I keep deleting and undeleting places where people might access this page, while growing a list in my phone of topics that are off-limits to my .net readership. The hope is: perhaps by clarifying my off-limits topics and/or self-imposed publication bans, that I might find it more comfortable to critique urban development, and you might feel comfortable subscribing, instead of hitting refresh or whatever is happening. There are a lot of people reading these posts — like, a lot. I am struck by the impact of my little .net project, compared to academic work, where it takes me sometimes years to see my ideas in print. So, I thought I might save some of you time, too, by being clear about what I do and don’t, or will and won’t, be writing about here on norainbows.net

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This is a post about trauma. First a short fragment, and then a list.

Today, to start the morning, “I wake alone in a woman’s room I hardly know,” — I’m getting so old. I wanted this, I thought. Instead: Immediately, I hate myself. I get dressed quietly, and prepare to step into the dimly lit February air. Expertly—and in a way that feels really gender-congruent—I fold my belt into my open jacket pocket, planning to put it on once safely out of earshot. I don’t want to forget my belt. Seems I need it to keep my pants on. That’s something I’d actually quite like to do. But more pressingly: it’s a really loud belt buckle. Because I don’t know how you’d react to the noise (and because belt noise carries social and/or traumatic connotations), I now have to leave even faster. I’m not going to wait around, beltless, for you to wake up. I have time for coffee (lots, actually; I don’t drink coffee, but that isn’t the point) — I am leery of the connection. We did a basic consent check, no personal trauma history. I have to do it the other way around: connect, before I wake up in your bed. Perhaps even connect in your bed. I am filled with a rush of something uncomfortable and confusing. You’d have to tie me in place for that to happen, I laugh quietly to myself. Thankfully there is always humour to salve my gross discomfort with intimacy.

For the first time in my life, I realize my sense of urgency is manufactured. I want to stay, but now, don’t know the sequence. I do know that I have to do things differently next time, if there ever is one. I have to slow down, but people don’t want to be microdosed until I to crawl inside their ribs and make a true home.

The cold air hurts, but the morning sun is hitting the still-up big moon in the nicest way as she makes her exit.

“What the fuck is wrong with me?” I say aloud, feeling ashamed and disgusted with myself. Rounding the corner, I try to pick up speed, but my movement feels constricted, my body sore from good sex without connection, but stiff from a short sleep. I suck — even sober. In some ways, it’s nice to sort out that it’s me who is the problem, at least in part. I might never go out again.

I think I get it now: I don’t want to be “demiromantic” but I am. It sucks for me, and the lovely human still sleeping with her door unlocked, or any number of people who could be her. I wish them no harm. I don’t want to be like this — I wish I could rewind and settle down. Instead, I am walking across the city of Halifax looking saddle sore. This feels more like a disability, than an identity.

Desperate not to let my cold, constricted movement collapse into stillness, I remember that Berlant and Edelman said:

“Sex, though subject to the pressures of legal sanction, social judgment, unconscious drives, and contradictory desires, holds out the prospect of discovering new ways of being and of being in the world.” (2014, vii-viii)

I need to learn to slow it down and grey it out in a world that seems to demand meeting and marrying — or at least, that’s how it feels — and has felt. I feel left out from something as significant as love. My writing attends to sex as a mode of social relation, because I attend to sex as a mode of social relation. I write about sex, and sometimes even have sex, to avoid writing and/or thinking about a great number of things.

Walking home to reclaim my virginity again, I realize that it has claimed me. I need to close the gap on sex and attachment. For some, my writing will be unbearably proximate, or unbelievably academic — too personal, too intimate. To me, it’s not nearly personal enough.

Meanwhile, there are some things I can’t or won’t write about. What’s a trauma history?

• #MeToo type details.

• The content of my nightmares.

• My group home tattoo experience.

• Things that could be subject to actual publication bans, like: specifics of my involvement in ongoing sexual assault trial(s) and/or investigation(s).

• Details about my ongoing participation in complaints processes, including human rights, professional, or otherwise.

• The process through which my ex became wanted on a warrant in Nova Scotia despite having never visited the province.

• The degree of unsafety I live with.

• My hopes for the future (if any).

• Generally, how boring I find topping; and now also, unfortunately, frightening bottoming.

Like my wavelength, this off-limits list is in progress. And, it overlaps with my wavelength.

We know more than we did last week.

Today, my mailbox contained (1) a postcard from Niagara, taunting me to return (should I?); (2) the hard copy of a book I’ve been reviewing, taunting me to finish my work (I should…); and (3) an excessive number of flyers for big-box retailer Canadian Tire.

Briefly embarrassed, I stuff the flyers back into my mailbox, trying — yet again — to lock it and leave them behind. Junk mail is relentless in Halifax. What is that — willful ignorance?

I feel mostly annoyed, over-capacity, before I pause to remember that for years, my American ex routinely confused Canadian Tire with the much more chaotic surplus store, Princess Auto, making her own portmanteau: Princess Tire. Clearly, our mail carrier once respected the sign: “No flyers, please.”

Were those simpler times or places?

Either way, I smile at the memory before turning to walk “home” away from the mailbox, and from my smile. My headphones dangle around my neck, their sound still audible: I feel stupid, and contagious …

I stop the song and walk in silence.

