Love for Sale

I wake up in Miami after 9 am, leisurely. I look at the time and turn back in denial to the other side. I want to go back to sleep. Alas, once I open my eyes it’s too late. I’m caught in between two states, tangled in a crazy berlinda of ideas, this sick game, and tantrum of the mind; repeated tormented thoughts of past mistakes, of trying my hardest to sort things out, to unveil subtle mysteries, and yet only losing myself deeper in the maze. One image’s gestalt leads into another. It’s useless as it is endless. The search is in vain. Things falling short of my expectations, leaving me nothing but an incredulous blasé smirk and a lost gaze of uncertainty. I imagine a stoner teenager saying DUDE WHATDA?–– The planet is burning, the images are terrifying. I remember this passage in the bible from when I was a child, saying that the world is going to end on fire.

Australia is burning, the video of a high-pitch crying baby Koala trapped in the top of a tree amidst the flames and smoke goes viral. Everywhere. Fires. In California destroying celebrities' houses. People praying for Lady Gaga's Malibu burned-down mansion. I imagine her crying performatively as she did in that Bad Romance music video, back from when I was still innocently immersed in the fantasy. Cashing in the insurance check to rebuild better — You go, Gaga! — Fires. High red flames in Greece as seen from a boat on the pristine blue waters of the Mediterranean, what a contrast. Forest fires back home in the Amazon hit a little harder. First, because contrary to the other fires, this one is a humid tropical forest, so the fire is intentionally manicured by men. Second, because that's the country where I was born. I laugh at the idea of the Amazon as home. I've never even been close to the Amazon. I laugh at the idea of calling Brasil home after so many years of living abroad. Brasil is now abroad to me. Bolsonarism made sure I don't recognize my country anymore, or at least underlying foundation problems are now resurfacing as the open wounds of colonization. The romanticism of thinking of Brasil as the country of the future, the amalgam of the world, of miscegenation as being the resolution of racial conflicts. “Racial democracy”, what a crazy totalitarian utopia the idea that we can all agree on a single colorblind reality, typically where denial and negationism hide, and for a while I innocently bought it, the idea that Brazil, or I, or anybody doesn't see color when we notice and judge every difference. It seems to me like every utopia is an innocent totalitarian dream in which people will follow a single script. Let's pretend there is no underlying problem here. Let nobody protest. Show some teeth, put on a big smile.

I really did believe as a child, things could be resolved with cookies and rainbows. Which they know (and they are many, and th have different names and motives, including innocent ones), so they try to sell the holy grail of acceptance and understanding under the brand of LGBTQA+ pink merchandise lines. The only difference from Nike is that it doesn't have a slogan, oh wait; LOVE IS LOVE. *-* (I guess mother Mary looks different now). As if the fact that I like to suck cock is determined by my consumption preferences, my fashionable glitter sneakers. That they are trying to sell me my sense of identity is something that has made me come to resent pink as a color. Pink makes me wanna puke. Ironically, it's just like back then as a little naive kiddo, when they forced down my throat all the "boy" stuff I had no interest for. Like those useless plastic green army men. I don't get the concept of toy soldiers, unless of course as a training tool to make kids comply in going to war and dying as heroes for some bullshit ulterior motive, hidden somewhere amidst the month of December in their agenda. I do not subscribe. I’m out. I'm not going down for this shit. I'm burned out, but I'm not gonna burn with the herd.

my (sometimes) spirit lady.

I think of all the golden marmoset quivering in fear, then screeching, their golden fur caught in the fire until it stops. An image of a phoenix rising from its ashes emerges in my head. It might be the thing that saves me. Smoke from California crosses the continent and covers the sky in New York City, where the people are busy talking on their phones. Where the MET gala's extravaganza is the talk of the town. Where even the people who are outspokenly aware activists who are not in denial of global warming are living another day like they are in denial of global warming (like me or anybody, in practical terms). What are they to do, realistically, other than little things? It's like how hypocritical or extremely naive charity can seem like a useless effort. Every time we speak we are cursed into being trapped in a dichotomy and that's not what we mean by it; to cause antagonization.

Why I am once again waking up to this? All of that and I haven't quite really awakened, but I can't just blackout again either. It's useless to try and navigate back to the realms of the images of the dreams still engraved in the back of my retina, that are quickly escaping under the mist of my subconsciousness – yet again, every day the same routine, like they are running away from me as if they were never there. My own invented? memories rearranged with sad projections of future past experiences. Renarrated scenes in farfetched combinations of mixed elements. Frankenstein coming to get me. A pot-pourri of bizarre imageries. Just the weirdness of it all–– WHATDA?–– and I can only, maybe, retain a poor snapshot, the type that catches the image during movement and is consequently out of focus. Overlapping shots in a confusing time frame. I want to go back and understand the encrypted message. I helplessly want to decipher the symbol, yet I can't get out of this maze. I feel nauseated. Out there everything is wrong, yet in my slumber I am safe. Or am I?

