A Second Guess Sample

If I had it to do over again, I would be a classical composer with chess pieces scattered across the piano lid. I would write pieces wishing I was a ballet dancer with the body of a ballet dancer in the arms and fingers. I have a writer’s words fingers and hands. I stole them from a dream I had once about the only thing I could ever be and do with them. No one has done less with the sweat of hands. Hands anxious from the sweat and do the opposite, too. I would be that composer who makes the most of different staffs and the notes on them. There would be staffs growing from the sides of my grandmother’s garage while she watches televised basketball through the window. She has her statues hanging from the walls above a green couch. I would be that composer to wrap her shoulders in the vines to keep her warm. She would watch her television set away from the cold she grew up with in white margarine containers in her refrigerator. I would write a magnum opus from the mouth of the dead bass above the doorway. I would write it on a violin made from the bass’s stiff gills and flap tail. The music would be that flap I have nothing more to love her with. 

Gurlesque Gon' Give it to Ya

On the branch, the sparrows dogfight with their beaks and onto the out of place pine. Before, beneath the birdhouse, wrestling breast to breast in the weeds. I have waited nine hours (two of them asleep to the pages of a chapter book) for the first sip of aluminum tea. In the nine hours I certainly sat on the bedroom floor eating cereal from my lap. I certainly considered the retributive violence scenarios played out in American major league baseball (to take the bat, with one, out to the pitcher’s mound for the war?) I annoyed myself awake with the same meditation that usually brings the sand. Lamps were on the way the sun is through the left-middle tree. My stomach ate away at itself and bran. It was a way to live.

The time that is not spent waiting for the tea is the ceiling fan and DMX’s “Ruff Ryder’s Anthem” connection to “All I know is pain / All I feel is rain / How can I maintain / with mad shit on my brain?” Guilt (?!) over wanting to recognize that same rain while admitting that, No, I was not in the airport parking lot on that fateful day. But wondering if I had to be to growl out the incurable ache. Because I was, after all, in the airport diner watching her gag an omelet into a red cloth napkin because her throat had forgotten how to swallow. I was there for those airplanes taking off enough to rattle the silver skillets and the scale models and the rental cars. I could not stomach the breakfast with a hacking music teacher at the bar behind me, and that should say something about appetites and taste. It should say something about what we are allowed to say about what we know of pain.

But there were also the mornings before little league games with holy grail Power Ranger figurines dug up from garage sales with the newspaper classified map. The ever-youth they promised more seductive than a line drive stuck in the web of a mitt. And I did make that catch at second base with the Black Ranger in the back of my mind. And I did not consider the workers at the factory that fabricated his mastodon tusks and chop-action arm (his fingers balled into a fist at the hinge if you wanted them to. You could make him a warrior with a hinge.) No one told me about those workers working for me to play. I did not talk to them on the telephone during those mornings because the Power Rangers were not telephones to be talked into. I used to pretend and play. I am told not everyone is allowed these luxuries and this is meant as a commentary on birth(un)luckiness.

…

Arielle Greenberg wants a Gurlesque space where women can write about dolphin stickers and postpartum depression and tongue-kissing boys and tongue-kissing girls and rape and baking sugar cookies with rainbow sprinkles. She wants a space where the painful and pleasurable/girlish mingle over strong cocktails and slinky dresses, maybe upping the ante of the mingle to a make-out session in the faux fur coat closet. I want this space, too, where trauma and nostalgia cross-dress for each other and it’s more than a dress rehearsal for a performance no one will buy tickets for (because the box office refused to print adequate seating information for fear that people might actually come.) I want a space where things can be cute and going very very badly. It is a necessary space. It is a necessary, potentially healing, space.

I also hope there is a space where men can write about Jean Claude Van Damme martial arts flicks and feminist politics and protein supplements and tongue-kissing girls and tongue-kissing boys and being over-privileged WASP’s and being emotionally insecure and the overt homophobia of their upbringing and falsetto singing. I hope there is a space where the boyish and the hypermasculine arm-wrestle over beers only to realize they have been holding hands the whole time. I hope there is a space where desiring to dominate and dominating and feeling dominated and desiring to be dominated are the web of a baseball mitt while daydreaming of the Black Ranger. Because there are patriarchal fathers who forget their sons’ fifteenth birthdays and the things of these sons can be cute and going very very badly. I hope for this space. It is a necessary, potentially healing, space.

I want/hope these spaces over DMX and rosebushes and breast augmentation optical illusions on television and sparrows dogfighting while they sing to each other. The want/hope is a potentially healing space. I want/hope more. 

