Standing next to a bicycle in the former capital of These United States, looking westward

yesterday, i stood in the woods less than a mile from here, wandered farm plots largely cover-cropped for the winter, and watched the commuter rail go by through the trees.

this city has history, quite a lot of it for this young country, and a queer sort of staying power. and like most such cities, time has worn it thin, so the landscape begins to show through the holes and the threadbare seams.

and this morning, my friend says to me "I'm thinking about Albuquerque. About how it will be out of water in 50 years. How, when I'm old, I will have the memory of when people started to leave the city, and when it became one of the first American cities to cease. And how all the people who leave Albuquerque will be tied together by that common experience, and how it won't happen all at once, and the city will persist in the cultural imagination for a long while after that...

and after a while, that will just be what is, and I'll get used to it."

Friends,
i have terrible news.
in the 11th hour, an agreement has been reached
and Status Quo has been snatched from the jaws of sudden, jarring disruption.
The great serpent which coils about the world has paused, and after a moment's contemplation, chosen not to swallow its own tail.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, we will get up, and we will go to work.
currency will wear deep, meandering channels through the middle of our lives.
everything will proceed as normal.

My very deepest condolences.

"after a post-death-announcement bump, the market finished down a fraction"

victory in the war on terror is the feeling you get immediately before the nausea hits.
the instant when your gorge has not yet risen,
two moments before you go tearing down the hall, salt seeping in under your tongue.
it is the thought you have three beats before you wonder if you'll make it to the toilet.
four beats before you make it. (or don't).

when you win the war on terror, you haven't yet arrived at the moment of reflection, hunched over with your own close sounds bouncing back up at you, wet breaths.

when you can see a little of your own face, and a lot of your own lunch, and the bathroom ceiling, and a single dark, curled hair, by the wall near your left hand.

when you feel spent, wretched and sour. and you wait, knowing you're empty, but knowing the heaving will come again. spitting to clear the taste from your mouth, but the taste is coming from your throat, and trickling down from your sinuses.

you don't feel any of that, at the moment of triumph.
in that moment, you have reached deep into your own imagination, and ripped out the enemy from your nightmares. you are fearless, because you are more powerful than any of the dark things that live in your dreams. you command armies, and the taste of blood is in your mouth.

and you have not yet paused to think that this blood tastes much like all the others.
and the things which have sustained you are already spoiling in your gut.

and later you will scrub your teeth, repeatedly.
and maybe wonder, while swishing another mouthful of listerine, when you began equating the taste of blood and ash with a sense of peace.

but the thought will be fleeting. it has been a very long time, and any other sort of closure would chafe on the new shapes that our bodies have taken.

this is something you can do, right at this very minute. or at the very next available minute.
go run a mile.
seriously. as fast or slow as you need to. but find a spot that's one mile off from one other spot. use googlemaps, even. start at one of those spots, and run to the other one.

here's the catch:
don't wear running shoes.

what i mean is you can run that far barefoot.
yep, even in a city. maybe especially in a city.
and yes, even right now, in mid-march.
if there's still snow where you are, you may want to run a bit faster.

i'm not saying it might not hurt. you might come back with blisters. but you will only step on glass if you don't look where you're going.

there are hazards in the city, but i'm not convinced that shoes will ward them off, or that bare feet invite them. the city does not have a monopoly on hazards. they lie in believing that the ground beyond your front step is inherently, exponentially more dangerous than the floor behind your front door. that your body is a china shop, and the world is a bull. that your two feet can't be trusted to carry you on their own. that you'll be safer in a house, in a car, in running shoes.

don't believe it. running shoes cause cancer.
not to mention pronation, supination, shin splints, lower back pain, heel strike and bad posture.

you'll be safer looking where you're going. you'll be safer being that barefoot weirdo. nobody wants to mess with her. if she runs around with no shoes on, on this street? there's no knowing what she's capable of.

haul wind into your lungs. feel the prickle of concrete against the soles of your feet, and wonder at how we live in places coated over with something so rough and hard and inhospitable. run, and know that with enough time, and practice, you could run twice that far, or ten times. you could run 'til the pavement fades away to sand beneath the tender soles of your feet.

it stays with you, and is worth remembering, frequently. that blisters will heal, given time. that it's hard to always look where you're going. that our bodies didn't arrive at their current shape wearing running shoes, or living in smooth-floored houses. that you can pick out the glass afterwards, and stepping on it isn't the worst thing that's ever happened to you.

