ANYWAY I am feeding it this:

My ex-boyfriend cited reading Cryptonomicon in high school as his inspiration for going into Peace Corps in Africa. Specifically, he mentioned the passage which in my copy (2000) is on pp 82-83: In Which The Hero Has Dinner With A Bunch Of Snooty Academics. One of the academics, G.E.B. Kivistik, says (as my ex recounted) “Who will build the on-ramps from the ghettos to the Information Superhighway?” His response, as a high schooler, was “Me!”

If you get closer to the passage, it’s clear that the snooty academic is not a sympathetic character. You’re supposed to identify with the hero, who gets more and more agitated about Kivistik’s abuse of the Information Superhighway metaphor, and eventually rips him apart for not understanding the Internet at all. If you actually look at the passage, it reads “How many on-ramps will connect the world’s ghettos to the Information Superhighway?” Taking this passage to heart is a little odd. (A friend just referred to it as “lacking Earth logic,” which is funny since he once commented that all he wanted was for his African students to use logic and reason for a change.)

What just struck me is the irony of one incredibly hurtful thing my ex said, in light of this passage. About a month after we broke up I went to feel out whether we’d cooled down enough to maybe talk things over. (“Too soon!” said Rachel. She was right.) I tried to explain why I’d broken up with him, and try to feel out why he thought I’d done it. He said he thought we’d broken up because we had a number of fundamental disagreements. Mainly, he didn’t believe that taking classes and studying was as valuable a way of knowing as actually having done things — and he explicitly applied that value judgment to the seven years of grad school I’d just come out of.

Now I’m not sure whether there’s actually an irony in the fact that he took his marching orders from a bloviating academic in a novel, or whether he was actually reacting to Kivistic as the hero did, arguing that as a programmer he knew much more about the Internet and what should be done with it.

As far as I know (I don’t read his blog anymore), my ex is still over in Africa. Teaching, not setting up technology.

* * *

It’s been almost a year since I broke up with him. The further I get from the breakup, the happier I am. I liked that he was idiosyncratic, but in hindsight, it served as his stubborn defense of continuing to do what he did as a(n only) child of well-meaning hippies; someone who barely emotionally survived leaving home to go to college, and returned thereafter to live in his childhood home before heading to Peace Corps.

Useful, in a protest setting.

I found out early in the anti-globalization protests of the late-’90s-early-Aughts that I’m really uncomfortable in throngs of people. My gut reaction is to run clear of them. It’s maybe not a claustrophobia thing. Maybe it’s a manifestation of privilege. I dunno. I hate walking behind slow people, want to kick out or thrash when I’m boxed in by a crowd. Being in an immobile mass makes me feel useless. Inefficient?

It’s one of a few reasons I always gravitated to communications roles and to the Independent Media Center. I prided myself on being able to accomplish things by writing (wrong as I may have been) and felt more like I wanted to deliver a clear message to a lot of people than be one of a lot of people chanting. Back in 1999 not many people had cell phones, so there was also a lot of use for someone who could help with walkie-talkies and dispatch. I liked that, too; I had done it for the Humane Society officers in my hometown, and it felt familiar. And safe. More comfortable in the crow’s nest, hearing from the streets by radio, being able to send directions back to guide protesters away from police kettles, cordons, or tear gas.

So much has changed. There’s barely anyone who doesn’t have a cell phone out there now, not to mention laptops and tablets. Always on, even streaming video live. No need to return to an Independent Media Center to take days to edit, or even to upload. No need, even, for the heavily-worked-on IMC website backbone, which was unlike anything else on the web at the time: letting anyone post anything, including images and video.

Read that again: unlike anything else on the web. Letting anyone post anything. Images and video. How soon we’ve come to take all of these capabilities for granted. Just a dozen years.

This is the thing that gets me as I walk through Zuccotti Park, the sleeping quarters and organizing center and mess hall and library of the protest: the decentralization. There’s a few signs marking information desks, and a few areas with a vague feel that they’re for a single purpose, but mostly the space is just wall-to-wall milling people. It’s not clear where “the leaders” would be. It’s not clear who’s doing much of anything. At an Indymedia center, there were very definite spaces for things like dispatch and website coding and video editing and meeting, and you could mill around and from the feel of how people dealt with each other you got a sense of who kind of had more influence than others.

