chapter one point oh three

Posted by eriktrips on

the ironies of becoming a white male have not escaped me although I am not entirely sure that this is what I have become so much as “male” describes the position where most people see me standing now. so many presumptions. I await my six-figure salary and will probably still be waiting next time we speak. expectations do not change so easily and neither do notions of entitlement no matter what they tell you it is not suddenly a free ride. that it were. that I had some idea of how to garner considerations and at the same time feel that they were my due. it still surprises me to be looked in the eye but at the same time it pisses me off that they didn’t used to. as though it were not me then or it is not me anymore. of course this is entirely possible but that is not the point.

I am neither alone nor in great company in saying I was once a girl or that is I thought I was a girl or I forgot that I had thought I was a boy for long enough that I sighed resigned to answer to girl for what looked to be the rest of my life until many years later when suddenly it was clear I did not have to do that anymore but and this is a subject that deserves a look in far greater complexity than I can give it in a reasonable number of words so it may be that the best way to put the question is to put it into questions. may it be for instance that a sense of personal infallibility and the birthright expectation that the world bow to one’s whims is a scaffold holding up bodies raged through with chemical stimuli to impulsiveness. but the structure itself would have taken a lifetime by which I mean between birth and something like adolescence or young adulthood that first lifetime that takes nearly all one’s life and then the race to the grave that first lifetime it would have taken to construct carefully any belief in my own perfect impenetrable authority nor was it delivered as a piece with the vial of testosterone that started my middle-aged puberty and its eventual effects the ones that have largely determined how the world will hail me and whether they will give credence to what I say those effects hardly extend to my longstanding and deeply impressed sense of my own chronic weakness and fallibility. that is the world hails a name to which I cannot answer if the answer they expect is one that assumes its own authority.

which also given that I write this at all may be ironic in its own way but writing has survived authority for quite some time by now. what you see written here is neither the truth nor a lie and in writing I do not mean to claim a position from which I could make out the essential difference between truth and falsehood regarding what has happened to the person called me. which is to say that memory even when it is not about something made up is still something made up about what is remembered. what has happened persists as a point around which memory orbits without the benefit of being able to look directly into that point as though it were bright as the sun without even the shield of our planet’s atmosphere so full of light that one cannot look at it without damaging one’s ability to see. if the sun is the furnace from which everything else will eventually emerge unable to recall its own origins a lake of fire at birth rather than death then perhaps the moment of trauma’s amnesia is also something like a fountain of sparks: a blindingly obscure source of potential material raw and naked awaiting a wardrobe it can only retrieve from within itself or by borrowing from its nursery-mates. and then you see do you not how we are related but not identical. you and me and anything upon which you can lay your finger.

but the idea that women can become men is ludicrous. by that I mean that it is an idea held as ludicrous as a corollary to essentialist notions of anatomically-determined gender. the idea that men can become women is terrifying and rage-worthy but that a woman might become a man is simply a laugh and hardly worth the speculation as to how it might be achieved. of course there is no way to penetrate the stronghold of tightly held sphincters of present-day American masculinity or that is most of the people around me who have ever given it a second thought never give it a second thought. oh you mean you are really a girl. wow you certainly look the part. you are a master of disguise. I never would have guessed. you pass completely.

not that I haven’t been humored and cajoled by the more obviously well-meaning and not that the general anonymous public when confronted with just me wearing everyday clothes is any the wiser. they expect me to think I am right when I do not and cannot having listened quietly to the many ways in which I was not to be allowed into the hall of authorial will and perhaps this is just me but whatever authority I am granted in a given situation disintegrates upon receiving the slightest push into a series of increasingly panicked interjections issuing from a kind of free-fall that can never be anticipated properly. without some tangible indication from another party that I know what I am talking about I have no clear idea as to whether I do or not and that is why in general I soft-pedal argument until I have simply had enough and must walk away. or if with a trusted friend I will break out into some hyst-/testerical rant spewing fifty-cent words this way and that because they are all that protect me from being torn to pieces.

which happens anyway.

the mystery of entitlement or that it is a mystery ensures that I will hold my tongue in most face-to-face conversations with men for whom entitlement does not appear to be any sort of mystery at all. how it must feel to believe that one is simply right and that one should simply be listened to! it may be true that I could open my mouth and be greeted with silence from others but having been a girl at thirteen fourteen or so and especially having already been a violated girl by age eleven I learned to take my cue from the exigencies of self-preservation which generally dictated that I say nothing and furthermore that I cast a withering eye at any emergent self-confidence with which, say, education might be providing me or experience might be teaching me if I were allowed to trust my own experience.

which I was not. like most children of the sixties and seventies I was told what I was allowed to feel as well as what was the right way to think about anything.

this is one story among tens of thousands if not millions and you will get a different one from whomever you ask for one. this was not what I meant and here is not where I expected to have arrived or rather although I was aware that arriving was neither a possibility nor a desirable goal I was not prepared to pass through where I have passed through those times I have passed through where I have passed through. there is no clean transition or that is I have not experienced one. the sequelae of emerging queer and bleeding-hearted in the thick of Southern Baptist rituals of mythopoetic abuse persist with or without an ambiguously-gendered appearance and with or without constant social reinforcement.

condescension feels pretty much the same as it always did although I have lost somewhat the ability to swallow my rage whole and entire and for years on end but this is not so much a consequence of changing gender presentation as of meticulously excavating and decommissioning a vast backlog of psychological defenses which has left me arguably healthier but evidently more brittle.

laying this all out here seems foolhardy but at the same time unavoidable and necessary and futile and without remedy. as though I pick up a broken pencil and a torn sheet of waxed paper having in mind to design a storm-proof, earthquake-proof, termite-proof, rust-proof architectural miracle. but the means they are not inadequate they are completely out of hand even as I try to grasp them.

on the other hand I can state fairly confidently that it is better not to be stared down by middle america when standing in line for the bathroom than it is to be scrutinized for signs of bodily protrusion by people whose worst fears may be standing next to someone like me in a place where we all have to compromise our safety in order to relieve ourselves of the various wastes of metabolism and respiration. The whole restroom ordeal is the focal point of an as-yet unheard stress and and unmitigated pain in the lives of the not strictly gendered and there was a time in my life when I found middle to aging ladies the most intimidating persons to have to deal with while trying to get to a place to pee.

men on the other hand will do anything possible not to look at you as you make your way into a stall so no one in the men’s room even knows what you look like much less cares although I have to ask you this and that is why is there a glory hole in the stall at school. We’re talking several flights of stairs to get to academic offices tucked into a corner of the building so it is not as though men looking for anonymous blowjobs roam the hallways there in large numbers.

or maybe they do. maybe I don’t know the men in my department very well.

