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?’”

And then my head exploded.

I’ve since encountered this idea in a few places, and my head, she will not stop exploding.

Because here is the thing: marriage is, yeah, stupid.  Marriage isn’t just the act of administratively binding your lives together; it has baggage.  Marriage is, no matter how we may queer it, still presumed to be monogamous and wholesome and financially responsible and is presumed to have procreation as its goal.  And as Mr. Kaufman said to Mr. Fisher, if you put the Mount Palomar telescope inside the Mount Wilson telescope, you could not begin to detect my interest in any of that.

This doesn’t matter.  What I can’t wrap my head around is the apparent underlying fear, that now we’re all going to be required to live straight lives plus buttsecks.  (Adjust as needed for gender.)  “We want to be allowed to move to the suburbs” isn’t the same as “we want to move to the suburbs,” and the distinction is extremely important.  Ironically, the argument that could be made to radical queers is exactly the same as the one some of us made or at least applauded in recent years, then directed at conservatives: if you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get gay married.

What, I have asked one friend who pulled this argument on me, should be our agenda, if not these conservative things like marriage and military service, otherwise known as the ways our dehumanization has been validated?  You don’t want the government validating your kinks or your polyamory, whatever the gay rights agenda has subsumed,  it seems to me.

Queerness has to exist on the margins of something, or it isn’t fucking queer.  Better it should exist in the margins of equality, acceptance, safety.  Kvetching about having your queerness coöpted by homos who want to move to the suburbs romanticizes oppression and is an enormous insult to people who still live in fear.

There are things to hate about HRC and that whole swath of moneyed, gay, largely male, lukewarm activism, like how it has thrown, or so I am told, transfolk under the big rainbow bus.  And there is a valid and urgent queer critique of gay assimilationism, and at its heart, it is a critique of other things, probably mostly capitalism.

This ain’t it.  Locally speaking, we have marriage and we have won.  People will still hate us or even just, you know, find us annoying, and we’ll deal with that, but right now, you know what?  We got the biggest bat they use to beat us.  Marriage is ours.  Now get to the work, good queers and friends, of subverting it from within, if that’s your agenda.  Go!

… plus …

= Delicious. And culturally appropriate.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Dresden is known for its beautiful central theater complex, its devastation after the Allies firebombed it in WWII, and of course its central role in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. It’s such a culty novel, at least for American college boys, that I assumed its iconic status would at least have earned it a cheesy tourist-site flag on the city maps.  Every German we asked about it, though, including some with degrees in American literature, looked somewhat blank when we mentioned it to them.  The slaughterhouse itself didn’t show up in any guidebooks or on any tourist maps.  Finally one person in the tourist office recognized what I meant when asking about “Schlachthof-Funf,” and gave us the address so we could find it with our GPS–since there was absolutely no other signage to point us there.

We reached the slaughterhouse complex, which is now used as a sort of renegade art space but is mostly vacant.

We went looking for clues as to which building was number five, but nothing was marked; finally we ran into a woman who runs the small art collective on the property. We asked her if she could point out number five, and she said that no one knows for sure which one housed Vonnegut and the other prisoners of war, which one sheltered their terrified, wasted bodies as they listened to the city around them being blown into a moonscape.

We were resigned to never knowing, when the woman came and found us.  She told us that a colleague informed her that an elderly American who was a POW during the war and kept in Slaughterhouse Five was at the site about a year ago and that he identified the building.  (“He was a prisoner WITH VONNEGUT!” I exclaimed in awe.)  It looked more like a regular house and less like a tumbledown slaughterhouse than any of the other buildings.

Nonetheless, seeing that location and feeling all the horrible ghosts and pain it housed (both of war prisoners and even of animals) was chilling.  The book is such a staple of young-adult lit, and the Dresden plot is so (deliberately) diluted by the time-traveling and Trafalmadorian adventures of Billy Pilgrim, that it’s hard to process the concrete reality of just what happened that day in 1945.  And that’s exactly why Vonnegut’s telling is so convoluted–the horror is too unspeakable to confront directly.  I’m glad it’s not a tourist site–but I’m so grateful it’s still there for the willing pilgrim.

