SBGradMag Stony Brook's Graduate Student Magazine

Dental work is what I went home for, for nearly a month. In this month of March. What I went home to do. Sort of. I'll be 25 this June, so my mother's much more expansive health insurance than mine will expire in its application to, coverage of my broke-ass (are you all aware of how bad our dental insurance is? Holy God, I didn't know how nearly worthless it is until I had to deal with a succession of dental procedures, some of which are not worth using our ‘coverage' for, at least in my situation, and most of which our coverage does not cover...). I also had not seen my father for about 15 months. With the exception of a brief lunch date the day before a trip to Cuba last May that left him, well, worried about my political, social ‘sympathies,' ‘leanings,' drives and affiliations. During which I had to subtly remind him that while I may be inclined toward risky propositions, if they are worthwhile beyond a short-term angle of vision, I am not drawn toward, like, breaking laws, inclined to embark upon what I would qualify as self-destructive acts.

"'Heimlich'?...What do you understand by ‘heimlich'?" "Well,...they are like a buried spring or a dried-up pond.  One cannot walk over it without always having the feeling that water might come up there again." "Oh, we call it ‘unheimlich'; you call it ‘heimlich'."  --from The "Uncanny," Sigmund Freud (1919)

Technically, Michigan is a space.  A big one, too.  Spanning over 97,000 square miles, it is the 11^th largest state in the U.S.  I lived in Michigan for most of my life.  If pressed, it appears that I know--that I have access to--the space of it.  I spent years hiking along the scraggly dunes of Lake Michigan.  I am intimate with its sand and clay, the acres of C.C. Camp-planted pine forests, the best places to hunt morel mushrooms and where along Bear Creek (pronounced "crick") bald eagles nest.  I also know the cityscapes; I've lived and worked in two of Michigan's three major cities.  I drive like a New Yorker across its freeways now, slipping in between the aesthetically-uninspired brick buildings that erupted in the 60s and 70s, but the surfaces of these roads remain the same familiar washed grey crisscrossed by a deep black from the tar sprayed into its cracks.  

MC Wren recently joined the fight against gentrification. He has joined a group of protestors who claim that the international phenomenon know as "hip-hop" can be attributed to a single apartment building in Brooklyn that now faces demolition. It was in the basement of this building that MC Wren spun and scratched records to the delight and amusement of partygoers, instigating a trend in music that forever reshaped the use of the record player, and the sound of music.

It was one of those "you had to be there" moments. It was art imitating life imitating art. The "Piled Higher and Deeper" (PhD) comics of Jorge Chan has a graduate student following of almost religious proportions, and to see him live, to witness as he presents an audio/visual extravaganza of topical humor straight from the pages of his strips is, well, moving.

Let's just put it right out there. This issue of the GradMag is racy-it's the sex issue, what did you expect? This will be addressed directly, head-on; we will not only release the elephant in the room but we shall entice it to rampage. Here we go:

Climax, cunnilingus, shaft, grannies, trannies, bears, furries, milf, dilf, bdsm, bukake, bbw, the horizontal tango, the wild-thing, the beast with two backs, gettin' it on, making love, I call it messin' with the kid.

I know I should tell her but I didn't. We've a pretty open relationship and (well, not that kind of open, but...) I've never told her anything that she reacted to in anger or disgust. But this is something outside the general confessions and disclosures one lover confesses or discloses to the other. This is secretive, it's scary, it's uncertain. It sinks deep into the heart of control and being out of control and relinquishing control and taking control in a partnership.