For the last week or so, my head has felt like a fried egg — overeasy and soft, a runny center, threatening to spill out everywhere. The pain radiates out from where my temporomandibular joints connect my jawbone to my skull. My teeth ache, too, and the soreness illuminates my head in a hellish halo, an aura of agony. The discomfort is so intense that at night, unable to get comfortable enough to sleep, I fantasize about knocking my jaw back into alignment with a mallet, Misery-style. My issues with TMJ aren’t new, but they worsened significantly after the most recent flagrant display of white power in D.C., which scared me so much I involuntarily left my body for a few days, until the pain drew me back.
My past “is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort,” according to The Body Keeps The Score, which also notes that the body has to feel safe enough to release the pain. I’m not sure what that much safety looks or feels like in this country. But despite this state of dis-ease, I am still reaching for pleasure. It may be some of the hardest reaching I’ve ever done. Pleasure has become one of my most precious pursuits during this phase of the anthropocene. I’m forever studying at the feet of my loves Tourmaline and adrienne maree brown, who both anchor their work around the radical notion that there’s always space for honey and sweetness. Around building what we want, while we fight to change what we don’t want. That our movements and revolutions can be born from joy and deliciousness, too. adrienne writes that pleasure is “a measure of aliveness, the life force that has been whittled away, stolen away, by oppression and colonization and capitalism.” Tourmaline’s incredible solo show, the Pleasure Garden (which can be viewed online), builds an imagination from that very locus, building portals to what it looks like to dream for ourselves. Like An Duplan in Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture, “I have found that one of the best oppotunities for liberation is in esthetic experience.”
Here’s a short list of some recent pleasures:
Rosemary. I’ve been using it in everything: Rinsed, organic springs in the terrible focaccia I made, in glasses of drinking water, as an essential oil in the Muju diffuser first thing in the morning while I meditate and ease my way into another day.
This mix by South London collective Black Obsidian Soundsystem helps me work a little bit of dancing back into my daily routine. Movement is medicine, which is another way to remember to love my body. Dweller asked one of the members, Pepper Coast, about the radical power of sound to shift states of being, and they replied, “if we can take those feelings we generate when we’re in that state of surrender and let them overflow then change is inevitable.”
Miso-caramel popcorn. We made it and started the new season of Drag Race which offered the reminder that chaos can be fun. I’m rooting for Tamisha Iman, Symone, Olivia Lux and Kandy Muse. And maybe Joey Jay, a little.
Sending letters. Sometimes they’re long, sometimes they’re just a card with a line or two of poetry. Sweet Shan makes these lovely postcards that I love sending because they themselves are works of art.
Mary H.K. Choi’s next book, Yolk, which is about recovery and sisterhood and friendship and the trustfall of allowing others see and love your true self, while still maintaining the zingy dialogue and riveting character development that’s become her signature style of fiction. I also just finished reading Torrey Peter’s Detransition, Baby, and Reese, whose acerbic inner monologues and naked longing for motherhood kept me intrigued until the last page. I look forward to reading (more) of the discourse around it.
These bitters by a Black-owned company in Oakland. I add them to seltzer with a slice of citrus and it’s my favorite daily drink. So far, I’ve only tried the traditional aromatic blend, but I’m eyeing their eucalyptus one…..
The spit scene in Promising Young Woman. How come none of the reviews mentioned that?! It may have been the only thing I truly enjoyed in that film, and it was worth it. And speaking of mischievously swapping bodily fluids: Youn Yuh-jung as the grandmother in Minari was entirely in her bag as a quirky grandmother, and a total delight to watch.
What I’m Looking Forward To:
Laaraji, live, free (Feb 4)
Catching up on all the lectures for Fractal Fête, in the tradition of the Black Radical Imagination, a month-long immersive seminar (for Black/Pan-African participants only)
“We Do this Till We Free Us” by Mariame Kaba
Upcoming Ross Gay readings (another teacher of pleasure and delight!)
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