zeitgeniesser

[zeitgeniesser]

2024 Teaching, Year in Review

Where is my circle

It’s 2024 and I feel myself pushing my limits of competency 

So exciting to roll the sticky snowball of a middle school classroom 

Down the hill

And not watch it all crumble

But I feel sad and worried

That the path that snowball will take rolls through a violent landscape

Of conditional care and

“Only if you’re passing”

It is said “every teacher cares about their students”

But radical teachers have a more holistic understanding of what care means

And I know for damn sure who I want to be

In this desert, I fear forgetting

I fear having never really known

The flame cannot be kept alive

I fear too, there is no elusive formula

No distillation

Only a process of shared impression

In the name of critical love

And right now, the institution is acting on me

Sometimes I think, I don’t know how to talk to these people

And that makes me feel weak

Grasping for a language of connection

My self-styled liberal arts intellectual ego, hungry

For some affirmation

–and to paint my ass on the right side of history–

The kids, hungry for water

Their souls so urgently need

[zeitgeniesser]

Mother's Day Poem

Gifts from my mother

I imagine the gifts my mother has given me

As a batman tool belt

A get out of jail free card

From mental prisons

From scarcity mindsets, from dearth of creativity, from inside-the-box

Hers is a brain of whirring possibilities

Which I say because she does things like

Make our dead cats out of paper mache

And builds a house, basically

With a garden that shatters the limits

Of its pebbly, cracked concrete confines

And I have always been watching

Drawing koi fish in the conservatory

Cutting out the guts of old books

To create new repositories of extraterrestrial dreams

Understudy in this dojo of new vision

A way to see the world, in textured, rippling, 4D

I never saw this for the gift it was

I thought everyone slathered their whimsy atop carrot cake

So now, when laughter echoes in the hallway

While students fashion the Sahara desert out of macaroni noodles

And wonder just what the hell is going on

I know where it came from

And in the rawest form of gratitude

I seek to pass it on

[zeitgeniesser]

Album Review: "In the Zone" – Britney Spears

More hoops less music

Ok sure, Britney Spears was famous in her own time. Like, she didn’t pull a van Gogh level posthumous glow up because she was top dog platinum bitch whatever whatever in 2003 already. But at the same time, she was on some premonitional shit, whipping up a crockpot of pop-cultural zeitgeist and setting the timer for 2020s era of accelerating societal neurosis. Ever been on the internet? Ever heard Justin Laboy or your 14 year old niece or your therapist drop a “Toxic” or twenty?  She literally coined the term. Not to say lots of good artists put their desires, longings, insecurities, possessiveness and flawed humanities on display… that’s kinda the point. But Britney gave us “Toxic” and for that I am grateful.

This is a story about toxic love, which we should all relate to, because it’s my belief we are all toxic. Which is just to say we are all flawed. Which is to say with a bit more nuance: we have conditioned often unhealthy patterns to receiving stress, or bad fuckin news, or things that make us feel less than we are or should be. We also have conditioned patterns to delivering affection, love and care that should probably come with a “side effects may include” warning. 

Here’s the twist, this love story is no romance. It’s an old coach, young player, bird taken under the wing, father-that-never was drama. Wrap it up however you want, there’s some male interiority to unpack here. Definitely parental vibes. This story is about Sacha, a bittersweet Croatian man with a stunning capacity for capriciousness, basketball, and fatherly showmanship. It’s about toxic love, strength, and the places we go when pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed.

When I moved to Germany, I had a low-tempo gig teaching English and not a lot of social obligations. Desperately wanting some semblance of normalcy, embeddedness and a sense of “I really live here” I sought out adult mens amateur basketball leagues. Thinking to myself that I would have a great chill fun fun time just hooping with the boys on Tuesday and Thursday nights I found myself shortly enrolled in the all-expenses-included version of intense, uniformed, sporting culture I had wriggled away from when I quit the Evanston Baseball Team my sophomore year of high school.  

