think globally act locally

A kinda funny thing about that 'think globally, act locally' line. Dunno what I really think about the line itself except that it seems like basically a totally unobjectionable but also totally toothless idea, but I think it's funner to flip it around.

If we take various scientific laws and equations seriously, like the idea that gravitational pull has this inverse square relation or whatever such that an object's mass has some effect on things that gets really weak with distance. Or like the idea of harmonics, that for any tone that's made, there are an infinite number of other waves that are similarly periodic though weaker and with higher frequencies.

If we take these seriously, me lifting my arm has a tiny but undeniably real gravitational effect at the farthest edges of the universe and my voice has billions of higher harmonics humming throughout existence. If we take those seriously, then I'm really actually acting pretty dang globally even though the thoughts I have about my actions don't really extend very far from my immediate surroundings most of the time. Maybe that's why we're exhorted to think globally and act locally, cuz what we do on our own is usually the other way around

I think this flipped version is way cooler. It makes me think of myself as some node in a mesh that can flex and change the entire universe in this very intimate sorta 'as one' in concert with everything else sense even though my my thoughts are pretty humbly local

jiujitsu

I don't know martial arts stuff. Is fencing a martial art? Is paintball? I think Jiujitsu is the one where you use your opponent's strength against them. But maybe it's Kendo? No clue. In anycase, using your opponent's strength to their disadvantage is an appealing idea, and it's especially cool when the other guy actually winds up on the ground. 

But what if you could get the stronger side to perceive that their strength is actually weakness and get them to give up before even fighting? That'd be impressive for real, and probably kinda baffling. 

Take the idea that things are getting worse. I've heard people say this about all sort of things: music, movies, I guess a lot of art-related things, but also politics or morality or family ties and so on. Heck, I've been the person making this sort of claim a lot of the time. And a super common response is something along the lines of: People have been saying that things have been getting worse forever, even in the 1700s or whatever people were lamenting the worsening state of things.

And this is is taken to be an argument *against* the idea that things are getting worse. How in the world is that supposed to make sense? Like, the fact that more people agree with your statement is taken to be a reason why it's not true. The more people whose experience lines up with yours the more you should doubt it. A chorus ringing throughout history: Things Are Getting Worse!   <-- you see? that's why you should think that things aren't getting worse. lol

I think this is a dumbass mindless cliche and I have no clue how it works on people. Noting that other people have said the same thing should be at least prima facie evidence in support of the claim, as far as I understand how reasoning works. I basically interpret this sort of argument as: shut up, stop complaining

Another one of these things has to do with so-called conspiracy theories. I really love the sorts of things called conspiracy theories I take that stuff seriously as a means to keep focused on the big questions of life, control, reality, etc. It’s hard to really take those questions seriously if you don’t take different answers seriously. Anyway, there are of course people who are trying to make things called conspiracy theories out to be a really bad thing, using whatever arguments they can.

One argument that they use makes no sense to me. When someone ties together disparate bits of information to show some pattern in a conspiracy sort of way, a common retort is something like: humans evolved a heighten capacity for pattern finding, and this claim you're making is an over-extension of that natural capacity.

But to me, noting that we've evolved to be highly skilled pattern recognizers seems to be an argument *in favor* of whatever pattern the person is talking about being real. It's not like I necessarily buy this evolutionary claim, what the hell do I know about the evolution of pattern recognition? But to say that humans are good at finding patterns doesn't make sense to me as a way to say that a pattern someone found is spurious. 

I know there are versions of this where the claim is that humans are by their very nature overactive fake-pattern recognizers and therefor xyz conspiracy is not real, but that's a different matter. And if it's actually hard for us to adjudicate which patterns are legit and which ones aren't, then I'm not sure how that idea says one thing or another about any given claim, though it does seem to grant that there even is an apparent pattern in the first place. 

Anyway, I think we're so immersed in this idea that takes a bunch of different forms like: reality is counterintuitive, you don't actually know what you feel or want, common sense leads people astray, etc. that it sort of turns shit on its head to such a degree that people wield these weird cliches all the time

firefighters

A friend came over for dinner last night who we hadn't seen for a long time. He had come from the Dixie Fire where he had been working as a firefighter over the summer. He was part of a crew from the Russian River area where he has a house and is part of the local volunteer firefighter group. He sort of held court about what goes on with those fires and answered our questions throughout. I thought I'd write down some of what he said as best I can remember it.

He first talked about the differences in scheduling between CalFire, which was leading things for the first bit, and the federal government, which took over midway through his stint up there. The main distinction here was the CalFire had people working on 24-hours-on, 24-hours-off shifts while the federal goverment had them doing 12, 12. In both cases these actually amounted to very little free time once you factor in sleep, driving to and from camp, and eating/showering/etc. 

He described the sleeping conditions. With CalFire, he was given a room in a rented cabin when he was on his 24-hours-off shift and would sleep 8 hours in out in the woods when on shift. With the federal government he would bunk with 41 other guys in these sort of semi-truck shipping containers, bunks stacked three-high, that people called the coffins or something like that. There'd be 6-8 of these trucks alongside shower trucks and mess halls with generators running 24/7. It was 90% men, he said, so there'd be a long line with guys in flipflops for the shower truck for guys while the few women would just walk right in to their shower truck. Other people stayed in Reno and drive 1.5 hours each way each day

The meals were cooked and served by prisoners in orange jumpsuits. He said they were older guys doing that, and basically the only non-white people there aside from the young guys from the California Conservation Corps. He himself is black and was one of the only non-white firefighters. The whole operation amounted to about 4000 people he said.

The Dixie fire was the largest in California history (though I guess this is recent recorded history, because from what I've read there used to be way bigger, regular fires before white settlement and fire prevention measures became the norm over the last century) and he said it had actually been contained a few times throughout the summer, but that the containment fires they built to hem it in would escape their control and lead to the whole thing being out of control again. 

