More from the archives — this was written about a year ago.  I’m not entirely sure if I decided that it was finished or not….

My executive director recently discovered that I’m Cuban.  “Oh,” she said, scrolling through an Internet video to show me a particularly cruel squat she’d seen, “are you going to go?”

My face betrayed me, and she caught herself.  “Is your family exiles?”

Yes, I said, and she said she had friends who were Cuban exiles; she knew it was a complicated question.  Our conversation returned to fitness.

Earlier today I was in a meeting with my immediate director and a co-worker.  I don’t know how Cuba came up in the discussion but my boss’s reaction was immediate: “Oh, I can’t wait to go,” she said, then addressed us.  “Don’t you guys want to go?”

I’ve only known my co-worker for three days now but she’s quite savvy, and she redirected the conversation before I even had a chance to react.  A good thing, because if I had reacted, I would have — at the very least — expressed the same frustrated refusal that I showed my ED, that reminded her of the other Cuban exiles she knew.

The ED’s question, though, was redundant.  To be Cuban is to be exile.  There are rare exceptions, to be sure, but for almost all of us the identities are inseparable and insuperable, a daily paradox of who we are and who can never really be.

*

My sister-in-law is an immigrant.  She came to the United States from Australia after completing her PhD in astronomy to do a postdoc at Harvard, and then to work at NASA.  She did not anticipate living stateside indefinitely until she met my brother; now they have a house and twin babies and her green card is in process, sponsored by their mutual employer.  But if they hadn’t accepted job offers at Caltech they would have taken positions at Australia National University, and living Down Under is not off the table of their future.  Her mother and sister visit regularly, freely, and the question of whether Jessie would ever like to go back to Australia is freighted only with pragmatic negotiation and personal history.  Immigration is never easy, but hers bears no geopolitical scarring.

When non-Cubans ask Cuban-Americans if they will or have ever or would like to visit Cuba, I suspect that they — that you — think you are asking the same question you would ask Jessie.

You are not.

*

Growing up in Cleveland, I walked the same streets that my father navigated in his childhood.  My brother and I went to the same high schools as our paternal aunts and uncles and grandparents; we ate at the same pizzerias; we sat in the same pews, in the same churches.  My father’s life has a context that I can never truly grasp — the Cold War, Vietnam, pre-civil rights — but it is also familiar and knowable from having lived there, laying new memories across a well-worn geography.

My mother’s childhood is the opposite of all of that.  To walk the streets of her childhood was not only to cross a significant distance but to traverse legality.  The US government is frequently blamed for freezing out Cuba, as if we are the sole bad actor, but even with rarely-granted American permission I could not have walked freely through my family history on that impossible island: tourists of any stripe but particularly Cuban-Americans are monitored if they stray from the beaten path of photo-ready beaches and hotels or the picturesque spots of Old Havana, where the nostalgic ideal of Cuba is shepherded and mediated, curated for all those in need of something “authentic”. 

Things are changing now, of course, there more so than here.  My cousin Teva, a Spanish citizen who can travel more easily, laid her mother’s ashes to rest last year in Santiago. 

Someday, I will make it all the way to Marcane.

*

Marcane is where my mother grew up, a small sugar-cane town in Oriente province, in the southeastern part of the island, along the alligator’s lower jaw.  I know it from stories and pictures and fever dreams, and I’ve imagined going back a thousand times.

You may know Cuba from news stories and articles, documentaries and the Buena Vista Social Club; photos might catch your eye, spark your imagination for a moment, inspire a moment of sympathy for those poor Cubans. 

To grow up Cuban-American is to be immersed in a place forever out of reach.  We know Cuba from news stories and articles and documentaries and the Buena Vista Social Club, from photos smuggled out and every photo that makes the paper, from articles clipped and mailed, memoirs and novels and blogs, links to El Nuevo Herald and Generacion Y.  I don’t linger on images of tropical beaches but about a decade ago there was a gif of Fidel Castro tripping on his way to give a speech, face-planting; I don’t normally delight in injuries to the elderly but I watched it over and over and over again, transfixed, gleeful.

We know it from family, from pork and black beans and ropa vieja and empanadas and mojo, from heirlooms that made it out, from letters, from diaries, from memory. 

What does it mean to return to a place that you already know by heart?

*

But of course, I don’t know Cuba at all.  I’ve never been there; all I’ve ever lived with is the rupture and the loss, the omnipresent absence.  Of course I want to go.  Of course I will go.  How could I not?

*

Going to Cuba is your vacation.  It is something wholly different for me, and for those like me.  Cuba is not about beaches and food and music and vintage cars but about understanding the central trauma that shaped the lives of my mother, my aunts, my grandmother, my grandfather, the interconnected web of extended family.

Cuba is about my mother: a determined and resilient woman who has survived cancer twice.  She came to the United States when she was nine years old.  Some of her stories I know by heart and some of her stories I will never know; traversing ninety miles of ocean is a hurt that time has mostly turned to scar tissue but hasn’t entirely healed, and I don’t know if going back to Cuba will be enough to close the open wound she still carries.

Cuba is about my grandmother: stiff and aristocratic and unyielding and judgmental; warm and generous and big-hearted, with a laugh that could transcend all of my shortcomings.  I didn’t know she had a sense of humor until I was twelve years old and we were in my parents’ sunroom in Cleveland, and her laughter was a revelation.  Most of my stand-up material would have shocked and appalled my abuela but she’s so much of the reason I ever did comedy at all.

Cuba is about my grandfather: a hard-riding, cigar-smoking country doctor, friends with Mongo, the overlooked third Castro brother.  He died before I was born, before I existed at all, but there are photos of him at my parents’ wedding and him with my brother and it is a miracle that he made it to the US at all — he stayed in Cuba after my mother and aunt and grandmother all left to tend to his sick parents and by the time they died he found himself wanted by the regime, and his escape is the stuff of legend. 

In eighth grade English class we had to prepare and present a short speech about an ancestor.  Most of our classmates spoke of German and Irish immigrants, hardworking people who sought economic opportunity along Lake Erie’s industrial shores.  My brother and I both, one year apart, brought in our abuelo’s whip and pistol and told a story of dodging assassination by one of the great villains of the twentieth century.

We were not, generally speaking, cool, but on that day — on that day, we were the coolest.

*

I have lived for thirty-one years in a Cuba that may or may not resemble the actual country.  This is what exile means: not only to be separate but to be severed, to subsist in suspended, impossible fantasy.

Do I want to go to Cuba?  I’ve ached for it for decades.  To stand in front of twenty-two thirteen-year-olds and tell a tale of derring-do was, like all boastfulness, an act of concealment; in 1997, I didn’t know if the possibility would ever be real, and in my desperation to encounter the man of myth a bragging retelling was the most I could muster.  Now I might soon be able to meet him as a native son; now my grandmother is gone, too, and so instead of her voice and her memories I can only hope to find their echoes amongst the bougainvillea and the mango trees and the sugarcane.  Going to Cuba is going home.  Of course I want it. 

*

I don’t think that is what they — or you — or they — mean, though, when they ask, and that is why my face falls and my jaw sets at the question.  The Cuba you want to see is worlds apart from the one that I’ve always known — but more than that, your Cuba is an erasure of mine, a pretty mask over my mother’s unanswerable pain. 

Yes, I want to go to Cuba.  And I will.

But although our passports might bear the same stamp, I will never visit your Cuba. 

*

Written in June of 2014.  

Some thing are worth saying because they are timely; others, because they are true. 

Lately in Cleveland, I have had a routine: after the quieting of the daytime bustle and as the long summer evenings bent into darkness, once parents were asleep, I made tea and took my laptop to the living room for emails and writing and general webfuckery, the cornerstones of my California life folded into a few nighttime hours.  “Friends” ran on the CW and then Nick at Nite and became the background to my labors, something like five episodes per night, and after weeks of this unfocused soundtrack I realized why Ross and Rachel took so damn long to get together: because neither of them knew what love is.

Ross idealized Rachel, from their preteen days.  Shy and insecure his strategy was years of pining, punctuated by an occasional grand gesture — an attempted prom rescue, for example, or a night at the planetarium.  And Rachel, the idealized object, enabled this, never considering Ross as a romantic partner until his devotion was revealed via such gestures.  Their on-again off-again relationship propelled the show’s narrative but it was also ludicrous, especially as the comparatively tame Monica and Chandler navigated a commitment built on friendship, shared values, shared goals, mutual attraction, and compromise — which is to say, a genuine and strong commitment, but not one to sustain an audience’s interest.

Grand gestures do not a relationship make, which is why so many gesture-built romantic comedies end when people fall in love (or “love”) rather than exploring an actual relationship, and also why romantic comedies are mostly bullshit.

For those who have experienced sexual assault there are two possible labels, it seems; we are either “victim” or “survivor”, both of which lend far too much credibility to the event in my mind.  “Survivor” implies more agency than “victim” but when I think of survival I recall my mother in intensive care, scrawling on a pad of paper because a tracheotomy prevented her speech, bald and pallid from chemotherapy but somehow still alive despite leukemia’s best efforts.  The sexual assault which I survived did not threaten my life in such a fashion, although the aftermath fully pursued may have; there were many reasons I did not testify against my late grandmother’s husband but the most prominent was that I simply wanted the whole thing over with, sooner rather than later. 

But whether I testified or not, the situation was beyond my own control.  Through a combination of coincidence my grandmother’s husband (her second husband, after my own grandfather died before I was born) was arrested and although he spent less time in jail for misdemeanor domestic assault than I did for violating curfew it unleashed a torrent from his enraged son, who paid a lawyer fifteen thousand dollars to send me threatening letters throughout the summer of my sophomore year of college — they would find out why I’d lied; they would find out the truth of why I’d transferred from Caltech to Georgetown; they would tell the world that I was nothing but a spoiled pawn of my father; they would destroy me. 

And what had I done to deserve such a backlash?  Was it because I had worn a tank top that night (or maybe it was a polo shirt — I can’t quite remember)?  Was it because I had visited my grandmother in Miami?  Was it because it was it was Good Friday?  Was it because I was nineteen and had a future that could yet be destroyed?

Or was it because yes: all women.

Those who stand in a witness box, who stare down the feint of objectivity that is the law, who force justice or at least demand to be heard — those are the real survivors. 

One of the most popular #YesAllWomen tweets was a quote from Margaret Atwood — “Men are afraid women will laugh at them.  Women are afraid men will kill them.”  When Margaret Atwood and Louis C.K. are making the same point, there is no secret left to it. 

My own story is complicated (as these things always are) by ethnicity.  To be Cuban is to be Hispanic and to be Hispanic is to be a culture of machismo, a society which excuses male philandering, and so an eighty-five-year-old groping his nineteen-year-old step-granddaughter is seen as part of a larger pathology; and Americans can shake their heads in sadness at the dysfunction of others. 

But Latinos have Dilma and Cristina and Michele and even Violeta, an elected female leader all the way back in the twentieth century.  Women at the helm do not disprove systemic misogyny any more than Obama’s election here ended racism, but it is not meaningless either. 

We have yet to vote a woman into our highest executive office, but in one of the most liberal states in the US we brought in the Governator.  The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, and yet somehow it is the caballeros whose problem is more tragic.

Here is a real tragedy: the distance between “I refuse to apologize for my privilege” and mass murder is much shorter than most anyone is willing to acknowledge.  

This was the start of a super-long examination of our narratives of romantic love, and how they promote misogyny; and how our American/Western sense of our own progress impedes us from seeing how much work remains to be done.  But I didn’t finish it.  I did get sexually assaulted again, though — in a totally different context this time! — so I could bring a whole new perspective to it now… but I’m not gonna.

According to my computer, I wrote this in 2014 — on Christmas Day.  Huh.

Hey there!  Do you have opinions about what’s happened/happening in Ferguson?  Of course you do!  You’re a person.  Perhaps even a person who cares about peace and justice!  Maybe you could use some extra ammunition for all of your Facebook arguments with people who think “posting links to Ted Nugent’s point of view” is a helpful tactic.  Maybe you’ve been posting links to Ted Nugent’s point of view (about anything, really).  Either way, let’s dive in to a hot topic and call bullshit on a lot of bullshit!

Bullshit One: “Mike Brown was shot in the front.  Therefore, his shooting was justified.”

This particular piece of bullshit has gotten a lot of airing among defenders of Officer Darren Wilson (with headlines like “shocking” and “conclusive”).  But guess what?  It’s also bullshit!  Fun fact: the direction a person is facing when fatally shot by a police officer has next to nothing to do with whether or not that officer will be charged with anything.  Front, back, side — if a cop can justify a “reasonable threat,” then it pretty much flies.  And if someone is shot in the back, then that means that they were running from the police, and the only people who ever run from police are criminals/the guilty (FACT!*); therefore, by cop-logic (or at least the tortured cop-logic deployed in these situations), someone running from the cops can still constitute a “reasonable threat” to public safety and deserve to be shot.  Even fatally.

There’s a reason that very, very, very, very, very, very, very few lawyers take police brutality cases.  The facts of the case hardly matter.  And speaking of…

Bullshit Two: “Mike Brown robbed somebody!  Therefore, his shooting was justified.”

Mike Brown may have robbed a convenient store before his death and stole some cigarillos.  Whether this is true or not has yet to be established, which is why it’s bullshit — yes, a grainy security video shows someone who strongly resembles Brown, but the store owner (aka the robbery victim) has said it wasn’t him.  Really, what this particular bit of bullshit demonstrates is how few facts around Brown’s death have been actually established, which is why a trial would have been a very good thing.  Determining the facts of a case is a major part of why trials happen at all!  It’s not why grand juries are convened, so at this point social media is basically carrying out the investigation which the St Louis county prosecutor was too lazy/corrupt/racist to do himself.  You know, like he’s paid to. 

Bullshit Three: Anyone cares what you think about the protests/riots.

Are you Pharrell Williams, Charles Barkley, or Ted Nugent?  Shut up.  Are you posting memes of Martin Luther King with the words “I respect this…” alongside pictures from Ferguson saying “not this”?  Stop.  Stop now.  Please, for the love of god, shut up.

Whether you’re riot-shaming, respectability-politicking, or just straight-up racist (thanks Ted!), all you’re actually doing is refocusing the conversation away from the very real injuries suffered by black Americans to whether or not their reaction is up to your standards.  And you know what?  Your standards are complete, utter, highest-order bullshit.  Of course you respect MLK now, and if we’re being real, fifty years from now today’s protestors might very well be regarded as freedom fighters — but in the meantime, asking them to live up to the best, most sanitized version of one of the greatest non-violent leaders in all of world history is fucking absurd.  Can you imagine telling anyone in your regular life that you can’t respect them because they’re not acting like MLK?  No.  Because that would a ridiculous, arbitrary, and impossible standard to live up to.  (If you don’t believe me, try it!  Tell a coworker that you won’t respect them until they live in the image of MLK, or Gandhi, or Mother Teresa.  See what happens.  See if you get punched.) 

If you want to have an impact on the tone of the protests, get out in the streets yourself.  Otherwise, shut. the. fuck. up. with this line of bullshit.

Bullshit Four: Cops are rational actors.

This bit of bullshit is one of the most endemic and problematic, because it’s what shields cops from the consequences of their fatal mistakes.  But let’s say for a second that it’s generally true — we can even put race aside for a couple sentences.  Let’s say that generally rational, good cops sometimes misjudge the situation and kill unarmed, innocent twelve-year-olds (#Cleveland edition), because they thought such a kid constituted a “reasonable threat.”

Well, reasonably, that is bullshit.  Reasonably, we must conclude that any cop who does such a thing is not particularly capable of accurate threat assessment; reasonably, we must conclude that such a cop is not very good at one of the core competencies involved in cop-hood.  Reasonably, if chronic tardiness is enough to get someone fired, mistakenly ending the life of an innocent human being whom you have sworn to protect should at the very least cost a cop his or her job. 

Reasonably, if typical citizens can be imprisoned for manslaughter when they accidentally kill someone, agents of the state — authorized to use lethal force only for the protection of the polity — must be held to a higher standard of behavior.

