all that's human inside (so she's chilly & slick on her hips where her scales meet the skin)
Look at what happens, how I spring leaks and bruise. What fascinates me is how my stories never seem to be the good stories or the right stories, the culturally dominant ones or the politically correct ones or the ones everybody knows already, and it's lovely and frustrating both. Like, there is the story where someone hurts herself by accident because she's clumsy and there is the story where someone hurts herself on purpose because she hates her body and needs to punish it or because it gives her some kind of erotic thrill. What about when someone scratches herself for calm and comfort and it's only problematic if she lets her fingernails get too long or isn't careful, or starts doing it in her sleep, and then maybe there's gouged flesh and blood spurting in an almost cartoony way, too bright and too watery? What about when someone is just curious about her contents and capacities, taking her creative and experiment-loving mindset to somewhat unusual lengths? (For example: my childhood attempt at cutting off a wart with scissors, the time I wanted to find out how many pins I could thread through the thick skin on the soles of my feet, every time I have wondered what I would look like bald, or without eyebrows, or with my waist cinched far in or my chest strapped down flat, and then decided to actually find out.) What about when someone bangs up her knees through legitimate klutziness but really likes the bruises, how they're shaped, how they grow and darken and finally fade, what they are, tiny burst blood vessels, her body's whole capacity to bruise and then fix itself? I mean, it's culturally sanctioned to love bits of your body because they are pretty (though not too much, or you're vain and shallow), and/or because they are strong and healthy and because they carry you through, climb trees, are muscley and strong-boned and resilient. And I do. And I don't love pain, and sometimes I'm really insecure about, say, the fact that I do not have perfect skin and do have noticeable scars on my face. But there is, in me, something that is far more and always attracted to what's broken and faulty and wrong and badly patched together and wounded and failed. In myself and in the world. I feel very tender towards it. And it's not a pity thing, or a perverse thing, some kind of fetishy S&M thing or an intentional contrariness, it's just...a little bit of fear, perhaps, and a little bit of rubbernecker's gawking, but mostly love. This weird, inexplicable, uncomplicated love. Love for the way parts of me leave and are taken and come back in a fashion or don't. What I may alter, and what is altered whether or not I want it. How my terra incognita becomes a map. How, look, I am a sort of Zeno's ship, my baby teeth all buried in three states and atoms not caring what is me and what is the rest of the world, just passing through and through and through a woman who, like all women, like all things, is mostly made of empty space. Springing leaks. My heart can't keep from bearing things out into the air.
(...AND ALL OF THAT IS WHY I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT MY TATTOOS. Even that they hurt to get and will eventually grow blurry as video footage of Bigfoot and I will look, perhaps, from a distance, like I have some kind of inky, oddly illustrative subdermal fungus.)
Also, I've been loitering alone in a student art exhibition and lord, these people I sort of know are talented. I wish I could show you the oil-whales (huge, made mostly of black plastic garbage bags) spilling out from inside their rusty barrel. The televisions with movies of sped-up dancers in ornate, eye-bleedingly colorful costumes, the sound turned off and the lights down low, intermittant breaks for static, and I like to watch static because you can still see little blips and blotchy things coming at you from the very birth of the universe coming at you if you peer closely and know what you're looking for or are very imaginative. That is a scientific fact, and also a compelling argument against the switch to digital TV. Blue screens aren't the same.
I'm going to be really sad when there aren't any real whales left alive anymore. But anyway, I'm going to be sad about a lot of things, and, I don't know, that's part of why I don't write about the news on here in general; there's usually not much I feel I could write that would be adequate, appropriate, helpful, or new. And I am not going to pull some ridiculous number in which I mention Depressing Current Events just to reassure other people that I'm a smart and engaged enough person to be aware of them and a good and compassionate enough person to be upset about them. But I am going to be sad about those whales, in the future. I know how that must sound, but it just really really hit me in a really really visceral way, near my sternum, when I was looking at that sculpture, how I will feel that loss, how it'll be worse for its blurry indefiniteness; I'll have lost the physical analogue to a dream-concept, story-concept, idea more than I'll have lost anyone I knew as a fellow-creature. It'll be like losing unicorns.