It's a war zone out there

It's pretty fitting that a holiday commemorating the existence of the United States is celebrated by mimicking all-out warfare.

After being scared shitless last year in the face of the pyro display in Dolores Park, I decided to stay in this year. But that doesn't help much when you live in the city, where middle-of-the street firecrackers and the like are pretty commonplace, at least in my neighborhood. It was a trip just walking back from the corner coffee shop after dusk. I had to cross the street back and forth a couple times to avoid sidewalk cascades of flame. It sort of reminded me of the riots in Quebec City during the FTAA convention in 2001, only then it was fire and tear gas, not fireworks, in the streets.

I'm pretty happy to be boycotting the festivities tonight, as 4th of July in San Francisco is a little bit scary. That, and I got a little partied out at Pride last weekend. Two holidays in two weeks is a bit much for me. Let's just hope the fireworks don't conduct with any of that crackling dry California summer air. The last thing we need is to go the way of Big Sur.

Just remember: only you can prevent inner-city forest fires.

Prince(ss) in shining armor

When I was a kid I had a made-up romance with a boy named Erik who didn't exist. At least, I don't think he existed. At the time I was pretty sure he did. He was the boy of my dreams, literally, who in my sleeping life I met on the first day of junior high school, a 9th grader with sandy brown hair who was older and more sensitive than the middle school boys I had known.

I convinced myself that Erik was Out There Somewhere, my soul mate. I was a shy, romantic kid who didn't date until I was 16, so Erik was all I had. I pinned all my fairy tale daydreams on the idea that I would find him someday, that he was waiting for me. I drew a picture of him that I kept on my wall, next to my celebrity teen magazine crushes Jonathan Brandis and Claire Danes. In reality the drawing was a copy of a photograph of Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale from Rolling Stone, and due to my limited artistic abilities it more closely resembled Edgar Allan Poe than a 14 year old boy.


Poetry or Puberty?



My first boyfriend A. wasn't Erik. He only kissed me too hard in the attic above the choir room after school one day, and tried to rape one of my friends. My college boyfriend D. wasn't either, but I fooled myself into thinking I loved him because having a boyfriend made me somebody. Like my friends in high school who took birth control and went to parties, having a boyfriend and having sex somehow made them cooler than the rest of us, cooler than they had been before.

K. wasn't Erik either. She was my first girl. My freshmen year of college she kissed me at a party because she “wondered what it would be like.” When we collapsed under the kitchen table that night I unbuttoned her top and finally knew what had been missing from those early teenage dreams, kisses and gropes. I didn't even like her that much. She ended up dating my housemate and pushing me toward C., who “wasn't gay or anything” but liked me. I fell for C., down the stairs at her house, limping home later with a twisted ankle and a lot of disappointment. Seven years later my ankle still hurts when it rains.

In the three-quarters of a decade since then there have been dates, one-night stands, three-month stands, drunken hookups, girls-I'm-dating, periods of pure singlehood, and one short relationship. There was an N., an M., a few S.'s, a couple L's, some A.'s, a C., a V., a D., a T. and a J. There was even, horror upon horrors, a woman who shared my first name. But none of them were Erik, or his more appropriate counterpart, Erika. Instead of finding the soul mate I so believed in at the age of 13, I've evolved into perpetually single adulthood, scoffing at the very idea of soulmates, pitying my now-married former high school friends still in the midwest, and certainly not making the big “I Do” next week at the Gay Marriage bonanza at City Hall.

How did I get here? When did I give up on the idea of Happily-Ever-After, the princess and the, er, princess, riding off into the castle in the sunset? And when did I start writing like a lesbian Carrie Bradshaw?


Bulldyke?



Or maybe the question I should ask is, why did I ever believe in that crap in the first place? The One True Love, or One Great Love mythology so permeated my adolescent and teenage expectations that if, at age 16 I had been able to look ten years into my future, I would have been bitterly disappointed. The truth is, I gave up on all that after the first time I fell in love. M. and I had a firey, summer-fall romance my senior year of college, and if anyone I've dated was truly my soul mate, she was it. But if I am to truly believe in soul mates, that means I either negate what I had with M., or spend my 50-some odd years of life after 21 never falling in love again. And that's a long-ass time to be single.

