I'm a Stranger Here Myself
a fake radio show
These are all songs given to me by SoundCloud around 2017, 2018. I listened to them riding the bus to and from work at the copy shop and I listened to them at work after my boss left and I listened to them walking around Vancouver. I know almost nothing about these bands, except that a few of them come from the same record labels, Trouble In Mind, Faux Discsx, PNKSLM1. In the delicious glut of mostly unknown music SoundCloud gave me during that time, I seemed to take two separate paths: girl music that went far off into the spaces I’d always been most fond of, and dude music the likes of which I’d never allowed myself to wallow in before. This one is the dude music. Expect the other side sometime in the future.
LISTEN TO THE FAKE RADIO SHOW ON MIXCLOUD HERE
I want to include a couple of corrections, and some news:
In my January 16th post, I forgot to mention that Tumblr was a platform I used a LOT, I made so many online friends there and developed my aesthetic vocabulary.
In my January 20th post, I gave the WRONG NAME of the school my dad went to! He went to the University of Illinois, NOT the University of Chicago.
And in NEWS, my short story “Breeders” is going to be published by Room Magazine, Canada’s oldest feminist literary magazine, in June 2025!
Let’s add a Subscribe button and move on.
I have no idea how weird my position is. I was a teenage dyke from ages 15 to 20, then I fell in love with a bi dude, and we’ve been together for almost 22 years now. I consider myself to have been a girl, who then failed to grow up to be a woman. I’m a nonbinary adult who prefers dudes, but aside from my partner, dudes are only a fantasy to me. I was recently revising a short story that contained a lot of my own background: when I was a kid, whether as a warning or because she had no one else to gossip with, my mom told me what happened to a neighbor girl who sometimes babysat me. While she was home alone one weekend, some boys from her high school came over, drunk, pissed and vomited on her parents’ furniture, and threw dining room chairs into the lake. The boys claimed that she had invited them, had thrown a party, had been drinking too. This sounded to me like the worst thing that could possibly happen. The only way to ensure that it did not happen to me, was to never make friends with boys. Therefore, I never really had friends who were boys until college.
It so happened that of my close knit group of 4 girls in middle school, 3 of us were queer. Two of us continued on into Olympia’s queer punk scene, got an apartment together a month before graduation, created a very homosocial world. Our senior year of high school, when we’d drive my car around smoking out boys from work (McDonald’s) or queer youth group, we couldn’t always hear what they were saying, their voices at a lower register than we were accustomed to paying attention to. When we started partying with the boys from work, I’d crack myself up taking beers out of their hands and drinking them, while they smiled indulgently.
Before Kaden and I were together-together, we were roommates, starting when we were 19. He had worked at a record store east of Seattle during high school, and had one foot in Seattle’s emo/hardcore scene and one in Olympia’s dyke punk scene. He brought with him some music I could not, could not stand (he also brought really great rock & roll like Love as Laughter, Tight Bros, and the Mooney Suzuki: I’m not complaining, I’m just telling a story). When we talk about what we were listening to back then, Kaden describes my record collection as more curated. Really, I was broke and frugal. I cared about music deeply, but I was happy to listen to all Patti Smith, Sleater-Kinney, The Need, all the time. I was very excited to finally hear what The Gits, X, and X-Ray Spex sounded like, from Kaden’s collection, having read about them for years. Once, I paged through an Adrian Tomine comic he left lying around and was absolutely mortified by the pathetic boy-man characters. I felt dirty reading it, in the bad way. I don’t think there was even a discourse around sadsack fuckboys back then, this was 2003, but I intuitively knew that these guys, trying to drag down successful girls with their depression were, like, the worst.
But then I got weird with my so-called heterosexuality, starting with the MC5 (“the MC5 made me straight,” I used to say), moving into R. Crumb, The Big Lebowski, Tom of Finland, Captain Beefheart, I don’t know, it made sense to me, it was what my early to mid-20s were made of. Coming out as queer again with Kaden in our late 20s was a huge relief, and freed us up to do more weird stuff like become totally obsessed with Deerhunter and Bradford Cox, and move to Albuquerque, where I went to massage school. But it wasn’t for a few more years, when I met younger people identifying as nonbinary, and began to understand myself as such, that I was really able to finally live for the first time. So, you know, fuck anyone saying nonbinary isn’t a thing, because it’s the only thing that has enabled me to have inner agency in my entire life.
I’m one of those assholes who was always like “I have no internalized homophobia!” and I never did, about being a girl who liked girls. But I wonder how much of my historical avoidance of boys and men and dudes has been a convoluted internalized homo/transphobia. Even though I consider myself friends with a handful of men in adulthood, I have closer friendships with women (so does Kaden, for what it’s worth). I never expect that a dude will take me seriously, in any sense.
The other day, Kaden accused me of only reading books about dudes, which is SO TOTALLY NOT TRUE (but I’m keeping track of the books I read this year, so we’ll find out for sure!). Ever since I was thirteen or fourteen, old enough to walk to the library search the catalog by myself, I’ve gravitated towards books about gay boys and men, and it’s also what I’ve always written. It’s still what I write. My linked short story collection includes a fictional band, Solar Plexus, made up of queer dudes, and maybe they sound kind of like any of the bands on this fake radio show. This mix is one hour, and I took exactly one hour to write this post, while I was recording it.
LISTEN TO THE FAKE RADIO SHOW ON MIXCLOUD HERE
Kaden and I always call PNKSLM Pink Slime even though it’s Punk. This became a label I listened to a lot more of, falling in love with their bands Magic Potion, Holiday Ghosts, ShitKid, and Beach Skulls.