Life Harvester #15: Adult Puberty Pt 1, Cometbus #59, The Pitch, "Heartless"
Life Harvester is written by Colin Hagendorf and edited by Rebecca Giordano. This is the email version of a print publication available for free throughout the United States and for low-cost individual subscription. Life Harvester subscriptions are free to prisoners. If you know an incarcerated person who would like to receive a newsletter every month, get in touch with me directly and I’ll take care of it.
A CORRECTION!
Welcome to March. Happy birthday Lou Reed, Sister Rosetta Tharp, Carl Reiner, Mariah Carey. Thank you for the “Perfect Day” duet you did with Pavarotti, inventing rock’n’roll, directing The Jerk, your early 2000s rap features, particularly Flipmode Squad “I Know What You Want,” and Jadakiss “U Make Me Wanna”.
Last issue when writing about the song “Ballin’” I mistakenly said that “Rack City” was by YG when it is in fact by Tyga. It’s a mistake I’m extremely embarrassed to have made because it illuminates what a washed old person I am. Sometimes being old is cute, like when I called Johnny Knoxville “Tommy Nashville,” but this is more like when I mistook Total Chaos for Chaos UK in an issue of my high school zine, a moment of abject shame. I hope we can all move forward together.
ADULT PUBERTY PART 1
Before I started my transition, everyone warned me that going on hormones would be rough and that I’d go through a second puberty. But like any truly shitty situation (getting dumped, scabies, etc), accepting the inevitability is nowhere near as horrifying as dealing with it. The early physical effects of hrt were immediate and intense. My skin felt tender, my senses were heightened. For the first week I was convinced I was on the verge of getting a cold. I also found myself more easily irritable than I can recall being maybe ever, and hyper-sensitive. The most minor perceived slight could hurt my feelings for hours. I described it all to Becca and she said, “you’re not getting a cold, boo, you’re PMSing.”
I started experiencing intense emotional overwhelm followed by complete breakdown/shutdown almost immediately too. It would be fair to call these moments tantrums. They tended to last 30 minutes, occasionally a few hours. It wasn’t until around 3 months on estradiol and spiro that I experienced my first bout of sustained moodiness. It lasted over a week, and while it wasn’t unrelenting, it consistently manifested for almost 10 days.
The hallmarks of chemically-induced adult puberty (which I’ll henceforth refer to as Man’s Puberty) are not that different from those of the (mostly) naturally occurring puberty seen in human adolescents (God’s Puberty, subsequently). A pubescent tantrum is largely a juncture of multiple frustrations/confusions. They can be external (you don’t understand me!/why don’t you understand me?), internal (I don’t understand me!/why don’t I understand me?), broad (no one understands me!/why…), etc. When I described the experience to my mom, she said it sounded similar to menopause.
Due to their emotional similarity, the primary differences that can be observed between Man’s Puberty & God’s Puberty are largely about awareness/accountability. In my experience during God’s Puberty, at least in my very male adolescence, there was little expectation that I would be reasonable, and I felt very little sense of personal responsibility to those around me. I was a literal child, just figuring out social norms, overwhelmed by horniness. Obviously, I wouldn’t be able to control myself. Make no mistake, my parents made it clear when I behaved out of line, but we didn’t process how my volatility had impacted them. They assumed that they possessed an emotional maturity that I, with my less developed brain, lacked, and so accommodations were made. Now, however, I’m a grown ass woman who has been through years of therapy. My hormones are in flux and my loved ones are understanding that this will sometimes lead to instances of chaotic behavior, but I have a responsibility to them to be conscientious about the ways that it impacts them that I didn’t feel as a teen.
In the end, I guess the only observation I’m really making here is that it’s harder to act like a maniac when you’re an emotionally responsible adult. Yet despite forcing me to throw fits and then apologize for them, transitioning has been worth it because I feel more and more like myself every day and because I get a weekly text from a high school best friend that says “are you a hot chick yet?”
COMETBUS #59 - POST MORTEM
Aaron Cometbus has been publishing zines since the year I was born. I first encountered his work 20 years ago when I picked up a copy of Cometbus #47 at See Hear, a long shuttered shop on E 7th street that only sold zines. Titled Lanky, that issue is a semi-fictional account of a teen relationship occurring the year after high school. I immediately recognized the penmanship from the liner notes of my Operation Ivy LP, an auspicious sign. Aaron’s prose is intimate. He has a conversational tone that it’s hard not to assume he cribbed from some of the greats of Yiddish literature. He can be harsh, but there’s an enduring warmth, and the tension between the two felt electric.
After Lanky, I went back to See Hear and picked up Aaron’s novella, Double Duce. I was once again swept into a chaotic world of 90s East Bay punk houses, fleeting relationships, drug drama, crime sprees, absolute madness—everything I was looking for. I haven’t read either since high school, but 20 years after reading them for the first time, I can still remember what it felt like. Cometbus wove itself neatly into the fabric of the future I imagined for myself as an adolescent.
