i tm i

no(t)stalgia

You want to know a strange feeling?
Opening a box that’s been shipped to you from the other side of another country and finding it full of objects from your childhood–
Objects that made up your immediate world as far back as forty years ago and were part of your day-to-day for years, that you haven’t seen for years. And now they are with you again far outside of their initial context.

How do you express the meaning of these things when meanings were never defined in words because these objects were with you before you had full grasp of language?

Are things only really valuable if you can condemn them to be recreated inside a mesh of language?

Then, even then, neither the language nor the things gain much value because they are mine. And what am I? What authority backs my words to give them weight and validation that would convince anyone else agree to give them greater value?

Nostalgia has been a hot word these days, but I do not long for my past. Nostalgia is not a word I would use to describe what I feel when I reconnect with my past. Unless the practically nauseating, full body shudders I get is nostalgia?

The feeling is more like the spookies that come over me when I visit haunted places. I guess that means I haunt myself. I conjure up the ghosts of my past selves. And I have to face their disappointment. I have to explain to them how I continue to be trapped in a (mental) health hole. And why the world isn’t any better.

Try explaining to a child why birth capable people in Puerto Rico and Greenland desperately needed to be sterilized for the good of humanity without their knowledge or consent, but known human predators aren’t lobotomized right away. It’s cheaper and quicker the transcranial magnetic stimulation, but we suddenly have ‘the ethics’ to consider for these people– for some reason. 😒

(I hope those two islands unite in their shared sorrow and make something powerful of it.)

Among the self-haunted toys, books, and things, I found a bag made by one of my sisters when she was learning to sew as a preteen/teen.

The bag was full of my plastic jewelry from the 80s: pop/snap beads and bright plastic charms that clip onto bright plastic chains that were too itchy to wear.

There was also a rainbow heart necklace that I wore once for a grade school class picture.

Looping that piece of the past around my neck now, I feel it strangling me in ways I did not feel when I was little.

How do humans call themselves advanced as thinking animals when it’s sociopolitical daring for me to wear some bright vintage children’s jewelry? What good is all this impressive human cognitive powers of logic and emotional intelligence if ya let yourselves get narrowed in the think-works so bad that heart symbols and rainbow colors manage to engender such… fear? Fear of being impinged upon by an “other.”

Not only are my past selves disappointed in humanity for being this asinine, but probably the ancestors too. Not just my people. All of them.

You want to put people on Mars, in an environment entirely hostile to the species, but you can’t figure out something like fair public bathroom usage in Florida? Really?

Can you hear all the booing from the beyond yet?

No? Well, I’m booing. And not in the spooky way either.

A Future, With Teeth

“Great men are not born great, they grow great.” – Don Vito Corleon

This is some crazy auspicious month this year with so many overlapping holiday observances– and an eclipse– With a sprinkling of social unrest in Mexico. I’m writing from Mexico. When they kind of do hits on cartel bosses it does kind of does ripple out to people who aren’t directly involved.

(Fun fact! I used to bank with Wachovia. Look them up. They were accused of money laundering for Mexican drug cartels. So… I have been involved.)

Taking it back down from a global scale, the month is dedicated self-love. And nothing says sexy good times more than dental work! We must keep a Cronenberg / Clive Barker perspective on sensuality, no?
Ok, if that is too much for you, then just think of it as self-care and maintenance.

I continue my healing journey with a discomfiting jaunt to the dentists chair to have cavities addressed, crowns replaced, and best / worst of all three posts inserted into my jaw. At a future date I will have three tooth shaped sculptures set in my mouth to fill the gaps that I have had for years.

I long for the day when this dental barbarism will be a thing of the past. I am aware there are labs working on a way to make life forms regrow their own teeth. Keep going, science people!

After walking away from Art Basel with access to a few coins, there are funds for this work. And I dare not put it off because the money could be used for something else. The money can always be used for something else.

I am trying out a muscle relaxant + anti-inflammatory controlled substance that was prescribed.. because it should give my back/ neck/ hips/ shoulders a break as well as help with the pain in my jaw. A double win? We will see.

You are advised to take pain medication as soon as the numbness starts to wear off, I didn’t do that. I wanted to feel the extent of the pain, the quality of it as it tumes and contracts. I’ve never had any of my bones drilled into before. I was curious.

Considering the trials I have already dealt with in my life, it didn’t surprise.
I’ve gone three weeks with an open 4cm hole in my chest without taking anything for that medical trauma. Then there were all those whole body inflammation responses to bacterial infections that were brutal and frightening in their randomness. Simple fevers having it out in my body give me as much ache in my legs. By now, I’m quite familiar with odd extreme pains and the dragging fatigue that comes with it.

Yeah, the pain is momentarily disruptive, but it’s not a problem. It’s not like I have an actual life for it to be a great interference. Such an odd advantage I have suddenly, no? I have the time to explore the nuances of physical suffering– For all the good that sort of luxury does a person.

I don’t ignore the momentary irritation and I don’t let myself mourn and worry about what all the pain means. I lathe my mind in sweet, sweet placebo. There is an end goal somewhere over there. I can vaguely envision about four months into the future when I will be able to chew food with both sides of my mouth again. Ah, divine thought!