This kind of shocked me, but he said this wasn't a major concern for the people up there. An engine crew would make $2000 a day just from having their engine up there and their salaries were paid on top of that. So the more time up there, the more lucrative it would be, for volunteers like them, and also for anyone else up there, including the more-or-less recently formed private firefighting squads. The whole institution, from food and lodging to water and electricity and of course the firefighters themselves really depend on the fires for their money. If the fire got sufficiently contained, they would need to drive across the state to some other fire. There are some real incentives to have these fires burning.

The actual firefighting is not so much spraying and dumping water on the fire, but rather bulldozing the forest in lines to corral the fire. This involves just tearing scars across the forest and removing combustable material from this sort of no-trees-zone. Individual firefighters would follow along with shovels to clear away what remains. This is real work but the better paying and easier job is hauling water around. Private companies would drive with tanker trucks wherever they're ordered to go with water before returning to the industrial agriculture pumps along canals to wait in line to refill. All these trucks getting very few miles to the gallon would also constantly be refueling.

Our friend told us that a lot of the guys up there didn't want this to end, they liked following orders, not having to live their mundane lives and such, which I guess makes sense from what I've read about totalizing situations. He ended up outline a plan for next summer, setting up some legal entity, pooling money to buy an $80k engine and manning shifts with friends to make some money.

school days

I've got to get this down. I'm really not entirely sure what to do, and I certainly don't want to show anyone this, but I think I just need to get my thoughts straight. I'm using pen and paper because of some paranoia about this ever sitting on an internet-capable device. My handwriting is crap, so I hope I can make this out later. Ok, I might as well start

Let's set the context. So I grew up in a household where we weren't rich, but never had to go without anything important, we went on vacations, though they were often camping trips, but we occasionally went to disneyland or hawaii. The trips aren't important, what's important is that we were fairly simple people, my parents don't have college degrees, we didn't have great art as part of our environment growing up. 

I was a bit of a striver though and was perpetually curious about the best or most special, superlative, whatever, of any given realm. For me as a kid the relevant realms were books and music and movies. For books, I tried to read what I thought were the pinnacles or outer-reaches of the form at every age, usually aiming too high and not understanding them. I remember reading Dracula in fifth grade. I read every word of that book, but only really understood bits and pieces of it, usually the sexy or gory parts. I don't think this is actually all that different from having highschoolers read the Great Gatsby though. Before you've gone out on your own and really experienced into the world, how could you possibly really get that book? I re-read it a few years ago and it was much more impactful. 

For movies, I generally watched action and sci-fi stuff communally with my friends and family, but alone I would try to enlighten myself with some stuff that would stretch my mind. I remember renting Vertigo, Eyes Wide Shut, Being John Malkovich, etc for instance, or then-contemporary to-my-mind outre stuff like that Nicolas Cage 8mm film. I also developed an aspiration to the sort of casual intellectual allusion-filled banter that I was mesmerized by in Annie Hall and Manhattan.

I guess I'm trying to use these as quick proxies for where my head was at. Sure, looking back on that now, it was all pretty solidly middlebrow, but I felt this other world of artistic refinement and achievement that went beyond what my parents were interested in. I was eager to get away, so applied to some of the fancier east coast colleges and actually got into one. Upon acceptance, I thought my life was set on this secure ever-upward track, or at least permanently altered in a good way. I still think it was permanently altered, but now I have no idea how.

My college experience is probably a lot like others in that it's too vast and multivaried to really sum up succinctly. But important for what I'm trying to get down is my relationship with Perce. I'm not sure of his full name, but his last name was Isigny. We lived on the same floor freshman year and he caught me one day in a common area reading a book for class. I remember the book exactly, that Horkheimer and Adorno stuff. I was not exactly really understanding the book, but I was reading every word diligently. He asked whether I was liking the book and I lied and said yes, hoping he wouldn't ask any follow-up questions. He didn't, but that was enough the break the ice for us and we became friendly from there on out.

Perce seemed exceptionally worldly and well-read. He already knew about the books I was reading and had derisive things to say about movies I talked about it. This didn't really get me down or anything, I just recalibrated my aspirations and modeled what I thought of as erudition and smarts based on what he exemplified. We'd watch a load of foreign films, far beyond the Bergman's and Kurosawa's I considered the apex of sophistication, but whenever I suggested a movie he seemed physically repulsed. More than that, I felt like he was trying to keep me from watching certain things, like I distinctly remember wanting to watch the Nicolas Roeg David Bowie The Man Who Fell to Earth movie, and he reacted nearly violently, telling me to stay away from that trash, Roeg's and Bowie's. The next day he apologized and explained that I could watch it if I wanted, but that their work was beneath me.

It's not that I aspired to be only like Perce, there were plenty of others at that school who's family backgrounds gave them this cosmopolitan air and comfort. Perce was clearly from a rich family, but nearly everyone here was. These kids were the result of years of after-dinner discussions of art and politics and philosophy. And when we sometimes compared our elementary through high school assignments, it was basically always the case that stuff I was doing in high school they were doing in middle school. This all gave me a chip on my shoulder, but I valued what they knew, and was fine playing catch-up. But it was Perce who was probably my closest friend, and if I was being really cynical, I kinda saw his attention as an avenue to bootstrap my way into another world or at least up a few levels. 

Fast forward to today. My college experience surely opened a few doors for me, but I still feel like one of those people who, if they compare their life to their parents', are just kinda skimming along expectations-wise. I'm back on the west coast, living in San Francisco and making OK money. The bumps along the way, plus a bout of unemployment for about six months a few years ago, have made me less enthralled by what passes for elite art and understanding. The people in charge seem like coddled idiots, true middlebrows coercing the rest of us to praise them. Though I still watch a ton of movies, I mostly watch them just for the visuals, or my own weed-induced galaxy brain takes. Again, dunno why I keep coming back to movies, they just serve as a good proxy, I think.

Anyway, I guess that's enough background. I kinda spewed that out in a rush, but I'm really just trying to give the rough dynamics of my relationship with Perce. 

