So You're Still Living in the City

Dear Friends:

Last week, I applied for promotion at my job. Note the lack of article: not ‘a’ promotion, as though to a higher-level position that’d opened up, but for the act itself, because at this stage in my career I’ve got only the one left. I’ve been an Associate Professor since 2016, and it’s time I become a Professor. For life...?

Anyway, I spent 47 hours on the application.

One of my pet peeves, as I’ve written in depth before, is complaining about success, so despite all the complaining I’ve done about the application process, I won’t bore you with it here.

Instead I’ll bore you with midlife malaise. Wasn’t I supposed to have four or five books out by now, instead of just the two? Is this all I have to show for myself? Playing up my publishing accomplishments while feeling so under-accomplished felt not unlike being in the closet again—posing, performing, speaking in the language you know others need to hear.

Those two books I wrote for job reasons, like school assignments I turned in on time. I’m writing this third one for me. I’ve worked so hard for so long, and have yet nothing to show for it. When you grow up believing validation only comes from others, it’s an uneasy feeling.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Bad Gays, by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller
The question at the heart of this history is why do gays only look to role models for a sense of who we are? Oscar Wilde is a hero to us all, but Bosie, the villain of his story, was gay too. What makes Oscar’s queerness essential but Bosie’s accidental? The authors delve into the history of major figures like Hadrian, Alexander the Great, Lawrence of Arabia, Margaret Mead, J.Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, and others to show how their various evils are inextricable from their queerness. It’s a book of cautionary tales, an anti-hagiography. If you (unlike me) like podcasts, Bad Gays stems from a podcast with the same name. A recent episode was on George Santos, showing that bad gays aren’t just a thing of the past.

2. McKenzie-Mueller Winery
It’s harvest time up in Napa, so why not endorse our go-to winery, for anyone making a trek soon? McKenzie-Mueller was recommended to N and me years ago by a tasting pourer at the kind of Major Napa Place where young folks in big hats instagram each other all afternoon. We wanted a more intimate spot, and she suggested this place founded by a head winemaker at Mondavi in the 1970s. McKenzie-Mueller is family-run, small, and every single red they make is delicious. (And they make a lot: malbec, petit verdot, cab franc, red blends, on top of all the Napa standards.) The winery stands out by how they age their wines before releasing them; right now I think it’s the 2018 vintages, so everything is already mellowed out when you open it. Their wine club is generous and always a treat, we’ve been members for 10 years, and being there feels like you’re on somebody’s farm, because you are:

So You’re Still Living in the City

The other day I was sitting on a concrete berm at the Eagle, watching the men amass around me, and just to my left was a younger couple, mid-20s, that I wished were standing a bit further away. One was dressed not unlike what 90s movies though goths were: oversized 4-button soft black leather jacket over a black t-shirt, and a pair of black relaxed-fit corduroys. The man he was with was dressed like the one kid in Jazz Band who also does D&D; he wore tie dye, and a septum ring hung above hard-to-discern mustache hairs.

There was a game, maybe, they were playing, where Jazzband would look close in the eyes of the softdom, and Softdom would snap a finger to make Jazzband slap himself in the face. Not hard, but hard enough. Then he’d do it again: snap—slap, snap—slap, Jazzband smiling the whole time. When it was over, the number of faceslaps satisfying some unspoken agreement, Softdom stood beside his boy, and while it looked like he was about to put his arm around the latter’s shoulder, instead he brought it down to the waist, where he tugged up the waistband of Jazzband’s boxer shorts in a 3-second wedgie.

They depressed me so much I had to move.

Later, when it was clear I never had to see them again, it struck me how what I found depressing one or both of them got a real erotic charge from, which is to say they held a power I did not, and it wasn’t a huge leap to deduce that the things I get intense erotic charges from others would find depressing. Or even dull. And what power does that leave me?

What I’m saying is that I almost didn’t go out of the house that day. And then I did go out, into this city, and once again it served up something deeply unpleasant.

Afterward, at home, it felt much better to have been given unpleasantness than nothing at all. But if someone had forecasted this unpleasantness to me, lying on the couch in sweatpants, deciding whether or not to go out, the sweatpants would have stayed on no question.