I Haven’t Finished "Down at the Cross" Yet, but There’s This While I Finish

A mid-morning (1:00 p.m.) walk after scrambled eggs led us to the doorstep of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad or his neighbor’s at Armando’s Tire & Auto Repair. Malcolm X was in the dead leaves fallen from the ginkgo tree pink, and his widow was the pigtailed girl on her scooter talking about the imminent arrival of first-grade school supply shopping. Probably J.D. Salinger lives in the crooked roof of the apartmentgarage on the corner and the other old recliner on the corner, too, is where he does his writing. All of it, the scene, was a Dave Chappelle sketch, with the joke’s punch line being three young women passing on the sidewalk and asking, “how y’all doin?” and us saying “hello, how are you?” on the way south to Comcast Cable headquarters (neither of us trust the television in the living room enough.) I had thoughts of my body flopping in the skin of my body unfamiliar. There were German Shepherds standing upright like humans. There were “No Trespassing” signs. There were shantytowns of gray-capped mushrooms and a woman I went to Spanish class with smoking a cigarette in front of her children.

James Baldwin met Elijah Muhammad at his South Side Chicago palace for a dinner of white devils and not-pork. Stuff was probably mad tense because the writer was raised deep Southern Baptist while the Prophet or whatever had spiritual slumber parties in state prison cells with X (says the Spike Lee joint, at least.) And the Prophet always, especially around dinnertime, had a hankerin’ for ideological hard sells. Also, there was a gaggle of Fruit of Islam tightening their belt buckles and fiddling with their cufflinks, and white-clad sisters a table over minding their food with a reverence usually reserved for hypnotists and game show hosts. Knowing the religious sales pitch would eventually come, Baldwin decided to wipe his mouth with a spiritual declaration and tuck it in his shirt, over his heart, like a napkin.

“I left the church twenty years ago and I haven’t joined anything since,” he said with a look and tone I know nothing about.

“And what are you now?” Elijah Muhammad asked.

A question that chips its own ice with a dull metal pick (to get to the bottom of things.) How often, in the actual words, does someone ask, “What are you?” (“What makes up all that you are and define yourself as?”) Of course, it’s furtively asked all the time (the McDonald’s billboard on the raised train tracks, with its glistening patties, asks me “Are you the person who will 99-cent-menu a block north on your right with the rest of the drive-thru line?” And I say, “No, those burgers in your microwaves are not the what of me.”) But rarely do leaders of major political, religious, or social movements confront people with questions about their ideological makeups over decaf coffee. Barack Obama has not asked me about my political party affiliation. Donald Trump has not asked me about my views on global capitalism. The Pope has not asked me about my takes on theology and Italian cuisine. I wonder, though, how I would react if they did ask me. Would my reactions/answers to these figures, because of who they are, be any different than my reactions/answers would be if I was asked the same questions by friends or colleagues or strangers? Would the pressure of having to answer for the “what” of who I am to a major figure push me to dumb-down my answer, or clam up with charismatic leader stage fright, or change the subject over cheesecake?

Baldwin, bold, answered “I’m a writer. I like doing things alone.”

And for this answer I find Baldwin a brave man with bullfrog cheeks and neck. Not because he got all “holy artist” and started spouting off lines about how his intellectual and creative work were his religious affiliation (thus, declaring that his spiritual alliances lay preoccupied elsewhere.) But instead because, when confronted with a pointblank identity-validation proposition (my nightmare because of the confrontation sweats), he calmly answered by stating what he did best and how he liked to do it. He answered, “Would you like to join our herd?” not with, “No, thanks, I already belong to another herd,” (probably what I would do with my baby wildebeest backbone) but with, “No, thanks, I’m not really into herds right now.” Which is brave because herds are so comforting and safe (ask a baby wildebeest) that people often make concessions (political, moral, personal, spinal) to be parts of them. To reject the comforts that come from comrades watching your tail at the watering hole (in favor of watching one’s own tale, drinking less, or drinking alone [and probably at a different watering hole]) signals an individual courage I don’t see enough of in the small corner of academic/professional/social jungle I live in.

Maybe Baldwin’s maverick bad-assery is what we should expect from our forward-thinking artistintellectuals. After swiping a copy of Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, off the “free books” table (which doubles as the “chips and salsa and leftover donuts” table) in the English Department mail room and reading the preface in my upstairs bathroom by the trashcan of beard, I’m more and more on board with his notion that “In the life of the mind, as in life itself, vitality requires resisting the lure of the familiar and the safe.” If the herd mentality could constitute part of the “familiar and safe” Jacoby is referring to (which I think it could and does or I wouldn’t be bringing it up), then an (as much as possible) independently formulated system of self-identification is crucial to those pursuing “the life of the mind” (Whatever that is. Sound gross though.)

While I still might not have the mettle to lay down a cold-blooded “what” of me declaration to the prominent leader of a social movement (or anyone) if confronted, Baldwin’s handling of the Elijah Muhammad Nation of Islam pressure cooker gives me an example of courage. And courage could very well be the most necessary tool towards self-identification we got. 

