one thousand secret kings

Any Given Sunday

2008-02-04T18:14:00.001-06:00

I got into exactly one fistfight in high school, when I was a freshman. And then I didn't need to anymore.

On our school bus, the cool kids sat in the back. The losers sat in the front. The football team sat in the back; I sat in the front.

One day I got to the after-school bus late. All the seats up front were taken, but there was one on the border between cool-land and un-cool-land that wasn't taken. I scrambled into this seat, books spilling out of my backpack, out of breath, glasses askew, etc. I didn't realize that I had sat down next to one of the less friendly guys on the football team. I want to say that he was the quarterback, but I didn't care any more about the team then than I do now, so I really couldn't say.

Anyrate. Apparently, my presence offended this individual. He said, "You can't sit here, faggot," and shoved me to the ground. My glasses went one way. Books went the other. It had been a rainy day, so I landed ass-down in grimy, stale school bus water a half inch deep.

When I stood back up, the entire back of the bus was laughing, and the front of the bus had turned around to see what had happened. So everybody's eyes were on me when I punched the guy as hard as I could square in the nuts, and then when he doubled over in pain, I hit him again in the face. I may have been small, but I had been a swimmer my entire life, and I was made of whiplash and bone. I was fast. I was strong. But most of all, I was mean.

I ran off the bus sobbing. My parents had to come to pick me up from the principal's office, and they never made me ride the bus again. This event, therefore had several major consequences for my social life. First, I lost the kind of connection to the kids in my neighborhood that can only be cultivated by years of bus rides along the same daily routes. Second, I began to find every excuse I could to stay after school and thus have a plausible reason not to have to ride the bus -- band, debate, orchestra, French club, quiz bowl, etc. etc. etc. You could not find a bigger geek, or a less popular one. Third, I established the precedent in my high school that there were some nerds that you fucked with and some you left alone. Because there is nothing worse for your popularity than sporting a black eye at school and having to admit to everyone that some scrawny faggot gave it to you.

But most importantly. I have maintained a smoldering hatred of football for twenty years. I was thinking about this earlier today, when I realized that football was the only sport I've never come to terms with. I'd love to be able to say that I hated the brutality and inelegance of the game play. But my favorite part of hockey is the inevitable crazy melee out on the ice. I would love to say that it was the crass commercialization of professional football that I objected to, to which the Grecian ideal of noble manhood had been lost. But I was swept along with Red Sox mania just like everyone else when I was living in Boston during their first World Series victory.

But the truth is that my hatred is completely unreasonable. So I will thank you, please, if you let me ignore all the Superbowl hoopla in peace. I may not be as fast or as strong as I once was, but I am still mean. And, apparently, I am still mad.

The forecast

2007-12-19T20:03:00.000-06:00

Freezing fog???

Where have I moved? Oh god.

Maybe me

2007-10-14T10:34:00.002-05:00

The water has to be precisely the right temperature. Too hot, and it will kill the yeast. Too cold, and the yeast will never wake. I've mostly got the hang of it now, but once in a while I still screw up the proof, and I have to throw everything out and start all over again.

~

At the height of the summer, everything got strange. I started feeling a little sad. Or homesick. Or lonely, or something. I don't know. Everything feels different here, and I'm running out of ways to explain it. The sun seems closer, except when it feels further away. The most personal emotions feel distant and strange, except that sometimes they're right there in the skin.

Part of it was the enforced solitude. MV was gone for a residency in upstate New York, and after a whirlwind few months of merging kitchens and adjusting to one another's schedules, the sudden, silent sense of absence in the house weighed on me. Meanwhile, most of my friends in this town, all displaced northeasterners themselves, scattered themselves to the corners of the earth for the summer -- to Paris, to Houston, to Berlin.

But it was also the weather, this heavy-handed mugginess that struck you like a physical blow every time you stepped outside. It had me feeling nostalgic for some earlier time, but I could never quite figure out what it was I was remembering: the summer we spent itinerant in the airless dorms, floating from room to room with the unofficial blessing of the superintendant who thought we were cute; or the magnificent summer days before the storms in southern California, when all the humidity from the entire basin pooled at the foot of the San Gabriels and made the mountains disappear; or the summer vacations during my family's first few years in the States, when the summer Virginia sun burnt me into the tiniest brown smudge of a boy.

~

I add flour by the handful, scraping down the bowl and smoothing out the clumps until the mixture comes together into a dough. It feels dusty and dry until I start to knead it and some hidden reservoir of moisture wells to the surface. It sticks to my hands, my apron, my suddenly flourless cutting board.

~

This city is an odd place to be sad.

Wait, that's not fair. What I ought to say is that I'm not very good at dealing with being sad here, yet. In Pasadena, I would slip out of the apartment and drive around all night, until I found my way---inevitably---to Koreatown and its 24-hour soondubu joints, and I would watch the stupid club kids slurp down their soups and come down off of their highs. In Boston, I would venture out to the clubs (to Campus, to Avalon, to the sad, filthy Paradise) and dance up on a box until someone---anyone---saw me and told me I was beautiful.

I used to deal with loneliness by wrapping myself in the crowd where, if I was lonely, at least we were all lonely together. But for all its trappings of a cosmopolitan life, this is ultimately a cow town, and crowds are the one thing this new city won't ever offer me.

