To scream one requires an audience. Effective communication of personal desire needs the dissonant soundwaves of frantic rage to submit to one's commanding directives for order and sensibility; in essence, for people to listen to your good sense your mind must first make sense. Today I've struggled to make sense of my life, and learned that no one is listening.

Today was a day filled mostly with second season episodes of The West Wing. I've reread some of Will Kylimicka's Multicultural Citizenship and compiled notes of the overview chapter of The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche to write my comic script, Superman: Ubermensch. Concentration eludes me. I'd like to believe that this writing will one day soon better my condition, but I've never been one for irrational hope, or blind optimism. No, I live as a man without faith, a disbeliever in the evidence of things not seen, by choice a hopeless heretic harried by helter-skelter humanity. Usually, this innate cynicism serves me well, prevents subscription to popular simple explanations of complex sociopolitical interaction. Today I'm paralyzed.

The situation: soon after the beginning of this new calendar year, Angel and I received 'save-the-date' notices of the upcoming nuptials of two of our friends, Angel's high school pal Gingerale, and my pre-Cornell friend Deidra. Needless to say, these happy events prompted abundant smiles and well-wishes from us, even though we know that people will continue to ask when Angel and I plan to follow suit. The answer? No time soon. On the real, people would be lucky to see me married before I'm thirty-five, if ever. I love Angel, with all my heart and soul. Too bad that doesn't matter in the slightest. Marriage is pain. To love is to suffer, and to marry your love is suicidal. You should know better. I've watched my parents argue about everything possible for the entirety of my short life. Every time I return to Virginia, I become the unwitting subject of their arguments whether I waste their money without sensible contribution or promote a counter-balancing aggressiveness detrimental to their household. My parents always argue, because marriage is about argument. Anything else isn't true love, and not worth the joint-filing tax benefits.

Deidra-s marriage in McKinney, TX to Mr. Keven Morris will occur on May 21, 2005 and Gingerale's wedding to Pierre Duez happens a week prior on May 14th in Singhampton, Ontario. Angel and I responded to both save-the-dates with eager happiness. Weddings are wonderful events, filled with smiling happy people, and I missed my friends Xander and Willow's wedding so I promised myself that I'd be financially stable enough to attend these pre-scheduled initial moments of holy matrimony. My generation is growing up quicker than I expected, but with a world filled with terrorist threats of dirty nuclear bombs, Ashley Simpson live concerts and Secretary Rumsfeld's private international Metal Gear Solid 3 covert-ops unit, childhood no longer remains a luxury we can afford.

Now, in our lives, I have never met or spoken to Gingerale, and Angel has never met or spoken to Deidra, yet Deidra addressed her notification to both Angel and myself while Gingerale addressed her notification to Angel alone. Both women have held prior knowledge of my relationship to Angel for some time. In response, Jenn and I composed thank you letters to both women for their notifications. On the letter to Gingerale, however, Angel added a curious interrogative, asking whether it would be alright with the happy couple if I accompanied Angel to their wedding. Now I have next-to-zero experience with weddings, but the couple I've attended in my life have been fairly sizable affairs, held in Southern Black churches, where people were happy to accompany others, whether or not the formal protocol of an RSVP had been signed, sealed, and delivered to the happy couple's publicist or wedding coordinator. I know not how other cultures handle this stuff; recently when Angel attended her cousin's wedding with her sister and mother, she drove down and had a wonderful time. I don't believe her presence was heralded in Pinyin calligraphy, but whatever. The point is that I questioned the necessity of asking Gingerale's permission to bring me. Angel thought it necessary at the time to prevent planning snafus, in case reception seating numbers were thrown off by my accompaniment. I tossed my quizzical countenance aside, and moved on. Angel and I responded, and had a pretty good night together, watching reality television and doing other couple stuff.

Of course, the differences in address were not invisible to my perspective; part of me felt at the time that Angel was needlessly reminding her friends of my relationship to her. Gingerale and Pierre have known for some time that Angel and I have been dating and living together. Honestly, her excuse about reception seating sounded at that time like a weak, flimsy reason to ask someone else's permission to allow my attendance. Angel's request bothered me. She could have written a response that simply assumed that I would join her and fulfill the notification issue completely. "Gingerale, thank you so much for the notification, and congratulations on your upcoming marriage to Pierre. James and I wouldn't miss your wedding for the world! Keep us posted on logistical issues, and again, congrats!" No, Angel's statement included something to the effect of "Would you all mind terribly if..." or "Would it be alright if James also attended..." or "Is it ok if James came along ...", like I'm some annoying little puppy that can never be left alone for extended periods of time without annoying puddles of yellow urine on the carpet and chewed up shoes in the closet, but has no place, given an utter lack of home training, at any formal gathering, much less a life-altering perfectionist's event like a wedding.

