WHEN LINES AND GARBAGE ALIGN
An image can become a little meeting place in your mind, like the bench where you wouldn’t be hassled for lighting up a cigarette after class, or an overturned bucket in a doorway at midnight after a grueling dishwashing shift… when the world loomed over you, because you were all ideas and not enough outlet (and still young and stupid enough to think cigarettes were legit… haha!). It is an entire small universe for you; a gift.
The photo at the bottom of this post really pleases me because it is an image that is a collage of the drawn, the cut and glued mediums, all framed through a camera lens with my hand and eye working together; different textures unified by a single color and shit I pulled out of a garbage can. It is unfinished. It is the apex of Virgo, the crossroads made sentient and animated, exploding with possibility. Not that dumb virgin-vessel bullshit, but the true meaning of Virgo. Call it “feminine” if you want, but I’m so exhausted by gender right now, I can’t…
My image below may not seem like much to you, and it isn’t, BUT it’s a snapshot of the moment my spazzy ADHD calculations made solid an invisible path. A path made of protein chains, rogue snacking and electricity. I asked my brian for something and it answered. The path really had existed like I thought, my imagination was REAL and I did not hallucinate the path OR that my imagination was capable enough to carry the weight of my thoughts like a skeleton. I had trusted enough in my brain’s invisible model that I felt it would not be wasting her time to ask my friend Judge drive from out of state to help me make it real. She is fluent in different, personal shorthands and languages and is one of the best translators of these languages I know. “Let’s make a giant blue sturgeon appear in this thrown away post office building I work in, please.” OK!
The photo below represents a lot of checkpoints I could have turned myself away from. It represents courage to trust my feeble “female” mind. It is evidence that I exist without my stupid vagina and uterus. It is evidence that I can stop using the word “stupid” when I refer to them someday, and maybe even love them like I love my hands or my tongue.
In the photo below I could see the fish’s head for the first time. The gills were finally the right proportions. The old clock face I removed from the frame and coated with glow-in-the-dark spray paint for the eye was now dry and semi-opaque and ready for its pupil. I looked forward to how satisfying it would be to glue on the pupil! I could sit for five minutes and enjoy my cinnamon tea (which, to my fifty-one year old self tastes and smells far better than cigarettes) and rest in its form for a minute.
That minute, and other’s like it are where I pop out the dents in my soul. Again. The dents made when the fucking gaslighting truck of the fucking patriarchy hit-and-runs me AGAIN. At least now when I appear in the court of my mind, over, and over, and over, and testify against myself AS USUAL, because after all, I was driving the truck AND being hit by it AT THE SAME TIME, I don’t always convict myself anymore. After lifelong conditioning I’m a fucking stunt driver for the patriarchy!!! I have that shit up on TWO WHEELS! It just doesn’t get any more meta than this! This situation exists because I believe the bad things that were seeded for me to believe about my “female” body/mind long before my grandmothers were born and this little moment is where I decide not to hate myself for being born “female.” It’s where I try to start over by giving myself an in and out breath of approval. This doesn’t look anything like yoga but has the effect that people who love yoga are always going on about. And that’s what I want for ALL OF US! I LONG for and hope for the FREAKS out there who have ideas of other versions of this life, free-er versions… I await, summon, command, and beg for them to return and LAY IT ON US AS TO HOW GREAT WE COULD BE! I need them and the feeling their joyful wake of movement leaves for everyone. I miss the freaks and their language, their fashion sense, their explosive diarrhea fountains of ideas, and their balls-out mistrust of lazy, ill-gotten comfort. I hope that perhaps I am one of those and that’s why I can’t identify them? …but I AM SO FUCKING LONELY FOR THEM it makes me impatient and unbearable as a human being. Yes, there are some around but there is so much pressure for them to do it all one-handed and it’s not fair!
As I look at my large fish I remember I can make a moment. I can make anything. But who cares? I’m waiting for, and working for, and aching for the luminaries of the past and those yet to be recognized today – the homemade one-offs, people who used to get called freaks for so many reasons – to intercede for us. How “crazy” does that sound?! Then again, I’m exhausted and I have just finished a long tour and saw Roe v. Wade gutted yesterday. I wasn’t surprised by it, I was surprised by seeds of hate for you, the men that I truly love, inside me. Just like the unwanted seeds of racism and self-loathing. And this is how it works. The path is not imagined, it is real. It was CULTIVATED with great care and it is wired into every inner language. I was cultivated without a second thought and still, the system of doom is remains flawless and efficient inside me though I am severely flawed! THIS is what the Supreme Court is trying to protect. The true definition of “Set it and Forget it.” But we don’t have to accept this, and we are not separate. One hand stabs the other, but we are not “men and women.” We are humans and WE are dying. My feelings about the majority of straight privileged men and the white women who help them are not ok. Those feelings are sick and in danger. This is a disease. We aren’t saving unborn babies, WE are dying.
I feel like the freaks are the arbitrators I need to repair my relationship with the heavy majority of straight men in North America and around the world. Maybe they, the Freaks, can get you to hear us women, us non-binary, LGBTQIA and anyone with a uterus, the neurodivergent, the phyisically challenged in an ableist world… Straight and priveleged men, I have made excuses for you for SO long out of my love for you but I cannot anymore. As the brilliant Barry Crimmins once said in regards to helping, rescuing and changing ourselves and others, “We have to be brave enough to listen.” You are actively shutting MOST of the world out without even having to try. We are dying. When will you understand it means YOU too are dying? I still love you enough to not want you to die. A small part of me is still cultivated BY me, with much hard work and intention and as a result is so fucking sane and healthy I don’t want us to die anymore. I used to. I wished a soft species suicide upon us.
I have never invited another soul into this moment until now. This is me telling the truth. This is me telling you this truth is cancer. This is me cutting it out with a knife in front of you. Now it’s your turn.
**I am not enabling the comments for this post but if I were it would only be to find a better way to express what the term “Freak” means to me, and if that is or is not ok. I was called one for so long as a young person, and with such great violence that I made it into my own beloved shield. It transmuted. The humans I looked up to were all called this as well and I think of it as a great word full of power and confidence, so please know I intend to do more searching about this term and that I mean no one else past or present any harm or shock by using it. XO