Adam Tendler's Blog, page 26

bye bye butterfly

heartbroken by the loss of pauline oliveros, who i just met, performed for, and had the most beautiful conversation with on monday. (you can see her in the left corner of a picture posted on my timeline from that event). she read letters by john cage and spoke about the origins of tape music on the west coast. we left it that i’d be in touch and would definitely visit her upstate the next time i drove north. i was giddy about the meeting even today, seeing a vinyl of hers up here in vermont. truly a historical person. i feel lucky to have crossed paths with her, even once. 

hello high school self

hello high school self

dishes

i imagine many people have experienced a moment when they catch themselves repeating, verbatim, words from their mother. for me it happened tonight after dinner when i told anyone who wanted to help clean up, “no, no… i have a system. i can do all of this really quick!” this is exactly what my mom says whenever i’m home and try to help after supper. the truth is, is kind of like washing dishes. 

hiking thought (9/1/16, Rwanda)

I’d like to keep it light while on holiday, but… traveling through a country that has pulled itself together so miraculously after a civil war and genocide, with reminders of that terrible era every few kilometers and underlying nearly every aspect of everyday life (and still, unfortunately, boiling in neighboring countries), it’s astonishing and inspiring to see Rwanda, in its comeback, leading African countries in safety, health, transparency, unity, and eco-responsibility (including no current cases of poaching and a countrywide ban on plastic bags). It’s also particularly chilling, in this context, to see clips from home of Trump making promises to build a wall and begin ridding the country “on day one” of, as he calls them, “dangerous, dangerous, dangerous” “criminal aliens” “without exception,” and to see the ravenous fervor this whips up in his supporters. I’m afraid of what happens if he wins, but also afraid of what will happen when he doesn’t. Where does all that fear and rage, all that poison, go? Does anyone who supports these ‘policies’ actually realize, historically, what it looks like when people “take their country back” from perceived enemies, their own neighbors (in our case, not just undocumented Americans, but also liberals, activists, non-Christians, the Clintons, etc.)? Nothing is more “dangerous dangerous dangerous” than this kind of brainwashing. Fake-populist “us/them” paradigms from political demagogues unfailingly lead to frightening outcomes every time – “without exception.” While it often takes a catastrophe for people to wake up and unify, I’d like to think it doesn’t have to get worse before it gets better. We have to put this fire out. Like, now.

why new yorkers are isolated

i just locked eyes with another person who promptly gave me the finger.

God bless my mom who, over the weekend brought up some celery...

God bless my mom who, over the weekend brought up some celery sticks as I practiced, found me like this, and then just chuckled and left them on the table. #stressposition Sat, 10pm, dixon place, lower east side, bit.ly/dixonplaceincollege

on being called a faggot, like, all the time in new york city

I have a serious question for you: is the way I look at my phone gay? I only ask because earlier today on a downtown 6, I was standing there crafting a press release on my phone when a guy got on at 23rd street, promptly muttered the word “faggot,” and then sat in front of me. Standing there—quite buttoned-up, as it were, on my way to teach—I wondered if what had just happened actually had just happened. Did I imagine him regarding me upon his entrance before that effortless acknowledgment? “Faggot.” Did I imagine his disdainful glare, continuing in that very moment?

I stared back, hoping he’d say it again. Then I’d know for sure. Then I’d say something. Then I’d be the radical queer activist I had imagined myself becoming, especially over the last couple weeks since the Pulse shooting, talking my big game on Facebook and over coffee to friends. Then I’d put my “enough is enough” money where my mouth is. I had a couple sentences ready. They burned in my chest. I would finally stand up for myself.

But we remained deadlocked, and I remained swimming in equal-parts anger and doubt. And rationalizations.

Say it again!

But he didn’t. I got off at Astor Place, waiting even then for him to repeat the word as I exited, which happens sometimes. I had sentences planned for that, too. But nothing happened. Maybe none of it happened. Maybe I’m going crazy.

I’d planned on grabbing a salad before teaching, but suddenly I’d lost my appetite. Maybe a smoothie. A gay smoothie? Ugh. See, so actually this is what pisses me off—that mine is not a story of courage, but rather a story where the bad guy wins and I don’t get a salad, where he goes on with his day unpunished, unembarrassed, while my brain remains absolutely poisoned. In this moment, I don’t feel like a faggot. I feel like a coward.

