Literal and Figurative Tornadoes
it's a motherfuckin' twister, all right
Right before 6am this morning, I woke up to a foghorn-esque howl and a muffled recorded male voice saying something in an urgent tone that I couldn’t hear. I sat up reluctantly, surprised because the noise wouldn’t stop. “What’s…that…sound…” I said wearily as Ian went back and fourth between rooms.
“That is a tornado warning,” Ian announced. He was unplugging everything in the house in case of power failure. “We’re outside its path, but we’ve been warned of ‘rotational winds.’” There’s a phrase you don’t want to hear too often. What followed shortly after was a thunderstorm unlike anything I’ve ever heard. But the sky cleared like a practical joke, sunny and blue and puffy-clouded, by 10am. Not sure what you were all so flipped out about, that sunlight seemed to say. The wind remained remarkably strong but unidirectional.
We’re rather living in a tornado right now, aren’t we? Maybe it’ll ultimately whisk us out of a black-and-white COVID-driven Dust Bowl bleakness and into a Technicolor world of adventure and companionship? I sometimes think it’s possible. I have to think it’s possible or why show up to work assuring college freshmen that their words matter, that their stories of deviance make compelling narratives? Deliscious writing can defeat AI and, more importantly, defeat the misogynist Nazi villians who want it to replace art.
Art can’t be replaced any more than trauma or falling in love or grieving can be replaced, but it can be repressed in a way those things can’t, and my place of employ is on the ground floor of REPRESS THIS SHIT WE’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR AN EXCUSE FOR YEARS. I can’t go much further than that until they stop cutting my paychecks, but I will. I’ve got quite the read planned for you on that score, on every Obey in Advance facet of it. It’ll be worth the wait, I hope, though I wish what I have to report was of a more inspiring nature.
By the end of the semester it will be, because my students make sure of that, even though it’s not their job to do so.
I have nothing insightful to say about the worst people in America destroying the government on purpose. I wish I did. What I do have to offer is a robot sex story published in the current issue of Lit Angels, whose theme for February/Issue 26 is “Love. Complex." I wrote ‘robots’ in 2022, but Francesca Lia Block’s editing helped it become what it needed to be.
I also have an essay titled “Technicolor Gender” that will be part of Just Femme and Dandy’s Mixtape Issue. All good news where we can get it, before we die of bird flu and/or the measles and/or nuclear war and/or elon musk or RFK simply deciding to kill us all personally.
To that end: make the confession send the love letter buy the frivolous clothing item eat dessert etc., we’re all clear on that, right? You don’t need me to tell you that, right? But in case you do. I’ve of course been writing detailed queer sex scenes in my work for more years on this Earth than not but now it’s subversive/political. I wish it wasn’t. I wish there was nothing inherently political about non-hetronormative romance. I’m old enough to remember when there wasn’t because that was less than half a decade ago!
Though in fairness, I had never lived in rural Georgia, whose norms hover somewhere around what should be expected in 1962.
My mindset notwithstanding, a beautifully-timed campus visit from a visiting scholar altered my life and consciousness thanks to this guy, Dr. John Belk. He has an MFA in Poetry, a PhD in Rhetoric, and such an invigorating approach to both Pedagogy and words as a whole that I — I, the reigning king of Don’t Show Up to Campus Before 1pm For Your Chosen Teaching Time of 2pm — got my ass out of bed for two mornings in a row to walk for half an hour in pouring rain to hear him speak at 9am. I’m thrilled to have broken my “I do that shit for no one” rule and I have no regrets.
BDSM lifestyles keep coming up in casual conversation as though I’m willing them to as a way to counteract the rural-Georgia-ness of my daily life. I suppose I am. I’ve started listening to Dan Savage’s Savage Love sex advice podcast again as an antidote to the conservatism that’s taken as a given here. Wild how valuable strangers’ sex lives suddenly become when you’re surrounded by people who seem never to have heard of the practice. I thought grad school in Creative Writing would be brimming with such tales but the days of Bukowski are gone. Or, at the very least, they sure ain’t here.
More and more, though, I’m concerned that Creative Writing is widely considered, at least in America, to be a way of eshewing the body unless you’re writing about chronic pain. Is that harsh? Am I wrong? I would love to be wrong about this. Perhaps it matters less how accurate my statements of concern are and more about what I’m doing to counteract them. Answer: Everything I can.
Speaking of action, something else you can do to counteract larger and more pressing horrors is buy a beautiful handmade piece of jewelry, item of clothing, or keychain from these talented Latinx artists whose Donation Collection gives a portion of their proceeds to Immigrants Rights lawyers and and legal services.
Whatever you’ve been doing to keep your spirits up during these times, I would love to hear about it. I have no plans to ditch my life-saving Wellbutrin to go do manual labor (that CP prevents me from doing) on one of RFK’s proposed “wellness farms,” but I do plan to pose whatever threats I possibly can to an administration that’s specifically going after the immigrants that have always been the backbone (and most of the ribs and a lot of the heart) of America. No surprise that they’re also going after Universities/intellectuals, queer and otherwise marginalized artists, and Federal workers who make possible the government programs intended to bring assistance and ease of hardship to the majority.
President Musk and his orange right-hand man do not like the majority. Because they are eugenicists. For Elon, sperm is a way to populate this wounded planet with as many white babies as possible. In addition to making sure all future generations are the color of Sclerotinia sclerotiorum, it’s a given that they won’t be allowed to walk the way I walk. I shudder to think what else encompasses this plan they've cooked up while the Establishment democrats all heave resigned sighs and go home.
That’s not where I was hoping to end this! I kinda blew my hope-load up there already though (what a classy expression!). Here. I’ve brought this up before but is there ever a bad time to revisit JENNA ORTEGA IN A UNICORN HORROR MOVIE?!?! Of course there isn’t. Let’s end it on this: