when an object doesn’t have a box to
sit in it spills and slips
and slides into places it’s
not supposed to be like your
mouth or my mouth or the dirty
pavement or into the salt
of a stranger’s sweat
you walk the freeway overpass between the train station and your front door and practise your spitting. you fling your saliva onto the pavement only to step right into it a couple seconds later.
right now you are thinking about how to make something that is timeless. something you can spit out and step back into over and over again, and you will never say, not this again, we are so sick of this, we have had enough.
how do you write a timeless piece about something so demarcated in time?
Scan the QR code and direct
your phone camera to this text
→
you go see Rocky Horror in drag, passing around a flask to suck between scenes. and then the flask is empty and then the movie is over. you buy a pint of whiskey and fill the flask up again. you are in the red leather booth at a 1950s-style diner where you empty the flask back out into vanilla thickshakes hidden under the table.
• 1 scoop vanilla ice cream
• 1 cup ice
• 1 cup milk
• 1 shot whiskey
there is no more thickshake. you all leave the diner and stand on the pavement taking turns spitting into the palm of Miso’s hand. you haven’t seen them in a long time. you want to show them how much you missed them.
you scroll instagram in March and someone posts a story like: I won’t be having sex for six months anyway but they are being ridiculous, they are being dramatic.
throughout his life, Félix González-Torres created nineteen works made of candy. piles of individually wrapped sweets, some weighing as much as 2,000 lb, some as little as 42 lb. pushed up towards the corner of a room or dumped right in the middle of one. the piles are barricaded by nothing so they spill and sink. each piece of candy is individually wrapped: sealed away from what is familiar. sometimes the candy-spills are replenished. sometimes they wane until there’s nothing left. Gonzalez Torres died of AIDS in 1996.
• unwrap a piece of candy
• put it in your mouth
• discard the wrapper by throwing it on the ground
• while sucking, think of the inside of your mouth
• think of the inside of every mouth in the world
there are two ways to look at the avant-garde. the first being that it is a way to isolate, the second being that it is a way to build community. section people off for not “getting it”. build a new kind of love: its sticky core thumps with the very few people who “get it”.
• COVID-19 is NOT a sexually transmitted infection
• but COVID-19 can be passed through saliva
• and kissing will likely be involved
• so
• transmission during sex with someone who has COVID-19 is absolutely possible
a year ago, Maurizio Cattelan installed Comedian at Art Basel and it sold for $120,000 USD.
it became very famous very quickly. Comedian was perpetually swaddled in crowd. people elbowing through bodies to get a closer look at a banana dressed in plastic.
you think about digging a tunnel
to take you somewhere new to
look at something new
those that have nothing to do
with you stay that way so easily
buy a banana and pay for it with your debit card
scroll your contact list
and delete the dusty numbers
you talk to your psychologist about being sad. it’s not one of those revelatory sessions that breathes like breakthrough. it is slow. the vowels come from your gut. you think you are confusing sad with lonely. lonely with horny. you do not tell him this. instead you promise you will make yourself rich dinners once a week and eat them alone as though it is nurturing, as though it is choice.
two days after Art Basel opened, David Datuna ate the 120,000-dollar banana. he walked up to it and took it off the wall and bit into it and called the performance piece Hungry Artist.
• buy a banana and pay for it with your debit card
• start walking home
• unpeel the banana
• take a bite
• swallow it
the house is so quiet now. from the other side of the room you can hear my throat go gwulmp like a marble squeezing past a glass eye.
you take a bottle of arak and a pitcher of water into your bedroom and pour one into the other and little by little pour the combination into your body. you dance and then you vomit and the next morning you are too embarrassed to tell anyone the extent of it. it’s not that you did these things but rather that you did them alone.
• grab 1/2 thumb of ginger
• take little bites and chew
• do not swallow between bites
• you want to eventually transfer all the ginger from being solid in your hand to mushy in your mouth
• spit it out into a small metal bowl
are you thinking about self-fulfilling prophecies too? and history repeating itself? and parallels? and what all those things would look like if they were shapes? do you think the first one would be 〇, and the second: ➰? and then third would be | |, naturally.
you wear white singlets under all your clothes now. the armpits go yellow and you do not use clorox when doing your load of whites. you have something to prove: look what my body can do.
put a ken
doll against
an action man make
them kiss get
things heated still
it will be a straight
line kissing a straight
line they don’t bend how you
want them to they
can’t soften with spit and heat
• put a stick of gum in your mouth
• chew it for thirty seconds
think back to that diagram that promoted mask-wearing. it went viral on twitter and instagram. grey 3D renderings of people standing face to face against a black background. in the space between them: a blast of spit particles. half the particles are blue, half are red. the two colours intermingling. the space between them softening with spit and heat.
you cut your jeans into jorts and wear them for ten hours straight even though the thick and tight denim muzzles your crotch and makes it gasp for air.
• unwrap a rubber
• discard the wrapper by throwing it on the ground
• while sucking, think of the inside of your mouth
• think of the inside of every mouth in the world
the phone line is so quiet now. there’s nothing left to say without seeing one another’s face. on the other end of the call you can hear my throat go thwewrm like a wet foot sliding into a rubber slipper.
Scan the QR code and direct
your phone camera to this text
→
• put a stick of gum in your mouth
• chew it for thirty seconds
• swallow it
you don’t remember your shirt getting wet but it is so you take it off and tuck it into the back of your jeans. you’re kicking and jumping and falling into shoulders. touching miscellaneous biceps. rubbing against denims. someone tilts their head back and now the beer that was in their mouth is in the air and then it is in your hair.
• eat a tablespoon of first pressed olive oil
you want it to be this easy
for something to slip
around like the time
you went to Josephine Falls
and watched a girl step
on wet stone with her bare
feet and fall
onto the slime and then
into the water
an eight-year-old in Monterey County, California needs to pee but she is still twenty minutes from home. her mum pulls over and grabs one of her one-year-old’s diapers. the eight-year-old stands concealed by a large jumper while her mum holds the diaper underneath her. the mum throws the diaper in the bin and they keep driving.
you go on dramatic walks to pass the time. when you need to piss you walk all the way back home even if that means having to hold it in for an hour and a half.
• go out for a walk and look for a discarded food wrapper on the ground
• try and picture the person it belonged to
• think about their mouth on and around it
• think about picking it up, but don’t
Scan the QR code and direct
your phone camera to this text
→
club kids wore their eyelashes thick and their brows sharp. diy & avant-garde & very queer & very rooted in community. they were club promoters who dressed up and pioneered the scene that existed between the late 80s and early 90s. club kid culture peaked and dipped and mirrored the timeline of the AIDS pandemic. as a part of Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s promise to restore the quality of life, he cracked down on Manhattan nightclubs. an egg separated from its shell. yolk slipping, sliding, unprotected.
• i usually go for tequila but it’s up to you
“this” is almost “over”. you scroll ebay for leather pants to wear out dancing, even on the weekends that line up with the heat waves.
strap your harness on to buy a coffee and a banana. club kid culture will come back because you walk the freeway overpass and fling your saliva onto the pavement only to step right into it a couple seconds later.