Disoriented, I strain my ears to listen for Niagara Falls as a way of being in relation while feeling strewn. I do not like rainbow crosswalks, but goddamn, I miss the Rainbow Bridge across the US-Canada border, and Princess Tire, too.

• Put on music (immediately)

• Drink water, take meds

• Gentle walk to Point Pleasant

• Cold dip in the (contaminated) Atlantic Ocean

• Try to move, maybe dance

• Reply to one (1) text, and then another if replying to one (1) text does not kill me

• Ask for help, tell safe someone how I feel

• Try not to focus on the feeling of being followed

• Mail a letter to a friend, just because

• Schedule something nice for future me

• Pray to exist in the future

• Feel yearning

• Turn on the heated blanket

• Make the air smell nice (no dogs)

• Put on my glasses, and admire the fine details of something small and important

• Try to warm up (it’s so hard)

• Cook myself some deplorable meal

• Write a list in my journal

Because night is long, to distract myself, I am drawing a bath and engaging in what might be maladaptive daydreaming. Either way, it is most certainly a practice in cruel optimism.

The tub in this apartment is the most comfortable yet — but the water is never quite hot enough. It’s a fleeting event. In any event, it’s one of the few places I am, at least kind of, at rest. Because of that, it’s one of the few places I tend to think about other people and really feel the extent of my aloneness. If I forget a towel, I’m rather fucked.

Enter distraction: Do you like the bath?

Would you want to get in or watch me?

Growing up, my parents’ too-frequent travel (or general neglect hidden by class) made their clawfoot tub and glorious bathroom a grateful retreat. In my teen years, one of my nicer boyfriends would sneak in and sit behind me, before we snuck off to my room. There was a lot of hot water, but never enough time.

Now: If you do like the bath, where would you sit, I wonder? In front of me or behind? Or would we take turns — not wanting to share body soup, and/or not wanting to get too attached to sitting in the same spot?

My early 20s were characterized by apartment baths too small and/or too disgusting with housemate filth to dream of sharing with a lover. Now; I wonder how many new-build apartments have nice baths with inadequate water heaters. “These are problems of both intimacy and neoliberalism,” I might say, as you take off your shirt. I am admiring your chest still, whatever its form — it doesn’t seem to matter to me at a rate of 1:1,000,000. Both/and to me, but annoying and/or a turn off to people who just want me to look at their chest or hold something constant like sex, and not politics and sex.

In response, you might roll your eyes and fetch a giant pot of boiling water. I’m hot with your resourcefulness. I’ll crouch in the back of the end-times, new-build tub, carefully out of reach, while you pour from a lobster pot — you being equally careful not to scald me in our attempt to enjoy a bath made too-short by a shitty hot water heater instead of the expanse of human desire. Either way, I’m warmed by the thought. I want to feel your skin. I have litanies of contamination fears, but body soup is not one. Get in, already.

What are you afraid of?

At least an entire 48-hours breathing only at the surface level of my lungs. Clavicular breathing, I remember from physiology. Structural dissociation, I remember from hours on the internet spent learning about why I feel the way I do. Or, why I am doing without feeling. When tasks are necessary but feel life-threatening, dissociation is a vital survival skill. I engage in a practice of maximum distraction to cope with the otherwise intolerable. PhD in Recreation, baby. I just want to feel safe. I came to Halifax with that express goal: be safe. And now, I am sabotaged whenever I try. I can’t imagine what about me is that interesting or compelling, and continue to try to make myself smaller in response.

I have always been avoidant of connection, but trauma has taken this to extremes. By someone credentialed, I am told I will find safety in connection, despite my fear. Against my intuition, desperate for relief, and in an ongoing bid for my life to continue, I make plans. I went out Thursday night to make bad art and be autistic/unmasked. I went out Thursday night in an ongoing effort to move on with my life—despite the dark forces that seem to prevent that from happening in any meaningful way.

Lately, I have the feeling I am followed everywhere I go, listened to whenever I speak, sabotaged whenever I try, and watched whenever I undress. To some degree, these things are truly happening. I think I am getting better at spotting potential private eyes—hired by my ex in Winnipeg, or some other entity equally nefarious and obsessed with me (in both cases, despite me not reciprocating the interest or venom). I want to move on, but I’m being watched as I walk away. The feeling of violation never gets better — gnawing at my ankles. Leaving to the feeling of being followed. I go faster and faster in response until I collapse. I’m tired now. The weekend will be spent in recovery. Two years or twenty — I live with trauma as a disability. I need rest but am not allowed, so I am ready and willing to work because what other option do I have?

Imagine having a bad week, going to make bad art to vie for life, and having your entire conversation potentially mined for intel that will be used to make your bad life worse. My life is filled with onlookers and inaction. There is no post-trauma for me. I am stuck in traumatic systems and situations that are unending while time passes. Time passes.

I wish you (individually and collectively) would move on and stop siccing your dogs on me, but you’re relentless. I just want to make bad art and complain about rainbow crosswalks on the internet. Remember, norainbows.net has no vision. No thesis, really. I practice radical detachment. I cannot make myself any smaller than I have; than this.

