Dual Booting Crunchbang Linux and OS X Lion on a MacBook Air 4,1

2013/03/31 – 15:07

PREAMBLE
WHAT IS POSSIBLE
DISCLAIMER
READ UP ON EFI BOOT PROCESS ON OS X AND LINUX SYSTEMS
DOWNLOAD #! WALDORF IMAGE AND COPY TO USB KEY
PARTITION DISK WITHOUT ERASING EXISTING OS X INSTALLATION
INSTALL CRUNCHBANG FROM USB IMAGE
USE ARCANE METHODS TO ENABLE EFI BOOT
ENJOY YOUR NEW DUAL-BOOT #! LINUX / OS X MACBOOK AIR (NOT GUARANTEED BUT YOU ARE PROBABLY REALLY CLOSE EVEN IF NOT QUITE ALL THE WAY THERE)

PREAMBLE

[teel, dear:
I usually prefer doing things the hardest way possible, especially since 'easy' usually involves a kludge of one kind or another.]

For reasons that are obscure and interesting only to myself and possibly other ambivalent OS X users who may not be eager to give up their rights to use their devices the way they want to, a few weeks ago a bee entered my bonnet and refused to leave until I got one of my Macs dual-booting into one of the “minimalist” Linux distros. Although my eventual obsession is still unsatisfied–to dual boot my iMac, leaving the current OS X system alone except for trimming it down as much as possible–I did reach an intermediate goal last week: dual-booting the MacBook Air that does not hold much crucial data first, to see how possible and how tricky such a thing might be.

I decided on crunchbang (#!) Linux after considering Arch and Slackware and deciding that maybe I should go with a slightly less DIY distribution so that I could keep the number of mysteries down to a manageable number at least until I knew a little more about the processes required to get an EFI-loading Mac to boot into Linux at all.

I have used crunchbang for several months on a weak-willed little netbook, and it does quite well with it, or at least way better than it did under Ubuntu. But then, Ubuntu was my First Linux, and so I did get a little carried away with all the free software and tried to install pretty much everything on that puny little netbook, until it began to freeze with every movement of the cursor or click of the mouse.

But that is another story. I ended up wiping the netbook drive and putting crunchbang on it and I like using it quite a bit. crunchbang is based on Debian, so there is a ton of support available at various debian.org websites and many, many pages on the internet detailing how to do almost everything.

crunchbang itself has been for me a perfect “intermediate” Linux distro. It tends to work well out of the box on most machines, but much configuration is still done by editing config files rather than using GUI tools, and it does not come with wizards or even much instruction on what to do once you see the desktop. However, it does give you a desktop to start with, so it might only be mildly frightening to anyone uncomfortable with the command line.

To find out how to do most things on crunchbang it is necessary to consult the internet. But the crunchbang user forums are notoriously friendly and I can say that I have been able to find almost everything I have needed for day-to-day operation either there or at debian.org. I am old, and used to reading linearly-organized manuals to find out how things work, but this modern business of googling everything is beginning to charm me quite a bit. A hunt for information can keep me entertained all day, and discovering which search terms will get me what I want is at least half of the fun in my universe.

And so I undertook to find out a bit more about my computer than how to change my window theme. This, then, is my account of How I Did It, offered in the hope that it might be useful to others.

WHAT IS POSSIBLE

So the current going options for booting an EFI-based Mac into Linux appear to be three:

1. Create a hybrid Master Boot Record (MBR) on the EFI partition and use BIOS like in the old days;

2. Install rEFIt or rEFInd to mediate between Apple’s EFI boot manager and whatever bootloader one decides to use for their Linux installation. I think one can go either to EFI or BIOS from there, but either way I did not like this solution aesthetically.

3. Since aesthetics is generally my guide when there are no particularly compelling and outstanding ethical issues–and I took care of those mainly by choosing a Debian distro–I followed my nose and went looking for ways to make the Apple’s native EFI boot manager talk directly to an EFI-enabled boot loader on the Linux side.

Number three is the least straightforward way to go, but it leaves you with the most straightforward boot process. I think maybe all my years with Apple hardware have allowed a certain minimalist design fascism to take root in my brain, so I cannot stand to employ even one more component than I think I should need, and I will persevere(ate?) until either I get what I want or I cry myself to sleep from exhaustion. I try to keep this tendency of mine on a short leash, but when there are no harmful consequences to be had, it can be fun to let it dictate how I spend my time.

For a little while. Well, it only took five days, which is not that bad I guess except that I am disabled and do not have a day job and so those five days were pretty much dedicated to eating, sleeping, visiting the bathroom, and trying to get my MacBook Air to boot into crunchbang. And feeding the cats, of course. And putting my feet up when one of them wanted a lap. And scooping out their litter boxes. And pulling together my end-of-the-month pennies to get them a couple more cans of wet food.

But you sorta get the picture maybe.

DISCLAIMER

Rather than detail the process from start to finish (my install log is up to 5100 words and still going and lacks a narrative arc) I am going to copy and paste the successful parts. Or the successful parts so far. So be aware of these two things:

1. This is not a procedure that I have tested all in one grand swoop yet; it is a procedure that I have worked out from my very circuitous experience. It could be tested. I considered testing it. But once I achieved my main goal of booting into crunchbang without rEFIt/rEFInd or BIOS, I could not bring myself to wipe the install and confirm the process as a procedure. But: I did wipe the Linux partition and start all over just before the install that worked, and I did approximately the same things I had done before. Until I came to those places where I needed to do something different, of course.

2. I still have some issues to resolve. I did get my right-click working the next day. My wifi card is still not showing up in Network Manager but I have not looked very far for it yet. I have not optimized graphics performance. My biggest problem now is that I think the machine runs hot under crunchbang, but finding a way to get readings from the hardware sensors to see if that is really the case is proving challenging.

This, then, is approximately what I expect I could do again to do it again:

Back up everything interesting on the MacBook Air, of course! And after trashing a bunch of old unused files.

