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Discovery from the drafts

(first paragraph written a month after)

The most productive action I can take to combat whatever nameless thing it is I have sought treatment for, is to write it all down. I have entries from when I was sixteen years old where I write about school and friends and my first experiences with infatuation. Sex, relationships, things I said out loud and things I didn’t live past their origin on paper. Whatever it is that causes the emotional droughts and floods I feel has been happening for so long now it’s how I operate. When I was a kid my mom would try and help by saying not everything you feel is real. I think about that a lot in reference to my severe highs and lows. Writing the feeling down makes it real forever. It makes me empathize with myself like I would a friend. It makes the feelings, or lack thereof real. Something that makes me sad reading thing back is hearing my hesitance. I am so fearful of hurting in the way that I have been hurt. This has crippled my ability to pursue romantic relationships as I feel a great resistance to complicate my life with intimacy. 

I open my eyes and feel the rise and fall of my shallow breaths. It hurts to eat, it hurts to breath, and it hurts to be awake. I am very sick and have been for over a week. Partly because of my lack of energy, and in part because my three roommates have been away for so long, I have begun to feel like a miniature in my large apartment. I have spent my days shifting from seat to seat, too tired to stand, and drinking every soup that is sold in a can. This has given me plenty time to think, but mostly, sleep. The weight I feel on my body has caused me to enter and exist sleep at all times of the day. My dreams most often reflect situations in the real world. I am so jaded even my dreams abide by the laws of gravity. But in my bout of fever and cold sweat I have noticed a pattern. My dream self and I are truly the same. When I dream she feels what I feel and she does what I have the potential to do. An unbridled sense of self is what separates us. Mine under lock and key, hers bleeding out.

So in between night and day (or whenever my eyes decide to stay shut for a while) I have been witness to this other. The other is erotic, in a true sense of the word. My waking self knows sex too well to experience it. I acknowledge my detachment from it is defense rather than appreciation. My sleeping self experiences expressions of great sadness, which my woken self looks at, hands pressed against the glass with envy. My sleeping self does not know what it means to be calculated. In the day I exist with a finger over every crack. I beg not to pour out and be exposed. 

What I believe was a week ago should have been the start of a new inner excitement. I was invited to a party, the first I have been to since what feels like another life. This party, filled with entirely new faces, and an entirely different context, one which my waking brain strongly approved. Invited by a woman of my intrigue, I wore my best outfit and spent the day wishing I could jump into my future self. Thirty minutes before the party I began to feel an intense cold. I became so cold I shook uncontrollably. And because I was alone I sat and took it, hoping it would pass. This prior week I had felt more under the weather than usual. My tightly wound disposition began to leave physical marks. But, determined I finally made it to the party.

Overall the party was a great success, despite the fact that I could not get drunk. I think my stress was sobering as I had many drinks. 

...I sat on the balcony of a fantastic apartment overlooking downtown, with a beautiful woman, who I know I feel great attraction to. So, hopefully with as much ease as I remember, when the moment was right I kissed her. I kissed her and we kissed and kissed and it was perfect in mechanics (it least I hope). As I kissed her I felt it, the static, and it was my fear come true. I felt nothing. I lie on that roof top dead, my living self practically beating me to wake up. Please I begged her, please allow me to be awake. We pulled away and that was that. I fear this experience will taint my minds memory of the action. I fear that she can sense how far away I am. I fear I will hurt her because of it.

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It's a splendid high waisted white flavored day It's Pavlov with barking and feathers and pearls It's porcelain, oh, so bored, faces and curls Buckles and gadgets and bell-bottom cools Strutting and studding and preening by the rulesCinderella for a day She's a queen in white angel lace In a dream that she fabricates From her last remaining green dollar billIn a corrugated castle with so many fossilized remains Plaster baked in saks special powder and villafranchian laceLong shanks lean shanks with mini-skirted brims It's a harem in conquest with alabaster skins Did i see you in rome? I wintered abroad Silky and creamy they're a peppered prime cause Of gallery flocking and rank hierarchy lockingArena behavior one man to a hill In turtle neck style with clean verbal kills Pass the champagne, will you please? And let's get on with the next social squeezeFemale flavored custom tailored The strutting ground's for the posh aggregates Spilling, dividing and multiplying In a system of social rotating matesIt's a splendid high waisted white flavored day It's Pavlov with barking and feathers and pearls It's porcelain, oh, so bored, faces and curls Buckles and gadgets and bell-bottom cools Strutting and studding and preening by the rules Ah, the hell with the rules

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i love this song

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c ya at the blood rave

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if given the mic i'd tell you memories from my role as the invisible wife (groveling deluxe edition)

