As far as writing goes, I did a lot of it in 2011. More of it than I might have ever thought possible. Enough of it to make me a little crazy at times. But not enough of it to make me feel like I never want to write again.
The other week, in a conversation with Matthew and B. Michael, I got kind of flustered trying to explain my frustration with not using Tumblr the “traditional” way. I want to publish these short and pithy posts, I said, but every time I set up a draft for one, it just feels wrong. I delete it and tell myself that it’s better to wait until I’m inspired to say something. But I also feel bad about it. I told them how I’ve been anticipating a grand exodus of followers for some time now, but that their number is steady — if not increasing. Nervous Acid has kept me humble in that regard: It turns out that despite the conventional Internet wisdom of the 24-hour news cycle, people will wait for you to think things through.
So while I may not post every hour — or every week, for that matter — your support in the past year has encouraged me to write and publish some really meaningful work on this site, and for that, I am grateful. To acknowledge it, I compiled a list of Nervous Acid’s Greatest Hits of 2011. These are, in chronological order, the ten short essays that I feel best represent (and map out) my year in thinking:
• “Take That (Or, Why I Am Not an Indie Rocker)” (January 3)
“The fact is that credibility has been institutionalized by scene ideologies and critical tropes. And because we don’t own it, we are unwillingly controlled by it. We consume, evaluate, and in many cases, simply dismiss media based on outdated historicism and meaningless signifiers of taste — and this is precisely why I am not an indie rocker. Much less an over-idealistic punk. Because, by my estimation, a group of 40-year-old men who, only twenty years ago, appeared in a music video naked while smearing jelly over themselves just made the album of the year.”
• “The Nervous Acid Guide to Responsible Speaking for Dummies” (January 12)
“The conventional wisdom is, of course, that if one yells ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, the showgoers will panic and begin a riotous move towards the exits — ostensibly causing stampeding, injuries, and even death. So let’s change the context: What kind of reaction would you get if you screamed ‘Fire!’ in a room full of firefighters? What kind of reaction would you get if you screamed ‘Fire!’ in a room full of burn victims? What kind of reaction would you get if you screamed ‘Fire!’ in a room full of pyromaniacs? For each person listening, that same one-syllable word is populated with completely different meaning — it is imbued with duty to the firefighter, anguish to the burn victim, and pleasure to the pyromaniac. Anyone who isn’t completely deluded can understand this.”
• “How to Graduate College When You’re Pushing 40” (May 31)
“Going to college in your mid-30s is embarrassing. It’s embarrassing when professors assume that you’re too young to remember Ronald Reagan or The Great Space Coaster. It’s embarrassing when you’re ten years older than your instructor. It’s embarrassing to have to explain to a 19-year-old young woman, who is objectively cute, that you are almost as old as her father and, either way, a happily gay man.”
• “Beyond Gay?” (June 10)
“The idea of the single monolithic gay culture that these young people think they are rebelling against is, in fact, a myth. If this writer had actually cared to cultivate some meaningful relationships with a few older gay men before dismissing them outright, if he actually connected with personal and cultural gay histories from even before Stonewall, he might know that the only way to go ‘beyond gay’ is, quite frankly, to be straight.”
• “Father’s Day” (June 19)
“When you don’t know who you are, everyone looks different to you. These people are not strangers anymore, but possibilities. Everyone you meet becomes a potential conduit to a sense of history and heritage that you don’t have, that you may never get. It’s a void you’ll fill with other things, but it’s never quite satisfied and always quite hungry. That void is the only thing my father ever gave me, besides the way I look.”
• “The Lesson” (July 21)
“’Wait a second!’ Grazíela said. ‘Are you gay?’
“Believe it or not, I’d never considered the possibility that I might be asked this question in a classroom. I’d never weighed the pros and cons of my sexuality as related to my position as an educator. But in this particular case, I wasn’t sure that coming out at this exact moment would be the best possible thing. Sometimes, when you’re a teacher, you have to put personal politics aside and reach for the ever-elusive ‘teaching moment’ — if only to give students an opportunity to be objective critical thinkers about the facts.”
• “Persons on the Internet” (September 21)
“If you are a Person On The Internet, chances are you have either overheard or engaged in such a conversation in the last fifteen years, and hopefully by now you have realized that the Internet is not any better or worse than the world offline, but merely a reflection: In one corner, you have Nigerian e-mail scams; in the other, Bernie Madoff. In one corner, you have people with fake or outdated pictures on their OKCupid profiles; in the other, you meet a hipster girl at a Girl Talk show who steals your cell phone and turns out to be a wanted criminal. There are freaks on the Internet, but have you actually left your house lately?”
• “The Doughnut Rant” (October 7)
“Mark’s initiative was inspiring and he always seemed to make the impossible possible. Like the time he actually convinced his Lower East Side tenement landlord to let him convert the basement of his apartment building into a commercial kitchen: That’s the kind of old-time New York City DIY fairytale you’ll likely never hear again. I’d already done indie publishing and indie rock; I wanted to be an indie doughnut guy.”
• “Doing Time on Croyden Drive: The Ballad of National Coming Out Day” (October 11)
“I grew up in a family of fundamentalist Christians, who seem to hold on to that whole ‘vengeful God’ thing tighter that whole ‘merciful Jesus’ thing. I grew up believing that gay people were sick, perverted, sinful, and completely lacking of any hope for redemption. The way my mother talked about it, you’d think that the worst thing I could do was kill someone, and that the next thing down on the list would be to love another man. So while I knew she wouldn’t congratulate me for coming out, I’m not sure I expected to be so easily discarded. Like an inanimate object that had worn out its usefulness. I didn’t think I’d have to begin a new life — without blood relatives, without a mother and father, as flawed as they were.”
• “The Death of a Music Writer: A 20-Year Exit Strategy” (December 9)
“The first thing I thought when I looked over Stereogum’s Top 50 albums of 2011 this year was that, truthfully, I don’t believe that there has ever been 50 must-hear albums to be released in any one given year. You might as well make a Top 400; it would be just as useful. But the other thing was this: I don’t care about at least 46 of the records on their list. At all. Like, you could put them on at a party and I’d probably take them off. That’s how far I’ve jumped off this train.”
Thank you so much to everyone who has been reading, new and old. It’s been a tremendous year.