This new protest feels decentralized. OK, maybe I wasn’t there long enough to really grok the social structure. Something about it, though — being outside? People wandering through gawking? No amplification system? People sleeping everywhere? — makes it feel structureless. And like the brain of the movement, its executive function, isn’t going on in that space, per se. Like it’s accessible, but someplace else.

Like the Internet? The Internets.

(And even on the Internet it’s hard to find the single brain of this protest. Only a loose network of brain pieces. A cloud. And you know? Can’t say that’s a bad thing.)

We thought Indymedia was helping make the first Internet protest. But it wasn’t exactly. I think the anti-globalization movement was in the process of shedding the skin of something older.

I’ve been trying to sum up this feeling for days. I was at the occupation site today when Naomi Klein was speaking. I was elsewhere in the park — sitting in on a meeting about “direct democracy,” wanting to know what the zeitgeist thought that meant this time around. (Still using jazz hands to applaud silently. Still aiming for consensus. Still striving earnestly to right past societal wrongs by structuring in affirmative action, bless ‘em. Over the polyrhythms of a more-competent-than-usual drum circle, I asked the kid who was leading the direct democracy training what the history of the process he was outlining was. “Have you heard of the Rainbow Gathering? The Radical Fairies movements down in Tennessee and elsewhere in the South?” he responded. I confess my disappointment. I was hoping to learn we shared a procedural heritage with Egypt and Algeria.)

Klein apparently had the same struggle as everyone else to be heard under the amplified-speaker ban, but she’s written up her piece for the Nation. And she has said everything else I might want to say.

About the ephemerality of the anti-globalization mobilizations, and how it never served local communities. (Would that she had talked about how the tech bubble of that moment fueled the well-meaning but entitled skilled elite who descended on cities during those protests. Maybe that’s someone else’s story to tell.)

About how much harder it was to communicate a message about the abuses of corporate power during an economic boom cycle. It seems so much easier, by contrast, to communicate “the 99%.” You can even say it to police officers and feel like you’re getting some sympathy. That greedy 1% of the population does what they want, and do they ever ask what we need to feed and educate our children, to live in dignity and health? They take money from our government and never give back. It’s easier to communicate to people now.

About how this movement seems to her, as it does to me, to have no Black Bloc: no wing intent on doing violence (and indeed, @AnonyOps and other outlets have worked hard to spread messages to quell potentially violent actions.)

About how we lost everything we’d built in that earlier protest season in the militaristic hysteria about terrorism after 9/11.

About how this movement, like the one at the millennium, like the one in the 60s, are about “changing the underlying values that govern our society.”

Klein writes:

A few final thoughts. In this great struggle, here are some things that don’t matter.

§ What we wear.

§ Whether we shake our fists or make peace signs.

§ Whether we can fit our dreams for a better world into a media soundbite.

And here are a few things that do matter.

§ Our courage.

§ Our moral compass.

§ How we treat each other.

I’m glad Klein wrote these things I was having such a hard time summing up myself. It’s welcome to hear someone from an earlier movement, any earlier movement, speak so lovingly and encouragingly to the next people picking up the torch. (There were moments, at Hampshire and other times when my generation spoke to the Woodstock generation about our own concerns, when we were patted on the head, called cute, given a designated building to take over, reminded how important were the gains won by protests in the 60s. As if they were the only real protests, ignoring also Reagan-era protesters, ACT UP, and their peers.)

It is my hope that what our Naomi has written is remembered as one of the great humanist documents of our time.

(As if writing matters. As if, in the flood of information we swim in, one statement can make a difference.)

Nobody owes us this
it could all come down
tomorrow
Nobody owes us this
the richness
of this kind of town

Sorrow
where the trains can afford to go
Pleasanton and San Jose
the East Bay
another long day
for the mother in the hotel apron
for the son of Aztlan
in the battered ride

Decades of ships and cattle
Foreign and domestic finance
Old building new kinds of capital
Maker spaces
‘lectric cars
or desalinization plants

Another year out on the Playa
the left-behind town falls asleep
Nobody owes us this
brothers and sisters
it ain’t cheap

(Lyrics. Probably not done. Something about hanging out with the musical side of my family brings ‘em on. Deeply infused with Paul Simon, who I always associate with trips to the Bay Area, hills, and fog due to a couple of early family trips listening to a tape of his stuff Robert made for us.)

