The Clear Plastic Curtain - april 18th, 2006

We went to the Cock last night after Pupu Platter...i know you are going to be, like, "duh, Mike, welcome to adulthood," but I am so so so sos ososososososososososososososososo over the gay scene! And i suppose, over any contemporary effort at mixing fun for profit. I think I need to move to afghanistan or I need a husband or to become a scientologist immediately. I feel like I am behind a clear plastic shower curtain and the real stuff I want is on the other side of it...

Outside my window the trees are thankfully blossoming in a predictable, traditional way. But this winter, and now, I am surprising myself at how deeply conditional my feelings of security and hope rely on the reliability of the earth. I dont know about you, but I am so thankful to see crocuses and buds and spores in the air. But now, paired with the pleasure of their aesthetic beauty, i feel this inner drop, that the radical weather and changes in patterns are going to make this impossible very, very soon.....

Coming back from LA a couple months ago i fucking freaked myself out reading Field Notes to a Catastrophe while on the plane. There i was in my narrow Jet Blue middle seat reading about sogging permafrost releasing Co2 gasses, entire Eskimo villages ruined by high winds, the subtle change in rain and atmopshere causing the extinction of some salamander creature, a disastrous flowchart that seems to be unwinding and unwinding that i am powerless to. I dont know who to apologize to. I have always felt like the natural world was one of my best friends. I have always picked up my trash, and feel horrible for wasting water, hate it when I can't recycle, and seriously talk to trees when i sit under them. But there i was on the polluting plane, started breathing shallowly, encased in that vibrating plastic fuselage, with its reconstituted air that smnells like Band-Aids, all the unavoidable telescreens showing The Learning Channel's reality show construction hunks hammering away on wood, and I felt like the natural, sensual world was mad at me, personally.

I was at a party in the West Village recently and was talking to this editor-dude i know, about global Warming. I said, "I know, cant someone just assassinate the president so we can abide by the Kyoto Agreement and begin some rational environmental policy?" (well that sounds so much cleaerer than what i probably said, which i am sure was full of "like"'s and "Um's")

"i dont think its all Bush's fault," the editor said, as if i was being reductive. And, yes, its true maybe i was...but I DO blame Bush for so much. Sorry, but in the alternate reality of the universe, where Gore was elected, I can promise you we dont have nearly as many catasrophic hurricanes, terrorism paranoia, and US run torture prisons where detainees are being shot with paintballs for fun. "I think the key is to buy property in Montana." he said. "Yes!" said this successful visual artist. "Buy some land inland." And once again i was so disgusted by the fact that those who can afford it may survive the apocalypse. All of those Garden District-types in the world will ascend to their dry, protected renovated plantations while the rest of us Ninth Ward types are sitting on our roofs. (Yes i am aligning myself with the poor and black, while being a white gay guy. I dont care, this is my website. And anyway you shoudl see my fucked up apartment.)

I read this article in Rolling Stone last year about Tre Arrow, an ecoterrorist who had disappeared two years ago, wanted for several crimes, including scaling a US Forest Services Building and living there for 11 days. He was just arrested last month, buying bolt cutters at a hardware store. In the Rolling Stone article, when he was still at large, one interviewee said that he had probably gone into the forests, where many ecological "terrorists" were living, and that one group is building a society based on ecoloogical awareness and sensitivity to the earth, including a kind of religious element. That one sentence in that article is pretyt much the ONLY thing that makes me calm. I know involved in this is some need for me to know that mankind will survive. And i have such fantastic daydreams of being on a commune's council, as their Communications and Artistic Director -type...making sure that along with sustainable earth houses and self-sufficient farming, there was a dynamic, expressive art and performance scene, and then the fantasy widens even more to being some kind of angry revolutionary, collaborating with a group of women, men, and intersexed creatures and writing a new eco-constitution.

Oh how my mind drifts... I just want to know that somewhere there is the possibility of a community that matches the embracing 70's style education on my childhood -- Free to Be You and Me racial harmony, the kind, efficient, well-swept Sesame Streets, smiling Hopi children in my National Geographic early reading series helping their grandmothers make corn meal or chasing after happy poultry pets. Why was i ever shown this imagery if it isnt plausible? If it can't be, then why not just give me the pictorial autobiography of Donald Rumsfeld when i was learning to read?

Where is that communal forest family?..are you out there? People who want peace and like the sound of harmonies on guitars and harmonicas, who dont want to compete for guys in dark bars, and who believe that our thoughts are fungible forms of energy (eeek, i know i am walking on a thin line here...i am at risk of sounding like a follower of Ramtha or a Scientologist)...

i am officially casting my energy and efforts outward to you -- help me pierce the toxic, vinyl plastic curtain that i feel sealed within....