Problem Chylde: Live from Pressure Cooker, USA

I’m really sick of talking to liberal whites. I really am. It’s difficult to speak to people who can’t summon the energy to examine their defaults in any substantial way, especially when they belabor some peculiar desire to introspectively examine themselves and their relationships with other people. The answer never can be “my movement is progressing in the wrong direction” — the answer always lies in some miscommunication on that person’s individual level that all of us must sit down and puzzle out and reflect upon before any further progress is made. And the blogosphere — amorphous, psyche-laden, cyber-infested pool that it is — the blogosphere captures in written word how one-dimensional, disingenuous, and inauthentic this constant refocusing is.

So does it surprise me to see Amanda Marcotte talking about seeking out discussions where she’d have the highest return of people agreeing with her, because that’s where change will start? No.

Does it surprise me to see Hugo Schwyzer go down some rambling, navel gazing rhetoric about possibly being a sociopath with ungrateful male students who call him a faggot even as he tries to teach them feminism is for everybody? No.

None of this surprises me, because since the journey is so one-dimensional and so trite, and I view it through this lens of verbal composition, the structure and the diction and the metaphors are always similar each time.

In the meantime, in the real world, people are dying and being raped and losing their homes and losing their jobs and unable to feed their children and unable to reach a place where the value of work means so much more to their families than the places where they were born. People are drinking and buying land and crashing cars and losing kids. People are cramming institutions and poets and equations and experiments and outlines and projections into two- to three-hour study blocks for the next mental dump so they can move as far away from poverty as possible. People are stringing together paper clips to make windmills, weaving and gluing the mundane together to make something beautiful of this broken and nomadic world, where there is nowhere to lay your head, and no one is truly okay.

And probably 90% of these people are wondering, “What the fuck is a blogosphere?”

So understandably, it warms my heart more when bloggers speak about human relationships to the world around them, above them, with them, and beneath them. Understandably, that’s how communities are formed, and that’s how dreams are made. The world of theory and intersection, where I live and keep my hard-won treasures. My beating heart drum, my hip grinding music, my tear dropping life.

Intersection.

Where I can go out for a night and come back to my window, and blissfully and unequivocally accept being the Emily Dickinson of the blogosphere.

Where I can spot a bevy of wonderful people who persist in living in their guts and their hearts, but luckily have the brainpower to keep up with such reckless and rhythmic inhalation and exhalation, keep up with the fact that the world thinks on a common thread, and there’s a vein that runs through the core of this imperfect union that keeps us all shuffling and jogging on the streets, the carpets, the pavements, the minefields — a lockstep we all unconsciously fall into so that the earth dizzily dances its jaunt around a monstrous fireball we call the sun.

That form of kinship and solidarity isn’t for sale. There’s no price. There’s no packaging that can vacuum press it, no printer that can inscribe it. It just is. It always is. It was, is, and will be real and vibrant and in motion. And everyone has it.

Even the assholes.