There were better reasons, too. It just felt like an outmoded tactic, marginalized out of any influence by time and money and, maybe somewhere, cynical or even malevolent volition. The march I remember in DC was deeply dispiriting. It was big, and we were very certain we were right, and it was in and out of the papers in a day. Nobody cared except us and possibly Anne Fucking Coulter.

Maybe Occupy Wall Street will vanish, too. It’s cold out there, and momentum is not an easy thing to regain. But already this is very different. NY1 is talking about it right now as I type, and the guy is saying it’s two months already it’s in the news. Fait accompli, as much noted: a substantive, non-negligible redirecting of public discourse, an energizing of some dormant leftist impulse, the wide dissemination of things about class you and I and all our friends knew and considered important, and the grudging attention of the ever centripetal leftish establishment.

Making a demand is a very short process if it’s denied. This is process that resists resolution for the moment, and that’s almost entirely good. Favorite concepts of mine like “negative capability” and “sitting with the question” are in operation here, and that means we’re already off the script, off the chute from gratification to impotence.

I’ve gone a couple of times. I’ve gone to show support for something that my gut says is right despite some misgivings, and to sort out my own feelings about the whole thing. I went with a friend with whom I’d never had a political conversation, and we had one. I’ve talked to strangers, which is easy to do there, and been alienated by a few zealots, and wondered how much I will participate and what I should do.

Your fellow Whatsiteer and I went down on Saturday. We stood near the southeastern corner of Zuccotti Park and watched a charismatic young woman facilitate a basically uninteresting General Assembly that, while we were there, was focused on whether fifteen people marching to DC could and should use the name “Occupy Wall Street.” Two months in, the crowd was orderly, attentive to established process, ruly when prodded to be more attentive, and I think it’s fair to say, alive with purpose and good will.

We participated in the human microphone, the technique I’m told was devised by farm workers, and here used to sidestep the problems of amplification. The speaker’s words are echoed by the crowd, outward in enough waves to reach the edge. It is a speech act not unrelated to the lamentable three-word chant, except it’s engaging and utile. It accomplishes a number of things at once including, I daresay, shunting that need to speak that causes people to tell their life stories in the form of questions into a focusing activity rather than a diffusing one.

Repeating words that have just been thought up sidesteps the numbness that comes from what is more properly termed chanting. It didn’t feel like Yom Kippur is what I’m trying to say.

*My favorite of these is my friend S’s unintended manifesto “The history of me working for other people can be summed up in the question ‘who the hell are you to tell me what to do?’”

When I was small, this meant that I was constantly asking teachers and authority figures to clarify whether something was something I actually had to do, or whether I could maybe trust my own judgment instead. And if I chose to go with my own judgment, the consequences would be whatever they naturally happen to be, or are you implying there is some kind of enforced punishment? And what will the punishment be, in case I still want to pursue my own course of action? I mean, it’s not going to be death, right? Unless you’re threatening me with death, I might decide still to go my own way on this one.

That’s pretty much how all my interactions with authority figures have gone from the nursery up through, uh, now. I always want to know what is the price of my freedom. What will it cost me to do whatever I want at all times? I want none of your “It isn’t done!” or “You will not!” because, technically, I very much will, and if I do it, then I suppose it is done because it is done by me and I exist.

Freedom, as we all know, is hell. Conceiving of yourself as moving freely through life without anything more than a sense of easily violated cultural norms to guide you is a real pain in the ass, and can lead to depressive thoughts, or, as it was for me when I was young, suicidal ideation. Free people are responsible for themselves. Free people have no master to appeal to.

I remember my students in New York would often express their understanding of various situations in literature or in the world as manifestations of their lack of freedom, especially compared to mine. They wanted to believe that I must be from a rich family (very not true!), that I choose things on my own or make up my own ideas. Somehow they seemed caught in a loop of thinking that freedom is something that Americans are constantly aspiring to achieve, even though only a privileged few can touch. Just like they want to protect wealth and excess when they have nothing, they feel it’s their duty as un-free people to celebrate freedom when they see it in others. They’re glad someone has the right to do what they will, even if they never can. They’re glad queer people can be out now, but they’d never consider whether they might be a little bent. They’re happy we have freedom of speech, but they really don’t want anyone to hear them saying the wrong thing.