So, while clinging to life, I am teaching theory that helps me personally contend with the otherwise intolerable. I can never date again. I miss sex and intimacy. Now, thanks to onlookers, I fear connection, maybe more than anything. So, here: have an intro to queer temporality.

Of course, my brain is on high alert, and there’s always the potential I am misreading the situation. I audit my thinking: Am I being paranoid? Maybe this week, my social time and/or other supports haven’t been sicced with your dogs. And there’s tangible evidence.

The audit is important and would imply it is me who is unable to move on. Yikes. That would (and does) direct me to therapy, rather than to the internet to complain. But here’s the thing: My social skills read the room at a fifth-grade level… but my senses are acute. Dogs stink. I’m more than two years into sniffing them out.

So, I am breathing at the surface of my lungs. And when I am sitting at a table in public trying to make bad art, I am talking at the surface level of my deep. “Bad dog!”, I chide. Now, I’m insubordinate. I’m so over structured and super-imposed power dynamics. Regulation in authenticity.

I cannot have a life in public because my every effort is trashed and thwarted. I cannot date because I picture the ways your dogs would maul my new lover. I feel queasy at the thought, and so my new lover is non-existent. I worry for the safety of the one woman I kissed then couldn’t see again. It’s still me who is being punished—two years later or twenty. I won’t ever get to move on. “Bad dog!”, I chide from the bottom. I’m over it.

I wonder what kinds of people are brave enough to take the risk, and/or be with me in private. Fools?

Where the early part of the week I wasunable to stay awake, by Friday I am unable to sleep. Delayed processing is a bitch. I must force myself to slow down and feel for the weekend. Catch up to my doing. Feel violated. Feel angry. Feel horny, with no relief. Feel sad, with no tears. Feel lonely, with no real connection because you are still there. Feel the want for company in a quiet chamber. Feel the want to kiss someone and not fear for her safety or mine. Feel this is unending.

Mercy.

“I don’t feel good,” I say aloud while sitting upright in bed, shivering at 4:19 AM. This is particularly bad. I went to bed around 7:30 PM because I wanted the day to end. I, for one, had seen enough.

When I wake, I feel afraid for my own life and/or certain it is about to end. At this point, that’s just symptomatic. Where life has historically felt too long, suddenly it feels constricted and short. This is confusing because I don’t know where to turn for relief—to hope for the day, or for a long slumber.

“I really don’t feel good.”

First, I try to follow my own instructions: rest, take a piss, stretch my legs. I lay still a moment longer, feeling my pulse throb in my upper back and shoulders before rolling over. I make eye contact with a tall laundry hamper overflowing with clothes. It’s Monday. I think about watching The Jetsons and writing on LiveJournal in my childhood home. Fear was with me then, too. Were you reading then, too?

By the time I get up to continue following my own instructions (piss, stretch my legs), I realize two things. First: I am covered in sweat, which means I was dreaming about something scary. That’s why I’m awake, why I can feel my pulse throb—but delayed processing means I register the sensation before the memory. I am learning to be with sensation as intel. And then, next: I am covered in blood. I got my period.

Immediately, I want to cry. Curse my body and the moon. I want to be inconvenient to someone who is sleeping. I spend the day wanting it to be over. I go to bed early again.

Tuesday:

I wake up heavy, unwilling to let the room come into focus. My glasses are always in the other room. It’s still dark. Everything is too cold and feels like Winnipeg. My whole body hurts. I walked a lot yesterday to get away from myself. I am scared again, obviously. I am scared of how scared I am. Everything is falling apart. I am no longer enjoying being alone. I wish you (whoever you are) would join me in my wasteland. I am feeling a shift — like readiness. I’m also declining. I will live in a constant state of maintenance forever.

Although I need to take meds daily to function, I did not take them on Monday because I was scared they would make me more focused on my fear. I’ve been medicated for an extremely long time—an early adopter, before the age of consent. So this is not how meds work, and I know it. But it’s a trick my brain plays on itself when I am acutely unwell.

I stop taking my ADHD meds. I don’t want to focus on how bad things are.

Now: This morning, I take them immediately upon waking. Won’t be fooled again.

I set the thermostat on high and boil the kettle. Over the sound of the water bubbling, my cat meowing for food, I recite from memory a preamble to a talk by Berlant aloud:

“This talk is located in a shattered, yet intelligible zone defined by being in life without wanting the world—a state traversing misery and detachment…”

Berlant is my closest friend, maybe. I am impressed at my ability to recite by memory, but also, their words are perfect and worth remembering. Obviously they are dead too. I cry for a moment: a PhD is the most useless thing in the world but ideas are everything. The kettle clicks at the same moment I hear my child’s sleepy voice say from the other room: “I want a hug.” My heart breaks for not being there the moment she needed me. I go back to her, back to the dark room — without a tea, and with the cat unfed and meowing in a way that makes me wish the cat did not exist, the same way the mountain of laundry should not exist. I’m still bleeding. My belly is still soft from carrying my baby (now 3) and bruised from my last testosterone injection.

I hold my baby (now 3) and feel my heartbeat change. My meds are working, maybe.

I’m tough as nails.

Don’t fuck with me.

Berlant believed queer theory got too caught up in identity and normative politics, losing sight of sex and intimacy. I tend to agree. Identity is thorny, frustrating. You don’t see me out here claiming many labels, hey?