Many of you good-lookin’, smart, down-for-the-cause gentlemen appear to be into bicycling. I generally click through a cute picture and skim down a well-written, funny profile indicating how reliable your leftist bona-fides are, feeling like you are maybe The One For Me, and then at the bottom, I see “Big bonus if you want to ride bikes with me.”

I have a confession to make, honey. I hate bicycles.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not a declaration of my desire to lock myself in a gas-guzzling, polluting, international-politics-disrupting metal box every morning and run over a half-dozen pedestrians while screaming words at my fellow drivers that they will never hear, in the name of soothing my xenophobic American sensibilities. That doesn’t appeal either. I am an ardent supporter of public transit, calling my senator with regularity to make sure transit bills get funded and not cut. I’ve been smug ever since we went to war, knowing that my daily life in New York requires far less gasoline than the average American lifestyle.

This is not about the environment. This is a declaration of physics. Bicycles have no intrinsic motivation to stay upright.

I do. I have an inner ear, bones, and a sensitive epidermis which generally do not like to be driven headfirst into the curb.

Horses also have an innate motivation to stay upright. I would like to ride a horse to work every day; I’ve schemed to make it happen. (They turned me down for the professorship at Appalachian State, though.) I would rather run to work any given day. Hell, I even enjoy riding Segways. Just please don’t ask me to get on my bike.

Yes, I do have a bike. I’ve had the same one since I was about thirteen, even though I’ve moved all the way across the country, periodically given it to other people, and once had it stolen from me. I keep the same one out of a terror that I will hate any other bike even more. This despite the fact that shortly after I learned to ride without training wheels (at thirteen, after a hiatus since the age of ten, when it became mortally uncool to use training wheels), the same bike pitched me headfirst into a curb.

I have a bike because my dad decided I needed one, and specifically needed one kitted out with super-bikey things which he, as a gearhead of the mostly-automobile-and-motorcycle variety, thought were pretty cool. Racing handlebars and toe clips, however, only worsened my feeling that the bike was forever about to tip over, grappling onto my feet to take me with it.

I rode it for a while when I was thirteen because I had a crush on a guy who volunteered at the Humane Society, and he biked there, so I decided I should, too. After I realized the guy was kind of a psychopath, the bike mostly served to get me over to some nearby stables, where I could hang out with other mammals who liked being upright so much they even slept that way.

My 1970s-era men’s Nishiki with mountain-bike handles is sitting here in my bedroom, glaring malevolently at me as I type. It’s in fine enough shape that I even ride it to work sometimes, to pacify the part of me that’s screaming that I need to leave New York City or at least try to spend some time in the sun more often.

I’m coming into the awareness that I would probably be happier if I had a Dutch-style grandma bike. But I hate the very idea of riding everywhere. I expect I might hate it less if cars did not have doors, or were made of silicone breast implants, or were unable to go over five miles an hour. Or if New York City was free of potholes and broken glass.

Then again, one of the more harrowing rides I’ve taken was across the Brooklyn Bridge, with all of you eager bikers zooming past my tottering form at top speed, so maybe an all-bicycle society isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, either.

So please — don’t make hanging out together conditional on me being on a bicycle. If you think we might get along, emphasize your resistance to tipping over. Or if you really want to impress me, buy me a horse.

The Beatles – Hello Goodbye

A simple song, almost like an exercise in opposites. That’s how the song came about, according to the Wikipedia page. Listening to it, something lifts from me.

Some of you may have heard that we recently lost my cousin, Clay Cobb, to complications following the flu. Clay was only fourteen. He’s the son of my mother’s half-brother, the nephew of the aunt who took such good care of me while I was struggling to live in San Francisco. He was one of the kids in her summer rock band camp.

