Some of you might have noticed a tip cup (normally known as a tip “jar” but I’m more likely to wind up panhandling with a crumpled, leaky old to-go coffee cup so mine is a tip cup). I am not certain just how many people I address when I say “you”; I do have a traffic meter that records how many unique IP addresses click on my page every day, but it is not always clear who is who or when, given that IP addresses are dynamic for most home users so for all I know I have one reader whose IP address changes every five minutes but ANYway the tip cup is what we in the biz call the “front end” to a paypal donation service by means of which you can toss me a spare coin or two.

Why would you want to do that? Well, you might not, or you might think that blogging should be a brave new world free of commercial ties and monetary concerns, but, especially as a writer in an economy that does not particularly favor writing, especially they kind that I do, I am hoping that if you like what you read you will find it in your heart to leave a small bill in the tip cup, to take the metaphor to its logical conclusion.

I’m not going to take the time in this particular post to explain my relationship to day jobs. I do have them–or I am trying to have them, I should say–but I am not very good at having them. I am good at writing and I am hoping to earn a living at it someday before I am too old to live any longer. As time passes I am feeling more and more compelled to seek my fortune in writing because it is one of the many things I feel passionate about and also feel like I can actually do in such a way as to produce good writing consistently and with a minimum amount of excruciating pain.

A little pain is ok and in fact writing that is not at all painful usually is not very good writing–or at least that has been my experience both in being a writer myself and when grading the writing of those who are nominally paying me to teach them to write. No pain, no gain. But on the other hand, if one truly hates writing, there is no good reason for them to take it up as a career.

But I love writing, and I plan to spend more and more time at it. Because I live in a society that dictates that I find something to sell in order to keep a roof over my head and food on my plate, my writing needs to begin to bring in some dough. And because I am currently limited as to what sorts of advertising I can place on this blog–this will change when I set up my own blog on my own server, but lack of spare time makes this a slowly moving project–I am asking you, my reader(s), to express your appreciation for what you read here (should you appreciate it–if not then I imagine we won’t be seeing much of each other anyway) by placing into the tip cup whatever monetary equivalent of that appreciation you think is appropriate.

If the world were different–and it would be if I were in charge–money would not enter my mind when offering my writing to the internet. But things being the way they are, I am taking the leap into commercial enterprise. If you think that what I do is worthwhile and you can spare a buck or two, please please please please pretty please click on the tip cup and enter some figure that expresses that worth. I will appreciate it, the cats will appreciate it, my landlord will appreciate it, and the myriad people I owe money to will appreciate it.

And then we can all hold hands and sing of our mutual appreciation for each other. Um. Or not. It can just be a quick transfer of cash if you’d prefer.

Thank you for your support.

blue zephyr

rigged gingerly a torn leaf
peal or pleasantly yelp ink
of your quarter-toned rustic curses
detonate ingrained turquoise purses
mischief curls trenchantly and kind
a palliative leap over land and sea
vent your torpor veiled in valerian tea

the chase was rotted leaden distilled

natal proton devil eyed
ravens appeal to riparian seeds
frankly scattered chants under fiefdoms
acquainted to rainy tonnage and squalls
ache with tranquil cisterns rending tripping
salty and silent
never vary or linger

curtains may trap you febrile
and vapor stunted prattle fends up maps or a stain
straightforward stupor lept outstretched
muddled strings why repast spells rain
rapidly made brittle versus noumenous scar

avidly laurels limp venerable
damnable traces in terraced slats
liquid raster violent cherubs laugh
notoriously gaunt rings interred
stack deleterious tattered wharf rats
nepal pending voracious
seduced livid talons
tangled archive

sip dusty crystalline needle rimmed

portable villainous art for rapt jailers
eviscerate appalled droves vital limbs–slaked felon
will fashion lucky furred hymns
tournament returns burning graphic
no kin in stasis
sainted ermine treads alone
guarded pale granite worn

this is a placeholder post.

