the first round
(12) styx, “mr. roboto”
deprogrammed
(5) starland vocal band, “afternoon delight”
213-199
and will play on in the second round
Read the essays, watch the videos (if available), listen to the songs, feel free to argue, tweet at us, and consider. Then vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on March 2.
On Love, Fear, and Blooming Late: sarah kortemeier on “afternoon delight”
You really wanna know what love is?
I do, I do!
I have such a weird relationship with this song.
My whole generation, pretty much, knows the Starland Vocal Band song “Afternoon Delight” by heart because of a hit movie. In Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004), there’s an amazing scene where Ron “explains” “love” to Brick, Champ, and Brian by singing the first verse:
Gonna grab my baby, gonna hold her tight
Gonna grab some afternoon delight…
And then all four of them bust out into “Afternoon Delight,” a cappella, in four part harmony. Explaining the unexplainable:
I grin when I watch this scene, but I also feel like I’m missing something essential, like I’m not catching something everyone else seems to get. Hopefully this is not because I’m a humorless scold. I just totally missed this movie.
I moved to Japan in 2004 and I didn’t see “Anchorman” when it came out; the closest movie theater was two hours away on the train, and it cost something like USD $40 to see a film. We just didn’t go that often.
So when a pal of mine in Japan, a fellow American on an English teaching contract, asked if I wanted to record a version of “Afternoon Delight” I had no idea what he was talking about; I had never heard the song. But I said I’d do the recording. I didn’t want to seem too uncool or out of it by saying no. And I love learning songs; I’ve been a singer all my life, and I figured it would be fun to learn this one.
I don’t remember how my friend taught me the song—it’s entirely possible we learned it off a karaoke track, because we sang a lot of karaoke together—and I don’t remember him telling me why he wanted to record the song. It’s only now, listening to the recording we made, [1] that I realize we were covering Anchorman as much as we were covering Starland Vocal Band. You can tell because of the skyrockets. In the ‘70s original, the “skyrockets in flight” lyric is underlaid with an engine-revving sound, made with a pedal steel guitar .[2] In Anchorman, that sound becomes an even more sexually suggestive “booooOOOOOOP!” My pal booooOOOOOPS enthusiastically in the backing track for our version. [3] But we did use an accompanying guitar, and we did try for an SATB blend, as in Starland Vocal Band’s original. The original song has such a cheerful, choral lushness, in a way that is super 1970s.
I want to point something out here, because it feels important, not because I know where I’m going with the thought, exactly. “Afternoon Delight” is obviously rich fodder for parody. But the silliness and the badness of “Afternoon Delight,” the parody material, is mostly coming from the lyrics, not from the musicianship. Have a look, again, at Starland Vocal Band’s original music video for the song:
Look at that body language! Look how they cheat out to the studio audience for nearly the entire length of the song. (That opening shot, where two of the singers look long, long into each other’s eyes, is so painfully overstretched it’s kind of hard to watch.) They know. These singers absolutely know how silly these lyrics are. For a song about the joys of a nooner, the performers in this video look awfully uncomfortable to me.
HOWEVER. The choral work here is much, much better than anyone (including me) usually gives it credit for. The musicians themselves, in interviews, have tried to highlight the tight blend they were able to achieve, and it’s a shame that the cheesiness of everything else (the lyrics, the firecrackers, the steel pedal) overshadows their singing, because, in truth, this is a highly polished choral performance. I say that not because of the multiple layers of harmony—the harmonies are predictable, they’re just fleshing out the chord. I say that because these singers are so very unified, rhythmically and in their vowels.
Here’s a live performance. You’re going to hear that tight ensemble sound coming through particularly clearly in two areas: rhythmically, in their cutoffs (note how “delight” cuts off perfectly together, every time) and also in their vowel sounds. Listen for the phrase “wheeeeeeennnnn….everything’s a little clearer in the light of day”; watch their mouths on the “aa” sound in “afternoon.”