I’ve met many perfectly nice cops in my life.  I’ve also been on the receiving end of a completely arbitrary and essentially purposeless exercise of police authority: it’s a trivial comparison, but when my friend Smo and I were arrested for a curfew violation, it had very little to do with any meaningful law enforcement and much more to do with a new, young cop bullying two vulnerable targets to satisfy his own ego.  Again, it’s trivial in comparison to the stories of Mike Brown or Tamir Rice, but most white girls — indeed, most white people — don’t ever experience police bullying, even on such an inconsequential level, unless they choose to (namely, by participating in justice-oriented protests).  It’s not something that the vast, vast majority of white people ever consider as an everyday possibility, but the truth is that cops can be dicks, and when a cop is being a dick to you, you’re pretty much at their mercy. 

Which is to say: the greatest bullshit of all is people claiming that they would, or would have, acted differently — if they were at the protests, if they were Tamir Rice, if they were Mike Brown, if they were Trayvon Martin.  Are you Martin Luther King right now, today, in your regular life?  No?  Then why do you think you could transform into Martin Luther King when faced with a gun?

We all know how that story ends, anyway.  As others have pointed out, MLK still got shot in the head.

Bullshit The Fifth: It’s just a few bad apples!

Are the majority of cops basically decent human beings?  Probably, but then again, the vast majority of humanity are basically decent human beings; nothing more and nothing less.  Sociopaths and heroes are exceedingly rare, and you don’t have to be a sociopath to kill people (especially in America). 

I put this one down because I just couldn’t stand to keep wading into the superheated discussion (and yes, I am aware that stepping away from stuff like this is absolutely white privilege at work).  Also, apparently I wrote this on Christmas, and, y’know, that’s a pretty busy — and generally happy! — day for me…

Written late October 2014; rejected by Grist and Shareable shortly thereafter.

Have you shared lately?  I don’t mean “share” in the sense that most of us use the word — the sense that we’re taught in preschool and kindergarten, the sense that commonly implies “wait your turn” and “be considerate of others” — but rather in the Silicon Valley definition of the term, with the rather less-common meaning of “use an app to hire a stranger to perform a service for you.”

Wait, what?

As the battles over Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and their ilk become ever-more pitched (this week saw Uber drivers protest in multiple cities across the country, and the company’s PR attempts at LA Weekly backfiring badly), it’s worth wondering how the heck these companies ever came to adopt the feel-good collective moniker of the “sharing economy.”  As originally conceived, the phrase was a rebellion against consumption, rather than a new and deregulated form of it; it was coined by thinkers operating outside the boundaries of traditional capitalism, and looking to redefine our concept of ownership and need.  Even before it had a name, the sharing economy had exemplars — Couchsurfing.org, for example, has existed for years as a worldwide hub for travelers, regulated only by social norms and community reputations (think of it as exactly as thorough and safe as Airbnb, except free).  Ridesharing was found not only in company-organized carpools but bulletin boards (whether at a coffeeshop or on Craigslist) and civic-led designated carpooling pick-up spots, not to mention, of course, the longstanding, grande dame of ridesharing: public transportation. 

Neither Uber nor Lyft look anything like real ridesharing, so it’s strange that they’ve co-opted the term while focusing their attention on killing the real industry that they mimic: taxis.  Read Uber’s corporate press and you’ll hear a lot about “taxi cartels,” as if cabbies are nothing more than organized millionaire thugs who happen to sometimes drive people places.  The app companies are doing a public service, they claim, by “disrupting” this inefficient service, and while it’s true that taxi rules could be improved in many cities, this could just as easily be accomplished by disruption’s gentler cousin, reform — a process in which all stakeholders could participate, that might even resemble actual sharing. 

The appeal of the “sharing economy” is obvious: public transportation is painfully unsexy, but dialing up a black car on your smart phone feels a little like being on an episode of “Gossip Girl.”  Couchsurfing is a hobby of vagrants and dirty hippies, but renting a couch (or a room, or a treehouse) somehow becomes aspirational.  One of the great lies of consumer capitalism is that value only exists as financial value, and so a service like Airbnb seems safer and more secure than the trust-reliant Couchsurfing.  I get it — when I traveled throughout South America in 2011, renting a room for three weeks via Airbnb felt vastly more proper and adult than arranging accommodations via Couchsurfing, but when my Airbnb host was a no-show and I was left stranded in Buenos Aires, it was the Couchsurfing emergency list that came to my rescue, no fee involved.

And therein lies the fundamental problem with the “sharing economy”: however much it co-opts the language of cooperation and collaboration, the “disruption” these apps promise most is the monetization of previously unvalued (financially, at least) interactions.  This sounds great on paper, particularly in a recession — hey, make some money doing the kinds of things you do anyway! — but as numerous studies have shown, introducing financial incentive into gift exchanges breeds distrust and destroys relationships.  You’re much more likely to become friends with your Couchsurfing host than your Airbnb landlord, and to be chummy with your carpool organizer or bus buddy than your Lyft driver.  The promise of human connection secured by money will always be false.

What’s not false, though, is the money these companies are making, and the anger their practices are generating.  Uber has been banned in Germany, and activists in places like New York and San Francisco are working to rein in Airbnb, which offers profit margins so far above long-term rental rates that mass evictions and conversions of buildings into exclusive Airbnb listings are leaving locals in a lurch.  The halo of “sharing” still offers these companies a comfortable veneer of anti-establishment do-goodery, even as Uber drivers run the numbers and realize their earnings fall below minimum wage, and even as the originators of the “sharing economy” concept have quietly abandoned the phrase — visit the websites of Shareable.net or the Sustainable Economies Law Center, which promote efforts like co-ops, b-corps, and community gardens, and you’ll read about the “new economy” or, more formally, the “social and sustainable economy”, or SSE.

In the interest of fairness, I think we should follow their quest for better labeling and call the “sharing economy” what it really is: the App-enabled Sub-minimum-wage Service Economy.  That’s a bit of a mouthful, so we can just go with an abridged acronym — the ASS economy.  Because only an ass could think it has anything to do with sharing.

Still true.

Reaching waaaaaaaaaaay back before this blog even existed: March, 2007.  This was written for an NYC friend’s zine, and I honestly have no idea whether it was ever published, or whether the zine even existed past its first issue…

In September of 2006, I moved back home for a temporary, painful stint in Cleveland.  The job market was crap, none of my friends were around, and the whole four months I was there I was stricken by a longing to return to the city I’d left behind: San Francisco.  Like Journey, I composed mournful ballads in homage to the city by the bay; unlike Journey, I resisted both a mullet and the impulse to make any such tunes public.

But I did get back to the Bay Area as fast as I could.

San Francisco looms large within the American cultural imagination — the Golden Gate Bridge, Haight-Ashbury, streetcars and the Transamerica building are all iconic.  But that’s just tourist crap.  What is the substance of contemporary SF?  Is it really, as some aging radicals will tell you, a sellout town of yippies and Silicon Valley money?  Or is it, as Bill O’Reilly would have you believe, still the bastion of liberal thought in this country, all Birkenstocks and acid?

Eh, a bit of both.  The Internet explosion may have priced pretty much the entire Bay Area real estate market out of ownership range for anyone not a millionaire, but the technology sector also ensures a population of young, progressively minded intellectuals; these engineers may have bigger bank accounts than their hippie forefathers, but the sense of personal hygiene is about equal.  And it’s the only major American city our current president has yet to visit — the Republicans have given up altogether on even making an effort here. 

I would love to wax rhapsodic about Bushman, a permanent fixture at touristy Fisherman’s Wharf who would jump out from behind branches to scare tourists, but — as much as he represents the stereotypical Northern California free-spiritedness — he’s retired, so that will be of no use to any NYC’ers planning trips this way.

No, the best place to recapture the sixties spirit is Golden Gate Park.  It’s on the west side of the city, the non-hip and predominantly Asian side, and thirty-nine years ago it was host to many Summer of Love festivities.  To go there now, you’d think it’s all gentrified, art museums and arboretums and Japanese Tea Gardens.  But on the western edge, hidden behind a bocce ball field, is Hippie Hill.  And Hippie Hill is where the sixties will never die.

Hippie Hill is not the actual name of the place, but if you’re wandering around the park looking for it, you can be assured you’ve found it by several measures.  Frequent drum circles provide auditory clues, and a pervasive odor of marijuana is omnipresent.  If you find a field meeting those criteria and are still unsure whether or not you’re in the right place, you can further verify your location by checking how many people around you are either (a) barefoot or (b) appear homeless.  I had a long conversation there once with a man known as Bag Lady Betty, who was a college friend of Robert Zimmerman at the University of Minnesota (which Mr. Zimmerman left before becoming known as Bob Dylan).  Bag Lady Betty got a PhD and was a professor at Berkeley when he got kicked out for dropping too much acid, which of course begs the question: How much acid was too much acid at frickin’ BERKELEY in the SEVENTIES?  It blows the mind to contemplate, and judging by Mr. Betty’s new hobby of collecting cans, it blew his mind as well.  On a related note, if you’re wandering through Hippie Hill and find yourself suffering a sudden hankerin’ for the reefer, pretty much anyone will share with you.  The ol’ hippie spirit of communalism still lives on, right alongside the drug culture and the drum circles.

And from Hippie Hill, on the western edge of Golden Gate Park, it’s just a short few blocks to the corner of Haight-Ashbury, where you can wander into the Gap and buy corporate, sweatshop-produced clothing to your heart’s delight.  It’s definitely a dichotomy.  The good news, though, is that if neither of those options — barefoot stoner-hippie, limousine liberal — sound appealing, you can always just pick up a wetsuit, a surfboard, and hit the beach.  Or some hiking boots, maybe a mountain bike, and head for the trails.  Outdoorsiness not your thing?  Well then, how about Chinese culture?  We’ve got the highest concentration of Asians outside of that continent.  Dim sum doesn’t sit so well?  How about burritos?  You can’t go a block down the Mission District without tripping over a taqueria (and, in a special note to the New York readers — good Mexican does not exist east of the Mississippi.  I know you’d like to believe otherwise, but our burritos are the best burritos.  Trust me.  I am a burrito connessouir!).  And if none of this is working for you, you can visit America’s most infamous prison at Alcatraz, or, alternatively, drive up to Napa and get shitfaced at wine tastings.  Because I’ve waited until the end to tell you the very best part of life in Northern California: being so close to hoity-toity wine country might make for some of the most expensive (and best) restaurants in the world, but Pinot Noir comes cheap enough to chug.  Similarly, since the coastal corridor from San Francisco north to Vancouver is generally considered the best weed-growing climate in the world, the marijuana is both potent and inexpensive.  And really, whether it’s rich techies getting drunk in their wine cellars, or dirty hippies smoking up with some smooth Humboldt County ganja, intoxication is one thing that everyone in this city can agree upon.  And isn’t that what matters most?

Ha!  Remember when I could afford to rent a place in San Francisco??  Or was able to eat glutenous burritos?  Oh, naive youth… (I did make a fun video about Hippie Hill — and the ease with which one can procure pot there — in 2009.  Watch it here.)

Written in April 2012.  I came up the title and needed SOMETHING to match it!

When conservative pundits caricature progressive, ecologically-minded urbanists as hothoused wealthy elites, I can’t help but laugh: I fit the profile as far as a college degree goes, but I’ve also spent more time in a dumpster than I ever anticipated at my Georgetown graduation and, sometimes, I’ve eaten ketchup packets for dinner.

We’ll get back to the ketchup thing later.  The dumpsters — it started when I worked with Habitat for Humanity.  One day my site supervisor tasked me with ensuring that the mountainous pile of cast-off lumber and sheetrock fit properly into its green metal container, so like the twenty-two-year-old badass that I once was I climbed in, revved up a circular saw, and bent a gigantic mound of trash to my will.  My photo on the staff page of my current employer’s website is of me sitting kinglike atop compressed leaves and branches and clippings in a green waste bin — I spent an entire day directing volunteers in the technique of proper dumping, and it was awesome.  Unlike some of my other poverty-addled environmentalist brethren, I’ve never actually dumpster-dived; no, my time in dumpsters has been spent in the seemingly eco-antithetical act of putting things in, not keeping them out, but I’ve still learned some lessons from it.

Most of my dumpstering experience thus far has been purely professional (you try working in a construction-related field and not learning a thing or two), but recently, things got personal.  I’ve never been one to have a lot of stuff — even as a kid, I relished the compactness of my closet — and that trait, compounded with general young-adult transience and the fact that I spent most of 2008 living out of my car (and occasionally dining on free condiments), has always kept my personal dump-quotient to a minimum.  But I’ve been living at the same address for a year and a half now, and although it’s a one-bedroom apartment shared with two other people, permanence has enabled stuff to settle and collect with a vastness that my prior vagabonding made impossible.  Also, my roommates have so much crap that sometimes I want to light it all on fire just to have it out of the way — not everyone, it turns out, adapts well to small-space living, but they’re working on it.

Even those of us committed to living lightly, however, can find ourselves with big problems that end only in a dumpster.  Recently, I picked up a new mattress (well, new to me — I got it off the Craigslist free section) to replace the one I’d had for over two years, a memory foam hand-me-down from a friend who’d moved back to Texas in 2010.  Regular flipping had staved off the development of permanent dents for some time but over the last eight months or so I had found myself sleeping in an indestructible foam crater, reappearing no matter how strenuously I flipped or rotated.  Replacement, I finally acknowledged, was my only option, although with the victory of a free Craigslist conquest came a startling question: what the hell does a person do with a yellowed, compressed, used foam mattress?

Sure, there are a couple of recycling programs out there, but most are run through manufacturers (not much of an option when your mattress is second-hand) and, as it happens, even the progressive Bay Area doesn’t offer anything in the way of alternatives.  My options were twofold– a dumpster or a giveaway — and I just didn’t feel quite comfortable pawning off the source of my recurring back pain on somebody else.  Sometimes one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, but sometimes, no matter how much we upcycle or downcycle or recycle or freecycle, crap is just crap.

So I hacked the foam mattress into pieces with a serrated blade, and into the dumpster it went — there was some other garbage in there already so it fit less than neatly, the sort of job I wouldn’t find acceptable if I were loading the dumpster from the start.  When I run dumpster crews, I often surprise volunteers with the suggestion that hauling and tossing trash is a task which actually requires skill and strategy — after all, we’re trained to stop thinking at the word “trash.”  No wonder most folks find it difficult or impossible to envision the scale, logistics, and impact of landfills or Pacific garbage patches: if a twenty-cubic-yard metal container at a construction site or streetcorner or park cleanup day is already regarded as a black hole of refuse, how are we possibly to make sense of what happens to our waste even further afield?

As I shoved my old mattress into my apartment’s dumpster, I couldn’t help but reflect on William McDonough’s eco-classic Cradle to Cradle — in that moment of doing battle with hunks of memory foam it was tempting to think that the problem was in its disposal, but the real issue — the one McDonough articulates so clearly — was that the mattress wasn’t built for reuse in the first place.  My friend had purchased it new less than five years ago, and now it was all but useless; she’d bought it on some great sale, but how good of a deal is anything that doesn’t last — and, moreover, that can’t be put to new life once its time has come?  My new box spring was previously used by a now-deceased old woman who had it for decades, and if it craps out on me I can at least cut it open and reclaim the lumber from its frame.  Memory foam, on the other hand, looks awesome in the ads, but in my experience it has been less than promised, just another piece of junk to add to the garbage patch.

But I know (albeit on a small scale) the effort that garbage-management requires, and despite the claims of marketers across the country, there is no piece of junk that is truly easy to dispose of.  If only we all got to spend a little more time hanging out in dumpsters, then maybe we might spend a little less time buying — and making — the kind of tossed-away stuff that fills so many of them.

Four years later: still love a good round of garbage Tetris.  This one holds up.

Wrote this in September of 2014 — it was commissioned by Shareable, who then didn’t run it (or pay me).  Transient and forgettable?  Maybe… but so was the topic.

If you or someone you care about happened to be among the huddled masses lined up outside an Apple store awaiting the iPhone 6, then maybe — just maybe — you need some smartphone methadone.  Enter the NoPhone: Dutch designer Ingmar Larsen’s gift to the tech-addicted, or to that overlooked demographic of folks who hate talking or texting but really like carrying around palm-sized plastic rectangles.  If you want to communicate with loved ones without the NSA dropping in on the conversation, the NoPhone is definitely the way to go; just be sure you’re within earshot of the loved one in question, because the NoPhone, as its name implies, is not actually a phone.  It’s a 3-D printed cultural commentary, and designer Larsen will send you one if you pledge twelve dollars on Kickstarter.  (For fifty bucks, you get a five-phone “family plan”: available on all major carriers!  I mean, no major carriers!) 

