bong that rips like a motherfucker, so he does it too, but at least on things that we still use... I often spend my money on an affective experience (a movie, a drink, a dinner, drugs, ect...) but he uses his money.)

All of this is so exquisitely vulgar. I love it. Crude, so handled, and wrinkled--like Brent Corrigan's asshole. (Zoom in for money shot.)

But now I'm sorta pissed. I've run up against a number of administrative red-tape blockades. For instance: to see a doctor I have to go to my school's clinic and then get a referral. Absent such a referral, I am charged $50 to see a doctor per visit. Well, in order to go see some one at my school's clinic I have to pay a $250 summer fee. Haha, brilliant. Or, the manner in which insurance doesn't cover some things. All of this has produced a pile of bills (well, hyperbole there)--but enough bills to make the sort of extravagances of last week a sadly now extinct phenomenon.

Let's see tho:
1) the Writer was in rare form for the 4th. I half wanted to cock smack him, and half just smack him. We had fun.
2) New Tulips are cool, esp. the DJ, who is a true sweetheart.
3) J. got a new bike, and it rides reallllll fucking smooth. He looks super hot. Hipsters beware!
4) 3ways are slightly over-rated. What was hot: getting fucked by my b/f while he was getting fucked by someone else. There is something Lacanian about this: the Phallus I want is in the vase (not my asshole, but J.'s)--what is nice, and maybe poor Jacques would have known this were he a fag--is that you can get this phallus in the vase: switch positions. Hottest, though: the sheer flattery of the whole damn thing. We will probably do all of this again sometime.
5) Fembots have feelings too. (Robyn and Scissor Sisters albums are really, really good.)
6) Re-writing my MA thesis (again), but this time with 2 years distance. I am finally (I think) on to what it was I wanted to say. Introduction sections are the pits, though. I hate them.
7) Spending more time in Wicker Park. It's a bizarre part of the city. No one is THAT cool. Except me. (And we know THAT's a lie.)
8) Making porno is hot.
9) J. moved last week and we were hauling all sorts of shit all over the place and that was fun. Better still, his Momma and lil brother showed up to help and that whole little family time went well. I was sorta nervous, and so was J. but we were both happy it went well.

I'm just sorta bothered. For no reason. Well, some reason. I need to plan a vacation, and then, on top of that study for a preliminary exam. Haha, whatever.

"Love hurts when you do it right: you can cry when you get older."

Bounce You On the Lap of Science (Move it to the beats of silence)

2010-06-20T13:11:00.000-07:00
Part 1.

As it was our week to celebrate a year together, J. and I did it up in style. The gods of work schedules prevailed upon Fate to allow for a series of free nights, and made good use of them. Thursday we had a lovely evening in the park listening to some Malian blues as the sunset behind the skyline, and then we were off to the tattoo parlor to get J.'s sister a belated birthday present, where we decided we would get some tattoos ourselves. It will be fun, I think, to finally get my dark horse. A gay tramp stamp, I suppose, but I love the look of them on the twinky pornstars I jerk off to so regularly.

Last night we saw Fucking Men (playing at the Bailiwick) and loved it. A very well-structured script which moved quickly but allowed the silhouettes of the characters to stand in marked relief given how briefly they unfolded. (What it true of love may not be true of art: the swift blossoming, though it withers almost instantly, still imprints an intensity of truth.) Then it was off to dinner, which was a quick bicycle ride away (actually 7 miles away...w/e), where we indulged in some fine dining. J. was in the perfect throws of youthful exuberance and, as it always is, it was infectious. We drank and ate and enjoyed one another's undoubtedly obvious and silly grins. Our server said we were "adorable." (The proper adjective for love.)

Then it was up to dance, dance, dance our pants off. Something strange happened: J., up on the little stage, begins to dance with another boy. And I watch at first, and he watches me, and I smile at him, and I wink, and then I turn away. They danced together until the boy ran off with his friends. Unsure of my ease the evening was a bit touch and go, but I was fine: unbothered.

Perhaps it is the drugs, perhaps that I am preparing to quit smoking tomorrow, or perhaps that I was able to tell him I knew he lied to me without my voice-cracking, and maybe it was that though I didn't need to prove my assertion he still didn't push it; and maybe it was because I said, "I don't care" (which was a lie at the time); or maybe because I'd just seen a play about the silly pretensions of monogamy... It doesn't really matter why, but I was actually unbothered. I'd seen what was so scary when it was just a fear: him enjoying himself in the arms of another person, him touching another person. I didn't feel that emptying in my stomach which he once gave me occasion to feel; I didn't curl my lips into a sneer, I smiled.

And perhaps that he was bashful about it all afterward, needed to reassure me, and be reassured by me. And perhaps that he came when I blew him, and then thanked me for my tenderness when we fucked. And perhaps, too, because I actually trust him. Finally. Again, for the first time.

Never Look Back (WhatWouldIDoIfIDidn'tHaveYou)

2010-06-15T15:59:00.000-07:00

Barthes speaks of love as the polymorphous vicissitudes of the "Image-Repertoire" that composes the Other, oneself, and the relationship between them. These are fragments, "schemas" (Barthes' corrects his reader: "These fragments of discourse can be called _figures_. The word is to be understood, not in its rhetorical sense, but rather in its gymnastic or choreographic acceptation; in short, in the Greek meaning: σχυμα is not the 'schema,' but, in a much livelier way, the body's gesture caught in action and not contemplated in repose: the body of athletes, orators, statues: what in the straining body can be immobilized.")
Thus, the lover's discourse (and the text which will "simulate" this: _A Lover's Discourse: Fragments_) is a "dis-cursus" ("originally the action of running here and there, comings and goings, measures taken, 'plots and plans': the lover, in fact, cannot keep his mind from racing, taking new measures and plotting against himself.")
Yet, the image-repertoire is static--each image is paralyzing, and it is the terror of an overwhelming image that does not so much imply a modification in its substance, but rather, that its stasis produces an amplification of its aeffects simply because it will not go away. This is not boredom (though one could imagine a pleasant image growing worn, like a porno that just doesn't "do it anymore"--the "je ne ce quoi" has evaporated, its 'effervescence' effaced--what a beautiful vulgarity!)
Rather, it is the horror of not being able to be done with an image! It is the dyspepsia Nietzsche diagnoses as nihilism. The inability to be done with anything, the "trauma" (the dream), is an activity, not a passive affliction: one must will-to-possess the image, to dwell upon the image, to wish to undo it and re-imagine it as one wishes--that is, to neutralize the dis-comforting image, to make it conform to one's own comfort. (Not the same as a desire to punish: this is not masochism; I am describing an absurdity named "Sovereignty". It is a profound irony: that the pursuit of sovereignty leads only ever to subjugation.)
Love, then, is somewhat demystified: love is the acute sensation of being haunted by the image-repertoire of the loved other, of being incapable of being able to produce _new_ images (for this would be a violation, an artistic violence against the free-giveness of the Other), which must rely upon, which must learn to embrace, to be ravished by the images given freely by the Other.
Yet, Barthes' loved Other does not say a word (for it is a text, X does not speak, he is written). But more profoundly, the Other gives signs (like a prophet, whose true-discourse is hidden within himself alone, who cannot answer before a tribunal or a chorus of witnesses). This implies deciphering these signs, to dwell on them, to not let them pass before they have been apprehended fully. That is, the lover cannot but torture himself, cannot help but provoke the horror of an image.
To love is to be in this paradox. To be in love is to be impossibly polymorphous (to be suspended by these images, in the images, perpetually re-figured). To be a lover is to be in the flux of the schemata, to give and receive, to measure and run back and forth, here and there....Is there a meaning to all of this action? (How could anyone ask such a question?!)

One year ago I met J. at work. It was wholly unexpected. He left, he came back. In between there was a risk on his part, and a desire on mine (I never remember properly). Tomorrow we celebrate. Though, the festival of our rage, our tenderness, our exhaustion, our passion--this has never stopped.

Affirmation of the Affirmation is Affirmation

2010-06-02T20:52:00.000-07:00

I've been getting high on Barthes--A Lover's Discourse: Fragments--and he, of course, is getting high on Nietzsche (via Deleuze) and Goethe (Werther). When J. and I have our moments (scenes, if you will) I despair, not having a proper hold of myself or him or what it is exactly that has instigated the scene (for it is also something outside us that prompts the disturbance). A hold that doesn't need to hang on something. A gift that dissolves in the giving: "If you want you can..." and I interrupt: because you offered me an out, I know I won't need it.

Re-Memorializing Daze

2010-05-31T12:03:00.000-07:00

Let me start by addressing my Chicago readers: bitch about your rained-out bbq to an Iraqi or an Afghani.

Memorial Day is always a strange one--I have a hard time getting into the spirit of the holiday for personal reasons but also because (unlike Independence Day) we are incited to implicitly celebrate American military conquest by explicitly glamorizing those men (and now women) who "served" their country or who "paid the ultimate (sacrificial) price" "in the line of duty".

I'm not meaning to hate on those who join the military. Rather, I'm querying the framing of the way we speak about America's military commitments. It was not uncommon for serious, "average" Americans to call into question the validity of the deaths of American soldiers in Vietnam, to ask, "why are we sending so many young people to their demise?" This was especially true of the Civil Rights movement--and we shouldn't forget that MLK was assassinated right around the time he was linking the struggle for domestic civil rights to American foreign policy (why are a disproportionate amount of poor black youth being drafted? why are there "exceptions" for white youth in college or who wear orthodontics?).

Left out of this discursive framing are the Iraqis, Afghanis, Palestinians, Mexicans, Somalis, and plenty of other folks who are directly or indirectly impacted by American military action. We don't ask after the over half-a-million internally displaced Iraqis, or after the families of those who suffered the loss of a loved-one or a home or a means of livelihood through "collateral damage"; we don't ask after the precarious position American patrols force already vulnerable Afghanis into when they are forced to submit to questions; nor do we ask after the American soldiers who have suffered rather serious injuries--psychical, physical, and neurological--and must wage war against an unresponsive, bankrupt bureaucracy; and finally, we do not ask after the logics under-girding both American militarism and enlistment (i.e., why are we fighting in Iraq? Or, why is the military one of the few places many socio-economically depressed folks can get a good technical or college degree?).

So, sorry that your bbq is damped by the weather, but maybe it shouldn't have been so warmly embraced in the first place?

***
In other news, classes end this week so I'm launching into the end of the quarter--final papers (both rather important) are to be written, and I'm looking forward to that. Also, teaching starts on Wednesday, and I'm always a bit anxious about the first class if for no other reason than as a younger, gay man it isn't always easy to earn the respect or exude authority, and so extra-strategic, diplomatic attention is always required so as to deftly read and respond to the nuances of the students.

I'm also excited for the summer to start. J. and I have been talking more regularly about expanding the structure of our relationship. What all that may or will entail is still unclear, but the summer promises to be exciting. IML was a great start. It was nice to be in it together, enjoying the attentions and affections of a lot of hot men and boys, and one another too! haha--there is something electrifying about being out with him when we are hit on: it is as if the desires of those men finds its way into and then out of our bodies when we fuck (i feel satisfied, full, invigorated). But he said quite openly that he wishes he could experience the cruising scene, and though qualified to include me in this desire (I want to cruise with you, ya know, for a third or something) I still get a bit anxious about how things will unfold. Yet, I should also relax a bit about it, not over-determine anything and let things happen as they do and respond when/if they do. Risk-aversion leads to some royally stupid decisions, which in turn tend to produce precisely the effect one works so hard against mitigating. Or, some effect even worse. All of this is easy to write, but maybe writing it out makes living it easier. The Stoics would say: live as if he already cheated on you, as if he already left you for another and then you will not be overwhelmed if he does, and you will enjoy your time with him freed from fear. (Of course, the Stoics were talking about death so they could speak of such inevitability, but love isn't like this: it imagines itself to be immortal, interminable: there is no escape from the lover's anxiety.)

Tonight we may go to the Black and Blue Ball, and I can get myself in the mood for it. I just don't know if I want to. It will depend on him. And then, in turn, on us. In the mean time, I'm loving formulating arguments against these despisers of the (embodied) Web. My work helps me, actually, with J.: it keeps me from making the same kinds of nostalgia-induced, reductive judgments: he keeps me fresh and fun. Infinitely interesting.

Needle In the Hay

2010-05-07T18:02:00.000-07:00

When I was in elementary school we had "moving-up" ceremonies (queue the R&B). At Chicago we have "convocations" (summoning a large assembly of people for the conferral of awards). But I'm going to my sister's "graduation" (cf. also: 2; the action of dividing into degrees or other proportionate divisions on a graduated scale.). Our relationship has been fraught, mostly because we have "graduated"--divided by degrees along some measured scale of silences, thinly veiled insinuations of disapproval (oh, really? a sorority?... really? he's in the Army?... Or: Why do you date men any way?). Graduated... Though, at least I'll have an excuse not to really engage. No, I don't know the first thing about getting a real job in the business world... No, I wish I could but I don't live in DC so I wouldn't know if that's a good rental price... That sort of shit siblings continue to pester one another with from whatever distances they have furnished themselves with. But I like my little corner of the world, and I don't need to ask anyone for their fucking advice. (Not true: just, no one in my family.)

To be honest, it's just that this seems like a chore. No: like a total bore. It is crazy or stupid or whatever. Perhaps mean-spirited. But only if you think that we should subordinate ourselves to the drudgery of obligation--familial obligations I find most repulsive. Some people wish for the bondage of familial obligation; gays call one another "family" (not, what I think is more appropriate, but hardly more accurate, "community"), and a cottage industry of philosophy has blossomed under the sign of a nostalgia fueled vehemence that can only lash out at the desire for more wiggle-room with all sorts of nightmarish doomscapes of nihilism.

It's a matter of being an adept psychoanalyst, I think. Yes, yes, all of this has been said: anomie, dis-empowement, alienation, exclusion, despair--the canon of 19th and 20th century literature (of the readable variety--which is to say, pleasurable). Honest, perhaps more properly. What is beautiful about literature, about sitcoms, music videos, video-games, movies, comic strips, commercials, ect--the cultural signs--detritus and otherwise--is this mirroring effect. Still: one can choose how to look in the mirror. Perhaps it is just me, but after really good sex I like to look in the mirror, to match the image to the corporeal sensation that is still alive on the memory of my skin. I like to see my lover next to me in the mirror, equally pleased, sated--but not quite--always more, always lacking, always wanting, wanting, wanting--to avoid boredom or an image that is too recognizable, too the morning after; desire is the good.

The bonds of family--this is a bizarre desire, I feel. An over-investment in the paternal order, the militarized state, the disciplinary apparatus of church, school, clinic.

My a girl I knew in high school is starring in the remake of "Nightmare on Elm Street". She's "Rooney Mara"--which is funny as her nom de theatre is her mother's maiden name. Anyway, she plays the chick who cuts or burns herself to keep awake, to keep out of the nightmare, and who (of course) gets hospitalized and sedated--how brilliant! Modern psychiatry is what is responsible for sending us to our hellish deaths: their arrogant expertise amounting to nothing more than a banal death sentence--a lethal injection of good intention. One night, at her house, we sat outside talking about how unforgivable fat is--on ourselves and on others (body fascists my Sokrates says). From the open window of her parents bedroom we hear her father exclaim something nasty about her (out of frustration?) to her mother, and there is nothing that can be said since we've both heard it and yet to acknowledge that it was heard would be to acknowledge that it was said, and neither of us want to do that--it would hurt too much, be too messy, too unexplainable--a wound impossible to treat. But there I was, and a part of me was so pleased: yes, I thought to myself, I know for certain that all the rest of "You" are as abject as I am--and yet, I get to take all the shit for you, from you, so you don't have to speak your own shit out loud, so it can be disavowed, heard but not really heard.

I think that if I ever win an award that requires me to thank people publicly, I think I'd be of the temperament which would say simply: you know who you are that I am thankful for. My love knows no bounds; and that nothing in me knows any bounds, I am constantly engaged in a playful wrestling match; I often keep my desires bound and gagged, moaning for release. Oh, my father-Freud, how vindicated I am! Infinitely invert-able, laughing at the sudden reversals--may I always be laughing!

Tonight J. make me laugh out loud; how wonderful, I said, that you transgress a threshold and I don't scream in pain, but laugh like a child! May I always be able to laugh! I love my body in his hands. Strong hands, skilled in delicate and intimate foldings and unfoldings. My hands are sometimes too clumsy: they clatter like a keyboard or a train-car. My hands, my hands, my hands! When they are in love with my ideas they dance for me: like beautiful boys in a ballet choreographed by Alvin Ailey and Lady Gaga... Half-psychotic, sick, hypnotic...

Paper Gangsta

2010-04-30T21:52:00.000-07:00

There may be some extra layer of shame that one might feel upon realizing that a pop diva has shown them up, called them out.
It came when wanting to identify with the Lady herself--someone just as real, as fabulous. And then I realized I had the flavor but no follow-through.
And I've thought about this song once before when I felt mildly reproached for being all about "papers". As an academic, that's about all I get to be into. And then I realized she said "fakers" and I breathed a sigh of relief.

(your diamond words melt into ice... absolutely devastating. Obviously this is about exploitative music producers or agents or what have you, but also about prenuptial agreements or marriage licenses--and thus marriage is implicated; and the self-help cottage industry... oh this list is endless! Like, Gangsta rap "ice" is ephemeral, melting away whereas Gaga will have diamonds only, and thus gestures towards Marilyn, an enduring feminine sex-pop icon--and what about that she is the new "Lady"? It isn't "move over" Billie, but rather: make some room--not that I think Billie Holiday would object to Gaga's company--birds of a feather and all...)

But, ok, I admitted to being called out. Gaga's affirmation--just as real, as fabulous--is a serious aesthetico-ethical standard. If she can dismiss managers/lovers/producers/competitors or "fakers" on these grounds, she must be able to escape her own dismissal. It was this thought that caught me, ensnared in the seeming purity of the dichotomy. I was going to reproach J., but alas: I fake as much as he does. He admitted what I have known for ages: he knows more than he lets on. And he puts up his blinders of repression, forces himself to see only what won't disturb. But the disturbing is seen, and it disturbs: he gave himself ulcers, for fuck sake! He basically says as much to me.

I think to myself: I choose not to show you things, too.

A version, no doubt, of faking.

I realized that I don't want to "grow-up" and that, in part, moving to a "bigger space" meant that I was growing--if not in age, then in the amount of stuff that I can't do without if I'm to be/come who I want to... Part of what is frightening about having more space is the silent imperative to "fill it". The German didn't do this for ages--he had an empty museum of an apartment when I was dating him. It scared me. But I should have seen then how perfect we were for one another at the time: he was increasingly incapable of swatting away the droning call to finally exhale and then re-fill his weary body with a fresh history. I was the bug that he could finally swat. And I was, of course, needing someone to show me that I was capable of doing what I wanted to be able to do so badly--namely, be a decent boyfriend, be sexy for other men, to feel my skin touched in new ways that I wouldn't recoil from or have to feel guilty for enjoying. We gave each other what we needed: he nailed the bug, and I got my body back (as if for the first time). But it was all there in the echo-chamber of his apartment--my pleading, broken-record whinings for him to finally "get some shit on your walls!" and his "I will (but not now, when the time is right)...)".

We think we are so clever, and yet we have no idea just how clever we really are: we tell ourselves and one another the truth all the time, in many ways, on many registers, and yet we don't recognize it for what it is--like an old friend we haven't seen in a while, who has gotten an uncharacteristic hair-cut--recognition, but not realization. Like J.'s eyes when the blinders wear thin and become patchy and transparent in places. These truths, where do they go? They are "in," like Trojan Virus's, but we don't feel the impact of the corruption until much, much later. And usually these detections require an up-dating of soft-ware, the next operating platform (if you will). Imagine the body as a computer dating from when you got your first family PC/Mac, and then imagine that without being able to simply replace the machine (the body) you have to get supplemental RAM, multiple external hard-drives; and when a virus seeps in, you quarantine it, but you have to use alternative programs now, you have to send your computer in for "repair" or spend multiple hours on "technical support" as an "expert specialist" walks you through repairing the problem.

