I’ve told every little star

Kids who grow up in small towns have to more or less invent entertainment for themselves. Not that I grew up totally isolated or anything, but the nearest town where we could really “do” anything (go out to eat, go shopping, go to the movies, go CD shopping) was a 30-minute drive away. So in small towns you find yourself a little niche, private places to hang out, away from adults or supervision. It seems like this is actually much easier to do in small towns than in cities.

When I was in high school, my friends and I used to love to hang out at the old Monte Ne resort. Before Beaver Lake existed (a huge, man-made lake in Northwest Arkansas where everyone goes now, but didn’t exist before 1966), there was a fancy spa-resort called Monte Ne. The developer and owner was a very eccentric man:

Harvey did some deep research into the history of the Ozark Mountains. He claimed that they were some of the oldest mountains in the world and definitely the oldest in the United States. They had been untouched by volcanoes and earthquakes. He believed that the mountains around Monte Ne would eventually crumble and fill the valley with silt and sediment. Figuring that the mountains were approximately 240 ft (73 m) high, Harvey planned to construct a massive concrete obelisk and its capstone would remain above the debris. Archaeologist in the distant future would be able to dig down and find the monument[32] He called the project “The Pyramid” and dedicated the rest of his life to its construction.

There is so much more to the story; if you like eccentric characters with tragic ends you should take a few minutes to read his Wikipedia entry. (FYI, my great-grandfather, once the mayor of Rogers, was a good friend of the developer and helped finance his presidential run. It was some weird, probably right-wing, made-up party that never went anywhere, but does offer the distinction of hosting a presidential convention in Arkansas – the only one ever.)

We liked to hang out there, I think, largely because it was so isolated, and largely because we felt the creepy, decrepit structure gave our lives some poetic sensibility. Walking up on that hulking structure in the midst of a pitch-black night, with no light shining but the stars, is one of the more intimidating experiences of my life, probably. But we went there frequently, sometimes even parking our cars in a small lot in some trees nearby and sleeping in them overnight. We would occasionally start fires on the concrete floors, or go skinny-dipping in the moonlight. Or we might go there with someone special to make out or smoke and share our angsty poetry by flashlight.

It is the place I will probably associate most with being a teenager in Rogers. I went back this weekend to see my family and decided to drive down there and take some pictures of it. A thing like that never changes, except that some of the underground hotel rooms we used to hang out in were submerged because the water is so high right now. I got a little nostalgic, I won’t lie.

The place has always captured my imagination. Several years ago I wrote a full-length screenplay centered around it, called, originally, Monte Ne, which I am now half-heartedly adapting into a novel.

I took several more pictures which you can look at here, (in full-size, too) along with my pictures of my July 4th weekend with the fam!

I had that cassingle #2 (and 3)!

When I was a little kid, one of my very favorite things to do was put on “concerts” where I would basically construct a “set list” of anywhere from 13-20 songs (including an encore) that I would compile into a mix tape and play, and then pretend that I was a performer giving a concert. These songs would be a mix of genders, but for the most part they were all songs by female artists. Yeah, George Michael would find his way in there somewhere, along with a ballad by White Lion or something. Sometimes my friend Jennifer would come over and we would pretend to be a singing duo group and sometimes fight over which songs we each got to perform at our concerts.*

But two of my very favorite songs to perform also happened to be two of my first cassingles, “Rush Hour” by Jane Wiedlin, and “Summer Rain” by Belinda Carlisle. Little did I know at the time that they both came from the Go-Go’s, which I only knew because of “Our Lips Are Sealed” anyway (my Go-Go’s obsession came much later in life). My favorite things about the Jane Wiedlin video are the dolphins she’s riding, and how she’s wearing a guitar but there’s no guitar in the song. And why is Belinda Carlisle wearing that big frumpy dress that makes her look like an eccentric art teacher at a rural elementary school?

Embedding Belinda Carlisle has been disabled by request.

*Yes, I was really fucking gay, get over it.

She rides the night next to me

We had a busy weekend. On Friday night we checked out a screening of Dirty Dancing, which also happened to be a “quote-along, sing-along, dance-along” performance. DD is one of my favorite movies (unironically) and Tom had never seen it. I was reticent to have him experience it for the first time in that environment, but as it turned out it was super fun, and it was maybe the perfect environment to experience such a ridiculous but also awesome movie for the first time.

Saturday we had to go get some renter’s insurance, then made a quick trip to the PSU farmer’s market, where we spent almost $20, and got the most delicious strawberries that ever existed. That evening we went to a friend’s housewarming party in the Pearl, and saw Food, Inc, which was shocking. Even after reading Michael Pollan, and Mark Bittman, and Eric Schlosser, there are images in that movie I’ll never forget. I’ve been toying lately with the idea of going vegetarian again anyway, and I think that movie finally pushed me over the edge. At least unless I buy the meat myself, and I get it from some friendly farmer at the farmer’s market. I can’t recommend the movie enough, even though it’s infuriating and depressing.

