8:51 a.m. - 2007-02-04
Note to Self: Let Them Eat Cake
Right before I left the Bay Area, I was able to quote a classic Noel Coward line: "I've been to a marvelous party." It was held at a art space in The Mission. When I arrived inside, there were people set up who were silk-screening clothes and sewing patches on them, all for suggested donations and, in some cases, even providing free clothes for those who wanted the patch but didn't want to alter what they were wearing. I actually used the free clothes to keep warm while they silk-screened "Trust is the only real currency" on my Ani T-shirt and added these beautiful embroidered red cuffs to my jean jacket. I headed outside with my friend Frankie and danced to a one man band, basically a guy with a banjo and a foot-drum, who sang about fairies and witches and goblins and who was fantastic, allowing me to let the one-eighth of me that's Irish do a jig or three. The seven-eighths that's Mexican got to shake his ass inside to one of the best DJs I have ever heard, who mixed salsa and bhangra and grunge together into some of the best beats I've danced to. A half-naked old dude, a very common creature in San Francisco, said I was a fantastic dancer. Then there was a remade clothing fashion show, some of which I wouldn't wear if you paid me, some of which looked like the best work of Project Runway designers like Santino and Jeffrey (the former of whom I merely hate, the latter I want to see roasted alive for being mean to an admittedly obnoxious contestants mother): edgy, distinctive, and well-assembled. At the end of the night, I found myself wondering whether or not I'd made the right decision to return home, when there were marvelous parties like this one in the Bay Area.
Well, last night I was at a marvelous party, a queer masquerade ball, no less. I believe I can safely say without fear of successful contradiction that I looked amazing. I was The Gay Joker (although much has been made of The Joker being a figure of the queer, but then again, look at Batman and Robin), a costume I built around the purple feather boa my friend Brackin gave me for my birthday (that boa was the envy of many at the party). I scroured Goodwill and Brackin's own closet (which is funny, because she is probably literally half my size) for anything and everything purple I could get my hands on, the piece de resistance being a purple silk robe with green trim, an essential for Gay Jokers in this and any season. I made a mask at our mask-making party, vivid green and studded with purple plastic jewels and purple and neon-green twisted pipe cleaners. I practiced painting on my blood-red grin earlier in the day, and that night, when all of this combined with a shitload of green hairspray and white pancake make-up, there could be no denying that The Clown Prince of Crime had been replaced by a queen.
The problem was that I did not, in fact, have a marvelous time. I had a good time, certainly, but I knew that I could and should have been having a much better time, and I am therefore quite annoyed with myself, because it would be more accurate, perhaps, to say that I did not let myself have a marvelous time. I am still trying, slowly, to learn and relearn certain lessons, and so I write this entry, as much to tell myself a few things as to tell anyone else.
I do not object to drug use (how's that for a segue). Like most American kids, my younger years were spent absorbing the message that drugs were bad, discovering as I grew older that no, in fact, drugs are quite good, or at least can be quite good. Drug use has as much to do with the person and the situation as the chemical. I am quite lucky in that I do not have an addictive personality, or at the very least that my addictions are limited to caffeine and carbohydrates, which take their own toll but not as quickly as, say, heroin. So don't think for a moment that I would ever object, in principal, to what someone chooses to consume in their own home. I believe the trouble comes from excess and the illegality of the items than from the items themselves. I agree with Chris Rock that drugs are quite often illegal when they are produced in Afghanistan or Colombia or some other nation other than the United States, which is content to let Virginia and Milwaukee produce their addictive substances.
However, I am very conscious of that very illegality, and from there springs paranoia about anything done in public. Taking the drug at home and going out? Fine by me, as long as you ain't driving (particularly if you are on hallucinogens, in which case I have to wonder how you would even know when you were driving or not). Taking those drugs in public. Ooooh, me no likee. Not to mention the fact that when I am enjoying something that takes me out of control, I want and need to be around people I trust, preferably in a space where people I don't trust can't freak me out.
