Working For the Weekend

 I spent eight hours today staring at a wall. It's not as much of an exaggeration as you might think. From 9am to 5pm I sent four emails and rang a couple people up and got some people their custom shirts from the back. In the remaining seven and a half hours I sat in my wheelie chair and wrote in a little note pad and clicked around on my mouse and keyboard to look busy. Why wasn't anyone giving me anything to do? No one bumping me some quotes to fill out. Customers coming in and asking questions I couldn't answer. I intensely watched people having conversations in an attempt to learn something. Or at least look like I was learning something. the husband of a friend of mine from Highschool/ elementary school came into my place of work to hand out a flyer for a party the casino he- I guess- works at. I thought about saying hi. Of asking after Charlie and saying that I enjoyed getting their Christmas card from a couple years back. But in that space I am not that. There, I stare at a wall for eight hours. I do nothing and my ass goes numb in a chair so I wander around putting the tags down the necks of shirts. There are worse ways to make 16 dollars in an hour. For sure. Though, my ass could get fired for doing nothing. So I sit in a semi wound twitch all day. Trying my best to not look like I'm enjoying doing nothing. Sweeping a more or less clean floor. Touching shirts in a kind of pantomime of productivity. I do not say hi in these conditions. In this situation I do not feel as though I have a self. I do not have a heart. All that is inside of me is a solid void. I sit and I have no future. Answering the dreaded "so what's new with you?" is a toll I will not pay for connection. People I knew once pass through my job often. Sam Elliot, the artsy gay boy who I loaned Scott Pilgrim to in Highschool. Mr. Schmidt, my third grade gym teacher. I don't say hi. There is nothing new with me, I want to say, I'm just working some bum ass job that I hate in order to not starve, and as much as I was trying to wrap my head around the idea of it, it's still terrible and terrifying in a way I was not prepared for. At all. I could talk about the gig I have coming up. Or the things I am trying to write or the jams I've been in, or the debut as a (bad) actor. But none of that is "happening' really. Those things are reprieves in the torrent of small violence that the world throws around every day. Those are not happening to me. I do them because I must. The mini comic I wrote has no barring on how the events of my day will play out. Nor on me sitting in that room. Nervous and still. Tense for eight hours. Listening to the static hiss of retail space ceiling tile speakers. The same dozen songs or so for the day. Coming at me from slightly different directions. At least it isn't loud. if the speaker system was actually clear it would be game over. 

This is the third job I've quit in just as many months. In that way I have no past. I have no cohesive line from the year before to now to four years ago to now. In my country I am sparred the worst of peoples judgments because I am white. Cuz' my momma raised me to be a kind of facsimilia of middle class. Or my  families penchant for bookishness and a life of the mind cast us in that direction. Whenever my coworkers and my boss talk about the homeless people who stop in for free shirts and who pass out on the benches near our store front, all I can think about is just how close I- and any other worker- are to being in that situation. I feel a kind of kinship with the social death of it. I have no life in so far as in America work is your life. Everyday I keep pressing on toward my own very real death I feel my relations dying as well. The older people I love, who seem invested in me- or some facsimile of me- are cut out the more and more my relationship to employment becomes adversarial. It's hard to explain just how much of a combat making it through the eight hour work day is to someone whose been doing it as long as you've been alive. As I quit job after job it just becomes a quilt of failure which separates me from these folks. You can only ask someone for a reference and just fucking walk off so many times. To a certain logic I have my imminent death coming. I can't get my shit together, I can't eat. 

It struck me today that all the people who love me -barring, probably, my mother- love me on the condition that I am not homeless. That I am not nearing death. Love is a very easy idea to maintain when it does not require the heavier lifting of actual sustained care. I have seen my own love for people dissipate when the love they require exceeds the love I am willing or able to give. And where I to fall out of the social order, to be- as is becoming clearer and clearer with every passing day- unfit for the life of an eight hour work day all the people who I file in my heart as beloved would most likely cease to be. either in that their capacity to help on such a scale is just dwarfed by their own need to keep themselves afloat, or by an inability to adapt what are more or less low input relationships to a higher resonance of interpersonal need. I do not long for survival because survival would cost me everything. I would rather die and leave behind a smattering of mourners than go on and drag myself away from all the people I love because my need has become too great. This is what I think of as the minutes crawl by at work. 

