I Could Clean Up Good For You (1800s Remix)

 

If I could tell you, I would.

Yesterday, while sitting in a hospital for eleven and a half hours for a reason having little to do with me, I read a book on Jewish meditation by Aryeh Kaplan that was given to me easily a year and a half ago. 

It takes a while to get back to oneself. To go within. To go without. To recognize the feeling of the texture of the walls within ourselves, but also to fall forward into a dimension unknown.

I'm thinking a lot about the things that bring me back to myself. But also how my self is shifting.

Something between listening to piano of the late 1800s and Tommy Richman's Million Dollar Baby. 

be well; be loved,

k.

 

[image: Nicolas Régnier, Saint Sebastian tended by the Holy Irene and her Servant (1626-1630)]

What You Plate When You Move So Fast (from another era)

 

Hiding out.

What were you learning in the workshop today, she asks. Amused and vaguely waiting for my lips to answer.

I waver. Not feeling taken seriously. Is she asking to know? Or is she asking to watch my mouth move. 

There was a lot covered.  Most interesting to me was that the presenter detailed out how to look for and recognize language elements that may denote language deprivation versus a situation where there may be psychiatric reasons for disfluency in the language. 

(pause)

I don’t like pushy people. 

I don’t like when people talk shit on avoidant attachment styles as a sneaky way to try and pressure you into being closer to them than you feel comfortable being.

 

(pause)

 

I know her relationship with her mother.

I know her relationship to her father.

I know how her father died.

I know what her uncomfortableness with him was. 

I know her relationship to a brother.

How her last relationship ended.

How long her relationships have lasted in the last year. 

Her poetry from college:

From high school. 

From a few months ago.

Her diagnosis of her last girlfriend.

The books her last girlfriend published.

The foods she can't eat.

How she felt as a child. 

I know her dreams.

Long term.

Short term.

It had been 7 days. I had seen her two of them.  

All she knows of me is that I am slow burn.

The lick of a candle flame at night.

 

 

The expediting of closeness is a product of capitalism:

 

She is breakaway gym pants

 

And I am Salomé’s Dance of the Seven Veils*. 

 

 

 

Be well; be loved,

 

K. 

 

*= This version of it. But extended. (Rita Hayworth's version is a bit too spectacle and appropriative, somehow.)

(image: Salomé, Jean Benner, 1899.)

The Sound of the Bell

 

And I'm a lioness when it comes to you

If they say a word, it'll be the last mistake they get a chance to make.

                   -- Forgetters; Too Small to Fail

One of the things I have a problem with is being overprotective of my friends. 

Not in the parental "Don't do that! It's not safe!" type way, but in the way that inclines one, immediately, to remove the fucking face of anyone who hurts or messes with their friends. Even when it is completely unasked for and said friend, arguably, does not need protecting. 

Is it a bad trait?

My inclination is to say that it is. The polite me says that advocacy is listening to what a person has explicitly stated needing, and then moving toward that goal. To do otherwise is to lack boundaries, meet fire with fire, to - perhaps- be a brute.

I get away with it more because of looking like a thin white lady. I always have. When a guy in high school sent a girl friend of his to beat me up, I pushed past her to go at him.  When a girl in middle school was picking on a friend of mine that was half her size (and still taller than me…), I stole my brother’s rings, wrapped masking tape around the base of them so that they would fit on my fingers, and walked directly up to her with my ringed fist hidden behind my back and told her to pick on someone her own fucking size. (It was such a corny thing to say. I had obviously gotten it from some after school television special. It did, however, work.) When I got into a fight in elementary school with some girl who was being a jerk, we grabbed each other’s forearms and dug our nails into each other. Then I kneed her in the box and she went down. Game over.

