DAY 43
I told a story tonight, in order to make friends; the past is a requirement for the future: we have to remember. Figuring back over my life is unpleasant. But I have to remember if I’m going to survive. Once I knew all those people and they are still known if I recall them. Once I was loved by people I’d known for years. Once I didn’t need to make sense of every day when it started, once I was able to wake up and just do and be.
I want to tell stories about filth and keep it real because any deep desire I might have to clean up has been burned out by the facets of reality as it is now. Real filth, real weird, real easy. The true filth of my heart, my animal nature, my birthright: filth. Punk filth, lady filth, hustler filth, dirtbag filth, poor kid filth, fuckitall filth, I don’t wanna clean filth, I’m making this a test filth, there’s no cleaning solvents filth; fuck your rules filth.
I have to get so clean for work and I hate it, so I want to be really dirty the rest of the time. Remember that dirt bath scene in Tank Girl where the portishead song made it so much hotter because desolation at least looks hot? When you wanted to be in the dust shower with her? What if the dust shower was just your day? Welcome to the southwest.
DAY 44
The girls I don’t bond with at work creep me out, even though I really want to befriend or at least impress them. My only advantage is my clothes, which makes me especially paranoid about my locker being jacked, but is that because I’m from the mean east coast, or because this is getting to be a competitive fucking business. Not that there’s anything to protect us, but I’m sure the owner has cameras or some surveillance going to keep his money where he wants it. Those dresses are worth a month or more in tips and are definitely my access road to other work. Sigh. It’s a strange fucking world, fitting my ever-changing figure into the forgiving dress forms. The thicker the fabric, the higher the value, the more beerbelly compressing it is, and the more likely that I might pass out from heat and restriction while making my money.
I know that in super old movies, girls used to dance in water as an ultimate symbol of decadence, and another movie that had girls painted in gold. I guess they had no idea that plastic would become currency the way it has, that with all our goddamn science its not renewable, and that it’s the oily coating of power that the jaded and burned out bankers who come here want. Yeah, sure, make anything you want out of corn oil and synthetics. We all know it doesn’t feel the same up against your skin. The sick slickness of polyester is unique.
A client tonight had me wrap my skirt around his junk. I caught his balls up in stretched folds of fabric and squeezed, seeing his face contort. Squinted eyes are either an indicator of pain or pleasure and it’s a fine line. The last time you came you probably squinted, as the last time you looked into the sun. A full eye close that lasts is a good sign, too fast means too much. These clues are the difference between going home early or staying to make the last dollar.
DAY 45
It’s not about a specific subculture. People get so caught up in the details of what a particular hairstyle means, they lose the essential idea, that being that some people don’t think the narrative and overarching “regular” system is any good. They think it doesn’t fit them, or that it’s essentially flawed or its maybe kind of ridiculous and silly, set up for uncreative people to fall back on.
I was talking with a trick this week about how I want/wanted knuckle tattoos for years but I told myself I had to be self-sustaining first before I could get them, and my tension was between seeing that being a normal, a nontatted person, got me things AND got me allies, and being a tatted woman changed reality permamently in a way my class freaked out about. I want to cross bridges to support myself and to support changing the world.
Whether it’s because the system rejected them whole young, or because it broke down somewhere along the highways while they were trying their fucking damndest to make it work. Maybe it was a busted system that never had space for them in the first place. All I know is any social system which rejects its own is incomplete and gawhar no good.
But we ended up here together somehow. This gathering, this time.
DAY 46
I’m just taking on little bits of the world, as my contribution to resistance everywhere, ya know? It’s one of the continuities from my old life to now. Home, i was one of many. Here I am too I guess, it’s just harder to find people when you haven’t been around all of them for years. I was someone who knew someones who did things we felt made differences. How long until I feel like I belong here doing that? I know this takes time. I know there is paranoia for a reason, I know the great age of surveillance made us all do more than change our names,
The cities, the communities are shaped differently. Its like … there’s this idea from radical geography that keeps popping into my mind. Radical geography, the idea that the division of space has social, and therefore power-related, meaning. How our cities and suburbs and buildings are laid out, who lives there and how, for how long and by doing what, talking to whom and escaping who else.