Critique as Holy Water: Ridding Romance Narratives of Possession Tropes Please

To be sure, the best time to watch Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001) for not the first time is at 2:45 in the morning on a summer Monday while the rain is stamping its feet on the overhang. And, to be sure, the best time to write about Moulin Rouge is in the early evening of a summer Monday, while the rain is still stamping its feet and Tchaikovsky is stamping his feet. Of course, Tchaikovsky’s strings are strained through the vinyl of a second hand complete symphonies box set, so the afternoon is not nearly as melodic as the early morning on the back of an Indian elephant statue in motley lights. And the Little Russian in speakers from an older address is not as minimal as, say, Elton John singing “This is Your Song” over and over to the Parisian moon on the tip of a windmill. But, it has been rumored that Ewan McGregor’s front teeth are the distant relatives of Pyotr Ilich’s old piano keys, and so the connections seem favorable to write the modern musical’s sexual motifs into my newly placed corner desk. By the window of rain and familiar bird.

In the year of our Lord, Two Thousand and One, every hometown high school girl had a notebook inside cover with “the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return” in glittery gel pen. These young women also had scraps of the Eifel Tower pasted inside and sang a soundtrack to their showerheads. Now, as current data makes clear, these same late-twenties women who were once hometown high school girls have the referenced quotation on their list of favorite quotations section of their Facebook pages. For the record, in 2001 I could not drive an automobile and trusted Nat King Cole as much as I could get a comb through his processed hair (I did, however, dig his throat and listened to him talk me down when I was in a holding cell of a fellowship room before the commencement of my older sister’s wedding [in which I played the role of a wobbly groomsmen.])

I never got the then-girls-now-women’s love of the quotation and still kind of don’t. Even back in 2001, when I wore oversized white Nike tennis shoes and played badminton like whoa, Christian (McGregor’s romantic idealist writer character) and his pop song poetry seemed like the easy way out. Maybe it’s the way “just” works in the quotation to make the acts of loving and being loved sound no-brainery. I felt like the hometown high school girls heard the quote in the film and were like, “It all (i.e., the constant decision making and position taking that make up human interaction as we know it) seems so simple now! I just have to love and be loved in return like the handsome man says with his dreamy voice!” Not ever really stopping to floss between their braces brackets and consider how difficult it can be to love people (even [especially?] the ones you love), and how it’s damn near impossible to be a loveable person (let alone to be a loveable person who is loved by someone, since the two are not the same thing, that is, one does not necessarily lead to or imply the other.) Maybe I was just salty that I couldn’t sing any of the songs in the right key or that I had adolescent acne and a belly that doubled for, as a kind classmate once informed me, a “big bowl of jelly.”

But enough about the quote. I was watching MTV’s teen-misfit dramedy series Awkward yesterday and it brought up some issues I saw in Moulin Rouge and have beef with (maybe the beef is seeing played-out tropes twelve years apart in the same day or whatever. Basically, my beef begins thusly :

THE FOLLOWING BEEF FEATURES POTENTIAL ROMANTIC SPOILER ALERTS

In Awkward, 16-year-old badass-nerd-writer Jenna finally has the boyfriend she wants in clean-cut class president Jake. Except shit gets weird when Jake finds out that Jenna is not a virgin (the previous summer at [of course] summer camp, she had sex with her first love, Matty [the sporty one who would never go for the unpopular girl but did for a night after a camp party because he finally saw how much of a badass Jenna was.]) Jake doesn’t know that Jenna slept with Matty (he actually doesn’t know who she slept with at all because he doesn’t ask and she doesn’t tell), he just knows this: his new girlfriend is not a virgin and he wants her to be one and he is jealous that she could ever be sexually attracted to anyone but him. None of this pissiness is helping Jenna become a virgin again, of course, but it does allow Jake to guilt Jenna out about her previous relationship and show off his best puppy dog eyes (they are, I must admit, advanced puppy dog eyes for an actor his age. The kid's going places.) Because, in the end, his feelings about his girlfriend’s previous sex life are more important than her feelings about them.

Fast-forward (or rather, rewind in production time) to Moulin Rouge, where Christian falls in love with porcelain-skinned and diamond-tonsilled courtesan Satine (played by a top-hatted Nicole Kidman) only to get wrapped up in some patronage drama that ends in a gross Duke wanting to sleep with the object (emphasis on “object”) of Christian’s affection. Satine’s all like “But the owner of the Moulin Rouge signed a contract that said if I don’t sleep with the Duke the show won’t go on and the Moulin Rouge will close down and the Duke and his scarfaced crony will kill your ass. So I should probably sleep with him and stuff.” And Christian’s all like “No, no please don’t sleep with the Duke. I really want the show cancelled and your place of employment burned to the ground and you to be unemployed and homeless and for me to be killed by moustached thugs. Let’s have all that stuff happen instead because I can’t bear the thought of you sleeping with someone besides me and the countless men you slept with in your long career as a courtesan that no one brings up.” In the end, Christian (name implications) sweats out a long night of Satine not sleeping with the Duke, dodges a botched assassination attempt, and freaks when Satine dies in his arms while he does not talk about his own sexual history or anything about that.

