Summer Directive
Late June, to mid-July, 2025
- On Identity, Regarding Muncie
I will preface this by volunteering that the characterizations of the people of Muncie that I make here are taken from my direct observation, including both in-person and what I see via social media – comments sections, local awareness group posts, etc. I still feel that social media has emboldened people in the last 20 years to be their most authentic selves, for better or worse. While I know that this anecdotal kind of evidence can’t speak for the entire community, I have now been here 11 years, so I’d think that the decade+ of observation – field work – I have done might count for something? For sure I don’t have the full story on the people of this town, but I have directly witnessed a fair amount. I have been accused of being a non-participant in life, merely being one of those people who sits in the stands and watches it all. I don’t know if that’s entirely true; I feel like I get in the game quite a bit, but they got the spectator part right – I quietly see a lot of things. The question prompt asks me what identities are important to me, and how Muncie plays along with those. I guess the first thing, then, is to realize what identities I have, then decide which of those are important. OK, so we have white, cis-gender man, bisexual, Southerner (out-of-towner), 40-something (Gen X), educated, unarmed, “lactose tolerant”, professional/middle-class, atheist, and I’m on the Left. So, we’ll just take each of these in turn? WHITE This one is easy…this country was built for me. I have never run into any difficulty in life because I was white. Well, I take that back – in the mid-90s, when I was applying to colleges in my senior year, the University of North Carolina did send me a letter saying that I was not being accepted because they wanted to make sure they were doing their part to have a more diverse student body, despite my grades, GPA, and the fact that I finished 9th in my class. I don’t begrudge them; I easily got into another university, and I was proud of UNC years later when they took down several statues of confederates. But no, Muncie is around 85% white; it’s probably the whitest city I’ve ever lived in. Life is easy here in Muncie as a white person – it’s the baseline from which everything else is judged. Based on the phone calls I’d get at a former job, tons of people here are openly scared of going into Whitely. “So, I have to go to your Whitely location for that service…I have to go in there? Oh nevermind”.? I heard this more than a handful of times. My personal circle of friends here are all good though – I don’t associate with racists, and there are plenty of folks here who are cool with whoever, regardless of race. I just wonder how much of the majority or minority they are here. Growing up in the South, I had this Northern myth in my head that since the North was on the “virtuous side” of the Civil War, that all Northerners were progressive – accepting. After living in Delaware and now Indiana, I have seen this school-kid theory is FAR from the case. So then, the importance I hold in being white: very little, but in the end, I lucked out there in being born the hegemony, which I guess makes it easier to not care about it? MALE/MAN Again, I am in the clear, here. The current world was made for (by?) men who value and utilize physical power and anger above all to carve out the world as they see fit. Thankfully, this inequity is lessening, although far too slowly. I never understood the idea of “I could kick your ass so that makes me right and makes you wrong”. I thought being factually correct made one “right”. I remember saying this to my uncle once, when he was chasing me trying to smack me for something I pissed him off about. I calmly looked him in the eye and said, “you can hit me all you want; it doesn’t make you correct”, or “you do that again and I’m going to write a book one day”. I think that somehow scared him. Or at least left him at a loss as to what to do with me. After a while, I was left alone. Toxic masculinity is of course bad, but there is some weird appreciation I have for a certain kind of stubborn self-assuredness and forthright determination to do what you see as the right thing, consequences and collateral damage be damned. Some people out there call that “chaotic good”. When used for purposes of philanthropy, justice, or to assist the underprivileged etc., it can be a powerful weapon. Of course, too many people use those skills for ill. And of course, those skills are not limited to males/men. It’s just that when a woman/female does it, she is called a bitch, whereas when a man/male does it, he’s just rightfully “being a man”. I hate that. Muncie makes being male easy. Here, like many other places, I am taken seriously from the word “go”. When I accompany my girlfriend to get her oil changed at a garage, the attendant speaks to me and not her, even when she chimes in, explaining that it’s her car and she’s paying