it’s all screen time now

Once a week, my phone alerts me to the amount of time that week I’ve spent staring at its little screen. 

How quaint. It’s all screen time now. What else is there for me to turn to? At home, I constantly put on Twitch streamers playing video games. Watching them play games is less lonely than playing games myself. I let their voices keep me company for hours and hours a day. I find it hard to turn them off, because when I do, then my loneliness is inescapable. It leaps out to swallow me at the first opportunity. My father used to listen all the time to Michael Jackson (the talk radio host, not the pop star) and Dennis Prager (yes, that Dennis Prager) as, I think, a way of keeping his formidable demons at bay. I use Twitch streamers as a kind of magic spell to ward off my loneliness, but they emphasize my loneliness, too. I feel the screen between me and them. They remind me that for months and months now, I have gone without face-to-face contact in the physical world with anyone I know and trust. The screen is no substitute for what I need. There’s something harsh and draining about it. I feel it burning into my eyes, leaving some part of me exhausted, a part that can only be nourished through contact with others. I wish I could shatter the screen, crawl through, and find myself in the same space as other people.

Of course I look away from the screen at times, though it requires a force of will. I read books. I go for walks. I turn my eyes on the vibrant greens of nature and imagine that I’m draining the life force from those trees and blades of grass to keep me going in this solitude for a little longer. I imagine that all this loneliness and screen time has turned me into a kind of vampire, flowers withering when I walk past them as my soul hungrily absorbs their essence.

I know that screens can nourish us, too, and I try sometimes to commit a decent portion of my screen time to the rich and varied humanity of cinema, though I think even watching movies here in my apartment is providing diminishing returns as the months of isolation drag on. But no, when I think of nourishing screens, I think not of the screens in my apartment which I have almost always watched alone, quarantine or no. Instead I think of the screens at movie theaters, one of my few communal experiences with other people these past few years in this lonely city which most of my friends have left. I think of how I can step out of a great film at a theater, into the light of day, feeling energized, and knowing that the energy I feel comes not just from having seen a great film, but from having shared the act of seeing it with others. 

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I want a return to that kind of screen time, the shared kind, the nourishing kind, and I want a life filled with enough genuine human interaction that I don’t feel the need to conjure voices on video streams all day long just to distract me from my solitude.

seen and unseen

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In Ammonite, Kate Winslet plays a deeply lonely woman with a heart in need of excavation.

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In The Green Ray, Marie Rivière plays a woman who finds it so hard to find real, meaningful connection that she feels, in a sense, invisible.

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“Do you need a bag, sir?” she asked.

“Ma’am,” I replied, more brusquely than I intended, but sometimes it hurts, even when I know it’s an honest mistake, the constant reminders that despite having transitioned many years ago, living full time, having had facial feminization surgery, all of it, to the world at large, I remain and will always remain invisible, read as something and someone that I’ve gone through so much trouble to assert that I am not.

Carrying my groceries away from the market and beginning the long walk home, I wondered if he’d be there, the one person I sometimes saw on my shopping trips who never misgendered me. Sure enough, as I stepped out of the building’s shadow, I immediately heard his voice calling out to me. “God bless you ma’am,” said the man who often hung around outside the neighborhood grocery store selling copies of Street Spirit. 

“Thank you,” I said quickly, politely, not wanting to make him feel invisible–I know how painful that is–but also knowing where he usually took things and not wanting to encourage him. I continued my brisk walk away from the store and away from him. Then, from behind me, I heard it.

“I’d like to get a cup of coffee with you sometime.”

An involuntary “aw” escaped me, but not the “aw” of “aw, that’s sweet.” An “aw” of sympathetic pain, for him and for me, too. Because I know that, as desperately lonely as I am, there’s nothing he can ever say or do that would make me want to get coffee with him or anything else. And because I know only too well what it’s like to long for time and closeness with people for whom, whatever it is they are looking for, it will never be you. How many of us are doomed to live our lives in solitude and invisibility, being seen only by people who we will never want and yearning always to be seen by people who will never see us? Eleanor Rigbys, the lot of us.

It’s not my fault that I don’t want closeness with him, and it’s not the fault of anyone I’ve ever yearned for that they don’t want closeness with me. As if to emphasize this, just as I was walking away from him, my Spotify shuffled up Bonnie Raitt’s song “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” “You can’t make your heart feel something it won’t,” she sings, and so it goes. But I can’t wait like this forever. In a world that doesn’t see me, I need one person who does, someone to give love to, someone to come home to. I hope he finds that, too. Because what is life without that?

