rant

always the wrong reaction

Posted on by metaphlame

What am I supposed to do with the ending of Gilead?

Because whatever it is, I’m pretty sure I’m not doing it.

Ames gave the fuck up. I’m sorry, but he gave up. He didn’t say a damn word to Boughton, didn’t ask even himself if young Boughton’s plan would have worked out in this town. He didn’t say a word. And that’s…it’s giving up. I don’t care if he’s dying. I don’t care if he’s tired. He doesn’t even ask himself. If he did, he’d say it in this, his last text before his death. And he doesn’t even ask himself. How disingenuous. How disloyal. To young Boughton, sure, but more relevantly, to his cause, and to himself.

I’ve been thinking about this for days. I kept returning to pages I had marked, trying to make something of them:

img_5183

–because, yeah, I loved Ames, and identified (narcissistically at times, grossly indulgently so, I know, I get it) the hell out of myself, with him. But that doesn’t say a whole lot of good about me, now, does it, when at the end all you’ve got is a bunch of pretty ruminations but no action taken — one of the few powers left to the old man, and he takes no action. He says not a word. How could he do nothing? He and we spend the whole second half of the book in a sneaking, sinking dread of how he is about to be hurt worse, at the very last. A life spent mostly in mourning and then the brilliance of love and now that will be dimmed and dulled and taken from him, we think. He tries to prepare himself for this. We (I) beseech him not to. To say any damn thing, instead of just sitting there in his chair writing about how terrible it will all be.

But he’s wrong! And we’re wrong! And it’s something else entirely that drives that asshat young Boughton to his doorstep day after day! It’s something Ames has the power, if not to fix, at least to pave the way forward for. Say a word. To the community (which holds him in esteem!), to old Boughton. Say something. Is his silence his lack of forgiveness? He said he never could forgive young Boughton for the fatherhood he squandered the first time. Is this that grudge still held? Because I get the sense that we are supposed to look at Ames’ last words, and his sorry-ass farewell and blessing (right, because that helps anyone but himself) and think “ah well, he tried, and now he’ll say some pretty things and go off and die peacefully now,” and well, no. The hell will I clap you on the back for doing exactly nothing, buddy. You bothered to pursue the issue far enough to figure out what it was, now at least make an effort to help this guy. Not because he deserves it, necessarily, because he’s kind of an ass. But is your grudge against this man going to damn his family too? If yes, is this supposed to be our lesson here? “The people who could fix things in America won’t, so we’re all fucked forever, amen.” Great. Awesome. Thanks.

If I wanted to hear that I’d, you know, be living my life in the world, not reading a damn book.

This is what that ending could have said: both Ames and young Boughton grew up in the shadows of great men, men lauded by their communities. Ames had his grandfather, whose unrelenting vision of divine justice both built him into the towering figure he was, and destroyed him when the world failed to follow him into the flames. Boughton had his dad, who people keep calling a saint so, okay, I guess he must be a good guy, though we don’t see much of his tenderness the way we see Ames’. (Except maybe when he trots the name of the child out, surprising Ames. Maybe there.) But Ames was able to deal with growing up in that shadow because, maybe, he saw what it cost the generation between them to reject it. He saw how it wrecked his father to see how much he had harmed his grandfather. Boughton doesn’t have that space, sure — it’s only him and then his dad, and it’s the son doing the wrecking — but Ames could have helped. He’s seen all sides of this; he could have helped. Tried to. Said something.

Here is another thing that ending could have said: Ames held the power he did, both in his community and, via word of mouth, as far away as Memphis, because of his grandfather. His grandfather who, while clear of mind in his younger days, descended, visibly (and so infuriatingly to me, upon encountering it) into a kind of feverish religious dementia that nevertheless strengthened his image and fed into it the kind of reverence that made the Ames name recognizable as a bulwark of the abolitionist movement, years after its end. What I’m saying is that the very disease that made me fling the book down in frustration is what enabled the youngest Ames to occupy the spot in the world he did. The last gift, of sorts, of his grandfather.

And he wastes it. You don’t waste that, fuckwit. You loved him. He’s dead. He gave you his name and, thanks to him, your name means something to people you’ve never even met. And you wasted that gift.

