round 2
(12) styx, “mr. roboto”
delayed
(4) SHEENA EASTON, “MORNING TRAIN (9 TO 5)”
135-96
and will play in the sweet 16
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 11.
T FLEISCHMANN ON “MORNING TRAIN (9 TO 5)”
How do men listen to music and what is bad?
I started caring about music when I was in the seventh grade, after I got a small CD player for Christmas. I went to a school dance, where I heard the song “Why Haven’t I Heard from You” by Reba McEntire. It captivated me in the junior high gymnasium, and offered a perfect emotional landscape in which to cast myself as I pined over this butch girl in my class, a girl who did not call me on the phone anymore, like how the man Reba scolds in the song does not call her on the phone, either. The next chance I got, I bought three Reba CDs to compliment my only other album, by Ace of Base.
That was 1997, and since, I have maintained just the worst taste in music. I listen to absolute trash, over and over, with little to no variation. Specifically, I tend toward the soft rock spectrum, with lots of lady singer-songwriters from the 1970s through the 1990s. It’s what you hear on Delilah, the radio call-in show that premiered one year before I found Reba, in 1996. To this day, five nights a week, someone calls in like, Delilah, help, my kids have gone to college and my husband doesn’t buy me flowers anymore. In response, Delilah asks, does your husband show you that he loves you in other ways? But she does not listen to the answer. Delilah just mouths a few platitudes and then plays a wildly inappropriate song, maybe in this instance “Pina Coladas,” an absolute banger about getting caught in the rain and infidelity.
In the evenings, all my adult life, I have listened to Delilah play my favorite songs. She plays my Hall and Oates. She plays my Jewel. She gives me my Lionel Richie and my Air Supply, and maybe, if I am lucky, a little pop country, just for the hell of it. Occasionally these songs are “good,” but most often, and even when they are good, they are quite bad.
Hush, I say to my husband as I turn the radio back up after a commercial break. Delilah is back.
I don’t think cishet men listen to Delilah. Not because they listen to good music (I’ve heard what they like!), but I think because they listen to music differently than everyone else. The gloss goes, in a shortage of media that parallels our own experiences of gender and sexuality, the associated gays and women project ourselves outside of our identities, into straight worlds and boy worlds. In a dominant culture in which only men and women sang, I, untethered, sang along to everything. I could become the vocalist or her object of affection, everything in endless gay variation forever. Wide open spaces, room to make a big mistake, where I fly some girl as high as I can into the wild blue. The island and the stream both, I’ve been waiting for a girl like me.
From what I understand, when they listen to music, men just pretend to be the men. This would make it difficult to immerse in most of the Delilah songs, which, even when sung by men, are most often about the emotional lives of women. By men here I mean like straight white dudes with jobs or whatever. Guys who would maybe get a song like Sheena Easton’s ridiculously catchy hit “9 to 5” stuck in their heads, but even then, would never imagine themselves as the woman singing the song. Men, I assume, do not happily sing about how some guy takes another train home again to find me waiting for him. If anything, the song just offers straight men an opportunity to fantasize about going to work and treating a girlfriend properly.
Incidentally, I am confident that straight women do, in fact, imagine themselves all over the radio because straight women are desperate to be any kind of gay. I know this because when I was younger I spent a lot of my time with straight women, and they liked to confess their secrets to faggots, often with a cocktail or cigarette. This happened a lot in the early 2000s because of how the cable station Bravo rebranded itself. And constantly during those years, straight women told me that they wished they were either a gay woman or a gay man. Sometimes they would also confess to playing around at lesbian things. So based on this I’m sure that straight women love singing the boy parts, too.
None of these generalizations really apply to the youth, though. At a protest recently, my partner heard a bunch of kids chanting “Hear the youth calling, gender nonconforming.” I thought this was a horribly embarrassing thing to chant and so I kept chanting it for weeks, around the house and when I was walking to the library. “Here the youth calling, gender nonconforming.” It was catchy. Catchy like my baby takes the morning train, with that nice emphasis on public transport. Like he works from nine to five and then! But even though I think, personally, that “hear the youth calling, gender nonconforming” is not the kind of thing we need to be chanting at rallies right now, I can’t really blame anyone who is chanting it, what with how men have been for so long stuck in their tacky genders, not imagining themselves into Bette Midler songs. The youth are just trying to help, my partner explained to me.