So we can have these themes of undying class president/outcast love and loving and being loved in return and stuff, but when push comes to shove, our lead male Awkward and Moulin Rouge characters, to varying degrees, buy into the tired female purity tropes that plague so many American romance narratives (e.g., the woman is looked on as less-than [not attractive, potentially not worthy of a relationship, not respectable] if she is not a virgin, the woman’s reproductive organs [and sexual feelings] become the property of a man the moment she enters into a relationship with him, the woman’s sexual history is the business of the man and fodder for testosterone-filled temper tantrums, etc.) All of this goes on, of course, while the man’s sexual history is either applauded or kept silent (implying that the man’s sexual choices were undoubtedly appropriate and, thus, not worthy of conversation or dispute. It is the woman’s sexuality that must be examined, scrutinized, and judged, so as to make sure the woman is acceptably “pure” and “good.” Vom.)

Narratives where heterosexual male “love” towards a woman is not-so-subtly acted out in his dominance over her sexuality lead me to make connections between conceptions of romantic love as a means of possession. In these narratives, Awkward and Moulin Rouge offering prime examples, it is not enough for a man to respect and desire to share lifespace with a woman; he must “have” her. More than this, when he sufficiently “has” her, he must make sure no other man has “had” her (this will lower her value, and thus, make her a less desirable thing to have), and he must guarantee to himself and the world that no other man besides him will ever “have” her. I wonder how many of these sexual power plays were untangled and considered when the famous Moulin Rouge quotation was scribbled in glittery gel pen or on Facebook by the hometown high school girls I knew and didn’t know. I wonder how many past and current young men and women grow up with possession/purity tropes playing in their minds as they navigate the challenges of real romantic relationships.

In the end, I worry about a world where young (and old) people think “the greatest thing [they’ll] ever learn is just (for men) to have and (for women) be had in return.”

‘Cause that ain’t love, no matter how well you sing it.  

In Response to "Let's Go Dancing!"

          A beard is in the upstairs bathroom trashcan. It is in a clump next to the empty toilet paper roll. The empty toilet paper roll is cardboard brown. It is making love to the metal turnstile because they have known each other so long there is a necessary intimacy. There is a necessary need to get things out of the way and enjoy them at the same time above the toilet boll rimmed in red streaks. The rim of the upstairs bathroom sink is sprinkled in beard and neck hair. Un-May-like weather means the air conditioning is kept under the pit bull’s armpits. Her armpits so bald from run friction and humping differently, from humping the day out of the thrift chair. The chin and cheeks are the same kind of bald now, barren with the former beard in the trashcan and the ceiling fan swimming laps above the washer/dryer. Later, the hair will smell like chicken noodle soup to some, barbecue meatballs to others, and, to still others, one of the most convenient and cost-effective ways to live.

An authentic dance style comes out when the beard is in the trashcan, and the dance style reflects the problematicness of the word “authentic.” The dance style, in its leg movements and shoulder pops reminiscent of a small backyard hedged in bumblebees, itself challenges notions of authenticity while drinking one Corona beer because it has to drive international graduate students home after the night. The dance style is twenty-six-and-a-half years old and weak in the lower-body joints from penitent. A bouncer with a pectoral t-shirt told it to pull up its shit or it wasn’t allowed in with its tucked business casual shirt. The shirt was wrinkled from napping in it and writing in it with stiff arms and neck. The stiff shirt had nothing to do with the authentic dance style, or maybe it did. Maybe authentic dance styles stem from the stiffness of business casual, or the casual business of moving through the world in planned or not-meant-to-look-like-it movements.

The sad part was the people without the dance movement style standing in a rectangle spilling their drinks on the floor and watching dancers spill their drinks on the floor with ice. At one point, a dance partner slipped on the ice and said it felt like high school prom graduation all over again and again and again because she slipped three more times. I said the pounding from the DJ booth, high up above shouting the occurrence of birthdays, was the rose on a rented lapel. The pounding from the DJ was a scene from the television show Happy Days, where everyone knows that each other have not been virgins for some time. I watched people watching and watching with their arms folded across their pectoral t-shirts. To the folding I did a lizard neck movement and did not blend in with the Southeast Asian men in leather vests. These men, one of them, would tongue kiss a mirror before the night was through, and next to them would be a young woman treating her baseball cap like a wild horse. The young woman broke her baseball cap backward on her own head. She broke it tame and shook her own ass.

