DAY 85
I have to get more serious about understanding the current situation. Even if it means shaking my head to fight off brain fog; even if it means forgetting hopelessness and forgetting happy endings full of potentiality. I used to read science fiction and I loved the feeling that by writing, the author was prefiguring the possibility of making it. It was the undercurrent of hope for survival, which is not translating to a current feeling.
- Trackers are real and are getting closer to being mandatory.
- Water is getting harder to come by though it’s not technically a crisis.
- Electricity is annoying as fuck to be dependent on but at least there are generators.
- CXMs, personal credit exchange machines, are getting more prevalent; see trackers.
What’s the opposite of this? What is hope? I’ve always wanted to start a girl gang, want to take pictures and send kisses to the end of time. Mr. Clock are you listening? I’ve got a beautiful fistful of usefulness coming your way, the excellence of a stopped watch, a clock that refuses accuracy. What time is it anyway where you are? What’s a girl gang when all the girls have faded away, anyway; or when I have faded away?
If I ever did get to have a part in a girl gang, then we have to find a way to pay for engine conversions on our motorcycles. Carbon offsets be damned, last year we laugh at you with matching patches silkscreened in water-based ink onto our leathers. We’ll take pictures, drink daquiris at the end of the day and lay on the rubble of what used to be factories and cities around them. We’ll get radioactive. We’ll recover because we’ve had shots for that in our blood since childhood. We wont need trackers or CXM. We will run our generators in wigs.
We have to find a way to pay and pay so we can play and lay. It’s horrible poetry for real life. Who will we sell things to and why? What will we wear? And where are these acerbic and brilliant friends I don’t even have? Ok, that’s dumb. There are people around me…what if I looked at them differently. As a group; a group who likes me. That might be a helpful change of mind.
Shoot. I need to get out of the sun, it’s affecting me.
DAY 86
Aren’t you supposed to feel good after you fuck? Will I ever? Me and Josh hooked up. It was a long time coming because, science boys, and then again out of the blue. I am thrilled because I asked for it and my words got me something I actually wanted. But I’m not sure I know how to ask for it in the moment anymore, and so stretched out the beginning into the late hours.
I woke up wanting to fuck this man. A strange and disorienting feeling, I wanted his cock sliding in me, like I was missing something without it. Christ is my womb talking? Creepy. We fucked with our hands like experts. I count down the minutes until he asked for a blowjob but the request never came and I was let down by my missed opportunity to decline. I wanted to think about doing it, think about his hands on my neck and the soft tissue in my mouth but then say that I was too sick or too gay or too new to him to actually get in there and see his disappointment. Am I a denial fetishist? Here we are, two people who are pleasure centers, who are caught up in the same army, different battalions thrown together on the same side of a fence. We found the heat and moved away from it, it was so dangerous to feel the fire on our skin.
When is sex just sex? When its not loaded. The revolution needs better boundaries and more real closeness. Because we all have to be outside of ourselves so much this feels almost impossible. What is it I’m fighting for? The right to live in a body that threatens me?
DAY 87
En route from the house to the gates a trip I took to France once entered my mind. I’d saved up carbon for a year and a half, though not so much on purpose as because I couldn’t afford gas for all that time. A concrete and marble replica of the Arc du Triumph, so random in its Parisian glory, but more so in Moscow and simply absurd in Brooklyn, stands as the entrance to the City. As if it’s the grandest place you can show your face. As if the streets are not lined with thieves and tricks called bankers and businessmen.
I only went in because I wanted to cool off and flash a little polyester for profit, a terrible combination. I wore one of my lesser-fine items under my regular dress – not a crime of course but certainly suspicious if it was noticed. I passed through the gate with only the regular amount of abrasive questioning, “Where do you work?”
“At home.”
“Doing what?”
“Sewing.”
“Why bother?”
“Excuse me?”
“Answer the question!” God these fuckers really can’t deal with having the tables turned.
“Uh…because everyone needs money?”
“Go ahead.”
I’m not at all sure that, having passed into the city, I can get back out. If only I’d remembered to ask Alison for the directions, but no. I must have tugged my dress in relief after getting in because within a few minutes I noticed the man who was still walking beside me looked more nervous than the Employees usually do. I glanced at his hands and saw that he was unfolding, hilariously, a tiny pair of embroidery scissors. I realized that these were meant to cut fabric off of me and in the next moment halted and stuck out a booted foot to trip the guy as he came twisting over to pursue me. As he fell he mumbled, “Just a little piece!?” and closed the tiny scissors impotently.
Ha! As if I hadn’t stripped the seams to a precarious 1/8 inch already, as if the hems weren’t already held in place with basting tape, zippers and notions replaced where possible. “Just a little piece will still cost you a lot.” I said down to him on the sidewalk, “Money up front, now, while I help you up.”
Well, I suppose I could take the shoulders up another half inch. And in one motion he handed me a $50 and the scissors and stood up with my hand. I bent over to ostensibly adjust my bra and in doing so took a strip off the shoulder of the black acrylic underdress I wore. He took the strip in his fingers like a tiny cock and stroked it with his thumb all the way to his pocket.
“Hasta luego.” I said and thought about that terrible period of time when that actor became a govenor as I walked off, hoping that the $50 was real and starting to look for a café where I could pin my dress back together.
