Unapologetically Obnoxious Mothers Day Post #47

I have to confess folks, that we here on the Block have had our hands full with our newly-encountered twenty-something existence to do much intellectual heavy lifting lately (though I did finally get around to reading Criminal Intimacy, which was exactly as awesome as I was promised).  As a result, this blog continues to descend into some questionable livejournal-y territory. My hope is that I can distract you with a short, but heartwarming Mothers Day post. Let me know if it works.

For all of the daddy issues that Will Danger tangles with, his mommy issues are actually pretty simple. Mama Danger is the coolest. Just the coolest. And so, in honor of Mothers Day, and in lieu of a smarter post, let me share one of my favorite childhood stories. Close readers that you are, you've probably gathered that I hate to tell a story in which I am not the protagonist. Consider my willingness to do so further evidence of my mom-related appreciation.

As a child, I had a tendency to sleepwalk. And usually, when I would sleepwalk, hijinks ensued. Examples include making strange requests of my parents, tumbling down the stairs, and turning on every light in the house. All between the hours of midnight and 5am and all on separate occasions. On one such occasion, everyone in the mid-90's Danger household was sound asleep. I couldn't have been more than six, meaning that my sister was three and my mother was the exact same age she is now. [Quick aside: My mother does not age. She continues to present in her early 30s, which is embarrassing because I think in the near future, I'm set to out-age her. This also means that growing up, I was always the kid with the hot mom, which I continue to be proud of, to this day.]

The stillness of this suburban night is broken by my sister's piercing scream. Mama Danger, who is almost as big a worrier as I am, leaps out of bed and runs into her bedroom, to discover the source of this disturbance. She finds me, standing silently in my sister's room, pajama pants around my ankles, peeing heartily into my sister's toy basket. My sister continues to scream as she watches her possessions being soaked in a steady stream of urine.

As my mother walks my somnambulant self back to bed, my sister is still hysterical and entirely unable to go back to sleep. Maternal warrior that she is, Mama Danger grabs the bleach, fills up the bathtub, and proceeded to systematically scrub each and every one of my sister's toys. At 3am on a weeknight. And to this day, I have absolutely no memory of the event.

My sister and I put this poor woman through hell (and it only got worse after puberty). So here's to you, Mama Danger, for raising and supporting two of the most wildly dysfunctional pre-adults. And also for not smacking the shit out of your children, even when we so, so clearly deserved it. Sorry we about the frequency with which we embarrass you.

North Carolina: Some Quick Thoughts

This post ended up being a little partially formed. Such is the nature of blogging. See Hedonismbot, below.

I find myself annoyed. In the short time since North Carolina's voting public passed Amendment 1, which put the (further) proverbial kibosh on its queer residents' matrimonial aspirations, my Facebook wall has been ablaze with angry statuses. These statuses follow two (more or less connected) patterns of thought: 1) That North Carolina's voting public is horribly backwards, mean, homophobic, spiteful, uninformed, etc. These statuses generally amount to "WHOOPS! NORTH CAROLINA SUCKS. BOO!" 2) That the tide of progress is inevitable, and that history is progressing unstoppably toward equality. Often these statuses come in the form of things like "We're not going anywhere!" I'll address both of these thoughts, in turn.

1) Blaming North Carolina voters does two things: First, I think it keeps us from addressing our larger national culture of homophobia that not only produces such an outcome, but also brings about a ballot initiative like Amendment 1 in the first place. And it's important to understand, gays of DC, how much we all contribute to this culture of homophobia, even though we bought HRC bumper stickers and LEGALIZE GAY t-shirts. [I would actually argue that DC's political gay scene plays a more active role in furthering national homophobia than your average Joe Homosexual].

Secondly, though, getting bogged down in a discussion of what a shitty state North Carolina is feels very much like saying "It could never happen here." Guess what, folks. It's happening in Maryland right now, as we speak, and it's happened historically all over the country.

2) Among other things, the idea that North Carolina is just fighting the general trend of history is a pretty useless strand of political thought. Hopeful though it may be, how much political traction are we really getting out of "It'll happen eventually?" Since when has the history of social movements in America been the lazy inevitability of progress? What we're trying to achieve here is a fundamental shift in American culture, not to mention law and public opinion. What could be less inevitable/simple?

If this all makes it sound as though I'm not upset by the evening's events, I'm sorry. This is a pretty significant hit for queers with marital leanings, and of course I regret the outcome. But I think that as a public, we are refusing to ask difficult questions, especially when the accompanying answers might implicate us in tonight's results. Making an enemy out of an entire voting public and distancing ourselves from moments like this feels politically irresponsible.

