ban marriage

I had originally meant for this site to be a place for chronicling the e-discussions that Mason and I have be toiling through for years now, and I was going through old emails looking in vain for an old copy of my resume and decided to pull a couple of emails out of the vault for public consumption. This was written a couple of years back, so if some of it seems dated, it is. I warn that we were never known for our brevity.

anyway...

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despite the fact that I should obviously be writing about my current finacial woes, I tend to rather attack a little nagging mental quandry rather than revisit the dead, beaten horse of my 'poverty'.

More directly, the question of my aversion to marriage. Do I come by it honestly? Perhaps spitefully, but to spite whom? I don't mind others getting married, but I generally recommend against it. when it really comes down to it, it seems that my spite on the subject when given rare voicing reaches resistance only in my parent's direction, who I would argue actually are amongst the best evidence of its success/utility that I have come across to date.

It is worth noting that often my family is so far removed from so many of my harsher wordviews that I find them completely incompatible, generally at the last moment of my tendency toward anarchy driving towards fruition, my family materializes in my mind and I am unable to tell the world to completely fuck off. The same can be said of my friends gathered over the last few years, but they in general have come together with me through some understanding forged in mutual rage/indignation/protest/conquest/laughter. I don't feel like expression of my rage separates me from them, rather it is what strengthens and tempers our bonds.

But what about my family? This inquiry started with the disparity of my opinions about marriage vs the reality of the main example of this institution under which my opinions were born. What is the relationship of my disgust towards this institution vs my admiration for my parents' marriage? I guess there is the very real fact of me resenting all things parental at a time when they had to absorb the brunt of an extremely angry and inconsolable adolescence. There was a time when I hated my parents so much I trimmed our nighttime au revoirs from "goodnight" to " 'nite", a minor act of rebellion mind you, but one whose subtlety was not lost on my mother and one which in my backward world of dismissives spoke of harsher venom than first glance might reveal.

If I hated my parents more completely than most teens and was more judgemental than hopefully they can ever imagine, I have also also forgiven them more completely than most people I know. If nothing else, there tends to be a certain symetry to my extremes. But do some of my cultural critiques remain casualties of this pubescent battle?

I think perhaps I am giving this too much thought. I suspect that more of the abhorance comes from my association of marriage as the penultimate goal of idiots in that horrible high school where all the other things they dreamed of had no reality while they slowly planned their early marital sentence and the wedding the neighbors would talk about and the cars they would buy and the trophies they hadn't won which would be avenged by their offspring. Marriage was a real and accessible dream to them and all the others were nothing real: just a sort of indulgent ugly fiction, uttered more to compete with the other uttered dreams or to indulge their parents' second-hand goals.

It wasn't real to me. Every other goddamn scheme I could come up with had more feelings of reality than dreams of marriage. From early on, before the idea of being gay was in my mind, the idea that I was going to marry someone was ushered unserimoniously out. I knew it didn't include me so I would kill the beast before it ever got to take a swing at me.

And so here I stand today: so terribly comfortable that even being laid off from a part-time job in a recession while living in one of the most expensive cities in the world doesn't phase my understanding that I am one of the lucky ones. But I have known I was lucky all along, just I knew(know) how I am lucky and how I am shortchanged and I don't and won't confuse the two. I've been given so much and I know at what cost and no amount of wanting to just relax and enjoy my windfall will get me to forget that.

Maybe that is a lot of my aversion to 'gay marriages'. Make no mistake: I admire every couple who sincerely has a ceremony these days and commits themselves to one another for life. I have been to a few and they have been beautiful and natural and wonderful. But I have trouble imagining myself involved in one and not just for the obvious reasons such as my fickle nature (which has been turned on its head lately). I have an agressive reaction about purity; not purity for purity's sake, or for bragging rights or any othe the other petty reasons most idiots claim or seek it. there is a certain dignity and beauty about it when it is real, beyond rules and appearances. I may have picked a loaded and inaccurate word in using 'purity' to try to describe what I am talking about.

Like I have said about fidelity in the past, it is neither here not their for me. It matters not in the least (in the emotional realm atleast, physiological/social matters complicate this proclaimation a bit) whether or not someone had sex with someone else while I was away, or perhaps it doesn't matter more to me that they didn't than whether or not they wanted to or perhaps why they wanted to (it also foolish of sires of mine to think that matters of this kind -motives and desires- are safer because I can't ascertain them; I know, I always just know). Of course there will be attraction to other people, to other interests; this doesn't phase me in the least, in fact any declaration to the negative sets off alarms. But when one of these attractions becomes more attractive than what I offer, and why that is more attractive than what I offer is the fabric that infidelity is made up of, therein lies the issue and I refuse to hold court to other people's simplified notions of it.

The same with marriage. As a legal institution, sure I want the tax break and all the security it allows. I know that is important. And I know that legalization will change public perception, it already has, it already does.

But I guess when it hits my reality...ME, considering my life and my love and my world... that as long as people are out there telling me that the partnership that I want to have for life can't be a real marriage and isn't sanctioned by God, the only dialogue that I care to have with them is "fuck off". No attempt at changing their minds and getting their blessing and earning their respect so that I can win the candy that everybody wants and they won't give me. It isn't theirs to keep from me or to tell me whether or not I am good enough or my relationship is good enough or anything else for that matter. The population at large has a long history of misjudging me and the popular opinion has earned my utter disdain.

Congress can argue about my tax breaks and whether or not they are going to make life easier on the doctor or nurse who meets with my aged wrath when they try to tell me I am just a friend who can't go into the ICU to see a loved one because we are missing a legal relationship, but as to whether or not I want my relationship 'legitimized' by legislature or church: fuck them straight up the asshole. They didn't want to make room for me at the table many times before and I have made my own now and I don't care to invite them to sit at it or to ask their permission before inviting someone else to share it. I'll sit on my pumpkin with anyone I want to and for as long as we care to and others can keep fighting for a place on that damn velvet cushion, but I wouldn't join them there even if invited.

So perhaps this aversion does have its root in issues of 'legitimacy'. If you allow that you need to fight over the terms of legitimacy or simply for legitimacy, then you allow that someone else controls it; you allow that what you have isn't legitimate.

so I need to go now. I was listening to "ban marriage" and had gotten into a discussion with my friend a- the other day about gay marriage the other day and will probably send him this message as well. that and the thought of spending a significant amount of time with someone is more real than ever before (please, feel free to puke now). gotta run.