It's just funny to think about. Some boy sits down and doesn't know how to navigate your crippled OS and tries to run X program and you freeze--the part of you processing (that rainbow circle of boredom) is remembering the stress, the hassle, the time wasted the last time this happened. Bodies, like computers, adapt; quarantine that program, and this one becomes the new default.

There is a part of my body that likes getting infected. (One can think cynically or hyperbolically but I think Laplanche, for instance, describes--in Freudian terms--how introjection is primal, and by this he means something like: infection of the Other and then auto-immune adaptive response: this is neurosis--and for Laplanche it happens from the very beginning!) Gaga says as much, in a sense, when she sings in "I like it rough"--"Is it cuz I don't feel it, or because you don't mean it... guess it's love..."--cf. also: Poker Face: "When it's love if it's not rough it isn't fun". There is the pleasure in being taken-over; in being overwhelmed. Infected by sensations, stimulations, (simulations), passions (pathos). It is deadly (for Freud: la petite mort), but this is the height of pleasure: to dissolve into the throbbing of a dance rhythm that two bodies produce, naked, like sounds--inside--...

I've moved to a new apartment, and I see a corner of the world now, and not just a ratty court-yard. I see people come and go; buses pull over and hiss and squeal as they let passengers off; I hear taxi cabs grate to a jerking stop; and the remix pulses of Gaga from the club across the way. I see boys going to the ATM, walking out with newly-found fuck buddies, the signs down the street advertising GOT MILK and then the TIME and WEATHER (2.45 am, 66 degrees)... I see the Hancock Tower way down the avenue, and what would be a tall, imposing gym-bunny appear only the size of my glass. (Rum and Rootbeer.)

I'm tired, but wired. And I'm wired to you. So I twitch, and hope that you don't think I'm trying to push you away.

Sexpo, Paparazzi, Moving, Longing

2010-04-29T11:20:00.000-07:00
Last night J., de Milo, and I all went to this Sexpo downtown. It was TRASH (*accompanying contemptuous dismissive gesture mimed*). We were so excited. We though we'd see gay porn stars! We even allowed ourselves to get so carried away that we fancied Buck Angel would be there. And though we all laughed at ourselves about how fucking scary he is (really: every infant boy's anxiety of the "bad breast," of the fatal feminine: a woman who can catch us, and kill us--his with vagina!), I think afterwards we would have risked Buck's cunt over the douchy sleeze-bags that populated the place. Poor women. And, interestingly, we were unmolested--we vamped and camped up a bit, and I thnk for this reason we were more frightening to these dumb-ass men than they were to us. Hahaha. Oh how I love invert-ability (Freud's blessing to faggots: we know how role-play like motherfuckers).

I'm moving today. Just across the street. Into "Pride Tower": Pride party at my place this year! (Perfect view of the route :) ) I'm not looking forward to it tho... it's a pain in the ass... But I'm excited once it's done. It will be beautiful--so much sunlight, more room... and still in Boystown. So important!

Being in VA made me really appreciate how lucky we are here to have a space that is all our own, where we run the streets.

I miss VA. I feel so stupid saying it. I miss "Tall J."--though, his name also begins w/ "J" so, I dunno... maybe I should just stop. He's become like a splinter under the skin of my imaginary. Digging and then disappearing and then sharply re-appearing. He suggested movies I should watch. "Antichrist" and "Otto: or, Up with the Dead People" (a gay zombie flick out of Europe). I'll have to find them some how. But I don't know if I should. This, thus far, other than the intoxicating memory of dancing, is the only thread that extends between us. And it is so tenuous, so fragile that I could so easily snip it without any pain or loss. But that's a lie. So I keep these txts in my phone, these titles, these suggestions.

I re-read my last post: it was half-true (or un-evenly true): I wanted what was also _not_ J: the difference, the remainder that couldn't be folded into the image of J. His accent, his age, his particular appreciation for the music (he knew the words, and was electrically alive when a song he knew came on; 1243: none of the bitches are better than me... It came on at the Sexpo last night and I thought of him instantly, and was thankful for his introduction, for I felt she was singing for me, and so I sang along having learned this refrain for the first time with him, his voice nestling the words in my ear as he gyrated against me)... (real good: we dance in the studio... [I'm your biggest fan...]--there's no other superstar...)

Cuz I'm a Free Bytch, Baby!

2010-04-26T07:33:00.000-07:00

"Bad Romance" was my theme song for our trip to VA Tech's Conference, Lady Gaga my muse, my Athena/Artemis/Hermes/Dionysus/Zeus/Hephaestus/Ares/Aphrodite/Demeter/Apollo/--my pantheon of personas blessing me with the gift of agility. In a nutshell: everything went swimmingly and we were well received. I was in rare form! Before leaving for this conference I say to the Grand Dame of our department, "I will reflect the glory of our department!" (I will channel Alcibiades for as long as possible!)

More to the point, I had a grand time with the Vegan, Cocoa and Parkaboy.

I also had the unique opportunity to get to know the local gay flora and fauna of the city of Roanoke.

We opened our night at "The Back-Street Cafe" where we saw a BRILLIANT drag cabaret show featuring Bunny Flingus and a stellar supporting cast. There I met a boy who did the make-up for Joe Biden and John McCain and Jerry Falwell Jr. (that's right the fucker's kid--Lynchburg is one of the "larger" cities in the area, along with Christiansburg, and the home to J. Crew and Jerry Falwell, until he died on my birthday, which also happened to be the birthday of this gorgeous boy, Caleb, who is a hair dresser/drag queen--tall, skinny, and looks 22 when he's really 27.) As the Vegan said, I scanned the room, found the cutest boy, bee-lined it to him, and was making friends within 3 minutes of being there. Well, more like 2 minutes, but w/e. hahaha...

Anyway, so apparently the place has been shot at. Surprise, surprise! But the Vegan loved it, and so did I, and though I wouldn't go so far as to say that they have gay culture "right," it is true that you don't usually see this sort of thing in Chicago (a cabaret that used "Alice in Wonderland" as the thread that wove all the performances together--for instance, the caterpillar performed--in a full caterpillar plush body suit--"Because I Got High" and the Queen of Hearts did "Poker Face" ect... all told, very clever deployments). The next night they did, at The Park--the only gay dance club in the tri-city area, with the "best sound system in Virginia!"--a rainbow themed show (obviously, Prince's "Purple Rain").

Friday the Park was next to deserted. It was interesting because the only nights they are open are Friday, Saturday, Sunday, so I had expected people to come out on Friday/Saturday, but alas: I was the only boy there who wasn't a total hot mess.

On a more somber note, I did meet a boy who was just tragic. (Tragic, not pathetic--the former, so far as I can tell, implies an overwhelming confrontation with Fate; the latter implies a confrontation with Fate which is not overwhelming but treated as if it were--victimization, "the spirit of gravity.") After a car accident, the boy is rushed to the local hospital which, because (no doubt) it is under-equipped and under-staffed, they send him to another hospital, which for the same reasons, sends him to a third. He is 6 y/o and wakes from the coma when he is 7 y/o--he literally lost a transitioning (symbolically, but with "real" affects)--and, though he is a lefty before the accident, has to learn how to write with his right hand because of uncontrollable spasms that rock the left side of his body. (We can imagine that if medical care were more immediately forthcoming the trauma he suffered, and which still plagues his body, would not have been so intensely damaging. We should keep this boy in mind, we pious theorists, when we feel compelled to issue forth denunciations of the "speeding-up" of time, of its terrible effects on our bodies, and when we sound the nostalgic call to "go back.") A scar, and a noticeable depression around his right eye, still indicate where the site of impact, crushing bone, probably damaging the nerves in his right eye (which is probably why he tripped and fell so many times--a dis-coordination of perception, which is only the organ-izing of sensuous data). He wants to be an actor, move to NYC and "become famous". It's Brittney over Gaga, but he still knows all of Gaga's songs and whenever one of them would come on he would take to the dance floor and mimic, with impressive accuracy, the stylized postures, gestures, moves, struts, syncopated jerkings of the video divas he has obviously studied with a desperate eagerness. And no doubt that I had bought him Coca-Cola's to get him to talk--Coca Cola because he was underage--had something to do with his choice to dance to Lady Gaga, as if still not believing my reassurances that I wasn't expecting anything in return. He was broke. Had driven over an hour to get to the Club. But the club was empty--saving some rather impressively trashy, and (to be perfectly honest) rather frightening, locals. "Hill people" the "city folk" call them. And indeed, we are in the valley of the hills out here. But this meant he could dance his little body all over the place, working himself against a pole in the middle of the floor, grinding his ass against it with all of the rapturous vacancy of a body on camera two lines down the rabbit hole, dropping to the floor back-down, pumping his torso up as if it were a mechanism in a car-jack, twisting himself around to simulate fucking the floor itself--as if the sexual energy were seeping up from the ground itself, an intoxicating perfume of sound and pulse and life giving him a freedom of movement, of unencumbered corpo-reality invigorating the musculature of his form--his performance at once the beautiful release of pleasure, and a gratuitous homage (he left his head and his heart on the dance-floor: a gift of self (to himself, and to the occasion itself for this opportunity, ).)

Then, and perhaps most interesting, I should say, was meeting "Tall J." as everyone called him. Indeed, he was J.'s doppelganger. Though he knew how to dance dirty.... lots of grinding, with no problem playing "top" or "bottom" on the dance-floor. But really: a spitting image: chops, skinny (with skinny jeans), the same mischievous smirk, the same unsure but cunning look in his eyes--a cinema major at the University (just as J. is a directing major--the visual arts). It was uncanny. He was both an impostor in my imaginary and an intriguing simulacra--the discrepancies fascinated me. I wanted him, to possess him--or at least the parts of him that reminded me of J. So strong was the resemblance that I could not help but want him. As if letting him go was losing some parts of J. that had become detached, which had followed me like a spirit or ghost and landed in this boy's body. As if not touching him, not hearing him breathe sporadically into the curve of my neck, not enjoying the pleasure of his attention... as if all of this loss was like losing J. I needed him. I begged for him. This imposing simulacra. Graciously, he was more like J. than I could bear: he said no, as if he were himself J., channeling his voice--the kind reminder that I wasn't in danger of losing what I had, that gentle reassurance (all spoken in the name of J.--"your boyfriend"...)--I clutched him before he left with his girlfriends, thanking him for knowing more than I knew--for understanding more than I could understand--even when he didn't even know or understand the desires wracking my body. I was thrown back--thrown back onto my own longing, my own desire, my own memory, my own anxieties: I wanted my lover, and this boy understood that. Better than I did, he understood, he knew--even though I can give no appreciable account of how. Perhaps I am that obvious.

Anyway, that was Saturday night. I also met Jeremy, who told me how, in W.VA, after one year of name-calling and taunts, his coming-out set a trend and "the cheer-leaders, the football and baseball players were all hooking up." I was stunned, having to flee the high-school in my own Liberal top-10 wealthiest American counties because the homophobia was so debilitating. I was jealous. I was completely flabbergast. I didn't understand, and I still don't. I desperately want to. Yes, there is homophobia in the South, but there is also something else that doesn't map onto the accounts that I'm so fluent in--from experience and academic training. (Interestingly, this plays out the same with bull daggers, too--the few I talked to also said that generally they were left alone, a sort of "not my business so long as you don't make it mine" governmentality operates in this area of the South. While obviously politically problematic, I'm was still jealous of the relative ease of these kids' experiences.)

Anyway, I made is home the next day. Made it back to the world where I dance "right," where I'm barely trendy enough to pass, where my lover and his contours and rhythm synched into mine like they so beautifully do. I made it back through back-water Ohio (where, at a gas station, a white woman just punched in her eye by her husband picked a fight with a Black woman for staring--as we all were--calling this woman a nigger, threatening to shoot her, threatening to burn down her house). I made it back past countless erections of trifecta Eucharist crosses. I made it past bad drivers, past XXX adult video stores, through rain, on badly maintained highways. I raced home. I sped back to my love, my home, my world. I fled. I did. I really did: it was a retreat. This world, this horror and this wonder, was too much. Enough for 3 days. But I had to get away. So much for the amor propre. I needed coherence again. My own frame. My world.

But that was because being there, in VA, was like living between two paradoxical frames, two mutually exclusive worlds: it was neither here nor there--we were like angels visiting from on high, and we were so readily recognized, but we were still spectral--our lives had no traction there, nothing solid to grasp onto--and so we dissolved, happily, into the pulses of music, the energies of the dance-floor, the indistinguishablity of the dark club where abjection, where shame, where fear was assaulted, buckle, and shattered under the insistence of the freeing siren call of the music (oooh lala!). Here we are just beautiful bodies, pleasure machines, wet with sweat, hot with energy, brimming with sexual need. We poured ourselves into the music, and we infected one another--our desire traveling on the tendrils of the webs of sound that bound our bodies together, quivering, spasming, "loosing" (but without loss--"orgasm")...

It is impossible not to fall in love on the dance-floor. I am you here, and you are me. We are not "WE"--we are impossibly separable. The dance-floor is where the paradox is kind, where it is loving--and we love this, we abject bodies and pleasures. This doesn't need a fortress of mountains to house, nor does it need a hip sophistication. I am so undone by this weekend... I left something of myself there, and I brought something of it back with me--and it is like a cancer now--it's cure is still there, somewhere, enigmatic and undecipherable--only showing signs.

Raaaaa! (When it's love if it's not rough it isn't fun)

2010-04-20T10:07:00.000-07:00

I'm glad to read that the Writer and I have brilliantly common capacities to say nasty things to our loved-other which, in fact, only make sense in terms of the cliche "rubber/glue" division of labor. Something like the smooth curvature of a mirror that rebounds an echo back--a haunting return of the obvious (not the repressed).

Every once in a while I imagine what it would have been like if I dated him--though, interestingly, the sex doesn't figure as prominently as it once did when I would first think about these things. Instead, I imagine these brutal exchanges of volleys--something like the boring plugging away of Civil War naval battle, Monitor v. Virginia... I suppose the desire stems from the desire to have an equally vicious antagonist. One feels less guilty when here is a sense of self-defense, a moral self-righteousness that allows the most vile words to somehow seem legitimate.

J. never does this. He has never reared back and struck, the death-grip of a mortal embrace. I do, though. And it sucks. To lie on my side of the bed, too proud to ask for what I want, which is to stop punishing myself, to stop trying to elicit some moral justification for lashing out. And yet, of course, "this hurts me more than it hurts you" is quite possibly the most insipid recourse one can make to sympathy.

The Writer and I share, however, rather reserved partners in crime--reserved to the extent that neither are forthcoming with the sorts of quotidian reassurances. Nor are either particularly eager to engage in constituting the inter-esse that weaves the binding threads of a life together. Theirs is a different model. Of course, B. & J.--aside from what I imagine would be very hot sex--would be utterly useless to one another: absent the neurotic doting, prying, praising, and provoking characteristic of boys like the Writer and me these stoic beauties would devolve into a miasma of meaninglessness. Ironically, though we are the neurotic ones, we are also the ground, the foundation, the pillars that support whatever detached flights of fancy these men of ours endeavor on.

(Are these only _my_ fights, dear Writer, or do we lash out because of this stoic refusal to acknowledge their gratitude?)

This weekend I'll be in VA for a gender and technology conference, which I am looking forward to. The Vegan and Parkaboy will all be there, and we will go playing together. I banged out 11 pages on Heidegger, technology, Derrida, and Nietzsche. It was fun, and it sorta just flowed out--like a religious experience or an orgasm. This are moments of poetic ek-statis, and it is why I do what I do.

de Milo (he reminded me of his own name, how terrible--but I like it: Venus and Marquis implied at one and the same time--the fabulously gender-bending fucker...) may have found himself a partner in crime himself. And I am both jealous (though of who, I'm not sure) and very, very happy for him. My conceit as seducer shattered by reality... really? why always the Real? hahaha, whatever. de Milo is quickly becoming one of my best friends. I am regularly impressed by his ability to get and keep (provisionally) his shit together come what may. He is staggeringly strong, and here my conceit as seducer totally inverted: I feel for his savoir-faire, I suppose. And how gracefully, how aptly he has eased me into being happy with what I already have. He and J. were a bit awkward. I am wholly responsible for this. Playing a poorly orchestrated game. I've grown up, I think, and stepped out of the way, and surprise surprise: they like each other, and get along just fine. This makes me most happy.

Ok. I need to go talk to my Old Man. (Just Dance!)

Cold as Ice/Hot as Fire (you're a god, and i'm a liar)

2010-04-14T13:23:00.000-07:00

I continue to fail to find Foucault's "ethics" satisfying. Or persuasive. As an interesting genealogy of the ways in which Christian asceticism develops out of certain Hellenic and Roman philosophical practices, especially Stoicism, Foucault captures my attention. But insofar as this analysis is meant to illuminate an _ethical_ dimension to life, and to the extent that this ethics is modeled after numerous _administrative_ examples (the soul as a ship, a bank, a house-hold, ect.), then Foucault seems to reinscribe a Christian figuration of the soul into Antiquity. I say this because, for instance, Plato and Aristotle--not to mention Heraclitus and Empedocles before them, and Diogenes after them--imagined the soul as an agonistic site of contestation and negotiation more closely resembling the Freudian tripartite psychic "structure" ego/s-ego/id, and not a technical/medical model of administration. There is also the ways in which Foucault's attention to "governmentality"--analyzed first in the context of a critique of neo-liberal economic rationalities--when it surfaces in his readings of the ancients repeats this self-same instrumental logic, "discovering" it in these texts (which may be true--but then, why build an ethic on the same rational foundations?)...

Anyway, I am feeling a bit overwhelmed with the prospect of my move coming up. My landlord was a douche about breaking my lease a month early--though, I also wasn't particularly interested in _asking_ either. Hopefully this won't really be a problem. It shouldn't be hard for them to find a new tenant, and anyway: it's not my issue: these people have been so regularly terrible to me, that the last thing on my mind is making sure _they're_ alright.

But this week also starts an insane blitzkrieg of "events"--Arendt Circle this weekend, and then our trip to VA for VATech's Gender and Technology. I still need to write my paper for this VA Tech conference.

Anyway. To finish "The Seducer's Diary". How about an ethic of boredom? Can we say that boredom is the ultimate evil, that it should be first philosophy to hold at bay this sensation? What would that look like?

Like Eating Glass (forricherforpoorerforbetterforworse)

2010-03-25T14:38:00.000-07:00

I'm enjoying and suffering in taciturn cycling a general aimlessness. Turtles/work/coffee-drinking/re-communing with neglected friends. In Lauren's class we thought seriously about the valences of "drifting" or "digression". (The "et cetera principle"--though, how could digression have a "principle"?--The Stoic says to me the other night: that's the death drive. I don't know, though. How can a "drive" which aims towards negation or stasis be devoid of an active principle? This isn't death drive. It is sort of just listlessness. Like a ship in a calm. A week long calm. But there is no sun for a tan. Of course.)

I've decided I'm only going to take 2 courses this up-coming quarter. Last quarter was brutal. I'll be so busy--just my travel plans are insane: driving to Virginia and back to only then hop on a plane to DC for little sister's graduation--and it really began to take a toll on me. And I guess I've been affected by the repeated complaints i've gotten from all of my neglected friends. And right now, missing J. as I am--which is rather more than I'd like to have to endure, to be perfectly honest--while anticipating a busy schedule prompts me to account for the profound ways in which I'd rather not want to feel like I do now. {On this, Tim Dean is wholly wrong-headed: there are ALWAYS mediating projections that enable a subject to FEEL close or distance to an Other.}

w/e. i'm bored. (even too bored to j/o.)