To not have a past is to also not have a future. For the eight tense hours I don't have a 'next move'. I have lived on impulse long enough that to do so anymore is to my detriment. I keep thinking about how many weeks there are to go until I can quit. 50. Maybe 40. I want to leave my home in the hopes of finding a life that doesn't feel like a holding pattern. I want it to all feel worth it at some point. I could quit this job, I think to myself, just leave. I've only been here for a few weeks so I don't need to give notice. I bet the ball bearing place is hiring. And then what:? work there and hate it? Quit that place too? Leave in 50 weeks when I take off for a new mid sized American city. The future rhymes with the past. I knew I would pay for my actions and here I am.  

I have a dream where I'm killed. I'm arming explosives and then I am running down a street from someone with a lot more power than me. I have thrown a grenade or killed someone and now I will be chased down and vengeance will be enacted. I had another dream perhaps where I was Sue Storm, the powerful matriarch of the fantastic four. The first family of marvel. My girlfriend jokes that I need a big roost to rule. I love her so much it hurts to know I am all by myself, nothing but a worry. I clean the dishes but she could do that. And I will die. There is no other destiny for me. No roost to rule. it's true. I would love an airy kitchen to lean on counters in. to chase grandkids and console the children the woes of their lives. to hold the great grand babies. A great mother at the head of a long lineage. Passing on the best of myself to stronger generations, and keeping the worst as a coming home gift for the absentee god who left us all to rot here on earth. We have lived not at his behest but in spite of his animosity. We are powerful in that way. I try and dig in to the idea that continuing is the only way to get there. to get anywhere. But continuity requires choice and I have precocious few. precious few. precious few. 

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I got fired from that job, probably not long after writing that. It was a mercy, really. That plunged me into depression and financial anxiety. I just couldn't hack selling t-shirts. 

  

Home and its destruction

A fascist jag named Ellis told me trans women were just pretending to be women. And zap, there goes my favorite comic bookstore. I turned from him, said fuck off and walked out, screaming fuck into the road. That comic store was, I thought, a port in a storm. A place for some beautiful retail therapy and comradery. A place where I could always be safe on at least a certain level. I had spent the last two years or so spending my way through to some type of certificate education in comics, buying whatever in the hell caught my eye at the overstuffed shelves of Comic Boom, consuming and regarding as a part of whatever on going pipe dream I have to write comic books. I'd walk in there more days of the week than not. 

I went home. after being confronted by this toxic, ridiculous, totalitarian way of looking at the world, after softly saying 'that is so terribly cruel.' and being told I was looking to be a victim. I went home and slumped in my chair in my sobbed. mourned violently the loss of my second home, and my naivety. Transphobia is not hard to find in the world. Go sniffing and you will get a whiff. whether you want to mince about gendered language and cisnormativity, or hunt for the destruction of gender essentialism or 'gay panic' defenses. And here I was, confronted with it all. The cool imperialist shitbirdisms that only some shlebby dude can dole out as though he was god himself (just before this interaction this dude and (I think his brother?) we declaring with marble clad certainty that Andy Warhol had made art worse, which hey fuck Andy Warhol, but what kind of person thinks art is the kind of thing which can be made worse). The tears and wracking sobs gave way to violence. I won't lie, the violence hit my brain pretty quick, pretty much as soon as I slammed the door and screamed fuck into the road. I thought about getting physical, not walking away and out. I ran in my mind a thousand different ways how it might have all gone down, how I could have controlled or handled the situation. Who I could have cracked over the head with a thick hardcover Möbius reissue. And the current of thought only got more violent from there. For days and days after. It kept me from sleeping a couple of nights. I hate conflict and I especially despise the arrogance of men and I hate even more a bastard know-it-all. A projected understanding of knowledge which is absolute and unwavering. no hemming. no hawing. no tick to to even present that one might need to consider the grand and complex tapestry of all the things we call the world. He asked me, if trans women weren't just men pretending to be women, than what are they. I whispered 'they're women'. He said that's 'just not how it works.' I left and told the room to fuck off. 