Create a Recovery HD image for OS X Lion on a USB key. Apple offers a software tool for this and instructions on how to use it:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4848

Note: my hard drive was encrypted and this interfered with the function of the Recovery HD image. Because I was in a hurry to see if I could get crunchbang to work, I unencrypted my disk and went from there. If I ever plan to leave the house with my computer again, I will look into re-encrypting it.

READ UP ON EFI BOOT PROCESS ON OS X AND LINUX SYSTEMS

General information about UEFI and its commercial hardware implementations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uefi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GUID_Partition_Table
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFI_System_partition

Information specific to running Linux on the MacBook family of machines:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBook
http://wiki.debian.org/MacBook
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Apple_Macbook_Pro
http://dentifrice.poivron.org/laptops/macbookair3%2C1/

Successful EFI boot mode installs on MacBooks:

A MacBook Air 4,2 install of Debian:
http://wiki.debian.org/MacBookAir4%2C2Testimonial
Practical link: provides concrete steps to follow

A Debian install on MacBook Air 5,1, written in both French and English:
http://alexandre.delanoe.org/blog/archives/2012/10/index.html
Not much different from the above link, but shored my belief that this could be done.

Debian EFI boot mode on a Macbook Pro:
http://glandium.org/blog/?p=2830
This link showed me the light, dropped the scales from my eyes, and pointed out that the grub-install script is a crucial component in installing grub. Heh.

All those empty spots that haven’t been filled in yet:

http://www.rodsbooks.com/

I kept noticing that when I needed to do some intricate command line task that I really did not quite understand, Googling the subject invariably brought up links to this site. So I link the index page here. These are the pages I found most useful myself:

http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/
Tools for partitioning disks that use a GUID Partition Table

http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/index.html
Which EFI bootloader do I want to use?

http://www.rodsbooks.com/ubuntu-efi/index.html
Ubuntu install with rEFInd, but also good partitioning guidance

DOWNLOAD #! WALDORF IMAGE AND COPY TO USB KEY

Downloaded here: http://crunchbang.org/download

I copied the .iso image using dd in OS X:

First show locally mounted disks to determine identifier for USB key

$ df -hl

This shows filesystems and their names; useful if you have a bazillion devices mounted. My USB partition was /dev/disk2s1

Unmount USB partition(s)
I just used Disk Utility to do this. Choose the partition in the left pane, click ‘Unmount’.

Then in terminal, write the image to the unmounted partition:

$ sudo dd if=crunchbang-11-20130119-amd64.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=4194304; sync

wait a little while. For me, this returned:

187+1 records in
187+1 records out
787480576 bytes transferred in 347.709451 secs (2264766 bytes/sec)

Note: I originally used “4M” for the bs flag in dd, ie, bs=4M
But that returned ‘bs: illegal numeric value’, so I converted the figure to bytes, geekily using powers of 2 to get the fancier number. That made it happier.

PARTITION DISK WITHOUT ERASING EXISTING OS X INSTALLATION

It’s partitioning, so back up everything you would cry about if you lost it. I resized my OS X partition twice without incident, but there are no guarantees!

You can resize the OS X partition using Disk Utility:

Highlight the target drive.
It can in fact be your current startup drive!

Click the “Partition” button above the right pane.
This button only appears when you have chosen the whole drive.
If you have highlighted a partition, rather than the whole disk, you won’t see it.

Your OS X partition will be shown with a shaded portion representing existing data.
If this partition has those three diagonal lines in the bottom right corner, then you can resize it. If it does not, you might have an encrypted drive. Me I had already unencrypted mine. See above.

Click and drag on that corner to resize the partition.
Highlighting a partition will tell you its size. Highlighting the new, emerging partition will tell you size of space you are proposing to free up.

You can add however many partitions you want here, which may be a little easier than waiting until you are on the command line, where you are headed anyway. Or you can write your changes to disk without doing much more to the new partition. This is what I did:

Left about 18GB data-free space on the OS X partition
Chose MS_DOS(FAT) as the format for the new partition

Make sure that when you click the “Options…” button that “GUID Partition Table” is chosen. If you have OS X on the disk already, it should be already. I checked anyway. Several times.

Name the partitions in such a way that you will remember what you were planning to do with them when you see a partition map on the terminal. Or not. Live life on the edge if you like.

When you have things how you want them, click “Apply”.

Hold your breath if you have found that this appeases the partition gods.

Using GPT fdisk tools to reliably divvy up and label your new partition(s)

As outlined at rodsbooks.com, the GPT fdisk tools will create partitions on GPT disks such that the partition boundaries will line up properly with the data boundaries on the disk. This is better, but if you need more precise reasons to do this and they are not already clear in any of the above links, bug me and I will try to find the relevant links in my browser history.

A link to download GPT fdisk tools is here:
http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/

They will install and run on Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Windows.

gdisk and cgdisk are similar. I used both of them at different times, but prefer cgdisk. If you need your hand held a bit more tightly or need protection from yourself when trying to destroy hard drive data, it may feel more comfortable than gdisk. I like cgdisk because it displays all of the commonly-used commands in a menu at the bottom of the screen, and that helps me not to have to keep calling up a command list because my short-term memory gave out long ago and to me ‘delete’ and ‘erase’ are not distinct but only one of them will do anything in gdisk or cgdisk.

You can find an outstanding guide to using cgdisk by visiting
http://rodsbooks.com/gdisk/cgdisk-walkthrough.html
It’s flawless. Just follow the instructions; they are way better than anything I would try to write here.

For reference, this is what my screen displayed just before I told cgdisk to write my changes to disk:

Part. #     Size     Partition Type               Partition Name
----------------------------------------------------------------
           3.0 KiB   free space
1        200.0 MiB   EFI System                   EFI system partition
2         83.6 GiB   Apple HFS/HFS+               littleBlackHat
3        619.9 MiB   Apple boot                   Recovery HD
         128.0 MiB   free space
5          8.0 GiB   Linux filesystem             linux
         128.0 MiB   free space
6         20.4 GiB   Microsoft basic              data share

As you can see, I left 128MB of space around the new partitions. It is said by many that Apple hardware really likes it when you do this, but I did note that Apple themselves left no space between their partitions. Nonetheless, as a gesture to the Apple gods, I put those spaces in, because I was tired of googling for accurate info and figured I could sacrifice the space for good luck.