{If Paul Verilio's argument is that technology has effaced our ability to enjoy/suffer distances, then he simply reiterates a problem that has haunted the human condition for ages (Anne Carson does a brilliant job of depicting the tension of distance in the context of ancient notions of erotic time and space). The problem of "new media" is that it is new for us, and this is our problem: how do we establish distances, distinctions, difference? Plato gives this philosophical voice and sets in motion the tradition of attempting to negotiate this condition. Indeed, this is Nietzsche's prompt for maligning democracy--and the "Enlightenment" writ large--as a leveling of distinctions. The spatial metaphors N. deploys to characterize the necessity of transvaluation are crucial (even the notion of an "over" man, but they do not end there: rank, an expansive soul, a protraction of the will in time, the 'going-under' of Zarathustra's Dionysian 'great contempt' and so on). Anyway, how myopic to assume that we, in contemporary life, are so radically severed from the past and the struggles (intellectual/existential and socio-political) thereof. And cowardly: we refuse to stop and look around, so enchanted by the anxieties of contemporary life--enchanting, in turn, the terror of the question into a reassuring abyss of meaning--a glamourous nihilism. Fuck that.}

From a certain Scamp: "how i said to you, "honey, just open your heart," when i've got trouble even opening a honey jar, and that right there is where we are..."

I Just Can't Get You Outta My Head

2010-03-24T12:47:00.000-07:00

I got my first ever "B" as a graduate student. There are plenty of contextualizing reasons/excuses why, but I don't really care. I got a "B" and part of me is proud of this. At least, the part of me that realizes I could have gotten an "A"--or even an "A-"--if I had done the work in a particular way towards a particular end. But I _chose_ not to. I said to J., The thing that sucks about this paper is that I know the paper this prof. wants to read is one I don't want to write. And so I decided to write the paper I wanted to write, and not the one he wanted to read. And I got a "B," which must be the most cynical grade ever, considering ample participation, no incomplete assignments, and only one missed class. But it was a defiantly missed class--one I refused to attend on principle. No doubt my grade was a result of an equally principled decision.
Regardless, I'm not upset--it doesn't hurt my standing in the dept., nor does it nullify the course-work. It was just a dick thing to do, and not very surprising at that: he is a tool.
In the mean time, I await my other grades. I'm less nervous about them, though. I feel confident about the work I did.
Tonight I will see a friend's apartment. I was talking to the Vegan and he said something I was afraid of: "It's not like I love Boystown, but you miss it when you leave it--I was getting shot at, constantly sneered at, and there was nothing around." So I'm looking at a 2 bedroom space for $800 a month in Boystown that my friend has till May, which I may be able to take over if I look very closely at expenses. A study, a bedroom, a place to host guests... It could be nice. And I think that if I need to, I could (maybe) do a (gay) roommate.
Which is to say, I doubt J. will be up for moving in with me--despite my desire to live with him. It will probably be too much for him, and I think he likes the sense of freedom that having "MY place" and "YOUR place" implies. Immutable boundaries that can be enforced like no-fly-zones should they need to be. I understand that. I'm not entirely sure I don't have the same desire, too.
But he is willing to leave his father's phone plan and join mine. Which I think is something--not a lease, but something like it. A formal piece of paper that connects him to me in this world. Even if it is a Verizon cellphone bill. For phones we will largely use to talk to one another.
I'm in the Center again because the interwebz I pirate are down. It's funny to see how things happen here--the constant movement, very formal, very official: name badges, walkie-talkies. All of that.
Anyway, I'm gonna go home, get ready for work, go to work, work, finish work, read a book for a bit, and get picked up by this boy and see his apartment. I'm nervous about moving. I said to the Vegan, "Even though I don't avail myself of the local amenities Boystown has to offer, I like being around other fags." Maybe if I get this smartphone with J. I'll have to put my money where my mouth is, and rely on Grinder for my sense of community. Only if I move away. Which I want to do less and less...
In other news, I'm excited about meeting up with the Writer on Friday, despite his animosity, which I always found somewhat endearing and even a bit charming. Fag Jesus had to hear all about it the other night and it was funny when he interrupted me to let me know he can imagine, in each ear, the two of us bitching about one another. I blushed in mild embarrassment.
Last night was spent with my Stoic philosopher queen friend, and she (a real bio-woman--a bionic woman?) had a grand time. We talked Freud and James and Goethe and Billy Shakes and all was well. Though some guy followed me back from the bus stop where I dropped her off yelling, "Sir!" "Sir!" "Excuse me, Sir!" and I ignored him and kept walking until I heard his feet fall in the rhythm of a run, and sensing that I wasn't going to make it to Halstead before he reached me, I spun around, and said, "Yes?!" in the most no-nonsense tone I could muster, and when he realized he couldn't clock me over the head and take my money he mumbled a "God bless..." (to which I said, "You wish") and retreated back into the shadows of the alley from which he'd emerged suddenly, so eager and hopeful to score my wallet. Motherfucker. Scared the shit out of me.

Best Friends Means I Pull the Trigger (Best Friends Means You Get What You Deserve)

2010-03-23T12:30:00.000-07:00

Dear Boyfriends,

Yes, plural—I know, I’m discovering as if for the first time, too. (Rouge-ish, that ‘as if’. As if I knew and am now only owning up to it? As if! …Yes, exactly: as if what? As if wise enough? devious enough? capable enough? dispassionately passionate enough? Enough. Period. Yes, boys have periods too. Essentialize that.)

I find myself somewhat at a loss. I’m not used to addressing a plural intimate, no matter the fact some would contend that is disingenuous. After all, what is this talk about the plurality of the psyche, of the body itself even, if not a championing of the plurality of intimate relations? I tip my hand: I rarely feel intimate with myself in the plural—I often find myself uncomfortable among many competing demands, the demand to perform, to meet a standard, to stand at attention, to not let intimacy flag, erect quivering attentive.
There is, in any great concentration of desire, a deadening of the soul’s plurality, a great narrowing and channeling of attention. I regret nothing in the span of this great concentration, honed-in, penetrating deeply. There is only this. Now. Many suidices, athletes, war veterans, artists, and lovers have often spoken the same way. But then, I am all of these, expansive as I am. So romantic, so noble—possibly tortured. As if.

There is a sex toy ironically named for a phantasy I only now realize. “It’s so two bottoms can be boyfriends.” So blithely tossed out, as if knowingly. A fuck you to the domineering pre-tense of tops, who can’t imagine their cock supplanted by a dildo. My dick is my phallus! (As if...) For all of the boys I fucked, it’s the ones I never did that I love, and there seems something profoundly unfair about this. Forget communities of impersonal intimacy. I live in communities of unrequited love. Sublimated libido. Misshapen, gaps and ad hoc binding exposed, two different colors—this dildo has not sold, and now the sign that reads “New!…” reads like a bad joke, propped up on a pedestal, slightly out of reach, slightly out of sight—but a nice idea. As if… a queertopia!

The time of ‘as if’ is the future, and the space of the ‘as if’ is the imaginary domain?

As if it weren’t smoking or cat allergies or any number of differences too innumerable to enumerate… Let the dildo mean more than it does. It’s the silly sense of things: over-determine—perhaps even fetishize—the damn thing. And your boyfriend. The one you talk to. Whose dick is also sometimes phallic. Forget ‘as if’ is as superficial as it is/n’t: lie. My noble lie. So romantic, so noble—possible tortured. As if.

As if I weren’t happy to sleep with my phone by my pillow so his call will wake me? I’m quite pleased for the chance, thank you. This sort of impersonal intimacy. So I can have my refuge from the demands of requited love. (Who makes these demands? With what authority? As if I knew… As if.) The phantasmagoria of exclusive, reciprocal love--the caresses, the promises, the little gestures of on-goingness comprising the melange of meaning always already on the brink of being compromised--and uneasy alliance of disavowal and earnest vows.
The discomfort of a membrane stretched too thin, too easily ruptured, pierced--a hymen of sensibility. Or a condom. Filled with water. Dropped from the 22nd story window of the penthouse apartment you dream of one day sharing with your partner. (In crime, in law, in life?) So I stopped fucking with condoms, but that was itself a risk perhaps too risky to take, or rather, receive. And when I look at the folds of my anus I wonder if the swollen musculature looks more like a scar on the order of a pussy or if that is just the effects of age and regular use--having just been used. I wonder if my asshole is ugly, and I consider how this might be a trifling question compared to the more pertinent question, namely: am I ugly? The wrinkles around my eyes and mouth. Folds of flesh on the order of a scar, use and age? As if my face is an asshole. A funny persona to think about. As if I could stand to think about the degeneration of my body.
The terror of realizing that, when taken to its logical conclusion, positing plurality and flux leads to a dissolution of every solid banister or wall or ground. That, indeed, there was never anything solid there in the first place. We've always been in free-fall. And this is something like falling in love--the sense of falling at the same rate: as if if the laws of gravity, mass, density, ect. conspired together, like when windshield wipers flap back and forth in time with the left-turn indicator: tick-flap, flop-tock. I joke regularly about the phantom cosmic clock that times my life with J. And though I know it is a metaphor--do you know what I mean?--it still is one of those necessary fictions--one of those 'as ifs' that I don't question and can only embrace and cling to with the desperation of someone who knows that this clock is not Swiss made, that it will become syncopated. And then what? As if I knew. So romantic, so noble... As if tortured.
Of course, I write as if my boyfriend reads this. No, these are illicit attachments--a desire for what is by definition out of reach: and indeed, this is the way I like it. Though I get nervous about the extent to which I keep at bay what I otherwise would want to release myself to. And I wonder about how expansive and retractive my life becomes, the rhythms of receptivity accelerated by the necessity of keeping-time for/with/to the demands I desire obliging myself to. Because I spoke these words: I want... (Sappho) As if I knew what I wanted. Though, on the short list: the 'then' (Sunday) 'now' (today). I miss J.
The brutality of desire is its exhaustibility. There is no defense here: I am a selfish lover, and you, dear boyfriends, were brutalized by my exhaustion. So beautifully resplendent in its fatigue--flaccid desire is curdled milk. Thirsty? And yet, you are not alone in this measuring out, this parceling time, intimacy, desire, pleasure. Even J. suffers from the insistence of this instantiation of incrementalized instances of intimacy. Everything succumbs to the incessant need to quantify, divide, subtract, add--all this math--all of these numbers... Does this count as an apology? Does it add up to the needed guilt or innocence? Divide my attention by the answer; multiply this by 2/4/8/16/32. Keep the remainder. Hope the balance changes. Wonder what this amounts to. What does this amount to? As if I could calculate...
And the other night when I passed out in my bathroom, when my cellular phone dropped into the toilet half full of piss, when my head crashed against the unyielding metal of the radiator, when I woke and heard on the short-circuiting of the phone buzzing through the filth and porcelain, the flashes of pain, the vomit, the piss. What scared me was precisely the inability to speak. Or move. I cried. There was no one there. J. gone. My neighbors unknown. Phone broken. More vomit. Shoveling ice-cream down my throat to get sugar in my blood. Blood on my hands from my head. Scared and alone. As if in free fall.
I'm going to go home, smoke some pot, drink more coffee, smoke more cigarettes--does it make sense to brag about future plans to quit over the summer? in the name of youth and health and vanity and terror--and then ride my bicycle. It isn't very warm out--or at least, not as warm as I would like--who do I complain to about this--as if weather were a bureaucracy you could score cheap points off when you needed to boost your self-esteem. But no one does what I do better than me. And though I'm rarely sure what exactly it is that I do, what I am rather positive of--to the extent that one can in fact be _positive_--is that I act out these silly vignettes--... Or have you stopped reading? As if...

A brief retort to Sam Tanenhaus

2010-03-21T23:43:00.001-07:00

A brief retort to Sam Tanenhaus's NYTimes editorial, "In Texas Curriculum Fight, Identity Politics Leans Right". Needless to say, I was rather peeved by the schlocky pseudo-intellectual tone Tenenhaus takes, supported one is meant to believe, by the never-ending regurgitation of archaic authorial authorities, Arthur Schlesinger most colorfully. Indeed, it is the half-cocked logic of the Schlesinger brand that ultimately takes the day in Mr. Tenenhaus' article--though, really, we should just call it a blog already. Despite tone of the headline, Mr. Tenenhaus seems to see no problem with this situation. This is because he rather condescendingly sees the latest round of cynical Right-wing revisionism as amounting to little more than the same identity politicking of Left-wing Black, gay, Feminist, immigrant, Indigenous Americans, even Socialist struggles for acknowledgment of a history that runs counter to the exceptional narrative of American exceptionalism.

Perhaps Tenenhaus took exception to Tocqueville's accompanying warning, namely it was precisely homogeneity that threatened the formation of a despotic mob who, through the deployment of social stigmatization and shunning, enforced a dominant narrative through the marginalization of those with dissenting opinions or "deviant" life-styles or orientations. This was not speculation for Tocqueville, but a historical observation born of careful ethnographic research and reflection.

It's this propensity towards selective editing of history, typified here by both the Texas School Board and Mr. Tenenhaus, that so-called "left-wing" indentitarian politicos have contested. And doesn't this make all the difference in the world? Can we _really, honestly_ say that conservative Americans are being, of all things, marginalized on the order endured by Blacks, gays, ethnic minorities, or women when textbooks document the history of rather noble agents of change like Oscar Romero or serve to remind contemporary Americans that "founding father" Thomas Jefferson advocated the separation of church and State? Certainly including these counter narratives will displace more traditional, even mythical--remember "manifest destiny"?--accounts. But, in part, that, too, is the point: the conservative movement can claim a mantle representing a tradition centering American self-understanding, only because political subjects who _did not, and still may not_ conform to those norms were marginalized. The list ranges from women, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Blacks, gays, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Gemans, Indigenous Americans, Mexicans, Creole-speaking New Orleanians, Italians, Spanish-speaking immigrants, and--for a time--any American who "was not with us" as the former Bush administration launched the country towards an ill-advised, fiscally irresponsible, legally criminal, and morally wrong war in Iraq.

Mr. Tenenhaus begins to advance an interesting thesis--that such attempts to domineer history betray a desire to retreat from the present--but this is itself quickly retreated from. Further, though the most interesting moment in an otherwise cliched and tired article, this thesis is sadly unidirectional in its scope. It ignores, for instance, how mis- or mal-educated American youth are vulnerable to the cynical appeals of pundits and politicians who harken to a time and place that never existed--except in the fantasy land of conservative Texan textbooks--with the promise of "returning" America to that idylic, "simpler time". While true that control of the past does not guarantee control over the future, it certainly helps pave the way.

Ultimately, however, what Mr. Tenenhaus fails to understand--and this was the most frustrating dimension of the whole editorial--is that at stake in the education of our youth is the cultivation of our country's future citizens. I think looking at the maneuvers of conservatives in the Texas School Board highlights a significant impulse prevelant in America: rather than face our checkered past, we disavow its existence. Now, such disavowal won't be so hard because we won't even know the history we are disavowing: we will simply be ignorant. There are many pit-falls to such an future: America needs to take seriously a number of profound challenges--peak oil, global warming, the de-territorialization of global commerce and even politics, climate refugees, a staggering National debt, and bio-medical advances to name a few. If we do not have the confidence that similar Americans, just like us, once confronted problems of similar scope and gravity, how will we expect Americans of the future to respond to these challenges? Because, fundamentally, what conservatives are doing is writing out of history all of the _conflict_ that defined the figures historical figures worth studying, and perhaps even revering.

Baby, Baby It's a Wild World

2010-03-19T20:53:00.000-07:00

It's trite, but I'll say it anyway: I miss my boyfriend, and while he hasn't really even been gone a full 6 hours, I am anticipating not having anything to do that will remind me of him while going about my day. It used to be I would listen to Mars Volta, and then Miles Davis, and most recently Afrobeat. He was busy this last half-of-his-semester/my-quarter. And so was I. I did a lot of work, more than I should have taken on. I got sick twice, which makes me nervous. I feel like my immune system has been holding on pretty well in the last few years, even getting better, but I'm thinking that the stress of school and trying to turn that off long enough for an intimate moment with J. has proven rather more trying on my health than I assumed.

And though it's lame to say it (again) I miss my friends. It was the Writer's birthday this week and I didn't even remember--nor had I any time to check into Facebook to be reminded. Part of me eagerly awaits the use of the brain itself as hardware for storing all of the information that I knew but couldn't access when I want--to know that you want something but not know until it's too late: that's what Freud call's nachtraglichkeit: delayed action--desire building like a wave but cresting too late, or a high-five on two different trajectories. That's what technology really is, I think: a way in which we are able to store, categorize, and process information in ever increasingly efficient manners. It's like evolution exhausted itself on man--rather than a processed image--a screen of information--we developed an immediate reaction: pain, for instance. Computers used to get slow because the available hardware space was filled, the processor chip too slow to transmit the information (a binary string more complex than DNA). We are reaching a point, Parka Boy says, where we can use rocks in the place of chips--after all, once you reach a molecule-wide strip of gold or copper you can't go any thinner. I think technology is man's way of exhausting itself.

J. and I run on a cosmic clock. Rilke's two strings and drawn bow sort of thing. He calls me before I do something stupid, that I knew I would remember with a pang of shame, and hurtled towards only in a sadistic passion of condescending douchery. He called from the basement of his grandmother's house, while his dad was getting ready for bed upstairs. I would be sleeping in that basement if I were capable of muting my own faggery or my passion for his son. If I could, we might be fucking right now, my lips pressed into flesh to keep quiet. It's hot to think about, I will again later.

I've come up with a 40 book summer reading list. Preparation for a comp exam. First pitch of a question was sent back by the editor. Re-draft, re-send, re-wait. RSVP in the mean time. Re-agree on hotel arrangements. Re-affirm excitement over conference. Re-mind yourself you will have fun. Right: the book list. Ugh. Oh! I mean...

J. calls and I realize that blogging is what I used to do to deal with missing him. But this is an ambivalent avenue. This is also how I used to deal with missing the Writer. Who I am also missing. Who I just drunkenly gmail chatted with for almost 2 or more hours. I lost track of time. A lot happened in between. Emails. A movie. Chatroulette.com (I like to mime the people who are intrigued at what they see...). 4 crap beers. A joint. A PBJ sandwich. Piss x6. I'm doing it now again, I guess. With a lot of ghosts, though. The Writer, School, J., this insistent libido. I said to my Old Man that I'm in limbo again, and to a former co-worker a posteriori: time to enjoy, but no money with which to enjoy my time. I will be exercising. Chin-ups. Bike rides up and down the lake. Excessive masturbation. (Does that count?)

