I've Seen Too Much; I Haven't Seen Enough

I woke up this morning and listened to  this song  on repeat.  It's my anthem right now.  (And no, not just because there is a Little Cesar's reference, although, I mean, come on...)  Just a reminder that I'm livin' my best life...

(pause)

There is an electricity, of sorts, in the air whenever people get together for a common good. Unpaid, un-obligated, just straight up community collaboration and organizing. It's a high of sorts.  You see the best in people because people kind of fucking glow.

The past 29 hours have been beautiful. Even the traffic jam that happened on the way down that turned two hours in to four and a half still managed to have hilarity because all of us in the cars speckled in different spots along the way spent the time texting immaturity and bad jokes to each other while we waited.

Today was Spanish-speaking families, their Deaf kids (and hearing siblings) doing art, climbing rock walls, having discussions of Deaf Latinx identity, tons of interpreters, food, games, laughter, and an army of folding chairs and tables.

Some highlights and images and/or commentary:

Meeting new folks and seeing familiar faces and chatting art, family, language and connection.

Standing in a field in the rain wearing a helmet and being surrounded by harnesses in a way I've never experienced. (Sorry, rock climbing types. You've got the wrong kind of 'butch': I only associate harnesses with sex so, throughout this whole ordeal I just kept kind of immaturely snickering.)

The smell of the air. Holy, holy, beautiful holy: It was grass and straw and dirt and flowers.  I haven't tasted and smelled air this fresh in so, so long.

Meeting a Deaf Queer Latinx person I had never met before who just moved from Chicago. We chatted midwest, following your gut, and the necessity of art.  (Always.)

The science experiments, the messes they made, and the look on the youth's faces when solid-to-gas was demonstrated with dry ice in water.

Taking a risk and voice interpreting for a community leader (ASL/ENG) in front of a fuck ton of my peers and a lot of ASL students.

I'm not sure if I can articulate this, but, the feeling of seeing people I work with all of the time outside of our usual contexts. It felt like one big, loving summer camp being two hours away from home in the middle of some mountains. Is it weird that seeing people simply in a different context makes  you all a ton warmer/closer with each other? It's not the distance or change of environment as much as the intention:  When people show up for shit that is thankless and without pay, something changes. Is that weird? It shouldn't be. It's been going on forever. It's hard to be a bullshitter or be fake with your intentions when you're all fried at the end of the day and covered in mud because you believe that supporting spaces like this is important.

Lastly, and aside: Out-of-the-city butches are some of my favorite.  They all kind of dress the same: Backwards baseball hats, some kind of 90s gauged earrings and a swagger in their step that is just the tad bit overdone. (They're my favorite because when they cruise me, the second I meet their eyes and cruise back, they blush and try to collect their swag back together.  I find it harmless, sweet and awkwardly charming.)


And now?

I have a long date with my bathtub.
 
 


But never did I change, never been ashamed
Never did I switch, story stayed the same
I did this on my own, I made this a lane
 
Y'all gotta bear with me, I been through some things.




Be well; be loved,

k.




title credit: from some Radiohead song I was listening to on the way home
italicized: lyrics from Best Life (Cardi B/Chance the Rapper)
photo credit: Me. This is the sky above aforementioned field.

The Romance of Language, or, Slide Your Finger Between the Petals

It almost, almost, feels like Christmas.

This morning I woke up so excited. There is an event that combines the three languages I have been playing with and learning in a way, or in a capacity rather, that I have never experienced. It got me thinking about the parallels of what I love about language and what I love about and need from the people in my life and the people who I date.

Put succinctly?

Language has rules and consistency without being inflexible or strict.

Think about it.

In relation to language:

One wouldn't be able to say dog when canned difficult soaping the and expect anyone to make anything out of it. It doesn't follow the rules of the language. The English-speaking mind can't make sense of it because it falls outside of the agreed upon expectation.

Yet at the same time, language is incredibly and gloriously playful within its rules.

(pause)

Suppose I asked you if tongues dance.

You might go to the dictionary, read definitions of tongues and see a bit of variation - the thing in your mouth you taste with, the part of your shoe that is underneath the shoelaces, a word used to describe languages, etc - but there would certainly not be any indication that any of these could disembody and go dancing.

And yet:

My tongue dances up the side of your neck, and you turn your face deeper into the pillow that rests upon your bed in your newly reconfigured bedroom.

My tongue dances.

Even in structure and placement it can press a different feeling.  The difference between:

I don't need anyone but you. 

and

I don't need 

anyone 

but 

you.


In ASL, I think of the way language play and flexibility can create a visceral response in its visual form.  I think, here, of how one way to refer to the sharpness of "Deaf eyes" (the sign for DEAF signed over one's eyeball) immediately makes me giggle, and of how the sign for one way to express "colonization" (a simulated and simultaneous ripping out of one's heart and mind from a power above) leaves me gutted.

I think about this playfulness in language often, and how it comes with practice and time.