When the next issue, Back to the Land, came out in 2001, I was so stoked, but when I finally got a copy and sat down with it, I felt like I was reading an entirely different zine. Back to the Land is a series of interviews divided into three parts: first with Aaron’s peers who grew up with parents that fled the society of cities for intentional rural communities (or rural isolation), next with some of those parents, and finally with Aaron’s contemporaries who had begun talking about going back to the land themselves. This sort of amatuer anthropology wasn’t as interesting to me as a 17-year-old as the self-mythologizing semi-fiction about East Bay punk, and I dismissed that issue as something of a disappointment.
In the 20 years since Back to the Land, Aaron has put out contributor issues, art issues, more novellas, a poetry collection. But for the past few years, he seems to keep returning to the strand he began to pull with Back to the Land, conducting interview-based research to map the boundaries of counter-culture, and presenting that research in his zines. 2015’s A Bestiary of Booksellers takes a zoological conceit and profiles the curmudgeons of the used book world, comparing each to an animal. 2016’s The New York Comic Scene is more straight-forward, with Aaron stepping outside of punk and into the adjacent (but sometimes adversarial) subculture of underground comics to conduct a series of interviews with luminaries in the field, in order to understand how that world functions both similarly and differently from the worlds Aaron is accustomed to.
This year’s issue, Post Mortem, feels like a culmination, a perfect marriage of Aaron’s penchant for grandiose self-mythologizing about the punk scene of his youth, and his tendency towards underground anthropology. Here, Aaron traverses the United States to interview the figureheads of punk and radical institutions that have existed since at least the 90s, (though one organization profiled, The Catholic Worker, has been around since 1933), with the intention of understanding whether there was a common thread linking institutions that last, eschewing the tendency in punk to lionize the short-lived, beautifully tragic failures and take for granted the those people and places that persevere.
“The history of progressive projects and radical spaces,” Aaron writes towards the end of the zine’s first act, “is mostly one of self-defeat…. Growing up in Berkeley, I was very conscious of what the hippies had left for us, which wasn’t much. I swore that my generation would do better. In part, that’s what this study is about, but you don’t have to skip to the end to find the conclusion. We did not.”
Yet despite this ultimately negative prognosis, delivered a fifth of the way into the text, Aaron is able to find hope in the rubble and create levity from chaos. Institutions profiled range from Thrasher magazine to Interference Archive, the Center for Cartoon Studies to C-Squat. There are two record labels, two book stores, and a donut shop. Discussions with elderly anarchists sit alongside a deranged conversation with a spun out Fat Mike.
The conceit this time is that the text is not an anthropological study, but a pulp noir. Someone killed punk, and Aaron is the scrappy detective looking for the culprit. While this structure sometimes feels overwrought, the narrative momentum is strong enough to make it work.
I guess the one account missing from this ledger is Aaron’s own. What is his secret? How has he managed to publish zines consistently for 37 years? I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that he’s developed something of a loyal readership in that time. Issues this good are a large part of why we stick around.
THE PITCH
This is NOT a review of Seinfeld S04E03, “The Pitch.” My review of that would simply be a chef kiss because it’s perfect. And until I can print these newsletters on a sheet of holographic film like the old people on the grave across from Deedee Ramone’s at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, publishing a review that’s simply a physical gesture is impossible. Nor am I talking about the satirical poem, “The Pitch,” a take on Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” published in a 1960s issue of Mad Magazine that began “once upon a final inning, with the other ball team winning” that I plagiarized 90% of and handed in as my own work in 3rd grade, receiving accolades from my teachers and peers. That review would simply say, “thank you.” The Pitch is also not a literal pitch. It isn’t pitching an essay or a book or a movie to an editor or producer. My review of that would be “annoying but necessary.”
What I’m talking about here is a kind of talking, actually. The Pitch is when you have a good idea and you tell it to all your friends and then it ends there. I talked about this somewhat awkwardly in the preface to the Slice Harvester book. There, I distinguished the phenomenon of Drinking & Talking, a passive category of sharing cool or funny ideas among friends while buzzed, from Going & Doing, an active category of executing those ideas. Five years ago in my book, I asserted that making the transition from Drinking & Talking was a simple matter of will. Garner enough escape velocity and you can rocket your idea out of your head and into the world.
But in fact, I think Drinking & Talking, or The Pitch as I’ve renamed it since I’ve been sober for years and I still find myself doing it, is a nefarious act that actually prevents work from happening. My theory is not that complicated, and is largely grounded in my own experience, but hear me out. I love running my mouth and shooting the shit. If I have an idea I’m excited about, I want to tell everyone. But something I’m starting to realize is that telling people about an idea is less satisfying, but much more immediate, than doing the idea. And sometimes if I tell enough people, I’m temporarily satisfied enough.
