The Golden Apple Thinking without bannister — researcher — a woman's circuity

What is there to do with the impulse when watching a Kyle Mooney video, to ask,“Would he ever interview a Black woman?” Is it wrong that I resent fat white women for the place they hold in comedy? Not only do they get to be funny, but they get to lay claim to an irate sexuality that’s briefly gesticulated towards. This rash appeal is denied in total with the Black female comedian. It used to be funny to make fun of us for just being us, now that that’s considered racist nothing about us is supposed to be funny at all. What are we supposed to be? If we’re not Aunt Jemimas, or fighting whores, or disciplinarians, or multicultural Rastafarian Muslims, or nurses with baby daddies, or doctors and lawyers, or government workers with side-hustle bakeries, or budtenders? I know some Black female comedians that are drop-dead gorgeous that I know the American Comedy Industry would not welcome because of their beauty and whistling-sexy bodies. Does a Black woman have to be making fun of herself to be funny? When I think of the Black women that Saturday Night Live has featured, they were either masculine in their gender/sexuality or performing a kind of Black female millennial comedy that seems outmoded. Where are our crazy comedians? The natural impulse here is to say ‘our Sarah Shermans’ but the Black woman does not seem to produce humor of this kind. That’s fine, that humor doesn’t interest me. Where are our niche humorists? With them, I am not familiar. I’m no longer interested in seeing Auntie humor or Don’t-Touch-My-Hair humor coupled with self-deprecating punchlines. I don’t want us to make a splash. Are we capable of our own distinct humor? We don’t like when other people laugh at us, we don’t like other people commodifying our memories, we don’t like for our linages to come under inspection. All of which are necessary for comedy. I fantasize delivering quips and bits to an audience. I don’t want to make fun of myself. Do I just want to be a politician? A great orator? Why is it shameful to make people laugh when you are Black? I tell my Mom that a friend of a friend told him that I’m ‘beautiful, smart and funny’ and she took deep offense to the ‘funny’. The Negro is no longer supposed to be humorous and instead should be a bleak business professional. Have not my people a long history in entertainment? What does that promise in our current century? Economic servitude to a small class of the uber-wealthy for a brief shot at maintaining low-end wealthiness? Does it ever end? I want to make a joke about it. I want to shine. I want to walk on stage with my sweat smelling sweet as a comforter, from my chlorophyll, and make people grin from ear to ear. It would not be honest for me to say that I don’t care if these people think that I’m pretty. I want them to think that I’m everything. I want to entertain them. I do not want to sell my body, sell my sex, shame my womb, devitalize my spirit, disrespect my ancestors, bring hellfire in the process. A little warm room and I’m making the crowd tremble with my he-he’s. Down the street, Netta is performing and she’s pretty n not making jokes about herself being stupid. The crowd goes wild.

We were holding hands by the fire, listening to Erykah Badu. It was one of those times when I recognized that Miss Badu was teasing of her body by different plays in the lyrics. This is in the album that I like the most, Mama’s Gun. She talks about her titties hanging low and her nebula hair being short and shoulder-length and shit, I understand all kinds of things like that. Do you? With your Eyes low. I’m eyeing you. Of course you would never understand, not even through me, which is how I’m able to exchange love with you so innocent. Oh, I love how your jaw connects to the pinions in the back of your throat that make your voice work. You are distinctly not a little bird at all. You could be a monster if you wanted to be. The thrill runs up the back of my neck and I have to suppress a giggle. It’s not funny, but it’s hot to be scared. Women say, “It’s not funny…” and crowd-work scan the room because they know by their heinous little giggles. Yes, yes it is so silly girls. I always loved the phrase: peals of laughter. Yes.

Oh, yes. This is something here, chaste and bumbling.

The bed of the truck rumbles to life and the trees that float by are full of life…they’re lifeless to us in our submarine, though, because we’re inside of a vehicle. A machine! Our feelings toward each other could be mirthless and hostile but still the mechanisms of the vehicle would hold us separate from all of the highway’s Others. The road is hopelessly expanding like a ventricle, creating berths and verisimilitude and little isolations. Here’s our car and here’s the rest of the world. Making love is like, here’s us and your penis and then there are other people who do this as well. We’re all of them when we do it together. I’m reading Sartre so I wonder if that’s God, when we know we’re all one and separate the In-Itself and the For-Itself. Can you believe it? Are you For-Me or is this passing slicing fruit and mouthes? Our eyes briefly meet as I watch you drive and you roll you eyes, beautiful pony who loves attention. Your jaw is loose because you’re singing, and you’re happy. The exorbitant price of this emotion! But you’ll pay. You get the kind of aggrieved that is born out of delicate insecurity but the salt of you sweats it away. You get the kind of rosacea I think is sexy on your face and you always have bits of it when you’re happy and the sheer cost of that emotion. You give it away as though you have nothing left. I like it though, whatever. For how long. I watch your eyebrows blanch different shades of colors. In lecture, I’m briefly stunned because a woman’s hair is so, so beautiful — soft chestnut tumbling into creamy blond, and all curly and spilling forward from the back of her head like a fountain. Aspirants know that a woman’s neck is a column and the nape is the temple. My hand touches the cool metal of the building’s austere handles and the ghosts of the institution appear. They cry together, beautifully, “Become a member of the bourgeoisie! Embrace academic privilege! Let your beliefs in a radiant new universe melt into published books, settled salaries!” Here then, appear the sciences; here is poetry, here is Spanish literature, here is mob relief, here is black pepper, here is your beating heart. Here is logic and here is delusion; here has become puerile and so we must start writing our radiant future. Together.