As I moved into adulthood, I recognized the legality of such an approach and moved my crosshairs elsewhere. It didn’t take much, really. I hung out with 99% men and apprenticed by watching their covert-yet-scary-as-shit threats of sliding into a person’s car when they weren’t there, cutting their seat belts, and leaving. I know that women get a bad rap of being cunning and malicious, but I will tell you first hand that you know nothing of the inner world of men like I do. The only difference, anecdotally,  is that they don’t tend to talk about it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve gotten all four of my tires slashed at once before. I’ve had people put up fliers with a list of names of people who should kill themselves (My name was on it. What can I say? We were organizing something women-centered on the cusp of the 2000s. What did you think was going to happen?)  If I deserved it seems debatable, but I would never play entirely innocent.  I know what I’ve been up to.

But is it a bad trait?

Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes when I’m here, sitting in the proverbial penalty box with a proverbial split lip, I’d say it’s worth it. Sometimes I overstep, and that is obviously not cool. So I sit in the penalty box and wipe my lip with the back of my hand: In part to rid the blood; in part to hide the smirk of satisfaction in knowing that that motherfucker will not mess with my friend again.



Be well; be loved,

k.

(image: Colin Farrell on the set of Alexander in 2004)

The Rose Between the Lion's Teeth

I’ve been thinking of tenderness as of late. The stories we hide within ourselves, and the love we extend to other people.

It takes a particular person to manage the balance between necessary brutality and necessary gentleness. Rare are the people who are able to be as brutal as fuck with one hand, while cradling the head of a grieving friend with the other. There are so many factors involved.

I’ve been thinking about how we are getting through our days - protests or not - knowing that there are people being murdered by the hundreds every day. How to navigate ones day when connecting with the compassion for the entire family of even one murdered member of their group.

Don’t numb out or turn your head.

There is so much at stake with every piece of it.

How does one balance compassion with overwhelm, action with stunned shock. We must keep moving, but we must stay connected as well.

What is the humanity mathematics of all of this?  How to look a stranger in the eyes as we walk by and offer compassion while our own worlds may be falling apart.

It’s what has been stuck within my head these days. This human ballerina leaping delicately on the edge of a circular and spinning blade.



be well; be loved.

k.


image credit: Miu Miu SS23- Shot by Teaghan Rohan & directed by Paris Mumpower

The Struggles That Are Worth It, and the Ones We Leave Behind

The other night, I read the description of the back of a person’s hands looking like "crumpled waxed paper" in a book I was reading.  It made me think of my mother.

I haven’t remembered the faces of my parents since I was a teenager. Only their hands. My father’s dull gold wedding ring, and the dark hairs sprouting out from below his knuckles.

(pause)

This season has been one of excavation.

The house is gone (not gone, but not “ours”), and there was only one box I chose to send to myself. I always imagined that I would fill boxes. But there was nothing remaining of me, and my parents had largely been strangers. 

In the end, it was a standard sized, singular moving box. 

Unjustifiably large. 

Its contents wobbling heavily back and forth within it.



be well; be loved,

k.


(photo: Head Lock, Luke Smalley, 1998)
(description of the back of a person’s hand is not an exact quote because I’m too lazy to look it up, but was from Rabbi Lawrence Kushner’s book, Kabbalah: A Love Story)

Steady Sailor, or, The Beauty of the Picture You Take, Each Weekday Morning, in Front of a Poster of Tomatoes

 

 

I.

I have just returned from Illinois, Michigan, and the scrape of Ohio. I will return toward the end of the month.

II.

Earlier this evening, I thought of you. It was in the cool, blue light of the apartment you used to live in with the walls that didn’t quite touch the ceiling. Your museum living room. The neighbors that complained about your smoking.

I have a voicemail you sent me on March third of the year you knew me. You had brought a man home from the bar. You didn’t know why. You barely knew what happened. The fear and confusion in your voice is palpable.

Sometimes, I have this odd impulse to send it to you. I don’t know why. I never would, of course, and don’t even know why I still have the voicemail. It was something I held on to for evidence for you, if you ever needed it.  Then, as time went on, I had waited too long to delete it.  Now, with my romance toward archival material, it is too late to destroy it with a clean conscience.  And so, it rests.

III.

I have been reading a lot of research that is fucking me up. It stares me straight in the eyes with its information and blinks only when I do. The curve of its hands hold my jawline and ask me “Didn’t you know this already?”.  I did not. It seems like such an odd Keeper to hand me now, at this point in my life, the keys that unlock the rooms I’ve been trying to get into my entire life.

