CAPS LOCK RANT: At people who voted for Donald Trump and now say, "It's only an election"

I HAVE A SNEAKING SUSPICION YOU WOULD ALSO SAY, "STOP CRYING. IT'S ONLY CANCER."

DON'T EVEN SAY THINGS ARE GOING TO GO ON AS USUAL. SO FAR, THE MAN YOU ELECTED HAS DESIGNATED A RAVING CLIMATE CHANGE CONTRARIAN TO HEAD THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY'S TRANSITION TEAM, MADE A WHITE SUPREMACIST HIS CHIEF STRATEGIST, AND MADE A FRINGE SENATOR WHO EVEN REAGAN SAW AS TOO RACIST TO BE HIS ATTORNEY GENERAL. IN A NUTSHELL, HE'S APPOINTING PEOPLE TO DESTROY THE INSTITUTIONS THEY HEAD. AND WE'RE JUST A WEEK OUT OF THE ELECTION.

AND STOP WITH THIS BULLSHIT ABOUT GOD BEING IN CONTROL AND SEEING MORE THAN WE DO. 1) THERE MOST LIKELY IS NO GOD. SORRY. 2) DONALD TRUMP WOULD AGREE WITH ME ON POINT #1, IF HE WERE TO ACTUALLY GIVE IT ANY THOUGHT BEYOND HOW IT WOULD GET YOU TO VOTE FOR HIM. 3) IF THERE WAS A GOD AND THAT GOD IMPOSED DONALD TRUMP ON OUR COUNTRY, THEN GOD HATES THE U.S.A.

THIS WAS NOT "JUST AN ELECTION," THOUGH IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN THE ONLY ELECTION IN WHICH YOU ACTUALLY VOTED. AND DON'T SAY YOU VOTED FOR OBAMA THE LAST ELECTION, OR TRUMP'S ELECTION IS NO WORSE THAN OBAMA'S. YOU JUST VOTED FOR THE LEAST QUALIFIED CANDIDATE OF OUR LIFETIME, IF NOT AMERICAN HISTORY. IF YOU THINK THAT'S A GOOD THING, I INVITE YOU TO HAVE THE PERSON IN SEAT 6C (OR WHATEVER SEAT, YOU CAN CHOOSE) NAVIGATE THE PLANE ON YOUR NEXT FLIGHT. IF YOU SEE OUR COUNTRY'S GOVERNMENT AS THAT PLANE AND YOU WANT IT TO CRASH, THEN YOU ARE THE PERSON IN SEAT 6C NAVIGATING THE PLANE.

I got nothing. But I promise I'll have something tomorrow.

So, a week has passed. It seems like much, much longer. I went to Standing Rock, and my country has a new president. I just finished writing a piece about my trip, and now I have to think on this new, ugly reality.

Ah, well. More Sneaky Feels starting tomorrow, and I promise you'll be reading about me and Standing Rock soon.

Let the real conversation begin.

Thanks to my colleague and teaching partner Nayma Qayum, I'll be discussing this recent piece from The Atlantic with my classes today as we begin our section on persuasive writing, with a focus shifted toward argumentation-as-understanding. Tomorrow I will vote, and the day after that I will be heading out to Standing Rock with Bill Housworth, an ardent Trump supporter who is also one of my oldest friends. We'll undoubtedly argue constantly and joyfully, as only people who understand each other as people can argue, when we're not too busy finding common ground in the mutual work we're doing and our shared heritage. It's going to be a very good week.

Sneaky Feels #16

The last Sneaky Feel of this week's residency is an intentional anti-climax. Enjoy our shared quotidian middle, friends.

Sneaky Feels #15

True story: I mostly dictated this one into my iPhone while driving down 9A one Thursday night (evidence below). Read it here!

Sneaky Feels #14

Day 3, and I'm gonna hit you hard with this one. We all get the feels, but what are you going to do?

Sneaky Feels #13

It's Day 2 of the Awst Press residency and here comes Sneaky Feel #13, in which Sylvia Plath and discomfort coexist in awkward liminal space (I know, big surprise).

Rave on, Sneaky Feelers!

Sneaky Feels #12

Today marks the first day of the Sneaky Feels' weeklong residency at Awst Press's website! They'll be posting one a day all week.

Here's Monday's, #12, in which we go on the road, or On the Road, as the case may be.

Two more Sneaky Feels this week, then the Spooky Sneaky Feels Spectacular next week!