I'm sure everyone has heard the idea that one knows when they reach a particular level in a language when they are able to understand and produce humor within it. For me, however, it is more the play that shows that.

It is similar to relationships and friendships.  One knows they have reached a particular level in a relationship to another when they are able to understand and produce humor within it.  But more so, it is the ability to have and play within limits. Within rules.  To improvise. Be flexible. Riff off of each other. To become more than just yourself by virtue of and conjunction with, another.

Both with language and relationships there has to be rules and consistency.

But the finesse comes with following - and sometimes intentionally breaking - these rules and limits while enjoying and playing within them. 

A bit of an aside: "Grammar Nazis" have nothing on me.  They lack this flexibility. The second someone starts making fun of someone's grammar, I just think to myself, "Damn. These people have no fucking clue about the art and intelligence and perspectives that exist outside of their boring and elitist rules."  Because when you do that shit, you miss out on all kinds of poetry: From Neruda to Cardi B's Instagram account posts. They are on par with each other. Don't hand me elitism. Beauty is as much in the glitter of sun on water as it is in the glitter of the moon on spilled car oil on blacktop. Designer perfume and the stench of fucking have equal merits in what excites me: I'm here for all of it.

Wisdom and lesson doesn't come in the form you always want it to.  And sometimes? It can make you nervous at first.

But that, too, comes with time.

As with any language:

Stick with it.

It will come.

(pause)

Have the limits and have the rules

but have the openness

to play

and play

and play.

It's incredible what you will find.

Underneath and

between

the rules

there is release

there is consistency

and there is love.




[Here is to 'love letters' as things written on paper and put into envelopes
but also
here is to 'love letters' that are those who allow love to happen.]


Be well; be loved,

k.


Playing with language to learn. This is a clip of a geography teacher who re-wrote Bodak Yellow to help teach her students geography. Fuck YES. Love. : here

(image credit : Silent Beauties, photography by Leendert Blok (1920’s) via blackbirdspots tumblr)

Motherwell: An Exercise in Art and Practice

This evening at 9:51pm, an email popped up in my inbox I had been waiting for. This isn't to say that anyone had said it would actually be sent, or that I knew who it would come from, exactly, but yet, in the less-than-seven-days that I really, truly hoped it would come in - there it was.

At 9:51pm no less.

I can't express the relief I felt and feel.  A person you don't even know with the information you need falling, like some weird and strategic feather, into your accidentally open and outstretched palm when you need it most.

Talk about manifesting.

I am grateful, thankful, relieved and ready.  A determined and quick study.  I had been wondering why I wasn't sweating it, but something told me just to be patient.

And then?

There is was. 

 (pause)

Piece by piece by piece.

Something is happening.

It is the most satisfying feeling to feel its electricity going through me.

(pause)

There is something to be said about being open.

There is something to be said about putting pain where its place is.

Tell me:

When is the last time you cried yourself to sleep

in the arms of someone

who is still here?





Be well; be loved,

k.

(image credit: Open #23, 1968 by Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) via giamvixxx tumblr.)

Each Candle Represents a Prayer

I.

My father, both on his birthday and on Christmas, would refuse his gifts. It was not so much an act of anti-materialism as it was an odd attempt to shame us for wanting to express love or thoughtfulness toward him.  That he thought so little of us that he did not want our gifts or attention. I knew that it was himself he thought so little of, but it was sad to watch him grumbling about attempting to press his non-consentual crown of thorns atop our silent heads.

I.

This afternoon I sat across the table from a woman who has the most perfect Cupid's bow of her upper lip.  While we talked, I kept wondering if she put highlighter on it to accentuate this fact.  The jury is still out on that one. Either way, it is gorgeous.

I.

Tonight I walked through a neighborhood that smelled identical to the neighborhood I grew up in during the summertime.  I know that it is supposed to rain the next many days.  Somehow the beauty of today and the drear of tomorrow are quite fitting. They both exist. The fingers of lovers hands intertwining while they sleep.

I.

Happy birthday to you.  Let the ones who love you, love you.

There's nothing sadder than a tortured soul wandering about denying all that he secretly wants deep within his heart of broken hearts.



Be well; be loved,

k.

(image credit: Maximillian Virgili via maximillianvirgili dot com)

I'm Back Sleeping or Fucking or Something

A few weeks ago I started reading Sartre's take on Baudelaire. It was mostly sparked by an obsession I have with scents. How scents intoxicate us. Impact us.

The Dandies and the Decandents knew the power of this.  Here, I have to share a string of the sexiest sentences I read within my research.  It is from the preview of a chapter in the book Scents and Sensibility that is written by Catherine Maxwell.  I'll underline the part of it that got me most flustered in the best of ways. It reads:

This chapter examines the decadent olfactif as represented by Oscar Wilde and the poet and critic Arthur Symons, who understood how perfume helped shape their identities as dandies and sophisticated men about town, with both of them alluding to new synthetic scents. Wilde’s use of perfume as a sign of decadent sexual identity, explored in Dorian Gray, is rudely interrupted by his imprisonment in 1895, but the idea of perfume abides with him during his incarceration as an important ideal and consolation.