I did not recognize the glory hole for what it was when I first saw it as it was my very first glory hole and after a lifetime of hearing the glory hole mythologized I never, I suppose, expected actually to run into one. of course this inability to recognize the glory hole was only exacerbated by the fact that for thirty-five years I only went into women’s rooms where you will find no glory holes and indeed very little acknowledgement of the tacit sexuality of the public restroom. that and in this particular men’s room people had been poking pen-sized holes through the plastic stall wall for some time which holes I supposed were for catching furtive glimpses so when a hole two and a half inches in diameter appeared my first thought was man. they must really want to see.

it dawned upon me at length.

which realization was helped along having noticing certain spatters which would have otherwise had to come from say a squirt gun although I suppose in a way they did. I thought you all used tissue or towels.

you wonder don’t you why they would build men’s stalls with easily perforated polymer given the myth of the glory hole a myth so widespread that denizens of women’s rooms know all about their function–if not their appearance–years before ever seeing one. interestingly this glory hole is perfectly, smoothly circular. is there a specialized tool for this or do humanities students at Berkeley carry cordless drills in their book bags?

the glory hole complicates considerably my efforts to pee unnoticed. at least once a day though someone stuffs toilet paper into it but oddly before the end of that day the wad of paper will be removed which makes me wonder just when the thing gets used. in any case I for some reason do not want to be the killjoy who blocks the hole so instead I do all I can not to be exposed before anyone who might be in the next stall. because regardless of its intended purpose, the glory hole is large enough to reveal to anyone looking pretty much anything they might be looking for.

and so it goes. when I was a small child I thought that grown-ups knew what they were doing and had complete control over and confidence in those great details I imagined they seriously and soberly concerned themselves with. it is not precisely that I expected to be handed an owner’s manual but I did think that life’s educating effects would have the effect of educating me about anything I would need to know when the time came to deploy that knowledge in the service of living life well.

today I do not know anyone who is not absolutely confused. people younger than I am, people older than I am: all completely confused. There are some who handle that confusion more gracefully or artfully than others and there are some who consign it to a sealed and padlocked chamber buried deeply underneath such an overly-optimistic mythopoiesis that it posits clear rules and clear penalties for breaking those rules but the confusion remains. occasionally it shifts position and all the clarity of centuries of revelation is shaken violently to the point where frantic prayers and petitions are unleashed in such volume that the words themselves form enough of a pattern that anyone who needs to see a concrete structure at work in the cosmos can easily project one through the interstices.

 
 
 
 
 

Chapter One continues

in two weeks

chapter one point oh two five

Posted by eriktrips on

it was sweat. I recognized it because I had sweated before. there were arms and legs asking to be let through to be moved past and not knowing the etiquette I let them. the question of who is indulgent of whom is not clear when it is also not clear just where on the spectrum between rival and trick the requesting party might stand. I noticed that if I stared too long at for instance that one muscular waist in the plunging evening dress they would stare back and I not being ready to commit looked away.

having spent so many decades learning to negotiate the social requirements of those completely unlike me I had no idea how to behave around these strangers with whom I had almost everything in common except that I did not either and I do not say this to be self-consciously postmodern but to indicate that the everything and the nothing are not mutually exclusive as we in what is sometimes called the West seem to believe.

commonality among the uncommon: arms and legs slipped past and kept slipping past as there was no end to the wanting to go here or there or back again and when the show was over they all rushed for the door hoping I suppose to let the sweat dry a little. then it was a matter of not getting carried away.
but before that before the release of have a good night set loose their joyful quest for air one by one a kind hand or a discreet knee would make its acquaintance and then press on leaving that mark to smolder in its wake a note of a wish so casual it vanished into the crowd with the moment which called it out.

once standing in a line I let her put her hand on my chest. I didn’t know who she was and she was dirty and she was drunk but she was only looking to make friends and asked liquid manners stirring crinkled rimshot eyes palm up can I touch you. ok. lightly her hand on the thin cold layer of my summertime shirt one beat two from far away a rumbling stampede I stepped back her fingers floated alone for a moment she swaying just beneath her own notice. I will never forget her and she will never remember me. either way nothing can come between us or nothing can interpose itself at that one point when nothing came between us.

in the zoo they all sleep in a heap.

it is true that I am a rank novice.

later on or that is sometime before but later on than some other time—and there is no way to explain this fully although something about the explaining is exactly it—but later on there was this one song and although I remembered it a certain way and it showed up years later as a slightly different way I knew it was the one I originally knew but in its temporary reincarnation I could not quite place it or reconstruct the stature it had assumed in that part of my memory that had stopped at precisely the point when the song drew me away from the chaotic cruelty of roller-skating middle school children casually tormenting one another and into a soft and insulated trance gliding without effort around the wooden rink which is not to say I skated well—most manifestly I did not—only that at the time skating was a private ritual undertaken in public and in which I was aware of music and of velocity but not much else. or at least not when this one song played.

as though the memory and the thing remembered were not particularly related and yet the thing remembered carried a ghostly reminder of the memory. how to outline the disjunction that was the closest of relations to the extent that I could not place the exact difference between the two except that this one note did not quite fall where I remembered it falling but I knew that this note was the very one which had sunk into memory and come out just enough different as to make me unsure or unable to recognize the note that had engendered the memory.

it is as though spelunking showed up details completely different from the ones on the charts but the details as they showed up presented themselves lethally and with occult powers and that only these could account for what the charts had become in their absence.

although that is not entirely the case. the account for what the charts had become in their absence proceeds at least partially from the charts themselves motivated by who knows what other than the charting and that is exactly what remains of the empirical in the end.

