I want to write letters. Dear Michael. Dear Richard. Dear Patti.
I have written the last one already but it is possible to write a thing more than once and sustain the same sort of sense while varying the precise wording each time.
We share approximate cultural milieux although different social circles although the two intersect and often at multiple points but this is not to say that I have made my way into very many of the social circles that I might have set my sights upon for whatever reasons and there are plenty of reasons to want to be a part of this or that although there are also for me a variety of reasons why going here or there terrifies me so I do not leave my room.
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I have tried writing about this twice already and it is not working well. The moment I am trying to describe is elusive precisely because it is a moment in which I realized that in the reams of cultural histories that have been written, at least in any language that I can currently understand, the universe is assumed to rest upon eternal principles that almost everyone can participate in by virtue of their full assent to the gender to which they were assigned when born–an assent that I have withheld for most of my life and thus which has placed me in the position of one for whom there is no cosmological correspondent.
It is all well and good that I understand that human mythopoesis is always a very human construction and that whatever principles we assign to the cosmos are thoroughly anthropomorphic and in such a way as to reflect only what a limited group of people felt was true about themselves in a limited time and place and so it is not that I think that literally there is no place in some cosmic order for someone like me who cannot sign on to being a case of either male or female humanity. The positing of eternal male and female principles is always a positing and nothing that reflects anything that is actually timeless and universal.
And yet.
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I may have been six years old the first time I flew back to Seattle. When I was six nobody knew where Seattle was.
I may have been five, or even four–I do know that I was two when we flew from Seattle to go live in Marietta Georgia and shortly after that we flew back, and thus I began flying back to Seattle when I was too young to be afraid to fly and I have continued to fly back to Seattle through a debilitating fear of flying until this day, if you leave out the few years when I would not fly but instead got into the habit of taking the train back to Seattle.
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By eriktrips
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Posted in autobiography, depression, disability, flight, nonfiction, politics, queer, writing
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Tagged autobiography, Berkeley, disability, flight, fundamentalism, nonfiction, politics, queer, San Francisco, Seattle, writing
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Sometimes you wake up and facebook dares you to write a blog post. I won’t reveal the name of the person who posted this quote, since facebook is, you know, that place where privacy is paramount. No really, I don’t share full names with the Internet at large without permission. The pointer, though:
“Why is the Christian right so enamored with the slash and burn capitalist system? –Capitalism: Take all you can. –Jesus: Give all you can. — The connection fails me.”
–fnordlord, commenter on huffpo
Sometimes the asking of a question is meant to be a pointed rebuke, as it is here. And this particular rebuke certainly has a very important point: why do fundamentalist Christians worship “all-for-me, nothing-for-you,” greed-driven, planet trashing consumption-driven capital above just about any other kind of economic system?
It seems contradictory on the surface of it and it probably is just as hypocritical if one pokes at it a little more closely. When I see questions like this, though, they make me want to raise my hand and wave it around and say “Oh! Oh! I was one of them! I know a couple of answers to this question and you all aren’t going to believe what they consist of!”
So, allow me, if you don’t mind: what is it about a deeply exploitative and self-interested economic system that appeals to a religion supposedly founded on principles of generosity and selflessness?
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By eriktrips
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Posted in ethics, nonfiction, politics, US, walkaway from fundamentalism
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Tagged capitalism, christianity, ecological crisis, economics, end times theology, environment, environmental degradation, fundamentalism, politics, war
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Another story about what can happen when assumptions about gender collide–you have probably heard about this already, that a transgendered woman was denied emergency medical care in Muncie, Indiana precisely because she is transgendered. That is to say, the hospital staff actually told her that they could not treat her “condition.” However, by “condition” they were not referring to the medical emergency she was presenting with; she had to ask, though, for clarification, and, no, they would not give her medical care because she was transgendered. What she came in for had nothing to do with gender–or at least not in any direct way that I can imagine off the top of my head, and I doubt they had anything in mind either–but they refused to treat her because of who she was, not because they were incapable of helping her with her presenting symptoms.
Go. Read about it. Do whatever you think you can do to bring some rationality to the situation. Then come back here and find out why going directly there and “kicking ass,” while a perfectly understandable wish if you were brought up on the American cowboy myth, would not help anything. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Well, no I won’t. I’ll write this and then some time after that maybe you’ll read it. All three of you.
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I am not sure if this is the place to write this. I am not even sure where it is I am going to be saying that I am not sure if this is the place to write this. Of my approximately five options, one is a PTSD board for people with PTSD from whatever trauma, one is a board for ex-fundamentalists who have walked away from their churches to varying extents, one is a board I only just joined that seems mostly focused on sexual abuse and rape, and the last board is a board for people with invisible disabilities.
I don’t know the PTSD board very well at all and, to the extent that one can get a vibe from just a few visits to an internet board (and I can, actually, and I am usually right), I get a vibe from this one that gives me some pause as to whether queer non-religious folk are welcome there or would be treated with care. I have not been to the ex-fundamentalist board in about two years and although I did get something out of my time there I don’t remember it being a place where one talked about more general familial abuse or trauma beyond that which was directly related to fundamentalism. About half of what I have to write is directly related to fundamentalism.
