Quantum Drag

Stock parts to whole parts

I’ve hit the ceiling of who I’ve been and am equally overwhelmed by the options of who I can be next. It is painful, messy, asking me to get fleshier and softer and something about that feels hard. MASSIVE GROWING PAINS. I literally feel like I have to stretch my body to make more room. The gnawing is subtle but corrosive. Like it is somewhere in the distance resembling everlasting reverb.

Today I found my flesh suit wrapped too tightly around my bones and muscles. I got on my mat, swam, howled, slacked my jaw, cracked my hips and all of a sudden all of that tension came pouring out of my face as some kind of salty water. In the middle of the night I find myself moaning and not the sexy kind. The elongated kind where my spirit wants to rip past the limits of a body. In a way where there just doesn’t feel like enough space in here.

Is this what growing up feels like?

There is something animal about what I’m going through. Stretchy. Fleshy. Melty. Like right at the edge of feeling like things will never change and then everything does at once. Full mouth yawns in public. Not in a rude way. In a I’m too big for my body way. I have been honest with people about these pangs, leaning into how life rocket ships between ages 30 and 35. A friend reminds me via text to lovingly look at my parts with curiosity.

I was in a forward fold at one point, instinctually gripping my lower limbs again and again, up and down and up and down, and saw flashes of my ancestors getting free through me. Kneeling down on my mat today I had the thought I want to be softer it’s just a hard mess to know how. Crying and moving and being some kind of silly little snotty beast is starting to feel like a bridge between a self whose chest is pierced by a ceiling and one whose head is ramming up the second level like a bull.

Becoming this next person while making my first object from scratch is something like sculpting from the inside out.

In all my interactions I feel myself hearing into the future. Not anticipating. But watching what the face does too. Listening to that. Double communication.

I’m on the plane reading Joshua Whitehead’s Making Love with the Land, the chapter on “A Geography of Queer Woundings” and thinking about the terror encoded in us. What it does. How it acts. What it demands of our relationships and perceptions. I don’t know its origin but there’s a 3-centimeter-long teardrop shaped indent in me under my left eye. I sometimes forget it’s there but when I remember it never feels like only mine.

I for many reasons have had to give up my lashings. A continuum where I somehow body more pain because of the color of my skin. Doing so has kept me ripe yet supple, agonizing over a daily return to tighten and toil, move around the skin. Keeping it drinking from a ritual bend. Not in an ignorant, spiritual bypassy way. But in a maybe the human body wasn’t designed to carry so much kind of way.

Perhaps these mammal-ships do ever just so slightly levitate, asking gravity to curve. Acknowledging how the earth sits there suspended. We love to mimic her ways. We fail but don’t quit.

And then a life happens and after that this reality turns off. We ash or some other decomposition, hopefully sweetly with just enough sorrow to appreciate the dance.

I’ve been wanting to make my own instrument from stock parts for probably as long as I’ve been recording music. Reading the current of the music industry’s inevitable death got me here.

Parts of me are always experimenting doing things the versions of me that don’t exist yet do. I call it quantum drag.

The genre cures. I keep company.

This October I’ll build it as an artist-in-residence at Makerspace YK. I knew I’d made something that wanted my mouth, used sensible, plain stock-part material the way a farmer would, and paid homage to the lineage of Black blues players my work would be impossible without.

There isn’t anything to transcend. Only shapes to take.

Doing things you’ve never done before is almost like flirting with faith. Like I’ll do the work to get there even while on my way.

Something as ancient as everything that hasn’t been born yet, like a sonic walking stick, ushering me home.

Below the paywall you will find a perception practice on how your life will tell you which object you need to make to pursue quantum drag.