You hear that twang, that nasal edge, on the word “when?” That’s on purpose, and it’s something they would have rehearsed. Singers’ vowels don’t line up like that without intention.
Their consonants are good too. In this performance Starland Vocal Band brings out the consonants that are traditionally hard to hear in a singer’s performance, like the “f” sound in “afternoon,” and they very deliberately de-emphasize the consonants that tend to pop aggressively out of the texture, like the “t” sound at the end of “delight,” “flight,” etc. A performer’s treatment of the “t” sound usually reveals quite a bit about their training level. People without formal training in diction tend to overemphasize the easy sounds like “t”;[4] people with training tend to de-emphasize the easy sounds and bring out the buried ones. You can understand every word in this Starland Vocal Band performance without trying. I’m just here to tell you that that effortless-sounding clarity takes work and skill.
I watch this performance of “Afternoon Delight” and honestly I’m not sure what to make of it. These people are outstanding ensemble singers and they are working very hard to achieve a tightly unified sound. They’ve put a high level of vocal precision into the service of some very silly words. They wanted us to hear each of those words with crystalline clarity. The words must be important…?
Unfortunately, those silly lyrics have a lot of power for me and over me. I would never have admitted this to my friend at the time we were making our recording of “Afternoon Delight,” but as we learned the song together, I discovered that the lyrics made me really, really uncomfortable.
Oh, we had fun recording it. We overlaid a bunch of harmony tracks and spent a few Saturdays singing with a guitar: harmless. But those lyrics—the arch euphemisms, the cheesiness, the silliness—felt so unbelievably wrong coming out of my mouth. They definitely didn’t make me laugh. I just sort of gritted my teeth—except not literally, because you can’t sing like that—and got through the sessions as best I could. I was secretly relieved when we said “good enough” and stopped working on it.
The recording we made isn’t terrible, but it’s certainly rough around the edges. The things that are rough about it are pretty revealing, fifteen years later.
Some of the roughness in our recording is technical. There’s a little pitchiness in some of my higher harmonies, and my pal and I aren’t rhythmically locked in. Our entrances and cutoffs aren’t together, the vowels aren’t matching up, and the tempo and the energy drag as the song goes on. We’re not together on the basics. We took the trouble to overdub multiple harmony tracks on a cover that wasn’t really clicking yet as a duet. Rushed process, amateur-sounding product.
Much of the roughness comes, though, from insecurity. Specifically: mine.
My pal and I both sound best on our first entrances. He’s doing an over-the-top twang on the vowels and consciously aiming his voice through the nose, country-and-western style, as Starland Vocal Band did. I don’t match him in this, but in my first entrance you can absolutely hear me grinning through the words. It’s tongue-in-cheek, the sound is warm. We’re both at our most confident here, and while it’s not a ground-breaking cover, there’s nothing actively wrong.
The singing gets more tentative starting with the second verse:
Started out this morning feeling so polite,
which feels a little on-the-nose. My pal comes off a lot better in this recording than I do, overall, but he backs off in the second verse and there’s no question he’s losing energy because of me. I begin to sing scared at this point. We start to vary the harmonies, and the sexual euphemisms in the lyrics get sillier and sillier.
But you’ve got some bait a’waitin’ and I think I might
Try nibblin’ a little afternoon delight
I start singing so quietly that it gets tough to distinguish melody from backing vocals.
Let’s lay it out. This song touched on my biggest ignorances, the ones I was most ashamed of. I was afraid to sing or talk or think much about sexuality. I was twenty-five and I was afraid of sexuality, full stop. I’d been one of those shy, awkward kids who never got a date in high school; in young adulthood my love life could best be described as a series of non-embodied crushes, with the occasional interruption of a physical relationship. I was scared on a fundamental level of the vulnerability that comes with sex, the potential for humiliation. And I was deeply ashamed of both my fear and my ignorance: I was terrified my peers would find out I wasn’t normal.
