on being gwyneth

There’s something going on.

Read more

Considering Juleigh Howard-Hobson’s “Feminism Negates Folkways”:

International development teaches that one of the best ways to quickly improve a country’s conditions is to educate its women.

Education of this kind is often non-traditional, and moves women out of traditional social roles.

To practice heathen Traditionalism is one of a class of first-world privilege of choices, the goal of which is the essence of feminism.

To attack feminism is to attack the right of choice, and the potential for actual material improvement in the lives of millions.

To glibly set aside material advancement simply because it is materialistic is chauvinistic, and implies that underdeveloped cultures remain in poverty.

Traditionalism is an affectation. It can be healthy for the practitioner, who has the right of that choice, but to declare it as a cultural necessity is self-serving.

For lives and souls are sweet
That give of themselves to Him
To taste.

I waddled into the main hallway of the apartment building where I live and toward the wall where all the mailboxes are temporarily mounted. I examined the spot where my own box had been for several months now, and noticed that it was incorrectly labeled ’304′ (using an alias, here). I was baffled. My apartment is 314. So where was my mailbox? I looked down the row to the next group and there it was, in order with 315, 316, etc. I shuffled over, put my key in… and couldn’t open the box. Baffled and frustrated, I went back to where I was certain my box should have been to begin with, put my key in the box labeled 304, and opened it. Pulled out a piece of mail, feeling a little weird about spying someone else’s mail, and confirmed the address on it. Yes… 304. Correct mail addressed to correct box. But not my box, though where my box should be, and which my key opened.

I approached the young woman who runs the desk in the evening and mentioned to her that something weird was going on with the mailboxes, and asked why the labels had been swapped. We both returned to the wall, where I demonstrated the problem to her as succinctly as I could. My box, 314, was in the wrong place and wouldn’t open with my key. The wrong box, 304, was where my box should be and could be opened with my key.

She calmly led me back to the front desk, where she asked me for my ID. She checked it against the records for a moment, handed it back to me and said, with a carefully neutral tone:

“You live in 304.”

I felt for just a moment as if I had gone insane. My brain had swapped a bit somewhere, had burned out a neuron, and a deja-vu-like false memory had completely replaced my knowledge of my own apartment number.

Did you ever have a dream so lucid and plausible that it was only some time later – maybe days – when you were able to correlate it against verifiable events and realize it hadn’t actually happened? This was even more disorienting.

I thanked her for her patience with me, retrieved my mail from its box and rode the elevator upstairs, still not entirely convinced that she was right. But she was, of course. The number on the box matched the address on the mail in my hand, which had my name on it, and which matched the door where I knew to go.

I still have no idea just what happened. And I suspect that single neuron is gone for good.

Last week I saw a couple on the Metro platform who I’ve known since college. She, once robust, was now a bit plush. He, once lean, was now decidedly craggy. I walked toward them unrecognized, stopped in front of her, smiled, and said, “we’ve aged.”

And so we have.

My father came over for a visit a month or so ago (as usual, my bizarre sense of time makes any accuracy impossible). He was smaller than I remember. I don’t think he’s lost any actual stature in the past few years, and I know I’ve grown no taller (though no shorter, either- I am still my full six feet). But he still looms large in my memory, and he felt a bit less… vital. As did my mother, who I saw earlier this year on a visit to San Francisco (that I still have yet to write about). She stopped dying her hair since I last saw her, and her total (but beautiful) grayness made me think of a grandmother – from the perspective, of course, of someone who has forgotten her own age.

The child ages, and the parents run ahead. And soon I shall follow.

But not yet. I keep my hair dark red for now, and hide my own plush with flattering, flowing clothes. I struggle to make something of my life before it finally runs down. To be something before I become nothing.

I feel it now, more than ever. I feel the limits placed on me.

I’m getting older. I’m 51.

You know there’s slim pickin’s on your TV when there’s Slim Pickens on your TV.

Has it been that long?

Once a month is no good. I need to drag the silence out of my skull and get the bubble and fume of my endless introspection into words, not just the Joycean stream that rounds my cerebrum like an opaque tide of angst and wonder.

Write, damn you, write.

For me, one of the most annoying things about being trans is the endless parade of self-serving ignoramuses (ignoramii?) who believe that they have The Devastating Argument which I must answer or concede my own delusions or fraud.

They are of course always the paragons of Reason – never disingenuous, malicious or ignorant – and their towering, unique Insight is both universal and infallible.

Some days it’s like being on a shabby “house of horrors” ride in a cheap carnival, with threadbare goblins flapping in your face as you inch forward.

So, so tiresome. And in the end, utterly pointless, since this gauntlet of snickering, needling ghosts has no real place in my life. Surely they cannot be so stupid as to believe that they can “persuade” me that my eyes and heart are not my own. Can they?

No matter. In the end, no matter at all, beyond what I choose.