~

Risen, the dough looks like some kind of primordial alien life form. It sighs when I punch it down, it struggles as try to I roll it out. I pinch closed the places where it has torn and try to smooth down the scars as best I can. But in the oven, these will emerge as flaws in the crust that show the clumsy touch of an unskilled hand.

~

There's this phrase that I've been using for a few years now. My friends and I developed it as sort of a bitchy little sotto voce we'd mutter to one another whenever we heard somebody whining about how their coworkers were out to get them or how all the fags in town were so unfriendly or how all their friends were so unsupportive during their breakup/job search/pet surgery.

We would listen attentively, nod supportingly, and whisper to one another after the fact, "Hm. Maybe it's you."

Sure it's possible that your entire office is conspiring against you to deny you your promotion, or that all of the fifty thousand gay men in metro Boston are sociopaths, or even that every single one of your inconsiderate friends has abandoned you/your cat in your/your cat's greatest hour of need. But maybe it's you, and you need to consider the possibility that, actually, you're the asshole here, and that all the bad karmic juju you've sent out into the universe is now coming back to you in spades.

It's amazing how often you can use this analysis in your day-to-day interaction with the world. After years of observing the world with this jaundiced, critical eye, I have come to accept that, honey, it's always you, and as a corollary, that sometimes it's also me.

The midwest is filled with millions of people who love to live in the midwest. This city in particular is named year after year as one of the best places to live in America. If I am finding it difficult to be happy here, there are two logical possibilities: either everyone else is wrong and completely misguided in their assessment, or I am.

Occam's razor suggests the latter.

~

I am an inexperienced baker, so the process of converting flour and yeast into bread still has the tang of magic to it. I understand the mechanics of the stand mixer; I understand the purpose of the yeast and the salt; I even understand the science that describes how gluten emerges to structure the dough under the kneading hand. But the oven is still a mystery. In goes a pallid mass of gloppy, wheezing, sickly protomatter, and out comes crust, crumb, flavor, nourishment, home, the body of Christ, American pie, wholesome family values, and, miraculously, bread.

~

We are shaped by the places we call home. I think we can all agree on this. It explains how George Bush's nasal Kennebunkport squawk matured into a Texas twang, and how Britney Spears, even at the height of her career, could never quite affect glamour.

I am coming to accept that one cannot be happy in the midwest until one becomes a midwesterner. So the trick will be figuring out what that entails and how much California will be left in me when this is all over.

I am trying to take pleasure in the kinds of things I think midwesterners should take pleasure in. The farmer's market is responding to the Fall with an amazing diversity of bright-colored squashes and root vegetables, and I find this beautiful. I run into a neighbor at the symphony and introduce her to my coworker who happens to be there with the woman I buy my coffee from, and this, too, I find beautiful. At one point last week I had a whole three-minute conversation about the Green Bay Packers, which required every bit of knowledge I had squirreled away in my brain about the game of football, and one day, I swear to god this is true, I will understand how this, too, must also be beautiful.

In the meantime, there are good days and bad. The ratio between the two is going to be up to me.

~

This third batch of focaccia is our best so far. The crust is golden and crisp in just a few places, the crumb is tender and flavorful, and the drizzle of olive oil over the top smells deeply of fresh crushed rosemary. MV and I make sandwiches for dinner -- a layer of our own pesto, slices of whatever tomatoes we picked up at the farmers market this morning, and a few leaves of basil from the garden out back. It doesn't matter that we're halfway into fall. In here, our house feels like summer.

Charles Simic

2007-08-02T14:27:00.001-05:00

Hm. I guess I've just never thought of Charles Simic as "a surrealist with a dark view." There's a kind of hollow loneliness expressed in a lot of his writing, I suppose, but his wintery dreamworld isn't a dark place. It's exuberant and ultimately, irredeemably, optimistic.

After we parted, the night, the cold, and the endless walking

Brought on a kind of ecstasy.
I went as if pursued, trying to warm myself.

There was the East River; there was the Hudson.
Their waters shone like oil in sanctuary lamps.

Something supreme was occurring
For which there will never be any words.

The sky was full of racing clouds and tall buildings,
Whirling and whirling silently.

In that whole city you could hear a pin drop.
Believe me.
I thought I heard a pin drop and I went looking for it.

From "The Initiate".

Three Short Stories About Family

2007-07-10T00:34:00.000-05:00

1.

Less than two weeks old, and my newest nephew’s features have already been apportioned out to various family members. To his father, his high, noble nose. To his mother, those luminous eyes and those shapely feet. We have even unearthed some long-deceased great-aunt to be responsible for the baby’s tiny monkey fingers.

All families must do this, I suppose, but I’ve always thought that Korean families manage to find family relationships in the most unremarkable of body parts. Ankles, for example. Who notices ankles? And yet, my mother swears, this baby is the recipient of two miniature replicas of her ankles. There is hardly an inch of anatomy on my nephew’s Frankenstein body that has not been donated by one relative or another. I, myself, am told that I am responsible for the melon-like hugeness of the baby’s head, and for his broad, featureless brow.

2.

My oldest nephew, meanwhile, doesn’t look a thing like me, but he and I are alike in more important ways.

Yesterday morning, when I was getting ready to go with him and his mom to get a cup of ice cream, he stopped me at the door, put up one hand, and said, “Uncle, you can not go out dressed like that.”

This, of course, is the same little boy who, when I asked what he wants to be when he grows up, said to me, “Cinderella!” And I wanted to tell him, “Oh, girl. Don’t we all.”

3.

