The difference between being a child and an adult is, when you're a child, your childhood is provided for you; when you're an adult, you have to provide it for yourself.
— James
My legal name is Patrick Quealy. Friends call me Q. It's a high-school nickname thing.
I was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Queen City of the Midwest. Nick says I'm a boi. Tony says I'm a dude. My birth certificate says I'm male. The Selective Service System says I'm a Man, with a capital "M."
I guess I am all of those things. More to the point, my rising sign is Virgo, my sun is in Scorpio conjuncting Uranus, and my Saturn — under Placidus and taking the center of my city of birth as birthplace — is in Libra within one arcsecond of the second house, but not quite there. Do the chart for the hospital I was born in, the houses shift a smidgen and it's in the first degree of the second house. I have a sun-Chiron-north node T-square, and a kite with Eris in the eighth opposing Venus — my final dispositor — with north node in Leo on the cusp of the twelfth and moon in Sagittarius (conjuncting a profound Mars-Neptune conjunction in the fourth) as the sides of the bisextile. Black moon Lilith is at 25 Libra in the second house. All this in a bundle chart clustered around the nadir, in which Chiron (in Taurus and in the ninth house) conjuncts the far midpoint, of which the Sabian is "window shoppers." My identity and personality reflect all this.
This page is intended as a sort of shortcut, long-form business card. In the age of MySpace, many pre-Gen-Y people consider it tacky to plaster a bunch of stuff about oneself online, as if anyone cares (or should care). But I think it's good to represent oneself to the world — certainly better than allowing it to be done for oneself by whoever cares to do it.
And you never know where it will lead. I've had two great loves, one of them reciprocated, and the resulting relationship was wonderful except for the awful parts. My ex-boyfriend and I caught one another's eyes at first, I think, with websites that represented us to the world as interesting, abnormal, and, well, probably a lot of other things.
When you're weird in this world, your best bet is very much to let everybody know and see what happens.
I went to college in Columbus, just a couple of hours northeast of Cincinnati on I-71. Columbus is a bunch of buildings that somebody stuck in the center of tens of thousands of square miles of corn, cows, and soy. The people are nice. It's a rare queer oasis deep in the Midwest. The place is rather flat, though, in a couple of ways.
I live in Seattle, the Emerald City, jewel of the Pacific Northwest. Upon arriving in Seattle, I described it as "sedate," which turned out to be as concise and accurate a description as any I could conjure. I have encountered no better description in print than this from the April 29, 2008 Stranger. Two key grafs. Under the subhead "Seattle Tricks People":
"Seattle" abstractly means to me something like "basking in the sunlight of overwhelming gratitude for life and art" but concretely means to me something like "feeling like there's no possible routes for escaping a life of poverty and alcoholism while staring at sentences written by Sherman Alexie in an environment of people shouting things like 'quadruple soy latte.'" I don't know. I feel "tricked."
And under the subhead "Seattle is Immune to 'Real' Despair":
I feel like most people in Seattle have "given up on life" due to a comprehensive knowledge about existentialism but in a "good" way that doesn't feel bad at all. They wake up, go to work copywriting shampoo advertisements, go home, lie in fetal positions facing the back of their sofas, and feel beautiful and existentially awesome. I can successfully transpose existential despair onto any city, but when I do it to Seattle something happens and it becomes "really good" somehow.
We have lots of clouds and mountains and oceans and lakes in the Northwest, not to mention rainforests. It's nice here.
I love coffeehouses and coffeehouse culture, though the coffee places here, contrary to Seattle's reputation regarding the two foci of coffeehouse culture, coffee and a grunge sensibility, aren't as good as the ones I grew up with in Cincinnati. I refer to Angst, original Fire-Hazard Sitwells, the Buzz, the new Sitwells, Kaldi's, and Highland's — in descending order of my preference, though they were all excellent. (At least three are no longer extant.) In Seattle, Bauhaus is nice, Victrola is quite passable, and Sureshot looks promising, but the scene is nothing like you've heard.
I like to squick normies. I try to do it compassionately.
I have been described with, I would like to think, some accuracy, if also a touch of melodrama and unwarranted effusiveness, thus:
I live according to what I call the Twain Principle. Mark Twain (perhaps apocryphally) said or wrote the following, or words to this effect: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." When faced with a decision, I ask myself what decision I will regret least in twenty years. This is different from asking which decision is likely to have the best, or most convenient, or least painful outcome. The key word is "regret": there's a self-serving imperative in human nature — and I think it's there for a reason — to do what we want to do. It sounds simple, and it is, and we ought to do it more. I have regretted making decisions not in accordance with the Twain Principle. I have yet to regret a decision made in accordance with it; "I made the best decision I could," after all.
My life was changed in my teens upon reading the following passage from Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning:
Don't aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run — in the long run, I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.
I had known intuitively that this was true, and having such a man confirm it was important to me.
I'm no Saint Ignatius but again I'm no barfly.
— Jimmy Buffett
As a recovering Catholic and a Catholic schoolboy of twelve years, including four years under the tutelage of Jesuits at St. X, I have a thing about the church and Jesuits and, you know, all those things recovering Catholics have a thing about. Incidentally, I don't like to call myself an agnostic, an atheist, or a theist in mixed company, because all three labels beg their question. I'm a theological noncognitivist, not in the sense that I propose to disprove the existence of God semantically, but in the sense that I can't conceive of a meaningful discussion of God's, or gods', existence or nature without using terms and axioms that limit the scope of the discussion too much for it to be useful. Conceptions of deity and divinity are preverbal. One thing we should all be able to agree upon is that faith is, and ought to be, arational — which says nothing of whether it is good or bad.