November 21st

Today is november 21st, which means that once again, i have forgotten the transgender day of remembrance. This year i forgot about the Trans Day of Remembrance in San Francisco, on one of the cities highest points, where the distance from the fog rolling through the golden gate to the bay bridge is only as far as a sidelong glance. I was absorbed with the thrill of running to this high place, the exhilaration of speed and strength. I was distracted by casserole dishes full of frittata for breakfast, and the lovely queer posse who cooked them. Then by hilariously prurient comic books, and by torrential rains and purple lightning, and conversations in the dark of a self-imposed blackout. I might have remembered at dusk, when the sun completed its impossibly long arc, and disappeared entirely, once more, into the fog and the western sea, might, perhaps, have caught the pang of fear in the sky's deep furrows of crimson and lavender. But the dark slate of thunderheads hid the sun with catharsis. Later, i ate greasy burgers and velveeta fries in good company, with whom i then didn't go to a historic gay bar (on account of its cover charge), opting instead for a steaming hot tub in a suburban thicket of redwood. I stood, naked and sweating, beneath the moon nearly full, and there was nothing, in that moment, to remind me of.

By this point I recognize the pattern, of laughter and forgetting, though yesterday i laughed better, beamed harder than in some previous years. This forgetting is a messy thing, bound up in the clothes i wear, the company i keep, the families i was born into and the ones i begin to piece together on my own. The mess notwithstanding, I think that I shall continue to forget trans remembrance day. 

For one day out of the year, it will be a luxury to forget that girls like us are anything but indestructible, and remain cozily oblivious to anything but how badass our friends are, and how ferocious we can be when we have each other's backs. for those few hours, we can afford the delirium of ignoring the threat which necessitates such solidarity, and is thus implied by it. We can have defense without assault, hard-won identity without the hardship or the fight. 

From 11:59:59 pm, november 19th, until the first seconds of november 21st, the only people who will ask me if i am a boy or a girl will be the children whose faces will brighten and whose heads will nod at my answer, and whose parents will shoot neither me nor their offspring any looks of cutting reproach. 

We will have 24 blissful hours during which we will be free to discuss the role of the moon in our miraculous transformations, and the comedy of our bodies, constantly being constructed ad-hoc. We will be the only ones howling, and the only ones laughing, and the glint of silver bullets will never cross our minds, nor the flicker of torches, held with pitchforks at the castle gates. we will take in the midnights on both ends, the better to appreciate the possibilities of night lived fearlessly.

Conversely, while our brethistren will spend the 20th in an indulgent amnesia, the world on the far side of the besquiggled gender divide will stand in rapt attention. The day of remembrance will be when our neighbors on the privileged shores of the gender divide remember the machinations of normative power, which daily surround them. They will feel the prickle of gender scrutiny tugging at the nape of their necks. In their every interaction, teeth in square jaws will be set on edge, manicured nails dug into palms. Skins used to comfort will crawl, and their residents will not be able to say if it is discomfort or existential self-doubt which sets them to squirming. The mundane iniquity of binarism, thrown into a razor-sharp relief, will stand alongside the great and terrible spectacle of all the world's trannies living 24 hours with total self-posession, in full command of our powers and abilities, in a world stripped of kryptonite. 

