Engender

Posted on November 4, 2009 by parmanifesto

I stand at the bathroom mirror, the portal of narcissism, too embarrassed to enter. Where are my enablers? The foundation. the clothes. The curling iron. The hairspray. The eyebrow pencil. They hover over me, and when they are done, I am hidden, but I am here. Now I can go there.

They’re all eyes. Eyes that are scanners running across my barcode. Scan. No beep. Scan. No beep. They’ll have to enter it manually. They ask: “So. What are you?”

I smile. “Glam Rock Peter Pan.”

“Oh.”

“Or Prince as a Pirate.”

“Hm.”

“Or a character from Velvet Goldmine.”

I bag and carry myself away. No merchandise in the public restroom! But I go in. I am not doing this to impress people. I am doing this to impress that person, now standing on the other side of the portal. That person who looks like me, but so much more lovely. I mistake myself for them. We are Annie Lennox at the end of the “Who’s That Girl?” music video: opposite sex symbiosis. Male and Female He created them. Male and Female I combined them.

This is not a costume. It’s a confession.

I don’t need your lust. I don’t need your love.

All I need is His indwelling. All I need is this instant.

In the iris of imagination.

Give us this day our daily gluten-free bread

Posted on October 13, 2009 by parmanifesto

I wish there was a way to vacuum undesirable ingredients right out of food. I would pick gluten, dairy, sugar. I suppose other people would pick fat, calories, carbohydrates. I suppose other people would pick people. We have a lot more undesirable ingredients than food. Laziness, stupidity, craziness. We would all benefit from a vacuuming, especially me, which is what I’m actually, astonishingly, always, talking about.

When you do your self-deprecating before dinner, this is what it sounds like.

I shouldn’t call it dinner; I should call it breaklundinn. Because it is all 3 meals in 1. Not really the same amount of calories, or food, but it’s the only meal I eat. I should say I only eat dinner. But that sounds so simple. Or anorexic. Or prejudiced against breakfast and lunch. I am none of these things, dear brothers and sisters! None. I am poor and pretentious: I can’t afford to eat healthy food 3 times a day, but I refuse to eat unhealthy food 3 times a day. So, here I am. Rock you like a hurricane.

This is another in a series of spiritual grilled cheese sandwiches.

–Burn the outside to melt the inside? Well I won’t get laid for that metaphor.

Leaving half of my material possessions on the curb was the first. Glorious lamps, pillows, posters, chairs – locking arms with one another, glaring at me: you can’t do this to us. And then, when a woman stopped her car and picked them up: you’ll regret this, but we won’t. We’re going to the University of Chicago. We’re going to get a bachelor’s degree. Unlike you. All right, they didn’t say all that, they didn’t say anything; the woman picking the stuff up said she was going to give it to her daughter, who was starting at the University of Chicago.

And now tonight, a newcomer in a small community of Christian queers. “Is there anything you want to tell us about yourself?” “The floral arrangements make me uncomfortable. What is that? Burgundy seaweed?” The restless ache that leaves our heart and tries to stay in another’s heart, only to find it full, and trudging back, a bitter homecoming.

There is a truck stop between who we are and who God wants us to be. We can take a shower, and have a meal, and then several years later realize we haven’t gone anywhere.

Dancing is Sex for Virgins

Posted on May 25, 2009 by parmanifesto

Certainly, wet dreams and masturbation might have more explicit similarity with intercourse, but they are also more explicitly selfish. Dancing involves partners, without body exposure, clean up, STD’s or emotional wreckage.

I like my sex public: at a stranger’s wedding reception. Wearing my lustful-but-formal tight black wool pants and tight white shirt with a tie so alive it could tie itself.

Brick House, Dancing Queen, Let’s Go Crazy, Billie Jean – the songs may be regular – like a prune-eating-fiber-supplement-taking geezer – but they are not shitty. Or maybe pop music is proof that you can polish a turd. I’ll keep eating it regardless. We are sweating and strutting our way to salvation. The crowd reactions are different – giggles, stares, smiles – but they are all the same: they wish they could be this wild.

Yet we are not enough for ourselves – no twist or thrust is fully satisfying. We cannot truly dance until we are without genitals, without gravity, without minds.

It’s only a few songs later when our humanity starts with its harrassment – unfortunately not sexual, just slumberous. Muscles slacken, hearts tap instead of pound. We are more attracted to a chair than the dance floor. Instead of sitting, we wave to people we don’t know, and sexily snicker and swagger to the elevator. We are out of there, and into the night – an early summer night – that sighs and presses its cool cocktail glass on our foreheads.

