Marriage Is For Faggots

Author's Note: All quotes from Zachary are in bold, all others are in italics.

There are instances when cruelty and accuracy amount to synonyms, when their colorful circles overlap into a spiteful Venn diagram. Summarizing Zachary Vallentine's paper on gay marriage-- Ornately tittled, "The Gay Marriage Debate"-- is such an instance. As an opinion piece, it's vague, illogical and poorly sourced: full of ignorant blanket statements and melodramatic slippery slope arguments. As writing, it's a throbbing mass of redundant non sequiturs.

The first two pages made me question if it's author had even encountered homosexuals. The last two had me wondering if he was raised in an Iranian cave where putting pen to paper shares the same legal status as sodomy. Regardless of upbringing and circumstance, Zachary is clearly anti-rainbow. Quote:

"While having an open mind and the ability to look past personal views is a necessity, the changing of laws to allow gay marriage is one situation that Americans need to stand together and protect the holiness of this sacred union."

And later on:

"Nobody should be able to tell anyone who to fall in love, or have a relationship with, but allowing gay marriage opens up so many other issues. Just because love cannot be explained does not justify allowing people of the same sex to consummate their love by being married."

What does that even mean? His 'It's good to have an open mind' platitude leads right into 'gays shouldn't be allowed to marry;' there is no connection. So marriage is sacred; marriage is a holy; and the institution is vulnerable-- an infant teetering over the edge of a shark tank, and must be protected?

Marriage is an abstract concept, governmental and societal, used to join property and people, not some fair-skinned damsel perched atop a conflagrated tower-- screeching for help. Yes, there are religious elements to the modern practice: when not being preformed in drab settings of a judge's office, the union is conferred by a minister of some sort. But whatever the method of attaining it, marriage is a much secular as it is sacred-- as much mundane as metaphysical. Would anyone go off on the safeguarding the "Holiness of tax brackets" or the "Sanctity of census taking?"

Of course I'm being unfair. Having experianced the trauma of my parents divorce at age nine, I'm aware that marriage isn't just some fancy notion reducible to a notarized piece of paper and ritualized cake-eating. It may only be an idea, but are so compassion and tolerance-- and idea or not, marriage has concrete ramifications for family stability and the quality of childhood. Which is why I found it queer to see Zach's paper skirt over divorce so nonchalantly; it's not mentioned once.

My parents didn't end their 20 year plus relationship so my father could run of to Cancun with our pool boy. After Dad moved out, Mom didn't start spelling her gender with a Y and wearing flannel-- they broke up over less tabloid-friendly reasons: money, arguments about money, trust, and my father's dependability. People quit relationships for simplistic reasons. Here's a 2004 survey of UK divorcees by consulting firm Grant Thornton International:

Reasons Given for separation:

* Extramarital affairs - 27%
* Family strains - 18%
* Emotional/physical abuse - 17%
* Mid-life crisis - 13%
* Addictions, e.g. alcoholism and gambling - 6%
* Workaholism - 6%
* Homosexual cabals N/A (question not posed)

The government recognized sundering of family units seems a a far more conspicuous threat to the marriage than some dudes with wedding bands brutally sodomizing one another in the comfort of their impeccably decorated home. So where's is the conservative backed movement to outlaw divorce in this country? Where are the propositions on ballots in the deep south-- the powerbase of the far right-- to outlaw this most immoral of practices?

Quote (from a 1999 study by the National Center for Policy Analysis):

"Aside from the quickie-divorce Mecca of Nevada, no region of the United States has a higher divorce rate than the Bible Belt. Nearly half of all marriages break up, but the divorce rates in these southern states are roughly 50 percent above the national average."

OH WOW I WASN'T EXPECTING THAT.

AND NOW A NOVEMBER 2004 ARTICLE FROM THE JEW YORK TIMES (by Pam Belluck):

"Kentucky, Mississippi and Arkansas, for example, voted overwhelmingly for constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage. But they had three of the highest divorce rates in 2003, based on figures from the Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics.