If that’s not enough to make your Apple-wielding friends jealous, go for the Selfie Upgrade — a mirrored sticker that posts images not to Instagram, but to your very own eyes, which, for those too young to remember a time before social media, is basically the same thing as setting your photostream to “private”.  The NoPhone mirror images don’t stick around on anyone’s server — just think of it as Snapchatting with yourself! — so if you’re a celebrity, it’ll also keep all your nude selfies hacker-proof.

Larsen is advertising the shatterproof, waterproof, battery-free NoPhone as an antidote to smartphone addiction (you no longer have to forego “any potential engagement with your direct environment” just to grip some cool black plastic), but with over $28,000 still to be raised for the product to be made, maybe we just like our smartphones too damn much to shell out for their Luddite simulacra.  Or maybe folks who feel the desperate need to clutch an obsolete, non-phone quadrilateral are just holding tight to their iPod Classics.  (RIP.)  If you’re in need of a “smartphone placebo,” now’s the time to shell out — just because you don’t have to camp out on a sidewalk for days doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy the smug glow of being first in line. 

Another tidbit from before this blog even existed: written in 2008.  Edited in 2012, by which point the sentiment had already well passed, but oh well…

The biological clock is rumored to exist within all human females; it begins its supposed steady progression at menarche, the moment it is turned on, but the ticking doesn’t really start to thrum until one’s twenties, when the siren call of the ovaries becomes impossible to ignore.  By the time a woman is in her thirties, the constant, metronomic hum of the unfulfilled biological clock drives her to the kind of madness chronicled on Sex and the City — compulsive preening, loss of sexual judgment, finding Carrie Bradshaw’s musings remotely interesting, etc.  At least, that’s more or less what I’d always heard, what I’d absorbed and compiled from pop culture and my elders; though a human female myself, I’d never felt much of these strange uterine directives, and I was perfectly content to keep it that way.

Until…

It happened the week before my twenty-fifth birthday: a sudden, inexplicable, maddeningly inescapable baby-lust.  I was helping my brother move into his new apartment and on trips to IKEA we were surrounded by small children, hordes of them shrieking and crying, and as I saw one and then another and then another I had to force myself to look away, to stop my goofy grin, to not reach out and pry someone else’s child from their arms and run off like a baby-snatching lunatic.

In short, the week before my twenty-fifth birthday I lost my goddamn mind.

In time this consuming obsession has faded into a steady background noise; it waxes and wanes depending on whether or not I’m living on food stamps or sleeping on somebody’s couch (the correlation isn’t what you might expect: in times of stability my lust is only for adventure, whereas the more my life is in shambles, the more my ovaries scream “You know what could fix this?!  A BABY!!!!”  Because, you guys, my ovaries are stupid, selfish bitches.) 

I thought I could live out my days immune from such biological pressures. My parents have long been concerned about my willingness to spawn, a concern perhaps permanently engraved in their minds when, during my freshman year of high school, I walked around for two days with a sign on my back that read “DO NOT REPRODUCE WITH ME: I AM A CARRIER!” in response to a biology lesson discussing hereditary diseases.  Among my high school nicknames was “asexual” (I wasn’t actually disinterested in sex, just more focused on getting into my dream college), and those who recall the Lauryn Hill song “Doo Wop (That Thing)” can hum along with the anthem my loving friends penned in my honor: “Hop, you know you better watch out/some asexuals are only about/bud-ding, bud-ding, bud-ding…” 

It wasn’t that I never wanted kids, or that I hated kids.  I’ve always liked kids a lot, actually, although my preference has generally run towards the more sentient, language-capable variety — you know, ones that have reached the age of reason.  I grew up in a family of four but with a mountain of younger cousins, the bulk of whom I have gotten to know fairly well and all of whom I find to be totally rad little people.  I dig kids, and kids have generally seemed to dig back, perhaps because my complete unwillingness to assume adult responsibilities ultimately renders me nothing more than an overgrown child myself.  Whatever the reason, kids and I get along, and more than that, kids crack me up; when they’re still young enough to be youthfully unselfconscious every day is a dance party (with, yes, occasional tantrum-breaks), and then when they get older and completely, obsessively self-conscious about every minute detail of their lives they’re so easy to embarrass that every day is like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, except all the neuroses are actually developmentally appropriate.

None of these sentiments towards children or the eventual possibility of a family, however, prepared me for the baby-lust, the explosive announcement of my biological clock’s existence.  It was immediate.  It is visceral.  And it will not go away.  I have degenerated into an empty-headed cliche and although I am aware of this sudden transmogrification into a chick-lit heroine, it would seem that I am powerless to combat the forces of millions of years of evolutionary pressure.  Suddenly some of my sexual fantasies are even ending in pregnancy, which up until this point has been among not only the least sexy but also simply the most horrifying scenarios imaginable.  It is not okay, people!

I would probably be less weirded out if I did not feel so freakishly alone — not alone as a female (or a human being, really) suddenly desperate to reproduce, but as a thinking person so suddenly overwhelmed by biological impulse.  (Seriously you guys, women who co-found their own feminist comedy nonprofits aren’t supposed to be so consumed by baby-lust… right?)  It seems a cruel trick of nature, that it should pick me for this particular Darwinian gambit: congratulations on lasting a quarter-century, commitment-phobe — now get on with the baby-making!  I was already bad at picking up guys when all I was interested in was no-strings-attached sex; now that I’ve lost my mind altogether how am I going to ever find a man crazy enough to want to mingle his DNA with my own (and then spend the next eighteen years being legally and financially responsible for the results)?  I thought I could remain unbothered by the hookup culture until I was at least thirty, but now for the first time I’m having to contemplate the prospect of trying to land myself in a serious relationship.  I don’t know much about those except that they seem to take a lot of effort, although to be fair even that is probably easier than raising a kid and suddenly that’s made its way to the top of my to-do list. 

Of course, the sad truth is that I probably won’t be procreating for a good few years yet (actually, there is nothing sad about this truth — it is unequivocally a good thing, rationally speaking, although all my rationality seems to have recently absconded in the face of this newfound procreative urge).  Practically, I am in a position absolutely untenable for having a kid, although if this new obsession drives me to be more pragmatic in getting together a career than I suppose it’s not entirely a bad thing.  Also, humans are not yet a parthenogenetic species, which means finding at some point an XY-chromosomed partner for this particular venture.  In fact, chances are pretty good that I’ll end up like Liz Lemon:  ten years from now I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find myself accidentally stealing coworkers’ babies and suffering Mexican-cheese-curl-induced pregnancy scares, because even a healthy dose of professional success is apparently not enough to compensate for an unfulfilled baby-lust, a biological clock ticking away the moments until genetic irrelevance — which is what, in turn, drives a girl to off-brand Cheetos in the first place.  

I can believe that.  The brief span of my unfulfilled baby-lust has already been torturous enough; ten years from now I could probably be spitting Pulitzers and still crying into my cornflakes about precious little fingers and chubby cheeks and wispy hair and drool.

In the meantime, pass the off-brand Cheetos.

Maybe all I really needed to give birth to was this blog?  A niece and nephew are doing me juuuust fine these days, y’all…

Written in September 2014.  Not posted because WHY WOULD I INVITE THAT INTO MY LIFE eh fuck it though…

My life isn’t complicated enough. I think I’ll write about Israel.

Much ink has already been spilled about Israel, and Palestine; my purpose here isn’t to add to the cacophony but to clarify certain dimensions of Israel’s identity, to better understand the claims made about it (and about Palestine).

1.  Israel is Jewish.

That Israel is a Jewish state is its primary identity; it was founded as such, explicitly, as a nation for the people without a homeland.  I don’t have a great deal to say on this matter except to point to a masterful (and shockingly readable) essay by Judith Butler, explicating why those who claim that to criticize Israel is to be anti-semitic are, in fact, making the same error of conflation as the anti-semites who use Israeli actions as an excuse to, say, smash windows in French synagogues.  The essay is beautifully reasoned and should be read by all.

2.  Israel is colonialist.

This is, perhaps, the number-one complaint against Israel: that its actions against Palestine are those of a colonizer against an indigenous population, and while violent oppression of the indigenous certainly has had its supporters, its historical heyday seems to have largely passed.  However, the colonial nature of Israel runs deeper than its actions, and even deeper than its founding.  Zionism, as a movement, developed in Europe’s imperial age, and its entire philosophical context is predicated upon colonialism.  That the Balfour Declaration was a British document owed not only to Britain’s comparatively liberal attitude towards the Jews, but also to the utter domination of the British empire, which had enough geopolitical credibility to resettle a global diaspora within a foreign land to which it held no legal title — a maneuver which takes both cojones and unequivocal international pre-eminence.  Israel is not only a colonial project for its Jewish residents; Israel is a European colonialist project, an abdication of “the Jewish problem” to another continent and, as such, a projection of European imperialist power. 

3.  Israel is militarist.

Israel often claims that its partnership with the United States is necessary as a consequence of its geopolitical importance: that it is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.  We’ll approach that claim next, but one important distinction between Israeli democracy and the other Western democracies to which it compares itself is that Israel is, fundamentally, a militarist state.  In the post-WWII era, European democracies have demilitarized; Japan was forcibly demilitarized, to the same effect — the reduction of military power as a central pillar of national might.  Even the United States, by far the largest military in the world, uses its armed forces less as a tool for national identity than Israel, where all citizens, regardless of gender or ability, must serve in the Israeli Defense Forces (Arab and Druze citizens, as well as ultra-Orthodox Jews, may be exempted; the exemption has been challenged for the ultra-Orthodox).  As a practical result of this, every Israeli leader, in all sectors of the country, has been, at some point in their lives, a soldier.  There is quite literally no other liberal democracy in the West where a similar statement can be made, because universal military conscription doesn’t exist  in any other liberal democracy in the West.  Universal national service exists in other Western liberal democracies, but such programs also include options for non-military government work or even community service; if an Israeli version of AmeriCorps were available as an alternative to the IDF, the experience of youth would be radically different.  Military service has often been a crucible for the formation of national values, generally patriotism, sacrifice, and adherence to authority.  That the Israeli public opinion continues to shift rightward is the result of many factors, but one little-discussed is the values formation inherent to Israeli citizenship, which is militaristic. 

When one holds a hammer, every problem looks like a nail; when every citizen is a soldier, war becomes an easy answer. 

4.  Israel is a liberal democracy.

Though this is a key dimension to Israel’s national and geopolitical identity, it is only a partial truth, mediated by point number one.  If Israel is to be an explicitly Jewish state, then it is unlike any other Western liberal democracy in that it is not secular.  If Israel is to be a truly liberal democracy, on the other hand, then a two-state solution with Palestine is actually less desirable than a fully integrated single state, with social and political equality between Palestinians and Jews.  Any claim for both full democracy and full Jewishness must rest, then, on the total expulsion of the Palestinians — a realization which has been the central principle of Israeli strategy since its foundation, and which might have been morally and politically acceptable one hundred years ago, but in the era where wealthy governments are officially apologizing to indigenous groups is no longer.  Intrinsic to contemporary notions of liberal democracy is pluralism.  Israel can either be a pluralist democracy and therefore embody the word as it is now commonly understood, or a Jewish democracy and therefore distinct from every other Western liberal democracy to which it compares itself.

5.  Hamas is a terrorist organization.

Yes, Hamas has used suicide bombers to terrorize the Israeli population.  They are terrorists.  But terrorism, by its very nature, implies just the asymmetry that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict typifies: terrorists do not engage in terrorism because they have the means to wage legitimate warfare, or to otherwise accrue power through peaceful, legitimate means.  Terrorism is — without diminishing its horrific effects — a tool of the dispossessed.  Moreover, terrorism does not necessarily delegitimize a cause.  Numerous states have achieved independence through means which included terrorism, but the actions of, say, the Irish Republican Army did not negate the brutality of the English against the Irish.  It is one thing to condemn violent actions which result in the loss of life; the loss of life is always tragic, whether in acts of terror or “legitimate” warfare.  It is quite another, and logically insupportable, to claim that acts of terror invalidate a subject group’s claims to liberation. 

A common statement made in support of Israel is that the nation has the right to defend its existence.  But this is essentially meaningless: the Palestinians have the right to defend their own existence, too (as do all human beings).  Moreover, it is not the fundamental claims of either group which are commonly subject to critique in Western media, but rather the methods invoked in creating those national identities.  If Israel can object to the manner in which Palestinian leadership proceeds, then Israel must itself be open to similar critiques.  Criticism of Israeli methodology is more important not because of any difference in identity or fundamental claims, but because of the asymmetry of power and resources; no matter how many tunnels are dug Israel is, indisputably, the stronger of the two combatants, and with great power comes great responsibility.

6.  Israel exists because of the Holocaust.

This is true, but is nuanced by point number two in interesting ways.  Before getting to that, though, it’s worth recalling the abhorrent history of violence against Jews in Europe — pogroms, expulsions, and genocide happened with regularity for some thousand-plus years before the Shoah.  There is, to this day, a town in France whose name translates as “Death to Jews.”  That Jewish idealogues saw in European colonialism a way out, a path to their own liberation, is utterly unsurprising, given the unceasing violence arrayed against them over the centuries.  In many places, even in the twentieth century, even before the rise of the Nazis, even assimilated Jews were not full citizens of Europe.  Zionism may have reached its apogee in 1948 but it developed over the nineteenth century, and the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917, well before anyone imagined six million dead in concentration camps. 

Those concentration camps, however, were not a foregone conclusion.  One of Hitler’s earlier ideas was not to murder every Jew he could get his hands on, but rather to export them all to Malaysia, an idea rejected because — in short — he thought it would outrage the British (that same nation which was the first to diplomatically support the export of Jews to Palestine).  Against the brutality of the Holocaust, some may find this nothing more than a bit of historical trivia, but it reflects an uncomfortable truth about Zionism: that removing Jews from Europe was a goal shared by Zionists not with liberal, assimilated Jews, but with anti-semites who wanted them gone.  Prior to the grotesquery of the Final Solution, where assimilation proved no guard against annihilation, the idea of moving to a hot, undeveloped, already-populated foreign land in the name of Jewishness was not exactly the most popular goal amongst the diaspora.  That Israel now asserts centrality within the international Jewish identity (a notion rejected by many non-Israeli Jews, but shared by many others) is, therefore, a feat of historical re-engineering rather than an inevitability.

Let’s hope that in the two years since I first wrote this, that town in France has changed its name, eh?  

The final essay brought up from the archives… a personal piece, written in the immediate aftermath of late January 2010, edited later that year, still felt in 2016.

I am on the BART back to Oakland and the music pulses in my purloined headphones, hijacked from the seat-back pocket and emblazoned with the United Airlines logo.  They’re cheap headphones but the sound quality is better than earbuds, rich with depth and clarity that I haven’t encountered yet from my iPod.

The BART is packed for a Thursday afternoon and I focus on the music, the slippery sounds that I have never quite been able to comprehend; it is entrancing, this brilliant noise, and I am ensnared by its rising and its falling, forever enigmatic.  I’ve read books on music theory, sonic cognition, and still it refuses to reveal itself to me.

Words: that is how I order the world.  Language I can marshal and understand but music is sublime and mysterious, and no matter how I chase it no illumination arrives.  I want to escape into the music now but neuronal firings won’t allow it, insistent upon conscious thought, and these words won’t go away even though I wish they would, coursing through my gray matter as they’ve done all week:

David, I wonder; David, where did you go?

Where did you go?

*

My flight into Cleveland is delayed by an hour and a half — bad weather in Chicago — and when my mother and I walk through the back door it is nearly two a.m.  My father is still awake, in the living room with my uncle and three aunts and a cousin, more arriving in the coming days.  Most of us are still on California time but all of us are hesitant to go to sleep.