Ok, so I'll put up two more SF's tomorrow and Friday, then next week is Awst Press's turn to host them! Tatiana Ryckman has chosen five new ones that fit together quite nicely, I think. Hope you do too.

Announcing the Sneaky Feels, on Awst Press!

I'm ultra-excited to announce that some lucky Sneaky Feels will have a special place with the wonderful Awst Press during the last week of October! Five special, all-new Feelies have been assembled by editor Tatiana Ryckman for a limited (read: into online perpetuity) run that week, one a day Monday through Friday. It's a Halloween Spectacular (that really has nothing to do with the holiday)!

Big Sneaky Feels announcement tomorrow!

I can't wait to tell you about it! In the meantime, here comes another one!

A little locker room talk.

I know, this "locker talk" stuff has been worked to death, but...

When I was in high school, I was on the football team. I didn't play much, but I was on the team. I remember plenty of "locker room talk," whether it was in the locker room or at the lunch table or wherever. One guy, in an intimate moment, confessed that he'd lost his virginity the previous weekend by raping an unconscious girl at a party. (He of course didn't use the word "rape.") I remember being deeply disturbed, but saying nothing; he was a big guy, and no one else seemed to think he did anything wrong. But I still think about that guy. In fact, when I hear Donald Trump and his "locker talk" I think of him and hope he feels a deep remorse that Trump seems incapable of.

But there was another guy on the football team who was at that lunch table, or locker, or wherever it was this rapist made his disclosure. That other guy, who is still my friend, would be embarrassed if I named him, so I won't. But I remember him waiting silently until the talk died down and he had their attention. "She's very young to have gone through that," he said, and got up and left. That moment of empathy for a person we'd collectively deemed just a body that got raped - I didn't say anything, so I was complicit - has stuck with me for twenty-five years as an act of courage and civil disobedience against a male culture intent on justifying and perpetuating its own violence.

Everything I told you is just talk, just like Donald Trump says his "locker room" conversation is just talk. But speech is action, just as silence is inaction. Not speaking out against a man running for our highest office who brags about sexually assaulting women is complicity in propagating rape culture, and it's not something for which we should easily forgive ourselves.

Playing hospital with my four-year-old just got real.

4YO: You've got bad blood pressure.

ME: Oh no. What do I do about it?

4YO: I don't know, some medicine? Maybe?

ME: For my broken arm?

The sad thing is, substitute a broken arm with pneumonia and blood pressure with high cholesterol, and that's pretty much my last visit with my previous primary care physician.

Damn, Daniel.

I had signups for revision meetings today in my freshman classes. I haven't really figured out a democratic way of ordering them, so I just put the signup sheet on my desk and told them to have at it. One of my students jumped out of his desk, hurdled another desk, and grabbed the paper to sign up.

ME: (In what I thought was a perfect meme voice) Damn, Daniel! (His name is Daniel.)

ANOTHER STUDENT: You already got some cred, Professor. But...Don't say that again.

Right? See ya, baby.

A student of mine who’s on the college baseball team just stopped me on the quad.

PLAYER: Hey, we’re meeting in the library today, right?
ME: No, the librarian’s coming to our class.
PLAYER: Oh yeah, that was in that email you sent, right?
ME: Yes.
PLAYER: I have you in like two classes today, right?
ME: No, just one.
PLAYER: Ah, yeah. <Does that snap/point thing in my general direction while walking backwards away> See ya, baby.
ME: <silence>

Here come the Sneaky Feels!

No, I haven't started an art-pop band, though that would be a great name for one. I've just had a lot of the feels sneaking up on me lately. I've also been feeling a bit, um, non-productive with my writing, busy as I've been with teaching and fussing over an essay collection that I'm so, so tired of looking at.

So, in the Two Birds With One Stone school of thought, I've been writing my sneaky feels as they come to me - on the train, late at night, alone or with my family, sitting at my office desk, whatevs. I'm just trying to get back to the joy and horror and fuckitallness of producing words that mean something to me without knowing exactly what they mean.

I've been doing it for about a week, trying to catch at least one sneaky feel a day. Some have been shit, but some have felt ok enough to share. If anything, it's been nice writing without the pressure if thinking it has to become something. I decided sometime last weekend that maybe I'd start sharing some them here (but only the good ones). I picked out three, gave them a little revision to at least make them vaguely readable, and I'll put them up today, tomorrow, and Friday. I'll try to put a few up each week. I am finding that they share some formal attributes, but I make no promises to stay within them for future feels. Because of course, that's not how the feels work.