The Ludwigshafen Flyers thought of themselves as a semipro team and had the local newspaper clippings, home and away jersey sets, and way-too-fuckin-intense attitude to prove it. In short, they were a group of non-too-talented 30 somethings happy to sandwich sweaty, bearish basketball runs between smoke sessions on the stoop of the elementary school gymnasium and 32-ounce cans of Carlsberg wegbiers. These would wash away unanimously the tastes of victory, defeat, tobacco and a long days work. Such a weird thing, male intimacy. Such a need for touch and taste and acerbic grit-drawn motivation tactics and banter about penises and wives and girlfriends.

This was not my scene. Perhaps to my father’s unconscious chagrin – we all know he wishes he’d busted my balls a little harder when I was a young thing – I came to Germany a reedy, nerdy intermittently effeminate recent liberal arts college grad.  Which maybe sounds harsher on myself than I intend to be, because I think, there are many sides of the toughness coin and many proving grounds of our humanities. But the point is: you can imagine how these men saw me and it didn’t matter how many threes I hit, ok maybe it did a little, but still, it didn’t matter because they didn’t offer me a beer after my first practice or my 5th and we all know what that meant.

Mirnes is the reason I even made it that far. The way I tell it, Mirnes decided the moment he laid eyes on me that he was going to be my Bosnian big brother. He would regale me with stories of Sarajevo and eagerly await my reaction when he related his year spent fixing air conditioners in Boston. Whatever protective instinct I triggered in him I thank God for it, because Mirnes had a beard and a killer crossover and the respect of the other guys and I had none of these precious things, but I had Mirnes so I had a reason to keep showing up.

 When coach Sacha told me after the first practice that “I play like a little girl”, I felt awful, but I had Mirnes.

When Michael, hissed out the German way: Me-shy-elle, put me in the hospital with a cruel elbow hook, I had Mirnes. When the older guys wouldn't offer a beer, Mirnes would slip me one. When Sacha would yank and tear and literally scratch with his fingers and metaphorically bite with his words during practice Mirnes would keep passing me the ball.   And so this became the dynamic. Sacha would bully and goad and Mirnes would encourage. 