And now, then, what is the point of my marking all those beautiful passages of his, of mourning him, when he just kind of shrugged and rolled over and died in the end? You had one job. And you could have laid it aside but no, no, you insisted on continuing to do your work, to try and lead people toward something like a better understanding of the world and their place in it. But when, admittedly, an asshole comes to you in his hour of need, you mumble about not knowing, and then, without even asking yourself if it would have worked out, you let him go. Send him off into misery. Congrats! That one job you had? You blew it.

I don’t think I’m supposed to be having this reaction. I think we are supposed to consider Ames as having made the best of a bad situation. But that’s settling. This is all he said:

“But I can’t give you any assurances about this, one way or the other. I’d hate to be wrong. You’ll have to let me reflect on it.”

and

“He said, “You have influence here.”

I said that might be true, but I couldn’t promise to live long enough to make much use of it. I mentioned my heart.

Oh come on. You could have at least tried.

Then, while preaching, Ames finds himself thinking:

The fact was, standing there, I wished there were grounds for my old dread. That amazed me. I felt as if I’d have bequeathed him wife and child if I could to supply the loss of his own.

This too-late regret is not enough. It does nothing. It helps no one, not even Ames. And he doesn’t writhe in it long enough for poetic justice, either, since shortly thereafter he goes home and dies. This guy, then, whom we (I) have been brought to love over some 200 pages, throws in the towel and goes back on every beautiful thing he said. What a waste.

If we were meant to over-identify with him, and then to feel slapped in the face by his impotence and thus moved to be move active in the world in precisely the way he was not, that would be one thing. But I kind of feel like that’s just me. That I willfully smudged the lines between myself and this guy because it felt good and eloquent, and like I could imagine being able to say things I won’t be able to, when I’m old. But that most people won’t have had cause to slam the book down in fury when dementia raises its head within its pages, or to feel chastened by the tenderness Ames brings to the observation of his grandfather that was, perhaps, lacking in the reader.

You might wonder about my pastoral discretion, writing all this out. Well, on one hand it is the way I have of considering things. On the other hand, he is a man about whom you may never hear one good word, and I just don’t know another way to let you see the beauty there is in him.

That’s about Young Boughton. But it’s not enough. Sure, huzzah, it turns out Young Boughton is still a jackass but was not, in fact, trying to replace you as husband and father. But you calling him beautiful, in thought or in deed, is not enough. When would it ever be enough? You acknowledging to yourself to this person you’ve disliked his entire life — “that is not my child!” — is not in fact all bad, is not enough.

And I think we’re supposed to feel like it is. Or like “welp, the world didn’t allow interracial marriage back then so, tough luck, I guess it was out of his hands.” Fuck that. He didn’t say one damn word. He knew he was respected enough for his words to matter and he said nothing. That’s not beautiful, or grand. That’s cowardice. Not even that — he was too secure in his position even to have cause for fear. He was just plain lazy.

How are we supposed to applaud that? Or not look at everything we applauded earlier, and bookmarked and underlined, and think “well, fuck?”

justice

How will you ever find justice if you won’t get off your ass and look for it?

And is he saying he outlasted his sense of grievance? Because if he is, he’s lying. If he really forgave that boy he would have done something. Anything. And he didn’t. Not one thing.

Edit: Yes, I am aware of the hypocrisy in lambasting a guy for doing nothing when more or less implying that the whole reason I was sitting reading this book was to look away from the ugliness of the world for a minute (versus, say, trying to fix anything). And that someone’s well-meant “yes but you’re allowed that” is no less applicable to Ames.

And also that apparently Jack Boughton is an alcoholic? Which is written in the advertisement for Home on that last page, which advertisement I never read despite noting all those page numbers around it. So, okay, if that’s true then maybe that’s why Ames didn’t do anything to help him? Because Della and their son would be better off without him? But if that was Ames’ thinking, shouldn’t he have noted as much in this letter to his own son? Because without clarifying that it still just looks like he didn’t bother helping because, like he said in a passage I took a picture of a few posts back, he can’t imagine how he’d ever forgive young Boughton. And that’s so frustrating, because as baleful as I am when wronged, I blurred the lines between myself and this character because I thought he was better than me, and he’s being just as selfish here as I would be, and that sucks.

