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

the one place in the world where someone will love me tiny handwriting scrunched together on the page a pina colada slushy everyone you knew here was not the people they were pretending to be, but something better guitars thrasing in the garage with a soft light on my face, touch the razer’s edge knowing me perhaps you only saw me, okay so touch me, knowing me I was startled, red maca horny red turtleneck double-breasted boobily busted tatted and shy reminiscent and glowing I knew you when you were yet to become the thing you are currently trying to be, all the physics necessary to make running away possible, so where you’ll go? Dangling my keys by the car door, ten books on me, a little ass quaking when I move, so what — Flirty, roasted marshmallow, you took that picture of me, on film and I gasped, now take all this clothing off of me, extant realities extra fiber boost from the clementine exponential fiber boost from the tangelo knowing you clothed pause knowing you naked the little gasp I took every time you put it in pause the way our eyes would connect pause the time I said I don’t know if you really love me and you said How can you say that and I did the distant thing with my eyes where I act like I don’t care and you were crying saying How could you say that and I was so turned on like I was ovulating but I was on my period and we did it standing up in the bathroom with my blood running on the floor? Bathroom so white, you said, Is this a joke? Dying laughing, like saying a little mess in that tiny voice, it looks like you killed me, telling me to hold my ankles, you know when you’re screwing good and you lose the position hahahaha, like what’s even going on here — There’s a football player for the Chicago Bears that looks like the man I knew, it’s “used to know”, or whatever, pause just for my breath, again, chocolate-covered gummy bears and their candied shells clicks off in your mouth If you’ve … never put any of your fingers inside a girl, touch the pink inside of your mouth clutching the thing hurtling me toward my death fleecing me in the most shell-shocked moments veganza gravy made thick with starch — I licked the arrowroot off the spoon, laying in your lap hoping other men notice, You’re not that innocent, yes, but I am a good girl, and I take it! You would laugh like I wouldn’t, like it wasn’t easy, like the load doesn’t get heavier, like I hadn’t had to back you against a door, like I won’t run myself over, like I’m not scared of myself, like I’m not like a bullet, like my feminine doesn’t get sour and wasted like the lights don’t get brighter, like I’m not on the edge and the outside, tasting you, tasting me.