This horrible exchange just served to remind me that the marginalized, a word i use to describe myself hesitantly, are never long for our safety. the places that hold us can be burned off in an instant. When I got home I texted my friend Dylan, and I called my mom, and I called my brother after I had called my mom. They all advised me, kindly and rightly, that I shouldn't let this experience ruin a source of joy in my life. Everyone knowing just how much time and how much of my heart I put into Comic Boom. Which is why it stung so fucking bad. I had put the chips on making that place a kind of home. A territory I could claim. ain't that the irony of life-and indeed a truism, which i do so find icky- it is the importance of things which makes their breaking apart so devastating. I so want to head the advice of my friends and family, but something in that moment felt like flash paper. just snap and gone. I think that is why i screamed fuck into the wet pavement of west street. Like I didn't even feel that regret of loss like... i had fucked up and been banned or the store closed or some tragic separation. But like a choice had been made, a path had been shifted. and all there was to do now was Mourne the loss of one more safe place to be in. A trans girl out in the lurch once more because of the ignorance, and the wide birth that ignorance takes up. 

Its all very metaphysical. i'm trying to be less melodramatic in that way. which is a kind of hard thing to say after writing everything I have written, but it's true. and im trying to thread  the needle of knowing that there is a difference between the world as i ingest it in a metaphysical sense-the meaning i assign to the segmented notions of its various parts- and life as it is just lived here, through the eyes and the hands. by this i mean i can talk about the flash paper moment, the mourning of a home destroyed. or i can just walk into the shop and risk looking that fucker in the eye again. and take up the space i want to take up while being who i am. though this struggle is essentially of life, between what things mean to you and what they actually are to you. In any case, i know i'm going to save a lot of money on comics thinking it all through. 

peace love and protect trans women. 

some thoughts on a justin long movie

 Okay so 2000's films fuckin suck. except there is an equal proportionality of unsuckness the exsists in tandem to the degree to which they FUCKIN SUCK, the way in which they flatten reality and make it unreality. ungodly. everyone becomes whiter, lighter, and more objectable. so all this to say that i hate that i love that jonah hill and jutsin long movie accepted so much. i watched it with my girlfriend and i loved it. loved it! it made my brain wriggle with ideas about the contextuality of association, communalism, communism, communes, and how we make our institutions. i did not expect  this from the movie with the line 'ask me about my weiner' in the trailer. 

wait. no. quick aside. fuck highbrow/lowbrow. though...  i still believe we can criticize our media. i suppose my theory is more like junkfood/nutritious food. wait yeah that axis works beautifully, in that i do believe there is a place for one to consume the things which they love to eat though might not be good fuel for the body, they should maybe just know that what their eating isn't gonna give them what they need in the end. and on the same token, i find people who peddle 'healthfood' solutions to problems with far broader causes tend to be full of a lot of shit. life, and art, is made more rich with a nuanced and caring understanding, that perfection isn't an achievable goal, that towering oneself off in an aesthetic of superiority is damaging. okay back to the matter at hand. accepted and hierarchy of art. this film, as i was getting to above, is an amazing example of that. packed with ideas and all the weighted male gaze and white washing of a film which lacks even the performitive gloss of wokeness of todays hollywood output. 

quick rundown. a guy, justin longs character, can't get into college, and so photoshops himself a fake acceptance letter to a college that doesn't exist and it gets out of hand and so he has to make a fake college. and that's the movie in a nutshell. there in lies the beauty. it's a simple, deceptively linear story. sure it has the 'big center lie' but there isn't some massive run around. most of the movie is spent just yukking it up with everyone at south harmon istitute of technology. also the 'big lie' comes from Justin longs characters care for the people he saw before him who needed a place to belong, who need shelter from rejection. and of course that comes in the form of dudes staring at chicks at the pool and skinny women who are offered up for their sex appeal... and also their own unique desires. like the former stripper who gets into fashion design or the school freak who takes up meditation. everyone gets to make of their time what they will and the anarchist in me loves it. the 'what do you want to learn' white board is genuinely amazing and inspiring and lovely. truly. it makes me weepy. an institution dedicated to allocating the funds its participants give it to the interests of those participants. a community which comforts and values its members. a fucking dream, and one i do not see stoked in media all too often. 

