Skin
Thag mentioned how she missed Shrine tonight, and sweet merciful fuck, so do I.
It’s about identity, of course. There were flashes of it before, yeah, and eventually I’ll probably talk about Rocky Horror and the Invisibles and everything else, but the point is that it takes a looooong time for things to filter into my brain and so who I was didn’t happen until I was also in the right place and time, which was and always will be twenty-first century San Francisco. Or Santa Cruz.
Identity. Ritualized identity. War drums and indigo dyes, choral hymns and bread and wine, Lohengrin and long white dresses; any number of ways to shift your identity into something more powerful than you could ever be otherwise. Something suitably adrenalish pushing the limits of shitty bundled speakers, makeup and big big hair and a slinky black something showing off Leavenworth-lathed curves, cheap vodka and Squirt, and every step of the ritual, every beat of boots on the sidewalk brings me further into the identity, the headspace, the skin of something other pushing its way outwards from the brain and heart and nastier areas, sheer force of diverted personality crystallizing in the air six inches away from my body.
My body. Not the meatsack social-drag I roll around in all day, not even the I-don’t-give-a-shit most people see as my behind-the-curtain, but a pile of flesh that I’m actually willing to fully inhabit, that moves right and feels right and is utterly congruous to the air that slides around it.
(from the inside. i kinda don’t want to know what this shit looks like from the outside.)
But, okay, from the inside is where it actually matters, because god knows what kind of crap people come up with to get through the day - ‘god knows’ being a perfect example, actually, but hey, if it works? Right on.
Anyway. That’s one skin, but there’s also a lot to be said just for the actual act of becoming, and yeah, obviously you can’t get anything as good as a skin that bubbles up out of your own precortical ooze, but it doesn’t always have to be filet mignon or whatever, a crappy roadside burger can be pretty good too.
Like games. Or comics. Or writing, or music, or even just talking to someone and figuring out what the world looks like from four inches behind their eyes, so many ways to take a ride as someone else and there’s just not enough time in the world.
Let’s pretend.