The lowest divorce rates are largely in the blue states: the Northeast and the upper Midwest. And the state with the lowest divorce rate was Massachusetts, home to John Kerry, the Kennedy's and same-sex marriage."

It'd be heavy-handed to focus only on divorce in a paper that glosses over it so completely, so I'll cherry pick some of the funniest arguments Zach came up with to battle the advancing specter of legalized gay marriage.

"If homosexuals were allowed to be married nothing would stop pedophiles from using the same excuses to attempt to marry young boys and girls. NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love association) is a perfect example of an organization that would try to legalize men marrying young boys. Americans would also have to allow polygamy simply because of love. In short, the simple fact that you might be in love with someone is not the only valid reason to allow marriage that is not socially acceptable. There is too much legal risk."

Comedy gold.

Does Zachary honestly believe it's a fine line between legalizing gay marriage and state-sanctioned pedophilia? That polygamy is at our doorstep the moment we pronounce some (un)lucky couple 'Man and Groom?' Those are entirely unrelated laws-- but if you want to employ a slippery-slope argument, it can just as easily slide the other way. Until doing research for this paper, I hadn't realized that the last law banning interracial marriage in this country had only been overturned a mere 20 years before I was born. Nevermind that amendments are designed to ensure personal freedoms rather than remove them-- The only exception being the ill-fated 18th or 'prohibition' amendment--, passing a ban on gay marriage sets a precedent for the government to regulate our personal lives on a national level.

After presenting us with the grim threat posed by NAMbLA's lobbying juggernaut, Zachary descends into several paragraphs of full blown inaccuracies.

"One reason why marriage brings stability is that couples go into marriage with the intent to have children. Since that is not an easy possibility, or a reason homosexuals' want to be married, it is easy to wonder what other motivations they have."

That's patently untrue. It's a natural human impulse to want kids; to want a family-- gays are not robots or aliens, they have these feelings too.

"Marriage should not be a gateway for homosexuals to receive the same tax breaks, rights, and privileges that heterosexual couples receive. The main reasons why homosexuals want to be married are financially motivated. Another reason they want to be married is to further their acceptance in American society. Marriage is a legally binding contract and should be entered into for the correct reasons."

Here Zachary's bigotry is at it's most naked. Where does he get that figure from? And what correct reasons? At the start of his essay, we needed to defend the "Holiness of this sacred union" and now it's simply a legally binding contract? We also find him ignoring the long, pronounced, and still continuing history of heterosexuals entering into marriage for morally dubious reasons-- but I guess it's okay when they do it.

"Even if raising children is a priority for some homosexual couples, have two moms or two dads is not the ideal situation to be raised in and learn how to properly become a member of society. There are specific things that humans learn from a father and certain things that one would learn from a mother. No matter how you try to duplicate the proper family structure it cannot be done. There are a lot of negative effects of children being raised by only a mother or only the father. How could homosexual couples be any different?"

From wikipedia's page on Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender parenting:

"The American Psychological Association states in its Resolution on Sexual Orientation, Parents, and Children (adopted July 2004):

there is no scientific evidence that parenting effectiveness is related to parental sexual orientation: lesbian and gay parents are as likely as heterosexual parents to provide supportive and healthy environments for their children"; and "research has shown that the adjustment, development, and psychological well-being of children is unrelated to parental sexual orientation and that the children of lesbian and gay parents are as likely as those of heterosexual parents to flourish."

Similarly, Children's Development of Social Competence Across Family Types, a major report prepared by the Department of Justice (Canada) in July 2006 but not released by the government until forced to do so by a request under the Access to Information Act in May 2007, reaches this conclusion: The strongest conclusion that can be drawn from the empirical literature is that the vast majority of studies show that children living with two mothers and children living with a mother and father have the same levels of social competence. A few studies suggest that children with two lesbian mothers may have marginally better social competence than children in traditional nuclear families, even fewer studies show the opposite, and most studies fail to find any differences. The very limited body of research on children with two gay fathers supports this same conclusion "

I'd like to close with a 2004-era interview with Jon Stewart on Larry King Live:

KING: Will same-sex marriage be an issue in the campaign?