it is sunday morning for me so I have all day but it will only be the last day in November for a couple more hours in my time zone so this is the last post of November but I am not sure yet what it is going to consist of.

there may be a picture of the undercarriage of the California Zephyr on display in Missoula MT. there may be a picture of something else. chances are it won’t look much like what I say it is.

accompanying this theoretical image might be something about how walking across the street in the crosswalk sometimes makes me feel like I am untouchable but at other times it occurs to me that the painted lines on the pavement would be no match for a driver who just decided to run over me for whatever reason or it might be something about how it is that people often do not understand the experiences of others until you get them to push a little past their own personal knowledge regarding an assumption that they always thought was natural and normal or it might have something to do with the question of choice and freedom when it comes to the socially mediated signs in which we find our bodily experience embedded: the idea that “socially constructed” is equivalent to or even implies “chosen voluntarily by ourselves as free agents” has no ground in the arguments about social construction themselves but is the result of an assumption one brings to those arguments.

or it might be something entirely new whose subject or at least vocabulary I have not yet dreamed up.

in any case, it probably won’t be formulated until sometime after the end of the month occurs calendarwise, so here is its placeholder in time, sitting back in November even after this November is over for good.

types at flies

listing on the port side sliding
past bergs two thirds unknown I have heard
wait here at length you will be along
the rail head bent to trace a line
to the vanishing point five feet distant
silhouettes against a heaven red with hints
of release in silver flashing
its menace at arms innocent and prone
to attacks of doubt
drove an entire school from circling
the black figure under a full moon
drew our eyes skyward
shooting rockets flared
into particles of flame returning to earth
is never as straightforward as might be thought.

a practiced nightmare.
couriers at full gallop.
crouched tipping a tin cup into the remnant of rainwater
secured us against thirst.
drosophilia living in a glass jar.
gracefully angling across a minute expanse.
no longer veiled rage
pulled round your shoulders a wool moth-eaten blanket.
a bold maneuver stakes shivering
rheumatic joints arrived naked and scarred.
stereotyped behavior driven in a standard
set of feral gestures
at a rock cairn indicating our destination.

notation.
cylindrical.
iron filings.
ionic or
lenticular.
a sea change sundered.

directories do not begin to comprehend
the destiny of your soul considered
five seals or seven.
falsified evidence.
diverse litanies written in brittle cadence.
trouble sulked crestfallen
soldiered benignly
underground
cistern
leaching
chlorine.

large red small

a car dealership closes on fourteenth street disgusted but clamoring for starry-eyed decorous lechery crisply ushered into red blaring sirened silence. cavernous swell you toss coins excoriated rumors due north northeast duly noted deep chested my heart’s rhythm jumpy since we scrambled ten of us fifty of them the once bustling square in cities tenderfaced and broken.

drifting on the ice mailboxes in peril but only kissed lightly so we turned and returned until june’s hail and lightning made the hair on my arms stand on end. franz marc foreordained. notice words leaned heavily filigreed scaffolding with coffee for unemployed engineers.

first trace. first center with wheat or feathered earth crumbling orbit decayed and toothsome. fastened recreated bulleted and justified right where light makes night and snakes through embankments of leather unencumbered.

ribald showers underscored with shadowy pieces of shattered knifeblades entrenched between concrete and coldpress fibered glass. you’ll not find wharves until flashing terraces floresce at the meeting of sun and moraine.

what I meant was culpability or basal metabolism. you there: heretic clad deftly left of pneumatic traumas or plated temples at least at last slated and labile. trance iron etched remnants still writing. pugilist. tarnished. drapes counting and tipsy. shred monotony. dash smartly east with impending fog.

one last ditch.

a trojan horse

“why did you watch it if you
did not like it.”
“I thought you liked it.”

you recall a term
for violet place settings. I
picked at a dried piece of yesterday’s
supper with my thumbnail.
that one trilled note piercing
surprised me the thrush
flapping out of my throat.