The other most sad part was the group dances played at post-collegiate weddings where people dance in a group and a group of lines. Think about a long game of bingo with ping pong balls read through a microphone and people sitting in their seats and making movements to the microphone’s instructions and saying in their minds, “Yes, I do know how to move after all now that the sounds overhead are familiar and in that dictatorial way.” To the music that was directions and also love letters to the sound of sampled disco songs sung by disco singers. I could not participate in the group dances because of the directions and the anarchy propaganda a woman in a long dress pulled out of her purse and read aloud to the people near our glass of water table. Near our table draped in leather purses and stacked with water glasses. She told us to rise up and she told us to rise up with her hips made of boxing gloves. She punched us with her boxing glove hips and we were sensical after that for the rest of the night. With the sensical vibration from the puddles of drinks we left at 1:30 in the morning and knew that we were much too old to style. We were this yelling thing after we got out into the street and saw a cigarette smoking on the ledge of a smoking shop selling smoke out into the street.

Ending in a rapper surprised by the internationalist nature of a peanut butter sandwich and an eyebrow ring. A duo of innocent teachers talking dirty in the back next to the box speakers. A drinking out of the vodka bottle with the help of a German woman and a concrete steps. Two bicycling women and their flashing lights on the not with the bicycle man. Two different purple eye sockets on the floor of a VHS tape and box of dirty laundry. Two women who went home from the dance style exhibition without their backbones or rational reasons for being without them. Thinking going on about those women and how they walk and what they will use to dance with later. To hold themselves up.

This all not being too much unlike the first time, in the cafeteria, planning diarrhea for a week over the talk next to the baseball diamond in the park two years before. All that diarrhea for the touching of a belly and the touching of the side of a belly from the side and from the front. Squares of men and women planning the similar touches and revealing those touches and the plans for them with a handful of bottle. Bottles and the old joints keeping things different from the diarrhea before, in junior high school. Still similar diarrhea the day after it all, or days after it all if relating to the newly pregnant woman on the way to her bathroom beyond the DJs. Her own belly something different from the earlier planned touches and friendly kinds of paranoia about all the things we’re going to need to read and remember for the week.  

How to Talk to Haters: With Special Guest Appearances by Bill O’Reilly, Dr. Cornel West, and the Artist Formerly Known as Snoop Dogg

I drove by the old house on Linden with the dance studio attached, and evenings it was lit up with television blue from the front room. Television-screen blue lit up the front room window blinds and sat on the front porch drinking Miller High Life beer out of beer bottles. Through the blinds, the blue, I saw angry and exasperated on the television. Distrust anger on the television spouting its exasperation in blue through the blinds and out onto North Linden, where I drove without my windshield wipers ticking. I saw the exasperation clear and maybe attributed it to the shade of the blue, how the blue was artificial and not the color of water or the sky or other blue things outside the front room. But the artificial television blue was familiar in the way seeing something every weekday evening for forever can make a thing familiar to someone. No other lights are ever on in the house except the front room television light. No other lights are ever on in the upstairs laundry room or in the attached dance studio. If the house was a face instead of a house, it would be a lifeless face, angry and exasperated.

…

            I don’t hate Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly simply because he’s a close-minded, arrogant asshole.  I hate him, or rather, the Hater character he plays on bluescreen TV, because he represents a dialogic paradox that makes me anxious when I think about it (or worse, have to plan for it. Or worst, have to react to it):

To engage or not to engage in critical (or friendly!) discourse with a Hater who will (likely) think you are stupid and wrong and untalented and worthless no matter what you say or do (unless, of course, you agree with him/her)?

O’Reilly represents, for me, the former elementary, junior high, or high school teacher who thought I was a loser when I was in his/her class and who tries to maintain my loser status in his/her mind, despite my limited academic and/or professional successes, by making me feel like a small town loser with nothing going for him (Note: in reality, you could substitute O’Reilly out of the equation and insert any hard-headed Hater you might know or interact with in your real or imagined life. I invite you to make this Hater narrative your own.) Here’s how the situation goes down in my anxious head (and in like two or three different real life situations of the past few years):

I am out and about in my hometown (where I attended all past and present academic institutions and where I currently live.) A former teacher (or classmate) spots me, weirdsmiles, and walks over. The conversation starts something like this:

Former Teacher: Hey, Evan. Still in town I see?

Me: Yes, I am. Just going to school.

FM: Ahh, still in school? You always did go about things in your own way.