Be better, dammit.

your pretty game is heartless

Posted on by metaphlame

I tried to play Witcher 3 back when it came out. I tried, and I made it about 20 hours in, but I quit. It’s too gloomy. Geralt’s a dick. All the women look the same — Barbie faces and big tits.

Plenty of people don’t seem particularly bothered by this, though.

There’s a whole group of fellow players I don’t even bother tuning in to when they start in on my favorite franchise, because all they have to say is “yes but it’s not as good as Witcher 3.” Some of these people truly wouldn’t give a shit if, say, rape were required of gameplay (“hurr, but the mechanics are so gudddd!”), but others should know better. By a lot.

They don’t, though. They don’t care. I can understand not minding the miserably dour, life-is-shit-and-so-is-everyone-in-it tone of the game, because some people are into that sort of thing. (No doubt they’re real fun to be around, too, but that’s beside the point.) But they keep returning again and again to Geralt and how great he is. “But he’s a DAD, don’t you get it? Dads are GREAT.”

Indeed, actual dads are great (mostly). Grizzled-ass grumpfaces who have exactly one note to their voices and who can’t go the length of two sentences without sighing in that world-weary, put-upon fashion are not great! They suck. Geralt sucks. With all the women he sleeps with in these games, you’d think he’d maybe enjoy himself. Just a little? Well, you’d be wrong. Because despite all that he’s still a grouch. Permanently. The appeal of assholes has been explained to me time and time again, but I still don’t get it. Who would sleep with this chump? Even for a one-night stand. He has zero fun. Ever. You’d have a better time keeping the other half of the bottle of wine to yourself, no contest.

And Geralt aside? There’s just no heart to the place. There are spectacular sunsets and cantering horses but everyone is selfish, surly and scintillatingly hard-hearted. Maybe this is “an accurate portrayal of medieval Europe,” uh huh. Sure. What with the monsters and everything, no doubt. But whatever it’s an accurate portrayal of, it’s not a place I want to hang around. Ever. Even with its gorgeous scenery.

It’s not that people shouldn’t be terrible. There should definitely be terrible people. In art as it is in life. But if you believe everyone is that terrible, you should maybe be meeting new people or having new experiences that convince you otherwise. Or, if that’s too hard, at least escape to a game universe where kindness fucking exists. If you think life is shit and you log into a game that confirms your every belief on that topic, why exactly are you playing? Does it even count as “playing” at that point? There’s no fun being had. Do you just nod your grizzled head every time some new horrible plot confirms your worst suspicions about humanity, and think, “grrr, yeah, fuck these guys, they’re just like everyone I’ve ever known?”

How about the sunsets? The shimmering sunstars, the glorious pink-tinged clouds? Surely you must hate them for interrupting your bitter scowlfest. Perhaps you build a mod to make it rain. All the time. Forever.

Mod on, Grinch. Mod on. But I’m still not gonna ride your gloom train. I’ve got better shit to do.

wrong line of work

Posted on by metaphlame

Why would you commit yourself to an altruistic endeavor that has “public good” written all over it, when not just your primary but your only motivation is personal gain and self-interest?

Go seed your poison somewhere else, venomous snakes of the workplace. Your concern for the public good begins and ends at your own goddamn bank account. You’re in the wrong line of work.

your way out didn’t work

Posted on by metaphlame

In language classes they told us that chotto was a way out. Saying it and elongating the sound of it and trailing off would be understood as a signal saying I want to stop talking about this and I also want to avoid conflict because that’s what we do in this culture so please stop. And your interlocutor, as invested in avoiding conflict as the textbooks promised everyone would be, would stop.

Well, it didn’t work.

A guy started following me one day. From a store to the bank to a restaurant. I noticed–I was so nervous and full of fear all the time that I noticed–and I wanted to go home but was afraid he’d follow me into the train and figure out where that was, which would be worse. And I’d already, in earlier days, been stopped by a cop convinced I’d stolen my own bicycle, so police didn’t seem an option. I figured they’d just laugh at me. (They probably would have. Stupid gaijin wears heels and a skirt and can’t handle the attention? GTFO the police box, lady.)