dismissed from sunday school
the latchkey carpenter
at loss as to
what to repent
his trail petered out dripping pitch
whose hollow scent would stick with you
fingered your collar
turned up in style
manual transmissions
spread southeast into
spanish moss and swampland.

how do you know the mosquito is not a vector
you’re not dead yet that’s how

and when your mother granted you birth
and you drew the short straw
amicably limned tincture of cedar and fir
and that sentinel sat up nights
a sight for lines or tents
your ice canoe
headed out
to skate on the underside of
“his eminence in exile”
or
“seattle lsd ‘96′”

minutes overtime

Chicago was far enough once. which
reminds me
it is not that association gets you nowhere.
or it is
but gaping impractically. or more than the sage
punctual
like the pulse of a glock
all the way to that shelf where instant gathers into shade.
the best of distance brought
not home exactly.
base 10 written
the shine on an electron
the talk strained at its circular run
manufactured extruded steel. they will dig here
cynical pick axes pulverizing veins liver and heart.
between torn tissue the veil rent also
holiest holes dank and bitter
give up the ghost steamed in modest portions.
varnish the truth seal it up
good. a paneled cell holding the perfect thief.
thrown in for good measure:
a pewter stein with a hunting motif–
receptacle for relief.
you always forget to
make it brief. rare earth
science names you
names keep you
the keep will hold you
until escape
excuses itself remanding the breach here.
a bus shudders where no one could see
the course is frayed so remain composed
faithfully estranged.
were it to stop. but no–
you’ll arrive fashionably late
dressed to the nines.

So I guess one could say I am not doing so well at this blog-every-day effort. I was going great guns there at first, but honestly the political ranting is not something that I want to engage in on a full-time basis–or rather, 100% of my blog’s time; I do not do anything on a “full time” basis as traditionaly understood in the US–but I kind of got myself cornered into it because it is easy to react to just about any politically oriented piece I read on the internet, making said reactions sort of a natural blogging genre if one is looking to throw together easy-bake arguments in fifteen minutes a day.

But I was hoping to vary my routine a little more than that. And I wanted to make this neither a diary nor a daily rant. And now I am wondering whether blogging every single day is necessary, or even good, for me. There is a difference between, say, writing a little bit on your book/thesis/dissertation every day and finding a topic to go on about in public every day, making it something that you can give a “treatment” to in ten paragraphs or less. How crucial is it that I think of something coherent but compact to say about a single, varied topic every day?

I am not sure.

I would like to blog more often than, say, once a month. And I would like to be able to feel like when I have something to say about something, be it linear or nonlinear or even nonverbal, that I can find the wherewithal to go on and say it, do it, perform it–whatever is necessary to externalize it in a way that is satisfactory to me.

But every day?

By stroke of free-associative internet luck, a few minutes ago I was reading an amazon.com user review of a book I had never heard of, Why Should Extroverts Make All the Money. I got there via a link from an Atlantic Monthly essay on introversion, “Caring For Your Introvert,” which is a short and, to me, ultimately frustrating piece on how it is that introverts are a misunderstood minority, at least in North American culture. It is a column, and so meant to be entertaining and somewhat light, so I do not think I should have expected too much from it, but ultimately it ends up saying the same thing as every piece I have ever read on the topic of how introverts have to find ways to get along in an overwhelmingly extroverted society: there are not enough of us to really change our culture so that it takes care, or even notice, of our needs, and so the best we really can hope for is to find ways to adapt when possible and to suffer in silence the rest of the time.

There is a link here with what I was saying at first. Bear with me.

But so this user review of Why Should Extroverts Make All the Money is a favorable review, written by an introvert who is happy that the book “enables self-acceptance while at the same time encourages and guides toward change.” Upon reading this I thought “What?? Why should we be the ones who have to change?”

