INITIAMANTHORN

See the fire in my eyes, the final light you'll see
I send you to the darkness with my sword of thunder and steel

Initially, the end toward which this blog was to apply itself was that of systematically undermining any and all means of satisfaction or solace my demographic has at its disposal. In other words, I was going to attack everything in which my peers and I take pleasure. "Why on earth?!" your understandably shrill query. The idea was: the structure of our lives needs a thorough reordering to dispense of features that offend my exaggerated moral sensitivity. Furthermore, people who are in a position to make the changes I deem appropriate (namely, my privileged peer group) are too comfortable with their position in the world, and only after their comforts are destroyed will they take an interest in the radical changes that seem so crucial. More concisely: I was concerned with the conceptual destruction of the cultural value afforded the rewards of privilege in hopes of undermining privilege itself.

After a brief moment of reflection, I suspected that this might be utterly stupid. It wasn't until a few days ago that my suspicion was confirmed. (What follows is a description I've repeated a few times to various friends, so if you've heard about the gay/not-gay-bashing incident, feel free to skip ahead a bit. Of course, I've embellished quite a bit now that I have no reason to fear losing the interest of my audience as you're not here for me to feel the sting of seeing you do so).

It was a leisurely sunday afternoon subway ride to the upper east side that revived memories of common high school thuggery and incipient homophobia. I was to meet several friends and indulge in a selection of Eric Rohmer films, soccer in Central Park, espresso, gelato and general merriment.

What I was wearing this fine Sunday - not usually something I attempt to discuss with much seriousness - proved to be of great significance given the tastes and temperament of a few of my fellow passengers. Earlier that morning, I had slipped my slender legs into slightly tight black slacks, my feet into white Nike hi-tops, and most importantly, my torso into a neon pink windbreaker, also produced under the sign of Nike.

Now, I can understand, perhaps too well, the impulse to transgress the orthodox in one's outward appearance. I do, however, think that one(I) can(have) become too focused on 'pushing boundaries' with one's(my) style, and I often wonder - calmly, to myself - "Why?", when I see someone looking like this in reality:

In the case of my sunday ensemble, I don't think that I really presented myself in an especially ostentatious manner. I would even say that my appearance was benign, but it is conceivable that my sense of convention is totally warped after so many years of "wildin' out." Regardless, one young man was horribly, horribly offended by my selected raiment. His attire, conversely, comprised the following: dark blue sport coat with indiscernible collegiate lapel pin, light blue dress shirt, unbuttoned, over a white tee, tan slacks, (loafers?). Very white, pale complexion, though flushed in the cheeks as though recently come from a wedding reception with some measure of dignified alcohol consumption - his friends are the marrying type. I had a vague feeling that I could very well have attended university with this fellow. My initial sense of his disapproval came immediately upon stepping into the uptown 6 train, which we would share for three stops all told. A sort of sneering, chuckling glance followed by a slight turn and pantomimed wise-crack to pal #1 standing next to him. Water off a duck's back, as they say, especially when you have head phones to drown out such trivialities. (Beanie Sigel - The B.Coming, in case you were wondering. This was preceded by The Breeders - TitleTK, Bathory - Under the Sign of the Black Mark & Demo, Bach - Suites for Unaccompanied Cello.)

Beanie Sigel - Can't Go On This Way ft. Freeway & Young Chris
The Breeders - The She
Bathory - Equimanthorn
J.S. Bach - Cello Suite II in Dm, IV. Sarabande

I remained focused on more pressing matters such as my lack of employment and slight pangs of loneliness. After the first two stops, I looked up and glanced around the train and spotted who I learned shortly thereafter to be pal #2 having a good chuckle, looking directly at me. I quickly turned back to my wise-cracker to find him still completely engrossed in cracking at my expense, mouth agape, also looking directly at me. I removed my headphones to hear if there was anything of value to be heard. I was disappointed to be met only with the sound especially clever people make when they caricature the mentally disabled. This euphony was followed quickly by the perplexing utterance: "I'll break your face, nigga." My wise cracker. In hindsight, this particular formation of the "tough guy threat" may have been the product of his being able to hear my music selection. I laughed mockingly and looked around to see if anyone else was amused by the absurdity, or better yet, offended by the racist tone. No? Okay. I turned back quickly to hear, "Nice jacket faggot."

"I rather like it," I told him, or tried to tell him, before he entertained the rather obvious idea of continuing to apply his refined capacity for fashion criticism to all of my visible garments.

"Nice pants faggot. Nice shoes." I looked down; "Yes." I thought, "That's about everything that I'm wearing."

At this moment, the subway door opened onto the 77th Street platform. "Oh no." I thought. "It's my stop. I must part ways with my new friends." Ah, my luck was not so bad as that. It turns out that my triumvirate would also deboard at 77th Street. Sweetly in my ear: "I'll fuck you up faggot," whispered my wisest of crackers. "You know where to find me."

This last bit puzzled me. "But I'm not looking for you. You're right there," I told him helpfully. I don't know if he was one for my sense of humor. "Oh yeah you are," he informed me. I agreed to disagree.