Eventually this guy approached and asked if he could sit at my table. I was so stupid and worried about him causing a scene (god forbid) I said yes. And then he proceeded to wax poetic for the next two hours on, alternately, how he loved foreign women, and how they loved him, and how he knew this because he had once lived in Canada, and how did I not know what an izakaya was, and would I be willing to rectify that by going to one with him?

I used chotto right and left. “Do you want to…?” “Chotto…” “What is your…?” “Chotto…” He just gave me a flat, fishy stare every time, waiting for me to finish. He was portly and I tried to exhaust him, walking all the way from Shibuya to Shinjuku, through the [busy; I made very sure; having not yet been assaulted on a train where the entire fucking car full of people saw and didn’t help, I was still under the illusion that people might assist should things go really wrong] park, passing any number of my usual sanctuaries (the sudden!Tahitian fish place, for example, or the Kinokuniya under the Takashimaya clock, or even my scholarship office) but afraid to flee into them lest he follow, and associate them with me, and haunt them in the future.

Yes, I gave him my number, after every chotto in the book. I needed him to go away. No, I did not have the prepossession to lie. I barely understood my stupid phone and he knew how to do the tap-to-share-contacts thing that I didn’t. Thank god I understood it so little; I had never entered my address in there. But even so I know I was a fool. I didn’t know how to get rid of him, and overlaying the desire to flee, like an oil slick, was the pressure not to be mean. Because of course that would be terrible.

I did not come to the izakaya (which is a kind of bar, and which no, I hadn’t known, because how would I have known? who would have taken me?) He called for months, leaving alternately mournful and accusing messages, wanting to know why. He called from different numbers sometimes so I didn’t know not to pick up. (After which I would immediately hang up.) I asked the girls in my guesthouse how to block numbers but they said it was a service you had to pay for; that my phone couldn’t do it automatically.

I didn’t return to Shibuya for most of a year. I loathed that I had let myself get into that situation; that I hadn’t just blown him off, hurt feelings be damned, and told him no he could not sit at my table and no, he could not walk with me. Chotto, chotto, chotto… It did not work and it was my fault for believing the teachers, for believing the way out had to be a polite one, a good one, a pleasant one. Thank you and have a nice day, you creepy fuck. Wouldn’t want to upset anyone or make a bad impression.

I thought of this because I remembered the Takashimaya clock, how it rolls off your tongue, how it sounds, when I mention that I used it as a landmark, like there is this lustrous history of experience and adventure I get to invoke when I say it. Well it ain’t true. Looking down at that clock from the sun-warmed safety of a breakfast nook in the Lost in Translation hotel with my mother (her last trip before she got too sick to travel), I shuddered. She asked me what was wrong and I said nothing. But I was thinking how fucking beautiful it looked, all lit up by the autumn light, and how that wouldn’t help. How someone could be fleeing toward it even as I admired it, a shining beacon of knownness and direction (not just through the city but through time itself), a promised way out, and it would grant no safety. There wasn’t any to be found.

When I left I wondered if I would rewrite my experience in my head into the sort of thing people want to hear. (I do, usually, if not on this blog.) I wondered if I could return, years later, and not shake under the jolting heart rate and intermittent bursts of loathing for japanophilic idealism that so characterized my peer group back home.

And the answer is no. Not chotto, just fucking no. I jabbed a finger into my throat to check, lying here, and when I felt that frantic flutter, even just mentally walking myself from Shibuya to Shinjuku–Hachiko, the blowfish, the park, the clock–I gave up sleep to write this instead. Because, no. It never goes away. And no amount of editing can erase it. And the day I was told continued studies would mean a return, was the day I was done.

wildebeest

Posted on by metaphlame

A reenactor’s guide to my last 120 minutes:

1.) Take exam (1/4 of semester’s grade).

2.) Realize server error ate entirety of exam and gave me a zero.

3.) Frantically email and post messages at professor, having been told by system that “it’s not us, it’s you.” (It was, in fact, them.)

4.) Submit last week’s assignment which couldn’t be done then because prof’s institution accidentally cancelled the subscription to the service we were supposed to use, and prof could not figure out new service.

5.) Submit this week’s assignment.

6.) Realize last week’s assignment had errors.

7.) Redo last week’s assignment.

8.) Realize giant project turned in on time last week was not recognized as such by the system, which is now telling me it’s very, very, very late.

9.) Wail.