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observant

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Gillian Anderson, by Juergen Teller, for Interview, June 2021

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I have been slowly chipping away at Sontag the biography of Susan Sontag which found me at Book Woman in Austin. I’m a sucker for a circular O like the one in the title, which is probably for why it caught my eye. I didn’t even realize when I picked it up that I had already read one of her books, On Photography, as I only knew her as the author of Notes on Camp. I am in awe of the author Benjamin Moser and his ability to chronicle the life of someone so complicated. The sheer amount of information he is able to reference is insane and makes me think he must be as addicted to reading as Susan Sontag herself. I identify greatly with the disassociation of self experienced by Sontag and reflected in her many works and interests. Her perspective on the world is frankly self centered but that’s what makes it so compelling. So few people are comfortable admitting self centeredness, when in actuality self centeredness is human. Sontag’s need to purge this perspective via her work is so genuine to her role as an observer. The statements she makes are bold and confident, subject to change, and a product of their host. 

The following is a passage contains quotes from Sontag and Under the Sign of Saturn, and an essay within it written by Susan Sontag dedicated to Walter Benjamin. 

“The only pleasure a melancholic permits himself, and it is a powerful one, is allegory,” Benjamin wrote, and Sontag quoted him approvingly. Allegory, in fact is one of the great pleasures of this essay: Benjamin as a metaphor for Sontag, an exemplar of her own saturnine temperament, with a “self-conscious and unforgiving relation to the self, which can never be taken for granted. The self is a text--it has to be deciphered.” Because he sees the self as an aesthetic phenomenon, the melancholic becomes an ideal interpreter. He is uniquely positioned to see a world of which he can never really be a part, because it exists wholly outside himself: “Precisely because the melancholy character is haunted by death, it is melancholics who best know how to read the world.” The world, too, is a text, and through it the self travels, trying to decipher the world, a travel-writer. “Benjamin, of course, was both a wanderer, on the move, and a collector, weighed down by things; that is, passions.”...The character born under the sign of Saturn was a liar (”dissimulation, secretiveness appear a necessity to the melancholic”) who needed his freedom (”Benjamin could also drop friends brutally”) and hid social unease with reading and writing (”the true impulse when one is being looked at is to cast down one’s eyes, look in a corner.”... For the melancholic, the natural, in the form of family ties, introduces the falsely subjective, the sentimental: it is a drain on the will, on one’s independence; on one’s freedom to concentrate on work. It also presents a challenge to one’s humanity to which the melancholic knows, in advance, he will be inadequate...These feelings of superiority of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself--these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.

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creating realistic fake breasts to use for a project and then never actually using them

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scans

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Journey to the monastic cell(phone)

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There is a video on youtube that is a profile on San Marcos from the 1970's. I love seeing places in video that I have been and seeing how they have changed over time. Fun fact I used to live in the church in the second picture.

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i'll never get over the fact that fiona apple credited her dogs in the liner notes for fetch the bolt cutters

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So you are choking on God's cock? Reflections and personal revelations from Beyond God the Father by Mary Daly

I am at odds with my physical and mental self. This dissociation of mind and body extends to my surroundings. A constant inability to ascribe words to this instability makes it feel overwhelming. Its lack of acknowledgement is terrifying and I find myself desperate to consume any material that at the very least can validate this fear. When discussing women’s liberation, despite my desperate support, I find myself second guessing if even describing women’s oppression is appropriate. Is this description dramatic or potentially hyperbole? Does it even seek to overshadow more pressing issues?  Author Mary Daly identifies this as the actions Trivialization and Particularization. Trivialization refers to the downplaying of this imbalance and Particularization refers to its forced normality. To enact Particularization is to make women’s issues alien. Liberation becomes something necessary for those in extreme scenarios; women oppressed by religion or existing in communities with a patriarchal structure apparent in the extreme. This attitude of othering women experiencing the effects of the patriarchy is condescending and a misunderstanding of the patriarchy’s existence as a structure. Instead, only acknowledging its symptoms.  Irony exists in self proclaimed progressive and often agnostic circles. The distancing between themselves and the “other” indicates this fundamental misunderstanding or potential refusal of understanding. Daly describes how male dominated academia perpetuates Particularization. She describes how circles which entertain the ideas of Freud must also acknowledge context. “Freudian theory emerged as the first wave of feminism was cresting,” and it is impossible to detach any writing of the time from its then present reality. The modern theorist should be hyper aware that “psychiatry and psychology have their own creeds, priesthoods, spiritual, counselings, rules, anathemas, and jargon.” To proclaim self awareness without this awareness perpetuates oppressive systems, intentionally or otherwise. 

