Jan 05 2009
Where is the danger?
“People have seizures. People faint. People have mysterious heart conditions that rear up and kill them at sixteen years of age. Do coaches then rise up and solemnly discuss about how all coaches should be heart specialists because of the great responsibilities of training potentially fragile athletes? No. They put the kid in shorts, and they put him out on the court.
If I’m driving my car and a friend in the passenger seat has a heart attack, am I at fault for not being a surgeon? For not having nitroglycerine on hand?
If I’m passionately screwing away at the advanced age of 97, and suddenly my entire brain explodes in one final orgasm that snuffs me out like a candle dipped in blood, will that sweet young thing beneath me be responsible for not knowing that that massive embolism was waiting for the right moment to end my lifelong perversity? Of course not. She has enough to worry about.
What goes on when people overfetishize safety is that they’re relapsing in the old frame of mind that what we’re doing is bad. It’s dangerous. It’s scary. It has the potential to get out of hand. That’s why we surround ourselves with rules, and we make a slogan into a mantra. Why we police ourselves and each other with an obsession aimed at making our love life and play into the sanest, safest, most consensual drama ever enacted in a relationship.
Well, life ain’t safe. I get up, and everyday I do things that place my body and life in danger. I take showers, and we all know how many people bash their brains out in the tub every year. I stand on rickety chairs to change light bulbs. I drive in New`York. I walk through dark Manhatten streets in a meat packing district in very queer clothing. I drink. I go to gyms, and I abuse my body, and then I sit in saunas. People die in them, you know. I eat meat. I eat sugar. I ride horses. I shovel snow, and I write, and I edit pornographic books under my real name in a conservative administration. I have joined the ACLU. If I wanted to, I could take up karate and I could go skiing. I could buy a motorcycle. This is all deadly stuff.
And life ain’t sane, in case you haven’t noticed. Any world where kids are born unwanted and people die from hunger, where tobacco is subsidized and artists are not, where one gender is dominant and one’s skin tone, and where rapists get out on bail and pot smokers get thirty-year sentences, this is not a fucking sane world. So who gets to judge my relative sanity? Doctors? Lawyers? Or other perverts?”
I didn’t write this. The writer Laura Antoniou did.
I just ask…… are you aware where is the danger?
Is it coming from the politic, the school board, the rap music, the chemicals in our food? The religious extremism, the crazy student with easy access to guns? The Supreme Court or the too noisy new neighbor?
The depression? The loneliness? The fat in that McDonalds?
In having too rules or too few rules? In keeping alive a troubled marriage or in risking everything and leave?
Where your danger comes from? How do you protect yourself?