I felt the question alone belittled me, reduced me to unnecessary baggage at best or at worst, a dirty, disgusting Golem best kept segregated, incarcerated, secret from the affairs of honorable men. I had to tell myself that it didn't matter, that the foci of the happiness were the weddings, and I shouldn't allow myself to wallow in petty interpretations of simple correspondence. I focused on meeting the one woman from my girlfriend's past with whom she possessed the most mysterious and misunderstood relationship, filled with teenage angst, Gothic pretension, female drama, adolescent teasing, and unresolved tension. I never understood Angel's friends; whether so overbearingly, obnoxiously effeminate to the point of Carson Kressly Queer Eye for the Straight Guy parody or so hypersocially apolitical Lucy Liu resembles Michelle Malkin, Angel's Torontoians were always people I thought she should keep in touch with, if only for the nostalgic camaraderie of talking with people who already 'get' you. I'll be honest - after five years in the biz, I still don't 'get' Angel; her daily surprises still astound the eye and confuse the understanding. Frankly, I relied on those who grew up with me to endure some of the rough spots Cornell University provided me; without the Squad, I doubt I'd have made it. I didn't understand Angel's obvious reluctance to keep in contact with her old friends, but I still feel that Gingerale's interaction had something to do with the frozen contact. Now that my Squad is dead and buried, a deceased union no longer politically viable or personally prudent, I find Angel's reaction obvious: a person trying to make a new start needs no tethers to an unforgiving past. Gingerale and Angel are both friendly competition and antagonistic competitors; whatever the source of their tension, it was enough to prevent any movement on Angel's part to seek out Gingerale for further contact once her collegiate years emerged, a raucous silence ever-widening their lacerated friendship.

What's past is prologue, they say. After we sent our response to Gingerale, my hope was to test my theories concerning Angel's interaction with her at her wedding. Last weekend, Angel and I received our response.

11 January 2005

Dear Angel,

The Save-the-Date was exactly that - a reminder for all our out-of-town friends that need to make travel arrangements; we will be sending formal invitations later. We are afraid, however, that the invitation was intended for you alone - we are trying to keep the wedding/ reception small, and both of us have a significant number of extended family members that must be invited. We hope that this won't prevent you from coming; it would be lovely to see you again.

All the best for the new year,

Gingerale.

To be honest, I really didn't know how to take this. I was being told that my presence at this most perfect of possible days was not now, nor had ever been, required or encouraged. Basically, I should keep my ass at home. Angel was immediately irate, but I told her without hesitation that she should attend the wedding, that there's no reason that she shouldn't go and have a good time there even if I wasn't invited. I suppose that should have been the end of it; further discussion averted by my uncharacteristically cool nonchalance concerning her friend's "please come alone" regulation. But I simply couldn't push the issue out of my mind. Paralyzed, frozen, disappointed, distant, I couldn't discern why Gingerale would decree such an obvious rejection. She didn't want me there; all that stuff on keeping the affair small seemed a small, minor excuse for another more pressing concern with my attendance. She doesn't know me; I refuse to presuppose a racial concern, but I am a tad weary with being told I have no place around Angel's friends and family. Frankly, I'm left confused. Given that she really doesn't know me and we've never met, what is the point of her written ostracism? Am I really so unwanted?

I've read Gingerale's blog for the last year and a half, at least; keeping up with the thoughts of this friend of Angel's seemed sensible if only to understand Angel's perspective and personal history better. I doubt I've been successful. Gingerale's writing strikes me as needlessly pretentious and faux artistic, the minuscule ravings of a short, forgettable, bland writer who wears horn-rimmed black spectacles with matching chopsticks clad with orange pseudo-Oriental printing as hair accessories while typing furiously into her Sony Vaio some ardently artsy deconstruction of Milton's Paradise Lost, who sips mint tea with ginger in a smoky college-town coffee shop called Stella's or Buster's or Ezra's, filled to capacity with thirty other literature majors all hell-bent upon individual distinction through personal quirkiness and outward counterculture fashion choice yet plainly identifies as uniform post-suburbanite trust fund beneficiaries as they pen droll, uninspired theses on the same three Joan Didion essays in Slouching Through Bethlehem while they overuse the same Max Factor rouge monotone and Clairol midnight black lipstick and as they wear nigh-identical pleated black schoolgirl skirts from Hot Topic and bleached white tank-top shirts under Clorox white frilly Euro-trash blouses from La Chateau to reach with slow, deliberate, background studio audience daytime television grace inside dark Emily the Strange handbags for the cutesy handkerchiefs and scarves picked up at bargains from the local hemp store. You can check for yourself.

