Celebrities, Poles, and other News

Earplugs are one of the greatest inventions in the world, ever. Suddenly an unbearably loud ferry full of children is muted to a soft roar. Even loud ho's on their cell phones are shunted by the little foam bits stuffed into my ears. Sometimes I don't understand how some people's voices are so loud. They carry the length of a football stadium with no amplification, and no loss of power.

Now that I've gone ahead and bitched about something, I'll go on to awesomeness.

I was born and raised in North Carolina, and when I think of true home, that's where it is, with a breeze of Louisiana and Arkansas seeping up from the roots. When I was a young thing in the beginnings of my world, I took ballet. A lot. Among the many other young things that passed over the dance floor of Bonita's School of Ballet, one of them had white-blonde hair and a megawatt smile. Her name is Katherine Southard, and she grew up to be this bombshell, also known as Miss North Carolina:



I always knew you had it going on, Katherine!
Your ability to be genuine, gracious, and politically correct enough to be family friendly while also smokin hot impresses me greatly.

And now, in an example of my inability to do so, a plug for my pole dance class. If we share a similar zip code, trot over to Emerald City Trapeze Arts and sign up for my bangin pole class. Here's what it is not:
I will not teach you how to strip. That's more of a self-taught skill.

Here's what it is:
I will teach you as many spins as you can handle, followed by acrobatic poses that will leave your inner thighs bruised red and gray. I will run you through a gauntlet of conditioning and extreme stretching exercises, and make sure you feel it for at least two days afterwards. Fun!

Life Recipes

This wordy, preachy, self-indulgent post is for my gorgeous friend Meg, of the unstoppable mind and riotous heart. I got your messages and kept them and kept them, and now it’s time to just write and stop obsessing over the perfect thing to say to deserve your regard.

“On knowing what you want and accepting who you are…”

Living in myself as I do, I don’t think I possess an expertise in these criteria; but looking at the world around me, I want to change my mind in comparison. In the past two years I have slowly begun to develop an increasingly elaborate sense of contempt. Namely, for the apparent epidemic of cowardice that plagues the masses. Knowing what you want is the hard part, so I understand that struggle. Knowing what you want and failing to act on it I simply do not understand. Why the hell would you allow your life to rot around you while you’re staring your heart’s desire in the face and openly refusing to claim it? Why would you waste what you are?

On the occasion that I meet someone who is on a path that they want to be on, doing what they want to do and succeeding, they almost always apologize for it. WTF mate? Who are you apologizing to? The quivering majority that didn’t have the balls to do what you did, whatever that may be? Why would you apologize to such a creature? If anything, by your example and your own apparent joy in your choices you should be saying, “you’re welcome.”

As far as knowing what you are, if I were to give advice it would be to open all the doors and windows of your mind and let the war begin. Things might settle down, they might not, but everything you’re presented with is a part of you and deserves recognition. Only a few of these deserve to be acted upon, and those few will decide the course of your life. Good and bad, loving and cruel, courage, cowardice, terror…I don’t see that these qualities are any reason for praise or criticism. Thoughts, feelings, and inclinations decide nothing. Choices decide everything.

I recently received an email from someone I quit saying, “all I’ve ever wanted is for you to not be so sure of yourself that it causes pain.”
First of all this is a lie. There are plenty of things you’ve wanted much more than my downfall. If I were going to respond I would ask this person why it causes them pain to know that they can’t have power over me?

Why would you want such a thing? Isn’t your own life enough? I guess not if you’re too afraid to fuck up your own life to do anything with it, you can play games and test theories with other people’s lives as they are expendable.

Contempt.

I feel no ill-will, I wish no restitution, there is no anger to let go of or forgiveness to give and free myself…only a residue of contempt with which I don’t know what to do with other than continue to refuse this person access to me.

I full-heartedly support being very, very particular about who you let into your life. Love the people that deserve a place in your life, love them extravagantly, knowing that they are rare, rare, rare. No one has a right to you unearned.

As the wonderful Bradley so perfectly put it, “I will honor myself without question. It is my fucking life.”

The concept of priorities is very underrated. If you know from the inside of your bones what is the most precious to the core of your existence, you can make the right choice when your emotions threaten to pull you off course.

For example, emotions say, “I don’t feel like going to train today and bruise the hell out of my hips and endure the agony of oversplits. I feel fat and tired. I want chocolate and Johnny Depp and to never have to work.”

Response from a prioritized mind, “Well no shit! That sounds really painful. But you’ve already decided that you want to fly through the air with the greatest of ease more than you want bruise-free hip bones and stuffy hamstrings. You can have chocolate and Johnny Depp after you train. And if you really hated working you wouldn't have chosen this in the first place.”

Emotions, “…”

Mind, “Good dog.”

When you have made choices and are going in the direction you want to be going, you can feel free to enjoy the torment and ecstasy of your emotions, ride them out or watch them pass; without letting them run your life. Emotions are the fun part. Act on the ones that deserve it, and that you can live with.

As far as knowing what you want in the first place and forming these priorities, I heartily recommend being ruthless. If all the worldly shit were taken care of: social standing, financial obligations, etc., what would you do? I’m not suggesting that you attempt to ignore the worldly shit when you take action, absolutely not, but they can cloud your judgment when you are deciding what to invest yourself in.
And once you decide, brutally investigate this decision every now and then to be sure you’re not coasting on momentum.

After a while you start to feel like this guy:

Festivus!

To my great surprise, the holidays are delighting me this year. Lady A and I purchased a tree corpse that looks just lovely in front of our (stellar) view. And even though it sounds in theory like a bad idea, the tree corpse's proximity to the forced air heater only heats up the branches enough so that our whole apartment smells of beautiful tree corpse.

I am altering the path of 2+ years of push ups without stretching my pecs so that eventually I can open my arms again, like the ballerina photograph that the lovely and lovable Maria LaMance gifted to me on the NYC leg of the VdV tour.
I'm also working on a small collection of hangs that, once perfected, will miraculously cease to give me headaches in the middle of the night or cause any further agony. We are not yet at this point, but it is very exciting.

The prospect of a 10 second neck hang gives me so much excitement and satisfaction there must be something lacking in my genetic makeup. Or maybe it's something wrong with everyone else who does not dream about hanging from the neck.

Saw a hummingbird. Mind you, it's December in the Pacific Northwest. Must be Ashley saying hello...come by any time.

I return home to find it much as I left it, only infinitely more beautiful for having missed it. It's unheard of that such a cold place can have seduced me so completely; it seems I can still surprise myself.

A perfectly rainy, Saturnine day ...perfect for all my swarthy intentions.

I've decided to present here a nugget of wisdom gleaned from my own life experience each time I have nothing real to say but insist on posting anyway. And since I have nothing of value to add here:

Probably the worst thing you can say to a crying woman is, "stop crying."

San Francisco, remix

And the sky broke open and I saw more than I knew was there before, or rather, I saw what I knew was hidden from me. By whose design, you can be sure it was my own. It usually is.

Our afternoon flight was canceled so we stood in long-winded lines while the sky turned bloody through the distant windows. It wasn’t one of those fussy sunsets either, it was the kind that lights up the whole arcing firmament with the conviction of its own death, a sky that comes along once every few years and demands your attention. The last one I saw was running in Alexandria, Louisiana, running under the trees and getting lost in labyrinthine neighborhoods; anything so long as my eyes could continue to consume the singular chorus of fire that was fading so soon.

It was one of the least miserable waits in line of my life. The guy was friendly and looked a little like Morgan Freeman, which turned me to liking him immediately. Mr. Jones was his name. So I left and went to wait in more lines and then some more, until finally I had a boarding pass and a plan and an appetite for a cheesy cream sauce with gamey red meat; a sausage of beef or rabbit, and fresh Italian noodles. I settled on a restaurant called “Alaska” because it had sit-down tables and antlers hanging from the ceiling, even though the music was too loud. The beef stew was the closest I could get to my fantasy meal, and arrived to me in a black Styrofoam bowl. I believe the recipe called for the same kind of meat they use in manufacturing cat food. The chunks of meat, which appeared to be pored and generally did look like overstewed bits of beef, actually squished like play dough in my mouth. Very unexcited about the meal, I ate it out of boredom that it didn’t even take the edge off. I then wandered in search of the deliciousness of an almond croissant. I was absolutely set on giving myself a treat. The dried up brick of “cheesecake brownie” that I settled on was very disappointing and I was just as bored with it, even though I had the added fun of obsessing over whether or not the crumbs were going to fall into my keyboard.

However I did get to spend some time reading a book that Kristina lent me probably the better part of a year ago. A sort of autobiography of Jung, beginning from his earliest childhood memories. I find mine were more beautiful and more profound, yet I still feel a kinship and my interest is piqued. It has been so long since I read, which is shocking considering the creature I was twenty years ago hated any moment not spent reading.

Lowering slowly into Oakland, I begin remembering my time here with a wrench in my gut. Mostly I remember the solitude and the ambition of the girl who moved here and threw everything onto this singular focus; to at once be worthy and have the best worthiness of the stage and the air over it. I took the BART to Oakland every Tuesday for a three hour rehearsal and still went to train afterwards. The silence and the stillness between BART trains and Muni buses and knowing that no power in the universe would ever make it faster, and time is just something that goes quickly and is sacrificed often when one lives in the city and has no money.

I found ways of spoiling myself. Shaun, mostly, in sporadic intervals arrived into my life in a fanfare of magic and color and pleasure and comfort. Not that he didn’t bring his own challenges…naturally, and according to my own design, he complicated my life in as many ways as he simplified it but he has always been a feast in every way.
And Kristina like a beacon of sanity and all the soul of those shrieking sunsets, settling into my life like a sister of the old blood who had always known, and to a greater extent, the reason I could not turn away from it.

Now I’m on BART, once again, and traveling at the speed of something towards my uncle Bradley and the glowing polish of his wood-paneled apartment. The haven and the sanctuary of him, so sleepy probably and ready for me to get in, have a cigarette, and go to sleep.

I am a lucky star.