Behind me, I hear the grumbles of a suspicion only trauma can instill. It makes me smile the smile that sparks a person to defensively ask why I am laughing.

I am not laughing.

I am shining from within in recognition.

I am shining from within in particular love.

You with your hair freshly cut from the barber closest to your work.

You with a microfiber lens cloth dutifully kept deep in your pants pocket.




be well; be loved,


k.

(Photograph by Leslie Zhang for MWMW Studios Fall 2019)

The Same But Opposite

 

 

It has certainly been a while. 

Even when I have been writing here, I have not been writing here. 

Within the last several months, there has been:

Two deaths.

No funerals.

One body.

One box.

One breathtaking Virgo upgrade.

One chance.

Six courses of a Shabbat meal in One hotel room.

Five cities.

Two cities to go.

Twenty nine thousand seven hundred and fifty four gasps. 

Three gifts from One heart in Four days.

Thirteen rows.

Twelve days.

Six flights.

Endless thirst for the depth of conversations One offers.

Two necessary conversations after Fourteen years.  

Four days and two shared beds.

The absence of sound when I need it.

 (pause)

 

I have been thinking on concepts such as cognitive empathy and the beauty of how the boundaries we set allow us to love, appreciate, and feel those without regret. 

I have been pondering the question of how trust is built and its relationship to incremental risk.

My heart has been open, overwhelmed and excited.  

When you know, you know: But it is wild to feel the intervention of unseen and formerly uncertain hands. 

be well; be loved,

k.

 Image: “Deconstruction”. Yang Ling by Jumbo Tsui for V Magazine China May 2023 via Vampite Fitness Tumbrl

On Having Lost All Perspective

 
I've been trying to figure out that middle ground of authenticity and connection mixed with appropriateness when talking to particular people I care about who are in my life about my life. 

In particular- although not exclusively- the challenges I have with this are in conversations with cis straight people who I genuinely like and care about. 

Culturally, sex and perversion is just something more casually talked about in queer contexts.  Not always, but usually.

For this reason, a question of "So what's been going on lately?" is filled with images I filter and sort through in order to find one that feels appropriate. The recent queer sex in a hotel room a few hours out of town seems like an out-of-place topic for this conversation. My mind's fingers fumble over to run along my recent combination-kink of freshly shaven and oiled legs, deep emerald green panties, and butter cookie flavored lip balm. This, too, seems at odds with the context. 

So my mind tries to imagine what would fit with them and I end up thinking of stupid, stereotyping topics such as taxes. 

[Interestingly, I asked a queer friend what he thought he could talk to straight people about and he, too, said taxes. Why does this feel so certain?]

It's not just with cis, straight people of course. 

At this point it could be with anyone.

be well; be loved,

k.

Of Sight and Sound in Fragments

 

Sometimes, lists are the only way to communicate. 

A Morse Code of sorts when one is too bogged down or overwhelmed to jewel together words in order to create a beautiful sentence to lay across your collarbone.  

A list as of late would include:

-You with your penchant for the Midwest, your 1950s barbershop hair and wild eyes.

-The spike of a stiletto shattering your classic Christmas bulbs: Solid red, solid green, solid blue - their silver innards spread across a hardwood floor and the satisfying crunch under my shoe.

-My hand upon my mother's chest in my hometown. The waterlogged nugget of sponge I placed into your mouth. The sandpaper grit in which your tongue stuck to it.  My aim and learned accuracy of getting the morphine exactly and slowly upon those furthest molars: A slow steady short distance down that throat that produced every word I have ever heard you speak.

 

 

(pause)

 

It would also include the observation: It is rare that one hears the sound of a firecracker and hears only a singular pop. 

 

 (pause)

 

 

I have been reading about the art of Sophie Calle (thank you, E.), and thinking about the concept not of "love at first sight", but of the "love at last sight" that Walter Benjamin references in his book Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. 

 

Love at last sight.  

Tell me of the people and times it makes you think of.

be well; be loved,

k.