And at this point we have reached the paradoxical moment typified by many an O’Reilly “interview” (is it still considered an interview if the interviewer isn’t genuinely interested in hearing anything the interviewee has to say?) Obviously, the Hater is doing his or her best to hate (e.g., trying to make me feel like a weenie for still living in my hometown, trying to make me feel like a weenie for traveling a less-traditional academic path.) The Hater (and O’Reilly is a professional, just check out the “The Hater Elite” list in the most recent issue of Vibe) will always try to discount the hatee’s identity / beliefs / ideas/work by claiming the hatee is a total weenie for this or that reason. As I see it, in the discourse with the former teacher outlined above, I have two ways to proceed:

       1.     Engage the Hater – Calmly and rationally explain who I am, what I believe in, and why who I am and what I believe in are valid and worthy of respect. I might explain how personal and economic factors (rather than lack of ambition or wanderlust) played large roles in my identical past and current geographic location. I might explain my current academic status in terms of my drive for post-graduate success (not delayed or non-linear undergraduate enrollment.) I might point out the value of advanced education, postmodern literature, creative writing, etc., in the expansion of a thriving cultural and political democracy. I might use facts, figures, and all manners of pie chart (the rhetorical possibilities are endless.) In the end, the Hater might still hate, but at least I know I stood up for myself.

Or,

       2.     Do Not Engage the Hater – Turn my back on the Hater (perhaps call him or her a dirty name) and more or less walk away. In the end, the Hater isn’t worth the time or energy of a guaranteed argument (especially one he or she probably won’t listen to/engage in/value anyway.)

As a trained thinker and language user, I am immediately drawn to Option 1. I suppose this is because, deep down (in my idealistic heart of hearts), I desperately want to believe that, when presented with a sound argument buttressed by reasonable data and presented coherently and persuasively, even the most stubborn Hater will at least consider a hatee’s point of view. But then I witness discourses like this:

                                 

and wonder if it’s even worth it to engage a chronic Hater in discussion when he/she is so completely intent on hating that things like hatee identity (“you consider yourself a learned man don’t you, Professor?”), academic/professional credibility (“your Princeton, or wherever it is, students”), and referenced data (hear: the silence of dismissive indifference followed by finger-pointing gab) are totally disregarded in favor of exasperated weeniefying (i.e., telling two noted African American public intellectuals to “knock it off with the Black business.”)

            Maybe it’s easier, and less psychically draining/traumatizing, to choose Option 2:

                                  

and tell all Haters to “suck my dick” because, after all, they’re probably “motherfucking pricks.”

            Unfortunately, when it comes right down to it, both Hater-dealing options pose potential problems of their own. Both options actually kind of suck, actually, for to engage a Hater means to validate a Hater-argument with a response (thus, giving the Hater a fight [which is probably all the Hater really wanted in the first place]), and to not engage a Hater means to risk coming off as just as closed-minded, arrogant, and assholish as the Hater him/herself. This nasty paradox haunts me in almost all potential Hater confrontations and is, I suspect, the concern of many academic pacifists who still want to stand up for themselves and the things they believe in.

In the end, I guess, while there may never be any “right” or “easy” way to deal with the persistent hating of Haters (“Haters are,” as the old adage goes “going to hate”), I take solace in the fact that Haters rarely hate on people who aren’t shaking things up, doing their things, and getting theirs. Maybe the simple presence of Haters means that just enough people are doing big stuff in the world. Maybe the best way to deal with Haters is to keep doing the things they hate.

Girls Just Wanna Have More: Lena Dunham's Hit HBO Show and the Rise of Millennial Dissatisfaction Tropes

          It can be considered that we are different people every second we are alive, in the way I read once that we can never step into the same river twice (the flowing-all-the-time water forbidding it.) All this water movement (and, more importantly, the movement being horrifically out of our control) reminds me of the chorus of the lesser known Stone’s song (originally written and performed by Otis Redding, no doubt) “(Dis)satisfaction,” and how we can get ourselves plenty of it if we obsessively reach for that next cool thing we don’t have. “(Dis)satisfaction” was playing on a Walkman while my father tried to wade across a whitewater river in Colorado, and my mother begged him to stop because she knew he couldn’t swim. He made it to the other side and was fourteen different people as he survived it, and the river was over four hundred different rivers because of the water current speed. The water current speed polished the flat stones of the riverbed, and the stones were many different stones in the time it took my father to climb up the other side bank in his big shorts. I was nine years old and the Houston Rockets were about to claim the NBA championship while Michael Jordan was out shagging fly balls. Briefly, while my father was his eighth or ninth different person of the wade, I imagined how his body might tumble down the river and bounce off Colorado boulders until I was fatherless. While he was on his tenth and eleventh different person, I took moments to imagine him gone forever down the river, and I was dissatisfied right along with the song playing in my ears. When he survived on the other bank, the song ended and the family talked about the satisfaction that comes from a properly cooked salmon fillet.