A final thought for some DC gays specifically: Does the gentrification that you're so fond of (and it's accompanying culture of race- and class-related inequality) contribute in any way to our national culture of homophobia, whose results we've seen tonight? Give it some thought, eh?

But We're Never Gonna Survive, Unless We Get a Little Bit Crazy

Working at Big Red is a really strange experience. It teeters between soul crushing, at which point I often imagine myself diving in front of a metro car on my ride home, and wonderfully amusing/educational. Whatever else it is, I find this combination oddly thrilling. Some quick examples:

-A coworker came into my office the other day and said, "Do you know what the biggest problem with education today is? Universities aren't teaching kids the skills they need to get jobs." I clenched my jaw, turned my head, and responded by acknowledging that we had fundamentally different approaches to education, and I didn't really feel like getting into it that early in the morning. I'm pretty proud that I didn't take the bait.

-Another coworker, while watching Bloomberg television (a staple at our office), decided to make fun of Obama by doing a Bill Cosby impression. Racism is alive and well in right-wing America. But then, when I mentioned, in my most innocent, definitely never, ever sarcastic voice, that I had read recently that Barack actually turned down his Jello endorsement deal, I was met with blank stares. If you're gonna brave the 1930's racism of an Obama/Cosby joke, at least know your history, guys. But mostly, just knock it off!

-I've made it my goal to say "God Bless America" at least once a day. Usually people just smile affirmatively, but I've also gotten two high-fives out of the deal. I don't think anyone knows how much I'm kidding when I say it. I'm also not sure they realize when I make fun of them, more generally. God bless stoic sarcasm.

-Between the job and my extracurricular reading habits, I now know more about economics than I ever wanted to. The tentative title of my forthcoming econ textbook is going to be, "Stop Giving a Shit about Pie Charts." Depending on who you are, you'll be excited/disappointed to know that I still can't bring myself to worship the dollar. Sorry, Dad.

One small bit of news that genuinely offends me, and to which I am not quite sure how to respond: In our company's quarterly newsletter*, they have a section where they list new employees, their positions, and a short bio. Well, I had to think carefully about the short bio, because I had a hard time writing anything that didn't read, "I am the homosexual menace, and here are my various fetishes." After some brief agonizing, I finally managed to put together a short, deliberately vague bio that basically read "name, degree & certificate, does a little writing, now has job." I even managed to pepper it with some pithy humor! Well, in the editing process, they completely sanitized the bio. The published bio read something to the effect of "Will Danger went to QTU. Now, he works here."

Alright, sure. Republican editors can't be faulted for being generally humorless. What I find insulting is that they refused to list my degree/certificate, when everyone else featured in this section, regardless of age/career status, had their various communications/marketing/super-lame-shit degrees listed. It wasn't a spacing issue, because my bio ended up being considerably shorter than everyone else's. There was even another former English major who had her degree listed, so I can only assume that they refused to print the fact that I have a certificate in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies.** This conclusion is simultaneously obnoxious, unsurprising, obliquely homophobic, sort of insulting, and (eventually) kind of funny. I'll make up for it by one day writing an exposé about my time in the conservative trenches. And the cover of the book will just be an image of my LGBT certificate punching my boss in the nose.***

I'll leave you with another Alanis anthem (a Seal cover, this time), whose sentiment has pretty much been getting me through the week: "But we're never gonna survive/Unless we get a little bit crazy."

Please don't think me unoriginal for repeatedly ending posts with a video. Just sing along.

*I can't believe that phrase has become part of my vocabulary. The world takes us to some very strange places, doesn't it?
 
**I made the deliberate decision in the bio to spell the entire thing out.

***We'll have to draw arms/brass knuckles on the certificate, obviously. Actually, the more I think about it, including a pair of brass knuckles with all future certificates seems like a good idea. Who do I see about making that a reality, Roxie?

Sitting on a Dock, Watching the World End

In light of a really rough week and a seemingly-endless string of terrible dates, the possible subject of future writing, I feel the need to begin this post by taking stock of a few sources of stabilizing optimism:

1. I don't sleep all that much anymore, but I'm managing to stay (mostly) on top of both my reading and gym-going habits, despite my entry into the work-day grind.

