Random notes

After a long hiatus over the holidays, Shannon seems to be calling it quits for her blog. Too bad -- it was usually really funny. I met S. in the novel writing group I'm still a part of, though she dropped out a few months later, saying she wanted to turn her story ideas into graphic novels instead of literary novels.

Speaking of which, I just finished Michelle Tea's Rent Girl. Though marred by a number of brain-dead typos, the book is a funny, fascinating and visually arresting tour of a young dyke's career as a prostitute. The illustrations by Laurenn McCubbin are fabulous -- funny, beautiful, alluring and honest. At the same time, the pictures make you want to be a babydyke lesbian prostitute, they make it look like the next best thing to having super powers.

Badger recently commented, on reading another memoir by another dyke local hero, "I'm all like, 'okay, you're so cool. I'll never be that dirtycool. I'm with ya. Now what? Let's get moving.'" I have that reaction to so many self-revelatory memoirs by writers whose outsider status -- and how much more of an outsider could you be than a formerly drug-addicted, gender-smearing dyke bike messenger-cum-rock star? -- makes them seem all the more cool to people like me who feel their lives are too staid.

Not that I haven't had my moments. But at age 48 I do harbor regrets that I didn't push things farther, that along the way I so often took the safe choice and the easy way out. The fact that a lot of people did die along the way, of AIDS and/or drug addiction, doesn't change the fact that taking risks and making the unexpected choice is almost always a good idea in the end. You know what I told myself, in those moments of decision? My internal censor had two different messages. One was, I didn't deserve what was, essentially, the pursuit of happiness; I was unconvinced of that "inalienable right" as far as my own pursuit was concerned. The other was even more subtle and corrosive: that I shouldn't sabotage myself, that others I saw who were failing were "self-sabotaging" their careers and that I wouldn't make that mistake -- when, in fact, not choosing to take the risk was the act of self-sabotage.