citizen / alien @citizenalien-blog - Tumblr Blog

Dear keyboard,

I'm sorry to have sort of dropped off the earth, to have failed to appear. I am more comfortable in socialist and anarchist circles. That said, I'm happy to work with liberals: I've worked with Amnesty International and spend a good amount of time bothering my state senators about (very non-revolutionary) legislation. My friends and family range from compassionate religious conservatives who harbor raging homophobia to Christian anarcho-pacifists, from annoying libertarians to black bloc frequenting wannabe Zapatistas. I limit politics talk, generally, to liberals and socialists of different stripes because they are less likely to help saddle me with a weekend of crippling anxiety. I am both tired of being in lefty meetings where tactics are dismissed as "liberal" out of hand and of being verbally harangued by centrists for being a stupid idealist who cost them the election. Right now, to be honest, it's mostly the latter. I have little interest in party affinity but was (somewhat unexpectedly) despondent at the opposition party in the US singing as health care was gutted on the House floor. I can appreciate the need for an opposition party even if said party has spent most of my life trying to throw me under the bus (I'm looking at you, Clinton-era welfare reform), and so my despondency comes from the vapors in my gut exploding in my throat, my god, I finally lost the last bit of hope that the DNC will learn from the election they lost, realizing, I think, that I wanted an apology of praxis for all the neoliberalism and that this will never happen. Then I get angry. I go on the internet, looking for hope in the anger of Democrats at their leadership, expressing my solidarity and frustration. The socialists et. al. are smug, and they are right to be so. We feel vindicated. At the same time, they/we can go fuck them/ourselves. How much of the oscillating affect of rage-glee-anger comes from experienced pain, and how much comes from the distance of privilege? The #imstilwithher brigade arrives, branding me a Berner and "of the ilk that actively campaigned for Trump." I am the reason all this shit is happening. And because I spell the word "labour" I am interrogated about my nationality. I'm a Trump plant, lying about my ethnicity and history with able-ness. I am told (recalling previous run-ins with bootstrap-advocating conservatives) that I have done nothing because I am a feckless idealist. I probably never vote, and they're right: I don't - initially out of principle but ultimately because I'm not a citizen. And, in this way, they can fuck right off, and I can feel sorry for myself for not counting, vindicated for knowing, and it just sort of continues like that, although maybe we'll play different roles next time. Best, X

thinking about class and homelessness in videogames

Got an example of a depiction of homelessness in a game? Help me out by letting me know about it. ~~~

Two of the most socially productive potentialities of expression seem to me to be:

to render something that’s apparently invisible visible,

or to render perceptibly contestable something that’s taken to be apparent.

To ask how something does that is, I think, to inquire about its politics. For example, to ask how, in its treatment of human sexuality, Gone Home might unsettle (or even disclose our expectations regarding) the heteronormativity often implicit in middle-class American nostalgia, we might start unpacking what kind of political significance it has. Or, like, in simpler terms, asking “what are the brown people like in this video game? Silent? Mostly there to get shot or be scary?” can tell us that the work is maybe not very productive in offering experiences that we might find politically valuable or liberatory.

My curiosities continue to be about the class politics of videogames, even if I’ve done little to satiate those appetites.* The potential approaches to thinking about this stuff, like any concept or social phenomenon, are varied, ranging from looking at certain works critically to thinking about the class politics of technology or industry practices. For the last few weeks, though, I’ve been thinking about homelessness - i.e. asking how is the situation of being homeless depicted or not depicted in video games?

Got an example of a depiction of homelessness in a game? Help me out by letting me know about it.

At first, I thought thinking about this would mostly involve looking at depictions of characters experiencing homelessness, but I think an analysis would profit from a wider look at not just homelessness but forms of social belonging and agency tied to conceptualizations of home that are either implicitly or explicitly depicted or experienced in videogames. And I’m not, persay, interested in more didactic treatments that are explicitly persuasive but how, given a historically situated conceptualization of homelessness as a form of 21st century marginalization, various treatments of being without a home are expressed in the medium, e.g.:

how people experiencing homelessness are portrayed and demarcated from say, nomads or adventurers.

portrayals of the nomadic hero or the adventuring hero (or the hobo anti-hero).

the relationship between “cosmopolitan” attitudes or characteristics and experiences of home or place (e.g. your player character just loves everybody regardless of race because he’s an outsider, maaaan, a tourist in this foreign world, unlike those racist NPC peasants).

depictions of home surrogates (think of the Normandy in Mass Effect, how little it’s like a “van down by the river”),

where are the economics in these depictions? are they visible or invisible?

