is it perimenopause or is it fascism?

on death and tiny shorts

writing in a coffee shop, i see a man in teal shorts so tight i can see his taint. i feel such tenderness for him and his tiny shorts and his taint. he has a bumble bee tattooed on his thigh and his ankles are so pale and bare, they seem extra naked because of the shorts. bumblebees are supposed to represent being able to do impossible things, because their adorable fat hairy bodies shouldn’t be able to fly, aerodynamically speaking, but do. their tiny iridescent wings, almost not there. i feel like this is similar, somehow, to the impossible thing we’re all doing right now in the Bleak, our heavy tender lives, our shiny meager hope.

thinking lately with tenderness for my future self, like instead of putting everything off for some amorphous later, as though later-things will be done by someone else, not-me, i do the things now, so later-me will be happier, as though we’re on the same team. this also goes along, i think, with trying to befriend my crone self and do things to take care of her, thinking of her with tenderness. how much harder things might be for her, more impossible, if things are already so hard right now. it kinda takes the whole reparenting idea to another level.

another thing i realized i need to undo, unlearn: my struggle to see old women fully as people¹, to try to really see them through the scrim and snarl of stereotypes of old woman. so trying to really lean in, and love them, and love the part of myself that is already an old woman, to see that crone-part as fully me, too. it is bumble-bee level hard. as i typed that, a literal real life bee tapped her fat body against the window pane.

it’s funny this more compassionate sense of the future and me in it is coming at a time when the future’s existence doesn’t feel at all guaranteed. it never has been, but now i’m starting to really feel that, feel into it.

it makes sense, i guess, but until now, i never really understood that you spend the last half of your life (half, if you’re lucky) undoing and letting go of everything you hoarded so jealously and cared about so deeply in the first half. i think that’s why middle age feels so messy. the only rule seems to be the dismantling.

i flash on this image from inside out where the characters go through an Abstract Thought portal and become falling-apart cubes of self, like they entered into a Picasso painting. they keep losing dimension until they are planes and then lines, frantically trying to squiggle back into shared reality before they become dots of light, i guess, and then nothing at all.²

the other day, i wandered into a thrift shop where two white men with bad faces were having an interminable argument about two joshes they knew. each bad-faced man was trying to insist that their josh was the one true josh, describing his skin color in terms i won’t repeat but can’t forget, and it became very clear to me that they were talking about the same josh, and couldn’t get there together, didn’t want to, each wanted their own separate but identical josh. it was an infuriating conversation to overhear, but i stayed because they had $5 hot pink sunglasses i badly wanted and a stereograph. peering into the stereograph felt like slotting myself instantly into a new world, one free of racist men and perimenopause. it’s strange and kinda thrilling that stereographs use everyday light but make it so otherworldly. i wanted to step inside the scene — which, come to think of it, looked a lot like Joshua Tree, with a big, gnarly, ancient-looking tree spreading sideways across the frame and reaching out to me, too, through the warbly 3-D, a tree that must’ve really existed, or still exists, though it looked so alien inside the little wooden viewer, so uncanny.

the louder fascism gets, the more alive everything feels — something of the stereograph has stayed with me: the trees a trembling technicolor, the flowers with their precise faces, my love for my people big and stupefying and wordless. it kind of feels like being on mushrooms a little bit all the time. psychedelics always brought me closer to the awareness that there was death in beauty, and that feels so true right now. as the death cult gets closer, my own life feels more tender, more beautiful, more loseable.

i think this is the aliveness i’ve been after in meditation all these years, though i’m not supposed to have been after anything. but i didn’t count on it coming with this urgent underneath feeling of WHAT IS HAPPENING? a sort of on-the-rollercoaster sense of constant low-key existential panic. i really do keep thinking is it perimenopause or is it fascism, and i think what i really mean is: am i personally dying more quickly than usual, or are we all?

the other day i was talking to my therapist about writing, how writing suddenly has a new urgency, a visceral one, how i have this new kind of uncomfortable pressure in my body to write. it seems seems tied to this new always-awareness of death. i keep thinking about the end of Michelle Tea’s Black Wave, have been thinking of the end of Michelle Tea’s Black Wave on the regular since i read it in 2017. i haven’t been able to talk about it because what i want to talk about is such a spoiler. so spoiler alert: the world is ending. all around the main character, also named Michelle, people are fighting and fucking and drinking and praying and offing themselves in advance. and the only thing Michelle wants to do is to write. Michelle’s story, stanched for so long, came quickly and clearly, page after page it came, the story of Michelle and her tiny life made big, her blunders and foolishness made human, sometimes noble, her struggles redeemed, momentarily, and her love. i think this image, this ending, has changed my relationship to writing. the idea of writing as the world ends (which is, it feels like, what we are all doing with our little newsletters, with our reaching-out), writing not just into an uncertain future, but what can feel like no future, continually makes me remember that writing is a holy act.

1. this not-seeing, a form my fear of death takes

2. don’t worry they make it. (but we don’t!)