Thursday, 4th March

I'm finding it difficult to extract 5 good things from today. The problem is not that 30 bad things happened. It is more of a definitional problem: What constitutes a 'good' thing in this exercise? Looking at yesterday's list, my definition of good seemed pretty broad and also strangely visual/animal based. A good day for an urban nature spotter/sad bird watching type perhaps. A day lacking, it implies, any contact with people (or at least with people that would contribute to 'goodness'. Does the list imply a lack of good people around me? Or an influx of 'bad'? I'm already becoming fixated on what I'm not writing; on the gaps and elisions produced by the task; on what is not written). Because of the parameters of the exercise - which is still a bit 'life-affirming' for my tastes - I feel the intrinsic dishonesty of the task. Focusing on 'goodness' rather than 'truth' (in my head, a tangent about the impossibility of truth... leave that philosophical argument alone for now) means even as I'm writing in the hope of alleviating anxiety and depression, I'm constantly reading underneath myself (makes me sound quite flexible doesn't it?) to see the layer of not-good things that happened. And that are happening all the time - Uganda's kill-the-gays bill, the conservatism and corporatisation of Mardi Gras, that twinge of pain in my knee, outspoken supporters of gay marriage not turning up for the vote in the Senate (bastards), out politicians not turning up for the vote in the Senate (traitors), deadlines I let slip by, small cruelties of conversation, large injustices and general thoughtlessness (some of them carried out by me). I feel like in affirming good things I'm ignoring everthing else and will turn into one of the those glassy-eyed nitwits who insist on accentuating the positive (eeee...lim-min-nate the negative...) to the detriment of the important; who use phrases like "positive affirmations"; who refuse to hear anything they consider to be negative (no newspapers for them then) because it would impinge on their morally justifiable quest to achieve happiness. I often blame Oprah for this highly indivdualist tendency but it's probably not all her fault.

These people look like they are in serious denial. They must be. In their strict refusal to hear information that might be a wee bit of a downer, their eyes must glaze and slip, unseeing, over objects, people, facts, thoughts, entire countries... It seems to me like a terrible way to live, insular and isolated, lazy and irresponsible, disrespectful and unchanging. It is easy to be buyount and light-hearted if you are empty. They are aiming, probably without realising it (because they'd have to read a novel with some death and injustice in it), to become Mr. Skimpole of 'Bleak House', that epitome of 'positivity', that 'child of the universe', whose blank refusal to deal with anything on the grounds of his vaulted innocence damages everyone around him. Forced 'positivity' only produces pure, terrifying innocence. Innocence, it turns out, is selfishness. Look at babies. (Yep, an anti-baby rant). They are very cute and squishy, but they are (until they get a bit older and eventually turn into people) pure selfishness - concerned only with meeting their own needs, unaware that other people exist as people, sucking, draining little vampires of desire. But there's nothing wrong with that in an infant, they are little more than flesh pods intent on survival. Larvae. In an adult though, it is terrifying. So boo to innocence I say. And boo to positive affirmations. I am not a man-baby, I am not Harold Skimpole, I refuse to affirm! No to O(prah)!

Ah fuck it. Here are my five good things for today (based, to keep my sense of self intact, on MY definition of good, not to be confused with the accepted meanings of the term "positive"):

1. I am petrified of spiders. It is my worst fear, matching precisely the defintion of 'phobia' (from the Greek phóbos, meaning 'morbid fear): an intense and persistent fear, couple with an excessive and unreasonable desire to avoid the feared stimulus. (See how you can't have fear without desire? Nice.) I have been known to travel two suburbs over in the middle of the night to avoid a huntsman which interrupted me while I was making a cup of tea (which prompted a short-lived fear of tea).

