Choire Sicha

Friday, September 12

Question: I have just had my heart ripped out by the love of my life. My question is: what the fuck do I do now? – C.S.
Answer: You have taken a very bad spill in the volleyball game of love. Let me be the lesbian physical therapist who patches you up and, with an alarming smack on the ass, sends you back in the game. You’ll be spiking it again for mommy before you know it – but only if we do this thing right.

Sage advice from me to you at TMN: The Non-Expert: Broken Hearts. ⊕

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Thursday, September 11

Armistice Day, the 11th of November, was recognized by Congress in 1926 as a rememberance of the date of the end of "the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals." Now become Veteran's Day, it's a day for Jay Leno jokes about Vietnam vets.

In 1872, Julia Ward Howe began to advocate for the idea of an annual Mother's Day as a protest against warmakers' slaughter of their sons. By now, Mother's Day is for most a guilty Hallmark moment of recompense.

Since Labor Day's invention as a celebration of unions and workers in 1882, it has come to mean lawn parties and the stowing of white shoes. Solemn Decoration Day became bar-be-que sauce Memorial Day, and the crucifixion of Christ on Easter has become a day of bunnies and peeps, and, queerly, egg hunting.

And what will we do to September 11th in a hundred years? Will New Yorkers put little aluminum twin towers in their living rooms, with little presents underneath? An empty table setting at the picnic table, like Elijah's? Will it be an official bank-closing holiday? Will the federal government take it for their National Anti-Terrorism Day? Will suburban children race about their Westchester lawns with toy jets, shrieking "I'm going to fly a plane into you"? Or will the random intrude: will we make little Arab terrorist masks and go trick-or-treating?

The human -- or maybe American -- capacity for refusing to retain any focus on disaster or grief with any dignity or sense is historically absolutely unlimited. Two years later, the remembrance of September 11th is already a day of frothy emotional appeal: children's faces in the World Trade Center pit, a day when we set aside squabbles over multi-million dollar celebrity architects' contracts and multi-billion dollar insurance lawsuits. It is a day of grotesquery without any relation to actual horror or content. Already September 11th has become a day when we must put critical thought on hold and pretend to focus on the public's morass of feelings. From the substance of those feelings, or from the skewed re-weaving of the media's representations of those feelings, inexcusable foreign and domestic policies are enacted. That use of September 11th is perhaps most offensive of all, and it is what will predominate as September 11th is drained of any particular meaning it might have had -- might have had -- in the decades to come. ⊕

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Wednesday, September 10

Hey you -- you in the Jesus sandals... Great piece by Ben Ehrenreich about hippies, the coasts, being 18, and the Grateful Dead: Burying the Dead. ⊕

In rehab, they teach you that "no" is a complete sentence. In New York, they teach you that "no comment" is a complete sentence. ⊕