Pass a good time
I wrote new writing goals today.
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)
What is “gentrification”?
Why “no rainbows”?
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.
