buffer-overrun

I’ve been thinking a lot about that 0.0001% post, and why I felt so hurt by it (before it got turned into the next round of Sherlock fandom wank).

So, I was having a tough week. It would have been Michael’s 41st birthday, and both the anniversary of his death and his birthday are always hard. And it’s getting to the point where I don’t really know how to memorialize him anymore. I cannot imagine what he would have been like at 41. I’m not really what I imagined. And a surprising number of the people we used to get high with are still alive, so maybe, in some alternate universe, he could still be alive. But then I would have had to figure out how to break up with up, because our relationship was so toxic, I can’t imagine either of us figuring out how to adult if we’d still been together.

And I had just started seeing all these posts about Richard Siken, and went looking for his poetry and was blown away by Crush, and I’m not usually a big poetry reader.

For me,Crush is about being young and a big slutty mess. (See also Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl.) And then you throw being queer into the mix, and all the internalized issues about being monstrous and evil, and you basically get my late teens/ early 20s. And this is a time in my life that I have been trying to write about, and it’s really fucking hard. I was a total idiot who put myself in the worst, scariest situations, that at the time seemed perfectly normal. It’s very hard to talk about that time without being super judgey and condescending and over-analytical of a bunch of crap that you couldn’t pay me enough to do now. And Crushcaptures that passion and irrationality. Perfectly.

And all the stuff about dreaming about his dead boyfriend? And how to work through all the unresolved crap with a fucking ghost? I was sitting in my car crying.

And, like, I understand that men get a lot more attention and prestige in publishing than women do, even from women readers, and that basically all of fandom’s brushes with famous people seem to put fandom in an even worse light.

And I make an effort to buy and read work by women and promote them on my main (more literary) Tumblr. A post I made quoting Chris Kraus talking about women’s confessional writing has, like, 200 notes (which, for me, is a lot).

And I’m not convinced that Siken is going to write very good Johnlock. Slash has it’s own tropes and rhythms and pacing, and writing explicit fanfic is very different than writing other genres, and especially poetry, where you can say “the dirtiest thing you know,” and leave it at that.

But I read the 0.0001% comment as saying that my heartfelt squee about an author I had discovered because of the squee of other Tumblr fangirls was evidence of internalized misogyny. And I know that hottest of my hot button issues are always about being a bad feminist and a bad queer women.

I know that it is important to have our biases and blind spots brought out into the light, because without self-awareness, you cannot improve. But also sometimes I just need the space to enjoy the things that give me pleasure.

—“I Had a Dream About You” Richard Siken, Crush

I have so much stuff to do. And I left the baby’s carefully packed lunch at home. I’m so exhausted and I think I’m coming down with a cold (or maybe I just forgot to take my Zoloft last night). And, really, the last thing I should be doing is sitting in my car reading poetry and crying.
Tuesday would have been Michael’s 41st birthday. I’m running out of ways to memorialize him. I cannot imagine him getting to 41. I can’t really imagine myself getting to 41 either, if we’d still been together. And I can’t imagine how I could have left. He said he would kill himself. Also, I’d promised to give him my purple jacket.

His mother hated me so much. And blamed me for everything. I hope she’s dead. So, I probably am as bad as she thought I was.