I remind myself that although I am open to infections, I can hold them back, I am equipped to deal. I did wrestle with myself about taking the prescribed antibiotics. I knew the dentist wasn’t going to understand my reluctance, so I didn’t bring it up. Even if the person spoke English natively I don’t think they would fathom my reluctance to take more antibiotics. (See: previous post)

Self-love is weird. Sometimes it means having holes put into your bone and stitches in your gums, making yourself look like some kind of Don Godfather over here with a swollen lower jaw. Sometimes is means stripping the microbiome from your body like a droid getting it’s circuits wiped– again. It means giving up on the stim of crunchy food…

What does your weird self-care look like?

Dragons & Snakes; Horses Aflame

Welpy-welp.

I’ve officially arrived at the ass end of the snake year.

The boulevard outside my door was soaked in pooling sewer filth from the 27th of December to about January 20th.

The snake has incontinence in it’s old age. Or it is terrified of the coming hooves of the next year.

I remember once being at a picnic with my family on some bright New England day. I don’t know who spotted it, but we– us kids got excited about finding a snake nearby. I believe I was the quickest one and was able to catch the garter snake with my hands. I did not keep hold of it for very long. It was terrified of being snatched up out of the grass by a child and it wet me in defense. And it 𝓈𝓉𝒶𝓃𝓀. I remember the talk turn immediately to best practices for nullifying strong animal odors, skunk smells especially. Tomato juice seemed to be top of the list. We did not have that available– and perhaps orange juice was used instead? I have trouble remembering if it was me who actually caught a wild animal with my own hands. I remember many hands: my siblings’ hands; my parents’ hands. I don’t remember any admiration directed at me for quickness of body, for swiftness, deftness. I remember skunks and tomato juice instead. But a snake had been caught then and admired for a moment.

Last year when the dragon transitioned to the snake, David Lynch was taken away in the momentum. That was something I felt deeply because he was on my mind in the days before he passed. This year, I get shit almost literally thrown on my doorstep. Not much better?

In spite of all the offal at home and abroad– (I see you Myanmar, DR Congo, Rwanda, Thailand, Cambodia, Sudan, Iran, Venezuela, Ukraine, Iran, Palestine… ET FRIKKIN AL)– I have been able to carve out some moments to “appreciate” my health journey since being struck down with the elfshot. I’ve made a curation here of some consecutive Julys that show the goings of this journey:

In July 2021 I was trying to go about my day to day while in a massive continual brain fog state. I was three months out from taking my first antibiotics for Brucellosis. I was functional, but not at all. I was brought along to Mexico City for a music+art thing with Hugo Crosthwaite and The Color Forty Nine. Covid-19 was was taking thousands of people out of life daily. Wearing medical masks was politicized.

Flip forward a year to July 2022. I was in the middle of another antibiotics regimen to clear my system of Brucella and Bartonella. I was taking three kinds of antibiotics for two months straight. This was after taking shots of antibiotics in the ass in November 2021. My body was in so much pain and discomfort. I was begging for death.

No one told me antibiotics make you suicidal.

Flip forward a year to July 2023. I was sporting another major scar from having my uterus taken out in May for which I had to take more antibiotics. I was traveling to San Miguel Allende for the Guanajuato Film Festival: a working vacation. Somehow, I rode a horse.

Flip forward another year to July 2024. I was a stunned animal going out alone, for the time in years, to a strange part of the US (South Dakota)– a piece of driftwood from the Pacific dropped in the Badlands. I was attending a sci-fi / fantasy convention to catch the year in the form of a man. I caught a dragon… or perhaps was caught by a dragon. I met such beautiful humans there that I would keep them forever if I could. It pains me to think of how I was barely present in their presence.

Flip forward another year to July 2025. I was only just starting to truly come out of the brain fog I’d been in since 2021. One year to the day, my ~~“impressionable” little~~ HIGHLY SENSITIVE self dreamt about that sci-fi / fantasy convention.

I broke the July travel pattern by visiting Mexico City in May/June. It was to catch a snake– to catch the year in the form of a man at a sci-fi / fantasy convention– again! It’s not a simple thing to hold an international sex symbol when you understand what that means. Of course, I suffered for it more than when I got the stink of a garter snake on my hands. I lost weight (I do NOT need to lose weight) and my body thought it would be fun to have a pretend menses– something to do with my body continuing to mend from surgery. Harried over-stimulation, not adjusting to the oxygen levels… I was a walking disaster. But a disaster improved from the disaster that I was a year before; but in a different way.

Healing is not a straightforward going.

(Heh. Skål to the Mikkelsen brothers for being a part of my irregular processes. Also, sorry, boys.)

These days I continue to have twitching in my eyes to remind me of my distress. It’s a far cry from when I used to feel like my body was going to stop working if I exerted myself beyond casual usage. I could not lift or carry much more than my own body and even then I had to be mindful. My neuromuscular interconnection was so screwed that just stretching would trigger panic attacks; waking up in the morning triggered them. Doctors don’t tell you the nuances of what anemic “fatigue” is like. They have even less understanding of the gut-brain axis.

I’ve soldiered myself from the fragility of existence to working with weights. I can almost carelessly do jumping jacks. I have muscle tone again. My brain fog is cleared. This is not insignificant. You have no idea the number of times I have broken down crying because I could do something with my body again, and it didn’t hurt in a horrifically unexpected way, or I didn’t expect… repercussions for it.

I mean, hey, it’s not like I was/am an art model and butoh performer. It’s not like I’m not going to be devastated at the loss of what little physical prowess I had, or anything.

The wood burns. The Horse runs swift.

I am here to witness it. I am here.

Be proud for me. I am not dead.