One Way Or The Other It's A Guy Thing

So I think a monster is large. That it inhabits - or has a relationship to - space in a way that is unfamiliar, even jarring. They take up more of it or take it up differently. Emotionally they are composed mainly of longing. They know they exist outside the dominant social/cultural/sexual/etc. paradigm but long to be in it. No - they long to have it reformed (yet are incapable themselves of enacting the reform, participating in it, that's part of being a monster) so that they can be in it. Is that right? Men make monsters, one way or the other. It's a "guy thing."

Ran into the monsters thing reading Dodie Bellamy and Camille Roy last night. Wondering then if Bhanu Kapil had absorbed their ideas, certainly she has encountered them. Then thinking of my own relationship to monsters, or monsterism, particularly lycanthropy. Another thing I could say is that as a child I was often scared, or sought out opportunities (as if they were forbidden) to be scared. Monsters then, the idea of them, confirmed that I was right to be scared.

"Why if there is nothing to be scared of are there so many guns here."

When I wrote that line whole parts of me lit up, lights going on like a village waking up. But also part of me immediately said, That's bullshit, a lie. You can't write that.

Two or three days ago, walking with D. for a few moments while it rained and town meeting disbanded as a wedding gathered, all in the same rough space, she said of my recent election to town moderator, "the name says it all. You have to moderate." And I had - and traces of it linger yet - a fleeting fantasy of being a mediator, a builder of bridges type of guy. And then laughed at - not with, not at all, this was a cruel laugh, a bitter laugh - myself as I have thoroughly absorbed the idea that I am the man who ruins bridges, reduces them to ash, and laughs at the smoke rising behind him while he tears off in search of the next one to destroy.