J. has the belly of the Hermes bronze-cast in the Uffizi: boyish and beautiful. Perfect.

A Rushed Reflection

2010-02-23T04:47:00.000-08:00

J. is asleep in my bed. I wasn't expecting it, him to stay the night. I was in "academic mode" in preparation for a night full of reading, writing, and preparing for today's classes. (And other administrative banalities.) I felt put out, thrown-off, disoriented: I was in a certain mindset, approaching a certain type of practice, and needless to say, it is not one necessarily conducive to small talk or sexual intimacy. "Sublimation" isn't strong enough to characterize the sort of affective process of engaging in critical reflection and analysis. There is a process of becoming "into" that particular modality of performativity which takes time and various adjustments to posture, gesture, tone and tempo of speech. It is, as it were, an "inhabituation"--a more or less habitualized inhabiting of a certain comportment to the world; a particular _in_ -relation-to... It took me 5 hours to realize what I wish I had recognized in the moment, namely, I am happy to be hearing his alarm going off, to have worked while he was in the other room sleeping. I tried to affect a radical persona-change in mid-stride, and utterly failed. It takes a lot of time to un-/re-dress, too. Much like Mr. Rogers, there is a ritual, or obsessive-compulsive sequencings that enable me to shift between/within multiple relationalities with more or less ease. In hind-sight, I should have simply said what I felt (my pleasure over the pleasure of his company), and then gone to work. I confessed to J. that I was no doubt terrible company because I wasn't really anticipating spending any time with him. But I don't know why I didn't just spend the time I did with him in a relaxed manner, and then gone off to work. I confessed further: I feel guilty putting my work ahead of you. He scoffed, just as I would if he were to say the same. He reminds me of my own commitments, and I am able to trust the way in which he respects and supports my ambitions. This even after jabbering on in a no doubt increasingly polemical manner. I am, however, that I have the chance to say this to him before the sun rises. So that I can share with him the pleasure of his company. An excellent start to the day. ("It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood, It's a beautiful for a neighbor, won't you be mine? I've always wanted to have a neighbor just like you..." hahaha)

Family Portrait (by Rachel's)

2010-02-17T17:51:00.000-08:00

For the first time in almost over a month I sat down and read the lives of my friends. It's funny because, while that sounds totally disjointed, like a phantasmic sort of intimacy, I've sorely missed it, and them. Two men, both of whom I've loved, and in a sense, still love, one whom I work with and see all of the time, and one who I rarely see. One single, and the other seeing someone. One in between, in that state of becoming where, as Holderlin states, "the possible becomes real everywhere, and the real becomes ideal, and in the free imitation of of art this is a frightful yet divine dream." The other stretched between worlds, two competing ambitions, perhaps mutually exclusive, and where the change must be self-imposed, the willful art of a creator and a destroyer. I forgot who is who... for all my love, I love my love most.

I live in a world that is too fast, a 250 character world, the Writer says. How brilliant! Yes, I've already bored you. (Try reading [...] all this before you go to bed!) The absurdity of such a compression. The violence of the demand! I need time, to slow down, to think, digest, clean, sleep, walk and feel myself touched by the wind, to talk to people. This desire is already too much. Too long(ful)...

I want to theorize in real-time. I want to be meaningful, what I write and think and say to be urgent. I have become this, in a sense, in a space (a certain space). But where I accelerate ahead, so many pages per hour, the home I need to return to every night gets farther and farther away. (I initially typed "farther and father away." A parapraxis, I suppose. A slip of the tongue, which isn't really moving. A slippage of control.) I miss a certain pace to my life, a certain rhythm. My fear was that I wouldn't be able to work, have a boyfriend, go to school, and have a life all at the same time. I've been pretty decent at 3 of 4. But I miss my friends. And I miss dancing at Berlin, drunk and loving the bizarre and beautiful bodies all moving in time together, against bodies with which they may briefly merge. In front of all those mirrors. And the physical pulsation of the music feeding the rhizomatic build of desire. I want to think like I dance. Thinking, however, is solitary: just you and so many mirrors.

My friend, the co-worker, would have had to have fought the desire to smack my b/f if he'd seen him, and part of me hated him for saying that. He's right of course, on a certain level. And I would have hit J. the night I left him had he not begged me to. I could have, but I knew I'd feel guilty for it, so I didn't, and I walked out. He asked me who he was going to wake up next to or who he would talk to about his day? He didn't say this to me. He said it to my voicemail, in the 2:50 time slot allowed. I listened to them later that night, once he had already walked into my apartment and waited me out until I was drunk enough to beg him to stay when he said, well if you don't want me here I'll go and then got up to walk out. He didn't take his jacket off until I did it for him. On my knees. And I should have hit him then, to remind him what he wanted from me. But we went to bed, and I quivered in his arms, with knowing, and then we woke up and fucked.

Outside the Walgreens near J.'s apartment, where I woke at 3.30pm, there was a man proselytizing. I had in headphones and Radiohead's "Bodysnatchers" was playing ("...I've no idea what I am talking about//I'm trapped in this body and can't get out..."). In his hand was a tract, the cover of which said: "Lonely But Never Alone" in bold and dramatic lettering. I read it, and, without really looking at the man, said, "That's interesting." "I've got others if you want..." he answered, but I had kept walking, throwing my interest over my shoulder as I passed. But it kept after me, like a yappy stray dog who had somehow noticed I'd looked at it too long as it darted back and forth on a noisy street corner, and which was then instantly at my heels refusing to be kicked aside.

In the Starbucks J. texted me and I replied and he called. I told him about this tract. It's not right, I said, because you can be alone without being lonely. Yeah, he said. That's human happiness, I told him, to be able to be alone and not be lonely, to not need anyone. Yeah, he said. You sound exhausted, I said. Yeah, I was going to take a nap, he said. Where are you, I said. And he said, on a couch in the rehearsal room. I never thought I would say this, I said, but you should buy a Monster or something. I don't have any money, he said. I was surprised, and my voice said so. Don't worry about it, he said. And I started to worry about it, but then I stopped and said, OK, I'm not going to worry about it. I let him take his nap.

I was wrong, though. Human happiness isn't about being able to be alone and not get lonely. You can only be alone without being lonely when you know you have people to go to later, when you know that there is someone who you can talk to, and listen to, and tap your foot to jazz music with or watch a campy porn with. When you try to be alone for too long, all the thoughts you had, which were born out of the company of your friends and grew over time, these start to become thin, almost translucent, ghastly reminders of what they once were. When you read, the ideas that excite you do so because they remind you, but memory only conjures ghosts.

Loneliness, Heidegger argues, is a public condition which is only felt in private because what would have accompanied one home--the stimulating morsels to digest--are wholly absent: one is fed a diet of McSociality. Overly mediated, hyper-accelerated: we will service your coffee/call/orgasm as promptly as possibly, and if we forget to recognize you in a wholly impersonal and punctilious manner, "Mr. Smith," you get a complimentary.... Oh, how the desire to be IGNORED is built into the structure of interface exchange! So that what we get and, ironically, are to be satisfied with is to be a shell, a formalized, homogenous pronoun interchangeable with the next, a singular and miniscule unit of interface in an 8 hour shift. I, "_pronoun_," am recognized. (as all too recognizable, thus: ignorable: the system works beautifully: our incentive package, the desire to be ignored, satisfies itself in a perpetual feedback loop. We return again, and they ignore our desire to be ignored! "Here is your movie/receipt/ID/, 'Mr. Smith'." Fuckers!) I go home with the taste of defeat on my lips, which I lick regularly, the speed: so quick, as if it never happened. Blink. Find keys. Open door. Open browser. Open fly. Masturbate. Close a certain window. Pee. Light cigarette. Open fridge. Moan. Open beer. Drink. Lie down. Moan. Close eyes. Sleep. Wake. Open eyes. Blink. (Repeat.)

Anyway, I read the lives of my friends tonight, and I don't feel so lonely. Which is funny, because I hadn't realized I'd felt lonely until recently. Maybe yesterday. Maybe today, waking up and realizing I'd only seen my boyfriend for an hour before passing out, that being there in his apartment meant nothing. Maybe because he slept in his bed while I slept on the couch until he woke me as he was getting ready for class and moved me into his bed. I don't know. Maybe because this whole thing is getting thin and translucent. Which means I'm getting thin and translucent, some how excavated, hollowed, sapped, drained, siphoned, bled, exhausted, mined... Tired.

"Sexy Boy"

2010-01-13T20:38:00.000-08:00

I can be fearless when I am understood to be afraid, diminutive, trepidatious. A slave's freedom, Nietzsche might say. Real fearlessness, he would say, is when you are bold, unresponsive, affirmative: the creator. But Nietzsche wasn't much of a politician. Or I'm too good a rat (a rat backed into a corner). Either way: Pin me down, hold me tight so there is no hope of escape, and I release myself to myself (no, not to you, not to the situation--the "circumstances"): the confines open up my freedoms.
"Nobody loves me, it's true, not like you."
Sometimes, like this afternoon, I wish to be dominated, almost totally, to be held down, by the throat, unable to resist, and get fucked. Hard. Brutally. It sounds strange, but I suppose I want to know that I can still love someone during, and after, being subjugated, physically. A need of mine: to refigure power relations.
A need of mine: to complicate the easy either/or of love.
J. doesn't need to: he doesn't read this, so he wouldn't know I want it--and so this isn't an expectation, or a call in the (not so) dark of desire. But if he were to do it, perhaps in a fit of sexual rage, abandon, I would not cringe or shirk or try to escape.
It is funny because he has, more than a few times, called me out on being too cerebral. It's only when he fucks me, when I am allowed to become an object, material, that my body suddenly matters: my materiality is aroused, responds, grips him, breathes hard against his flesh, loses itself to him, cums through him, claws at him, can't release him...
"toy-like/boy-like"
If I wrote as much as I jerked off, have been fucked, or (been) hit on, then I'd be a best-selling author all of you would be paying $16.95 to read.

Don't You Know I'll be There?

2010-01-06T23:48:00.000-08:00

NY was a trip. Details, details. The park, a play (O'Neill's "the Emperor Jones"), Museums, walking through my old stomping grounds, drinks at Stonewall... Details, details. Family--two dinners, and a board game... Details, details. He met my friends, he saw me laugh with them as we drank PBR in a Williamsburg flat on New Years Eve after the mixology bar...
What mattered most is that we didn't kill each other. In fact, what mattered most was that we both sorta felt a bit out of place when with my family, and so we held tight to one another. And when in the city, we both were struck by the awesomeness of the grandeur of it all--he of the city, and me of his joyous wonderment. I fell in love with him more than I knew I could. And I think he fell in love with me more, too.
He was our navigator--this kid, this man, from Illinois, leading me around the city because something in his body tells him which way north is... I need signs and trial and error... and he just gets it, a cocksure turn in one direction and a somewhat disapproving reproach: I know where we're going! And he did. And he does.
This morning I looked at the ring he wears, which he started to wear when we became "official" in his eyes--though he said it meant he was married to some girl he knows--and I allowed my phantasies to dream of stealing it away for a day so I could get us matching bands. I thought, then, of the betrayal this would entail--of my politics, of how seeing a man wearing a ring on THAT finger means "straight (and narrow)", how it means heteronormative privilege... and I thought of all the things I've changed about myself since I started allowing J. to penetrate something more than my asshole, and of all the things I want to change, of the things I've learned about myself... And it was terrifying and exhilarating to realize how unlike myself I've become, and how much I like who I am currently.
I wear a gold bracelet he gave me. Both of our signs of commitment he found, neglected or lost, on a street sidewalk or a train car aisle. I'll wear it until he breaks my heart. And then I'll give it back to him, so he can melt it down to make a ring for someone else, or pawn it. I don't know what to give him other than myself, and it seems such a thin gift that I keep giving it, too much, always, in an effort to make it right, to even the odds, to make him want to stay. And I think there is something about love that is irreconcilably about inequality, but that this inequality has very little to do with the other person--the one we love--as much as it has to do with ourselves: love forces a confrontation with ourselves, our value, our worth, our meaning, and we must stake this, must risk this as a wager--and my poker face sucks, and I often feel like I bluff my way through, barely.
How do I explain this except to say: The necessary fictions that got me through suddenly are exposed as the artificial guises I always knew they were, but they are exposed as wholly inadequate: not because I am not a good liar, not because I didn't will the most adventurous, but because my fictions were about survival, and not about love; I can survive on a will to power that cocoons me in a myopic view of the world, but he insists, he demands, he invites, he seduces me to see that such a way of life is no life at all: life, he says, is about receptivity, about welcoming the unknown and allowing it to remain unknown until it develops into itself--to resist the impulse to categorize, schematize, impose form and order and interpretation--violence--on this unknown: I can only hold him tightly as he leads the way into such an affair: I am so at a loss, and yet so very desirous of feeling, experiencing, understanding what he lives when he allows himself (and us) the courage to simply go forth boldly. I am in awe, and so thankful.
I am confronted with a terrifying proposition: to live anew.
There are, I think, two forces that confront such a proposition, or rather, that afflict--or, better still: that color, temper, inflect--the process of embracing such a proposition: 1) mourning the loss of a certain, past way of life--a life that served you well, that offered comfort and security, regularity and predictability--that is to say: control and mastery; 2) anxiety over the loss (willed and desired as it is) of that way of life: suddenly, or gradually (until one notices, and then immediately!), one realizes that what is before you is uncharted--and this terrifies you, so you hold fast to the only thing you know (but these, too, are opposing forces: what you KNEW and then him, him: that force which calls you out, calls you out of yourself, challenges you and prods you and teases and allures you...: stasis and dynamis...), and you realize that to retreat to what you know is to abandon him, and yet to embrace him is to embrace what it unknown: your fear itself.
At such moments, such as when he offers you his head phones and his shoulder to rest your head in an airport shuttle, you accept his offer, and you release yourself to him. And you don't shutter with terror, you feel the warm of his neck so close and you breathe.
My lover is younger than I am, and so my sister calls into question his capacity to challenge me, she says: I don't know if he can provide for you (I paraphrase). She likes him as a person, but her unforgiving eye looks for and sees nothing but weakness.
My lover is younger than I am, and yet, I so often feel like a child before him, reduced to something primitive, stupid, in need of learning. I speak so highly, I allow my speech to elevate me to the heavens--if they still exist--and I hide behind the clouds I accumulate around an otherwise naked frame.
He comes and makes it rain: I am drained, and my coverings wither, and I am naked before him. I am ashamed, except that then he reaches out to me, touches me, strokes the side of my face, and welcomes me into his arms. And naked, I grasp him.
Love is about inequality insofar as what is loved is never reciprocally loved: He loves me, but I will never see, nor love, what he sees; and I love him, but he will never see what I see, nor love this. Perhaps because we always already look through the lens of phantasy. Perhaps, also, because we are somehow sick and self-defeating, and the idea of embracing fully what he says of me is so anathema to how I've lived that such a way of life would be too close to a sudden death--even if it promised a new life.
Ultimately, perhaps, because love demands a new vocabulary, one which has at its center the very love of the unknown: a center that is a "remainder"--that which cannot be systematized, symbolized, or rendered comfortable or knowable.
And yet, if there were a man with whom I would risk such dissimulation, it would be him. After almost 7 months--and my mother laughed when I said, "that's 3 years in straight people time"--I am more recognizable to myself than I've ever been. And yes, this notion--recognizable--is antithetical to the "unknown," but not quite: I've come to know what I've heretofore been afraid of knowing in a meaningful sense: I've come to accept what I couldn't before, and even learn to live with it--perhaps I'll even learn to love it. Though, I imagine, that will depend on my will(iningness) to release myself even more to him.
Why is it that to come to oneself, one must alway turn away from oneself?
I wrote--I write!--about this all the time. And yet, what a mindfuck to live it. I had to leave you, so that I could return. Re-turn. I write in the midst of a turn. A spin. Like Penelope's loom, I am done and undone by this man. And I love the weaving itself, his hands on these threads.

Buy a Ticket & Get on a Train

2010-01-05T04:29:00.000-08:00
J. and I are home from NY. The family was met, as were the friends (minus a few). We had a grand time. We are in love, like we always were, but not--it's different now. In the best way possible.
I'm home. Hit the ground running and all that. School in 3 hours. Hurrah!
More soon.

It's Good To See You

2009-12-27T18:27:00.000-08:00

When Heraclitus speaks of law, when he speaks of necessity, it is the simplicity of the event of a becoming: there are laws: the "is" of a moment, which is un-alterable. We look at this from the vantage of the past, we see the contingency of the fact of the matter: we see how it could have been other than... We see the possibility of something different: we wish to reject from the simplicity of the event the sanctity of its law: of its necessity, there is only one thing certain: that it was, or, that it was thus willed. Vulgar practitioners of Fate, Calvin, for instance, see the future as though it were the past, the inescapable necessity of the law of being. If it is, then it must always have been, and thus it must always be--this is the feeble logic of the theological. To see the necessity of a moment, rather, may still be redeeming. Who would know such a salvation? Liars, cheats, artists--I would say philosophers, but they, too, are theologians these days: a belief in logic, in the laws of grammar, and of what is so undeniably close--all of this deadens the senses of the childish imagination. There is a sense in which law becomes something indiscernible from the imagination, from the terrible artist of the soul. Recently it is so very posh to denounce this savior, too, as just another snake-oil salesman. Ego, it is called, and all Lies, it is called. And those of us who mock Truth--as pleasure, as the negative (w)hole--we live these lies, with laughter. There is a monstrous artist in us, who violently shears off whole swaths of cloth, who stitches together the fabric of a cloak, of a veil, and our eyes gleam through these threadbare filaments, familiar to one another only as the unflinching eye. We are those who do not blink. And there is always a moral element--for we are humans (all too human, still--striving for more, or less) and it is this: the love of the veil, of the transformative moments that become flesh, that become a cloak, and home: to see the lies as the effect of an artistic moment of creation: We who laugh, we laugh together: at ourselves, our feeble stitching, and our desperate eyes--we know these well, and we do not spit like camels, nor do we roar any longer like lions: now we know a new sight. And what unspeakable beauty is to be found here, and there is nothing we can escape, nor do we wish to: I willed it thus, we say.

That's the Way We Get By

2009-12-26T09:55:00.000-08:00

When I was in Italy with friends a girl we were fond of said: when you're in love your cells change their shape, like puzzle pieces, and get used to the other person's cells. It made me think of the old myth from Plato's Symposium told by Aristophanes: two halves looking to be whole. And yet, its that or some sort of cosmic clock that allows two people to somehow get on a rhythm, move in some sort of syncopation. Last night, for instance, after watching the very, very long and silly "Terminator Salvation" to kill time while waiting for J. to call I thought, after looking at the clock, well, he's not gonna call. And then, the phone rings. Literally, as soon as I had ejected the movie and put it back in its case. It's like a cosmic clock that chimes our movements. An erotic metronome.

I was talking to the Vegan yesterday, and after letting slip the identity of the Writer--a secret I'd managed to keep for almost a year--I told him how, ironically, being in a relationship can be oddly de-sexualizing: when you go out, you are sized up, groped, you dance with beautiful men in suggestive ways, you're offered drinks, phone-numbers, quickies, ect. I don't think I'm the first to point this out, but whereas most would say, "But the trade-off is intimacy, comfort, security, ect..." I want to say that there is something profoundly weak about that counter-argument. Yes, intimacy, comfort, security, ect. But, still, I am a sexual being--which is to say, most gay men are rank narcissists and we live on the affirmation of others who look at us and say: I want to fuck you.

It's not that one cannot have such a thing in a relationship, indeed, I think I do! It was just a strange experience to be missing J. rather profoundly while also wanting to go out dancing, to go out and get that affirmation--that nice reminder that I am fucking hot, that while I may be out of the game, I still haven't forgotten how to play. This is also, no doubt, a reaction formation to the trauma of loss--I think that my experience with a near melt-down after breaking-up with my ex almost 2.5 years ago still haunts my imaginary.

I spoke to the Vegan about how much it bothers me that J. is still in touch with his ex, and that I keep finding out about his past lovers. By contrast, J. knew from the beginning where lovers from my past stood--the Vegan, the Writer, and the German--all neatly contextualized, all neutralized as "threats" to him, which was necessary, I thought, because I wasn't about to sacrifice my friendship with any of them. The Vegan says, well, at least he's not going to leave you to discover what he might be missing (which is what he did with his ex after four years). And the Vegan sympathized with my being bothered about J.'s ex. "The same thing happened with me, and I hated it!" I wonder if J.'s ex serves as that reminder for him, that he can still play the game even though he's off the field. I'm not nervous, or jealous. I just wonder what serves as that extra-relationship force for him.

Anyway, he calls. Just when he needed to. Just when I had given up on him calling. The pendulum of our erotic clock swung us back into place.