I am camping out in the basement, my own private cave in the zoo of so many people.  It’s a spacious basement with room for more but something is wrong with the water pipes and whenever the toilet is flushed they bleat a ridiculous song, something in between a siren and a gong, loud and reverberating.  No one else is willing to put up with the noise but I don’t mind it, my head too stuffy to sleep.

I take advantage of the privacy to stay up late, later even than everyone else is staying up, and in the quietude of dead hours I lean on language to make sense of all this.  I don’t know that it can but my aunt and uncle have asked me to speak at the funeral and by five in the morning I think I have beat the words into a shape something like my cousin.

*

This family, my family, our family, is a many-headed organism made of dozens of moving parts: one matriarch, twelve siblings and each one paired off, twenty-three cousins (only a few of those paired off yet), three great-grandchildren so far.  Technically I suppose the number is now twenty-two but the official tally, the permanent record, will always say twenty-three, death certificates be damned.

We play Scrabble and put Scotch tape on my aunt’s cat, sleep on air mattresses and go through gallons of booze and don’t stop talking until we pass out from exhaustion.  It’s so easy in this world to feel like an outsider but in this tribe I see myself reflected, in so much resistance to tragedy and so many reflexive jokes, and together at my uncle’s house and my parent’s kitchen and the funeral home we stave off despair with food and alcohol and laughter and each other, most of all, with each other.

*

I am in a NyQuil haze for the wake, my head pounding and congested and confused on so many levels.  I don’t normally take much medicine but I needed some rest and NyQuil seemed the best way to sleep through the symphony of the pipes; I’ve been too sick to drink but at least I can achieve a chemical unreality with cough syrup.

It is an open casket and David doesn’t quite look like himself, made up and in a suit and more formal than he ever was in life.  I want to touch him, to shake him awake, but instead I go through the line and hug my aunt and uncle and then my cousin, David’s little sister, collapses against me.  She is a senior in high school, about to graduate from my alma mater, a middle child forever hassled by her older brother, and I stand firm and hold tight and say nothing.

Words may be all that I have to make sense of this world, but sometimes there are no words at all.

*

There’s an easy moral to be had from it all — drugs are bad, kids — but I’ve seen “Trainspotting” half a dozen times, and my cousin never looked like “Trainspotting.”  The pastor gives the official eulogy, something long-winded and meandering that ends with an exhortation to come to Jesus.  My father had employed David in countless home improvement projects and he sobs next to me, my mother on his other side clutching at his hand, and I wonder if his devout Catholicism is blunting this pain, making sense of the inexplicable.

There is a polished wooden casket at the front of the church.  I had pushed past it moments earlier, to speak at the lectern, to read what I’d written, and it seemed then and it seems now oddly out of place: I know David’s body is inside, the same made-up thing I saw the day before, but that is not where my cousin is now, and I just want to figure out where he has gone.

*

We like to think of death as a point on a continuum: birth and youth, adulthood then old age then illness and then death, the period at the end of a long and complex sentence.  It is a process to reach such triumphant punctuation and we imagine that it should happen peacefully, with family and friends present, time given for all the necessary goodbyes.

It happens this way for some, I suppose, but for others it is binary and sudden: they are alive and then they are not, young and vital and then — not.  David didn’t even go to a hospital, beyond such intervention.  My aunt found him in his room and of all the comforts this enfolding human blanket of family can offer, no one can ever erase that tormenting image for her.  I’m told there was some blood but I can’t listen yet, can’t picture something that I can’t even believe to be real.

*

They tell me that I captured him well in my words, well-written and well-delivered, and I am asked for e-mailed copies.  What I can proffer is so little but it is at least something, these meager words and whatever meager comfort they might inspire.

They were only memories, these words; they made sense of the person that was but offer no insight into what has happened to him now.  David was a solid presence in life, the sort of guy you’d want on your side in a fight (the sort of guy who got into fights), but death has rendered him ethereal, here and then gone, given over to time and things I do not understand.

I could blame the NyQuil or the head cold or the lack of sleep, those screeching pipes, but deep down I know that no matter how lucid I am this will never make sense.

*

Within one thirty-six hour span I go to the airport four times, all of us dispersing back to the unceasing demands of a life that moves in only one direction.  Chauffeuring is something to do, to keep me occupied as my parents’ house slowly empties.  I am the last to leave, departing back to Oakland, leaving behind a mountain of sheets to be washed and the wailing of their plumbing for the distractions of work and stand-up comedy gigs and bills to be paid.  It all feels even more unreal from thousands of miles away, and it is too easy to believe it never even happened.  Days later I play Lady Gaga at absurd volume across the Bay Bridge and try to crowd out the tears in my head, but she is less effective than booze and family and the song ends too soon.

The tears never come, anyway, dammed up by unrelenting disbelief.

Memories peek into my life now from so many unexpected places.  A Phil Collins song plays and I remember joking about it two Christmases ago; “Titanic” is on television at a friend’s house and with a jolt I recall seeing it in the theaters with David more than a decade ago, my grandmother taking us both in her maroon Oldsmobile.  These have been unconsidered memories for so long, piling up in my brain without reflection, but now that their collection has been so abruptly foreshortened I cling to them; they have lain dormant in my gray matter for years, shuttered and unspectacular, and suddenly three time zones away from where I grew up with my cousin they are all that is left. 

Six months later I am transferring numbers into a new phone, culling old friends — fallen away now — and I am blindsided at the letter “D”, tears welling up backstage at an open mic, and against all rational thought I put David’s number into my new phone because anything else would be a betrayal.

It would’ve been a fun trip home, under different circumstances, but under different circumstances we might not have all been so determined to have fun.

*

I am, like so many other members of my family, a terrible judge of time.  If it can be held and touched I can measure and analyze and understand but when it comes to the fourth dimension I am strangely disabled, pathologically tardy, incapable of proper judgment or perception.  Music lives in that incomprehensible space, transient, evanescent, and despite the best efforts of man to suspend time and hold onto these sounds still they fall forward into the ether. 

It is like life in that way, music is, and just like life it cannot go on forever.  There is much about music that is a mystery to me, but this much I can understand; these are impermanent things, fading from the earth in time, disappearing to unseen places, but when I close my eyes I can still recall the peculiar notes struck by water rushing through my parents’ pipes and the particular cadence of David’s voice, and these lush sounds are more than all the words I’ve ever put together.

His birthday is (was? is?) two weeks after the funeral.  Twenty-three years old today, if only I knew where to send the card. 

*

I was there last in August, on my most recent trip to the Bay Area. I stayed at my aunt and uncle’s house, just across the street from the high school and down the road from Santa Rosa Junior College; my aunt and I made our usual stop at the Santa Rosa fish market, a downtown hole-in-the-wall with seafood so fresh the air is thick with brine, and you walk out the door with the day’s catch and beach hair. We got oysters and scallops and mussels, the usual order for our regular bivalve nights, a tradition begun a few years’ back when amidst mussels and wine I drunkenly proclaimed my love for the bivalve and that little-used word became our inside joke, one so flavorful it retains the ritual capacity of the eternal present: my uncle shucks the oysters, fresh from Tomales Bay, while I slice the scallops into sashimi; they are sweet and butter-soft, luscious, melting on the tongue, the Platonic ideal of a scallop. My aunt cleans and steams the mussels, with white wine and lemon and garlic and backyard parsley, and some backyard purslane that I insist on adding. My uncle uncorks and pours the most hyperlocal of wines, grapes collected from nearby vineyards and brewed in my aunt and uncle’s garage. The next morning in the garden I collect a tote bag full of fallen green walnuts to make a nocino, steeping now in my cabinet, and my aunt and uncle gift me with apples from half-a-dozen varietals that they’ve grafted (now living in my brother and sister-in-law’s freezer, applesauce for my niece and nephew, jars and jars of it), pears, peppers, beets. We snack on prunes, ripe off the tree and sugar-sweet, and pause to drink more wine as the chickens cluck, content in their coop, all of us warm in the afternoon sun.

It takes time to build such a life, one that reads like an enviable magazine feature on the wine country.  My aunt and uncle have been in their house for thirty years, and I’ve only been witness to the last twelve; I didn’t see the garden laid out or the studio built or those apple trees planted. By the time I moved to San Francisco, just out of college and craving the California sunshine, their home and their yard and their family were all well-established enough to become my escape, to feel — as I moved, as I couch-surfed, as I had no place to call my own — a little bit like a home to me, too.

And so last Monday, when I woke late, frustrated that a long sleep had done little against a persistent and vicious cold, when I checked Facebook and saw posts from friends in San Francisco about respirators and outdoor air quality, links from Bay Area friends about the mounting flames, panic rose until finally, fortunately, a post from Jake, my aunt and uncle’s upstairs tenant — he and I have bonded over the years, forcing my aunt and uncle to watch “South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut” on a Movie Monday and getting into a shouting match about Richard Sherman and racism in the NFL during one memorable Super Bowl — who was OK, who had packed up his guitars and gotten the hell out even though, he reassured his social network, he was not actually in an evacuation zone. As I waited for my aunt and uncle to respond to my frantic “ARE YOU OK?!?!??!!” I tried to look up maps of the damage, but the chaos of the moment was too great for such orderly reporting. Eventually I realized that the Santa Rosa Junior College Twitter feed was probably the best source of information I could find for their neighborhood, and refreshed it compulsively until my uncle emailed later that night. They hadn’t been evacuated, but half a mile away the entire Coffey Park neighborhood had disappeared into smoke and ash so they had spent the day packing their car and truck, preparing to flee to Marin, to another aunt’s house, but when the time came to go they couldn’t do it. Nor the next day, or the next, or the next — even as the lines of the evacuation zones crept closer and closer to their house they chose instead to stay, to volunteer at evacuation shelters, to go to work. My aunt is a county employee; she’s an official part of the recovery effort. The ash she had to wipe off her desk when she went back into her office, she wrote to us, was inches thick.

My home-away-from-home, my second home, the center of my California gravity — by whatever label it might be known as, its more important label is safe. It stands, still, in a city where hundreds of other houses do not, by nothing more than luck. There will be nocino and applesauce for years to come. My aunt and uncle are safe; we could have had bivalve nights under another roof, if it had come to that, but without them the tradition would have become tragedy; not only because they are family but because they are the kind of people who, faced with a city-destroying firestorm and the opportunity to flee, choose to stay and help others.

I spoke on the phone with my mom on Tuesday. She was certain that they’d gone down to Marin, no matter how many times I corrected her. I suspect she would have fled, and simply could not imagine someone making a different choice. I would have fled, too, and though I can acknowledge that my aunt and uncle stayed I am nonetheless astonished by it, although I don’t know why; I have been the direct beneficiary of their generosity for over a decade, and why should I be the boundary to it?

Nearly a week on, my Facebook feed is oddly bifurcated. From Northern California friends there are links to articles, links to GoFundMe pages, links to DIY air-filtration systems to keep the dense, choking, particulate-heavy smog out of one’s lungs. From Cleveland and East Coast friends there is nothing, no mention or acknowledgment of the devastation, no donations, no thoughts, no prayers. Dozens dead, thousands displaced, millions suffering from the heavy smoke — and yet it seems that the media response is to treat this as just another California fire, something typical and expected. But Katrina was not just another hurricane, and this is not just another fire. Some disasters are not so typical.

Our president and his acolytes at FOX News, of course, have political reasons for pretending California doesn’t exist — we are an inconveniently well-populated foil to his claims towards representing “America,” or to have been popularly elected — but the ignorance of the scale of the fires comes not only from conservatives. I blame hygge: in the last decade American ideas about “the good life” have rotated northward, borrowing not from the Mediterranean ideals of “Into the Tuscan Sun” but from Noma-inspired Nordic fantasias of coziness and Scandinavian seasonality, so much more applicable to the chilly Northeastern environs of our national tastemakers than the tired cliche of endless wine and sunshine available only to us lucky West Coasters. It is not today’s aspirations but yesterday’s dreams which disappeared in the flames, and isn’t it gauche to mourn something that we’re all supposed to be over already anyway?

That day in August, after we picked walnuts and apples and prunes, my aunt and I drove to three different grocery stores trying to hunt down more of a specialty product she’d bought and nearly run out of, a fermented sheep’s-milk butter from a small Petaluma dairy that she insisted I try. It was featherlight and funky, singular and transcendent, worth the effort to hunt down even if only to discover that it was a short-run seasonal product, and out of stock at the moment. That’s the beautiful thing about brewing wine and nocino, about eating fresh apples and ripe prunes and backyard purslane: it teaches you to wait, to understand that singular and transcendent gastronomic pleasures require patience, that the land cannot be hurried. It’s a pithy lesson amidst most food, mass-produced and shipped from a great distance, but in wine country the sheer unabashed sensuality of every flavor is its own argument and all it takes to convert a skeptic is one simple meal.

I don’t mean to shame those unaffected by the fires; from Hurricane Harvey to Harvey Weinstein, plus the omnipresent threat/spectacle of our own dear leader instigating nuclear war via Twitter (what a world), we are all a little wrung out on national disasters. Napa and Sonoma counties have money that Puerto Rico does not, and that matters. But the fact remains that this is not a local tragedy, or a regional disaster. The North Bay might be its own self-indulgent self-parody at times but it is also America’s culinary conscience, which seems like a rather niche morality until one considers exactly what food encompasses: agriculture and environment, transportation and labor, culture and pleasure.  To live by a philosophy of food is to be embedded in ritual and tradition and principle, the ascendent theology of “clean eating” an ascetic dogma to which the North Bay can only shrug in bemusement at the idea that anyone might choose a chia pudding when creme brulee exists. Such flavorful impacts reach beyond the palate, as this beacon of localism and landedness has developed into an entire — and substantial — economy.  There are independent food and wine producers all around the country, but where else in America do they constitute an internationally recognized identity? Losses in the North Bay are not only losses of wine and cheese and produce and fermented sheep’s-milk butter but losses of toasts and togetherness, hospitality and home; even if you don’t live there, even if you’ve never been there, the openness and ease of the wine country embodies an idea of home so fundamental that we all share it, that we all aspire to it, even if we’ve replaced the grapes with lichens and the sunshine with snowshowers and rebranded it as “hygge.”

The North Bay is not beyond critique. Racism and inequality are issues there as much as they are anywhere. The gentleness and gentility of wine country agricultural practice does not preclude exploitation, and the truth is that those who labor the most often savor the least, especially if they don’t have the right kind of papers. The sticker shock of housing in Santa Rosa is less than down the 101 in San Francisco, but that’s not saying much; my aunt and uncle have worked hard but they also got lucky, buying at a more affordable time, one unlikely to be revisited again soon.  But no place is perfect, and if the humane vision proffered by the best of our gastronomic wonderland — of gathering, sharing, welcoming — is to be expanded, to be made more inclusive, it must first be rebuilt.

For that, we should all care, and thankfully, people have stayed for the effort.

-wearing khakis

-wearing sweatpants

-(wearing unisex sweatpants)

-wearing a hoodie

-(wearing a Shaun White for Target boys’ hoodie)

-not wearing makeup

-wearing glasses

-long hair

-short hair

-being fat

-not being fat

-being outspoken

-being well-mannered

-being intellectually serious

-being a comedian

-being a feminist

-femininity

-androgyny

-plainness

-daytime

-nighttime

-who i was hanging out with

-who i wasn’t hanging out with

-going to a religious school

-being a virgin

-not being a virgin

-believing in God

-not believing in God

-sobriety

-shortness

-whiteness

-middle-classness

-being in a rich area

-being in a poor area

-trusting authority figures

-not trusting strangers

-taking various self-defense classes

-being good at math

-reporting my first assault to police

-being in public

-being well-educated

-being from a “good family”

-being at my grandmother’s house

-believing that there was anything I could do to “protect myself” 

-knowing that there was nothing I could do to “protect myself”

*And many other people who believe that their good intentions are enough to justify the active harm they cause women and other-gendered victim of sexual predation and assault every day when they peddle this pile of unexamined garbage.

Berners, spring/summer 2016: 

Any result that is not Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee is illegitimate and wrong! We must disregard the votes of millions of black women, who have overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton, to get what we want! Also identity politics is a stupid distraction from the *real* problems facing America, which can only be solved by class-based solidarity led by the white men writing Internet screeds saying so.