for the automotive services. She explained to me that girls here are, in so many words, brought up to be subservient to men. Her sister actively looked for a man to dominate her in all her life choices. What kind of 1950s hellscape is this place?? My girlfriend apparently needs my permission to go forward with certain medical procedures – I was mortified at this, but doctors simply will not do various reproductive or family-planning things unless I first sign off on it. Disgusting. As an ardent supporter of bodily autonomy and freedom of choice, I was beside myself when I learned that this is what women are up against in the medical world. Do better, Open Door! How can these conservative types here love freedom if they also like keeping half of the population under the other half’s thumb? So yeah – Muncie…great for me, less so if I were a woman. The importance I hold in being male: I really don’t care, because I’d do for me regardless; but I guess people get out of my way more as it is? BISEXUAL It took me a long time to come to terms with this fact, but unlike most, I came to it from the other direction. I was always OK with the idea of being into other guys; I had to slowly admit to myself that yes, girls are OK too. This only happened in the mid-2010s, when I was in my mid-30s. Something about me being into girls seemed so heteronormative and boringly normal. In my late teens and 20s I used to fancy myself as quite the interesting, quirky, subversive fellow, and liked to reject anything that came across as one of my favorite attack words of the 1990s, “suburban”. Looking back, I had to have been insufferable to those around me, and I apologize. As someone in the LGBT community, I do not feel cared for or safe here in Indiana, and in Muncie specifically. Not scared for my physical wellbeing (although there is always a possibility here of being hate-crimed in the streets), but more scared that people in charge – in the state or local level – will legislate me into oblivion, as has been going on these past few months. This is a city where the mayor appoints openly and unapologetically far-Right Christian nationalists to public office. This is a city where its university refuses to stand up to Trumpian higher-education DEI-elimination mandates. I really thought I was done looking over my shoulder in parking lots when I left the South back in the early 2000s. Luckily-enough for me now, I am in what passes visually as a heterosexual relationship, so whenever I am in public with her, I feel a little bit camouflaged. Also, luckily enough for me, this is the Midwest, where people often keep their opinions to themselves. Folks in general don’t like upsetting the apple cart here. Where I’m from, you WILL get approached in public, while running your errands. Sure, there are some fantastic people here – I have found a lovely group of well-meaning, forward-thinking, Democratic-to-progressive folks to call my friends. But the point still stands – while the hatred is much more potent, and visible in the South, here, it’s largely murmured about behind closed doors. People here are no less racist, homophobic, and misogynistic as the South, they are just quieter about it. I feel much safer and cared for in larger cities; I always found it funny that so many people on the right fear urban areas. But stats have shown that right-wing extremists are far more likely than left-wing extremists to commit a mass shooting or hate crime. So while the left and right are each other’s boogeymen, the people on the left are the ones with genuinely something to fear. The importance I hold in being Bi – it is as important in that it, more than other identities I have, affects how people have treated me throughout my time. And yeah, I still get a little bit of a kick out of being just a little bit off-center, anyway, even though being LGBT really isn’t the weird thing anymore.? SOUTHERN/OUT-OF-TOWNER Yesterday was Independence Day, and as we were riding around, getting our holiday plans going, my GF jokingly asks me “so, what do Confederates do on this holiday??” I simply let her know, also joking, that as a member of the clearly losing team, I merely quietly allow the Union to have its big day. By being born there, I simply am Southern – it’s just a matter of fact and transcends subjectivity. No matter where I live now, or ever will in the future, nothing can change my Southernness. It’s neither a bad nor good thing. Some parts of it are very bad, or at least annoyingly stereotypical. Some parts of it are good! I love thinking about those Southern people and things that have added great value to American life…William Faulkner, bell hooks, Ava Gardner, real BBQ, the word “y’all” (which is the superior 2nd-person plural pronoun), Sun Drop, the Athens, Georgia music scene, Robert Rodriguez. Anyway, it’s something that I try not to dwell on too much – the topic doesn’t need tending; I can really suffice to just have the knowledge of this identity tucked into the back of