It started with a natural disaster. Will it end up in a body bag? If so, how many do you need? Don’t you want to dance (say you want to dance)? Can the precarious navigation of the homosocial resist deteriorating into an “event”—whatever that means—that will foment the galvanization of a new form of what could only euphemistically be called “kinship” with the potential to subvert several academic disciplines? Can you hear someone say “discipline” without laughing uproariously? Where do we go from here?
These are only a few of the many questions that linger beneath the tempestuous surface of the new year. Of course, newness has always-already ended; we have (only?) what we have inherited. We are aporias, held aloft by the thinnest lines of narrative coherence, dangling above the abyss that is the post-temporal social in its contingent entirety. Or have I got it backwards again?
We do not need Shirley Phelps Roper or even someone exponentially less unattractive than her to tell us the end is nigh; the signs have been unmistakable since the beginning. Now is the time to declare that the end has already happened, and move on. Forget that we may be cursed with four more years of a vice president whose agenda is about as secular as 770 Eastern Parkway and not nearly as interesting. Messianism is out; it’s over.
Instead of prophets, today we have pundits. On Friday night, we watched one of them holding onto a telephone pole, blown literally horizontally by raging winds, struggling to give a candid report of the weather situation to the news. We were in a moderately priced Italian restaurant, waiting for house-made taglierini, watching a flatscreen television over the bar.
I stabbed my crostini, launching a piece of porcini mushroom into the distance, and sighed. “It’s pathetic what passes as ‘news’ these days.”
“I disagree,” a high school debater replied.
“That’s what you always do. But life isn’t a debate round. All these created spectacles are clearly designed to trick us into imagining an emergency situation and then forcing someone else to deal with it. I don’t understand why they try to make it so realistic. People were fooled by Forrest Gump.”
“That’s because of their mirror neurons.”
I nodded thoughtfully, then poured my glass of Limonata on a man wearing an ascot at the next table. “Oops! My neurons made me do it!”
He laughed and said something in Tagalog.
Back at the hotel, a sense of emergency permeated the lobby, exemplified by an obese woman with a placard that read “Save Yourself Now—With Refreshing Snacks from Our Gift Shop.”
“Is that just a Schlotzsky’s sign turned inside-out?” I asked.
“How can you tell?” she said, clearly potentially embarrassed.
“Shut up and dance, bitch!” I ordered. She complied, but her running man was quite disappointing. I don’t think she’s going to be on the next season of ABDC, that’s for sure.
In the gift shop, a couple wearing Hazmat suits examinined novelty T-shirts, admiring one with the Dairy Queen logo but with “Dallas” instead of “Dairy” written on it. “Wasn’t ‘Dallas Queen’ your nickname when you were in the army?” the woman wondered.
“Don’t ask; don’t tell.”
“You know, in the aughts, being a Dallas Queen doesn’t mean being happy and free. It means you are exactly what you are.”
At that moment, the hotel fire alarm went off, and we hurried outside, finding a group of friends also from Minnesota. We reminisced about the time in Des Moines when a guest at an out-of-control bachelorette party dropped a lit cigarette onto the carpet in her room. It was total chaos as strange combinations of half-dressed people emerged from hotel rooms together. The shame! I was alone with my economy-sized bag of Kettle chips, the best roommate there is.
“Was that the time when there were male strippers in the hotel dressed like firemen?” someone asked me.
“It was one of the times,” I said, “but that’s another story.”
It was. Yet another story was the Atlanta ice storm, where two inches of slush terrified everyone but orthodox Jews and Greeks so much that they didn’t leave their houses. When the electricity went off, a woman from Texas had a nervous breakdown and only recovered after a plate of bacon was placed directly under her nose. Amazingly, she immediately recovered and used the down time to plan structural changes to the national circuit high school debate community.
So many disasters, so much tragedy . . . Why do we put up with it all? And the situations keep getting more and more extreme. It’s like there’s a trolley with five people coming straight at a sad clown whose rainbow-colored hatchback is stalled right on the tracks, and there is no easy solution. Some would call it a moral dilemma; I call it unbridled hilarity.
This time, an overactive sizzling fajita platter in the hotel restaurant apparently caused the fire alarm. Fajitas are so random.
The news reports were still dire. We were to expect two to five inches of rain on Saturday, and wind gusts up to 50 miles per hour. That night I dreamt I was caught in a tornado, whirling above the sprawl of Addison, Texas. I stopped to feed a Korean meatball to an airborne peacock, then adjusted my body so I could drift over to admire Blueprints at Addison Circle, the sculpture in the roundabout at the town center. I was nearly maimed by a plastic tub, but I made it to Blueprints just in time to see the entire sculpture uprooted, joining the swirling matter. Would I be the latest victim of death by public art? I shuddered, remembering the giant “Man With Hammer” sculpture in Cleveland whose mechanism had gone haywire, resulting in the pounding to death of a small family of small people.
The alarm clock went off before my fate was determined. The news forecasts hadn’t changed, and I prepared for the year’s first day of debate watching footage of destruction, wind and waves ruining shoreline communities. Sarah Palin was planning on speaking in a few hours; I wondered if she would repeat the hard-line conservative response to Katrina and say Ike was holy revenge on the sinners, those brazen enough to believe in and even practice pre- and extramarital sex.
