Goodbye Gilman (From MRR #312)

photo by Robbie Wobbles

“I just got egged!”

“What? No way!”

Pat showed me the slimy side of his pants with a disgusted grin. Jon followed him in the door laughing into a tall can of root beer saying, “Yeah, they threw them out of their car at us. They only hit pat though.”

“People still egg people?” I said, eyebrows raised, still staring at the drippy mess of Pat’s pants.

“They egg Pat anyway.”

I scrunched my face up, looking at pat and said, “well at least nobody is trying to kiss you, I’ll take eggs over gross old dude kissings any day”

“who was kissing?”

“ugh, it doesn’t matter. I’m just grossed out and a little mad”

“that makes two of us”

I don’t know why we were smiling, but we were. Arms folded, smiling at each other. Mad, grossed out, and smiling.

This night started bad, then got weirder and worse as it went. Everybody was late, bands cancelled, it rained, only a handful of people turned up to watch the bands, and to top it off two older drunk dudes under the guise of thanking me for the show gave me too familiar hugs and planted bar floor smelling kisses grossly close to my mouth. The first one I chalked up to drunkness, and a slight case of the over friendlies, but the second dude swooping in for the same right after, that was conspired lechery. Add to this a band whose song mentioned going to TJ to catch a donkey show, and you have my idea of a bummer night.

But looking at Pat with his eggy pants and folded arms, it couldn’t be anything but funny. I started giggling hysterically, and I couldn’t stop even to explain why I was laughing.

Gilman is like that. You get shit on, and when you think you ought to be mad, you’re laughing.

1st and 3rd Saturdays: It’s meeting time.

We are sitting around in a loose circle on dirty couches and metal folding chairs. These twice-monthly meetings let us check in with one another since we don’t all come to all the shows. Here we decide everything pertaining to the club from frustratingly small quibbles, to the ideologically large. Anyone who has been to at least one meeting before can vote on any proposals brought up, and anyone can join in discussion. These meetings, though sometimes tedious, were a large part of why I wanted to get more involved with Gilman in the first place. I loved that any issue you had could be brought up to the collective, and that even if you didn’t volunteer at the club you had an equal say in it’s running, because as a punk who went there you had an equal stake in it too.

I remember soon after one of these meeting seeing “It’s your club” printed behind plexi in the entrance and finally getting it. Really getting it. It was my club. I knew suddenly that it was all of ours to take care of. The next weekend I started training to work in the Stoar — that was sometime in 2005.

My palms are sweaty. I don’t usually get nervous talking in front of big groups anymore, particularly here at Gilman. But I have an announcement to make, and one I won’t enjoy making. I have to tell them I’m leaving. That after these years spent volunteering here, I am leaving and I don’t know when I can come back.

I twist up my scarf in my hands and begin “I’m moving at the end of august. And I can’t be head coordinator anymore….” I take a steadying breath, and I tell them that I’m going to LA, and will be gone at least a year. I am trying not to look at anyone.

I know it’s not really such a big deal, that someone else will step up and take the responsibility I’m letting go of. But I can’t help but be worried. A big part of my life the last few years has been just that, worrying over and tending to things that needed to be done at the club.

For the first time it occurs to me that maybe I’m less worried about how the club will do without me than how I’ll do without the club. As much as I’ve tried to do in the last few years, I know I’ve gained more than I’ve ever given.

I used to be a pretty plucky fighter, ready to punch someone out if they deserved it, but I’ve seen again and again that almost all fights start over nothing and come to nothing. Over and over I’ve seen fights erupt over stupid misunderstandings or drunken aggression and end in blood pouring down faces and flashing red and blue lights. Now my only respect is for those who can speedily prevent fights, or break them up. I’ve also cleaned enough split lips, broken noses, split eyebrows to know that y’all need to learn to keep your heads down (or your arms up).

I’ve gone to a lot of shows I never would have gone to and am better for it. Seeing bands that I would have always thought to poppy or sweet for my taste, and liking them despite myself. Which is how I ended up with a Defiance Ohio record, and Kimya Dawson stuck in my head. I found that across scene divides everybody is just as nice, and just as punk.

