Personal

I just looked at the men-seeking-men personals on Craigslist, thinking that they would partially be dating personals. Nope. Nooooooo way. Nothing of that kind.

And man, how can guys our age be so horny, and willing to take such big risks just on that basis? I don't get it. Thought it was a little sad. Though maybe I just find that anonymous online shit much more dangerous than other people do. I guess it isn't necessarily more dangerous than some club.

It's hard to not be anonymous if you're gay, though. I mean, being attracted to the same sex is part of your personality in that case anyway you split it. So to hide that part... is like concealing your own name. Murakami (Haruki) runs a motif of namelessness through a large part of his early works and that was part of what got me hooked on his novels. In Japan, namelessness in a novel is a huge elephant in a tiny, Japanese-size room: over there, after you and a person have introduced yourselves to each other, you address each other using the other person's name. Murakami's basically calling attention to the question of how much you can really introduce yourself to a person, and to the fact that even after you introduce yourself to someone else, in a sense you can't claim to really "know" that person. But of course that's only a small part of it, since otherwise his stuff wouldn't be so mysteriously intriguing. Ordinarily I don't tell people to read shit because I hardly ever read what people recommend to me, but Murakami's stuff is a must. For a great, heart-stopping short novel, try South of the Border, West of the Sun. For something equally great and slightly longer, try Norwegian Wood. If you want to go straight to his epic masterpiece, read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I don't really recommend the Kafka-prize-winning Kafka on the Shore, but it's not a bad novel; it's certainly not his best, though. Unless you have to be the overly esoteric "I'm reading this one first because it has to do with Kafka" intellectual, go with any of the other three I mentioned or After Dark which is slightly shorter than Norwegian Wood.

I think part of the reason a lot of present rights movements like the gay rights movement don't have as much success as they potentially could is that they do a poor job of abstracting their arguments. The reason I'm not into gay literature or many other things associated with gay rights (or with even just being gay) is that being gay is a hard enough distraction in real life; there's no reason why I'd like to dwell on it too much in my spare time. A lot of gay people do not want to stick out or flout "gay pride," finding the latter awkward and as for the former, well, what is the gay rights movement for if not to stop the societal fate of sticking out like a sore thumb for being gay? Anyway, I'm being too wordy and have probably lost the logic I was following.

But yeah, one thing is that "gay rights" is a misnomer in itself. "Equal rights" would be better. Hell, "human rights," which is why I think the Human Rights Campaign or whatever has such a great name. Because that's really what it's about. The right to be treated as others are also treated, and to be left alone when it's really not someone else's business.

And, yes, "individual rights." But what I like about Murakami is that his novels don't put the individual in a battle against his society; they show the individual lost in his society. And society reduced to the level of other humans floating around you, nothing more.