my head, always being true. It is always just there whenever I have some need or want to stroll back there and open that trunk in my basement. But it kind of does help me not assimilate to Muncie or Indiana. (Not that there is a need to refuse my Hoosiering.) It’s just nice down there in the warmth and humidity; it’s uniquely specific to me, and I miss it – the salty smell of the marsh means I’m home and I don’t get that smell here. Every day I’m not smelling that is a reminder that I am out here on the road. But as it stands, I am kind of in too deep here, to just drop everything and move back to a place where I don’t know too many people anymore. I am a prodigal child that can’t go home. I’ve tried twice – in 2019 and 2021 I went down there to see about a job prospect. But both times everything felt so empty, dead – of a long-lost time. Sure, I could very well have taken one of those jobs and re-established myself there and built a new belonging, but it really felt like moving into the past, and it was suffocating. Coming up in about a month, my gf and I will be honeymooning down there, and I can’t wait to see what kind of a mindfuck it will be to have the past and present clash like that. As far as Muncie is concerned – I don’t know. I have noticed in my time here that there are so many people in Muncie descended, maybe only a generation or 2 back, from Tennessee or Kentucky. This makes sense, as poor Southerners fled north after the Civil War, looking for factory work. There are SO MANY people here who long to retreat into some well-hidden cabin in the Tennessee hills. They really look at Tennessee as their personal Shangri-La – their entitlement – like Florida with New Yorkers. There is a giant orange Tennessee “T” painted on the side of the liquor store leading you into the town of Eaton. So many people in Muncie see themselves as Southerners, even though they were born here. So, my first reaction to these folks is “well, move there if you love it so much!” (said out of encouragement, not vitriol), but of course that would make me a hypocrite, as I also identify with some other place more than the one where I live, and I am making no real plans to relocate home anytime soon. I see their identification with TN/KY and I can speculate how this adds to this self-loathing that Muncie people often exhibit. So many of them hate it here. They resent having to drive on these crappy roads – to hear about yet another corrupt city official – to not have a beach – to have to store and not ride their motorcycles over the winter – to realize the new fast-food establishment will spurn the South Side yet again. While there is a little circle of Muncie people who are cheerleaders for this town (there will always be plenty of folks attending those bridge dinners), I think a large minority of Munsonians hate their city, or at least are a little bit embarrassed by parts of it. I’ve never seen anything like it in any of the 14 cities I’ve lived in. So many seem like they are disgusted – resigned to their fate. The importance I hold in being a Southern non-Muncie native: little – I realize it’s unimportant, but I admit it is kind of my guilty pleasure. The most important way that this outsider-ness affects me is that I agreed to move here in 2014, never having been here before, because my then-partner is from here, and we were both done with Arizona, where we both finished grad school at the same time. We were moving here, to a place where at least one of us had connections – and indeed, I walked right into my first job here, because he used to dogsit for the director of my first company. She set up a meeting for us the first Saturday we were in town, at the farmer’s market. That meeting was 2 minutes long, where she said, “there will be a job opening on our jobs page in a couple of weeks, you should apply for it”. I was hired less than a month later. (Not that I didn’t qualify for it, it’s just nice to know a couple of people.) That was fine and all, but in 2023, my partner and I split up, and he left Indiana altogether. So here I am, in this place of his, and I got left here, like some kind of family pet that was accidentally left behind at a rest stop on a family road trip. I’m still here, living in what I realize now is a physical manifestation of the past. This place represents 2014-2023, and staying here any longer only keeps me locked into that time period. The options are twofold, and obvious – (1) leave to somewhere else more relevant, or (2) find my own reasons for belonging here; stop living in a past that is gone and doesn’t really matter anymore. Either way, end this tired habit of getting off on being the ill-fitting visitor. GEN X I was born in very late 1977, and in my mind, anyone born in 1982 is still a child. I think I get this from my one cousin, born in that year, whom my core memories of him were from when he was a preschooler. I just missed the cutoff from being an older Millennial…if I was born 2 years and 2 weeks later, I