This is so often the approach taken in self-help books for introverts–how to adapt to an extroverted culture that is not at all interested in adapting to us–that every time I see this sort of advice given I die a little bit. Honestly. It is not that I have no sense of humor, and it is not that I am unwilling to compromise with the world; in fact I spent the first 20 years of my own life compromising in every aspect imaginable with the demands that were thrown my way by a family and community that had no earthly idea what to make of me nor what was wrong with me. But they knew that something was, and that it needed to be rooted out and worked over until I was willing to believe, willing to speak, and willing to accept that I was defective to the point of needing a divine miracle to set me aright.

So. I do not do that anymore. Or that is, I am trying to learn how to accept what it is that makes my own neurological processes somewhat unique, or unique enough that they often feel at odds with the majority of those around them. And I am trying to learn how to create a space in the world where I can live without shame or constant self-approbation.

Even writing that out gives me some pause, as though I am not entitled to anything of the kind and need to go back to the sort of compromises I once made, which, among other things, required that I spend most of my waking hours dissociated and that I defer, indefinitely, doing the kind of work that I find most important and most necessary, because that kind of work is not generally valued or even considered work in most instances.

But I have been told, more lately than, say, 1982, that it is not necessary so much to cure myself as to be myself. Now, there is much I could say on the topic of “myself,” but for now I am going to let the word stand in for the processes and events that constitute this idea that I might even approximate a self to which I could be authentic or not. These processes and events, though, are not up for judgment as to whether they unfurl in the correct way so much as to what sort of effects they have. As they are, the only suffering they cause is that which they themselves undergo. Thus, even to the extent that they function so as to be thought of as introverted, as contrasted with extroverted, there is nothing about them that needs to change in order to be made more acceptable according to any external principle.

What does this have to do with blogging every day? Generally I find that it takes time before I can come up with something that I think is an adequate response to a given question or thought or issue, and, unlike the extroverts among whom I have to make some kind of peace, I do not find it useful to air my thought processes in public, unless I am specifically trying to expose those processes themselves as a topic in itself. Which I sometimes do: writing about writing, thinking about thinking–l’art pour l’art, in a way. But whether I am meta-writing or not, it still can take some time before I think I actually have something to put out there. Whether or not it happens every day is not as important to me as whether or not I can let it happen as it happens whenever it happens. The whole point of my undertaking the goal of blogging daily was to make it a device for lifting the veil of self-censorship, which is closely connected to shame and which keeps me from speaking up in the ways in which I do speak, when I speak.

Thus whether I have something to say every day is of less matter to me than that I be able to make time to write when it is time to write, which is a question with variable answers, all of which are unpredictable. What I want is to be ready and able to write whenever it seems necessary or valuable. So that is how I am going to finish out the month, and that is how I am going to continue not to stop myself from writing but not force myself into writing, either. That seems fair enough.

Given that this is a queer blog, or that is it is a queer blog to the extent that the writer considers himself quite rather queer, it might seem odd that I have not said a whole lot about Proposition 8. Given also especially that I live in California and donated a little money to the No on 8 campaign and voted against it myself and did other assorted things to work against its passage, one might think I would have more to say.

I am a little surprised myself, but not a lot. I am upset about those whom I know who are waiting to find out if they are still married and I do not think that it is right that a simple majority should be able to write a specific group’s rights out of the constitution so easily here in California and I wholeheartedly support the lawsuits that are being filed as efforts to get the thing repealed/revoked/rebuked/removed/rerased. I do!

But to be honest I am having a hard time working up the energy to go to the protests and I am having a hard time working up the energy even to argue about it. I do not think this is just because I never plan on marrying, do not understand the urge to marry, and wonder why anyone would pledge to spend the rest of their life with one person (realizing of course that a large number of marriages end in divorce, so that pledge has to be taken with a grain of irony). I do not think that my reluctance has to do with my own alienation from the whole institution.