I was playing pinball one evening at the skating rink quite unaware of how pinball was scored but knowing that keeping the ball in play was a good thing when a boy I had never seen before rolled up to me and asked if anyone had ever told me I was ugly. no one ever had. I informed him of this fact. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant—did he really want to know if anyone else had been so disturbed by my appearance that they chose to alert me to their discomfort rather than just stop looking? my answer left neither of us with anything to say. I did not scream or cry or curse him or even look at him so he left and I continued to flip the ball around trying to make sense of what had just happened. no one has asked me that question since or that is no one who lives outside of my head has asked it.

as far as I remember I never met up with friends at the skating rink but was always avid to go alone just so that I could for instance skate to this song or another song because to me the point of going was to skate and not to talk. occasionally someone would push me or poke me or giggle at me or mouth some incomprehensible joke at me and then laugh presumably at my expense but none of this registered beyond the bewilderment I still feel when people I do not know approach me in the street to ask me something.

but so if I never was able to make sense of the social mores of the skating rink it is because they had nothing to do with why I was there. I don’t remember anyone else at all; only a mass of kids interacting in ways that were quite beyond my inward-facing imagination.

the rink was variously orange and gray and natural wood tone. who knows who decided the finish at any particular time. who knows if I even have the orange right by now given that the song was not quite what I thought I remembered either but then again it could be argued that what is important is just what both the orange and the song touched off in the way of obscure motivating forces which then went to work inscribing their obscurity into my nervous system.

the real irony lies in that skating was done mostly on Tuesday nights as these were Ladies’ Night. girls of twelve also got in for free and in fact there were very few actual ladies there on Tuesdays just girls and boys as traditionally reckoned.

it was a badly-engineered pair of skates that spurred me to my initial empirical research into the basics of force, acceleration, and fall. this first pair was assembled such that the rear wheels sat some inch and a half forward of the heel of your foot which caused them to spill you over backwards almost constantly because if you leaned back at all your center of gravity would no longer be over the wheels. I remember getting a better pair of skates and learning that I was not nearly as bad a skater as I thought. I knew it was the skates and not that I had improved overnight so I compared the new ones to the old ones and the reason for my new-found stability—on skates that is—was suddenly quite clear. I was about nine years old I think, and the principles of gravity, mass, and support seemed more or less obvious.

so you see there was that then. all I have to offer is all you see here except that all you see here is neither representative nor recollective of any given signal moment. curiously although I do hold that I am nobody in particular or rather that between you and me there is only an infinitely small shift that passes for difference this infinitely small shift is insurmountably orthogonal to all that you know or in other words we could not just switch names and none be the wiser even though neither of us are remarkable. it is not only that there is no such thing as repetition but also that there is no such thing as originality. no matter how many times you say a word that you think is the same as the one that came before there is no way to get them to match up precisely and yet all the information needed to generate an infinite variety of words is already extant.

language being in this case an analog for a number of other things but not only that, given what you and I are doing here I on my side having happened upon some turns of phrase I found interesting enough to use as a kind of semaphore in which to act out strings of neurological impressions gathered not entirely at random and you possibly reading although for reasons at which I can only guess. I imagine that you might come to feel as though you knew me which would be remarkable if only because I understand already at this early pass that trying to lend these dim recollections coherent shape as though I could work them up towards a literary purpose or even just a moral tale would not only be quite beyond my enfeebled means but would also constitute a vain effort to impose myself or interpose myself into the mythos of some age or another when the fact of the matter is all I can do is suggest that someone who called themselves “I” and “me” passed through somewhere between you and me leaving broken traces of that famous metonym for divinity as I can feel breathing and moving there where sits a cat across my feet keeping us both warm.

by that I do not mean to be cloyingly romantic but to note what it is to face death together with a close relation and loving claw and bone for the short time that we are differentiated from iron and water and although headed for the same destination once arrived we both will disperse unevenly across the roiling expanse into which we are afforded a glimpse given a clear night sky his eyes on the skittering bodies of nocturnal cousins mine on the brilliant violence that unthinkingly cast us as its own auditors. out of this host of suns emerge friable sheets of living tissue to be struck by the light that forged us to behold light. as though we fragile and thirsty were the only possible mirrors to the stars we who huddle under our transient atmospheric buffer for protection from the indifferent forces that spat us out but who cannot help but look up.

just that difference between a cloud and an ant or between my left and right feet then. what I mean is not that on a cosmic scale difference diminishes but that at the level of elemental variety—which is considerable—those distinctions that we believe fundamental disappear into that variety and become themselves varietal instead of iconic.

this may be because that which we consider essentially different can only be realized as monotonously the same and that which we consider exclusively different—that is, objects made distinct through negating their own backgrounds—remains an entangled array of hazardous accidents among which no essential difference can be recognized and therefore nothing that is the same.

see this chair? it’s just a chair. but by that I do not mean to say that it is just a chair.

 
 
 
 
 

Chapter One continues

in two weeks

Chapter One Point Oh Two

Posted by eriktrips on

in any case I cannot say that I knew where I was in relation to the girl/boy problem from the very beginning except in a way I did or at least I had the genre pegged by age seven. that I think was the year I went as a hippie for halloween. as though at age seven I had some sort of presentiment of incongruity.

well at age seven it was no longer a presentiment. mom was already overwhelmed by my eccentricities and I found that where the certain uncertain get going is mainly by themselves.

the earliest pang of certain uncertainty that I remember was seeing the crest on my brother’s sports jacket. I wanted a sports jacket with a crest. I told mom I was envious of boys’ clothing and she said but girls’ clothing is so much more interesting. she did not understand the allure of a sports jacket with a crest nor why suits were far more interesting than any dress could ever be. all those pockets! today I wear as many pockets as possible at all times.

when you’re a boy you can wear a uniform. I wanted a boy’s uniform not a girl’s or that is I wanted what were called boys’ uniforms rather than those called girls’ uniforms.

there is no compelling reason to start right here though. history only adds up in the telling but the telling itself lingers without pedigree beyond a vague haunting of oneself by oneself. apparently I was also enthralled by a stroller or what more accurately was called a baby buggy. this was one christmas morning or one birthday I forget. one cannot be always exactly what one wants to be. but purity is overrated so this is not necessarily distressing.

and yet really I did come into my own in a Sears Wish Book kind of way when I discovered not only GI Joe but also that mom would buy him for me. it may be that she regrets this but it would not have made a difference if she had not bought him for me I still would have wanted a sports jacket with a crest. from GI Joe I graduated to wanting chemistry sets but at twenty dollars or whatever they were too expensive. this was back when money meant something in small quantities. probably a largish collection of lego bricks could have been had for $1.99 for instance. what I did get was a geology lab so it must have been less expensive and it was kind of fun but when you mixed together the various chemicals they provided for testing minerals they never did anything interesting like foam or explode.

in those days they gave you real chemicals too. none of this salt and water chemistry. I wanted to mix whatever I could find to produce something entirely new. it is probably just as well that I did not get a chemistry set as I probably would have combined random chemicals to the effect of corrosion and fire and toxic fumes. the geology set did have a sample of fairly pure sulfur which gave off a terrible odor when burned and so naturally I liked burning small bits of it frequently.

not that that has anything to do with anything but if I for one feel like pointing it out and do so someone else might say yeah that was it thanks for putting it into words. I mean that has happened to me before. see it is the gap between it which is a word but not only a word and the words which purport to explicate it where I get lost. you will see what I mean as we go along. really the first time for it is the first time for it and that is all it takes even though it gets everything started and no one can keep it or themselves still ever after. the serpent does not eat its own tail. it throws it up.

