dear reader!
long time no see! can’t believe it’s been months!
i've missed you!
hope for my IRL fans, we can have some version of this conversation IRL sometime!
!!!!
but also, what a time to be with myself, be with fewer people than I once was, be on more calls than before, to be raging and grieving and figuring and dipping and feeling and v online and v offline and
ok I’m done, I have no more sentimentality
(yeah right, benedict, nice try)
[photo by me: selfie of me on a bent left leg with my hands in front of my chest/face, in a park at nighttime]
i’ve been thinking about how saying most things in public feels trite or perfunctory online and how
most things worth saying transmit thru the private channels
so I’ve been writing (like besides texting) to/for/with myself and the private pals mostly, without a very strong desire to engage in these public slushees, this additional medium of digital performance (but wait, aren’t I? don’t)
when I first started this little slushee babe experiment in 2018 (!!!), it was a way to escape the confines of the media publishing industrial complex, one that has taught me a lot but also circumscribed what/how I could write “publicly” for often very little (and sometimes 0 ugh gross) pay
here, I could self-indulgently write about 10 different things, bury the lede at the very fucking end (just wait, if this slushee has a lede, it’s next), wander away from a clear stance, return to the same tired point (burnout is terrible!!!) from a new angle, etc.
thanks for being present for these experiments, for writing to me when they said something to you, for telling me in person that i’m basic and/or ridiculous
like many things from the ~before times~, trying to recreate elements of this ethic feel contrived, redundant, naïve, etc. “lately”
(reassuring compliments are still welcome in the replies!)
[photo by me: selfie of me about to step on my right leg from my left, my arms splayed around me, looking to the right, in a park at night time]
so here’s a smol story
I had one of these caricaturish days lol - absurd pre-COVID, absurd mid-COVID, online or offline, yet totally familiar and still horrible to my body
some of the calls were absolutely delightful but the rhythm of this day…. c’mon now, “we” don’t do this anymore. except… as ~the autumn~ approaches, I can’t help but feel/worry/observe how the #freelanceflailing life will just be worse now, more foggy to navigate, more cutthroat competitive, except everyone’s fighting for ppl’z burnt out digital attention more than IRL togetherness
forgive the doomspeaking!
so structures of (self/community) care etc. and somehow, i’ve been finding a way to enjoy the zoom call with a pal or a nice human. never thought i’d loop into this dimension of the zoom circle considering how much i’ve hated zoom since my job got me on it in 2017 (yes ofc, i’ve always been ahead of the trend) but “resiliency” and things “evolving” and all that idk
within the rhythm, i’ve been dancing everyday in my small way, in my big room, in the big park since summer came and brought me outside again. this is divine
a couple wks ago, a pal invited me to send her what i’ve been doing and I was like, “oh yeah, I can record myself?!”
so I started trying to ‘document’ my little park jaunts and ditties and became immediately aware of losing the ease, the flow, the groove of just feeling myself in my own little body of mine.
this venture towards capturing my smol ephemera was often uncomfortable but not uninformative. before sending this pal the choicest most flattering and representative snippet of ~how i’m moving now~, I looked through half a dozen vids taken over a week. I seriously considered the ones where I got lost and wandered ~out of the frame~ for half the time before sending some 90 concise seconds that look like something legible
LOL
which is to say, shout out to the unintelligible, the formless, shapeless, the fleeting moments
not that my pal wouldn’t have received them just as openly, but my praxis is still in development,
shout out to these small photos embedded here. they were snapped this very evening from my petite excursion between calls number 7 and 8 (I know, I know, I didn’t have to count them but) where I left my apartment for the first time in 27 hours and found quiet time for myself and couldn’t resist documenting how my body looked moving under the nighttime street lamps because the pandemic has not cured my self-absorption or if I were being kinder to myself, ~these unprecedented times~ have made think about how to be my own witness to time rushing too fast, to my trying to grip onto something, anything when it’s all just slippery
maybe c u next month, maybe next _____,
benedict ⚡️
xtra slush mush
^^cc; aug 25 2020
this originally autocorrected to daddies. I—
last month, a neighbor introduced me to another neighbor, who said he had seen me dancing in our shared park when things were really dark for him in March and April (if he only knew) and it brought him joy. I—
happy first quarter moon in sagittarius and just saying shit idk
like some recent reading reccs: The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi, In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado.
send me urs!
& top quarantine performance I can’t wait for, week of 8-24-20, nobody @ me
after my last slushee on April 30 (!!), a reader sent the following video, which has idled in this draft since. but why is this still TRUE! someone set me up on a zoom date with an ARIES SUN or ARIES MERCURY so I can practice hanging up ABRUPTLY