Questions for a Friend

What sorts of vacations did your family take when you were a child? 
Were they road trips like the ones my family took? 
I know your family had more money than mine did, 
maybe you took trips to Europe or something, I don’t know. I want to know.
But if you ever did take road trips, did you love the big skies over small-town motels?
Did you love seeing what each night’s swimming pool looked like?
Did you ever ride past Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas along Route 66 only to find it lodged inside you forever?
Did you sit in the backseat with headphones on, completely lost in music, trying to escape from things outside (your father) and things inside (a self you couldn’t be)? 
I’m guessing you didn’t. I want to hear all about the difference. I want to hear all about the specificity of you. 
Was there laughter in your childhood car rides? Were your parents gregarious? Did you play games together to pass the time, looking for license plates from different states or cars of different colors? Or did pop songs from radio stations fill the air until they shattered into static?
Were you ever affected by a sadness you couldn’t name as you moved through the vastness of it all?

Did you feel free out there, as if everything under the grand expanse belonged to you? 

I did. 

I don’t anymore. Do you still? 

Do you think maybe we could go to some of those places again, together, you and me, and get them back?

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I Want to Know You

Recently I read Adrienne Rich’s remarkable 1977 essay "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying.“  At one point, she writes:


We take so much of the universe on trust. You tell me: "In 1950 I lived on the north side of Beacon Street in Somerville.” You tell me: “She and I were lovers, but for months now we have only been good friends.” You tell me: “It is seventy degrees outside and the sun is shining.” Because I love you, because there is not even a question of lying between us, I take these accounts of the universe on trust: your address twenty-five years ago, your relationship with someone I know only by sight, this morning’s weather. I fling unconscious tendrils of belief, like slender green women - of threads, across statements such as these, statements made so unequivocally, which have no tone or shadow of tentativeness. I build them into the mosaic of my world. I allow my universe to change in minute, significant ways, on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you.

It reminded me of what it is to really want to know someone. The way, as Rich writes, knowing someone can meaningfully expand our universe. I remembered how learning even simple, mundane things about the last woman I loved–her father’s name, a bad movie she’d seen at the theater in her early teens, things like that–felt exciting and nourishing to me. They became part of my universe, which became larger as it expanded to accommodate them. I wanted the entire expansive overgrown solitude of my mind to be rejuvenated and made into something new by learning about her. New monuments and statue gardens. I wanted a kind of intimacy with her where knowing how she saw the world might inform how I saw the world. 

Now I feel so solitary, I feel the damage this prolonged loneliness is doing, and I can feel those tendrils in my mind, the ones Rich mentions, withering, drying up, needing to come across someone who ignites their interest again, someone I want to know, and who wants to know and be known by me in return. Elsewhere in the essay, Rich writes, “The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life.” But we can’t have that alchemy with just anyone. That’s why Rich calls it alchemy. 

To find someone is hard enough. Someone with whom you can “both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us.” Without the other, there is no possibility of life.

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Secretary (2002)

The Wheel of Fortune Keeps on Spinning

In Michael Winterbottom’s extraordinary 2002 film 24 Hour Party People, Tony Wilson’s passion project Factory Records seems to be on its last legs. Just after a disastrous meeting at Factory HQ, the film cuts to Tony (Steve Coogan) hosting Wheel of Fortune. He strikes a rather more philosophical turn than longtime United States Wheel host Pat Sajak ever has.

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In 2018 I gave a keynote at a conference in Cologne, Germany. Today, I wore the same outfit that I wore that day to an interview for a job at a grocery store. So spins the wheel of fortune.

I come from a working class background. My mom kept us barely treading water working the night shift doing data entry at a medical laboratory, the phone ringing off the hook with creditors calling throughout the day. She did that until about a week before she went into the hospital with complications from cancer, which killed her. 

Some of my friends have parents with money. Houses and property. People they can turn to in failure if need be and ask for help. People from whom they stand to inherit some wealth someday. Of course, a lot of Americans also don’t have that at all. I’m one of those who doesn’t have that at all. As heroine Holly Sykes says in David Mitchell’s urgent and thrilling novel The Bone Clocks, “Being born’s a hell of a lottery.”

Society has a way of making class distinctions feel like natural law. They’re not. They’re bullshit. For a while, I got lucky. Got to stop doing coffee shop and call center work and become a so-called professional writer. Even though I know class distinctions are bullshit, there was still always part of me, the part that had internalized society’s bullshit, that felt like I had cheated destiny by breaking out of this life for a while. That part of me now gloats, pleased to see the universe correct itself as I’m returned to my rightful place.

