what i know about sickness is that it makes you obsessive.

what i know about obsessiveness is that it makes you unbearable.

what i know about being unbearable is that it makes you interesting.

what i know about being interesting is that it makes you attractive.

what i know about being attractive is that it alienates you.

what i know about alienation is that it makes you love sick people.

what i know about loving sick people is that it makes you unconsciously susceptible to abuse.

what i know about abuse is that you welcome it.

what i know about being unassuming is that it is never obvious.

what i know about being obvious is that it is always hidden.

what i know about hiding is that it is essentially elementary.

what i know about childishness is that it is necessarily curious.

what i know about curiosity is that it is lacking.

what i know about lack is that it makes you crave a rich chocolate cake.

what i know about being rich is that you can pretend as long as you’re attractive.

what i know about pretending is that you can survive as long as you have your cake.

what i know about having your cake is that you can sustain keeping it until you force it out of you.

what i know about forcing it out of you is that you can pretend as long as you forget.

what i know about forgetting is that you can eat because you were attractive.

what i know about having been attractive is that you were once a part of yourself.

what i know about having been a part of yourself is that yes, you were taken.

what i know about being taken is that you can take until you forget.

what i know about forgetting is that you can remember until you also forget.

what i know about remembering is that it doesn’t happen often.

what i know about time is that the incident seems less likely.

what i know about blame is that it all falls upon yourself.

what i know about yourself is that i can orchestrate your reality.

what i know about reality is based on appearances.

what i know about appearances is based on being taken.

what i know about being taken is not within my reach.

hospital

You could say that I am worried about me – I am voluntarily wearing shoes that are too small for my feet. But that isn’t why I am worried. Yesterday morning, I was released from the hospital. I wasn’t in the hospital for any particularly life-threatening reason. I woke up still drunk on Saturday morning and as I was walking to my friend’s kitchen to get a drink of water, I fell over in pain and began to throw up on myself. As it turns out, a cyst that had been residing on my ovary had burst and sent some sort of hemorrhagic fluid all over my pelvic region. When the paramedics got to my friend’s apartment, I was curled up with my head hovering over a Victoria’s Secret bag waiting for the next stream of vomit to involuntarily leave my system. I couldn’t make it to the bathroom, so my friend brought the first receptacle she could find to my relief. It’s the first time I’ve thrown up without shoving a finger down my throat in, well, since I can remember.

I think that it’s my fault that the cyst burst. I had been having the same pain that I have had since I was in high school, these shooting pains that sometimes happen when I ovulate, and I decided it was time to get healthy. I thought I should start exercising regularly, that exercising might shape my body up to deal with the simple act of ovulation like a normal body does, but I think that the YouTube exercise videos I did in my parents’ bedroom actually just made the cyst on my ovary pop. When the paramedics helped me up from my puking position, I realized that I had undone my pants, and I apologized for my indecency. Actually, I think I said, “my ass usually isn’t hanging out when four men walk into a room to escort me into a vehicle.” My friend thought it was funny.

It was snowing, so my friend hopped into the ambulance with us instead of driving separately to the hospital. Everything was closed in a few hours, for reasons of snow, and “polar vortex.” Later, my friend stared out of the window of my hospital suite and watched the whole city, pondering about the attractive middle-aged paramedic’s impressions of her. I thought that this was funny.

In the ambulance, a younger, more attractive paramedic tried to IV me, failingly, twice. I can’t thank him enough, because now I have a beautiful bruise running from the inside of my elbow all the way down to a few inches above my wrist. I have never wanted to wear short sleeves more than now.

When I got to the hospital, the doctor(s) and nurse(s) wanted to give me morphine but couldn’t because my blood pressure was too low. I think that my blood pressure was too low because I hadn’t eaten anything except for a few pieces of pita bread and tabouli and hummus the night before and had probably drunk more than a quarter of a bottle of Bombay Sapphire. I don’t even ever drink gin. We didn’t even really do anything. We just made cupcakes for my attractive boss. My friend is in love with him, and I would be too, if I cared. But instead, I just think he’s attractive enough to make cupcakes for. You know, to garner attention.

The night before, I had made it a point to stretch my too-small shoes out. I brought over one pair of shoes and bought another on the way to my friend’s house. Yes, I stopped to buy a pair of shoes on the way to my friend’s house. I figure, if I’m about to spend hours talking to someone who isn’t a male, I might as well put my feet into shoes that will stretch out into being comfortable enough to house me into being attractive enough to a male in the future. Even though that never happens and I am never satisfied. I’m going too far here, but that’s how it is.

bosnia, bosnia, edwin

     

and in progress

            When you wake up in a house on the upper west side next to a 20 year old wearing his absent mother’s silk robe, and the bracelet you bought in Sarajevo a week prior is broken, to which his response is, “it was trashy, anyway,” you feel as though you might be a bit misplaced. You think for a moment about where you lie, at least spatially. You can’t orient the causality in the events that led you into this space; you couldn’t recite the story to another person if they even asked, because the story wouldn’t feel like your story to narrate. You feel dismembered from your self, you feel as though the concept of “self” is not exactly valid at this moment; the thousand thread-count sheets and sparse town car traffic close in on you so comfortably that your momentary inclination to really assess the situation you’re in flees from the scene just as easily as you have fled from your responsibility to “self”.