Gender, like music, persists long after it is outdated. Like 1981, when Easton’s literally unforgettable smash hit competed on the charts with Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and Rick James’s “Super Freak.” Or how straight men still walk around thinking that they are straight in the year 2020.
“9 to 5” is weirdly anachronistic in this way, too—not timeless, but the qualities that make it perfect sitcom sequence music also make it sound more like a late 50s la-di-da than a theme for the early 80s girl of the world. On surface, it’s hard to find a more regressive idea of gender from that year’s pop culture, with everyone from Miss Piggy in the Great Muppet Caper to Joanie Cunningham in Happy Days displaying more liberating visions of heterosexuality than the singer in Easton’s hit. The title even has a progressive predecessor from a year earlier, the Lily Tomlin / Dolly Parton / Jane Fonda movie 9 to 5, where some bad bitches get drunk and kind of kill their boss, a lovely romp.
But the regressive romantic vision that two-hit wonder Easton offers is what is maybe good about the song, or if not good, then bad. Good and bad like the songs on an episode of Delilah. I do not want any of that noxious romance in my actual life, where I react allergically to displays of attachment and coupledom. Disgusting. Yet when it’s Carly Simon’s 1987 comeback hit “Coming Around Again,” I love that shit. I sing it all day long to the husbands and wives in my mind.
“9 to 5,” like this, does heterosexuality, making what is outdated about it catchy (man goes to work, lady doesn’t). And the woman, yes, she is in love with this man. What makes Easton’s song so brilliant, though, is that she only sings half of heterosexuality, the part where the man goes away. In fact, she devotes the lyrics to describing in specific detail what it is that this man’s going-away should be about:
He goes to work every day, and takes public transit to do so.
When he comes home, he gives her sex if she wants it, sometimes all night without rest.
On occasion, he is allowed to take her to the movies, dinner, dancing, or alternatively, to “anything [she] wants.”
She gets his money.
In contrast, the woman’s responsibilities and time are left undefined. She says that she’ll be around in the evening, which seems fine, considering that they sex each other all night long—a reasonable thing to stick around for. And during the day, she thinks fondly of her man, also fine considering the legendary dick he’s apparently giving her, and which she brags about for much of the song. But outside of getting horny for the sex, no part of the singer’s days goes to the man, these days that “seem to last forever,” blank slates through which she can do anything she wants. She does not clean, she does not work, she does not brush her hair. Whatever she does, it’s none of your business.
What a cool bitch.
The way we listen to songs has as much to do with what makes them good or bad as the song itself. Whoever you are, listen to “9 to 5” again, and allow yourself to become the singer. Revel in this glorious song about a man who leaves to earn money, then comes home to give you that money and, when you want it, sex. Imagine, as the chorus returns, all the things you might do if left alone with your days, and relieved of two of the constant struggles in which so many of us live, the labor hell of endless capitalism and the humiliation of tracking down dick to suck. Without these burdens, where else might your time go? Smoke joints and read novels, maybe, or carry on lesbian affairs with your neighbors. Perhaps you would organize your friends into a small group to wait outside of the local prison and help recently released people connect with resources and housing. Maybe you would burn down an oil line, or train yourself to be a very good spy.
Really, it can be anything, la-di-da and catchy like Easton’s song. Don’t worry, you won’t have to tell your man about it, or acknowledge in any way that you have a private life. The man, who only sings along to the boy parts of songs anyway, does not ask. And with how broken the public transit system is in the United States, he might well be gone for ten, eleven hours a day, hours in which you might privately bloom.
This particular cultural, political, environmental moment is as good as any for the people of the mainstream United States to do what should have been done centuries ago, to disrupt the normal flow of events and dismantle the settler state. The consequence of the United States continuing as it has been seems quite clearly to be apocalypse. But still, the horrors of the world screaming, people go on. They go to corporate jobs, drive cars, watch shitty entertainment about straight people, marry, and so on. The men intuit that they should do something different, I think, but still, they are unwilling to stop, as unwilling to imagine themselves as someone else as I am unwilling to listen to music that came out later than 2005. This makes the men seem like pussies but whatever, that’s just kind of how it is. I didn’t ask to believe that Sheryl Crow’s Tuesday Night Music Club is one of the best albums of all time but when I put the tape on, my ears don’t lie.
Easton’s sweet, celebratory, infectious song gives these aimless men something they can hold onto, which is again just to take public transit to work and then give their money to women, and also to satisfy their sexual partners properly.