I used to have to drink at least a 40 or a couple 32’s in order to comfortably enjoy a show. Yeah, social anxiety is rough. But, after so many shows spent sober, and delightfully able to remember what bands sounded like, I don’t think I’ll ever feel the need to link how much fun I’m having at a show to how wasted I am again.

I used to think every punk band was playing for the love of music, but I’ve had to see some pretty pathetically money driven displays that have opened my eyes to the fact that a lot of punk bands are just as greedy and obsessed with getting their “due” as any other genre. Instead of being disillusioned I am instead more appreciative of the bands that are generous, and really are doing it for the love of it. Bands who give money away to other bands, who don’t have or want booking agents, who don’t have tantrums over the band order, and who say thank you and mean it — they have a very special place in my heart. How your band acts in the world has equal bearing as how much you rip, so be nice.

More important than any of this I’ve learned to trust myself as capable. The other volunteers of Gilman have trusted me to be in charge of decisions and their trust has given me confidence to make those decisions, to take the lead in emergencies, and to know without a doubt what I am capable of (it’s a lot more than I thought). In turn I’ve learned to encourage others to see what that are capable of, to push them to do what they’re not sure they can, and enjoy their success as much as my own.

Gilman’s appeal, it’s amazingness, is the very simple fact that it is entrusted to us (all of us) to make of it what we will. Even if you live a thousand miles from the Berkeley, I guarantee there is something that that you can do that will mean the same to you as Gilman has meant to me. You can work unselfishly for the betterment of your (punk/whatever) community, share power and decision making with others, and respect the needs and opinions of those around you. If you resolve to build or maintain something good in your community, I promise you will get 100 times back what you give. And it will be impossibly hard to leave if you ever have to. 


The meeting is over and it’s time to get started on the night’s show. Bands are loading gear in through the side door, I’ve got to go get the worker list and a clipboard to get started on staffing the show. I notice Pat standing in the doorway still has a yellowy string of egg on his pants.

The War (from MRR #312)

On her first Christmas back home from Iraq, I helped my mother roll out dough for piecrusts. She was showing me how to roll it out nice and even when my stepdad popped the cork off a champagne bottle. She froze like a small deer: tense with wide terrified eyes. She dropped the pin and put her hands to her face like an embarrassed child. I put my arms up in a panic to comfort her. So quick I didn’t have time to process it, she yanked me into the pantry and shut the door.

I pulled the dangling string and lit up the tiny food closet. Surrounded by oatmeal boxes and cooking oil, and every kind of canned vegetable imaginable, my mother stood crying.

She looked up at me meekly, her face flushed wet, as she said, "Is my make-up okay?"

I took a napkin from its bulk box container and patted away her smeared mascara.

"Good as new," I said, touching her cheek with my palm, starting to choke up a little myself.

“I could stand to feel this way as long as I didn’t have to do it in front of everybody. It’s so embarrassing.” She muttered as she leaned forward into my shoulder. I held her and stroked her hair the way she used to hold me when I was I child.

"We can stay in here as long as you need to momma.” My voice broke at the end and I looked around for something to distract myself with as I kept stoking her hair.

“I mean, look at all this food! We could camp in here for weeks if you wanted… Crap, we forgot to bring a can opener though. You think anyone would notice if I reached out and got one out of the drawer?"

She rumbled a little, chuckling into my shoulder. She leaned back and used her apron to wipe the last tears away.

“We’d better go out there before anyone notices,” she said as he smoothed her hair.

“No one expects this to be easy for you,” because no one knew what to expect at all.

My mother is a small woman, with quick eyes and delicate wrists. Only the faintest ring of her southern accent remains in her small soft voice. She likes show her military ID to people and giggle when their mouths drop open in disbelief. I wonder with them. How did this little soft spoken woman, one who never used to raise her voice or swear, how did she end up a Lt. Colonel in the Army? How did she end up a medic in the middle of a war?