My sister has been getting the usual set of post-natal gifts from friends and colleagues. I happened to be there when a set of her coworkers dropped by to see the baby and leave a small gift. There were wee little baby clothes, and a set of wee tiny stuffed rabbits.

When the guests had left, my mom opened the present and fingered through the offerings.

“Hmph,” she sniffed. “Target.”

Just in case you ever wondered where I got it from.

Requiem

2007-06-15T16:33:00.000-05:00

All right. First things first.

My grandmother died several months ago following a long coma. It was, frankly, a little miraculous that she hung on as long as she did. The sort of injury she sustained to her head should have killed her within hours; the doctors didn't know what to do with this old woman who refused to die.

They didn't know my family. I come from a long line of mean bitches, and my grandmother was the meanest bitch of them all.

It freaks me out a little to see those words written down. I should know better than to speak ill of the dead, and if anyone was going to reach across the veil to punish me for my impiety it would be her. But it's a true thing, nevertheless, and it's something you need to know if you're going to get the whole story.

My grandmother has always been a survivor. She remembers fleeing from the Japanese, who were marching through the peninsula slaughtering the traditional aristocracy. She told me once how she fled with her parents in the middle of the night, weighed down by all the money and jewels her tiny body could support.

My father remembers fleeing a second invasion along the same route to the south, clinging to his mother's skirts as the communists advanced towards Seoul. They spent nights hiding in ditches with other refugees. They ate fried cakes made from barley, which were stretched by adding indigestible rice grain casings that some farmer or another had discarded. (Heuk deuk, she called them -- "dirt cakes".)

She lost everything twice. After the war, after my grandfather had returned to Seoul and died in a menial job as a porter, my grandmother made a meager income for her family by selling the last of her jewels and becoming a small-time loan shark, handing out small parcels of cash to people more desperate than her and enforcing her contracts with what few spells and curses she knew. It was a meager deterrent; even in those days, few people believed in curses. But my grandmother took what money there was and scraped together a living, and an apartment in the city, and an education for her son.

The thing she would never forget -- the thing she would never let you forget -- was how her family had been robbed of its rightful place in the world. Hers was the noblest of clans; imperial blood flowed through her veins. At her poorest, she still demanded to be spoken to like a yangban.

Which is why she despised anyone she thought was below her position. Like her neighbors living in her ghetto. Like the nouveau middle-class family my mother came from. Like me.

My father doted on her, a good, pious son. Like so many of his generation, he was sent to America to earn a living and to send money back to support the family. But it was never enough for her. How dare he spend money on his whore wife and his two misborn children instead of sending money home? He tried bringing her to America to live, and she was miserable. He set her up with a nice condo in an upscale suburb of Seoul, and she was miserable. Everything about my grandmother's life was dramatic, and conflict swirled around her, like a solar system orbiting a star.

This is why we were so anxious when she slipped and hit her head. Somehow her body had become old and frail without any of us realizing it. None of us had ever really considered the possibility that she might die, and nobody knew what was going to happen once she was gone.

My sister and I anticipated the worst. My father and his sisters had spent so long living in the shadow of guilt that there would be some sort of a feud, and they would blame one another for her death, and they would blame one anothers' spouses, then their children, and the family that my grandmother held together by sheer force of will would tear apart.

Thank god, then, for long comas. Nine months is a long time to come to terms with someone's death. After a brief period of inevitable squabbling, my father and his sisters met and put the family's affairs in order.

By the time my grandmother died (gathering just enough consciousness to swear at the nurse with her last breath), it was agreed that there would be a modern funeral. The period of mourning was reduced to three days of sleeplessness and fasting. Her body was cremated and interred in a temple instead of being buried in the family plot with all of ceremony and wailing and beating of chests that that would have entailed. It was a quiet, unglamorous ending to a long, dramatic life, and perhaps the only modern thing my grandmother has ever done.

Home

2007-06-11T11:06:00.000-05:00

Chris emailed me a mess of photos from Boston Pride this weekend, and it had me feeling homesick all of Sunday morning. There are pictures of Chris' annual pre-parade brunch, the traditional mid-afternoon cocktail at Club Cafe, and the inevitable post-club snack in Chinatown. It was the whole gang of miscreants I ran with in Boston for three years, along with a few new faces that I didn't recognize. I only allowed myself a few moments to wonder which one of them was supposed to be my replacement.

But later in the day, MV and I drove down to a farm a few miles outside of Janesville. We spent an hour kneeling in the dirt, picking strawberries and getting sunburned knees. There were strawberry tarts for dessert, and there's strawberry ice cream resting in the fridge. I fell asleep watching the Tony awards with my head resting in MV's lap. This morning, I don't feel so homesick anymore.

Excuses

2007-06-02T15:33:00.000-05:00

So.

Um.

I guess, when an author you've admired for years gives your long-fallow blog a shout-out, you're sort of obliged to post something on it.

I have a lot of excuses. First, I've been the kind of busy that seems to take all day but leaves you with nothing interesting to talk about at the end of it. And, all of that work involves writing, and the last thing I want to do when I get home is plop down in front of the computer and crank out a few hundred more words. And, the adolescent, made-for-TV-movie drama that was my life in LA and Boston has mellowed as I've gotten older; what do you write about if it isn't the clubs and the bitter queens and all the stupid fun you and your friends got yourselves into?

But I've been missing the blog. I miss telling stories. I miss the sense that there were stories worth telling about my life. And most of all, I miss the sense that there was a community of people who would read one another's blogs and care about all the crap that was happening in someone else's life, even if it was someone they had never actually met.