So last week I drove down to LA to visit some old friends from high school. I was staying with one of them in East Hollywood. She sort of aggravates me, but is very nice and we have a history together including dating each other for like a month in high school, lol. Anyway, one of the things that aggravates me about her is that she's one of those people who are weirdly into Disney stuff and generally stuff I consider more appropriate for kids. Related to this, she's a big Anne Hathaway fan, from The Princess Diaries and Les Miserables. Anyway, there was this new movie with her in it, some dorky kids movie called The Witches and she was dying to see it. Not wanting to be a bad sport I said I'd go with her. 

After the movie, we saw it in some needlessly expensive theater near Rodeo Drive, we were walking around looking for an ice cream or gelato place. Stopped on a corner at a crossing, out of nowhere, someone walks up from behind and turns to face us and it's Perce.

I was shocked from not having seen him for years and for the way he approached us from the dark, but his demeanor was the same as ever and we fell right back into chatting. He offered us a ride back to East Hollywood and soon we were walking to towards his car. It was a few blocks walk down the deserted Beverly Hills streets before we came upon his car. The car itself was not totally remarkable, it was a convertible, but not flashy. What was strange was that the top was down and the car was idling with the keys in the ignition. Had he just left it running? I have to admit the idea of a car just idling for who knows how long made me wince, thinking about the environment, but I was mostly concerned with the fact that he would leave the car in such a vulnerable state. I asked him about this and he said he wasn't worried about it.

He dropped us off and gave me his number, telling me to give him a call while I'm in town. 

So I text him the following day, thanking him again, and he invites me over to his place to catch up, just me and him. He picks me up around 8 and we drive off into the hills. I'm honestly grateful to get a little break from my host and even more curious about what his place will be like. Back in the day, I think my excitement would have been centered around this hope of social inclusion into his sphere, but I'm a little wiser now and am mostly hoping for an interesting story, with a sliver of my being thinking about whether anything lucrative could come out of this rekindling of our connection, a networking opporunity, a job, who knows.

So everything from here on out is what I'm actually trying to get down. And everything from here starts feeling a little uncomfortable for me. I think I might ramble but I can come back and edit later.

First, by 'his place' he must have meant his parents' place because this is a full mansion and he introduces me to his sister, his mom and dad, and his uncle who also happened to be visiting. I wasn't expecting to have to be this social and meet new people, especially really rich people who I generally feel I have to act a certain, respectable way around. I hadn't had to play this sort of game since college. But that's the price of admission, I reason to myself, and glad-hand around and talk admiringly of the house and the neighborhood and LA.

The father says now that everyone's here, let's get down to eating. We make our way into the dining room and I of course don't say anything about how I didn't know we would be having a meal or anything about having already eaten. I can also make room to smooth over social awkwardness.

The table set-up was pretty sleek and modern, chrome and white leather with some pale pink accents. It felt a little sterile, but the food was great, some sort of quasi-Indian vegetarian slop (that sounds bad, but I love that sort of thing), bread, wine. I had a few glasses, but not enough to really impair me.

After dinner we did a 'retire to the parlour' sort of thing that was so forced and formal that it felt like some corny bad television thing. We chatted more about my time since college in the sitting room, which wasn't that interesting, at least to me. What was more interesting, was the seating arrangements. We sat sort of distributed around the perimeter of the room, each with little table for our drink next to our stuffed chairs. Perce was sitting in his dad's lap for some reason (there were other places to sit in the room) and his sister was sort of straddling the arm of the chair her uncle was sitting in, with her arm around his shoulder. Perce's mom on a sort of loveseat thing directly across from me. It all seemed sort of posed, like that's how this class of people learn to sit in this sort of setting, I'm not sure. But I did get weird, I guess, sexual vibes from the siblings' interactions with the person they were sitting with. But other than that, the scene was otherwise normal. The conversation was mostly about my time since college, me and Perce's time in college, etc. None of us seemed to be getting drunk, and I could sense it was just about time to say our farewells for the evening.

I remember seeing Perce's sister whisper something in her uncle's ear, then some more time passed. An awkward pause lingered up to the edge of my comfort and just as I was about to say that I ought to be going, the uncle says: it's time for the puppet show

This sort of kills the hope in me of an immediate end to this kinda weird and tedious night, but I hide my disappointment and gird myself so some more pleasantries. A puppet show sounds really cringe-inducing or at least sleep-inducing, but the uncle announced it in such a way that it felt unavoidable, inevitable. The rest of a the family nods and murmurs approvingly and we leave the parlour and head back into the dining room. The table has been cleared and there's a small sort of stage set in a recessed part of the wall, maybe 6 feet wide and 10 feet tall. 

The uncle climbs up what I assume is some ladder obscured by some curtains along the side of the stage. The lights dim and reveal the reflected light of some small candles in the front of the stage. There is a small painted set depicting some mountain scene, alpine maybe? with a few cutouts of trees and a boulder, very desaturated colors, nearly black and white. It seemed a little rinky-dink and stodgy. I could dimly make out the uncles face above the stage, not so much his head, but his face shrouded in black. His eyes were looking down with concentration as some music swelled, old-timey classical stuff, I didn't pay much attention to it. 

But this is what I want to get down, the only thing that really matters. In this darkened room and on the small stage slides a person. He is facing out to us, the audience, with his hands raised, elbows at right angles, I guess held up by strings, though I can't exactly see them. His feet and legs don't move, he just sort of smoothly slides sideways from stage right. He's about a foot tall I'm guessing and dressed like some kind of court-jester or something, green tights, silly shoes, and different color feathers dangling from a tunic-like thing, similarly desaturated, nearly grayscale. But he looks REAL, like he has real material heft, there are subtle but obvious twitches in his limbs as he hangs from the strings. And his face. His eyes are not dead painted-on things, but really real and glistening. He looks extremely uncomfortable and afraid. He's clearly crying.

I flinch and Perce puts his hand on my shoulder. The music changes and the puppet man starts singing. The voice is not what you would expect from a human shrunk down that small, but sounds like a full grown person standing right in front of you. His face contorts in barely perceptible winces and grimaces as his tiny lips sync up perfectly with the singing. He looks to be otherwise in the bloom of youth, mid twenties with lightly rosy cheeks. He reminds me so much of my old roommate from freshman year it's uncanny, just weirdly made up with red lips and arched eyebrows. Just as I think this, Perce's mom whispers in my ear: "He wants a bride" This, I guess, as some translation of the song and scene that I'm viewing. 