The EFI partition and the Apple partitions were already there. Leaving them alone is the best way to not disturb them.

INSTALL CRUNCHBANG FROM USB IMAGE

The main idea here is to install crunchbang without installing the version of grub that the installer will choose for you. After that, I boot up from the LiveUSB image and then chroot into my new system and install grub-efi-amd64. Then comes some fancy footwork on the command line that will place an .efi target on the existing system EFI partition so that it appears as a startup disk choice when you boot with the Option key held down.

That is basically what is going on here:
http://glandium.org/blog/?p=2830
but I changed a few things and actually forgot some steps but it worked anyway so I did not have to go through all this one more time. I will detail what I did. I may or may not know precisely why or how any particular step works the way it does, but I have many more hunches now than I did last week at this time, so feel free to ask!

Onward!

Power off MacBook Air
Insert USB with #! Waldorf image ["#!LiveUSB" is what I am calling it]
While holding down the Option key, press the Power button

After a few seconds, you will see a screen that offers you a choice of what system to boot. Mine labeled the #!LiveUSB as “Windows” and its icon was a generic yellow USB drive icon. I was also offered my existing OS X system and the Recovery HD, which exists to help you to reinstall OS X Lion if something gets borked. I chose Windows even though normally I would not.

You can also connect to your wireless network while on this screen, but my MacBook Air has never played will with my Netgear wireless router, and I guess they weren’t speaking to each other just then, because the little wheel kept spinning but I was never able to connect. So I plugged in a USB to Ethernet adapter when I needed internet outside of OS X.

When the crunchbang Live menu appears–as it has for me perfectly everytime I have booted the #!LiveUSB–choose “Install”.

Note: the trackpad did not work throughout the Install process, but:

Arrow keys will move the cursor through possible choices
‘Esc’ will go back to the last screen
‘Enter’ aka ‘Return’ will accept whatever changes you made on that screen and advance to the next.

Follow the prompts (language, keyboard, hostname–these you can set however you want) until you reach the screen where it asks you about choosing and partitioning your disk drive.

Choose “Manual”

If you have not manually partitioned a for a Linux install before, this can look a little intimidating, but if you got through the cgdisk procedures, you will do fine. These are very similar. Also, as with cgdisk, you can fiddle with your partitioning scheme for days if you want. All your changes are stored; nothing happens to your disk until you tell the installer to go ahead and write the partitions, and it gives you fair warning.

I put the whole crunchbang installation on one 8GB partition to keep things simple and so setting up my partitions was also relatively simple:

Choose 8GB partition
Mount as: / [root, in other words]
Format: ext4
Bootable: Yes
Name: someCoolName

I did not create a swap partition after having read repeatedly that with 4GB or more of RAM it is not necessary. And it is also written that solid state hard drives do weird stuff with swap partitions.

If you do not create a swap partition, the installer will ask if you meant to do that and prompt you to go back to the partitioning menu. You may politely turn it down and move on.

Once you have allowed the installer to write your partitions to disk, you can continue until it asks you where to install the grub boot loader. It does not immediately give you the choice not to install it at all, but if you press ‘Esc’ it will take you to a scrolling menu of install steps. Skip over those having to do with any sort of boot loader, then choose the following step and press ‘Enter’. Unfortunately, I cannot find in my notes what step is next on the list, but all I knew then was that I wanted to skip the boot loader installation, and it was clear at the time how to do that.

Then just finish up the installation according to your own lights, and then shut down to proceed.

USE ARCANE METHODS TO ENABLE EFI BOOT

This is the tricky part, but also the fun part. I installed grub-efi-amd64_1.99-27 after downloading the necessary .deb files directly from a Debian package mirror.

http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/grub-efi-amd64

Otherwise, crunchbang will try to install an earlier version, and since this package is still evolving, I wanted the latest I could get. The earlier version might work for all I know, but somewhere in the middle of multiple failures I decided to grab the newest one and so that is what I worked with from that point on.

grub-efi-amd64_1.99-27 is mostly installation scripts as far as I can tell, and it depends on several packages that will not be installed on crunchbang by default, so I downloaded those, too.

The dependency chain–and thus install order–is:
efibootmgr [not kfreebsd-amd64]
grub-common (= 1.99-27)
grub-efi-amd64-bin (= 1.99-27)
grub2-common (= 1.99-27)
grub-efi-amd64 (= 1.99-27)

I put those on a FAT-32 USB stick. Mounting it was also tricky but fun.

But first:

Boot into #!LiveUSB to modify your new crunchbang system

With #!LiveUSB inserted, hold ‘Option’ while powering up.
Choose the #!LiveUSB (“Windows”, in my case) as startup disk.
Choose “Live Session” from menu.

You will need internet for the first bit of work, so plug ethernet in if that is where your internet comes from.

You start inside the #!LiveUSB system, but you want to work in your newly installed system.
chroot can help you with this. I have cribbed this procedure from xaos52′s most excellent post:
http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=15351
I reproduce parts of it here for some small convenience.

You first need to look for the location of your new crunchbang install. You can open GParted to see this easily, or you can deduce it by thumbing through:

$ ls /dev

If you open GParted, it is a good idea to note where the system EFI partition is, too. Most likely it will be sda1, but computers are devious beasts!

Once you know, you can

Use chroot to work from inside your new crunchbang install:

Prepare the target. A number of directories in the system you booted into need to be “forwarded” to your new crunchbang install in order for it to function correctly after you have chroot’ed into it. You will also be working as root for some time, so have your wits about you to whatever extent your existing data is important to you.
Remember also to replace the [x]–brackets and all–in sda[x] with the correct number for your new system partition–i.e., /media/sda5 if you installed to sda5.