So I promise some more stuff here soon.

Fog

2006-12-13T08:28:00.000-06:00

I am finding it harder and harder to wake up these mornings as the days get shorter and sunlight becomes an increasingly precious commodity. Yesterday, our promised rain manifested as a dense fog that clung close to the surface and embossed the whole day with a dream-like tint. On my walk in to work, visibility as low as it was, scarves wrapped tightly around everybody's heads, buildings veiled in haze, it was easy to forget where I was, and even though I walk the same stretch of State Street every morning, I could have sworn I had been transported to a winter day in Berkeley.

Isn't it odd how you can feel the most out of place on those days where you feel the most like you're at home?

Diversity vs Pluralism

2006-11-22T14:01:00.000-06:00

I seem to be completely unable to write original prose nowadays. Instead, I offer you yet another blurb from my archives, this time from a group blog called specialagency.net that lasted for, like, two months.

I went through elementary school in the early eighties, during the formative years of the movement that would come to be known as "political correctness." My teachers, God love them, were totally keen on the idea and worked as hard as they could to recognize and celebrate the diversity of the students in their classrooms.

Unfortunately, we lived in a small, ethnically homogeneous town in southwestern Virginia, and in second grade there were three of us in Ms Branchaud's class who could concievably be considered "diversity." On our annual Culture Awareness Day, the three of us would be trotted up to the front of the class for a special show-and-tell, during which we would show off some cultural artifact demonstrating how we enrich the fabric of American society with our weird foreign ways. On this day, Benjamin (Jewish) wore a yarmulke to class. Kanaka (Indian) brought a small figurine of the Hindu god Ganesh. And I wore an elegant Korean hanbok, an elaborately embroidered silk garment that had been passed down through generations of my family to me.

Or, to put it in second-grade language: there was the guy with a frisbee on his head, the girl who prayed to elephants, and the boy in girl clothes. Needless to say, we got beaten up almost as soon as recess started.

I want to point out, this wasn't anything having to do with racism. It's just the nature of second-graders to mock and torment kids who exhibit any difference at all. The first kid in our class to start wearing glasses, for example, got into fights every day for weeks, until Bruce broke his arm playing touch football and we all got distracted by the cast. But I think this illustrates, on small scale, why the rhetoric of political correctness is failing ethnic minorities in America.

Politicians will often make grand, sweeping speeches about the virtue of "diversity". The ethnic and cultural diversity of America, they will argue, adds vitality to American culture by offering fresh opinions and new points of view.

Hogwash. Diversity, as far as it goes, isn't a virtue at all. It's already an undeniable fact of life for residents of almost all American cities that this country is no longer a white, Christian, Anglo nation, if it ever was. "Diversity" takes no work. Moreover, race riots, like the one that gutted Los Angeles' Koreatown in 1992, are still possible even in the most ethnically diverse of American cities.

"Tolerance", I suppose, is a bit better. "Tolerance" at least moves us away from outright violence between minority groups. But mere tolerance is still not the same thing as acceptance. Consider the recent history of the gay culture in America. Will and Grace has been a hit sitcom since 1998. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was the cultural phenomenon of the year last year. Ellen Degeneres' eponymous talk show has already won four Emmys in its first season on the air. Tolerance of gay culture -- or at least, of depictions of gay people in the mass media -- is at an all-time high.

But as soon as homosexual couples start demanding the right to have their relationships recognized by the law in the same manner as their heterosexual counterparts, states start passing laws defending the institution of marriage from being sullied by this queer taint. The apparent "tolerance" of gays in America is still, at best, a superficial, begrudging acknowledgment of our existence. Former blogger noahlogue went further and once referred to Queer Eye as a kind of gay minstrel show -- straight culture's ironic and patronizing appropriation of those aspects of gay culture it finds humorous or useful.

I'd like to suggest that we stop thinking about diversity and tolerance as if they are ends in themselves. If American society values diversity at all (and democracy inherently should), it has to be in the context of an active, engaged pluralism in which individual cultures interact substantively with one another while preserving their own unique and valuable aspects. I would argue that the cultivation of this intercultural dialogue should be the real ultimate goal of all identity politics.

Now you see where I'm going with this.

Diversity isn't a goal; it's an undeniable fact of life in modern America. But multiculturalism without intercultural understanding is dangerous, as different cultures have different and often incompatible values and interests. Recent history provides any number of examples of multicultural nations where internecine tensions remain unaddressed and eventually turn into ethnic violence. And the problem with tolerance alone without a commitment to dialogue is that it doesn't provide a way for groups in conflict to cultivate a truly pluralistic common society.

Political values, like all social values, are culturally contingent, and insofar as American society can be thought to consist of competing "red" and "blue" political cultures, I would argue that American political discourse between liberals and conservatives demands the same kind of active engagement that the interaction of any cultures in conflict do.

What's most upsetting about the vitrolic tenor of American political discourse, for me, is how much it sounds like the rhetoric of ethnic conflict. Both liberals and conservatives accuse one another of being immoral, leading to a contemptuous sort of superiority complex. For pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Roger Moore, and increasingly the webloggers who attempt to emulate them, political discourse is all about belittling their interlocutors and suggesting that their opponents are not only less ethical and less rational than they are themselves, but also somehow less human.