And this weird thing happened: I started to push back. One day, midway through the season I hit a gamewinning layup with Sacha clinging to my waist in a desperate bind. The team was ecstatic, I was ecstatic, Sacha was ecstatic. With the look of a beaming father he slapped my ass. “If you play like this from day one you would be a starter!” 

~~~~

In hindsight I see the strange family we formed crisply contoured. Sacha played the dad, proud of his eldest, Mirnes, and disappointed by his younger boy’s precarity of spirit. He drew from a toolbox of blunter parental motivation tactics, instructing discipline, grit and persistence by giving me something to really complain about. Had Mirnes not balanced the sauce, Sacha’s ambivalence towards my possible failure would have bled over. 

I have encountered attitudes like Sacha’s in only one other place: the restaurant industry. Those days are behind me as well, but now I am watching “The Bear”, a show about this strange world. It demonstrates the power of a domineering, masculine, get-it-right and do-it-faster ethos in molding self-respect and proficiency.  It also shows the pitfalls. The ugly callousness, the self doubting perfectionism, the bullying in the name of love.

On the last day of the season Sacha pounds my chest. “Now, you play like a man”.  I twisted my face, sheepish towards pride like I hadn't felt before.

[zeitgeniesser]

Review of “This Old Heart of Mine” —  The Isley Brothers    1966

dedicated to jeff

I like this album so much because its technically all about romantic love but its plainly so about so much more love than that. Find yourself in one of the harmonic threads of “I Guess I’ll Always Love You” and realize you're in a musical forest inviting a Bambi posse to come chirp and party with you.  The Isley Brothers are catchy and elusively polyrhythmic in the same breadth, in the type of way that will bring you, your great aunt and everybody in between out on the dance floor at the same time. “This Old Heart of Mine” is a Valentine’s note to the whole gang–friends, family, and forest critters.

[zeitgeniesser]

Review of “Pieces of a Man” — Gil Scott Heron, 1971

Delete your socials y’all. Your new gluten free diet isn’t gonna save you. Yoga with Adrienne ain’t gonna save you. Knowing your rising sign ain’t gonna save you.  That $44 reishi cleansing powder delivered to you like a Star Trek apparition sure as hell ain’t gonna do shit.

Gil Scott Heron might save you though. Well he won’t. But his message might get you right. 

The revolution won’t be televised because it won’t make for good TV. The revolution won’t be sold back to you by 19 year old instagram influencers applying layers of cosmonautic cosmetics because the revolution doesn’t come in a bottle. The revolution won’t be in your personalized costar fortune cookie astrology reading because the revolution isn’t about you, you selfish prick, and besides you really thought the revolution was hiding behind all the toxic friends and energy you are going to cleanse with mindful breathing?? The revolution is: your grandma telling you a story about the first cigarette she ever kissed and the first boy she sucked the air out of. The revolution is: skinning your knee because you tried to slide into second base with shorts on, and now your dad is running to the park district building for some hydrogen peroxide that will bubble and sizzle make your tears run a whole lot faster than you, cuz your chunky ass was out and that’s at least 50% of the reason you’re crying. The revolution might even be on some revolutionary shit. Sweaty El Milagro workers demanding respect, money, and humanity. Black kids on the street demanding their lives. Nursing home attendants demanding some blood back from their vampiric bosses. The revolution lives in these spaces.

Gil Scott Heron gives visions of analog revolution that are anything but old. At the time, some people called what he was doing rap, and while I wouldn’t call a jumper before the invention of the three point line a three, they do bear a resemblance. The point is, this shit is as fresh and new and genre bending as anything, even while it feels like the type of thing you want to hear in a smoky little piano bar, or over oatmeal whilst stewing in nostalgia–like me rn.

[zeitgeniesser]

a sex story from 2020

This is a sex story for all the boys out there

Blessed with a good heart

(Surely, a healthy dose of motherly presence in their lives)

And an occasionally psyched-the-fuck-out dick

~~~~~~~~

It’s a hard thing being cute and silly and wiry and tall 

And white

Eyes glistening snowball munchkins

They don’t know consequences

Everyone treats me nice at the party because I’m pretty

And I’m nice back, because

I like the attention

For some reason I cannot yet quite ascertain

These bi-women want to fuck my brains out

Or cuddle more likely

I think it's because I can at least feign emotional intelligence

Or because I am cute and silly and wiry and tall

And white

Good thing for me, as I’m horny a lot of the time

But I fear rejection

So the doe-eyed safe-space of the nice

20s something–likes thrifting and “Legally Blonde”

Queer woman

Will do just fine

In the car I ask to kiss her

It is an awkward ask, but she tells me I’m cute for it

A few minutes later 

I cannot feel my left foot jammed under this seat

But it doesn’t matter because she tells me

“I’m so turned on”

My penis glows with affirmation

Who’s counting, but

We are climbing the ladder towards 

“I’m coming”

With stunning alacrity

By the time we are in my bed

Stunning alacrity has lost its sport-coat luster

Turns out it has surpassed our sexual communication technology

Still stuck somewhere around telegraph

And I want to go down on her

Because I like that

And let’s be honest

It’s good to get one on the board

But she wants to get right to it

So we do

Thrown off my game 

Suddenly I am lost not in the escapade but

In my own head

I’m not a jackhammerin dude

My slimy rituals of foreplay interrupted

It’s not long before 

My spongy dick calls it a day

She says not to sweat it

I lay awake until 4am

[zeitgeniesser]

Album Review “Eve” — by Rapsody, 2016

“Eve” is almost too beautiful and powerful to touch with my words. If Rapsody does battle with liquid swords, I muck about with peanut butter snowballs. Luckily, she will never read this. Into the universe I cast my awe and admiration.

Rapsody spends this album launching deft punches against patriarchal racial capitalism with none of the stiffness accompanying more dogmatic revolutionary text. “Eve” is a get-down bonafide celebration and an emotional tour that circles reflective, melancholy, angry, loving, and party-vibes bases. This is music for the people. The party people.