The down-side to rebounding from a mild anxiety attack is that the up-swing tends to hyper-sexualize me. And J. says to me the other night that I grind my teeth in my sleep. He understands why I'm an alcoholic now that he's taken my pills. If I was on those all day long all the time I would need a drink to take the edge off, too. Of course, there's something off about taking pills to get "on" only to then have to drink to take the edge off. The problem, perhaps, of harmony. I'll have to talk to my doctor about this. We shall see. But, anyway, knowing that I'm in a hyper-sexualized arc I'm not worried about the "truth" of my feelings. And, still, I wonder.

And then, as if my cosmic clock needed to sound the alarm, to rouse me from a stupor: in walks this man, a boy, that I almost made the mistake of sleeping with. Details aren't important. Needless to say, I was done with him before I met J. and he was after thought until this afternoon when in he walks to work. And he is so repulsive--not that he's ugly, and he's hung like a horse--but that his soul itself is offensive. It makes the skin rise on pin-pricks. He says, after finding out that I'm in a relationship, well just because you have a boyfriend doesn't mean we can't still hook-up. And I say, actually that's exactly what it means. And that was that. This sniveling, gossip, creep made me realize that I would never trade what I have with J. for anything, least of all that douche bag.

And J. is off to mass with his family. Off to get married, he jokingly says. And I say, that makes me your elicit "friend" which is fine with me so long as you name your first born son after me. He says, maybe not the first born... but who knows, maybe just 'junior'. And I'm horny as fuck. Wanting to see him kneeling at the alter for communion, imagining those perfect lips parting, the moisture of his tongue lapping up the sacrament with reverence...

They're the Kind that Will Talk Through the Wheezing of Coughs

2009-12-23T13:57:00.000-08:00

A funny thing happened on the way through Wholefoods.
I ran into the Vegan, with whom I've spent the last 3+ hours.
And he's been topping, too! Indeed, pigs can fly, Hell is cold, and my little boy is now a full grown queen!
Also, a post to craigslist has proven to be easy and as cheap as one would imagine. It was an itch that started to ache when I realized I have no idea how my boyfriend used to cruise. The interweb... that's only for porn and scholarly articles, not love.
"She's American, and that makes her human..."--a gay man on Paris Hilton: wonderful: chauvinism is still alive and well amongst the fags. Good to know. I guess, since gays aren't afforded the full rights of American citizens, that gays aren't human...
A voice from the past--if only still the past!--made a pass. No thank you. But he's hung like a horse. One wonders...
J. is in the suburbs w/ his family.
I miss him terribly.
I hate that I come off so needy.
And yet, I don't.
I've come to that point where if he were gone I would be lonely and sad and feel incomplete. I know it would only last for so long, but I know I would feel it, and it would hurt. I wonder, how much of what we call "acts of love" are really "acts of self-preservation"?

Scraps....

2009-12-22T20:41:00.000-08:00

"This Holiday Doesn't Mean Anything Anymore"

There is something beautiful about thinking about the body as an organic part of the world--an organism. In this context I mean to emphasize the ways in which the body has its cycles, like a weather pattern, almost. And, like the weather, especially here in Chicago, this shit can turn on the drop of a dime. Sunny and mild, now windy and overcast--my psychology as meteorology.

I'm tired now,
of trying to figure out how,
Sometime next week
it will come to me
Will it be too late?

Sometimes skies defy words
and it's all I can do to stare
I imagine you're in there
Somewhere
Always a sunset
---

"That's the Way We Get Down (or: On Artistry as a Way of Life)"

For Nietzsche modern man is sick, sick of himself--man makes himself sick, and is sick of being who he is, doing what he does. This condition, "ressentiment"--French for "resentment," but with clear illustrative power of "re-sediment," "re-sentiment"--is a turning back-upon, a doubling over, a re-coil, a bent-double in pain. For Nietzsche the "soul" or "conscience" is born of this process of turning emotion back onto the self, of inflicting pain onto one's own body rather than letting those emotions or passions flow out into the world. (For Freud, the "soul" is the super-ego, the "judge, jury, and executioner" of the Freudian psyche.) Nietzsche, as much as Freud, sees this "soul" or "conscience" as the advent of "humanity," the "moment" (which is never a single moment, and is itself anachronistic, resisting linear models of time) when, as Nietzsche writes, Nature gives herself the paradoxical task of breeding an animal with the right to make promises. Nietzsche's whole genealogy of morals is to show how the birth of the soul in and of itself is not a good or bad thing. Rather, how the soul functions is important for Nietzsche--what and how it does, and why: these questions are more important for Nietzsche than the simple fact of the soul.

Part of the problem Nietzsche identifies is that we come to understand ourselves late in life, after we already have a conceptual understanding of "I," of "self." The problem is simply that this is an "I" that was formed by forces, influences, and agents totally other than "I," but which now are inseperable from "I." Social constructivism is an interpretive lens that asserts the pervasive effects of culture on our lives--that we cannot understand ourselves outside of any given context, precisely because we are always already in a certain context. Nietzsche recognizes this phenomenon, and indeed is one of the first in the West to give it full articulation. As he understands the problem of modern man, man sick of himself, the context is seen to be total, as an unchanging, unchangeable _fact_ of reality. Thus, Christianity, for Nietzsche, is a religion (as almost all are) that gives a "reason" for suffering, for the violent re-doubling-back-on of re-sentiment (ressentiment): the priest says: the world is evil, and the body is fallen, impure, corrupt. Nothing can change this metaphysical fact of the world and only death and the afterlife promise happiness or "purity".

This kind of thinking, and the kind of life that lives this way, is only possible because of an act of will. Nietzsche writes, people would rather will nothingness, rather than not will at all. The important move Nietzsche calls attention to, however, is the denial of any act of will: modern man is sick of himself, but denies that he makes himself sick--this responsibility is projected onto the world and the body. For Nietzsche, modern man looks at himself and says, "It happened thus..." as if there were some sort of mechanistic necessity to the way the world unfolds. By contrast, the over-man, the man who tries to get "over" man, declares: I willed it thus!

Of course, this is a lie. But a necessary lie--a true fiction. It allows life to go on... the illusion of mastery, of some sort.

---

"The Queer Thing Is... (or: "To Fail to Represent Your Life As You Know It...[Is] To Create")

This afternoon, in the wake of a simply wonderful conversation with De Milo, I went to the local cafe and sat in the glorious sun reading an equally wonderful book, Drucilla Cornell's "Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law". Her reading of Lacan, and especially her reading of Derrida's critique of Lacan, is superb and I'd like to take a moment to share with you some of the thoughts I've had in the immediate aftermath of these two incredibly stimulating intellectual encounters.

De Milo and I ran the gamut of topics, but we consistently returned again and again to the importance of resisting a reification of the structural binary that so easily insinuates its way into so many radical discourses. Dichotomies of man/woman, inside/outside, proper/improper, top/bottom, pure/impure, active/passive--dichotomies that by sheer force of repetition are now taken to be natural givens (or, and more to the point, "pre-givens")--are often taken at face value, and unfortunately taken at face value by the very folk who are to be ironically subverting--"queering" if you will--such rigid binaries.

This led me to wonder: Is there something about the very structure of sexual difference that leads us to slip into the metaphysical language of "proper position". Or, rephrased, What is it about our framing of sexual difference that seems to force us to speak of its presence only ever against a metaphysical horizon of absence or loss?

As I've said in other blog posts, the tendency in contemporary queer discourse to speak of sexual difference--and thus of sexual practices--within or against a horizon of immutable "positioning" can be traced to two distinct sources: Lacanian linguistico-psycho structuralism on the one hand, and Anglo-American "essentialist" feminism on the other. A paradigmatic example of the latter would be Catharine MacKinnon, who is treated rather charitably by Cornell, but who nevertheless, by operating out of a Marxian frame of critique refuses the possibilities of imagining a "beyond" to socially real-ized gender norms. Because, in a doctrinaire Marxian modality, the base is always already determined by the super-structure, "who" a woman or a gay man or lesbian "is" arrives as an absolute imposition of identity. There is no room for "queering" the scene because any performance is always already enframed by a rigid binary of sexual difference. This leave MacKinnon, as Cornell points out, in the position of having to disavow the feminine as a position of domination, and to unconsciously affirm the masculine as equivalent to freedom. That is, the revolutionary politics MacKinnon proposes amounts to little more than an inversion of the current configuration of subject/object positions, a redesignation of the feminine in the "masculine position" (viz. free), a move that effaces whatever specificity the feminine may offer and an unwitting acceptance of the very gender-hierarchy MacKinnon is purportedly is critiquing.

It should be noted, at least in passing, that MacKinnon suffers from a serious lack of imagination, and this because she sees the possibilities of the imaginary domain as always already "infected" or determined by patriarchy. Her vehement denunciation of such "flights of fancy" is in the service of stating what _is_, and thereby demanding a confrontation with the reality of gendered domination. But her insistence on what "is," coupled with her rejection of imagination, shifts her analysis out of the register of a _descriptive_ phenomenology of patriarhcal oppression, and into the tenor of a _normative_ assertion of what reality, in its totality, "is". This slippage is almost inevitable; her onto-epistemological claim, the "is," is marked by the very metaphoricity of language: "is" always already is written: "is like...". (This "is like..." "is like..." "is like..." when making ontological claims is the trace of _differance_ which marks every claim to present presence with the deferred, differed Other.)

Cornell does a superb job of showing how, in a sense, Lacanian linguistico-structural psychoanalysis suffers from the same slippage from the register of a phenomenological analysis of the structuring "realms" of psychic life (symbolic, imaginary, Real), to an instantiation of these realms on the foundation of sexual difference, of castration.

This Year To Save Me From Tears... (or: a Queer Holiday)

2009-12-22T13:59:00.000-08:00

This will be the first time I spend Christmas with a boyfriend. It's not that big a deal, I know... But I guess what I've always liked about Christmas is the sense of tradition that it involves, not on a religious register, but that every year our family would get together and do stuff together--hang ornaments, go "elfing" together (my sister and I for our parents, my dad for my mom, ect...), and then of course waking up in the morning, eating freshly baked bread, drinking coffee, and opening presents in age order--no anarchic ripping wrapping paper willy-nilly, no siree!

This time around, it will be a bit different: I'll be in Chicago while J. is with his family(s), and I'll be with the Barister and his b/f and a friend from work--actually, something of a little brother. Then, J. and I go to NY. And he gets to meet my folks, my friends, and see my city (haha, "my!"). J. will become, in a way, a part of that tradition, even though that tradition is changing. But I like that. I like that the tradition can accommodate me, and J. That, even though we aren't the "traditional couple," we still are a part of this tradition.

Recently, the Writer wrote a bit of a rant against a father who refused his gay son. It is beautiful, and I thank him for his intervention. Silly as it sounds, these sorts of moments prompt me to reflect on how lucky I am to have a family, especially a father, as welcoming of me as they are. When it comes to issues of family and the private realm, I am something of a conservative--I do think that if we lose a space of privacy and familial intimacy we lose the foundations of our society. Obviously, I don't go down the route of many nasty social conservatives, but to the extent that my family has been a formative, and often times crucial bulwark against a lot of cultural detritus, I do think that the family is indispensable. That is to say, we need to re-imagine the ways in which we understand "familial intimacy" in radically more inclusive ways.

I'm proud of my family for being courageous enough to do the work of re-imagining familial intimacy. The conversations I've had with my Momma and Old Man in the last few days have been so reassuring--I don't think I realized just how nervous I am/was about bringing J. home--but talking to them has put me at ease. I know they'll be just fine, and I know i will be, too. And as much as I want everything to go well, I'm sort of just happy about the chance for the two of us to spend a week together, in NY, with people I love.

You've Been Hit By a Smooth Criminal

2009-12-12T22:45:00.001-08:00

This morning I woke and J. was just back from grocery shopping. He kisses me, pulls the blanket tighter around my ears, and tells me to keep resting and that there's food in the fridge if I'm hungry. He leaves. I realize he's just left. I go to chase him and he kisses me again and closes the door. I feel a bit empty, a bit lost, unsure of what is happening. I return to his room, curl in the blankets. And then I'm angry at feeling this way. I wake, I grab my clothes and then, under my watch, is a note.

It was a moment of normalcy that I wasn't anticipating... My boyfriend, the grown-up, leaving a note for me while I slept. There is something protective about the whole thing, and something wonderful. I suppose I'm not used to being taken care of in such a way, I'm not used to having someone live and make me a part of that life... I dunno why the whole thing is so profound, but I guess it is on some level.

I'll Lay Down My Glasses (if things go awry...)

2009-12-10T13:25:00.000-08:00

The quarter ended on Tuesday--final papers submitted and all. About 50 odd pages of papers, the culmination of reading 24+ books and twice that number of articles in a 10 week period. This means that I can resume blogging on a more regular basis. I'm excited about this. I realized at some point a few weeks ago that half of the pressure J. and I were feeling was the simple failure of my ability to pre-process and or dispel some of the thoughts that were buzzing about in my brain. Academics, I think, are, by design, anal-retentive: we let nothing go, let nothing fall out of play--our skill, when working best, is to heighten the tension of a situation, to refuse to allow what would otherwise be repressed or denied disappear. This, as you can imagine, is a terrible way of being in a relationship, especially when you are in a relationship with someone who is as intense a person as you are. The MGMT (my new moniker for a new friend) has been riding me about getting worked-up about small things. Indeed, and his advice--which, to my credit I was able to heed--came at just the right time.

I'm in desperate need of a haircut, but costs being what they are, and my income being what it is, this will have to wait, or I will have to get a friend to do it for free. I'm trying to save as much money as possible for our trip to NYC. It will be so worth it to have money then, and so frugality--a concept and practice I have an incredibly hard time with--is the order of the next few weeks.

They are building a new back stair on my apartment. Poor guys: it's 4 degrees out!

A Man Like That Is Like an Unmade Bed

2009-12-04T16:31:00.000-08:00

Tonight, after not hearing from J. all day, we finally spoke. We are seeing a show tomorrow night, and then maybe an "ugly sweater" party hosted by some of his friends. The last time I was out at a party with J. it was very nerve-wracking. I don't do well with people, I suppose, especially straight people when in a party setting. I can do fine when on my own, but with my b/f it was a bit strange. I didn't know exactly how close I should stand to him, whether or not to see the old guy who lurked near-by offering him a joint as somehow hitting on him, or what...

And there were TVs going in every room with music videos. I remember one especially: It was some heavy metal band. A man was in a car, wearing an orange prison jump-suit. But his face had multiple faces within it, like he was a schizophrenic. He was running away from something. Then his body, too, becomes like his face, only instead of being multiple bodies, this other body is a woman's body: this man is a schizo hermaphrodite (the third sex). And then a woman appears in the passenger seat and starts berating him. His mouth opens and a beam of light is cast onto the road ahead: it is an image of himself. The man w/ multiple faces is now both running away from something, and trying to run this phantastic image down.

I turn to J. and say: this is the insidious operations of power: the "mentally ill person" is a criminal on the run; he is mentally ill/criminal because he is gay. He projects his fears ahead of him after being shamed (by this woman), and tries to kill it, himself, his gay diseased criminal self. A Freudian-Foucaultdian reading.

Some times I see the world as through through the Matrix code, like Neo at the end of the first film. I see the coding that cultural artifacts are laden with; I decipher and I share this with people who half the time look at me and think I'm crazy. It's just a music video, they say: stop reading so deep into things! This makes me nervous. We are innundated with coding from every angle, and we rarely stop to think about how it infuences the way we think about the world, and ourselves within it.

Sometimes when J. and I talk about these sorts of things he gets angry and says, "this is why I'm leaving!" As much as hearing him say that, I can't blame him either. I sometimes wish that I hadn't committed myself to the life I'm in, but rather had held to the desire to just get away. As much as I know there isn't an "outside" to power, I also know well enough to see that things are different, and sometimes even better elsewhere. It's moments like that when I question my devotion to this country, to its future.

Anyway, tonight we finally get in touch. He's catching up on his work, and I'm proud of him for working so hard--he sets a good example. Tonight I'll be doing the same: I finish this Freud paper tonight or bust. I've three papers due Monday/Tuesday, which basically means that I'll be swamped and somewhat crazy all weekend.

But we have these plans. And then he says, "But I'll be seeing my family right after work." I begin to freak-out, and he begins to meet me there and then, suddenly, he defuses the situation: I can get my sister to drive me down so I can see the show. And I follow him: I'm sorry I made it an either/or thing, I say, I just will be so busy and won't be able to spend much time with you this weekend because of my work, and I really wanted Friday to be a night we could have together. He says to me: Pssh, I'll be around after your papers are done.

It was exactly what I needed to hear, though I didn't know I needed it until he said it. I didn't know to even ask for it. But it was there, under the surface, as it were, stirring around in my blood, putting me on edge. And maybe he didn't know it was there either, but I'd like to think he's beginning to learn my rhythms, I'd like to think that across the distance of tele-communication he was still able to see it in my voice and hear it under my skin.

I'm ambitious: I want work and love, like Freud. But it sometimes pulls me in two directions. And then I worry about neglecting the one for the sake of the other. He released me of that worry: do your work, I'll be here when it's done. And I couldn't have asked for anything else. Or needed anything more.

Baby Boy: Turn Me On With Your Electric Feel

2009-11-21T23:09:00.000-08:00

It's safe to say that there are relatively few things in life that are "safe." This has become, for me at least, something of a guiding principle. Still, it's hard to affirm the radical contingency of life itself without at the same time, and through the same gesture, condemning oneself to a nihilistic cynicism or a destructive despair. To affirm danger is also to acknowledge the danger of such an affirmation. A double affirmation, one which tempers the other.

I've recently started to seriously thinking about thinking outside linear or teleological schemas of development or progress. In this effort, I've taken-up the (dangerous) task of thinking things in terms of turns, or tropes. It is an emphasis on the revolutionary possibilities of affirming radical contingency. If theories of development tell us that "we are making progress" or "from x, to y" such thinking presupposes a stable logic of inference and causality, but ultimately a logic of presence: if x, then y will be present.

Thinking outside the "if, then" conceptual schemata is difficult, mostly because it is the very structuring grammar of our lives. But also, because such grammar affords a comfort, a safety: If I work hard, then I will be provided for in retirement (the American Dream as a paradigmatic example of the way this thinking operates, and, as the recent debates around Healthcare Reform have demonstrated, how ideological such thinking is). If, then thinking is a logic that seeks to master the unpredictability of the world, as if the cosmos itself were governed by this grammatical contract (as if, for instance, pension plans were a "natural" and necessary fact of employment, and not the result of a historical struggle for workers rights).

Politically, such thinking is disastrous. But this thinking isn't just political. It dominates our thinking about just about everything--so much so that even the religious sphere, where resistance to such contrived grammatical edifices (idols) would presumably be most at home: even the miracle, the event that defies the causal order of nature itself, is assimilated into this grammar such that it reads: if you have faith, then you can move mountains (not, as it Biblically reads, that faith and its acts are simultaneous events).

I should start again, perhaps, to say that the event of this entry is also the event of the joys of thinking in terms of turns. J. and I spent a wonderful few days together, re-turning (to) a sort of care-free laziness that we enjoyed so very much in the summer. Lots of time was spent lounging in bed, alternating, in turns, between childish giddiness, intimate conversation, and life-defying sex.

In his turn(ing) I've learned so much about J. and about myself in the process of learning the angels that cut and refract him/me. Tomorrow we buy tickets to NY--or, rather, we talk to my Momma who will buy us tickets to NY (the best x-mas present ever!). A week in NY, a city he's never been to, where my family and friends are. Where the whole ideal of a world I wish for was born for me. And to meet my parents, to eat some home-cooking, drink some expensive wine, and smoke some killer pot. To get to know my family--I think, reader that he is, that he'll notice immediately how much of my father's son I truly am. But, also to see that though it isn't always easy, it's possible for one's family to be supportive of their gay son, to welcome him and his boyfriend with the same generosity of spirit that has always marked my parents.