Berlant and Edelman (1998, p. 546) wrote: “The sex in ‘queer theory’ has been treated as a privatized possession, a secret, or a pathology, rather than as a mode of social practice.” Berlant later explored the embodied and affective dimensions of sex and sexual politics. I wish they were still alive.

I don’t claim to renaturalize queer theory—I’m not above identity-focused theorists—but I am among a handful of people working to re-eroticize what is roughly called queer theory. I do this while feeling out the edges of my own demi- identities, which I am disturbed to learn are considered on the asexual spectrum — that feels off. See: thorny identity. Lately, writing has been one of the few things that brings satisfaction. Pleasure, in a life mostly filled with friction and annoyance. Sometimes, I just have to write about that friction and annoyance and call it theory.

And writing is painful. When it’s good, when it works, there’s a feeling of overexposure. Of tipping my hand. Of making my vulnerabilities more pronounced. I write about my wavelength with the assumption that nobody will ever find me there. I am leaning into the idea that I might just have to be alone forever—or something like it. It is lonely and also expansive.

Regulation in authenticity. I can think of worse things than being alone forever. But I also can’t dwell too long on a lifetime of aloneness—it makes me feel tired and heavy. Enter: my ex’s hands, in all forms — violent and gentle. Shutdown comes next.

So, on one hand, all I can do is continue to live and write as myself. On the other, I have to remain constantly vigilant, aware of the ways my authenticity makes me vulnerable. The way my writing feels connective, but is actually brutally isolating.

Let’s not forget: I almost died before I left Winnipeg.

Turns out, I know nothing.

It’s embarrassing to be this smart and still this inept. The ineptness makes me self-conscious, so I hold myself back. This is why I don’t initiate: I’m operating at a huge deficit. There’s too much risk. I am two years into recovering from relational risk, right at this moment.

Meanwhile, my strangeness makes me seem resistant to indirect pickup attempts—even when I want to be picked up. And since I can’t access subtext well enough to initiate directly, I assume people desire sex at a rate of 1 in 1,000,000 (like me) and will say so when they do. To be less of a problem, I’ had started being upfront when I’m interested in having sex. Oy. Mostly, it’s been another lesson in my own difference. I assumed everyone could have sex without attachment and took “no strings” problematically too far. Now I’m two years chaste. In this time, I learned that I am (probably?) demiromantic—meaning I can’t form a romantic attachment without an emotional connection. I love a situationship with a bit of security. Unfortunately, if I have sex before I form that attachment, I get what social media calls “the ick.” This is something I am actively working on.

So, there’s no rush. There can’t be. My processing delay is so severe that I’m only now, at 35, starting to understand sexual subtext. I finished high school at 16, looking like a doe. You can imagine how that went for me.

Enter: my wavelength.

For a first date, I know it’s a date. If not, you’ll feel a bit rejected. In any event, you come back for a second pass. Or you’re willing to take the risk of rejection. I’m slow, not stupid. That’s a humble way of saying: I might be worth the wait. And—sorry for making you wait. By the time I’ve made you feel rejected, I’m falling hard.

You’re confident, not intimidated by me at all. You don’t feed my ego. You’re better than me at many (most) things, so my total of two talents aren’t a source of tension. I like to watch you work. You make things that make me tilt my head and smile. I ask questions and learn a lot. More often than not, I am your student.

You’re direct about your desire, upfront about your intentions. You know I can’t access subtext, so you deal in directness because you know that’s the only way this will happen. You want it to happen. You work with my processing delay and maybe even find my ambivalence or obliviousness to sexual subtext a bit compelling or “cute.” You’re not trying to change me. I’m not a project. Not your manic pixie dream them.

We eat soup sitting cross-legged on the floor when we should be at work.

You have your old friends and let me have mine. We don’t have to share everything (except soup).

We make public spaces uncomfortable with sexual tension, so we spend most of our time in private. People wonder what we’re up to, but you respect my need for privacy. In public, you like that our private life puzzles other people. You might like being in public just fine. I am a retreat.

You respect my lists—or at least tolerate them.

You’re sneaky.

You don’t mind sneaking around a little. My kid goes to bed around 8. This is going to be different and clunky and scheduled for a minute.

You’d like me to take better care of myself. At minimum, you don’t get in the way of me taking better care of myself.

You’re not a drunk. You can handle your shit.

You’re not trying to be perfect at anything. We are against purity. You can have a drink, you know? I don’t mind. Do you.

You don’t put me on a pedestal or idealize me; in fact, you find me quite annoying and maybe a bit daft. Again, in my experience, my lovers categorize this as “cute” despite it being the source of a lot of social suffering for me. You lend an assist and let me struggle.

You don’t abuse my loyalty.

We get really good at tying knots together. We could get a laser boat or maybe a pony with a lot of attitude. You’re in charge, but I’ll play along.

Your hands feel new.

That might be progress.

When I add up the time, it makes no sense. Two entire years. I’m still having nightmares. Berlant and Edelman (2014, p. 140) said: “On the other side of plotting for kisses, there is being in loss.” So while I am being in loss forever, I am problematically uninterested in plotting or pursuit. I want to be interested. I want to want you — whoever you are. I want in.