Anyway, I actually get called a faggot a lot. In fact, before New York I lived in Texas and Indiana, but only since moving here to the Big Apple have I, as an adult, been called a faggot—and a handful of times, mind you.

Off the top of my head, there was once on a bike with one of my best friends, once in the sidewalk near Times Square (I’d bumped into one of those people handing out newspapers, so he called me a faggot), once exiting a subway station at Union Square, another time on a subway in Brooklyn, another time on the upper west side while running to a friend’s gig at a church. More may come to me.

I came away from these experiences the same way I came away from today—wondering honestly if I run gay, sit gay, ride a bike gay, bump into people gay, walk up the stairs gay, type press releases into my phone gay. Do my straight friends get called a faggot when they, too, run down the street or type into their phone on the subway, or am I really, truly, just so gay that it seeps through my various forms of heteronormative drag?

I also come away from these situations seething with anger. At myself, that is. I replay fantasies in my mind where I handle things differently, where I demand some kind of… no, not an apology, fuck that… but where I go into a kind of Steven Seagal mode and give these people just a taste of the humiliation, or the memory of humiliation, rather, that gets triggered in an adult like me when a word like that surfaces after a bully-conditioned childhood.  

Yes, every time that it’s growled or muttered in my direction I remember, more than the chants and heckles that followed me right up through high school, the whispers of an eighth grade boy, a year older than me—his name was Tom—who one day cooed between the seats of the school bus that he was going to kill me. Woven into the tapestry of his promise was his name for me. “Faggot.” Frozen in my seat, I didn’t say a word. I wonder if he remembers.

…just found this scrawled in the back of my Beethoven...

…just found this scrawled in the back of my Beethoven book from college. Yikes.

summer

summer

vermonster

In high school, I worked at Ben & Jerry’s. For the first six months or so, my mother drove me to work and picked me up afterward. So that means I was 15. Within about a year, I earned a promotion to “Shift Leader,” manager of the premises during my shifts, which astounds me to this day. A beacon of responsibility, I was not. One New Years Eve, I invited so many friends to the store that the Associated Press called. 

The scoop shop in Montpelier no longer exists, and I worked there before the company’s Unilever acquisition. At the time, the pints still had the old design, and the flavors, many short-lived, seemed as bizarre as ever (“Peanut Butter and Jelly,” anyone?). We’d do bottle drives for women’s shelters and project movies for the community on the sides of buildings. A massage therapist once came in to treat the whole staff.  

Ben & Jerry’s did, for all intents, fire me, but that’s a story for another day. (It involves Chopin.) No, my favorite story from Ben & Jerry’s, one that I’ve thought about ever since, involves a group of tourists who came in and ordered a Vermonster.  

A Vermonster, involves something like twenty scoops of ice cream, layers of cookies and brownies, any toppings on hand, and of course whipped cream. Possibly a cherry. A sort of gluttonous free-for-all, we would served this sundae in a specially marked souvenir bucket, usually to sports teams who would order it after a game. Still, for all the hype and fascination, the Vermonster was a rare bird. 

This group of tourists came in and ordered their Vermonster. Delighted by the opportunity, I dutifully scooped the ice cream, crumbled the cookies and brownies, tossed in the gummy bears and Reese’s pieces and whatever else they asked for, and covered it all in whipped cream and sprinkles. I handed them the bucket with a fistful of spoons. "Enjoy.”

About twenty minutes later, a woman from the group returned with the bucket nearly empty but for a layer of goopy melted ice cream, fudge, caramel and masticated toppings. This was always the tough part, and just looking at it turned my stomach; a literal bucket of ice cream backwash. I knew what was coming: she would want me to wash it out and return the clean bucket as a souvenir. But she had something else in mind. 

“Could you scrape what’s left into that blender and add some milk?” she asked. “We’d like you to make this into a shake.” 

 “Excuse me?” I asked for clarification a number of times, and over and over she confirmed the unthinkable. “We’re going to drink it." 

Breath held and stomach knotted, I emptied the brown slime into a blender, added ice and milk, and hit the switch. Gag reflex screaming, I poured the ooze into a cup, popped in a straw and handed it over, barely able to say the word. “Enjoy.”