The most common reactions to the 'feared stimulus' inclulde: a) freezing as if caught in headlights and staring intently in an effort to destroy spider using eyeballs and as-yet-untapped telekinetic powers; b) running away whilst squealing like a small child and flapping arms around head; c) sitting down, crying, and compulsively rocking back and forth; d) begging Panda to kill said stimulus (though I never use the word 'kill' because I am effectively ordering its execution and at the same time trying to protect myself from the guilt and blame that will inevitably occur. So, like a mob boss trying to distance myself from the hit and retain plausible deniability, I ask Panda to "get rid of it"). This hardly ever happens because Panda is a life-protecting person, much better than me, and hates to see living creatures killed, especially slowly and obviously painfully from toxic insect spray. At the same time I am panicking and reaching something like a spider-induced critical mass, Panda's well-reasoned and ethically sound argument makes me feel like some kind of unfeeling monster, oppressor of creatures smaller and weaker than myself, but only able to assert power through the actions of others. So I start to hate myself. But in my terrified state I quickly project this hatred onto him and spiral into an ill-advised spate of accusation about Panda's obvious deficiency of love for me (ie. 'if you really loved me, you'd want to protect me.'). As you can see, a spider encounter is a very busy time for me emotionally. It has the capacity to alter my sense of self-worth, ruin my relationship, and occassionally force me from my home.



So why a spider-themed no. 1 spot on good things? This morning, before Panda was awake, I took my coffee, toast, cigarettes, and novel and went to plonk myself down on one of the sofas in the living room. Naturally there was a massive (ok fine, a medium-sized) huntsman spider on the wall above the couch. I grabbed the spray and gave it a couple of squirts. This in itself is a victory in self-control and moderation, as usually, when left to my own devices, I spray them with enough insect killer to bring down a large bird. The spider dropped behind the couch, and I retreated to the other sofa, curled up against the arm and began to read. Another victory for me, as this meant remaining in the same room as a possibly-alive adversary AND taking my eyes off its last known location. I had only read a page of my novel when my eye was drawn to the curved edge of the sofa's armrest. One creepy, pale brown leg at a time, the spider was attempting to traverse the curved incline, only a few inches from my hand. Like a mountain-climber reaching the crest after a long journey in a low-oxygen environ, it slowly, painfully, and with a dogged determination, reached the crest and came to a stop. This. Is. My. Nightmare. Instead of the panicked, skittish movement of a healthy (and justifiably scared) spider trying to get away from the enormous fleshly blob of death they must see me as, this little trooper had covered a huge distance in a very short space of time to arrive, surely not without design, so close to me as to warrant a suspicion of cognition. More than mere cognition - of strategizing and possible super-spider speed and power. We're talking about at least 4 metres of carpet and a 1 metre incline in less than 2 minutes. And it was ill. What the hell was happening?! How did it know where I was? Had it come for revenge, or god forbid, assistance? Was it seeking out the only other living thing in the room in a desparate bid for medical attention? Or did it understand it was I who had attempted to kill it? I imagined it struggling onto its four hind legs, and with its last breath, raising one shaking leg to name its killer: "J'accuse!" (Apparently spiders are French. Or have read Émile Zola.)

So where was the good? It is perhaps a minor good, a good defined by lack rather than positive value. Returning to points a) through d), I am proud to say that despite the extreme nature of this encounter (and it was supernaturally bad), I refrained from my usual display of histrionics. I merely stood, recited my mantra quietly so as not to wake Panda ("nightmarenightmarenightmare...") and brought my trade paperback down upon its brave little head. The paperback's flexibility and the soft give of the cushy armrest meant that instead of a mangled spider body stuck to either sofa or book, its body bounced off the armrest and out the balcony door.

This, as you can see with all the contextual information provided, is a definate victory, and in the scheme of things, though perhaps not 'good', provided a moment of profound, not-as-bad-as-it-could-have-been relief.

2. As part of the Mardi Gras festival I went to see a female cabaret show called Lady Sings it Better. Six women perform songs by male artists, so the performance has a nice lesbian-appropriation feel. The show in itself is good, because they are all beautiful and talented, but what stands out for me is the context of its conception. The creator/artistic director was taking singing lessons in her teens, and was belting out some romantic number sung originally by a man. Her teacher, showing the endemic blindness of the heterosexually inclined (or as I like to call them, the heterosexually limited), encouraged her to change the pronouns in the lyrics, which would straighten out (ha ha) the meaning of the song for a female performer. To come back to this rather seminal event in a young dyke's life and reclaim what was probably yet another damaging instance of straight-brain presumptions in a life filled with them, will always be welcomed as a kind of reparation: returning to trauma in order to heal it. Healing with singing? What could be more gay!