Today we had a leisurely morning and saw a $1 screening of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which is one of Tom’s favorite movies, but I’d never seen it. How could I say no after he went to see Dirty Dancing with me? Plus, it sounded fun. Since we saw the extended version, I definitely thought it was too long, but I think most movies over 80 minutes are too long. I had a really good time, and thought it was hilarious, and that it looked gorgeous.

I realized today at one point when I was waiting for the train downtown that I feel really at home here. Strangely, what caused this epiphany is that I realized I know which trains are coming just by the way they’re color-coded, without having to read the signs, and I knew that the yellow train (”City Center”) coming my way wasn’t the one I needed. I can’t tell you how much I love living in a city that has “America’s Best Transit System” according to plaques on the trains. Despite all the rumors I’d heard about Portland’s great public transit, I was very nervous giving up my car, and felt like I was taking a real leap of faith, especially without ever even having been here. I’m glad it’s a leap that’s paid off (for the most part). Of course sometimes I still wish I had a car, but honestly, I rarely even think about it anymore, except when I want to leave town, and then it’s kind of a bummer. But then I think about how I don’t have to worry about gas prices (I saw a gas station yesterday as I was passing it in the streetcar, and was shocked to see that gas is up to $3 again), I don’t have to go get oil changes, I don’t have to pay insurance, and I don’t have to pay for costly repairs, or, even more importantly, freak out and panic when I realize I won’t have a car for days because it’s getting costly repairs. When I think about possibly leaving Portland in the next few years, I realize I will miss this aspect of this city more than anything else. And also maybe the fact that it’s the most beautiful city I’ve ever set foot in, completely engulfed as it is, by nature.

But I’m thinking about composing a whole post here soon about how my life has changed since going car-less, so I’ll save it. Until then, go crazy for some Swayze.

Culture of Disaster

The “Good Friday” earthquake in Anchorage, Alaska is the largest earthquake in North American history, and the third largest earthquake in terms of richter size, in the history of the world (since earthquake records have been kept). It measured a 9.5 and shook the ground for over 4 straight minutes (compared to roughly 10 seconds or so for normal earthquakes).

It also caused tsunamis all the way down the coast to Northern California, where 12 people were killed; in Oregon, 4 children were swept off a beach; and a Canadian inlet, 55 houses were totally washed away.

Tsunami damage in Kodiak, Alaska

The Alaska quake was a subduction zone earthquake, which occurs when an ocean plate slides beneath a continental plate or another ocean plate. These produce the deadliest quakes (think the 2004 Indian Ocean quake). As it turns out, there is a subduction zone 50 miles off the coast of Oregon. Last time it unleashed a massive tremblor was in 1700, where it reportedly caused tsunamis in Japan. According to seismologists quoted in The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith by David Ulin, which I’m obsessing over at the moment, this particular zone should blow off steam (i.e., produce a massive, devastating quake) every 200-500 years. If it were to happen now, it would completely wipe out the entire coast of Oregon.

As it turns out, there are three huge fault lines running underneath Portland, two of which are directly underneath downtown. One, the Portland Hills Fault, is about 6 blocks west of where Tom and I live. Scientists are unsure if any of these faults are even still active or have ever really produced substantial earthquakes, but they all agree that the Portland Hills Fault is the most likely to blow any time soon (in fact, they give it about a 10% chance of producing a sizable quake in the next 30 years). If it goes, the west hills would completely liquefy, and everything on them (all those million dollar homes precariously placed over the city on pencil-thin stilts) would come crashing into downtown, making a lot of people really unhappy. There was a fairly unpleasant earthquake in Portland in 1993, which shook residents out of their beds and damaged some buildings, but strangely, geologists aren’t sure where it came from. They all agree that there is a far greater chance of Portland being disturbed by earthquakes in Washington, as it was when Portland residents felt the richter 6.8 Seattle quake in 2001. And in 1949, there was a huge earthquake in Olympia that killed 11 residents there.

Damage from the 2001 Nisqually (Seattle) earthquake

The myth of solid ground

I guess on Sunday I’ll be participating in a “Pride” celebration for the first time ever when I march with Pacific University in their annual representation in Portland’s Pride parade. I was pretty indifferent about it, but my friend Caryn, who doesn’t even go to school with me, wanted to volunteer at the festival anyway, so I suggested she march with us and she was all about it. Several of my classmates and professors are also attending to represent, so it should be fun. My classmate Carrie asked her 7-year-old son if he wanted to march in the parade and he got real excited, then the next morning at breakfast he was more ambivalent about it, and asked her, “What does gay mean?” So she told him in terms he could understand, he pondered it for a moment, then replied, “That makes sense.” And then got excited about being in the parade again. She’s raising a great boy.