I’ve been down and anxious ever since I heard Clay was in the hospital; since he died, there’s a small hole in my awareness of the world. I didn’t know Clay well. For historical reasons of the “half” in half-brother, half-sister, my sisters and I were raised a bit more distant from that part of the family, the way you are when a child’s relationship to someone is inexplicable in terms they could understand. More to the point, Clay and his brother Jesse are a lot younger. But getting to know them and their side of the family has been really important to me, for the sake of clearing any clouds that linger. For healing wounds we didn’t know were there. Being Facebook friends isn’t much (the newspapers all agonize over that, as they’ve forgotten how to agonize over telephones, the rail system, global mobility) but Clay would always invite me to his concerts when he was playing with The Flounders or Cheez-It Failure from all the way across the country, and I was genuinely bummed to miss them.

Clay and Jesse and their dad and my aunt Patti are all musicians. Clay was only fourteen, and already notorious. Patti would say — what was it — he looked like Robert Plant, played like Jimmy Page? (update — no, Patti says that’s what she says about Jesse, but still, Clay got his share of rave reviews) — I don’t know, that side of the family grew up soaked in rock and blues, and my own education in those genres is poor. But everyone said Clay showed great promise, and he and Jesse played together extensively.

I don’t know if the Cobb boys care much for the Beatles, but maybe because I’ve heard Patti do Beatles covers — Hello, Goodbye among them — the song and the video have caught me right now.

Maybe because we know the characters and their story. The whole trajectory. The Beatles turning on, breaking up, reuniting. Losing John. Following the remaining Beatles to other bands, for better or worse (I don’t get the appeal of Wings, but George in the Traveling Wilburys taught me a lot about music). Losing George, eventually. Honors for Paul; Ringo going on to entertain younger generations. There’s something about viewing the full life of an artist that’s comforting. I’ve studied Martha Graham and Pablo Neruda, and knowing how the smaller pieces of art fit into a bigger picture lifts you back out of the Lamentations, and the Songs of Despair.

Clay didn’t get a full, long trajectory of his own, and it feels like a horrible cosmic mistake. But he’d played a prodigious number of songs for a kid his age, even cut an album. (I’m hoping some of the concerts got recorded, too.) His story is part of other artists’ stories already, even at fourteen, and that’s really something. His brother’s, his dad’s; the dozens of kids who have been showing up on Facebook, saying “I hope we’ll get to jam together again someday.”

Hello, Goodbye has a melody that skips towards the sky until we lose it, out of the range of the human voice. It is a lightweight song about a big picture which escapes us: you say why? And I say I don’t know. I don’t know why you say goodbye. I say hello.

With the release of the song, McCartney gave an explanation of its meaning in an interview with Disc: “The answer to everything is simple. It’s a song about everything and nothing. If you have black you have to have white. That’s the amazing thing about life.”

*goes to google whether Rousseau wrote about bedbugs*

*finds google’s results to be roughly the quality of bed bug feces*

I have bed bugs. Had, past tense, hopefully, if yesterday’s treatment took. No shame in it. Everyone gets ‘em these days. Upper East Siders. Department stores. Trump, I think. A former roommate who is also an EMT and who had them herself admonishes that it’s not an indicator of lack of cleanliness.

But god, will it ever make you feel like you have social herpes. All over your face. You mention it to people, and they quietly inch away from you. For a while I didn’t even want to go in to school, just so I wouldn’t pass bedbug detritus on to anyone else. Nobody’s coming over for dinner — I’m just not going to invite anyone until the course of treatment is run and they really seem to be gone. And here I’d just made a resolution to have people over more often, because I wasn’t getting enough social time last semester.

That was really what hit me first: that I couldn’t have people over. I’ve had a handful of friends now who’ve had the bugs, and I was also concerned that, like them, I might go bloody crazy, sleep in the bathtub, move as far from the center of town as was humanly possible.

What I didn’t know was why they went crazy. I don’t think that for most of them it was about getting bitten mercilessly while they slept. I did see them get anxious about contamination issues. I thought that wouldn’t happen to me. I’ve never been a particularly anal person about cleanliness.

But the process of preparing for the exterminator is contradictory, complicated, and exacting. The instructions: Wash absolutely everything you own. On high. Dry it on high. Put it all in Ziploc bags. Open the bags, close the bags — not clear which from the Internet instructions; each exterminator and poison has its own demands. Don’t vacuum. Vacuum. Anything under the bed must come out. Don’t move anything.