By the logic of straight men, where the boy parts of songs are what matters, I think that this must feel pretty great. Easton really throws herself into the eroticization of the guy going away to work, and the lady being horny for him. She makes it so that, if you were a guy, presumably, you’d just really want to go along with what she’s talking about. In the music video, she seductively rides her bicycle to the train station, sending you off with a moan, then humps the train itself. It’s kind of silly, sure, but again, I like to pretend to be a femme singing about her lost dyke while I croon along to Vanessa Carlton (brilliant), so no one is trying to judge here.
And, perhaps most beautifully, men do not actually need a Sheena Easton of their own to do this, just like I did not need an actual Indigo Girl in my life, but in fact only needed myself to go to the doctor, mountain, and fountains. There are women all over the world who want money and who have been denied it by white supremacy, and men, single or partnered, can just give their money directly to these women. You simply go to Twitter and search “pay black trans women,” cruise around for a minute with your social media literacy, and then get to it with your Venmo and your Paypal. And just as any person can listen to “9 to 5” and dance around the apartment and think of all the things you might do, unencumbered, while your man is at work, so too any person with a job can do the boy parts of the song. So too can white women, for instance, give their money to black and brown trans women.
Yes, as Easton shows, it feels good to give away the money. And when a man then listens to the radio, he can know that Easton is singing about how good he is, so long as he has given his money to women already. Because women love men who take public transit and then give all their money away so much, they write songs about it. And everyone, literally everyone, wants to be loved by women.
Sexuality and gender never fit comfortably into themselves anyway. I’m sure, for instance, that rat-faced Pete Buttigieg only sings the boy parts, and that Jeff Goldblum pretends to be the lady. And thank the goddess, we’re not left with only the artifacts of the shitty culture these days. The straight lie is weaker, and the youth are chanting. We don’t have to be anyone we don’t want to be. And when we find ourselves burdened with our identities and our habits anyway, still, we can imagine new lives inside of them, as gloriously as I have imagined a transsexual fantasia through the hit singles of the band Chicago.
Because it’s the culture itself that is bad. The state, the family, your job. But if you’re going to listen to the music anyway, Sheena Easton’s “9 to 5?” I fucking love that song. It’s a god damn hit and you know it.
T Fleischmann is the author of Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through and Syzygy, Beauty.
“What Not To Do To Your Roboto”: berry grass on “mr. roboto”
“I've got a secret I've been hiding under my skin/ My heart is human, my blood is boiling, my brain I.B.M.” —Styx, “Mr. Roboto”
“Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.” —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Is “Mr. Roboto” even a bad song? I mean, are concept rock operas inherently bad? Do synthesizers make a song bad? Is there something bad about a cinematic 40 second mood-setting opener? Are robots bad? Is thinking robots are bad bad? Is showing gratitude to robots bad? Is it bad to be thankful?
If you look at Styx’s 2nd most popular—but also 1st most reviled—single as an assemblage of its constituent parts, “Mr. Roboto” is extremely my shit. It sounds like The Cars and Steven Sondheim and Journey and Genesis all got together to nerd out over episodes of Kamen Rider & wrote a song about it. Almost every one of my favorite albums of all time is a ridiculous concept album, and when I put on “Mr. Roboto” I hear in its layering of synth sounds, down-tuned power chords, operatic lead vocals, & character-dialogue-for-lyrics some groundwork of concept album bands that have my whole heart: Ayreon, Pain of Salvation, Queensryche, Kamelot, The Mars Volta, Opeth, Wolverine, Porcupine Tree. It feels like an extension of Renaissance, ELP, Yes, and Camel, only trading progressive & symphonic chops for emerging electronic flair (a downgrade, admittedly). It’s a song that tries to make something commercial out of the esoteric.
Sure, the punk rockers and new wavers that controlled college radio and the popular music press in the 80s hated it for being too emotional, too grandiose, too pretentious, too cheesy. As a lifelong fan of progressive rock, heavy metal, and musical theater, I know that cheesiness is often the ultimate form of sincerity in art. Cheesiness is vulnerability. Cheesiness is more punk than punk. Rolling Stone in the 80s (& 90s? & 2000s? &…) reads like literary critics who scoff at genre writing in favor of domestic realism. Is a song that’s literally about a man imprisoned for rock & roll crimes who pretends to be a robot in order to escape prison cheesy? Yes. It’s also a song about being thankful for the coping mechanisms that saved us but no longer serve us. Is that sincere? Yes.