2. In spite of the occasionally soul-crushing (and usually racist) nature of my new job, the strains of political and economic thought it has forced me to engage have opened for me much more nuanced understandings of some academic arguments about politics and culture. Between my job and increasingly-frequent social outings in DC, where the general etiquette is "BE AS OBNOXIOUS AS POSSIBLE ABOUT YOUR POLITICAL BELIEFS,"  I'm finally able to locate myself within the political narrative that Lisa Duggan traces in The Twilight of Equality?. All of this is really just to say that I am still learning.

3. I recently saw The Cabin in the Woods, which is in serious competition for the title of "smartest horror movie I've ever seen." More on this point in a second.

4. Whether through my own sporadic efforts, Roxie's deeply energizing and critter-affirming optimism (for which I remain boundlessly grateful), or Historiann's repeated refusal to put up with anyone's bullshitte, the blogosphere continues to offer me intellectual sustenance  and emotional fortification.

Now, on to The Cabin in the Woods. This post got a little lengthy, but lie to me and tell me that you read it.

Anyone who's had a conversation with me for longer than thirty seconds knows that Will Danger loves loves loves horror movies and would go even gayer than usual for Joss Whedon, who wrote Buffy the Vampire Slayer, among other things. That being said, Joss hasn't actually produced anything of particular merit lately. Dollhouse fell pretty flat, and I've never been in love with Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Nevertheless, Whedon's newest movie, The Cabin in the Woods is one of the smartest/most entertaining horror movies I've never seen. I want to take this opportunity for my first sustained crack at thinking through horror movies.

SPOILER ALERT. SRSLY GUYS. I haven't held back any plot details. Read at your own risk.

Of course, the plot gets a little hokey. Joss leans into science fiction pretty hard, presenting a mysterious company of scientists whose sole job is to stage horror-movie rituals, where they kill off co-eds in an effort to keep "the ancients" from waking up. From what I can gather (some of the details are deliberately vague), these mysterious ancients (old gods who used to rule the world, but are now sleeping) require a horror-movie body count to be appeased. In this case, the slaughter-worthy breakfast club includes a Slut, a Jock, a Brain, a Stoner, and a Virgin. At the movie's end, the Stoner has managed to survive and the main character (the archetypal Virgin) is tasked with killing him, in order to save the world. She ultimately refuses, the ancients wake up, and the world starts to end just as the credits begin rolling. 

There are some pretty straightforward readings of this meta-narrative available, but I don't want to spend too much time on them, because they're pretty readily available and kind of boring (I hesitate to pass over them entirely, just because the straightforward and seemingly self-evident are seldom so). Among other things, it appears that the audience is meant to identify with the Company that stages these horror movies. The film's meta-narrative becomes less stable and less straightforward the longer I spend thinking about it, but in its more brilliant moments, I think the film questions our attachment to horror movies, horror's broader role in culture, and the kinds of narrative violence unleashed by our uninterrogated attachment to the conventions of horror.

The movie's most interesting moves, however, come in the last five minutes. In the film's final scene, Dana and Marty, (the Virgin and Stoner, respectively) are sitting on some stone steps, passing a cigarette back and forth and apologizing to each other as the world comes apart around them. I love how much the scene comes to resemble this image, a kind of "relax and watch the sun set" moment, except Whedon substitutes a sunset for the end of the world. I find the moment's calmness wonderfully interesting. Literally apocalyptic thought it might be, this moment indicates a resolution to the movie's suspense and is free from the tension that otherwise pervades horror movies. Though perhaps a generous reading, I think this moment has genre-redefining potential. What would it mean to end a horror movie with such a moment of calmness, clarity, and (most importantly) safety -- especially when the trope is typically to end a horror movie with a "final scare," in which we discover the villain is still alive and kicking, often at the expense of plot/narrative coherence.

In this scene, the Stoner also apologizes for ending the world. I’m absolutely enthralled both by the idea that ending the world is something that you would apologe for (why bother?) and by the idea that destroying the world is something for which you can be forgiven.

This decision to end the world is where The Cabin in the Woods most approaches queerness (Importantly, I'm not actually arguing that Cabin is a queer film, only that this moment hinges on a queer sensibility and contains mostly-unrealized queer potential). In the beginning of this scene, the Company's mysterious director (played by Sigourney Weaver, no less) lays out the Stoner's options pretty well: "You can either die with them, or you can die for them." He is going to die either way, the crux of his decision is whether or not he wants to take the rest of the world with him. This is pretty much a no-brainer, right?