Cardboard boxes are bad. It is said the little bastards really like living in them, and certainly the boxes under my bed contained a few that I saw. So it was off to Target to pick up a forkliftload of clear plastic tubs.

I had a few bits of plastic storage crap in college, but when I graduated, I swore I’d never intentionally purchase any ever again. I’ve actively avoided plastic even at the small scale; given the choice, I prefer small wood or metal organizers and tchotchke boxes, often secondhand. I hate thinking about how plastic is going to stay around forever in landfills; I hate how it looks, and I hate how it breaks.

If I wasn’t depressed enough by the social herpes, I was certainly meeting some clinical definitions as I stood in front of Target’s aisles of plastic tubs. Aisles. So many plastic tubs; so much plastic furniture. Meaning there was so much demand. (The size of the store in Marble Hill was already getting to me; I’ve been shopping in tiny local stores so long I’m not steeled to withstand mass commercial throughput.) It barely mattered if I spent a couple hundred dollars on plastic tubs (and I did; the things are fucking expensive, as well, and it’s irritating to think of how much more cheaply they are doubtless manufactured); everyone else around me was already generating demand for hundreds of these things a month. Every time the checkout person at a local store tries to hand me a plastic bag, I make a point of wondering aloud, “Where do they go when you’re done with them?” Now I’ve started wondering why I bother.

I probably could have picked up tubs at the local Goodwill. But I have cause to suspect that my willingness to pick up used furniture could be why I had bed bugs in the first place. I’d really been lackadaisical about it. Once we started hearing bed bugs were making a comeback in the city, I developed some sort of willful magical thinking about my scavenging habits. Nobody put a sign on that chair; surely it can’t be infested. It looks clean enough. Goodwill wouldn’t sell anything they hadn’t inspected and cleaned, would they?

Probably this dubiousness of secondhand furniture and clothing is why there’s historically been a stigma against buying anything used. But I didn’t know that, not viscerally. My parents were thrifty, saving money so that they could pay for our education instead. We shopped at secondhand stores for much of my childhood. We had a sort of defensiveness about it. Perfectly good, was the phrase. (A girl in one of my writing workshops at school hung an entire essay on her mother’s tendency to use that same phrase about bruised fruit and dented cans. That girl’s good; she’s since been published in Harper’s.) There’s no telling quality from the objects you surround yourself with, now, is there? That’s what we always clung to.

What I’m saying is, standing in those aisles at Target, filling my cart with sucking black holes in my budget, I was reminded how I do define myself through my relationship to stuff, just not by buying the newest, best stuff. I re-use cardboard boxes. I try not to cause much in the way of new packaging or new consumer goods to come into existence on my account. I’m branded with the motto on my father’s old office wall: use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. And this whole bedbug experience has torn up all of that.

I have thrown away things — furniture, clothes, pillows — over the past few days which I’d normally be loath add to some landfill, knowing how long they’ll stay there. I’d usually give them to Goodwill, but I don’t want to perpetuate the cycle of infestations. The experience has been useful as a purgative, though, a good excuse to get rid of stuff I’ve been carrying around uselessly forever. The contents of my sock drawer have been halved. Finally got rid of an awful, cumbersome plastic file bin which has been the bane of my existence for the past few moves. A few ancient stuffed animals finally bit the dust, always the hardest thing for me to do; long before any awareness of PETA, I had a hard time throwing out anything that had a face.

This whole experience has made me feel like I’ve somehow taken on someone else’s neuroses. Standing in the laundry room putting everything into ziploc bags and pressing them so the air comes out, I want to tell the neighbors I’m not normally like this. I’m not normally concerned with what I leave on the floor. I don’t feel compelled to wash my hands over and over. People who do that seem sick to me. Suddenly I’m one of them.

Then there’s the poison, which aggravates my own cleanliness anxieties. In my shell-shocked tweets over the past few days I’ve been unable to remember its specific name: pesticide. I came home last night, after the exterminator did his work in the morning, to find everything in chaos. Boxes everywhere — I’d left them that way — but all the pictures were off the wall; my bed was disassembled, the mattress in the hall. Something still dripped from the bed’s upraised legs. Everything in my room was covered with a white, chalky, spotty film of what I can only think of as poison. It looked like permanent damage to the finish on all the furniture. It was on my accordion case, my alarm clock, my shoes. The floor was covered with dried puddles of varnish, poison, and dead bug bodies, which when handled indelicately would leave blackish-red smears of gore on the pale flooring. Bed bug freaking Vietnam.