Berners, fall 2016:

DONNA BRAZILE EMAILED HILLARY CLINTON TO TELL HER THAT DURING THE DEBATE IN FLINT THERE WOULD BE A QUESTION ABOUT THE WATER CRISIS IN FLINT THIS IS PROOF OF COLLUSION AND VILLAINY AND DONNA BRAZILE IS AN UNTRUSTWORTHY INSIDER DEMOCRATIC PARTY/CLINTON HACK!

Berners, fall 2017:

Donna Brazile is the only Democratic insider we can trust. Any critique or discussion of her insider claims are efforts to silence all black women, who we must always listen to!

Berners, spring/summer 2020:

Until the overwhelming majority vote for someone we don’t like.

Please. Step down.

It’s been a long few weeks for women (and men) who hold memories of assault and harassment as part of our lived landscapes. It’s been a good, surprising kind of pain, to see predation and abuse met with actual consequences, but those consequences nonetheless demand the excavation of our own scar tissue, all of those itches that so many of us have spent so much effort trying desperately not to scratch, and while satisfying it’s also really fucking exhausting. Trauma retriggered, emotional whiplash, crushing disappointment — it’s all there in every all-too-familiar headline, the story of Weinstein’s hired Mossad agents a caricature of the legal scuffle I endured as a naive nineteen-year-old assaulted by a family member who then hired a bloodhound lawyer who spent months sending me taunts and threats (he would expose the REAL reason I had left Caltech!, he promised, because one-third of college students transfer schools but it is only weaponized and discrediting when a young woman speaks against a prominent man); the pleasant shock of learning that the compact I’d assumed the world had made with Louis C.K., to overlook his sexual misconduct because “genius”, was a contract with limits, that what I’d heard about for years as a member of the comedy community was not as universally known as I’d thought; the less pleasant shock of seeing the photo of another prominent comedian, behaving just like a comedian, groping a sleeping woman on a plane, grinning at the camera.

I like Senator Al Franken — I’m not a Minnesotan so I have no call to vote for him, but if I were, then I would; not only because the near-extinction of the moderate Republican leaves essentially no non-abhorrent alternative to punching a ballot for (D), but because Senator Al Franken seems to take a balanced approach: serious about the issues, unserious about his own role, lacking the self-importance so easily found in politics and politicians.

Comedian Al Franken… I’m kind of meh about that guy. I know, I know, he shaped the glory days of “SNL,” but — well, were the glory days of “SNL” really that glorious, after all? When do we get to stop pretending that Chevy Chase is the peak of comedic brilliance? When do we admit that forcing collaborative efforts like sketch comedy into the white male worldview is creatively limiting and makes for a lot of shitty comedy? 

When do we acknowledge that jokes can be cruel and oppressive as often as they can be funny and liberating?

To look at the photo of you groping Leeann Tweeden, Mr. Franken, is to see a picture of Comedian Al Franken, which you stated as much in your (second) apology — “clearly it was intended as a joke,” you said, and it is clear. “It’s just a joke” is the preferred hiding place of every comedian whose immaturity/thoughtlessness/malice/privilege/ignorance/hate — take your pick, there are plenty of examples for each — occluded their view of their own jokes and the hurt those jokes might cause, often recast as “offense” because that loaded term implies a certain thin-skinned sensitivity, rather than a genuine and justified injury. It’s all part of the game in a comedian’s non-apology, in which said comedian transforms a question of their own values and humaneness into a debate about free speech, because “free speech” is an easier banner to rally one’s self-importance than inclusive comedy, predicated as it is on empathy and humility. 

But groping someone isn’t reducible to free speech; it crosses the boundary behind which comedians, and so many others, hide all their worst impulses. It’s not the worst of the recent assault and harassment allegations, not by a long shot, but it’s still gross and dehumanizing in the way that so many of the ways men treat women are gross and dehumanizing, ways that aren’t always — or ever — legally actionable but that nevertheless slowly chip away at female selfhood, that keep our eyes down and our voices low, that assert a hierarchy we can’t escape even asleep, even in a flak jacket, even at thirty thousand feet. 

The photo was taken almost fifteen years ago, and people change. I have no doubt that Senator Al Franken is a different, and probably better, person than Comedian Al Franken — but that is precisely why Senator Al Franken should resign, rather than allow Comedian Al Franken to continue to write his apologies. Because Senator Al Franken seems to have an understanding of political optics, of the mechanisms of power and privilege, of what it means to stand for others — which can mean, sometimes, standing down.

Mr. Franken, your groping one woman is not as serious as Roy Moore assaulting and harassing multiple minors. It’s not as serious as Trump admitting to grabbing ’em by the pussy; it’s not as serious as anything Bill Clinton has been accused of, or, in the case of Monica Lewinsky, admitted to. But that’s just the point: as long as powerful men can act with impunity, they will, and until we as a society have a mechanism and a model for them to face consequences, they won’t. The question is not whether or not Senator Al Franken deserves to answer for the actions of Comedian Al Franken — the question is whether or not Senator Al Franken wants to set an example by which other powerful men, much worse, might be brought to account. 

Because right now all we have is a group of powerful men pointing fingers at each other, each one trying to deflect attention from their own misdeeds by claiming someone else is worse, and somehow the only individual who seems to have paid any political consequence whatsoever is *Hillary* Clinton, because OF COURSE. I’ve been a woman my whole life, and unfairness ceased to surprise me a long time ago; when I was about nineteen, I think.

Given the partisanship of today’s Washington — and America — I don’t imagine that your stepping down, Mr. Franken, will immediately spur self-reflection on the right, that it might cause Roy Moore to drop out of his campaign or Donald Trump to resign his trophy presidency. I don’t even imagine it will do much to quell the right-wing outrage machine, which has proven itself adept over the decades at manufacturing anger and fear to suit its own needs regardless of reality. I’m not making an instrumentalist argument, at least not in the fashion being widely debated across the Internet, and certainly not in the fashion of the instrumentalist arguments offered in defense of Bill Clinton in the ’90s, recently and succinctly summarized — and deconstructed — by Matt Yglesias.

No, Mr. Franken. First read Rebecca Traister’s excellent essay, about the way sexual harassment and assault harms women along many axes, about how it not only exhausts us but dissuades us from our own ambitions, about how speaking up and finding justice is its own cost. And understand that I am asking not for your punishment, but simply for you to do the right thing. Because the argument I’m putting forth is not one of retribution, but restitution; of taking responsibility for causing harm, rather than making other people — women — responsible for the outcome of your actions.

It takes a lot of ego — a strong sense of self — to run for Congress. Asking to be a Senator is asking for moral responsibility, and to suggest that an ethics committee is suddenly necessary to determine culpability or consequence — at a moment when consequences have finally just materialized for sexual harassment and assault, for the rarest circumstance when there exists incontrovertible photographic proof of the incident, rather than the all-too-easily-disregarded words of a woman — is disingenuous, at the very least, an evasion of moral responsibility as obvious as so many comedians’ claims to free speech. Because just like those claims, that’s not the point: “free speech” and “I will cooperate with an investigation” both dodge the basic adult obligation not to hurt other people. Not, Mr. Franken, because what you did specifically to Leeann Tweeden was so hurtful — though it was — but because, in ceding your agency to rectify the situation, in forcing other people (women) to do the work of making things right, you are continuing to exact a price, continuing to benefit from women’s emotional labor, continuing to build an edifice on our scar tissue.

There’s another choice, and it’s a simple one: Be a goddamn grownup.

Bill Clinton maintained his own personal power by deploying the defenses of the right (“This is a private matter!”), rather than affirming the legitimacy of women’s experiences and participating in the sometimes-hard-and-personally-costly work of dismantling the patriarchy. Roy Moore and Donald Trump are pretty committed to their own irredeemability; they dismissed their own humaneness well before anyone else ever did. But you, Mr. Franken — you actually seem like a decent human being and a good progressive. 

There are plenty of people — including women — arguing that that, in itself, is reason for you to remain in the Senate; that decent humans and good progressives are a rare enough breed that we can’t afford to lose a single one. But the notion of irreplaceability has been used persistently to keep women and people of color from accessing power, because the men wielding it are just too damn good to let go — it’s an idea that protected not only Louis C.K. but Weinstein and Wieseltier, and frankly, it’s a steaming pile of bullshit. There are plenty of people who can tell good jokes, and produce good movies, and nurture good writing without assaulting, harassing, or otherwise discriminating against at least half the world’s population (“at least half” because, let’s be honest, if that’s the way they treat women, they’re probably not super great on their interactions with gay men or non-white men). And the reality is, the world is full of decent human beings and good progressives. 

Minnesota is full of decent human beings and good progressives.

So, if you really want to be a hero, then make a real sacrifice: find a few decent human beings and good progressives who would like to be a senator from Minnesota — especially women, especially women of color — and resign so that they can take your place. Mention them by name. Support their campaigns. Create a whole new template for responding to the failings of masculinity, one that’s generous and stands in genuine solidarity with women, rather than one that lives in defensiveness and self-justification. No, Roy Moore and Donald Trump probably won’t follow your example, but if they’ve become our ethical barometer then we’re all screwed, and the point is, somebody will probably follow your example, or learn from it, and women will be empowered by it, instead of exhausted by the endless demands of speaking out! that only compounds victimhood.

The first time I was assaulted, I reported it. I spoke out, and for that, I was hounded, taunted, and threatened for months.

The second time I was assaulted, I said nothing.

It can’t only be women’s responsibility to speak out, to arbitrate consequences, to manage this entire conversation. Maybe all men can’t get their shit together right away — but you, Mr. Franken? You’re a progressive. You’re a feminist. You believe women, and you believe in women. Prove it. Hold up your end of the bargain, because women have been holding up more than our share of it for years now, and we’re pretty damn tired. 

Women have dragged sexual assault, harassment, and misogyny into the public consciousness once again, and men seem to be taking notice. Notice is nice. But what we need now to move things forward is the hard work of dismantling, of some real heavy lifting. 

I hear men are supposed to be good at that kind of thing.

Written in spring 2013

My toes are hairy; fine enough hairs on the four little toes to go unnoticed but the big toes betray my Hispanic roots more than any other feature.  In Middlesex Jeffrey Eugenides defines the “Hair Belt” across Eurasia but he forgot to jump oceans and include us bestial Latino folk, swarthy, unibrowed, hairy-toed Latin lovers that we may be.  The paint on my toenails is chipping, half off, bright blue at the moment until I make the time to sit down with nail polish remover and balled-up bits of toilet paper to separate each little piggy.  The paint job tends toward the neon end of the palette, and it’s never well-done — on interior finishes I can be maddeningly precise but hand me a makeup brush and I might as well have Parkinson’s.  My arches are dropped and my feet have been a source of pain since I could walk but lately I have a new pride in them too, for an orthopedic flip-flop tan so absurdly well-developed my feet may well have been grafted together from skins of my mongrel background, Cuban bronze intercut with German-Irish pale.

Do I have cankles?  I can never tell; it seems to depend on the viewing angle, or the style of shoe, or the cut of pants.  I broke my left ankle my sophomore year of college, racing into a friend’s dorm room to hide an anatomy-class fake cat skeleton in her bed.  God did not approve of my pranksterism and smoted me, or maybe I just have bad balance, but I turned a corner and the thing shattered.  It bothered me for years until I finally did some damn physical therapy and it’s reserved real estate for a tattoo now, a standing microphone which is next on my to-tat list.  My shins can flex with muscle and my calves can bulge with it but as they taper towards the knee it’s all overlain with fat, though I never shave often enough for my legs to be aesthetically appealing anyway — who has room in her schedule for such constant maintenance?  I’ve got better things to do with my life; the entire series of “Cougar Town” isn’t going to re-watch itself.  My hair is coarse and dark and my legs are pale and there’s usually some kind of bugbites involved as well — I am nectar to fleas, shrugged off by human males but irresistible to insects — plus the odd assortment of bruises and scratches that come along with drinking and carpentry (never together; my limbs may be imperfect but I like having the complete set).  I wear shorts anyway, year-round, because that’s why I moved to California in the first place. 

Above the knees I don’t get laid often enough to shave with any regularity and besides the hair helps cover the shame of my thighs, chunky, cellulite-riddled, stretchmark-addled.  My legs are stubby (all of me is stubby) and the detritus of so many In-N-Out burgers shows all too clearly, even if I do order them protein-style.  On my inner right thigh is my most colorful inking, a red chili pepper winking ironically near the juncture of my legs: I am a spicy Latina.  I was pantsless in front of a friend and a stranger for an hour while the latter laid the colors into my skin and though there was a moment of panic when I first dropped trou (they will see the worst of my flab) the event was surprisingly comfortable, really; I’m friends with the tattoo artist on Facebook now, which is more than I can say for most gentlemen who spend any length of time working that general region.  My left inner thigh reflects back a long skinny scar, memory of a high school birthday party where an intense capture-the-flag chase scene ended with me lacerated by a furnace’s protruding metal flange.  (I paid the chasee back the next year, bruising her kidney during a particularly vicious game of foosball.)  The scar is thin and gleaming ivory, easy to miss amidst the creeping, rambunctious pubic hairs that spill beyond my bikini line; I know there are strict maintenance standards now (or so I hear) but I’m too poor to get professionally waxed and have not yet mastered a razor around the knee in fifteen-plus years, and some things just aren’t worth risking — I’ve never celebrated my genitals in the fashion of the Vagina Monologues and between gut-busting menstrual cramps and regular urinary tract infections the whole thing can sometimes seem more hassle than it’s worth, but my vagina has proved its use in other ways, so I’d rather leave it furred and intact than tempt fate.  I’d probably hate my ass if I could see it easily but as it is I don’t think much about it except when it earns me the kind of compliments that only come because I live in East Oakland, and there is a different kind of ideal figure here.

My belly is pooched and droopy — I went to the emergency room recently, with abdominal pain so intense and long-lasting that I thought I might have a burst appendix, and I would have liked to flirt with the cute jokey resident but he started off by palpating my flabby, gluten-intolerant stomach, and there was really nowhere to go from there (except to discover that I didn’t have appendicitis anyway, just severe gas) — but cures for this adipose are harder to come by.  I used to swear by crunches, five hundred a day at the end of my freshman year of college (my anorexic phase), but now my back is a wreck and I must work my core carefully.  My back held up for years under the duress of piggyback rides and stair-falls and construction work but in October of 2011 it gave out in the bed of a pickup truck, a tarp half-a-ton full of wet dirt in hand, and it’s never been the same since, spasming under even the mildest of exertions.  I used to be a beast, to savor the fatigue of a long effort, but now I fear I’ve become just some functionally useless fat chick.  The pain runs along my spine to the base of my ribcage and above it lives not relief but constant soreness, consequence not of spectacular muscle failure but of everyday pressures; I’ve traveled to four continents with my trusty backpack and it’s with me always day-to-day, a lesson of my transient personal history: keep what you need close at hand.  The weight of the backpack earns cheap jokes from coworkers (no it’s not filled with rocks) and strains my shoulder blades — I should have my dowager’s hump by forty, if the permaknot at the top of my spine can be trusted, just above the infinity sign etched on my back.  It was my first tattoo, standing shirtless at a parlor in Dallas, wondering how well the needles might sting, and I’ve been hooked ever since.  I like to think it distracts from my backne.

There are hairs on my breasts — I thought for some years of my adolescence that I was a shameful mutant but in time I learned that it’s quite common, though uncommonly discussed; that the much-adored breasts of Renaissance art and of Playboy share a certain artifice beyond inflation, the fiction of rose-tipped, pristine skin, uninterrupted by something so unseemly as a follicle.  But the common ancestor we humans share with apes was almost certainly one hairy motherfucker, and hirsute boobs are a real thing.  I have another tattoo above my left breast, sitting atop my heart, the cursive letters dbh flowing from a fountain pen.  It was my twenty-seventh birthday present to myself, nine months after my little cousin David Berosky Hopkins died, another young man made statistic. We’d spent a lot of time together learning finish construction from my father, one or both of us working at his side during endless home renovation projects, but when the time comes for me to buy my own fixer-upper I will have to work alone.

I have not always been kind to my own flesh, but I am trying to be gentler now.