$ sudo su
# TARGET=/media/sda[x]
# mkdir -p $TARGET
# mount /dev/sda[x] $TARGET
# mount --bind /dev $TARGET/dev
# mount --bind /dev/pts $TARGET/dev/pts
# mount --bind /proc $TARGET/proc
# mount --bind /sys $TARGET/sys
# cp /etc/resolv.conf $TARGET/etc/

Then chroot into your new system:

chroot $TARGET /bin/bash

From here, my procedure is synthesized using the ideas at
http://glandium.org/blog/?p=2830
and
http://wiki.debian.org/MacBookAir4%2C2Testimonial

Some of the instructions are lifted directly from one or the other of them, and it is worth looking over what they each do to get an idea of what you might need to do.

Update, upgrade, and install a couple of utilities

Since you are now “inside” your new installation of crunchbang, and its root directory is your working root directory, it is a good time to

# apt-get update
# apt-get upgrade

These will also help you with setting up your .efi target:

# apt-get install hfsprogs icnsutils

Mount the USB key with grub-efi-amd64 packages inside of the new system

Make a place to mount the USB holding the grub packages:

# mkdir -p /target/usb

Now you need to go back to the #!LiveUSB system to fetch the USB:

Control-D

Drops you back out of chroot.

Mount the USB stick inside your new system
(mine is called “rentMe”; replace that with whatever name of yours shows up in /media with:
$ ls /media) :


# mount --bind /media/rentMe/ /media/sda5/target/usb

Return to your new install:

# chroot $TARGET /bin/bash

Mount the system EFI partition inside your new system and install grub-efi-amd64

An fstab entry for the system EFI partition will help with mounting it later:

# echo $(blkid -o export -s UUID /dev/sda1) /boot/efi auto defaults 0 0 >> /etc/fstab

Then mount it:

# mkdir /boot/efi
# mount /boot/efi

Tell your kernel what the EFI variables are:

# modprobe efivars

This gave me the error

efivars: Unknown symbol efi_enabled_facility (err 0)

but still seemed to work ok. If you skip this step, the install of grub-efi-amd64 could fail.

Install grub-efi-amd64 from /target/usb in depency chain order:

# dpkg --install /target/usb/efibootmgr_0.5.4-3_amd64.deb
...
# dpkg --install /target/usb/grub-common_1.99-27_amd64.deb
...
# dpkg --install /target/usb/grub-efi-amd64-bin_1.99-27_amd64.deb
...
# dpkg --install /target/usb/grub2-common_1.99-27_amd64.deb
...
# dpkg --install /target/usb/grub-efi-amd64_1.99-27_amd64.deb

Edit /usr/sbin/grub-install:

Look for « xfat »
and remove the block of code that looks like:

if test "x$efi_fs" = xfat; then :; else
    echo "${efidir} doesn't look like an EFI partition." 1>&2
    efidir=
fi

Run grub-install:

# /usr/sbin/grub-install

Now copy /boot/efi/EFI/debian/grubx64.efi to a spot where the system EFI will find it:

# mkdir -p /boot/efi/System/Library/CoreServices
# cp /boot/efi/EFI/debian/grubx64.efi /boot/efi/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi

Consider the consequences of trusting the wisdom of fools

This is where
http://glandium.org/blog/?p=2830
details steps to bless the boot.efi file, but I was so excited to see grubx64.efi actually appear where it was said to appear–I had been looking for it in vain for over 48 hours–I skipped right past them and backed out of the fresh install to the LiveUSB, shut down and rebooted. I only realized I had done this after I was booted into my new, working MacBook Air crunchbang system! At least one other person has commented on that page that no blessing is needed, so I dunno if it does something crucial that I am missing, or not. If you have not yet looked at that page, now might be a very good moment to take a break and then visit glandium.org to decide for yourself whether you want to rely on my dumb luck.

You can also stop and put a distinctive icon on the EFI target if you don’t want to see a generic hard drive icon:

# rsvg-convert -w 128 -h 128 -o /tmp/icon.png /usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/debian-swirl.svg
                                              [or /path/to/some/other/image/file.svg]
# png2icns /boot/efi/.VolumeIcon.icns /tmp/debian.png
# rm /tmp/debian.png

Back out to the #!LiveUSB and unmount everything you mounted however long ago it was:

Un-chroot:

Command-D

Checking the value of $TARGET is a good idea:

# $TARGET

If it is still assigned /media/sda[x], then

# umount -l $TARGET/dev/pts
# umount -l $TARGET/dev
# umount -l $TARGET/sys
# umount -l $TARGET/proc

And also

# umount -l $TARGET/target/usb

Now you can shut down the #!LiveUSB session and shut down.

Praying to whatever beings you find to be congenial to technological issues certainly cannot hurt.

ENJOY YOUR NEW DUAL-BOOT #! LINUX / OS X MACBOOK AIR (NOT GUARANTEED BUT YOU ARE PROBABLY REALLY CLOSE EVEN IF NOT QUITE ALL THE WAY THERE)

If all went well and the wind is from the west and the moon either waxing or full you should be able to remove the #!LiveUSB now and boot into the crunchbang system on your hard drive.

To do this you will still need to hold the ‘Option’ key down while booting. This takes you to the EFI boot manager’s startup disk menu; otherwise you will boot directly into OS X.

My crunchbang system shows up on that menu as ‘EFI boot’; if you put a custom icon on it before restarting, that should also appear, rather than OS X’s generic hard drive icon. Choose it, hit ‘Enter’, and look on breathlessly as crunchbang Linux puts itself together on your Mac.

The crunchbang welcome script will lead you through a few more steps to customize your install. The only difference is that updating your repository locations and then upgrading your system should not take very long at all, since you already did that before installing the grub EFI bootloader.

One more caveat: when I try to do a system-wide upgrade using apt-get, it defaults to trying to DOWNGRADE grub-efi-amd64. Just be aware of that. There is at least one way to tell it not do that, but I have not yet investigated it, or any others, to the point that I am comfortable upgrading with apt-get. Synaptic is installed by default in crunchbang, though, and allows you to control exactly what gets installed by checking and un-checking boxes, so for now I am using that to get packages needed to tweak my installation.