Feel free to share your own feels in the comment section. I'd change it to the feels section, if Squarespace would only let me.

My piece on teaching from The Best American Essays is up!

I wrote this critical piece as part of the Best American Essays Spotlight series at Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. The series also includes a fascinating interview with luminous BAE editor Robert Atwan, Jenny Spinner's "Best American Essays Series as (Partial) Essay History," and Lynn Z. Bloom's "The Great American Potluck Party." Great company to keep, methinks.

The Eternal Return of the Grievous Angel, now out in New Madrid!

With the start of school, the end of summer, et cetera ad nauseam, I somehow forgot to promote the publication of my longform essay in New Madrid Journal of Contemporary Literature! Thanks to Jacque Day for asking for it, and to Riley Hanick for editing it.

"I desperately wanted not to remember him as the beaten man fading into the walls of his rented flat, the hophead electrician some people of the town would undoubtedly use as an example of what can happen to anyone daring to step outside the bounds of conventional morality. No, I wanted desperately to remember the Blakean man-beast, pure energy bound by no reason, and the Nietzschean will to power, bound by no law, who could through the force of his own nature evade or destroy anything in his path, the world if necessary, and throw it all at my feet. I wanted him to be the myth I’d built around him."

...

"I saw across the table from me a man whose brother had just died, who couldn’t even allow himself to grieve—a man doomed to relive his mistakes until his own death, whose funeral the child to whom he’d given over his youth and his purpose would almost certainly not attend. I saw in him the immutable truth that we are all grievous angels, returning eternally to the scene of our first demise."

Scottish Places link and interface are up!

Ok, I promise this is the last I'll write about Scotland (for awhile, at least). I just put up a nice little interface, linked at the top next to The List and the Story. If by chance you haven't yet read that silliness yet, now you have it in a nice little package!

Scottish Places: Edinburgh

Wednesday, 6/1

The transition from coastal Highlands to urban Edinburgh was not entirely smooth. We spent roughly an hour circling Waverley Station looking for the Europcar rental dropoff, getting the distinct feeling, like centuries of other foreign invaders, that all these stone walls were completely impenetrable. After getting instructions from an annoyed man at the other end of a crackly speakerphone at the bus pickup to "take four straight left turns and keep going down" that were, incredibly, correct, I told the Europcar representative as my wife handed him the keys that I felt like we were in some heretofore undiscovered ring of purgatory. "That bad, eh?" he said, walking away. We then walked with our luggage the roughly half-mile to our AirBNB in the Grassmarket, a trek that seemed all uphill. Once we got to our apartment I took a short nap, and woke up with a bit more perspective. I always have a hard time adjusting when arriving in a city I've never been to; I think this might be at least in part because I want to feel at home immediately, as if there is some urbanite code I'm proxy to. But cities just don't welcome strangers that way. They might feign a welcome at tourist destinations like the Royal Mile and the Grassmarket where we were staying, but even a little perception makes it abundantly clear that this city, as with any city, existed well before you, and is functioning just fine without you, thanks. But the early glimpses are the ones that stay with a visitor - angles, openings, perceived familiarities, all of which greeted us when we left the apartment to venture forth into the Edinburgh evening.

The view from the door to our AirBNB apartment building

At the notable corner

We had dinner at a steak and mussel place, which allowed us to inject ourselves into one of the most aesthetically interesting urban street corners in the world. Then, determined not to waste a minute of our one day and two nights together in Edinburgh, we found a literary pub tour. Led by two actors, one of whom plays a bohemian drunk and the other a literary scholar, the tour started at the Beehive Inn at the Greenmarket public square. No photos were allowed on the trip, which I was fine with; it was an active and lively tour, and we definitely would have missed something if we'd taken time to snap photos. The two characters talked about Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others, all while negotiating with locals hanging out in the closes outside the pubs where we were hanging out, including a homeless man walking his bike and howling in pain at some unseen horror (during the Stevenson/Jekyll and Hyde segment, by the way). After the official part of the pub tour concluded on Rose Street in New Town, my wife and I hung out a bit with the two actors, free-associating about frankfurters, papaya, Stevenson's "Apology for Idlers," and curriculum development (my wife's ostensible reason for being in Edinburgh). I left thinking I had a possible essay that we collectively dubbed "Here We Go Again." This paragraph will probably have to suffice.