She’s defensive if I ask her outright. She says, “I knew what I was getting into, I knew there was a possibility things would end up like this. I went in with my eyes open, I want you to know that.” I do, I know she made a choice, that she knew there were risks. But I still can’t piece together what combination of events and sentiments brought us both here.

Her first real love and fiancée died in Vietnam. She only speaks of it in her faraway voice as if he were a dream. “He was dark and tall. I loved him and he died.” She carried it with her, through two subsequent marriages as a waitress and a single mother of two boys. She struggled, scraped up enough to put herself through nursing school. Met married and divorced my much older father. And at the end found herself in her forties with three children, and no security --nothing to steady herself with.

She wanted to finish college, but couldn’t find a way to pay for it. She lived in a rented house she couldn’t afford, and let my brothers grow a crop of weed in the garage to help make ends meet. I was eleven, and I could tell my mother was falling to pieces inch by inch. In this moment chance and need and predisposition collided when she joined the army as a nurse, and an officer. She said she dreamed of saving the lives of other people's loved ones so that they might be spared her pain, so that they might not have their futures ripped from them.

Now, having been through war, my mother has dreams of a burning woman she can't put out. She wakes up sobbing, and buries her face in the soft sheets of her queen-sized bed in her king-sized track home in the middle of quiet California farmland. The woman she dreams of was a real woman, a patient burned in a bombing, who though full of morphine screamed for hours until she died. A woman she could not save, whose pain she could not lessen.

Sometimes she wakes up at night to her own screams. Other times she can’t sleep at all because of the burning tingling that shoots up her legs and arms from her last series of anti anthrax shots. The VA doctors think it will get a little better over time, but the neuropathy caused by the drugs will probably be with her all her life. Sometimes she’ll wake up sleep walking looking for her rifle that was by her bedside in Iraq. She says she has this sense in her dream that if she finds it she’ll feel safe again, that only then she can really sleep.

When she first came back it was hard to talk politics with her. She was quick to jump to defending the war, to insist that it would be too much if all these people were dying for nothing. When she's feeling defensive you can almost hear the war drums rise in her voice. Borrowed words, and sweeping sentiments used as armor. It was too much then to even consider that everything she had witnessed had been for nothing, had been a big sprawling mistake.

When she first came back she was also prone to hilarious angry outbursts. We were in the mall trying to find some shoes she felt comfortable wearing after a year in boots. There was a woman ahead of us in line berating the sales clerk and pitching a fit that they didn’t have the color sandals she wanted. My mother turned a bright crimson before she yelled, “What the fuck is wrong with you? Be glad they have shoes here! Fuck, some people don’t even have feet!” I gently pulled her backward out of the store as the pale shocked faces of the customers stared at us. The offending woman said, “I’ll take the red ones” in a very small voice and I burst out laughing.

She also took to saying really grumbling old man things like: “war is fucking hell. All these people don’t know how fucked up the world really is. They get to stay here and shop and pretend nobody is dying. Fucking assholes.” Sometimes I can’t believe how much more alike we are now. We can relate in ways I never thought we would. We both hate war and warmongers. We both can’t stand the self-entitled decadence that is life in the US. We both despair that we can’t see a way out, and that these wars rage on. She used to be so optimistic, so cheerful, full of hallmark sayings, and faith in the world. Now that most of that is gone, I miss who my mother was, but enjoy the closeness our mutual despair has brought us. It might be the only pinprick of light in all of this.

After a months and months of painful adjustment, she has come into a little bit of peace. She works for a VA Hospital doing outreach to homeless vets. She says it helps her as much as them to have someone to relate to.

She has come to believe that the wars raging in Iraq and Afghanistan are unjustified, and the people that have died, did in fact die for nothing. But this has only strengthened her conviction that she has a duty to go and help as many people as she can make it through.

She was deployed again last week, first to a base here in the states, then, back again to Iraq or Afghanistan. Back to sewing young men and women back together again. And I’m preparing to help pull her back together again when she gets home.

Crustier than the next dude (from MRR #310)

photo via macwagen on flickr

            Last summer Burt got ringworm and scabies at the same time.