 I spent too much of my life worshipping an anthropologically White, chromatically gray version of social change. Phone banking in high school gave way to canvassing for DSA candidates in college. Efforts of abstraction. Pouring sweat and passion into the mechanical maw of American democracy, our work unrecognizable in the end product. But mostly, it wasn’t fun. And when it was, well, that mighta made Lenin warily squint. What did that man get off on anyways? Weird rituals of control? Intellectually flattening motherfuckers? Running his hand through collectively farmed wheat? Maps?

Back to the track. 

I think sometime in the future people are wondering why we didn’t hang out with each other more. Why we worked so hard. And they are no strangers to work. This is the post-apocalypse after all. But why did we work so hard in service of fleeting, atomized self images? Why did so many of us, feeling the alienation of our time, ultimately obsess over the same God? How did an obsession over being right unmoor us from any sort of real principle? In their mud huts, or tilling their moon-rock fields, they wonder about the social and chemical narcotics we poisoned ourselves with. And not in the good kind either. The opacity inducing, dependently insecure variety. They wonder how with Rapsody in our midst, we ended up how we ended up. There was always another path. Maybe they are those who took it.

[zeitgeniesser]

15 minute love story

Dear sister,

A woman set next to me on the bus today and swallowed my imagination. You have to imagine my surprise when she stopped at my aisle, it was not a full bus. I looked up, my eyes not so much steeled as lukewarm with bewilderment and curiosity--I could not hold her laden gaze long.

She was short and white and wore her hair in a smart ponytail. I like smart women--a real Hermoine fan, as you know, but still she was not as though someone had ripped a page off my psyche to blueprint my romantic attachments. Placing her hand on my knee she held it there, a wisp of a smile reaching the corners of her eyes. Just the strangest thing, and unspeaking too. I had to break the ice, but as I searched for the correct intonation of "hello" --

She told me "the greatest success of capitalism has been its ability to culturally reconstruct value, meaning and purpose."

joining her wordlessly I mouthed in rhythm "in other words the secret in the sauce is not so much attributable to any ingredient or technique but rather to an infallible belief that sauce in the first place is the appropriate way to feed humanity". Imagine the saucers my eyes became.

Then she broke into a full smile, or toothy smirk, I am not entirely certain. I felt as though someone had severed the piano chords between my mouth and my brain.

"But don't worry" she spoke again. "I am normal too, look I bought this shirt at H&M because it looked cute and was on sale. I am going to go home, get myself off on some softcore porn or maybe just a fantasy I have about Ryan Reynolds and make a peanut butter banana sandwich after." I didn't think that was an entirely normal thing to say, but after everything to that point it went down like apple juice. Actually I found it rather disarmingly hot.

I must have looked frighteningly dumbfounded, and still words eluded me. She didn't seem bothered though, and she took her hand from my knee and took my palm in hers. That may sound more romantic than it really was, in a sense it was peculiarly ordinary, my fingers an object of passively warm curiousity.

Sighing, she stood up. I tried to grasp her hand, even lightly, to signal somehow in my mute state a flicker of reciprocation, of heat, of desire. My fingers were unresponsive but I think maybe she understood because she said "I'd love to hang out some time. Maybe cook something and talk about Love is Blind or Robin D.G Kelley or the politics of desire. Maybe we could raise a family." The bus shuddered to halt and she skidded forward, breaking her gaze.

I knew that was it, and I wanted her to look back, but she apologized for hitting the man in front of her and briskly walked off.

I imagine I will find a way to simp about this quite possibly hallucinogenic sequence for a year.

Your loving brother

[zeitgeniesser]

nemeses are good

a wise old instagram post once told me: when you are annoyed at someone, how much of yourself do you see in them?

