So, my bookclub is reading
Atlas Shrugged. I'm a fan. I've been a fan since I was 14. It took me two months to read
The World is Flat, not because I don't find the topic matter interesting, but because I don't find the topic matter moving. And I've been known to, many times, find trade policy moving. So it's not that. It took me 2-days to re-read all 1000 pages of
Atlas Shrugged. Because I still find the concepts moving.
Don't get me wrong. Like any explanation of a philosophy, it's over simplified. Not all people who "produce" are purists, not all people who need carried along are weaklings who should be despised for it, not all of the value of society is in production as opposed to higher values of humanity. And seemingly in the last two sentences discussing how there's so much generalization and oversimplification, despite all 1000 pages, I just generalized and over-simplified, but work with me.
There are many things that one thinks about when one reads Ayn Rand. I most often think of the town I grew up in. It was, undeniably, the type of small, midwestern town that sitcoms are made of. A small college meant we had big libraries and access to all kinds of things not normally found in a small town. But being a small town meant we painted the road on the way to the high school football field with Trojan heads every football season, had a community Halloween parade and often didn't lock our doors at night. Soon in this entry, I'm going to talk about the failings of a town like this, but let me start it out by saying that, as I think we all know, I was grateful for growing up there in many ways and grateful that now, at almost 32, I can say that my stories of childhood include all of the following:
- The day Pookie when went to play in the woods and came home to tell me that he'd found the Forsythe brothers down there building a tree fort and by the end of the day all the local boys were building said tree fort
- The days when Catwoman, J-Flo and I would drink Pepsi, eat German Chocolate cake and play cards, and then eventually go sit on the porch swing and actually watch traffic
- The day J-Flo and I were racing "Soup" down the hill by our high school after school and we lost control of the car and wrecked -- into a corn field
- The day we hazed Pookie by making him sing Alice in Chains in front of the entire high school cafeteria
- The fact that my yearbook picture for "Most Outgoing" is actually a picture of me and my actual BOY NEXT DOOR (literally) walking out of my high school's front doors (get it? "outgoing?")
- The fact that my friends could walk into my house any time and my mom would feed them and we'd all sit around the dining room table
- The day one time when my parents left me alone for two weeks in the summer when Catwoman and I came home and J-Flo had broken in while we were gone and rearranged all of the furniture in the house. The same trip where I threw a party and came down in the morning to find all of my mother's drapes ripped from the curtains and being used as blankets. They were fiberglass drapes.
- Every single farm party.
- The fact that every time you took a walk around town, you had to stop every 50 feet to talk to somebody that you know.
And see, those things were good. I'm thankful for them. I look back on my youth and smile and am happy, probably much more than any of the people whom I still am close with who grew up there. But then again, I had it much easier than most of the people whom I'm still close to who grew up there. I wasn't a gay boy before
Will and Grace made it okay to be gay or a punk princess back when punk was still dangerous or poor or fat (though, you know, pudgier then) or a perpetual virgin or too smart or not smart enough or not involved or too involved or any of those things. So I probably have more smiles because I had less to make me not smile, and that's really my point.
There are many, many, many things you can point to about the town I grew up an and say "That's wrong." They were, at least at that time, all of the following:
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Homophobic: Where to start with these examples, eh? Here's a favorite: A daughter of one of my parents' friends decided to leave our public high school and go a private, all-girls school (the same private, all-girls school that I wanted to go to and that caused such dissention between my mother and I for a while). Upon announcing this, she still had to complete the last month of her current year in my high school, where she arrived to "dyke" or "dike" depending on the gradation of spelling disability of whomever was writing in Sharpee on her locker EVERY SINGLE DAY FOR TWO MONTHS. We won't even get into the story about one of my dearest friends and the car demolition.
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Racist: Joel and I still tell the mythological story of Jason M. He was my sweetheart and I adored him, but sadly it was rough to be anything other than white in our town. So one day, 15 white kids jumped Jason M. in the cafeteria (which by the way was actually a cafetorium because we were too poor for a separate cafeteria and auditorium so they were one in the same -- shit you not). And Jason M. fought the first ten of them off. Literally, he stood on a cafeteria table and flung white rednecks to the ground. And he would have ended up relatively unharmed if a teacher had stepped in and stopped the 15 white rednecks from beating the shit out of him. But they all just stood there until Jason eventually was outnumbered and knocked to the ground. By the way, he gave them the big Fuck You and is living happily now why they wallow in their various trailors (Oh I wish I could name drop right now, You know who you are). So there. My point is, not even the best teacher in the cafeteria that day had an interest in helping to save his ass.