would have been not taken seriously at all by Boomers. But as it stands, I am one of those mysterious, ironic “productive slackers” who peaked in 1993 and are really into Pearl Jam?? Is that what I’m supposed to do? Anyway, I really do love nine inch nails and ministry, though, and I refuse to apologize for that from when I was 12! I am 47 years old, but I have no idea what that means it should feel like. Am I old? I don’t feel old. I feel like I did when I was in my 20s. For whatever reason, it doesn’t feel like I should be hanging around people in their 40s…that seems like I’d be hanging out with old people. But of course, I know that is just silly. I say this kind of thing, but the instant I am around most people in their late teens and 20s, I am glad I know people my own age. This isn’t to say I hate young people…they’re fine…I just relate more to these people in their 40s that I for some reason see as old. In any friend group I’m part of, I am usually the oldest one. I regularly use Facebook (that makes me old), and I see people I graduated high school with sending their adult children off to college and I feel wildly out of sync with them (making me feel really young). I see millennials and GenZ interested in doing things that most would consider very old-person activities – baking, sewing/crafts, and an unreal number of them use the Merlin app for identifying birds by their call. So it’s a weird dichotomy. They seem both very young and very old. Time is stupid and I reject it. I am in an age gap relationship – 20 years. While I actively try to not feel like a “dirty old man” about it…which I don’t think I am, I feel like I really relate to her. She often says that she can’t wait to be in her 40s, she loves Rush, and she currently has a bad back. She is the oldest 27-year-old I know. As far as this relates to Muncie, I guess I am glad Ball State is not a crazy party school; students tend to all leave town for the weekends and completely disappear during the summer. So, it’s nice that it is still quiet for large parts of the time. Still, it would be nice if the town were noisy sometimes – I realize that most things I do for fun, I have to leave town to go and do them…the zoo in Indy, baseball games in Chicago, Detroit, or St Louis, my brother and his family in Seattle, concerts in Cincinnati, DC, or Portland, a tabletop gaming convention in Columbus, a rock and roll hall of fame in Cleveland, a cemetery in which they filmed “Night of the Living Dead” near Pittsburgh, a valid beach in North Carolina, decent BBQ also in North Carolina, a really, really good record store in San Francisco, an excellent art cinema in Tucson, football hooliganism in Ireland. I like Muncie’s peace and quiet, but I am 47, not dead…it would be nice if any of that stuff could be found here, but of course that is unreasonable. Muncie is a place where stuff like that doesn’t exist, so you must make your own fun, and I for sure do that. I run a book club, I host a monthly film screening series at Cornerstone, I DM a D&D game that has been going since 2017, and we attend trivia nights throughout the calendar. I like living in a place that kind of makes you connect with people in a direct way, in a society that constantly fosters a misanthropic level of individual solitude. The importance I place on being a GenXer: moderate. I love having come of age in that time, and I can see where I exhibit many of the most stereotypical traits of that generation. The music and movies then were amazing. Go watch Gummo, it’s terrible and fantastic!! But I do love millennials and GenZ; they have a lot of fun, insightful, unique perspectives to add…TIkTok humor is amazing. EDUCATED Growing up, whenever we would drive “into town”, we would pass by the front gates of the local college. There was this tidy 4-foot wall along the highway, delineating the campus property, and I really felt the effect the wall gave – behind that wall was kept some marvelous, unknown intelligence that I knew one day I’d want access to. I knew I was meant for more than some “standard” life. I loved learning things. My grandparents sent me to a kind of science camp there one summer. Flash forward to high school – our guidance counselor put on a couple of SAT prep sessions, and in it, she just threw it out there to everyone, that she anticipates that I will get the highest score in the class, “because (I have) a superior vocabulary.” And indeed, she turned out to be correct. That plan to immerse myself in higher learning came true; I graduated with a BA in [field redacted] in 2005. I finished my first master’s in that same field in 2011, and I earned master’s #2, in a field in which I now work, in 2014. I moved here to Muncie during my final online summer class for that one – I decided that I would go to Bracken Library and do my work for it there, to have as appropriate a setting as I could to mark the official end of my formal education. I submitted my last assignment for the class and cried a little. After