I was too afraid of men to feel remotely silly about the prospect of sleeping with any of them.
When I look at the uncomfortable body language of the singers in that “Afternoon Delight” official video, I am comforted. At least I’m not the only person who failed to experience perfect sexual liberation as a young adult. Yay?
The wink-wink innuendo, as well as the sexual joy, that are “Afternoon Delight’s” defining lyrical aspirations were entirely out of my reach when I was twenty-five. It’s a deeply silly song, but it represented a whole world of experience that felt totally closed off to me. At the time we sang it together in Japan, I didn’t recognize the pop-culture markers my pal was gamely trying to reference, but I absolutely recognized how false it felt to pretend to experience I didn’t have. This was not my friend’s fault. He was trying to include me. He wanted my help to create something. The recording we made is a failure I’ve tried to learn from in the intervening years.
Dorothy Sayers, in the persona of Lord Peter Wimsey, says that “the worst sin—perhaps the only sin—that passion can commit is to be joyless. It must lie down with laughter or make its bed in hell—there is no middle way.” [5] I’m married now, and as I think about the goodness of my marriage, I recognize something essential in what Sayers says here. My husband is a joyful and generous personality, and he’s spent years patiently teaching me that I am worthy of love; he’s shown me that love can help you relax into yourself, forgive yourself your awkwardnesses, admit what you don’t know, laugh about it all. Laughter is not frivolous. Laughter is key. It’s about taking delight in the beloved.
So in a neat and perfect narrative, I’d be able to say that I’ve moved beyond the awkward self-consciousness that marred that earlier recording of “Afternoon Delight.” This is true some of the time, but it’s not true not all of the time. Those cheesy lyrics still have power over me. The song gets direct about sex in a way that makes me feel bashful to this very day:
Rubbing sticks and stones together makes the sparks ignite,
And the thought of rubbing you is getting so exciting!
But I think the ham-handedness may be the point. “Afternoon Delight” wants us to talk directly about sex, to have sex when we want to, and to poke fun at the whole mess of it. To approach sex with a simultaneous eagerness for connection, and a willingness to laugh at ourselves.
That’s worth something. I think a lot of us—me included—could stand to be a little sillier, a little more sincere.
To quote a slightly more recent country-and-western song, [6] we look so good in love. We also look a little dumb. I want to go back to 2004 and tell that girl: it is OK to be in love, and it is OK to be kind of stupid and awkward about love, and you will be OK. You don’t need to know everything, and you are going to have a life that opens up.
[1] Which I dug up on my iTunes, and which you absolutely may not hear.
[2] I highly, highly recommend the Washington Post’s oral history of “Afternoon Delight,” compiled by J. Freedom du Lac: “’Skyrockets in flight / Afternoon delight’: The story behind Starland Vocal Band’s one big hit,” July 10, 2018 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2018/07/10/skyrockets-in-flight-afternoon-delight-the-story-behind-starland-vocal-bands-one-big-hit/
[3] It’s also just now, reading about “Afternoon Delight” and its afterlives, that I realize lots of college-aged folks did covers of the “Anchorman” version after it came out. Apparently there are a ton of Internet videos of people doing this, dressed up like the news team.
[4] I once saw a guy at a karaoke bar take this tendency to the next level by inserting “t” sounds in words where no “t” occurs. He was especially prone to swap out “d” for “t,” so that “ready” became “retty,” “degrading” became “degrating,” etc. I mention this not to be snide about his performance, but to express sadness and solidarity. This person cared about the song and had a clear desire to sing well, but lacked some essential tools. I’ve felt this way so often in my life.
[5] Gaudy Night, 1935.
[6] George Strait, 1983.
Sarah Kortemeier's debut collection of poems, Ganbatte, is just out from the University of Wisconsin Press. She serves as Library Director at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and she works, lives, and sings in Tucson.
“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 that I quoted above, where Kilroy sings about the 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.