            All of this is to say that, in a roundabout way, if I had to guess at an overall theme for the first two seasons of Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls, I would guess “dissatisfaction” and feel dissatisfied with my guess. I watched the first season of Girls after a familial birthday present DVD purchase went characteristically wrong, and held a two-day marathon viewing of the second season online while my new roommate ate frozen pizza next to me and looked content. At certain points during the second season, the two-year-old pit bull sat with us on the couch and rested her big head on my left knee looking dissatisfied. At these moments, on the living room couch in front of the silver computertelevision, the three of us were at our most misguided summer vacation twentysomethingness (the pit bull being adolescent in her dog-yeared body, but close enough to get the gist), and I recognized, for better or worse, that we were, on that gray couch of dog shed:

1.     Unrecognizably handsome with nowhere to show our faces in town

2.     Not living in one of the trendier boroughs of New York City

3.     Past the years of having casual sex with mail carriers (if the years ever existed at all)

4.     Very much writing people with voices in our heads telling us to not write (these voices coming from other people we know somewhat well, and also our own voices influenced by these other voices, negatively.)

5.     Begrudging Millennials with our eyes set on an innocuous prize “out there.”

6.     Stuck in a Girls-themed game of carrot-hanging-from-the-end-of-the-stick, where the carrot represents “fulfillment” and the stick’s length is mathematically represented in the following equation: lifespan (to the present moment) + opportunity x privilege ÷ expectations [note: the total, due to the inordinately high value of the expectations, always equals less than 1. And 1 is the goal so, you know, everything sucks.]

For those of you who haven’t sufficiently trekked the Girls terrain, allow me to break the poshy landscape down for you: The female (and male, for that matter) characters of Girls have a lot of good shit going for them, but that doesn’t keep them from wanting/kind of demanding and/or laying claim to more good shit. They have college degrees and, often, intro-level jobs, but they want Mac-adorned offices and careers that caress their creative minds and oversized egos (and they want these jobs, and their accompanying pay raises, yesterday.) They have comfortable apartments to live in, but drool over luxurious brownstones and dream of the days when they’ll be able to not only have enough money to own their own swanky places, but also fill them out with furniture and art from (insert names of trendy boutiques and galleries here.) They have, where applicable, stable relationship partners, but they want dangerously exotic sex adventures where they desperately need and are desperately needed, where they are romantic objects of affection and amateur porn stars at the same time (they also want intelligent, respectful conversations with their partners to fill the mornings after the sex adventures. duh.) In short, the women of Girls have educations, jobs, money, homes, friends, lovers, but want better jobs, more money, cooler homes, cooler friends, better lovers. They want and, interestingly, feel like they deserve (for reasons best considered in future posts) upgraded versions of their lives. They, like many Americans, want the almighty More (i.e., the Supersized life, without the extra calories.)

            And it isn’t (Dunham's alter ego) Hannah and her posse’s constant push for More (or subsequent disdain for what they consider to be their own sorrowful lots of Less) that irks me. It’s that I’m pretty sure Dunham wants me to empathize with Hannah’s existential woes (cue not-so-subtly sad orchestral music when Hannah’s sweet-ass-internship director does not [gasp!] offer her a salaried position after all her hard work writing copy for I don’t know like twenty hours a week or something.) But how can I, or anyone, empathize with a kid who gets a piece of chocolate cake and cries because it doesn’t taste the way she thought it would (or, maybe even worse, because it is not [double gasp!] served on a vintage dessert plate)? Are viewers actually supposed to forget that not everybody gets a piece of chocolate cake? Are we supposed to forget that chocolate cake signifies surplus (i.e., it is only served after all nutritionally adequate foods have been consumed. And if not everybody is getting the chocolate cake, are we supposed to forget that it is likely that not everybody is getting dinner either?) Are we to forget all of this and start craving a piece of (More-flavored) chocolate cake of our own?

After completing the many hours of show (some of them viewed from locations as exotic as a fourth-floor Quality Inn and Suites bedroom couch in Lansing, Michigan), I suspect Hannah has rarely fleeced her More-hungry shoulders in Dr. Dustin Hoffman’s I Heart Huckabees therapeutic universe blanket. For if she had clothed herself in the universe blanket, she would know that “Everything she could ever want or be, she already has or is.” Dr. Hoffman’s point being, of course, that if one looks strictly outside of oneself for "fulfillment" (perhaps the ultimate More), one’s bound to get mad exhausted during the search (see carrot-hanging-from-the-end-of-the-stick reference above.) A little mindfulness/appreciation of what one already has might go a long way (even in “Brooklyn, New York City where they paint murals of Biggie.” Shout out to Talib Kweli.) Maybe we could take “has” to a capital H place and give More a run for its insatiable-appetite-money? Granted, Zen characters void of passions/desires/vices don’t make for must-see big-time television, and I get this. Not many viewers are likely to tune in to pay-cable episodes of Dunham’s Hannah sitting on a meditation cushion in her reasonably priced apartment while she counts her breaths and the items on the long list of things she doesn’t need to reach enlightenment. Contentment just doesn’t sell.