The nub, I think, of this overall curiosity-project is my conviction that the experiences of homelessness in 21st century advanced capitalist society are articulated in multifarious circumstances (e.g. on the street, with relatives, in a tent, in a shelter, out of a car) that are nevertheless all shot through with common forms of economic marginalization which are often erased, compressed, or rendered invisible in the gameworlds we explore. It’s amazing to me how little the “homedness” of the characters in the videogames we play resembles our own, and how little the homeless/not-homeless binary form of social identity pertains in their worlds, so I am curious as to how we avoid being more unsettled than we are in these depictions. Moreover, what sort of work are our historically-situated conceptualizations doing? Is the absence (but unassailable reality) of a middle-American abode lurking in the wings of these experiences, preventing the gamer from experiencing vulnerability or dislocation? Or do these gameworlds just participate in belonging as an unattainable object of desire in a way that is just part-and-parcel of being able to get out of bed in the morning IRL?

*I’m no longer a student or ‘aspiring professional critical thinker.’ I work for a wage and raise two young children in a manner that have kept things like ‘books’ or ‘papers’ or ‘thinking’ at arms length.

Got an example of a depiction of homelessness in a game? Help me out by letting me know about it.

#videogames

march 2002

School day, sophomore year of high school, United States of America. I don't need an alarm because the birds go crazy before daybreak, and the rising sun creeps across the nylon of my tent and warms my chin, then nose and, without an overture, blinds me in the eyes.

I am the first outside. I spy my acne in the reflection of our van after clearing the surface with my sleeve. My parents' tent is frosted over, and the ground is frozen. I grab the poop shovel and some toilet paper and trudge off into the woods.

My breath smells like old books, and the vapor fogs my glasses as I stretch my hands in front of me like I'm swimming through the aspens. Branches snap back and wake me with curses.

I find a spot. The shovel is useless, so I shit into a grocery bag and hang it from a tree, hoping my stepfather will find it or perhaps a ranger, who'll question our presence as anything but recreational. Maybe my refuse can be ornaments to this anti-holiday, breadcrumbs for shit-sparrows to follow us as we move from campsite to campsite.

When I return to camp, my brother is screaming. He is naked and just over a year old, standing on a rock by the open sliding door of the van, mud growing around him. A portable shower is plugged into the vehicle's cigarette lighter, and my mother is trying to quickly lather him as my stepfather redirects the showerhead pulling water from a five gallon construction bucket. Somehow the water is not frozen.

I reach past and fetch a cooler from the van, then retrieve a bag from my tent. As the sun melts my solitude with its effervescent heralding of monotony, of time stuck in a hamster wheel, earbuds go in my ear, and I am safe as the music starts. I fill the small brass camp stove with white gas. The blue flames frame my gaze.

And later I go to school.

#me

#politics

I did the math; 156 hours between doses, thanks to insurance corp moneybags bureaucracy black boxes and pharmacy's willful indifference, but thankfully I once again have god's sweet brain drug #3 running through my fluids and cells. Boy did things get hot for some hot minutes though. It was like capitalism came and took a shit and flushed while I was in the shower. Should be good now. Or regular. In a couple days hopefully, when peak saturation is achieved.

#mental health

LinkedIn is like Facebook but all your friends are your relatives, and all your relatives are Tony Robbins

#linkedin

#photo #me

phrasebooks

Most phrasebooks I have ever owned have had a section on stuff to say during sex, which I guess is meant to imply that love knows no borders but also suggest that there are people right now somewhere in the world touching genitals while dexterously navigating a Little Red Book-sized love-script that reads like a VCR manual.

#travel

jumpsuit: an ungendered monogarment

#rational dress society #fashion

Chomsky on the charity of billionaires in today's Guardian

#Noam Chomsky #quote

#photo

Uncle-baby, age 7.

#myojipockle #video games

October 1992

I am dressed like a frog with the head of a human child. This is my first Halloween, and I am in America, the home of Michael Jackson and Kevin McCallister. The Rocky Mountain foothills are frosty but still look like they could burst into flame at any moment. I can see my breath. One of the older boys in the family we’re staying with grabs my hand, and we go feed the rabbit in the hutch by the compost pile. This used to be his costume, his sister explains, bringing a green hood. The rabbit’s? No, she laughs. His, pointing at the brother holding my hand.

