Let me state clearly at the start that: 1) no one has a right to another person’s romantic affection; and, 2) there is a valid feminist critique of the concept of friendzone, in that it is largely a product of men’s sense of entitlement to women’s affection. But these realities also serve as a convenient veil for the very real sociological effects of inequality on a relationship level. To put it simply, there is no randomness to who gets “friendzoned” the most, it is based on what/who is valued the most in our society and what/who is not.

This is not about the specifics of any particular interaction, this is about who in our society gets to have the possibility of romantic intimacy and to what level (how many options are available). I think it is more useful **not** to think of the “friendzone” as a phenomenon of interactions, an unfortunate side-effect of our human desires; but rather to think of it as a **social location**, one from which the formation of a romantic relationship is extremely difficult if not impossible. And this concept of the friendzone as a social location can come in handy as a tool for analyzing oppression and privilege.

It becomes even more interesting and illuminating toward the contours of oppression and privilege in our society when you throw in the friends-with-benefit zone, which, trust me, sucks worse than the friendzone. In the case of the friends-with-benefits zone there is sexual attraction, but the desire for a romantic relationship is absent in one member of the dyad. More pronounced cases of physical desirability in the absence of emotional and social intimacy are the one-night stand, and the longer-term version of this I like to call “benefits-without-friends.” In all of these cases, who is considered sexually desirable deviates from who is considered desirable as a romantic partner in very specific and sociologically informative ways. For instance, trans women (and let’s get real, provided penis not sold separately) are an object of desire to a significant percentage of cis men but are rarely considered desirable as romantic partners by these same guys. Could it be that cis men who are sexually but not romantically attracted to trans women feel that way because (often subconsciously) they don’t want to get infected with the stigma, oppression and marginalization faced by trans women? Can you think of a better explanation (on a sociological, not a snowflake level)?

This is a story.
And it’s not about drunken, tear stained notes
pinned to shirt
reflected in the steamed over bathroom mirror
standing, impulsive razor blade to shaking wrist
hot water filling sink
“Don’t Fear The Reaper” wafting in from the other room.

This is about trudging through another day of
Chest tightening when the phone rings
–texts, emails–
more bad news?
So you make little deals with yourself to keep going
to eat some breakfast, get in the shower, get dressed, and out the door.
Into the powerlessness of a never-ending monotone gray December sky
just hold it together
a little while longer
you’re almost home
and then you can
do all the things you used to enjoy
now empty rituals
red buttons attached to nothing.

This is about lying in bed
praying to a god you don’t really believe in
to just let you die
painlessly, blamelessly, in your sleep.

This is about waking up alone in the dark.
This is about digging out that old prescription bottle
staring
pouring two pills into the palm of your hand
staring
putting them back
and pouring them out again.
Repeat until the pills are soaking on your tongue.
Too late now.
Repeat every 4 to 6 hours as needed.

This is about searching
struggling for terms
but no matter what you put in
the same words pop up again and again
telling you to hide the knives and call a friend.

This is about…who writes that shit?!!
Ubiquitous, platitude dripping crisis center call sheets
waterlogged, sinking life preserver pamphlets.
Fuck this.
This is about making a plan.
This is about it’s not so easy
two-car garage tofu hugging wanna be yogis
forming committees
until there’s no good bridge left in this town
not covered in mother fucking safety fence.

This is about being everyone’s favorite charity case
It’s getting old fast
(and so am I)
*shrug* it could be worse
(but it isn’t getting better).

This is about watching friends rise up and down
along their paths through adulthood
gaining skills and experiences and building lives that…
A long time ago I saw a film about a severely developmentally disabled adult
played by Robin Williams
who is best friends with a neuro typical boy.
As the boy comes of age
gaining the rights and responsibilities of adulthood
–a car, a job, dating, falling in love–
Robin Williams’ character gets increasingly erratic, bitter, and rageful.
After all, even though he isn’t able to participate in the rights and responsibilities of adulthood
or know their joys and heartaches
he is painfully aware that they exist and that they could have been his too
should have been his too
if not for a condition he is powerless to change.
Watching his friend grow into adulthood
standing so close by
and being unable to follow
is too much for him.
He strikes out
often self-destructively
but many times in ways that hurt the boy
who is upset and confused
after all, the boy has gone so far out of his way to be patient and kind and helpful to his friend
and make time in his busy life to spend with him
even though their realities have become so different that they can no longer truly relate or empathize with each other anymore.
It was a pretty crappy movie
but for some reason it stuck with me all these years.
I never dreamed it would be my story.

