rocket shoes on my favorite mule

if UMX is the front of the store, this is the back room, the cluttered, easy, unpretentious and comfy sofa and hookah room. or widescreen video game and snackbowl room. or the editing couch room where you fall out between sessions. or the beanbag, espresso, and plate glass window facing the sunrise room. however you want to paint it, that’s where we be. stream of consciousness thinkbox scratchbox doodle pad heavy bag full drag mousepad.

my hair is longer than it’s been in my adult life. this is wild! you’d have to know the whole story and i dont have time for it now but here’s some.

i grew up with long hair, and i mean long and i mean young. by the time i got a haircut i wanted short hair so bad. just to fit in with peers. i was tired of being called a girl. and sometimes not as a joke. but then i got older and after many years of short hair i missed my long hair. but since being a kid, my hair has become much courser and thicker. much harder to grow. easier to sculpt than cut. it grows “out” for a long time before it grows “down.” so i never want to go through that tough six or eight months where it grows longer than short but shorter than long. lots of unruly, defiant, huge hair. i’ve even got the ends trimmed once and its long enough now that i think i can finally call it “long hair.”

of course now i start romanticizing my shaved ‘do. missing that lean, smooth, clean aerodynamic feel. i did love the queue-type cut i had (twice) for a while. long  hair and shaved hair at once. the best of both worlds. boy did i catch hell for that hair. serious. i’ve had a lot of hairstyles. but wearing a queue (and as a non-asian, maybe that made it worse or better, i dont know if at all) in manhattan and oregon, both, i’ve done it. people dont even hide the whispers anymore. it’s like they think that you’re so “out there” in some way (religious, cultural) that you can no longer observe them, or hear, or maybe speak up?

once i turned around i was in a movie line (i once feared confrontation as a boy but at some point cured that by instead rushing right toward it as a habit and now its where i’m at mostly) and heard someone actually talkinga bout me RIGHT BEHIND ME and i was like wtf is that? and i turned around and glared at the person and they, like, turned around too to face away from me. it was sort of comical, but i was really irritated. i dont know if i’d be better with it today. other stories, too. at a party at my friend’s in nyc, i was taken to be a hari krishna devotee. this really weirded out some of the room, but it probably didnt help that half of them were on acid that they had been told was e. talk to me some time about that night. it was…memorable.

the good thing about a queue is that you can go from long hair to queue, tho not the other way. i could just shave the rest of my head and keep that part, now that my hair is long. if i wanted to. what i didn’t like about that hair was sleeping. if you keep it as a braid, it is right under your head so you cannot lie on your back. and you can’t really just let it fall all over. anyway. my hair is pretty long now. i keep it tied mostly in back. tho yesterday i pulled it all to one said and knotted it there. thats why i love having long hair. you can do SO MUCH with it. i often bemoaned being a boy when i was younger because we had all the boring stuff. boring clothes, boring hair, etc. of cousre i grew up in the 70s and in a subculture not mainstream american but influenced a lot by india so what i had been exposed to was pretty flavorful and majestic and free, all in all. by the time i started thinking about clothes and a “look,” the world had become very conservative, and michael j fox was hip on tv as a young republican. i was like wut? no colors, no little mirrors, no sequins, no ties, no ballooning airy flow, no threads, no embroidery, no flaring, no layers? this is what i get to choose from? …short, boxy hair and pants and shirts????? even in my video games i chose to be a girl. they just always looked cooler to me. were allowed to be cooler, free-er, expressive. one thing we dont talk about a lot online is the box males are crushed into. and of course this clothes ejemplo is just a tinge of what i mean, just an outrcopping, a sign of the mime. we talk about how the patriarchy kills and despises women. and “it” does. and “it’ also crushes the heart out of out males. binds us up in cheesestring and paints eyeballs on our head. it has to. to make us the footsoldiers of “itself.” trust  me. i’ve suffered within this male role. i dont care for it. and first you have to learn to even see “it” as prescribed and required. in fact, i dont think you can see misogyny fully until you do. hand in hand. and its a stagnant, dead land there’s no air in there. there’s not much joy. there’s dominance and war and anger and self-repression and control and aggression and violence….and its not who any of us really are. no more me than she. its as much a trap as the image we foist on women, the one that tears them down, too. each cage is tailor made. we need to address both traps or nobody gets free.

my whole week has been fucked up by these computer issues. why is it always that way? why, just when you are about to lift yourself out of the tiniest bit of debt, you break a tooth or two? why just when you breaking even, another expense comes up? i was finally looking like i might just get ahead of my stress-laden schedule, no not even aHEAD, just even which would be so nice, and bang. my hard drive dies, causing me days of lost time. and now i’ve gone an blown all the time i thought i’d use to get even and now i’m behind again. 

! oh man you have to laugh. you really do. lookee how i dragged a manhattan pace into oregon. fuuuuck. think about it. what RC said. at this point, i don’t even need to be nailed to a spot. i could move south of the border and be WARRRRRRM and in the SUN all the TIME and throw capital letters around like I JUST DONT CARE yo. still make my money. in fact, while i struggle on the lip of the red column as just a matter of regular life, if i were to take my spindly income and outsource my ass to a cheaper locale, then i could be livin large, baby. and by “large” i mean, “less stress.” why is it that you feel you are always around the corner from the clearing? that’s an illusion, isn’t it. by “less stress” what i think i really mean is a kidney-shaped pool in a tropical land. and good, good rhythms. and blender drinks. and a ton of smiling faces who drop by whenever they want. my dreams, in actuality, have never been big. its the nationally-endorsed nightmares that tower like buckling glass drenched in hot footlights, like a three-camera stage shadow on your forehead, like a ladder that never ends and looks like it’s taking you up while its taking you down and around the bend.

honestly, i can’t wait to be done with MTV and these weekly-minted legally-choked little video-snax i do. i do’nt mean i’m not grateful for them and the gig, i am. happy to have shown myself again what i can do, and to earn bucks this way.  but just wait, baby. just wait to see what i dig up when i’m not asking for release forms no more or approval from 1515 b’WAY. just you wait to see what ima goan give back to this place. brad will up in my camera bag, ‘mano. el amor y justicia en mi corazón. rocket shoes on my favorite mule and jade-flavored dynamite jelly in my breakfast scones.

music n justice, blogmiga. out. love n soul, papá.