STEWART: Same-sex marriage is a very difficult situation-- and I was freaked out by it too... until I found out that it wasn't mandatory, because I love my wife and I'd hate to have to leave her for a dude... they said, “the gay marriage,” and people got upset, so I figured, well, clearly this means that there's a law being passed that we all now have to be gay... Once it was explained to me that [it was] only [for] gay people, I seem much more comfortable with it; It doesn't seem like such a big deal anymore.

Oh, one last thing:

Countries that impose the death penalty on gays:

Mauritania
Sudan
Iran
Saudi Arabia
Yemen

Countries that allow gay marriage:

Spain
Belgium
The Netherlands
South Africa
Canada

We all know which way our social slide whistle is headed if we choose to ban gay marriage.

Can we be more like Belgium and less like Yemen?

Please?

POUMZ

Fun-eral:

No priests.
Or monks.
Or imams or whatever.
A Unitarian would be okay.
No one in black.
Scatter the ashes on the faces of my enemies.

Invite everyone I've known to a potluck,

And

Make them talk about how awesome I was. Or like,

Have you seen Batman two?
Near the end when the penguin dies (spoiler warning),
Near the end when the penguin dies,
His mournful namesakes gather,
Honking sorrowfully.
And, downcast yellow beaks clenched upon black fabric,
Waddle his bloated, pin-striped corpse,
To the icy depths.

You know what?
Just do that.

***

Here's Dani with the weather:

I'm not reaching towards the sexual when I say, "you could charm the pants off me."
Like a micro burst deals with ill-parked convertibles shaded by top-heavy trees,
You send the rigid frame of my better judgment onto uninsured violence.

***

Glug glug:

I can find your name in conversation-- an excuse or inhibition.
I can find lust in kneading hands on the jeans of your peers.
I can find sincerity underneath your whiskey-dusted breath.

***

4am in the parking lot at work:

The blizzard is back lit thermonuclear orange by still active street lights.
Flakes mass and stagger towards contact.

A winter-soft bomb aftermath.
A radioactive snow globe.

***

That's actually the name of my metal side project:

You had the gall to drink at the wedding reception.
And It was offensive.

Like,
If you'd arrived hours late,
With "faggot-nigger abortion"
Tattooed on your forehead,
And proceeded to cup the groom,

It was like that.

***

Those lithium ones:

I found him motionless;
Disproportionately room temperature within the broiling minivan interior.

RadioShack was having a sale on batteries.

When you lose a child, a part of you,
Does it rule you out for 'parent of the year?'

***

The Unauthorized Biography of Allison Smith:

You will be the same at 30.
Your waxy Adrian-Brody-features,
Like six pack rings half-buried in sand,
Shaming the concept of decay.

You will be the same at 40.
Because shifting your opinions induces pain--
Harsh-physical-actual-pain.

Excepting the divorce,
You will be the same at 50.
All darkened missionary sex,
Seething judgment,
And giggles tailing speech.

You are the five; you are the mean of our species.

***

She has big juggs too:

She is pandemic
Draping in friendly pinks and speaking in absolutes.

She is plastic flowers and clove cigarettes.
Indifference on a pedestal.

***

This was in what? Jr. High?:

Walking home
I encountered a Doberman,
Alert behind stained wooden planks;
Barking like I was a rapist.

I set my books against the sidewalk

And,

Through high-pitched imitation,
Matched its guttural aggression,

Then spent the next week pondering his owners expression.

***

And the "bapjism":

I loathed the hours.
Waking near the edge of twilight
To the pull of my mother's leather-clad hands,
Then huddling naked in that snowy forest clearing. But,

The worst part of satanic mass
Was the placental cakes frosted in menstrual blood.