            But I also wonder about the healthiness of selling white, upper-middle-class (potentially misplaced) existential discontent to American audience members who are likely still (knowingly or unknowingly) dragging their tired legs and credit scores through the hopefully soon-to-thin-out economic sludge. At what point is it socially inappropriate for viewers to be led to look at Hannah’s character [twenty-threeish, recent college-graduate, supportive parents, present friendship circle, somewhat healthy socio-sexual opportunities] with pity, simply because she doesn’t have the stellar life she has “always dreamed of” and “worked so hard for?” And before an answer is decided on, let’s consider that a recent New York Times article places the national unemployment rate at 7.5% and the national unemployment rate for college graduates at under 4%, meaning that Hannah’s prior-to-season-one-earned liberal arts degree puts her well ahead of the fictional (and, symbolically, real life) pack when it comes to running away from economic insecurity and/or poverty. Are we to feel bummed that she can’t make this runaway in oh-so-cool, unreleased Dr. Martens? Isn’t it more appropriate to feel bummed for those who can’t run/keep up in the first place? Isn’t it cooler to let the bummed feeling push us towards some sort of More-for-all (with no Emmy-nominated strings attached) program? Could that program make it on HBO? It’s More than TV, I’ve heard.

Teaadora Nikolova Singing a Cover

           Matthew Donovan, when he sings a certain song on the stage of a pizza restaurant, expresses a pain I have since I was very young. I have not been able to express the pain myself in any scratching way. I have not been able to write the pain or read the pain away. The pain was not under the covers of any Beethoven symphony. The pain was not Tupac Shakur with his shirt off and abdominal muscles flexed. The pain was not any of the shoes I bought with my best friend in high school. Also, I should not be speaking about the pain in the past tense, that is, I should not be saying the pain “was.” Because the pain surely “is” at least as much as it ever “was.” So, to be clear, when Matthew Donovan sings the second to last song of his set last night at a pizza restaurant, he expresses a pain that is and was in a way I have not yet.

            He is the long and far away from the microphone shriek, and in that is the very pain. He doubles over to vomit out the high pitch. He vomits up the water from the disturbed bigot man before the song and wipes it up with his canvas shoes. There is a long white cord draping in loops towards a sound amplifier and a clamp at the end of a guitar that bites on wood and metal. All of this is in the creases of Matthew’s mouth when he shrieks, and I am not the help to him. He is the deep and heart-arrowed help to me on his t-shirt. Later, I will carry the sound amplifier to the back of a long car. I will touch Matthew on the shoulders and spine and distressed neck curl across a forehead. There will be a twinge burning in my bicep and right hip that Matthew predicted near a curb and a small public shrub.

            Back to the deep and more meaningful pain. It involves the amnesia of my mother’s ovaries and how they forgot and forgot. Also, the gonads of several other important relatives that forgot along the way (namely, my father and the significant parts of him.) Their combined memories, all of them, fit on the recipe cards my mother used to document her famous summer salad. There are ramen noodles, slivered almonds, vinegar, chopped cabbage, and a handful of black pepper on the index cards with lines. The cards fit into a box covered in strawberry stems. The entire box was over the old microwave and once told me to take a liquid of ulcer medication before I was allowed to play in the backyard. I took the cherry medicine and the box touched my back in the way to tell me to go outside and run. My stomach and the lining of my stomach could be forgotten about for that afternoon, along with the parts of my brain that miscalculated the release of stomach acid and that regulated stomach lining depth. These parts of my brain were never considered in the first place or typed into the small bank calculator my mother used to balance her checkbook in the first place.

            All of the gonads’ forgetfulness led to the worse and worse. Also, there was a forgetfulness especially in its cold quiet near the basement door. Near the special installed desk with cheap bleeding porous wood. Not one of us, to this day, knows who installed the desk or how it was paid for. It was not there one day on the white and specked carpet. And it was there one day on the white and specked carpet to where my father kept a manuscript of a book he wrote about me drinking Kool-Aid and there being fresh cut grass in the background. Above the desk lamp was a window that led to the backyard where the dachshund used to shit in the rocks. The window opened up to the level of the rocks and the small pebbles of shit. On evenings, my mother and father sat on the desk with their shoes off and swung their legs and feet above the carpet to forget little things about how we felt. Sometimes their feet scratched the carpet in a sound that meant it was all happening and could not be completely forgotten in the way sounds are permanent things to point at. I heard that sound from my room where I was a crying witness to it. I remember the sound and I keep it in my fists.

            Matthew Donovan shrieks the sounds out of my fists. Out of my fists and into a tile floor and the pain pinched across my face. In a way I twisted the pain into the strands of my beard. My beard was long at the base of my neck because of him and people noticed my beard after the police left. I talked about my beard into the windshield of the long car. I mentioned Matthew in the front seat of the long car and everyone of her understood and said the word “gentle.” We didn’t argue about the meaning of the word gentle and agreed it was not the pain so much. It was about the pain so much. I held the gentle instead in my fists and noticed the missing long car mirrors.