Morning interference

Sitting here in front of the light box. Still dark outside. Maybe a little blue-dark, but a dart of sun hits the ice. We are licking the moisture from the windows. We are thirsty for a new year.

Timothy sits on the couch, feet up. Reading a bad book. Because he always has to be reading. Today I want him to think only big thoughts.

Please let me leave this waiting room, this space of lost luggage. Please let the cogs turn, the planet swing low on its orbit back toward heat and warmth. We will go away together.

It's in the hands of their god

I find myself mildly interested in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's 2009 Churchwide Assembly being held in Minneapolis this week. They're grappling with the question of gay clergy and celibacy. A double-standard is currently in effect, whereby clergy in monogamous same-sex relationships must be celibate. It seems likely that the ELCA will vote to equalize the standards for both gay and straight clergy. Also up for discussion is the acceptance and recognition of long-term monogamous gay couples.

I'm slightly interested in this because I grew up as a Lutheran and attended for many years a little church on the shores of Lake Superior. It was actually a huge part of my life during my teens. While I hated the seemingly forced attendance of confirmation classes, I found a calling, so to speak, within the church choir, where through voice I found access to untapped stores of emotion and extrapersonal experience which, at the time, I attributed to the presence of divinity.

The ELCA is fairly laid-back, even for Lutherans. We had a female pastor growing up, practiced open communion, and felt comfortable with the doctrine of Justification. While I didn't understand very much about theology even into my early teen years, I basically went to church with a warm feeling that while there was a hell, no one was in it; basically, as long as you tried, you'd go to heaven. And even if you didn't try very hard, Jesus would reveal a Truth to you, and that was inescapable. To be taught all this by a big round lady pastor was pretty sweet.

But this entire edifice, built on faith and mystery and ritual, crumbled in the span of one Sunday morning. I was 17 years old. And I was in love. With a boy. He was younger than me, and neither of us were out, and our relationship was constrained by these limitations, and I burned for him, I ached constantly in the weeks between our brief visits. It was torture to be away from him and ecstasy to be with him. It was love, and it had more colors and more chords than any of the psalms I belted out from the loft above the congregation on Sundays.

Back then, the ELCA had another meeting about what to do with gay Lutherans, and it had a different outcome back then (this was the mid-90s). I remember our congregation sent a representative to the meeting, and he returned that Sunday to stand at the pulpit and report back on what happened. "Our church is safe from them," he said.

At that moment I became of aware of my identity, embossed on me in the negative. "Our church is safe from them." Them. That is me. I am them. The church is safe from me.

I was sitting in the loft and looking out over my church and it suddenly dawned on me that I was sitting in a contradictory position.

I knew my love; I knew it was real. And I knew that it was good. That was what won out that day.

Everything dissolved that morning, the tapestries fluttered to the ground, the flame went out, the wine turned sour. That morning I left the church and it was just a building. It was just wood and stone, with no more authority to command than the lake it sat beside.

I've never been back.

So it's with mild interest I'm following the story in Minneapolis this week. Almost fifteen years ago, had they reached the decision they seem to be close to reaching this week, I wonder if things would turned out differently for me.

...I'm suddenly remembering something else, a minor blip during a momentous first year away from home at college. I won a scholarship. A gay scholarship. From a gay Lutheran organization. I remember the ceremony, claiming, only half-heartedly, that I was still a Lutheran but knowing deep down in my heart that it wasn't true. The man who presented the award was in his late fifties, white hair, utterly kind, shook my hand, seemed proud and happy that I was gay, seemed to be one person, at least, who was celebrating the contradiction, smiling at it as though it wasn't really there. Funny I would just happen to remember that.

Beautiful Assassin

I am often looking at these photos of Lewis Payne, taken in April, 1865, perhaps on board the USS Montauk, by Alexander Gardner. They show the boy, just 21 years old, three months before he was hanged as one of the Lincoln assassin conspirators.

Of these images, Roland Barthes said,

In 1865, young Lewis Payne tried to assassinate Secretary of State W.H. Seward. Alexander Gardner photographed him in his cell, where he was waiting to be hanged. The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. (Camera Lucida)

Why I love my neighborhood

Today, on the first really warm Saturday of Spring, a local band set up on the corner of 26th and Lyndale in South Minneapolis and jammed away the afternoon. This is why I love my neighborhood.

What Las Vegas means to me

I was in Las Vegas last month for work. Here are two photos which represent what Las Vegas means to me.

Berryman

There Sat Down, Once, a Thing on Henry's Heart

Having a coke with you

Checking out Dobby Gibson's website on my lunch break, I came across this YouTube clip of Frank O'Hara reading his poem, "Having a Coke with You":

I've read this poem numerous times but it's never felt alive for me until now.

Which leads me to wonder...could YouTube be the ideal medium for the transmission of poetry?

Regifting to the past

I finally tossed this bottle of cologne the other day. I've had it for about nine years now. It was gifted to me by another family, on another continent, in another age almost.

It never suited me but I would once in a while splash some on in the hopes that it would conjure on the flesh the sensations of that earlier time.

Crank dat soulja boy

Sometimes I'm a little bit embarrassed by my own misprision when it comes to what the kids are listening to. Take Soulja Boy, for instance. I like his music enough to listen to it on my headphones while I use the elliptical machines at the YWCA.