I opened my lower sock drawer, scanning as I do for a pattern that matched. I saw several pair and a loner but nothing that fit my mood or the weather. I opened the upper drawer and repeated the scan with the same results… several pair and another single, none of which caught my eye or invited my foot. I went back and forth a couple of times in this manner, less methodically each time until the alternating drawers became a kind of slow zoetrope. At which point I realized that the single sock in each drawer was the same… and further that it had been the same for many weeks during which I had performed this ritual, each viewing so consciously distinct from each other that I had never seen that a single pair had been always been in sight, just in slightly different moments.

—

I have no real sense of time beyond the present day. I can physically estimate a minute or an hour or even several hours with fair accuracy, but the relationships of things in time outside the scope of about a week are almost completely indistinct to me. I have no idea that a particular event occurred a year ago or two years ago or ten, except by careful calculation and inference. This is completely incomprehensible to anyone who inherently knows the context of related events, either in their own lives or in the wider culture, and I often get blank or unbelieving stares when I try to explain it. But my memory has no order, no scale. It’s just there, like a drawer of disordered socks.

—

Philosophies of meditation always tell you, in one way or another, to “live in the moment.” In a sense it’s the only way I’ve ever lived or ever can. I dream the past, of course, and ponder the future. But my experience is always immediate, to the point where I really know nothing else.

Now is all I have.

I’ve undertaken a fairly significant reset of my priorities and interests. Part of it involves a commitment to a process that will require quite a lot of writing over the next year. Whether any of that work winds up here is an open question right now, but, well… a writer writes.

And a thinker thinks, and what you put in your head has a lot to do with what churns up there and eventually makes its way out in whatever form is most present to the thinker… which in turn shapes the thinker further.

Writing about not writing is of course the most facile dodge… and so in a way is worrying about the reader, who you set up as your silent editor, the external agent who has more power than you to say what should and should not be written. And there is no reader, not really. Not unless you’re hopelessly addicted to polemic or pornography. There is only you.

There is only me.

I can’t get my head around the fact that someone voluntarily fucks Rush Limbaugh.

Tomorrow work resumes, and we appear to have survived another ugly season.

We observed our own New Year on the Solstice and have watched the proceedings since with both detachment and frustration – expressed by Alison as sadness and by me as anger, each in accord with our habit and character.

For me, the season ties into a larger sense of loss of ideals which pervades much of my thought these days, and which I’ll have to work out at later and at length in these (digital) pages.

For both of us, there is the struggle to remain both civil and honest in the face of such a pervasive cultural event. We even debated, briefly, the idea of observing a sort of “weightless christmas” in which we soothed our nostalgia for its own sake. We abandoned the idea quickly – the suspension of our own real attitudes towards this holiday was just not possible… attitudes which are well expressed, at least in part, by T. Thorn Coyle:

…I say to anyone who is not a Christian and who celebrates Christmas: what exactly do you think you are doing? Why are you contributing to this beast, this monster, this creature that not only feeds on the sweat of poor people around the world but simultaneously takes more and more money to just maintain its caloric requirements? Why have you – atheist, Pagan, Christian, or Jew – been taken in?

I’ve heard far too often that “the meaning of christmas is what you bring to it,” as if it were a neutral vessel – but even that attitude is a capitulation to the idea that the vessel is gilded and special – that it is something to which one ought to bring some meaning, any meaning, as long as you agree to acknowledge it.

“Here… drink from this cup. You can pour whatever you wish, but you must drink it from this cup.”

No. We will choose other cups, and this year especially we will put our efforts to their making.

I think I’ve commented in the past about the fascist urge in contemporary politics. Exaggerated nationalism, faux populism in the service of eliminationist ideology, xenophobia, authoritarianism. And in some places far more: Purging. Genocide. State Terror.

These are all real horrors, the struggle against which is a requisite burden of humane civilization.

But it’s hard to get a grip on, hard to find a proper scope for action. So what do you do if you’re a dilettante with an extra Organ of Self Righteousness and a bit of free time, rather than concern yourself with the larger world in which people with actual influence and power sell and enact fascism?

Why, raise the alarm about a neofolk band’s possible connections to small, splintered groups of hapless idiots wearing armbands, of course. Because, you know, that’s what fighting the good fight is all about: scrupulously policing every product and statement of a suspect-by-association fringe musical subculture for evidence of Wrong Think, demanding that they answer your tendentious charges and exposing them to harassment.

What bullshit.

I like Allerseelen. I also like Nokturnal Mortum, Gorgoroth, Darkthrone, Negura Bunget, Moonsorrow… in fact a lot of bands whose politics have been considered questionable. I even think Varg Vikernes is sort of an interesting character, though probably a sociopath and I don’t really care for his music.

(And by the way, nobody actually cares what he thinks. Newsflash: Glenn Beck doesn’t listen to Burzum.)