I will say it straight out and that is I do not know how to get from here to there or what passes as my getting from here to there is a ruse and that is all it is but is getting from here to there ever other than a ruse is the question. like I said it lingers but it does not only linger. the question is why put it this way.

in fact there is always a question of how to put it and how to put it works itself out in the most concrete ways that you really only notice if you try to get underneath it all or if you are thrust underneath it all by circumstance and perhaps breeding.

there is no getting underneath it all. not all of it. one can sometimes find the point at which we all agree to begin but even that is not the beginning so much as a mutually acceptable point of departure. a bivouac of sorts. there is however a limit at which saying anything more makes no sense whatsoever and the simplest distinctions stand naked and bereft. I mean it is not so dire as all that but if you are the naked and bereft one it can be embarrassing.

to wit.

the men’s room is deteriorating. not everywhere or at least as far as I know only in this particular spot although probably they are deteriorating elsewhere too but here there was a seat for the toilet and then there was no seat just a bowl but there was still a stall door but now there is no stall door either and all of this would not be so bad except that the door to the outside opens directly onto a view of the stall and there is no lock on the door to the outside so one crouches trying to hover above the seatless fixture while concentrating on what to do if the door opens for instance does my shirt cover me or do my pants not pulled all the way down cover me or should I move my arms across to cover me because this is always the question how best to cover in order not to evoke great surprise or consternation or urge to kill. and that vulnerable moment between sitting (crouching) and standing where one’s only recourse is to turn quickly around and let their eyes reassure them in the absence of continuous corroborating evidence that they did not see what they did not see. that or meeting their eyes with a yes you saw it but that is life you sometimes see odd things and for pete’s sake why not let it be.

since when is surprise a mortal threat. since the very beginning apparently.

I know a guy who writes down everything. you cannot say anything without he is pulling out a napkin and scribbling and sometimes I wish I had that drive or dedication or compulsion or something. so much goes by. you could name it all one by one if you had the time and the pencil lead but as is a moment is only a moment and although you might notice it because you have learned to say I see that even so it passes unremarked except in the most rudimentary of ways that is in the way exactly that you would say it if you had the words which of course you do or in their absence at least the phantom perspective from which to issue them. what I propose then is a collection of words from those phantom perspectives at which I myself can recall to have spent at least a small amount of time.

it occurs to me though that the desire to tell the story vastly outweighs any sense of what the story is or was or is to be. the result as might be obvious already might be said to be a sizable surplus of telling and a glaring paucity of story. I am quite certain that either way all of the important details will be left out while only the inconsequential ephemera surrounding those details will make it into any story or telling. the point is to repeatedly miss the point and although I could claim to do this stubbornly or even militantly or at least voluntarily I suspect that I could not do otherwise even if I tried very very hard. this could also be a ruse but in all honesty a real story would simply be too painful and so this painful in its own special way but not especially so is what the story will turn out (not) to consist of. that too is not a complete explanation not even if you take into account all that has been said thus far and will be said later and so in order not to intrude upon any accounting let me just tell you this. tonight I am waiting for the moon to come up so that I may take its photograph. am hoping that glow behind the rocks to my east is a promising sign. whether it has occurred to anyone else to write this down I cannot say but it could have easily just as you could be reading what they are writing rather than what I am writing.

for example I could describe for you what night in the desert in winter is like and how the coyotes chatter at dusk their yips cavorting over the dusty blue spines of what I would like to be sage but is not and the way the campfire in the next site over smells unusually spicy like cardamom or sassafras not that those two scents are anything alike so it may be that the fire or more properly the smoke from the fire smells like both and I could point out that it is unclear whether the sunlight is lingering on the horizon or if I see just the reflection of every light in Palm Springs many miles to the southwest or how silence sounds strangely like one’s own tinnitus and thus there is no telling how it would occur to anyone else or the way voices from other campers who are strangers and to whom I will not speak are comforting in the way they approach each other with no apparent ill will.

I could try to trace a line similar to the infinitesimally thin one that separates the deep black of the hills and spiked yuccas from the fainter black of the sky and I could tell about any of this floridly and with adjectives to make Edward Abbey weep but even if I did so we would not get anywhere as there is no particular whereto head for but flashes of a significance so bashful as to snuff itself out immediately and often.

I could describe this one needle-thin and lovely bug with wings of gossamer were it not a cliche so no gossamer but wings of precarious membrane so thin as to be unmentionable who has visited me my book and my water bottle a number of times and thus we are acquainted and I could even mention the difference between Sunday night and Saturday in the Ryan Campground in January the one you see is boisterous where the other is muted but more congenial for all that and I could make meticulous note of everything that allows itself to be noted which is darned near everything there is which gives me pause as though being born into the note were not a violent thing although something something escapes even that most gentle of incisions upon being cut away.

if I remember correctly we were talking about the difference between boys and girls and also how the coyotes talk amongst themselves at sundown. I was about to say what do coyotes care about boys and girls but for all I know they care deeply although one suspects that what they care most deeply about is what is in that burrow right over there. be that as it may the difference between what passes by and what is noted bear some relationship to each other even and especially where they come in contact with one another although I hesitate to claim that any contact actually occurs nor whether what might only be the close call gives me a secure foundation from which to speak.

on the contrary.