And then, one day, it will once again be the time for remembering. On the calendar, this new Remembrance Day will follow the Celebration of Armed Transgender Self-Defense. It will fall five months and one day after Juneteenth, that dual memorial to the Emancipation Proclamation and the Abolition of the Prison. The new Day of Remembrance will recall the days when every trans funeral was a riot, and the years in which the fury of our grief brought the gears of the State to a screeching halt. The new holiday will have its roots in a hasty call from those days of rage, a plea to corral the anger and the mourning, to preserve some semblance of business as usual. That first proposal will be as forgotten as the usual business it sought to salvage. Its descendant will find its home, in the third week of a november long after the fires have subsided, when we finally need a day to remember that, not so long ago, there was a world where we were killed in frantic hatred, and went to the grave in shame.

on that day, children will watch tedious documentaries in school, and perform clunky pageantry in which they will depict the horrors of gender policing and heteropatriarchy. they will act these scenes out woodenly, in costumes made from old bed sheets, and laugh in the middle of their lines. they will try, and fail, to imagine a world in which gender was an instrument of conformity and fear, rather than a tool of invention and inspiration. And when they fail, they will laugh.

and until that day comes, i am content to keep forgetting: 

That the only day set aside for our trans family is the one that reiterates the logic of the Tragic Hollywood Transsexual, and remembers us after we are safely dead. 

That it is a day whose name erases the role that racism and misogyny, the marginality of sex work, and the violence of the state play in the death toll. 

That we set aside so little effort and so few resources for the militant preservation of Trans Life. 

That we do so little to honor our strength, or the daily feat of trans survival.

Instead, I will forget. I will be loved and I will feel invincible, and I will laugh with the children of the future.

Just to be clear:

when i say i've reluctantly come to the conclusion that industrial civilization is destroying the planet,
i don't mean it like how this guy meant it.

christ. what an asshole.

-10 points for "WTF" appearing in your manifesto.
and -20, at least, for targeting (out of all cable programming in all the world) the fuckin' discovery channel.
i mean really now.

malthusianism is fucked. humans are just animals. and baby animals are awesome.

moreover, humans aren't built for destroying the planet.
we're built for running. we just get confused sometimes, that's all.

i have been trying to find the right way to put this, but it's not easy.

yesterday i wrote for hours about slavery and petroleum, the Transition movement and Lydia Maria Child.

there's a point to be made there, but i couldn't quite make it, because i feel a powerful need to cover my bases, explaining carefully, so i am not misunderstood, what is and is not the same about the chattel slavery economy and the petroleum economy. and what i hope and fear is, or is not, the same about Transition Northampton and the Northampton Society of Education and Industry.

i've also been reading stories about what the world might look like, once petroleum goes away, if slavery doesn't. they're quite good, and have gotten inside my head, in that way that unsettling parables do.

and i've been planning for grad school, in history. and reading derrick jensen for the first time, and spending a lot of time outside, down by a river that seems to get lower by the day, and the woods that are none of them much past 100 years old.

just now, a series of funny things. i read this sentence: "what are ten species of edible plants within one hundred yards of your home?" and i could answer that question. more or less.

and then i read this: "I was recently in new england, and someone there commented that local trees had grown back over the last hundred years. he took this as a good sign: the people of the region had finally learned to not deforest their own backyards." followed by a counterpoint: "technological and social innovation have enabled these yankees to deforest the globe."

and my first thought was that when i walk, or run, out to those century-old woods by the river, where i can identify burdock and lambs quarters and dandelion and acorns and nettle and daylily and a half dozen other edible plants, i find them in fields that get annually bush-hogged, and in the thin slips of young woods between.

and then the last funny thing that happened was that, in this same book, i read the name of a friend i fell out of touch with years ago, which spurred me to try to find the right way to say this again... and when i went upstairs, i found i'd left my coal burning computer open and idling on the website of the man who gave me that phrase.

the friend was someone who went to yale when this country was first invading iraq. she thought that the invasion was a really bad idea, and hung the flag upside-down out her window, and for her trouble, she had her living space invaded by a belligerent group of white undergrad men wielding 2x4s and racist epithets.

