Stardate 94656.82 - Commander Obama's report on exiled Ferengi operating on uncontacted pre-warp world.

Commander Michelle Obama of the Federation starship Defiant reports that she has encountered a renegade Ferengi, who may be the same individual banished from Ferengi Territory after involvement in the unsuccessful coup attempt against the Grand Nagus. The Ferengi DaiMon, second from left, is reportedly now in the midst of seizing power in the largest extant economy on an uncontacted late-industrial class-M planet. Starfleet intelligence is still investigating how the Ferengi came to reside upon the uncontacted world, which is home to a planetbound civilization, still dependent on the combustion of fossil fuel sources for most of its energy. Grand Nagus Zek has stated only that DaiMon Trump was "given the boot" due to "staggering incompetence" and commented that the DaiMon "utterly lacked the lobes to pursue profitable trade."

The Admiralty has, over Commander Obama's strenuous protest, placed the Commander under strict orders to follow the prime directive, and leave the Defiant cloaked and in a holding pattern within the system's asteroid belt. Starfleet Command is concerned that, given this Ferengi's uncharacteristically spiteful and vindictive nature, any overt intervention by the Federation at this time could prompt a bellicose response. Starfleet Intelligence notes that the government under control of the Ferengi is the largest military power on the planet, and maintains a sizable thermonuclear arsenal.

blame, guilt, and white people's mayan prophecies

driving back down out of the Green Mountains last night, i found myself getting really mad at the radio.

namely, at "truthquake radio" on the local low-power legally-not-considered-a-pirate-radio-station.

in fairness to both host and caller, i stopped the station scan on this show because i knew it would make me mad. and i knew this because the caller was talking about "Sandy's artificial trajectory" and how it was "sent" right into downtown manhattan.

by the end of the call, the Gentleman Caller (himself also a host, for another show on the same station) had cited "Mama Nature's revenge on Wall Street" and his initial elation at Sandy sticking it to the Man by decimating northern Jersey Shore and New York City, as foretold, no joke, in the Book Of The Hopi.

the host felt obliged to point out that some poor people were also affected, citing "people living in beach community motels" and "renting beach houses for cheap in the off season." which are maybe marginally good points, if you're unaware of the existence or geographical position of Hoboken, Staten Island, Queens, Chinatown, and Brooklyn, where i'm pretty sure a few working class and poor people might live.

Gentleman Caller graciously conceded that, yes, those people living in beachside motels in Far Rockaway were also affected, and that wasn't fair, but in closing, reminded us that "Mama Nature doesn't discriminate," and that this is what we, as a species, could expect as "earth changes" begin, and "mother nature moves to re-establish equilibrium."

i was particularly primed to be mad at this, having just watched this explanation of how a violent, catastrophic return to a pre-anthropocene equilibrium is better than the best-case scenario, because at this point, we're rushing towards the threshold of never being able to have any sort of (even very warm) stable climate, ever again.

in the community health training i'm helping put together, we talk about handling emotional trauma, and how guilt and blame are coping mechanisms. when faced with a situation that's beyond our control, it's much easier to say "it's my fault. i was in control, but i screwed up." or "it's their fault. the situation was under control, but then they did the wrong thing."

because both blame and guilt rest on the reassuring fiction that We Are In Control. or failing that, "it's in god's hands," or "it's nature's way."

all of that is reassuring. there are rules, and a certain justice to those rules. but we move to re-complicate the narrative, because blame, guilt, or abdication of responsibility to a higher power are all temporary, protective coping mechanisms that will prevent their users from moving towards coherent plans of action.

and if we don't move towards some coherent plans, damn quick, then what will happen to "us" (U.S.) might be poetic justice. but it will happen to the rest of the world too. and i don't mean just humans. and that doesn't sound much like justice to me.

then Truthquake broke for a public service announcement. which was a message from "Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth."

Then some of the people who might have a hope of understanding the urgency of our situation got back to their magical thinking and their echo chamber, thanking each other for their problematic "insights," congratulating each other for seeing through the veil of smoke and mirrors.

Without ever looking at themselves, or asking what was burning.

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.