Stages: An Experiment
My turtles: Harold and Maude. Maude a cooter and Harold a red-eared slider. The cooter, Maude -- the size of a silver dollar when we got her -- has tripled the size of Harold. Every morning, Joe turns their tank light on as he's leaving. Then I drop mealy worms in.
When Maude sees me, she (their sexes are not clear to us yet) stands on her hind feet, flaps her front feet, makes huge splashes and waves, and generally upsets the whole tank, clamoring for food she barely recognizes -- from all her flap -- when I drop it on her snout. Harold sits frozen and compact on the bottom.
When Harold sees a free-floating worm, he tentatively stretches his neck for it. Maude promptly puts a flipper on the back of his head, pins him to the bottom of the tank, and sucks down the twitching worm. Repeat.
It's silly, but I've taken to screaming at Maude. I call her a gluttonous and stupid bitch. I laugh at her when the worm floats right past her eyes and she rushes past it to bash her nose into the tankside. I call her an attention-monger. I have found a way to use her like a machine, to feed Harold. I drop the worm square in front of her flailing chest, watch her go sort of addled and cross-eyed, then see the worm go under from the undertow she is making, sucking the worm under her shell's length and right behind her to the waiting and less dejected Harold. Relief! Gulp!
Joe tells me that turtles are stupid creatures, with incredibly short attention spans. They know Swim; worm; eat; breathe; clamber; swim again. There's no way Maude could plot, preen, bully, and fawn. She's just hungrier because her species is supposed to grow bigger. Harold is more satisfied with his smallness, his quaking lethargy.
Still: She is such a bitch.
I can't help it. I have always foamed at showboats and swans, always waited anxiously for capsizings and dives. I have always stared at the person on stage, the kid loud-mouthing in the center of the room, and thought, Your need is so big, so gaping, that it's disgusting. It disables you from seeing anyone else in the room, except for those who feed your need for attention.
I've usually preferred the ugly, the small, the overlooked, the quiet.
When it comes to the arts, I brace myself when in the presence of musicians and actors. Composers and playwrights and directors? Hallelujah! Performers? Eek! I listen to the radio and wonder why we credit, say, Elton John so much, who in my opinion, is so very little without Bernie Taupin ... Elton becomes a tinny, melodramatic fop with a need to be caught with fashion models. Wonder why we imagine so many film "stars" as more than well-made hand-puppets and then ask their opinion about the war, about poverty. We even choose our presidents based on their image, their marketability, and allow patent illogic and stupidity to be floated in front of our faces ... very much like a fat, white mealy worm that we are more than blind with need to eat.
Celebrity is all.
And, yeah, that chaps me.
This morning, I had a wild hair as I got out of the shower. I decided to listen to a cd my friend Laura had given me for Yule-ishness. The music was by turns punkish and then quirkily instrumental, seriously angry then ironically cheesy, stripped-down and then elaborate, politiely dissonant and then garishly mellifluent. Sort of like me. (Good ear, this Laura!) I dried off and made faces in the mirror. I mouthed along. I pounded on the night stand, while passing, to emphasize a beat. I laughed at funny turns of phrase in the lyrics.
See: I rarely even listen to music outside of background noise on my way to work in the car, on the radio. The cult of personality -- that performance thing, remember?! -- just makes my skin crawl. But was I really gesturing at myself in the mirror, and singing along, with toothpaste foaming off my lips and into my beard, and laughing? Whose little performance was this? Yeah, I'd be mortified had anyone seen me. But truth: I must've enjoyed seeing myself this way, just a bit.
I went to work feeling focused and sunny, with a sense of place and direction, full of energy and still relaxed.
I guess being queer has left me with little experience of baby and bathwater.
While excessive attachment to celebrity is harmful, so is the same excessive attachment to anonymity. Both touch and independence are necessary parts of any healthy psyche's diet. Living together, whether in tank or apartment or block or city, requires an economy of attention, a trade in touch or word, and any such trade comes, inevitably, with its own sets of performances -- whether it's the loudly silent type, the shrieking peacock, the defiant punk girl, or the smiling monk.
I like a little anger. I like a little irony. I like a little rejection, a little sweet confusion, a little thoughtfulness, and a little mischief.
And I have to perform it every now and then to make it stick as true.
I can only hope that, if anyone ever sees me actin' a fool outside my shower, they are understanding. Hope they understand that most folks try to only take the attetion they need.
...
I think it's time to start feeding the turtles in separate tanks. Remove the element of competition and replace it with one of compliment. Let everyone feed at their own pace and in their own way.