That is all for now! Hope this was useful in some way!

By eriktrips | Posted in geekery, how to sort of, linux | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

the first part of whatever it is to be

2012/03/19 – 03:33

and the last installment of Chapter One of UndiaGnosed is up. it is already getting completely out of control even though it was mostly already written. I am a bit frightened but I am not giving up yet. you have no idea the mountain of words still waiting to get polished up.

By eriktrips | Posted in autobiography, nonfiction, writing | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Why do men tell me things?

2012/01/05 – 14:03

I used to be a man-hating dyke. That is, according to a certain strand of American popular thought, I must have hated men, because I was a dyke. Back then I did at times feel more than a minor annoyance at some men, and on the odd occasion I came close to kicking a stranger in the junk because he was following me too closely on an uncrowded sidewalk just long enough for me to become aware that he was following me and that I did not know his intentions for doing so and was thus growing uncomfortable with his behavior.

I never actually assaulted anyone, and I am fairly certain now—because nothing untoward happened then—that most of these men meant me no harm and would have been very surprised to know that I was waiting for that fatal wrong move, which I would have answered by whirling around with fists, elbows, knees and feet flying. And I cannot say that in the moment I hated them. I did find it exasperating that they could not seem to figure out that walking right behind a woman on an uncrowded sidewalk might be construed as threatening behavior and that therefore they might want to consider what they were doing. Still, hate is too strong a word for what I was feeling then.

I may have changed my mind now.

It has been almost fifteen years since I began a transition from appearing to walk the earth as a woman to appearing to do so as a man. It has turned out not to be a “gender transition” exactly, because I am not convinced that my gender has changed. It is now packaged differently, and I usually feel less cognitive dissonance when others react to me as though I were just another guy than I did when they reacted to me as just another dyke, but what I thought was a desire to “become a man” has quite vanished, and with it any idea as to what a man is or should be or should do in almost any circumstance. I am pushing fifty so closely that by the time you read this I might not be pushing anymore but have arrived and already begun coasting downhill, but I have not the first clue as to what a fifty-year-old, bearded white guy—a description that reasonably approximates my current presentation—is expected to do, like, pretty much, ever.

And other older white guys? Oh my god.

I am a writer, a reader, and a thinker of some fashion or other. I spent my formative thinking years as a body that was read as female and thus often assumed to be incapable of adequate thought. I was, and still am, so introverted that I pull introversion/extroversion scales wrong side out when I take personality inventories. I hate confrontation for various reasons and for various, often related, reasons, I assume most primarily that I do not know what I am talking about when conversing with others in real time. I do not think quickly on my feet; my brand of introversion and social anxiety makes it difficult to articulate myself at all outside of my room and without a keyboard or at least a pencil and paper. I think intuitively and visually and have to translate this sort of thought into a linear language of at least somewhat common understanding before I can present myself coherently, and that takes time—time that is usually not available at parties, in discussion groups, in seminars, or in other social situations in which I have been called to try to think and present at the same time.

Short version: I do not do well in real-time arguments and spent the first half of my life not being taken seriously anyway due to (somewhat) female appearances. Thus, in spite of the fact that I am supposedly educated and well-read, I will still default to Intimidated in an average conversation with anyone. Conversations with men, in particular, though, have become almost surreal since I have come to look like one of them.

Interestingly, perhaps, men still address me as though they are quite assured that they have given whatever matter all necessary thought and are offering me the Single Inescapable Conclusion on whatever topic. That has not changed, and so I am getting the impression that in US culture men do not talk to men all that differently from the way they talk to women, except they do sometimes have the sense to keep overt sexism to themselves when women are around. This means I have heard some even-more-horrifyingly-than-before sexist things since transitioning to a masculine presentation, but the whole patronizing tone has not changed. It was always horrifying and it still is.

I suppose I should clarify my terms here. When I say “men” in this case, I am usually referring to cisgendered men with whom I might interact in an average day, or men who have, to the best of my knowledge, no prior experience living as a body perceived and/or labeled as feminine. This is not to say I have not had any conversations with maddeningly obtuse men whose history includes identification as trans- or some other variety of gender nonconformity and/or transition, but this happens less often. Whether this is because other trans-spectrum men [1] are more likely to have at least some awareness of the vagaries of societal gender expectations or because there are simply not very many of us, I am not certain.

What I am describing here, though, are my experiences in conversation with apparently cisgendered men as a USian trans-identified male who spent thirty-five years as a body hailed more or less as female (less as I got older, cut my hair shorter, stopped wearing anything but men’s clothing, bound or otherwise hid my breasts, etc—but this resulted in a confusing presentation much more often than in one “mistaken” for male), and as a person whose temperament makes confrontation quite difficult to negotiate and disagreeable to contemplate.

So, when I encounter men still holding forth as though their thoughts are the unassailable products of rigorous reasoning, even when said reasoning is obviously lacking and nobody appearing to be a woman is present [2], I find myself in a position of not knowing, exactly, what is going on. My experiences as the assumed-feminine recipient of male wisdom do not help me: although I did come to understand that, where I live, patronizing condescension is to be expected of men if one appears to be a woman, this tells me nothing about what to expect if one appears to be a man.

On the one hand, the fountain of youth from which so many female-to-male transsexual individuals drink has rendered my visage a good ten to fifteen years younger-looking than it actually is, and so it may be that I am still considered a novitiate in the world of masculine knowledge, and I am being condescended to because of the tenderness of my perceived years. On the other hand, I wonder whether it is that men simply spout off all the time, expecting other men to challenge them with counter-spouting-off if they hear something with which they disagree. Whether or not the man spouting off believes he is actually right is unclear to me as well, because the “knowledge” so imparted is often so obviously self-serving that I wonder if it is being offered in some sort of ironic self-deprecation that I am just not getting.