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Religiously Stubborn: At my graduation, unprompted, my principal got up and said "There is a God and he does want to have a relationship with you." I started to get up and walk out in protest, but my darling boy next door held me down. That was mostly because we were walking partners for the recessional and he didn't want to be embarassed, but that doesn't take away from his being a good person.
Okay, and those three things are, you know, they make me naseous. For sure. But I actually kind of forgive people for that because it was what it was there. Now, some might say it's easier for me to forgive for that because it was always easier for me than it was for a lot of them. I know that some might say that because several have said that. And I'll concede that. But here's the thing about that town, and about towns like that, that made me the most crazy. CRAZY.
It really was a case where achievement based on hard work was appreciated, applauded, woo-hooed, but achievment based on natural ability was totally condemned. I actually think, if you want to get out of my immediate circle of friends, that Catwoman's brothers were some of the biggest victims I saw of this. Those boys, or for sure the middle one, were so smart. But because they didn't want to try and visit the library every day and try to be class president and newspaper editor and polite and learn how to work the system, they were SHUT DOWN. Two certain young gentleman whom I refer to often on this blog, the same thing. Catwoman, for sure the same thing. And there was a response to this in most of these kids. If the message was that no matter how good you were, you weren't good enough if you weren't putting in the same effort as everybody else, then you had no interest in being all that good. OR, OR, OR....more commonly, you wanted to be REALLY great so that you could leverage being great into getting the hell out of there. But once you were out, no matter what you did once you were out, no matter how many successes you had, you were resented for leaving. You come back to town and when you walk into the local bar they all give you the "You're not one of us" look and then proceed to talk about how you can't understand because you didn't stay.
For sure. I mean, what do you even want me to say to that?
Then, they ask you what you're doing. And you tell them. And no matter how good you've been, there's always something. You work in corporate world? ENRON! You're one of them! You live in a city? DIRTY! AND YOU ALL VOTED FOR KERRY. You took a trip outside of the country? WHY? DON'T YOU WANT TO SUPPORT AMERICA WITH YOUR VACATION DOLLARS? No kids yet because you're focused on other parts of your life? LESBIAN.I KNEW IT. YOU AND CATWOMAN, RIGHT? I mean, it's endless. And not infrequently, somewhere near the non-end of the endless, it's suggested that you have the big career, you should buy the next HUNDRED rounds of drinks.
I don't make this shit up. Ask Catwoman. Ask shamus. Ask (ILove) Paul Jack. Ask darthferris or Candy or Gary or J-Flo or anybody.
Last time we were both home, Catwoman and I had an email conversation afterwards about how going home made us feel, always a little confused about the warm parts versus the other parts, and she said it the most beautifully:
"It seems to me, that it doesn't matter if you spend 3 days or 2 weeks, something is always left unattended in the valley. Although that feeling lingers as you return to your life, like, what did I leave behind? What have I forgotten? What didn't I accomplish? Rest assured it will be drowned out by the jubilation of: I don't live there anymore I can wash the valley funk from my skin! I can walk to Starbucks! I have cell phone reception! I need tampons at 2 AM, no problem! I can feel pretty and dress to impress and not be treated like a freak! It's OK that I wear lip gloss to the gym! It's OK that my skin care regime costs more than my utility bills...."
And it's true. Because the contrast is that you can't take away the good. The stories about small town Halloween parties and the time Brad S. and Jim T. made me to to a Dwight Yokum concert and Starlake Ampitheater and the Charleroi Pizza Hut and Dennis P. climbing my parents' tree and front porches and basketball practice and the bus stop and my 18th birthday party and skateboards and all of that. But you always leave feeling unsettled. And of course the obvious answer is that you feel unsettled because you can't reconcile the warm parts with the fact that never since you left have you been somewhere where you are so essentially different from the people around you. And so you leave, wanting to feel the warm, but you have it checked by the feeling that there is something very different between you and those people who stayed there. And that those people are more like people everywhere. And that though you may have gone out and searched and surrounded yourself with people not like that, basically, what it means is that you are different from most people.
And that's the logic train that goes there until you get off the plane wherever you're headed and hear some language other than English being spoken and know that tomorrow you will go into work and people will care about accomplishment whether they make you crazy in caring about it or not. That nobody will say to you, in your real life which is probably not all that real, "You bought that at Target? Why would you shop there? It's so overpriced. I only shop at Wal-Mart. That's where real people shop." (Yeah, seriously, that's a real quote.)
It's not totally relatable to Ayn Rand. But I guess in a lot of ways it explains why I relate to Ayn Rand. And most of the people I love the most relate to her. And that's probably why. Because we don't know the feeling in the unrealistic black and white terms she usually puts it in, but we do know the feeling.
That is all.
Prince - "Black Sweat" 
summer heat
I'm so taking the week off.