           When he told me I just laughed at the absurd punkness of it. I’ve never had scabies, but I feel like it’s one of those supremely punk problems. Like on tour when we rolled into town and find the house we were playing emptied of furniture.

           “We burned the couches last night”

            “Whoa, why?”

            “Scabies.”

            We all nodded our heads solemnly. Unconsciously beginning to scratch our arms, or rubbing the edge of one shoe against the other leg. We hugged our friends, but carefully, remembering every time our skin met their skin, trying not to think about it… but thinking of it all the same.

            Then we drank around the blackened remnants of the bonfire, and later sleep fitfully in the bare rooms with grime outlines where the couches used to be.

            Every tour it was a different house, but the rituals were the same.

            I’ve had and heard about my fair share of tour ailments, both illness and injury, but none so sadly out of control and preventable as Burt’s.

Burt is not the cleanliest of dudes. His once white shirts are the color of smog, and his previously black clothes have all turned a sickly olive or a rich reddened brown. But in general he takes care of himself. His is not a self-destructive neglect, but a general aversion to clothes washing or owning enough clothes to have to decide what to wear.  I like to call him a house crusty, or apartment hobo.

Even being as grimy a dude as I know him to be, it still seemed crazily impossible to get both ringworm and scabies at the same time. I made him walk me through it, step by itchy step.

            In his estimation the problems began before he ever left on tour.

            “Getting ready to leave. I had so much to do. I wasn’t showering. I wore the same underpants for a week and a half. I’m sure that was a bit of a factor.”

            He didn’t worry about the itching at first. Like I explained, he’s a generally grimy dude, so he’s used to some itching.

            “Everybody itches. It didn’t seem like a big deal. But it got worse. I woke up at night and couldn’t go back to sleep. I’d just scratch and scratch”

            It was two weeks of constant itching before he couldn’t take it anymore. The turning point came when it made it’s way onto his “junk.”

He’d woken up at 5am and tried showering to help ease the itching. But it didn’t work. He called around to find a free clinic, but no one could see him. So, he had the band take him to the emergency room.

            “I said, ‘it itches’ and she had me drop trou. She glanced me over and said. ‘You probably just have jock itch.” (Aka. Ringworm. Aka Tinea Cruris. Aka punk itch)

            ‘She prescribed pills and ointment and told me to wash thoroughly twice a day. So, I had to try to shower twice a day at weird punk houses, and sadly the next string of houses we stayed at only had tubs. I spent a lot of awkward time crouched over in these tubs washing my groin. It fucking sucked, but we did get to make a lot of ‘there’s a fungus among us’ jokes.”

            The additional thing Burt had to do to get rid of the itching for good? Boil his underpants. Which seemed easy enough to arrange since they were staying with good friends. But when Burt asked if he could do some panty boiling on their stove the answer was an unequivocal “No way!”

            He grimed through another night in his ringworm underpants, and the next day, in the next city, he decided to go for it and boil them while his hosts were away at work.

            “I only had a small pot, so I had to boil all my underpants and a couple shirts in batches. My clothes hadn’t been washed in… well, ranging from two weeks to a year. I didn’t add more water between batches so the water got all low and black. I singed some of the clothes a little bit”

            No one came home from work to find Burt making dirt soup and burning his clothes on their stove. He got it done, and presumably killed the fungi living there.

            Two weeks later and he had finished the anti-ringworm regimen. During that time he had gathered a vast array of anti-ringworm accessories: special soap, a loofah, tea tree oil, and some boxers. But he was still itching. Bad. Some of the redness had gone away, and it seemed to have retreated, but it was not getting less itchy. Luckily, they had a few days off in his hometown so he could see a doctor he knew and get things sorted out properly

            “I went in and said ‘hello sir, I’m having a problem with my penis.’  He examines me and says ‘let’s just think about this.’ We spent a while comparing my junk to pictures and realized it looked just like scabies. We deduced I had killed the ringworm, but had let the scabies take over.

            Burt was given a cream to apply over his whole body, and leave on overnight. Unlike the old days of being forced to use the harsh foul smelling Lindane, he was prescribed a mild scentless cream called premethrine. He was warned that even with the treatment done he would itch for another month, but he would no longer be contagious.

