It was like Vesuvius

"I read in Hygieia we should not hide our blood in shame and told my girlfriend about it. She agreed it was feminist for us not to hide our blood in shame"

1973

 

Thirteen women gathered in a friend's home to stage the first ever “Bleed-In.” The organizers, Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth, decided they required a uniquely feminine ritual to stimulate their joint writing of a history of the culture of menstruation. The women shared stories of their first periods, viewed “educational films” from two menstrual product makers, and scrawled “menstrual graffiti” on a piece of paper attached to the bathroom wall.

This sounds kind of gross right? But think about the time you have shared with your sisters discussing period or lying on the floor groaning under a table in your English A2 classes. That time when the biggest bitch JAP in your sixth form took too much methanafemic acid for her cramps and tripped out in the nurses office. She took all her clothes off, shouting how hot and burny she was then threw her tights at the nurse. You sat with her for 2 hours and talked her down from a fever and an intense trip because face it you were the only one in that entire place who had dropped acid and talked to a malign female God about why I feel so goddamned typical in nourishing my inner aspect with the souls of other men.

I must be the patron saint of sad women I swear to God. I've spent a lot of my life bringing women to their voices, giving them the strength they need to confront the inequality of the day to day feelings we have and the immense spiritual pain Eve bestowed on us. I coach them on their lines and lives in bathrooms of clubs when everyone is fucked on E, and under full moons when their babies are in the back of their pickup trucks and all I wanted was a ride home from the club to see my curly haired man.

I try to bring out the bitch in you, I rouse the serpent in you. 

It probably started when I was just a little girl and my babysitter would sit down next to me on the couch "He doesn't love me." She'd say in the most needy, desperately sad voice and my little body would freeze up. I'd nod and listen, keeping my eyes on the television because I couldn't stand to see her soul fear. I couldn't stand to see myself reflected in the conquered irises. I didn't understand it consciously, but that's when I started paying attention. That's when I began my life-long learning that men were hurting women and women were letting it happen. That's probably when I lost my faith in true-love and lifted myself up from the stone bed in the forest to go off with the wild animals. I kissed myself out that deadly sleep, stretched my legs, and went running until my feet were hooves and all the night creatures knew my name. (My prince charming has come many times for me though, and sometimes come inside me)

Sometimes, it isn't so noble. Sometimes I fuck up, but even then some kind of strange black magic happens. I become an unlikely superhero. I get caught red-handed sleeping with their boyfriends only to offer them that blood to build new selves with. (This has never actually happened, actually, except when I am in dreamstate).

If you want to drink with me, we might play  on repeat all night in a dive-bar red-lit from cheap jukebox and the eyes of hungry guys that you will not fuck tonight leaning against the bathroom wall because you are mine. If you want to cry with me, we will do it in that old cemetery at night near my father's house with  a half gone bottle of Lambrusco and lonely Nina Simone on a portable phonograph.

I'm the saddest woman you've ever known when you want me to be, when I realize the shared  soul is the eternal. 

Like most saviors, I haunt secret places and I die from the stigmata of their sins and their refusal to face their own skipping song and lift the needle. I live in the shadow of their big safe show and I disappear in their inability to save their own lives. 

Can you believe they never thank me?

I will say your name before I sink Poseidon, I have a sweet tooth for you.

Lose yourself in fucking, bouncing off of each other's fingertips in an early morning darkness. Then a door will open and you will see the garden.

Kierkegaard said 'the most common form of despair is not being who you are'. I'm really glad that I know who I am right now. 

This is me:

This is also me:

SIMALCRUM

I enrolled in clinical trials for depression. I have to pretend to be depressed so some doctors pay me to take pharmaceuticals, but as I am actually depressed in real life this starts to turn into a meta-reality, a postmodern, pseudo-authentic, Baudrillardian simulacra of depression which is, ironically, real. How depressed must I profess to be? Real depressed or fake depressed? Which will earn me more money? I have started getting phone calls asking me if I have considered suicide or harming myself in the last seven days. Despite being made by a robot, the concern expressed makes me feel relatively loved.