I was somewhat upset that I wasn't invited to Thanksgiving with his family--and just generally hurt that his family seems to view me as a big, bad bogey monster. Being the sort of person that I am, I want so desperately to prove them wrong, to show them that I'm a good guy who loves their son, that I've got a good future, a supportive family, and that I'm good for their son. Maybe it's the Christian (still) in me, that desires the chance to convert them. And maybe it isn't even a matter of conversion (as if from a "pro" to a "con") as it is a matter of re-position the notion of homosexuality, of turning on its head the notion of what it is to be a homo. And if that is the case, then it is the revolutionary in me that desires the chance to meet them.

Upset, but (as has been the case) not incapable of talking it out with J. Indeed, that is the joy of our relationship: we seem to have the brilliant ability to talk, to listen and respond (dare I say, our response-ability?). I said to him last night, when he asked about my time with my ex, that in fact it wasn't a relationship: we tried to obliterate our differences, I said, as if we could become one person, so that there wasn't a "we" so much as a "super I". This is the first relationship I've attempted, I continued, because we actually respect our differences, and rather than try to cover them over, we make space for them, we negotiate them, we actually _relate_ to one another. It was hard to stay upset. I can see things from his perspective, and he can see things from mine, and though they may not always overlap, we are able to figure out a manner of positioning ourselves such that these differences aren't crippling but rather constitute our interests (our inter-esse, the things we have in common, that are between us as the Latin suggests).

When we spoke of the possibility of living together, we actually articulated our fears, the chief two being a) loss of personal time and space, and b) that if living together didn't suit us that this would be a "referendum" on our relationship. The first isn't so much a concern to the extent that we will both be keen to acknowledge the others need for time and space. The second, however, is somewhat frightening. Often, I think, living together is seen as "the next step," a "step" in the development of a relationship: if we're in love, and if we spend time at the others place, then living together is the "natural" next step.

When talking this out I suggested that it isn't the only way of thinking about things: that in the first place, the concern isn't over living together so much as it is "is our relationship strong enough/ready/et cetera" for this increased degree of intimacy (qua proximity and, well, sharing a bathroom is a rather intimate sort of thing). It would be a mistake to over-freight the change; rather, we should look at it like we did all the other changes that we navigated. It simply takes some of the pressure off. Indeed, it would be the Christian in me to look for the big moment, the conversion point that definitively tells the "truth" of a thing. And supposing that living together wasn't our cup of tea? Certainly this doesn't mean that our lives together are some invalidated, over-ruled by this.

But all of this is to get ahead of myself: I haven't even decided whether or not I want to leave my place, curb my excess furniture, et cetera. I haven't decided whether or not I actually _do_ want to live with J., though I am rather confident that I could live with him.

We will see how all of this turns out. But then, that's the challenge, to attend to the turns and re-turns--to dance, dance, dance--and love the pleasure of the movement itself.

On Ghosts and Such

2009-10-31T23:58:00.000-07:00

It is fitting, as tonight is Halloween, to speak of ghosts. Ghosts of memory (we are haunted by memories), ghosts of our dreams and phantasies (what Freud called "wish-fulfillment"), and the specters that disturb the vitality of our meanings, that scare the wits out of any deepest intention.

I refer in the last instance, of course, to the ghostly "quality" of our language. What we breathe into life with speech is haunted also by a g(h)as(tly), presence. The terror of the absence of a secure, tangible body of meaning to hold, which casts our speech cast-away, derelict, waifish.

When we speak what we mean we mean more than we wish. And less. Our language itself, our grammar and its laws, is possessed of itself, and in itself always bear the mark of a a history beyond (but within) the singular unity that is spoken when we say what we mean. When it says more than we mean as we speak. As I write.

Nietzsche reminds of this, exposes this to us--for we always knew it, and our love sprang from this polysemia. Nietzsche loved too deeply to let the lie persist, upon which time he realized he couldn't love any longer.

We are introduced to a new concept, which emerges for the first time with Nietzsche, and in another context, with Kierkegaard: the concept of the will to power, which is nothing more or less than the will to belief, or, what is the same, a will to fiction, to the profoundly superficial, to Baubo's mystery, to laughter.

And to language. Many commentators on Nietzsche do not understand the extremely creative manner of Nietzsche's prose, of his lyrical ping-pong match of meanings that resound throughout the corpus of the sheaf that is the envelop of Nietzsche's meaning. What does he mean, after all?

Nietzsche is the first person who wites for us to ask this question, with the trembling apprehension of a lover.

We shouldn't be surprised. Love is spectral, phantastic, hauntingly possessive, terrifyingly intrasitive; profoundly narcissistic. Love delivers our messages, but never to anyone other than ourselves, the ghosts of meaning that are intangible, but which elicit the electrification of our skin, our hair stands on end, our spine wavers. We sent these devils away without question itself: we exorcised ourselves of them.

And when you allowed the tighly bound appendage to remain mummified, the bone one eats around, then the ghosts seemed to have evacuated the burial ground of my love. The dry, dead earth chaps whatever friction might have generated heat, and the gasp of the ghastly rasps its way out of parted lips. Heraclitus' heat banishing moisture, drunkenness, Dionysus.

And I was left with parted lips, with the return of the question, of the phantastic wheeling-back-upon of the repressed, which refused to be condensed, rarified; entombed. The death of narcissus, the death of the cicada.

The death of love, when that ghost is exorcised--or what is the same: when it re-possesses in the return of the repressed: the haunting of memory--this is the moment at which point Nietzsche takes up his spur and writes (the trace). As if to conjure back those life-giving specters.

I Need You To Pretend That We Are In Love Again (or: It's been a while.)

2009-10-22T23:01:00.000-07:00

Fragility is utterly terrifying. I realized last night, while with J., that I avoided what I imagined was a hostile reception at school, a knowing reception. I claimed sickness, and stayed home. Sleeping, mostly. Recovering from a weekend spent running around Manhattan and Brooklyn, trying to keep up with my friend, the Pearl Diver, and presenting a paper before an unsympathetic "analytic" audience. I barely slept. I barely was able to think on my feet. I was still able to dance. This is what is so frightening: when reduced to the ultimate bare minimum degree of functionality, I still can dance. Shoot a question regarding Plato, I parry; again with a volley on Aristotle, I deflect, absorb, pause... then fire. A deep breath, the fire of reckless daring, and I fire. The question, so triumphant, so haughty in its knowing conceit... it limps now, shot through the knee: unable to swagger. I smile, a drunken smile--tinted green and hazy (I want to be, after all, a sailor--and a murderer, and a poet).

I am afraid of revealing before J. the weaknesses that make me fundamentally human. The notion that after seeing and hearing such abjection he would be so thoroughly repulsed, so wholly put-off... I fear and loath my own frailty. Without sounding too presumptuous, I think it is impossible to fully divulge oneself to another human being and have that wholesale outpouring received, reciprocated, and loved. Fundamentally, we are ugly creatures. We adorn ourselves with some many trappings, so many disguises, so many postures--all to conceal what we most fear.

It is, I think, more likely that we allow ourselves to, as if in a peek-a-boo box, flash those moments of disgusting human frailty. But these moments are dispersed--not only in time, but in space: we reveal certain moments of ourselves to others--but only so much.

I think this is why we need friends. Nietzsche writes, of the friend, "A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything. Your dream should betray to you what your friend does while awake.//Your compassion should be a guess--to know first whether your friend wants compassion. Perhaps what he loves in you is the unbroken eye and the glance of eternity. Compassion for a friend should conceal itself under a hard shell, and you should break a tooth on it. That way it will have delicacy and sweetness."

And, "You do not want to put on anything for your friend? Should it be an honor for your friend that you give yourself to him as you are? But he sends you to the devil for that. He who makes no secret of himself, enrages: so much reason have you for fearing nakedness."

And, from The Things People Call Love--"... Here and there on earth we may encounter a kind of continuation of love in which this possessive craving of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and lust for possession--a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship."

Friendship, for Nietzsche, is the 'venue' in which the slivers of despair may be exposed, to be shown so as to be ridiculed, mocked, laughed into oblivion. For lovers who one trusts--with one's body: such laughter is curative.

Brief Relexions

2009-10-02T01:20:00.001-07:00
Reading again, like a mad man. She assigns only 50 pages, but from a book I should have read long ago. I read the whole thing. I read with an audience, always already, in my mind: my archivists, myself in 3 weeks, 3 months, 3 years, and my peers who will hear my reflections based on these readings. I become increasingly fevered, increasingly critical, increasingly self-critical--I am slowed in my reading: everything says too much. I hear the reverberations of all those prior books, the matrix begins to adjust, to incorporate this book, too, into its web: the connexions are re-strung, new resonances ring: I am full of noise, like a mad-man; a Rite of Spring: a riot ensues.

And there is J., who in his innocence I simply adore and grow simply more and more fond of, more indebted to, more alive with. It was hammers and nails tonight as he worked, and when I arrived with his requested sustenance we retreated from the storm to the fold of an awning and lavished one another with the banalities of our days that I have come to see as the "stuff" of our life together--these tenuous threads that only ever get woven (again) when the sun rises (like Penelope at her loom): our fabric. There is J., who is so admirably accepting me, as a mad-man, in the throws of a riotous re-stringing, of all this tension and contortion. That he can find concord in this discordance is a miracle: the miracle of being welcomed, which can neither be earned nor explained.

My miserable neighbor, who earlier this morning (1am) was incapable of getting into his apartment (again), and who I had to help into his apartment (again), only this time with the boy he brought home--he was just denounced as an asshole by this same man, who hurled it behind him in the time it took for the screen door to open and then slam shut. I heard this from my desk, through my door, at 3.34am. Miserable because he is a rank alcoholic, a sorry example of the sort of homosexual who cannot be intimate with another man unless drugged or drunk, and who, thus, cannot be intimate with himself. I return, again, to Freud's insight: the homosexual as the paradigmatic example of civilization's discontents: a hyperbolic case, to be sure, but an apt one, too.

The Rhetor (my new moniker for my long-time friend now in Canada) is having troubles with his g/f. I love them both, though I will always "side" with him, I suppose. Out of loyalty, out of shared experiences, out of fraternity(?).

And then there is J. What an anomaly in my life! A mad-man, himself, perhaps. There is, as Nietzsche writes, always some madness in love, but also always some reason in madness... I am pleased with the madness, and need not look for the "kernel" of reason. That is, I am happy with the love.

I Suppose I'll Fly As I Fall

2009-09-22T23:51:00.000-07:00
I just remarked to myself of the self-indulgence of this undertaking. I turned to it to alleviate the pressure, to release my anxiety by mastering it, by enframing myself in a reading (or a writing--Derrida would say, "In a word..."). Derrida would ask after my double-gesture, my acknowledgement that, while enframed, the frame is not totalizing. He does this by looking to the text, rather than, as Sartre did in Being and Nothingness and look to the subject (of Humanism), because, as with Heidegger, Derrida recognizes that Humanism is, itself, just another ideology, a totalizing erasure of differance, the margin(alized subjects) that is/who are deferred/different, that give the lie to (belie) the ideological text, the gramme. Sartre participates in this, after all, when he positions a "being" and a "nothingness". Though "nothingness" cannot be "enframed"--and thus, this is what makes the "nothingness" every subject already is the site of freedom--it still is not. Sartre, in thereby positing an "outside," "freedom," he misses that he subverts his own desire for freedom (authenticity) by making it a "nothingness." (Lacan in the same way posits jouissance as the site of freedom--from the reifying strictures of the Symbolic--in the "nothingness" of Woman, in the desire for reconciliation between the lost, desired Object and the always already castrated Law of the Father: the "oceanic" dream of knowledge of the Absolute Truth (in the Hegelian sense) that having the penis means being the phallus--(a truth mediated by, but "subsumed" "over-against," the Mother.) Heidegger's charge against Sartre, which is also Derrida's against Lacan, is to be found in the insistence that Humanism, no matter how knowing, remains a foreclosure, an inappropriate propriation of, Being on the one hand, and multiplicity on the other. For Heidegger, Being is elusive: it comes to us. Thus, to claim that one has "discovered the inherent greatness" of any appropriation of the communal world, one inauthentically denies the courage to confront the communal world on one's own, which also means confronting one's place within it: individuation; the glimpse of Being in the angsty response to the call of conscience, "Here I am!" For Heidegger, this call elicits an acknowledgement that, in fact, one is never "properly" "Here," but always a "being-there": between two poles, the past and the future, divided by that most lonely of loneliness: the moment a daimon issued a call of conscience. Derrida, however, inverts the insistence Heidegger makes on a singular "Being of beings" and emphasizes the multiplicity of possibilities that always already are deferred/different (differance) from the "enframing" of the world picture: the very metaphoricity of language denies the absolute truth of a text: within the text, itself, there are slippages, parapraxes, puns, plays on words--but most importantly, metaphor. The truth is only to the extent that it is like this or that as well. These metaphors, in traditional metaphysics, however, are "subsumed" into the logic of meaning being "present," self-evident in the text itself: metaphors only "present" the Truth, like a gift, but the Truth is distinguishable from the metaphors. In this sense, the critics of deconstruction wish to claim that the passenger is distinguished from the carriage. Perhaps--though, doesn't the quality of her petticoat speak volumes of her carriage. It is necessary to add to this account that differance is not "contained" to the text itself: the "nothingness" of Sartrean freedom and Lacanian jouissance is, in fact, "there". I say "there" so as to avoid the temptation to revert to metaphysically laden conceptual schemes, but to also imply that the margins are not pregiven empty spaces, "nothingness," but erased text, foreclosed text: they are "populated" with the traces of what metaphor "subsumes". This is the Freudian unconscious, the 'well-spring' of imagination, and of the necessity for repression. But repression, symbolically enforced through phallogocentric Law, is just that: a repression, a compulsory denial. Thus, if Lacan imagines the impossibility of a reconciliation between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, it is because he implicitly accepts, and thereby perpetuates, a radical, insurmountable binary--one which his own reading, ironically, lends itself to the project of exposing as hegemonic rather than essential such a binary. That is, if Lacan goes "back to Freud" (like Husserl went "back to the things themselves"), he regresses too far: he elides Freud's insights into the contingency of any given psycho-sexual enframing, or, in a words, scripting, and insists on a radical and decisive rending of the sexes, of the symbolic from the imaginary, of, that is, love itself: the subject is always already a "barred" subject from the subject of desire (oneself, the other, et cetera). Derridean differance is a reminder of the remains of the unconscious, of imagination, its impossibly erased, but hegemonically marginalized, possibilities that can still write (on a subject "not yet").

So where is my "double-gesture"? Where is my acknowledgement of the tension which "always makes this dual gesture, apparently contradictory, which consists in accepting, within certain limits--which is to say never entirely accepting it--the given-ness of context and its stubbornness." Derrida immediately adds: "But how without this apparent contradiction would anything ever be done?" I'd like to point out the literary Derrida himself makes with this turn of phrase "anything ever be done?": it calls to mind both Freudian "termination of treatment" and Nietzsche's ubermensch, "adyspeptic": it is the contradictions that enable civilizations and their pleasures: the space of multiplicity, of a proliferation of "there's," a Dionysian excess. Isn't this moment, this writing (which is always already ahead of itself) of self-indulgence the moment of excess that exceeds the enframing of my "intent" (which was to "confess" my anxiety over "starting" classes tomorrow, meeting my cohort, professors, and so on...): enframed as I was (as I am) in my anxiety, this, too, is de-limited, not Fated: "the structure thus described supposes both that there are only contexts, that nothing exists outside context, as I have often said, but also that the limit of the frame or the border of the context always entails a clause of non-closure."

J. is asleep in my bed. I'm in at my desk typing. It is crazy, this: I can "relax" with him when I am at his place--going to his place meaning only that I don't have to do anything in the morning... When he's at my place I've always something else on my mind.... I can't just fall asleep... This, too, will need to change.

That's Why I Said I Relate (or: Back from Miami)

2009-09-22T12:04:00.001-07:00
I'm back from my business trip to Miami's South Beach. It was, well, hectic--lot's of work, a multiplication of responsibilities that I hadn't anticipated. The weather was atrocious--humid 90s--and the scene very touristy. I did my job, though, and quite well. It was an honor to be sent as an emissary, to take charge of a chaotic situation and make it orderly, take account, and write a report of my efforts there. I would thrive, perhaps, as a consultant, or an economic "repair man". If only I could find any passion in it, or, rather, if only I were able to successfully extract the passion I have while doing it from what it is I am actually doing: making calls about people's lives and money. There is no space for passion in the cold calculations of capital. It is a brutal logic, and I am a lover, a Romantic, a martyr.

Seeing J. again when I got back was a relief, but not in the sense of "oh, good! you're still here!" I knew he would be there, he said so, and the relief was almost that there was no need to be relieved. Am I starting to take him for granted? I don't think so. I think, instead, I'm becoming more comfortable with the idea of him in my life as something that won't abruptly disappear. I think we both are.

J. had a good time at his Michigan festival, which was also the last time his band will perform as a band. He is upset about this, and I understand, now, why. Without a band you are just a lone performer on a stage, no context, no grounding. But he's diving into the scene that school is providing for him: lot's auditions for plays, et cetera. This is a good thing, I think. We will both be abundantly busy, which I also think is a good thing: we can be one another's "fresh air," the proverbial "cork". And, with pleasure.

Orientation begins tomorrow. Finally. I register for classes, I begin my regular commute to Hyde Park. I'll see a friend from NY while I'm down there. And the German, too, probably.

At a cocktail party in honor of a friend defending his dissertation I had my first taste of what it will be like to attend parties with academics. What a profoundly insecure type! My Old Man asks me how I found myself handling the dynamics of perpetual cock-measuring. I said, "I take a page out of Riviere's 'Womanliness as Masquerade': I know how to be deferential, and how to subvert that performance without destroying the fantasy of the structure."

I had wanted J. to come along with me, but I was, in hindsight, glad he couldn't make it. He has absolutely no practice interacting with people like these, and he would have felt terribly out of place--and they would have encouraged him to feel that way, too. Still, he was there in spirit. I've decided it is important for me to be "out" while in this program. On the one hand it is a matter of integrity. On the other, it will become abundantly clear given the nature of my work and interests. Academia is such a "boys club"--and as a homo, I'm not really included in that club (after all, the logic goes, he takes it like a woman!). Part of J.'s "spirit" abiding with me meant that his fiercely oppositional character--he is my Nietzschean Lion--was evident in my own posture. Demure, certainly--these are your professors and senior peers--but don't submit: redeploy, subvert, mock--and with a smile, a dancing spirit (like a woman, who only ever loves a warrior!).

I've been speaking with my dear friend from NY, who, interestingly, does not have a "Nom de Guerre" for this blog (I'll have to think ask him what he thinks it should be), and he's adjusting to life in Canada just fine, though life in NY is a bit shaky. He left behind his love, and that means he is stretched along two poles. We will see how that works for him, if it works for him. When I was doing my MA I, too, was in the same position, but the object of my desire was nothing more than a phantasy, and so never was "there" but always "here". We will be reading the late Heidegger together. Heidegger, who changed the game, and who we have yet to reconcile ourselves to.

I'm back in Chicago, which is to say: I'm home. It is very, very satisfying to say that: these streets I recognize, this grime which I familiar, these bums, slums, and squealing taxi brakes, this man's love, this man I love, this apartment's smell, this community I am known in, these friends who see me and love me... this is my home.

The Upside To Being Thrown Off A Train (or: A Reading of Marx)

2009-09-17T21:38:00.000-07:00
A philosophical critique of Marx's youthful '44 Manuscripts might seek to expose the ways in which Marx assumes the existence of a reality in and of itself that is proper to Man. For that matter, a philosophical critique of these texts might also call into question what appears to be an implicit gendered designation of the masculine as the neutral universal--thus, "ontologically" man is the species-being who produces his own world: a man's world? A philosophical critique of these strident and earnest analyses might also synthesize these two lines of approach and ask if the reality of man that is ontologically secured is more than this appearance--namely: a world where the reality of man is created by man (or men) for himself, for himself as the neutral universal.