 
 
 
 
 

Chapter One continues

in two weeks

chapter one point oh one

Posted by eriktrips on

Chapter One.

or

on being a female-to-male transsexual living in San Francisco.

what were the odds. when you think about it being a female-to-male transsexual living in San Francisco was and is really very unlikely. well. if you live in San Francisco your chances of being a female-to-male transsexual are probably higher then if you lived most anywhere else in the world. statistically though given the sheer numbers of the world’s population from the time it has been populated until now it is highly unlikely that any given person would have ever even seen San Francisco let alone live there and it is highly unlikely that any given person would have known a female-to-male transsexual let alone be one themselves and yet here I am a given person and what were the odds of that and that is why I propose that I could have been anyone and in fact am but apparently this is not at all true because I am as it turns out extremely unlikely. if you take me as an example I cannot exemplify anything as I am unusual to say the least and yet what am I but one example among billions of others. I could take anyone’s place and have and anyone could take my place and will. it is the same for everyone that is being peculiar being particular being that one bizarre occurrence as well as being completely exchangeable for any other bizarre occurrence.

if I say I am just like you and I do say that I am not just like you but I am just like you. there is a fine distinction to be drawn and it is always the same gesture to draw it but the gestures are all different and each one not at all what might be expected.

obviously my odds of being any given person were 1:1 because that is what I am. obviously my odds of being this given person were 1:1 because that is what I am but the chances that I should show up as this person at this time and place seem to me to be infinitesimally small. the odds against my arising in this form they must have been astronomical even though there was no getting around it for me and certainly no way of ignoring what turned out to be true.

this is partially to say then that none of this is my fault as there is no beating the odds and I could just as easily have been you and you me and we both would have been every bit as surprised as we are now. the fact is I am you insofar as I am anyone and so are you but we do not coincide in any way and by that I mean that although it might prove difficult to show precisely where my outermost membranes stop and the world around me begins it is still true that the particular path that brought me this far has been unique except that it is pretty much the same way for everyone that is it is not at all the same for everyone.

as a friend once said “I” is perfectly common even though only one person can say it that is the first person who is every person except in relation to you or me it is only a single person. if there is only one commonplace it is “I” but my place in particular is peculiar and strange. you could be writing this for instance but you are not and the odds of my writing it were unimaginably slim and yet here I go.

here I go. here I go in your place and you in mine and look at that we wear the same size shoe. no we don’t. I only have my feet and you only have yours. oh even that is saying too much. feet. what can one say beyond that. not a lot.

but you see that we are not alike because we have feet or ears or hands or hair or fingernails in fact we are not alike at all and I do not mean to imply that we are the same because we are definitely not. but all of this could easily have happened differently except for the fact that it did not and thus could not have but you could have found yourself in my place very easily even though there was little chance of that but still this could have been you here. what if that had been the way life worked out. it could have you know.

if you know what I mean.

be that as it may I could still tell a story or rather take down a few of the things that have made my experience whatever my experience has been. I mean things you might not have thought of even though as we have established you very well could have and you could not have done one iota of a thing about it had you. keep that in mind while you read this. I mean you do not have to but it might prove useful for imagining what it might have been like to be somebody else.

there must have been an infinite number of ways I could have come to arrive here where I am now, whatever here might mean in this case which will no longer be the case when you read this although I cannot begin to guess what will be. spelling out any one of those infinitely different ways seems pedestrian to me but not even that so much as a kind of betrayal although not necessarily of myself so much as of the living of what has been so far my life. to say it was that way or this way is but an island of hearsay in a racing flood of anonymity parading. not parading as anything. just parading. that is the best you can get out of this sort of question and if you try to extract more than that what will happen is that instead of opening the way up to the possibility of being told rather you end up closing off what ought to remain a source of potential stories even to the point of never ever running out of them.

that said.

that said suppose we were to talk of those ways of being that we call boys and those ways of being that we call girls if in fact there are ways of being that can be called either one without some liberal dose of irony. whatever the case may be it seems to me that someone somewhere is always ascribing the title of ur-difference to whatever difference might arise between the ways boys are said to go about life and the ways girls are said to go about life and this title of primeval difference is said to found the whole frigging dialectic but I am here to tell you that that is not the case.

oh it has already been shown. there is no need to show it again. that is I am not going to try to prove to you that male and female cannot be constitutive of the enduring difference that plays out along the general schema of this versus not-this. and I am not going to do that because others have done a good job of it already. if I remember when I get there I might append a bibliography to all this but then again I might just let it be.

but see the main problem is that the greatest of differences has been attributed to exist between one and two and if you think about that is quite absurd because not only are they are far too involved with one another not to mention what else they might be involved with but why stop at two that is why stop at this and not-this. one might for instance move on to some other or a house or pink or bleakly or carom. and one might continue to move on indefinitely without running out of places to turn.

don’t even get me started about the one and the many. we are talking of girls and boys here not god and the manifold. although there is the slight possibility they are the same thing. by that I do not mean to claim they are the same thing but to suggest that they might be very closely allied with each other in the general mayhem of ideas.

suppose there were other alliances than this.

 
 
 
 
 

Chapter One continues

in two weeks

Introduction

Posted by eriktrips on

apparently my first words were hi there kitty.

you could deduce my whole life from that but exactly why I will leave to some other accounting in some other time. see I don’t really remember saying it but the story has clung to me in such a way that it has become both me and my insignia. my inaugural event. first address.

later on I tried to write pop tunes but always they came out too long and the rhythm all wrong and although we won over a small devoted following which was all we professed to want all the same it was not enough.

in between odd things went on. that is to say that in between we got from the one to the other through nothing but detours and really as it turns out where we got was a detour too. talking to cats may have always appealed to me more but it never explained the lifelong search for the perfect hook. don’t tell me I have contradicted myself. I know perfectly well what I have done.

if there is a story to be told I am not at all qualified to tell it. I have begun countless times at least partially earnest each one and each one has been consigned to its own plot of crumpled paper ghosthood where it will rest until the gods know when or maybe longer than that. it is not as though the telling is futile although it certainly is that but rather that in no case have I found myself to be able to bring even what might be called a single episode to a satisfactory close or even under anything like the barest hint of control.

nonetheless I go on and it seems imperative to do so. if at night I have a drink in order not to go on it never keeps me from going on and as it turns out a drink only goes on in its own fashion for instance a thought that only comes in the form of the flicker of light through the bottom of an amber brown bottle. at some point you begin to hallucinate or at least can fondly believe that you are hallucinating as edges of reflected light soften and blur ever so slightly and then resharpen in some way not quite recognizable.

there can be no question of characters or scenes as I have absolutely no imagination for characters or scenes but I can spin around one little point
endlessly should something occur to me and it certainly will.

for instance just take for example anyone. what more can be said than just take for example anyone. who am I but anyone but not anyone or only this particular one who happens to be unable not to write but anyone can say as much anyone can and does say nearly anything at all for example it is friday night and I am going out. it is friday night and I am going out.

of course this is not true. it is sunday night and I am staying in but it could just as well be friday and I could be out except that I am in and it is not friday. but for all you care it is and for all I care it will be repeatedly whether either of us wants it to do so. this is what I have noticed that no matter what night it is it will be soon enough any other night and then another and something appears to dictate that this happens again and again except that nothing dictates it it just goes the way it goes.