This was the climax of three days of nonstop trips to the laundry room, the change machine around the block, the drugstore for housecleaning supplies, Target, and the cat sitter’s place, all of this under what seemed to be bronchitis and, outside, impending snow and freezing temperatures. It was ten o’clock at night. The next day promised still more laundry and running back downtown to get the cats again (one of whom would, of course, shit the carrier before the taxi ride was over). Somehow I’d hoped the exterminator would come and it would all be over. I would have collapsed immediately and given up, except that in my newfound anxiety about leaving anything on the floor, I’d left myself not a single horizontal surface to collapse on. Except, of course, Apocalypse Now bed bug territory.

I woke up this morning with poison still crusted under my bed, garbage bags of ziploc bags of laundry and pillows strewn around my apartment like the macro-larvae of American consumerism, gorged on Chinese manufacture.

As of now, everything’s clean again. I vacuumed and mopped every inch of floor in this apartment more thoroughly than I ever had today. The cats are back, and I’m praying there’s not enough traces of pesticide left on the floor to make them sick. Tomorrow I might actually have a chance to go to work. I don’t think there’s anything more that needs to go in the laundry.

* * *

As they say on the Internet, LFMF, apartment-dwellers. There’s really nobody to blame for bedbugs — like I said, it’s not about cleanliness — but there’s things I wish I had known sooner, so let me share them with you:

• Cardboard boxes are not your friend for under-bed storage, particularly if you scavenged them from someplace when moving.
• There’s a reason your grandmother told you never to have a mattress or box spring resting right on the ground. I’m pretty sure that having bed legs makes it harder for the little bastards to find their way to you. Certainly having a mattress right on the ground makes it easier for them to hide.
• Bed bugs are not so small that you can’t see them. Full-grown ones are large enough that they could be mistaken for small cockroaches. And, in fact, I think I did a couple of times, thinking bed bugs would be nearly invisible (perhaps because when our parents spoke the childhood goodnight rhyme, they had to assuage our fears by explaining that bed bugs couldn’t really get you anymore; in other words, they were imaginary?) Acquaint yourself with what they look like before you know you have an infestation, so when you do get an infestation it won’t get as far before you notice.
• Likewise, acquaint yourself with what bed bug poop looks like. On sheets, it will look like someone made a dot with the tip of a black or brown fine-tip permanent marker (and it may wick along the threads of the sheet so it looks like a little star or cross). On hard surfaces, it will look like small raised black bumps in a cluster.
• I heard bed bug bites were like spider bites, which kept me from identifying what I was getting. Some people don’t react to the bites at all. Mine manifested like a diffuse, light rash which I confused with my slight allergy to wool.

Teh Moar U Know ====-* More complete information and advice on bed bugs can be found at BedBugger, which my former roommate referred me to.

Before I did that, though, I did find a very interesting South African sort of version of The Onion which made some reference to Himmler selling blank textbooks to the Bantu for “educational purposes.” The satire site appears to have shut down. Shame — it was regional jokes I didn’t get, but it’s great to find that kind of thing on the Web.

This pleaseth me mightily. Listening for the line “I listen to everything except country and rap” has always been my favorite way to weed out potential dating material, because as far as I can tell, it translates to this:

Unfortunately, the rest of the contributions on Know Your Meme are pretty weak sauce, rightly eliciting calls from the voters to deadpool the meme. The format is usually “[name of band you like]? [misinterpretation of name of that band].” Not particularly compelling. Who cares about your favorite band? Why should we assume everyone’s heard of them?