To my inner teenager
I know you feel let down, I feel that disappointment and sadness
I know you feel cheated, I feel that betrayal
I know you feel unfairly punished, I feel that indignity and rage
I know you feel powerless, I feel that hopelessness and frustration

Our society, and especially our parents taught us that so much of life, so much of what we feel is wrong and needs to be struggled against. Society and my parents led us to a position where we feel so much unnecessary pain, not because they are bad, but because, like us, they have been abuse. Despite what they do and say and may think they want, society and my parents don’t want us to succeed because that would make them feel worse by comparison, and they already believe they are incapable of feeling unconditionally good about themselves because of how they were raised, just like we do.

I apologize for all the time I tried to change you, shame you, bully you into not feeling or at least keeping those feelings to yourself. In this way I am like my parents. All you feel is real.

I acknowledge and honor your pain.
I acknowledge and honor your anger.
i acknowledge and honor your sadness.
I acknowledge and honor your hopelessness.
I accept that you are a part of me and you will never go away, and that this is ok.

If forgiveness feels like surrender, then I will feel that sense of defeat
If healthiness feels like denial and success feels like capitulation, then I will feel the resentment that engenders.
If my reflection feels like a slap in the face, I will feel that sting.
If my voice feels like a disgraceful secret, I will feel that fear and shame.
If my body and mind feel like a prison, I will feel that frustration and rage
If self destruction feels like revenge, I will feel that satisfaction

And I will know that this is all a part of me, but it does not define me and it will not control me. In the end, how I manage reaction to life is up to me, every second of every day. And that is the only real power that I will ever have.

JM Littenberg
Some Play On The Words Greatest Hits
.
.
Hack (Allen Ginsberg Tribute)

I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by Everquest.
Searching, with glare strained red myopic eyes,
flying aloft fiber optic spines,
liberated from the corporeal cells of your world
to become infinite, anonymous, living spirit!
Yet, in effect, motionless.
Locked in stasis,
frozen in front of screens
or behind the wheel.
Driven to distraction by playlists
on the way to jobs that promise nothing but the next paycheck.
And they give nothing in return,
save their bodies and their time,
or lives,
either way, it doesn’t matter, I want to take you in my arms,
squeeze out the pain,
wash away the stink of dirty blood,
and teach you how to love.
.
.
My People (Do What It Takes)

The daily wake and bakers
The morning, noon, and night pill takers
The bent behind their desk hip flask fire drinkers
The after class gas huffers
Zombified
Acrid bloody monsters
Burnt out husks following the wind
All the people on the street alone
purposefully talking, who don’t even own a telephone
The uninvited
The whispered about
The blessed, catching the AM Express
The brilliant frantic scrawling
The narrative drifters
The urban dog walkers lost in song
The shut in
The cast out
The long gone
The freaks so far out there isn’t even a word for them yet
The chronically fucked
The had just about enough
The despised
getting together
throwing a party in the street
not even caring about the cops barreling down with orders to break it up
.
.
360 BPS

I am
my friends
you
and the rest of them
all
struggling to keep up
drowning under the weight of too much stuff.

Things
spilling out the Internet with autism rocking always-so-much-fucking-more
falling off the bloated shelves of strip mall super stores
stuffing full kitchens, beds, baths and beyond
straining, groaning closet doors.

Racing down manic caffeine spirals
dizzy with excess
texting, tripping, driving way too fast
speaking in tongues, dripping
spitting out half chewed trash
never stopping except for Stopping Class
coming soon, just you wait
shh, grab a seat in the back…you’re late.
.
.
Still The Ghost Laughs

Still the ghost laughs
Beware queer child
Before the door flung wide
Revealed, reviled
Verdict lying in wait, waiting
All this time
Hate, hating what they cannot define
nor dismiss
The open space between what’s mapped and what exists
You live on the cusp of it
Wearing masks
One day they’ll come
And you’ll be dragged away in chains when it’s done.
.
.
I’d Love To Sit and Chat

