Polyphasic Everything

I don’t know if it’s because I’m finally back on track with my birth control and thus my hormones are down, boy, or the fact that I’m just so goddamned in love with humanity after election madness, or because my blood is ceasing to boil just a bit of late, but I have the gooshy wooshies. I am falling in love. With a lot, all over again. But maybe not in the way that you (or even me) think. And let it be known that this only started because I wanted to write a bit about roller derby. I had dinner with my lovely derby wife Poppy, whom I dedicate this mess to, (read her blog, it will change your life) and as the case with us always and forever (and hence why we are wives), she totally lit my fire, reminded me who I am. My fire has been sparked a lot lately by you excellent human beings I call my loved ones, and I am eternally grateful. It’s Gratitude Project month after all, they say, and also the time to grow moustaches and write a novel. I’mma do it all in one fell swoop.

Here’s the thing. Everything is transient but it’s a perpetual transience. You go at it as hard as you can, you come down. It’s orgasmic. It’s tension and release. Fight and stillness.

I mean, back to roller derby. It taught me how to be a woman. A real woman, in the ancient Greek Olympian sense, strong in body and in mind, attempting to mimic the gods in a sort of display of reverence and a little hubris. It is communal. What you have to understand is that only in giving love and light can you receive it. When that feeling strikes you must mark it and remember it and then give it away, because that shit is the red hair dye of life. It’s the hardest to maintain and the hardest to get rid of. It strips things away and binds into you. The tide will recede and you will need to know in your guts why it’s all happening and why you want to it to go on, what you will work to return to, the Eternal Yes.

My own personal Jesus, aside from Sisyphus, and absurdism and the idea that all of existence is quantum, is the truth of there being a deep-seated need within me to live my life in such a way that I would choose to live it that same way over and over for all eternity if I had to choose (which I don’t, by the way, that is the beauty of mortal free will). If you wouldn’t, you need to sit down with, shit I don’t know, perhaps a hash brownie or insanity pepper and ask yourself what the fuck you are doing in your life. I don’t mean “arriving” at any sort of point, or bullshit bucket list of accomplishments, because I am a girl obsessed with possibility and projects and the struggle, experience for experience’s sake...but would you perform the same behaviors steeped in the same values...FOREVER? YES?

You throw yourself into it the way you throw yourself into sex, no hangups, we are all animals living our animal lives. You give yourself your work, your purpose, based on your innate nature, or you become the Australian shepherd herding children because you don’t have an existential job to do. And you know what? Some of us are here to be dicks. But they aren’t bothering with us right now, are they; they are off living their dick lives and so then, let the ships pass in the night. The will to power is not for those who seek power over others but over their own manifest destiny. Life is about giving the middle finger to the universe’s apathy. We give each other empathy and enjoy the glory and horror together.

But you know, a lot of you know, all too well, that I pull in and cover the light sometimes, because I have to. Because it’s the only way I can keep it lit. It’s shitty, it’s selfish; it is the greatest affirmation of life, which as a stone-cold atheist, is what I have to work with. Work with what you have. Spread the love, but batten down the hatches when the storm threatens to snuff it out. Polyphasic everything, because life must hold the duality of being an Olympian and an animal in the same human being.

So, I say YES to the uncertainty, YES to the knowledge that I am terrible grad student, YES to the loss of my ass because I can’t skate right now, YES to the financial mess of my bank account, YES to the lack of sleep and the oversleeping, YES to my friends and my family and my love and my hate and my loneliness and my imperfect skin, YES to turning myself back into an athlete, YES to my struggle to have a normal relationship with my Mom, YES to pulling back and out, YES to fancy pants dance parties with the most amazing women ever (!), YES to not being able to drink shitloads of milk anymore, YES to my classmates and my coworkers and all the new people in my circle of light, YES to my old loves who always have and always will be there, YES to ugliness of all kinds, YES to the humor and comedy and laughing, YES to the infinite beauty and chaos, YES to going on to do amazing things, YES to arrested development on and on, ever and ever for all eternity...

Has my moustache grown yet?