Whatever the case may be, I still feel like a squirrel in front of an oncoming car, trying desperately to decide which direction to run, when confronted with Self-Obvious Truths as Mediated by Men. My self-assurance in these situations is almost nil. I do not expect anyone ever to take anything I say to heart, and I do not expect to be able to out-spout any pontificating personage regardless of gender. It occurs to me that I might simply act as though I thought whatever comeback I could manage were gospel, but I do not yet have the bravado necessary to do that. Besides, if I were ever to become a condescending, patronizing know-it-all, I would beg you to please shoot me. I do not think that acting like one even without conviction would be a particularly good idea.

On those occasions when a retreat to computer-mediated communication is possible, I still do not know what is the best way to proceed when I am faced with a man who has no idea that any experience diverging from his could even exist in a parallel universe, much less on this very planet and possibly even next door. I can write, and I know I can write, but I am not convinced that burying someone in discourse is advisable or healthy for all parties concerned. That is, if the tendency in men to declare themselves master of whatever field of knowledge is at hand is also an invitation to other men to join some sort of dick-waving competition, I am not sure that answering that invitation helps things at all. Although I may be in a venue where I can respond, how to modulate that response so as not to stage yet another cock fight is less clear.

I do know that the longer I am on testosterone, the harder it is to resist such competition. This is not so much because I want to compete, but rather because it drives me over the edge with anxiety and rage when one man appears to be dominating the conversation to the exclusion of all others: I am acutely aware of the silencing of others and sensitive also to being silenced myself, living as I do under a constant din of self-doubt, where silence has, for so long, felt safest. Testosterone has had the effect, in me, of amplifying both my emotions and their ensuing impulses to the point that they are often difficult to resist.

But I participated in a few too many usenet flamewars in my internet youth. Thus, my response to being told how I think, for instance, or who I am, is often simply to flee. To approximately here, where I can write abstract treatises on how it is to figure out social propriety when one is not well-versed in determining what might be proper in any given situation. I grew up as an extremely introverted girl, terrified of being wrong but usually convinced that she was so. I am no less introverted and no less terrified than before, and still convinced about 75% of the time, which means that when I do engage in written argument, my instinct is to argue as though my life depended on it. It sort of does, in what my therapist calls my “rich inner life.”

Small animals who think their lives are in danger are extremely hazardous to handle; they may not not mean to take anyone out, but will not hesitate to try to do so if they feel threatened. One reason I was able, when it was my job, to deal with animals in that state without any fear or anger of my own was because their aggression made perfect sense to me. I even identified with it much of the time I was at work: trying to negotiate the intense sociality of a daily job left me feeling much like that completely bewildered cat that will take your arm off if you reach for it.

But so any internal model for responding to disagreement without immediately escalating into combat readiness is quite lacking with me. Fight or flight are the only options that make instinctive sense to me, while human social functioning is incomprehensibly subtle. Add the complexities of socialized gender and I am thrown into my own personal third-body problem, where calculating real trajectories—much less ideal ones—becomes operationally impossible. And so answering the pronouncements of men who are so sure they are sure that they don’t even have to care about the actual cause they are promoting becomes an exercise in what I can only describe as sublimely disastrous communication.

I do not suppose that I actually hate men in general because certain ones of them drive me to this sort of distraction, but between my own disabilities in negotiating conversation and the very tiring fact that these same conversations just keep happening, I have come to a place where I question ever more vehemently the very idea of What Men Do in my culture. That devil’s advocate, for instance: who would want to be one? One is reminded of big brothers who torment their younger sisters just to get a rise out of them. Arguing without conviction for a position that makes little difference to the arguing party seems to me to betray some sort of delight in eliciting responses that are enormously costly, in terms of emotional energy, to the person goaded into a response, and in watching, without having to pay a particularly high price for the “entertainment,” the gyrations of another in pain. And what is that? Sociopathy? Psychopathy in larval form?

I wonder, and I wonder how it is that one comes to believe that behaving thus is acceptable in what passes for polite company. Here I am, having gone to some effort to cross over to the “other side,” but how the lifelong residents here choose to behave is every bit as bewildering, and nearly as maddening, as it was before I arrived. I do realize that there is no here here and that there never was; that is, I realize that “men” is a completely fictional category (though not, for all that, necessarily voluntarily chosen). But it is a familiar category, and one that I was led to believe, as most of us were, would make sense upon investigation.

But, no. Like most of life thus far, it makes less sense than ever.

[1] I use the term “trans-spectrum” here as something of a neologism, because it is difficult to use the term “trans” together with “man” in such a way that every person who might be included under such a locution would agree to being included thus, and so there is no current consensus that I am aware of as to how to refer generally to the class of human bodies who were assigned female at birth but who identify as some other gender. “Coercively assigned female at birth” might come fairly close to naming an experience that many of us have in common, but even there rests some controversy, so I note it here and hope that “trans-spectrum” men can be taken provisionally, as it is offered, as a shorthand term that is necessarily inadequate.

[2] See Rebecca Solnit’s “Men Explain Things to Me” for a very useful exposition of the phenomenon of Men Educating Women. What I am mainly considering here is why and how Men Educate Everyone, apparently.

By eriktrips | Posted in autobiography, nonfiction, queer, transgender | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (5)

Why I am not here

2011/11/22 – 10:12

So now I guess I am posting every other month.

Well, you cannot say I have not been busy. I have books to mail; videos to plan, film, edit, and release; and I am posting my autobiography, UnDiaGnosed online piece by piece, partly as a spur to finish it already, and partly as a serial experiment in publishing and distribution over the internet.

And I have taken to composing lyrical pieces when I am feeling especially inarticulate. Maybe there will be another collection sometime in the not terribly distant future.

Not to mention some interesting developments in the world of politics that have been begging me for some sort of contribution. But I am not going to say any more than that for now.

So, please, go read UnDiaGnosed; I am trying to post a new part every two weeks. I do not really know how long this will take because I have many sections to work on but some of them are short and so I will combining varying numbers of the into single posts. It might be some sort of entertainment for about a year, though.

If I think of something worth arguing prosaically, I will consider running off at the mouth here.

