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The auto parts cataloguing isn't nearly as boring as I thought it would be. I light scented candles and open myself up to the internal combustion engine as a meditative devotion.
And whadiyaknow. I'm learning a lot about internal combustion engines. Catalytic convertors are actually nifty little devices. The rest of the automotive OS not quite so elegant. Most of the power generated by internal combustion engines gets dissipated as heat. That problem should have been solved by the early inventors, seems to me. By now there is such a gigantic market in parts and systems designed to circumvent the basic design flaw that you couldn't correct it even if you wanted to – there's just too much money invested in keeping the flawed system afloat.
In between writing about auto parts, I've been watching all 13 episodes of House of Cards. It's heavy-handed political drama of the Advise and Consent variety, but fascinating nonetheless, mostly due to a brilliant Richard-the-III-like performance from Kevin Spacey. Do real politics play out like that? Who knows? I made the decision very early in life that power is uninteresting, that coercion has finite limits, that really the only thing worth having in life is influence. I can't say I've been particularly effective at acquiring influence, but that game is not played out yet. Plus there is a part of me that looks at artists like Van Gogh as the only real heroes, people so far ahead of the vanguard that they're complete failures while they're alive.
Haven't called Ronnie, the Iranian Jew, back yet. Or Peter, the Mineola lawyer. Not really sure what that's about. But if I don't wanna, I don't wanna.
Last night, I accompanied Cassandra and Allan to another meeting of the Leather and Roses people. Very interesting speaker, Lee Harrington, transgender poet and performance artist.
Gender choice = male. In conversation on the ride home, I forced myself to use the pronoun "he" when talking about Lee. Thing is, though, it was an active translation process for me. Inside my own head, everything about Lee Harrington screamed "female", despite the hormones that had produced a beard, despite the surgery that had removed the breasts.
The voice: entirely female.
The seductive way of connecting with the crowd: very feminine.
I believe strongly in respecting other people's choices so long as they don't injure me. If Lee Harrington wants to be a guy, then by Gawd, Lee Harrington is a guy. But within the cordoned off preserve inside my own skull, Lee Harrington was not a guy. In fact, he was something a lot more interesting than a guy. He was a modern-day Tiresias, a sacred hermaphrodite. A gender outside of male or female.
In classical antiquity, hermaphrodites were oracles and prophets.
###
I'll out myself here as hopelessly Politically Incorrect here by remarking that I've never understood the appeal of body mods of any sort.
I don't understand why anyone would get a tattoo, for example: How do you know that you're gonna love that picture of Elvis/Mom/your favorite band in high school/your best friend who OD'd your senior year in college every subsequent day for the rest of your life? And you'regonna have to look at it in the shower!
Plus the thing about tattoos is that they get ugly over time. The ink runs into your epidermis, your epidermis itself sags as gravity does its thing.
When Robin was here, he drew me an elaborate picture of the tattoo he plans to get just as soon as the $$$ from my mother's trust comes through. There's a stylized image of the Golden Gate Bridge – or maybe it's the Bay Bridge – and a tree with Justin's initials and death date carved into the bark. I have it up on my wall and I'm staring at it even as I type. It's Robin's body. He gets to do whatever he wants with it. But I don't doubt that there will come a day in 2053 when the death of Justin will seem really inconsequential to him compared to the two divorces, and the dust-up at work that may be putting his livelihood on the line, and the way his pee has started to dribble in spurts and starts in the morning because his prostate is enlarged. But his body will still be a billboard to Justin's increasingly irrelevant death.
I'm a bit more arbitrary when it comes to piercings. I'm fine with pierced ears and pierced noses, for example. Other piercings, not so much. Someone I know recently forked his tongue. I like this person, but I physically have to avert my eyes away from his mouth now when I talk to him. No, his forked tongue doesn't freak me out. It's just fuckin' ugly.
Gender reassignment surgery I just don't get at all. No, you don't have to explain it to me – I get it on an intellectual level. I understand that for some people, the body they were born into – the skin suit, if you will – just feels all wrong. Since the means now exist to correct that feeling of dysmorphia, why not take advantage of it?
I don't get it as a functional solution because 18 times out of 20, it doesn't work. The vast majority of the time, you can tell that the person wasn't born a male or wasn't born a female.
It does work if you look at it, I suppose, not as gender reassignment but as the creation of a third gender – genders that have the characteristics of both males and females.
But I don't think most people who go through gender reassignment surgery look at it that way.
In a hundred years, of course — assuming that human beings are even around in a hundred years – we will be having this conversation on a far larger scale. "I was born a human," people will say. "But I've never felt like a human. I've always known I was a cat."
And because science will have dispensed with clumsy surgeries by then in favor of sophisticated gene splicings, we will live in a world of interspecies mosaics, an endless array of genetic combinations and permutations where phenotypes are no more consequential than clothes are today. Who knows?