And, I like being alone. Or I got stuck waiting for a non-existent sense of “ready” and it’s never going to come. Recently, I learned maybe other people approach dating with more intention than I do. I am plagued by ambivalence and also, lately, yearning for something I can’t hack all by myself or with pieces of people patched together. It’s not that I’m not interested. It’s that I can’t access the subtext. It’s frustrating for everyone involved.

So how about this: get on my wavelength.

There are dating apps that I am not on, and a mentality to the whole thing that I can’t quite muster. I’m getting tired of losing people. I want to slow everything down. “Erotic desire is always in part the desire to stay with what is lost, to live with the absence even as it inflects our capacity for care and intimacy.” (Berlant, 2011, p. 176). I have to learn to love (or something like it) while also attached to gaping absence. Starting and stopping. Connection and disconnection.

I come through the door of my therapist’s office too fast — my coat, scarf, and too-heavy bag strewn on the chair where I should sit, headphones ripped out of my ears, glasses off my face. I, for one, have seen enough.

I need to feel the floor beneath me or I might fly off into space. I am touch starved, but wouldn’t admit it. It I lean my head against the wall and sob. I’m already sobbing before I’m there, maybe. My body hurts, and I can’t get away from myself. I am trapped. The carpet I’m sitting on is covered in mites, for sure. My brain distracts itself: if I feel pain, I might need to slow down. So here, have some fear. Mites! I wish I could be at home but can’t conjure the feeling of “home” and think I’ve gone too far. There is truly nowhere left to run. “No contact” — none. I miss the feeling of her hand on my back and feel the urge to rush away the thought and also to throw up.

“I don’t want to be touched,” I snap at a question that hardly registers, and possibly was not asked. Non-truth, as I beg the floor and the wall to hold me up. I picture the big sky, hear the Kinks, and imagine I’m floating in a tea-coloured lake that I don’t visit anymore. Maybe it doesn’t exist. Then, I feel my foot step into a nest of leeches instead of onto the ground. I’m back in the room. I feel my head against the wall. I’m ashamed I didn’t take the time to cry sooner, when I was upright. It’s time for salt.

Years earlier, I learned to use teen-branded tampons in the public washroom of the Dartmouth Sportsplex the morning my mother pulled me by my ankles as I grabbed the rails of my bed and begged not to go swim laps at 6 a.m. in February. “Living near the ocean, it is important to swim well,” my mother would say, handing over a still-damp bathing suit. I wriggled my body. I first tried to use a Diva cup on a camping trip with a cold snap in Northern Ontario, which also happened to be my first period in ten years. Wriggling in a cold tent — Why would I stop?

For my soft departure, I left Halifax-proper for West Pennant in 2015 or so, commuting 40 minutes each way to school and work. After the worst of the traffic on the drive home, the thermometer in my car would drop a few degrees as I approached the coast. I have wanted to get out of Halifax for as long as I can remember. But as I attempted to make a home just outside Halifax, I found relief that made me more afraid. I had never been still in my whole life. More like sand through fingers than a rolling stone

So when I wasn’t frozen with fear, I learned to hike, and when that wasn’t enough, I bypassed the immobilizer and drove to Montreal repeatedly. I devoured long drives with old rules like: no stopping until we hit Quebec. Hotel 12-12. And when we get to Montreal: exclusively by bike in the city. No time in Halifax. I said yes to every work trip until I made a job that involved being away from West Pennant more than being home, as if I was forging a home. Before I was washed up and recovering, I was forming an escape plan.

In West Pennant, I relied on the reliably cold ocean to slow my pulse. I hate the cold, so I can only assume this urge to immerse myself in the frigid Atlantic came over me because I’d never been allowed to stop, so any time I did it felt like my heart was banging around in my rusted out body. Stopping — stillness — has been unsafe at a cellular level. I’ve been stuck in motion because I assumed that if I sat on the floor and cried, I’d get stuck there too. Cold water does not want to keep me. Praise.

From the floor of my therapist’s office when I finally speak, I say something like: “I don’t want to cry,” and then sob a bunch more. They make a sound that feels like understanding, which is disgusting — but also curious. There is a breath that needs no remark. On the way home I practice walking fast and then slow, fast and then slow. Stopping and starting.

Cruel Optimism is also the most widely cited book in the humanities, so there’s that. The point of this piece isn’t to convince you to read it — in fact, maybe it’s the opposite? Frankly, I’ve been stuck on this paragraph for a month. Time to move on. I laugh at a meme of a long and winding road that calls to me: “Thankfully I have my headphones and have never gotten over anything in my entire life.”

Berlant (2011) says: “Cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” Here are some examples: The American Dream, the perfect lover, hard work that leads to success, a sense of place, the ever elusive then and there. How are you still holding onto ideals that are both unattainable and holding you back?

Suddenly, I don’t want to teach theory to the masses.

Honestly, fuck this. What’s the point?

Classically, queer theory is devoid of class analysis. I have to table the thrust of productivity to learn to write like a person again, or something. For now, I want to write to the city that I am writing with. And, I want to write to the city that I am writing about.

More than ever, I have to watch it on both the pacing and the jargon.

