another year around the sun
nothing like a birthday spent around teenagers to get ya feelin' philosophical: notes on queer time, ruins, and answers
Substitute teaching has been a good gig. My worst days with students still beat out my days behind a bar slinging IPAs to animated golf polos (no offense boys, I also love a hazy and a synthetic collared shirt!). I’ve spent a lot of time weighing the merits of finding an alternative pathway to teaching. I’m leaning towards getting my certification whenever Stevie & I find the place we want to settle down. The teachers I work alongside have been affirming, and even on really, really bad days (being a sub ain’t for the faint of heart) I’m still happy to be in the classroom.
I feels funny to turn 31 and not have a career. There’s a sense in which LGBTQ+ folks experience a queering of time: adolescence is prolonged or restarted or illuminated, procreative urges are mitigated by biology or finances or examination, adulthood remains a mystery yet unseen. Queerness, as understood through bell hooks’ definition as “the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live,” is also opposed to the capitalist system that necessitates an HOA, 2.5 kids, and a goldendoodle. Amidst this uninhabitable landscape, like building a small fire on the frozen tundra, we build novel lives. To mix metaphors, bushwhacking takes the time it requires.
During the #STOPCOPCITY Week of Action, I visited the encampment at Weelaunee Forest. (If you don’t yet know about these efforts, please take a moment to go read about the struggle — additionally, consider listening to the four part series from It Could Happen Here on Georgia State Patrol’s murder of forest defender Tortuguita.) The forest was a revelation. The intersection of abolitionist organizing, efforts to resist climate disaster and environmental racism, the struggle to restore land stewardship to Native nations, and an international call to stand in solidarity against militarization and neocolonialism.
A zine created to orient forest visitors begins:
This is a decentralized and leaderless movement. All activities are self-organized. No negotiators or organizers can decide for you how to participate. Keep an open mind, know your boundaries, and look after each other.
No divisions or in-fighting. We resolve conflict within our movement with dignity and respect. We honor a diversity of cultures, values, and approaches to this struggle. There are no “bad protestors.”
Defenders have found the forest to be nourishing and community to be life-giving. Apart from the surveilling helicopter flying low, cops seem afraid to enter the forest — except for when they execute murderous raids — and instead choose to roam the adjacent streets and neighborhoods, looking to pick off individuals as they come and go. Their dark cars are legion in surrounding areas, giving the drive a distinctly ominous feel.
Pulling into the parking lot, you’re surrounded by rubble — the skeletal remains of the gazebo and paved trails that were destroyed by developers. Huge slabs of grey stone and contorted ribs of rusted rebar. Organizers have rebuilt a staging area with their own lumber and tools, affixed to it is a banner reading, “WE ARE NOT IN THE LEAST AFRAID OF RUINS.” This line comes from Buenaventura Durruti’s response to a reporter who told him that even if he and his anarchist comrades were successful during the Spanish civil war they would “be sitting on a pile of ruins.”
“You must not forget, we also know how to build. It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and in America, and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place, and better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth, there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world, here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.”
The “Ryan” referenced in this graffiti is Ryan Millsap.
I wrote a few months ago about my fear of collapse. Turning into the People’s Park and seeing all that rubble, I felt that visceral terror bubble up. However, even my brief time among the ruins was transformative: if we understand the ruling death cult that currently occupies our world, if we can cease fetishizing the politics of powerlessness, if we can actually grasp our agency, apocalypse — true to it’s roots — becomes a revelation.
I subbed for a 10th grade English class today. They’ve just finished reading Oedipus Rex and I was tasked with giving them a writing prompt involving Roland Barthes famous quote, “Literature is the question minus the answer.” Perhaps revolution is the same. The great undoing followed by, “and then what?”
While the students wrote, I read Quenton Baker’s poem ballast — a lamentation, a meditation, a redress — of the 1841 successful revolt of american-born enslaved people aboard the ship Creole. (y’all, go buy this book now — seriously) “and then what?” is a repeating line in the second half of Baker’s haunting poem. A few of the lines that follow this refrain may give us a glimpse:
“we are prayer in the long boat / a rhizomatic scream”
“our rugged hands irradiated with callus / emit navigatory black”
“we the lived-in rupture / the recollection of breach"
“we live”
We will demand more. We will root down. We build anew. In the fractures and cracks, we will thrive. We will make a life out beyond this present world. Out here in Atlanta, life is being made in the Weelaunee Forest, and in return the forest supports and nurtures and teaches us new ways.
What comes next? The questions have been posed, the answers are being lived.
Anyways, if you read this far, you deserve a treat.
While thinking about turning 31 and yet in many ways still feeling a bit stuck in my teens, I made this little playlist inspired by the angst and peculiar joy of growing up queer in lexington, sc. Some of these are songs I had in heavy rotation as a kid, some of them are songs I would have loved if they had existed in 2008. For those of you from L-Town (don’t call it that), there’s a song called “drinking at the dam” that I think you’ll particularly enjoy. Cheers.
Your Weelaunee Forest story reminds me of the protest arc from Richard Powers' The Overstory. Long book but fantastic story about the power of trees.
Also, did I know you grew up in the Midlands, too, but forgot? Small world!
Happy birthday to you! I look forward to your next update.
Happy Birthday, Farris! So grateful to know you & get to wake up to your words this morning. 🫶🏽