I was reading a history book the other day and all it had in it was who had killed whom and who had sold what to whom when what I really wanted to know was what were they saying to each other in the meantime and what sort of shoes they wore for scaling granite or loam slopes. because what is exchange or murder outside of the sweet kiss of the verb the verb to walk or to jump or to fare or to align or to contract. what is a verb outside of the kiss of exchange and murder.

be careful not to take what I say too seriously.

anyone could say as much and is in fact now doing so or writing as much and by so doing is writing no differently from they way in which anyone might put it down except that if you asked most anyone they would have no idea what I was going to write next. on the other hand I am not clear on this myself and so not in much more of an admirable position than anyone else.

I plan on chronicling here nothing remarkable in that these things could have happened to anyone and in fact did and anyone could relate them in one way or another way and in fact what happened happens to no matter whom no matter what but you will only hear about it here that is this is the only place where you can read what you are now reading even if it could have been written by almost anyone except that it has somehow become my story. whatever this is and by no means to I consider it a story in any of the common senses of the term if terms can be said to have common sense which is itself a term that begs for some chastisement but not here. there but for the grace of god go you but if god’s grace means but the inevitable chance that things would turn out the way they have then you had no choice but not to and to go instead the way you went. all the same there is no sense in claiming that I am anything or anyone special by dint of what I will repeat here even if I do nonetheless find most all of this
to be almost unbelievable even while it could have not been any other way or thing or tale or pathway or whatever it is that is going on here.

except that the way it went bears no essential relation to what I will write about it. there is that.

chapter one could be called my life in public restrooms and in fact could be called anything else but to call it that which it is would be problematic so lets just call it my life in public restrooms.

 

 

I get worse in the evenings.

 

 

a story to be a story that is a story that anyone would follow must have from what I have heard a certain amount of sex and violence. well my life has known a certain amount of sex and violence but to what extent they have been remarkable I am not sure.

 

there is no way to fix this so let us move on.

 

 

 

in two weeks:

part one of

Chapter One.

or

on being a female-to-male transsexual living in San Francisco.

overture, friendly

Posted by eriktrips on

Fashion is a manner is it not a way a particular method for putting things together or arranging things or dressing them up I will tell you a little later what it is like suddenly to have a body you enjoy dressing and a little money with which to do so but I sold many of the clothes because cotton is the enemy when you sweat horselike in temperatures higher than 55F and this is something that I do so no more cotton shirts for me. I do not understand really why cotton is so popular and just hush for a minute because we are talking about fashion and cotton is fashionable for the masses in casual wear but it absorbs and holds water and does not insulate when wet and so the only people that can wear it are those who never have to do without air conditioning or who never have to work up a sweat in cold weather.

Sometimes it comes upon you like this and this will have to do for a segue even though it should be obvious that fashion will be a subtext from here to wherever the end is but not because of anything I wear or even put on but that sometimes you will just be sitting there when it is like a song that gets stuck in your head and it has a beat and you can dance to it but not only can you dance to it but you cannot do other than dance to it or it dances you in a certain sort of way but it is not as though your feet move although they sometimes do but it has nothing to do with the beating or the sweating or the stains that will not come out of your shirt no matter how many times you wash it with or without color-safe bleach.

But here is the thing or rather here is not the thing or rather there is no thing and that is not to say that there is nothing nor that I am trying to go all nihilistic on you but what you have in your hands if you have it in your hands and from here I truly cannot tell whether you do or not but let’s say this lands in someone’s hands at some point I find it important to make sure that if you are holding this in your hands its form is illusory and imposed by customs that by their nature cannot comprehend what they propose to speak of.

I am going to try this. A moment ago or really several moments ago but that does not matter for the sake of argument I will just say earlier I was reading an article about how few Jewish writers of fantasy there are and a friend of mine posted to the internet that Neil Gaiman might find the article incredulous but whether or not the writer had forgotten about Mister Gaiman or just had not come across him yet which seems unlikely if he were really serious in addressing who is and is not writing fantasy as distinct from science fiction and probably it would be interesting to put Gaiman’s writing into conversation with this one particular thing the writer did say which was, “Tolkien and Lewis both referred to Christianity as the sole true fairytale. Jewish thinkers are far less likely to consider this praise” [1] and I think this might be precisely because of their particularly close acquaintance with fascism’s consequences but what is bothering me is that from very far away almost so far that I cannot hear them at all but off in the recesses of what might be called my interior landscape but is more of an auditory sounding chamber in which in my imagination some things are quiet and some are loud and they all go round and round with each other as though someone’s life depended on it and I guess one thing I would like to point out is that I am not sure whose life it is nor what the point of the argument is nor why at this very moment it seems important that I try to figure out that very thing even though I know that it is not to be found anywhere that might show up a visible or audible sign and this is intimately related to what has been since I was very young my singular conviction that there were no singularly true myths. Even as they tried to teach me the true myth of Christianity which seems to be stubbornly unable to understand what the very definition of myth is and why it is that mythopoesis cannot stop and to say that it has or that it should or that one course of being said in particular will win out over all else that is being said is precisely fascism itself not to mention a remarkable loss of human life but would it surprise anyone to find out that I fight internal fascists every single day of my life or would it seem reasonable.

I will have to rewrite all of this. Or I will have to write it again which is the same thing except for the question of whether or not anyone else gets to see the first draft.

But see the story cannot stop and therefore taking it down is in some ways an act of betrayal and certainly setting it into order and saying that it is the best or preferable or ideal order is also an act of betrayal at least as serious as the day I was led to confess my faith and thus be propelled down an aisle that I never would have walked had I been aware of the possibility that multiple interpretations are available of any text and especially the one that Mom spins for us when we are too young to understand that the mother tongue is a method for putting things together but it is not the thing put together and it cannot have the last word or that is that the last word would blaspheme the ability to draw breath to continue to speak and by association be a kind of matricide but not of anyone like our true mother or anyone like that because to flock to one would itself be the murder of those whose nameless labor begot us.

And so I set out even though I know that the end is already in existence or rather that it is not something I can reach even though death itself stretches out against me like the most intimate of friends so much so that we sleep intertwined each knowing that we have nothing to fear from the other.

What I have to speak of is not death and is not even kin to death but is in the common parlance worse than death which is something like horror or what would come after death if we could imagine something that would obliterate even obliteration that could annihilate our ability to slip back into the earth at a moment’s notice he writes warily eyeing the sun.