Today, I want to introduce both a concept — queer negativity — and also introduce a format for working with other concepts I’m calling “queer theory.” As a writing project and public performance of the oftentimes private, my pacing will always be too fast for some and too slow for others. Awkwardly, my goals involve writing theory that is both more accessible and engaging. As I see it, queer failure is something of a precursor to queer negativity (Halberstam, 2011, p. 123). And although it doesn’t seem it yet, queer negativity is still generative.

No Rainbows includes my own unpublished academic writing and fieldwork on the topic of rainbow crosswalks. But my orientation to the rainbow crosswalk is as follows: I’m not thrilled. As such, I anchor my critique in accessible examples or case studies, layering them with explicit components of queer theory. In this case, queer negativity is offered as my orientation to the rainbow motif in general. This posture is annoying to some and explicitly threatening to others, though neither are meant.

This work takes up my so-called open-palmed encounters with rainbow crosswalks in cities across Canada and the Atlantic Seaboard of the United States. This is an ongoing project. I am caught up in what Berlant and Freeman (1993, p. 167) described as “‘the urban redecoration’ project on behalf of gay visibility.” These ideas are mostly written elsewhere as queer theory, but without such practical examples. No Rainbows takes up the rainbow crosswalk as fodder for thinking about public art, power, and placemaking. This negative posture is important because burnouts and defacings are a regular addition to most rainbow crosswalks. No Rainbows brings a leeriness to pride flag painting budgets that is protective. “Progress”?

The queer negative does not vie for inclusion. The queer negative is more passive than it is insurgent. I read Bersani’s (1987) essay Is the Rectum a Grave?, and the academic debate that followed, so that you do not have to. Its main offering is the “antisocial thesis” in queer theory. Today’s queer negativity might ask: How is “hope” an imperialist project? (Halberstam, 2006). Radical passivity involves unbecoming, or defiance to become (e.g., academic, woman) (Halberstam, 2011, p. 173). My move out from behind the paywall and into the public domain isn’t an attempt to restore (or renaturalize) queer theory to its rightful place. I’m not being corrective. There is no pure queer theory (Berlant & Warner, 1995). As an academic genre or discourse of critique, queer theory shouldn’t exist — certainly not in the university (Berlant & Warner, 1995). But it does. I think it’s in my email signature, for now.

So, as political and philosophical stance, queer negativity presents a mode for queer existence in an era that promises “it gets better” as things actually, get much, much worse.

Next concept: cruel optimism

But I warn you: If you are attached to any call-to-action, my invitation may make you defensive. That’s not my intention. This invitation is not an either/or. These are just some words and stuff. Low theory. It is time to “revel in the domain of failure” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 27).

Attempts at political mobilization that centre identities and involve identarian affirmation (“I am this, what are/aren’t you?”, and “I do this, what do/don’t you do?”) can only ever redistribute power within existing power structures. Anti-revolution. Often, we inadvertently reinforce the same power we set out to subvert. Redistribution within existing structures — why bother?

Only you know the reasons you still try. Elsewhere these issues are theorized as problematics of identity politics.

Detachment, for me, involves an attempt at writing more accessibly. I remain receptive to hearing that I have failed. And, until someone chimes in and says I need to shut up: all I can do is try. First, I need to get out of formation.

Can you picture the popular political graphic of a large fish made up of many smaller fish? The text reads simply “Organize,” and it is a provocation.

Next, do you remember early-2000s Bushisms, including condemnation for a water dam project in Michigan state. He said: “I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.”

Structural power has a close relationship to categorization. How are we reinforcing those structures? Community organizing that is identity-affirming is also, almost always, vulnerability-enhancing. How do you prevent the formation of a “like you” category for political fodder? Organization into categories (like schools of fish) allows us to be netted all at once.

If I were writing theory I might ask: Beyond reifying structures of disempowerment, how does participation in these structures also limit possibility? Do other options exist beyond the call to “organize”?

Of all the possible shapes to take — why take the shape of a fish?

Don’t answer the question. I am not advocating for identity deconstruction. This invitation to detachment produces a lifelong process for which I am not an ideal template. I am not your teacher.

As Deleuze (1994, p. 23) said:

The movement of the swimmer does not resemble that of the wave; in particular, the movements of the swimming instructor which we reproduce on the sand bear no relation to the movements of the wave, which we learn to deal with only by grasping the former in practice as signs. That is why it is so difficult to say how someone learns, which means that there is something amorous - but also something fatal - about all education.

We learn nothing from those who say: 'Do as I do'. Our only teachers are those who tell us to ‘do with me'”

Do with me… Next time you can’t sleep, write a list of the things you are attached to.

I write lists compulsively. I fill pages and volumes — a long form person, by nature. Gold pen dripped onto the cover of a black journal reads “DETACH” and it contains an archive of failed efforts. It’s unending. Now, as public performance of the usually-private, I transcribe verbatim:

Practice detachment from the concept of “your” politics as anything externally identifiable, claimable, or capable of being categorized. Get out of formation. Refuse to organize political discussions as “I am this, what are/aren’t you?” ... and learn about refusal as a political practice connected to your identities. Let down your titles. Commit to learning your place. Develop a language for difference. Don’t cite your politics in biographies of 350-characters or less. Do (organize, if you must) and also detach. Relationality involves fumbling and failure far more than purity or perfection. Reject the pedestal and the podium. Feel contagious. Embrace contamination and practice abundant care. Grey-it-out and resist the never ending pull to either/or with a determined both/and. Revel in the rot like, "What grows here?" and "How?" Be imperfect, and make room for others at the great table of imperfection. Raise a toast. Work to find resonance wherever you first want to yell out in alarm: “DIFFERENCE!” ... Repeat.

