WE ARE ALL DOGS IN GOD'S HOT CAR
hot-covid-trans-logoff-abortion.docx
Texas summer heat is a thick coating of molasses. It is slow, textured, fragrant, humbling, wet. The mind is delayed, the body reactive. It is an endurance test with which there is no reward other than the intrinsic value you may derive from surviving yet another ruthless summer season on an increasingly hotter planet.
I have a colleague, Steve, who is a professor and fellow cyclist. He relayed to me the following anecdote from his time in Louisiana. A friend of his, yet another cyclist and professor, would ride his bike in full professional garb beneath the punishing southern sun. When this guy would get to the office, Steve would ask him, “Now, how do you manage to bike in that outfit in this heat?” and in a deep southern drawl, the man calmly said to him, “Well, Steve… I sweat.”
Indeed, that is all you can do.
Humid heat is not so different from the arid New Mexican summers I grew up with. Both inspire laziness, indulgence. New Mexico is the “Land of Mañana.” It is leathered skin out in a plastic lawn chair smoking cigarettes, laying waste to the world and loving every minute of it. The smell of weed exuding from a dirty bong. Cracking open a piss beer before noon. Firing up a first-person shooter and filling your couch with farts. Same goes for Texan summers, except the sweat creeps into every fold, crease, and orifice of your flesh as you rot. Decadence takes many forms in a crumbling empire.
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Last week, my doctor referred me to the Long Covid clinic run by the University. I eagerly await their call.
Since getting sick (and subsequently getting a concussion), my capacity and cognition is compromised to a degree that has forced a lifestyle shift. I am grateful that my sobriety and curiosity in Polyvagal Theory encourages an intentional practice in tracking my body and becoming attuned to its needs and limitations. Cultivating this prior to getting sick has made my new reality a little easier to accept.
The exhausted are the saints of the wasted life, if a saint is a person who is better than others at suffering. What the exhausted suffer better is the way bodies and time are so often at odds with each other in our time of overwhelming and confused chronicity, when each hour is amplified past circadianism, quadrupled in the quarter-hour's agenda, Pomodoro-ed, hacked, FOMO-ed, and productivized. The exhausted are the human evidence of each minute misunderstood to be an empire for finance, of each human body misunderstood to be an instrument that should play a thousand compliant songs at once.
― Anne Boyer, The Undying
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In news that’s unsurprising to those of my transsexual ilk: I have joined the fabled ranks of trans mascs with a befuddling attachment to their lesbian identity despite becoming increasingly more attracted to people that are not women. The magic of testosterone works in mysterious ways, and I feel within arm’s reach of the queer EGOT, fellas. Rather than writhing in existential pain over my identity and becoming enmeshed with the disc horse around the topic as I’ve done with past shifts, I have chosen the path of transcendence, which is to say, I do not care at all about what this means, for I am just a hole, sir.
I am reminded of Max’s essay WE DO NOT BELONG EVERYWHERE for the Rumpus (which I had the honor of illustrating).
And I wanted women. Some women wanted a butch, some wanted a man, some “just wanted me,” whatever that meant. I grew greedy for the full scope of their desire, to know it from the perspective of every possible object, to change my look or body in whatever way necessary to become the pleasing, asked-for thing. It started with clothing—dresses, suits, corsets, lingerie, leather—but then I grew to regard my body this way. Facial hair or breasts, muscles or rolls of fat on my hips; none of it bothered me, none of it meant anything. They were just tools of my wanting, a way into people. It was wanting that got me out of bed in the morning, got me talking and fucking. In fact, without the animation of lust, I barely noticed my body at all.
I started taking hormones. I meant it as an addition. Testosterone made me feel fecund, lush with growth—not changing gender, increasing gender. Biceps ripened, hair sprouted overnight. A new paint job at most. It didn’t feel like loss.
In the end, Max states their identity is “a newer, more difficult story that I rarely want to tell.” I feel this deep in my bones. In early adulthood, I used to frantically explain myself to audiences indiscriminately, sparing no detail, no matter how longwinded the context or uncharitable the listener. I am now loathe to disclose much of my inner workings to anyone. To share my philosophies of the transgender self or what I perceive to be the origins of who I am today yields little reward for me. Most seemingly well intentioned (cis) people do not know how to handle the conversation without the pressures of political correctness or bias tainting their ability to authentically interact with me, a Person of Dynamic Experience. So, in mixed company I stay tight lipped. I largely feel that only other trans people have the range to discuss my story with the absurdity, curiosity, and commiseration it deserves. Even then, it still depends.
I have learned to revel in the great paradoxes and open-ended questions that comprise transgender identity. I gleefully encourage the so-called social contagion of transgenderism. Life is significantly better this way, and I will not stop evangelizing about it.
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Share and bookmark helpful resources then log off. Process with people you trust offline. Plug into seasoned abortion providers and funds in your area. Increase your tolerance for illicit activity. Be informed, vigilant, skeptical, strategic. Reduce participation in the engagement farms on social media. No matter how resonant or infuriating a take you see is, these tweets and posts do nothing. Again, I succumb to these impulses too. Things will get worse. We must pivot.
Until next time,
Cowboy Rocky