When I was sixteen years old I spent a summer at Carnegie-Mellon University, taking calculus and physics courses, and there my studies were inconvenienced by a strange diagnosis: afolliculitis, or a bacterial infection of the hair follicle.  Probably my razor touched something in the dorm showers, the medical center staff said, and I was forbidden from shaving or using deodorant for one week while the antibiotics did their work.  I don’t think I was born with the impulse to do comedy but there is a certain point wherein one must come face-to-face with one’s own inherent ridiculousness, and for me that moment was when the doctor told me I had an armpit disease.

But from the cesspools of my underarms spring my most glorious feature, arms less toned than Michelle Obama’s but no less magnificent for their achievements.  My right forearm is significantly larger than my left although the difference is not so freakish as it once was; at the peak of my work with Habitat for Humanity, five days a week of swinging a hammer and raising beams and hefting fifty-pound buckets of nails (two at a time, by years’ end) — back then my right forearm was a beautiful monstrosity, bulging and jaw-droppingly capable.  Sometimes when there’s no one around to high-five I take out my old framing hammer and swing it at nothing, just to feel the completion in the arc of my arm, just to feel complete.  On my right wrist is my lone easily-visible tattoo, a tiny outline of a hammer to remind me of my own strength — my Habitattoo, I like to say, although I got it months later and hundreds of miles away in Los Angeles.  My left arm has little to offer except symmetry and a place to hang a watch (I’ve got a bitchin’ watch-tan), but then, it’s tough to compete with a hammer-arm.

I have the stubby unpainted fingers of a small child and the thick squat neck of a linebacker, my shoulders always creeping towards my ears with tension and momentum until I notice and force them into relaxation.  I have a birthmark on my neck that looks like a hickey, covered with hair usually, just like the tattoo behind my left ear; a light bulb, the old incandescent style, memento of a road trip to New Orleans.  A light bulb because I’m a thinker, in case the thick glasses and the constantly furrowed brow (I’m not yet thirty, but the lines are already starting to show) are not evidence enough that this whole body is really just casing and vehicle for the blob inside my skull, hyperactive and impossible to turn off when my physical self demands a pep talk even to get out of bed.  I like my face well enough, pretty sometimes, other times sweaty and set; my hair has grown finer with age but in spite of six years of red dye (I wanted to be Agent Scully when I was in high school) I’ve come to terms with the dark brown color.  The scalp underneath is nicely shaped, too, a fact discovered my freshman year of college when I shaved it all off for a bet; one hundred and fifty dollars, and the first thing I did with my riches was buy a hat.  At Christmas I came home with a crop of dark fuzz and my mother, auburn-accustomed, couldn’t accept that this was my lot in life: “God made you wrong,” she told me, not unkind. 

I never thought myself so graceless until I began telling jokes in public, and in the dark with a microphone in hand I felt confident in what I’d written and confident in my vocal delivery and completely confused about what to do with my body; this was stand-up, and I just stood there.  I tried to take a dance class at the local community college to fix it but the instinct and muscle memory I rely on to, say, drunkenly punch my male friends abandoned me altogether and I was as awkward in the classroom as I am in the clubs.  I know physical surety amid scaffolding and roof trusses, driving nails bent and left by volunteers, and alone in my house with music blasting (or sometimes in a particularly empty grocery store aisle) I can bust moves with impunity — but the moment a gaze is fixed upon my gyrations then it all falls apart. 

On the rare occasions when I am really feeling down I take the BART across the bay, to the Daly City station, and I stand on the platform and look across the street to the houses I helped build, with sweat and effort and the brute force of this imperfect body.  They are homes today, foundations and frames and finish now joyful and sorrowful and occupied, and I always feel better for the trip.

Postscript: I don’t live in East Oakland anymore, and can’t just hop the BART to look at my handiwork when I’m down; I also never got that microphone tattoo (instead, a Foo Fighters quote on my arms).  But effort and attention has restored my back to much of its functionality — a fact I genuinely do not know how to celebrate without relying on ableism (suggestions welcome) — and this imperfect body has accompanied me on three more years’ worth of adventures.  I think I appreciate it even more now than I did then, cellulite and all.

I began writing this three years ago; it was meant to be an epic, but I lost steam fairly quickly.  Visiting the Wizarding World of Harry Potter last week has rekindled enough enthusiasm to post the fragment that I finished now.

Like so many others, I am a giant “Harry Potter” nerd.  With the release of the final film, I’ve been embroiled in some discussions — and read some articles — about various facets of the Potterverse, much of which revolve around the usual meat of this blog: ethics, narrative structures, social justice and political identity.  So I thought I’d go ahead and, rather than respond piecemeal to different sources, collate all my thoughts in a single post here.  There’s a lot to cover, so I’ve tried to impose a structure that keeps things pretty clear.

First principles: “Harry Potter” is written for kids.  That’s not a slam — I love (and sold) kidlit — but it is an important rebuttal to two common complaints against the series.  Firstly, there’s the writing style.  JK Rowling’s prose is not revelatory, but it does the job well, maintains an appropriate reading level, and gets in a great deal of wordplay (what other book has contributed so many inventive new words to common language in the last fifty years?).  Rowling’s a better storyteller than she is prose stylist, and while the very best writers are both in equal measure, children’s literature tends to lean more heavily on the former than the latter.  I’m not going to pile on the series for using too many adverbs or ellipses (even though it kinda does).

The second complaint often leveled against the series is the simplicity of its moral universe, which is what I’ll be deconstructing for pretty much the rest of this post, but I’d like to begin that process by pointing out the obvious: “Harry Potter” is told from the perspective of Harry Potter (almost the entire series, save a few expositional scenes, are in third-person limited, in Harry’s voice).  Harry Potter is a kid.  We meet him when he is eleven years old and part with him at seventeen.  Adolescents are wonderful and capable creatures, but their moral compass is still very much under development.  As such, in order to fully understand the ethical complexity of the Potterverse, we have to read past Harry himself.  Readers encounter the wizarding world as Harry Potter encounters it, but hey, this is a post-Nabokov literary moment — trusting that our narrator, however heroic he may be, is correct or complete in his perceptions is just being a lazy reader.

The last premise I’d like to establish before getting into specifics is my reference point for authorial intent.  Authorial intent is kind of a twitchy thing to lean on, and my aim isn’t to find things that aren’t actually present within the text but rather to backstop textual interpretation with a sense of Rowling’s own attitudes and politics.  I’ve read several interviews with her but the most extended and thought-provoking speech I’ve seen from her was at the Harvard commencement in 2008 — my brother was graduating with his PhD and although I, barely employed and couch-surfing in Los Angeles, could not afford the cross-country trip both he and my parents insisted that I not miss the video of her address, which celebrated the dual importance of both imagination and failure (the latter of which was quite reassuring, as I watched with a cup of ramen noodles from my temporary home on a friend’s floor).  Imagination’s import is not presented frivolously but rather as the groundwork for empathy and political action: prior to writing Rowling worked with human rights refugees, and in the speech she interpolates a causal relationship between the literary imagination and the compassionate courage necessary to engage in positive changemaking.  It’s a powerful idea, and I’ll revisit it herein.

So, without further ado, I’ll run through my thoughts character by character, in an order that I think makes the most sense.

Harry — Although it’s his name on the cover of every book, Harry can be easy enough to dismiss as a hero: he’s blessed with athleticism, good looks, and a frankly absurd amount of money, and that’s before we even start in on the whole “Chosen One” thing.  We’ll get back to the prophecy stuff in a bit (and won’t really bother trying to decipher the wizarding economy, because really, that… is a whole ‘nother can of worms), but I’d like to bring up a point that’s relevant to his narrative reliability — in addition to being an adolescent boy, in addition to being tasked with a tremendous burden, he is also recovering from a full decade of abuse.  If Hagrid hadn’t shown up and whisked Harry off to Hogwarts at age eleven, then one could only hope that the boy might’ve encountered a sympathetic teacher to report the Dursleys to social services — kids who have experienced what his aunt and uncle do to Harry are the kind of kids who wind up wards of the state.  I don’t say that to be facile, either; I say that because, about six years ago, my father — who teaches severe behaviorally handicapped students at a residential school run by the county — had a student whose parents also used to lock him under the stairs (in a crawlspace, not a cupboard), where he would befriend insects and spiders to pass the time.  Like Harry, the kid was resilient, but he was also messed up.  Harry’s inability to see flaws in Sirius; his petulant anger at Dumbledore’s unrevealed past during the entire first half of book seven; his immediate judgment of Snape after being treated poorly by the man; the fact that Harry can never shut up about his dead parents — y’all, this kid is needy.  Yes, it can be a little irritating at times, and occasionally obscure some important points (as we’ll discuss regarding Sirius), but given what she stuck the boy with as a premise Rowling does about the best she can at striking a middle ground between a tolerable narrator and the psychological reality of a teenage boy coping with a history of serious abuse at the same time he’s also trying to, like, save the world and shit.  The Potterverse is not entirely unproblematic but to lay those problems at the feet of Harry himself is, I think, incorrect — after all, if anyone wields genuine power in the Potterverse it is not Harry but rather his mentor, which brings us to…

Dumbledore — The AV Club write-up of the entire HP saga took JK Rowling to task for her comment that Dumbledore is gay; they found it “opportunistic.”  Which is a head-scratcher to me — how is Dumbledore being gay any more or less opportunistic than his being straight?  There are those who feel that his homosexuality should have been more overt, that he should have had some kind of romantic entanglement, that more evidence is necessary to justify his sexual orientation, but this response disregards the created reality of the wizarding world, which is, plainly, heteronormative, perhaps even more so than muggle society.  Dumbledore holds a great deal of power and prestige, but even he is not immune to the undemocratic manipulations and machinations of his (numerous) enemies; were he to come out publicly there would surely be repercussions, particularly given his past history with the dark wizard Grindelwald (wouldn’t Rita Skeeter love to report THAT story!).  It might not be the most courageous option, but Dumbledore’s pragmatism in not coming out publicly has served him well in leading the effort against Voldemort.  Revealing this part of his identity privately to Harry, with whom he was fairly close, would be less scandalous but also entirely irrelevant — the entire first half of book seven goes to great lengths to point out how little Harry actually knew about his mentor, because their relationship was always focused on either a) Harry or b) Voldemort.  For Dumbledore to suddenly bring up his sexuality would have been rather Catholic-priestly of him, and, well, isn’t it better for everyone that the series didn’t go there?  Moreover, for those who found no precedent for Dumbledore’s orientation, I suggest looking to his generous outlook towards house-elves, muggles, giants, centaurs, and all the other manner of creatures discriminated against as a matter of course within the wizarding world.  Dumbledore is not an agent for systemic change (which fits with his closeted sexuality) but he does express a consistent solidarity with oppressed classes, suggesting that underneath his power and privilege there is some experience with marginalization.  This is why, although he is a closer mentor to Harry, the young wizard who most echoes Dumbledore is in fact…

Hermione — Dumbledore aside, Hermione is the best thing the good guys have going for ’em; when Sirius calls her “the brightest witch of [her] age” he could be referring either to her class at Hogwarts, or to her entire generation.  Without Hermione on their side, Harry and Ron die in their first year of wizardschool and Voldemort comes back into power without much issue.  In short, Hermione is AWESOME, and as others have pointed out, she deserves her name on the cover of the books at least as much as Harry — her heroic efforts happen not by happenstance or prophecy but arise from intelligence and hard work, and on top of all those smarts she also demonstrates the most well-developed conscience of any of the Hogwarts students; her love of rules is not so great that she can’t see past them to recognize the many structural injustices of the wizarding world.  

And that’s all I managed to finish — mostly because there’s just too damn much to say about Hermione, her experience of marginalization, her solidarity with house-elves (and the flaws in her allyship, and the pushback she receives from other wizards for even making an effort) — and then the great revelation that Hermione could be black (as, indeed, she is in the upcoming “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”) — well, that’s a lot to unpack, and most of it is already there in bits and pieces on Tumblr.  

(Also, for those of you who are noticing a pattern: yes, this is the week in which I dig out old writing that’s sitting unloved on my hard drive and send it into the digital ether.)

Another blast from the past: an attempt at the Internet-hallowed form known as “snarky recap,” from early 2013.  Because I always shoot for the advanced-level shit, this first effort was for a threefer — the novel, stage musical, and movie musical versions of “Les Miserables.”

A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO LES MIS

Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables has been in theaters since Christmas Day, but with its multiple Oscar nominations and the general controversy surrounding the adaptation, people are still buzzing — and buying tickets.  Whether you’ve already seen the movie and are kinda fuzzy about what exactly happened over those two and a half hours, or want an outline to help navigate the plot before you go in, or just want to be able to condescendingly correct people at cocktail parties who refer to the film as “about the French revolution,” here’s everything you need to know about the history, the novel, the musical and the movie — in a nutshell.

Before we even delve into the plot, the first thing to be aware of is that Les Mis is different from many popular musicals in that it is entirely sung-through; in this way, it’s more like an opera than it is like, say, Chicago.  Although the category of “sung-through musicals” has been invented to cover the likes of Les Mis and other recent pieces like Rent, which are more pop-infused and lyric-heavy than traditional opera, it’s also worth noting that some of the vocal parts in Les Mis are also more traditionally operatic than you’ll find in most musicals — namely, the two leads of Valjean and Javert.  So bear that in mind when you crap all over Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe: even a Broadway vet like Jackman struggles to stack up against the demanding range of Valjean.  The other thing worth knowing is that the novel on which both the stage production and the movie are based is hella fucking long, you guys.  Seriously.  The movie runs two and a half hours, which feels like a marathon until you realize that two and a half hours of reading Victor Hugo’s dense prose still leaves you learning about how the Bishop of Digny is the greatest human being who has ever lived (for reference, the bishop is in the movie for all of, like, eight seconds).  Most of the problems of the musical have to do with the unavoidable fact that compressing something as sprawling as Hugo’s epic political novel — which has been (kindly) referred to as “gassy” by fans — into something that is both entirely coherent and also less than seventeen hours long is damn near impossible. 

Anyway!  On to the movie.  We open as the stage musical does: on the docks, with the chain gang.  Unlike the stage version, however — which relies on the high technology of a rotating stage to showcase the many scenes of the musical — this movie is CGI’d way the hell up.  Hey!  Wolverine is helping to pull a giant boat!  He’s a prisoner, and his prison guard is the Gladiator.  Or, as he pointedly tells Wolverine while giving him his parole papers, Javert.  Wolverine is Jean Valjean, which in French means “John Johnson,” and in literary theory means “Everyman.”  Also, Valjean is super-strong.  Like, he might still actually be one of the X-men.  He heaves the giant, broken piece of wood that holds up the flag on a ship (I don’t know my maritime vocabulary), which manages to be a visual metaphor for Valjean-as-Christ-figure and also Valjean-as-Everyman-who-holds-up-the-nation-of-France.  But enough with the metaphors now: Wolverine is freeeeeeeee!

Except it turns out that being free kind of sucks.  First of all, Valjean’s been in the clink for nineteen years (five for breaking and entering — he was trying to steal some bread for his starving nephew — and fourteen more for trying to escape from prison), and dude looks like hell.  Which is taken pretty directly from the book, in which even dogs attack him for looking like such a sloppy vagrant.  He can’t get any work, because he must present his yellow parole papers everywhere he goes — his status as a felon is following him for life.  Hey, it’s only been one-hundred and fifty years since Hugo wrote about this particular form of social injustice, and guess what?  We still think it’s a pretty swell way to live!  Well-played, society. 

So Valjean gets spurned at joint after joint, until he rolls up to the bishop’s house.  As I mentioned earlier, if you sit down and read the unabridged novel, you will learn everything the Bishop of Digny has done in his entire life — or at least it feels that way, given how much Hugo rambles on about the guy.  (Fun fact: he went into such excruciating detail about how the bishop was the Best Guy Ever because he wanted to show what an ideal priest might actually be like, in order to shame and embarrass the actual prelates of his time, most of whom were pretty far off the mark.)  The bishop in the movie is played by Colm Wilkinson, who originated the role of Valjean on the London stage; he’s the Original Valjean, or O.V.  I always found O.V. to have a bit of a doddering-grandfather quality to him, so I like him much better as the bishop than as Valjean.  But don’t share this opinion too widely in musical theater circles, as many consider it heretical.

