10:50 p.m. - 2007-01-13
Tornadoes Can Bite Me, Twice
Please excuse me if there are an inordinate number of typos in this entry, and I am 1) typing this on someone else's laptop and 2) high.
I spoke last entry of fear in existential terms, the fear of taking a risk, of falling, of failure. Fears we suffer through every day. However, there is another kind of fear. I took this performance workshop with Tim Miller my fourth semester at Berkeley. For those who don't know, Tim Miller is a celebrated gay performance artist, one of the famed "NEA Four" whose work was deemed an inappropriate use of public funds for their (homo)sexual content (except Karen Finley, who just came across as kinda pervy, which she is, in an awesome way), and the love of my life. Well, his boyfriend might object, and the most contact I've had with Tim Miller is a hug, but I think I join many a gay man in saying that, after an hour, I realized there was no gay man on the planet as sexy and wonderful as Tim Miller. Anyway, he asked us to do an exercise in which we imagined ourselves being pursued by our greatest fear. After much shouting and screaming and the occassional collision, he had us stop and name our fears. Many people mentioned things in the nature of the aforementioned fears: failure, death, loss, solitude, etc. I said, "a great white shark."
Yes, I am scared of failure and all that other stuff, but if you gave me a choice between "Fail publically" and "Be put in a pool with a shark" I just might fail publically. My fear of sharks makes me pathetic. I get scared when I turn on The Discovery Channel or Animal Planet and see a shark. I have felt my heart shudder when seeing a shark in a magazine. My friend Jessica once through a shark balloon at me, and I flinched. Isn't that sad? A balloon, people. The worst it could do was pop close to my ear. At least I didn't scream like a girl. I didn't. I may have squeaked like a mouse, though. I'll admit that.
Sharks are one of my big three childhood fears. Now, I was a scared little kid. You could freak me out pretty easily, and my cousins did as much as they could. But there were three big fears that would keep me up all night, or at least far away from large bodies of water. The first was sharks. The second was vampires, and their representatives in the real world: bats. There is a bridge on the walking trail near my Dad's old house that is internationally famous as a haven for Mexican free-tailed bats. It wasn't until my mid-teens that I had the guts to walk underneath it in the evenings. My fear of vampires and bats has waned over the years, particularly after Bram Stoker's Dracula (which I insist is a highly underrated movie), Anne Rice, and Christopher Pike's Last Vampire series (I could do a whole entry on Christopher Pike's teen horror novels, but the Last Vampire series was his magnum opus because, like, it taught you stuff about, like, Hinduism and stuff) made me realize that it was far more fun to eroticize vampires.
The last fear is tornadoes, which are fuckin' with me even as we speak.
Before I move on, actually, isn't Anne Rice a born again Christian now? Doesn't that say something about the comparative literary quality of a bunch of New Orleans goth novels and the Bible? Or not. Just sayin'.
Anyway, back to tornadoes. I suppose the fear stems from a combination of The Wizard of Oz (that thing turns women into witches, man, and there were plenty of ladies in my neighborhood I would not want to fuck with if they were given access to flying monkeys) and the fact that tornadoes are a very real possibility in my neck of the woods. I've also frequently been semi-psychic about tornadoes. I've had dreams about them, only to find out the next day that one touched down relatively near. The fact that, in these instances, "relatively near" is on something of a national scale and tornado warnings had been issued the night before should not diminish the faith in my awesome psychic powers.
Nor should the fact that I had no dreams last night, even though a tornado touched down in San Marcos, about 30-40 miles or so from where I live. It hit a non-residential area late in the evening, so no lives were lost, thank god. But it meant that, since my best friend was coming up from San Antonio, which is on the other side of San Marcos from Austin, I could not let her, in good conscience, make the drive up, so I told her to turn around and go home. Which meant that she didn't come up, which meant that I didn't go see the White Ghost Shivers show.
Like I said, fucking with me.
Now, this should not be an issue, and really, it isn't. The White Ghost Shivers are playing next weekend. I was also a bit reluctant to go to this show because one of my friends here is disabled, and she wanted to go to the show, but the venue is only accessible in so far as they have people who are trained to walk wheelchairs up the stairs. This sucks for a disabled person, so my friend opted out of going, which I understand. It's just that, well, this was supposed to be my birthday party.
Everyone break out your violins. Yes, now.
