re DmS's rant against human procreation - I have to agree that most people probably shouldn’t have kids because evidence suggests though some mutual resentment is natural in ANY human relationship, that most people who have kids don’t even like kids AT ALL and then eventually don’t like their children as adults either soooooo, well the logic does escape the big pic on all that. I dunno. Her own instinctive affinity toward the vulnerable and away from armed-with-power suggests to me that DmS herself would have some talent at observing small people unfold into bigger ones – I feel like she’s parented me in that way quite a bit. But parenting and procreating aren’t the same thing, they just often overlap. I can see the Global Warming reason against there being more humans, but I always think “Let’s kill all the mean people who have ever cruelly struck a child for instance or laughed at someone in pain and wow I bet the planet would get a lot less overpopulated fast!” When we stop letting Assholes run around willy nilly, I’ll consider donating my ovaries to the save the planet effort. Until then . . . not so much.

More locally, I’ve seen my sister a couple of times since her kid was born but otherwise I don’t know anybody in an intimate way who has kids except for D. Occasionally D. has an anti-anti-procreation rant. Disapproving of all the people who spend their time building stock portfolios and then decorating their fridges with pics of their pets etc. I don’t feel much allegiance with that rant either. Cats need love too, as do spouses, nephews, neighbors, selves . . . do we all have to put on diapers to count as love worth accomplishing? Nobody I work with has kids at all – not infrequently someone rants and calls it a lecture about procreation as proof of anti-intellectualism. Once a student got pregnant mid-semester in a class I was co-teaching and the other prof could not quell her visceral disgust even slightly, told the woman she should quit school until she ‘could concentrate’, which she did. Standard academia. X wrote his dissertation about how marriage/procreation is the antithesis of articulation and that you could either live in words (write) or not (thus, procreate) – then he “fell off the wagon” hanging out with a bad influence. That hurt once, as did the nickname “Breeder” that he and his family gave me to go along with it. A lot. Mostly because it took aim at who I loved; nobody wanted to hold TJ but me for a couple of years, a shunning for which sometimes I still find it hard to summon forgiveness – but I do, because now he is the most beloved, and it would hurt TJ for me to keep a record of the other time instead, and love finds ways to make the world safer for intimacy and if it doesn’t do that it’s not love, it’s something else.

Last night, as we often do, I fell asleep near Ears – he likes to hold my right hand in his left and draw in his journal with his other hand until he gets tired. I wake up and re-cap his markers. I have really loved very few people, fewer via sexual intimacy as a principal means of expression, and if you subtracted the ones who shared my body by coming from it, wellll my love life would have tumbleweed blowing around I guess. This is not a love-life path that most people have taken, though it’s clear that just about everybody feels able to have an opinion about it. People think they know everything about me if they know merely my full titled name and that my children exist. It’s one of the most consistent ironies of my life, since I chose the largely solitary life and ‘childish’ love affairs that I did mostly because me and strangers and intimacy do not mix instinctively at all, and what I feel that I don’t really know repels me if it gets up too close. [And I assumed if I wanted something I’d have to do/make it myself (selps).]


Maybe there should be a conceptual umbrella to cover this public-property problem, under which many phobias would share some territory. Intimacy-Phobia, with huge obvious portions like homophobia and also subdivisions of various kinds, all having this in common: that people think they know something about you by who/how you’ve loved (or not), and that their “knowledge” just amounts to fear that there’s something wrong with THEM that your ‘difference’ can assuage because they can kick it around.


armand van helden - you don't even know me