As we drove up to the cafe, we both noticed — but didn’t mention to each other that we’d noticed — a group of guys hanging out in front of the smoke shop across the street. Some of them had tattoos crawling up the sides of their necks and their shaved heads. They didn’t quite look like the types that hung around that neighborhood, but I didn’t think much of it after we pulled into the parking lot.

Heliotrope is a short street in East Hollywood that borders one side of Los Angeles City College. The Hel-Mel area has become hip-ified of late, with two bicycle shops, a coffee house, a couple of galleries, a tattoo parlor, and Scoops, a hipster ice cream shop that makes its own odd flavors and shows work by local artists. On certain days the street teems with bicycle nazis working on their fixies at the Bicycle Kitchen, decked out in long dickies shorts, hoodies, bike shoes, and those dinky little cloth bike caps that don’t do anything but signify that the wearers want to be taken seriously as bicycle hipsters. My secret name for that area is “Little Berkeley”. Still, I like to hang out there on occasion.

We settled into our booth and ordered posole and craft beer. The food was incredibly delicious and warm, and we happily relaxed into our afternoon repast, Tim reading the Arts section and I the article in the Travel section about Iberian acorn-fed ham. The white hipsters scattered about the cafe were involved in their conversations, the girls in the corner talking around their lip-rings, the bike dudes carefully wiping their mustaches clean of the drippings from their jackfruit tacos and discussing the latest cranksets.

We lingered awhile after we’d finished eating, and eventually Tim mentioned that our meter was just about to run out, but rather than rushing home, we thought we’d go across the street to see what flavors Scoops had on offer. We took our time putting on our coats and settled up the bill.

As we rose to leave, we heard what I thought was loud firecrackers outside the cafe window. People in the cafe were looking in the direction of the noise, and thirty seconds into it Tim started yelling, “Get down! Get down!” About half of us hit the floor, but quite a few continued just staring out the window. We lay on the floor for a good few minutes until the popping subsided. It felt like a game. A guy at a table window yelled that someone should call the cops, and eventually a couple people took out their phones. Several people, including Tim, had seen a blue van drive down the street, and a guy step out and start shooting into the small crowd of guys in front of the smoke shop. One of the gangsters returned fire, and there were murmurings and rumors that he’d been hit in the leg.

The couple that had been sitting at the table in front of the window remained there for the entire incident. The man made a joke about the neighborhood being safe, and did his dining companion still want to be his roommate. He complained loudly that the cops probably wouldn’t even show up, and while they eventually did, it took them about 10 minutes to get there, far too long considering the fact that there was a police station blocks away, and the area was usually crawling with cops. The chef came out from the kitchen and had 911 on the phone, but it wasn’t until he mentioned that somebody had been hit that they considered sending out a squad car.

Some of the guys outside began picking up the spent shells from the ground. It looked like one of the guys was pocketing them, while one of the bystanders was apparently just curious (and stupid, as we pointed out to ourselves, since he was getting his fingerprints all over them).

As we waited for the cops to arrive, we talked about being surprised that even though we were in East Hollywood, there were gang shootings on this particular street. One guy said that he saw “MS13″ tattooed on the neck of one of the guys in the crowd, although we were dubious that he could see that from across the street.

Somehow we all feel shielded from this sort of violence – by what? Our economic class? Our color? The street that we live on is frequently being tagged by MS13, but I’ve never seen anything worse than that. While I’m aware that getting hit by a stray bullet is a possibility, it’s not one that I dwell on very often. Had we left the cafe a minute earlier, it’s quite possible that one of us would’ve been hit by a stray bullet, and this story would have taken a different turn, or perhaps not be told at all.

Eventually a couple of police cars showed up, and the rest of the gang members sauntered into the smoke shop, as if they suddenly had something else to do. The cops began questioning some of the bystanders, and after a few minutes more we deemed it safe enough to leave the cafe and go to our car, which was parked a few doors down from the incident. As we left the cafe, one of the other patrons admonished us that MS13 are bad news, and that it would be best not to talk to the cops. We hurried across the street and checked the side of our car. There were no bullet holes.