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hey you,
a few things here. an essay-ish. a prose poem kinda. a collage set maybe. (fyi: wieners.)
happy new year.
-kj
sweeping all the corners
I tend to suspect New Year’s—all of it, the calendars and planners, the detoxes and cleanses, the reflections and reminiscences and resolutions, every last bit—is a giant torture routine we do to ourselves. At the very least, it’s the worst kind of S/M relationship. We have no clue who is sub and who is dom, least of all who is top and who is bottom, and yet we’ve wasted obscene amounts of money on fantasy gadgets that don’t do much and will be letdowns by their second use. When the lights come on, we’ve been whipping ourselves in an empty room.
My god, of all years we could shed ourselves of the concept of time.
New Year’s always felt like an utter scam as a child. Every year, my mother would spend the evening frantically cleaning the house. There was no whom in the cleaning: no party, no houseguests, maybe a handful total in fifteen years. It was just what had to be done. Every corner had to be swept and mopped. The dirty mop water had to be tossed by midnight. The counters would be wiped, the various piles of things assorted into different assorted piles of things.
One year we did turn on the computer to make sure it wouldn’t melt.
And so each year would begin the same, a plate of rice and peas and pork and greens, cooked until the whole house had an earthen bottom funk. The Rose Bowl Parade would begin at eleven Eastern, as whatever vestigial chill could be found on the southern Floridian coast burnt off in the midday sun. Behold a marching band from East Something. Only the statice can produce a “true blue.” Can’t have more cornbread until you clear those peas. These upstarts sold their kidneys to make it to Pasadena. Eventually, the entire day would fade into a pale hum, the disoriented wandering of an afternoon without soap operas or talk shows, a Wednesday without schoolwork. The urgency of the new year—the childhood goals of becoming an off-year olympic medalist, the adolescent need to eliminate all puppy fat by the first of March, my middle-aged delusions of daily pages—met the sheer uselessness of the holiday. It was in many ways the mirror to Christmas, a full week of timelessness, days that weren’t quite days, a building midwinter dread that the closing door would catch my foot.
We conned our grandfather for that computer but, to be fair, he had it coming.
I spent years as a historian, which I think broke my ability to make any meaning of time. I can do basic things: I can tell you “now” is usually between “back then” and “later.” I can tell you x-to-y arguments are facile because they ignore a through w, and that the power dynamics which determine what facts are indeed facts, and what facts stay around, and what facts are assembled into sources and documents, and then archived and later preserved, usually leave us with b f j and q at best. I can arrive at an airport two hours before departure. I know how long I want to fuck you, the color I like my toast.
In many regards, I don’t think this year is any more or less of a letdown than many others.
But I suspect I do owe something to you—or rather, we do owe something to each other. (I’m more for mutual play.) I print out these missalettes and maybe you come to my intermittent church. I sweep all my corners and ask you to raise your feet—maybe I’ll kiss them and maybe I’ll clean the bottom funk. Maybe I’ll make you something nice and temporary, your own rose float. Maybe I can hold you and we’ll take the chill off each other, just chimps who traded in vestigial tails for hand computers. Maybe I’ll give you some more pages here and there and we can make it to Pasadena. There’s nothing delusional in that. Happy New Year.
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Is this how they’ll find us? Curled into each other, legs on legs, fur on fur, parentheses arms, watching Shadows and Light, neither of us quite yet big spoon nor little spoon? Joni swings into “In France They Kiss On Main Street” and I turn to my left, stare at the fine lines at the corner of your eyes, the slight wrinkle in front of your ear, purple turning blue.
(“You okay?” “Oh, sure.”)
We talk about Joni’s suit jacket, the afternoon crowd full of faggots looking for good tunes and good times. Whatever happened to them? How many of them still have names? How many of them still have that afternoon, shirtless in the September Santa Barbara sun? How many of them found a tug and suck during the show, in the shadows of a stall, golden hour light peeking through the hinges, purple heads and blue sky?
(“Forever?” “Gosh, that’s a long time.”)
The concert footage isn’t the album track list and we see The Persuasions come on stage and then come back on once again. I tell you about an article I read, about a fast food shack they found in Pompeii. They had already found a few dozen of them, but this one I guess had really great paintings of sea nymphs on the counters, ink blue scales on murky purple seas, vats for snails and lentils and lamb and wine. They had just found another couple in the remains, or at least what they’d call another couple if they knew what to make of two faggots in the ashes.
(“Big spoon.” “Little spoon.”)
Is this how they’ll find us? Is this how they’ll find us? What are they going to miss when they sort through the highway rubble and find our bones, layered on top of each other, ancient ivory cutlery. Every archive is a set of nos and nos and nos, but some of those nos are beyond the historian’s call.
(“Yeah?” “Yeah.”)
What the historians won’t quite get: the noises we make as we nuzzle and bite each other’s necks; the swirl of the third beer in our bellies and brains; the swirl of Joni and beer as the concert boys get brain during the intermission, bobbing on bellies; the last song those faggots in Pompeii heard, maybe on the street while ordering food; how we stared at each other as Joni swoons into the third dowwwwwwntowwwwn” birdwing smooth, her pants the shade between your eyes and mine; the shade of the sky before the volcano; whether they noticed each other’s fine lines in the stall light, in the dawn before the pumice wave; how i can’t tell which bones are yours and which are mine as we drift off to sleep, oh sure, oh sure, oh sure.
Thanks for reading, whether this is your first issue or you’ve been in it for the long haul. This year has been a lot. This dumb little zine has helped. May you have a good luck fox, too. Thanks for reading. I’m sure I’ll have another one soon enough. -KJ
What an absolute treat