To this day I become uneasy when thinking about my upbringing. I consider myself to have had the average childhood but occasionally a conversation with a friend will shatter this reality. Ages six to thirteen I went to church five days a week. On Sundays I listened to a sermon on the second floor and Monday through Friday I had school on the third. In the morning I went to Ecclesia, named after an Ancient Greek assembly and meaning a group of “believers,” to pray with other children. Every morning we said pledges to the American flag, the Christian flag and the Bible. My history classes were taught centered around the birth and death of Jesus Christ. My fifth grade math teacher taught our class the Bible story of Jesus exorcising a man, and sending the demons into a herd of pigs, which subsequently killed themselves by jumping from a cliff. Demons, hell, the devil were not for halloween, they were real and to be feared. To this day I have to remind myself that god is not listening in on my thoughts. My entire world was set up to have me believe a man died for me so I must live for him. In doing this, I must give away my autonomy. I have countless memories that indicate the way my beliefs were attempted to be shaped; like my mother noting that our neighbor at the time, an unmarried middle aged woman, was not following god's plan because she had no children. Or the time my grandmother was upset that a woman conducted the sermon at a friend's funeral. Apparently it is possible to be too involved in the church. So as I aged, watching my male  pastors preach to a congregation of hundreds, while the modestly dressed women sang backup, I looked around and wondered where this was all heading. Was I expected to perform a modest but attractive woman one day? Was I supposed to be attracted to the men around me who believed all of this? Did I believe all of this? Yes I did.

Years later I am sitting in the parking lot of my old school and current church. Notoriously late for everything, I could get away with driving separately and secretly spending my morning in the furthest parking spot in the lot. I wasn’t a little kid anymore and although I would probably still have claimed my faith at any cost, I had discovered freedom from my religious isolation. Looking back I treasure the small but brave steps I took to assert myself as free from this community. It wasn’t the nose ring that set off alarms for my relatives, as those became popular in the central Texas Christian community in 2016. It was the betty bangs and the collared shirts. Less about my choice presentation and having to do more with it’s intent; It was no longer being seen as attractive by the average Christian male. If I wasn’t the target of advances by a Christian boy how would I become a Christian wife? To renounce my faith is death in the next life. Without it I am unhinged in this one. To a child taught the air is filled with demons whispering my temptation, things start to get weird. I am an adult now, I think of the person I could be if I had been given the freedom of choice when I was younger. What monikers would I be brave enough to take? How would my mind work and as a result how would I choose to express myself? I become very sad when talking about this subject because I know I mentally have so much to undo. I  fear when people learn of my foundation they will doubt my ability to view things objectively. In a way I am glad at least I know this side of things. This is many people's reality, varying in extremes, mine not even being close to the rigidity of others.  I think it only appropriate to speak about my experience, but the watchful eyes of god are something no one is free of. In America they are in our constitution, his name on our currency. It has been established there is no coincidence between the popular American depiction of Jesus as a white man with blue eyes. I believe there is no coincidence a higher power, so complex our tiny idiot human brains can’t comprehend, has a dick.

No one has ever said god has a dick?! I must admit that statement was meant to make people angry. I think it’s only fair after years of gaslighting, being told a version of religion palatable enough for the masses. It is not spirituality or organized religion that I believe to be inherently problematic. Admittedly, who am I to define that. My argument is American Christianity limits mobility for those who identify outside of its strict moralism. The role of god as He and as the father is a manifestation of the narrator's influence on his story. “If god is man is man god?” 

The writings of the Bible and its manifestations in present cultural expectation cannot be separated from its authors. Illustrating this concept Daly writes, “A woman whose consciousness has been aroused can say that such language makes her aware of herself as a stranger, as an outsider, as an alienated person, not as any daughter who belongs who's appointed to a marvelous destiny. She cannot belong to this without assenting to her own lobotomy.” Finding myself identifying with this described woman I am at a loss of what to do next, but what I can say is that if I find myself in a position where I am asked to draw the form of God the(hi)mself I will be sure to give them the biggest breasts possible. 

When attempting to verbalize my described imbalance I am left speechless. The lexicon of the present is not equipped to delineate these happenings. I find myself using vague descriptors like happenings to acknowledge a tinted reality. Daly proposes a potential reworking, the goal being mobility for all and freedom from expectation. In the past we have “screened out experience and responded only to the questions considered meaningful and licit within the boundaries of prevailing thought structures.” What is a reality like, in which we counteract these structures and exist as honestly as possible within them? Recognizing this all encompassing fog makes way for something unseen, a fluidity and being which we can “express dimensions of the search for ultimate meaning.”