it's good! it's good writing! i love your writing. not just how much you know about music, how passionate you are about music, your _writing_, the way you _write_ about it.
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some thoughts.
i've never been to connecticut. when i think about connecticut, i think about new haven pizza. i don't think i've ever been to connecticut. i've only eaten new haven pizza here in portland. it's the second most popular city in the us for new haven pizza, so i'm told. it's good pizza. better than st. louis pizza or altoona-style pizza.
i'm not so much bemused by what regular people do as the idea that there _are_ "regular people", people like your customers. i see signs of them. i went to a movie last night and there were some realtors trying to leverage their queerness for business in the most entitled, white, cringeworthy ways. they seemed to be appealing more to straight people who wanted to perform "allyship" by having a queer realtor. i guess that makes sense. most of the queer people i know aren't exactly ready to buy houses in portland.
time is weird to me. i've lived in the past for years and now i guess i'm "cutting edge" by virtue of being trans but i don't feel cutting edge. i feel extremely archaic. this is the only place i'm on the public internet. even when i talk about the present i talk about it in terms of the past, the way it _used to be_. i don't want to talk about my present. when i was young they said "those who say don't know, those who know don't say". i don't think it's true. i don't know _how_ to say. easier to talk about...
but i am old, i've always thought of myself as old. i mean i'm younger than you, scott, but "you're only as old as you feel". i've felt old, always. "boomer" = "old". i grew up with this weird, like... i wanted to be a boomer. i wished i had been there in the sixties, when things seemed exciting, things seem like they _mattered_, and now i guess for better or for worse things are exciting and i'm somehow caught up in it just by, like. existing. i worshipped these people, i wanted to be like these people, and now the idea of the "boomer" - because it's a _mindset_, not an age, one can be a boomer at any age. there are people who are younger than me who are boomers. i call myself a boomer, because to them boomer is a slur, like cis is a slur, and it's not the _word_, it's how we _use_ it, and we use it that way because of _how they act_. and they don't understand. they don't know. that's the bemusement, to me. it's not that they don't understand other people, it's this _clinical lack of insight_. they know not what they do.
my favorite thing about the term "generation x" is that it was coined to describe boomers. my "generation's" name is a boomer hand-me-down. it seems appropriate.
Dogs are big here. I don't know how it is elsewhere. "Emotional support animals". Animals won't fuck with you like people will, is I guess how it is. My QPP's roommate has an ESA. Flash bites me. I don't know why. I'm not hostile to Flash. People did "no dogs allowed" like in that Snoopy movie so I guess they came up with ESAs so they could have dogs around and like. Everybody _is_ an emotional wreck, everybody I know. People make all kinds of compromises but sometimes, you know how it is. People set "boundaries" in ways that make other people responsible for their shit. And sometimes people use ESAs like that. Not always. Sometimes. So stores have signs up now saying "If you got a seeing-eye dog, fine, but no fucking ESAs please." Sometimes in those precise words. I was at a bar Wednesday that had a sign out front saying "We survived a pandemic, we'll survive your shitty Yelp review". I kinda like that attitude. It's very East Coast. The West Coast isn't necessarily known as a "fuck you" kind of place, but more and more I got that old East Coast "fuck you" feeling. Maybe there's not that much difference between East and West like there used to be, maybe there never was. The Brahmins are now boomers with weed gummies and you have them on either coast.
Learning to fake emotion, I know that as a trauma thing. When someone is in an abuse situation. You don't get to be yourself. I was listening this morning, coincidentally, to _The Gouster_, from Bowie's "Who Can I Be Now?" The chameleon. Grew up queer with a schizophrenic brother.
(REDACTED):
I am a new person every day
It's called self improvement
Kate Cavatappi — Today at 8:52 AM:
or sometimes 4. Identity disturbance with markedly or persistently unstable self-image or sense of self
That's the thing. It's all about _them_, it's always all about _them_, and they don't understand what it's like for everybody else to have to put up with their bullshit without being able to hold them accountable, because they have all the power, always have. All their life. To me that's the difference between them and the people who are "mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs and/or depressed and/or desperate and/or chronically ill, and/or dying of terminal diseases", to be a "boomer" means not confronting any of that, believing that one's going to live until 150, believing that Your Generation ended racism and saved the world and that the people who hate you aren't treating you LIKE YOU DESERVE TO BE TREATED. But they never treat anybody else, you know. The way they think they _deserve to be treated_.
Kate Cavatappi — Today at 12:25 PM:
I've always tried to live by the "treat people as you want to be treated" kind of person. Unfortunately I used to kind of hate myself so that caused a lot of problems...
It's good to read your post. I was asking about it the other day here... Is it me? Is it only me who lives in this situation, who sees these people? Is it only Portland? And from what you say it's not. What you say makes me feel like desperate people are everywhere. It's just hard to talk about and acknowledge, without fear or shame, and so people don't want to talk about it.
It's that contrast. The boomers with all the records and the desperate people, and the former are the latter but with money.
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we have a big queer woman population here of every age too and queer moms and non-moms alike also make up a good portion of our buyers. thank the heavens.and non-binary people. and the like. lots of younger queer folks. they didn't used to be such a big part of our customer-base. a lot of things have changed in general here since the pandemic. people moved to the country. all kinds of people. which is an awesome by-product of a terrible thing.
i WAS kinda lumping sad gen x dads together though. i basically meant people who reminded me of myself. slow. world-weary. heavy sighs. maybe not so quick to look at the records underneath because it means bending.
― scott seward
i was never able to dad because gender dysphoria and all but slow, world-weary... again, that's the out of time thing, i always had these old man vibes... there's a picture of me from when i'm 20 where i'm look like a 50 year old chain-smoking golfer in 1971. but it's also interesting to know that, again. it's not just portland. the queer people. the pandemic babies. queerness has changed _so much_ over the course of the pandemic, and I don't know if it's coincidental or if the pandemic brought about a sea change.
for me the pandemic was... even more than trump, it's, what's the term? "stochastic incompetence"? stochastic incompetence changed my life.
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i too really miss blogs. i had a blog between '20 and '22, a pandemic blog... it's the only way i can really write. i use ILX like a blog sometimes. i don't know what else to do, where else i can write that other human beings at least have a chance of reading. like i sad. i feel very out of time.
― Kate (rushomancy), Friday, 26 April 2024 20:53 (one month ago) link