But here’s what’s actually true. The people who are doing those jobs that our culture deems “better”–they’re there because they’re lucky, too, like I was lucky for a while. I’m not saying that hard work and perseverance are never a factor. They certainly were for me. But so much of all of it is down to privilege and circumstance. Impostor syndrome was a constant problem for me in the circles I’ve moved in for the past several years but I know now better than I ever have before that I’m way, way more than competent enough to do any number of jobs in and around the games industry. I don’t know what my failure to find such a job now is about–Being too trans? Being too political? Just plain bad luck after a run of good luck?–but I know it’s not that I can’t do them. 

I acknowledge that part of it probably has to do with certain limitations of mine. We all have our limits, and there are certain kinds of writer that I just can’t be. I can’t be the kind of writer who churns out stories like The Best Starter Pokemon of All Time or Ranking All the Snakes of the Metal Gear Solid Series, because I just don’t care. I don’t think along those lines. That’s not at all how my mind or heart works in relation to games or cinema or anything else, and if I tried to contort myself to fit into that mold, the results would be forced and terrible. If that is what the market values now, then this must be where the market and I part ways. In a 1999 interview with Charlie Rose (which for whatever reason has stuck in my head since I first saw it all those years ago), Johnny Depp says that if he was forced into being a purely commercial, leading man “product” who could no longer make the kinds of creative choices he wanted to make, “I’d rather go back to pumping gas.” I’d really love to keep writing about games or writing for games or working in games in some other capacity entirely or doing any number of things rather than working at a grocery store or a call center or wherever I end up, but if my choices are to churn out pieces of a sort that I fundamentally don’t see any value in or to pump gas, well then, I guess I’m pumping gas. There’s certainly no shame in it, and I’m not entitled to do work of a different sort, at least no more and no less than anyone else is. But I sure wish it paid a little better. 

I’m really scared. So far this decade is shaping up to be far more uncertain, unstable and unpleasant for me than the last. For the whole planet too, maybe, and I know that the problems of one little person don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world but still, it’s my life. It’s the only one I’ve got. And I’m terrified. 

Earlier in 24 Hour Party People, Tony passes a man on the street who asks him for money. Tony gives him a bit and keeps walking as the man shouts after him:

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To which Tony says:

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And then again, after a moment:

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I know.

The Pain of Waking

Because I decided it was too long for Tumblr, I put my new post about revisiting The Matrix, the power stories have over us, and different kinds of liberation, on Medium. You can read it here.

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what acupuncture feels like

A friend asked what acupuncture feels like, but I don’t know what it might feel like to you. I can only try to explain what it feels like to me.

You have to understand that I wake up every day with my skin screaming for touch. I live the life of the skin-hungry, and this drought withers the mind and the heart as well as the body. 

So, acupuncture. Sixteen or so sometimes-symmetrical precision points of touch that I don’t feel touching me at all, so small are they. But my body knows they’re there, and in fifteen or twenty minutes, it’s the strangest sensation, like dreaming while awake, a vibration runs through all the barren places, all the far-out peninsulas of my body, a vibration that feels like warm water thawing out ice, or like greenery coming back to barren lands. Today, even though I knew my arms were by my sides, for a while I could have sworn they were reaching straight out in either direction. It felt like floating, like expansion, like a memory of homecoming. 

Always a memory. Always the same memory, and never nearly as good as the real thing. A tune-up when what I need is an overhaul. Metallic pinpricks that work their own valuable kind of magic but I still need the particular magic of human touch.

See, what I only just realized today is that when I left your apartment that night all those years ago, and took the bus to the subway home to my little fortress of solitude, it wasn’t, as I had thought for so long, the world that was vibrating around me. It was me, at the age of 37, alive and awake for the very first time.

Living in Grievance, Living in Gratitude

The other day I was walking down Shattuck in Berkeley. Ahead of me, two people were strolling very slowly and talking to each other. One of them caught sight of me behind him out of the corner of his eye, stopped walking and started rapidly repeating a rhythmic three-syllable phrase that at first I didn’t even understand. Then my brain made sense of it: “Come on, sir! Come on, sir! Come on, sir!” he said. “I see you straggling.” He had stopped to insist that I pass, and my soul curled up a little tighter inside me as I did. Finally turning to face me fully, he offered up an awkward correction. “Or ma’am, whatever.”