I suppose at this point I could start to go into how these fairy tale ideas are used to control women, make us think we'll be sluts if we sleep with more than one person over the span of our entire lives (and think that being a slut is a bad thing). Or about how they prop up the institution of marriage, which, Supreme Court ruling aside, has historically functioned to prop up patriarchy and homophobia and racism and the class system and just about every other ideology good radicals like me throw molotov cocktails at. And I could point out that not everyone is wired for monogamy, that friends of mine are able to juggle multiple lovers without emotional dishonesty, a fact that makes me grit my teeth and secretly hate them when I haven't been seeing anyone for a couple of months. But the truth is, I don't see how I can believe in the fairy tale ideal anymore because there are just so damn many people out there. Even when I've self-limited my options to lesbian, bisexual, queer, or otherwise-identified-girls-who-are-into-girls, there are still thousands, maybe millions, of potential dating partners out there. And, barring accident, illness, or end of the world (knock on wood), I've still got another good half-century or more on this planet. I'm not saying I'm ruling out marriage (which is now actually an option for me in the state of California) or lifelong partnership, but I don't necessarily expect it anymore. These days when I look at my future, I don't see myself happily coupled off with the same person for decades on end. I don't see myself still single, either, growing bitter and more jaded at every coming year. The truth is, I don't know what to see when I finish up my twenties and head into my thirties, and forties, and fifties. Maybe not knowing is half the fun. Or maybe I should stop speculating, and end this blog.

So I just finished reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. I can't believe it took me so long to read it. I think it was first recommended to me by this guy I made out with at some co-op party my freshmen year of college. I spent a lot of time back then getting drunk and making guys talk politics if they wanted to make out with me. That's how I ended up ditching one guy who said he voted for Bush, but that's an entirely different blog about my heterosexual years.



The way this guy talked about it made it sound like it was about population control, but he said it was right in line with the kind of stuff I was talking about at the time. The book is actually a conversation between the narrator and Ishmael, a gorilla who has the ability to communicate telepathically. You kind of have to read the book to get everything it's trying to say, and I don't want to write up a whole summary here, but it got me to thinking about humanity and its place in the world. According to Ishmael, humans (specifically a group of humans he calls the "Takers") have been living out lives based on the premise that the world was created for humans, and we get to decide what happens to it, what lives and what dies. And that premise is what's killing us, because the world wasn't created just for us, and we've spent thousands of years trying to control what we cannot control.

I was probably saying something similar to this when the book was first recommended to me 7 years ago, back when I was a vegetarian and blossoming vegan. My argument for veganism was that humans use our intelligence as evidence of our supremacy over other species, but it was humans who set intelligence as the criteria for supremacy. That's like bio men saying having a penis is the criteria for supremacy, or white people saying white skin is. Who says that intelligence makes a species superior? Why not define it by the ability to fly, or live in harmony with one's surroundings, or survive major environmental catastrophes? By that last criteria, the superior species might be cockroaches or beetles. Shouldn't our intelligence brand us the most inferior species, since we're using it to destroy the earth?

But as Ishmael would point out, it's just the "Takers" who have been leading us toward catastrophe, just the humans who live as though we were gods who can control the earth. Humans lived, and still live, for millions of years with the same intelligence, without bringing us to the brink of apocalypse. The point the human race has reached was by no means inevitable. The myth of capitalism is that capitalism was inevitable, that it's the only rational product of human nature. But capitalism has only been around for, what, a few hundred years? Humans lived for millions of years before it, we could live millions of years after it if we can only find a way to abandon what we've created and start again.