Boom. Gotteem. But forreal, I'm here for the spice, and the spikes, and the spite. Nemeses are good, baby. Find yourself a dark kermit. Let darkest timeline Abed show you who you really are, and who you really can be. And don't look too hard, they are aplenty in the mundane.

~~~~~~~~~~

Here's the proof. Today at the Y, a prim rose-haired, nails-shellacked, nose ringed, queer-spectrum-ass-punk-ass-White kid pulled his lil tank top wearing punk ass up to the court where I had just put the finishing touches on a W and called next. Sensing something a little unusually electric, and competitively aroused by the princeling interloper, I jumped at the opportunity.

That's the stage setting, but first, some necessary backdrop:

For starters you gotta know I'm pretty decent at basketball. I'm YMCA good anyways. I'll let you place me on your own mental spectrum from amputated dachshund to LeBron.

Second: real recognize real. If you're discerning, you can measure a guy's rote ability pretty fuckin quick. And this dude was busy checking boxes. Legit handle. In-and-out dribble. Drag step. NBA range. Surprising bounce. Quickness. 5'8'' sure, but dangly earrings spoke for his confidence. And beneath the geniality, the high-fives, the lobe-to-lobe smile an icy and unmistakable competitive glimmer.

Third: it takes one to know one. Sure, I don't take it quite the distance as this fuck, but I'm standing there as the only other earringed, tank-topped, big-cheesin, skinny ass, punk ass Whiteboy in the gym. And I also don't like to lose. And certainly not under these circumstances. I get off on being the gangly charming hipster who's also capable of stacking Ws. This is a -- I want to have my cake and eat it in front of you moment. A howdy partner, this town ain't big enough for the two of us moment. That type of shit. I could go on.

~~~~~~~~~~

So the game gets going. He's got his crew, I've got mine. It's not the perfect matchup but we end up guarding each other. I'm a sucker for a little narrative, a little juice, a dose of rivalry. It's conspicuously even. He's quicker, I'm taller. I post his ass up for a bucket. He hits a drag step fallaway on me. I choke out: "nice shot." I block him. He hits a deep three. I hit a deep three. ...

Between the fireworks there's a subtler tug of war happening. A clash of souls. A battle between light and dark. Smug and smugger. Alt and hip and cool and chill and good-at-basketball.

This is about who can win, yes, but it's really about who can win with the most stylistic nonchalance. Because in this flamboyant swashbuckle there is also a particular mantle of cool detachment at stake. The coveted victory that does not debase our personal brands. Brands built on years of breezy Golden Child achievement, "smart-smart" rep, effortless charm, chummy leadership (but NOT the bro-ey Crab Goyle & Malfoy variety), and against-the-grain visual affect. Grimy competitiveness certainly does not comport. But neither does getting run off the floor.

So what will the tone be? The urgency? The physicality of this dance? We let each other know in little ways. He sets an off ball screen on the first play. Daps up a teammate and drops some hoops jargon. "Good weak side rotation. Clean dive." Behavior that to the naked eye looks like nothing, but to a fellow shark sends a signal: I know what I'm doing and I really don't want to lose. Not so fast pal, from the jump I'm on him. Pushing slightly and not so slightly, hand on his ribcage, hard box outs. I'm telling him, I'm bigger than you are and you're gonna have to earn your points today. When he scores on me, even my "nice shot" is loaded. Motherfuckers don't get easy buckets on me because I'm good at basketball. There's a wintry respect in the air.

And then it breaks. We're all knotted up and it's late in the game. Little dude on their team goes up for a rebound. I go up for the same rebound. We both come down with it, four hands on one ball. I call jump. In pickup hoops you can call jump when two fellas are grappling for the ball. Usually stops things from getting messy. Gives possession to the team that didn't start with it. That would've been us. I knew that. Of course I did.

And so did he. I look over, his eyes are blazing through the thin curtains of his usual smug smolder, the cold steel of his septum piercing red with indignity. Seeing no legal challenge, but mad as hell, he storms forward, grabs the ball and proclaims "I'll shoot for it." In pickup hoops this is the equivalent of invoking trial by combat. No matter how sacrosanct the rule in question, you can always opt to leave it in the hands of the basketball Gods.