Roast

Posted on April 30, 2009 by parmanifesto

You, insecurity, you, ego, you, sexuality…you will not succeed. I have stories to tell, not syndromes to whine about. You will not succeed.

You may stand between me and my art and pick your nose and make candles out of your ear wax and blow spit bubbles – but I will not be embarrassed by your orifice exploration.

I will knock you over and my art and I will crash into one another “like a couple of taxis on Broadway,” a line which Thelma Ritter so simply delivers in Rear Window. You’re not even what you seem. You’re Satan wearing a sandwich sign, shaking your ass on the sidewalk, trying to get me to buy your bullshit. Not happening, hot stuff.

And I won’t be conned into becoming a critic instead of an artist. One requires observation, the other vulnerability. I know which one is worth it. Fuck off, flamer. It’s going to take more than a lack of money, lack of talent and lack of direction – start locating some more lack ofs.

Now I’m going to clean the apartment. If you think you’ve distracted me, devil’s cake, than you’re dumber than I thought. I just want to clean the apartment.

She's Here

Posted on March 18, 2009 by parmanifesto

Spring has swooped down and is sitting in the center of creation. Everyone stands around her, motionless, staring. She is unconcerned with the audience’s attention or unawareness. She’s used to it. I want to ask for her autograph. I want to be just like Spring. Whenever she arrives is right on time.

Time! Philosophy, religion, these are just two-dimensional, all forced perspective. They seem so far, so sure, so straight. They’re fucking flat, all right? They’re flat.

You, Me – are three-dimensional. We weren’t made in the U.S.A., we’re not crap. We were imported, we’re quality.

And Spring! She’s trying to explain this to us with her presence. Don’t move. But do breathe – you must breathe – oh GOD, I don’t need anything else but Spring’s air. Then there’s a wallop of wind. Hair, skirts, scarves try to fly away, we stop them, they resent us for it.We start walking. Remembering our routines. If only we could forget them.

Theodicy

Posted on March 11, 2009 by parmanifesto

God is good.

I rehearse this, in my mind, trying different readings. None of them are believable.

God is sometimes good.

Like a traffic light is sometimes green? How automatic, even arbitrary.

God can be good.

This seems better; after all, if you undercase the first letter and add an “o” in the middle, God can be good.

I have a conflict of interest. I have accepted gifts from God my whole life…an otter keychain (with real fake fur – I found it on the ground somewhere when I was a kid. I put it on my key ring – which at the time was all keychains and no keys – for a long while, at least as long as I refused to wear jeans because they weren’t comfortable), and parents to rejoice in my adoption of this miniature mammal, and enough food to feed him, and a bedside table to put him on, and a bed to fall asleep in as I stared at him, deciding the next day’s adventures.

What about the other ones. The ones who only see the back of God’s head as He’s watching a movie. A movie about their struggle. They try to tap him on the shoulder, but they can’t reach, they try to scream, but their voice is snuffed out. The prisoner who races in pale terror to tell a guard an inmate is trying to rape him, only to hear the vacant response: “just let him. Get it over with.” The young woman held captive by her father, physically, emotionally, sexually abused into believing that he is a godly man.

This is not “the problem of evil,” which makes it sound like something that can be calmed by calculators, or rational conversation. This is just incomprehensible. How can He watch this movie? How could He allow this movie to be made?

I don’t know. So I ask Mindy, a friend who’s done everything, and had everything done to her, and still came to the God conclusion.

“What do you think about God and evil?”

“God and evil?”

“Why does he allow it? How can they co-exist?”

She pauses, then mumbles thoughtfully, “God and evil. All right, let’s get to it.” She looks out the window. “If God…if God stopped people from killing and raping and stealing, then…we’d all be mechanics.”

I look at her. “Mechanical?” I ask.

“Yeah, right. And if he stopped people from killing one another, there’d be overpopulation.”

“Oh.”

“But it’s wicked,” she says, and her remaining teeth put aside their differences and work together to form a smile.

My Kind of Town

Posted on March 2, 2009 by parmanifesto

My relationship with Chicago? It’s like Scottie and Judy in Vertigo. I keep trying to make her into New York. She tries too. What else are we going to do on a Friday night?

Now, I am not most people. I am not some people. I am not even those people. I am a person. A person who enjoys the pre- and post- more than the experience itself. Preparation and retrospection, these are the pleasures. So! A night on the Chi-town. I have taken out three potential sweaters and spread them flat on the bed. Which one will make heterosexuals, homosexuals and bisexuals want to get sexual with me? Or want to be me? Coveting is humanity’s only hobby.