Still, my confusion endured. Of course, Rei Ayanami would expect me to indulge in what she terms my penchant for "racial paranoia", but without a first-contact scenario I'm reluctant to make that assertion. It could be anything - jealous prevention of any other appearance of a long-term relationship amongst her friends outside of her own on her wedding day, an anti-Angel assertion of dominance to prevent her from arriving with backup in case any tension between the two emerges, even a simple truth that space really is at a premium. Sadly, my past experiences with Angel's family and friends will not allow me a moment's peace. My mind wanders; the real reason for my requested absence could be that Gingerale never wanted a militant Black man to appear amongst her family and friends arm-in-arm with one of her lifelong Chinese-Canadian female friends. In real-time, full audio/ visual imagery, open for personal one-on-one interaction, Angel and I could intermingle with all the other wedding guests, in-your-face human examples of the ebony midnight of Asian female outmarriage into interracial relationships. The relevant point here is that I don't honestly know what her motivations are in asking Angel to attend her wedding alone, but I don't believe that her excuse about 'space considerations' provides full disclosure about any real issues with my attendance. Maybe I simply do not trust Gingerale anymore than she trusts me. We've never met; do not know each other. At this point I doubt we'll have the opportunity to alter that status quo.

It shouldn't matter to me, I know. I should not be offended. Or bothered. Or irritated. It just pisses me off, frankly. Too many times in the five years I've loved Angel have people from her past deemed me, both directly through confrontation or indirectly through secret discussion and quiet disapproval, inadequate and insufficient of Angelic affection, and derided me as wholly undeserved of her heavenly love. I've come to realize through bitter tears and dehumanizing sacrifice that I will never stand as 'good enough' and appear as worthwhile to the vast majority of Angel's extended family and personal friends. Angel's parents look upon me as a nigger, the lowest form of quasi-humanoid brute, the criminal, aggressive, coarse Black savage more likely to rob than read, more likely to rape than write. I am no more the athletic Supermasculine Menial than I am the dirty urban crack fiend armed with spasmodic switchblade and amphetamine adrenaline in the abysmal darkness of metropolitan alleyways. No academic achievement, no persuasive argument, no psychological assessment, no personal recommendation will change this obvious and uncompromising fact. If Gingerale agrees with this assessment, that is unfortunate. I don't believe she needs to in order to justify barring my arrival at her wedding. It's her day; she can assemble who she wants.

Still, it is quite difficult for me to interpret this as anything less than another amorphous, transparent, completely unopposed anti-nigger episode. I really don't want to, and I'd probably shrug off this entire refusal of my presence if Angel had not asked Gingerale's permission to allow me to escort her to the wedding in the first place. I feel that Angel either knew or suspected that there was a possibility that I was not welcome in Singhampton, Ontario during the May 14th 2005 weekend. It's unnerving; I second-guess Angel's immediate anger towards the note, re-interpret her vitriolic flash as too easily satiated by my easygoing, mild-mannered initial support of her attendance at Gingerale's wedding, wonder quietly if I was simply playing the requisite 'supportive boyfriend amidst unconquerable racism' role, simmer in stereotypical silence so typecast as the brooding, furious 'angry Black male' I'm eligible for confessional close-ups on MTV's The Real World. Angel did not seriously share with me the possibility that Gingerale would refuse my presence, perhaps because she never believed it possible, perhaps because she feared what would be my irate questions protesting such an event. Now that the event has occurred, I find myself oddly sobered. My mother always told me to never go where I was not wanted, but what I have learned so far in my brief and moderately eventful life is that to travel anywhere one desires, one must travel where one is not welcome. My short lifetime includes several examples of boldly going where no one would rather I visit. I have lived with Angel for years; every minute here I reside where I am publicly repugnant. My graduation weekend from Cornell University involved several instances where my presence within the warm amber confines of Angel's innocent love caused public strife and personal dissonance. My life is a journey of the unwanted.

Gingerale's wedding is just another example, just another painted wooden sign warning "No Dogs, No Jews, No Niggers!" in the segregated North American backwaters of my atheistic, liberal, college-educated, terror-stricken, "Vote or Die", Pimp My Ride slogan-fed generation. Cultural diversity and multicultural tolerance can not exist within modern Western liberal democracies as long as individual citizens are both unwilling and unlikely to question their own prejudices and attitudes toward the various racial, ethnic, national, religious, gendered, and sexual identities they encounter in fellow citizens, and within themselves. There is no monolithic mainstream within a modern Western liberal democracy. At best, minority multiplicity ricochets individuals into each other, pinballing increased conflict and catastrophic crises until cooperation and compromise allow combatant citizens short respite until the next anarchist's paradise. Pretend not, dear readers, today's capitalist-imperialist public order has not evolved Western civilization beyond the Hobbesian acid trip; under the Leviathan George W. Bush, John Q. American still endures a solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short existence, supplemented only by iPods, American Idol, and blockbuster remakes from Ron Howard and Tom Hanks.

My war for this world is as yet incomplete. Even though I've found someone to love who loves me back, I feel shamed by the illogical inadequacy imposed upon my person every time our connection emerges before her family and friends. I always end up wrinkled and degraded, pissed upon by racial uncertainty's acid rain, left alone by personal distrust and public hate. I should never have let this damnable note bother me.