The song continues. The puppet seems to be staring straight at me, right into my eyes. I find this unnerving and look away. In an effort to keep my eyes from the puppet they land upon Perce's uncle, up behind the stage, his hands busy, his gaze fixed down at the puppet. I start to worry that if I keep staring at the uncle, he might look back, so I try to rest my eyes, unfocused, on the mountain backdrop and it fades to black and the show ends.

We applaud as a bashful uncle emerges from the curtain, waving off the family's praise. I clap and try to maintain a pleased look, but I'm so tired and weirded out and done with this this stuff, I don't know how well I did. 

It's clear now that the evening is over and we're making the sort of nearly scripted small talk you make when a social event is winding down. I get some multi-handed handshakes and lingering sincere eye-contact from each of the people I met tonight and Perce walks me out to a car and thanks me again for coming. There's a driver in it who ferries me home.

I'm really weirded out by it all, but mostly that puppet show. Thinking about it makes me want to cry and I feel this sharp pain in my lower stomach. A few more days pass in East Hollywood and things fall back into a normal vacation routine. I have some sporadic texts with Perce and then yesterday he invites me back to his house, saying that my old college roommate Rory is there and that he wants to see me. 

I don't really know what to do. I'm getting more afraid of that place and that unnerving puppet show and the Rory look-alike and now him up there. I don't really know what to do. At least I wrote this down.

found

I am presenting here the result of some research I've carried out on what I consider to be a novel discovery. In short, I've found what appears to be an early instance of familial strife brought on by a child of indeterminate age undergoing a gender transition, as instantiated by a poem. Below I reproduce the poem and offer an introduction to it in addition to some critical notes. I am not a scholar, but I trust the following will be of some interest to those who are.

A few weeks ago I was taking a little roadtrip up the coast and decided to take a look at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. I had always had some curiosity about the place, but never enough to stop and look around. The environs are enchanting, the physical infrastructure so often obscured by thick dark forest and winding paths. The school of course has its reputation, but I was interested in its day-to-day functioning as a place of learning, growth. 

I wandered across the Linguistics department, and though I found the door to be locked, out with me in the hallway was a table bearing the load of a number of old books, apparently free for the taking. Most were of recent vintage and concerned teaching English as a second language: not something that interests me. But a murky red spine caught my eye and I opened it to find a collection of Early Modern English poetry. I am casually fascinated by this era: The foul seed of early capitalism taking root in the uncanny soil of the north of Europe, the bitter fruit we are compelled to eat from the result to this day. I slipped the book into my purse wandered on. 

I entered the woods and found a table to sit at, opened the book, and found this:

          Squeaking Anthony

1        The Bird of Spring was spurr'd to bring

          A Lord and Wife awarded Life.

          With fed Souls, Heads full

          Of vernal Dawns, eternal Fawns,
5        That May met they
          Their one boon Joy, their dear June Boy.

          Yet in Sight quickly, he is quite sickly.
          The Womb's bleak Bloom's weak.
          His Guardians hope he's hardy and copes
10      But Hope wanes through Woe, Pains,

          And Dread reigns. Red drains

          From Child's meek, mild Cheeks.

          As Seasons roll Reason's sole

          Design to rot, resigned ought

15      A Wife her Role, still rife and whole,

          Claime and hold, though lame and cold.

          Patient Grace at gradient Pace

          A Faith so true for Traites so few.

          Inspired and hale from a Priory Sale, 

20      We tried a pail of Friars' Ale. 

          Desire she wails. Fie Ire to Hell! 

          A lyre swells, a choir, bells

          A higher Spell for their Pyre veiled.

          But Sire he fails, his Spire is frail.

25      They lie there still. 

                                          Heir, Stay little. Thy

          Sweet, tender, Tweet Sender

          Was no Deity's Love, nor Laity's Dove.

          The Devil lies with leveled Eyes

30      Sent in a Demon by Dint of Semen.

          —

          Dear Mother, mirrored Other,

          Four Years your Feares

          That some Deed of Yore bore your dumb Seed

35      Made haunting Days a daunting Haze.

          You hated it well and I waited to tell

          You bore no Blame, just Luck's blown Aim

          Here we are now, how we are near

          And in the whorled Wood, as the World would,

40      

          Bury me and merrie be

Notes:

The title: At a surface level, the title straightforwardly nods to the child depicted in the piece (presumably assigned the name Anthony at birth) and their avian provenance and/or their arguably pathological means of communication. This may well be one of the intended readings of the title, but I propose that it is at least also bears a relation to the contemporaneous work of Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" (The poem is unattributed, nor does it have a date, so it is not clear which work is referencing which, the poem the play, or the play the poem). In Act 5, Scene 2 of that work we find the following:

CLEOPATRA

        Nay, 'tis most certain, Iras: saucy lictors
        Will catch at us, like strumpets; and scald rhymers
        Ballad us out o' tune: the quick comedians
        Extemporally will stage us, and present
        Our Alexandrian revels; Antony
        Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
        Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
        I' the posture of a whore.

Here we see our Ant(h)ony as invert Cleopatra and the squeaking as a variety of cross-gendered vocalization. Shakespeare is wryly commenting on his own or future era through the mouth of his  creation locked in the fictionalized past, on the page. But staged, what exactly would this be Cleopatra enacting? 

Line 1: The passive mood is used here, obscuring the agent of the event of 'spurring', much like the current ambiguity concerning the etiology of transgender impulses.

Line 6: A "June boy" that arrives in May indicates, at first glance, a baby that was what we would nowadays consider "premature". I think pressing beyond this superficial reading reveals a more fundamental interpretation wherein the child does not meet the parent's high expectations, but they nevertheless insist on clinging to their hopes and pre-conceived (or pre-conception?) notions despite reality. In this sense, the deluded desperation is found not in "June", but in "Boy".