When I’m misgendered, which I am all the time, I retreat from the world, even as I am out in it. My spirit tightens into a little ball and hides somewhere deep in the core of me, leaving my body a kind of ghost ship, navigating physical space but not really inhabiting it. You could say that I take this approach to every aspect of life. My birthday was earlier this month. I turned 43. But I don’t like to call attention to my birthday. In my darkest, most self-pitying moments, the voice in my head says things like, “Another lonely, empty year. Toss it on the pile with all the others.” It was definitely a year in which I felt the lack of what Bresson called “the bonds that beings and things are waiting for in order to live.” There were few new memories made, no close connections, no seeing and being seen, no knowing and being known, no intimacy, no touch, no affection, no warmth, no love. Will 43 be the year that my life starts? Only time will tell. Maybe the key at this point is to find a kind of meaning that isn’t rooted in close connection with others. But what would that even look like? For me, right now, love is all that matters.

So: I’m extremely guarded against the world largely because I don’t feel seen by it. But the one thing I need more than anything else in order to feel like my life has meaning is close connections with others. I hope you can see my dilemma. 

When the pain is at its worst, it sometimes seems to me that there is a choice I have to make between anguish and anger. The anger is much easier. It’s more seductive. It feels more powerful. The anguish leaves me open, aching, yearning, wanting, needing. It hurts like hell sometimes. But in the anguish, there is still the possibility for connection, for salvation. The anger cuts me off. It puts me at odds with the world, with other people. The anguish is better, infinitely better, I assure you. 

On the final page of Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch, there is this: 

Maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open.

And the thing is that at times, in fleeting moments here and there, I am still so fucking grateful to be alive, even though I’m most definitely not always “so glad to be here,” because though I truly do seek to be free of the loneliness and alienation and anguish in my life, I can sometimes see a strange kind of beauty even in my own spectacular failure of a life. 

I found The Goldfinch frustrating for the ways in which it was entirely about whiteness and wealth and privilege but didn’t seem to know in the least that it was entirely about these things, a novel that had the privilege of passing off its experiences and insights and truths as universal when in truth so few of us get to live lives unfettered enough that we can reach for such truths the way Theo Decker does, flying from posh hotel to posh hotel, never really acknowledging that the people behind the counters of those hotels have inner worlds as worthy and wondrous as his own, that they, too, live lives worthy of Pulitzer Prize-winning novels. And yet, I adored it in the end. In the novel’s final moments, as Theo reflects on everything he’s been through and the now that all of that has brought him to, I finally understood where the word “breathtaking” comes from when critics use it as a superlative to describe the impact of a work of art. Sitting outside the little neighborhood coffee stand that is part of my daily routine, I felt my breathing shift, so awestruck and exhilarated was I by the truths Tartt was holding up to the light. 

In the closing pages of the book, Theo says,

…I’m hoping there’s some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it–although I’ve come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don’t, and can’t, understand. What’s mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn’t fit into a story, what doesn’t have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy. 

Yes. Yes. Those are the truths that matter to me, too. After finishing the book, my brain and spirit buzzing from its ending, I walked into a Target, and my phone shuffled up the song “Pobody’s Nerfect” by Wolf Parade. As with so much of Wolf Parade’s music, there’s a point in the song when the sound just gets so vast, it encompasses cities and mountains and forests and starry night skies and also the most intimate truths, the look in the eyes of a trusted friend, the lowering of defenses between people, the past, the future, a freedom from crushing expectations, all of it, all of it at once, and I felt my soul, normally so very small within my body, so guarded, so tense, so vigilant, sweep out to fill the Target and the town and the universe and I thought, that’s it, that’s where it is, that’s why I’m here, the mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable truth that is microscopic and cosmic all at once and that I will never be able to hold in my hands but will never, ever stop grasping for.

Here’s the thing: My life is so fucking small, just me, here, alone, in this little studio apartment, the solitude stretching like a gray gelatinous blob from day to day to day to week to week to week to week to year to year to year to year to year, and yes, I’ve built a fortress around my heart because I feel besieged in the world, and yes, there’s only very few who can breach it, people who bring my guard down, who make me feel safe and seen and free from expectations that I can never hope to meet. Isn’t it strange how living with the fear of failure, the fear of being deemed too much of a fuckup and cast aside as a hopeless case, has done nothing to motivate me to change, has succeeded only in turning me inward with shame, yet the absence of that fear is what I know could motivate me to change? I’ve lived with the fear my whole life. It doesn’t make me a better person. But love? Yes. Love could do that. 

On very rare occasions people try to claw their way into my life but they’re all wrong to me. They’re people who have me raising the drawbridge, flooding the battlements with archers. Then someone strolls by for whom the drawbridge lowers itself, someone who carries the password to bypass all the magical fortifications our enchanters can devise, and they don’t even wish to enter. So it goes, for what’s true for me is as true for them. Again, from the final pages of The Goldfinch: “We can’t choose what we want and don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth.”