The contestants are: a pink one with black French words and squiggles (100% acrylic, which means if I stand next to a heater I’ll start on fire), a green one with huge gray numbers on it (I’ve always said it looks like something a character in a 1992 Spanish textbook illustration would wear – his name would be Amador, don’t you think?), and a striped v-neck looker that belongs in a Patrick Nagel print. I’m not that international tonight, so I pick the third one. Actually I pick the second one until I’m about to leave; then I change into the third one.

It is fuckin’ cold. The weather is a spiteful monk who has decided everyone should be indoors meditating, not outside titillating. I walk the downtown streets, keeping my coat open as long as possible to give optimum exposure to my obscure style.

All dressed up and no one to be.

The more certain I am of God, the less certain I am of myself…a tall ladder leaning against a building, waiting to be used, but grateful for something strong to rely upon. I remember when this started: God squatted down, put his hands on my shoulders, looked in my eyes and said, “I’d like for you to come with me. Would you like that?” I was thinking about nodding when I spotted a box of donuts behind him. After eating them all and throwing up, he asked me again and I said yes that time. But now, two years after, I still tell myself I want the donuts, even though I don’t…I want to know what I am and what I want, and go for it.

I have been walking for an hour and a half, in steel-toe boots (which would be suitable if I was playing kickball with a bowling ball) and a v-neck sweater (my v is numb)…while the cold hunts down my body heat and has its way with it. Why aren’t I in bed, not dreaming about Chicago?

It’s time to leave. I don’t like this city. It wants to be something it’s not.

The Greatest Love of All

Posted on February 4, 2009 by parmanifesto

I look down, and I make the decision: Everyone must die.-

-The straw wrapper, the placemat, the napkin. It is only a question of timing, order, method. With the realization comes a quietude that trickles from the top of my spine, to the clavicle (a bone that looks great on everybody) scapula, humerus, tibia (but not the fibula, what a loser, the tibia could do so much better) and into the carpals, metacarpals, proximal phalanges, intermediate phalanges, distal phalanges (I like to call those last three “the Jessica phaLanges.” They like it too). I will dominate these man-made products, and therefore dominate men. Hot Dog Dammit I will do it. And I start doing it. I take the straw wrapper and tear, then tear what was torn, then tear the twice-torn.

Then I look at him. He is smiling at me. “You’re funny,” he says.

My ego rumbles. It’s hungry. Didn’t I feed it before I left? And that comment he just made, that comment, it was a piece of gum, something to chew on to make me forget I was hungry, but it doesn’t work.

I’m still looking at him. His smile dims. “Are you nervous?” He says.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“You.”

“Why do I make you nervous?”

“You have analytical eyes.”

He does, and yet. It is sanctimonious of me to be nervous; this is not a date, we met on craigslist. But me in a romantic context is a toddler learning to line dance. Jesus, I can’t even walk, how am I supposed to dance? And in cowboy boots? With this hat? . . . I’m beginning to think I should be paid overtime for this conversation, it’s such hard work. Then he confesses his love for Amy Grant. Amy Grant! I will stuff sauerkraut in my underwear if he asks. We admire Amy individually, collectively. I’m listening hard, but I’m trying harder to find flaws in his face, ones that I can crawl into for comfort: a pock mark, a misshapen nose? It’s hopeless, he has those things, but they make him hotter, I can’t be here, why hasn’t he asked me to leave? “You look like Clark Kent,” I say, “I mean I know you don’t have the glasses…maybe you look like Clark Kent as he’s changing into Superman – and where do the glasses go after he takes them off?” my bladder commandeers my mouth and I say, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

Get up. Breathe. Walk to the bathrooms. Breathe. Pick the Men’s. Breathe. Do what needs to be done. Breathe. Go back.

Then I’m sitting down again, and he’s still sitting there. I’m saying: “Well, what do you want to do? Stay here, or…go someplace else, or…what do you want to do?” He’s saying: “What…what do you want?” I’m saying: “I don’t know, we could…” He’s saying: “We could try something.” I’m saying: “Yes. We could try something.” He’s saying: “Should we go?” I’m saying: “Yes.”