So imagine my feeling when, in the process of helping plan this event, I was told there would be cake, and that this cake would have a special ingredient. I was quite excited about that, actually, because the last time I had really good cake with a special ingredient I got so blissfully fucked up that I lost the ability to speak. Then I was told that the icing would have an EXTRA special ingredient. The last time I had that EXTRA special ingredient, I became one with the quantum nature of the universe, found myself loved by a tree, and watched this dude turn into a fairie and, later in the evening, into Ani DiFranco. Don't ask me why. All this in a house that was already something out of Alice in Wonderland. It was the first time I had ever taken a drug that left me completely out of control. I do not like being out of control. And I really did not like the thought of a bunch of people being out of control in public, at least not when I was on the planning committee.
Things got worse this week. I was asked to be the coordinator for volunteers working the night of the party, which was fine. I sent out an email to the listserv with my phone number in it, thinking that it would just go out to people we all knew and trusted. Then it got posted to the myspace page. And then the Austin Chronicle, the free life and arts publication in town where every event that's any event advertises, decided to print our ad, finally. Only they didn't print our ad. For reasons I don't want to think about, they printed our call for volunteers. With my name and number.
Mega-fucking freak out mode, people. I was getting calls both from people who sounded really fucking sketchy and from people who sounded really fucking underage. I was terrified that, were anything to go wrong, the only name that could be traced on documents would be mine. I want to reemphasize that, because as much as I may have had altruistic worries about "What if the cops come and the party gets shut down?" or "What if some kid drinks too much or does too many drugs and we have to call an ambulance?" the voice always came right afterwards, loud and clear and completely self-centered: What if I get blamed?
Then came the variations on that question: What if I have to take someone to the hospital? What if everyone else is too fucked up to talk to the cops? I'm scheduled to tend bar for an hour; what if they come in right as I'm giving a drink to a minor? What if I have to call my dad from jail and he sees me in this totally fruity outfit? What if I get a criminal record? What if Berkeley doesn't let me come back? What if I fuck up my whole life based on the bad decisions of a single night, decisions that weren't entirely my own? And it didn't matter that we decided to card and mark hands, or even when I called and made sure that the cake in question would be kept safely hidden throughout the evening, brought out only when most of the strangers were gone and offered only to those we knew and trusted. All it took were phone calls from people whom I didn't know, people who had no idea what the organization was and who could easily have been narcs or psychos. I spent all of yesterday a complete and total nervous wreck, thinking up contingency plans for when the authorities arrived, about means of escape or of absolving myself of responsibility.
The trouble was that I couldn't resolve myself of responsibility. I just read Judith Butler's amazing Giving an Account of Oneself, which takes as its central thesis that we our responsibility to one another is constitutive of our very being. I refused to refuse that responsibility. The panic turned to something like a dark resignation, that I had made my choices and now I had to make sure that I took care of everyone else.
The problem is, though, that I wasn't taking into account all of Butler's work, which also acknowledges that any attempt to give an account of oursevles will be something of a failure, because there are things about ourselves that predate our coming to consciousness, and so not only must we learn to forgive ourselves for being unable to give full accounts, we must be capable of forgiving others. We must recognize that our attempts to shield one another from harm will always fail, because we have always already been harmed, and so it becomes a matter of accepting that things will go wrong and still being capable of healing and finding joy.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick takes up the other side of the same argument when she talks about paranoia. She claims that much of academic writing is founded on paranoia, the need to know the operations of a system in order to prevent oneself from becoming damaged. We learn the secret meanings so they don't jump out at us, and a lot of them are based on an idea that we are not as powerful as we think, and that authorities are out to get us. Both of these things are true, but Sedgwick reverses the classic 60s phrase when she says that just because everyone is out to get you is no reason to be paranoid. Paranoia, according to Sedgwick, gets stronger the more things go wrong, the more that the very events paranoia anticipates come to pass no matter what the paranoid does. Paranoia becomes a cycle that is hard to break, and the result is usually the rejection of more and more things as being a source of danger, a cloistering inside the self, taking solace only in the fact that, even if you were harmed, you were at least able to anticipate the harm, never mind that the anticipation might be worse than the harm itself.