so many years, it was ending here – in a library that I had no real attachment to. It should have ended a couple of months prior, in May, when I walked – that way I could have left it in that city. I landed here in Muncie where the US Census Bureau will show you that 25.7% of the population has an undergrad degree (the US average is 38%). And only around 8% of Muncie has a master’s. So, I was kind of immediately towards the top of that heap here. I don’t know how often Muncie has very capable people just parachute in like that – usually I hear it’s the other way around…capable home-grown folks flee once they get the chance – going to Indianapolis or Chicago or wherever. I came to the conclusion very early-on that Muncie is a great place to start out one’s profession/community service – the city is DYING for people to do good things for it. It’s pleading. If you have an idea for a thing that doesn’t currently exist here, just go out and do it. No one will stop you, and probably no one will have tried it already. People will say “yes”, and give you the space to do it – it has happened to me on several occasions: Cornerstone, the Public Library, White Rabbit Books, or Ivy Tech. I have done several public-facing things through my job that community members have told me are excellent little additions to the social, cultural, and educational scene here. I don’t do it for the ego boost, or anything dumb like that; I just want the place I’m in to be more like the place I’d want to live – and I love showing people cool new things that they didn’t know about before. We can’t all live in Ann Arbor, Durham, Seattle, Bloomington, or Berkeley, after all – people here (everywhere) deserve nice things too, and I am all too happy to do what I can to provide that for them. The importance I have of being educated: high – I don’t, like, get off on being smart or anything, and absolutely there are some topics I know ZERO about, but it helps me navigate life, and work to make things better wherever I am. UNARMED I don’t know if I’ve ever been asked to explain or justify why I do not own or use firearms. Usually that question is aimed at the folks that do? But I would answer the question by saying that I simply don’t live a life where ready access to a gun is necessary – I am not in law enforcement, I’m not in the military, I’m not a Wild West cowboy, and I am not a gangbanger. I don’t hunt. I don’t have daddy issues, and mental health professionals have told me that my self-esteem is fine. I got tired of growing up around insecure men who were on the constant lookout for whatever imagined enemy was lurking behind any nearby bush. Life must be exhausting when boogeymen take up so much real estate in your brain. While I do support strict gun control legislation, I think the problem is much deeper than that; the problem is not so much the ability to access guns, as it is the desire to access guns. How do we make people not want them? That’s my main interest with this topic. I am glad that I don’t have any space for firearms in my life – life is far more powerful than death. As it relates to Muncie – I guess I knew going into it that Muncie is a right-leaning town in a very right-leaning state, so I knew that my chances of running into insecure trigger-happy people was higher than when I lived in other, bluer places. I occasionally remind myself not to inadvertently cut someone off in traffic, because who knows, they might reach under their seat and make me have a very bad day. The importance of me identifying as unarmed: high, but it’s a smaller one for me; I don’t think about it a ton. LACTOSE TOLERANT This is just my weird way of saying that I am able-bodied. It is a loving nod to my Girlfriend, who is lactose intolerant. I have no allergies, physical handicaps, mental illnesses, or diseases. She likes to say that I am “medically boring”, which is really the best way to be boring. I have only been in the hospital twice – once for a routine colonoscopy, and again for a vasectomy. My 1 prescription is for Vitamin D, which I was told by my doctor is commonplace for people who move from a very sunny location to a very cloudy one, which is what I did in 2014. I didn’t have a vitamin D deficiency before, when living in the desert, or the South! My cholesterol, A1C, kidney function, liver function, and blood pressure are all fine. I have 20/10 vision, which, I was told by my eye doctor, is highly unusual for someone who is 47. I am neurotypical. I don’t know if I should feel lucky for all of this, or if that’s just what “being ordinarily functional” is like, and wish we could all say the same for ourselves (which I do)? Looking back at my family, most of us are long-lived – I can count several of us who lasted well into our 90s. In my immediate family, most health issues resulting in death have more to do with substance abuse, or foul play. And I for sure don’t plan on starting a heroin habit or being murdered anytime soon! Being in my 40s, my metabolism has