I listen to these and other artists – including Agalloch, who are implicated in the “alert” linked to above – because they create the soundtrack for a way I feel… and that is not fascist, but certainly aggressive at times, often fatalistic, sometimes grimly meditative. The fact is that most of the time I have no idea what these bands are singing or what they allegedly stand for. I appreciate their esthetics, not their ethos.

Sort of like Wagner.

Anyway, read more about the kerfuffle at The Wild Hunt, and spend some time on its lengthy, and instructive, comment thread.

I’ll tell you, though… if it comes down to a choice between handing in my Approved Leftist Card and my MP3 playlist, I know which way my head is banging.

It turned, laughing quietly, and wings of ash shadowed its face. I stood in horror, not at its countenance, but at its appalling significance. And in that same moment, when the world I thought I knew flew apart and revealed itself, grinning, many-armed and terrible, I saw also that it inferred the other truth… that light and dark made each other and were one. That terror implies hope and that pain has a possible end other than oblivion.

Its claws brushed the mantle as it turned and in turning, tilted its awful face, listening to my revelations with a widening grin as they came upon me like lightning, like cracks in the sky, like Arjuna’s mind split and opened by Krishna. And into that opening it poured itself, a grey wind fluttering and cold as it closed its jaws upon me, whispering the truth:

“No. Darkness needs no light, and is the only end.”
Read more

It wasn’t that, after waiting a year for the event, and hoping to attend nearly every week this year, we could finally only make it to the very last weekend of the Renaissance Festival.

Nor was it the matter of our attire, necessarily drab as we had errands to run before we took our rented car out to the distant suburbs, and we didn’t want to be dressed like medieval peasants while discussing pistons and timing belts at the Toyota parts counter, so that we could continue the seemingly endless labor on our own wounded vehicle.

Nor was it yet that, after arriving on a glorious early afternoon and getting warmly stoned on mead and bawdy tunes, Alison had a fullscale panic attack, in the teeth of which we beat a hasty and early retreat, only to have her anxieties finally relieved by shopping for pet supplies and hardware… our own special version of make-up sex.

Nor, finally, was it our ill-judged repast at TGI Fridays, into which we tumbled exhausted and slightly shell-shocked, too drained at the end of a weird and rotten day to even decide what to have for dinner, where already bad food is called “cajun” as an excuse for masking its miserable flavor with an overdose of red pepper.

No, in the end it was none of these things that made this The Day of Suck. Rather, it was the drinks we received and for some reason swallowed, having been lured by the pretty distraction of a “Punk Pink Cosmo.”

Drinks that involved pouring an already oversweet mixture of vodka and fruit juice over massive lumps of cotton candy in our glasses.

Nauseating. Shockingly vibrant in their awfulness. The very pinnacle of bad taste, both literal and figurative, fit only for pigtails and fake IDs.

The apotheosis of Suck.

I asked the world:

“What do you do when you need to make art, but don’t know what the art is that you need to make?”

To which Alison responded:

“Why, you team up with a jocular-yet-bitter old clarinet player and a neon-and-coke-powered Australian muse to found a cult of rollerskating dweebs and build a temple to Zeus and disco, of course!”

Lisa and company irritate me a fair bit these days, with their increasing commitment to a certain kind of theoretical/ideological language. But I still have enormous respect for their project and this is a good example of why:

In a recent article, Lisa spoke of the acceptable narratives of trans-ness, with a focus on the element of the acceptable liberal narrative that holds we are totally and forever happy after transition, the end. What I will focus on here is what comes before that, the hegemonic discourse surrounding pre-transition life. It is, in short, that everything is bad and terrible because you are “trapped in the wrong body” and waiting for deliverance as you sit in a swirling vortex of darkness. To a large extent this is true in its way- who among us does not remember deep depression and self loathing? I had suicidal ideations, virtually no will to live, and by the time I hit 20 my energy to do anything productive or meaningful had at last become the latest casualty to the dysphoria.

But the problem with the dominant narrative is that it tacitly insists that that’s all there is to pre-transition life, and my story was always more complicated.

Read the whole piece.

What always cracked me up about the ideological commitment to the Harry Benjamin Doctrine on the part of some, is that it utterly erases their own grasping claims to “authenticity.”

In short: Harry Benjamin Syndrome is not a disorder of women.

I have a mentor who says that a woman is a person who makes the choices of a woman.

Obviously a can-of-worms kind of statement, and easily taken as glib if you ignore the immense and intense introspection that goes into it.

But it’s a better working model, I think, than comparisons of superficial, gender-normative behaviors. And it does allow for certain observations I’ve made of some men, that they are truly women, and of some women, that they really are men – transgender aside.

The entire question is fraught with ideology, with delusion, with intense need. There can be no objectivity.

As for myself: well, I am more than a self. I am several. I am the momentary instance of subjective and objective, intrinsic and extrinsic, endogenous and exogenous, behavior and perception. I am a system. I am trans, and I emit behaviors that, by and large, return female-reinforcement feedback. And that’s both about it and barely the surface.

I mark the changing seasons by the morning shadows shifting across the Metro platform.