The Golden Apple Thinking without bannister — researcher — a woman's circuitry

When I’m doing academic work around Asians, I feel completely and totally locked-in. I imagine that people at USC or Berkeley are feeling locked-in 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Because of how many Asians are at those schools. I’m at a boba bar in Baltimore right now — that phrase, a boba bar. What the fuck? I’m writing an essay about bidimensional dispositionalism with regard to sexual behaviorism. In philosophy, we say if and only iff. In my American Studies class that’s primarily about immigrant food businesses, my professor invites in the scion and heir to a Korean food business and consummate fortune, who I can’t help but to feel attracted to. That’s because I’m an American woman, and I’m attracted to capital. Even worse, I’m a Black American woman and I’m hungry to create long-lasting financial structures for my friends and my family. And my future kids, or whatever. He’s definitely wearing raw-hemmed Japanese denim and the way his polo sits on his waist line, I notice. It’s little things, money. He brings his high school-age daughter with him to talk to us about economics, and his conversation is wonderfully stimulating and informative. I love to talk about money, I love to talk about how people make it, I like to make people know I’m listening by the quality of question that I ask. Listening to Boards of Canada, the song, “The Color of Fire”, the vocals say I…love…you! Distorted against the conversation of a group of Koreans — I can tell they’re Korean, I have The Eye — talking about, you guessed it, finances. Back in the boba bar. This narrative doesn’t really take place in-time, I’m cheating. Some guy on Twitter says you can’t feel the presence of Asians on the East Coast. That’s laughable. Achievement, ambition, and the concretized uppitiness of a large social group can certainly be felt. Especially by the people who rank beneath them on America’s racial totem pole of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. The reason the concept of the model minority exists is because of Black people; we’re the opposite, we’re the model that the hustlers are viewed against abstractly. I’m so racist — I’ve made the people in my life more racist, I believe in my people in a way that defies our actual realities, and I’m jealous of Asians because of how America allows them to be. What America seems to want them to be. Are we articulating perfection now, or what? I feel really greedy. Outside of the show, there’s this Asian girl crying on the ground, they won’t let her in to the show. She seems super fucked-up. She can’t stop crying and it doesn’t seem like she bought any friends with her. I sit next to her on the ground and feed her grapes from my purse. I always have fruit in my purse because I’m mentally fucked-up and I love women. I love being jealous of all other women. People think I’m being sarcastic when I say stuff like this but I’m fine with what the experience of being a Western woman is like, I welcome it. I’m jealous of this fucked-up Asian girl for no reason even though she’s eating fruit from my hand so close that I can feel her teeth scape it, like a little horse. We laugh, looking at each other. What do you have that I don’t have? What do I have that you don’t want? Are women ever really together? With a man, I can put him in me. That’s the main distinction that I have. There’s that understand that we can make a person together with all men, random men on the street. Do Asian men think about Black women the way that white men think about Black women? My twin says, “Well, what do white men actually think about Black women?” I can tell you what Black people think about Asian people. It’s always about gender at the root of the issue until the root of the issue is race; now, the root of the issue is class. I know that my people have our noses up at everyone who can make capital here in places we aren’t welcomed. We have a tech sector in this nation because we have Asians, and we want them at our state institutions because when they’re American they can afford to pay full tuition and when they’re immigrants they pay more as foreigners receiving American educations. Soon enough, the University of Maryland will be Chinese girls from Bethesda and Chinese girls from China. I’m fucked up because I want there to be Black women in academia after I leave? Do I plan on ever leaving? 😉 Hopkins is worse — whatever the qualifier ‘worse’ means, because it’s poor Black people in all the surrounding areas of the university and Asians wearing California-university-name hoodies making use of the Institution itself all around Waverly. I’m a femcel poet, I’m a exclusionary woke Black conservative, I write from a place of bitterness and love. I hate everything, I love so many things, I know that sharing is a farce invented by the State after the enclosures, I know where I belong. Where people are smart. I don’t think the only smart Americans are Asians. There is no easy way to cross this gap without throwing myself into it.