shifted, of course, so I am around 50 pounds heavier than I was in my late 20s and 30s, but that’s not much more than a vanity issue anyway. You can look good at any size – and I cut much of the sweet tea and heavily fried foods I grew up on in the South, so I am doing better nutritionally, regardless of what the bathroom scale says. And to top it all off, I survived a fairly promiscuous phase in my young adulthood – the late ‘90s-early ‘00s – dodging all those fun little diseases. I don’t think Muncie has much to do with this, other than supplying me with several chicken and breakfast establishments, which makes me aware of making better food choices. Midwesterners LOVE their carbs! I never knew that chicken and noodles is to be served on a bed of mashed potatoes. Double starch! Also, I do have the bad habit of letting the Midwestern cold keep me from being as active as I should be in the dark part of the year. That’s on me, and I should do better there. I should really go to and enjoy more of the state parks in the area – running around outside is pretty good for you. Importance of being “lactose tolerant”: very high. I feel lucky to not have to worry about so many health issues that so many other people have. Everyone deserves peace in their health. Something will inevitably happen with mine, and I’ll deal with it then. For now, I am doing what I can to minimize any afflictions. PROFESSIONAL/MIDDLE-CLASS With 2 master’s degrees, I can only have hoped that I would end up with a job that pays well enough to deal with all the bills and for me to not be an undue burden on others. Maybe I can even do some end-of-year giving, which I have done before, to various local nonprofits. I currently make $48,000 per year, which is about $5,000 a year more than my last job. The individual annual income in Muncie is $24,582; so according to that, I am not doing badly. I’m “Muncie-comfortable”? It doesn’t feel comfortable for big chunks of time, though. I owe $209,000 in student debt – and I am 9 years into the 10-year Public Servant Loan Forgiveness program, and terrified that Trump will kill it when I am so close to that finish line. Also, for a job title that includes the word “director”, I think my salary is way lower than what it should be. What can I say – I’m public-sector and Hoosiers don’t like paying taxes, nor funding education – I vote for way fewer tax breaks for millionaires, and way more free school lunches for kids, that kind of thing. My partner makes about $62,000 annually, so we are in a $100K+ household. Not rich, but we get by. I have never owned a home; I am a lifetime renter. We are trying to change that, finally in a position to be able to start saving up a down payment. For me, being in school until I was 37 really delayed the home ownership deal. That, and not being ready to admit that Muncie might be my forever town. That certainly will keep you from starting the homebuying process. In Muncie, I feel like I am further along than most – I guess that’s if you measure worth by how financially stable you are? I really don’t do this. Some of the worst people I’ve met here earn 6-figures+, and some of the best really struggle to make it to the next payday. Living here kind of makes you wish that 1 person could do more for the benefit of the entire community. Looking around here, you can quickly see that so many people need it. But the change – no, improvement – this city needs will have to come from legislation, and short of voting how I should, there is little that can be done by an individual – especially in a city where so many people are so ill-informed about what’s going on around them. Muncie is no different than any other city in that regard. How important is being middle-class to me? Again, considerable, but I don’t dwell on it (I guess my ability to not worry about money so much is a privilege that having a livable income affords.). I’m just glad I can in some way be a contributor to the community, despite my own occasional struggles. ATHEIST Growing up, whenever an adult would want me to do something, I would need reasoning as to why that request was the right move for the situation. They would often reply with “because I said so”. And I can remember even at the age of 8 or 9 saying “‘because I said so’ isn’t good enough”. I need proof that you know what you’re on about; show me you’re not an idiot. For whatever reason I never took someone’s word for anything; you needed to demonstrate you knew what you were talking about before I would buy into your agenda. I imagine I exhausted my family. Eventually they kind of just left me alone to do my own thing until I moved away to college. It felt like that anyway. I promise though I am not nearly as insufferable about this topic now as I was then; I have learned to people a lot better since I was 10, of course. So then, you can see where this is going. Belief is not good enough – I need knowledge. Evidence. We should all hold each other to that standard, probably? The burden