Thursday, 6/2

Edinburgh Castle was the first we visited that felt alive—not rebuilt or left in ruins, but crawling with activity. Government officials marched to their duties flanked by high-stepping military, cannons loudly saluted the noontime hour, a band marched playing the theme from Star Wars (brazenly playing Darth Vader’s entry music as a series of high-office officials walking into their building). If Stirling Castle felt like a once-teeming metropolis, Edinburgh Castle felt like the metropolis’s crown jewel. And it didn’t hurt that it actually houses the crown jewels.

Next to Edinburgh Castle is the Camera Obscura, which houses more than a century of optical illusions, musical contraptions, magic even. We ascended too quickly for me to know this for sure, but I got the feeling going from the first through the sixth floor and onto its roof that each floor took us further into the past, to the root impulse of the original camera obscura—taking the real and making it unreal. This alone allowed me to contextualize the unreality of the spinning tunnel thing on the first floor that had me clutching the rails dizzily despite the room not moving at all, and the sense, in the dark with a roomful of other tourists, that I was watching the street below with a child’s awe, not as a piece of contemporary infrastructure but as an ancient, ageless reflection that our barker could manipulate simply by moving the mirrors.

We spent a half hour observing Scottish Parliament at the startlingly modern building (so modern, in fact, that I found it too ordinary to photograph). During our time there they were arguing about benefits and entitlements for the elderly and disadvantaged - similar issues our American congress argues, though we're only allowed to observe it on C-SPAN. I couldn't help thinking how I've now seen in person more of the inner workings of Scottish government than my own.

Perhaps the only aspect of the Edinburgh landscape that can overshadow Edinburgh Castle is Holyrood Park, a gargantuan lump of land on the other end of the town square that we could see from every vantage point in town. From a distance it looks like a single mountain was removed from the highland coast and dropped onto the city near parliament. At its peak is the mystical Arthur's Seat, which may be but was probably not the site of King Arthur's Camelot. As we approached the mount, we looked at the map of possible ascents, but decided to to follow the trails that generally went up. Either we seriously underestimated the time and distance to the top, or we took the longest way possible. Either way, it was worth every step. We traversed stone steppes (that spelling just feels right here) and vein-like paths up and around the goliath, looking up and down a green and blue and dots of yellow gorse all around us. We saw the ruins of St. Anthony's Chapel and followed blackbirds around the bends, where they caught wind and floated in the breeze coming from the water we didn't know until then surrounded Edinburgh on most sides. And when we reached the top together, I looked at my wife and felt a fire burning inside me that was so intense I thought my chest would combust. And I looked at the other people gathered around Arthur's Seat - parents with small babies, teenage and twenty-something friends, speakers of languages I didn't understand - and for these moments I was completely sublimated in a beloved community of fellow wanderers, souls joined together at this summit for just these few specks of eternity.
 

Steppes

The veins

St. Anthony's Chapel

Arthur's Seat

I must qualify, before saying another word to recount my two days in Edinburgh, that it rained not a drop during any hour of our stay. I felt a little guilty when I read Stevenson's words from the first couple of paragraphs of his essay "Edinburgh" in the Scottish Poetry Library on our way back from Holyrood Park: "The ancient and famous metropolis of the North sits overlooking a windy estuary from the slope and summit of three hills. No situation could be more commanding for the head city of a kingdom; none better chosen for noble prospects...But Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest climates under heaven. She is liable to be beat upon by all the winds that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out of the east, and powdered with the snow as it comes flying southward from the Highland hills." From this and from all I understand about Edinburgh - hell, about Scotland - I feel the need to equivocate that our stay should be taken with a grain of salt, or perhaps as a grain of sand, miscolored but not prominent enough to be noticeable in the vastness of the lovely town's historical landscape.

Friday, 6/3

I left Edinburgh first thing in the morning. My wife walked me to the commuter bus just after sunup. Riding through New Town, I wondered if I would ever get to know this city any better. While on the moving walkway on my way to my plane at the airport, I noticed a quotation from historian Murdo Macdonald: 

This got me to thinking about my initial comeuppance on entering the city, and the deepening sadness I felt as I got to know it better, knowing how little time I had here in Edinburgh, in the highlands, on this stony archipelago. Cities—like the land and sky, like people—are never completely knowable. Every person to interact with them, whether for a day or a week or a lifetime, brings upon them one’s own preconceptions, expectations, and mythologies. In this way, they are maps for finding ourselves.