But if at some point the drawbridge lowers and someone enters and we come to some sort of understanding, both of us clear that though there are limits to how well we can know ourselves, much less each other, we’re willing to live together in the full wondrous ambiguity of that, appreciating the beautiful inexplicability of it all together, I will be so grateful, and so glad I lived long enough for that to finally happen in my life. And if it never does, and if I live out the remainder of my years as lonely as the last many years have been, well, it won’t remotely be the life I want for myself, but even that, I suppose, will be inexplicably beautiful in its own way.

tenderantigone:
“anne carson, nox / shauna barbosa, “gps” ” tenderantigone:
“anne carson, nox / shauna barbosa, “gps” ”

tenderantigone:

anne carson, nox / shauna barbosa, “gps”

(via ahuntersheart)

Let’s Get Nuts: The Vulnerability of Michael Keaton’s Batman, 30 Years Later

The hype for Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman was extremely real. I remember talk of people going to movies in the preceding months just to see the trailer. I don’t remember if it was this specific trailer, but I do remember that it was like this–no narration, just atmosphere, just footage, 90 seconds or two minutes you could just get lost in. It tantalized us with Burton’s steamy, shadowy, fully realized Gotham, the raw power of the Batmobile, the star power of Jack Nicholson, and, in a casting choice I found thrillingly off-kilter, Michael Keaton as Batman.

I was 12 that summer. I remember the thrill that ran through me once riding past a billboard on Sunset, just the shiny metallic logo on a black background and the film’s release date. It seemed to herald the arrival of a particular kind of cool that simply hadn’t existed before, at least not in my young life. 

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It’s interesting, isn’t it, what falls away as the years go by, and what remains? Now, when I think of that film, it isn’t the (admittedly outstanding) environmental design that I remember most, or the silhouette of the Batwing against the moon, or anything that seemed to make the movie so tremendously important and exciting in the summer of ‘89. Even walking out of the theater after my first viewing, I remember that I’d been blindsided by the peculiar vulnerability of Bruce Wayne, and it’s this that I still love about the film. 

Sixteen years later, Batman Begins would give us a version of the character who’s tremendously capable in or out of the Batsuit, a martial artist who cracks a ton of skulls in a prison camp before being dragged away by guards to solitary. “Why?” Wayne asks.

“For protection.” 

“I don’t need protection!” 

“Protection for them,” the guard quips, nodding back toward the numerous men Wayne has left writhing in pain. 

I can’t imagine Keaton’s Wayne ever being in a situation like this, and if he did get himself into one, I don’t see him being so dominant. As Batman, he’s a capable enough fighter, sure, but one gets the sense that the theatrics of his costume and all his accoutrements do a lot of the heavy lifting, as he uses the shadows of the city to his advantage, instilling fear into the hearts of his opponents. In an early scene, we see a criminal being dragged off by police after an encounter with Batman, raving deliriously. “I’m tellin’ ya, man! A giant bat!” 

When he lacks the suit and has to do what he can in broad daylight, it all feels very different. He pays Vicki Vale a visit at her apartment with the intention of telling her that he’s Batman, but their conversation is interrupted by the Joker, and pitted against him, Bruce feels completely outmatched. Smashing a vase with a poker, Wayne goes all in, doing everything he can to operate on the Joker’s level. “You wanna get nuts?!” he shouts. “Come on! Let’s get nuts!” But the Joker isn’t even fazed. He just pulls out a pistol, asks Wayne if he’s ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight, and shoots him, without missing a beat. 

Bruce’s attempt to confront the Joker doesn’t feel like one formidable force against another. Compared to his incredibly threatening nemesis, in this moment Bruce comes across like a wounded child, trying very much to make himself seem big and scary in an effort to fend off danger and keep safe someone he cares about, but only succeeding in revealing how small and vulnerable he really is. It’s my favorite moment in the film. It seems to me that the power dynamic is not entirely unlike those moments when I’d try to make myself seem bigger than I was to protect my mom when my father went on drunken rampages, but I actually only felt very small and very scared. It’s in this scene that we most clearly see that Keaton’s Bruce Wayne is still very much the person he was in the moment his parents were killed, that the Batsuit and everything that goes with it are tools he’s created not just to frighten criminals but also to protect himself. I guess this is what’s stayed with me most from the film because as I’ve gotten older, it’s only felt more true to me that those of us who are made to feel lost and scared when we’re young, we can carry on, we can grow, we can heal, but that wound will always be a part of us.

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