            “I want to clear up some misapprehensions it seems most people have about scabies. It’s not that bad, and it’s harder to pass on than everyone seems to think. According to my doctor you have to ‘share clothes or naked hug someone’ to pass it. I spent eight weeks in a hot van with my band, and no one else got it.

            “I’ve changed my habits a little. I mean, we all want to be crustier than the next dude, but I change and wash my underwear more often now. I’m also more likely to go to the doctor now; these are the kinds of things that I always struggled to take care of with a home remedy. I’m all about home remedies, but I think this is a situation where you want to have ‘the man’ give you a chemical.

            For home remedies Burt says the tea tree oil helped alleviate some of the symptoms, but it didn’t come close to any kind of cure.

            “Couple tips for those with scabies: hot showers are no good! It encourages them to thrive. As for killing them on your clothes, boiling works… but you should iron them too to be extra sure. And crusty dudes particularly – change your underpants dude, please.”

            Both Ringworm and scabies are things the punks seem particularly prone to. We live and tour in filth, shower less frequently, wear tight pants, and tend to wait for our ailments to cross the last possible line before we seek treatment.

            The kicker? Right before Burt left on tour, he told a friend about his slight itchiness. They said. “dude you probably have ringworm, take care of that shit before it gets out of hand.”

            Dear the punks: Listen to your friends, change your underpants, quit putting off taking care of shit you are hoping will just go away but know won’t, and please take care of yourself so next summer I won’t show up to your empty house wondering if I should risk hugging you.

            It is now perfectly safe to naked hug Burt, but for at least a few people who read this-the following will be true: he boiled his ringworm scabies underpants on your stove, in your only pot. 

 

The Dickies - Banana Splits

The "Banana Splits" single came out in 1979, and somebody thought it wise to throw some money at these crazies and let them make a video.

Rumor has these dudes all met because they had the same speed dealer. surprised? no, didn't think so.

1977 in San Fernando Valley, what else to do but get high and start a punk band right?

more factual info on the Dickies

Corrupted (from MRR #308)

I’d say it happens once or twice a year. A show that reaffirms or re-inspires why punk is important and relevant, one that fills you up, carries you through the shit we call life. One you can really say makes it all worth it. Some of these moments get added to the annals of punk history, repeated and made legend. Some are only remembered tenderly by those few who were there. Some others are made into memorable moments in post production, given a glossy sparkly sheen by time, and remembered more by those who were not there, than those who were.

In search of the past

The night before, I worked a smaller show, one that deserved a bigger crowd, but it was a cold blustery night, and wintery rains will keep punks home with hot cider here in California. (To those accustomed to trudging through snow banks to get to the show, I know you think California is perpetually temperate and that we are just crybabies, but it isn’t so! It gets cold and miserable here, I swear, and not a single person I know has a decent rain jacket. But I do wish we had more of your fortitude sometimes.)

I was listening to the dark hypnotic post-punk/death rock of Swann Danger, wondering why they aren’t a cult sensation yet, when a reporter from the Daily Californian came to ask a few questions for his article about the 20th anniversary of Green Day’s first show at Gilman. I should have given a fake name, told half-truths, or refused to comment… but I never think of these things in the moment, and I can slip into an overly helpful mood while working.
He asked about my feelings about Green Day, and was clearly disappointed that I had none. I told him I was six at the time of their first show at Gilman, and didn’t know anyone that was there for it. He asked angled question after question, until he finally just asked what he’d hoped I’d say all along.

“Don’t you think they sold out?” he said with his pen poised to write in his little top bound notebook, like a kid playing reporter.
“I wasn’t here when it happened. I wasn’t even punk yet.“
“But you can still have an opinion about it…”
I’m not one to turn down having an opinion, so I told him, “You have to have stood for something to begin with to sell out. And maybe I could blame them for spawning countless horrible pop-punk bands or for mainstreamizing punk… but they weren’t alone. I hope you understand they just aren’t on my radar at all.”
“But don’t people talk about them here?” he said slowly putting his notepad down, tucking his pen in his shirt pocket.
“Only tourists and reporters.”