THE VERY FATE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ITSELF.

The Internet:

Famed antagonist of the elderly and those who didn't "realacize that there dun was a camera in the barn," it's been warping the very fabric of our existence since it's inception. I can order shoes without leaving my house; I can order pizza without out picking up my telephone. I can spend hours vanquishing electronic dragons or view massive stockpiles of explicit pornography during the time I've allotted for writing this very paper! We live in the goddamn future; a land of iPod touch screen phones with innumerable Usher (Ft. Lil' Jon) ring tones. Flying cars and cancer-curing sex-robots are not far behind.

Some will claim that it's advent has stifled a once flowering English language; that the written word is nearing it's death rattle. While their, no doubt, ineptly composed papers would appear to back, at least superficially, their equally moronic claim, I am not in possession of this fear. For you see, I have read pitchforkmedia.com. Ornately constructed and entirely heavy-handed with their reviews, Pitchfork is one of the more popular websites-- both to read and to bash-- at the moment. Take comedian David Cross. You might know him from his television appearances (Mr. Show, Arrested Development), his voice acting (Those tremendously popular Halo video games), or his stand up. The latter falls into the field of pitchforks reviews, and both his CDs have seen appraisals by the site. When he was invited by their editors to submit his top ten album, Cross responded with:

Hi, I was a somewhat surprised that Pitchforkmedia.com would ask me to participate in this. Here's why:

"The devastating paradox of David Cross' pre-recorded comedy: Is it funny that everything Cross says is nauseatingly smug, yelped out in smarmy, supercilious prose? Or is David Cross just a giant fucking asshole? That Cross is such an immensely unlikable live performer-- condescending, defensive, arrogant, patronizing-- is both his greatest asset and his most crippling flaw."

And while the above review of my second cd It's Not Funny is certainly more thoughtful than, "David Cross? Yeah, he's funny" or "He sucks", it's still a bit shitty. "...immensely unlikable"? The paradox is "devastating"? How is it devastating?

And that's just one reviewer, Amanda Petrusich.* There's another one, William Bowers, who claims to: "...having developed a strange, extra-textual concern for David Cross. Likeminded futon-psychoanalysts fret over his fluctuating weight, his fitfulness, and despondence..."

Fretting over my weight? Oh well. But regardless of their opinion of me and/or my act, they've asked me for my Top Ten List®, So here is my contribution to the Top Ten List® For Pitchforkmedia.com.

Cross then went on to review ten fictional albums at the expense of Pitchfork.

You can see, from the text quoted in Mr. Cross's list, that the written word is alive and well; perhaps a little too alive. This is not some obscure little backwater URL that features blog posts about what the webmasters cat did, this site is a giant; a behemoth of taste-making. Bands like The Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, or Tapes N Tapes have all exploded into the limelight with a mere positive word from it's staff. It receives (according to the semi-reliable Wikipedia) 200,000 hits per day and 1.5 million unique visitors per month. People would jump off a bridge if it received anything higher than an 8.5.

Plenty of non-digital publications are striving for a dumbing down of the populace-- pick up a USA Today-- and It's well known that newspaper circulation in America has been graph-plummeting with study determination since the Carter administration. Printed media is at a, to borrow a the title of a Britney Spears vehicle, crossroads. Newspapers increasingly consolidate and congeal into more compact larger firms under bigger and more faceless corporations. Conversely, the quantity of magazines has increased dramatically, driving competition among frantic publishing magnates to be the next Maxim or FHM and grab a slice of the ever thinning market share. Both those magazines are vapid nudie-mags for men too chicken shit to view actual pornography, but their success in a dying industry has spurred numerous imitators. Rolling Stone even hired a former editor from the latter magazine to spruce up their sales-- I'm guessing that cover with Jessica Simpson vacuuming in her underwear was his idea. While that might appeal to John Q Stupid, a snob like me would avoid that image like AIDS. The most sex appeal you'll see on popular Internet music sites is from the American Apparel ads and Jenny Lewis interviews. For a prude such as myself, that's almost too much.