That way I may exert less energy on yelling in the morning, save more for my bathroom mime work.
When Maude sees me, she (their sexes are not clear to us yet) stands on her hind feet, flaps her front feet, makes huge splashes and waves, and generally upsets the whole tank, clamoring for food she barely recognizes -- from all her flap -- when I drop it on her snout. Harold sits frozen and compact on the bottom.
When Harold sees a free-floating worm, he tentatively stretches his neck for it. Maude promptly puts a flipper on the back of his head, pins him to the bottom of the tank, and sucks down the twitching worm. Repeat.
It's silly, but I've taken to screaming at Maude. I call her a gluttonous and stupid bitch. I laugh at her when the worm floats right past her eyes and she rushes past it to bash her nose into the tankside. I call her an attention-monger. I have found a way to use her like a machine, to feed Harold. I drop the worm square in front of her flailing chest, watch her go sort of addled and cross-eyed, then see the worm go under from the undertow she is making, sucking the worm under her shell's length and right behind her to the waiting and less dejected Harold. Relief! Gulp!
Joe tells me that turtles are stupid creatures, with incredibly short attention spans. They know Swim; worm; eat; breathe; clamber; swim again. There's no way Maude could plot, preen, bully, and fawn. She's just hungrier because her species is supposed to grow bigger. Harold is more satisfied with his smallness, his quaking lethargy.
Still: She is such a bitch.
I can't help it. I have always foamed at showboats and swans, always waited anxiously for capsizings and dives. I have always stared at the person on stage, the kid loud-mouthing in the center of the room, and thought, Your need is so big, so gaping, that it's disgusting. It disables you from seeing anyone else in the room, except for those who feed your need for attention.
I've usually preferred the ugly, the small, the overlooked, the quiet.
When it comes to the arts, I brace myself when in the presence of musicians and actors. Composers and playwrights and directors? Hallelujah! Performers? Eek! I listen to the radio and wonder why we credit, say, Elton John so much, who in my opinion, is so very little without Bernie Taupin ... Elton becomes a tinny, melodramatic fop with a need to be caught with fashion models. Wonder why we imagine so many film "stars" as more than well-made hand-puppets and then ask their opinion about the war, about poverty. We even choose our presidents based on their image, their marketability, and allow patent illogic and stupidity to be floated in front of our faces ... very much like a fat, white mealy worm that we are more than blind with need to eat.
Celebrity is all.
And, yeah, that chaps me.
This morning, I had a wild hair as I got out of the shower. I decided to listen to a cd my friend Laura had given me for Yule-ishness. The music was by turns punkish and then quirkily instrumental, seriously angry then ironically cheesy, stripped-down and then elaborate, politiely dissonant and then garishly mellifluent. Sort of like me. (Good ear, this Laura!) I dried off and made faces in the mirror. I mouthed along. I pounded on the night stand, while passing, to emphasize a beat. I laughed at funny turns of phrase in the lyrics.
See: I rarely even listen to music outside of background noise on my way to work in the car, on the radio. The cult of personality -- that performance thing, remember?! -- just makes my skin crawl. But was I really gesturing at myself in the mirror, and singing along, with toothpaste foaming off my lips and into my beard, and laughing? Whose little performance was this? Yeah, I'd be mortified had anyone seen me. But truth: I must've enjoyed seeing myself this way, just a bit.
I went to work feeling focused and sunny, with a sense of place and direction, full of energy and still relaxed.
I guess being queer has left me with little experience of baby and bathwater.
While excessive attachment to celebrity is harmful, so is the same excessive attachment to anonymity. Both touch and independence are necessary parts of any healthy psyche's diet. Living together, whether in tank or apartment or block or city, requires an economy of attention, a trade in touch or word, and any such trade comes, inevitably, with its own sets of performances -- whether it's the loudly silent type, the shrieking peacock, the defiant punk girl, or the smiling monk.
I like a little anger. I like a little irony. I like a little rejection, a little sweet confusion, a little thoughtfulness, and a little mischief.
And I have to perform it every now and then to make it stick as true.
I can only hope that, if anyone ever sees me actin' a fool outside my shower, they are understanding. Hope they understand that most folks try to only take the attetion they need.
...
I think it's time to start feeding the turtles in separate tanks. Remove the element of competition and replace it with one of compliment. Let everyone feed at their own pace and in their own way.
That way I may exert less energy on yelling in the morning, save more for my bathroom mime work.