Total Bummers

It's taken me nine years to finally adjust to the idea that I don't have to get gay married if I don't want to.  First of all, it sort of freaks me out that 2004 was nine years ago. I'm piling up decades behind me now at a rate of speed that seems altogether unsafe. The acceleration of the apparent passage of time as we get older is a cruel fucking cosmic joke, yes, but the temporal-mechanical physics of the phenomenon suggests that, as we age, we are being pulled closer and closer to an unidentifiable source of time-gravity, driving us ever faster at is effects a stronger and stronger pull on us as we get closer to it, like a collapsed star capturing and drawing in a wayward, obsolete satellite as its battery core spends half-life after half-life, pinging at it with an increasingly garbled, unintelligible message confounded by the wear and failure of overburdened machinery until finally, mercifully, it's smashed into its molecular elemental components at the far border of the event horizon. We end as a streak, exploded and scattered into a cloud of un-being, drawing the stem and bud of a thanatotic flower rooted in nothing and blooming to nothing, beyond the reach, at last, of light or thought or memory.

Or maybe it's just like going down a slight downward incline. Whichever one of those analogies speak to you, I'm comfortable with.

The speed of social evolution seems to be zipping right along as well. I mean, chattel slavery in this country lasted from 1607 until 1865, and even that had to be contested by extra-political means to move things along. We get very attached to ideas in this country.

Or at least we used to. I'm not sure if it belies a new nimbleness of thought or the complete collapse of our ability to affect a collective ordering of any kind as a social whole, but we burn through ideas more and more quickly. We held on to the vinyl record for a long time before the cassette tape challenged it, but the speed at which we've gone from there through CDs to MP3s to purely streamed music has been the epochal equivalent of a sneeze. Sure, it can leave us feeling a bit untethered, but such fluidity is also responsible for the relatively short adoption, rise and utter abandonment of the white guy high-top fade experiment, so it's not all bad.

Maybe it's an awakening of a Darwinian realization tying adaptability of thought to a higher probabilities of survival. But this argument obviously wouldn't fly in the South and other evangelical pockets, whatever its merits, as "Darwinian" is always automatically heard as "communist terrorist hip-hop satanism." But maybe that's an apt descriptor as it's exactly in those buttoned-up pockets* where Darwin is crowded out by Toby Keith that gay marriage is also failing to settle in.

In 2004, there were 11 state ballot initiatives "protecting" the hetero-only privilege of marriage, all of which passed, and drew out voters in battleground states enough to re-elect G.W. Bush. This includes Ohio, which if had flipped for Kerry, would have changed the outcome of the election.

In 2008, Proposition 8 was proposed and passed in California, even though Barack Obama won the election overall, and handily in the state. But this was before his own reassessment on the issue. It passed with something like 52% of the vote. Instead of being a lead weight on my argument for the shocking rapidity of social change since 2004, it makes it all the more remarkable that today in my state, we are only now living up to our long-renowned reputation as a haven for perverts and sodomites by approving of gay marriage by a healthy 14-point margin.

So the Supreme Court ruling may or may not be historic or affirming of the new electoral reality in California, but I guess the point is: it doesn't really matter any more. My eyes are opening. When I was in 5th grade, I came to grips with the idea that I couldn't get AIDS from a drinking fountain** and boy, was that a load off my mind. And now I've fought through similar propaganda assuring me that gay marriage meant the automatic de-certification of all straight relationships. I'm good with it. It's going to happen. And lots of people are with me. Either way, it's good to know it's not just me and Rush Limbaugh out here on this island alone anymore.


PS- Traveling next week for spring break with the kids before the big one outgrows his tolerance for my company. I guess what I'm saying is maybe when posting time rolls around next Thursday, maybe keep your expectations in check a bit.


--

*Best defense against the wandering hands of Gypsies. Or any other yucky foreigners.
**Exception: the low-rise bubbler outside the stage door at the Patroclus Club on Leavenworth between Geary and Post for a two-week period in late January 1982.