Rolling Stone Magazine is the analogue counterpoint to Pitchfork. Founded in 1967 (Pitchfork's birthday was in 1995) it has somehow managed to stay culturally irrelevant for the entirety of it's shameful 40 year run. This is a magazine that despised Led Zeppelin during their prime creative years and gave Nirvana's landmark album Nevermind a nondescript three stars. This is a magazine that would rate Kid Rock or Creed as favorably as Radiohead. This is a magazine for your self-aware uncool father; It's VH1 in print. With a circulation of around 1.3 million, they also lay claim to the burliest market share.

While they have published some commendable journalism (I am a card carrying progressive), RS is a music based publication, so I will judge them by that. Their business model seems grounded around selling CDs. Look at a list of recent album reviews in any issue you'll see a mean around three and a half stars. It's a brilliantly ambiguous rating really. You could apply it to a Lenny Kravitz album or an Elliott Smith CD and no one will be the wiser. To be fair, unlike Pee-Fork, their reviews are mercifully short and entirely readable. Here's paragraph one of a criminally enthusiastic Creed review:

On Weathered, Creed's lucid powerhouse of a third album, the Orlando, Florida, trio emerge as masters of hard-rock atmosphere. As Soundgarden proved with Superunknown, there are a million little intricacies to pulling off what sounds like big enormous rock. And Creed are all over them: Weathered is rock of unusual focus and arrest, a beautifully distressed dance of sustained style and unapologetic emotion.

If there's a video of what Scott Stapp (Creed's grotesquely untalented frontman) did to the editors of RS to get that printed, I hope it was thrown into a volcano. For it surely involved the most base of carnality and the most unwilling of livestock.

But you can see, comparatively, the text is dumbed down-- refreshingly so. And yet this is a printed medium; a relic from the days of Gutenberg and the enlightenment. Shouldn't it at least be stuffier? Harder to read? No, our linguistic mass grave does not lie in the shadowy crevasses of the Internet, but our humility, our unpretentiousness, just might.

Crash

Crash? More... Like... Tuh-- Trash! (that's clever; that's good Paul; keep going).

Bad introductory sentences aside, I didn't find this to be a great movie.

Good? Sure. You could you argue for good. There's a few moments so intense and spellbinding (the fiery car wreck, or the police stand off) that comfortably make this uncomfortable film worth watching. It's good for you; an emotional multivitamin: we shouldn't judge people by their skin! Racism is bad! Etcetera! But Crash as great? Oscar worthy? Really?

I don't have a thing for gay cowboys. I'm not a gay cowboy aficionado; I don't widdle away my conscious moments painstakingly collecting and filling my favorite issues of Country Beefcake magazine (Alphabetical by cover article, then chronological) into moisture-proof Mylar bags to the gypsy kings pumping from my stereo system; It's just something I don't do-- I'm not gay--, but it seems hard to fathom how this won best picture over Brokeback Mountain, over Jake Gyllenhaal's watery blue eyes... Rock hard abs... Mmmm.

The Review! Right:

I didn't hate it, like I do with-- you know, Mexicans, but it didn't strike me as a movie worthy of the praise so liberally slathered upon it by the press. Yeah, I get racism is wrong-- and I get that we're all guilty or prejudice-- and that even the most enlightened and liberal minded of us is predisposed by our nature as human beings (due to an inherent biologically-driven preference towards the familiar) to bigotry-- I know all of this! Having this told to me in movie form doesn't make for good story telling. The format irked me too. While I loved the way they shot the film and the music that went with the stark imagery of the Los Angeles winter, I loathed the "have a buncha awful shit happen to all these people" concept. It renders the movie's message as unsubtle as a tomahawk to the sternum.

Admittedly, I live in a world almost entirely free of overt racial hostility. Everyone around me, my friends, my family, is white. But when I do come across Blacks/Arabs/Persians/Mexicans/whatevers, it's just never that fraught with tension. It could very well be that I'm living in the wrong place for me to relate fully to this film. I don't think that's what it is, though.