The internet has this amazing unrealized potential to become just the sort of meeting space where pluralism can flourish. Getting to know how The Other Side thinks about an issue could be as easy as hopping over to a conservative chat room or reading through any of the now countless gay blogs on the net. And message boards, to me, seem like they could be the perfect place for people from different backrounds and different political cultures to interact.

But as it stands now, the internet may only be helping to exacerbate the problem, because it's so easy for me to limit my reading to only those blogs that I already agree with. Why should I have an open mind, I might think, since there are all these people who already agree with me?

So while we here at specialagency have been a little obsessed with how the political discourse in America is broken, I'd like to suggest that the problem is really much deeper. People naturally just aren't good at dealing with people who are different from themselves, and the ability to be open-minded when confronted with difference is something that has to be learned. The impulse that drives us to be intolerant -- whether this manifests as racism, homophobia, sexism, religious intolerance, or poisonous political rhetoric -- is always the same, and, unfortunately, all too human.

June 15, 2004

A better day that comes

2006-11-09T10:39:00.000-06:00

Today is better.

Yesterday was a big mess. I stayed out too late, drowned my sorrows in one beer too many, spent too much time commiserating with too many friends who had also dumped so much time and money into fighting the marriage ban. As much time as I spent preparing for the worst, I guess I just didn't realize how hard it was going to be waking up the next morning a second class citizen of the state.

It hurts. It hurts a lot.

I did want to point out what kind of extremists are behind the ban. Now that they've marginalized all unmarried people, the Family Research Institute of Wisconsin is turning its evil unblinking eye to divorcees. Here's what Julaine Appling, CEO of the FRI, president of the Vote Yes campaign, and crazy person has planned for us:

Appling said the Family Research Institute, which took the lead in fighting the same-sex marriage ban, would "judiciously" examine Wisconsin's no-fault divorce law - spouses can request termination of the marriage without having to prove marital misconduct - and eventually approach legislators about introducing changes. She said she could foresee proposing a longer waiting period for divorces and implementing required premarital counseling.

I'm friends with a lot of the people who helped to organize the drive against the amendment, and they're really good, honest people who didn't want to participate in smear tactics. But I think the vote could have come out a lot differently if we had made it clear just what sort of right-wing extremists were behind the ban. I think it also would have been nice if someone in the press had asked questions a few probing questions about Ms. Appling's long-term female roommate and the nature of their relationship, but that's just me.

Fine. Whatever. The time to debate strategy is passed, and I'm happy to amicably disagree with my peers on the politics of outing and the ethics of campaigning in an irrevocably flawed democracy. This battle is lost; it's time to start planning the rest of the war.

--

So like I said. Today is better.

Today I started chipping away at all of the work I've let fester in the build-up to the election. I cleaned my apartment a bit. I made reservations to have dinner with friends before the Margaret Cho concert tonight.

And somewhere along the line I realized that I don't know anybody at all who voted for the gay marriage ban. None of my friends, of course. None of my neighbors. Not even my Mormon coworker. I get to be surrounded by people who see me and like me for who I am. This, at least, is a great blessing.

There's something I learned in high school, long ago, when I was hanging out with the rest of the freaks and rejects who were all trying to avoid getting beaten up by our white trash classmates:

Fuck you. I don't need your approval. My sense of self-worth has never rested on what a bunch of preliterate redneck Neanderthals think about me. Faggots are God's most perfect creation; He made us strong and fierce. Our fabulous light shines like a beacon into the heavens to make the luminous angels dance.

You who wish we would just go away. You can never hurt us. You can't even touch us.

Stream of consciousness

2006-11-06T18:31:00.000-06:00

Recorded in my blog archives from August 1, 2002.

"[beep] Hi, it's Mommy. We land in Hawaii safely this morning. Daddy giving talk tomorrow morning, but now Mommy and Daddy are relax on hotel room balcony. Daddy drinking something fancy, I think he call it Mai Tai. Mommy is eating so much papaya, (so fresh!) and we can see whole the beach from here. The sunset is very pretty, orange like Daddy's drink. Ocean so calm, only little waves breaking against the shore. Mommy and Daddy talking how beautiful it is, how much you like it here next time. We are so proud of you, so happy you moving back to Boston. We just want you to be happy, and not lonely. We hope you not to have to go have the anonymous gay sex in porno theater, because all the disease. We call you when we get back to mainland. Love you! [click]"

Tiny worlds, worlds apart

2006-10-22T14:16:00.000-05:00

The world is tiny.

At a party last night, I met a guy who, after about an hour, I realized was a blogger I used to link to back in the day (velcro.prosaic.nu), back before either of us had retired our blogs and moved out here to the tundra. You see, it's not just Madison that's small, it's the whole world.

At the same party last night, I had a conversation with a friend who is working to fight our state's amendment banning gay marriage and civil unions, who said that he and his partner plan to move out of the state if the amendment passes. It reminded me of something I wrote to Aaron a while ago, when Congress was considering a federal gay marriage amendment:

There's a part of me that looks forward to the day such an amendment passes, when we all will flee across the border in little homo caravans, covered wagons tarped with 800 thread count Egyptian cotton and piled high with all the Diesel jeans and Clinique For Men skin care products we can carry. It will be a spectacle that will make San Francisco Pride look like the pony ride line at the state fair. We will leave George Bush's America under a rainbow banner and take all the color with us when we go.

That was just over a year ago, right before I had moved to the tundra.

But this place -- this flat, corn-fed, permafrosted wasteland; this cheese-head Eden; this scepter'd isle -- god damn if it hasn't changed me already.