*
“I am the modern man (secret, secret; I’ve got a secret)/ who hides behind a mask (secret, secret; I’ve got a secret)/ so no one else can see (secret, secret; I’ve got a secret)/ my true identity.”—Styx, “Mr. Roboto”
“I have invented a mask that makes me look like anybody. People will not even turn round in the streets.”— Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera
*
Nearly every interaction in my daily life is spent wearing a mask to normalize me & my neurodiversity. The term “masking” describes the way that autistic & otherwise neurodiverse people learn to hide/camouflage/obfuscate their social and sensory difficulties, because to do otherwise results in targeted harassment and discrimination, reduced opportunities, and general ostracization. It takes a lot of active brainpower to remember to perform social cues that do not come naturally for me: eye contact; smiling; small talk; socially-appropriate phrases or sounds while someone else is talking to indicate my continued listening; trying not to talk at length about the things that excite us; trying not to connect with someone sharing their emotions by talking about times when you’ve felt a similar emotion; using prepared, replicatable facial and verbal reactions that center everybody’s feelings but my own; etc. I am a good and attentive listener. I care, deeply, about others. I have many emotions. But none of that is seen unless I play a character version of myself, honed by a lifetime of social trial and error, that’s legible to other people.
One of the harmful stereotypes of autistic people is that we are devoid of or deficient in emotions. Basically robots. It comes from the incorrect notion of autism as an “extreme male brain” (which itself comes from reifying harmful ideas of a gender binary), and the prevalence of this stereotype among clinicians & diagnosticians results in women and other gender minorities being drastically underdiagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, especially in their youth. Because of socialization under patriarchy, gender minorities are socialized to be more attuned to the emotions of others and, not coincidentally, autistic gender minorities are about 300% more likely to employ masking than cisgender, heterosexual autistic men and boys. Gender minorities so often go undiagnosed because they escape notice, because they don’t look like what parents and teachers and doctors expect, because they aren’t seen.
The thing about masking for autistic people is that the more we use it to reduce the external consequences of being autistic in a world reluctant to understand us, there are internal consequences. We meltdown. Shutdown. Bear the brunt of short-term and long-term stress, of anxiety, of depression. We may dissociate. We may hurt ourselves. We may impact our jobs because of the time it takes us to recover. We may lose friendships because people don’t want to understand us.
*
“The time has come at last/ to throw away this mask/ so everyone can see/ my true identity!/ I'm Kilroy! Kilroy! Kilroy! Kilroy!” —Styx, “Mr. Roboto”
“A person is guilty when he: being masked or in any manner disguised by unusual or unnatural attire or facial alteration, loiters, remains or congregates in a public place with other persons so masked or disguised, or knowingly permits or aids persons so masked or disguised to congregate in a public place; except that such conduct is not unlawful when it occurs in connection with a masquerade party or like entertainment if permission is first obtained from the police or other appropriate authorities;” —New York Consolidated Laws, Penal Law - PEN § 240.35(4) Loitering
“Because we want no more death and trickery for our people, because we want no more forgetting. The mountain told us to take up arms so we would have a voice. It told us to cover our faces so we would have a face. It told us to forget our names so we could be named. It told us to protect our past so we would have a future.” —Subcomandante Marcos
*
Whether you come to agree with me or not that “Mr. Roboto” is decidedly not a bad song, you should know that the song is part of Styx’s 1982 concept rock opera, Kilroy Was Here, and that the album’s story is totally bonkers, and all in all it may be the most politically confused concept album I’ve ever heard. It’s so simultaneously unintuitive and inane that the band had to play a 10 minute short film prologue dramatizing the album’s conceit before their concerts began.
Set in some vague, 1984-esque dystopian United States, we learn in the prologue that the country is being ruled in part by the authoritarian group Majority for Musical Morality, and its leader, Dr. Everett Righteous. Styx modeled the group quite transparently after televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr. & his political organization, Moral Majority. In “Kilroy Was Here,” Righteous has lobbied for? enacted? a total ban on rock music. The short film opens with a bustling mob of people throwing records & guitars into an ever-widening pyre. This majority seems perplexingly youth-driven, only in a choice that predicts the 4chan alt-right incels of the mid-2010s many of them are wearing Dick Tracy-style fedoras. The staging is meant to invoke the infamous pictures of Nazis burning all of the research & history & records at Magnus Hirschfield’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, which was the premier site of sexology research in the world at the time, with a specific goal of bettering the lives of gay and trans people.