I remember the sense, at the time, that this kind of violence was waiting, out in the open, for anyone willing to say anything marginally honest about iraq, and this nation's military goals there. doubly so if these honest people failed to be straight white men.

and i remember being confused that someone who so gloriously failed to be such things would still be, as our mutual acquaintances told me she was, a primitivist. my exposure to primitivists at that point was mostly to the variety that seemed excited about The Collapse, and the fantasy of eking out a hard-bitten survivalist existence that was nasty, brutish, and short, in the deer hide pants that they had already made for the occaision. i had, and have, little patience, and something verging on utter contempt, for dudes whose rejection of "civilization" stems from civilization's emasculating nanny culture that fails to separate the men from the boys... or whatever. so i wrote off primitivism and deep ecology and "anti-civ" as so much masturbatory ablist heteropatriarchal macho fantasy, with a fetish for the noble savage. There's a slight aftertaste, bitter and lingering, of some of that in Jensen's writings.

at the beginning of my senior year in college, i watched Post-Katrina New Orleans happen. and i worked on my thesis during spring break, when most of my friends went to new orleans for the same reasons i later did - a powerful need to do something.

and when i got down there, i found that Post-Katrina New Orleans had taken place just like The Gulf War. and what is most upsetting, and hardest to shake, is that new orleans absolutely refuses to be anywhere but the real world. which means that what happens there happens because of what happens here. the same world, the same rules, the same patterns of inputs and outputs. 

at the beginning of the summer, two lovely friends from new orleans visited my home town, and we talked about the Deepwater Horizon. gallows humor, mostly. a few weeks ago, a wonderfully thoughtful mentor and i sat down to lunch, and she said "It's gotten to the point where things are so fucked that I can't take it all in." we were talking about the collapsing lobster population in the atlantic, and about the Deepwater Horizon, which had still not been capped.

i've reluctantly revisited my dismissal of primitivism. or rather, i've come to the conclusion that all my discomfort with The Dudebros Of The Apocolypse is merited. and that calling it "civilization" is complicated, but that the industrial petroleum economy is going to burn itself out, that there are other economies waiting to take its place, and they are also going to burn themselves out, and that in so doing, those economic systems are going to continue destroying vast areas of the world, and vast numbers of its inhabitants. Look at the gulf, or that other gulf that oil comes from. or the niger delta, or the appalachians. or the Sundarbans. one of the helpful things about Jensen is that he insists we already know plenty of examples. and i find that i do.

basically, i have, in the last several years, stopped seeing apocalypse as an adventure fantasy, and have started to see it as a fairly honest way of describing actual events. a partial description, because apocalypse, as a concept, has two parts. the first part is the end of the world in question. then the veil-lifting part. and we've got the worlds ending part. it's been with us since 1492 (in Al-Andalus and Guanahani both) and before, and since. the difference now is that many different sorts of worlds seem to be ending at once. 


there's some level of consensus on oil discovery and production being well over the hill. ditto the effects of climate change. and as joni seager doesn't quite put it in her wonderful talk at barnard, fuck a bunch of 2 degrees feel-good bullshit.
it's the revelation part that we're still waiting on. not The Case Of Chosen v. Fallen kind of revelation. the other one, where knowledge gets assimilated, incorporated, and acted on.

So i'm marking the end of this summer by taking the GRE, and then looking after some dogs, and then going to work with some Queer Family in tennessee. and from there, i'm hoping to go visit a lot of people i care about, in a lot of places i've never been, and try to figure out the right thing to do, somewhere in the process. 

because i know that i can wake up in the morning and write my thesis instead of going to new orleans. i've made that decision before.

but there are deeper and more simple questions, about far less familiar and far more apparent options.

And i'd appreciate some input.