By eriktrips | Posted in autobiography, nonfiction, writing | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

killing you softly

2011/09/11 – 14:40

What defense against the apprehension of loss is at work in the blithe way in which we accept deaths caused by military means with a shrug or with self-righteousness or with clear vindictiveness? To what extent have Arab peoples, predominantly practitioners of Islam, fallen outside the “human” as it has been naturalized in its “Western” mold by the contemporary workings of humanism? … After all, if someone is lost, and that person is not someone, then what and where is the loss, and how does mourning take place?
… If violence is done to those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and again). …Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object.
Judith Butler, Precarious Life 32-33

Today being the day it is I decided that rather than participate in the public spectacle we seem intent on creating out of our inability to mourn whatever it was that we in the US think we lost ten years ago–although we may well have never had it to begin with –rather than go along with the ruse of our fallen, long-mythologized invulnerability to attack or even decay, that I was going to re-read Judith’s Precarious Life, since in it she addresses violence and mourning in direct response to the war that we imagine only began in 2001. I wanted to try to understand what it was exactly in our fetishization of the images of destruction that I find so frustrating to deal with, beyond even practical and political concerns over the extent to which we seem to be willing to give up every last shred of dignity and “freedom” (were we “free” before?), if it will help us to reestablish our illusion of security and safety from political violence.

I am also thinking a bit about death and the multiple, complex relations between life and death–not only in the realm of the human, but even in whatever cycle it is with which the forces of the whole universe are engaged: materialization out of potential, animation out of elementary energy, and any and all inevitable returns to entropy that we might also be undertaking as moments of complexity and approximate coherence in a system characterized by violent destruction in creation, and creation in destruction.

As is usual, I managed to get about thirty pages into my chosen reading before I felt compelled to begin writing. The questions that arise upon reading anything with nuance or subtlety are irresistible to me, and so I remain in interminable study, never able to finish much of anything but always starting again to reformulate this process in which I have, for most of my life, been chasing after ways to express the inexpressible and to narrate that which defies language. To put it all too neatly.

It is not a simple coincidence that the refusal to integrate our national experience into a humane course of action causes me to pause over this question of what it is to live in close proximity with death–even here in the US where death is sequestered and hidden away beneath neatly manicured lawns and behind antiseptic curtains. And it is not simple coincidence that this question occurs to me at the same time as does my perennial questions concerning the limits of language and sense, for death is one name for an ultimately senseless way of going along: it is the primary way in which I myself have been and will be related to all that is for all but the tiniest sliver of time that I claim as my uncertain lifespan. I do not mean by this that ultimately I will be dead, but rather that my being dead, or my not being, or something inexpressible that has to do with never having come to be to begin with despite my apparent sensible existence at the moment, constitutes the primary and primordial relations that ground this current state in which, for now, I seem to be here.

To put it in a Zen Buddhist sort of way, I am already dead and always have been. There are infinite other ways of putting it, for it will not be put, or it will not stay put, or in other words there are no other words and so there will always be an ongoing stream of other words. What we in the US seem unable to comprehend is that our ideal of individualism and consequence-free domination of whatever it is we damned well feel pleased to dominate has been bound from the time of its conception to meet, eventually, its limiting case, its moment of mortality realized, its susceptibility to destructive forces and its vulnerability to the violence that it so easily calculates as acceptable expenses for a political economy that will admit no peer. That is, empires are destined to fall. Are we falling now? Have we not already fallen?

–

To the degree that we must recognize the unrecognizable–that is, our “primary vulnerability” to that upon which our very being falters, even disastrously, in its attempt to circumscribe itself as independent and individualistic –in order to be able to mourn whatever is lost in a violent encounter, in a disaster, then to that degree, one who suffers loss might attempt to disavow one’s own vulnerability to loss by virtue of the fact that injury is instigated by an unrecognizable force. Thus is rendered impossible the question of any sort of narration of loss or resolution in sensible language of the insensibile moment of trauma. But rather than pausing to consider what might be the consequence of our all being exposed in this way, by virtue of our primary vulnerability, if we decline even to pause in the face of what undoes us in violence, if we attempt to master our vulnerability, we only manage to deny the very conditions of our existence and are immediately closed off from the possibility of our own future. With the unrecognizable other, we also die, or are discarded, or are disavowed, or are visited in the continuing cycles of violence that serve the interests of this denial of vulnerability, which is a denial of life itself.

We are thrown here on a sort of paradoxical demand: that the unrecognizable not be consigned to illegibility or, worse, to unreality, because we are not prepared to acknowledge that we might not be able to conceptualize, chart, categorize, or comprehend the nature of our own being exposed to an other. That is, this would be the ethical demand of living itself: not to deny the fact of our helplessness, not to foreclose the possibility of incursions from unpredictable sources–incursions which may cause us pain or pleasure or both, which may occasion the possibility of our being able to live in a more lively way, or which may frustrate our desire to keep our lives in order. One cannot predict which it will be, or whether all of these moments might be bound up together in such a way that pain is the precondition of pleasure and vice versa, or, more precisely, in such a way that the distinction between pleasure and pain is lost in the very potential of coming to life as terrestrial creatures.

Relegating to the unreal that which threatens the security of the self, denying conceptual meaning to that which breaks the bounds of conceptualization, is a form of impotence in the face of the other. This impotence is realized as the impossibility of negating that which, conceptually, one has already negated–as well as the impossibility of negating that which is not subject to the workings of negation! But although the workings of negation or exclusivity or ideation cannot bring this other into any sort of domesticated, enforced “peace”, this other remains naked and vulnerable in relation to the subject of the act of negation. Our impotence, or inability to erase what is not, to begin with, legible, visits upon the other a violence without end, a real violence that incurs real atrocities precisely because its mission is impossible, and thus must be repeated indefinitely, so long as the subject inflicting that violence seeks to immunize itself against what is crucial to the being of that very subject: its other, against which it attempts to define itself. And fails.

