let's move slowly to the pulse of the neon golem we sculpted from the bones of this city

 

 

 

 

Showing up at an odd little storefront, where I had been invited by a friend I hadn't seen in awhile, I walked into a cramped costume shop area that opened up into a kitchen. It was a group of fire spinners and circus folk, a community of rainbow colored hair and expertly fantastic makeup. Descending into their basement-turned-yoga studio, I sat on the side and watched the packed space filled with bodies twisting and turning sticks in a bizarre pantomime, barely missing each other in their pajama-like clothing, moving to music playing at varying speeds in their heads. It wasn't until my friend lead me upstairs and into the ice slicked courtyard that I understood the importance of that awkward room. Once the ends are lit, they swoosh deep and loud through the cold air, and the fearlessness of the body manipulating these flaming batons is fiercely obvious. Enviable. Powerful.

As the J train moves through Brooklyn, it sits above Broadway, so looking out of the windows alternates between looking out across different neighborhoods and staring into upper apartment windows, level with the people inside. There are surprising and silly placements of graffiti, both good and bad to break up the architectural landscape with a hint of whimsy and broken rules. I usually sneer at the unpracticed hand of some of the wannabe artists... but that awkward room of kids twirling batons and balls on string stayed with me - I realized that for there to be truly profound graffiti, there first be massive amounts of bad to mediocre graffiti. That we must all begin at the beginning.

That we constantly undervalue and overlook the importance of Time.

Two different psychics mentioned during readings with me, right before I went away to college as a freshman, that they saw something blocking my throat. It would take me years to eventually realize that I struggled most of my life with feeling like no one could hear me, and it reflected itself in my sexual relationships as well as my work ones. College provided powerful training in how to have a voice visually, but not in what I wanted to say with it. Schools and parents place such high expectations on a fast turn around from our studies to making money that they never pause to consider the human being at the center of it, underdeveloped as a person, but expected to crank out accolades and a reasonable rate of return. Going from home, to school - from parent's opinions about the world to what teachers feel is waiting out there - how can anyone expect us, upon Graduation, to have big, important things to say yet. All we have is other people's experiences to draw from, someone else's story. Someone else's voice.

It might take years to hear our own voice under the clamoring of voices and opinions around us, at us, over us.

In the behemoth machine we are an extension of -the Economy- our time is transubstantiated, from intangible to flesh, its physical form we know as Money. In the entertainment/labor industry, working amongst all these various standards and rules provides me the opportunity to look into the future. Most of these aging stagehands and carpenters in their unions, the ironworkers and the truck loading Teamsters have spent their whole lives, used up their bodies and any bit of good karma in acquiring piles of money, but it is flavorless. Their daily existence is one long whining complaint after another. When you've spent your entire life putting aside freedom and exploration, how do you start, in retirement to even comprehend those things? Especially when you've got no mobility left, mentally or physically?

Run.
It's a trap.

We are starting to resemble our meat, packed into little cages that cut of our access to the world and fed a specific diet, so our flesh and memories have no flavor and no color, consuming blindly until we die. We are what we eat, literally.

Pork used to be a red meat. It lived longer and ate a much more interesting diet not so long ago, recently enough that there are people who still remember a more flavorful animal than what we see today. At some point, even the poorest person knew how to slaughter an animal, how to make bread and cheese from scratch. Most of us don't make or grow our own food, we are forced then to buy what the market offers us. As we have less and less respect for Time and its vital existence in every aspect of our lives, we've sped up all of our processes. We give our time-as-money to machines that process our food for us, the things we eat increasingly becoming a singular product manufactured in a myriad of deceptive ways. In doing so, we also relinquish that knowledge, the thousands of years of learning to harness the elements to nourish our bodies, the ability to provide our own sustenance - and the more we buy into the system, the harder it becomes for us to exist outside of it.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