He shook my hand and left, saying he’d be back to try and find someone with an opinion or more insight. I was angry, mostly at myself for bothering to talk to him. Then at him, and every other reporter who shows up to get a good line to put in their article about the mega-band, trying to craft a narrative where there is none; either trying to paint the club as a bitter ex or a proud parent. It never occurs to them that we are too busy running a club to be constantly contemplating the past, and that some of us have never known a scene that included a punk Green Day. To us, it never happened.

I stayed a little mad at myself for talking to a reporter, knowing he could probably find a fraction of one of my sentences to use the way he wanted. I went home, went to sleep, and dreamt about the apocalypse.

Try not to blink, or sleep

It can be any combination of things that make a show amazing, but there is something extra, something like magic that can push it over into the realm of perfect. Everyone you want to see is there, people you haven’t seen for years came out or drove in for it, there is an air of excitement, the bands are not only playing well, but playing as if they are playing for posterity, playing how they want to be remembered. (Add to that the hundreds of vegan tamales, and something truly magic happens.)

After an amazing set by Stormcrow, and a pretty interlude by Amber Asylum, Asunder took the stage in total darkness. I don’t mean it was very dark, I mean the stage was a pitch black void, and they played so well, so tight, that it seemed impossible (without some sort of night vision or extrasensory abilities). All three bands played short sets (for them) of about half an hour or so, so that Corrupted could blow everybody’s minds and play for two hours.
Let me guess, you’re thinking, “Two fucking hours???” You’re right, I exaggerate. They actually played for only an hour and fifty-four minutes. An hour and fifty-four minutes of the heaviest, slowest, most epic drone/doom/sludge; shit that can be a mindfuck even when you aren’t beyond tired and hopped up on too much coffee.

I’ve been waiting a long time to see Corrupted. After hearing their split with Phobia, I had a friend tape me a copy of their Llenandose de Gusanos record. I was nineteen, and walked through the forests of Santa Cruz listening to that record, eating too-strong weed food, and in the process scaring the shit out myself. For a few hours I forgot I had a walkman on and just figured this must be the sound a forest at sunset makes. I was out of my head, but it was the first time I actually enjoyed living in that weird burnout, forested beach town. To see them now, sober, but older, was much the same as then, only not scary, just transformative.
To see a band carry out an epic vision, see a show transcend into event, and to know that what is happening is special the moment it happens (not years later while reminiscing), is really all that you can ask. Particularly for a band that you’ve been waiting to see, hoping you would get the chance to see.

You can talk all you want about what was. About what must have been the perfect moments in our shared punk history, you can even write trite articles in local newspapers, but don’t be so hung up on the past that you miss the moments that are now, with current bands and current faces. Don’t miss your chance to say “I was there”.

Thank you to Jay for all his hard work putting the Corrupted show together, Karen for all the glorious food, Pat for keeping shit secure, and to all of the other Gilman staff/volunteers that make a show like this possible. Thank you to Corrupted, Asunder, Stormcrow, Amber Asylum and Swann Danger for providing the soundtrack to a weekend I won’t forget.

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digital hearts analog

yes, you can use www.poladroid.net to turn your digital pictures into polaroids.

It is fun to play with  and instead of $1 a pop it's cheap as free.

but it's still not as fun as shake-shakin' it.

(photos are a mix of mine, and ones via ffffound and flickr)

Pick one. (From MRR #307)

I’ve been waiting for two hours to turn in my Food Stamp application and talk with this, the gatekeeper of social services. She wades through and confirms all of my information line by line: Name, address, Social Security number.

She looks like uncannily like Teresa Covarrubias from the East LA punk band The Brat. I know it isn’t her, but can’t help but think of her as some other punk turned social worker (probably the fate of more than a few punks) working for the state and serving the public. Doesn’t seem like a bad gig either. I know more than a few punk teachers who love it, and I read somewhere that Exene is a librarian.