I’d love to sit and chat
Listen to your advice and “just relax”
Reclined on the sofa
Midday lips around your hookah
And talk in lazy tones about this and if and that
Our days, the prices paid to disobey
Unhurried, in the now, knowing
Reading by feel the cracks in the lies
And maybe how we make others pay to fill our pantry
Despite our best effort
Because the system, shit, and radical monopolies
Because you can’t spend all day gardening but you got to eat
Because you can’t spend all day hammering and nailing
Molding, placing, sawing, sowing, erecting ceiling walls and flooring
But you need someplace warm and safe to sleep
When it rains

I’d love to sit and chat
But I have like maybe twelve good hours this week to do all that:
Piles of laundry and dishes and groceries and cooking and cats
Regular meals to take with all those acquired over the years vitamins
And eke out a foothold to climb up the triangle
To meditate and stretch and breathe
To exercise and write-it-out and visualize
And read up on the holy word spell dripping off the specialists lips
And friends and the never ending links they send
Goddess bless ‘em
And click on it until the hunt to get well makes me sick
Searching with glare strained red, myopic eyes
Because there’s only me to blame if I don’t try
To eke out a foothold and climb up the triangle
And read the news
The real news
Written on the back of burning toilet paper
Strewn screaming from the mouths of passing eighteen-wheelers
Caught in the gears and ripped
Shreds stuck on the high dry bramble flowers
Kindling fires on the side of the freeway
I pick up the pieces and make a map
To find my friends and people like them
To conspire to create some space out of the petrol filled air
To knit a home from the marrow sucked dry of broken bones
To thwart your words
So that the hurled slurs fall short
And rain sweet tintinnabulations on the roof
Like a Caribbean steel drum
Stars on our heart
We build our own sun
Chimera shinning in the glare
I’d love to see it ‘til it’s done.

I’d love to sit and chat
but I can’t because this poem took up most of the morning
And spat out a shrill early warning
The clocks ticking
Any second, any second now the pain will come
And the laundry and the groceries and the bills and the litter and the meditation and the yoga and the revolution will have to wait ‘til later to get done
Blessed later, mythical later, panacea goddess of the well and able
Always there to greet them on the other side of whatever vacation, setback or sick-day they’ve taken
And yes I know again for me later will come
But come late, too late for me to salvage all the things I’ve begun
For later ain’t as soon for me as it is for some
And sometimes later finds me searching back over millennium
A million miles and horizon lines
Behind heat shimmer mirages dancing on desert feet
Bent on burning hands and knees
Sifting through the sand
Searching for my keys.
.
.
Reasons to live

To give and receive love
with my…
cats
family
friends
their pets
and all the creatures I will find dear but have not met yet

To tend my garden
and think new thoughts
To see plants shoot up in the spring
Endless summer days
The leaves changing color in the fall
Snow falling from a pregnant white sky

To be in love again
To love myself again, first
To learn
To recover
To laugh
To forgive
To try and understand
and maybe once again, to help build castles in the sand
the midday heat and grit between our teeth
salt and water
touching your skin
and feeling electricity
.
.
Naked

I am everything, and as such I am nothing
But I am also my body
Hungry, lazy, tired, cold, hot and sweaty, manic up all night thinking about lines and inflections
Or early morning gotta get up but not right now heavy cat petting sessions
Or just content, shut the flea mind down, post-meditation quiet reflection
I love you for the flavors, sights and sounds
Oh the places we go
But you know…
You have hurt me like a scar that won’t heal
Pitted, red raw
I love you but I can’t look at you too close
Ok, I’m just gonna say it —
I take my glasses off before I look in the mirror
I keep my back to the wall when I’m naked because I’ve been jumped by my own reflection too many times
Beat to the ground
Scraped knuckle asphalt skin
In pain, crawling, limping, picking up a stick to lean on, calling a friend in tears, I need a ride home

I know now-a-days we are all supposed to be so proud of our bodies
Love our bodies
Because, yes!! That’s the most radical thing a trans person can do in this culture!!!
So I try, I really do
But it becomes just another boxing match with my head
Singing me to sleep with songs of what could have been
But never will be
Because
Because I was never asked to decide
Because I couldn’t quite jump off that cliff
Because I was scared
I was twelve years old, and I was scared
I knew what was coming
I told myself this was it
Now or never
Either way I’d be an exile

The question was:
Do I get to keep my mother’s warm hands, stroking my hair, touching my face, making me eggs just the way I like them
Do I get to keep my father’s strong arms, lifting me gently from the back seat and placing me in my bed still sound asleep
Do I get to keep the quiet comfort of my dog’s understanding eyes
Do I get to keep my family?
Or do I get to leave with my body?

