Spinoffs, The Jimmy Carter Impersonation, and Other Unravelings

My days are dervishes, we are all eating each other’s tails, or maybe just dipping in and out of our non-bodies like you would a noon-sunned pool. Example: I refer to the Mother Spy turned double agent now as M.S.S.M for Mother-Spy, Spy-Mother, then Ms. Sem, and then just Sam. All names should have half-lives.

If we don’t see each other at the Fast Food Fanatic, she leaves a ketchup bottle beside the cash register to let me know. Soon it is another language: turned towards says, “I miss you,” turned away, “We need to talk,” a cheeky 90 degrees, “I want to eat your pussy in the smaller of the two supply closets,” and so on. We utilize angles until graduating to objects employed grammatically by their vertical placement, the bottle in various states of undress. Dot teases me but leaves the bottle be, carefully working around it for days like a sacred relic.

Sam asks and I say, “Looking back, there’s only one reason I started the FFF. At a pride parade, The Jimmy Carter Impersonation carried me on a peanut shell through the streets shouting ‘Lesbians for everyone!’ There was something about having this hero emerge from the shroud of myths and hoist me up like a baby on a river that, well, it just did it. The crowd smelled like hotdogs and much later—after all the other fake bodies had hollowed themselves out—smelled like tomatoes.”

I want to wrinkle up all the birds into one black ball of desire and TV actors.

I want to observe the scandal of sun on grass.

I want to use a 3D model of myself as a dildo.

I want to pass it down the generations, the heirloom dildo of myself.

I want red blood cells of orchids.

I want tomato palms.

I want the ponds to act like flocks of sparrows.

I want to understand every form of braille that dirt can speak.

I want Sky Brother to love me.

I want The Mother to love me.

I want The Magician to love me.

I want War Cogito to love me.

I want to go where the others went.

I want to be an informer.

I want to betray my organs with schemes within schemes.

I want the schemata-stigmata.

I want my vowels to hold water.

I want them to want more than that.

I want them to act like ponds acting like flocks of sparrows acting like light.

I want Clytemnestra’s ghost to just shut the fuck up already and let me sleep.

I want to break all of her vessels.

I want all of my personae to make love and to love me back.

I want my personae to crawl back in my void cock.

I want the mailbox.

I want the whence-they-came body.

I want underwater cake.

I want the delicious body.

I want to vandalize the delicious body with orchid blood.

I want mercy.

I want so much mercy.

Baboon Moon had a spinoff show called Gibbous Moon. The Mother acted in a few episodes, wrote maybe half a season despite her slow march towards planetdom, with regard to mass. Critics called it “voyeuristic.” In one episode, The Jimmy Carter Impersonation—playing herself and credited as JCI for the first time via that same-old half-life—finds a crack in her apartment wall and watches Sky Brother and The Cogito Kid act out an entire back catalog episode of Baboon Moon in real-time. There is a moment of catharsis in the inner episode that does a kind of orchid bloom in the outer.

A sugar glider calls me about a design opportunity in Newark. I am not in Newark, I am not a graphic designer. “Full benefits,” was how the conversation started. I don’t know what a sugar glider is. I marvel. I lapse back to tomato speech. I say, “I’m unraveling.” Sam, always the Mother Spy, stifles a laugh on the tapped line. I love her for it. I ask the sugar glider, “How can the Animal Kingdom be so vast that I haven’t even heard of a common pet?” The sugar glider utters a thoughtful “hmm,” then she says, “You know, think of it like this: dirt braille is the parent language of tomato skins. You can really hear it in the vowels. Or, put another way: continuity is a synonym for sacred. Look, all I mean to say is have faith,” and that is that.

 

MYTH OF THE HUMAN DONUT

Let me ask you this: where were you when Baboon Moon first broke your heart? I was reading The Mother’s script where Sky Brother sacrificed himself for the Magician so that the Magician could escape and love and be a body so filled with non-bodies, she was bursting.

What I offer is duress. The kind that chases the storm from restaurant windows, the kind that prints out skinny white labels and they all read ‘history-memory.’ I wake up with The Mother Spy knotted in my legs and her soft face pulling at the air near my hand. Oh, Sam. Something sparks. It burns in her exhaled air and then in my fingers and then it’s consuming all, raging, and I’m sucking universes through her cunt, the black hole of me, like wings opening on the inside, like they’re alight in the flickering yellow beams of my solar plexus.

When the world returns to rest, she whispers, “There is the sea and who will drain it dry?” trailing her fingers in the valley of my breasts.

“What? Agamemnon?” I ask, “the play?”

