A Letter to the People of Roseburg

Dear Roseburg,

I am not gay.

Sincerely,

Steve

That's so negative. It sounds condemnatory. Not to mention defensive.

Dear Roseburg,

I am not gay -- but it would be okay if I were.

Sincerely,

Steve

That's a little better but still problematic. The old "Not that there's anything wrong with that!" defense from someone who clearly believes there's something wrong with that.

Dear Roseburg,

My orientation is none of your business. However if you really must know, I prefer women. Not out of any kind of religious-authoritarian "morality," but mainly for aesthetic reasons. Women are prettier than men, their skin is softer, their kisses are sweeter. And yes, I know this from experience -- Because I'm not so afraid of society's condemnation that I am unwilling to explore the urgings of my own body.

Sincerely,

Steve

Okay, that is the best so far. But you know? I'm still bothered by this whole business. Why should I have to fit myself into a set of socially-constructed categories?

Dear Roseburg,

What do these terms, "gay," "straight," "bisexual" even mean? They are only words, and do not actually describe objective reality. We can know this, because we can point to cultures throughout history in which those words would have been useless. The Sambia of New Guinea, for example -- Were the men all gay, or bisexual, because of their belief that men could not produce their own semen and must -- ahem -- acquire it from some other source?

What we are ultimately talking about are the sexual urges, preferences and sources of pleasure of individuals. Historically, in the West, certain sex acts have been proscribed -- and the nature of the human libido seems to be such that within a given population, a given number of individuals will prefer these acts. Meanwhile the sexual urge is powerful enough and, indeed, important enough to the individual's psychological health and peace, that the proscription of such acts becomes a terrible burden on individuals, particularly when "proscription" includes the infliction of state-violence against individuals as had been the case throughout much of the Western world.

In the twentieth century we saw the emergence of identity politics as a means for large groups of individuals to counter state violence by creating a common identity and organizing to protect one another and change the laws that targeted all of them individually. Though this began with marginalized "racial" groups, it did not take long before these tactics were co-opted by others against whom state violence had been directed: Including those labeled "homosexual."

Individuals targeted by the state have the right to resist in any way they choose. Identity politics has proven an effective method of resistance, and no one can begrudge so-called "gays" and "lesbians" (and "bisexuals" and the "transgendered") the right to their employ. This does not change the fact that "gay" as an identity is an artificial, cultural construct, and not a thing in-and-of itself, an objectively verifiable component of concrete reality (inasmuch as there is such a thing). And for myself, I reject the idea that I must identify myself with an essentially hollow social category. Culture is produced and reproduced by individuals, and even when we don't see it, we all have the choice as to whether to participate in a given cultural construct's reproduction.

In this case, I choose not to participate. I look forward, rather, to a day when such labels are unnecessary and we are all free to love who we choose in the manner of our choosing, without fear of the law, without fear of those trembling authoritarians (i.e., homophobes) who prefer violence to love and would rather kill a man than see him live his life in the manner of his choosing.

Therefore, I am not gay.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Sincerely,

Steve

I think we've got it!

Mistakes Were Made

It began wittily enough.

First I was in the grocery store and the cashier had to slide my card a bunch of times. "I'm sorry," she said, "Your card wasn't communicating." I looked at her and said, "Yeah, that's what my girlfriend says about me."

I'm single, but everybody still laughed.

***

Later it was time for Little Murphy's. It was an important evening for me, the Night of Restitution. I walked in by myself. Bill the BarBack was there and said, "What do you need?"

I said, "First, I owe you seven dollars from last Thursday."

He looked at me in shock as I gave him seven bucks and two for the tip jar. "That's the first time that's ever happened," he said.

For one fleeting moment, I was an honest man.

I was waiting for LeeAnn, but she had decided that there is little difference between 7:00 and 7:50. In the meantime Gabriel and Megan turned up. Says Megan: "What should I order?"

I noticed on the menu that there is a logger sandwich, Roseburg being a defunct logging town. I suggested that. "The logger is so you."

"Why, because I'm from Roseburg?"

"No, because you're malty with a smooth finish."

***

Some weeks ago, Gabe and I were at The Idle Hour when a woman turned up and chatted with us about how we are intellectuals.

Last night the very same woman was there, and accosted Gabriel, Megan and I as we were smoking cigarettes outside. She is crazy and we were irritated. "Hi intellectuals! You guys are so cool! You're the coolest in town!"

...It was obnoxious, until she started giving out Awards! You know of course that this is not the first award I have received this week, but it was the first award presented by Sloth from The Goonies.

The 2008 Sloth Awards

brought to you by psychedelic mushrooms, or possibly the use of intravenous drugs during pregnancy

Presented to:

• Gabriel. "You are the Smartest."

• Megan. "You are the Prettiest."

• Steve. "You are the Cleverest."

I would say that everyone was pretty satisfied with the results.

***

It is the next day, and I am left with a few lingering questions. Among these:

Why did it make sense to go the DeathMetal Bar at 10:00 at night?

Why is my bank account suddenly so depleted?

What is this pounding, pounding, pounding in my skull?