And I know this doesn’t make good copy
Does not sit well at all for a member of a radical, trans-fabulous organization
But I’d rather be hung by my own people
A traitor
Then slowly choke on the rope that’s been hanging around my neck
The rope that’s crushed my larynx and constricted my breath
Until I can’t even speak, only croak
And I can’t fill my lungs, only keep from blacking out
Though sometimes my head hurts so bad that blacking out is the same thing as a cradle made of angel wings
Hold me as I fall asleep to harp strings and the singing of angels

I wake up every morning
And I smile —
Twenty-four brand new hours before me
I vow to live fully in each moment
And to look at all beings with eyes of love —
And I try, I really do
Laying in my soft bed
Under warm covers
Bathed in morning light
The cats crowning my head
But every morning there comes a point
when I look up from brushing my teeth or open my mouth to speak
And I feel it
The rope around my neck
Pulling me back
Back into the angry teenage room I escaped
And the silent vow I didn’t mean to make —
To never again smile with the open, sober joy of a child
I’ve twisted, contorted, struggling to free myself
But now I’ve gained the grace to accept
All the days
The week, the months, the years,
All the decades it’s been in place
Chaffing
Until the rope and my skin are the same thing

But I’m not the same
I’ve learned, I’m learning to balance on this tightrope
Between the past — which cannot be remade
And the future — which cannot be controlled
I’m learning to love now
I’m 41 years old
And I’ll tie no more ropes around my neck
If you want me you’ll have to catch me
And feel my wet hot breath against your chest as you tie the knot

This is the truth
I stand before you naked
Take me as I am
Or leave me be

After the gastroenterology appointment yesterday I spent most of the rest of the day sleeping. Guess I needed it. Woke up early this morning NOT feeling pain or exhaustion or depression. It’s hard to express how good that feels, so I wont even try right now.

So today I am in a space where I can recommit to my regular practice (Buddhist and otherwise). I feel like the past few days, really the past few weeks, maybe months, have served the purpose of reminding me why I started doing all these regular exercises in the first place. That it’s not about to do lists and pushing myself or upbraiding myself when I can’t, of always being in a hurry to make up for lost time. In this way being very, very depressed has been useful.

Severe depression (which I’ve said in an earlier essay is really a lack of something else rather than a thing in itself) forced me to let go of all these pressures and the anxieties they produce. Until it becomes extreme, depression is all about fear and self-loathing as you lose willpower just when you need it most, just when every little task gets bigger and more difficult because you can’t think right and you’re tired and your heart is not into it. Then things pile up and begin to topple over, making a giant mess of everything. At a certain point it becomes impossible to “clean up the mess” and you reach hopelessness and can let go of all that. This is usually followed by a whole lot of lying in bed because what is the point of doing anything when it holds no meaning, no pleasure and no hope of future rewards. Then eventually you (or I, at least) reach a point where you start doing things for the sake of doing them.

Now I understand what Pema Chodron was talking about when she talks of accepting, even embracing hopelessness. It’s not about overcoming suffering, it’s not about doing everything you can to minimize pain and maximize pleasure; it’s about not struggling to get out of suffering. Because suffering is an unavoidable part of being alive, and trying to get out of it only causes more pain as you twist and turn, trying to free yourself from reality. That isn’t to say pursue suffering (unless that’s what you’re into). I’m just saying that making the avoidance of suffering or the pursuit of pleasure your reason for doing things takes away from your ability to experience the things you are doing; it makes you less alive, and there’s plenty of time for not being alive later.

I don’t know if it’s possible not to fear suffering, but it is possible not to run away.