It’s funny how all of the existential philosophers I’ve read any of over the past few months (Nietzsche, Sartre, and Ernest Becker) never talk about how to achieve happiness, but they do seem to talk a great deal about unhappiness, which seems to stem largely from a lack of meaning in one’s life. And of course unhappiness leads to all kinds of undesirable outcomes, especially when it’s wrapped up in an effort to deny one’s mortality in order to become infinite. From henceforth all the world’s evil and injustice flows, according to Becker.

It’s hard to be unhappy in a neighborhood as lovely as mine. Or maybe I’ve just finally achieved the meaning I’ve sought. People who go around harping about how happy they are all the time are some of the most insufferable people that exist, mostly because I don’t believe them. Or maybe it’s because I do believe them. Or maybe it’s just because they’re annoying. I don’t think “being happy” (an idea I actually find very distasteful) implies a lack of unhappiness in one’s life, it just implies balance, a dedication to reality, the maintaining of perspective, and the feeling of being useful.

I don’t think that’s so unreasonable. But damn, it sure is difficult most of the time. And naturally, as soon as one declares oneself “happy,” something hideous will happen to them. Life is nothing if not humbling.

But today I am happy, and I am fulfilled, and I have wine and ice cream in my belly, even if my shoulder has been aching all day from doing restraints on children at work yesterday. Back to work at 7am tomorrow. I can’t wait.

“I look forward to when society beats them down.”

When I started doing diversity workshops with Bridge 13 last fall, the facilitator (aka, my boss) asked me if I would be comfortable telling my “coming out story” at the end of each training. It’s something they do each time with 2 or 3 people, to help put a human face on some of this stuff we’d just been talking about with them. I said I would, even though I don’t really have a coming out story, per se, since for all intents and purposes, I was never really “in.” So I sort of pieced something together on the fly, which is basically the “story” I now tell at every workshop. I talk a lot about how when I was a kid, I pretty much fit every qualifier for gender identity disorder, except for “clinically significant distress.” I give mad props to my parents for just letting me do my thing without interfering or freaking out, even if “my thing” (my favorite thing, actually) was to put on my mother’s lacy nightgown and ride my bike around the neighborhood. Not to mention my love of dolls, the fact that all of my friends were girls, that I wore my mom’s makeup (which she did, actually, call me out on, but she was mad because I had mixed different colored powders together), my obsession with Broadway musicals (ohmygod, Annie, especially) and Olivia Newton-John, and the list goes on and on.

But even if I didn’t have some kind of personal vested interest in just letting kids be kids and explore their gender roles as they see fit, I probably still would have cried reading an article on Huffington Post today about 2 completely worthless shock jocks who ranted on air about how “transgender” children were complete freaks, and should be beaten and have violence visited upon them.

Williams and States took turns referring to gender dysphoric children as “idiots” and “freaks,” who were just out “for attention” and had “a mental disorder that just needs to somehow be gotten out of them,” either by verbal abuse on the part of the parents, or even shock therapy.

“Allowing transgenders to exist, pretty soon it becomes normal to fall in love with the animals,” they said.

For his part, States bragged that if his own son were to ever dare put on a pair of high heels, States would beat his son with one of his own shoes. He urged parents whose own little boys expressed a desire to wear a dress to verbally abuse and degrade them as a viable response. “Because you know what? Boys don’t wear high heel shoes. And in my house, they definitely don’t wear high heels.

“I’m going to go, ‘You know what? You’re a little idiot! You little dumbass!’” States sneered, adding later, “I look forward to when [the transgender children] go out into society and society beats them down. And they wind up in therapy.”

I mean, who cares what 2 idiots in, what, Sacramento think, right? Well, I do, and it’s shocking to me that this is allowed to slide. Saying shit like that about adults is one thing, but advocating for child abuse in a society already incredibly hostile to any confusion or gender challenging in our children is quite another. If this had been racial, you can bet your ass they’d be fired. But so it goes, that’s how our society is.

In light of the well-publicized suicides this year of the two boys who took their own lives because of bullying and harassment for “acting gay” (which, in the argot of modern North American teenagers, often refers to acting in a way considered unmasculine by their peers) the stunning lack of moral sensibility on the part of States and Williams is breathtaking. But it also points to the increasingly degraded landscape of talk radio.

The causal link between Bill O’Reilly’s obsessive baiting of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller on FOX and Tiller’s murder on Sunday, May 31st as he was ushering in his Kansas City church, is currently being explored, an exploration particularly relevant in the case of Rob, Arnie, and Dawn in the Morning, and the potential violent fallout from their inexplicably rage-filled invective against not only transgender children, but even boys who err on the feminine side of standard adolescent behavior, behavior States and Williams consider unnatural because “men are hunters and women are gatherers.”

