hi dave
Tag: writing
Crooked Fool: How an artist survives the end of the world
In the morning before first light, they kneaded the covers with their legs, freeing themselves to roll onto the floor with gentle sureness. Eyes still closed, they rolled their body around on the cool wood, bending into joints, slip-sliding around, rolling over themselves, dancing horizontally until they felt stretched, released, ready to adapt and mold to whatever came their way. Then they finally blinked their eyes open, the rolling and stretching having worn the sleep away. They rose to their feet and walked downstairs. In the kitchen, they put on a pot of coffee and their favorite music. They hummed and half-danced until they could pour the black liquid into a mug, adding plenty of milk and some hot chocolate mix, because they damn well weren’t going to miss out on the sweetness. Cup in hand, still taking piping hot sips, they clumsily wrapped themselves in a thick blanket and stumbled down the stairs to the basement. By now, they could hear footsteps above them as the rest of the household started to stir. They knelt on concrete in front of a makeshift altar and just stared, breath suspended, cup clenched in hand. Then breath drew in ragged and ribs expanded again. Life filled body. Grief sighed out. Eyes glided and stopped on a photograph, then another, and another. Somehow each person on that altar was everywhere while simultaneously being wholly gone. A bow of the head. A lump in the throat. A zing of caffeine in the fingertips. And the day begins. They dress in their favorites because they can. In a bit their chosen family will pile into their living room to share food. And while they claim joy in sustenance, they will plan their survival, their safety, their freedom. And then they will take to the streets, maybe quietly, maybe screaming to be heard. Both can be dangerous. And after a day of reclaiming their place, and even if they lose another, even if they are bruised and bloodied, they will gather in yet another house to dance, talk, cry, and tell stories until their bodies tire out. More food will be shared. Maybe they’ll go home to their sanctuary. Maybe they’ll slide down and curl up where they are, in community, insisting on survival again.
~Sappy Daze~ Day 15
The First of Many Love Poems We should make love in a bed of ticklish holly and narcissus; that way our child will be joyful -ly lacking your lack of self-esteem. I wish you could see how I see you, especially with my rosy forget-me- not tinted irises. That way you’ll know our time together has & will always grow eternally, though our bodies age annually. - Sappy
Ringo From the Stars | The Label “Alien”
Ringo has thoughts about humans…
The Bursley Pirate Ship: FLOOD EDITION PART 2
They say it is highly unlikely that lightning will strike the same place twice. Sadly, no one ever made a flood version of the saying so here we are.
While packing my belongings to return back after break, I decided to check our dorm group chat to let the memories of my Michigan home flood (absolutely no pun intended it’s far too sensitive of a topic) my brief nostalgia. When I saw this message, I mentally slow clapped at this building’s ability to structurally dissolve at any moment.
This column may transform into a flood report issue. Once is a mistake, twice is a coincidence, three times is just more content.
From a possible future Ann Atlantis,
Captain Singh
Crooked Fool: Embracing the 10
“I’m sorry there was some…emotion there.”
Sentences like this one have been said to me in a variety of situations in recent years, usually in the context of some minor moment of tension. And in many cases, this response almost rubbed me the wrong way moreso than the original conflict.
Why are you apologizing for emotions? We can apologize for our behavior or the way we respond to things, but that’s not the same thing. Plus, why is expressing big emotions somehow offensive, or even more troublingly, some universal sign of mental instability? Why does feeling and showing the urgency, immediacy, and importance of something warrant our friends diagnosing us with various ailments and commenting on how “dysregulated” we are? While therapy and emotional intelligence can be beneficial and healing under the right circumstances, they aren’t meant to be weapons pointed at anything that’s mildly uncomfortable.
Emotional intelligence isn’t the same as emotional absence. We have them for a reason, and using them smartly and compassionately doesn’t necessarily mean using them less.
I was an Angry Kid, or at least that’s what I was constantly told. My emotions were simply too big and implied that, at best, there was something a bit wrong with me mentally or, at worst, I was just a bad, angry person. As an AFAB, femme-presenting person, you could argue that this was mostly just misogyny. Since I’ve spent most of my life with a visible deformity, and since deformity is often equated with villainy in media and the arts, you could argue it was ableism. But whatever the underlying reason, it was a form of hatred. It was exclusion, meant to reinforce the notion that my emotions made me bad and that I needed to be punished into controlling them, cutting off their sharp edges, in order to be worthy of love. I needed to fit in the box and follow the rules, and if I couldn’t do that, I was Bad.
I’ve struggled for years to articulate what drew me to theatre in those early days, but one thing I remember vividly is how freeing it felt to be able to fly up to a 10 on the emotional scale and be praised for it. Onstage, the 10 is encouraged, a necessary use of energy to draw the audience into energetic proximity. Though they know we’re just telling a story, heightened emotion shows immediacy, need, scale, stakes – it shows that the events taking place, real or imagined, are worth drawing up our vital force and setting it loose, pushing it beyond us. And if it’s worth it to us, maybe it should be worth it to them.
This is why live performance has so much power. It’s a sharing of life force in proximity and a declaration that there is something out there worth physically putting ourselves out there for.
Theatre has its problems, at least as it exists in a late-stage capitalist, colonized society. But it makes space for big personalities and big emotions. More than that, it cultivates them, training them into us because of the power that they have to move a room, to cause someone’s breath to catch, to break skin out in goose bumps, focus soul power through glaring eyes, and zing urgent, world altering energy into fingertips, twitching them into action.
And sometimes we need the 10 even in life. Big emotions are there for a reason. Sometimes that reason is change.
What is worth your 10? Where will you lend your vital life force? Which story will you let breathe fully into your living body in the years to come? When is it worth exhausting yourself and getting angry if it leads to change?
We can’t live every moment of our lives at a 10, but sometimes we are called to it, and we have to be ready to draw upon ourselves in fullness when that call comes. Villainizing our heightened, most powerful selves will only serve to keep us quiet when it counts the most.