And I have read the arguments about marriage being a tool for wealthy white folks to accumulate more wealth, but from my vantage point, queer marriage rights are for legal protection, more than anything, of one’s access to one’s chosen partner in times of crisis: the legal definition of “kinship” extended to one not related by blood is enormously important in all sorts of contexts and all the legal maneuvering and contract-writing and power-of-attorney-granting one can afford to engage in can so easily be trumped by selfish and self-righteous family members that I think this one reason alone is sufficient to throw one’s support behind queer marriage rights–but then, I think that we should all be free to define our own familial relationships however we want, be it in marriage or other types of chosen alliances with those we love. For so often are many of us cast out of our “real” families that it should be an easy thing to say simply “this person is now my next of kin no matter what any of the idiots in my ‘family’ have to say about it.”

And that is probably enough to brand me some sort of anti-American communist, to be so thoroughly distrusting of the American Nuclear Family. Later on I am sure there will be discussion of the roots of my dissatisfaction with our so-called building block of society. For now: bullocks. The building block of society is friendship. Whether your friends are blood or legal relatives or not, your partner or spouse or not, society begins wherever there is love and trust.

That is my general position on legal kinship, which is the sum total of my personal stake in queer marriage rights–the degree to which these two ideas intersect.

But I have not been to one protest in support of queer marriage rights since Proposition 8 passed, and as badly as I knew I would want to riot if the presidential race had been stolen by the Republicans, the loss on this Proposition is not compelling to me, and if you do not mind, I would like to talk about why that is. If you do mind, move along. Nothing to see here.

First there is this: Why the fuck is there, in all the Proposition 8 ranting that I can find, no mention of the recent murder of Duanna Johnson, a black transgendered woman who was enmeshed in a legal battle with the City of Memphis, Tennessee over her beating at the hands of Memphis Police last June?

Now, I do not believe in zero-sum games when it comes to community activism, and I do not think that we need necessarily to abandon our outrage over the passage of Proposition 8. But why is that outrage so out of proportion to what sparse protests there seem to be over this woman’s murder–a murder that may well have been orchestrated in some way by the very City and Police Departments that are now “investigating” the murder? If anything should outrage queer sensibilities in the United States right now, it should be this woman’s death.

I could make an argument as to why so little attention is being paid to her case. She is not a young white boy from the heartland. She is a black transwoman from an urban area of the Deep South, a place where, I suppose, we accept this sort of thing happening as an every day occurrence. I mean, I could make that argument. Should I?

Or maybe it has something to do with uninformed queer historicizing that subtracts gender-variant people from the whole queer rights movement, as though we were only just now jumping on the queer bandwagon for a ride on coattails already bloodied by pure gayness, untrammeled by poor “gender confused” bleating for human dignity. Is that it? Is that an argument I should make? I will say that much to this end right away, and for the nth time, so listen the fuck up: the Stonewall Riots were led by drag queens and other gender-non-conforming individuals, because they were the ones who were targeted in the lgbtq community all along. A goodly portion of anti-queer legislation in the US during the first half of the twentieth century mandated such things as that one wear “gender appropriate” clothing in public, and if one did not, one was subject to arrest. In short, in Anglo-American culture, queers have always been persecuted for gender-variant behavior, of which sexual contact with members of the “same” gender was just one offense among many that could contravene strict gender roles.

“We” seem to have forgotten our history. Maybe I should be writing lectures instead of rants.

On the other hand. Because there are always other hands, often as many as fifteen or more: queer marriage is what is up right now. For better or worse, this has become the “gay” issue of our time (I actually cannot say for certain that it is an LGBTQ-wide issue, because little has been said about transgendered marriage rights, or genderqueer marriage rights, but one probably can assume that “gay” marriage would be written so as not to discriminate against any gender. Or one hopes that one can assume this). It is not the issue I would have chosen to stake a national battle on the worthiness of queer relationships and identities on, because I think that there are more grievious problems in the relationship between LGBTQ culture, such as it is, and the larger, heterocentric culture of the US.