The twist comes when both the Stoner and Virgin refuse this choice, opting to destroy the world, rather than to save it (This choice seems particularly strange for Dana, who opts to die AND destroy the world, rather than kill Marty. Her life is actually still at stake, here). I'm enthralled by the movie's determination to make the wrong choice and it's insistence on choosing the un-chooseable option. In his disavowal of correctness and his determination to fail in saving the world, Whedon opens up a host of previously unthinkable cinematic possibilities, the most immediate of which is that, paradoxically, failure might be the most successful option. This makes me feel much better about the fact that this post itself might indulge in failure.

Seriously, you guys. Go see this movie. Even if you hate scary movies, the writing really, really shines. Joss Whedon is back, y'all. I'm even managing to garner a little excitement for his version of The Avengers coming out this summer.

Drowning, Resurfacing, and Being Entirely Unable to Find Kansas on a Map

My life is undergoing a radical restructuring, and change is always difficult to blog. I've imagined several incarnations of this post, the titles of which were things like "How my Liberal, Hippy-Dippy Education Taught me Everything I needed to Know About Doing Your Job," "How Blogging Got me a Job Working for the Devil," and "Everything I Needed to Know about Life I Learned from Blogging." As I put fingers to keyboard, though, my thinking feels much less stable than it did when I was only dealing in possibility. Isn't that always the case? With these various potential posts floating around my noggin, I begin by saying that Will Danger is being forced to adjust his privacy settings.

I have news, dear readers, that will partially explain my recent absence, and then immediately make you stop reading my posts: Will Danger got a job.

What kind of job, you ask? Where would a comic book-reading, pop culture junkie like you get a job? Are you ready for it? (Hint: You're not)

I work for the most conservative book publisher in America, who for blogging purposes I'll simply call Big Red. That's right. I get up every morning, put on a suit (a suit!), hop on the metro, walk past a picture of Ronnie Reagan on my way into the office, and sit down at my desk, where I have Ann Coulter's phone number hanging on my wall. My weekends are spent trying to wash the taste of the Devil's dick out of my mouth. [Sample experiences: I think there's a copy of Donald Trump's new book on just about every desk in my office. I also caught a coworker with a book entitled The Terrorist Next Door. Dorothy Gale has nothing on me.]

I'll give you a moment to recover from your initial reactions, most of which I'm sure were very violent and/or visceral. As you reassemble your smashed keyboards, return from your various vomitoriums, and try to reign in your laughter, I'm going to continue to muse about privacy in the face of the professional world. Most simply put, I don't know what I can write about anymore. Obviously, I have some very, very strong feelings about this bizarre right-hand turn my life has taken, but my ability to think through them is compromised slightly by the fact that I was hired based on my experience with the blogosphere. No need to reread, you read that sentence correctly. They've visited New Queer. They took one look at this ongoing farce and decided that I was the editorial assistant for them. [The fact that my anemically-funded, queerly-slanted education in the humanities has more than prepared me to do this job is perhaps a topic for another day.]

And so, I am unsure to what extent I can blog about work. I'm going to err on the side of safety for now, but I will say the following: if there's any terror running through your heads about the state of my life (and it's obnoxiously narcissistic of me to assume that there would be), it's running through my head as well. I don't take my titular "drowning" lightly. Good or bad, I'm gonna need some more time to assemble anything coherent about my newly-found case study in American conservatism. But I am writing through my frustration as best I can, in less public spaces. 

In spite of what I may look back on as the specific moment where my life went wrong, I have to keep the following in mind: I am (finally) employed. I'm getting out of my apartment, which after the last few months, is something I will never again take for granted. Better yet, I'm writing (ghostwriting, mostly), researching, and actually publishing. Occasionally,  my job resembles that of a professional blogger. Even if it comes with a healthy conservative slant, I'm being forced to be politically present in a way that I never quite have been before, and in this sense, I can see this job being great prep-work work for graduate study in public affect/political theory/public sphere stuff. I am more obsessed than ever with the mess that's America.

All of that being said, of course, I am still being required to make ideological and moral compromises, the likes of which I will be required to account for, should anyone ever attempt to take stock of my life. Nancy Botwin and I could probably have a sit-down to discuss the fact that we both know where our efforts are leading us. I cannot say for sure if I'm doing what I should be doing, or what I'd like to be doing. All I can say definitively is that I'm doing something, which at this particular impasse, I have to label a good.

On Seeing Rent Again at Twenty-three

Why don't these people just pay their rent, again? The twenty-something slacker in me appreciates the sentiment, though.

Bear with me, dear readers. I've been wrestling with a particularly nasty bout of writer's block. In partial penance, I offer this really neat cover of Mr. Springsteen's Thunder Road:

The Boss and I don't always see eye to eye, but this is one hell of a song.