And I thought it was really catchy how he said "Superman, Oooooh!" now and again. But the other night I was having dinner over the Emily's, and over homemade venison stroganoff and beets we got talking about Soulja Boy Tellem and the actual meaning of the lyrics. Apparently he's saying, "Superman dat hoe!" with 'Superman' being a specific sexual act that involves ejaculating on a woman's back so that the bedsheet sticks to her like a cape! Interesting. What will the kids think of next.

Music to drive to Duluth to

I never really thought I'd consider myself a fan of bluegrass--but a couple of recent new arrivals on the Minnesota scene has redefined how well this musical form fits with the Minnesota landscape.

I've been to a few Pert Near Sandstone shows and the manic strumming of strings can have a pentacostal affect on me and my friends--suddenly I'm spilling beer down the front of my shirt, laughing, and hot-stepping with Jessica or whatever girl happens to be closest at hand.

I just got the new album by Trampled By Turtles, Duluth. It's quite wonderful--it'll be perfect driving music when I head up to French River (about ten miles north of Duluth) for Christmas this week. At it's slowest it sounds like early Ryan Adams (lyrically, too, with the common motifs of I can't love you like you need me to, you are going to leave me, it's too cold to go outside, Duluth is my home but I hate it here, etc. etc.). Faster songs are mellowed by a plain, measured male voice intoning about church bells and being too drunk to remember last week. Ah, brings back memories.

Music to read manuscripts to

Department of Eagles.

I saw Grizzle Bear in concert a few years ago; it was on the of the prettiest bands to hear. Department of Eagles is a side project of Grizzly Bears' Daniel Rosen, I picked up a copy the other day and it goes well with both snow and with long office projects.

In one ear and out the other

Someone forwarded this link to me and I almost gagged:

Anders Ponders

If you like this sort of thing I encourage you to support him. BEWARE! The photo of the "artiste" is not safe for work! It depicts a man-boy in too-short shorts.

I dated this person for like a day. He wanted to be a housewife. He was totally into some old boyfriend who was like the son of a Sandinista or something who was doing graduate work at the School of the Americas or something. I've never drunk so much Black Label in my life!

Pure research

A friend sent me a screen grab--it is not safe for work so I put it in the extended section of the blog entry. Just to forewarn you, it's a photo of a boner.

Cartography of the Back Forty

Home for the holidays, I escaped the madness of a sequestered family and took a walk in the woods.

I know these half-erased and overgrown trails well because I made most of them as a kid, playing Revolutionary War Minuteman, Luke Skywalker, building forts and playing at Indians, or just stalking myself among the popples.

Others have been through too of course...the bear hunter baiting out by the Cedar Tree, deer hunters making long cuts to form sightlines from the deer stands, ancestors from last century bringing bags of garbage out to the dump in back.

Just inside the forest, at the edge of the yard really, beyond the railroad tracks, in sight of the house (meaning the sites were laid down in extreme youth, when the woods were scary unless you could see your home through the trees), He-Man guys are buried in old tupperware and so are pets--a seagull with a broken wing rescued from a garbage can on the shore, a crow.

Deepest in is the river and the old shack where the creepy hermit lived decades before I was born, residue of wolf kills, in the winter snowshoe tracks from mysterious passers through.

And in between is the Cedar Tree.

Not sure who nailed the ladder steps onto the tree; not the deer who come to rise up on their hind legs and nibble at the tips. But the stairs are for wreath makers who come to fill out their Christmas swag with cedar and ground pine.

Beyond that is this little crazy schizophrenic ganglion of Scotch Pine branches gone crazy--a tree tumor.

We call this a witch's broom and as such it's always seemed a warning to me not to go further. Beyond are darker pines, less light, the cranberry bog. It seems like something a witch might leave behind or put up on purpose, even, for kids like me--but even beyond the metaphor it says that things aren't quite right in this patch of woods; something's afoot that twists and gnarls reality and folds it upon itself like a weaver of cancer or evil. For some reason though these are never touched or snipped off the tree; they're left alone as if they are to be respected or feared as contagious.

Beyond the markers and sites well known by family and neighbors and the passing hunter, my back-and-forths across the wide expanse of acreage, from sunken fence poles in the east to sunken fence posts in the west, and beyond, toward the tree farm and the moribund spring or the neighbor's homestead, I've discovered other little bits of humanity that once served some sort of purpose but now seem nothing more than crude attempts at earth art or bones...a place that could have been a head-high treehouse or deer stand, a coil of garden hose cracked and brittle, an Easter lily sprouting incongruously in the middle of a moss pot set there by human hands after church one Sunday.

Trees will eventually swallow up everything, of course--wire and nails and trails.

It's pretty up there, but oppressive. The forests are thick and clotted and lying as they do upon the flat land there is no opportunity for you to gain perspective over the world around you. I've never been a tree climber and in any case the popples narrow at their tops would set me down again like a tree climber in a Robert Frost poem. You can travel for miles and only see what is immediately in front of your face--more trees, and beyond that, more trees. I think that's why I find the lake so necessary for any visit--for once, you feel like you can see far into the future.

So that's why when walking through the woods to be suddenly bisected by a human-made swale between two groves of pine is to come up short on the edge, crouch down, suddenly exposed, to scan the tree tops for hunter's orange or nest or biplane of some sort or glass or extinct studebaker.

The Revolution is my boyfriend

Bruce La Bruce, prescient as always...

Homosexuality is only to be used for revolutionary purposes!

There will be no revolution without sexual revolution...