Thus, what is at the heart of the matter is the assumption of an implacable ontology befitting for Man. But, precisely because Marx designates this real-being as the real-being of Man the heart of the matter seems to demand a necessary supplement, a distinction between Man and...?

There are two (at least!) possibilities that stand in for the Other to Man when thinking seriously of the ontological claim that Marx makes in the essay "Estranged Labor". On the one hand is the animal, and on the other is Nature. In the first instance the trope of consciousness infects Marx's thinking: as much as man is the animal that labors, that produces actual objects in and of the material world, Marx can only value this doing by making it a conscious doing, a Hegelianly reflected upon doing; a doing that reflects the distinction between need and desire, immediacy and mediation, animal slavishness and human freedom.

The other Other is Nature, which houses Marx's text like a womb, like the world of the species-being that lives-on Nature by consuming and destroying it, and forcibly manipulating it into his image. Marx wishes to say that this labor on the inorganic body of Nature--which is his own body insofar as "intercourse" with Nature is necessary for survival; yet which is also Nature acting on itself (herself?) as man is "part" of nature--is the reality of the ontological status of species-being, of man as the universal. Yet precisely because Marx holds to such an ontology of the species-being Man as reality he effaces the power of his own assertion that man is a producer, an artificer, an artistic creator--perhaps: a narcissistic idolator? The reality of man ontologically, on Marx's terms, and the very "property" that makes him potent, is his imagination: Man is the animal that forcibly renders Nature in his image, thereby making it real.

This capacity of man, to be distinguished from an animal by his consciousness, is why man lives on Nature, as if over-against Nature, and not in Nature. To live in nature, to be an animal, is to live immediately, to live with no image of nature--to be in reality? Marx positions man on Nature, superimposing himself on nature, enframing nature, into reality. Man has reality by living on nature. Man has universality from the vantage of being on nature.

Man in relation to nature, is like money in relation to man. Money extracts from man his properties, renders the real an image, and an image into reality. "I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore, I am not ugly, for the effects of ugliness--its deterrent power--is nullified by money." I am an animal, but I can produce for myself the most useless of objects. Therefore, I am not an animal, for the effect of animality--its unmediated power--is nullified by frivolous production. Man overpowers Nature with the hostile image of his world, just as money overpowers alien being with the image of its possession of propertied properties.

What, then, does Marx identify as the true power of money if not its inverting power; that is, its power to superimpose an image onto the image of the reality species-being has superimposed onto Nature? An image onto an image that does not reflect the "reality" of the image of species-being.

Money, Marx writes, is the alien, external, indifferent, hostile force that establishes the tenor of human life. Alien, external, indifferent, hostile--antithetical. Have we already arrived in Hegel's civil society? Money as the negation--the Freudian negative--of species-being's position on Nature: in a word, competition.

Marx plays the game by decrying the rules. He knows the rules: "We address ourselves not to other men's humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. (Wealth of Nations, Bk I, Ch. 2, cited in Marx, '44) To accept the rules, after all, is to cede to the image of reality money produces a reality as real as the image of reality produced by labor. Marx positions the reality of "humanity and necessity" as the negation of the reality of "self-love and advantage": the position of the image of reality (or the reality of the image) shifts: the position is the negation (or the negation is the position of the image of reality)---the choreography of this production is really poorly imagined!)

The ontological reality of species-being is thus haunted by an image, a specter, that threatens to expose species-being as itself a product: a specious-being.

What does Nature have to think of all this? Or isn't it so immediately present that Nature is base, unthinking, does not have an image? Only man would bother to imagine such a question: for man, species-being is part of nature, living-on nature, for pro-duction, pro-creation with the inorganic body of the material (maternal?) world. Money is indifferent to Nature as its materials are the products of labor, labor itself: species-being. Money does not care about the object of production because it produces producers as its objects (or does it?). Money sees itself in its duplication--its interest rate--just as the laborer sees himself in his duplication--his objectified production.

Money interrupts the intercourse of species-being and nature, it objects to this image of man's reality. "In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his species-life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him." Money tears species-being off nature, takes his object, and re-images it: the reality of production is the property of money. Intercourse with nature moves through the valuation of money, and is always deprived of its object, its produce. Labor labors but never can be private with nature, have nature properly again, as his property. The union of species-being and Nature is torn asunder.

Isn't this a mirror image of the reality of the Oedipal drama? Of an image of a union which was always already a re-union insofar as it is an image--of a reality of being on top? The child's fantasy of the mother as always giving, always replenishing, his to fashion. The harmonious symbiosis of species-being as a part of nature such that his imaginary is Nature's imaginary: desire as the remainder of the demand for love once need is satisfied. Money interjects itself into this fantasy, its value, its image is reality: money effects a loss that was always already lost: it insists upon its image, its fantasy, as the mediation of man to nature. Man loses his object and receives the symbol of the object in its place. Thus, labor as jouissance: the always and ever futile pursuit of the Real of species-being, the Real of production (understood through the infantile image of having intercourse with Nature).

That is, Marx writes as the castrated child subject to the prohibition on incest. His defiance--his denial of castration and ambivalent projection of castration onto Money (it makes impossible and impotent imaginations into reality)--does not erase this structural parallel. The economy of the loss of the Real of jouissance circulates in the currency of species-being estrangement.

The alienation of species-being is reconciled through the reflection, the recognition, of the laborer in the object of his production--the happy consciousness. Estrangement through the mediating value of money demands the laborer resolve this alienation through reflecting upon himself under its image, to see himself recognized in the symbol of the lost object. "Estrangement is manifested not only in the fact that my means of life belong to someone else, that my desire is the inaccessible possession of another, but also in the fact that everything is in itself something different from itself--that my activity is something else and that finally (and this applies also to the capitalist), all is under the sway of inhuman power." Whereas species-being resolved the difference between itself and its object by seeing production as a matter of reciprocity--the fantasy of man's doing unto Nature as nothing more than Nature doing unto itself (consent, in a word)--is, under the value system of money denied, barred: species-being is a split subject (always already).

Not that Marx necessarily understands his own negation of money to be a position akin to it, related to it, familiar with it: he maintains the Real of labor. But his critique of the fetishization of money is an unconscious projection, deferral, of the reality that the ontological status of Man qua species-being is guaranteed only by the forcible superimposition of his image onto Nature through labor. Marx remarks of money's inhuman power the way Nature must remark of man's unnatural (mediated) power.

The unconscious projection of an un-negateable position (living on nature) on which to found the ontological reality of man is expressed in this dismay, and allows Marx to (unconsciously) see his own project of ontology in the logic of capital: it produces itself as real and then denies that it was produced: an ideology, an image that frames reality. The ontology of man Marx proposes is an ideology insofar as the productive capacity of man is limited to, stops short of, the affirmation that this ontology, too, is the produced "real image" of the reality of man. Such emphasis on the productive capacity of labor to re-produce itself with variations and slippages (parapraxes?) potentially distinguishes it from money, which only ever appropriates the properties of the property it possesses (and is thereby possessed by).

The trace of labor always marks the real image of money, then, to the extent that there can be no absolute erasure of the real image of production: labor is the specter of money, the imaginary of its symbolic value. To affirm in the inverse, too, is to melt the ideology of Marx's youthful ontology.

To the extent, then, that Marx's critique of money issues from an Oedipal relation it is also possible to read Marx against himself and to thereby recover from the reified ideology of ontology an affirmation of the disruptive power of production insofar as this production disseminates a "real/image" beyond the valuations of capitalism...

"Never Heard a Man Speak Like This Man Before"

2009-09-15T00:51:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've posted, and I lament that this infrequency will become more the norm as school starts up. I've been very busy, but it seems like "busy work" rather than sustained, focused labor (to invert the meaning of the terms, perhaps even to make work something flighty and give weight to the process of labor, of giving birth).

J. has started classes--this is his second week. He has a packed class schedule, and a play in the works, and his job on top of it all. A week ago things seemed dicey, a bit of ambivalence about commitment, I think, as he was beginning to live the competing demands that life makes on a person, rather than (as I always do) think them out first and stress a priori. Two eruptions of frustration, two ambivalent resolutions, and then a night that ended with a decided(ly ambivalent) decision: "Maybe I do need time away from you..."

A restless night, tears, self-remonstration, utter exhaustion gave way to a dawn and then to a day at work which was graciously interrupted by a text message: Are you free Friday? he asks. I don't know what motivated him to think he should send out an olive branch. I don't think I could have done the same: I am so very skilled at working my way against a brick wall and then burrowing a way through it rather than turning around and walking-back my own stupidity. Instantly I made myself free and replied that, Yes, I'm free. He took me to see The Mars Volta. Friday night at the Congress Theater.

It was a perfect set list. It was a perfect night. He reached out for my hand as we made our way into the crowd, held it proudly, and we danced like a couple of kids in love with life, one another, and the music that we first made love to. (Yes, he played "De-Loused" the first time we fucked... it would have been scary if he wasn't so caring as a lover...) I met his friends from home as his "boyfriend" and they were wonderfully welcoming and happy for us both--I wasn't expecting such a warm reception from his home-town friends, but then: I've come to learn that with J. it is easy to make false assumptions: and I love him for this: he is complex, fluid, mocking of any one determination: I'd like to think we share this in common: and perhaps my own anxiety stemming from living "Am anfang war die Tat" lies in the uncanny resemblance his life, his style, his posture, his masks, bear to mine.

When we made it back to his place, after a delicious fuck, we started up some small talk and then, much to my dismay, and despite myself, this small talk swelled into a full-blown argument. I stopped myself, I slowed down, I realized that "the point" wasn't worth staining the night we'd just shared. He was less receptive to my attempt to walk-things-back, but then, as if out of no where he says (and I paraphrase and add dramatic flourish): "Don't be jealous but this afternoon I found a letter I wrote to my ex..." (a letter he never sent apparently), "and in it I apologize for arguing with him all the time. It's funny because I don't remember arguing with him over anything important, only theoretical bullshit" (at which point I interrupt: "theory isn't bullshit" and he smiles and demurs, "I know, but you know what I mean...")... "I guess it's just the way I relate to people, my Dad is like that, too..." To this I say, "I'm not jealous: I'm relieved: it means it isn't me, that you aren't disagreeing with me because we are incompatible..." He says that he ripped up and threw away that letter for fear that I would find it. He probably didn't need to do that. But it was interesting that he added this fact: that relationship, it's as if he said, is over and it means more to me that you not feel jealous or nervous if you ever saw this letter, this artifact of my feelings for that man, than preserving a record of those feelings.

J. and I have this brilliant capacity to talk around the "real" issue that dogs us, and to then talk of that issue "through" some other issue. My mistake, so often, is to correctly read that something else is at stake, but to then presume that I can rightly diagnose the "real" issue. Instead, whenever I've tried such a tact, J.--who is no fool--throws my pretensions in my face with the full forcefulness that I would myself muster against any such haughty condescension. What I've found, rather, is that when we simply try to walk-back our own fervor and remind one another (and ourselves) of our love... then, at least thus far, the "real" issue suddenly comes to the fore.

This isn't always easy for me: language is my weapon, and my best defense: I can tear anyone apart, or at least keep myself from getting eviscerated: I can go toe-to-toe with the best, and I have, with fear and trembling, and with defiant pleasure. But J. has the capacity to frame things in such a way--a way that affirms that with him I can be less guarded--that allows me to hear what he says not as a criticism, but as an insight, not as an indictment, but as a welcoming. My challenge--and no doubt it will remain my challenge for the foreseeable future at least--is to remain receptive to those moments of insight and welcome, and to extend to him the opportunity, to help open a space between us, where he can feel open for the same sort of receptivity.

This isn't, of course, anything that can be prescribed. As I have affirmed in other contexts (just recently with my friend "the Church Girl"--a monicker that doesn't do her justice by any means), life itself is a "process", a conversation rather than a conversion: there is no "The Moment" when everything clicks absolutely and finally into place: shit changes, and we must be capable of changing with it.

After this change in tone, in "mood," the "thing" that sat between us--that threatened to wedge us apart again and throw us back into a cycle of ambivalently made promises and ambivalent ruptures of those self-same promises--was no longer a "thing" that separated us, but which brought us together: Let us be certain: there is always a "thing" in-between any "us"--a mediating third point in the triangular structure of any relationship. This "thing"--too complex to reduce to language--was all that is contained in the concept of "commitment," but especially a sense of shared relief that we could relate to one another in a multiplicity of modalities without thereby effacing the common-ground that keeps us together. We made love again, and fell asleep in one another's arms.

It's as if that night was an exemplary "scene" of the face of things to come: the joy of sharing a wonderful night together, the ever inescapable complexity of human defenses to human trauma, and an affirmation of desire in the face of the manifold challenges that simply "being-with" another human being must negotiate. I think, when I reflect back on this night, that we both were immensely grateful for it: it served as a moment of realization for us both (one of many already experienced, and one of many to come) that we can do "this" if we do it together and not against one another. Often, for me at least, this means also, doing it with him against myself--I am so very talented at being my own saboteur!: give me a wall and I will pin myself against it and try, through alchemical osmosis, to force myself into and through it... I am learning to love the absence of walls.

Tomorrow I head down to Hyde Park to meet with a professor friend, to set for myself the proverbial "Thousand and One Goals" that will guide me through the next five-to-seven years of my academico-intellectual life. I am so eager to begin! In der Tat, in the beginning is the deed! Being in Hyde Park, on that campus again, walking down those halls... I came to realize after my year at Chicago that I "belonged" there. Not in any sense of "belonging": the place reeks of Ivy League privilege and pretension--but I "belonged" there because it was the first time I was really critically challenged as a scholar, intellectual, and human being. It is the place, I found, where I was most finely honed, and a part of my body's purpose is to be a weapon: perfectly weighted and balanced, finely cut and tested, sharp and quick. A weapon that can dance: nimble and delicate, like a lady: a stiletto.

J. wrote to me, "finally home and pretty much all ready for school". It took a week to catch-up, to establish a rhythm of step that could feel comfortable: he's all registered, his computer arrived, his books are on his desk, and I'm there with him in a way that doesn't obfuscate those demands: I "fit in". No doubt when school actually starts for me there will be yet another adjustment, yet another series of negotiations that will need to be performed. But, and here is the crucial point, the point that gives me hope and confidence: we've performed such negotiations already, and while not perfectly, we addressed ourselves to the changes that were rippling through our lives. We performed it once, and we can perform it again. I'm not worried.

This relationship, unlike my only other, has been fraught with doubt, with ambivalence, with "fear and trembling" in the face of another human being that refuses to settle into a simple confining context. But it has also been so utterly immensely satisfying for these very reasons! In my first relationship all the questions, doubts, hesitations, and conflicts were buried underneath the sheer volume of accumulated pronouncements of "love"--we never allowed ourselves or one another to figure out what the hell we wanted, and who we could be individually within the context of our relationship, until much too late, when any such assertion of selfhood seemed like a betrayal and the inevitable dissolution of that relationality. J. and I are, now, in the beginning, establishing our hesitations, our doubts, our ambivalences, our "fear and trembling" so that when these same challenges confront us in the future they do not confront us as alien entities, betrayals, but as that which has always been there, as part and parcel to "being-with-in-love": to the very person that each of us is and the dynamics of our relationship.

I'd say that I feel "so grown up!" saying such things, but the truth is, as I joked with my Momma, it's only been because of J.'s ability to let me see myself, and what we're up to, in this light that I can make such mature proclamations: "Either he is 25 years old psychically, or I am 20--but most likely we both exist somewhere in-between." She laughed at this, and said that it didn't really matter as long as we were able to maintain the necessary tension that comes-between and holds-together any couple. Still, I do feel "grown-up," and I include in my narcissistic valuation, J.: I'm able to relate to another human being on an intimate level that heretofore was unimaginable for me, and he is in no small measure a main contributor that that process: with him it is desirable to risk the danger that might also promise salvation (to quote a poet's poem). I gave him a book of e.e. cummings' work: "Deeds cannot dream what dreams can do" a single verse reads. I never allowed myself to see the inter-animation of ideas and action in the profound sense that I do now: if Cummings gives voice to my aspirations (I wish for a better future, my actions are guided by this messianic hope), then J. counters: "dreams cannot do what deeds can dream"-- a reversal that throws emphasis on the act itself, on the deed itself giving ground for dreams, from which dreams can launch.

J. and I, we exists, in our love, in the in-between of this perpetual reversal: the play of deeds and dreams. We dance as we follow the flips of polarity, sometimes missing the beat, needing to re-catch our step, but we have learned to, in such moments, hold onto one another, to feel the tempo of the other's body, and to regain our rhythm. I've been reading a lot of Murakami this summer on J.'s urgings, and he emphasizes again and again in his fiction the importance of the "flow," the "dance"... "Dance, Dance, Dance"... And, with J., I never heard a man speak like this man lives before.

on your back with the stacks you load

2009-09-09T01:26:00.000-07:00
That weight in my chest, curled like leaden vipers coiling around my lungs... it's back. That clenching in my shoulders and my neck, that dull ache in the back of my head.... they're all back. Something like a gravity too dense for this planet that covers my skin making it hard to move, hard to think, hard to breathe. Too much to bear, but not enough for it to overflow. It sits, like stagnant water, heavy and thick. This weight.

...
my mystic writing pad drafts the deeds before i speak them. the director yells cut, but i like the take. the mirror in my trailer is missing a bulb. the shadow makes my eyes look dark and intent. i'd love that man if he weren't so miserable, so afraid. no amount of reassurances could ever soothe him. my mystic writing pad gave those lines to the mirror, spoken out the side of its missing bulb.

...
There is a moment when everything seems incredibly clear and laid out before you. From this moment of clarity, you turn and flee. If I had a bottle, I'd empty it. If I had a cave, I'll contort my body into its crevices. If I had another chance... Wouldn't I flee?

...
i don't know what i'm doing. to try to think it makes me crazy. too many forks in the train line and my mind can't keep up. i race around like a lunatic. like a frantic man in a burning house who can't decide what he needs to take with him. his hands are empty when they find his remains.

Get Up (Boy, You Must Be Dreaming)

2009-09-06T23:15:00.001-07:00

So a blog post instead of hanging out with J., which was what we had made plans to do. Something rather irksome about this, actually.

Somehow "I'm all yours" carried with it an unspoken ellipses: "I'm all yours... as soon as I'm done hanging out with my straight friends who I am closeted to (which prevents you from staying the night when they are around), and my drug-dealer... I'm all yours around 2am--maybe--even though I've known you've been done with work for 5 hours, even though I know you're exhausted after a sleeplessness night of writing... I'm all yours so long as you will wait for me to be ready... All yours, except when I'm not all yours, except when someone or something else comes along... Yours, J."

The second time, now, that I've been blown off by him in as many days so that he can hang out with his straight band mates. Forget that I wanted him to meet and spend an evening with my friends. No, that might be too damning in their presence: my gay friends, of course: and then the jig is up...

In moments like this I begin to wonder whether or not I am simply deluded. If, in fact, I called it those two months ago (which seem to contain more time in them than two months would allow) when to the German I said, "I know this is simply a summer-time distraction..." Maybe when I said that I wasn't speaking so much about myself, but rather of J. Perhaps then I intuitively gleaned what is becoming abundantly clear: the boy is simply still a boy: he doesn't take anything seriously because he takes everything too seriously: everything, still, is too close and he doesn't yet know how to assert himself in the face of so many demands, most especially, in the face of those demands that issue from his own desires. And, though I thought at the time that the Vegan was being self-protecting, maybe he was right to say that these younger men have no clue. This, still, despite their best intentions.