A year later, I don't really want to leave this place. For one thing, my job here is sort of a dream, and I can't just pick up and move without a significant blow to my career.

For another, where would I go? There are amendments like this in the constitutions of a growing number of states, and we haven't been able to turn one aside yet. How many times would I have to run away?

And finally, I'm not leaving, because this is just noise. History is marching this nation inexorably towards justice and equal recognition for us. We are at the cusp of the greatest new civil rights breakthrough since the end of segregation, and I want to be here at the start of things.

And then, in thirty years time, I want to tell my nephews long stories about the culture wars, and the time before his uncles could marry, and how sweet those first days of equality were.

A year in the life

2006-09-02T14:10:00.000-05:00

In what may be the surest sign that summer is finally over, winter squash have started arriving at the farmers market. Early morning vegetable shoppers, pushing their children along in oversized strollers, eye the small. jaundiced acorn squash with a suspicious sort of distrust, as if these sad misshapen gourds are unwelcome interlopers at a summer party.

I myself am avoiding the fall produce in my own very charming version of total denial. If it were the end of summer (which it isn't), this will have been the end of my first full year here (which, I mean, it can't be, can it?). My bags are full of all the pea shoots and zucchinis I can find, and I'm freezing tomato sauce tonight in the hopes that the winter might not seem so bad.

I'm still waiting for the moment when everything doesn't feel so new anymore. It seems as though, after a year, I should be more settled here. My apartment should have been fully furnished by now -- I shouldn't still be sleeping on the same ratty old mattress I schlepped across the country into my new empty home. I should have visited more of the cities around here, and I should know the freeways better than I do.

Here is what I have learned after a year in the midwest, out here on the tundra.

1. Everybody is friendlier after a beer or two.

2. Cheese curds are actually supposed to squeak like that.

3. Football is very very important.

I'll get it one of these days, y'all. I'll get it.

Math

2006-07-24T15:49:00.000-05:00

My apartment has been slowly slouching towards presentability, lo, this long last year, and this past Saturday we finally had some friends over for cocktails.

J. was the first to notice my pitifully small DVD collection.

"That's fascinating."

"What?"

"Your collection is: Lord of the Rings, Queer as Folk, Margaret Cho, and Star Trek."

"I guess it's a weird collection."

"Well, no. Not really. It pretty much sums you up, right there."

Sangju

2006-07-10T08:54:00.000-05:00

My grandmother lived with us for the first few years we lived in the States. I was very young, and my memories from this time are all a sepia blur. Mostly it's just impressions. She was very old even then -- thinning snow-white hair a fright, thicky creased eyes weighted down by flaps of drooping flesh. She wore dull grey peasants' clothes, sashes over petticoats and a tiny sheathed dagger at her neck, that probably looked anachronistic when she was a girl.

She never learned any English. She refused to look at the TV. She never acknowledged strangers on her morning walks. Her only connection to the outside world were the Korean newspapers my aunt would send to her at the end of every month, when they were weeks out of date and brittle and red with age. For all that my used to feel that my parents lived apart from the world of mainstream American culture my friends' families all seemed to inhabit, my grandmother lived one step further removed, in a tiny bubble of reality of her own fashioning that had its own time and its own rules.

The neighborhood children were all scared of her. They called her a witch, and I think I believed them, because she was the one who taught me all of the superstitious nonsense my parents didn't want me to know.

You can read the future in the way cards fall, and in the fight of birds.

Begin things when the moon is new, and never during its wane.

Wear your clothes inside out to confuse evil spirits.

Never cut your nails at night; cast the trimmings into the fire.

And so on.

I don't believe any of this, you understand. This is the 21st century, and I'm not a superstitious man by nature. There is no place in my life for folk remedies and old wives' tales.

--

A week ago my grandmother fell and hit her head, causing an intracranial blood clot followed by hydrocephalus and, eventually, coma. I have been getting sporadic word from my parents, who have flown to Seoul to do whatever it is one does when your mother is ninety and in a coma. Things sound grim -- a ventricular catheter has been installed to drain excess cerebrospinal fluid, but although the intracranial pressure has been relieved somewhat, she hasn't responded to the treatment yet. The doctors, reading between the lines, are at a loss. Korean women of her generation do not often live to be ninety.

I will need to get ready. I am the oldest grandson and heir, and there are things that will need to be done. They will tie my hair back with hemp and call me sangju, and I will guide the spirit to heaven. I will write write a blessing on the funeral shroud, pour a sacrament of wine over the grave, and burn her last garment as an offering to the gods. My wails will comfort the spirits of our ancestors and open the gates of heaven. It will mean the difference between curse and benediction.

Things have been a little jarring, lately. I am at work, I am talking to my parents about feeding tubes and cranial shunts and catheters, I am pushing papers across my desk, but I am not here. I am not here at all.

A midwestern fairy tale

2006-07-03T10:22:00.000-05:00

Over a hundred painted, bejeweled, life-size porcelain cow statues -- commissioned by the local chamber of commerce (or something) to recognize the importance of the dairy industry (or something) -- have been deployed all over the streets of Madison. Each has been designed, deconstructed, reconstructed, decorated, and reimagined by a local artist and then given a whimsical name. One, painted yellow with orange circles to resemble Swiss cheese, is called "Holy Cow" (ho ho ho!). Another, near the entrance to our new arts center, is painted in the delicate geometric designs characteristic of Taliesin and called "Frank Loin Wright" (ho ho ho!). And there's more! Town and Cowntry. Pink Flamingcows. Georgia Cow'Keefe. My favorite is Babushka Marushka the Polka Cow, who guards the entrance to my local Walgreen's drugstore in a state of preternatural cow-like readiness.