We have handed over the power we once had over our bodies, from the act of giving birth, to turning healthy food into something torturous (diets), to selling us on Anti-microbial/biotic everything, villianizing the things that make us strong and self sustaining. We've let the GovernmentPharmaceuticalFood industry distance us so far from our bodies that we don't even pause to ask it what it wants. We don't trust our bodies, and we don't allow them to speak with their own voice, because we aren't listening. We go through motions - being taught hygienic standards by unaware parents, washing our hair with shampoo that strips it of its oils, upsetting the balance of the delicate ecosystem that is our scalp, so it over-produces oils to compensate, creating greasy hair that needs to be washed again... allowing a profit based system damage our bodies to justify buying other things to treat the void they created. What would happen if we simply walked away? Opted out?

Would our fears of not being good enough even survive if we no longer let society dictate the things we take pride in?









'When an environment fails, over and over and over again, to provide her with a means to follow her internal compass, then she will leave.'



“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”
―Groucho Marx


“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

-Steve Jobs

My future Ex-Husband is a Wolf

                     He invites me back to his workshop by which he means lair
                                          by which he means room with no heat by which he means cave

 

Visiting Salem (Mass) this past August, drawn by the thought of witchcraft and local ciders, I tentatively sat down with a Tarot Reader, curious about what she would find. I watched her, deadpan, attempting to express as few reactions as possible. Stricken by the male directness of my presence, she talked about the balance between masculine and feminine energies, how deeply I resonate with strength, that I am misreading that strength, so am not able to express its fullest capacity. After obligatory money comments, and something about a guy she saw in my future that she didn't like, who wanted to drag me down with his clingy, heavy, emotional weight, I started to feel like it was time to walk away from this nonsense.

Except he found me.

Someone who worked in a similar capacity to my experience working with metal/wood and building massive structures for the entertainment industry, I figured he was a safe enough bet, and every time he looked at me his eyes were as large as saucers, which can be very hard to resist. But I deeply underestimated the power of forces acting on society, on us, on him. When I asked about the little girl on his phone screen, he explained quickly how a short - lived interaction lead to him telling someone no about getting an abortion. I should have turned and ran right then. There was no appropriate time or place to tell him I would kill the man that tried to tell me what I can or cannot do with my body, especially if he was going to describe his daughter to other women that way. Later he tried to take me to dinner at McDonalds, and the horror calcified. He could spend huge amounts of time and money on shoes and sunglasses, but not on what goes inside of his body - he literally said 'ew' out loud to everything I ate when I was with him because he subsisted completely on fast food, so I resorted to eating before I saw him, and the one time I walked into a coffee shop for a real latte, he said 'I don't belong here'. I watched, and I listened, and I thought about what was wrong.

There is something about being on a jobsite that fills one with purpose and adrenaline and a bizarre sense of intimacy that feels like a sexual charge. I always feel slightly crushed when I leave, cause I can't bring that with me... but I'm starting to realize that having a strong sense of purpose OUTSIDE of work isn't a given, it's self directed - we no longer have the same goals and expectations, so those things will never quite translate. Similarly, I find guys are always shocked by what I am when I'm not onsite, but by that time, I've already figured out something isn't right and cease to pick up the phone. I've had notoriously bad luck with men (and women). Suddenly, in a flash, I get it. I SEE it. The problem at the deep dark core.

In science, and in sex, we study the individual, the microcosm to understand the macro, the whole, the big picture. A relationship, like a hypothesis, isn't a rule, but a path to explore with as little personal bias as one can possibly muster. Just as one molecule reacts very differently to various other molecules (oxygen can be turned into water, or hydrochloric acid, depending on the participating parties), different people bring out a range of unexpected instincts and reactions, choices I make with them vs without them. That doesn't negate the core truth of myself or of oxygen, or the possibility of finding someone who doesn't bring the hydrochloric acid out of me. But the space and research we give a scientific thought, the scrutiny we give all aspects to make sure it plays out in all directions for soundness and stability aren't thought about in the arena of human reproduction, we often fail to hold the (social) experiment of mating in such rigorously high regard. We move forward without adequate research, we gladly acquire blind spots, start making compromises before you can say 'backbone' and then internalize differences in opinions and lifestyle as if we are not good enough.

