On April 15, 1947, Major League Baseball’s first black player, Jackie Robinson, walked onto the diamond at Ebbets Field unsure what would happen next. It was a year before President Harry Truman integrated the armed forces, as Jackie’s daughter Sharon wrote in the New York Times, and everyone thought the Dodgers were insane. Jackie Robinson had good reason to worry someone might kill him.
But thank God he played. He won Rookie of the Year in his first season, MVP in 1949, hit .311 in his career, and was a six-time All-Star. His success made it harder for racist assholes to argue that blacks didn’t have a place in professional sports—or mainstream America.
Yesterday, NBA player Jason Collins became the first active professional male athlete to come out as gay. And he couldn’t be more different than Jackie Robinson.
Read More on VICE.
Tonight is the night before May Day, a celebration in Oxford where everyone gets really drunk and then jumps off a bridge as Magdalen choir sings. I planned to go out with Kit and some other bitches tonight, but my body just can’t handle it. The last two days I have slept a total of twenty-six hours—the universal Mitchell signal for my blood being off and/or my immunities not being able to handle some nasty bug. I want to go out, but going out would mean getting sicker. And my little sister’s best friend just died because she didn’t listen to the doctors and take her medicine, because she wanted “to be normal like all the other kids.” Apparently, for a sick person being like all the other kids means death.
I would feel comfortable going out and ignoring my body if the bloody NHS would prescribe me my blood medication. But they refuse; there’s not enough studies to prove my medication will do enough for me for it to be worth the government’s money. Yay for socialized medicine and liberal dreams!
On top of all this, I drank too much Saturday so my depression has settled in my stomach, making me feel blue for nothing and knocking me out on my bed, where the room spins for days and the only thing that makes me feel a little better is Taylor Swift. And the only thing I can do to control any of this is not too get drunk for awhile, which is why, as my friends jump off bridges, I am laying on this bed listening to Red and writing about Gertrude Stein, whom I hate.
Oh, the joys of being young and sick.
A few weeks ago, I received heat for only writing negative articles on contemporary life. Since I’m a sensitive fuss who absorbs every negative comment (and therefore should never have started writing on the internet in the first place), the negative reaction sent me to my bed, where I lay wondering if my writing had no positive effect, as if writers were supposed to serve a higher calling, not just tell the truth and entertain readers. Last Thursday evaporated my moral questioning.
I went to Babylove, the shitty Oxford club I always go to. It was a nineties night (read: “straight dudes’ excuse to dance to Destiny’s Child” night), and I could spot the four gay boys in the room. They were all attractive; they all knew how to dance. But instead of speaking to each other—dancing with each other, touch each other, participating in the ritual that leads them to leave with each other—they looked at each other across the room. Nobody ever approached each other; we danced with girls instead, our bodies in synch with the girls’ hip movements but our eyes glued to all the other sad gay boys. This was nobody’s fault but our own. Society’s moved on from homophobia in many ways, but we haven’t moved on from the feeling we learned as kids: nobody loves a faggot and there’s something wrong with us loving each other.
My writing serves no moral purpose; nothing outside of environmental or political journalism really does. But my writing is less immoral than stories about twenty-year-old gay boys loving themselves.
"Furthermore, I had a gorgeous husband who reassured me I’d be pregnant with his child in the wink of an eye. When I think back to those nights when sex was deliciously fun – the seduction techniques, the alluring underwear, the at-times sexy, at-times funny lovemaking involved in trying to create new life – it was exciting and pleasurable, without question. Yet such memories were always tainted by the inevitable disappointment of failing to conceive each month."
— Samantha Brick is an incredible troll and very, very underrated writer.
"If you love something, keep it off the internet."
— Someone from grantland said this during a podcast; I couldn’t tell who. It’s such a true statement. I wish I had learned it earlier, although I’m sort-of glad I destroyed some friendships. In the long run, it might be better for me that they ended. I’m still sad though.
"You’re a good writer. You’re just a terrible person."
— Drunk Oxford boy screaming at me outside a men’s room. #57DaysLeftInEngland