I'm 25, an ambitious-as-fuck PhD student about to embark on the training that will sharpen and hone me into an intellectual capable of taking the world by storm, I'm rather good-looking (though one is never pleased on this front, are they?), and I'm very fucking attuned to my sexuality, my desires, and the socio-psychical challenges entailed therein. That is, there is absolutely no reason why I should be happy to be dicked around.

I said to DeMilo this evening that no more than 6 months ago I viewed with distain queers who remain closeted. As a phenomenon it struck me as cowardly, self-serving, and yet, paradoxically, totally self-denying. What happened to that refusal to compromise on such a principled position of mine? Is it that I'm gaining nuance and attending to the complexity of a situation that I had been inclined to view in black and white terms? Or is it that I was slowly drifting away from myself as I drifted towards J.? And, if the latter, what was the quality of such "drifting"? Was it escapism--the "distraction" I thought this would prove to be little more than--or was it something like allowing myself to open-up to the perspective of another I was growing to respect, and love?

And of course my pride begs me to say the latter--to deny that I imported more into a relationship with a 20 y/o, a sophistication and depth that wasn't really there; to deny the charge so many of my "acquaintances" have hurled at me: can't handle a "real man," huh? And if I can't? Which is not to say I think there is something every remotely resembling "a real man". I suppose I would measure a "real man" by their capacity to floor me with a sentence that curls like a plume of smoke, nimble and subtle, but which seeps into the very blood of who I am. Someone who can hold their own and then some with me in intellectual conversation--who will never say, "You're just smarter than me" as if to belittle themselves. Someone who can make me cum with my whole body, who can make me laugh, and, I suppose, who can make me cry. Does that sound "real" enough? Because I know plenty of 40 y/o men who can't read their way out of a paper bag, who see "Project Runway" as high culture, who are miserably unhappy people. I know plenty of my peers who are lonely, unable to articulate their desires, or who "lack the courage for what they know" (as Nietzsche once beautifully put it), who can only stand to be seen by other men as sexual when drunk or doped up.

I'm done with this writing... I'm pissed and this is going nowhere. What am I even trying to say? This much is clear: I'm fucking pissed. I'm doubly pissed because to say I'm pissed seems to pose a referendum on our relationship: am I over-reacting? am I placing too much stress on a foundation that cannot hold under its weight? But what weight is this anyway?! Nothing more than his own promise! And maybe that says more than I want it to.

I Was Loud By Your Lows (so many creature fears)

2009-09-04T00:06:00.000-07:00

(For J.)
I've been thinking about the sex/gender distinction a lot recently. I'm reading Drucilla Cornell's "Beyond Accommodation"--a Derridean reading of Lacan at its most powerful--and just finished Michael Warner's "The Trouble With Normal". Needless to say, the former is far superior to the latter. But still, both books attempt to get at the problem of "naturalized" or, in philosophical parlance, "essentialized" gender roles. Briefly, a naturalistic or essentialized account of gender takes recourse to anatomy, to "sex," to account for the "proper" actions of a gendered subject. Thus, the logic goes, a man, because he has a penis, desires a woman, sleeps with her, and towards the end of reproduction. The gendered "male" is a man insofar as he, by virtue of his anatomy, is directed by his anatomy to sleep with the "proper" sexual object, a woman, and for the purposes of reproduction. This is, obviously, immensely problematic. But let's attend to what makes such a notion problematic in the first place. After all, it wasn't so long ago that the idea of a difference between "sex" and "gender" was a radical idea--a radical idea we now are the beneficiaries of, and which we have the privilege of taking for granted.

Sex, it was once thought, to be "male" or "female," issued forth from anatomy itself. In a strange way, then, we can now--from the vantage point of contemporary queer and feminist theory--see that the body itself, the natural corpus, the text of the lived life, was always already moralized: a certain body "naturally" does certain things and with certain other bodies (never the same kind of body, a "homo" body). Plato, for instance, gives voice to this fantasy of biological determinism in the Symposium when he, through the voice of the comedic playwright Aristophanes, tells the myth of two bodies, once unified but split by Zeus, longing for reconciliation, for a re-joining that would complete them or fill the absence of the Others loss. That a penis fits into a vagina, the story was appropriated into saying, proves that the "rightful" union of two divided lovers is between a man and a woman. (Needless to say, this reading, so prevalent in Western civilization that my own gay mentor was taught by his [straight] mentor to "pass over the disgraceful indulgences of the Greeks," elides--actively erases--from the Symposium the very inclusion of gay and lesbian pairings articulated by Plato himself.) Of course, Plato interjects, in the voice of Socrates: just because the Other is your "other half" does not mean he or she is good for you: a person has been known to amputate a diseased arm because it is no-good, regardless of whether or not it is a "part of him". That is, and with an appeal to the body itself (to a certain form of [Nietzschean] naturalism), Plato introduces the necessity of ethical or moral or political standards or judgments into the idea of the "health" of the body: just because it "seems" to "fit" doesn't mean that the myth Aristophanes tells is binding: your other half, or what you are meant to take your other half to be, could be a gangrene appendage. Something other than simple biology, Plato is saying, must aid in deciding who the Other that will be your "compliment" will be.

For gays, and I speak in what follows from the perspective of a gay man, the problem of the distinction between "sex" and "gender" is particularly troublesome. Because the common understanding of sexuality is understood within the context of a heterosexual alignment of man/woman the idea that a man could love and fuck another man throws the whole concept of "sexuality" into chaos. Who is the man? people ask. Who is the, you know, the one who fucks? they ask. These questions, which for any gay man who speaks frankly about his pleasures are common-place, belie a deep-seated acceptance of a gendered assignment of sexual roles, so deep-seated that they seem natural: to be the man, this logic thinks, means to be the one who fucks. To be a woman, conversely, is to be the one who is fucked. Restated in philosophical language, the distinction between "masculine" and "feminine," between "fuck-er" and "fuck-ed," is phrased in the context of "active" vs. "passive". To be a man, it is understood, is to be the active penetrator, the fuck-er, rather than the fuck-ed. To be a man means to stick your penis into something (a woman!), to actively penetrate.

Thus, to be a man who enjoys and who takes pleasure in being fucked is to be the logical equivalent of a woman--at least by the logic of sexuality. (And I mean by 'sexuality' "heterosexuality" which only ever speaks of its Others with qualifiers--"pathological sexuality," "perverse sexuality," "homo-sexuality," "trans-sexuality"--which, as it were, takes itself as the norm that must distinguish itself through a series of ever increasing qualifiers from the "aberrations" of itself: "sexuality" always already presupposes "heterosexuality" upon which every other sexuality is but a derivative, and a less than worthy derivative thereof.) When my boyfriend says, with me, "I'm a gay man, I like to get fucked in the ass" we disrupt, we--as it were--fuck with the very logic of gendered sexual roles. We expose, with our pleasures, with our affirmation of our pleasures, the lie that grounds the logic of gender as determined by sex. As men, so the story goes, we are not men if we, as men, get fucked. Then we are women. But we say, and live, otherwise.

In the wake of the Black Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's, a movement which relied in no small measure on exposing the hypocrisy of White discrimination and demanding consistency, the Woman's and Gay and Lesbian Movements took recourse to a very politically potent weapon the Black movement made use of: biological determinacy. Before addressing the appropriation of this logic by gays, lesbians, and feminist women let's first attend to the logic Blacks used in their struggle. It is, first of all, a logic that directly appeals to a theological conception of "man" as the creation of God and thus equal: we are all children of God, and made in his likeness. Therefore, how can a Black man be any less worthy of divinely imbued dignity than a White man imbued with the same divinely imbued dignity? (It is no unimportant fact that MLK Jr. was a Reverend.) This line of argumentation dissipated, however, but what remained was the "fact of Blackness": I was born this way, I had no control over the pigmentation of my skin, and because of this, because of my being victim to the event of my birth as a Black person, you (you White folk) cannot rightly hold me accountable for all that "Blackness" means. An appeal not to God but to genetics is made in this case to justify the a-responsibility of being born Black: lack of control, being "fated" to "Blackness", contains within it a moral imperative for Whites to not discriminate.

In the same way gays and lesbians have made the same appeal to a perverse sense of biological determinism: I never asked for this, the logic reads, I was born this way: I had no choice, just like a Black person had no choice over the color of their skin! The analogy between race and sexuality allows the following point to emerge with brilliant clarity: being gay or Black is only something someone has to excuse or justify through recourse to lack of choice when the norm, the ideal, is White or straight. The logic, as it reads, says nothing more than this: If I could, I would be you--White, straight, male--but I was born this way--Black, gay, female/queer--and I can't help that I can't be "right"/"proper". Therefore, the logic continues, take pity of me. Don't discriminate, don't call me nasty names, don't beat me up, don't look disgusted or afraid when you see me: I can't help that I'm different, that I'm not like you. This logic amounts, ultimately, to an appeal to the privilege of the so called "Normal" (White, Straight, Male) population to not hold us freaks to their impossible standards, all the while promising with everything we are that we freaks will try to be normal--at least as best we can.

The question that strikes me is this: Why are we making any such appeal to "Normal" for pity, for allowance in their otherwise pristine world (if not for the appearance of us freaks), for permission to be who we are and to pursue the pleasures we enjoy? I think the answer to this question is to be found in the very same impulse that gives rise to the question in the first place: an acceptance of a biological determination of sexuality. The logic reads: Just like a Black man has no control over his skin pigmentation (though, to a limited extent certainly, he can determine what that pigmentation means) a gay man has no control over his desires: he is the victim of his homosexuality in a Straight World just as a Black man is victim to his skin color in White World. I reject the notion that to be gay or to be Black is to be a victim. I think, instead, the very impulse which seeks out such a refuge always already accepts that Straight or White is what is Normal, right, and proper.

Thus, I think about defending gay sexuality, but not exclusively gay sexuality, outside the context of the Black Civil Rights Movement and its tactics of justifying inclusion on the grounds of theological, and thereby biological, determinism. I am not a child of god, and even if I was born this way, this isn't a "defect" that needs to be accommodated: politically, and psychically, speaking biology has nothing to do with my oppression, with my frustration, with my confusion, or my sadness.

I, instead, ask the obvious question, which I alluded to above: why do I need to justify my pleasures, my body, my lover to you, Normal? What makes you, Normal, so pristine that everyone around you needs to legitimate themselves before they can just live? These questions (and there are so many more--just ask a wounded queer of their rage and pain) are decidedly political insofar as they strike at the public and socially accepted ordering of our bodies and our pleasures. Fundamentally, it is a question of where you can hold your boyfriends hand without fear of backlash. That is, it is a question of appearance in the public realm: who can and cannot "properly"/"appropriately" appear. It is a series of questions that invert the hierarchy of power: instead of "Normal" demanding of me that I justify my appearance on its scene, I ask of "Normal" why it presumes to legitimately dominate and order the scene in the first place. Instead of "Normal" "accepting" me so long as I'm no "too obvious" with my boyfriend I ask why "Normal" can be as obvious as it likes to be without fear of social punishment. Instead of keeping my desires and affections silent, I ask "Normal" why it can declare "I'd totally fuck her" with impunity, without fear of reproach. That is, in inverting the direction of power, I thereby empower myself: I can ask the questions now, and you, "Normal," have to answer up: now "Normal" has to defend itself.

Usually when such questions are posed, when answers are demanded, recourse to a naturalistic determinism is made: "Normal" is normal because that is how we are made, we are born this way: boys are supposed to sleep with girl: it's nature, that's how babies are made, the continuation of the species and all that. It's funny how when Normal wishes to justify itself it elides pleasure all together: no mention is made of how the act of sex might feel good, might be enjoyable. (Notice how when Normal is in the "hot seat" it retreats to the same tired position as queers: it denies its pleasures on the basis of a victimization, only that Normal happens to be "the right kind of victim".--Could not our shared status as victims to a restrictive Law of what is normal, ordered around a pleasureless functionalism, serve as the basis of our commonality? More on that in a moment...) Instead there is a retreat to a bare functionalism: sex is such only to the end of reproduction. Indeed, most straight people can't appeal to pleasure because there are, following the logic of sexuality, a whole host of pleasures they could (and probably would) enjoy that are denied to them: to defend their sex on the basis of pleasure would already be to start sliding down the slippery slope of de-naturalizing the gender roles they so adamantly need to defend. Freud, when he speaks to so called "perversions," includes kissing, looking, masturbation, oral and anal sex, and touching in the realm of "perversions" of the norm of reproductive, functional, naturalistic sex: such play is about pleasure, not "sex". Of course, Freud's "list" (as it were) is in the service of subverting the very concept of "Normal," to expose the "normal" (give or take) sexual acts that almost everyone engages in that fails to meet the standards of Normalcy.

Also, usually, such questions are never even allowed to be posed. Violence against gays and lesbians (and those who look a bit too queer for comfort) is aimed at not the actual being of the feared homosexual but rather the questions their very bodies pose to "Normal". The insult, the punch, the look of disgust: these are only ever defensive acts of effecting a distance between oneself and the feared Other: with the insult, strike, or disgusted look a gulf opens up, and that gulf keeps Normal safe from the challenges of the questions the very body of the freakish Other poses: What, after all, make you normal? A question the only answer to is either, "Nothing" or the debasement of the very desires and pleasures the answerer might feel in the reduction of sex to mere functionality. Why is it that Normal (or, rather, those who claim to fit into "normalcy") would rather preemptively silence the Other than face the challenge of a question of their normalcy? Doesn't this impulse speak volumes of the fragility of the very concept of Normal, a concept so fragile it cannot allow itself to challenged? In a certain sense, doesn't the vehement opposition to the appearance of us freaks on the scene belie, in fact illuminate, the very breaking-point that Normal is afraid it is being pushed towards? But still, why the need to silence the Other, why the fear of a "breaking point" the occasion of queers on the scene seems to threaten?

I don't as of yet have an adequate answer to this question. The critique, as it were, ends with this unanswered question, leaving in its wake a serious challenge to Normal on the one hand, and the prospects of a way of life that can exist "within" Normal while resisting normalcy on the other. For, while "Normal" may not exist and may not be able to justify itself--and I thereby answer what were, ultimately, a series of rhetorical questions--this does not enable the belief that now "everything is permitted." The loss of the norm, of "Normal," does not entitle us to act without constraint. Nor, more to the point, does it legitimate violence--whether physical or otherwise--against straight people, or one another as queers. Rather, with the rejection of Normal what remains are still the questions: what remains is oneself as a subject who poses, and who is subject to, questions, to critique. It is not enough, that is to say, to simply live in opposition to Normal; one must also challenge oneself with the same intensity that one challenges Normal. When Socrates is about to face death he strokes the hair of the young Phaedo who, anticipating the loss of his friend and exemplar is already in mourning, and says: the real loss, young Phaedo, would be to let the conversation die, to stop asking questions. The death of Normal does not thereby mean that the questions Normal poses for us, just as the questions Socrates posed for Phaedo, disappear: we can reject the norms of Normal without thereby being free of the questions born of that rejection. Indeed, so long as the traces of Normal are always with us--we cannot leave our homes without seeing is effects everywhere!--so too must we remain questioning, and questionable, subjects.

Deeper Into A Murakami Novel continued

2009-09-02T13:07:00.000-07:00
When you stopped yourself and thought about things hard enough, usually after a bottle of wine was emptied and the ashtray had been piled full-up, you realized that J.'s disappearance made perfect sense. There were a number of reasons, all perfectly coherent and logical, that laid themselves out before you which, even through the haze of the liquor, were undeniably clear. The future itself was always something J. felt uncomfortable about discussing. Still, not talking about it allowed it to unfold itself, as if almost by some magical force which also kept you to him. The promise, when it was ever spoken, was only to "be there"--a projection into that unknown, untalked about abyss. It was into that abyss that J. disappeared into.

It was three weeks ago that he left. Classes had started again; your students vivacious and eager as always, your colleagues jovial and perpetually aloof. The folds of the books that lay open, spines cracked, pages heavily marked and annotated, had, once again, become your refuge. They became his arms but their embrace was more total: every sentence opened itself to you, reaching out to you, and then holding you to them with steely insistence. You remembered why the text was your lover in the first place, the return to a primordial state of total envelopment.

You had let J.'s arms grow more and more slack, less emphatic. He had a rival lover he could never best. After four years of this gradual disengagement he finally disappeared. And you had adjusted yourself to his absence.

Once, when you had just fallen in love with him, as coursework was impending, he guffawed at the sex/gender dichotomy. Lacking any will to patience, you had lost your cool. My body, you snarled, is political resistance. It does not bend to the contours of the demands made of it from every angle. It stands erect when it can, and it harbors always an irrepressible need to revolt, to scream, to never, never be cowed into denying itself. My body is fluid and filth, but it is your fluid and filth, too, and if you can't love this, then I'm going home. I refuse to deny my pleasures, my jokes, my irony, to accommodate your anxiety.

It was your body, you thought as your rode home on your bicycle, battered by the wind off the lake, that he was assaulting.

La La La (boy you're loving is all that I think about)

2009-08-28T13:42:00.000-07:00
Gay man that I am, and thanks to the Writer, I've kinda become all sorts of hung-up on Kylie Minogue's album "Fever." I know that it's dated, but it was the only album I could get from work's computer. Why we (American gays) have such a hard-on for Madonna and not Kylie is something of a mystery to me at this point: her music is just so superior.

Last night while hanging out with J. as he worked the corner Dr. Phil strolled by--yes, Dr. Phil frequents the "Viagra Triangle" (makes sense)--and upon realizing who he was ("I know you!" I blurted out) I fed him some of his own medicine: "I want you to start living as a gay woman!"

To Dr. Phil's credit, he replied, "That's me!" J. and I lost our shit--we couldn't help it, we just laughed in his big, good ol' boy face as he sauntered down the street in a white linen shirt and his umbrella cocked on his shoulder.

It's small things like that which make hanging out on a street corner in the rain until 2am worth everything. Little things like that, and big things like this:

Last night J. and I had a pretty intense back and forth on the meaning and importance of language, paranoiac delusion, the structure of society as the mental hospital writ large, the definition of friendship, and the role of expectations. Two hours outside in the rain, under an awning, and then another two hours on the phone.
At a certain point J. called me out: It's like you want to find out the Truth of me, like I'm a puzzle and you want to fit all the pieces together--but there's no puzzle, there's just me. (I paraphrase.) It was a totally arresting moment: "It's like you want to find out the Truth of me..." In that moment I realized that I was betraying my own theoretical convictions, that I was attempting to hypostatize "J." into a knowable, unchanging being.
I confess as much. "I understand," he says, "I know you're nervous about school, and I know that all you want is to know I'll be there."
"Yes," I say.
"I'll be there," He says.

In past posts--posts that pre-date J.'s entry into my life--I expressed the profound desire to be-with someone who will be a challenge, who will be my match, who can dance with me, keep up and push me harder, even. I think I even phrased it with a gesture to Judith Butler and Wendy Brown.
It is such a pleasure to feel like with J. I'm privileged to have a partner in the process of, to borrow from Nietzsche (who borrows from Pindar), "becoming who I am." He does, in fact, regularly challenge me, he calls me out of myself, to see myself in new dimensions. And he promises to, no matter the intensity of our theoretical excursions, "be there." I don't think it is possible to ask for more.
I said to him, after taking a breath, that it is very scary to do what he is asking of me: for you to stay, I must let you always be able to go--do you know how hard that is for me? It means I need to trust you!
He laughed, and I laughed myself, at myself.
It's scary for me, too, he says.

It's easy to think change--this usually entails mapping out contingency plans--and it's easy to write about change--this usually entails a plethora of cliche--but, in contradistinction to thought and speech, it's very hard to _do_ change. Goethe writes, in an inversion that rippled out into the entirety of Western civilization: "Am anfang war die Tat"--in the beginning was the deed. J. beseeched me, Trust my actions.
Indeed (in der Tat), I can trust his actions--he told me so.