I searched all morning for the answer, before deciding: Perhaps there are some mysteries Man was never meant to unravel.

The End of Days

Yesterday was the 8th Day.

Notes on the 8 Days of Broke and Sober:

I only drank during 5 of them.

They included one of the bigger disasters to befall our group of friends.

It didn't befall me directly, but since I was present, I deserve almost as much sympathy.

My friends are very good.

They would be good even if they didn't a) buy me drinks and b) indulge my self-obsession. Yes,

• Gabriel (full-blooded Jewish-Catholic and finest of the world's Burien);

• Megan (the safest driver in America);

• TeacherMichael (who is actually a really good guy if you ignore all the words he says);

• NewVistaLexie (who earned my approval with her love of Springsteen but, come on, you're actually going to call Tunnel of Love his best album?);

• SarahtheLeader (who uses her crypto-Stalinist Leader powers to be nice to me);

• LeeAnn (TONIGHT IS TUESDAY! I CAN PAY MY BAR TAB!)

• Lindsey (with whom I have now bonded thanks to lizards, manzanita and bewildering rockgoblins);

• Adrienne (Thanks For Being You!);

• DrunkLily (absent this week but forever alive in our hearts);

• EmilyOnTheCoast (O friend faraway & lonely beside the Sea, May the Springtime sing a thousand blended joys to you & the winds of Oregon return you to us soon);

• KatieTheBartenderAtLittleMurphy's (Tonight is payday! I am coming back to pay my tab!!);

• And finally, yes you knew it was coming, SteveWhoIsMe (Keep on doing what you do, man):

Yes, all you great and fiery-blooded people are the first ever recipients of

The Better Cats Award!

Some cats are good cats. These cats are Better Cats.

(Photo: Left to right, Gabe, Megan, Emily, Me, LeeAnn, TeacherMike, and Lindsey prepare to play ultimate frisbee).


Congratulations Everybody!! And to all you good cats out there: Don't give up hope! Your time will come!

In My Dreams I Was A Werewolf

Well, not me, actually.

Dream: Girl and I are in film class (for some reason taught by my high school Spanish teacher) about to watch The Wolf Man. Girl and I cuddle, the movie begins: Close up on a scraggly-haired bearded man, biting a woman repeatedly on the neck as she stands on her front porch. He leaves. The door opens, and her boyfriend is there. Close up on her face: her eyes are wolfish yellow, the shape of her face subtly changed and sinister.

Now I am with my girlfriend (a different girl from before) in her father's laboratory. He is demonstrating the miraculous properties of fire and water. "Look!" he says, striking a match, "How powerful fire is." There is a bowl of water on the table in front of him. Somehow I know it contains several drops of my girl's blood. Father continues, "And yet when exposed to water--" he dips the match in the bowl. A gout of flame shoots up, and I know. Father and I go into the back room. "My daughter eez a verevolf," he says, in a thick Eastern European accent. "I know," I tell him. "Their blood is combustible, isn't it?" "Oh yez. I remember last time" (brief flash of a bowl of blood and fire) "Oooh! It still give me hangovers to think about it."

She is waiting for us in the other room.

End dream.

***

I have only just realized: The girl bitten and my girlfriend in the second scene are the same, and I am the boyfriend character in the first scene.

Why does it start in the form of a movie?

What is it about?

The fire in the blood passed on, one person to the next, by that bite.

...Isn't that all of us?

The Rains of Monday

Write on, right on.

It is Monday and Oregon is up to its usual tricks again, teasing us with the loveliest weather since I've been here and then snatching it away as soon as it could.

Another weekend passes us, with a new cast of characters and plots unfolding. Highlights from the last several days include:

• Our Newest Friend. There is a new VISTA (actually there are two, but we only met one) (Is that the royal we, or have I started to think of Gabriel, Megan, and -- heaven help us -- Mike as extensions of myself?) (Let's go with the first one) in Roseburg, and her names is Lexington. Lexicon has already made positive contributions to the Good of the Whole, including being present for ultimate frisbee, buying me drinks on Friday, and being the only one of the McMinniman's crowd to come to Megan's and experience the Best Fire Ever. Yay for Lexus!

• I don't have a picture of Lex, but she looks something like this:

• Ultimate Frisbee. I think I have played this game once before, & hadn't really expected to do so again. In Oregon, though, it is the most important thing you can do after disc golf. So we gathered the Group at a very nice park to play. It turns out, I'm not very good at Ultimate Frisbee. Not even while drinking a beer. Not even while drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette.

• The Fire That Burned Everything. Some might say, it is unwise to place a bottle of lighter fluid into a fire to see what will happen. Others might suggest that when it takes you five minutes to notice that your foot is engulfed in flames, you are too drunk to be playing with fire at all. To these I say: Fuck off!

• Awkward Stories.

...Okay, this is one I actually need some advice on. Let us say that I have a friend named Bartlebee. And let us say that Bartlebee called me at the bar on Friday night to say: "Steve, I need some advice. You know that kid, Chad?"

This took some thinking, because all of Bartlebee's friends are named Chad, but then I realized which one he meant. "Yes," says I.