The Pitch is not just talking. The Pitch is anything that gets you the little adrenaline rush of doing something, but takes little to no effort. It can be a tweet or an instagram post. In fact, the internet is full of places to Pitch. The most stark example I can recall is this: a few years into putting out zines, I was introduced to the early-internet microblogging platform Livejournal. Prior to this, I had consistently released an issue or two of my teen zine every year. But once I had access to the internet, I could post writing, and have people respond to it immediately. It felt like a more efficient means to an end, but that conclusion rested on the assumption that the only end I was working towards in putting out a zine was sharing my writing. In fact, I found the whole process of making zines thrilling—laying them out, designing a cover, breaking into the copy shop late at night to run them off, the satisfaction of hard work, and most of all, the exquisite torment of waiting. Delayed gratification can be far greater than immediate satisfaction. Not to be coarse, but have you ever tried to hold off an orgasm for as long as possible? It’s usually better.
And look, I’m not saying that conversation is inherently somewhere that ideas go to die. There are some people with whom I talk about ideas to think them through. Becca, my girlfriend and the editor of this newsletter, is someone who I’m constantly talking with. A big part of why I had a crush on her for 5 straight years before we dated was that on the afternoon we met, we couldn’t stop talking to each other. It felt incredible! After the first afternoon we spent together I wanted to be around her all the time and now, baruch hashem, I get to.
I digress. Productivity in conversation isn’t confined to the intimate space of my romantic relationship. My friends Aaron, Ben, and Tamara are three people I can think of who I had long, generative conversations with last month while I was in New York. I think it’s no coincidence that in all three of those conversations occurred one on one, during meandering walks, but I think Walking & Talking is a whole other topic, so I’ll save that for later.
So what’s the difference then? Obviously talking can be good, riffing can be good. When I discussed this piece with Becca, she asked if it didn’t actually just come down to what I was seeking in the conversation. “It’s a distinction between doing something and being percieved as doing it. When you approach a conversation looking to engage with ideas vs looking to be recognized as cool or funny, not that there’s anything wrong with wanting to be recognized as cool or funny.” And she’s right. Doing things is harder and takes more investment than seeming like you do them. In the end it all comes down to the age old question of whether or not you’re a poser.
THE WEEKND - HEARTLESS
A few weeks ago I was at the co-op when this frantic Bette Midler approached me in the bulk herb section waving a jar of mullein. “Is this good for a cough? I heard this is good for a cough?” I told her it was, and she seemed momentarily relieved before her brow once again furrowed in panic. “What’s good to treat a fever? He’s got a fever too.” I suggested elderflower and yarrow to promote sweating, as well as honey and garlic for their antiseptic properties. I also told her that I was far from an herbalist, and maybe she should take my advice with a grain of salt. “I figured the people in here,” and she gestured around the co-op in mild disgust, “would know better than me. I don’t want to take him to the doctor, they’ll just say to give him Robitussin and he doesn’t like things that aren’t natural.” At this point I became alarmed that perhaps I was passively abetting the neglect of a minor, so I asked the woman, “is this for a child?” “Yes,” she answered confidently, then paused. “Well, he’s 31.”
In his song “Heartless,”* the Weeknd sets the energy of this 31-year-old adult baby to an infectious pop beat. While the Weeknd’s entire career has been built on the twin pillars that you know you’ll regret fucking him but you’ll do it anyway, and that he wants to be better but just can’t change because there’s something so broodingly broken about him, he’s managed to do so in a way that neatly captures the sociopathic charisma of men like him. The hits on his records Beauty Behind the Madness and Starboy all make it very clear that he is a bad person, but there’s something magnetic about him. There’s a charm there that is undeniable and compelling.
Initially on “Heartless,” The Weeknd is no more bald than usual about his pathos. In the second line, when he says he’s “tryna find somebody that can fix me,” no one is surprised. This is his typical cocktail of just self-aware enough to rope you in mixed with with just enough plausible deniability that it was an admission of willingness to change to weasel out of it. It’s later in this first stanza, however, when he sings “Amphetamines got my stummy feelin sickly” where the Weeknd goes from his normal Fuckboy Envoy to The Baby from Dinosaurs.
There’s something vulgar about adults doing Kid Talk in any context. Once at a sandwich store in San Francisco, a man told me my “sammy” was ready. I snatched it from his hand and brusquely muttered “I’m a fucking grown up” as I left, repulsed. This is an aesthetic preference on my part, not an objective truth, so if you’re a grown up baby talker and feeling attacked, please remember that the fact that you don’t have enough faith in yourself and confidence in your preferences to own this is an indication that on some level, you know you’re wrong. Lol jk, everyone should do whatever they want, I don’t care.
The point is, while I find adults infantilizing themselves to be generally odious, there’s something particularly insidious about the context in which the Weeknd does it. The word “stummy,” a portmanteau of stomach and tummy, evokes the image of a child who is old enough to want to call their abdomen by its adult name, but is still unable to do so. What reads as an adorable striving towards maturity from a toddler reads as a performative helplessness and false of vulnerability coming from a 30-year-old man, two pathetic traits! The whole thing about the Weeknd is that even though he clearly sucks, he’s at least supposed to be cool and there’s nothing cool about the word “stummy.”
* I didn’t have the column space to discuss this VIDEO in the print newsletter, but let me just say, the choice to cosplay Hunter S. Thompson, a publicly sexless journalist and sanctimonious dipshit adored mostly by those who are spiritually and emotionally teen boys regardless of their age, is an interesting one to say the least.