I am six years old, and I now speak English, although I will forget it by next summer. Ninety days are counting down until my mother is done with her internship at the Waldorf Shining Mountain School in Boulder, Colorado, and I can go back to Oslo and see my grandparents and their dog, Bessie. We live in the basement of our host family’s house and walk to the school each day, where I am in a kindergarten class that smells like wet bark and lavender. We learn to comb wool to prepare it for spinning. There is no door on the toilet stall. I spend most of each day knitting a doll and trying not to go to the bathroom.

I know that Rudolf Steiner was a German man who believed in wood nymphs and the importance of being able to recognize edible roots. My mother says it’s okay to pretend, but Mary, my kindergarten teacher, is deadly serious about not stepping on cactuses or collecting leaves that haven’t fallen yet; we must respect the Earth, she says, because she is our Mother, and the Spirits of the Forest are our Brothers and Sisters. Jesus, my mother assures me, is the only one we have to worry about.

A few weeks after we arrive in Boulder, Mary’s ex-boyfriend Jay picks us up in his Ford Bronco and drives into the mountains. His breath smells like a cat’s turd in a sandbox, though he is friendly and tells me about his son, Joel, who likes to go fishing. Maybe the three of us can go fishing sometime, he says, showing me a picture of a boy in red sweatpants. The mountain canyon road spits us out in a small town called Ward. We’re visiting Mary for dinner. A lot of the houses, Jay explains, do not have electricity, and the sheriff wears a cape. On midsummer's eve, you can challenge the blacksmith to a boxing match, and if you win he’ll make you a sword. Mostly old hippies, he says, looking at me in the rearview mirror, but beautiful country, nonetheless.

Mary makes us vegetarian pizza in her wood-fired stove, asking my mother about Norway, while Jay wanders around the small wooden house scratching his mustache and examining the walls like a cop dusting for fingerprints. Both fawn over the natural beauty of my native country - fjords and waterfalls, cross-country skiing, villmarka, reindeer and muskoxen, Samii and salmon markets, nisser and trolls. No words pass between the two Americans, though.

Years later, Joel would explain to me that Jay and Mary had lived in a clay dome together, where Joel would have to sleep when he visited Wednesdays and every other weekend. I’m sitting at the edge of Brainard Lake, just north of Ward, and Joel is casting a fly, standing in the water. Like a yurt? I ask. No, a clay-fucking-dome, he says, no electricity. Just my dad and his stupid fucking van full of tools and soda cans. He passes me his joint before casting again, and I find a rock to sit on, out of the way.

We will go to the school for Halloween. We could go door to door asking for candy, the kids say, but people will give you candy that is full of chemicals and maybe even razor blades. Instead we’ll go listen to a story about the seasons, told by my kindergarten teacher, Mary, and we’ll sit on tree-stumps and hold the beeswax candles we made the week before. I will return the frog costume and wake up the next morning to frost on the ground. In the iced gravel of our hosts’ driveway I will pause to pick up a magazine page while my mom walks ahead, a half-torn photo of a woman spreading her labia with what looks like dentist’s tools. I am too young to understand why she is smiling. Instead, I think about the cat I once found on the side of the road, bloated, its insides leaking out its rear, eyes bulging. I place the page back on the ground, in case whoever tore it out changes their mind and comes looking for it, and I run to hold my mother’s hand.

#me

3 April 2006

#photo #st bernard

Good Friday, 2011

My Christianity is born in the tomb, nervously shedding its shroud before climbing back on the cross, then down again, crowds swallowing sentences whole, dust settling - until finally the baby becomes a fetus, and Jesus is just a name that everyone takes in vain.

Look: I am going through the Stations of the Cross backwards. I am slightly sweating, late, folding and unfolding prayers like a nervous tourist opening and closing a map. Twelve months have passed since I stepped foot in a church willfully, without the compulsion of not seeming idle amongst others on a Sunday, and now the crosses wear shrouds, and the altar is stripped, and I can smell candles solemnly extinguished, an echo from last night’s service.

The priest remembers me, but I have arrived too late for either of us to make any signs of greeting; a throng of hushed congregants shuffle under his elbows, neither maps nor rosary beads in their clenched fists (this is King Henry’s church, after all). I cut an elderly couple off at the stairs, attempting to place myself in the huddle as if I’ve always been there. Does anyone else notice that we’re moving backwards? Or did I just arrive at the wrong end of Via Dolorosa?