« Fais avec moi »

Now what?

After a layover in Fort Lauderdale, I (presumably) contract Covid-19 for the first time. Oblivious, I connected into Buffalo, N.Y., and pit stopped by car at a Wegman’s before driving over the US-Canada border, to the cold, metal hangar referred to as an “airport” in Hamilton, Ontario. Briefly, in Ontario, I feel at home for the last time before a handful of near-death experiences send me packing, home to the city where I was born — Halifax, N.S. I can’t and won’t write about my last few months in Winnipeg.

How did you cope with bad dreams as a child?

When I can’t sleep, I find making a list in my head to be very soothing. I pick a topic, and organize the items in my mind, gradually adding detail to each item until I exceed my own capacity for sub-categories of thought without rising to write. I don’t want to wake anybody up.

Initially, I struggle to accept the label “avoidant” (like “autistic”) because I have a literal manner of thought. I’m inclined to believe talking about my feelings won’t change them. I like the alphabet, paper and a Pilot V7, the label maker I’ve kept since childhood, and two more I have bought since. Listing is a clever hack for a kid who is alone and can’t sleep. It works well for PTSD, too. Sometimes, I exhaust myself and sleep comes quickly. Other times, I have to write all it down. My journals have looked like this since childhood:

Some jobs I have had (chronological order)

• Babysitting

• Camp Counsellor-in-Training

• Camp Counsellor

• Fabricville

• Riding Instructor

• Blockbuster (Halifax)

• Tour Guide - Fort Sackville Foundation/Scott Manor House

• (Fake?) Barista

• Tea Salesperson

• ECE

• Campus tour guide

• Student health promotion

• Addictions prevention intern

• Research Assistant

• Quest for freedom #1

• Court Reporter / Commissioner of Oaths (lapsed)

• Research Coordinator

• TA

• Washing my personal mail and groceries at the start of COVID-19

• Research Assistant

• Instructor

• Pregnancy and childbirth

• Research Assistant

• Instructor

• Quest for freedom #2

• Vagrant, postdoc, instructor, and so on …

Along the way, I learned the term “sense of a foreshortened future” was removed from the most recent DSM criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Instead, this facet of PTSD is now described broadly as “avoidance symptoms” — falsely limiting beliefs about the future being fundamentally fucked. Writing goals are a promise to exist.

I have been avoiding things for as long as I can remember, including Halifax and lately, writing. I fantasize about a witness protection program that does not exist and a job that never feels like work. I quote my friend mk by memory: “‘Get in the groove,’ I say aloud to myself, to no one”, and start a new document (Alexander & Stinson, 2024, n.p.). I should be prepping a syllabus for the course I am teaching next term, but instead I am writing about writing. Performing for you, I guess.

Writing goals (Nov ‘24)

1. What is “gentrification”?

2. Why “no rainbows”?

3. Who tagged the utility box “suck clit”?

Because I have answered trickier versions of these exact questions in various academic outputs, today’s writing goals are thankfully just that: writing goals, simple prompts. Not research questions where three is secretly nine (3x each: content, theory, methodology). My new writing goals are uniquely prima facie. I’m trying to restore a creative practice. Reclaim my labour. Write for fun. Write for free. Write theory that’s easier to read.

I hold a PhD in the field of recreation and leisure studies, for god’s sake. All I ever wanted to do was write.

Having an audience is a necessary evil, then. In February 2023, I took reprieve from my then wintry Winnipeg home, and travelled to New Orleans for a work gig. Around this point, I dismissed my contributions to a book as “not worth” the cover price. Chiding the cost was easier than explaining how impractical it felt to write about gentrification for an academic audience. I either had to fix it (fix me) or stop writing. I needed ways to be “in but not of” the university (Moten & Harney, 2013), or leave the university altogether.

I set the scene on Gottingen St., where I got my start. “No Rainbows” traces the proliferation of rainbow crosswalks in the places I have lived and traveled, across Canada and the Atlantic seaboard of the United States. I wield venom for neoliberal “placemaking” (and/or place-taking or place unmaking) schemes that displace and fragment communities under the guise of progress and modernity. “No Rainbows” was built from disaggregated fieldnotes, photos, and headlines re-arranged in the form of a conspiracy theory involving cities, symbols, and power.

In a last-ditch effort to feel congruent, I traded the PowerPoint for a written script still damp with ink from the hotel printer by the time I presented, and the podium with a chair from the audience. I think I would like academia with less decorum. It makes sense you’re reading this on a Blog — these considerations are always both stylistic and political. I sat, spread my legs, and took up space; closed my laptop, leaned back in my seat, and made eye contact with the one person I knew in the room, Rasul Mowatt. I owe part of my audience to his talk, Cop City/Fear City, just before mine. He nods in silence a few times. I join his eyes in glancing down, where we both quietly watch my papers shake, and zero in on my hands as the source. “Even if it’s just a job, what is just? It never releases, ever. The snake replaces the mole, the body converts to a trip wire for the talk, and the bargaining is a desperate freedom, which is to say, whatever, motherfuckers! I’m your teacher and I showed up.” (Berlant & Stewart, 2019, p. 12).