“Oh, just something I knew as a little girl,” she says, still dreamy, her voice a subterranean chandolier, as all roots are, all rootings. “There is the sea, there is the s e e, there is the c-word, will you drain me dry?” She smiles and falls back to sleep.

I’m caressing her cheek and there it is again, the same spark, burning at my fingertips, and even as I turn my palm over it’s trailing black ember letters through the digital light. I’m writing. I’m transported, for the first time in a month of months, I’m actually writing.

Mother Spy mutters something in her sleep hours later and makes soft disappointed sounds when she doesn’t find me with her radaring arms. Finally, she comes over to laugh softly as I peck, reading glutinously over my shoulder whenever she isn’t pressing her lips or teeth into my neck. I know Sam will repeat the script back to The Mother verbatim, that she is in fact already snapping pictures with her earring cameras, the light cascading from them in chaotic flashes too bright for mere glint of morning sun. This is the function of The Mother Spy, after all. I don’t care. I mouth my new name for her as if underwater. Sam.

Let me tell you this: the best way of making art is to put dirt in your belly button, way down in the tickle-weird navel floor. Put a tomato seedling in the dirt and make your way outdoors. Preferably naked, how else to feel the wind on your matted pubic hair? Then, lay back and write like you’re on fire. Write until the sun is out of sight and all that’s left is the black shapes of pine trees tracing out a heartbeat on the EKG of Sky Brother. The next day, plant the seedling near a heavily walked road or path.

I love how my art voice is, all twisted like our insides. The Mother used to tell me the Myth of the Donut Human for a bedtime story: that we’re all straight lines and there’s a hole that goes right through the center of our body from mouth to sphincter. There’s even a nice word for it—toroidal—and a variation on the myth having to do with auras and heart electromagnetism, which she would deride of course, but not without a certain fascination. Really though, we are infinitely-knotted-donut-humans-and-leaking, she’d say. I’d say it too. I’d say it through my mother mouth. I’d yell it through my sister sphincter.

 

SUN VOWELS

I’m practicing sun vowels. Hibernation, sun vowels, hibernation, sun vowels. Like how seasons are one way of breathing.

“Behold the fragrance of words.” That’s Zohar smell. That’s me holed up in my room with the original sexists playing pin the leaf on my skeleton.

Playing write my TV script with only a dried flower for pen and the doppelganger body for gardening. What I’m writing is Woman in the Dunes meets a Drano infomercial. After all that, at least I have an arc now: Sky Brother translates the Zohar. It’ll work. Everyone goes in for this kind of thing. Planes pass overhead for so long they are the next plane.

The pace at which the Baboon Moon organism digests is incredible. My episode is stuttering out its TV light in less than a week, already just an afterimage of blue credits sewing the world together with its lightning. The director took some liberties. While eating couch ramen, Tif and Sky Brother watch an episode of their own show through one of those curved CRT TVs that somehow feel green even when they aren’t. The inner episode is, as far as I know, a brand new plot: Sky Brother—played by the same actor that’s watching in the outer—meets War Cogito in a bookstore. They do that Humphrey Bogart snooping. They do that gendered movement. They pull on a book that is not a book and through this mechanism discover an underground bunker where three novelists have been living for decades. The authors are miserable, disheveled, and earth-crazed, brimming with regret and catacombic dust. Collectively, they’ve only produced two manuscripts that managed to avoid literally being used as toilet paper. Both of these saved pieces are horrendous, though Sky Brother finds the fantasy novel strangely enthralling. Deer spirits dot the pages.

External images act on me, transmit movement to me, and I return movement. That’s the Deleuze jitterbug. That’s the end-credit tango. May my womb birth only these white letters.

Despite the deviations, I’m still thrilled. My first ep. in forever is damn decent. The Purloined Voice even calls it “wonderfully post-signifying” in its weekly Baboon Moon dedicated column, “the start of something great.” The Mother rolls in her non-grave.

Speaking of, at the market, Sam meets with The Mother’s agents to exchange secrets over the watermelon display while I pretend not to notice in the next aisle, buying wine and tomato juice and other red liquids. One has a crawfish tattoo perched on her shoulder peaking from under her shirtsleeves. That’d be some new symbolism for this crowd. I don’t catch the significance and Sam turns from the subject when I bring it up postcoital, which is in fact also precoital and antecoital due to my current activities involving two hands and a tongued asshole and a brief space for affirmation and a warmth of orchards and a dynamism twirled through the false air. I want to introduce my Foucault’s, but it’s too soon. They’ll have to chorus on the outskirts for a while longer. They’ll have to pendulum as the desk toy that they are, crashing into each other with their predetermined pulses. Sun vowels, hibernation, sun vowels. The thumb and the forefinger searching each other out in the caverns of my Sam. I make a mouth of myself. I swallow all.