#good friday #religion #me

Whatever happened in May of 2013

What happened to industry, I wonder, staring out across the city morning at the bright yellow cranes down by the harbour, Samson & Goliath. They sit like a chair missing its seat and back, two rectangular brackets without a platform and a giant arse to rest upon them. In the years I lived in Belfast, I never looked farther than those estates across the river Lagan, cold brick and crumbling mortar, looming paramilitary emblems and murals of men with black masks, flags, and rifles. I took quick glances and found the pavement full of glass and dogshit every time, just like my own adopted neighbourhood across the city. Post-industrial landscapes, no doubt. No jobs. Inevitable sectarian conflict. That’s just what happens when you lose your shipyards and your linen mills. Technological unemployment is one of those unfortunate facts of life, but the Market will adjust and respond if you beckon it, just like Down South, where they have Google and Facebook headquarters and an information economy sustained by industry-amenable infrastructure and FDI-friendly fiscal policies. Right?

I have watched the sun rise with a cigarette in my hand for nearly two weeks now, leaning out the window of the spare bedroom of our third-floor flat in West Belfast. Cigarette butts are accumulating on the asphalt in the yard below, which I do not have a key to. No one goes out there anyway, except the neighbours in the adjoining building when they are hunting for fuel for the summer bonfires. No fence post or picket is safe.

Nevertheless, I am terrified that someone will stick their head out of a window below me and catch ash or an ember. My lungs take smoke like a hungry infant. In the late morning I will try to repose for an hour or two with the aid of some earplugs and a sleep mask to ward off the evil eye. Otherwise, I move between my desk and the landfill of research material scattered across the floor and furniture, occasionally commuting to the window for a smoke and the bathroom for a piss. I’m in the final stretch of my undergraduate career, deadlines zipping past me left and right as I wretch like a marathon runner about to shit their pants before crawling across the finish line. These essays comprise roughly half of my grades for my entire degree. I am hyper-alert and listless, a fighter pilot chemically committed to landing his craft on the head of a pin. I am that poor bastard in Speed with a sweaty boot on the pedal. I am Randy Quaid flying up the arse of a UFO.

This particular morning marks the passing of a third deadline. I have been excused, however. My mysterious vertigo warrants an extension. May is drawing to a close, according to the calendar. Clock-time, though, only intrudes upon my consciousness when I catch the eyes of my wife or a memory of someone’s expression. An end, however, seems impossible - that I will not forever be losing myself in fitful starts and stops, deleting hundreds of words in one go, following trails of articles through bibliographies and word searches. I look at Samson & Goliath, standing there arse-less, mummified into postcard scenes for arriving tourists and memories of the Titanic, organs ripped through its orifices while capitalism took its course. Failure to keep up would be a living-death for me, too. In a few weeks I will leave this country with a pregnant wife with nothing but the prospect of more-of-this-shit and accompanying stipend sustaining us. I have been accepted into the PhD program for Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a place neither of us have spent more than a day in. My lecturers and colleagues in Belfast are ecstatic. I am introduced to professors and department heads like a prospective Olympian. Hopkins, they tell me, is just something that doesn’t happen to us. To go from being an undergraduate in Belfast, Northern Ireland to a PhD student in the fifth-ranked Political Theory program in the United States is just some kind of accomplishment. And I agree. I am desperate to have an utterable answer to the question mark on the horizon of my time on this island. I arrived nearly nine years back like a man fleeing a burning house on the shoulders of Jesus Himself, but things have become complicated between the Lord and I. We sleep in separate beds now. Sex is infrequent, and I barely look over my paper at breakfast when He places my coffee in front of me.

A hatred for writing is spreading to my bones. I roll cigarettes using the Gospel of Matthew and spit, surveying the rising sun. If I can’t pull myself across the finish-line, however shit-panted and sun-burnt, then… I don’t know. I couldn’t claim to be myself anymore. The person carrying my child has already quit her job and bought our plane tickets. We’re down to a couple of chairs, some savings, and this utterable trajectory. I can’t look at the keyboard. I can’t dance with the words anymore. It’s a boxing match between lovers, and I can taste the acrid sweat on her fist as it charges into my teeth, filling my throat with enamel and blood.

#mental health #me

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