Well not really. You're fucked if you can't shoot.

He can though, and he drills it. Small recompense. Everyone and their grandma knows what just happened. Just like that, the mirage was shattered.

Salty ass motherfucker. Competitive slimeball. Two faced diva. And the worst yet: tasteless. Among the regular degular hooper crowd there's a special disdain reserved for frequent foul callers (and frequent foulers, which can lead to some dicey situations). Those who lace it up learn to understand the informal glue, the communal decorum, the unwritten expectations, the honor that holds together such a psychosomatic blob of sweat and ego. Beneath the aggression and chirping and competition there's a bond of good faith. Break it, and you might manage to mortgage the L for the asterisk. But the cost is steep.

The interloper had proven himself willing to engage in such a Faustian Verhandlung. In doing so, he exposed himself as worse than competitive. Competitive is a vice we can live with. One we can manage and trim and take for walks out on the basketball court so it doesn't shit all over our amygdala's carpets. But competition must make peace with the sour taste of defeat, the roommate who's existence it might prefer to ignore. And the landlord, your psyche, would do well to acknowledge even their more rowdy, less outwardly presentable tenants.

Which brings this boomerang home. I'm not always proud of my achievement complex, or competitiveness, or high horse but I do well to acknowledge it. Play whack-a-mole and it escapes in geysers of unbearable smugness in victory, and saltily gritted teeth in defeat. Of course, I can always run. Until the universe drops another hint. This kid on the court, this prima-fuckin-donna jabronie fauntleroy schmetterling showed me a mirror and I didn't like it. I don't want to fly so close to the sun, I want to sit in my fuckin swamp water snatching balls out the passing lane with my crocodile jaws, desperately and unashamedly hunting for a win and already at peace with a loss.

[zeitgeniesser]

thinking about sparks

Something is off, and I'm here to let y'all know. I mean we all know America isn't a genuinely happy place. Our flippant jokes about anxiety, retail therapy, and the gray soup malaise of contemporary life land dangerously close to the center of the dartboard. If someone tells you who they are, after all, believe them. But that's not news--even if the astonishing depths of America's mental health crisis do merit billboard treatment.

Here's the real headline: I'm feeling a bit bored lately. Not all the time, but enough, and in moments that I shouldn't. What I want are sparks. Sparks of connection and conversation and improvisation. Sparks of learning and failing and loving. Banter. Tickling. Mischief. In adulthood, especially this professional variety we are now universally prescribed, this can be prickly medicine. As a teacher, I do all I can to encourage the spark and energy of encounter with my students. Sometimes this fails because it runs so counter to the expectations of young people...astonishingly schooled in the notion that SCHOOL should be devoid of curiosity and play. What a fuckin schande. But in the end they are kids. If the game is good...they'll play.

So where my adult play partners at? And tbh, it's not even that...because like, guys, guys, I promise I have friends. But where is the general public attitude towards laughter, goofiness and sparks?

Here's some good things that happened to me lately:

Last week my dance partner threw me to the floor. I threw him to the floor. He picked me up. We contorted and molded and discovered we both wanted to have fun and could make the space more fun for one another.

Every week I talk to one of my closest friends about teaching. We eat, and while there are complaints, there is far more laughter. We scheme, we dream, we revel, we bullshit. We play.

I saw some extended family this weekend. My cousins and I built gingerbread houses, jumped in icy rivers, played basketball. These were not just activities. Fueled by perpetual banter and hot-pink-hot-takes they were stars in a constellation of good times had. Sparkles. The whole weekend.

~~~~~

Once, a woman I was fawning over told me I was "intensely playful". I beamed. In hindsight, I don't know if I was meant to. I suppose we all have different connection ignitions, and I know I am supposed to respect that. But can't respect coexist with mischief? Hardly novel, but hardly the factory setting of most people. And in this day--of emotional disconnect and social atomization couldn't most of us do with a fuck ton more play?

Tag, you're it!