How to Make a Scene

The other day I found myself on some pseudo-fancy cruise ship down Pittsburgh’s dirty riverways, and while sitting up on the deck trying to ignore the innocuous blaring muzak and outrageous drink prices I watched two drunken frat boys loudly harassing the other passengers and eventually getting them to do the wave in their seats. Part of me imagined the crowd’s compliance to this request was out of fear of reprisal, or out of utter boredom of being stuck on this boat without much else to do; but what struck me was that in that moment these two yinzers had unwittingly assumed an undeniable position of authority that enabled them to make something interesting happen.

(posted at key23)

you've got to plant your hopes to grow tomorrow

It's strange to look around at all my friends and see just how many of them are getting married and having kids these days. Not that I blame them, our community is incredible right now, people are very supportive of each other and want to make some stronger commitment to being here together. I hope it still exists when I'm ready to have my own children, as I couldn't imagine wanting to raise kids in the social isolation of the nuclear family. But that's still aways off. Even though this is the age in which this type of thing happens I still feel too much like a kid myself and have so much I want to get done before "settling down," going back to school and traveling the world and publishing a novel not the least in my plans. But that doesn't stop me from being utterly blown away by the courage my friends have to do this themselves, especially in this day and age, or from thinking about it a lot.

For years now there's been a long debate in the "scene" about whether it is a good idea to have children when the whole world seems to be falling apart around our heads. Look at the mess we're leaving them, and look at how overpopulated our small planet is already. But at the same time, having children is like the ultimate act of hope, it says "I believe things can get better. I believe there is a future." I've known a lot of older punkrockers who've sneered at this sentiment, but really, if we say we want to make this world a better place where better to start than by breaking the cycle of kids raised to conform to the world around them instead of shaping it to their desires, or of families tearing themselves apart under the lonesome weight of this emotionless system on their backs and in their wallets. Yes we can plant gardens, and have riotous parties, and learn alternative health care and bike repair and whatever else we need to take our lives into our own hands, but it is this community we have here and the families that are springing from it that will ultimately grow and carry these small techniques of revolution out into the world and time. Already I see my friend's children, just starting out in their lives, but so full of wisdom and autonomy and the desire to live, and I can't even begin to think what they will accomplish twenty years down the road. The word miracles comes to mind. We may be leaving them a world full of problems, but we are also building the foundations to leave them the tools to fix it and that spirit necessary to actually do so.

Spat and I were talking before the show about why we do what we do, create music and writing and revolutions with the passion that all good madmen and artists have, and he said that he used to do this so that he had something to leave for his children. A box full of novels and lps that they could point to and say, "my dad did this." We even wrote a song about the revolutionary potential of child raising when Courtney had Sonedore, called Resistance is Fertile (it's on the album). Now he's not sure if its in his cards, though I suspect he won't always just be "crazy uncle Spat" to his friend's kids. I told him that regardless of his future parental status this work will all get left to the annals of culture as well, which offers some motivation, but I do want to have a more personal stake in that legacy than just some scattered words and sounds. Our children are left to society too, and are just as much part of the work as recipients of it. They literally are the future, and I would rather not leave the making of it solely to those who have no regard for making it a bright or sustainable one. And it would be nice to be taken care of when I can no longer take care of myself. Society's certainly not going to do it for me.

towards a new male

But maybe there is some hope yet that the macho role models like Schwarznegger and Stallone are giving way to a more caring type of male.

Move over Rambo, you're cramping new man's style

"PARIS (AFP) - Macho man is an endangered species, with today's male more likely to opt for a pink flowered shirt and swingers' clubs than the traditional role as family super-hero, fashion industry insiders say.

A study along these lines led by French marketing and style consultants Nelly Rodi was unveiled to Fashion Group International during a seminar Tuesday on future strategy for the fashion industry in Europe.

"The masculine ideal is being completely modified. All the traditional male values of authority, infallibility, virility and strength are being completely overturned," said Pierre Francois Le Louet, the agency's managing director.

Instead today's males are turning more towards "creativity, sensitivity and multiplicity," as seen already in recent seasons on the catwalks of Paris and Milan."


thanks to Cap'n Marrrrk for the link!