10.) Ascertain that if I screwed up 8, so did everyone else, because they all did the same thing. We are wildebeests. Safety in numbers. I seek the center of the herd.

11.) Submit required ruminations on last week’s and this week’s assignments plus this week’s readings, which were done today on my lunch break.

12.) Receive email from prof saying he could unlock my test for me but not the clock, so I’d have to do it under the previously-established timeline, of which maybe 20% remains now.

13.) Redo exam.

14.) Observe clock; note that have been working on some form of work, be it for job or school, since 5AM.

15.) See step 9.

mind the gap

Posted on by metaphlame

Okay! So this sounds familiar! Group of once-dashing twentysomething heroes appears 10-15 years later, not just “battle-hardened,” which itself is trite, but worn-out and weary by so many of the things they believed in beginning to tarnish, their relationships with each other not beginning to fade, exactly, but to change in ways their exuberant younger selves wouldn’t have thought possible…

I’m speaking here of book two of the Dragon Age prequels (and I suppose, book two of all of the four non-graphical books that exist right now), so I’ll give you a spoiler cut just in case. We’ve got both DA:O prequels as well as a little Inquisition and Awakening spoilers going on here, as well as a very large one for DA2, so watch out.

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bullies are not bees

Posted on by metaphlame

When I was little, I was a maverick at handling bees. My mother had told me to stand still and wait for them to go away, and I did. One time, when a group of us and two mothers were visiting the botanical gardens, all of us kids ran on ahead, laughing and yelling, down a tunnel of exploding blossoms–pink, white–and around a corner. And into a maelstrom of bees. It was like something out of a horror movie: bees everywhere, saturating the air, getting caught in your clothes and your hair. The other four kids started to shriek and run. I held still. I was terrified but I held very still, my arms frozen out to either side where they’d been when I was running, my mouth clamped shut. I backed slowly away, back around the leafy corner with its mushroom clouds of blossoms. I was not stung. My mother peeked around the corner–the others behind us, sniveling and wailing–and looked down at me. She said it would work and it had.

But she said the same thing about bullies, and it doesn’t work. Just don’t respond and they’ll get bored and go away. They’ll leave you alone. They won’t sting you. It doesn’t work. I am a few years shy of 30 and I should not be bothered by bullies. But when they crop up I flail and rage, exactly the way my friends did in the torrent of bees, exactly the way I was told you shouldn’t. But I hate them.

Now that it’s warmer I cannot run alone. There are lousy fucks out there. They sneer and jigger. It doesn’t matter that I ran a half marathon, that I built my arches back up, or that I’m no longer the pastry spokescartoon I grew up looking like. I’m just a vagina with legs to point and laugh at. Two days ago I did intervals, ten 300m all-outs with 300m jogs in between, on the beaten-down once-there-was-a-factory-here track in the neighborhood. Three teenagers had parked on the bleachers smoking pot and I never looked them in the eyes, not once, because it engages them, like feral dogs. But it didn’t matter. Their heads followed me all the way around, and though I tried not to hear what they murmured every time I passed them, one of them–an overflowing boy, built like a melting pile of slushee, a bullseye for diabetes if ever there was one–announced, clearly and loudly, “Ick.” I did not respond. “I mean look at that, it’s just gross.” My pace took me away before he could elaborate. I don’t know what it was he found so gross. My sweat, my muscles, my lack of makeup? My blotchy face or the flesh under my arm? The fact that I was using my body while his rotted? Who the hell knows. But he’d planted his barb and they sauntered forward, to the middle of the soccer field in the center of the track, to hoot and stare at me from there for a few laps before they went home, fleeing rain that granted me blessed solitude.

Or yesterday. A textbook redneck with cutoff sleeves and a rusty popped pickup truck waited to pull onto a main drag–blocking me from crossing the intersecting street, waiting as I was–until I looked him in the eyes. I looked everywhere else first. The sky, pretending to grimace at the weather. Down the street, checking for other traffic. There was no one. It was just him. And when his waiting stretched so fucking long that to continue to wait would be a kind of cowing before him, sure, I looked him in the eyes. And he leered with a couple of his remaining teeth and stuck out his tongue and floored his shitty car onto the main drag and away.

