July 4-6: Illinois

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

I’ve ended up driving through about a dozen small Illinois towns as part of my effort to avoid toll roads. Thanks, Tomtom.

Out of Focus
Sunday, July 5th, 2009


I own two of these books. It shouldn't be too difficult to figure out which two.

Whoo, culture shock: leapt from the farmhouse to a meat-market dance club in the largest city in the Midwest. Was introduced to the Berlin Club in Chicago, and didn’t get out until five in the morning. (Five in the morning? Score one for Illinois over Minnesota.)

I’m told that the turnout – which I found overwhelming – was significantly less than usual, most likely due to it being Independence Day. (I actually forgot it was the Fourth – I know, I’m a bad Libertarian – so I was alarmed by the sporadic explosions taking place around me as I drove into the city. Apparently in Chicago, the official fireworks display takes place on the third – meaning that the fourth is devoted to awesomely illegal fireworks displays. We walked down at least one street where vision was significantly obscured by smoke, explosions taking place all around us. I wonder how many war veterans were having terrible, terrible flashbacks.)

The club was definitely one of those environments where the particular combination of chromosomes and gender preferences was not stacked in favor of a heterosexual male. I enjoyed dancing, although the number of wandering Captain McFeelyHands around various regions of my pelvis – steadfastly ignoring whatever timid, Minnesotan signals I was trying to give – cut short the experience a few times. Which led me to start wondering if enjoying myself too much would be sending the wrong signals, and trying to dial it down. And that led me to wonder, huh. Is this what chicks feel like all the time at these things?

I’ve spent a lot of time ridiculing my dad’s inability to focus on anything for any length of time – hustling everyone out to events, then immediately losing interest and hustling everyone out – but I definitely have a streak of it, myself, and I find it extraordinarily difficult to maintain my focus in environments like this. I’m reconsidering my earlier statement about requiring constant stimulation, because that’s exactly what places like this revolve around – but the stimulation is sensual, attempting to drown your consciousness in a way that’s visual, aural, and tactile – and with too much undifferentiated information to process, whole sections of my brain just lose interest and go wandering. (Which is one of the reasons I find myself annoyed by a lot of Bedlam Theatre’s work, but that’s a whole different essay.) Standing in the midst of the pounding music, flashing lights, and wandering hands, I find myself thinking I wonder what the oldest surviving sword is and which society produced it? and Are Superman’s abilities telekinetic or strength-based?

Mostly, though, I feel frustrated – disappointed at my inability to respond appropriately in social situations, and envious of those who can. Everyone around me seems to be having an awesome time – but I find myself thinking, huh. So this is what my dad feels like every time I drag him out to an art museum.

Monday, July 6th, 2009

My first apartment in Minneapolis was located near Dinkytown, next to the entrance to Highway 52. I used to leave my window open, so that I could go to sleep to the sound of traffic whizzing past. The apartment I’m staying at in Chicago is located next to a train station, which means that I get to wake up to the sound of bells and engines and whatnot.

(Why do I fetishize this stuff, anyway? Bears further examination.)

We had plans to hit the town on Sunday, but nothing seemed too terribly inspiring and we were frankly wiped from our evening of partying. While my hostess was at work, I spent the day with her partner, who’s an astonishingly cool lady, dripping with observations about the economic history of Chicago – I almost wish I’d been taking notes.

I definitely encountered an ideological leap at the Berlin Club. The environment doesn’t exactly lend itself to conversation, but there were a few political palavers shouted over the copious background noise, mostly with dudes trying to pick me up. (I am apparently far more attractive to homosexual men than heterosexual women. Le sigh.)

(Another sign that I’m back in the city – being greeted with stunned, open-mouthed shock at mentioning that I wasn’t an Obama supporter. As usual, my irrationality was forgiven once I clarified that I wasn’t a Republican. I decided I probably wouldn’t be speaking too much that evening.)

I assume that a shared political background is part of the unspoken social contract of entering the club, but it’s something I find with most communities –if I grin and say nothing, the assumption is that I share their core beliefs. (And once they’ve been talking for a while, you feel guilty correcting them.) Thus, in what little I could hear over the sound of music, my fellow conversationalists chattered on about the things that, of course, all rational people know: that conservatives are an undifferentiated body of white males who are simultaneously brilliant, conniving manipulators and blithering idiots; that military personnel are knuckle-dragging orangutans; that we require a centralized economy to protect us from the rigors of the free market. Much like the conservative groups I inhabit all assume that I share their homophobia and blind militarism and sexual repression. (Well, okay on that last point, but just because *I’m* hopelessly neurotic about sex doesn’t mean that I think that everyone else needs to be.)

I recall a science-fiction novel I read several years back – it wasn’t terribly well-written, and painfully heavy-handed in places, but it had a fairly interesting background. It details a dystopian America, brought about by a single invention which serves two functions. The first is that it enables people to vote on each individual issue from the privacy of their own homes – and that this anonymity unleashes a collective savagery in the American people. (Thus, perhaps, proving John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.) It replaces public discourse with a kind of unacknowledged mob rule; in other words, it replaces a representative republic with a direct democracy. The other function the invention serves is to allow individuals to control the information that they receive.

Now, what strikes me about the last point -- leaping from rural Wisconsin to Chicago nightlife -- is that this is something that we’ve already achieved. It’s possible to entirely insulate yourself from information that you don’t want to receive, and in fact that’s what most of us already do: conservatives watch Fox News and listen to AM talk radio, while liberals watch CNN and read the New York Times. With the rise of comedy shows and the blogosphere (guilty!), it’s possible to process news *entirely* through the filter of your choice. So it’s no wonder that when we hear anyone speak from outside of our self-created information bubbles, they sound like lunatics to us.

Not that I have a solution – the alternative, I suppose, is information controlled from a centralized source. But the problem with democratizing that is that it hinges on the idea that individuals make good decisions about educating themselves, which is a dubious proposition at best. Either way, it’s definitely a trend that I find troubling.

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One reason I’m glad to be getting out of Chicago – the traffic. Oy.