 

Lines 19-24: Up until this point, this piece has been loyally spooneristic, perfect or slant. But here we find that system breaking down and a disorienting swirl of near-rhyme and assonance reaching a perhaps drunken pitch. This bacchanal scene between the parents, followed by profound sexual disappointment, serves as warped, bitter microcosm of their larger hopes and disappointments with their child, complete with concerns about genitalia.

Line 25-26:  Here we find a jarring break after the crescendo of the previous stanza. It is not clear whose voice begins line 26, though the vocative "Heir" can be seen as an indication that it is the voice of a parent, and the remaining lines would further point to the frustrated mother. What interests me however is the further break from rhyme and assonance, and the utter obliteration of the spoonerism schema above. These two lines, when represented phonetically, appear to instead be near phonetic anagrams of each other as represented in the sketch provided below:

Of note here are a few things. First, this is an anagram not of the letters, as is commonly the case, but of the letters given breath and spoken aloud, indicating a transcendence beyond the rigid and dead written word. Second, this interpretation demands an abbreviated pronunciation of 'little', more akin to the cutesy 'lil'. Such infantilization is a common means of expressing trans-misogyny (or perhaps a means of expressing ones own gendered experience). Third, the phonetic anagram is off, incomplete, as there is an extra (or missing) ð ("th") sound. This can be seen as intentional distancing from (or highlighting of) the stereotypical "gay lisp". 

Additionally, what does it mean for the child to "stay little" (or "stay [lil]")? Death is one way to stay little, be it physical or in the mind of a parent who is unaccepting of their child's true gender. 

Line 27:  Thus resumes the spooneristic cadence with a saccharine reference to the misapprehended bird of spring from the outset. Surely this "Tweet Sender" can be no prescient allusion to the modern parental worries of children being enticed away from traditional gendered behavior via so-called social media, though I must admit that despite my better, rational, judgment, this explanation has its appeal. Of course this being true would demand a reappraisal of our understanding of both poetry and reality. 

Lines 29-30: Further supporting the possibility of some anachronistic index of contemporary fears of social media, we find the familiar hysteria surrounding the sex act acting as a conduit for devilry. In this instance it is the trans subject deviating from the plan of some infallible god, lured astray down an electronic path by, well,

Line 31: In Heinrich von Kleist's 1808 novella Die Marquise von O.... we are greeted immediately in the title with a familiar sort of typographical alchemy, the ellipsis. In an inert string of dots, we are invited to envision the unknown, or unspeakable. This practice of course persists in various guises including sitcomdom's yadda-yadda-yadda (which in turn recalls the Semitic jodh and Greek iota characters, the smallest meaning-bearing letters in their respective abjads and alphabets, as well as the Jewish yad pointing tool and in turn the typographical ☞) and etc. Of course the more infamous use of typography to indicate the unsayable is found in Kleist's use of the em-dash to represent/index what Grant McAllister of Wake Forest deems "the most-delicately accomplished rape in our literature": Hier – traf er [...]. This novella reflects our Anthony in its traffic with the undesired causes and effects of pregnancy. A modernization of this story was released exactly 200 years later in the form of the 2008 motion picture Il Seme della Discordia (Eng. The Seed of Discord), whose title finds resonance with lines 30 and 34.

        On line 31 we find a similar dash, one that seems to indicate a dividing line between speakers, akin to the break after line 25.

Line 35: If it is indeed the child speaking here, it is not clear how they would have access to their mother's experience. The child has no access to what it is to be an adult woman, having (probably) never been one before. Any sort of dolorous haze must be: a delusional fantasy of the child, a personal experience expressed via maternal ventriloquy, or something else altogether.

Line 37: "Luck's blown Aim" recalls (or anticipates) Love's Easy Tears, a recording from the Scottish musical group "The Cocteau Twins". 

Line 38: "Here we are now" inevitably recalls the famous exhortation to "entertain us" issued by the pop-rock group Nirvana, fronted by Kurt Cobain. Much has been made of Cobain's gender identity and this link is a compelling addition to that speculation (see also line 28's "Love", common noun or surname?). Now, assuming a certain, common, conception of the passage of time, it would certainly be absurd to suspect that the author of this 17th century poem was somehow ex ante aware the 20th century song, but it would likewise be outside the scope of this investigation to explore this possibility further, so I will drop it. Another, perhaps more likely, explanation is that Cobain, during his extensive time in Olympia, WA, came across this very book and was influenced by this poem. Regardless of the truth, this line will undoubtedly inform future scholarly work on the gender identity of Cobain.

Lines 40-41: The text to these lines is apparently lost, rendering the motivation to "bury" the child unknown, although lines 38-39 would seem to indicate that a universally agreed upon course of action is at hand. Though even that is not unambiguous. The "now" in Line 38 has a special deictic property that allows it to point any contextually salient present. And in light of the likely time-warped intended reading presented here, I think it's fair to say it might point to a personal now, like the one I experienced that day at that table in the forest. It may be beyond my bounds as, I suppose, curator of this piece of work to suggest what might precisely have existed in this gap. But I am a casual spoonerist myself, not to mention trans, so please excuse my attempt:

with a bold eye get that old guy bit 

to be my sister as I missed her

through sorcery fey, we force him say:

    

mon day

 I do mon words. I mean, I talk in mon words. It's not true that it's just to save time. I do them to add a bit of the strange to my speech. The big tech guys can hear me (they can hear your too) and they use their math to try to get what I and all of us say. They try to 'grok' it, if you want to use that word, and they try to guess what comes next, what might come next. Their math works and it works well if what you say is bound to a wide, broad norm. But with mon words, you can add bits (or take bits out) so that no math can grok you. You are forced with mon words to talk kind of weird, so be it and so I do. A guy or gal can still get me and know what I mean, but math can't. At least I hope.