There are others. There are always others. Bros that launch their beer bellies into half-hearted motion as they cross the crosswalk as I’m running the other way, snerking “Hurr hurr, I’m running too!” Teenage boys–barely teenage boys, 13 at most–snickering from their porch steps, “Keep burning those calories, bitch!” I would love to say I let this stuff slide off me but I clearly don’t. I am consumed with rage. “Boys will be boys” is bullshit. These little wastes of life should be pounded to pulp for everyone they ever stripped with their stupid horny judgmental trained-by-porn-to-expect-goddesses-with-their-legs-spread-around-every-bend eyes.

But no one does. I don’t, certainly. I run faster. It’s just like Japan, really. I can do nothing in the face of this bullshit but run away from it. And if three thousand miles wasn’t enough, no distance is ever going to be.

a completely cursory glance

Posted on by metaphlame

When this popped up in a new release feed, I clicked on it, sure, because of the knitting on the cover. And I read through the description and began to sour on it.

1.) The only difference between what this book claims is happening here vs. what people have been wringing their hands over in Japan re: “grass-eating men” for years now is that there these roles are assumed to be belonging to women, and god help us all if men want to take them up. Can we all just stop pretending we’re coming at this from some saintly altruistic “well I’m just worried about our country” perspective. Every hand-wringer is coming at this with their own presuppositions about what males and females should and should not be doing with their time. Enough.

2.) Amanda Marcotte’s twitter description made me twitch in the same way. Great, wonderful, you have no interest in knitting. That’s super-important for us to know, since of course we wouldn’t want to confuse you with those other, lesser feminist bloggers who do knit. Get over yourself, woman. Would you emphasize to people that yes, while you are a trendy Brooklyn feminist writer who follows political news, you would never wear your hair in a braid? No? Then STFU. Your haste to disassociate yourself from hypothetical comrades-in-fiber labels you as kind of an uninformed jerk.

3.) I’m pretty sure that this is something the feminist chef extraordinaire over at I’ll Make It Myself might touch on…oh wait…she did. On this book, even. I’ll just let her speak to that then:

Perhaps what the WP should focus on next is the problem with heteronormative expectations of domestic life and the culture of “make me a sandwich,” as well as the topic of non-heteronormative people who enjoy “domestic” activities without buying into gender roles, why that’s a good thing, and how we can take back our activities from the gender police. Furthermore, as a culture, we need to highlight the strangeness of separate spheres and stop privileging the “masculine” above the “feminine.” As for Matchar, I sincerely hope she will address these issues as well as food feminists more in depth in her forthcoming book.

I’m going to bed. Having begun work on this. Because, you know, my husband is making me provide woolens for our family like it’s 1833. Or because yarn is my one option for validation since I’ve only been providing most of the money and all of the health insurance/savings/computer hardware for the both of us for—oh right—years.*

*And it was my goddamn choice to do so, thank you very much. 

“are you too close to this?”

Posted on by metaphlame

Despite what some would have you believe, this is not a universally applicable question.

We watched The Dark Knight this evening, because all six rentable copies of Batman Begins were checked out and overdue, and because listening to the latest, TDKR-centric podcast of Comedy Film Nerds made us want to go watch the third movie again, which we couldn’t do. During the recording (the Side B half of the most recent posting, which is composed entirely of spoilers, and so can talk more freely/deeply about aspects of the movie glossed over in spoiler-free reviews), Graham Elwood is pushing his reverence of TDKR and forgiving it of its trespasses, citing Christopher Nolan’s skilled grasp of the PTSD-wracked personality of Batman as yet more proof that he really knows what he’s doing. At which point guest podcaster Mike Schmidt bursts in with “Now wait a minute, are you to close to this?” More quietly, Chris Mancini adds, “Yeah, as soon as you said PTSD I thought that.”

I pressed pause here and did a cursory search to see if Elwood himself had suffered PTSD or if it was just a cause he is passionate about. As far as I can determine it’s the latter—not that it’s my business to know; I just figured that if he was so unabashedly open about the illness itself, he’d have used himself as an example. I don’t think he has, but he cites a comedy tour he did overseas, and soldiers and relatives of soldiers he has talked to, as having made a huge impact on him. So I went back and pushed play and listened to the rest of the podcast.