So what does this tell us about living in a city in your 40s?

As much as I like the question, I can’t answer it without knowing what ‘living in a city’ means, and ditto ‘your 40s’. Look at how I snuck some plural pronouns in there to grammatically jury-rig my lone experience as something shared and universal. But cities aren’t homogenous or even much alike (I think this is part of the point I’m getting at).

And when I see ‘your 40s’, I read it within a heteronormative framework I thought I’d abandoned decades ago—but clearly not in full. That is, I’m still holding my experience of being 45 up alongside my parents’: Where is my owned home, my children plural, my comfortable routine of when it’s proper and improper to go out on the town?

I think what I’m getting at is sovereignty, the fiefdom of property you find in other locales, that record of accomplishment you can point at and measure. Here is the car that I’ve bought and washed. Here is the lawn that I’ve seeded. Here are the living humans I’ve made with my spouse. Here is the fence that divides what I own from what you own.

Cities are far too porous to have any truck with all that.

The previous day, N & I went out to see Barbie. (I don’t have any worthwhile thoughts on Barbie, just condolences for all folks named Ken for what’s undoubtedly been a summer of tedious jokes.) We took a rideshare there to the Alamo Drafthouse, which was once the New Mission Theater, and which has become so synonymous with gentrification its marquee glows in the background of a scene in The Last Black Man in San Francisco where a realtor is talking:

By the curb there, the city had installed those big metal hoops you can lock your bike to, which I imagine was meant to encourage folks not to clog up streets with rideshares, like we had. On five hoops, I counted 11 app-scooters leaning on top of each other, taking up all the space. What brand of scooter? I had to google it, we’ve had so many different companies throw them around over the years. But they’re much bigger now, Sport Utility Scooters.

It was another public utility swarmed by, and made accessible only to, certain app users—like our roads, which, as my mom texts me about after seeing a segment on Good Morning America, now have empty robot cars cruising around, waiting to be summoned.

Here’s another story, in another city. I’ve endorsed Elizabeth McCracken’s stellar Barton Springs Swim Report substack before, much of which is complaining about the habits, trajectories, or blindnesses of other Austinites in a pool that is large and filled by nature. While the pool is thus for her, McCracken understands it’s not hers; we all have to share nature (in theory), and so attendant to the kvetching is a kind of respect:

Freestyle swimmers move across the water splashingly, diagonally, heads turned to the pool floor. They are visible, oblivious. I hustle to get out of their way, but I am a slow craft. If they come too close I raise my head and say, Jesus or golly! or dude! or watch out! or You’re swimming on an angle! I believe myself to be swimming in a straight line. I don’t know if that’s true. Perhaps there’s a shadow blog somewhere, where my swimming crimes are detailed.

Self-reliance fantasies turn to dust in the city. No rented apartment is a home you make for yourself; no matter what furniture you bring in, what decor that’s been undeniably yours for decades, you’re always in a home someone else made for themselves (to make money). Outside, the grass you touch is grass everyone can touch. Maybe you own a car. (We own a car.) But half the time what you rely on to get around everyone relies on.

And so in some sense you have to rely on everyone. And it’s easy in your (i.e. my) 40s to feel like other folks in the city aren’t keeping up their part of the bargain. What’s the bargain? That by agreeing to make, share, and maintain public things the public is forced to use, the chaos and disorder of any city will be if not ordered then less chaotic.

Sure, public goods and utilities make everyone miserable, but they make everyone miserable, is the idea, not just those who can’t afford not to be miserable.

If cities are porous, then making any happy home here must involve the city itself. So I’m getting out more, by heading to the Eagle, or getting symphony tickets, and encountering what I encounter, unpleasantness be damned. As Jeremy Atherton-Lin writes in Gay Bar. ‘San Francisco was a beautiful problem that wasn’t meant to be solved. I wanted to get back into it.’

Then again, he left town years ago.

This week’s thing I did not buy at the antique store is a ‘vegetable man’ that looks like Mandy Patinkin: