i tm i

Copy, Artemis

Some very well cared for human beings flew around the moon this month.

I was right there with live-stream of the astronauts as much as I could be enjoying the glitchy feeds, relating hard with the cramped living quarters and… waste management issues.

When people go camping they don’t think much about where to put all the shit. It’s natural. It can go in the Nature. Or in the vacuum of space.

But what do you do when you have limited resources and are camping out in an urban environment that is all pavement, security cameras, limited privacy, and limited toilet usage?

And what ever nature that is available is precious and will be protected from being used as a toilet– I should add.

This was one of my logistics nightmares when I was one of the unhoused, living in a van in Williamsburg, Brooklyn back in the Hipster days.

Solid waste was by far easier to deal with. One can evacuate into a bag and drop that off in a trash can as one does with dog waste.

Liquid waste was more interesting to deal with. Especially in the cold months. I remember winding up with an accumulation of gallon jugs filled with frozen urine stored under the van. It was embarrassing.

I made myself do some reconnaissance and be brave (mostly that) so I could start doing waste disposal “runs” (walks actually) carrying sometimes four jugs of piss at a time to a nearby public toilet. (That’s four gallons / 18.2 liters of urine, y’all.)

I would go from from where Figo Il Gelato Italiano is now (It used to be an unpaved parking lot for zip cars when I was there.), across N12th street, into McCarren Park and all the way to the toilets near Lorimer St.

It is about a four minute walk that my skinny ass made during daylight hours carting obvious liquid waste à la main to a proper sewer system access point. Then I would toss the empty containers in the waste bins and scuttle back to the van pretending to be a completely normal person.

I don’t think I ever used those toilets apart from those waste runs. They were not very pleasant.

And just like the astronauts, my actions were being scrutinized from afar. My upright and properly domesticated neighbors needed to watch to make sure I wasn’t going to start breaking into buildings and or stealing things, or be too… you know, improprietous. I was a street person. Or course they would need to be wary. It’s what humans do.

I had to keep my head down while somehow hold my head high at the same time. And be sure to dispose of waste correctly lest I be visited by the fine fairy. Which sounds like it could be real nice. But it ain’t. Because even if, damn they fine, they’re going to ask me to cough up money that I didn’t have yet that I need to buy food with.

Oh, to have billions of dollars backing me just to make it snow a little bit in space. No one wrinkles their nose at you in disgust for that.

Wildly enough, all of this fringe living nonsense was part of how I became included in the NASA Artemis space program. No, really.

Sticking it out in New York led me to becoming an art model. That put me in contact with a nerdy figurative artist friend who brought me in via the Lunar Codex. It’s a whole project where NASA litters the moon with examples of human creativity because… that’s is also what humans do…?

I can’t send children to the moon, but something of me is there in name and likeness. I got a Magario to the moon in some fashion.

And it did take me freezing in a tin can Apollo 13 style and being a mission specialist in charge of waste management to do it.

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?