Even if he had experienced PTSD himself, though, I still grind my teeth at the idea of being “too close” to have your opinions count. Of there being the concept of “too close,” when it comes to what you are sitting there feeling in response to something.

Do realize that I’m broadening this out here. I understand that if your job is to dispense dispassionate analysis of some exterior force or situation, some emotional distance is required. I rather doubt reacting to movies (art forms designed to elicit an emotional response!) is one such instance, though I can see how Schmidt’s frustration with Elwood’s kneejerk forgiveness toward any technical shortcomings in the film would lead him to make the accustation. But that doesn’t make it a justified accusation. The hell do you mean, “are you too close to this?” Elwood goes on to say that it’s not just PTSD and Nolan’s treatment of it that makes him so loyal to the film; it’s the years of crappy Batman movies, his fierce adoration of the comics, the revelatory awesomeness of Nolan’s take on Batman, etc. etc. But even if he himself had suffered PTSD I don’t understand how his thoughts on the film would be subpar, tainted in some way, in comparison with someone who hadn’t had PTSD and thus could claim that, I guess they would say, “distance.”

We’re all tainted, people.

We’re all too close to something. We’ve all felt things too akin to this character, or been in fucked-up situations too close to this book or that movie, or had to make a decision one way or the other, and picked the wrong one, and then seen our choices reflected in fiction. And we reacted to it, probably more strongly than those who lacked the connection. And that doesn’t rule our reactions out as invalid—the strength of your feelings should in no way make them moot. What kind of sense does that make?

There are degrees of acceptability here, of course. If you’re a judge and a defendant looks like the guy who beat you up after school every Friday for ten years, maybe you shouldn’t be handling this case. Or if you’re a lawyer. Or a cop. Or a doctor, faced with having to treat your daughter’s rapist. We can’t all be Atticus Finch, even if we know we should be, and if you’re going to handle the man roughly because you’re “too close” to shit he has done in the past, maybe you should hand him over to another doctor.

But reactions to art? Film? Books? Speeches? Mandates? News? How exactly is someone expressly not in a position of authority re: these things capable of being “too close” to them?**

If you used the internet last year, you knew about this. You probably had lots of friends and relatives who posted it. If they were “close” to someone who died, or to somewhere people died, they might have been posting the bungled quote in order to look like the kind, beneficent people they wanted others to think they were. Or to convince themselves they were. Or maybe they’re just saints. I don’t know.

But those without the closeness—I fumed, seeing them do it. A relative of mine decided, like who knows how many other good little christians trying to look like extra good little christians, posted it to her Facebook page, accompanied by a slew of “likes” and self-righteous condemnation of the people who were glad bin Laden was dead. For various reasons, this relative of mine was the only person I saw posting this on Facebook, so she bore the brunt of my reaction, however unwittingly. I never mentioned anything about it, online or in person, since. This, though, is what I would have said to her:

So you’ve decided to paint yourself as a good samaritan in bright neon colors and plaster it across the internet, to make sure all your friends know. Good for you. I don’t suppose they’d think so much of you if they heard all the racist homophobic bullshit you spout when you’re drunk, but then I don’t know your friends, so maybe they would approve. Who knows. But while you’re busy congratulating yourself on your peacefulness and oneness with the world you spend every day that isn’t today complaining about on Facebook, let me explain something. You lost your father when _______. He was taken from you, but because you’re a good little believer when it suits you to be, you never felt an actual person was taking him away from you, robbing you of him without right or reason, out of nowhere. You never felt that. You felt shock and pain that I’m sure you still feel, but there was never anyone to blame. Never any perpetrator. Maybe you even had angry venting sessions with some sort of religious representative, but you swallow the dogma and you’re not treating the concept of God as a physical person who took your dad away. Natural causes, and all that. Working in mysterious ways.

But if you had felt, from the time you heard of a pre-meditated disaster until the time the line in front of the phones cleared, and someone lent you money, and you got on the phone with someone who could tell you they were standing in front of your dad and he was still alive—if you felt, during all that time, that someone took him from you—you would have been a better person than I, if you still wanted to blindly repost some fashionable pronouncement of scandalized goodwill, when the person you thought had done this thing was dead.