Crash could captivate me entirely, but was capable of reinstating my disbelief in equal portions. So officer Hanson will, full of disgust at his racist sexual predator partner, report him and seek a new one? He will risk his career and possibly life to deescalate a near shoot out with the an obviously irate and ready-to-blow black man? But he'll shoot another black man, the one whom he offered a ride, to death for reaching into his pocket after laughing? Police are trained not to be trigger-happy or short-fused. I know it's fiction; that shooting still took me entirely out of the film and back into my community college seat. The exact opposite of how you want to feel at a theater.


Also, I hate Sandra Bullock. God, Remember Speed Two? With the boat? And like, Jason Patrick? Oh man. I hate her so much.

Sunday

Sunday means church. Sunday means my mother sighing at me in my pajamas, from the open doorway to my room, over and over until I'm roused from mild shame at my sloth. Sunday means being packed into mildly undersized corduroy pants and a third-hand gray formal jacket originally belonging to my (second) oldest brother, Jared. Sunday means sitting on a hard wooden pew next to my family at some ungodly hour-- always around nine o'clock-- and passing notes to my siblings consisting of silly drawings or non-sequitors etched into the back of donation envelopes with those little golf pencils next to the hymnals. Sunday means release at 10:30; an entire day to do or play with who or what I like.

This sunday I find myself half-awake in dress shoes; an adult hand tip pressed gently in between my shoulder blades herding me into the blue minivan with red stripes flaking off the sides. Once seated and buckled I rub at my eyes, at my face, forcefully, to will away the last clinging's of sleep. When I'm finished, I notice the shade of aspen and oak leaves whipping past in a carousel of black dots over my little sister Jennifer's pale-placid face and her sky-blue dress-- It's the one with those lacy white ruffles framing the hem. I remember the sound a 1986 Chevy Astro engine makes and realize that sound is being generated. We are moving. I feel for the armrest with my head.

*Sleeeeeeeeep*, I think.

***

"For god will always give what you ask of him," the minister intones. I know it's important to remember the rest of what he said; that means you're paying attention. I wasn't though; I must've been too antsy, too eager, to get home; to eat food; to sleep on the couch with the sun slowly dispelling the shade over my chest. The organ is playing again-- Oh Come all ye faithful--, but all the people are standing up; I am standing up. We waddle toward the exits as one stretching, tentacled mass. My parents -- like all the adults-- stop to exchange pleasantries with neighbors or business associates on the way out. We are at the exit now; the massive wooden slabs of the cathedral doors propped against the stone walls of it's exterior; they welcome the August morning and it's cloudless blue ceiling. "It was a wonderful service Father Howard," My mom is sincere; she is always sincere.

The crowd disperses through final doorway and begins to flow in random directions. The organ is faint now, receding into the clacking of high heel shoes on pavement and the laughter of children. My three siblings and I are ushered back into the now-broiling confines of the venerable Astro. Windows are rolled down and complaints are issued. "I'm hungry!" Jennifer laments from beside me. Jacob, my oldest-oldest brother cranes his neck backwards, "They'll be pancakes when we get home," he comforts.

I'm itchy; I'm really, really itchy. My corduroys are clinging to my damp underside, glued by sweat and an hour of non-movement. And I'm figidity because we're pulling into the driveway ,but I'm used to getting out last as the youngest male-- I expect it even. We go by age then gender. My parents and Jacob climb out first and start to work on breakfast, followed by Jared, Jennifer, and myself. At seven years, Jennifer is not suited for the task of opening and closing a sliding Van door-- She is a child, after all--, but I am ten; I am world-weary and experienced; I know things. It's more than sensible for me to be irritated when I catch her small fingers fumbling with the plastic knobs controlling whatever levels and gizmos dictate the motion of the Astro's metallic opening: she doesn't have a goddamn clue.