Not nuff guys and gals talk in a way that math can't grok, to my mind. More should, so I try to spread the word on this stuff. It has not worked yet. Guys and gals find it nice and fine to use more than mon words. They do use mon words of course, they just use more too, which makes their speech a piece of cake for the math to grok. To my mind, they are all dupes, these guys and gals, but I of course still love them and want them to join me. Or, they could think up more, new ways to do the same sort of mon word thing. They could come up with more new ways of their own to scape math. It's not just me who's smart. At least I hope.

So I was out in the air one day in the near past. Just one day in the past, not now. And I walked by a Ring next to a front door down the street. These things watch you and save what they see. They coat my hood and you can't walk but that they see you. I hate them. They form a sort of cage that you can't see. I try of course to look nice and safe as they watch me. But in my mind, my thoughts are not nice and safe. That's why I try to keep them, my thoughts, locked up and not in view. The same goes for my speech. My phone, my comp, my friends' phones, their comps and of course much more that I don't see or know of, they all hear my words too. A cage you can't see part two. Or the same cage if you zoom out in your head. 

Well, I got lost. Let's try one more time. So I was out in the air in my hood. I had left my house to go buy some food at the store, some milk, cheese, eggs, cukes, bluebs, yog, broc, you know. And I ran cross this guy which of course is kind of odd since no one does much in the way of new friends on the street now. Then too? I can't see clear back then, so I don't know. He says to me, well, he did not of course use mon words, but I want to keep his thoughts safe too so I'll take his speech and make it mon words for you, for me, for all of us. So he says, I've seen you here in the past, like six or eight days in the past. You made this long, wide arc as you walked. I think you tried to steer clear of that watch node in the store car lot. You do that each time you come to the store. You want that they can't see you? Good luck. That shit can't be done that way. I should know, I've tried and it don't work. They can still make a guess about you and your path since it's so smooth and just like the paths of the guys and gals who are bound to the norm. You have to walk with jerks, not smooth, bob, weave, twitch (he showed me some moves as he said this). That's what you have to do. Move your arms in weird ways, shake your legs and then stop real quick. 

Now it's hard to show his speech, mon words or not, but he talked like he walked with fast starts and stops and half words and more than one word squished to make one big word, but with parts not there. He did sound nuts, but if you knew like I did that he meant to talk that way, as a goal, it was not nuts, but quite sane, to my mind. He spoke like a comp that did not work good, like some guy had broke it. On the street you would think he did not have a house, that he was sick in the head, that he was not safe. As we talked then, he told me that he wears these weird clothes (he made a point with his fing to them) so as not to be seen by the Ring nodes in the big cage that we all live in. What's more, he can't have a job or a house. If he did, he would get caught in the cage. Of course, if he had a nice house in the woods or a thing like that, he could also not get caught, but to get nuff cash for that, he would need the sort of job as part of the cage. So no job, no house. In fact, he asked me for some cash for food. No cards either of course. Life was hard this way, but he had to do it to be free from the cage at least. He could use a new friend to join him, loads of friends if he was to be frank, he said. If a large group of guys and gals joined and left and left the cage like he had, we could all be free. I liked this, but it scared me. It was too much and I still thought my own mon word ways would keep me safe, well ish, and free, um, ish. I walked home and for fun I did a quick herk and jerk, stop and start in front of a Ring node just to see what it felt like.

untitled

You are reading. Each group of letters collapses into view form the choppy indistinct field just before and just below. You can see with a hazy sense with decreasing precision a halo of symbols centering on the one that if you linger, glows larger. For years, you were trained to do this, crossing your eyes and peering in and pulling back. You've calibrated this tool that you had no choice but to use, awkwardly at first. The training is complete and irrevocable. You can practice and hone the tool, or not, but this hazy halo is not going away. You've developed private tricks, to read faster, but also to escape. You can focus on a single grouping of marks, such that the glow gets too bright, the meaning evaporates, and you're free. You can also unfocus your eyes, expand the halo to encompass your whole field of vision, but these are just temporary, and take conscious effort to maintain.

Your other option is not so much an option. Reading is a tool that's been installed by force into your only mind. Permanently dismantling it can only been done with a lot of collateral damage. You're stuck. And largely at the mercy of what your rigged halo passes over. You're forced to understand this. The shackles have worn into you from the earliest age possible and have now long since incorporated themselves into your flesh, no longer really distinguishable like a chainlink fence pressed into a growing tree. The marks are there but the metal is no longer visible.

And here you still are, still reading. What lies ahead on the page could be very unpleasant, or change you in ways that you don't want. Change you further than you already have been changed. You have no control over what you will come across and what you will render. You have no control as to whether the next word will be beautiful or whether it will be pus. You were altered as a child, altered so that you now have a new conduit for strangers to directly access the deepest part of you. Maybe you think the way out is through. It hasn't worked yet, but what other option do you have?

...

When you're reading, you're doing a lot of the work. The tool, once implanted, still requires an operator, a host. There is no soft pink petals fallen onto the warm green grass without your help. There's no distant lighthouse without you and the pale yellow you can help but see is your own personal creation. These letters are cheap and the real work can be outsourced to you if you have the right implant, so you've been fixed. You can think of it as a joint effort. The words lie there in a particular order for you to bring to life the way only you can. That inner sanctum is yours and you've just been opened up to more through your training and calibration. You can think you're ultimately in control and that you can exploit what's been done to you. Who's to say otherwise? Who is to deny that? Who is to stop you from getting tired and distracted and losing your focus enough to drift off. Who's to tell you that the lamp is now red, not yellow, now green and now blue. It flickers and grows too bright and it buzzes and hums and now red and now out and black. A figure steps over and clicks the lamp on. He, it seems, then sits next to it and opens a book and looks in.

He is absorbed in the book though it's not clear what the title is or what sort of book it is. Books are generally elusive things. A single book can simultaneously be 1.5 pounds and 300 pagers and written in the 1800s and translated from the original French. A single book can weigh two kilos in hardcover and one kilo in paperback. This book looks to be about 500 pages, hard dark green cover. From this vantage point, the man reading seems to know more about it.