I think one of the most resilient forms of oppression is looksism, including sizeism. Liberal, progressive, even radical people who’ve done so much work to de-naturalize systems of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, cissexism and even ableism will continue to zealously defend their right to be attracted to what they are attracted to without question or analysis. And I can understand why people get nervous when their likes and dislikes, attractions and repulsions are questions, particularly queer people who have had to battle heterosexist, homophobic culture to embrace their desires and have them recognized as legitimate–or at least not worthy of oppression–by others. It can seem like a slippery slope from questioning what body type and facial features one finds attractive to questioning the gender and/or sex one is attracted to. But this is not the real slippery slope, because the only reason such questions of one’s sexual desires are problematic and linked to oppression is because such questioning has always been one sided, with the dominant (hetero) group questioning the ‘deviancy’ of other groups. The real conceptual culprit here is the ideas of ‘normal’ and ‘natural,’ specifically, that heterosexuality is valued as normal and natural and other forms of sexuality are maligned as abnormal and unnatural. Likewise, the real slippery slope is in not questioning our attraction to body types and facial features by naturalizing them. So when I try to get otherwise critical people to analyze their physical attractions and am shut down with statements such as “I like what I like” sometimes with the angry addendum, “and I don’t need to defend that to you,” it is frustrating and disheartening.

Sometimes people try to explain to me that physical attraction is exempt from analysis because ‘there’s someone there for everyone;’ that physical attraction is like preference for ice cream: some people like strawberry, some like pistachio, some like rocky-road, some like anything as long as it’s cold, and some don’t care for ice cream of any flavor. This is a false, although delicious analogy because it assumes that like preference for ice cream flavors, people’s physical attractions are more or less randomly distributed and not shaped by systemic factors such as social hierarchies and inequalities. But the reality is that people’s attraction to various body types and facial features are not randomly distributed. Study after study have shown that most people in our society rate people with small noses and high cheekbones as more attractive that those without; that people prefer taller thinner people to stockier shorter people, with the sometimes exception of buff guys and curvy women (though only if they are the ‘right’ curves in the ‘right’ places); I could go on but you get the point.

These preferences are not just non-random, they also align to a disturbing degree with the typical physical features of ethnic groups that have historically and continue to dominate our global political, economic and cultural system. And even though there is a large variation in body shape and facial feature within most ethnic groups and these preferences don’t line up perfectly with specific ethnic groups relative power, they line up almost completely with the physiology of those members of each ethnic group who face the least oppression and have the most material resources. Don’t believe me? Try going to a bunch of rich neighborhood, walk around and look at the body types and facial features of the people there, especially the women. Now do the same in a random sample of working-class neighborhoods. Note the similarities within and differences between regardless of race and ethnicity.

To return to the ice cream analogy, it would be as if vanilla ice cream has the lion’s share of the best locations in our hypothetical ice cream parlor, and almost every advertisement for ice cream features smiling people enjoying vanilla ice cream and, low and behold, the vast majority of people turn out to prefer vanilla ice cream. In reality it doesn’t work this way. The flavors of ice cream people like might not be random, but they don’t align with any specific cultural, political and economic inequalities. The television doesn’t bombard us with ads for products…and drug-store shelves aren’t loaded with pills and lotions…and surgeons don’t get rich performing expensive operations to make other flavor taste, look and feel more vanilla. So let’s stop talking about ice cream and start talking about what we are attracted to and why.

I’d love to sit and chat
Listen to your advice and “just relax”
Reclined on the sofa
Midday lips around your hookah
And talk in lazy tones about this and if and that
Our days, the prices paid to disobey
Unhurried, in the now, knowing
Reading by feel the cracks in the lies
And maybe how we make others pay to fill our pantry
Despite our best effort
Because the system, shit, and radical monopolies
Because you can’t spend all day gardening but you got to eat
Because you can’t spend all day hammering and nailing, molding, placing, sawing, sowing, erecting ceiling walls and flooring
But you need someplace warm and safe to sleep
When it rains