It is something like having to understand that home is the universe and not any particular part of it or even possibly not this particular one. Which is something like having to be prepared any moment to die. Which is something like trying to understand why monotheism gives way into an atheism that is not allergic to divinity but understands that having to get everything right no matter whether for one god or many is the definition of despotism and that compassion issues no commandments but stakes its life on the possibility that compassion can remain in the absence of a command that it do so.

In other words if this is poorly written please have mercy upon whomever this reminds you of but do not expect me to change what I have put down for otherwise who would have reminded you.

With that he takes another pill to regulate his neurochemistry so as to make this all somehow more bearable than it was prior to the spirit of opium which has been with us for eons longer than the laws that try to keep us apart.

But I am good because I only take what the law allows me to. Don’t let anyone try to tell you that there is any virtue in this. There is not but there are limits to how far afoul of any particular code one wants to run and by the time I got to this one I had already placed myself somewhere to the forgotten side of the back forty as was once said of that place you had let all to itself because it was of no value to you but be danged if the law has not penetrated every parcel of land on this continent. No one wanted it this way but everyone wants you in a certain way so the compromise is always between yourself and a host or that is a host of hosts.

Although I do not trust it or any other dictionary, the Oxford English one has some light to shed on this score and in fewer words than it would take to explain why the stranger is not the enemy except in the Christian version of hospitality and that is why Christianity is an aberration from a particular way of proceeding that has in fact almost already interpreted its own way into Nirvana, where all strangers are kin, instead of heaven, where all strangers are enemies.

The dictionary, then:

L. hostem (hostis) stranger, enemy, in med.L. army, warlike expedition. The Latin h, lost in Romanic, was gradually readopted in OF. and ME. spelling, and hence in mod.Eng. pronunciation.

Lord (God) of Hosts (Jehovah Ts’baoth): a frequent title of Jehovah in certain books of the Old Testament; app. referring sometimes to the heavenly hosts (see a), sometimes to the armies of Israel, and hence in modern use with the sense ‘God of armies’ or ‘of battles’.

L. hospit-em (hospes) host, guest, stranger, foreigner. For resumption of h, cf. prec.]

A man who lodges and entertains another in his house: the correlative of guest.

Me again:

I would rest my case but there is no resting only a variable relationship to haunting and hunting which themselves walk hand in hand when uttered together. Here no dictionary can help as rather than diverging to hunt and to haunt have converged in more recent usage from more diverse points in past usage. Haunt has to do with habit whereas hunt has to do with running to earth which is itself a peculiar way of saying to hunt down and kill.

From here where do I go. I take up a thread chosen for me by worn out obsessions that lasted long enough to create vignettes for themselves. My aim is not true and not authentic but to the extent that character forms strung together can serve as shelter or fuel for fire I am hoping only to pass this along as possibly of help.

[1] Michael Weingrad, “Why There Is No Jewish Narnia”, Jewish Review of Books, Spring 2010, Issue 1. http://www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/publications/detail/why-there-is-no-jewish-narnia

It seems clear to me that the true myth is the death of myth whereas the ongoing interpretation of scripture were it not specifically of scripture but of any written source which it could be why not what is scripture but that which is written at the least admits of the possibility of infinite iterations without the imposition of true form from above.

It may be that my only motivation is for complete freedom but not without the bounds of compassion. Only our current models of freedom are usually uninformed by if not hostile to compassion. Certainly there is no compassion in Christian “free will” in which we are free to choose eternal torture should we exercise said will and set out for the occulted edges of a world that cannot be bound. And by occulted I do mean precisely unseen or opaque to a given rationale or obscure when viewed from the point of view of everyday common sense. Whose sense is common and whose is unmentionable usually comes down to a decision made according to desires which themselves are not sensical even though they have had the time and space to articulate themselves in such a way as to seem the only reasonable conclusions or rather the only allowable conclusions for reason is the rhetoric of passion even if it is a passion for dispassion and predictability which it so often is that a story that ends in a way that can be anticipated can be mistaken for the essence of all that is rather than the elaborate schemes of a pattern-finding animal.

So you will see that I spend a fair amount of energy on disavowing the absolute truth of what I say however I do write without intention to mislead or obfuscate it is only that outside of any system of truth and untruth is a wide expanse of that which can be said without causing suffering—which condition has little to do with truth and may at times be utterly incompatible with anything like truth.

interspersed comment

Posted by eriktrips on

Last week about this time I was trying to recover from a burst of social activity the week before which left me gasping for breath sort of like a fish flopping around on the sand when it cannot get back to the water quickly enough.

And then I started coughing.

Still coughing. Not flopping so much as still recovering from recovering from flopping.

The militantly introverted amongst you will understand what I mean.

Anyway, the next post will be last week’s installment which probably means I had better get working on next week’s installment soon.

An Introductory Preface or Diving Right In

Posted by eriktrips on

I started with time didn’t I. No I mean I did not start with time in any sort of cosmic sense but a little while ago I was saying something about time and then clamoring and experience or experience and then clamoring and why I do this at all is a mystery except that I cannot seem not to do it. So here it is.

It strikes me that there must have been a kitchen clock but I don’t remember one. Maybe we used the oven clock. There was a clock radio that moved around the living and dining rooms until we got our first stereo system that if I remember correctly came with a cassette deck and a smoke-colored plastic cover or did the tape deck come separately. I cannot remember really. Stereos got very big and then they began to shrink and now I produce my own music on a piece of machinery less than an inch thick and I listen through middling quality monitors less than a foot tall that nonetheless convey most sounds with warmth and definition, those elusive qualities of music production.

I carry another stereo in my pocket in fact it is so small that I had to put it in a case to make it big enough not to get lost very easily.

Is there more to say about time? Probably.

For now or for this point in time which will shift about depending on where it occurs to it to be read I will point out that to some degree what I have asked myself to do is to write simultaneously or perhaps simultaneity even translating it to linear form but to do it in such a way as to cause a reader any reader even it could just be myself reading it but to cause a reader to get some sense of passing time even while time is not passing or rather while it is passing but in the time in which I write nothing passes which is to say everything gets away.

About which Freud undoubtedly would have been very happy to write a long mythopoietic treatise had nothing passed for me around the time and place that nothing passed for him. It is not a question of my letting go but of it letting go of me that would be the question I mean its not letting go. Attachment insofar as it is to be given up reads to me like attachment to order and answers that help keep that order afloat in an orderly way but I have been attached for quite some time to a question that interposes itself constantly and although it is true I must maintain in what is sometimes called quotidian life an almost ghostly stability or that is a kind of stability that haunts me in such a way that I cannot rebuke it without appearing to be talking to the air I still quail at the faintest outline of any systematic arrangement of epistemological facts that might arise at the horizon of whatever it is I scan compulsively day and night with what I have heard called the mind’s eye but I am not completely certain that this horizon truly appears anywhere.

