First, denial. My country hasn’t gone crazy…it’s just going through a very bad patch. Then Anger. YOU FUCKERS KILLED THE DREAM I HATE YOU! Then bargaining. Maybe I can just ignore everything and pursue my job and my art and find peace and happiness that way…
RUSH LIMBAUGH: Have you heard, this new movie, the Batman movie — what is it, the Dark Knight Lights Up or something? Whatever the name of it is. That’s right, Dark Knight Rises, Lights Up, same thing. Do you know the name of the villain in this movie? Bane. The villain in the Dark Knight Rises is named Bane. B-A-N-E. What is the name of the venture capital firm that Romney ran, and around which there’s now this make-believe controversy? Bain. The movie has been in the works for a long time, the release date’s been known, summer 2012 for a long time. Do you think that it is accidental, that the name of the really vicious, fire-breathing, four-eyed, whatever-it-is villain in this movie is named Bane?
“Eight years was awesome, and I was famous and I was powerful. But I have no desire for fame and power anymore,” he said in a new interview with the Hoover Institute’s Peter Robinson.
Then acceptance. I live in a country that has gone completely fucking nuts and the more it drives me crazy the more I fit in.
Where Are You When We Need You, Nikita Khrushchev…
Seriously, I often say I am thankful for the cold war in that regardless of how scary it sometimes was…
…it gave me a decent education.
But there is something else I miss about the cold war…horrible as it was. The communist line was that communism was a better deal for workers then capitalism and developing nations should go communist to protect their workers’ interests over the evil running dog capitalists. So we had a propaganda war going on between us and them and Wall Street and big business were keen to prove to the world that our system was the better one for workers.
People Who Look Like That Want People Who Look Like That.
“Tell a girl she’s beautiful – she’ll believe it for a moment. Tell a girl she’s ugly – she’ll believe it for a lifetime.” -Unknown.
Boys too. Some boys. Basically what you’re telling people is they’re not desirable. It really cuts to the bone. It just takes all the life out of you. Everything becomes why bother. Every day is just empty going through the motions, walking through it, speaking your lines as though it were something real and it isn’t. You look in the mirror and you see nothing.
In a review of Eric Klinenberg’s Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, Benjamin E. Schwartz critiques the single life…
Schwartz says in part…
Going Solo bases itself on relatively new data showing that more than 50 percent of American adults are single, and 31 million- roughly one out of every seven adults – live alone.
Yes, and I am one of those solitary adults. I guess I was just born to have a bundle of negative stereotypes hoisted onto my shoulders. I am an only child. I’m gay. I’m a socially clumsy art/techno nerd. And now I’m getting old. I’m that weird old guy who lives by himself in the house down the street. The one you read about in all those newspaper stories where someone murders one or more other people and everyone in the TV news story says the suspect was a kinda quiet guy who kept to himself. Actually I don’t keep to myself. I don’t like keeping to myself (except when I’m in a mood to be at my drafting table). But being gay in America you get used to neighbors who chat pleasantly with you when you approach them, but who never once approach you. There are two openly gay guys on my block and we both get lots of smiles and friendly hellos and that’s about as much socializing with us as the heterosexuals on the block are willing to endure. As Truman Capote once said, a faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room.
So there is more to the solitary life then mere self centered selfishness. But that’s a pretty reliable stereotype of singles, just as it is with only kids. We’re all just spoiled rotten…
As his subtitle suggests, he likes what the data tell us; his position could be summed up by the subtitle of a book he commends: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. Klinenberg is rarely explicit about his convictions, which saves him the trouble of seriously assaying their implications, but he finally gets to the point directly in his conclusion, asserting that “living alone is an individual choice that’s as valid as the choice to get married or live with a domestic partner. . . .
I suppose it is for those who choose it. But not all of us do. For some of us it is a lot we’ve simply been cast into. And yes, there are a few negative consequences that follow from that. But don’t expect Schwartz to grasp them…he just goes off the deep end babbling about “expressive individualism”, a term I think he wants you to hear excessive individualism in, and society’s ability to transmit moral values. Because, you know, solitary people are innately immoral. Kinda like how poor people are poor because they’re lazy.