Birthdays and Death-days, an Absence/Presence Story

I'm having a particularly difficult time writing this, because of the way in which this post has needed to inhabit a space that is simultaneously celebratory and morose. The post is motivated primarily by two concurrent events. First, today marks the one year anniversary of my plunge into the blogosphere. The second, infinitely weightier event, is the untimely passing of an old friend's father. I had concluded that the easiest, and perhaps most reverent, course of action would be to write two separate posts and to leave it at that. In the midst of my emotional and intellectual head-scratching, however, we lost Ms. Whitney Houston, which has made it feel even more important that my celebration and mourning remain intertwined. I've tried to let this potentially insensitive tension guide my thinking but, as with anything worth writing, it remains difficult.

In spite of my Danger-prone blogging pseudonym, I am very fortunate to have only experienced death in the most peripheral way. I've witnessed the death of acquaintances, friends-of-friends, and distant relatives, but never a passing in which I had real emotional stakes. Even now, my attachment to both of these losses is distant. I obviously didn't know Whitney as anything more than a diva figure (a position we shouldn't undervalue), and in the past ten years, I have lost touch with both my friend and his father (though I was once close to both of them). Nonetheless, I do feel both of these deaths, and they have both occasioned serious thought on my part. I think this paragraph treads some questionable ground, so I should be clear: my thinking centers around these two passings because of their temporal proximity, not as a way of analogizing them. Tragedies cannot be analogized; grief can't really be compared in any productive way. All I can concretely say is that both have affected me, and that my (admittedly distant) grief in both cases shares a similar affective core.

What is it about death, exactly? It wounds us, it scares us, it fascinates us in some strange way. No small part of my own attachment to death is the fact that every death I encounter reminds me of my own potential to end. In that way, my reaction to death feels inappropriately selfish, a discomfort which I find quite interesting.

Having just come from a funeral service, I am struck particularly by the awkwardness of grief, both our own and other people's. Though perhaps outside of culturally available scripts for grief, this awkwardness feels really important. Unbalancing as it is, extreme awkwardness makes us feel our proximity to other people in the most visceral sense. It underscores the fact that death organizes and mobilizes us in ways that life, commonplace as it is, cannot. Death creates strange intimacies and brings us into contact with figures from our past, friends-of-friends, and total strangers. Funerals become both a staging of grief and an environment in which these oblique and decidedly un-permanent relationships play out.

I don't have any concrete conclusions to draw/arguments to make, but I am wondering about the publics of grief and the way in which the performance of death becomes about diagraming a particular life. At the funeral, the priest proposed (correctly) that everyone present had their own interlocking and overlapping stories to tell about Mr. Rob. To me, this indicates a desire to map out a life and to account for our own (inevitably complex) intersections with another person.

At its core, though, our mourning always brushes up against celebration. Dear old Emily Dickinson wrote, "The absence is as the presence" (I cannot find a citation for this, forgive me if I've misquoted). Said another way, we do not mourn that which we did not celebrate, and mourning is celebration of another kind. And so, if feels strangely important that my halfhearted musing about death should coincide with New Queer's first blogoversary. Despite my uneven posting habits, this sustained writing project indicates a definite presence, in contrast to the sharply felt absence of death. My blogging efforts have helped bring about, or at least chronicle, a noticeable improvement in my ability to write and think, a progress that stands in opposition to death's haltedness. There's an appropriate symmetry to celebrating my blogoversary on the heels of a funeral, continuing to build and progress in proximity to death, and to celebrate every step, movement, and blog post along the way. When I die, let them pour streamers (or possibly Pokemon cards) into my open coffin.

So, I am left thinking about birthdays and death-days, about progress and passing, about the euphemisms we invent, the stories we tell, and the emotional baggage that we try to avoid. (As a short side-note, the copy of Nella Larsen's novel sitting on my nightstand has me thinking about the numerous conceptual puns we might explore regarding "passing." Why do we use an action verb as a euphemism for death, the most literally immobilizing human experience?) Mr. Rob, Whitney, you are both missed in complex and surprisingly simple ways. Happy Birthday,  New Queer. Let's toast to many more years of sporadic posting and bullshit before Will Danger finally lays his pen, his party hat, and his ten-inch stilettos to rest.

A short note for my own funeral: Drag optional, presents not expected but encouraged. In lieu of flowers, you may drop jewels/pages from Mrs. Dalloway/pogs into my casket. Whitney was slated to perform, but I guess that's probably not going to happen. Bjork, maybe? Alanis?

At any rate, here's to more years, while we have them. Let's let the late Queen of the Night sing us out: