death and a certain man

September 6, 2021 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

I lost a dear friend this year. He was widely agreed to be one of the most frustrating individuals to ever walk the earth. There was no hiding from him. Your foibles, your feints, your fake news: absolutely fair game, and he brought everyone who cared for him to the point of hair-tearing hysteria at least once.

I learned the lyrics of the Gatchaman theme song for that son of a bitch. In phonetic Japanese.

He was also one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and voraciously devoted to his goals. I think about him a lot, as I did while he still orbited in an embodied form. He was deeply aware of mortality, of the fleetingness of life, and the need to use your time passionately.

What I feel, in grieving him, is that there truly is no meaning in existence beyond what we ourselves provide. Some may want his death to be a ‘message’ from ‘God’ to value your life, but he was passionately secular, and would have fought you with every ounce of his prodigious logic to prove that his morals derived from anything beyond the human need for belonging and connection.

We cannot satisfy this need through cruelty and restriction. We all belong to the human family. We all belong to the earth. Our walls are false. Created by human minds. If there is a divine, it does not pick and choose which of Creation is most glorious. How bold of us to assume. How unhelpful, when the dented little spaceship we call home is closer than ever to being pushed out of the narrow span of livability.

Adam would have known what I mean. He hated that essentialist bullshit. Worked up until the end of his life to make our world more fair.

What else is there to be done?

edge effects

September 3, 2021 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

torn

eternally

what is this

stillness

except an expectation?

(2020)

Love song

August 29, 2021 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Be my abyss

Let me shout into you the seven hundred cursed names of those I will destroy

Let me cry near you and wear away a river’s worth of rock

Be cool and empty when all is hot and loud

Be the inferno sleeping

Waiting for me to slither into your invariable dark night

On the day when things explode

(2020)

I was going to say have you ever

August 19, 2021 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

I was going to say have you ever

But it’s you so then I wanted to ask

You know when you have a vision of your own death

And it’s that real

What have you done after to go on living?

(2020)

A Few Words about Essentialism

August 12, 2021August 12, 2021 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

**CAVEAT: IF YOU DISAGREE WITH THE FOLLOWING, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT’S HOLY, PLEASE DO NOT ENGAGE WITH ME ON THE TOPIC. Maybe you think I’m being far-fetched, that I’m making false equivalences. Too bad. Suck it up, and move on, because I do not debate subjects that involve my friends being negated from existence if your side “wins.” Trans rights are human rights, full stop. Thank you.**

Everything Solnit writes makes me think. Even when I agree with her completely, her words add new levels of understanding. Her recent repost of her 2020 Guardian article lead me to rattle off the following:

Accents of pronunciation suggest that what many of us take as physically innate is often very malleable. No one is born with an accent. We are merely born with the capacity to make sounds, and we train our bodies (mouths, lungs, vocal cords) to produce the sounds that endear us to our environment. Children mimic their adults’ speech patterns, whatever those happen to be. Adults pick up local accents without any intention to do so. It’s what we do, and we’re built to do it with whatever speech patterns exist in our environment.

And we change our accents. Maybe not to the point of indistinguishability, but we alter our speech all the time. If you think you would never change the way you speak, and certainly never to “impress someone,” tell me right now you use the same language at the bar with your best friends that you use with your grandmother. Very few of us can say yes. Just like you don’t scream “FUCK” in church (if this is the sort of thing you do happen to scream in your church, lemme know, I have questions) you maybe don’t drop as many ‘aitches’ or slur your vowels when you’re sitting in front of a university admissions panel.

Our voices are part of our bodies. They don’t come from our brains alone, but from an interaction between our brains and bodies. Our vocal chords, which we can reshape at will. Reshape your body at will.

What’s my point?

That we change our bodies.

All the time.

On purpose.

Things about ourselves which seem physically unchanging, aren’t, and we change them on purpose.

Our performance of gender can be one of those things.

And clinging to the illusion of gender essentialism is a waste of everyone’s time.

WHAT RUINED ME Episode 1: ‘Orlando’ by Virginia Woolf

July 30, 2021February 17, 2023 ~ Will Forrest ~ 1 Comment

I was perhaps nine when I read Orlando. My mother was a literature major, and our house was chockers with Penguin Classics with their orange and black and pale green spines. I’m confident that in letting me read whatever books I liked, she did not intend to implant in me the idea that one could just…become another gender.

Becoming ‘other’ was already a given in my mythology. Animals become heroes. Ordinary children become mighty kings and queens. Wardrobes become portals, and the very best parties turn into treasure hunts. As long as you know where your towel is, the rest will work itself out, more or less. I was thus very comfortable with the idea of waking up one day as someone else and it all being perfectly manageable and not at all like hell (Kafka aside).

The matter-of-factness in Orlando is one of its strengths. Though the book is about gender, it is not really about trans identity, which at the time of its writing was certainly extant but not under such terms as we know it today. Orlando doesn’t consciously surrender their gender. It is instead taken away by unspecified means, which are beside the point as Orlando goes on to navigate their new gender while retaining the perceptual filters of their first.

Can I confess to remembering very little otherwise? Adult attempts at reading Woolf have been troublesome. Her style of writing is an effort to read, and I am generally disinterested in domestic dramas, so there go most of her plots. This book is however iconoclastic, and is up there with Voltaire’s Candide and Orwell’s Animal Farm as a literary classic worth trying to get people to read when they’re far too young.

Can’t be arsed reading? There’s a film… https://www.indiewire.com/2012/09/heroines-of-cinema-tilda-swinton-and-sally-potters-orlando-44615/

Verdict: Did Not Finish

July 21, 2021 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Carrying on from the last post, here’s a short list of reasons I haven’t finished books recently.

An aristocrat so incompetent she can’t cut a piece of fruit (this seemed false, as she’d have had knife skills for eating complicated state dinners) and a master thief who habitually targets mansions of the rich, but didn’t know about the servants’ passages behind the walls. And was told about it by the same girl who can’t cut fruit.

The FMC “humorously” tricking the MMC into humiliating himself in public, knowing that’s his worst nightmare. Relationship red flag, yo.

The Dead Hooker trope, in which the MMC’s heroic motivation is seeing his mother and other sex workers get violently assaulted. I’m not saying this isn’t motivating, but did you need to make me imagine a dozen women getting raped just so I’ll believe this guy’s do-good motivation? Growing up in a London brothel in the 1860s would have been motivation enough, thanks.

Same book: anachronistic use of the word ‘pussy.’ Kids, the Internet is RIGHT THERE. Google that shit. I know I do.

When the characters keep noticing how hot the other person is, even while in mortal peril or the midst of the worst argument ever. This is everywhere and I hate it.

Christ, I’m a snob.

“I want you to throw me against the wall and make me regret all my life choices. Now would be fine.”

What makes me finish a book? In the main, intelligent characters with genuine agency, and if there’s sex, consent is explicitly stated in the text. Even the enemies-to-lovers, ass-slapping, fight-while-we-fuck stories need to have consent baked into the plot.

Actively agreeing to ridiculous sex is damn sexy. “I want you to throw me against the wall and make me regret all my life choices. Now would be fine.” Having had sex I regret, that I didn’t entirely plan on having, I know what I prefer.

The Commuters

June 24, 2021March 19, 2023 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Paris, 1903

When is the next train due?

Seven minutes.

Will we have enough time?

Yes, only hurry. This way, behind here.

Is this safe?

Of course not. Do you care?

Have I ever cared?

I’ve missed you so.

A kiss first, quickly.

Mmm…you changed tobacco.

Actually I did. Your brand.

You’re even more delicious. Come, further from the light. Over here.

Kiss me more. I never get enough kisses from you.

We never have time. If I could only have you for a night. An hour even, alone.

To get undressed.

Yes. To kiss you everywhere. To touch you properly, feel your skin against mine.

Time for you to do everything to me you’ve ever wanted.

This is madness.

It’s enough.

Hush, footsteps…alright, they’ve gone. Andre, we can’t keep doing this.

But how else can I see you?

I’ll rent a room. Somewhere that people won’t care who comes and goes. You know I have money. It’s not impossible.

It’s not safe.

This is worse. This is scandals and inquiries and your whole life and mine gone to ruin. For seven minutes of scrabbling in the dark, like a pair of blind—

Hush…they’ve gone.

Andre, please, let me find us somewhere. One night. Somewhere in the north end. Or right out of town. Rent a cottage, arrive separately. Take guns and dogs and say we’re hunting.

We’ll talk about it later.

There is no later. There’s this, and this again, and never anything else.

Don’t leave. Michel, I’m sorry. I’m frightened and I’m sorry that I’ve got nothing more to give you. I’m sorry that it will never be enough.

Stop. If that’s all you’ve got to say, let’s stop talking.

Kiss me again.

Mmm…come farther now. Hurry.

I can barely see you.

You don’t need to see. Just touch me.

Oh my…is that…all you?

Don’t you know how I ache for you every moment we’re not together?

I want you in my mouth.

We can’t. Not here.

I must. Just this once.

Agree you’ll see me elsewhere. Tell me you’ll be with me, if only for a night. Or I don’t know that I can ever do this again.

Don’t lie.

I mean it. Promise me one night together. Or I’ll walk away right now—

Don’t. Don’t ever say that again.

Well then?

I promise. We will be together. Not just like this but truly together. Whatever you desire. Only say you’ll never refuse me.

How could I refuse my heart?

One more kiss. Then let me have you.

Yes. Only hurry…

I’ve wanted to do this for so long. Every time we meet.

You’d better start or you’ll be waiting again…oh…Andre…oh, love…what is that you’re …how can it feel so…oh yes, touch me there. I’ll spread my legs for you to reach…yes…yes…yes, take me right down…oh, I’m going to…oh yes, suck it down. Yes, take it.

Well…I never knew you had such talk in you.

You wait. Wait till we’re alone. When there’s no one to hear us, judge us. I’ll tell you all the things I’ve ever wanted to do to you, love. And then we’ll do them.

Yes. Find us a room. I promise, I’ll be there.

Do you still love me?

More than ever. I’ll be tasting you all night.

I hear the train.

What about tomorrow?

What about it? You know I’ll be here. Quick, kiss me one last time…now go. Carry on with the crowd. I’ll leave after.

I miss you already, darling.

Tomorrow, love. I promise.

a love story (cut-up #1)

June 23, 2021 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Nothing to do but surrender,

take it,

and because he could not cry out,

There seemed no end to it,

thoroughly gasping,

around Ed’s

and the motion and

“So could I.”

Truly breathless, unresisting

his worst and his best, his heart and his body’s lowest cravings.

oh, my Valentine…

(2021)

[a found assembly of phrases from the editing file of a short story]