The cows are everywhere.

They line both sides of State Street along the entire length of my ambulatory commute to work each morning.

They ring the Capitol square in a multicolor shellac bovine parade.

There is even one far out along the bike path skirting Lake Monona, shaped like a kneeling cow topped with ice cream and a gargantual melon-sized cherry on top.

I kind of love them. They're awful, and they're hideously tacky, but I love them.

----

It took me weeks to realize that some of the statues move around. The cows at the bottom of State Street, in the little concrete park where the skinny little emo boys skateboard and smoke menthols, change configurations every few days. A few weeks ago they were standing in a circle, nose to nose with their hindquarters pointing out. This morning, they were milling randomly about the park like any other grazing herd of cattle.

My favorite cow, the first one I noticed moved, is a simple black-and-white Jersey who meanders up and down West Washington, gracing the front lawn of first one dumpy grad student apartment complex and then another. I have never seen the workers who must come at night to pick up and move the statues from place to place. I have never even talked with anyone else who has noticed that the cows are motile.

It all reminds me a little of the old fairy tale about the twelve enchanted girls who are statues by day, but who transform back into princesses when the moon strikes them just right. They dance together every evening, only to be turned back to stone when the sun breaks over the horizon in the morning.

Late into the evenings, when the lamplights shimmer off the darkly glazed eyes of the statues, and I am too tired to think entirely straight, I can't help but imagine that these statues are just moments from springing to enchanted life. Maybe they're all secret cow princesses, and in a moment, when I've rounded the corner and the square is comfortably empty again, they will wake up and dance the wee morning hours away.

It seems like a very midwestern sort of fairy tale.

I can't wait to fly

2006-06-27T23:28:00.000-05:00

I, of course, was more of an X-Man child.

Don't get me wrong. Superman was great. I loved Superman. But that was sort of the problem, you know? Everybody loved Superman. Superman was the embodiment of the cool kids' crowd. He was strong, and handsome, and had women swooning after him, and even in a faaaabulous cape and ruby-red boots with two-inch heels, he still came across as butch. So fine, he was an alien whose entire race got blown up in a planetary cataclysm (save for himself, a dog, his cousin, and three criminals in parachute pants), and he was consequently the ultimate outsider to this planet he had chosen to protect. The point is, he was a hero to everybody. He passed.

The first time I read the X-Men was in the mid-eighties. Our family vacation to a beach in South Carolina had gotten rained in, and to shut me up my mom gave me a dollar and let me buy a comic book from the convenience store.

It was an early issue of the Morlock Massacre. There was a cameo by the Power Pack kids; Rachael Summers (Phoenix II) was part of the team; Kitty Pryde was in a stasis chamber on the Blackbird slowly disincorporating. The team spent the whole issue slogging around sewers and fighting mutants with hideous deformations and strange, slightly off-putting powers. The art was a bit sloppy, the story was a giant mess, and I read the entire issue in one sitting and found myself in it.

The X-Men were loathed by everybody. Nobody thought of them as heroes, except for those of us observing their universe from the outside. Every character was tragically flawed, and they muddled through their imperfect lives the best way they knew how, just like the rest of us did.

I think I was too slow to get the message, if there was one intended. It's the same thing I'd tell my ten year old self. Hang on. You'll get through it. Everyone does.

News From the Lake

2006-06-17T12:52:00.000-05:00

In my last months in Boston, when I told my friends that I was turning down the offers in Toronto and San Diego and taking a job in the midwest, Benjamin had the best response. After a long, last drag on the butt end of his cigarette, he gave me a big hug and a kiss on my cheek. "That's fabulous, sweetie. And I promise I'll still be your friend when you come back all earnest and fat."

A year later, I am still blessed with tiny stick arms and hummingbird-like metabolism. And I have managed to surround myself with bicoastal expat friends who all have the same sickly inappropriate sense of humor that I do. I live in the center part of town, one of what the locals sneeringly deride as "condo people", and I would very much like to believe that my life is still more This American Life than Prairie Home Companion.

And yet.

I go to the farmers market every Saturday morning and banter about the weather with the lady who sells hand-made soaps.

A coworker sees me on the street and invites me over for dinner because his wife, she's pulled in a mess of strawberries and now it's time for pies.

I go biking out past the suburbs on Sunday mornings along a trail that winds through fields full of sprouting cornstalks and swerve to avoid the chipmunks who like to dash across the pavement for fun.

I walk home in the evenings past a white-haired man playing lazy blues on a steel guitar who sings infrequently in a croaking whiskey and cigarettes baritone.

There are days I don't understand at all how I ended up here. My heartbeat is slowing to match the steady plodding thrum of the slow midwestern life I'm begun to lead, and I can't decide if it's my age or the oddly compelling charisma of this town that's causing the change. But oddest of all is how much I'm coming to like this place, where all the women are strong and the men good-looking and the children above average.

Life in Lake Wobegon won't be so bad.

In/Out

2006-06-13T23:59:00.000-05:00

I gave directions today, and they went something like this.

"Okay, you see where they're tearing up the road over there? Just after you pass the concrete truck, make a left and follow the street down past the new student apartments they're building until you see a strip mall fenced off for demolition. If you see a second construction zone, you've gone too far."

