Gay punk witch

He somersaulted backwards onto the stage, busted some ballet moves with the bouquet, lit a candle, led breathing exercises where he gave a guttural scream on the exhale (“I love being scared, it’s cathartic”). He read his story from a big handmade book, taking out pages and crumpling or throwing them out when he finished.

Be grateful for being fully functional (or not). Conjuring, combustion [windmilling arms]. Ritual of punk, mosh pit etiquette. Chaos with care, rage with tenderness (and sparkle) . “Faggot” sounds punk. Meant kept boy. First date with boy when 14, offered ecstasy, kissed on cheek, terrified. War in Iraq protest flyers. Brother went to Young Life (Jesus camp), came out as gay, life is better with gay twins.

Things that are punk: Healthcare, Medicaid, COVID checks, STD clinics. Librarians! (Big applause.) Books. Queer history. Smutty zines. Leather daddies. Dancing so much until my (hanging) toenail came off, the night of the Biden/Trump debate, being the only one who got COVID, love letter to grunge.

Not punk: Marketing. Target or not Target. Harry Potter & Galbraith.

Dance under the full moon naked! Being naked is my favorite outfit. Don’t ask permission. Strip clubs and yoga offer the same service.

Occult dances in the Copycat building, making an exhibit of being a creature in a maze. Eat shit and practice witchcraft. Final girl silence. Finding grimoires in the Folger Shakespeare library, across the street from the Supreme Court, flipping them off on the way to work. Independent research has no rules.

Not gay as in happy, queer as in “fuck you”.

Didn’t know I was had ADHD, witches said it was because I’m a Gemini.

Watching the crotch and butt in ballet. I’m an ass freak. Nutcracker’s nuts.

Do yoga for yourself, not other people. Karma, spiritual guidelines to living, alchemical process of the soul.

camp

All quotes are paraphrases.

bardo dance

She (wearing black) lies down on the floor, takes off her shoes, takes off her socks, stays still. What thoughts does she float through behind those closed eyes?

in line for kava

We talk about talking about emotions, both pull out pocket notebooks. He shows me the “how we feel” app. I choose “comfortable.”

journey to the center of the self

the protector,
controller
(pay: terrible, hours: eternal),

fixer,

skeptic
↳discernment,

fear
↳awareness,

victim
↳advocate
↳storyteller,

damaged self
(What is the role of the damaged self? To take damage),

vulnerable child
(curiosity, hope, the run of emotions, making friends, open, expressing, play, wonder)
(What would all your parts do if they were in service of the vulnerable child?).

book on polyamory

“When you constrain the relationships people can have, you limit information exchange. Polyamory solves information bottlenecks.

“The species closest to humans are chimps and bonobos. Chimps have to compete with gorillas; they are patriarchal and violent. Bonobos don’t have to compete with gorillas; they are matriarchal and polyamorous. They use sex to build relationships.

“Polyamory is on the rise now that we are moving towards a more bonobo-like environment.”

I often get this inferiority complex talking to polyamorous people. The question I want to ask but never ask is, how does one get to polyamory? It seems like an distant shore, unreachable. I’m stuck here, unenlightened.

And/or I want a reassurance: your dedication, your single-track mind is a-OK 👌 You’re not being left behind in the next stage of human evolution.

I don’t find the answer in the book, but the fault is with me the reader, too shy to ask.

summer solstice

“Last year I came knowing the gender ratio would be 5:1. I wasn’t here to find love. I was married. I fell in love with someone from the other side of the world, we got each other. We had passionate intimacy. We knew it would never work. I’m poly, but she wants to find a husband and start a family as quickly as possible, I’m married. She stayed over for a week, I visited her city and stayed over for a night. Knowing the breakup was inevitable didn’t make it any less painful. I have no regrets.”

“The teacher of a pottery class divided the class into two groups. One group’s goal was to make as many pots as possible. The other group’s goal was to make the best pot possible. At the end, the best pots came from the first group. The second group theorized endlessly about how to make the best pot, and the first group learned to make good pots from experience.”

evening

How to tell when I’m socially burned out: when I stop taking initiative. When I only wallflower (a.k.a. lemur). I can keep going to events, but it’s not worth the deadened interaction.

I read in the room above the tea house.

interlude: collaborative haikus

Fear of freedom / I don’t know where to fly / Still orbiting Earth

Your teeth have big gaps / I hope someone lets you know / Your smile is perfect.

Trees rustle softly / Sunlight gleams through summer leaves / Birds shit on my head.

Noninterfering / We circle separately / Same space, different times

Blades of grass shine green / Noble verdant vorpal blade / My mower is slain 😦

I hate Baltimore / I hate Philadephia / Moving to SF

I pooped my pants / Not such a bad start today / I will breastfeed next

Oars fall into lake / Panic arrives so quickly / Breeze takes me ashore

storywork

“Every three months, I gather my friends for a ritual. A collective ritual equips you to deal with the unknown without fear. For the summer solstice, after we shared our stories, we put our colored ice cubes in a bowl in the center, so all the colors mix together. This sounds better in the imagination, because actually it turns black. We added some vodka and drank it down, our feelings mixed together.