of proof is on the claimant, telling me there is a sky guy. So far there is no proof. Belief simply won’t cut it. How many thousands of gods are alleged to be out there, in the air, in rocks, under the sea, on some other plane, in his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. Sure, it would be nice if there were someone we could plead to for peace. A person to beg for rescue when you are trapped by floodwaters in an underground cavern. That’s comfortable. But fact is not supposed to be 100% comfortable; it’s supposed to be real. I say “fact” and not “truth” because truth is a slippery slope to faith. It’s better to hear the cancer diagnosis from your doctor – that way you have a clear path forward towards improvement. That’s how I look at most things. Bad news is actually good news. I think that here in Muncie this doesn’t come too much into play; I am usually surrounded by agnostic, atheist, irreligious folks. I do have a couple of Christian friends, but they are cool about it. I wouldn’t mind chatting with them about it but I wouldn’t want anything weird to happen and have a friendship ruined over something as BS as religious views. I think they are skittish to bring it up with me, lest I bite their heads off or something, but I really would never jump down someone’s throat about it. Of course, religion plays a huge role in people’s voting and political habits, and I think we can all see how red this county and state are. I loathe religion being used to form public policy. How presumptuous does someone have to be to assume their religion is the only right answer for everyone else? No, Mrs. Bornagain, I am doing just fine over here – I do the right thing because it’s the right thing, not because I’m scared of some kind of eternal spit roast if I don’t. The Satanists I know here are lovely people, and much less judgy, hateful, racist, sexist, exclusionary, and fake-nice than many (most) Christians I know. LEFT So, all these identities probably add up to create this last one. I am on the Left. I would say that national borders, private property, and money should not exist. Of course, I know that none of that will ever happen, not until the extinction event we are currently witnessing plays itself out and takes us with it. But it’s good to have a goal to work towards. Something to measure progress against. No, I don’t want the eradication of the planet! I was just saying that greed, anger, and resentment over lack of power are innately human characteristics, and there’s no real way to 100% eliminate them. American hyperindividualism is disgusting – all too many of us will completely sabotage even those closest to us if it means dying with more stuff. Our leaders are happy to rule over the hill of skulls they created to get them to the top. In Muncie, this is easy – it makes me feel like I have no chance to do any kind of work to fix any of that. It’s really asphyxiating, knowing that in 2024, 57% of the Muncie population voted for a rapist because they thought it would make their eggs and gas cheap, and because they were annoyed to hear about how diversity, equity, and inclusion are important, that other people besides them should experience it. Very often I vacillate on that ol’ chestnut of a question – should I move somewhere else that has its shit together already (for my own sanity and safety), or should I stay here and somehow help this place get its shit together? I hate that the answer right now is “well, it IS pretty cheap here”. How important is being on the Left in my life? Vital – it’s what drives everything I work towards. Everything I hold important. I wish for societal happiness and success, even if that means it takes a little more from me individually to help make it happen. Not everyone won the American lottery by being born a cis white male, so I’d like to use my luck there to make it count for something.?
- On the EDLM Project
I am so glad that I ran into what I believe was a facebook post somewhere in 2017, asking for contributors to this project. I had attempted journaling before in a few places – livejournal being the longest-kept of those back in 2004. I could never keep up with it; it always felt so self-centered and as any of my friends might tell you, I hate making a spectacle of myself. I never like being the important guy in the room. I like others to succeed and if I have anything to do with that, fine, whatever. So, I signed up for this, and immediately it was OK to talk about me. That was the whole point. What DID I think about certain subjects? I didn’t even know. From 2010-2023 I was partnered with a guy that was miserable, and kind of sucked the air out of the room wherever he went. He was loud. He bloviated. He naysayed. He sighed a lot. He loved rolling around in those things in which he found substandard, which was almost everything here – he’d go on and on about how judgmental, conservative, racist, puritanical Muncie is. He almost got off on it, I think. It felt like there was no