The bishop is a pretty cool guy; he’s the sort of person whose boundless generosity and high expectations of others make you want to become a better person yourself.  He feeds Valjean dinner off of some fancy silver plates — his lone extravagance in life — and lets him crash on his couch, and in the middle of the night, Valjean decides to take the silver and run (Couchsurfing.org does not use Hugo’s work as an advertisement).  He gets caught pretty fast, though, on account of the entire town being terrified by the crazy-eyed hobo-felon who wandered in earlier; the cops have been watching his ass.  They bring him back to the bishop’s house and give him the what-for: how could he dare to steal from O.V.?  And to claim that the bishop had made him a gift of his silver — preposterous!  But O.V. zigs when the po-po expect him to zag, and he says that yes, indeed, he did give the silver to Wolverine; in fact, he forgot the nicest part of the gift — two fat silver candlesticks.  The police leave, and O.V. announces that he has now purchased Valjean’s soul for God.  (Everyone wants Wolverine on their side!)

Narratively, this introduction is much more efficient than the novel, but it also minimizes the role of the bishop, who in Hugo’s work casts a very long shadow (in part because he takes up, like, four hundred pages before Valjean even shows up).  The book has a gentler introduction to the Valjean/Javert dichotomy — we learn about his time in prison through tormented flashback, after he’s already met the bishop and had his soul bought — and Hugo has already taken great pains to point out the enormous social benefit of such iconoclastic mercy.  The bishop is the anti-Judas, using silver to bring souls to God, but politically, he’s a royalist; his family was rich before the Revolution, like all sane folks he was appalled by the Reign of Terror, he was pretty cool with Napoleon (except at the end) and he’s down with the restoration of the monarchy.  In short, the bishop might be the kindest, gentlest person alive in all of France, but he’s also not about to start agitating for the kind of serious structural change that would do much to seriously improve the lives of the peasants for whom he cares.  Which is important towards the larger meaning of the story, which we’ll get to (though it will take a bit of time to explain, because seriously you guys, this book is eleven billion pages long).

So, back to the movie.  O.V. brings Wolverine over to Team Jesus, though it takes Valjean a songologue to decide he’s on board; life has been hard for him up until this point, and accepting the bishop’s mercy is not easy, because it challenges him to live a better life himself.  (Arch postmodern literary types who studiously avoid didacticism probably hate this story.)  Ultimately, Valjean decides to tear up his parole papers with his Wolverine claws and make a new and better life for himself — he cannot fulfill the moral obligation the bishop has placed in him while still forcibly oppressed by the state, so he throws those yellow papers off a mountain, sells the silver (except for the candlesticks, which he will use as dreamcatchers for the rest of his life), and becomes a respectable man.  From the mountains of Digny he lands in Montreuil, near Paris, where he runs a garment factory and serves as mayor.  People are still hella poor here, though.  When Tom Hooper’s camera zooms in on the streets of Montreuil we see that they are filled with peasants and beggars, dirty, wet, hungry types who part for Javert, who is riding through the town on horseback with his posse.  (Russell Crowe is a better rider than singer.)  He’s gone from gladiator to prison guard to police inspector, and he rides right up to hobnob with the mayor, a gentleman who goes by the name of Madeleine but who we all know is really Wolverine.  Javert cannot fathom that a convict could ever become a truly decent person, so he doesn’t suspect him too much at first. 

This is also when we meet Fantine, in the workroom of the factory; the foreman wants to bang her, because she’s the prettiest princess (or, you know, factory-girl) around.  Also, all of her coworkers hate her for the exact same fact — specifically, they’re jealous of her beautiful hair and gorgeous white teeth, which, as this movie makes very visually explicit, are NOT common at this period of French history and oral hygiene.  Fantine keeps to herself and is barely adequate at her job, so everyone gossips about her, and the song in both the musical and the movie does a pretty job of efficiently conveying that this is regular, routine sport for her coworkers — they’ve been razzing her for a while.  In the book, Hugo takes pains to connect the gossip-ringleader’s attitudes towards Fantine and her open-secret of an illegitimate daughter with her political and religious background — in the novel of Les Mis just about everything is connected to politics and religion, whereas in the musical, the ringleader is just kind of a bitch.  Although at least the musical doesn’t take the time to call her a “gorgon,” which the novel definitely does.

Anyway, Fantine gets thrown out on her ass after getting into things with the gorgon, which sucks, because she’s gotta support her illegitimate daughter, who lives with an innkeeper named Thenardier and his wife.  They keep writing Fantine and asking her for more money, so she’s gotta come up with some way to bring in the benjamins (or the napoleons).  She goes to the docks, where there are lots of whores and seedy characters waiting to take advantage of her need!  This is a change from the stage musical, wherein “I Dreamed A Dream” happens right after Fantine loses her job — the rearrangement is much more powerful, and is possible because this is a movie, so there’s no need for a five-minute solo piece to allow enough time for the female chorus members to change from their factory-girl costumes to their whore costumes.  Fantine sells a locket, then sells her gorgeous hair, then sells some of her teeth; the first two items are in the stage musical but the last is not, probably because that would be really hard to stage, but it’s taken directly from the book.  Then some pimp sees her lying shorn-headed against a wall, nursing her wounded gums, and he’s all “Yeah, I’d hit that.”  So she starts working for him, banging a captain and then being very, very sad about her life.  She sings “I Dreamed A Dream.”

Here’s the thing about this movie: Anne Hathaway fucking owns it, and it is all because of this song.  It’s amazing.  I have never been a big fan of this number — not even when it is sung by Lea Salonga or Patti Lupone, and I love Patti goddamn Lupone — because, as a big solo number in a big Broadway show, it’s usually, well, big, belty and unsubtle and sung to fill a theater.  But this is a movie, and Tom Hooper’s directorial decision to use mostly extreme close-ups pays off in this song more than any other.  In the intimacy of film Anne Hathaway is able to communicate the depth of feeling motivating each word, some of which are more breathed than sung; it’s the opposite of the Susan-Boyle-esque whimsical sadness with which this piece is typically imbued, and what it conveys is a woman who is absolutely shattered by the choices presented to her by the world.  It’s fucking phenomenal, and I usually hate Fantine (in the musical, at least). 

Now that Fantine’s a prostitute she wanders the streets coughing a lot (because, oh yeah, she has tuberculosis, and let’s be honest, probably also syphilis) and getting groped at by random dudes, one of whom looks like a poor man’s Paul Rudd.  PMPR smarms at her but she’s not into it, so he grabs her and she claws at his face, breaking the skin with her nails; PMPR cries out and because Montreuil has only one policeman in the entire goddamn town, Javert shows up.  He’s ready to haul Fantine off to jail for assaulting the guy — violence against sex workers has always been a normalized part of society, apparently — but then Wolverine rolls in and asserts his discretion, as mayor of the town, to decide punishment for such incidents.  He elects to take Fantine to the hospital instead of prison.  Javert is displeased.

Valjean is wandering around his town when someone grabs him to help lift a wagon that has fallen on some old dude, slowly crushing him.  Valjean uses his Wolverine-strength to lift the wagon that others could not (lift with your legs, people!), and Javert — seeing all this — recalls the freakish might of convict 24601, the man who lifted that heavy-ass piece of boat right before he got his parole.  Gladiator is onto Wolverine’s game, y’all.  But — what is this?  Javert gets a letter from Paris, and goes to visit Valjean to confess: he thought the mayor might be a convict who escaped his parole, and reported him as such, but it turns out that they caught that guy and have him on trial, so, Javert’s bad.  He’s all ready to fall on his sword over the matter, but Valjean is like, “Dial it down, dude, you can keep your job.”  Valjean dismisses Javert and immediately begins to songologue his moral quandary — the false arrest of another man in his place is surely wrong, but if he confesses and saves this other man’s life, all of his current good works will be brought to a halt.  Wolverine sings it out and ends up going to court and announcing himself, saving an innocent man and condemning himself instead.  Everyone thinks the mayor has lost his goddamn mind, and folks are too shocked to arrest him yet.  This is pretty much the way it goes down in the novel, except there’s a lot more detail about the courtroom and the trial against the innocent dude — Hugo’s book has many universal themes, about love and mercy and justice and mortality, but it’s rooted in the very specific details of French governance at a particular period in time, and he documents those narrative environs with sometimes-excruciating precision. 

And now… Fantine dies.  Valjean goes to visit her at her bedside, in the hospital (which is run by nuns), where she is hallucinating about her daughter, Cosette.  Anne Hathaway sing-cries her way into the Great Beyond, and Valjean decides — promises! — that he will take Cosette into his care and raise the girl as his own daughter.  It’s just like in the Princess Diaries!  But before he can get out and do that, Javert shows up, and Russell Crowe is not very good at singing, you guys.  Their confrontation does not have the dramatic tension it should, and at the denouement — Javert announcing that he is “from the gutter, too” and Valjean leaping out a window into a river to escape — it’s all kinda “meh.”  Which is really too bad, because this can be beautifully sung, and Javert’s history is actually quite important to understanding the character as part of the whole of society that Hugo is trying to portray; he was born in prison and he understood from a very young age that this fact shut him off from most routes to “respectable” society.  Without the ability to become a gentleman or a professional, Javert instead sought respectability via the only avenue open to him — an institution of violent authority, in this case, law enforcement (his other choice: the military).  Javert lives by a straightforward moral code that has been shaped by his own experience in the world, an experience in which he was never shown the sort of transformative kindness at the hands of power that Valjean knew from the bishop.  His moral rigidity — that if one lives rightly, by the rules, one can overcome one’s past as much as is ever possible (although never fully) in the eyes of society — animates everything he does, but Crowe is not a powerful enough singer to communicate any of that.

(Also worth noting: in the book, the whole confrontation goes down very differently.  Indeed, when Javert first shows up at the hospital, Valjean lets himself be arrested, and then he breaks out of prison and runs back to the hospital, where he hangs out in Fantine’s room again.  Javert immediately tracks him down but Valjean hides in the shadows and an awesome nun named Sister Simplice lies to Javert, who believes her because he is so immune to moral complexity that he cannot believe a good woman who is a representative of the authority of the Church would ever speak falsely.  Obviously, Javert is not familiar with the capacity of nuns to be the most badass people in the whole Church hierarchy.  The high school I went to is where Sr. Dorothy Kazel used to teach; believe me when I say that shit is for real, y’all.  Then there’s a looooong digression about the Battle of Waterloo, and then Jean Valjean gets recaptured in, like, a paragraph, and made to work in the galleys of a ship again, until he jumps overboard to his freedom.  The musical compresses all of this, and the audience is grateful.)

But anyway — Valjean escapes, one way or another, and runs off to find Cosette.  Who is living with the Thenardiers, venal innkeepers in another small, nearby-ish town.  Cosette is pretty and innocent and sings a song about imagining herself in a castle on a cloud where someone loves her instead of being stuck doing chores for some clowns who like to slap her around.  She clutches at a doll that is basically a bag of dirt and is not so much a real character as an object of pity, which foreshadows the fact that Cosette pretty much never becomes a real, fully-drawn character in any version of this story.  It is not Victor Hugo’s finest moment as a writer.  Madame Thenardier — hey, it’s Bellatrix LeStrange! — sends Cosette out to get some water from the well and fawns over her daughter, Eponine, who is the same age as Cosette and appears to have everything Cosette does not.  Then Bellatrix wakes up her husband, Borat, so they can open their inn and sing a hilarious song about how they are the scum of the earth.  The Thenardiers are used as comic relief in the musical and the movie, but in the book their greed is portrayed bluntly for what it is: they are part of the parasite class, taking advantage of whomever they can, robbing from rich and poor alike, with no sympathy for anyone.  They’re the sort of people who refer to themselves as “realists” to cover up the fact that they’re really just selfish, self-serving assholes who prey on the weaknesses of others.  In short, they suck balls, but they’re very popular characters in the stage musicals because they’re funny about it.  (And, to be fair, the musical really needs the comic relief.  You can put the book down and take a breather when shit starts to get too heavy, but on stage or film, where you’re presumed to sit through the story more or less continuously, something’s gotta break up the parade of misery.  Not all critics have enjoyed the somewhat jarring change in tone which occurs whenever they’re on-screen, but try to imagine getting through the damn thing without it…)

Valjean finds Cosette wandering in the woods, and she hides for all of three seconds before deciding that this random helpful stranger is probably less of a threat than the people she lives with.  They roll on back to the Thenardiers, and Valjean pays to take Cosette away, covering Fantine’s outstanding debts plus all the profit that the Thenardiers extort from him, because that is what they do.  It’s quite quick and very different from the book, wherein Valjean keeps his intentions hidden for an entire evening at the inn, choosing instead to play some serious mind games with the Thenardiers by paying them to stop yelling at Cosette and giving her a brand-new, giant-ass doll that makes young Eponine (who doesn’t actually have that great a life, except by comparison to the shit-show that is Cosette’s) crazy jealous.  They have no idea who he is or what he’s after and it’s kind of amazing, but the musical ain’t got time for that shit.

Debt settled, Valjean and Cosette ride off into the sunset (or, Paris).  Shortly after they depart the Thenardiers’ inn Javert shows up in pursuit of Valjean, making quite an impression on the innkeepers (which will come up again later) but not quite catching up to his man.  Valjean is in a carriage with a sleeping Cosette, singing a fairly bland song about how this sudden fatherhood has changed his life even though so far all he’s done is buy a kid a damn doll.  The song is new for the movie — it’s not in the musical — and it’s fine, but not great.  They roll up to the gates of Paris only to find that carriages are being checked — Javert has gotten there first, and the cops are on the prowl for a fugitive!  So Valjean wakes Cosette and they sneak out (but not before Javert spots them and follows), running through alleyways as they are pursued by the long arm of the law.  They reach a dead-end and Wolverine busts out his mad X-men skills to free-climb a multi-story wall and then pull Cosette up after him, because Valjean really is a superhero after all — he was bitten by a radioactive bishop, and now shoots deadly mercy-beams from his eyes!  On the other side of the wall they land in the safety of a convent whose groundskeeper just so happens to be the old dude whom Valjean saved from that carriage earlier, and who will of course keep their secret.  See, kids, you never know when saving someone’s life might be the key to finding safe haven from an overzealous, self-righteous police officer later down the line!  (Or maybe that’s only the moral if you live in Oakland, or early-nineteenth-century France.)  This whole scene is quite well-done and is absent from both the musical and the book — it’s never really explained how Valjean manages to make it into Paris, so this is a welcome addition, even if it does stretch credulity a bit.  (Although no more than some other things in the story.  Victor Hugo was a big fan of coincidence, y’all.) 

Even my love of French history could not power me through such an exhaustive recap — especially when it involved reliving Russell Crowe’s butchering of “Stars.”  (I would love to post a video of Norm Lewis utterly crushing the same number as a balm to everyone’s soul, but apparently YouTube took them all down?!  GOD DAMN THE MAN!)

More from the archives — this was written about a year ago.  I’m not entirely sure if I decided that it was finished or not….

My executive director recently discovered that I’m Cuban.  “Oh,” she said, scrolling through an Internet video to show me a particularly cruel squat she’d seen, “are you going to go?”

My face betrayed me, and she caught herself.  “Is your family exiles?”

Yes, I said, and she said she had friends who were Cuban exiles; she knew it was a complicated question.  Our conversation returned to fitness.

Earlier today I was in a meeting with my immediate director and a co-worker.  I don’t know how Cuba came up in the discussion but my boss’s reaction was immediate: “Oh, I can’t wait to go,” she said, then addressed us.  “Don’t you guys want to go?”

I’ve only known my co-worker for three days now but she’s quite savvy, and she redirected the conversation before I even had a chance to react.  A good thing, because if I had reacted, I would have — at the very least — expressed the same frustrated refusal that I showed my ED, that reminded her of the other Cuban exiles she knew.

The ED’s question, though, was redundant.  To be Cuban is to be exile.  There are rare exceptions, to be sure, but for almost all of us the identities are inseparable and insuperable, a daily paradox of who we are and who can never really be.