“Equinox is a time of flux, solstice is a time of stability. Each season has the seeds of its opposite, summer joy and winter grief.

“Why stories? Plans give you false confidence. A story is not true or false. It compresses information and leaves open uncertainty. It directs our attention to the points of tension, and we can ask: what does the struggle represent?”

My question: How do I grow a relationship? How do I garden the soil from which relationships grow?

I narrativize my own dating experiences.

Responses: Get to know someone in a multisensory way.

Crushes are stories supervening over reality.

It feels chaotic being the captain of a ship, but from outside, people can see consistency over time. Extend the time over which you are intentional about relating to someone.

How you do anything is how you do everything. How you talk about the relationship in a relationship tells you about the relationship. Perhaps those who don’t react well to honesty are those who would have filtered themselves out of my life.

what we talk about when we talk about body counts

hot seat: “Body count?” “Pass.”

(I’ve never heard the term “body count” like this, but the context soon made it clear.)

“Last year they got people to line up in the order of what they thought their body count was, without communicating.”

overheard, later: “Why do we have the concept of a body count?” “To measure the amount of resources that people can leverage into sex.”

my thoughts 1: No, it’s because of a toxic culture of sexual performativity/competition/comparison/one-upmanship 🐛. Answering the question is a trap because that means you’ve bought into the premise of the question that it is useful information. The premise itself should be questioned. Also you forgot an important point, not just the amount someone can, is able to leverage but actually does, was willing to leverage. Well, but aren’t these the sorts of hazing questions that make us braver and able to talk about taboos, confront us with facts that we would otherwise never know, more information = better? Yes, but: without a container, is it just a black pill? Maybe this is the container and my chance to be part of the conversation, but I don’t know because I stopped eavesdropping.

my thoughts 2: Is the reason I’m aloof and befuddled and not bought into this game just that I’m actually demisexual, like in “The Map of the Homes of the Stars” where the boys keep driving around the houses of the girls because they’re secretly gay??

my thoughts 3: You’re just being an aesthete. (You’re just good at convincing yourself you don’t want things you can’t get.) You’ve only become less sexual to close the cognitive dissonance between your desires and reality, to conveniently put yourself on higher moral ground. If you had the ability… But. Self-fulfilling self-deception is not a bad strategy.

shooting is like meditation

“If you look directly at the target, then you’ll miss. The moment of surrender is necessary to consistently hit the target.”

om nom nominous

In the interactive theater performance, the dinner guests sit in groups of seven: Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. What a brilliant way to try on a different personality, to have to rise up to your archetype. That, I think, is the most “PSYCHOACTIVE” part of the experience for the dinner guests.

coda

I made the decision to trust people. Conversations are deep, even when brief, hit on something the other person has also thought deeply about, and sometimes we feel I get to the point so fast that, after the exchange, I don’t know how to follow up.

Will this be a blip in my social matrix, an island unmoored from the rest of my life? Or will it be a community that I carry forth with me?

“What’s your takeaway?” People ask. I say something complicated, which the other person boils down to “just do stuff.”

On the road home I hear an interview with Corey Keyes on the radio, about flourishing. It’s not just about having relationships or being in community but “mattering”, contributing, being needed. I’ve become more social, taking advantage of events other people organize, but I want to be more of an architect in bringing people together.

Okayness

My friend can shift her emotions. She does this by going to a core place of okayness.

I think of what [my friend] said about okayness. How do I find that place of okayness within me? It can’t be based on something that can be lost. It can’t be based on achievement or ability. It can’t be based on friends who could disappear. It can’t be a place of being all alone, because I might need to find that place of okayness when I am lonely.
I imagine that going to that place of okayness is like going on a sunset walk on the beach, except in my head without a sunset and without a beach. It’s a place of beauty where there might not be any other people, only me, yet it has to be filled with other voices. It’s a place of imagination, so bring your favorite things in your picnic basket, music and memories and stories you tell yourself. But you do have to bring everything yourself. The people I love – if I really love them – I will take in their voices. They might be echoes, but they are leading somewhere, and for okayness they might be enough. Think of them as chibi Platonic friends, the hybrid forms of Best Of friends, or oppositely, the messy collections of details they are composed of. These voicey dolls will accompany me in my okayness, if I am alone in trying to find that, and if my friends are actually there, still in communication with me and online and trusty, then they can be a part of that okayness.
Yesterday, I asked [her] to teach me to find that okayness, and she said I had everything I needed. Everyone can do it. Just reach in and find it.
(What’s the soundtrack? What’s the landscape? What’s the smell and feel and taste? What’s the feeling? What are the voices that answer when you call out?)

I shared this with her, and she wrote back.

not the soundtrack/landscape/smell/feel/taste/voices but whatever it is that perceives them
not content but container

Once there was a couple who decided that every year, they would spend a week alone.