I shudder to imagine the response of the late Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover’s mother if she’d had the misfortune to hear the KRXQ broadcast.

“They were always saying [to Carl] ‘You’re gay, you must be gay, you act like a girl’,” Sideaner L. Walker told the press in April, speaking of the dead son she had to cut down from the support beam he hung himself from after months of taunts from his peers—taunts that likely bore more than a passing resemblance to the invective used by States and Williams on their May 28th broadcast.

But hey, who cares about some dead fag or sissy, right?

Theft or homage?

I know I’m about a week behind on this, but recently my lovely friend Kurt brought my attention to some ripping off of one of his Grindhouse posters Showtime shamelessly engaged in recently.

Kurt’s Poster

And Showtime’s new poster

God bless Andrew Sullivan

Sometimes he says really stupid things, as we all do, but sometimes he’s pitch-perfect:

Bearing the Heart

Whenever I see a film with young people driving around at night, with cicadas going wild in the background, I always get a little nostalgic. I’m instantly transported back to my own youth, with the warm summer air, driving too fast with music too loud, sometimes skinnydipping out at the lake and sleeping in our cars. I saw Adventureland tonight at the Mission Theater, which is a mere 5 blocks from my apartment, with my friend Caryn, and while the movie was pretty great (with the exception of Kristen Stewart – somebody tell the girl she’s a human, not a robot; she’s about the most bland actress I’ve ever seen in my life), what it really did was make me miss those heady, stressful days of post-college.

Just because it's Ryan Reynolds

It’s different from being post-high school. That particular summer seems so rife with promise, and every moment is bittersweet. The summer after I graduated from college (the first time), I moved back in with my parents after living in Dallas for 2 years, and we fought all the time, and I worked in a warehouse for, like, $6 an hour or something while I went to see punk shows every night and slept until 3 in the afternoon on Saturdays. It was sort of fun, but I was bored, and restless, and wanted more than anything to move to Los Angeles, and I already knew at that point I had zero interest in using my new degree. Which is a fairly good thing, because it was pretty useless anyway.

It took me a really long time to grow up (about 29 years, I’d say), and while I wouldn’t go back to being a teenager or to my early 20’s for anything, it’s still fun to remember what it was like and how much potential and how many options I had. Not that I don’t still, but when I find myself realizing that if I go live in Italy for a year after I graduate, I’ll be 40 before I have my PhD, and I want a kid before I’m 40, and my boyfriend has his own future and education and dreams to think about, so I need to start making some choices. For instance. Remembering when you had all the time in the world puts things in a little bit more perspective. But having a narrower band of choices doesn’t make things harder, or less fun. It just means I’m finally getting to where I want to be, and where I thought I’d never be when I was 22.

Sludge

I never realized doing a detox diet, even for 2 days, would feel so much like withdrawal. Essentially we’re supposed to be cleansing our bodies of primarily inflammatory toxins, such as caffeine, alcohol, sugar, dairy, and wheat. Yes, I consume large amounts of all of those things. And believe me, going without them feels like torture. On the flipside, I now eat very little meat in my diet, maybe only 2 or 3 times a week, and my diet is already very fruit and vegetable heavy, and I’m very active. So it would seem from the lack of satisfactory sludge excretion while detoxing that perhaps my body hasn’t actually built up tons and tons of toxins. Which is a nice thought.

We start both mornings with steamed vegetables for breakfast (carrots, sweet potatoes, kale, zucchini, and asparagus), along, maybe with some green tea, but definitely beginning with the cup of water with lemon juice, one of which we’re supposed to have every hour. Lemon, apparently, is a great cleanser of livers and gall bladders, stimulating as it does, the production of…well, whatever it produces to clean itself.

The rest of the day is composed primarily of more lemon water and large salads of bitter dandelion greens, which are also supposed to stimulate liver function. There’s a tarragon/lemon/garlic/olive oil dressing recipe, and we’ve been adding some chopped up red peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, and super fresh avocadoes.

I was mostly okay yesterday, but I went to bed last night with visions of buttery waffles and hot coffee for breakfast dancing in my head, which could explain why it took me over 2 hours to fall asleep, despite being exhausted, and feeling like my body was doing some work. Today I’m grumpy and hungry, and came up with my “I’m-already-too-clean-inside-I-must-not-need-this-diet” theory and nearly attacked my leftover Mexican fajita from Friday night that’s currently feeling neglected in the fridge. I woke up with a headache, and my whole body is a little achy, and we’re about to go “briskly walk” the neighborhood to “keep our bowels moving.”

It’s a good thing we went to the farmer’s market with some friends yesterday and not today. Yesterday I still had willpower – today, I’d give anything for a pizza or an ice cream sandwich. I can’t wait for tomorrow.