When I’m doing academic work around Asians, I feel completely and totally locked-in. I imagine that people at USC or Berkeley are feeling locked-in 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Because of how many Asians are at those schools. I’m at a boba bar in Baltimore right now — that phrase, a boba bar. What the fuck? I’m writing an essay about bidimensional dispositionalism with regard to sexual behaviorism. In philosophy, we say if and only iff. In my American Studies class that’s primarily about immigrant food businesses, my professor invites in the scion and heir to a Korean food business and consummate fortune, who I can’t help but to feel attracted to. That’s because I’m an American woman, and I’m attracted to capital. Even worse, I’m a Black American woman and I’m hungry to create long-lasting financial structures for my friends and my family. And my future kids, or whatever. He’s definitely wearing raw-hemmed Japanese denim and the way his polo sits on his waist line, I notice. It’s little things, money. He brings his high school-age daughter with him to talk to us about economics, and his conversation is wonderfully stimulating and informative. I love to talk about money, I love to talk about how people make it, I like to make people know I’m listening by the quality of question that I ask. Listening to Boards of Canada, the song, “The Color of Fire”, the vocals say I…love…you! Distorted against the conversation of a group of Koreans — I can tell they’re Korean, I have The Eye — talking about, you guessed it, finances. Back in the boba bar. This narrative doesn’t really take place in-time, I’m cheating. Some guy on Twitter says you can’t feel the presence of Asians on the East Coast. That’s laughable. Achievement, ambition, and the concretized uppitiness of a large social group can certainly be felt. Especially by the people who rank beneath them on America’s racial totem pole of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. The reason the concept of the model minority exists is because of Black people; we’re the opposite, we’re the model that the hustlers are viewed against abstractly. I’m so racist — I’ve made the people in my life more racist, I believe in my people in a way that defies our actual realities, and I’m jealous of Asians because of how America allows them to be. What America seems to want them to be. Are we articulating perfection now, or what? I feel really greedy. Outside of the show, there’s this Asian girl crying on the ground, they won’t let her in to the show. She seems super fucked-up. She can’t stop crying and it doesn’t seem like she bought any friends with her. I sit next to her on the ground and feed her grapes from my purse. I always have fruit in my purse because I’m mentally fucked-up and I love women. I love being jealous of all other women. People think I’m being sarcastic when I say stuff like this but I’m fine with what the experience of being a Western woman is like, I welcome it. I’m jealous of this fucked-up Asian girl for no reason even though she’s eating fruit from my hand so close that I can feel her teeth scape it, like a little horse. We laugh, looking at each other. What do you have that I don’t have? What do I have that you don’t want? Are women ever really together? With a man, I can put him in me. That’s the main distinction that I have. There’s that understand that we can make a person together with all men, random men on the street. Do Asian men think about Black women the way that white men think about Black women? My twin says, “Well, what do white men actually think about Black women?” I can tell you what Black people think about Asian people. It’s always about gender at the root of the issue until the root of the issue is race; now, the root of the issue is class. I know that my people have our noses up at everyone who can make capital here in places we aren’t welcomed. We have a tech sector in this nation because we have Asians, and we want them at our state institutions because when they’re American they can afford to pay full tuition and when they’re immigrants they pay more as foreigners receiving American educations. Soon enough, the University of Maryland will be Chinese girls from Bethesda and Chinese girls from China. I’m fucked up because I want there to be Black women in academia after I leave? Do I plan on ever leaving? 😉 Hopkins is worse — whatever the qualifier ‘worse’ means, because it’s poor Black people in all the surrounding areas of the university and Asians wearing California-university-name hoodies making use of the Institution itself all around Waverly. I’m a femcel poet, I’m a exclusionary woke Black conservative, I write from a place of bitterness and love. I hate everything, I love so many things, I know that sharing is a farce invented by the State after the enclosures, I know where I belong. Where people are smart. I don’t think the only smart Americans are Asians. There is no easy way to cross this gap without throwing myself into it.

Making money is a distraction, it’s a distraction from daily life. People laugh all around the room, but I’m old enough to know that the noises are more about fitting in! Conservatives think that leftists are about going against the grain; anyone involved in community organizing for long enough know that fitting *within* the *against* is more important than finding ways to stand further apart. The meeting is gluttonous in its indecency. Everyone has to be a star. A participant asks us to share our Instagram handles (the whole room) nearing the end of the gathering. I don’t want to look at anyone in the eyes when they ask this, because I just look like the kind of person who is active on Instagram. I make a personal note that I want to wear skirts less. Wanting to look hot, to everyone here, feels penultimate. To the organizing. Afterward, on the train, I draw my knees and shins and legs up beneath me like I’m twelve different horses, and noodle with the weirdly long hair that’s growing behind my calf. It feels good to mash my face with the palms of my hands until my eyes feel different colors; I adjust my skirt and whisper ‘Gomu Kassana’ (cow legs) to myself in a monotone that reminds me of my yoga practice, my affair with whimsy, that I can use my physical voice whenever — even by myself on the train, where I may look ‘crazy’. All winter, I read this tome of a ‘historical novel’ called Direct Action (by Luke Hauser) that follows the trajectory of protest organizing in the 1980’s Bay Area. So much of the work is heavy with Hauser’s personal hesitancies, embodied in a differently-named protagonist, that the activism of street theatre and punk die-ins wouldn’t prevent corporate, and therefore the State’s, advancement. Shucks. Hauser, I meet you from the future — you were not wrong! I read an ad in the subway for a 60 gram of sugar fruit juice that is rebranding as just enjoying yourself — it’s a smart campaign. We know you know about the sugar, but buy this anyway… The informed consumer, who in previous decades with more leverage, was an activist. When the term meant something. Reading Direct Action now, during the late 20’s of the twentieth century, feels even more bleak, and trying to organize in the face of both the Labor Movement’s and the Neoliberal Progressive Movement’s failures doesn’t feel romantic to anybody. People are going to meetings for protests because they’re lonely…Abbott and I are smoking in my CR-V in front of their sister’s bachelorette party, and they say, “I want to organize with other people and I don’t want to make friends! I want to get the work done, and go home. I want to feel connected to the other people I’m working with but I don’t want them to assume we’re going to hang out in another capacity after we work together.” I agree exuberantly, my besties always understand what I’m on. Are we the problem? Or is the assumption that group work lead to a virtual performance of community, suffocating?