Still, you can’t avoid that you feel pathetic, unethical, meaningless, cavernous. A series of anti-attempts to cultivate your voice have brought you to this comfortable place. You had told yourself that it was time to start living unhinged from the voices of others who dictate what or who you should be; you had made the break into simply acting in accordance to your desires, refusing to suppress any desire of your own because if it is “yours,” you should actualize it. And then your self may reveal itself to you in all of its desirous plentitude; and then you might really produce as a result of having finally crafted yourself in harmony to what you have always wanted.

Your hair is curled, you’re a bit too fat, you’ve spent a good chunk of your grant money on discounted clothes you can’t afford otherwise, you can’t find the Serbian liquor you had the night before but take a bottle of Pernod instead, you wait for your 20 year old to call a driver, and you bask in the complete emptiness of your every move.

In response to Alex (Ruin Porn)

 Waterwash. Something last-named Waterwash fucked her up, pushed her to the wall and made her bruise before I was even conceived and ten years later another rendezvous in alcoholics anonymous would lead her to the wall again with me at age 12 stepping silly on sticky floors because a case of Corona was thrown in defense against a barstool situated before a petty regal marble countertop, installed by the man who cut his fingers off while installing hardwood floors in her dining room. This man taught me Heart of Gold on the guitar in a cape-cod entertainment room, 64 inch television set playing Degrassi in the background, seven-hour trips to Asheville in the back of both of our minds. She splayed herself to us, two hours into the drive refusing to get back into the car at a rest stop in Kentucky just almost at the real peaks of the Appalachian mountains. If they had been real at the point of her departure we may have taken her more seriously. Me dreaming about being a submissive man in the back of a dirty white Ford Escort, my brother making himself gag in a carseat to my right.

In response (kind of) to Aliza Shvartz:

I am interested in the kind of dispossession that leaves traces of disgust and confusion. The type of failure that is so masochistic the audience asks, “but why?” To which even the performer cannot adequately respond. It is not in order to achieve “shock” and it is not throw-away performance for the sake of masochism. There is an affective quality to masochistic acts that is not achievable under any other circumstances.

I want to test the malleability of flesh. Because I possess a feminine body, I have experienced the malleability of my own flesh through the bodies of others, while I am myself an Other. However, I have never been able (as a consequence of this "Otherness" as much as my own failures/shortcomings) to access myself either as this Other or as a corporeal, speaking, breathing, living, acting subject at all. I have disallowed myself access to my own voice and my own body for as long as I can remember. Even masturbation has always been a traumatic event. I dissociate from my own body and the whole event seems a pleasurable storm of disembodiment and a re-inscription of past traumas through my own hands (especially because I don’t feel as though my flesh is actually my own).

It doesn’t matter with whom I’m engaging in “sex-acts” with, even if it is myself. A ghost of a person is always touching me, as a shadow, traces of trauma and simply the gazes of others and what I read into (and out of) them.

I was anorexic for five (give or take a few here and there) years and did not know it. It took a year of sporadic bulimia for me to grant myself the agency to claim “bulimic” and seek medical help. Just as sex-acts are ways to dissociate from myself and live through the flesh of others, bingeing and purging provided a means with which to short-circuit; to access a plane of affect that I do not have access to in my day to day life. This isn’t a sort of reaching for the Real; my acts of masochistic transcendence weren’t efforts to reach a state of being that is irreconcilably inaccessible to all bodies. It’s rather a way to feel something in the act of complete dispossession and self-inflicted debasement. In some ways, to feel as though I am saying something, that I am able to say something, even if (especially if?) only to myself, to my own body, with my own flesh.

I have engaged in spontaneous acts of privileged consumerism. I have identified with objects in an effort to forge an intelligible identity. I have attempted to merge my own skin with the lavender walls of my room, the intricately patterned linens on my bed, my bed the site of sex and the site of identity formation and the site of identification with others and the site of all of my attempts to identify with myself through the flesh of others. A separation from the objects I have deemed significant in my repertoire is like a separation from a lover that I have never had. Once, my home was infested with bed bugs. I threw away everything that I owned in a fit of liberation and I still have not recovered.

ways in which the wall can love back (2006)

I am enamored by negativity because I identify with it. I want to make it clear, however, that I do not view negativity or regression as my goal, or any goal for purely ethical reasons. However, I question the relevance of a “goal” at all, focusing rather on iterations, of acts that perhaps do not lead to a cumulatively understandable “goal.” This isn’t to say that one cannot attempt to capture a certain amount of space within a certain amount of time and understand what is contained within as a product of lived experiences, social realities, embodiment. However, I would argue that no genealogy of cause and effect exists. As thrilled as I am with negativity, failure, dispossession, disembodiment, I have (perhaps naïve) hope in utopia. In futurity. Perhaps an interlacing of failure and success is necessary for any futurity at all – the debasement of oneself can sometimes act as a crude reminder of work that still must be done. This is not an alignment with any sort of teleological understanding of history; nor am I aiming to legitimize any harm inflicted on selves or others as necessary events in the name of “progress” or “improvement.” Instead, certain acts of negativity, failure, and dispossession can become punctums with which to understand and empathize with others and, of course, with selves – selves that span time and space in often indigestible ways.