I also want to talk about the mailability of reality in this movie. how a lie, in earnest intention, became reality because of the collective intent of a group of people. goddamn that is energy i want to see more in the world. i don't think communalism would be easy, but i don't think it would be any harder than the world at large. life is painful and hard in society as it is. i annoy easy and get overwhelmed by a deeply paranoid and exhaustive brain. but one of the best decisions, one of the best things about my me, is that i decided a long time ago that i would always let my higher ideals guide me. that i would never let myself become one of those 'that's not how the world is' one of those 'if only' people. the world can be whatever the fuck we want it to be, and not in that bullshit rightwing libritarian way. fuckin free staters overrunning my fuckin home. fuck them. i mean it in a way that i think i read in the writing of alok vaid-menon, by engaging my radical imagination. we hold this world in our hands, and we have immense power just in that. and accepted was one of the most unlikely places i have learned this. 

this 2000's raunch-comedy, illustrated perfectly a kind of ontological modality that i certainly do not think it was trying to. and that's why we need to destroy notions of high and low art. our art reflects to us the things we wish to see from it. consider your art a frame from with to put things in or to put things outside of. maybe my junkfood/ healthfood dichotomy wasn't so useful. we're onto ponds or mirrors or hearts. things which echo and flow.  i do wonder if the team (it had to be a team) of people who wrote this were thinking about any of this. this was just a fun party flick. but hey it made me almost cry. and point my eyes toward the horizon and that supersedes any creator intention.         

Apocalyptic prophesies

i'm not really... like a music journalist actually. not that anyone was saying i was. i think this is the child playing in their dads truck (like i used to do in my dads) version of music journalism. i am uninterested in a lot of ways in making a point here. having a point means you could have a wrong point. it means assuming a certain weight of moral vision. of having the right framework. i have been dubious of frame works lately. in part brought about by a certain quietism. and the feeling that so much is grasping at straws. i am probably just angry. anger has been the shadow force in me for a while. and i just never knew. angry at myself. angry at feeling useless and out of step and boiling in my own ignorance. so who am i to say anything about anyone. to make a point. but i still like to write. and i still love billy wood's music. so why not say just anything. no points. no trying in anything else other than to illuminate an artist whose work has changed my life. i have a laptop and a feeling.

woods is a rapper from new york by way of d.c and zimbabwe. he got his start in the new york underground with the likes of rap legends vordul mega and others (frankly that's my one example sorry, he's had a long career in underground rap). I came to him around the time of his 2018 album hiding places, produced by the equally amazing kenny segal. it helped propel me through a philosophy paper i was working on (an addendum to a previous paper on hegelian recognition theory and the relationship between cis and trans people). without that record i probably wouldn't have finished the danm thing, let alone had so much fun.

wait, lets talk about frameworks for a second. i like a particular kind of rap, and this isn't to be all 'well he's not like the other rappers' about it. that's racist bullshit that white geek rap fans have been pulling forever and just reasserts the exceptional negro troupe. so stop it. anyhow i digress and also say that woods is like other rappers, he raps. rap is a lineage, an artistic tradition. again, digressing. what i mean is my idea of what fun is my own distinct version of what fun is. woods is what i think of when i think of fun hip hop. i like dark and sad music truly and he is dark and sad hip hop. i get a genuine thrill when i hear him rap 'grew up around where dogs was racist/ fathers pulled firing pins out of guns gave 'em to us to play with'. that shit kills. like hot damn. he raps like a house fire, not just in image but in feeling. he raps like a burning police precinct. a flickering intensity that lets you know these are only the tips of some particularly nasty icebergs. settle in. get ready. cuz we ain't stopping just yet. we've got a lot of very corrupt and vile systems to get rid of. rodney carmichael, npr staff writer on hip hop, in 2019 said woods was the 'poet laureate of our afro-dystopia.' the most concise and effective explanation for what woods does and why its amazing.

the density and command with which woods rhyme is what i think earns him the laureate title. he orates these fragments and snippets he masterfully strings together into his own kind of punchline structure (his line "shorty can't eat no book, what i told ta-nehesi coats" is just one of the most fantastic things i've ever heard. take that award winning and generally beloved cultural critic mr coats)... like i said i don't have or want a point... i just have a lap top and a feeling and i could just start quoting lyrics and going 'see he's a genius' but that would get very very boring. so i'll say, he's a more abstract wu tang to me. he isn't rapping about trans people getting killed or abut how uncomfortable it is to live the fallacy of social gender all the goddamn time. but in the terror and the novelty of life which he raps about, i do find a sense of comfort and a sense of cinematic entertainer, much the way i do with wu-tang clan lyrics, hearing this man rap about the violent and apathetic characters which inhabit his songs. plus he wrote one of the greatest songs ever written; red dust.

shout out to my future neck tattoo.

and i got out without making a point.