Sensitive and Strong

When I first posted here I mentioned just how difficult it was to date and try and be an avatar in my own life. Since then it only got worse, to the point that I briefly considered writing a diatribe against the shallowness of the whole "dating scene" and the ritualization of meaningless sex in our culture, and finally gave up completely on wanting to ever meet anyone again.

And as predicted by my closest friends, as soon as I gave up on finding love it walked straight into my life, and I now wonder why I had any doubts for this at all. More importantly however I also found that this was only possible because I try and live up to myself and the world and be the best person I can be whenever the opportunity arises to do so. And it always does. She loves me because I am an avatar, because I attempt to be honest and caring and sensitive and attentive. And this doesn’t conflict with the fact that I am also sometimes crazy and melodramatic and prone to intense fits of seeing the world through a filter of ideals and archetypes. She loves me for that too, because I don’t deny that it’s also a part of who I am.

Of course I’m not saying that the whole dating game isn’t still fucked up, or that a lot of people actually want honest and sensitive men in their lives. This is a culture of masculine archetypes after all, soldiers and cowboys and cutthroat businessmen. My lover’s sister broke up with her abusive boyfriend yesterday, and when it was suggested she try and date someone who might actually be good for her she laughed and said "I don’t date pansies." I don’t understand where the idea came from that sensitivity is synonymous with weakness. As far as I see it, it takes a near infinite amount of strength to be a caring male in our culture. Or just a caring person. Though admittedly some "sensitive men" really are pansies and let their lovers and parents and bosses walk all over them so that they aren’t seen as exerting even a little power or authority over other people, but that just buys into the stereotypes of weakness as well. Which is more sensitive, denying you have power or knowing how to not hurt other people when you use it? Which is stronger, heedlessly fucking everyone else over just to get a leg up or being aware that your actions affect everyone around you? Why is our culture obsessed with these extremes that only seek to keep people at their worst, and what can we do about it?

The most obvious answer perhaps is to be as strong and sensitive as we can, and maybe create a different role for people to fill.

I don’t understand where the idea came from that sensitivity is synonymous with weakness. As far as I see it, it takes a near infinite amount of strength to be a caring male in our culture. Or just a caring person...'

the almost unbearable lightness of being in time

Everything still feels really intense right now, as if I had been walking around in my sleep, and suddenly woke up and opened my eyes for the first time. Everything still feels fragile, but in this really beautiful way where I can take each moment for what it is and then let it slip through my fingers like grains of sand. Yesterday when I was walking home from work I was looking at the sunlight breaking around the passing clouds and falling through the leaves of the trees, and the joy I felt at being alive and witnessing this was indescribable. It was filled with sorrow too, in not being able to hold onto it, but for perhaps the first time I was able to look at that first hand and be able to bear it. To paraphrase Castaneda in Journey to Ixtlan, the art of being a warrior is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive. To be able to look at all the things we have lost along the way, and all the things we can not control now and in our futures, and to smile at this though tears threaten to break in every moment. Because that's all we can do.

I don't know why I have always been obssesed with change, with the finality of endings and the unexpected unknowns of beginnings. Maybe because that's really all we can percieve in this world, the small differences from one moment to the next, and how our own actions are inextricably tied in with the world around us. As Octavia Butler put it in The Parable of the Sower "All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change." Permanance is an illusion, our experience is one of coming togethers and falling aparts. And admittedly that can be a frightening thing to try and recognize head on. Maybe it's because I grew up in a dysfunctional family near the dysfunctional city of Washington DC, reading too many myths about the apocalypse and noticing too many of the tragic endings that accompany living near the country's psychotic center of government. Certainly things have only gotten worse there as time goes by. It looks the same on the outside, but it is falling apart day by day. Hell, even our bodies are falling apart on a daily basis, the skin cells shluffing off and collecting in the corners of our rooms as dust. Thankfully our bodies regenerate, at least until they don't anymore. Our society doesn't seem to be blessed with that ability, and has been rotting away since they wrote up the Constitution.

"Things fall apart, the centre can not hold." (Yeats)

I used to lie awake at nights as a child and imagine what it would feel like to be dead. The utter horror of it was that I realized I couldn't imagine not being able to feel anything. So I put it away somewhere and tried to forget that one day I too will end.