The album has two protagonists. One is the rebellious youth, Jonathan Chance, who is leading an underground rock insurgency against Dr. Righteous. The other is the legendary rocker, Robert Orin Charles Kilroy (his initials are R.O.C.K.! Whoa!), who brutally attacked a member of the Majority for Musical Morality (or did he? Was he framed??) & is now serving a life sentence in prison and...ok, I can sense the look on your face. You think this is bad. Well, you’re right. But there’s more!
The prison that Kilroy is serving time at is using a fleet of Japanese-manufactured, human-shaped robot prison guards. Robotos. Jonathan Chance breaks into the prison & manages to send a message to Kilroy, including an instruction manual for the Robots, titled “What Not To Do To Your Roboto.” Kilroy takes special notice of the page that identifies the Roboto’s groin as a weak spot, for some reason.
Kilroy manages to take down a Roboto in private, break open the Roboto’s head, and then wear its head like a mask. Kilroy then dons the Roboto’s prison guard attire, which somehow fits him correctly, and proceeds to escape prison by pretending to be a Roboto.
In some unspecified number of days? weeks?, Roboto-Kilroy keeps up the disguise while travelling on foot to some unknown destination. He then encounters Jonathan Chance by chance after hours at a Rock & Roll Museum, which features animatronic recreations of Elvis Presley and Jimi Hendrix, ala the Rock-afire Explosion robots at Chuck E Cheese restaurants. Jonathan Chance soon realizes that the museum is a propaganda site meant to depict Rock & Roll as morally deviant and dangerous. The main exhibit is a recreation of Robert Orin Charles Kilroy bashing a Moral Majority dweeb with a guitar. Jonathan Chance momentarily begins to question the cause of rock, wondering if Kilroy really is a bad guy, when Roboto-Kilroy confronts him and starts singing about how he’s got a secret & he’s not just a Roboto & it takes the length of the song for Kilroy to unmask & let Jonathan Chance know that he is, in fact, the Kilroy of rock legend.
If you’re still following—yes, you have it correct: ALL of that bonkers storyline is the prologue to the song “Mr. Roboto.” The song doesn’t make sense within the story of the album unless you watch all of that. And while I find that the song makes resonant sense isolated from the album’s concept & visuals, it becomes confusing when taken in the context of the overall story. Kilroy seems very thankful for the Roboto, who he killed and used to find freedom & sort of became intertwined with. But there’s also the brief moment in the song where Kilroy sings about the destructive problem of too much technology in our lives. The song that is literally titled after expressing gratitude to a Roboto also explicitly states that the Robotos are on the side of dehumanization & authoritarian control.
So which is the mask: the gratitude for the Roboto, or the condemnation? Does Kilroy even know? Does the band?
*
“So if you see me acting strangely, don't be surprised./ I'm just a man who needed someone, and somewhere to hide/ to keep me alive. Just keep me alive.” —Styx, “Mr. Roboto”
“Sometimes, to become somebody else, you have to become nobody first.” —Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars
*
I’m a trans woman. That I can relate to the concept of hiding within somebody or something else—at worst confined within the other self, at best an uncomfortable compromise because of circumstances beyond one’s control—in order to survive should be obvious. That I can relate to being thankful for no longer needing to hide should be obvious.
*
“The problem's plain to see:/ too much technology./ Machines to save our lives./ Machines dehumanize.” —Styx, “Mr. Roboto”
“Fuck it, mask off.” —Future, “Mask Off”
*
There’s a phrase that’s seen plenty of use on social media the past few years, as politicians and celebrities and commentators and general discourse in the United States pushes ever rightward: “mask off.” As in, some people are saying the quiet part out loud. Conservatives are fully embracing fascism. Neoliberal pundits are increasingly not trying to hide their disdain for the poor. Arts institutions and publishing companies flagrantly pursue a politics of marginalization—celebrating their funding from subprime mortgage lenders and pharmaceutical giants; throwing release parties with barbed wire table settings for books about migrants; tokenizing the select few marginalized writers allowed through the gates. So much un-pretending.