The fight over queer marriage rights is certainly bringing all sorts of “cultural warriors” out of the woodwork to defend the country against the mythical “Gay Agenda”; likewise it has been quite revealing to read what some white gay men have to say about people who are not white–even when they are gay. People say the darnedest things when they are upset. This issue may well prove to be a cultural turning point on queer rights–I just hope that we do not lose sight of the fact that people are still dying in this fight, and that pushing anyone who is other than cisgendered, white, or 100% homosexual ever further to the fringe of the LGBTQ-rights movement is only going to replicate the same disenfranchisement that marrying gays and lesbians are experiencing right now, working thus to fragment what could be a vibrant coalition.

The Transgender Day of Remembrance will be this Thursday, November 20. Demonstrations are planned worldwide. Duanna Johnson’s case is still waiting for some sort of outcry to push the federal government to intervene in a case where the investigating entity has a clear conflict of interest. The HRC’s call for a federal investigation is already buried by continued screeds about Proposition 8.

So “we”–whoever we are–do have a chance at proving that we can be as outraged by continuing predations on the most vulnerable members of our community. Will we? I do not know. I will go to the demonstration here in San Francisco, and probably report back. Until then, I am not certain that I will throw my efforts wholeheartedly at regaining the right to marry whomever I choose. Right now, I get a little miffed when gay men think it is ok to address transsexual men as “it” (sorry I cannot find a link for this right now. Let us just say this is aggregate data collected from various sources. Press me and I will find that one horrible column in The Advocate again if you cannot find it yourself), or when lesbians accuse transsexual women of rape simply by virtue of their being (you can find that one yourselves easily enough as well). I simply hang my head in shame when white gay men shout the One Word I Will Not Type at black gay men. You could say that I am torn, in similar ways that I think the LGBTQ “community” is torn. I would be happy to support queer marriage, if I thought that there was a good chance that it supported me and several other people whose lives and deaths are getting lost in the din. Right now, I am not so sure.

This was what I was going to post on the 11th after I had been on the train all day sleeping but I fell asleep in the middle of writing it. Sometimes sleep just leads to more sleep–you know how that goes?

Two [ed.: yeah three since this one passed too] days pass without an entry and now I suppose that means I have “blown” NaBloPoMo but this is one those situations where I will dissent from the common vernacular and say for myself that I have not “blown” anything as long as I continue to post every day that it is at all practicable–i.e., every day that I’m not with friends 24/7, which should pretty much be the rest of the month with the possible exception of Thanksgiving although I must admit I have not yet received my invitation to Lingerie Thanksgiving so I am not sure it is happening this year which would be tragic but you know things change sometimes. That is things change all the time.

The point of doing the post-a-day challenge was to give my blog a reason to exist: for the regular posting of some sort of textual, visual or aural object that represented an effort to think around some sort of kernel of an idea. The blogosphere is not exactly a world of academic essays or unassailable arguments but that was not the point either. I was not trying to produce something “publishable” every day. As Gertrude Stein pointed out, not everything you say is literature. But if she had waited 75 years she could have blogged it all!

I did not blow it this year so long as I can continue to produce something every day that I have a chance to do so. The last three days were spent traveling to San Diego, hanging out in San Diego, and traveling back from San Diego. In fact I am still traveling back from San Diego but I am near an outlet on this train and so can write although I may have to start looking out the window while typing lest I develop motion sickness from gazing at a screen which gently bobs this way and that before my eyes which are bobbing in different directions from those of the screen and you put it all together with the inner ear doing some third thing and boy do I feel pukey all of a sudden.

I know people who are doing NaNoWriMo as well who have said that they are never going to make 50,000 words by the end of November but they are still writing which is all that is supposed to happen anyway. None of us has “blown it.”