Didn’t it make you laugh, when digging into a falafel bowl, there was a whole wedge of lime, but seasoned with sazon of all things — or it could’ve been Tajin, but it was crunchy and OD deep-fried like it was intended to be a vegan sausage or something — I think bad writing is often greed because it relies on the writer’s life being a lilting cartwheel to work. What I mean to say is don’t get caught up on making everything try to look like a lush little department store catalog, and we’re all hunching over teeny granola packs with our thumbs up our asses. Bumper sticker headass you think your life is supposed to be a movie. I’m more like the evening you and your tribe decide to rest for a blip in the refuge of a marble cave and a wolf comes in with a strip of his flank missing but he walks in like a dancer and laughs like he’s not crying. He knows that the wound will heal. I’m like the wolf. I’m like the dense fear in the cave. I think Thoreau was a little greedy because he was surrounded by a lot of natural glory that has been generationally eroded by industrialists so I’ll never get to see it the way he saw it — I think he was a little greedy because he had all that beauty and of course phrases were coming to him so orgasmically that he was a wooden medium, vessel, oscillating and oscillating. He had people coming over, too, all night long. Not every night. I’m becoming politically quite atheistic but subliminal things in that way make me connect the dots. I was thinking about X so I saw X and now I believe in X. Conspiracy is poetry and the schizo void is Saturnian in it’s discipline. Everything has to be fascinating in the narrative of the life of the author, one must be a great writer. One must be a great writer, suffering is the bracing wilderness. The wilderness is fascinating, one must be every thing. One must be in the narrative, fascinating.

The pulse of sugar or starch, varying, rises in response to stimuli from my cerebral cortex — my learned cravings and desires. In the midst of great energy and reverie, especially of an intellectual pursuit — down the barrel of the gun the eye travels, hoping to find its own reflection.

Pasadena is so similar to the necked roads of Beltway counties because the city is peppered with small businesses; different because they are of white people’s habits and ticks. Bar after small bar adjacent to gas stations and the straight lines of suburban regimentation. In Silver Spring, Ethiopian restaurants and 7-11’s, eyeglass huts and street Black Israelites bemoaning women wearing jogging pants. I don’t see anyone walking around in Pasadena. I’m driving through Severna Park on a dusky Wednesday night to pick up my Community Supported Agriculture box from a weed-growers shop. They don’t sell any real bud on the premisis. Trucks grow exasperated at newcomers finding their way along Baltimore-Annapolis Road, and they hum with violence past smaller cars to prove their larger existence. I grew up understanding something about flying a display-size flag from a wooden pole on the back of a pick-up truck! I’m from the Shore. I grew up understanding the slipping feeling of drink in majestic inner cavities, floating from the house party down to the McDonalds. And I’m still chasing everything.

Maybe that’s why I still eat Starch and don’t swallow it, holding the ball of it in my mouth while the flavor slowly rolls in. Pressing it between my tongue and upper palette until the roof of my mouth takes like chalk if it’s Target cornstarch, sweet and loose dust if it’s Argo, the bulk of the grain of a potato if it’s potato. Maryland as an assemblage of concrete sensations creating a fantasy that can only be briefly experienced, then fraudulently aestheticized into a conversational non-existence no one else recognizes. How can I make you know this place the way I know it? Only I have this distinct pain. When I talk to other women who are from where I’m from, they’re inevitably white and I always feel Outside. They know Inside. But we both grew up in the same place, doing the same things. Kyle would always come to parties with his Obama mask in the trunk, a flesh-resembling plastic hood with a lifelike resemblance to the past president. I guess the point of the mask was to poke fun but it always seemed a kind of reverence to me, but fraught. Kristin’s brother surprised to find me rehearsing our dance project in her basement the first time I visited her house. The silence of the beach while my friends frenched on it. Only I know how 50 curves into the Beltway and only I know how it feels to cherish the Beltway because I’m from a remote island bereft of the kind of foreign Negress archetype I originate from. I digress. To physically sense the beauty of the female writer on the page is the sensation from which many of us are writing from, I do not know if I’m bold enough to claim that place as my center. If you wait long enough — can you wait long enough — to create these neural pathways, please. The limbic system controls the body’s physical responses to emotions and the cerebral cortex creates meaning; activates the limbic system regarding the positivity or negativity of an apparent stimulus. The Stoics believed that there was no universal reality, all each of us have are our distinct reactions to the gaseous phenomena arising around us like oxygenated free radicals. The esoterica of my teenage years was the horniness of a male poet’s tumblr post, and I still believe in lust that one has to dig and crawl into to make.