This is how, or one of the reasons why, totalitarian violence is in the last analysis suicidal: an attempt to destroy the other which faces me and makes my utterance of “self” possible in that primordial encounter, the effort to sever relations with that in which we are already entangled and always were, from a time prior to memory and thus prior to time, is, in a very real way, the destruction of ourselves. It is not only that the balance of an interconnected ecosystem can be fatally disrupted by exploitation to the point that exploiter and exploited both perish, although to conceive of the relations between living things in the universe in this way makes our fragility in the faceless face of our own exploitative appetites quite clear. But it is also that without those relations we are, quite simply, not. Or rather, not simply at all: those relations’ being the anteroom of history and discourse renders them both foreign to and constitutive of our ability to try to name them as such.

I have no idea how to end this, but it seems as though it might be worthwhile to pause at the point of our own suicidality as it emerges from militaristic efforts to secure our place in eternity. There is no such place to be had, of course, and we only hasten our own demise in struggling to erect for ourselves a line of defense against every possible enemy. Again, this is not only because we are happy to relinquish our ideals for the illusion of safety, but it is at least that and also our current relation to that which has, in the “West”, so long been designated as inadmissible: vulnerability itself, subjection itself, fallibility itself, interdependence and the possibility that our ideals themselves are inadequate and provisional.

By eriktrips | Posted in ethics, ethics, philosophy, politics, US | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

fly me. or not.

2011/08/23 – 18:30

I am trying to find a way to Seattle and back that involves as little money as possible. For reasons about which I can only begin to speculate air travel is less expensive than both rail and bus but no matter which I were to choose I cannot really afford either one. So this may all be moot in my particular case but it still seems pertinent to say:

Looking at the anecdotes posted at tsastatus.net for SEA and SFO sent me diving for a Klonopin. These stories are not particularly graphic and do not consist of the most horrible cases of TSA personal encroachment that have been passed around, but imagining myself in the place of the people describing their experiences as they went through the security line was enough to send a cascade of cortisol through my body. And so I do what is necessary to counteract it.
Read More »

By eriktrips | Posted in autism, disability, domestic policy, flight, ptsd, queer, transgender, US | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (7)

Kickstarter project: we have achieved liftoff!

2011/08/18 – 14:59

One Last Ditch: the movie.s. has been launched at Kickstarter! I have 45 days to reach my funding goal so that I can start making non-pixelated videos–or at least, when I want them to be non-pixelated–in October or so. Please go visit and please consider funding more poetry videos, for whatever reason compels you to support poetic and visual art. I have my own reasons, but they may not be yours: I am trying to find my own voice in order to speak up for life experiences that are not necessarily considered “normal” in American culture in the twenty first century. I know that hearing and seeing others who were considered freaks in their own milieux helped me to find reasons to stay alive when I was young and terribly unhappy, and although I do not propose to go into this to save lives, I do know the power of images and language when used well. I only hope to use them well and for the forces of life and the forces of love.

And it’s fun, besides. :)

If you wish to bookmark the page (but pledge soon, because 45 days is not as long as it sounds!), use this url: http://www.tinyurl.com/onelastditch –it’s much easier to remember than the long Kickstarter url.

By eriktrips | Posted in artwork, depression, music, poetry, video, writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Kickstart One Last Ditch videos! Soon!

2011/08/17 – 09:55

Over at onelastditch.com I am trying to contain my anticipation as I launch my Kickstarter project to fund turning the rest of the book into video. Keep an eye on things over there.

Um. Please. If you don’t mind.

By eriktrips | Posted in announcements, music, poetry, video | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Why we have ethical questions but not answers

2011/07/17 – 18:51

As so many do, this post started as a reply to another post elsenet where a writer was quoted about something like the impossibility of an ethics of narrative or what is commonly thought of as postmodernity’s most glaring problem: that of the relativism of its moral arguments, when it has any.

Usually when I read the phrase “post-modern ‘anything goes’” it is being written by someone in a field in which postmodern theory does not figure very large–often a science-y type or sometimes a social science-y type; I suspect that in the social sciences postmodernism does get airplay but it is something like an AM radio broadcast of what needs to be auditioned live and in person.

Yes, the author is a fiction in most postmodern theory, and yes, it is difficult to make any claims to objective reality from within a postmodern critique of metaphysics. We do live in a discursively constituted, culturally mediated environment as postmodern Westerners and narrative does tend to be where one looks when one is trying to discern the grounds of classical Western metaphysics.

But “narrative” does not equal “not real” or “not binding” or even “voluntary” or “at somebody’s whim.”
Read More »

By eriktrips | Posted in ethics, ethics, nonfiction, philosophy | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (1)

home is where. no seriously. where is it.

2011/04/09 – 21:44

Like most urban dwellers in the US, I am from somewhere else. I have been from somewhere else for as long as I can remember; when I was two years old my family moved across the country from Tacoma Washington to a suburb of Atlanta Georgia. I grew up saying I was “from Seattle” because in the 60s and 70s in the Deep South it was slightly more likely that one’s interlocutor would have heard of Seattle than that they would know about any Tacoma. Both possibilities were vanishingly slim and I suspect that Seattle was mostly missing on any map drawn east of the Mississippi back then.

Until I was about high school age it was the family story that one day we would move back to Seattle. My parents never did and now claim that they hated the rain anyway and prefer tornados to earthquakes, but of all the things they indocrinated me with, the only one that took was that I had to get back to Seattle. After a childhood of flying back to visit relatives in this lost paradise where it never got hot and the grass stayed green all year I was so hell-bent on getting back to Seattle that when my partner and I decided that we had to leave Atlanta in 1987 because, well, it was the South, I immediately and relentlessly campaigned for us to move to Seattle.

I was successful, much to my immense pleasure. Now I live in San Francisco but that has turned out to be something of an accident and I still assume that one day I will head back up to the land of dark and rainy winters. I miss those actually: one could stay in bed all day in the winter and not feel slothful in the slightest.

But what I mean to write about is going home. Read More »

By eriktrips | Posted in autobiography, depression, nonfiction, ptsd, queer, transgender, walkaway from fundamentalism | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (5)
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.