"Well tonight," says he, "Chad was grabbing my ass and--" Bartlebee went on to describe a number of other much-too-forward actions by his apparently-gay friend and continued--"So should I pound his face in?"

And I said, "No. No you should not. What you should do is state, firmly and clearly, that you do not have any interest in him and that it is not okay to violate your personal space."

"Okay, but what if he continues? Then do I pound his face in?"

"No. Then -- Use the power of shame. Point out his actions to the rest of your Chads, mock him a little and ostracize him from the group."

Now, to me, that seemed like the best possible solution. If a person violates another's space, this is an aggressive act, and is not to be tolerated: And this has nothing to do with the sexual orientation of either the violator or the violated. Face-pounding, while everyone's right as a last resort, was completely uncalled for in this situation; among 19-year-old Boys, meanwhile, shame is a powerful tool.

Yet when I told (Let us call him) Rick, who is himself openly gay (one of I believe 3 such individuals allowed by law within the city limits of Roseburg at any given time), he condemned me for prescribing the use of shame. This despite the fact that I was not recommending shaming Chad for being gay, but for acting in a manner inconsistent with the values of politeness. (Granted, I am also afraid that the revelation that there are as many as 5 male homosexuals in Roseburg might send the town spiraling into a bloody cycle of witch hunts, purges and show trials, but that is a different matter).

I think I did the right thing.

***

Finally, speaking of purges and show trials: I have recently been reading and rereading this little work of horror. It is Nikolai Bukharin's final letter from prison to Stalin. (Ignore the commentary attached on the website, it is completely asinine). In it, Bukharin praises the "great and bold idea" of the general purge of which he has become a victim; professes his love for Stalin and the Party; and begs for forgiveness. I am simultaneously horrified and fascinated. What produces this sort of mind-set? How does it arise from the original socialist impulse? These questions are hardly new and really are as old as Stalinism but...This is the first time I've asked them. & I don't know either what the answer is.

The Haunted Forest

That, my friends, is the face of a Slug! There were many of them out and about today, and Lindsey, Sarah, Sue and I many times paused to say hello to them as we hiked our way through the woods of Somewhere East of Roseburg, guided by a fellow named Seth. Pictures are, as usual, at Picasa. Highlights include:

• Manzanita. I didn't know what it was before and only knew the word from the Gary Snyder collection by the same name. It turns out Manzanita is a city! and the trees of it we met were aswarm with bees and flies and lizards.

• Indian mounds. Now, raised an Anthropologian in the east of America, the term "Indian mound" to me conjures up images of burials, Cahokia, and the beginnings of socioeconomic stratification. Here in Douglas County, Oregon, "Indian mounds" refer to piles of rock heaped up by young men (and women?) out on vision quests. These were located at the top of a hill at the end of a half mile trail, dozens of piles of rocks seeming to resist the laws of physics in the way they were stacked. I didn't notice them at first, then there they were; and my companions seemed to have disappeared; and it felt like the rocks were looking at me, and there was a presence there, and it was older than trails and ecotourism and much more potent. It never occurred to me to get out my camera in their presence, or even to speak, and I think to do either would have been terribly disrespectful.

• Waterfalls! Is there anything more to say? Waterfalls are awesome!

***

Here is another thing on my mind. I have been (I think you know) drinking lots and lots of superfood drinks. And my favorite thing about these is that they contain algae. When I think of algae, I picture an endless sea, by turns blue-green and deep red, under a sun as soft and orange as the memory of childhood, but racing swift across the waters in which strange creatures dwell. And think: This is the image of Inside-My-Body! My stomach, my gut, an ecosystem or universe, an oceanic home of a trillion myriad beings, existence physical and metaphorical, home of ancient dreams and urges and intuitions.

My Self, nothing but a haunted forest.

The body as landscape, as universe, animate with the divine magic of mind and thought -- my mind, my thought? -- microorganisms, tiny minds, a billion, a trillion -- a storm passes through a sea of neurons, and somewhere "I" laugh or blush or pine for lost love -- and here consciousness is an illusion, or maybe it's not, and the immaterial components of thought pass as ghosts through the cities of intestinal flora.

Isn't this the ever-inspiring-image? Don't worry, everything is fine, you are nothing but a universe.

I do hope so.

Better Cats

I have had a thought, and I may act on it, depending on how much willpower I have.

My thought is this:

Recently, we at Better Cats and Gardens introduced the Dionysus Award. This went over very well, and everyone who received a Dionysus personally called to thank me. So I was thinking of introducing a new award: The Better Cats Award.

And this would perhaps be a weekly award, given out every Thursday or Sunday or some such.

And who would be the recipients of the Better Cats award?

Why, the Better Cats, of course! Which is to say -- All my friends! I would post a picture of a given friend who had particularly pleased me that week, and write a bunch of stuff about how much I like them.

...Does that seem like too much sentiment?

I consulted a wise person on the matter: She said, "It would be really cute." I believe she is correct. So, introducing, the Better Cats award! Starting soon, everyone is eligible! (Except for people I hate, they are not eligible.)

We will see how this goes.

***

On a completely different note, I think this is the saddest poem ever written:

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping,
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.

--A.E. Housman