DAY 88
Work is shifting. Alison, the new girl [Sasha], we’re all outsider bitches and I talked about my little dream of a gang of us today as something nice for the new year. We joked that we’d call ourselves The Slix.
What would I give up to start The Slix? Well, considering the world went to shit, there’s a melted-candy effect and it’s all a fucking sweet mess you can’t really eat.
I’m easing into a new mindset about work. The seriousness of it scares me, though. Nothing is taken lightly and nothing happens quickly. A blight on the days I do it, it’s a 10 hour trip into nothingness that’s hard to snap right out of once it’s over for the day.
My friend who has [had?] a PhD and was making 40G as a research assistant until he got his current job making 110G as an internationally traveling science headhunter told me, “Don’t give them more than they’re paying you for,” And it made me love him because he’s right. I go to work and reserve at least 50% of my mind for thinking about something else, because I have put a price on myself and I’m only at half. Because one hour in a lime acetate pantsuit can get me twice the money than a day of “honest” labour can. Because any minute I don’t spend thinking about my passions is owed back to me whether that’s from work or from being sad. I want every second of life to be alive. Why is that too much to ask?
Also a little cat wandered by my spot again today; I’ve seen it before, we eye each other warily but maybe something about me is different now and the small creature stopped to look at me longer, or I looked at it longer. Am I less feral? More? I called it Lucky in my mind and blinked slowly at it, you’re supposed to do that with cats.
DAY 89
So, I’ve been fucking this person for a few days. A handsome dark-eyed dude who makes me feel all kinds of reverberations of feelings that I’ve felt in the past. Don’t think the feelings are about this person but who knows and who cares yet. Sullen and cute yet participating, my type.
Really I’m actually just excited to have something I’m not supposed to be doing to look forward to.
I told them today to have fun at a protest they were going to, but I felt weird saying that. Who goes to a protest to have fun, I mean that’s not the most obvious goal, even if it is one of those puppet-led carnival protests that are actually kinda fun. But yeah. I guess I meant:
- don’t get tazed or pepper-sprayed
- I hope you feel like something was accomplished/you got information/people’s hearts were changed/your voice was heard
And really I should have just said: go rage.
You have a reason to rage. Who the fuck does not have a reason to rage right now. These are rageful times. The government lives in weird boxed-in cities as do most of the people with money and resources. Shittons of people are having to self-generate infrastructure and you can’t get around. YOU CAN’T LEAVE WHERE YOU ARE. This is completely confusing to the way of life we knew, even if that was severely cutback from ways I remember as a child.
There were cars, we drove them for fun and we had them for pleasant outings. I could afford gas and it made my old car run. The new shit barely works in old engines, it’s such a tragedy. So much steel, so much velour polyester interior wasted on E3000. Anyway reasons to rage also include the shitty police and vigilante groups who try to mete out justice.
What the fuck is justice in a time of resource war? It looks like wasted youth, like before. Young poc getting taken off. Young folks without money getting taken down. Having to set up your own community watch so some other patronizing group won’t “help” by doing it for you. Worrying when your friends go off to protest. Maybe it will be met with community groups curious about the issue. Maybe it will be met with chemicals and violence. Most likely both.
DAY 90
Does AC/DC have all the knowledge I need to survive – I’m only young but I’m gonna die. That’s truth.
Most people have some kind of history. Usually they can’t get away from it, its coded into their skin or their habits. “it’s a question of realizing that you don’t have to be ahistorical to leave the house,” Allyiah chastised me because I’ve chosen not to have a history. The sweat of my people means so little now, and the successes of people who are as pale as I both disgust and fascinate me. And the people I knew are gone, so what’s to keep? Only these few phrases that will pop into my mind when I let my guard down. I want to forget everything I want to forget that I was happy and that I was loved, because if I can force the memories out then I can at least control something…
Today’s research included the history of kidneystones and about the genesis of recycled-plastic clothing. Not the real historical shit like what I work in, the stuff that was made to be recycled chic. These Germans made a great wooly felt out of #5 around the turn of the century. Today’s adventure included a too-long walk and discovering a print of Blue Boy with a Dracula face badly layered on. I slowly carried it the miles home because I think Lucky will like it.
Allyiah is right though, white people are total fuckups about this shit. I’m a fuckup and that’s my legacy.
DAY 91
Sometimes I fall into a hole called It’s Not Fair. Rational brain is like “when is life supposed to be fair?” but my heart brain whispers the words “you’ve been cheated” to me over and over. There’s nothing to do in this hole but wait it out. I think today all I can do is whine, try to blame someone or something, or distract myself. I am going to pick the latter. I will think about ETLE. I read more of her writing. I think I’m getting obsessed. It’s dangerous to trust someone I have barely met but It’s more dangerous to have nothing to think about, nothing to hang my worries onto.
What if there were a lady warrior I could look up to. What of leadership?
ETLE seems to inhabit the characteristics of one of my favorite women in history, the Whore of Babylon [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whore_of_Babylon]. Her full title is “Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Prostitutes and Abominations of the Earth.”
Yes bitch. MOTHER OF ABOMINATIONS.
If the reality one is in creates a norm of fucked up horrors, perhaps an abomination is what’s needed. Perhaps the emergence of female violence is exactly what’s needed. Perhaps ETLE’s Violent Female Revolution isn’t just a story or a metaphor. Perhaps she’s a guide.