“Jennifer!” I object, “No! Lehme open the door! I'm s'posed tah.”

This is important.

“Nohhh!” She ripostes. I look out the windows and see Jared strolling up the garage stairs into our house. We are alone in the van.

“Jennifer!” She actually got the door open “Jennnyifur!” I grab the door sternly and force it in the opposite direction. She's standing though-- I'm sitting-- she has her entire small body to work with. She leaps out overflowing with confidence, entirely misplaced, with me right behind and now attempts to shut the door-- she can never close it right. My feet are firmly planted on the earth and I loom over her. I wrench control of the cobalt blue handle and slam it shut.

She's screaming.

Is this her crude idea of protest? Whatever. I unlatch the handle and the metal panel slides back open.

There is blood; it rushes out to paint the unscathed portions of her hand and the brighter parts of the asphalt. She is screaming even fiercer now; she is a banshee; I cover my ears and the bite of it does not dull. Tears are pooling the soft brown lobes of her eyes. Her speech is mangled and watery. I put my hands on her shoulders to calm her, but she shrieks and throws up her arms. I back away. I hear frantic footsteps from behind; that same clink-clank of high heels; I can recognize my mother's voice-- It's uncommonly shrill.

“OH! OH! Oh sweetheart!” Mom inhales deeply through clenched teeth as she kneels to inspect the wound. I back up further from the driveway and bump lightly against our rose bush, the one lining our front yard beneath our windows. Jennifer resists any and all attempts for a closer view of the gash.

“Honey – Honey,” My mother gently takes Jennifer by the shoulders, “you need you let me look at it,” she coos.

I hadn't noticed Jacob at my mother's side, but there he is. And there he goes at her instruction, inside to retrieve gauze from that first aid closet we keep.

“Sweety...” My mother's eyes attempt a parley with Jennifer's but she still hasn't calmed down. “Sweety-- Sweety, what happened?”

Jennifer takes a rapid breath in between most words:

“I—I—I---I Wuh---wuh---wuh wanted--- I wanted to--- to-- oh—oh--- open the--- the do—do--- door but Jermanyclosedit---andit-andit--hitmy---hand-and-and-andnow,” Jennifer manages before resuming her outright sobbing.

My mother turns to my sulking frame, clearly enraged, “Jeremy-Rupurt-Fackrell! What did you do?”

I find myself rubbing my hands and staring where the dirt of the rose bush mingles with the sidewalk in light swirly patches of brown-grey.

“She wanted to close the door.” I mumble.

“What?” She growls.

Dad is supposed to be the mad one.

“I wanted to close the door.”

***

I'm in the cottonwood hospital waiting room now. We had all piled back into the Astro when it became apparent that Jennifer required professional medical attention. I last saw her wearing a single, lumpy, bandage-mitten and sullenly marching off to some doctor's room with my parents in tow. My brothers and I remain uncharacteristically silent for the forty-fiveish minutes they're away. I take a Highlights from a basket of old magazines underneath a nondescript beige lamp and pretend to read it. Mostly though, I alternate between imagining a life of indentured servitude to my sister after they amputate her hand, and studying the other ER patients.

Eventually, they return. Her hand is neatly bandaged now. Her face puffy and red, especially around the eyes, but it is dry and has returned to her default expression of dignified calm. The doctors informed my sister that she would never have normal used of her right hand again. She would have to learn to write differently, and certain every day tasks would blossom into endless frustration. Of course they are wrong. When do you ever hear the soccer-playing spinal cord injury victim, or the recovered cancer patient, tell you the doctor told them they 'would never walk again' or only had 'six months to live' without a note of pride at their health-care provider being so completely wrong. They are never right in these stories. My sister can write fine and I am not her house slave. I ended up providing enough “I'm sorry”s for her to stomach-punch me. I guess I deserved it. It's the type of thing we could laugh about now-- if she hadn't been killed in that grain thresher accident¹.

