Heat Wave

The heat wave has just ended and I am very happy about it. I’ve never been great with summer and with the heat or the humidity, but the realities of a changing climate just add a fresh sprinkle of stress and helplessness to everything. I’m glad that there are cooling centres open and a focus on making people aware of when it’s best to stay inside and how to deal with heat.

But the fact that this is necessary kind of makes everything feel a bit apocalyptic. At times like this, I wonder if we should go farther north in an effort to chase the snow and the cooler weather. Uproot our lives again and retreat further into wilderness and further into a more rural lifestyle. But then I also long for skyscrapers and lights at night. My feelings are complicated on this issue.

Don’t Expect Ponies

Gary Indiana’s Horse Crazy is definitely not about ponies. What it is about is New York in the waning years of the 1980s, while the AIDS epidemic is spreading and there begins to be a feeling of end-of-days in the air as people die, drift away, or otherwise become lost in the shuffle of the changing decade and cultural landscape.

The story follows a thirty-five-year-old writer (clearly to some extent a stand-in for Indiana himself) who is ensconced in the art scene of the Lower East Side. This writer meets and then rapidly becomes obsessed with a man named Gregory Burgess, a man who both does and does not want a relationship with the writer. He is a man who clearly displays evidence of sharp instability, a lack of empathy, and boundless narcissism, but for some reason the narrator cannot leave him alone and cannot move on. As AIDS becomes a looming and very real possibility, the narrator is left trying to determine just how much at risk he is and whether or not Burgess might be his psychological and physical downfall.

On Structure

Indiana is one of my favourite writers, but Horse Crazy is not one of my favourites of his works. I love his essays, and his novels that have a basis in real events or true crime are very compelling, but I think the fact that he straddles fact and fiction here does not help the narrative here. It feels like Indiana is too close to the subject to give it the structure that it needs. On the whole, there is less clarity to the work and less of trajectory. To some extent, this is intentional. This is a narrative driven by desire and the thwarting of that desire. But I found that there were a few times where Indiana frustrated just too many times, and it would have been easier to put down the book than to keep going.

The reader is supposed to be asking just why can’t all of these people kick Burgess to the curb — but how many times can I ask that question in the course of a little over 200 pages before I get too annoyed and the story challenges basic believability?

A Comparison

Horse Crazy is a novel that I propose is meant to both analyze the progress of desire and destroy the conventional picture of it that romances present. Not only is this published at a time when LGBT+ relationships were not depicted with any kind of regularity in literature, but it uses a framework that is used frequently in heterosexual romances.

This is an example of a red-flag romance before that term even existed. More than that it is  a red-flag romance that is critiquing ideas surrounding bad relationships and depicting them in anything approaching a good light. Horse Crazy at its core is a novel of lies. The lies of Burgess, the lies the narrator tells himself, and the lies of what is and is not attraction and desire — because it has crossed the line into obsession and self-harm.

Making Peace with Rain

I hate that rain is now something that upsets me. I know I have to heal from everything that happened over the winter, and I want to heal from it. I think the first step of that is making peace with the rain. Not worrying about when it comes or how much will come or how much we got overnight. Not sending my lovely spouse into the basement to check the walls constantly.

I need to somehow convince my anxious brain to have some faith in nature, and some faith in myself. That I can do difficult things. That I can be tough. Even if I feel very fragile right now.