I lost no one. By chance, the very few people I care about were elsewhere. And I know that my minutes-long fear that things were otherwise in no way compares to the feelings of those who actually lost loved ones. I know that, implicitly, I have much less reason to be angry than they. Much less reason to react at all. But for those thirty minutes of not-knowing, I felt that I had been robbed. That someone could have—might have done so already, or might have caused the chain of events that lead to blocked passageways, flickering lights, and gas leaks that could even at that very moment be quenching out life—taken away someone I held dear. As a deliberate act. And yes, I was angry. And I stayed angry as so many of his friends died and he didn’t, and he entered a depression, and watched the news into the wee hours of the morning, and tried to eat himself into another shape and another person so as, I assume, to escape who he was—someone who couldn’t go after the perpetrators anymore—and what he was—alive.

I stayed angry. Clearly. To some extent.

And if you think you who never felt murder had been done to you, never felt that someone with eyes and hands and feet to continue to walk over the earth with had removed the very possibility of you ever seeing your loved one again—if you can tell me I should just be a nicer, more christian person, or that I should turn the other cheek, or welcome the hardships or revel in the mysterious ways or whatever the hell you tell people who have been hurt, robbed, by another human being—you are either a beautifully compassionate person, or a real bitch.

And I know what you think about anyone who’s gay or, god forbid, not white, so I’m kind of leaning toward the latter.

So, yeah, I don’t understand this “too close” business. You’ve got to be “too” close to something, or you wouldn’t be living right. Someone or something has to matter to you. And if it matters you’re going to feel something about it. And if feeling something about it makes your thoughts invalid, well, what the hell else are people for? Who else is going to do the feeling?

**I am aware that by the end of this I am no longer speaking of reacting to fiction or art forms. I guess what I’m saying is that, barring my holding a position of authority where my actions, influenced by my strong emotions, might lay untoward claim on someone’s life or person, why should there be a “too close” zone of opinion? Who gets to draw those lines?

guarded is the new pink

Posted on by metaphlame

I am not, socially, a Hammurabian.

Most people are. Most people my age, anyway. There seems to be this belief that because you dump your political beliefs in my lap, or your deepest secrets, or your sexual history, that I should in turn do the same to you.

Um, no thank you.

I signed off on nothing to receive this report on your intimate workings. In nine out of ten cases, I did nothing to encourage it. This is a conscious move. The less I know about what really makes you tick, the less I can be disappointed in it. Because let’s face it—most of us are disappointingly mundane when it comes to our inner workings. Not that beautiful or moving traits shared by millions are any less beautiful or moving for the sharing, but I can count on one hand the only people whose inner awesomeness I really need confirmed in my heart of hearts. Everyone else can be assumed to be much more interesting, or deep, or thoughtful, the less you know about them.

If this sounds vague, let me give an example. When people start the political conversation with you, unloading their views on you like a dump truck full of gravel, they do not want precisely that in return. What they give you is a laundry list of stances they either agree or disagree with. What they want from you, minus perhaps a few highlights from that list, is a label. Are you a liberal? A libertarian? That is what they want. 

I hate labels. After academia, labels are probably what I rant about most on this blog. Labels do violence to the people they are employed to describe. They oversimplify and eliminate, as far as society is concerned, the need for narrative—and I am in no way a proponent of the elimination of narrative. You want to know what I think and why, you don’t get a goddamn bullet point. You get a story. Because stories are everything.

But because they are everything, they have power. And I don’t want to just hand that power out to people. Friends of friends of friends have no need to know why I will lay into you like a rabid bear if you start off on your crackpot 9/11 conspiracy theories anywhere near me. Passing acquaintances have no place knowing what I find attractive in a person, or why. You have no right to those stories—and they are indeed stories. Probably you would have no interest in them once you attain them, but occasionally you meet people who latch onto things and remember them, and who then think they can label you as a result. Perhaps if I were better at reading people I could be more generous with my storytelling, weeding out the labelers from the genuinely interested and/or politely disinterested, but I’m not. I err on the side of caution, then, and avoid what a German teacher of mine once proclaimed to be Americans’ embarrassing tendency to overshare.

You can spill your guts to me all you want, but if you’re expecting me to share back, before I’ve gone through hell with you, or have any other reason to believe you really give a damn about who I am or what I think…forget it.