They planned their vacations in secret, took separate cabs to the airport, so they wouldn’t know where the other was going. Each imagined their partner was flying in the opposite direction, would end up on the other side of the earth. They had complete freedom to do what they wanted, engage in whatever connections might spark from being an untethered person. And when then met again, they would have a whole week’s worth of adventure to recount. It would take them many weeks to unspool their stories, and still they would each have secrets they held back, experiences that were theirs and theirs alone. There would be a dance around each other, suddenly strangers shy, before they sunk into each other’s grooves again. It was their respect for each other’s freedom, and their time apart to rediscover themselves, that held their relationship together year after year.

the wrong side

i thought it was
us vs. the world
but it was
you vs. the world
and i’m part of the
world

before you can be intimate you have to be lonely

Loneliness is true. Distractedness is false. Being alone and distracted, it’s like you wasted your time alone.

The one quote that remained with me most from Shantaram: “If we do not suffer with our pain, then we have not learned about anything but ourselves. Pain without suffering is like victory without struggle.” It didn’t make particular sense when I first read it, but now it feels so resonant. When you feel pain, you can choose whether it’s isolating – I’m going to isolate myself from everyone until it goes away and I can rejoin society as a repaired human being – or unifying – this pain is similar to the pain of others, and in feeling it, I come closer to understanding a human universality.

You can choose this not just with pain, but with any feeling. It’s about being thoughtful, meditative. Do you feel the feeling in full, acknowledge it, rather than try to tie it up, suppress it, distract yourself with other things? “If we do not feel loneliness when alone, then we have not learned anything about ourselves. Solitude without loneliness is like lying without sleeping.”

I remember college insomnia, getting up and writing a long thing in 750 words. Those entries are still here, a few clicks away. They feel like a lifetime away. I don’t want to go back and read them. It’s not just that it’s a easy sinkhole of an afternoon. That’s not what I’m afraid of. It’s that inside that past loneliness is an infinite hope, the potential promise of desire that exceeds exhaustion.

So I’m afraid, reading back, that I will be a disappointment to myself. I know that if I explained where I was now to the me of ten years ago, I would be so disappointed. All that life-force, where did it go? When I read the past entries, it’ll be like staring at a ghostly version of myself, with stars in his eyes, with such high expectations for the person he would become when he was my age.

“No inspiration, just habit.”

True but… there’s a kind of life-force that keeps the habit inspiring. And insomnia, perhaps a symptom of that life-force overflowing, I did my daily fill and at the end of the day – I’m impatient for more –

The opposite of insomnia: going to bed when you’ve not done all you should with your day, because your soul feels too worn out, and you lay awake, but without the slightest impetus to get up and do anything.

Crabbiness is a superpower

(from journal, 2019/3/20)

…I was thinking about crabbiness. Was feeling crabby doing reviews – one paper took me a long time to go through because it was so technical. I really disliked reviewing it. (And I gave it the first worse-than-neutral review. I’m through with being Mr. Nice Guy…) I used to look weird at crabby people – why don’t you just like life more? But being crabby is a superpower. It’s like wearing glasses that separate the real, the good, from the fake, the stupid. It’s like seeing the emperor’s new clothes for what they are. Not taking BS. Saying to yourself, I frugglicking hate this crap, and is someone tells you, “well, look at the bright side,” you say, “SHUT UP YOU DOUBLESPEAKING SHITHEAD.”

Here we are at the Censorium.

“In these shelves you will find the beginnings of thoughts that you might have, if you were not completely satisfied with your life, or if you cannot sleep. And you will find those thoughts, ended in satisfactory ways. Reading them you may be frustrated at first, thinking that the continuations evade the questions. But read them enough, and you will find that they are perfect circles, questions swallowing their own tails, until you wonder what you were asking in the first place.”

what is the aesthetic of a softer world?

it is a world without permanent scars. you can always recover from anything. there is always a second chance. there is never a Real Death. you can take back anything.

the end of every story is not the villains’ defeat but their atonement.

but in our world, too many changes are permanent. and if you are afraid of them you don’t get far from the starting line.

if you say the wrong thing, a million people will villainize you, each by itself a finger-nudge but together they are like a high-speed train slamming into a pedestrian.

“please don’t flow so fast, you little mountain.”

the people who want a softer world are not those would-be villains. “it’s empathy in overdrive,” explain the school of hard knockers.

the softer world is impossible. or possible for the faithful utopist, as a post-death world with border guards, lifetimes away.

but we can strive for it as an ideal.

people kinder with a few extra words.

“reject

“sorry. but try again next time. i mean it. please do. you are beautiful.

“you can always try again.”

Depths

Sometimes the world doesn’t understand,
why you watch from behind your windows,
why you’re so deep in thought
so they try to draw you out,
and when you try to explain
they mistake your stumbling for pain.

But you don’t have to come out
if you’ll just let me in
Some spaces, like yours,
are larger from the inside.
Oceans which look a formless blue
are teeming with alien life.
I would love to surf the waves of your mind
Find the sharks that you hide below
The deep-sea vents that even you don’t know
and drown in your depths.

 

(From the writing prompt: Write a love letter to yourself.)