In the one year I attended college I took an honors class called "thanatos: the many meanings of death", which looked at how death is one of the biggest taboos of our culture, utterly played down and yet we are desensitized to its overexposure in the media. There is no mourning and no learning process for our dead and how to face it in our own lives. And if we were to learn to face it for what it is we might be able to take our own lives head on and live them literally as if the next moment might be our last. Because it just might. Beyond asking us to keep a journal of our emotional content, which was the point when I started writing regularly, our teacher also said that if we are doing something in our lives that doesn't make us happy then we shouldn't be doing it. Even if being in class right then was boring, and we felt we had much more exciting and worthwhile things to do at that moment, then we should get up and walk out of class and go do them.

To paraphrase Castaneda again:` I insisted that to be bored or at odds with the world was the human condition. "So change it." he said "if you do not respond to that challenge you are as good as dead."

And so I did, and walked out of going to school and living in Dead City as well. I can't say I've spent every day of the five years since then living my life fully, and there have been some major periods where I was most certainly not happy and didn't try to walk out of it because of some illusion of stability, but looking back now I can't say that a single moment has really been boring. I think I made a pact with myself that day when I stood up from the table and said I'd be much happier going down to the river with my guitar than sitting in class that I would try and never be bored again. That life is too short and too sweet to not live it passionately and intentionally. Why else do I believe in magic and hopeless romance, and play music without ever recording it, and write so many stories and poems, and wander aimlessly at night watching the stars, and do all the things that are there to be done and give my life meaning and fulfillment? Even walking down the street from work has to be packed full of the utmost feeling, because I am there feeling it, and may not be again. The wind on my cheeks and rustle of leaves in my ears could be just that, but it can also be the sighs of the world knowing that it too is falling apart and moving on, and my acknowledgement that this transience is almost too beautiful to bear. But just enough that I can blink back the tears from the corners of my eyes and laugh.

but what does healing look like?

Of course, having the time and space and energy to wander around and worry about the finiteness of existence takes a certain amount of privilege that I happen to have right now. If I was bogged down in school or a full time job there would be a lot more pressing things in my life to worry about than how soon the flowers might wilt. But then again, I have spent the last several years making my life one in which this type of perspective is possible. I could say that I am care-free, except that in the absence of more mundane cares these other more psychological issues raise their heads. So be it. At least a part of that "free time" is spent trying to figure out how others might be better able to address this stuff in their own lives.

As part of the community health collective Grace and I have started working on how to write up Wellness Recovery Action Plans, which essentially detail lists of personal early warning signs before breakdowns, symptoms of both good and bad health, and a "toolbox" of actions that can be taken when one is feeling down or in a crisis that could potentially be used to feel better (such as sleeping, eating well, talking to people, yoga, etc...). Ideally these WRAP's could be given to our closest friends so that when they see us getting close to a breaking point they can say "hey, why don't you do this instead of freaking out?" Because often in those situations of extreme duress it is so hard to keep in mind those simple things that actually help. Now to learn some new techniques that will. I'm excited that several hours of the next meeting will be spent learning some basic massage. I am craving being able to heal people with my hands.

Something else that has interestingly come up in this recent intensification of experience is an increased amount of visual synethsesia. I am immediately reminded of the tunnel dreams I had several years ago that I could never really wake up from and hung at the edges of my vision throughout those days, except that this is much less directly image-oriented. In moments of extreme presence, physical contact brings up the perception of colors and textures in my field of vision, especially when it is combined with appropriate music. Abrupt touches are a jagged red while brief brushings seem as a light blue field with white birds flapping across it. And sound itself has it's own looks. I got my viola back from the shop with new strings and the bow rehaired for the first time since elementary school, and the depth of the new tones at practice felt more like painting a picture than playing an instrument. I don't know how much of this is just a suggestion of my imagination but the multi-modality offers a pleasent change from more linear ways of interpreting the world. Perhaps it has always been this way, and I was just numb to it before, but it is certainly familiar, as if it were a part of the structure of human perception below the discrete partitions of the "five" senses.