As much as I dig the sound of the song, it’s undeniably true that in the context of the album’s concept & music video, “Mr. Roboto” is racist. It feels at first as if “Kilroy Was Here” has a liberal politic: it has a clear message of artistic freedom in the face of religious authoritarianism that strongly critiques the Satanic Panic of the 80s. But the album & short film quickly veer into xenophobia, needing audiences to know that the ban on rock music is enforced by made-in-Japan Robotos. Growing up in the Midwest, I heard all sorts of disdain for “foreign” motor vehicles. The Japanese car industry was made into a boogeyman that was hurting American workers, redirecting the blame away from the real evildoers—wealthy executives for GM, Ford, etc. During the prologue short film, the imprisoned Kilroy does a mocking bow to a Roboto guard while another prisoner insults the Roboto by saying “your mother was a Toyota.” Later, when Kilroy dispatches the Roboto he would disguise himself with, the Roboto crumples to the ground saying “Ow, Kawasaki!”
The villainization of the Japanese motor industry is not subtext here, it’s text text, a total Mask Off moment, and it leads directly to the villainization of Japanese people. The heads of the Robotos, featured prominently in the video & on the album cover & in Styx’s live show, are obscenely racist. With an exaggerated overbite & slanted eyes, they look just like the World War II propaganda caricature illustrations of Japan’s General Hideki Tojo. Even the album’s title is a reference to World War II; U.S. soldiers often left graffiti behind them after conflict in towns or villages, the most infamous tag from that time being “Kilroy Was Here.” So, Kilroy,“machines dehumanize,”? Or are you blaming the wrong thing.
The Redress Movement to win reparations for the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII had been going on for close to two decades before Styx released “Kilroy Was Here” on February 22, 1983. Literally two days later, February 24, the federal Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians made its official determination after years of study that the internment was a failure of justice, and that a [meager, paltry] reparations of $20,000 should be paid to every survivor of internment.
I lack the positionality or interest in making an apologia or defense for Styx’s conceptual and visual racism. I think the song itself has its own merits. But, arguably, choosing to look at “Mr. Roboto” in isolation from those things is its own obfuscation, its own act of hiding.
*
“Thank you very much, Mr. Roboto/ for doing the jobs that nobody wants to./ And thank you very much, Mr. Roboto/ for helping me escape just when I needed to./ Thank you. Thank you, thank you./ I want to thank you. Please, thank you.” —Styx, “Mr. Roboto”
“Gratitude in women is a quality like electricity: it has to be produced, projected, and consumed all in the same instant to exist at all.” —William Faulkner, The Town
*
The way to make this essay legible as a literary essay would be to bring all of its various threads together here, at the end, to make the thinking feel neater, more tidy, than perhaps it actually is. To give readers the satisfaction of all the pieces falling into place. I don’t feel like making that move happen with this essay.
I’ve been thinking this whole time about wearing a mask and nothing about it is tidy. Drama and Comedy. Existing as not your true self and as more than yourself. Masking is both good and bad for me. But its only good because of the circumstances that necessitate it in the first place. Similarly the painful gendered compromises that trans people make before transitioning can literally enable survival, but at a cost. It’d be better though if survival wasn’t contingent upon compromises. There can be beauty in removing a mask, in standing bright in one’s truth. There can be ugliness in removing a mask, if that mask was hiding bigotry or covering up abuses of power. There can be ugliness in wearing a mask if it enables your success at the exploitation of others. There can be beauty in wearing a mask if you and your comrades wear the same mask, centering collective struggle over personal identity.
I can be thankful for the small things I do every day to survive. I can be thankful that I’ve survived this long. And despite what Faulkner’s misogynist narrator thinks, I’d like to think that my gratitude looks towards past and future. Does Kilroy’s gratitude towards the Roboto he killed do the same, or is it fleeting, momentary? Is anyone’s gratitude its own mask? A veil of virtue hiding ugliness beneath it? I’m not going to answer those questions, because I’ve got a secret: I don’t have the answers. Maybe you do. Maybe you can make things legible.
Berry Grass has lived in rural Missouri, Tuscaloosa, and now Philadelphia. They are the author of Hall of Waters (The Operating System, 2019). Their essays and poems appear in DIAGRAM, The Normal School, Barrelhouse, and Sonora Review, among other publications. They are a 2019 nominee for the Krause Essay Prize. When they aren't reading submissions as Nonfiction Editor of Sundog Lit, they're embodying what happens when a Virgo watches too much professional wrestling.