time or space left over for whatever I thought, cared about, or wanted. Even worse, I allowed him to rub some of his worst traits onto me…the spite, judgment, and distance. So, this writing exercise really became my opportunity to have a voice. I know that this project is about Muncie, at its core, but I never really thought about my journal entries in those terms. The instructions were to write about your day, what you did and what you were feeling, and I am quite sure none of us go around thinking about Muncie all the time, nor what it means to be here, as a Munsonian. It might come up occasionally, especially when prompted, but on the whole, I tried to be 100% honest with my thoughts and actions on journal days, despite what they did or didn’t include. One thing I quickly learned upon rereading my entries was that I can’t stand my own tone. So many of my entries sound nasty, hopeless, snotty, or hostile, really. I promise you all that I am not that kind of guy. People who know me would tell you I am sweet, soft, and one of the most caring people around. I really want my people to thrive in their own unique way. A friend of mine once owned a sweet shop here in town, and she did a kickstarter to help make it through the pandemic, basically. She wanted to use it to raise money to move into a larger space downtown. I told myself that I want to make sure she gets over her goal amount by the time the kickstarter ended. And I did; I watched the clock tick towards midnight, and with a couple of minutes left, I donated the exact amount she was still short of her goal. I was so happy for her that she made it – again, I was not the important person there…she was, for trying to have a really cool, nice thing here in town. My current partner says I am so much gentler and kinder than what she thought I was like when she first met me. I’ll give you that – for whatever reason I am not great with first impressions. People have told me I come off as aloof, arrogant, or just weird at the beginning, but scratching just under the surface showed them I am not like that in reality. I think the initial off-putting manner might be me trying to fight through an imposter syndrome or something; it was probably residue from being turned into a hard-ass by having been married to a hard-ass for several years. I guess my writing style can be curt, but I think that’s due to me wanting nothing but complete truth at all times, and sometimes the truth isn’t pretty. This project deserves better than its participants screwing around with tall tales. Once my divorce went through and my husband left Indiana, you could notice an immediate lift in the tone of my entries. I was happier, and I saw something I hadn’t thought about for a long time – a future. Suddenly, a life with my new partner seemed like the most amazing prospect, and I can’t wait to have that life with her. A few years back, one of the summer directives asked us several questions about Muncie specifically, and my response was absolutely scathing. My dismissal of all of it, combined with my need to keep Muncie at arm’s length all the time (refer to the “out-of-towner” section above) resulted in a blistering indictment of all of Muncie’s ills. I think about that journal a lot, actually. How different I feel now – not nearly so much resentment of things going on in my personal life that I guess I had been taking out on most things around me. I am sorry I felt that way. Sure, Muncie has its issues, but its shortcomings have nothing to do with my personal life; it wasn’t fair to put my baggage onto this city, and judge Muncie for it. Everyone else is out there fighting their own fights too. It will be hard to imagine life without doing these journals – it has been a valuable part of me for the last 8+ years. As such, I made the decision to just keep doing them, after the Everyday Life in Middletown project ends. Starting in 2026, I will roll dice to randomly select 1 day every 3 months, and document those days just like I have been here. I love this project for giving me the chance to plug into something bigger, and to give me a mirror that really told me about myself – so that I can see where I was and how far I’ve come. What do I think of Muncie now? I guess I’ll go back to what a co-worker told me when I started my first big-boy job here: “Muncie is one of those places where you just kind of wake up one morning and go ‘Hey, I’ve lived here for 7 years now’.” I’ll never be a Hoosier, and I’ll never be a Munsonian, but that’s not Muncie’s problem. I never would have guessed I’d be living in Indiana at all, much less Muncie. But I followed a relationship, and for my troubles, got left on the side of the road back behind the IHOP and the northside Y. It’s not the greatest city, but it gave me a career, and it gave me the chance to get involved with a community. And of course, it put me in touch with the lady I’m about to marry!! I woke up this morning having lived here for 11+ years. How on Earth did that happen?