Since moving back home, from the rich and diverse suburbs of DC to the shifting and exclusionary country exburbs of Annapolis floating alive across the water, transportation is my gleaming irradiated nugget of fascination. After classes, I leave my car at the College Park Metro and ride the rails all evening, articles from The Anarchist Library propped up on my phone’s browser and a fresh pre-roll tucked behind my ear. I watch multicultural couples perched on low stone walls scroll their phones together, faces luminous with screen and the contentment of having an Other of their own, in a public space. People with professional DMV jobs get on the train with backpacks on like proud elementary school students. Their presence does seem to be the fuel through which the train powers across the train yards, their employment the embodiment of the productivity of the District of Columbia. Every time my friends visit, and we’re out to eat or walking the Mall or thrifting and book-hunting, they relay their fascination at how the physical sensation of the State is looming in the District. Growing up in her shadow, and surrounded by her, she leaves me quiet. I think about Aaron Bushnell’s body burning and the police emptying bullets into his form, I think about the resulting discourse about his ‘performative white activism’ on Twitter that I begin to think is sparked by CIA moderated Twitter bots, I think about how homelessness where I’m from in Maryland is almost impossible if you don’t have a car — to drive out from the compactness of gridded, central DMV to the remoteness of the beach. What is not preventable is a youth population of homeless who are from the Shore, revolutionized in the suburbs. What is not preventable is me, paying for a train ticket and yearning in each second for a world profoundly more free.

I’ve been sleeping in my car for more nights a week than I’ve been sleeping in my family home, to understand more about the relationship between upper-middle-class youth trapped in permanent adolescence by a weakened economy, engaging in forms of homelessness that were popular during the late Bush-era of American politics. Riding the rails, squatting, traveling across the country. I’m 28 — Black women my age are after plane-ride trips to destinations padded with the comfort of a resort and natives serving foreigners hand-on-foot. A man is supposed to buy me a trip to the Cayman Islands, and I have to be sexy enough to deserve it! Instead I’m in my car, reading the last of a book I can by my dying nightlight. I drive across the State in less than a day, sleep in rest areas and parking lots that look welcoming. I trust the night and dispose of the fears haunting women who have done the same. Jackie Wang is the saint looking over my SUV as I drift into sleep thinking of her biking on to on-ramps and flashing a thumb for a ride, or getting between Brooklyn and Baltimore in one day like it was nothing. I am one step closer. Tonight, the temperature of the night is perfect, and I crack both of my back windows. Is it true, that because of my relationship to my family and wealth, that in the morning I will drive home and take a shower? Yes. Do the people I have waiting at home love me? Yes. Are they concerned that the way that I’m living does not seem to be running parallel to conventional American success for young people? Yes. What my family thinks of me means something to me, too — pain comes with this. But I have to know what’s on the other side. I’m not running from anything unsafe. I am running from a feeling of complacency — worthlessness — picking up the new clothes I just purchased and thinking, “Is this all there is?” Professionalized labor doesn’t promise satisfaction. She promises accumulation. I cannot be distracted by a tactic invented to do so when I’m inventing a new method of participation, as worthless as the practices of the spoiled brat organizers may seem. When I return to my bed, I find it harder to sleep…it’s too soft, too easy, too accessible and I don’t feel like the labors of my day deserve this cushiness as a result. Tingles pressure my hands. Maybe my relationship to labor is changing, because of anarchistic risks I’m taking to gain a new perspective.

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.