We get to his house, which is on a street so quiet that all my crazy thoughts compensate and crank up the volume. His dog greets us at the door. Ah, yes, dogs, I know how to act around dogs. Scratch these areas, speak in a coddling sing-song voice, and a new friend is found. “I should probably pay attention to your owner,” I tell the dog, and he understands. “Well.” I say, trying to threaten the silence in the way it’s threatening me, but it laughs, not out loud, with its eyes. “We could go to my bedroom,” he says. “We could,” I say. We do. Suddenly everything on his walls is so interesting, and I tell him so. I keep an eye on the bed, making sure it’s not coming any closer, that it’s staying in the corner.

“Do you like to make out?” He asks. Do I? I’ve done it before. Maybe if I do it again I’ll have a definite opinion. I tell my body to look busy. Is he thinking this is the countdown to copulation? I wonder. I told him “I’ve never done anything”; maybe he interpreted that as “I’m a slacker”? His hand goes up my shirt. My hand goes up in the air. “Uh, no.” I say. “What?” he says. “Just, no.” I say. He leans back and asks, “Why are you so insecure?” I close my eyes. I say, “I don’t want to be a book with just pictures and no words. Or a book with just words and no pictures – that’s probably what I am. Why are you insecure?” He looks slightly away. He says, “I used to get made fun of a lot.” I nod, then ask: “What’s the worst thing someone did?” He pauses. “This one time a guy made fun of my mannerisms in front of the girl that I liked, and she laughed.” I nod. “What about you?” He asks. I pause. “When I was a freshman in high school my class voted me on homecoming court as a joke. All my friends told me. Which made me wonder if they were my friends, but it made sense. For the next month everybody was sarcastically high-fiving and spanking me,” I say, poking at the past with a stick…yes, it’s dead. I look at him. He is tired, and tedious, and I want to shove his head in a fishbowl and watch the betas swim in and out of his mouth, and try to kill one another.

I say goodbye, and say that I’d like to see him again, in case I get touchy-feely and need someone to call. I get in the car. I wish I had a CD player. I want to listen to “Nothing” from A Chorus Line –

“And I dug right down to the bottom of my soul
To see what I had inside.
Yes, I dug right down to the bottom of my soul
And I tried, I tried…

And I said, ‘Nothing,
I’m feeling nothing…’

They all felt something,
But I felt nothing
Except the feeling
That this bullshit was absurd.”

1.28.08 2.2.08 1.11.09

Posted on January 19, 2009 by parmanifesto

-> who what when where why how -> the questions in journalism are the same as in philosophy, and they’re exotically vile hors d’ouevre; the free, they nibble and pretend to enjoy them and spit into a napkin when no one’s looking. The imprisoned have no choice, there is nothing to do but eat them, all of them, over and over, even though they don’t like them, and they can’t throw up, and even if they could they’d eat them again. But two of them – who and why – are impossible to swallow.

The free use entertainment to escape. Some watch movies. Some play games. The imprisoned use bed sheets to escape. Some out the window. Some round the neck.

Andrew Peterson chose the latter. Imagine the bed sheets, puzzled by their removal from the bed, then disgruntled by the stretching, then trembling with cold terror: Oh God, is he going to, oh, please, his little hairs are poking into me, I’m tightening, I can’t stop tightening. NO! no————— ___________ And then, untied from the neck, balled up, heading for the washer: Why do I have to live? Why didn’t I die? I hope the water’s hot.

Suicide is a final dress rehearsal – a performance for oneself. No audience is allowed. And before the show can even open, it is closed.

-> who who who who who who -> Joel. The day Andrew stabbed my cousin Joel it was my grandmother’s birthday. The day of Joel’s funeral it was my birthday. The day Andrew killed himself it was my grandparents’ anniversary. These three days want to retire from their day job, do something else, maybe a third-shift janitor, where they can come into work without talking to people, listen to music, stare at a dirty floor until it’s clean.

After his death, everyone created a role and clutched it closely. Father became “World’s Greatest Dad”, Stepmom became “Mother Superior”, Ex-girlfriend became “Endless Love.” I became half of a comedy team. We used to mutter jokes to one another, adjusting the volume according to appropriateness. Joel was like Vince Vaughn – a wiseass, but, a wounded one. He had this facial expression that came standard – “premeditated mellow” – it sounds like a paint color, doesn’t it? But he made known every thought, without moving. I could lock eyes with him across the room and feel understood. My sister and I called him Joe Cool.

And my grandparents…they looked at life, and looked at death, and laid down somewhere in between them. You had to lay down next to them to have a conversation. Even then, they didn’t look at you. They looked up. They asked why.

-> why why why why why why ->

They asked you why, Andrew.

You said,

“no reason.”