I’d love to sit and chat
But I have like maybe twelve good hours this week to do all that:
Piles of laundry and dishes and groceries and cooking and cats
Regular meals to take with all those acquired over the years vitamins
And eke out a foothold to climb up the triangle
To meditate and stretch and breathe
To exercise and write-it-out and visualize
And read up on the holy word spell dripping off the specialists lips
And friends and the never ending links they send
Goddess bless ‘em
And click on it until the hunt to get well makes me sick
Searching with glare strained red, myopic eyes
Because there’s only me to blame if I don’t try
To eke out a foothold and climb up the triangle
And read the news
The real news
Written on the back of burning toilet paper
Strewn screaming from the mouths of passing eighteen-wheelers
Caught in the gears and ripped
Shreds stuck on the high dry bramble flowers
Kindling fires on the side of the freeway
I pick up the pieces and make a map
To find my friends and people like them
To conspire to create some space out of the petrol filled air
To knit a home from the marrow sucked dry of broken bones
To thwart your words
So that the hurled slurs fall short
And rain sweet tintinnabulations on the roof
Like a Caribbean steel drum
Stars on our heart
We build our own sun
Chimera shining in the glare
I’d love to see it ‘til it’s done.

I’d love to sit and chat
but I can’t because this poem took up most of the morning
And spat out a shrill early warning
The clocks ticking
Any second, any second now the pain will come
And the laundry and the groceries and the bills and the litter and the meditation and the yoga and the revolution will have to wait ‘til later to get done
Blessed later, mythical later, panacea goddess of the well and able
Always there to greet them on the other side of whatever vacation, setback or sick-day they’ve taken
And yes I know again for me later will come
But come late, too late for me to salvage all the things I’ve begun
For later ain’t as soon for me as it is for some
And sometimes later finds me searching back over millennium
A million miles and horizon lines
Behind heat shimmer mirages dancing on desert feet
Bent on burning hands and knees
Sifting the sand
Searching for my keys.

Lysergic acid diethelylamide
When taken in sufficient dose
Loosens the bonds that hold things in place
Beginning with the things barely there
Held together with hope, will, practice, anxiety and fear
Like narratives, life plans, good and bad, next week’s geography exam
The future and the past
Then the clouds, rolling in from the horizon
Blowing in, picking up speed until the house starts to come apart
The floor can’t stand still anymore
Pieces move in seasick asymmetric undulations
The walls become islands of texture
The picture fragments into colors, shapes
Each field, each tree sets out on its own
Moving to a rhythm only the two of you can hear
Shared secrets, whispered, hover, pop in the air
Language unravels paragraph by sentence
Concepts freed from meaning die and are reborn in strange mutations
Until you find yourself speaking wordless language
Struggling to communicate unnamable dreamtime equations
That sometimes, somehow they understand
More and more
Sweating in the heat of the molten lava as it slowly, slowly cools
And the newborn joy of sharing
As the souvenirs you’re holding slow their shifting
And stop slipping through your fingers
While now turns into minutes and hours pass
And no one can say when
The world reformed again

…Only my world had never fully formed to begin with
Growing up, the crust never hardened into something all that solid
Standing in the field watching the earth breath
In the distance there are green waves crashing
As the soccer cleats on my pre-pubescent feet churn no dirt
“Littenberg!!!”
The soccer ball hits the side of my head and careens out of bounds
Followed by the obscenely loud…
Knock on the bathroom door
“you still breathing in there, kiddo~?”
Yeah, mom, I’m still breathing in here
Breathing to the rhythm of the undulating wood
Grain dancing songs that speak of home
I could almost reach it
My real home
My real family still sets a place at the table
In a room that smells like the worlds in the paperback books
When I hold them real close to my face
So they can block out the sounds
I’m being whispered about on the other side of the wall

So you see the first time I dropped acid it wasn’t a trip into outer space
But a return to a neighboring state
A place I could see from my room if I squinted just so.
Only I came back a tourist
I couldn’t speak the language
And then it was over
So each time I returned I traveled a little deeper and stayed a little longer
Hoping that I’d either gain asylum of burn out my difference
One way or another I’d be home.

Well, I never did make it home
But not for lack of trying.
And I’m still in here, breathing.
Along the way I sought out or stumbled upon–
Half-found, half-built in wishes and clay
–A new family
Raised up from the ground
And it’s beautiful, but it’s not perfect
And sometimes out of the corner of my eye
I’ll see it
A wavering place
And I want to return.

Still the ghost laughs
Beware queer child
Before the door flung wide
Revealed, reviled
Verdict lying in wait, waiting
All this time
Hate, hating what they cannot define
nor dismiss
The open space between what’s mapped and what exists
You live on the cusp of it
Wearing masks
One day they’ll come
And you’ll be dragged away in chains when it’s done.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.