An earthquake struck in ’92. The aether ripped, frost from the overhead slipping into the architecture. Shuddering freckles of cobalt collapse into lithium mines warred over by techtonic cataclypse. Swarm.

Sometimes when you are queer the future can occur before the past.

Growing up frozen in temporal veins, branching paths lead back to premature adulthood, a ghost of an imagined future pressing into the present, blocking the development of the past. I was born in ‘9X. The USSR collapsed into Gorbachev-cum-Yeltsin, a Reaganing of the alternative. Fresh pressed flowers gored into WASP loafers. At the end of history, I begin.

Y2K, the clocks stop. Hardboiled Nostradamus melts yolk over the History Channel, a chronoclypse paraded into drooled-over annihilation. Now erased, the beforeshadows of conspiracy excavate false pasts. We grew up in virtuality, a representation of a representation spun through a rewound VHS. At the turn of the Millennium, just as use collapsed into exchange and exchange collapsed into the universal form, as the universal form became money and money became credit, credit became its own image, the circulation of pure significance, a shout in the dark spectering falsely through unaired air. Fizzle, the white noise poltergeist of a million signals in conscious spoken symboling.

George W. Bush stole the election in 2000. Or, the Brooks Brothers did. Or, the Supreme Court did. Or, Pat Buchanan did. Or, Donald Trump did. Or, Joe Biden did. Or, or, or. The procedure of democracy replaces its content. Democracy, cannibalized by the 80s, becomes an image transposed onto a digital flag flickering over the ruins of the return of history, tragedy peaking into the real at 9/11.

Crush. Terror. The purgatory of puberty bubbling into PTSD-driven reactive adulthood. Echolalia-alolaclypse ticcsoverto tardive dyskinesia.

(Blank.)

In cycles of queer time, our temporal orientation is reflected back into itself, forcing us into a project of re-engineering our own autobiography. In abjection, the squick horror of being crip cracks the body into artifacts arranged throughout spacetime. The goal of crip/queer narrative is archeology, the excavating of the shattered queer us, queer I, into a mythos of resistance. Queer time is inherently anti-fascist, incapable of being incorporated into the palingenetic apocalypse of the zombified nation-state. Rejecting the question of coherence, queerness rejects the potential of authority, the name-of-the-father shouting in the background of the ego.

Sometimes when you are queer the past is an echo of the present and the future is an act of history.

Image: Birth of a Galaxy, Max Ernst