Unuseful Information Now

My daughter doesn’t like me writing for Our Big Gayborhood. She’s evinced this before, of course, refusing to read more than a sentence or two of the articles that I write, asking straight-out why I “write for that thing.” Tonight, after I’d told her that I had some writing to do, she decided to dispense some career advice to remove this glaring object of sexuality from the presence of our relationship:

“Daddy, you should write for The Courier-Journal [our daily paper here in Louisville, KY],” she told me, staring up through our tired maple tree’s branches into the gloaming haze of Sirius’s fiery rise. My daughter, Penny, will generally read the Sports section if I leave it on the table, maybe a passing local interest story from the Metro or a heart-warming Family Circus. Admittedly, my answer was unsatisfactorily pragmatic, something about newspapers hiring journalism majors, and about the fact that I wasn’t really a reporter.

What she said next, though, had me turning the page of my notebook: “Yeah… but you’re good at unuseful information now,” an awkward, grammatically mangled interpretation of my work to which my only response was writing in large letters at the top of my glaringly white new page: “Unuseful Information Now – UIN.”

It gets an acronym because it sounds more like a brand name than a style or mode of writing, packaged up by that little 3-letter interpellation of temporality at the end which Coppola used to pull Conrad into the 1970s… “Now.” UIN. Unuseful Information… Now.  The new toy I can’t put down, the reflective orb enabling me to not only deflect my daughter’s pubescent anxieties upon an expanded cultural sphere, but also to return to the alchemical laboratory where our crude, aesthetic conflations bubble and spark atop the tall, un-kept tables.

I pull the cleanest cauldron from the pile and slap my UIN bumper sticker on its side, ensuring that whatever manifestation of meaning that I conjure will be mine, the bastardized progeny of a fretting, 12-year-old mind and my own narcissistic desire to define what it is that I am doing here, a straight man writing for a publication that labels itself as the place “Where the Queers Write.” Since I started writing for OBG, I have been haunted by this awareness, that my experience, as an elemental force shaping the writing that I do, is one of un-usefulness for the audience that I’m projecting. If I’m not gay, if I have not shared in the experiential dramas of bigotry and repression, dogma and persecution, that the “queers” who write for OBG have, then it is only my packaging of this inherent un-usefulness, my literary contortions of the Now that we live in, that will connect me to the “Queers” who, though I might share ideological positions with, possess an experience that I never will, and who could easily regard this essay as the scribblings of an “other.”

This is to say that the crisis that this paper confronts is aesthetic, rather than political. If what I’m “good at” is “unuseful information,” then how do I turn this talent into something that my “queer” audience can use to achieve our shared ideological objectives?…  When here I am, the father of an insecure 12-year-old grappling with her father’s queer, strange, unidentifiable ideology, and her attempts to engage this world without conflict or derision…

UIN… I’m tempted to imagine it as the call letters of yet another ideologically-charged news outlet, some venue where such headlines as: “Pat Robertson Clawed His Eyeballs Out Today When Lightning Struck a Fiberglass Statue of Jesus…” or “Ted Haggad is Gay, Regardless of What He Says,” capture this shared experience of ours in some way that the truthiness (thanks Stephen Colbert) of our condition can be manifest before my daughter’s eyes, so that she can take the “Now” of what I write and make it useful in her progression through this compendium that we call “Life.”

It’s all so ironic… I don’t believe that Life has Purpose, but I spend all this time consumed with UIN…

Tags: Father-Daughter Relationships, Gay, Parents are Dweebs, Straight, Ted Haggard, Unuseful Information Now