I don't read much compared to most educated people, because I'm an exceedingly slow reader. I tend not to be believed on this point, because "smart" is almost universally conflated with "omnicompetent." It's my pet disease.
"Disease" — like "telephone" and "album" and "newspaper," it's a metaphor being pressed into service in contexts where it doesn't apply. Metaphor, properly understood and applied, has the power to save or destroy humanity, and certainly the power to enhance or destroy a life.
There are many specific things I don't know much about. When in doubt, I try to keep my mouth shut and learn something. I don't always do a good job at this, but I really do try, and I not infrequently succeed.
I seem at first blush to be a Luddite, but I'm not. I have an intense geek fetish (distinguishable from an innocence obsession in the sense that blue skies may be distinguished from pain), the average number of computers I own at a given time is three, and I have a degree in computer science — though that discipline, as Heinlein wrote of doctorates, is becoming watered down and indistinguishable from the credentials of the playground supervisors. I even gave Twitter a fair shake and acknowledged that, like nuclear bombs, any technology is a good thing when thoughtfully used. (Would that we stockpiled nukes in case we need to blow up an incoming asteroid, rather than in case we need to blow up the planet.) Technology is great, but only when a society knows (which is to say: when the individuals in a society know) how to use it to conserve labor, create utility, or be happier. Much technology does not serve these ends, but rather serves to debase us. Witness cellular telephony, text messaging, television, AIMspeak, et al. — all of which have utility, but at what cost?
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
— H.L. Mencken
I like to say a compassionate libertarian is a socialist who reads the fine print. More on this elsewhere.
Someday, I hope to open a coffeehouse called The Yiffy Fawx, and perhaps a bar and cafe called Axis of Emo.
Like any 'coon, I'm fond of pretty shiny things that tickle the senses. My tastes aren't refined; I like fun stuff.
My biggest musical obsession of the moment is Casey Stratton, who writes the most wonderful lyrics and touching music and is dreamy in every respect. He strikes a balance between the ordinary and the transcendent that's common to most of the music I love, including (this is a severely limited list) Hanson (maximum squickage points were earned from blasting "MMMBop" in the parking lot of my all-boys Catholic high school), Jimmy Buffett, Pink Floyd, Roger Waters solo, the Pet Shop Boys, Chumbawamba (the thing they're famous for is the one track in their vast oeuvre that's poppy), musicals and pop opera (The Fantasticks is my favorite of the former, and of the latter I like Rent and Bare; I'm one of those geeks who memorizes the whole thing and can't help but sing along, even in the theater), the Barenaked Ladies (genius, which you'll miss if you buy into the silly exterior), smaller acts like the Judybats and Laughing Colors that I happened into because friends pointed me there, groups with small but beautiful portfolios like The Postal Service and Prozzak, and others ad IDIC.
Yes, by the way, I refer to that Hanson. They're seriously underrated. Not as much as Casey, but close. Their first major album, Middle of Nowhere — the one with the radio edit of "MMMBop" on it — was good in its own right, but to hear their subsequent stuff, you might not recognize them.
People often comment upon my penchant for fixating upon, and memorizing, quotations and lyrics and poems — and also on my inability to remember names, faces, or the simplest plot points of a film.
I practically worship Camille Paglia, and I'm ecstatic that her monthly column has returned to Salon. She's batshit crazy, undoubtedly sometimes wrong, intellectually honest, and brilliant. None of those are bad things. She's the kind of educated person I like to just read, or listen to, and learn and absorb things. Not all educated people are good at teaching; those who are, are sometimes too condescending about it; a few public figures are able to bring, even cheer, the rest of us along, acting the way a member of an enlightened elite legitimately may. (Howard Dean is another of these; his far-left rhetoric isn't who he really is, and though I understand the pressures that led him to give up a shot at the presidency for the DNC chairmanship, I wish he hadn't done it.)
My favorite book is The Giver: a "children's book," simple but not, bittersweet, and powerful. Also on the short list are The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. I recommend to your attention my Contrarian Reading List (on which Moon also appears), criteria for inclusion in which are two: they were a hell of a lot of fun to read, and they challenge conventional wisdom at almost every turn:
And you should check out an awesome book/album pair: Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, and Amused to Death by Roger Waters. Postman's book inspired Waters' album.
Some favorite films, in no particular order except for the first, are: Dead Poets Society, Angels in America, Brother Bear, Falling Down, Love Actually, I Heart Huckabees, Heat, The Big Lebowski, Conspiracy, The Wall, and Network.
Steve Schalchlin is a singer, songwriter, videographer, actor, and more, and was one of the first bloggers. I mean years and years before anybody had coined the word "blog," or heard of LiveJournal or Xanga or Blogger, and before most people had broadband at home. Steve's an amazing person and a good friend and you should totally see everything he and immensely talented partner Jim do, sing, write, or make. You can buy some of his CDs (and even download a few freebie songs) from YGS.
Yiff! will make history. I follow its progress with considerable anticipation.
I have the aesthetic sense of a brick. I don't know much about visual art; I only know what I like. My friend Alec Clayton has done some paintings I love. (He's also written a couple of books that, for different reasons, mean a great deal to me. They can be ordered from his site.) I take my coffee each morning from a mug beaing a quotation from a character, Red Warner, from one of his books: "Down with namby-pamby art!" A compelling exemplar of that artistic philosophy is Anthony Goicolea, who hits the sweet spot for Art between the attention plea that is "Piss Christ" and the boring pretension that makes up such a regrettably large proportion of art and of life.
But, Wilde would say, I repeat myself.