The sexy redhead letting me into the dispensary late at night after I retrieve my final belongings (the old router, my good bike with the satchel) from my last apartment — asking me where I’m from, where I’m going? I’m currently living a revolution in a book, trying to tie these loose ends up to become the kind of woman everybody seems to want me to be. When I fight with my Mom, I tell her I have a hard time marrying my narrative of who I know myself to be with the disfigured automaton of how she sees me. I want to know the narrative of who I know myself to be, though. It isn’t the E-girls who have decided that hope is retarded making up my Twitter feed, and I’m becoming even bereft of that. No longer cool, much more sexy, on the edge of the known universe, trying to stop putting a teaspoon of Starch on my tongue to settle me before rubbing it on my gums coke-style and finishing with grand spit of it all out into the sink. No calories. Much change. Brief levity, redundancy, the smell of the good earth beneath me, the reminder of plantations preceding home-ownership, and what comes before that knows nothing of how I got here — meaning very little to me.

I’m afraid of everything, but mostly I’m afraid of starting. When I’m in Brooklyn, and I’m stimulated, I’m embarrassed to write of the pride in my emotions — how the big stinky city is full of the dirty freaks and their friends making love between the wars, I guess in post-Vice cultural years it becomes less and less cool to become excited by a city. Our cities are becoming more like nebulous clusters of identity-types, made possible by pixelated capital streams and girls becoming more beautiful by the humid night. Hot girls, so hot, make fun of a young lady who tweets that men move to Brooklyn to marry ‘Instagram girls’ and leave behind ‘beautiful mids’ in flyover states. I turn my profile to the side in the mirror, hold the bump of my non-pregnant belly. Instagram girl, maybe?  To you, I hope none of it is superfluous. Girls manage to maintain attention when they’re Aria from Pretty Little Liars, the emotional nerve center of the family and emotionally mature enough for a grownie at 16. Can I be like her at 27 in some way? My organizer friend lets me smoke with freedom and gall as he whips his hands around, never breaking eye contact, explaining to me why we’ll need organizational structures for power (Communism) and not mangey rangey freedom like what I believe (anarchism). I love him — I expected to sleep with him, but now he’s in love and we’re making art together in trust. I am not to be ashamed of the rise you cause in me, I think, eyeing his little braids and eagerness to think. The seditious expressions I let slip past my tongue, the way I imagine my waist smaller for you to hold it. But I do that for every boy! No pleading. The city slips away from me and I run home with my plots. I’ll get skinnier.

Doesn’t the anarchic female always have to present as the seductress, even in the midst of the civil war? At least, in the virtual, no of us us have any reason to be removed from the brief stimuli that currently constitute the breadth of our desire. On all of the timelines I exist beneath, algorithmically or of my own creation, women’s inexhaustible performance of the muse doesn’t seem to halt. No length to the emotion. Bleakly, I confess that the labor of the maiden waiting to be chosen for altar is most exhaustive to me, not even the slaving in the kitchen and looking like a dyke, but the punishment for looking like a dyke and not a princess in moments of tremendous effort and I expect it’ll probably be the same even after the revolution. No? Across the table, mid-meal, my intimates regard me with an appraisal that simmers down to bitterness. I suck my teeth, mmmft! I’ll show them, I’ll get skinnier, I’ll really speak my mind then.

When I read science fiction, I become sexier through escaping into the body of a fantasy, and this remote expulsion doesn’t fuel me passionately to either write or create new worlds. Dorothy Allison writes, “I was conditioned to suspend my disbelief with science fiction, and that meant I could imagine myself in the books. But it was still a big jump from my tentative and careful fantasies to imagining the sexual adventures of those marvelous heroines. That I began to do it all I credit to the power of the really gifted science fiction writers who gave me worlds in which little girls did not have to confront the horrors of my everyday life.” When I was littler I would bristle after a fantasy and shove my face into my pillow, infuriated by the delusion. When does the world dissolve and the sweetness become real? You’ll stuff yourself up with addictions, trying to cover that road over and over again. Making the pith taste sweet when it’s meant to be tough and ropy.