I am absolutely on my knees that one's  use of perfume as a sign of decadent sexual identity can be rudely interrupted by incarceration. Yes, please. 

In any case.  Back to Sartre (although he annoys me).  I want to bookmark his discussion of the white blackbird.  Did you know that they exist?  They do.  And I want to return, perhaps in the next entry, to the construction and comparison between Baudelaire and/as a flamboyant, somewhat self-obsessed yet self-uncertain blackbird that is completely white. 

More on this soon, indeed.
 

 ***

Today was one of sunshine and phantom excitement. New leaves and new bodies turning over to feel the heat of what may be shining, above them.

The last few months have been beautiful and blotchy. Deep kisses and good music. Complex incense and meticulous order. The multitudes of thick fabrics and textures. The delicate snap of eyeglasses.

I'm setting my suitcase down for a bit. 

The one I've been sprinting around worlds with. 

The leather is worn

but I still know how to stash my trash and secrets within its lining.



be well; be loved,

k.
(title via Moss Icon)
(photo by Paul Graham via untrustyou tumblr)

Your Diamonds and Your Pyramids: A Smudging

I've been listening to Chad Lawson's A Grave Mistake album. Mostly piano with some other effects that was composed to accompany a particular episode of a particular podcast.  The episode mostly revolved around people who were accidentally buried alive.  I believe that you will like it.  You, who listens to mostly non-lyric'ed albums by candlelight. Sure, it is on Spotify, but Lawson's website also offers the option to buy it on vinyl. Even the art on the cover is good. Or, at least, stereotypically me.

One word on the podcast it is connected to:  I want to believe the hype about Lore.  I saw the art on the front of the book (which came after the podcast and a series that was just made on Amazon based on the podcast), and this is how it ended up on my radar.  I listened to a few episodes.  The narrator and creator of it seems a bit too self conscious of his cleverness that isn't really that clever.  The topics are researched, but not as well researched as other programs or books are or can be. I'm curious what you think but, to me, it reads like a gothy version of Sex and the City. Each episode- and here I will admit listening to only eight or so of the 18 minute-ish episodes- the narrator seems to ask a question or make a statement in the same cadence that Carrie Bradshaw would while staring at her computer screen and blinking cursor.

In any case, as with anything in life:  It was worth it for what it lead me to which, in this case, is this album.

[Here is the Spotify Link]

It is something to read to. Something to write to. Something to paint to. Something to think to. Something to calm to. And, my favorite from last week, something to drive through 40-to-60 mile per hour winds in the rain across a bridge at night to.


Be well; be loved.


k.

(image: Vincenzo Agnetti, Free-hand photograph, 1974 Osart Gallery, Milano....via giampxxx tumblr)

Find Me On the Grit; Find Me On the Pavement, or, Walking From Around the Corner of a Building

There is something in the air that is something between premonition and conjuring.

I see your tired eyes and fitting jacket.  Your ruggedness and perfect frays.

There is something that is about to come.

Be prepared for it.

I already am.


k.

(Image: Splish Splash; Marilyn Minter)

Do You Believe in Magic?, or, Your Belted Hips and Paint Spattered Pants

Dear C,

It has been just over a year since you died.

It is the autumn that reminds me of you the most.

That face, those hands, that laughter and that wild, wild look in your eyes upon learning.
 
I miss you everyday, and can hear you best as my shoes click upon the pavement.

k.

The Solitude of Corpses, or, The Depth of the Ocean

There are odd, even embarrassing facts that follow us at times.  Accidental occurrences that instantly expose a truth and/or contradiction of ours that is undeniable.  One of these accidental occurrences is that, every time Miley Cyrus's Adore You comes on somewhere, I think of a person I am surprised I think about so readily. Always. (I know, I know. Where am I that this song is coming on?  It's as if this sliver of pop culture haunts me through the electrical sockets of most buildings.) It's a funny, sad, weird betrayal of heart and mind.  But it's enjoyable all the same.  The truth rises no matter how deep you attempt to bury it.

(pause)

This weekend has been one of recharging.  Of writing. Of creating. Of friendship. Of late night adventures with people I sort of know. Of revisiting a film that speaks to me in different ways every time I watch it.

(pause)

I have been thinking about time, lately.  Not in the typical ways of scarcity or big questions of life. Rather and simply, the enjoyment of time.  Even when that enjoyment involves sadness or worry or fear.  There is so much going on in the world.  I want everyone to feel safety and certainty, but I also know that these terms are relative and can instigate so many ugly things. But in a fundamental way, a basic way, I want people to feel these things, and for these things to be true.

be well; be safe


k.

(image: Lush Paintings of Solitary Swimmers by Pedro Covo via genetic-freak Tumblr)