It can also be read as a defiant (and in this case by turns witty, touching and sexy) re-reading of mainstream cultural texts. You don't want to give us songs, films, or books that reflect our lives? Well, fuck you, we'll steal yours and make them our own. What makes this performance more than apt for this particular Mardi Gras is the way it fits with the this year's theme: History of the World. It draws into sharp relief the double meaning of the theme. As queers we are constantly seeking out figures, texts and events in history that we can retrospectively claim for ourselves. This happens whenever marginalized groups are denied a history through censorship, invisibility, or misreprenstation. Women, gays, lesbians (who are also women, poor dears), people of colour, perverts and freaks, criminals, the mentally ill... Being marginalized is not something that is temporally fixed - it extends, from our perspective, back in time, hiding our likeness, shadowing histories that could be ours, if only they hadn't been (deliberatley) lost. Think of the poems of Sappho, burnt centuries ago and coming to us only in fragments. That's what we have to work with. The practices of making a coherent narrative out of fragments is varied: historical fictions, imaginative reconstructions, queer readings of otherwise 'straight' texts. Listing famous people in history who can be claimed as one of us, as another practice of historical recuperation, is more than a fun pasttime; it takes on real and affective meaning in the creation of an imagined/imaginative genealogy for those normally excluded from such structures of belonging.

The second meaning, linked to the first, is our own personal histories of exclusion, isolation, fear, shame, abuse and violence. And being born post-Stonewall does not necessitate a waning of these experiences. The removal of discrimination at a policy level, and even at a general social one, does not mean the immediate reduction at other levels of experience. It did not stop the gen-Y creator of Lady Sings from being informed, however inadvertantly, that her desires were not even a possibility in the mind of her teacher. So hooray for Lady Sings it Better for performing a bit of time travel for the homos enjoying their spirited renditions (pronouns definatly unchanged!) of AC/DC, Michael Jackson, Leonard Cohen and Lenny Kravitz. Because in their acts of gendered ventriloquism and appropriation they took me back to adolescent moments of undefinable pleasure, singing along to love songs about women, relishing the perversity of the improper pronouns in my proto-gay, out of key and uneven voice. Seeing six women doing a cabaret version of 'Closer' by Nine Inch Nails? Good thing.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=532340111&ref=search&sid=570443446.2003291912..1#!/pages/Lady-Sings-it-Better/135424649838

3. Drawn to the balcony by someone yelling out the name 'Amy' over and over, in increasingly frustrated tones, led to the sighting in the back alley behind my building of an enourmous man - bulky and tall and terribly butch - chasing after a fat little pug. Amy, despite her genetic disposition towards plumpness, bad respiration, and stumpy legs, had made a bid for freedom. With a dexterity defying her shape and size, she consistently avoided the man's attempts to restrain her, dancing around him, taunting him, then darting just out of reach. A pug's face, though expressive, does not often convey such a clear sense of smugness and joy.

4. There was a kitten called Charlie in the window of the vet clinic. He was white and tortoise-shell, with that little black spot under his nose that often prompts associations with another famous, tiny, moustachioed man. But the vet staff had gone for Chaplin instead, which is nice because one should not be miopic when it comes to referencing famous facial hair.

5. I had a good conversation. It was with Panda and Toosh, and centred around the current state of the gay rights movement in Australia, the unfortunate policies of New Mardi Gras, and Panda's fantastic idea to instigate a kind of reverse relationships register for straight people. The idea is to have an online register/petition which straight people would sign declaring their intention NOT to get married until marriage rights are extended to everyone. A show of solidarity. The idea came from watching The View (and that is probably the first and last time an idea for political action will come from that particular source). Sarah Silverman was being interviewed, and when asked by the panel when she would marry her long-time boyfriend, she replied 'Never'. She said she could not reconcile herself to participating in an institution that was, at its heart, discriminatory. She likened it to joining a country club that would not allow black or Jewish members.

Damn straight.