1. Nah, I'm just fucking with you; she's fine

Freudian Mintiness

Tuesday is my day off from Subway and, this week, my friends and I all share fortuitously similar schedules. We congregate at Larry's house (in truth an apartment) in the early afternoon, pondering how best to spend the gloomy late-spring day. Like every pack of shiftless, disaffected youth, it takes entire episode lengths of 24 for anything to be decided on as a group. To overpower our stagnant inertia, any choice would have to be enthusiastically unanimous, clicking into place with a metallic "Ah-ha!" Such decisiveness is a rare gift.

A haggardly unshaven Jack Bauer is water-boarding some "evil-doer" in a darkened warehouse, nondescript and vacant---

Greg nobly suggests Ice Cream. Andrew purses his lips in agreement and Larry consents with a "that sounds good." Larry's house is near public transport, so we take TRAX a half-mile west without buying tickets, then deposit ourselves a mere twenty yards from the stores entrance.

Three of us take time to collectively assess traffic, tugging our necks right to left, left to right, as Greg trotts his large frame through the busy thoroughfare with genuine nonchalance. We catch up with him loitering in the lobby, slack jawed and examining the menu with an easy concentration. I start to follow suit when my eyes brush across the slender young woman waiting patiently underneath. With every light, rapid glance I attempt, the more exceedingly nervous I become. She's outfitted in a tight goldenrod Pittsburgh Pirates t-shirt and ass-hugging blue jeans. Her face is framed by oddly clean-looking black dreadlocks and a nose piercing. Aside from the jewelry, her face is immaculate, as though that one flaw magnifies every other strength through awesome contrast; I have never seen a prettier human being.

Don't be a shit head, I think as my friends advance towards the counter. Just order your ice cream and leave; escape with as much dignity as you can carry.

Greg is the first to order. "Hi, yeah, uh... I would like... Two scoops of cookies and cream-- please," he says, his eyes still squinting and fixed on the menu text.

What is that music-- I've heard this like a thousand times.

As Larry wraps up his order and Andrew begins his, I realize that the beautiful young woman is pumping to Built To Spill-- a moderately obscure indie band-- through the black speaker boxes parked in the ceiling corners above. I. Love. Built to Spill; I'm shallow enough for this to boost her even higher in my esteem. Now she has gallivanted out of my most lucid fantasies; she is Aphrodite manifest; she is steaming raw love; she is OT8; she is so overwhelmingly pleasant with her dark eyebrows raised.

"And for you?"

I stammer, "Um... Yeah I'd um I'd-d like a cunt of mint choc--, I meanImean aacup-- Aca-ca-cupofmint--"

I am warm; all my exposed skin is redding to pink; I want to jump into a snowbank. She's fast to interrupt:

"What did you say?"

2 (121 words)

In response to why Araby is great writing.

I had a difficult time getting through Araby, but not because I couldn't understand the words employed, nor because I wasn't engaged with the prose. While my eyes were eager to carry on working over the text, my brain preferred to pause and render each image he provided in a mental plasma-screen-detail. It was dense, but it was equally economical with it's word choice and despite the snail-like pace at which I took it in, I was entirely engrossed. My childhood on the streets of Dublin felt like an experience I'd fondly recalled thousands of times, both to friends and litters of nonexistent ginger-haired grandchildren. Joyce had a talent for describing anything relatable in the sharpest, and most intimate of fashions.

1 (100 Words)

In response to this.

Reading through the Eggers' story, I recalled love in it's sunniest form. Seeing her glide past in halls, or exercising the high privilege of conversation; her tolerating my dorky stutters and squeaky cadence. How could such a perfect creature talk to me? Or even acknowledge me? Eventually she began to answer my self-doubt with alternating blasts of indifference and malice. Her girlish laugh, like her phone calls or mischievous glances, became infrequent reminders of school days not so tensely solemn. Anything could trigger an outburst. A poorly formed comment, a glancing touch, a joke. I was too fond of jokes.