I have always been rather superstitious about both New Year's and my birthday, which fall very close to one another. I feel they set the tone for the rest of the year. This was particularly problematic when I turned 25. New Year's had been amazing, and the days leading up to my birthday were amazing, but on my birthday there were all these bad omens (I hit a dog-thankfully without injuring it--in my car, I found a dead lizard in my shoelaces), and 25 proved to be not so much with the good (not entirely bad, but it was definitel the time when I started feeling like I got off track, not to mention a year that featured a big health-scare for my Dad and my first major back injuries). On my 26th birthday, I literally ran out of gas, and if 26 was about anything, it was about me running out of gas. There was a point this past fall where I felt like a piece of paper that had been erased so many times that a hole had worn through. It was a great year for melodramatic prose that a teenager would be ashamed of, let me tell you.
In hopes of taking 2(00)7 by the reigns, I decided to work all day on my birthday. I would read for orals, write, and go to a meeting for an upcoming queer performance project. To me, that seemed like a perfect day. In practice, much of my time was spent talking to friends on the phone (which was good) and staring at a blank screen (not so good). However, the really unfortunate thing, the thing that had me worried and in a snit, was that the meeting for the queer performance project didn't go as well as I wanted, and I put it that way because I am well aware that I was being petulant and paranoid. I am one of those people who takes "I'm not sure about your idea" to mean, "I hate you and hope you die, faggot." It's just a little quirk of mine. To be a little more specific, I am a newcomer to an ongoing project, so when someone said that the ideas that I was bringing in might mean a departure from the original vision of the project, I took that to mean I was being asked to leave and throw myself off the bridge where all the bats hang out, preferably in an area where sharks had been released in my honor. The guy didn't mean it that way. He probably didn't. I think. I hope. Please, God.
It didn't help that I was really excited about the project and wanted to do the best I could and was really, really worried about either taking over and alienating people (my first Bay Area theatre experience) or dropping the ball (my second Bay Area theatre experience). Or that the guy who was resistant to my ideas was 1) tall, 2) Jewish, and 3) the owner of a pair of puppy dog brown eyes, a combination that anyone who knows me will tell you I fall to my knees for. And I mean that in the filthiest possible way.
So I was really freaked about the possibility that I'd screwed things up with something (and someone) I really wanted to do within the first hour, and it took a phone call with St. Caroline and the resurrection of The Notorious RRZ to get me out of my funk and writing semi-decent stuff on a page. It also helped that my horoscope for the day on Astro.com said that I shouldn't let the little mishaps I'd face today make me believe that the whole year would be disappointing. The fact that this would make sense to put on anybody's birthday horoscope should not diminish the faith in Astro.com's awesome psychic powers.
One of the reasons I was happy to work on my birthday, though, was that I knew that Saturday would mean a visit from my best friend and a night with arguably the funnest band in Austin. Then the weather hit and I assumed my friend would cancel, since she loathes driving in the rain, and I dealt with that, but she said she'd come. Then she wouldn't answer her phone and I assumed she'd sleep through the show, and I dealt with that, but then she woke up just in time to get to Austin. Then I heard from my friend Brackin that a tornado hit San Marcos, and I called my friend to turn her around. This was the right thing to do, and as a result I will not be celebrating my birthday as I had planned.
Are those violins still going? The Sudan? They're in the Sudan? Does their suffering compare to mine? I think not.
Okay, fine.
The White Ghost Shivers are playing TWICE next weekend, in a handicapped-accessible venue that's right next to my favorite ice cream in the world (if you've never been to Austin, and never had Amy's ice cream, you are missing out, and perhaps deserve the violins more than I do). Another band I love, Mistress Stephanie and Her Melodic Cat, is playing tomorrow night at the Hole in the Wall, which is within walking distance (if I'm feeling ambitious, which I won't be in the freezing cold). So there is no need for me to be petulant, and now that I've bitched about it for a couple of pages I feel a lot better. I need to remember that just because things aren't perfect doesn't mean they're not better, and full of promise, knock on wood.
Still, it figures tornadoes would get me in the end. This is just them taunting me, I know it. They'll fuck up little things for a while and then gang up with sharks and bats to finish me off. I know their ways. So if you see a flock of bats and a funnel cloud converging near an aquarium or seaside area, let me know. They may be plotting something.