Unintentionally you see how easy it is unintentionally to admit agents into your narrative before you even know who or what they are and what they might be doing or asked to do or how they will function or to put it plainly why they are there at all. It is not simply that I have voices in my head but that they each have an idiosyncratic rhythm that tells me immediately which of us holds the microphone. I cannot always turn the thing off before they get going and generally what they say is rooted both in obsessive repetition and in the desire for a kind of postulated novelty the sort one might think one can introduce occasionally in between ever-recurring phrases.

Immediacy is not what it seems at first.

And although it may be that the time of my experience is synchronic it may also be that the time of my experience is asynchronic or it may be that the time of my experience is simply chronic and that is the whole matter with me.
Let me start again.

No. Let me go on from here.

—

Which story am I going to tell? All of them. But see this is precisely the problem: I cannot tell all of them because there is no finishing and not just because and happily ever after will not occur in this lifetime but because each time I write something down like it was an afternoon this time my hands were gripping first the wooden frame of the back of the couch and then the cording on the edge of the top of the seat fingernails digging into knobby brown upholstery arms implacable around my waist quite impossible to resist until finally my fingers lost their purchase and could no longer reach the couch at all and someone I knew but did not know carried me off and there the image stops but I think I might have known that the other kids had been unwilling subjects of a procedure that day although I don’t think even those performing it knew the rationale behind it but either way I was next. It may have been some distorted obsession with hygiene or at least that is what my best guess involves a preoccupation with alimentary attachments and pinchings off but this is to a degree useless conjecture because all I recall with certainty was seeing the syringe bulb again a few years later in a place I did not expect it to be and recoiling.

Did you see what happened that time? Probably not because that is the first time it has happened to that particular image but I could start all over again and it is not that nothing happened then whatever day it was rather I have only the vaguest notion of what it could have been what happened but I can say for instance that it was akin to having a bolt slammed into one’s ear so hard that it leaves the impressions of its threads in the gaps between those neurons dangling next to your cochlear chambers but naming these impressions thus is incidental to what they implied for what came after and yet having just named them so has its own implications for what will come after.

When you sit down to write a book you know that one thing is going to come after another. In some very unlikely world where I have never even set foot they tell writers to begin with an outline but I have only ever made outlines after most of the whatever was to be outlined was already filled in in its details. When I was very young I could project what I was going to write so far into the future that I knew several paragraphs ahead of where I was what approximately those paragraphs were going to consist of but because of something is it age or is it the lingering traces of psychosis or is it simply exhaustion on my part I can only see about two sentences into the future anymore.

This translates roughly to three days in real time or what they call real time which is the time that we measure here on earth by some atom that vibrates so regularly that it proves that there is time in which for it to do so and that it can be measured after a fashion.

I am avid for fashion.

This is not a digression. Or if it is then digression is one of my primary methods for working out how best to fit in even those images and events that remain indistinct from those in dreams but whose sheer winds oxidize memory before it can find for itself a shape that might make it legible for anyone interested in what memory remembers using for its flickering accounts arms and legs and dispassionate brute force conveying to small bodies that they were small bodies in comparison with most others they would ever find themselves to be contending with.

Another explanatory post and then the real thing

Posted by eriktrips on

So in a minute, if our internet holds up, I am going to post the first 1200 or so words of UndiaGnosed. I am going to try to do this at two-week intervals, on approximately Monday, so that whoever decides to read will have some idea of when to set aside time with lots of coffee for untangling and parsing and whatever else you might need to do to make sense of what I am about put out there for all to see.

One word about order: I put these sections in an order, but they are not chronological nor are they in some order that causes all of the threads in them to line up neatly into a smooth and easy narrative. I am not attached to the order in which they are currently arranged, and when it comes time to produce something like a physical book-like object out of them, I am going to try to find a way to make the different sections re-arrangeable. I am not sure how I will do this just yet but for now I’ll just say that it is not imperative that anyone read these in the order that they are posted here. I cannot really say whether the story will make the same sense no matter what order you read it in but then I have not been able to make the whole thing into a consistent, singular point while writing and arranging. In fact I am fairly convinced that the more interesting picture will result from a variety of arrangements of orders of telling, but it may be that I am the only person in the world obsessed enough with my own life to want to play with the pieces putting them this way and then that to see what sorts of shapes obtain from various relationships between episodes or flights of fancy or the occasional stab at something like a meta-autobiographical interpretation of the autobiograph itself.

That is the only guidance I can offer right here at the start. That and try not to get hung up on making sense. It is not necessary for life always to make sense but the words used to bring it into something like an account that can be given will always act a little anarchically and nibble away at whatever accounts might appear. If I write in a way that is difficult to parse, it is to loosen the grammatical constraints on sense, which needs room to fall apart as much as if not more than it needs a steady hand to piece it carefully together.

And so.

undiaGnosed is on its way to.. somewhere

Posted by eriktrips on

This here is the formal announcement that undiaGnosed–also known as my meandering and monstrous autobiography–will soon start appearing here, piece by piece, posted a section at a time on a regular schedule that I have not yet settled upon. Much will depend on how much it takes to get each section to where I actually want to show it to the public, but this showing it to the public I am using as a spur to finish it already or that is find a way to bring each part to a close and then stop writing on this particular volume of whatever story it is I have to tell. And I do have to tell it. This is not something I chose off of a menu of things I would love to do. Not that writing is necessarily painful all of the time but it is necessarily painful some of the time and yet I cannot stop.

I am going to try to have the first installment installed within two weeks, so by about 26 October 2011 there should be something more here than me standing around talking about what will be here ultimately.

Alert the media and call your friends. So far my life has been incredibly weird and damnably interesting to the point that I have for the moment abandoned those indefinite plans to kill myself that I have been pondering since about age 15 because I keep wanting to know what happens next. At some point that might get old but for now it is useful for keeping this body engaged with the world it gradually became aware of so many years ago.

This is neither a preface nor an intro but something like advance warning. It is time.

Eventually the URL undia.gnosed.com will lead here but first I must talk my domain parking host into letting me at the new and improved control panels. I am fairly certain that the entire operation was recently outsourced. I will let you know when to update your bookmarks.

Hope this is the start of something medium-sized. I have had enough of small.