There’s much bigger game to hunt with this meme, much as there was with Privilege Denying Dude (privilege denying cat?). Because really, music is so often a stand-in for so many other things. I think the meme deserves a new life, which of course I am going to give it, because I don’t have other things to do like preparing for job talks, or not blogging so said-potential-employers don’t have blog posts on potentially sensitive subjects to turn me down for (O HAI PANOPTICON). Voila:

And then I couldn’t resist making one which was a “what, you haven’t heard of my favorite band?” one, because of course anyone who has will get that voice in their heads on reading this:

In conclusion: I am an insufferable music snob who only likes music with accordions in it.

I put my elderly iPod on shuffle while I made these, and here is what it played:

DMX/Jay Z – Money, Cash, Hoes
Tom Ze – Politicar
Sylvia Woods – The Harper’s Vision
Paza – Teen Hipster
Patsy Cline – I Fall To Pieces
Nelly Furtado – I’m Like A Bird
some instrumental cover of the Internationale or something by Utah Phillips and Ani diFranco
something by a friend of mine who works with Negativland
Anonymous 4 – De Supernis Sedibus (Rondellus)
Beck: Epro
Shuggie Otis
Shirley Bassey: Where Do I Begin (Away Team Mix)
Bjork: In The Musicals
Henry Purcell: Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day
Heitor Villa-Lobos: Etude 5 – Andantino
Frankie Ruiz: La Rueda
tracks from the video game Jet Grind Radio
Siftan Desh Diyan (artist unknown)

Seriously. Now get off my lawn.

I anxiously tried to keep an eye on my bag, laptop, and clothes, as bag x-ray staff had stolen electronics from my bag during an earlier flight through Detroit. The female screener who came over to me was accommodating, carrying my three trays awkwardly over to some nearby benches. She was very clear about what she was about to do, and not unpleasant about it, as if we agreed that the patdown option was as necessary as the scanners themselves.

Worrying about the patdowns before my flight to New Orleans, I imagined I had been through something like it before. Namely, when I was processed into jail. They’d penned some 600 of us in at a protest for “parading without a permit,” put us on buses and held us overnight, eventually sending us into jail cells at a courthouse where we slept on linoleum floors with an arm zip-tied across our bodies to the opposite leg. I have never been through anything as humiliating. All of us were already nervous, not having expected an arrest and not knowing what would happen to us. The staff were harrassed, most of them postal detectives and other desk officers who did not appreciate being asked to work overtime. We’d been on buses for hours, sometimes arguing with them, sometimes begging for bathrooms. The short, stocky woman who processed me in grabbed me roughly, sticking her hands between my legs and down my pants and squeezing. I felt like a piece of meat. The sexual feelings it provoked when she grabbed around my waistline were unwelcome, and completely unavoidable unless you wanted to fight, which would only make things worse. It was a hint of the humiliation that must be common for those in prison in the US.

But the woman at the Detroit airport was extravagantly careful, telling me when she would check my waistband, when she would use the backs of her hands, where she was about to move. I stood with my nose in the air, legs spread, like a show horse being checked for conformation. There was a ritual familiarity to it. This time, I knew I would feel aroused, so I was ready for her, and not ashamed. She finished, told me to wait while she scanned her gloves for traces of the bomb-making materials I had no doubt been grubbing around in, then called from her post that I was free to go.

Putting on my boots for the umpteenth time since 9/11, I found myself thinking I was comfortable, more so than I would be going through the machine which would not touch me or cause any sensations. Better to be touched by a human being than poisoned and captured by a machine, I thought.

This is what we’ve come to.

Yeah, I’m surprised to report it. At La Guardia, at least, full-body scanners are still optional. They seem to be using them if you set off the metal detectors, which I didn’t, as I tried to dress as non-metallically as possible. There’s a large sign letting you know those scans are optional, and you can opt for a thorough groping ^H^H^H^H^H^H patdown instead.

What I *did* run afoul of was an older roadblock — the size-of-liquids-container rule — as I forgot to chug my smoothie before I hit the gate. They sent me back out, I drank it, I came back through a second time. Still no problems. Though now I’m a bit concerned that I’ve just exposed myself to unfamiliar yogurt cultures, which sometimes turns out to be a bad thing in my intestinal tract’s point of view.

Anderson Cooper’s on the TV right now talking with someone about the scanners. I think I heard her say something about how Americans’ trust was being violated for the sake of these companies making some money.

We’ll see how things go flying from New Orleans to Michigan in a couple of days.