Those minute differences have HUGE meaning, and overlooking them is exactly the wrong way to handle it. This guy's comment about abortion may just be circumstance, but it alludes to a deep core belief about women and his boundaries of control in relation to them, that may not be obvious in the short term, in the immediate passionate exchange, but will ultimately manifest in other areas. Like when he called me 7 times in one day (while he was leading a crew, no less) and I had to tell him to stop. That was my time, that I wasn't interested in sharing, in my new kitchen with meat all over my hands when he called to ask how my fucking day was going. He felt he had the right to interrupt my life constantly to maintain this tenuous connection. He tried to put himself in control of my dog, out of jealousy, and was mean to her in petty, childish ways that finally broke the sweetness of what had been. Control in all things. It shocks me to remember giving away all of my power and sense of self in previous relationships, and it starts with the subtle stuff, like not wanting to start a fight, so staying silent about my reaction to his simple comment about abortion.

On a slightly more macrocosmic level, I've been working in the labor industry for 4 years now, and quickly found my whiteness, femaleness, and college degreeness wasn't an advantage - they were negative strikes against me, and I had to learn the artful language of broken English along with how to use my body in ways these boys had grown up understanding intuitively. I fearlessly found my way among them and have made some very good friends, but turns out it doesn't work in the reverse. As open and accepting as I may become, shoulder to shoulder with ex-cons and illegal immigrants, they are in socioeconomic subculture that has wholeheartedly embraced the fast-food industry and consumerism that is crippling the future generations through waste and obesity levels that are skyrocketing, as capitalism breaks down, and politicians pretend to fight for control over the corporations who paid for their elections to office. I'd love to say we're all the same deep down and pedigree shouldn't matter, cause it's true, but there are deep seated relationships around those things that have a much bigger impact than I had previously understood.  He was lean and dark, handsome with a husky Spanish accent, eyes big and full of emotion, but consuming nothing but fast food made him seem uniquely helpless, childish. His willingness to allow so much darkness and fakeness to fill his body seemed to mirror the earnestness in which he saw us as being in a real relationship over the few days we spent together, the lack of depth or reality that was important to how he lived his life and chose to define himself. He was wrapped up in, possessed by the status quo, only interested in looking nice on the outside, incurious for what it would feel like to live a quality of life that even paused to question truth or personal power. This is the America created by major food companies waving the flag of capitalism. Some of us are ok with living and eating a hologram.

Looking at him, I saw the American People, after the Great Depression, slowly, innocently unaware of the power they had given up in the newfangled world of frozen dinners and preservative laden food processes, except many of us may never roll over realize that we never liked our spouse in the first place. We're too busy being afraid of how it feels to be alone to realize we never had to settle at all, even though our moms and grandmothers will ask when there will be babies for them to spoil every Christmas when America goes home to celebrate consumerism and obesity in a time honored familial tradition, brought to you by Coke.

He was crushed when I didn't say goodbye.

I texted him that I wanted to be left alone weeks ago, but he still calls. I ignore those calls. I'm already a completely different person than when I started that little romance, and there isn't really any going back. Now I have come to see the work I've been doing with fresh eyes, and I don't like what I see, where I've been swept up in other's expectations, at the expense of personal respect and power, because money, like love, seems like an acceptable trade off for our basic needs. I've spent so long allowing myself to be filled with other people's purpose, and that has gotten me far, but it is time to act rather than be acted upon.  I would never have expected this random liaison to have turned into an elaborate chemical reaction, to walk away alchemized into a completely different self, like I was on the outside of my life looking in, and now I've been called into the ring to fight for myself, and the beliefs that I had no idea I so strongly believed in.