How more American could it be to insist that one day missed blogging means you have blown the whole thing–just as eating that piece of chocolate cake means you have blown your diet, as though you could not resume it immediately, or that having that drink or pill means that you are no longer “clean” and have lost all control over your actions when in fact you could simply not have another drink and/or pill. You could! Many do. Honestly, our Puritan roots sometimes are so painfully obvious that we should all run around wearing one of two t-shirts emblazoned either “good” or “evil,” or maybe “servant of god” or “servant of satan” or some other variation thereof. It would be mandatory to wear a t-shirt like this every single day and you had to choose one and only the “good” people would be allowed to, I don’t know, open checking accounts or get into the movie theaters (of course I am well aware that a “bad credit” t-shirt can ruin your chances at a new checking account; maybe better to reflect the real foundation of our Puritan ideals the t-shirts should say “rich” and “poor”).

And of course we would have to wear the “bad” t-shirt immediately and for all time once we had thought something untoward about a neighbor or had stolen a pen from the bank. Why would anyone object to this? If you have done nothing wrong then you have nothing to worry about, right? Well, not necessarily.

This is sort of old news and maybe we think with the Democrats in charge we will soon be safe from the far right politicians who engineer this type of investigation into the lives of civilians who have done nothing remotely blamable. But I would not count on it. People with power rarely give it up, and the federal government has been handed a crap load of authority to barge in on the lives of whomever they please.

But to stay somewhat on-topic with what I was sort of beginning to talk about, here is an especially chilling quote from the above-linked article which, if you didn’t click, told of a Maryland State Police action to classify “53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and [enter] their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects.” This happened under a Republican Governor who appointed this Hutchins fellow police superintendent. They are out of office now, but here is what Hutchins had to say about the incident:

The former state police superintendent who authorized the operation, Thomas E. Hutchins, defended the program in testimony yesterday. Hutchins said the program was a bulwark against potential violence and called the activists “fringe people.”

Fringe people. You know, there have been times when I would gladly take on that designation–especially when reading articles like this one and suspecting for the nth time that I do not belong here or at least not now–but sort of like the word “queer,” it is not ok when someone else calls me that. Not that I am in Maryland or on that list, but I am a non-violent activist and blogger and I am quite certain that should I ever garner an appreciable amount of attention I will be watched by somebody who has decided I am anti-American, because I am anti-capitalist and religiously extremely unorthodox, not to mention as queer as, say, a housecat who does what you ask it to.

This urge to place oneself in a group of “good” people by defining that group so that it excludes others who are, for whatever reason one wants to make up–and they are all made up–unworthy of membership in the “in” group is one of the oldest tricks in the Anglo-European tradition. That is not to say that variations on this theme do not exist in other cultures, but often times you will find that dichotomy in other cultures does not work nearly as exclusively as it does in ours, or that whatever exclusiveness there may be tends to be modulated when thinkers allow that “opposites” often involve each other, to the extent that they cannot be said ever completely to exclude one another.

But this rarely happens in Western metaphysics. Since Plato on the heathen side and Abrahamic traditions on the religious side, there has been a millennia-long campaign in Western culture to “purify” the positive pole in any given oppositional pair: good must be cleansed of evil, for instance; purity must necessarily exclude impurity. This is not necessarily intuitively obvious: as one moves further from Europe, across Asia and into Hindu and Buddhist ways of thinking, the opposition between “opposites” begins to be more nuanced, and at times is on the point of obliteration, but not with the result being a perfect, unified “synthesis” of opposites, as the more simplistic interpretations of Hegelianism would have it.

Instead what we find is something like an infinite variety of possibilities, none of them diametrically opposed to any other of them, and none of them completely disentangled from the rest of them. This is an oversimplification of a number of schools of thought, but I am only trying to outline broadly what might be an alternative, or an infinite number of alternatives, to dualistic thought. Interestingly, perhaps, Western thought itself starts to diverge from dualism when it is moving in more esoteric regions: Jewish mysticism sometimes casts off the dualism of orthodoxy for something more difficult to articulate, and some post-modern theorists–the ones everyone loves to hate but nobody actually reads–also poke around at the supposed impregnability and mutual exclusiveness of logical opposites.