I am playing a show tomorrow. This is exciting and terrifying, as it's the first time I've played with someone else since I left my soulmates in New York. Reflective and reflexive. 

Should I write lyrics? Inadequacy and expectations. 

Hahahahahahahaha, I can only write about deer now anyway. 

I'm in the way, am I in the way?

I see you singing the animals to sleep, and I know, by the way, it's over without you. 

I'm in the way, am I in the way?

When you talk can I tape you?

Someone outside is screaming FUCK OFF OH JUST FUCK OFF. I can hear everything from my room which overlooks the entrance of my halls; lovers' quarrels included. A girl, slams the door. I make up the minutiae of their nights and write it on paper that later I will make into boats and sail across the puddles that form by the library. If I honour this external heartache properly then it will never happen to me. I like you. 

I only wanted what everyone wanted.

Whilst living in (dear, beloved) Il Corral, during my metamorphosis, I read and read and read. Our walls were covered in bookshelves and masses of books from the 1954 Journal of Psychiatric Health to Herman Hesse to Coping with Abandonment. Christie and Stane's End of the World Bookshop that lined our beautiful hallway/kitchen/creatingspace/arthole  was a womb for me for so long. 

I'll be unable not to write more about Il Corral in the future, no doubt. But now I was thinking of something specific I have been thinking.

Oh yeah, fuck Kerouac. In the End of the World I read Kerouac (white man has adventures, shit talks women). I read Into the Wild (white man writes about other white man's stupid adventures). I read Jack London (white man has adventures, makes up a lot of bullshit about the North, refuses to put any female characters in his stories except one who gets 'hysteria' and dies). What else? 

These books somehow inherently angered a part of me that itches, and I've begun to explore why. 

I’m angry at the writers of the beat generation, white men who said “fuck it all” and set off to be free. Leaving behind families, of course. Wives who had to raise children all by themselves, whose lives and raw complex emotions may have made a better story. And all the copycats who came after them, falling away through the decades. Wealthy, able bodied young white man rejects privilege, has adventure. I see it all the time. I read it all the time. Am I bitter because I've loved them? Am I that hysterical girl who dies in the frozen gas station carpark outside of Arizona because I am not good enough for my sweet wandering prince?

Or is it that the magical white manchild is such a useful escapist mechanism, writing about him doesn't involve encumbering the listener with real world oppression that makes you retch hot vomit it is so unjust and the burning disparate desperation associated with women, people of colour, natives, who have to leave and never look back. Who can never return. 

I keep writing, and what itches me is this- Who gives a fuck about my story? 

God I’m such an asshole.
Heavenly father, my ego is flagging.

Truth is, in the cold light of 2.44am I feel like the beat poet runaway-and-be-free god-the-road-is-crazy let-me-tellyou-about-this-one-time horse has been beat to death for about fifty years now. That’s how I feel.
And I feel like my stories are just stories and I can't contain my disappointment.

Chere.

I've really missed platonic intimacy; sometimes I fantasize about when we were young and we all got in your bed and made a strong sisterbrother circle, and laughed and were all subconsciously aware of each other's bodies. Sometimes we were tripping and the red string you hung from your ceiling became malevolent but our youth conquered it.

I think I strive to replicate this and it does happen these days and BANG I feel content, but then oh oh oh oh self aware. Someone turned to me in surprise the other day and postulated that self awareness is a good thing. Baby it is, but sometimes I just need to be carried by friends of friends.

I think about this a lot after the times when your underwire radio comes over my international airwaves, and we make big ethanol cloud plans of collectives in cottages by the water. I still don't know what is permanent, but what's a wolf without a pack? Sister wolves. When we have our babies our families will be big and people will always be together and family members touch each other and say I love you, unconditionally yours. Is this why we crave the touch of strangers? Our daughters will know these things.