Feeling warm toward her, as an imaginary punk, I interrupt to ask her name. I feel like it’s the polite thing, she knows who I share food with so I might as well ask her name, but she is awkwardly surprised and skeptical. She stares at me for a moment, and then says, “Just call me ‘lady’.”

I feel momentary embarrassment for crossing some kind of unspoken line, but we are right back to my application, moving forward as if I never said a word to her. She is inputting my information into her computer when we hit the stumbling block. Ethnicity.

"It will only let me check one."

“I’m pretty sure at least one of the forms said ‘check all that apply’ for that portion,” I say shifting from foot to foot on tired legs.

She is still staring at the screen, brows furrowed, not hearing me. “I just don’t know what you do in this case.”

Looking around the room at all the people, thinking of the volume of people this woman has assisted, I could not imagine I was her first mixed person. It seemed a statistical impossibility. An involuntary flush began rising in my cheeks. I’ve been waiting a long time; I’m tired and, well, hungry.

“This doesn’t affect how much I get in benefits right? Can we just check “other” or something? What do people usually check?” I ask, hoping this doesn’t take longer than it has to.

“They pick one, sometimes they say you are supposed to side with the mother. But it is self-identifying.”

“What happens if I don’t want to pick?” I ask, starting to feel like I just want to leave.

“The county will do it for you,” she says matter-of-factly, looking up at me.

So much for self identifying.

As of the 2000 census the county where I live, Alameda County, had 1,443,741 people living in it, of which 5.63% were of two or more races. Even with statistics almost a decade old Alameda county had somewhere in the neighborhood of 81,000 mixed race people, and still Social Services has no way easy way to categorize them? The “mark all that apply” option is usually the best in terms of inclusion, so why not make it so in their internal system? Why this checkbox category system to begin with?

Sure, for Social Services, the need to collect data is understandable. They are trying to answer pragmatic questions: Which communities are underrepresented and in need of more outreach? Are there languages other than the ones they are offering that they need to hire translators for? Etc., etc.

But if their forms aren’t dynamic enough to really represent people, isn’t it flawed data to begin with? If people simply have to choose one, won’t our understanding of others and ourselves stay as stagnant as the forms we must fill out?

The human impulse to categorize isn’t limited to race/ethnicity. It’s in gender, sexuality, class, and for many the fewer categories the better. For a long time the dominant paradigm saw the world as such: man/woman, straight/queer, white/not-white, rich/poor, Christian/godless, good/bad. Things have certainly gotten more complicated, but instead of understanding that the system of categorization was the problem, we have simply added more categories. As if there ever be enough categories to explain or encompass what we really are. Sometimes try to rephrase our category to be more positive, something we can own, but even that isn’t all that empowering. It also has a tendency to reinforce the idea that you are born with certain characteristics, and that they do not and cannot change over time. That your sexuality cannot vary and shift and grow with age, that your gender cannot also be ebbing and flowing more toward one end of the spectrum or another across your lifetime. We are made to choose, and when we choose, we are expected to stay. Like good dogs.

It’s usually only those who fall between or outside of these categories who see them for the human inventions they really are.

“Lady” surprises me with a personal aside, but it’s almost like she is speaking to herself. “My husband is from Ukraine, and my family is Mexican and Filipino… my children are mixed too. It seems silly that they won’t know what to check. Okay, I know what to do. I want you to check “other,” but we are going to write everything in the margin, and I will input it in the comments and show to my boss.”

She handed me a stubby little pencil and I wrote as small as I could in the margin. In alphabetical order: Apache (Junimano), Basque, Catalan, English, Scottish, Yaqui.

It felt good. Once the need to categorize was eliminated I could for the first time in my life spell them all out. One by one, each portion of “makeup.” As soon as I had, I felt how arbitrary they were. Little pieces of the past, people and places no longer remembered, collected together. I had thought the world at large was just too lazy to understand, and for my whole life, even I had labeled myself in order to make it simpler for others to understand. Now it seemed like just stories about people no longer remembered, with no real ties to my life.

I crossed out my little list and wrote “fuck you” below it.

When I handed it back to her, lady laughed, and dutifully typed “fuck you” into the comments field. Maybe she was a little bit punk after all.