I know that part of this attitude toward authority is worse now than it was when I was 19 because of financial upheaval, the militarization of the state, increased police presence and brutality, and the insistence of the state that we love it all. At Penn Station today, there was an Amtrak-produced film playing in which various Amtrak customers talked about how calm and safe it makes them feel to be surrounded by armed police at all times. Nod along! It feels so good, right? Police sure are there to protect free speech downtown at the protests, too, right? We all feel so good knowing they’re there.

I feel like Kids These Days grew up never feeling like punishment might just be worth getting to do what you want, because the punishment was always unbearable. The reach of authority was too great. If you do what you will, you won’t just pay for it now, today, for the next week or year; you’ll be set on a totally different path of life that will lead down into death and you will always remember that this was the time that you chose to disobey. You’ll be One of Those People.

I know some of you grew up with some sense of human authority, right? So what is it that makes the idea of authority so different now?

Mother has always been a challenge.  Apparently, as we age we become extreme versions of ourselves.  The thought patterns magnify.  The world shrinks.  Patience is gone.  Everything is a crisis.  She is even harder to accept than before.

Father has always been a delight.  But his patience is gone too.  And his confidence as a fierce and aggressive road warrior is cracking.  But worst of all, he has only 40% hearing in each ear.  The social animal is plagued by the poor design of hearing aids.  We can send many men to the moon, smash atoms and put all sorts of exploratory machines on Mars, but we can’t sound engineer hearing.  The pub is a blur of sound.  The family a cacophony.

Mother asks what I will be like at 71 after a long night in which she has persistent and dramatic nightmares about losing her mother.  What she really wants to say is: you will be old too.  And you’ll regret not having children (my grandchildren).  And you’ll regret every decision you made.

I am now resolved to live big for the next 20 years and engineer a painless demise at 74.  You?

This was a friend’s status update. It jolted me to read it. In fact, I’m not sure how he intended it, but it took me back immediately to this documentary I watched in grad school, Daddy & Papa, about gay couples adopting kids.

Now, I’ve never wanted kids. It predates any realizations about being a homo and in (what then seemed it would forever be) a difficult position w/r/t kids; in fact, it’s one of my few lifelong certainties. I pull a lot of W.C. Fields schtick about not being able to stand the little nose-pickers but the fact is, other than infants (anathema!), I’m just a little awkward with them, don’t usually know what to say to them and, okay, I don’t find them particularly interesting. But there’s no great animosity. Once in a while I like them, if they’re weird and smart.

But you get backed into things sometimes. So for instance I’m watching this documentary and one proud father explains his longing to adopt. He sits there looking at the camera, holding his partner’s hand or some shit, and says “we were just looking at the rest of our lives and thinking, what if it’s just more dinner parties and gallery openings?!” [cue: the saddest music in the world]

I like dinner parties. I don’t have a strong feeling about gallery openings, but I suddenly felt like I’d go to the wall for them. I walked out, indicted and angry about it. This is how I’ve come to be occasionally affiliated with nutcases like the “childfree” set. (If you’re not familiar, these are the people who refer to mothers as “moos” and kids as “crotch droppings,” among other terms. They’re frightful, but I’d be lying if I denied occasionally feeling more closely aligned with them than with the culture of parenting, if only because I know they don’t think of me as some soulless, dinner-party-throwing monster.)

The fact is, yes, you lose a set of guidelines for what you’re supposed to do after you settle into a career if you don’t have kids. And everybody needs new chapters, and I do think a lot of us who don’t have kids, even the ones who emphatically don’t want them, occasionally have a twinge of roadmaplessness.

I think about my parents’ lives: childhood, high school, college, graduate school, first job, first kid, second kid, by the time we were out the door and superficially independent, they were 50. That’s a lot of your life accounted for, given an outline however broad.

What’s the question I’m left with, long past the end of my proscribed outline? It’s the same question as everything else, I guess. Though it’s a bit grand for these glib ditherings, inevitably I think of Grace Paley in a little introduction she wrote, talking about a friend she had met in 1957.

After that we talked and talked for nearly forty years. Then she died. Three days before that, she said slowly, with the delicacy of an unsatisfied person with only a dozen words left, Grace, the real question is — how are we to live our lives?”