Man Cave

In 2006, Finola Hackett lost the Scripps National Spelling Bee on a German word, Weltschmerz, that means, roughly, the feeling of despair or sadness one has when comparing the actual state of the world with an ideal state, or a kind of sentimental pessimism. It seemed there was no better word on which to lose, if you had to lose.

I know this because I was watching the Bee on ESPN that year (maybe it qualifies as a lifetime sport) and I liked the idea that in some languages words can convey contradictions that are so much a part of human experience that they seem useful to represent in a single word.

I wanted there to be a word for another feeling I have frequently, the feeling of simultaneous total shock and absolute lack of surprise that comes with, say, listening to the news or being called a faggot by a stranger (and not in a good way).

That word, the one I don’t have, would have described perfectly the thing I felt on a recent fall day when descending into the Man Cave, a new basement addition for “men” in a retail store in just barely upstate New York, when I saw this collection of images, clustered above a box of neatly packed scarves (yes, I was also shopping):

These three iconic pictures — the Sexy White Woman, the Cowboy, the Noble Savage — defined the manliness of the Man Cave, the desires folded into the shirts and hanging on the racks.

Shocking to see and not at all surprising. A reminder that some bodies, especially in combination and out of time, mean deeply and incessantly. A reminder, in case we needed one, of the peculiar and particular construction of white American masculinity against and through the bodies of others.

World Series, Game 2, bottom of the 8th

Anyone living in Brooklyn, with cable, and therefore without the World Series, should know by now that there are other ways to watch the games. I learned last night when I tuned into Cablevision’s ongoing Fox-won’t-put-content-on-channel-5-so-we-will campaign against the broadcaster that they’d credit my bill if I paid Fox to watch the Fall Classic live-streamed on MLB.com. It is complicated to be anti-capitalist and also an avid fan of sports, but this is how I came to be seated on my couch watching San Francisco’s slow climb into an easy 9th inning, thanks to four straight walks issued by Derek Holland (three, with two runs walked in) and Mark Lowe (one more walk, and one more run).  I watched as Holland delivered ball after ball outside the strike zone, listening to the announcers’ voices slide into tones of increasing astonishment: “That’s nine balls in – a – row.” And while I am rooting for the Giants in this series, in the bottom of the 8th, with 2 outs, as the baserunners began walking home, I felt an ache creep across my chest, some kind of phantom pain starting in my throwing hand and settling in just past my right shoulder. The feeling, I imagined, of the total inability to make your body do the one thing you most need it to do. Not once, or twice, but nine times in row. The wind up, the throw, the miss.

I often imagine that the trouble with living in a body is, while something that could be experienced by anyone, the kind of betrayal or wonder that is distinctly, if sometimes distantly, political in nature. And so perhaps it was the way my body noticed the pain of these other bodies’ struggles, the way they could no longer speak the one language they’re meant (read: paid) to speak, that made it seem like as good a time as any to begin writing.