At this point, I was becoming more aware of the intensity with which this character felt his distaste for my presence. Unfortunately for him, I'm rather into being here... and there as well, anywhere really. Long story short, I'm not going anywhere, and certainly not at the insistence of one as ill-mannered as this particular joker. I could not comprehend how my mere physical existence could become such agony for another person. I figured it was best if I just let him and his friends continue on up the stairs ahead of me. I should have verbalized this intention of mine, because my new pal wanted to accompany me for as long as our paths covered the same ground, despite the fact that his friends would be gone from sight for the remainder of this encounter. This was spent in awkward silence and hateful glances back and forth as we made our way to the stairs. As I split off from him on the west-facing stairwell, leaving him at the landing, inspite of redundancy and perhaps because he felt some mild despair at the realization that our imminent parting was final, he said: "I'll fuck you up, bitch."

I, incredulous: "What are you so stressed out about today?!"

I don't know if the frustration I was feeling at the moment made this question come off as relatively insolent in comparison to my previous utterances, all made with the goal of being maximally charming. His reaction seemed to imply that I had been egregiously disrespectful of the power he wanted so desperately to wield over me. Truthfully, I had lost all but the base level of respect for this fuming hulk below me, the level that keeps one just above completely ignoring another's efforts at communication, meager though they may be.

"WHAT BITCH?!" he shouted, and quickly he ascended the stairs so as to come in real close; very intimate now. "I'm gonna fucking knock you out!"

"Okay! You keep saying that," I shouted back. I was hoping he would throw the first punch, because I just watched "First Blood" with Sylvester Stallone, and it was "all good" for Rambo to devastate the sleepy Washington town in pursuit of his would-be destroyers because "They drew first blood!"

Instead, my assailant just gave me a stiff shove down the stairs into the flow of ascending passengers. The person directly behind me who broke my fall was an elderly woman walking with a prepubescent I hoped was her grandson or an unrelated child in her charge. She let out a gasp as she also fell back into the fellow behind her. I steadied myself on the railing and turned around to help her regain her balance.

"Now, calm down you two!" she said sternly.

"I'm perfectly calm," I said rather unconvincingly. I was at this point losing my sense of what was reasonable behavior. I felt a strong urge to chase him down, my mind was a wash of violent images...

My tough guy didn't really hang around to see if either I or the collateral had made it through unharmed. More threats were directed at me, but I couldn't really tell you what precisely was said as he climbed up and out and eastward. I felt vengeful hatred most strongly, but also a slight sense of fear. And these I still feel now, though intermittently, several days later as I remember the exchange. I'm often suspicious of the glances of my fellow commuters on the train. On occasion, I feel compelled to buy some weapon or another, lest I meet a more zealous hater.

I've never felt so clearly that someone wanted to destroy me. (No chief, not even on 9/11.) In fact, this ridiculous, homophobic prick is more truly my enemy than that vague category of privileged bourgeois - actual instances of which I've shared the majority of my life with and come to love as friends and of which I am one from a certain perspective, but this is never the whole story, as I'm arguing - because he was able to look me in the face and still demonstrate the desire to erase me, curbed only perhaps by the legal consequences of such an action. Or, more provocatively, he is more truly my enemy than the (to date, in my experience) purely abstract and impersonal bogeyman, Al Qaeda. Of course this would not be the case if someone near and dear to me had been the victim of one of their attacks, but even then, the very element of indiscrimination in such an attack - to say nothing of the subsumption of individual agency under ideological imperatives - only serves to problematize the very tendency that is at issue, namely the obliteration of particulars by general categories. This process is at work everywhere, but so is its inverse, when and where one allows. The experience of particulars erodes the authority of the general insofar as one is willing to resist first the ease of comprehension - what is actually miscomprehension concealed by the denial of nuance - for which the rather blunt tool of categorization allows, and second, and perhaps more insidious yet, the impulse to press experience into reinforcing such systems of categorization for their own sake, which is to say, the sake of those who author them. Perhaps this is pure naiveté, to be so distrustful of absract categorization and hypothesize individuals capable of being in the world without it. It is, however, this same manner of organizing the world that furnished the aforementioned prick with the imagined justification for pushing me down the stairs. (A boy in pink is gay, gay is abnormal, abnormal is bad, I hate bad things, I destroy what I hate). But it is also what led me to consider in all seriousness - and for too long, I'm not especially proud to admit - trying to deny myself and my peers all pleasure in life, presumably because I liked to insist on everyone's guilt, especially mine. I see my own mistakes in this angry young man's attitude, in that of the terrorist.

So while it may be in some measure accurate to assert that the privileged must accept their share of responsibility for the sorry state of the status quo, it is of no use for one to hate another or oneself on this account. This is probably obvious to people who aren't disposed toward self-loathing, but it's taken me a long time to figure it out, and perhaps so stated it may reveal instances of the same ill logic at work elsewhere that contribute to genuinely woeful conditions in one's own life and the lives of others.

Beanie Sigel - Gotta Have It Ft. Twista & Peedi Crakk