The invisible disabilities board is more of a place to go when one is running out of spoons than for insight into abusive childhoods; most of the people on that board do not attribute their disabilities to abuse and most of the disabilities represented there are more physiological than psychological–although I do believe that most psychological disabilities correspond to series of discrete but complex physiological states, there are many discrete, complex physiological disabilities that correspond to no particular psychological state. In other words, my invisible disability is one that tends to get section off in its own little room, apart from those with disabling physical symptoms.
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By eriktrips
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Posted in autism, autobiography, depression, disability, ptsd, walkaway from fundamentalism
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Tagged american culture, autism, autobiography, christianity, disability, fundamentalism, introversion, mental illness, ptsd, religion, spiritual abuse
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This is from a comment I made on the ButYouDon’tLookSick’s message boards, and although I think that it is a bit of a sketch and could be expanded upon, I don’t know if I have the energy to do so now. I wanted to put it out to a, um, well, another audience, we’ll say–since “a larger audience” is probably not an accurate description of the relative numbers of readers here and there.
The thread in which I posted this was a short debate on whether disability can or should be seen as “merely” difference and whose interests it serves to look consider a condition that causes one difficulties in functioning in daily life, as it is commonly conceived, as a difference that should be celebrated or a disorder for which we should try to find cures or solutions or accommodations or any of those things with which one might address a disorder.
This is what I said, more or less, with some edits for clarity:
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By eriktrips
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Posted in autobiography, depression, disability, nonfiction, politics
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Tagged autobiography, cultural theory, difference, disability, diversity, neurodiversity, paradigm shifts, psychological disability
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This post is inspired by a number of recent web developments. One is the launch of pip.io, which I am fairly sure happened a little while ago while I was not looking because that is when everything happens, mostly. But while thinking about this social networking conundrum–you know, the central question: what to do about the fact that facebook is making itself uninhabitable and yet everyone in the whole fucking world is on it and it is unlikely that any one of us will get the whole fucking world to move as a group to a single alternative social networking site and so we jump on things like pip.io and diaspora because we want to make sure we are there when the rest of the world arrives–I happened also to read a fairly lighthearted take on executive functioning at Square 8 and it occurred to me that there may be some sort of connection between my ambivalent attitude towards social networking and the difficulty I have keeping up with even the most leisurely schedule I can possibly come up with for myself even though there are many, many things that I want to do before I die and although I am not facing death in any urgent way that I am aware of, I still think to myself every now and again that another thirty productive years would be a blessing and another forty something like a small miracle given my always already tired constitution.
When I am 88 I expect I will still be reading and probably even writing, but I may not have the energy for five-mile walks every day. You know? Certainly some 88-year-olds are in lively physical shape, but I suspect that I will be one tired old man when the time comes to be an old man.
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By eriktrips
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Posted in autobiography, disability, nonfiction, writing
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Tagged autism, autobiography, disability, executive functioning, nonfiction, productivity, psychological disability, social web, writing
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It is almost Tuesday now. On Friday afternoon I found out through quite indirect means that my claim for psychiatric disability had been approved and that in fact there was already money in my bank account as a consequence and I did not even realize it was there as I had not checked my balance in several days. The award letter itself was to have been mailed today, Monday, so I might get it tomorrow, Tuesday, unless it had to come from someplace farther away than Sacramento. It will, I imagine, say more about what I can expect every month and what to do with this Medicare card I received also on Friday with no instructions other than “show this to your provider.”
Since then I have grown somewhat paradoxically more and more anxious as I find it difficult to believe that the federal government could agree with what has been for some time my main proposition as to how I am not suited for adult life in the 21st century in a postindustrial society that emphasizes individualism and self-sufficiency and having fought with this system for thirty years trying to put together a livable way to put together a livable life it seems literally incredible that I could have addressed it in this particular way and found financial support for that which I lack in relation to it I always thought that I would be regarded in that same way the human race was said to me to be regarded by heavenly beings–as unworthy and blamable for anything untoward that may have happened to it at any time at all. And so it seems that I quite expect someone to say oh you know what we messed up nevermind you were not right after all.
Whether what follows is the sufficient and necessary etiology of my lack of faith is something I have no way of measuring and so anyone who might read this will have only themselves to consult for authority on this or any other matter I might take up for inquiry.
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I think I am going to try writing here as though I had readers, to see if the spaced age sages are right and that if you make a place for something it will appear.
This one, though, will be short and prosaic but the sort of thing one would want to tell one’s readers if one had readers so I am going to tell you all that I am writing music again and have most recently put up eriktrips’ debut track “I Remember Will,” which can be found at both thesixtyone.com and at last.fm for auditioning.
A word about the mix: the vocals are quiet because that is how I have always done vocals. The words really, honestly, are not important; I am much more interested in texture and melody. I guess this means I won’t ever be a pop star but what can you do. Contrariness is deeply ingrained in my nature. Or my nurture. Or somewhere in between.
The other thing I am going to advertise in this little, um, advertisement, is the ever-bated-breath with which I await the final final galleys for my book, One Last Ditch. I have created an “author” page for myself on facebook (I am not sure if I could have chosen “writer,” but I will try to change it if possible, given that the author is beginning to smell quite ripe at this point), which is where I will put news of things like actual book releases, readings, photo opportunities, and other occasions for plugging my sorry version of poetry. And it is sorry. Not sorry, but sorry.
You know.
Carry on.
By eriktrips
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Posted in ad spot, autobiography, music, nonfiction, poetry, writing
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Tagged alt pop, autobiography, Erik JM Schneider, eriktrips, I remember Will, music, one last ditch, poetry, writing
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