He reads for an hour in silence, pausing occasionally to scribble in a notepad and hold a pen to his lips and stare at the ceiling. He's sitting on an old couch and is wearing brown perhaps woolen pants and an olive green sweater. His age is not clear but he has a large brown mustache. He stirs and readjusts himself a number of times before setting down the book and sanding up. Over in the corner of the room is a large trunk, creased and grey with age not hanging from any elephant. The man walks over to it and stoops to open it. He pulls out a heavy quilt and drapes it over himself now lying on the couch, head propped by a pillow. He continues to read for a time but eventually closes his eyes and the book. The books slides though and out of his hands and onto the floor. The light buzzes, turns pink, now green, then red and flickers out into black.

...

You are currently reading these words. You also have a body, a body that has been with you your whole existence. You can feel the weight of your body, pulled toward the earth and you're feeling it right now. These words draw you towards them just like the earth does. The difference of course is that it was never in the cards that you wouldn't be pulled toward the earth, but it could have been the case that you never learned to read. The gravity of these words is chance and artificial and they could easy have no pull on you if you couldn't read. But here you are nevertheless, pulled into the orbit of this one and now these two and these ones and this two. 

You could have in some life not known how to read. Most people who have ever lived didn't read, were illiterate. And it's really only the last century or two that it's become so ubiquitous. But you do know how to read, you can read, but that is kind of misleading. It's not just that you 'can' or 'know how' to read. You have to read. You can write, you know how to write. Put a pen in your hand and you can write, but you also can not write. You have a choice. Saying that you can read hides the harsh truth: you have no choice, you have to read, upon seeing a written word. Saying that you can read  implies you have any say in the matter. A page of text is an iron cage, an iron cage that comes into rigid being just by you looking at it. You have to physically distance yourself or avert your gaze to not read. Otherwise, you must read. You can't stop. 

A whole was bored into your so-called mind's eye, an intimate venue, when you were a child. Now you will see a fingernail being clipped. Your finger is carefully clipped and smoothed. Now it's a stranger's fingernail, clipped. The first fingernail, yours, was clean and now it's nicely round and smooth and parallels the arced tip of your finger. The stranger's fingernail is dirty and the act of clipping pinches the skin. The pain is sharp but slight and annoying. You just read about some fingernails and the act of clipping them. Your finger with its neat and smooth fingernail is slammed in a car door. It's not severed of course but the knuckle is shattered. And the pain is inescapable. You don't look down at it and you are afraid that you might send instructions to flex it. But now your finger is fine and it was never crushed. Your finger is clean and smooth. The stranger's finger is not yours and it's very dirty. The stranger turns on the warm water and soaps up with an orange bar of soap and scrubs until his hands are very clean, like yours. He walks into the kitchen and pulls some carrots from the refrigerator and beings to chop them into coins on the cutting board on the countertop. He cuts them slowly and pauses and looks upward and sighs. He leaves them on the cutting board and sits at a table. At the table he puts his head in his hands, the base of his palms over his eyes and his fingers spread upwards against his face towards his temples and beyond.

The pieces of carrot are sitting on the cutting board. A piece of carrot is obviously not a carrot itself, just a piece. A carrot is something else, something more somehow. There There are pieces of paper on the table in front of the man and a piece of paper is also not a paper. But a paper is not something else. Pieces of paper are not parts of a paper the way that pieces of carrot are parts of a carrot. The man has made pieces of carrot from a carrot, but he has no say with the paper. There never was a paper to make pieces from, and instead the pieces of paper were, if anything, made from another piece of paper. Pieces of paper all the way back. The man collects the paper pieces and stacks them in one column. One by one, he looks at them and reads the ones that have writing on them. Before the column is depleted, the room goes black. You can see the black. It's your black, your own personal black. The black as written here is just an instruction to fetch and employ your secret black and you unfailingly obey those instructions. You obediently retrieve black and horse and whatever else. You hurry as fast as you can, on command, to access whatever you're instructed to. Even when the instructions are not clear like big or very big or which type of concessions, you try your best. 

This is true of eyesight and hearing and other senses, but that was unavoidable and is different. It takes ongoing effort for someone to affect you with spoken words this way. They vanish immediately and if you're a moment late, you won't even have heard them. Pictures, images are less ephemeral, but they do not give you the precise instructions, and moreover they don't outsource as much to you to conjure up your own personal secret image, like mother. The written word can lie in wait like a landmine indefinitely, like a tree falling in the woods just for you. 

You cede control and do the bidding of the written word. This position was forced upon you by people more powerful than you. You were a child, what would have happened if you had refused? It's too late and there's now an extra and artificial bore hole in to your secret place. A man is in a living room. He walks to a side table near a couch and picks up a framed photograph of a young woman with a child. He carries the photograph with him as he lies down on the couch. He seems to stare at the photograph. The woman and the child are not smiling and they are slightly squinting as if facing a bright light. They are standing on the front porch of a house and there is a flowering bush to their right. The picture isn't perfectly focussed which lends it an air of distance and their clothes suggest the picture was taken over 20 years ago. The child is barefoot and so is the woman. The man notices a cat's tail in the dirt beside the bush near the edge of the frame. The man's eyes linger on that tail. That cat is long since dead now. Whatever joys or fears or experiences it had have been so entirely obliterated that to try to recollect them demands recourse to some general cat stock made particular by conscious fantasy. The cat lying in the sun, hiding from the vacuum, monitoring flies some afternoon, you know how cats are. The number on the porch is 6926, the house on Hoyt where he spent his first few years of life. The house where his parents, then in their 20s, comprised a little unit trio with him.

When he was 17 the man received in the mail a brochure for the local vocational school. At the time, he was very ambitious and the idea that any such school would be remotely appropriate for him would have made him laugh, had it ever crossed his mind. His mother idly wondered whether he might be interested in taking a class there. He reacted with bald scorn and belittled the sort of people that he imagined would attend such a thing, thinking that the school functioned as a sort of palliative care center for those too inept to live. He reveled a bit in his superiority, sure that he was destined for better, more advanced things, better suited to his type. His mom said that she had attended that very school and that what he said had hurt her. He knew his mom hadn't really ever had a long-term job and what jobs she did have were relatively motley, seen from afar. He felt immediate and vertiginous remorse for what he had said and felt like he was a stranger to his mother. She still bore the same relation from his perspective, but felt that from hers, he must be no different than the countless cruel figures throughout her light that mocked and dismissed what they imagined to be her worth as a human.