Making money is a distraction, it’s a distraction from daily life. People laugh all around the room, but I’m old enough to know that the noises are more about fitting in! Conservatives think that leftists are about going against the grain; anyone involved in community organizing for long enough know that fitting *within* the *against* is more important than finding ways to stand further apart. The meeting is gluttonous in its indecency. Everyone has to be a star. A participant asks us to share our Instagram handles (the whole room) nearing the end of the gathering. I don’t want to look at anyone in the eyes when they ask this, because I just look like the kind of person who is active on Instagram. I make a personal note that I want to wear skirts less. Wanting to look hot, to everyone here, feels penultimate. To the organizing. Afterward, on the train, I draw my knees and shins and legs up beneath me like I’m twelve different horses, and noodle with the weirdly long hair that’s growing behind my calf. It feels good to mash my face with the palms of my hands until my eyes feel different colors; I adjust my skirt and whisper ‘Gomu Kassana’ (cow legs) to myself in a monotone that reminds me of my yoga practice, my affair with whimsy, that I can use my physical voice whenever — even by myself on the train, where I may look ‘crazy’. All winter, I read this tome of a ‘historical novel’ called Direct Action (by Luke Hauser) that follows the trajectory of protest organizing in the 1980’s Bay Area. So much of the work is heavy with Hauser’s personal hesitancies, embodied in a differently-named protagonist, that the activism of street theatre and punk die-ins wouldn’t prevent corporate, and therefore the State’s, advancement. Shucks. Hauser, I meet you from the future — you were not wrong! I read an ad in the subway for a 60 gram of sugar fruit juice that is rebranding as just enjoying yourself — it’s a smart campaign. We know you know about the sugar, but buy this anyway… The informed consumer, who in previous decades with more leverage, was an activist. When the term meant something. Reading Direct Action now, during the late 20’s of the twentieth century, feels even more bleak, and trying to organize in the face of both the Labor Movement’s and the Neoliberal Progressive Movement’s failures doesn’t feel romantic to anybody. People are going to meetings for protests because they’re lonely…Abbott and I are smoking in my CR-V in front of their sister’s bachelorette party, and they say, “I want to organize with other people and I don’t want to make friends! I want to get the work done, and go home. I want to feel connected to the other people I’m working with but I don’t want them to assume we’re going to hang out in another capacity after we work together.” I agree exuberantly, my besties always understand what I’m on. Are we the problem? Or is the assumption that group work lead to a virtual performance of community, suffocating?

Since moving back home, from the rich and diverse suburbs of DC to the shifting and exclusionary country exburbs of Annapolis floating alive across the water, transportation is my gleaming irradiated nugget of fascination. After classes, I leave my car at the College Park Metro and ride the rails all evening, articles from The Anarchist Library propped up on my phone’s browser and a fresh pre-roll tucked behind my ear. I watch multicultural couples perched on low stone walls scroll their phones together, faces luminous with screen and the contentment of having an Other of their own, in a public space. People with professional DMV jobs get on the train with backpacks on like proud elementary school students. Their presence does seem to be the fuel through which the train powers across the train yards, their employment the embodiment of the productivity of the District of Columbia. Every time my friends visit, and we’re out to eat or walking the Mall or thrifting and book-hunting, they relay their fascination at how the physical sensation of the State is looming in the District. Growing up in her shadow, and surrounded by her, she leaves me quiet. I think about Aaron Bushnell’s body burning and the police emptying bullets into his form, I think about the resulting discourse about his ‘performative white activism’ on Twitter that I begin to think is sparked by CIA moderated Twitter bots, I think about how homelessness where I’m from in Maryland is almost impossible if you don’t have a car — to drive out from the compactness of gridded, central DMV to the remoteness of the beach. What is not preventable is a youth population of homeless who are from the Shore, revolutionized in the suburbs. What is not preventable is me, paying for a train ticket and yearning in each second for a world profoundly more free.

I’ve been sleeping in my car for more nights a week than I’ve been sleeping in my family home, to understand more about the relationship between upper-middle-class youth trapped in permanent adolescence by a weakened economy, engaging in forms of homelessness that were popular during the late Bush-era of American politics. Riding the rails, squatting, traveling across the country. I’m 28 — Black women my age are after plane-ride trips to destinations padded with the comfort of a resort and natives serving foreigners hand-on-foot. A man is supposed to buy me a trip to the Cayman Islands, and I have to be sexy enough to deserve it! Instead I’m in my car, reading the last of a book I can by my dying nightlight. I drive across the State in less than a day, sleep in rest areas and parking lots that look welcoming. I trust the night and dispose of the fears haunting women who have done the same. Jackie Wang is the saint looking over my SUV as I drift into sleep thinking of her biking on to on-ramps and flashing a thumb for a ride, or getting between Brooklyn and Baltimore in one day like it was nothing. I am one step closer. Tonight, the temperature of the night is perfect, and I crack both of my back windows. Is it true, that because of my relationship to my family and wealth, that in the morning I will drive home and take a shower? Yes. Do the people I have waiting at home love me? Yes. Are they concerned that the way that I’m living does not seem to be running parallel to conventional American success for young people? Yes. What my family thinks of me means something to me, too — pain comes with this. But I have to know what’s on the other side. I’m not running from anything unsafe. I am running from a feeling of complacency — worthlessness — picking up the new clothes I just purchased and thinking, “Is this all there is?” Professionalized labor doesn’t promise satisfaction. She promises accumulation. I cannot be distracted by a tactic invented to do so when I’m inventing a new method of participation, as worthless as the practices of the spoiled brat organizers may seem. When I return to my bed, I find it harder to sleep…it’s too soft, too easy, too accessible and I don’t feel like the labors of my day deserve this cushiness as a result. Tingles pressure my hands. Maybe my relationship to labor is changing, because of anarchistic risks I’m taking to gain a new perspective.