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How are people still calling a baby “precious” post-LOTR. I’m so grossed out every time.
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“Boop beep, money money money,” she said with a smirk while the neonate’s forehead pressed against a vein in my bicep, eliminating blood flow to my wrist, and therefore fingers. Gestational carpal tunnel’s sweet revenge.
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You and your partner in a shared moment, carved out, noticing that this life is the noticing of being totally disappointed by everyone. Even those you thought were collective. You are so mad at the forces of individuation, selfhood, humanism, Enlightenment, Bildungsroman, the romantic. Where are my comrade slime mold mfers.
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Let losing sleep radicalize you!
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When the neonate rents open (the world), I’ve never felt a stronger urge to scream within myself. We’ve been shoved into purpose, squeezed into a mass of intimacy. Eutrophic nuclear. Pasteurized nuclear. Somehow both, writhing in racial capitalism. The contortionism of holding nine pounds slightly extended. My relaxed shoulder waits.
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I bought the domain “feminist.dad”. My first thought is a public intranet of revolutionary, radical, pragmatic, probably all textuals? Some hopecore from caring fatherers? A carrier bag, a wiki, a vade mecum, a graph database, a slim mold. Pornographic, squishy, mossy, watery, rivers, estuaries. Bodies without organs, motherings, and humour. A perfume, a toxin spreading mindfully. Rococo and paratactic pizzaz to disturb the phallus, but pellucid splashes of communism and retrofitting social safety, and walkable matrices of allyship at conversation pace. My friends will be in there. My loves with white, hairy dicks, gone soft on the vine in their patience.
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Shitting and puking and farting and squirming and scrunching and stretching and
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The neonate on my chest, light as this fog-cum-drizzle that’s partially evaporated. They are suspended on me with light animations of breath. I’m some cloud, tethered to some larger weather system and subordinate to infinite pink above that unfolds the earth. I am in suspended animation, much like the cast of Severance in braided challahs of simulacra at Grand Central Station. I’m a station stationing in place. She’s wearing donated pink, a cloud of cotton candy with a baby head. She would be drawn as pink by binary boosters. She has shit all over the inside, and scares the boosters with brown. I’m waiting to poop, which has to wait for coffee and kimchi, which has to wait for this neonate to awaken to the charms of this household that crumbles and reassembles and through which wind travels against fastly. Some kind of fate that Pink Lady Opera comes on the speakers.
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All my memories before now feel laminated, shot through an overhead projector across lecture hall. As in: leading me to force air through my mouth and whisper to myself nothing mattered until now. This while laying in bed. I don’t believe these words, they’re someone else’s romantic. But the phrase parrots a scent of split with the before times which seems to leave those before times with less purchase in the present so the present is coming through as thicker memory now. Now is thick as the gluon of the neonate’s mother’s mucous plug come undone.
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If you’re rocking the neonate up and down, leave the upper body alone and bend at the knees. Drive through the heels and give the big muscles of your horse half something to do. You are now a filthy new monster, filling up pages of a cozy fantasy of epic draining the shelves. You’re relieving the pressure, bending, swaying; her back is a snare drum in dimly lit Osaka neo noir. You are a doll of a fatherbaby that deserves every last drop of Fernet rubbed on the souls of your feet.
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A week before she was born, the woman at the front desk introduced herself as “sequoia.” That’s an evocative name. I remarked, “that’s a beautiful name,” angling the words so they would have a gentle drift over the cubicle wall without any masculine omen.
Did we chose the wrong the name for the neonate? Did the name inscribe the landscape with the right mix of homage, culture, and foresight?
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You’ll topple that which stands in your way
with jagged confidence
while you’re having a whole body jag
you’ll succeed with this mother confidence
as a mother parting a crowd to reach the child -
NAMES
early girl
tomato
little monster
my unaverse
the unaverse
little nut
little nut hatch
my una and only
little face
dude
man
sir -
Good things are
laying horizontal next to each other, falling in and out of sleep
alacritous latch
B in repose, having a nice family wind down
cute new noises from the neonatal
brother got the booster
mom’s ease on the porch, sun drenched, listening to bird calls
cheezits on demand, thanks mom
waste curves rushing back
cute pic from Ron and fam popping the champagne
skin to skin with the neonatal and a library book from SF Public Library Bernal Heights Branch
doing nothing in particular
organizing the shelf
kissing you -
While watching the mother breastfeed the early girl tomato, I noticed her shoulders tensing. Remarkably familiar. I offered a gentle reminder, bringing two fingers together, fore and index, just strong enough to lift a bookmark, and sent them into shoulder closer to me, strong enough to feel through callus, sending to the back blade in one shot. Two decades of martial practice and study pooled at my finger tips, letting down into her skin at the connection point. She instinctively settled back into crinkled percale. I love that give. Relaxed, but attentive, noticing, still a body at work.
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Perhaps the most frequent utterance on the training floor is “relax your shoulder.” The shoulder gathers desire for upper body action as tension. Whatever the move required, that’s where we seem to steel ourselves and become ready to engage. Even for a lunge or slide, ostensibly in the realm of the lower body, students tense their shoulders.
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