The man sets the picture onto the coffee table face down and continues to meditate on his relationship with his mother. He envisions her teenage years and concocts some vintage world. All the old songs are being perceived as cutting edge and new. These well-worn songs that unavoidably seem to him to make up the very infrastructure of reality whose every next note is a forgone comfort are now rendered live and unpredictable fragile crests of a present now cascading forward into the future. His mother's life like his, new and avalanching. She, then, hopelessly unaware of the likely contours of life that were at hand before her, including an ungrateful son her age that would shrug and sneer the way her siblings and teachers do.

The man is older now than his mother was then, both thens. She, well, she's now still careening forward. The man sits quickly upright looking confused. He looks around the room and the room is still. He looks at his forearm and holds his gaze. His gaze is what you just read. You are reading this word and now these. You're not exactly a pawn, it's your own volition that leads you from letter to letter and line to line. But you are still reading this word and now these. Any character is an instruction to a subordinate. You are given a recipe and you make do with what you have. You make do with what you have to create something, to give life to a character in any way. The character is only incidentally and marginally controlled by you. You have to leave the text fuller control, but as long as you're here, the character lives upon your obedient efforts. As long as you're here the man sits on the couch and stares at his forearm. He turns his hand over and stares at his palms, stares at the creases in his palm. He thinks of his real, undeniable corporeality and how it yes it is inescapable and unavoidably subject to the invisible vise grip of time ushering him along, the same force that rent his mom from her teenage years and does not relent. Any action feels light and free, but how free can it be when you're in that grip. 

As a very young child he's told he would call out through the house awake now! after a nap. His mother says she would give anything to hear him say that again. That young child no longer exists and is dead in a way indistinguishable from the sort of death the man fears. That child, his thoughts and speech are obliterated just as much as his old cat, utterly unreconstructable. This dead kid went unmourned despite a loving family until now. The man looks at his forearm again and tries to relate that image to his kid but can only do so in some dry pedantic sense. That kid of course no longer exists, is dead, but he's not dead. Is he dying? At what rate? Well, honestly, it's the sort of question that's interesting only to the one asking it.

You see him jump up and hurriedly walk across the room and enter the bathroom. You can see him through the open doorway leaning into the mirror and staring into his eyes, feeling his face. He pulls away upright and looks up and around him and then he looks over his shoulder. He reaches for a chain and pulls it down, turning off the light.

The Perfect Rebirth

In the dark the idea is in his head. Only part of it can impinge here. It can at most impress the perfect rebirth as what might as well be English spelling. The Perfect Rebirth the idea throbs for him. The Perfect. Rebirth. 

He rises to seated on the couch and looks around. He lingers on the stove in the kitchen and the sink in the bathroom through the open doorways, You see him staring back and he closes his eyes to black. 

He stretches and yawns out of bed and slowly walks to the kitchen where he picks up a bowl and fills it with water. He sits at the table and spoons it into his mouth. When finished he pours a glass of water and begins to drink. He walks into the living room and unscrews the lightbulbs in the lamp on the side table to the couch. The room becomes darker, but it's still light enough to read. It's clearly still light enough for you to read too. He reads closely from the old book, tracing his fingers across the words. A certain passage he traces and retraces over again. He mouths words silently and the with small murmurs.

The Perfect Rebirth is just dark lines grouped into symbols against white for you. You are shown just the arid, brittle hint. But however a denatured, feeble debasement of what he knows as                         , you are compelled to go through its motions and play puppet to its mute and desiccated puppeteer. The idea waxes and subsides with him but you can only be haplessly strung along by rs and fs from e to e. You can supplement this with your own ideas. You are welcome to try. You are currently free to try.

The man has thrown his book into the incinerator chute and he has snapped and drained his pens, laughing. He has unscrewed all the lights in the apartment and smashed them. He has a candle in the kitchen to eat his water by. The One and Perfect Light. He's getting closer and needs traditional light less and less. 

He sits at the table with the candle in front of him. The room is otherwise dark aside from the aura around the candle. He moves his lips repeating and the room grows brighter, not from the candle. The candle now casts a shadow onto the wall, except of course for the flame, which throws its own light instead of a shadow. The candlestick appears against the wall. The man murmurs and the light grows. Slowly the outline of the flame appears as a shadow against the wall. The man screams and the candle goes out as the room goes white.

I am reading these words. I am now, actually, the one reading them! I can see this this and I can read horse and it means something to me. I can feel the weight of my body. It feels like it has always been my body. I feel like I have always been me, there are no seams. It is really miraculous. I'm still me! It worked! I am a man. No matter what, I am a man and I am free. I am in charge. I can feel this will, my will. I can feel my body, which is a man's body, mine. Something is happening and I have important things to do.

the big room

Something is happening. I walked to the grocery store yesterday and it was very sunny, no clouds, but the light was different. It was bluer and also had more of an iridescence to it. And instead of all things expressing their own light, the way a red car seems to be responsible for its own red, it instead felt like I was in a giant room, a room so big that you can hardly fathom it, but still very much an enclosed room. It was an impossibly large room with space for everything, and it had one source of light. The objects around me, the street pavement, the cars, the seagulls, the houses on the hills, the hills themselves, all had the quality of things in a room with a single source of light and that this source was responsible for the colors, painting all the colors, not the objects themselves. 

The source was above my head and to the left, but facing in that directions was hardly bearable. The light, bluer and more iridescent, was too powerful. The brightest thing, which made its presence in the giant room so utterly dominant and its effects so utterly ubiquitous, became all that I could think about. And even though I couldn't look at it or hear it, or smell it, or directly apprehend it in any way, it suffused me. This thrilled me. It was not simply miraculous, it was a real and immediate, ongoing miracle and I was part of it. And it's still happening