But what Ishmael doesn't give is a roadmap for how to get there. It barely gives you a starting point. And that's where I've been stuck at for the past few years. I went through a period of years when I was just starting out as an adult when the world was exploding with knowledge, where I began to see the world in ways I never thought possible. And out of that came a period of action, of taking over streets, buildings, meeting halls, minds. Of becoming little activist superheros with my friends, becoming voices of dissent and revolution in our town. But what came of it? After all that work, did we actually change anything other than ourselves? I've said to myself a hundred times that during the time that my life was being revolutionized, the rest of the country was devolving into something resembling fascism. Our activist scene in Lansing got more steam out of the anti-war movement than anything, but it's been 4 years and the war is still going on. And what's more, I never thought, even for a minute, that any of the organizing we were doing back then would actually end the war. So why was I even there? Why did I devote my life to it for so many years?

I guess the more meaningful question is, where do we go from here? How can you mobilize a catatonic population, create real change against larger-than-life foes? Just some stuff I've been thinking about the last few days.

So to make good on that promise to myself that I'll write more, I am going to actually start posting on my blog.

In related news, this weekend, after months of preparation, procrastination, and then trying to find and remember the work I did during the preparation phase, I finally committed a rite of passage for aspiring writers everywhere: I submitted some of my work to a (print) publication.



I've already submitted stuff to a web journal or two, but there's just something different about putting your writing on paper and in an envelope and mailing it to New York. Other than killing more trees, I mean. Email submissions you could do on your lunch break at work, provided you get a lunch break or have regular access to a computer at work, of which I have neither. You can email anyone: your mother, your friends, people you don't know, your dog, Dick Cheney, and then completely forget about it moments later. Same goes with getting published. If I published a poem or short story in a print journal, I could cut it out and stick it on my refrigerator, and then my roommates and anyone who comes over would know that I had something published. But I can't stick my computer on my refrigerator. My little mac book might be cute and compact, but I doubt it could be held up by refrigerator magnets. And nobody remembers what they read online.

They say this journal tries to respond within about 6 months, so I have a while to wait before I get that other rite of passage in the writing world: my first rejection letter.

Hopefully not an early warning about the likelihood of my ever having a writing career, hours after mailing in my two lovely envelopes (to the poetry and prose editors) I suddenly became violently ill. Well, maybe not so much suddenly as over a couple of hours and into the night. And at the time I attributed it more to the cheese sample I had at Rainbow than to my recent writing endeavors. In any case, I spent the rest of the weekend lying alternately in bed and on the couch, attempting to drink fluids and watching an insane amount of DVDs. I have now seen 3 Wes Anderson movies, re-watched the old Batman & Robin movie with entirely new eyes (Holy Homoeroticism, Batman!), and am halfway through the second season of Desperate Housewives. Say what you will about that last one, but Bree Van De Kamp is HOTT. I can't believe she's not a lesbian.

Now that I'm able to eat not only liquid but solid foods again, I'll be returning to work tomorrow. If I'm lucky, there will be no poop to scrape off any floors. On a lighter note, I'll leave you with the DVD moment that made my whole weekend, flu/food poisoning notwithstanding. It's true, some days you just can't get rid of a bomb.

Warplanes in the sky? It must be October.

I was heading out to a client's house in the outer sunset today when I heard an odd rumbling noise coming from the sky. My subconscious mind's first paranoid response to anything alarming and unusual is "earthquake"--this applies to low-flying planes, car backfires and the recycling truck collecting glass at six in the morning. But after thinking for a minute, checking the date, and remembering back to autumns past, I realized it was time again for what I warmly refer to as Motherfucking Fleet Week.

I was first introduced to this charming event a mere two weeks after moving to the Bay Area from the Midwest, where people do not fly warplanes in close proximity to skyscrapers and high-traffic bridges. And what better way to celebrate another year in San Francisco than by waking up in sheer, abject terror on a Saturday morning to the sound of a bomber jet about to crash into your building? This is what I have to look forward to on the worst weekend in the year to be a San Franciscan. And since this is the third time I've been subjected to this shit, I think I can finally call myself one.

For those not familiar, this is what San Francisco is subjected to the first weekend in October:


Really, Navy? Do you think this makes you more manly? There are people on that bridge. If I saw you flying your big fighter jets that close to my car, my first though would be terrorist attack. In sheer panic, I might go careening across the other lanes of traffic, through the safety rail and into the Bay. Not funny, Navy. No points for you.