Here’s a moral value for you Schwartz: empathy. Not all solitaries are in that situation by choice, and even those who are aren’t all selfish. Selfish is when you stereotype people because you’re too damn lazy to actually look at them and see the people for your conceits. Maybe then people might see that a culture with half its members living alone has within it both the seeds of its own destruction and it’s own salvation. It’s a solvable problem, if only we as a society, as a culture can see the value in expending the kind of energy on making it possible for people to find the companionship in life they need that we do on…oh…let’s see…waging war and killing people’s husbands and wives. How about instead of fighting to keep same-sex couples from getting married, we built a society where no one has to live a life unloved, instead of casting the lonely into the trashcan of society? Moral values Schwartz, moral values.
And…Mr. Klinenberg… I am still awaiting all that surprising appeal of living alone you speak of. For some of us it’s more like life in solitary confinement then an exuberant life lived lightly. It’s hell but with air conditioned singles bars and pantries full of single size servings. We just learn to deal with it. Until we can’t anymore.
A friend from back in the BBS days recently posted a photo of the Names Quilt panel of his very dear and still very deeply missed friend. It reminded me of something I need to keep close to my heart whenever I wonder if my art work matters much at all in the grand scheme of things, and why should I even bother. I was given the task of designing that panel, after the passing away of the one it was to be in tribute to. His name was Chip.
I was not as close to Chip as the friend who brought me the work, and I was deeply honored he even thought I would be up to the task. His friend made a few suggestions as to how to proceed, gave me some needed pieces to start with. I thought about it, about the person it was for, and about all his friends, and their love. What I was being asked to create was a pretty simple design, but I was afraid of getting it all wrong. Chip was much beloved in his circle of family and friends and I wanted more then anything to give them something that let them remember and heal.
There is an utterly non-verbal place inside where there are only feelings, and images that are feelings. I have no words to describe it…it’s just how that most creative part of the work happens. There are no words. I don’t even try to find words in there anymore. But there are images.
I drew a rough sketch and presented it for approval and the friend was so taken with it he insisted that was it and no more needed doing. He organized a gathering of Chip’s friends and the sketch was projected onto a canvas sheet and we all worked on it. I’d included a spot organic to the design where friends could sign their names, and perhaps leave their own memories, thereby completing it…making it the perfect tribute I alone never could. Basically all I did was create the setting. But it had to be something that put them instantly in mind of their friend, so all those feelings would come out of them, and they could do the rest, and make it their own. It worked. They put their own hands on it, and made it their tribute to their friend.
It’s part of the larger Names Project Quilt now. Time passes, the universe expands, and decades later that panel is still very much a place of remembrance and healing for Chip’s friends. It was a small enough task, but I will never feel as though I’ve ever done anything more worthwhile with my talents, such as they are. All artists want recognition. But even more what we want is to touch hearts, and maybe, if we’re good enough, lift them up a little. I can go to my own grave knowing my art was able to do it that one time when it was needed. Just a little sketch, but it did its work.
“All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.”
-Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me
I got the inks finished now on episode 15 of A Coming Out Story. This one has been like pulling teeth. There’s something to be said for not digging up your past. Double for not trying to find your first crush after so long. But I am more determined then ever to get this out of me because I think it’s worthwhile, not just as a personal exercise in exorcising my inner ghosts, but as an accounting of what it was like being a gay teenager in the years after Stonewall, but before the APA decided we weren’t mentally ill anymore.
There’s something to be said for all that advice out there about not searching for your first crush. But I had to. It’s been since March 2011 that I posted episode 14. There were times I thought I’d never finish this one. When I started this cartoon series I had no idea where the object of my affections in this story was, what his life might be like, or even if he was still alive at all. After the AIDS Quilt was first unveiled in Washington D.C., I used to have nightmares about walking along its rows and finding one with his name there. Every time I restarted the search for him it terrified me to think I was simply going to discover he was dead.
Then, shortly after I started this little online comic story I found him. And…creatively…my head has been a mess ever since. Somehow in the past couple of weeks I got a head of steam up for it again and I have just zipped through the finishing of the pencils and now the inks. I finished inking this basically in just two days. And my head is still as much a mess as it’s ever been these past six years.
I do not understand that right brain side of me anymore. Not that I ever really did.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