*

My sister-in-law is an immigrant.  She came to the United States from Australia after completing her PhD in astronomy to do a postdoc at Harvard, and then to work at NASA.  She did not anticipate living stateside indefinitely until she met my brother; now they have a house and twin babies and her green card is in process, sponsored by their mutual employer.  But if they hadn’t accepted job offers at Caltech they would have taken positions at Australia National University, and living Down Under is not off the table of their future.  Her mother and sister visit regularly, freely, and the question of whether Jessie would ever like to go back to Australia is freighted only with pragmatic negotiation and personal history.  Immigration is never easy, but hers bears no geopolitical scarring.

When non-Cubans ask Cuban-Americans if they will or have ever or would like to visit Cuba, I suspect that they — that you — think you are asking the same question you would ask Jessie.

You are not.

*

Growing up in Cleveland, I walked the same streets that my father navigated in his childhood.  My brother and I went to the same high schools as our paternal aunts and uncles and grandparents; we ate at the same pizzerias; we sat in the same pews, in the same churches.  My father’s life has a context that I can never truly grasp — the Cold War, Vietnam, pre-civil rights — but it is also familiar and knowable from having lived there, laying new memories across a well-worn geography.

My mother’s childhood is the opposite of all of that.  To walk the streets of her childhood was not only to cross a significant distance but to traverse legality.  The US government is frequently blamed for freezing out Cuba, as if we are the sole bad actor, but even with rarely-granted American permission I could not have walked freely through my family history on that impossible island: tourists of any stripe but particularly Cuban-Americans are monitored if they stray from the beaten path of photo-ready beaches and hotels or the picturesque spots of Old Havana, where the nostalgic ideal of Cuba is shepherded and mediated, curated for all those in need of something “authentic”. 

Things are changing now, of course, there more so than here.  My cousin Teva, a Spanish citizen who can travel more easily, laid her mother’s ashes to rest last year in Santiago. 

Someday, I will make it all the way to Marcane.

*

Marcane is where my mother grew up, a small sugar-cane town in Oriente province, in the southeastern part of the island, along the alligator’s lower jaw.  I know it from stories and pictures and fever dreams, and I’ve imagined going back a thousand times.

You may know Cuba from news stories and articles, documentaries and the Buena Vista Social Club; photos might catch your eye, spark your imagination for a moment, inspire a moment of sympathy for those poor Cubans. 

To grow up Cuban-American is to be immersed in a place forever out of reach.  We know Cuba from news stories and articles and documentaries and the Buena Vista Social Club, from photos smuggled out and every photo that makes the paper, from articles clipped and mailed, memoirs and novels and blogs, links to El Nuevo Herald and Generacion Y.  I don’t linger on images of tropical beaches but about a decade ago there was a gif of Fidel Castro tripping on his way to give a speech, face-planting; I don’t normally delight in injuries to the elderly but I watched it over and over and over again, transfixed, gleeful.

We know it from family, from pork and black beans and ropa vieja and empanadas and mojo, from heirlooms that made it out, from letters, from diaries, from memory. 

What does it mean to return to a place that you already know by heart?

*

But of course, I don’t know Cuba at all.  I’ve never been there; all I’ve ever lived with is the rupture and the loss, the omnipresent absence.  Of course I want to go.  Of course I will go.  How could I not?

*

Going to Cuba is your vacation.  It is something wholly different for me, and for those like me.  Cuba is not about beaches and food and music and vintage cars but about understanding the central trauma that shaped the lives of my mother, my aunts, my grandmother, my grandfather, the interconnected web of extended family.

Cuba is about my mother: a determined and resilient woman who has survived cancer twice.  She came to the United States when she was nine years old.  Some of her stories I know by heart and some of her stories I will never know; traversing ninety miles of ocean is a hurt that time has mostly turned to scar tissue but hasn’t entirely healed, and I don’t know if going back to Cuba will be enough to close the open wound she still carries.

Cuba is about my grandmother: stiff and aristocratic and unyielding and judgmental; warm and generous and big-hearted, with a laugh that could transcend all of my shortcomings.  I didn’t know she had a sense of humor until I was twelve years old and we were in my parents’ sunroom in Cleveland, and her laughter was a revelation.  Most of my stand-up material would have shocked and appalled my abuela but she’s so much of the reason I ever did comedy at all.

Cuba is about my grandfather: a hard-riding, cigar-smoking country doctor, friends with Mongo, the overlooked third Castro brother.  He died before I was born, before I existed at all, but there are photos of him at my parents’ wedding and him with my brother and it is a miracle that he made it to the US at all — he stayed in Cuba after my mother and aunt and grandmother all left to tend to his sick parents and by the time they died he found himself wanted by the regime, and his escape is the stuff of legend. 

In eighth grade English class we had to prepare and present a short speech about an ancestor.  Most of our classmates spoke of German and Irish immigrants, hardworking people who sought economic opportunity along Lake Erie’s industrial shores.  My brother and I both, one year apart, brought in our abuelo’s whip and pistol and told a story of dodging assassination by one of the great villains of the twentieth century.

We were not, generally speaking, cool, but on that day — on that day, we were the coolest.

*

I have lived for thirty-one years in a Cuba that may or may not resemble the actual country.  This is what exile means: not only to be separate but to be severed, to subsist in suspended, impossible fantasy.

Do I want to go to Cuba?  I’ve ached for it for decades.  To stand in front of twenty-two thirteen-year-olds and tell a tale of derring-do was, like all boastfulness, an act of concealment; in 1997, I didn’t know if the possibility would ever be real, and in my desperation to encounter the man of myth a bragging retelling was the most I could muster.  Now I might soon be able to meet him as a native son; now my grandmother is gone, too, and so instead of her voice and her memories I can only hope to find their echoes amongst the bougainvillea and the mango trees and the sugarcane.  Going to Cuba is going home.  Of course I want it. 

*

I don’t think that is what they — or you — or they — mean, though, when they ask, and that is why my face falls and my jaw sets at the question.  The Cuba you want to see is worlds apart from the one that I’ve always known — but more than that, your Cuba is an erasure of mine, a pretty mask over my mother’s unanswerable pain. 

Yes, I want to go to Cuba.  And I will.

But although our passports might bear the same stamp, I will never visit your Cuba. 

*

Written late October 2014; rejected by Grist and Shareable shortly thereafter.

Have you shared lately?  I don’t mean “share” in the sense that most of us use the word — the sense that we’re taught in preschool and kindergarten, the sense that commonly implies “wait your turn” and “be considerate of others” — but rather in the Silicon Valley definition of the term, with the rather less-common meaning of “use an app to hire a stranger to perform a service for you.”

Wait, what?

As the battles over Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and their ilk become ever-more pitched (this week saw Uber drivers protest in multiple cities across the country, and the company’s PR attempts at LA Weekly backfiring badly), it’s worth wondering how the heck these companies ever came to adopt the feel-good collective moniker of the “sharing economy.”  As originally conceived, the phrase was a rebellion against consumption, rather than a new and deregulated form of it; it was coined by thinkers operating outside the boundaries of traditional capitalism, and looking to redefine our concept of ownership and need.  Even before it had a name, the sharing economy had exemplars — Couchsurfing.org, for example, has existed for years as a worldwide hub for travelers, regulated only by social norms and community reputations (think of it as exactly as thorough and safe as Airbnb, except free).  Ridesharing was found not only in company-organized carpools but bulletin boards (whether at a coffeeshop or on Craigslist) and civic-led designated carpooling pick-up spots, not to mention, of course, the longstanding, grande dame of ridesharing: public transportation. 

Neither Uber nor Lyft look anything like real ridesharing, so it’s strange that they’ve co-opted the term while focusing their attention on killing the real industry that they mimic: taxis.  Read Uber’s corporate press and you’ll hear a lot about “taxi cartels,” as if cabbies are nothing more than organized millionaire thugs who happen to sometimes drive people places.  The app companies are doing a public service, they claim, by “disrupting” this inefficient service, and while it’s true that taxi rules could be improved in many cities, this could just as easily be accomplished by disruption’s gentler cousin, reform — a process in which all stakeholders could participate, that might even resemble actual sharing. 

The appeal of the “sharing economy” is obvious: public transportation is painfully unsexy, but dialing up a black car on your smart phone feels a little like being on an episode of “Gossip Girl.”  Couchsurfing is a hobby of vagrants and dirty hippies, but renting a couch (or a room, or a treehouse) somehow becomes aspirational.  One of the great lies of consumer capitalism is that value only exists as financial value, and so a service like Airbnb seems safer and more secure than the trust-reliant Couchsurfing.  I get it — when I traveled throughout South America in 2011, renting a room for three weeks via Airbnb felt vastly more proper and adult than arranging accommodations via Couchsurfing, but when my Airbnb host was a no-show and I was left stranded in Buenos Aires, it was the Couchsurfing emergency list that came to my rescue, no fee involved.

And therein lies the fundamental problem with the “sharing economy”: however much it co-opts the language of cooperation and collaboration, the “disruption” these apps promise most is the monetization of previously unvalued (financially, at least) interactions.  This sounds great on paper, particularly in a recession — hey, make some money doing the kinds of things you do anyway! — but as numerous studies have shown, introducing financial incentive into gift exchanges breeds distrust and destroys relationships.  You’re much more likely to become friends with your Couchsurfing host than your Airbnb landlord, and to be chummy with your carpool organizer or bus buddy than your Lyft driver.  The promise of human connection secured by money will always be false.

What’s not false, though, is the money these companies are making, and the anger their practices are generating.  Uber has been banned in Germany, and activists in places like New York and San Francisco are working to rein in Airbnb, which offers profit margins so far above long-term rental rates that mass evictions and conversions of buildings into exclusive Airbnb listings are leaving locals in a lurch.  The halo of “sharing” still offers these companies a comfortable veneer of anti-establishment do-goodery, even as Uber drivers run the numbers and realize their earnings fall below minimum wage, and even as the originators of the “sharing economy” concept have quietly abandoned the phrase — visit the websites of Shareable.net or the Sustainable Economies Law Center, which promote efforts like co-ops, b-corps, and community gardens, and you’ll read about the “new economy” or, more formally, the “social and sustainable economy”, or SSE.

In the interest of fairness, I think we should follow their quest for better labeling and call the “sharing economy” what it really is: the App-enabled Sub-minimum-wage Service Economy.  That’s a bit of a mouthful, so we can just go with an abridged acronym — the ASS economy.  Because only an ass could think it has anything to do with sharing.

Still true.

Another tidbit from before this blog even existed: written in 2008.  Edited in 2012, by which point the sentiment had already well passed, but oh well…

The biological clock is rumored to exist within all human females; it begins its supposed steady progression at menarche, the moment it is turned on, but the ticking doesn’t really start to thrum until one’s twenties, when the siren call of the ovaries becomes impossible to ignore.  By the time a woman is in her thirties, the constant, metronomic hum of the unfulfilled biological clock drives her to the kind of madness chronicled on Sex and the City — compulsive preening, loss of sexual judgment, finding Carrie Bradshaw’s musings remotely interesting, etc.  At least, that’s more or less what I’d always heard, what I’d absorbed and compiled from pop culture and my elders; though a human female myself, I’d never felt much of these strange uterine directives, and I was perfectly content to keep it that way.

Until…

It happened the week before my twenty-fifth birthday: a sudden, inexplicable, maddeningly inescapable baby-lust.  I was helping my brother move into his new apartment and on trips to IKEA we were surrounded by small children, hordes of them shrieking and crying, and as I saw one and then another and then another I had to force myself to look away, to stop my goofy grin, to not reach out and pry someone else’s child from their arms and run off like a baby-snatching lunatic.

In short, the week before my twenty-fifth birthday I lost my goddamn mind.

In time this consuming obsession has faded into a steady background noise; it waxes and wanes depending on whether or not I’m living on food stamps or sleeping on somebody’s couch (the correlation isn’t what you might expect: in times of stability my lust is only for adventure, whereas the more my life is in shambles, the more my ovaries scream “You know what could fix this?!  A BABY!!!!”  Because, you guys, my ovaries are stupid, selfish bitches.) 

I thought I could live out my days immune from such biological pressures. My parents have long been concerned about my willingness to spawn, a concern perhaps permanently engraved in their minds when, during my freshman year of high school, I walked around for two days with a sign on my back that read “DO NOT REPRODUCE WITH ME: I AM A CARRIER!” in response to a biology lesson discussing hereditary diseases.  Among my high school nicknames was “asexual” (I wasn’t actually disinterested in sex, just more focused on getting into my dream college), and those who recall the Lauryn Hill song “Doo Wop (That Thing)” can hum along with the anthem my loving friends penned in my honor: “Hop, you know you better watch out/some asexuals are only about/bud-ding, bud-ding, bud-ding…” 

It wasn’t that I never wanted kids, or that I hated kids.  I’ve always liked kids a lot, actually, although my preference has generally run towards the more sentient, language-capable variety — you know, ones that have reached the age of reason.  I grew up in a family of four but with a mountain of younger cousins, the bulk of whom I have gotten to know fairly well and all of whom I find to be totally rad little people.  I dig kids, and kids have generally seemed to dig back, perhaps because my complete unwillingness to assume adult responsibilities ultimately renders me nothing more than an overgrown child myself.  Whatever the reason, kids and I get along, and more than that, kids crack me up; when they’re still young enough to be youthfully unselfconscious every day is a dance party (with, yes, occasional tantrum-breaks), and then when they get older and completely, obsessively self-conscious about every minute detail of their lives they’re so easy to embarrass that every day is like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, except all the neuroses are actually developmentally appropriate.

None of these sentiments towards children or the eventual possibility of a family, however, prepared me for the baby-lust, the explosive announcement of my biological clock’s existence.  It was immediate.  It is visceral.  And it will not go away.  I have degenerated into an empty-headed cliche and although I am aware of this sudden transmogrification into a chick-lit heroine, it would seem that I am powerless to combat the forces of millions of years of evolutionary pressure.  Suddenly some of my sexual fantasies are even ending in pregnancy, which up until this point has been among not only the least sexy but also simply the most horrifying scenarios imaginable.  It is not okay, people!

I would probably be less weirded out if I did not feel so freakishly alone — not alone as a female (or a human being, really) suddenly desperate to reproduce, but as a thinking person so suddenly overwhelmed by biological impulse.  (Seriously you guys, women who co-found their own feminist comedy nonprofits aren’t supposed to be so consumed by baby-lust… right?)  It seems a cruel trick of nature, that it should pick me for this particular Darwinian gambit: congratulations on lasting a quarter-century, commitment-phobe — now get on with the baby-making!  I was already bad at picking up guys when all I was interested in was no-strings-attached sex; now that I’ve lost my mind altogether how am I going to ever find a man crazy enough to want to mingle his DNA with my own (and then spend the next eighteen years being legally and financially responsible for the results)?  I thought I could remain unbothered by the hookup culture until I was at least thirty, but now for the first time I’m having to contemplate the prospect of trying to land myself in a serious relationship.  I don’t know much about those except that they seem to take a lot of effort, although to be fair even that is probably easier than raising a kid and suddenly that’s made its way to the top of my to-do list. 

Of course, the sad truth is that I probably won’t be procreating for a good few years yet (actually, there is nothing sad about this truth — it is unequivocally a good thing, rationally speaking, although all my rationality seems to have recently absconded in the face of this newfound procreative urge).  Practically, I am in a position absolutely untenable for having a kid, although if this new obsession drives me to be more pragmatic in getting together a career than I suppose it’s not entirely a bad thing.  Also, humans are not yet a parthenogenetic species, which means finding at some point an XY-chromosomed partner for this particular venture.  In fact, chances are pretty good that I’ll end up like Liz Lemon:  ten years from now I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find myself accidentally stealing coworkers’ babies and suffering Mexican-cheese-curl-induced pregnancy scares, because even a healthy dose of professional success is apparently not enough to compensate for an unfulfilled baby-lust, a biological clock ticking away the moments until genetic irrelevance — which is what, in turn, drives a girl to off-brand Cheetos in the first place.  

I can believe that.  The brief span of my unfulfilled baby-lust has already been torturous enough; ten years from now I could probably be spitting Pulitzers and still crying into my cornflakes about precious little fingers and chubby cheeks and wispy hair and drool.

In the meantime, pass the off-brand Cheetos.

Maybe all I really needed to give birth to was this blog?  A niece and nephew are doing me juuuust fine these days, y’all…