I think I'm finally getting the hang of this place. Towns in the midwest breathe in cycles, and here there are seasons for planting, seasons for construction, and seasons for sitting quietly at home and drinking hot cocoa.

I've had people tell me that all of this is due to the weather, and that in a place with seasons as extreme as ours, construction happens in the brief respites between cold snaps. But Boston was never like this. The routine of digging up and tearing down and repaving and building up happened all year round, and there were snowstorms there as bad as any I've seen here.

The truth is something nobody from this city will ever admit to. For all of the pretensions of urbanism, this is a farm town at heart. Farm people know that there are days when the crops need picking and the cows start to calf, and if you want to build something, well, you've got about a month between the end of morel season and the start of squash planting, so you'd better start it then, hadn't you?

I am getting it. I may never be one of you, but I am getting it.

There now

2006-06-10T15:26:00.000-05:00

Doesn't that feel better?

Tessera

2006-04-26T23:07:00.000-05:00

Last week I found myself sitting in a hotel room in Century City wondering if I would still hate living in LA as much now as I did back then.

There are still a lot of things I don't like about this place. I hate the smog. I hate the soul-crushing grind of stalled traffic on the 405. I hate the scrunchy, plasticized faces of the washed-out failed actors masquerading as morning news anchors on KTLA.

But on Wednesday I ate Korean street food with tiny silver chopsticks in a mall food court, surrounded by people who looked like me and spoke the same pidgin mashup of English and Korean that I do. On Thursday I ate enchiladas with an old friend in West Hollywood and then watched The Gays weave their intricate daily mating dance to remixed ABBA. On Friday I drove a long winding path through the spitting grey mist that passes for rain in the City of Angels to order fried chicken and waffles from an old black lady who I think was older than god.

I think Los Angeles may actually be a beautiful place. Or at least, it's a series of imperfect but unique places stitched together by concrete freeways and a common sense of Angelino identity, all of which hang together like an insane patchwork Guernica.

I think I missed the point. Sometimes I think I always miss the point.

Something in the air

2006-04-24T10:06:00.000-05:00

Yesterday
at the bar
a creepy man
with bad breath
stuck his hand
down my pants
and I thought
to myself "Wow.
Must be spring."

Spring Break

2006-03-14T09:28:00.000-06:00

California was never like this.

On Friday the chill lifted slightly, and the length of State Street grew thick with college kids starting their spring breaks one day early. It's not warm out yet, but it's warm enough, and the rest of us threw off our scarves and heavy coats and ran out to join them.

It's like the whole city has opened up and gone a little crazy. There was an old, completely hairless man selling hot dogs on the street out of a corrugated aluminum cart and singing Gershwin songs in a cheerfully toneless cigarettes-and-whiskey growl. There was a tiny nuclear family of hippies, the youngest child dolled up with filthy dreads and birkenstocks and a baby-sized "legalize weed" tee shirt. There was a woman in a charcoal grey power suit eating ice cream and dribbling perfectly oval spots of strawberry pink down the front of her elegant camisole and clearly not caring at all.

These days never happened in California, you know? Easter comes at the end of winter for a reason -- the winter empties you out bit by bit, day after sunless day, and it's only at the end of it all that the spring comes and fills you back up again in one great rush, and suddenly you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Every day this place feels a little closer to home.

Ten Resolutions For The Rest Of Us

2005-12-29T11:09:00.000-06:00

Friends.

How many years in a row have you made the same three or four resolutions and failed to keep them? You said you'd exercise more, but did you? You said you'd eat better, but did you? You said you'd be nicer to everyone, but let's face it, honey, you're the same hateful bitch you were a year ago, and you love it.

So a few years ago, I vowed to stop making impossible resolutions. Instead, every year, I make a list of resolutions of the sort that I think we can all get behind.

In 2006 I resolve to:

1. Eat all the fat, carbs, and sugar I damn well please. For breakfast on New Year’s Day I’m having twelve cupcakes and a stick of butter. Fuck you, Dr Atkins! I spit gnocchi on your grave!

2. Screw the gym! I’ve worked out religiously for years, and have I developed smooth, sleek, muscley Arms Of Love? No sir, I have not. So screw it. Me and my metabolism ain’t gonna play no more. I’m spending that hour every day watching TV and eating bon bons on my couch.

3. Binge drink all the damn time, and consequently

4. Have more drunken one-night stands. Because everybody loves an easy lay.

5. Stop pretending I like you, you and stupid ironic tee shirt and your so-called “indy cred” and your stupid ugly face! I hate you! Go to hell, Stinky McWhoreface, and take all your stupid dirty hippie friends from Burning Man with you!

6. Self-medicate. Who needs self-esteem when you have Paxil?

7. Have more drunken one-night stands. Who needs self-esteem when you’re an easy lay?

8. Overspend. The good lord gave us credit cards for a reason. So really, isn’t it a sin not to go into debt? Isn’t it? Isn’t it?

9. Keep a self-indulgent narcissistic online journal where I talk about friends, family, and coworkers without impunity. So what if I lose my job, become ostracized from my relatives, and turn into a social recluse? At least I’ll have a legion of adoring fans who will support me and hang upon my every word whenever I write about pooping in the bathtub or that really cute thing my fucking cat did the other day.

10. Peace on earth, goodwill to man, blah blah blah. All that good stuff.