But I do not want to get too abstract here. Why have I even gone off on this tangent? There are lots of reasons why it appeals to me to think about things in this way, but one practical result of deconstructing the urge to dichotomy is to break down the barriers which have been erected along the boundaries of society–even now and even still, when it seems as though we should have moved past absolute dogma years ago, while it continues to lurk in the wings, waiting for an opportunity to retake the popular imagination. In fact, I do not think the popular imagination in the culture I was raised in has ever seriously questioned the idea that there are but two alternatives when categorizing things: that is, there may be more subtle and interesting ways to distinguish between acts, persons, and ideas than “good” or “bad,” or “us” vs “them,” to name two instances, but I do not see much evidence that my fellow Americans have ever given these possibilities a whole lot of thought.

One of my favorite moments in teaching (nestled in there among the labyrinth of anxiety and fear that keeps me from continuing to teach) was when, during a visit to my office, a student had a particularly spectacular “a-ha!” moment. We were talking about whether it was possible that something could be neither “true” nor “false”–we were not being very specific about what the thing was, but I think we could have been talking about statements more than any other thing–and I drew a diagram with a circle around dots representing “true” statements, leaving “false” statement-dots outside the circle. And then I drew a bigger circle around the false statements and asked “What about those statements that fall outside of this true/false system?”

She was quiet for a moment. Suddenly her eyes got really big and she said quietly, “Oh my god.”

She looked more relieved than if I had told her I had talked the registrar into bestowing her degree on her the next day. Now, drawing an exclusive circle around an exclusionary thought system does not do justice to what it actually means to deconstruct dichotomy, but for there to be an “outside” to a system still requires in most American students’ minds that there be a boundary around that system to be “outside” of. In actual practice, that is not how it works at all. I only had two dimensions to work with very quickly, though. Perhaps I should have hovered my pencil above the paper and said “what about this point up here,” but I am not always quick on my feet–see labyrinth of anxiety and fear, above.

But so yeah, no. I haven’t “blown it” and there is still good reason for me to claim to be participating in this blog-a-day marathon. I am not one of “them” and nobody who has missed a day is unless your explicit goal was every. single. day. But if that were the case, I would ask why. I know one response is “I like the challenge,” but the challenge is still there after your missed day: keep writing. That is why we are here, is it not?

I think a good exercise for darned near everyone might be to think of a moment when they have been most seduced by exclusive thought: whether it has been in thinking anyone who does not believe in your god is “lost” or if it has been in believing there are always two easy alternatives to every question, and all one has to do to live a “good” life is to choose the right one, which will be self-rewarding and thus self-reinforcing. A concrete example of the last might be blaming the poor for their own poverty. “If they just worked harder”; “If they just made the right choices”; “If they just valued education the way I do”; etcetera. Nothing is that simple. Life is a complex interaction of circumstance, materiality and will–to name only three of many other things–and often all the will in the universe cannot overcome circumstance, or whatever cluster of abilities it is that we call “ambition” or “good attitude” is not meted out evenly between different individuals. Life itself takes its toll on resolve and energy, and who knows, unless one asks, where life has compelled one to surrender or to hesitate or to back down.

Exclusionary thought is often a shortcut to making oneself feel superior for whatever good fortune one enjoys, but it rarely accounts for reality and it almost always shuts out possible approaches to take towards the complexities of daily life, approaches that would turn out to have greater practical value because they take more variables into account than just “p” vs “not-p.” What else can you imagine as a method for defining things? Anythings? “p” and “not-p” and “q” and occasionally “m”–sometimes I think that a multi-dimensional way of figuring the world is possibly more promising than just about anything else we could do for ourselves.

I will write something else tomorrow. If I can.