Sitting at the front of a conference room named Marigny, I read for thirty minutes. Claps, claps, claps, and then questions. I need to leave.

Free from the conference venue, I round the corner and retrieve a single, tepid can of PBR from my bag — I am after all someone who researches leisure and place. It’s before noon. I am running on fumes, but it doesn’t matter. It is Lundi Gras today. Tomorrow Mardi Gras will begin for the first since 2020. From my detached, but comfortable distance as an observer, I sit on the curb outside America’s oldest continuously running gay bar, open 24-hours, and sip my beer, scouring Google with my phone for a fieldwork destination.

“rainbow crosswalk + NOLA,”

“Rainbow crosswalk + New Orleans,”

“NOLA + no rainbow crosswalk,”

No rainbows? Not one. Finally.

I write fieldnotes before whipping my empty can into the trash. Pass a good time. I am walking back to the conference centre for the keynote address. Some of the buildings still have water lines on them from flooding. I recognize the stadium and a statue of Joan of Arc. My hands shake. I won’t have writing goals again until November 2024.

Writing used to be about connection — a way for me to work myself out of isolation and to you, in one form or another. It meant a lot to have your ears or eyes, from time to time.

But these days, I can’t manage to write anything critical or coherent enough to publish — paywall or not. I’m suffering, if I’m honest.

I blame this lapse in productivity on being acutely traumatized, at first. I delete calls for proposals and conference abstracts. Time marches. Wires got crossed somewhere along the way. Trauma has a way of making the pleasurable frightening and the future feel horribly “foreshortened” — sucks to expect things to suck. I didn’t plan on becoming a critical theorist. I send a friend a text: “Let me know if you wanna hang out. I am on the verge of death, and trying to write myself into life.”

Death. Specifically, I am growing quite sure that writing theory is going to get me killed. Death being the opposite of connection, I find myself at an impasse when the cursor flashes and demands rudely that I walk the plank. Read. Write. Be read (wrong, obviously). When I share this worry with my friend, she is good to remind me that the capstone experience of our PhDs involved an ideologically-motivated hate crime in a gender studies class on our campus where Covid-19 restrictions had recently eased, allowing for a return to in-person learning. I probably should have been scared way sooner.

“Jokes circulate about how we might as well just wire ourselves directly to sensation buttons and skip the step of content altogether” (Stewart, 2007, p. 69).

Gratefully, I’m not a memoirist. My primary concern is the emotional or affective register of this text.

I am, above all, loyal to Belcourt’s (2019) aesthetic preference for ambiguity over veracity.

“My story isn’t linear, and in these pages, I marshal the forces of poetry and theory to create a kind of memoir that stretches as well beyond the boundaries of my individual life" (n.p.) 

“Perhaps this romance with the not yet makes me a bad lover,” Belcourt said.

“So be it” (p. 97).

I wanted to lay some track before getting into the “noise” emanating from the Halifax Curling Club, how the Halifax Grammar School is managing to make the south end both autocentric and inaccessible, the first drag show I saw in three years where a local political candidate got up and left, or the rainbow crosswalks that overwhelmingly replace queer people in the places I have lived and traveled over the past decade (many). 

I felt I needed to explain where my tooth went, why I’m always walking around the city, and whose baby I’m raising, before really getting to the flesh of this project. 

And to be clear: this is a writing project. For me, a writing project involves a public performance of the usually-private. Even my orientation to critique is oblique. My interests swirl around (1) writing, (2) displacement, and (3) identity politics. I apologize if the writing seems self-interested at times — that’s not my intention. 

I write about my three interests from the narrow confines of my own personal subjectivities. These subjectivities are always fleeting (a fourth interest — the micro, fleeting, or liminal — shows up here, but it is subsumed). 

I am against the formal practices of biography-writing and identity-claiming. I can only write this post because I retain the authority to delete all or some of these words later, at my discretion. Behind the paywall, things don’t work that way. Elsewhere I am printed with names I no longer use; arguments I no longer claim but can never call back. 

Oh, right. Whose baby? 

Un/fortunately, even when I am offline, I am always writing.

google drive link

A magnet with a picture of an empty lot on Gottingen St. is holding a prescription for 15 pills (0.25 mg) of Ativan (lorazepam) to my fridge door. Of the countless things I left in Winnipeg, Manitoba: fridge magnets and a tooth. There are more social scripts for replacing teeth than fridge magnets. I am grateful in part.

I am 361 days “sober” today.

I am today convinced that I feel more fear than I have in 361 days. I am caught up in the slow of Friday to Saturday. 

I am also convinced that one of 15 lorazepam would fix this. 

Earlier in the week while eating chips and cheese out of the hatch of a CommunAuto SUV, I brushed off a friend’s offer to celebrate my milestone because at some point I had way more than 361 days sober. At some point, I didn’t count days.

Until then: 361.25 

Read more: plans for 2215 and 2183 Gottingen St. here (2009)