A professor of mine whom I love very much told me once that, in order to be successful in academia, you kind of have to be a paranoid, obsessive-compulsive narcissist. I worry sometimes that I may have what it takes. I'll account for obsessive-compulsiona and narcissism later. Here, I'm talking about how I'm paranoid, and like any red-blooded American I am going to begin by blaming someone else. In the Zaprudy diary, I wrote about one of the worst events of my graduate school carreer, one in which a professor chose to write a scathing, patronizing email to the entire class because he believe the class hadn't done the reading, when in fact the silence was in large part due to the fact that he and another student were engaging in a debate so baroque that the rest of us lost interest. I wrote that it took me back to those days of grade school when I'd be minding my own business as the rest of the class went wild around me, but that rare was the teacher who wasn't ready to yell at and punish ALL of us for the actions of a few. I learned to hate group punishment more than anything, but I also learned that the only pleasure you can find in such situations is that you saw it coming, you knew the relationship between consequences and actions and acted accordingly. The only satisfaction you can take is in saying, "I told you so."
Yeah, I was that guy. I am still that guy. At least, a part of me is. A part of me, as much as I hate to admit this, is someone who would rather be right than happy. And that part of me was in a snit last night when nothing bad really happened, when all my worrying was for nothing, because maybe the only thing worse that worrying for something that comes around anyway is worrying for something that never fucking happens. Sure, the authorities showed up, but they fined us and let us carry on. So what the fuck was I worrying for? Damnit, if I'm going to freak out all day long, can't you at least ARREST ME?! God. What a let down.
I am, right now, laughing as I write this, just in case anyone ever wonders if I truly wanted something like that to happen. I actually PRAYED to GOD and the Goddess that nothing bad would happen, that everyone would safe and no one would be hurt and the cops wouldn't fuck with us. I promise that, however paranoid and self-centered I may be, I wanted everything to be wonderful.
The problem is though that I was so worried about everything being wonderful that I didn't get a chance to really feel the wonderfulness. I worked a lot of shifts and only took one drink, and although there is nothing wrong with that and it earned me mad points with my roommate, I realized that, in my need to be in control and to assume responsibility, I wasn't letting myself go. I wasn't trusting people. Rather than accepting what I couldn't know about other people or events, I tried to counteract it by keeping an accurate account of myself at all times. This is not the point of Judith Butler or Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work. I don't think either of these women would object to letting go, particularly if they were surrounded by queer in FABULOUS costumes.
I don't want anyone to think I didn't enjoy myself. I did enjoy myself, just not as much as I could have or in all the ways I wanted. I can, however, say that I relearned a lesson: fear is largely pointless. Authorities can be bought off, by which I mean that if it comes down to letting people party if they pay a fine or shutting things down, most authorities will offer a "Party on, dudes" as they walk away with a check. Other people have as much sense, if not more, about how to manage drugs than I do. Trust, in a way, is a matter of choice, and just because my trust has been disappointed is no reason to shut it down forever. I cannot know myself, and so I cannot fully care for myself, but, with the help of others, we can take care of each other, and even have a pretty good time and, as I had at the end of the evening, a little bite of cake.
The lamp was wobbling suspiciously as I went to bed, but that may have just been exhaustion.
Next time, I don't think I'll be a coordinator. I think I will absolve myself of some responsibility and just enjoy the party, although I will be happy to work a shift or two. Paranoia, after all, is hard to exorcise, so maybe it's better to take preventative steps to prevent it, which is, ironically, the stance of the paranoid. Or perhaps, just as one must come to understand that harm is inevitable, it might to me good to know that paranoia is inevitable, and learn to take some steps in the moment. If "next time" is the key phrase of the paranoid, maybe "this time" is the stance of the reparative mode, which Sedgwick describes as trying to find the good in things, realizing that the bad will come, but doesn't take away the value of the good, a complicated way of saying, "Look on the bright side."
On the bright side, I had a good time, made my roommate's event go well, heard some good music, got another actress for my upcoming Emma Goldman project, and looked amazing. I may not have danced as much as I wanted to, or flirted enough with someone whom I wanted to flirt with (I really, really need to work on that skill), but as I paint the picture of this memory I hope to bring out the rosier tones, the fact that I was in a city I loved, with people whom I loved, starting, slowly, to rebuild the person who earned so much love and respect here in the first place, remembering that I actually managed to earn myself those things in Berkeley, too.
Sedgwick refers to the paranoid and reparative modes as positions, as stances, not as personality types. One can choose to change positions. It's difficult to change positions, and no doubt fraught with mistakes, but as many mistakes will happen if you--if I--stand still.
I'm going to need some more costumes. And cake.