Here, it’s where you live, what the climate is in whichever little compound community you’re in that defines a lot of your reality. I guess that’s actually really similar to everywhere I’ve ever lived, now that I put it like I just did. Do you all have water? Are you mostly passers, folks who can get into City Zones, or not? Is there a local barter or trade economy? Is there cash around? Is there a community generator? Who runs it? Are you living alone, can you, and do you want to? Do you all have a curfew or are you an all-night kind of place? Who there makes thir money how?
I’m certain that I’m not the only hooker here and that relieves me. It’s such a dumb conversation to have with people who are not smart about these things. yes, dear, that’s my job. Don’t fetishize it on my behalf. As least it’s mostly decrim-ed, now. Who’s got the people power to follow up on a few bitches that live outside the law, now, anyway? I mean, sure, cops realize there’s more money to be made inside clubs than picking up street girls, and outside the city zones there’s really not cops. Vigilantes, sure, that’s something else…
DAY 47
I wander into churches and it affects me for days. I want to be inside them because I want something this beautiful for my system of thought. I want to make beautiful things. I once made this video, because my friends are beautiful and I wanted to celebrate them: http://youtu.be/kHoGcuZO6gY
My friends and I might eat dirt off each others’ skin sometimes, we might look intense or like overly critical thinkers, but guess what – just cuz jesus didn’t directly instruct us to think doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. Is criticizing my world unchristian? No. Is working to ease the pain of others unchristian? No. Is trying to contest the beliefs of others and mandate aching? Apparently so.
It’s a sin to leave your city outpost. It’s a sin not to make a baby if you’re healthy. It’s a sin not to settle. It’s a sin not to turn in your plastics for reployment. It’s a sin to distance yourself from people. It’s a sin to keep too little for yourself. It’s a sin to share your stress.
DAY 48
I found this littered outside the street of the church I was at yesterday but didn’t look at it until now: “Confessing Church Agreement” Presbyterian Church, USA.
The pamphlet’s title didn’t explain tons of what else it was going for, and I thought about agreements and rules, and how much people like them for safety. Moving past the nuclear age into the Great Recycling, moving out of the cities and into the neighboring climate-controlled compounds; or out of the suburbs and underground because of the UV rays and the worries of personal safety.
So instead we have the belief that rules make safety and that’s combined with a Church that loves to make rules with the explanation that it makes people feel safe, and with the underlying idea of making more rules. Rules like men and women carousing is only acceptable when they are married to one another. Rules like taking someone elses last name when you promise to be theirs alone for life. Rules like turning the other cheek and asking for more.
I want completely new rules. Want 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?
If I get to have part in a girl gang, then we have to find a way to pay for engine conversions on our motorcycles. Carbon offsets be damned, 2010’s 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 got shots for that in our blood since childhood.
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 yet? Shoot I need to get out of the sun, its affecting me.
Agreements and rules can make things possible, functional, radical. And they can also make your life hell, without you even needing to die.
DAY 49
Life is sparse, life is rich. Coming come from work I took the long way and decided to go into this doorway that had xmas lights running off a noisy generator outside. Stepping over the tile threshold was a bar/café, a place half full of tables of al kinds, covered in wood, metal, glass.
“I miss formica” I said, not thinking anyone was listening. And turned to my left to see what must have been an hundred-year-old soda fountain counter, red with white checkers like a happy picnic was hiding inside, gold flecks in the white and black swirled in the red. Beautiful and rare, I wanted to taste it.
“I have done so many things on the edge of the law, too” I overheard her say, before I saw her, “Me too,” I thought. She was seated at a wooden table with magazine pics of jell-o moulds decoupaged on to the surface. Her shitty jacket opened to reveal a vest that blocked ink swirling and dipping onto her dark skin.
I wanted to flirt with her, talk more, find out what the fuck that meant. Right then I felt in my head like all these seven weeks added up to one big cloudy idiot party, and I smiled and looked back down. Damn.