Scattershot

Brooking the Madness, Mostly, or Finding Ways to Abide

Lately, every grasp I feel like I’m getting on a point or insight gets pushed off the edge with yet more operatically bad news: the goings-on in this country hardly feel real. If someone found a giant plug that we could pull to restart the Simulation, I wouldn’t be surprised.

I want to talk to you about what it’s like to be an out queer scholar teaching a Deviance-themed Freshman Composition class in rural Georgia, but I’m not sure how much detail I can go into while I’m still under contract. I will tell you that a thoughtful student, known for active participation and insights that have generally impressed me, made this statement yesterday: “The point of art is to appeal to as many people as possible.”

That sentence makes me want to rip up my syllabus and spend the rest of the semester explaining that Art and Influencer Culture are unrelated. As it is, I’ll probably start next week’s first class posing the question, “What is art for?” then go into what I’m actually supposed to be doing after we’ve given that discussion more space than Thursday allowed. This is a student who’s convinced that AI can easily take over the Arts, and now it all adds up: “AI art” is, by definition, broadly appealing, provided we define “broad appeal” as “what a group of racist/sexist programmers decided to train the algorithm on,” but that’s a whole separate issue that even my nonlinear ass will likely avoid deliberately bringing to this spontaneous table. Given David Lynch’s recent passing, I felt compelled to ask if anyone in the room had ever heard of him. No one had.

I think I’m allowed to tell you that the higher-ups in my institution of employment absolutely love AI. They’re shameless about it, so it should be no mark on my record to pass on their enthusiasm to you. “We’ve been told to ‘swallow it’ if a student turns in a paper that’s written by Chat GPT,” someone I work with related to me when I naively thought that doing so was frowned upon. It all makes sad cohesive sense: Humanities build critical thinking skills that compel students to question established narratives. What do people in positions of authority in rural Georgia love? Established narratives. NO QUESTIONS ASKED ABOUT THE PAST, no questions asked about anything that might shake the foundation that this blood-soaked state was built on.

I teach my Deviance and Criminality-themed Freshman Composition class and do everything I can from here. Not everything. There’s always more we can do. Working through mental health issues feels, itself, like one of Buffy’s badass hardcore training montages. (Actual training at the gym feels like that but in a different way, as Planet Gym orbits its own separate cosmos of catharsis and relief.)

I’ve experienced hallucinogenic levels of exhaustion lately, despite, thankfully, getting plenty of sleep. Unlike the Fall, when I taught every blessed day, I only teach Tuesdays and Thursdays this semester, yet I feel like I’ve clawed and chewed through flesh to get to this particular Friday. And Monday evening I thought, “There’s a whole fucking week after this?”

When students meet with me at Office Hours, I am truly alive, feeling as though I shimmer with purpose. When I don’t have students meeting with me at Office Hours, my shared desk becomes a portal to the Void. Wednesday, I sat, stared, unable to use my computer or brain to any purpose whatsoever. Half an hour before my Office Hours were set to end, I did some grading — a hero is me — then one of my friends/colleagues came in and venting about our shared political moment brought me back to life. Back to life enough that I got to the gym, worked out, and walked home, but I could barely stand long enough to do the dishes Wednesday night.

The palatial indoor track with its floor-to-ceiling windows are one of the gym’s many highlights, along with the fact that it’s free to students and faculty and student/part-time faculty members like me. In San Francisco, I paid way too much to use the gym, but considering that the money bought me life-changing sessions with a gifted personal trainer and was a short walk from where I lived, I’d almost re-rack-up the credit card debt so as not to have to deal with the journey. Walking half an hour up hills with jagged curbs to get to the shuttle stop for a 15-minute ride and making the commitment to do it all again on the way home — all while it looks like rain — did not appeal to me today.

I drank copious amounts of tea after my coffee, pulled on a sports bra, and lifted the weights that I’ve got. I went through my usual routine plus a few extra sets to establish that THIS is a LEGIT WORKOUT even though I’m in my HOUSE, but ultimately, Rohit was right: he once told me that, contrary to my assertions, even if I won the lottery and put together a killer home gym, I would still leave the house “for the social aspect” of working out. It’s true. Even though the conversations never go on for long, I have an understanding with my fellow inhabitants of Planet Gym. We know why we’re here. And knowing anything for certain right now is an indescribable relief.

I can’t end this, because the feelings driving me to write this are not going to end. Some of them have just started, they’re related to our cratered political landscape that imploded less than two weeks ago, some of them are old agitations, rooted in warped personal histories that I’d still be dealing with even if Bernie had won the election in 2016 (imagine!). Some of my feelings are the furious compulsions to escape in the ways I used to when I was younger and some of my feelings are chastising those very impulses, a whole mutiself Jungian funhouse mirror of reflections and distortions and sexual agonies and—

Anyway.

How are you?