Outside, it was cloudy and humid, windy with a hint of dankness—very similar to what I imagine it would be like if scientists recreated the climate of a human womb for an exhibition or perhaps a theme park type of thing. I braced myself, trying to prepare for an event that is arguably psychoanalytically similar to leaving the womb: facing, for the first time in months, the debate community.
Yes, I had seen some of them in June, when we converged upon Las Vegas to witness crazed dance advertisements, unit-related commerce, exxxotic bowling, and masculine transsexuals creating traffic disturbances on Tropicana in 115-degree-weather. And again in August, I spent two more weeks with some debate people in Los Angeles, watching out-of-control small Asian children destroy elliptical machines, soft-serve ice cream dispensers, and the spirit of diversity and acceptance manifested in not only the otherwise liberal debate community, but also the coed high school cheerleading community.
During these summer debate activities, I obsessed over ethnic food, became a more astute and practiced observer of the AmJack subculture, gave Whole Foods an inordinate amount of my disposable income, and came to lament the lack of In-N-Out in the Midwest.
There were to be no such distractions in Texas. No bowling with strippers; no rabid packs of unsupervised children; no animal style. Instead, it would be boys talking about their speaker points out of rounds, talking about morality and McIntyre in rounds; it would be coaches of all sorts: the vicious ones, the vicarious ones, the Chinese ones as well; it would be, in a word, random.
Even with the anticipation of historically bad weather later that afternoon, I quickly fell into the same routine: pretend to listen to people talking about Heidegger and cognitive science; observe social rituals not usually seen in our own little corner of the primate community; lather, rinse, have some pizza. I was idly contemplating the inner workings of a sea salt grinder between rounds when an unfamiliar face approached me.
“Excuse me, but are you Mr. G?”
“I’m not usually called that outside the community theater community,” I said.
“I thought so. Anyway, my school wants to honor the victims of Ike by writing and putting on an original musical revue.”
“Do you live near Galveston?” I asked.
“No, central Missouri.”
“Well my first thought is call it ‘Ike Can See Clearly Now,' like about how people get through the storm and it makes them reevaluate their situations.”
“Oh, cool! How they appreciate the little things now?”
“Actually, I was thinking more that they’re violently angry at the lack of an organized official response to the disaster and inspired to organize a post-Maoist insurrection aimed at the overcoming of oppressive social apparatuses and technologies of control. But appreciating the little things would work, too.”
“Thanks. You’re given me a lot to think about.”
I promised to write some lyrics for a song by the end of the tournament, but there was no time just then because the last round of the day was released. After one more hour thinking about a fat person being pushed off a bridge to stop a trolley from going off a cliff, it was time to again navigate the Addison dining scene. Someone once told me that Addison has the largest amount of restaurants per person in the country, or maybe it was that Addison has the largest people in the country. It was something impressive, though.
We opted for Tex-Mex. Enchiladas were consumed; stomachs were upset; that insufferable Spin Doctors song was on the jukebox, which made me so angry I crushed a bottle of Shiner over my friend’s head and took out my anxiety on a potentially undeserving piece of tres leches cake.
It was at that moment, in the throes of rage, that I realized the horrible weather had never materialized. It rained a bit, and there was a peacock in a tree, but nothing worse or weirder than that. This really made me think, and when I think it is usually never a good thing. That night, as my stomach churned from the enchiladas, my brain churned along with it. So many ideas were coursing through my head: passivity, disaster, Nietzsche, trolleys, the homosocial. I knew I would be able to come up with a brilliant song about Ike.
The next day, while the debaters were stupidly trying to win their elimination rounds, I strapped myself to the beast—the Roland keyboard in the electronic music classroom—and experimented with chords, melodies, and finally words. By the time the awards ceremony was over, I had my original ode to the hurricane victims. It’s called “After the ‘Cane,” set to the music of “After the Rain” by Nelson.
*
After the tragedy, we’ve suffered such pain
We’re drowning in a tidal wave, soaking wet with rain
You’re submerged fully from your toes to head
Your dog, your cat, your mailman and your grandma are all dead
Now you realize the corruption of the state
After the ‘cane it’s a chance to reflect
And insurrect
Only after the ‘cane
Can you live again
I know your house was ruined by a tree
Now you’ll fight off oppressive ideology
Your children lost all their precious toys
Come on with me and we’ll subvert and destroy
It’s time to take down technologies of control
After the ‘cane it’s a chance to reflect
And insurrect
Only after the ‘cane
Can you live again
[Singing saw solo]
Anarchists will appear to light the way
Only after the ‘cane
Can you try to smash the state again
You know the time has come for you to face the truth
After the ‘cane it’s a chance to reflect
And insurrect
[Repeat chorus and fade]
*
So, we’ve survived another one. But there will be more. Even if you only need one, you get more. Life is random like that. But if we stay positive, we might just learn to live together, to share things together—food, rooms, beds, the planet. Our lives.
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