And whadiyaknow. I'm learning a lot about internal combustion engines. Catalytic convertors are actually nifty little devices. The rest of the automotive OS not quite so elegant. Most of the power generated by internal combustion engines gets dissipated as heat. That problem should have been solved by the early inventors, seems to me. By now there is such a gigantic market in parts and systems designed to circumvent the basic design flaw that you couldn't correct it even if you wanted to – there's just too much money invested in keeping the flawed system afloat.
In between writing about auto parts, I've been watching all 13 episodes of House of Cards. It's heavy-handed political drama of the Advise and Consent variety, but fascinating nonetheless, mostly due to a brilliant Richard-the-III-like performance from Kevin Spacey. Do real politics play out like that? Who knows? I made the decision very early in life that power is uninteresting, that coercion has finite limits, that really the only thing worth having in life is influence. I can't say I've been particularly effective at acquiring influence, but that game is not played out yet. Plus there is a part of me that looks at artists like Van Gogh as the only real heroes, people so far ahead of the vanguard that they're complete failures while they're alive.
Haven't called Ronnie, the Iranian Jew, back yet. Or Peter, the Mineola lawyer. Not really sure what that's about. But if I don't wanna, I don't wanna.
Last night, I accompanied Cassandra and Allan to another meeting of the Leather and Roses people. Very interesting speaker, Lee Harrington, transgender poet and performance artist.
Gender choice = male. In conversation on the ride home, I forced myself to use the pronoun "he" when talking about Lee. Thing is, though, it was an active translation process for me. Inside my own head, everything about Lee Harrington screamed "female", despite the hormones that had produced a beard, despite the surgery that had removed the breasts.
The voice: entirely female.
The seductive way of connecting with the crowd: very feminine.
I believe strongly in respecting other people's choices so long as they don't injure me. If Lee Harrington wants to be a guy, then by Gawd, Lee Harrington is a guy. But within the cordoned off preserve inside my own skull, Lee Harrington was not a guy. In fact, he was something a lot more interesting than a guy. He was a modern-day Tiresias, a sacred hermaphrodite. A gender outside of male or female.
In classical antiquity, hermaphrodites were oracles and prophets.
I'll out myself here as hopelessly Politically Incorrect here by remarking that I've never understood the appeal of body mods of any sort.
I don't understand why anyone would get a tattoo, for example: How do you know that you're gonna love that picture of Elvis/Mom/your favorite band in high school/your best friend who OD'd your senior year in college every subsequent day for the rest of your life? And you'regonna have to look at it in the shower!
Plus the thing about tattoos is that they get ugly over time. The ink runs into your epidermis, your epidermis itself sags as gravity does its thing.
When Robin was here, he drew me an elaborate picture of the tattoo he plans to get just as soon as the $$$ from my mother's trust comes through. There's a stylized image of the Golden Gate Bridge – or maybe it's the Bay Bridge – and a tree with Justin's initials and death date carved into the bark. I have it up on my wall and I'm staring at it even as I type. It's Robin's body. He gets to do whatever he wants with it. But I don't doubt that there will come a day in 2053 when the death of Justin will seem really inconsequential to him compared to the two divorces, and the dust-up at work that may be putting his livelihood on the line, and the way his pee has started to dribble in spurts and starts in the morning because his prostate is enlarged. But his body will still be a billboard to Justin's increasingly irrelevant death.
I'm a bit more arbitrary when it comes to piercings. I'm fine with pierced ears and pierced noses, for example. Other piercings, not so much. Someone I know recently forked his tongue. I like this person, but I physically have to avert my eyes away from his mouth now when I talk to him. No, his forked tongue doesn't freak me out. It's just fuckin' ugly.
Gender reassignment surgery I just don't get at all. No, you don't have to explain it to me – I get it on an intellectual level. I understand that for some people, the body they were born into – the skin suit, if you will – just feels all wrong. Since the means now exist to correct that feeling of dysmorphia, why not take advantage of it?
I don't get it as a functional solution because 18 times out of 20, it doesn't work. The vast majority of the time, you can tell that the person wasn't born a male or wasn't born a female.
It does work if you look at it, I suppose, not as gender reassignment but as the creation of a third gender – genders that have the characteristics of both males and females.
But I don't think most people who go through gender reassignment surgery look at it that way.
In a hundred years, of course — assuming that human beings are even around in a hundred years – we will be having this conversation on a far larger scale. "I was born a human," people will say. "But I've never felt like a human. I've always known I was a cat."
And because science will have dispensed with clumsy surgeries by then in favor of sophisticated gene splicings, we will live in a world of interspecies mosaics, an endless array of genetic combinations and permutations where phenotypes are no more consequential than clothes are today. Who knows?