I gather the courage to get up. The wooden Venetian blinds covering the windows cut the light like layered and pilled paper slices. The penumbra of the room is comfortable for my waking eye. As if I took some valium to wake from my slumber. I'm gonna be a while. So I linger in bed, I hug the fluffy long king pillow in a loving embrace. The inoffensiveness of things that bring you comfort. How they never turn against you and never fail to serve their purpose. Their tactile reliability. I smother the pillow who won't complain, lock it in a deadly embrace, so tight I feel my own heartbeat pressing against the thing. As if I'm lending it life. Then I let go. I look up at the white wood plank ceiling looking for the natural shapes hidden beneath the paint. The fan's turning slowly and I can almost make out and glimpse at the shape of the slates but the vision doesn't last, it keeps swirling. The in-motion blurred image is hypnotically circling around its' axis. Its enlarged shade cast on the ceiling, swallowing the thing. There's a slight delay in the tempo of all the pivoting projected. I don't know how long I last looking at that live .gif image. I think of crystals of time. What do they even mean in practical terms? Another concept I can't grasp.

I snap out of it. I fish for my phone dug between the pillows. More MET Gala as I scroll down the feed on my social media account, above and under the forest fires, amongst other disasters. I'm so fed up with it all. We are so lost in the fantasy that we look like our own self-parody now (like singer Nat Natasha's name is a response to female pop singers stereotype, I thought she was an SNL character for a while). It's almost genius, cringe really is the word of the decade, as we become this shelve product disposed on a TikTok grid. More people commenting on the MET Gala (I'm ignoring the political outrage thread for self-preservation, it's too early in the morning) The outfits are a tacky deconstruction of things. It's meant to be iconoclastic (I guess!?). They want to subvert social norms for shock value, but the whole VIP structure of the party still exists intact. It turns out, consumption was the only thing capable of putting Guys in dresses. There are more people of color now. Like we were invited to partake in the fantasy. Look how inclusive, but nothing that actually matters has substantially changed. The neighborhood I live in, the whole city of Miami is gentrifying at a quick speed, and I am part of it, I'm replacing people, flipping what was their homes with nice finishes and up-to-date design with open spaces and some feng shui to orient the space, Marie Kondo to organize drawers and le Labo 3-digit scented candles. Well, at least I'm Latino, right? A white (?) Latino, but Latino. What does that even mean? At what side do i stand on the scale of social oppresion? That we have moved from one-drop-rule racism to colorism racism? That it can pervade and hide under pseudo-subtleties? That inequality and exploration will keep one being produced in not-so-new inventive ways? That it's a no-win game we are playing? PacMan is coming with his open wide mouth to swallow us whole.

I want to celebrate Beyonce, whom I used to worship, covered in gold, singing an ode, a hymn to celebrate the billions she has accumulated. She's on top of the world. Gorgeous. Flawless. But I can't help wondering, is that what she dreamed of? She's on top. She made TriBeCa (along with the trouble of writing two Caps within the word — a luxury branding indeed) happen or whatever, but is she satisfied? She can't be. No one is. I remember Chimamanda's stern voice saying in the middle of one of her songs; you can have ambition, but not too much, but does she have a –different– kind of ambition? Does she have to impersonate a contemporary version of princess Di handing out alms, drippin' candy on the ground, making the word peasants perfectly relevant and updated? Let them eat cake. I read somewhere that was an invention to further vilify Marie Antoinette, one she never actually said. (Burn the witches, kill the scapegoat!) All my disgust at her in middle school was heavily based on this entire sentence. And I see people I looked up to say it like it's no biggie in new updated ways such as "eat the cake Anna Mae", why is that so conveniently left aside? What does it even mean? No explanation seems to make it right, and in the world of cancelation, few dared to enquire about how uncomfortable, to say the least, this is. How unconfortable it is to address contradiction. Mainstream media turned the other way. Well, I'm not in favor of harsh condemnation, either right? What even is the outrage of morality? It's dubious as fuck. All my assumptions and inferences constantly falling apart. It's still all about money, what people are rapping about. I guess I expected more of Beyonce and that somehow is potentially racist me. Did I expect her to renounce her riches, to be more vocal about inequality, to donate more money to Africa? To not amplify late-capitalisms burning desires of accumulation? (More than she’s hyperbolically doing but profiting by doing it) Is she a saint? Does she have to be a martyr to fulfill expectations I didn't even know I had until she finished climbing that ladder and I celebrated along as she flawlessly escalated? She wouldn’t be Beyonce then if she hadn't played the big league game and abode by those rules. But what is she gonna do with all that gold? Eat it? Will that still be worth anything when the planet is burning like the about-to-be extinct golden marmoset?

I keep thinking of Beyonce as the apex, the zenith of the flawless diva. She dazzles me completely with her diamond spark, so I kind of resent her a bit, for feeling cheated by her sparkles, like I once was for market campaimgs aiming at me, or by the color pink as the representative of queerness. I feel dissilusioned by the never made promises of people I admire and unconsciously appointed as apostles for the newest-gospel, when we live in the time of the post-gospel.

It's how you feel towards a parent when you realize all that is wrong with you and go back in search of the source of trauma, the first rampage that sent you downhill, the wrong belief in which you build all your life assumptions on top as your foundation, until they come crumbling down such as the twin towers back on September 11. Fucked up symbolic image fed live. A mega-production Blockbuster free of charge. First falls you, then follows the self-projected image of yourself. All of that foreshadowing the death of reality (oh, God) as we knew it and the birth of narrative as the primary tool to obtain power (we are back to basics now, the force of the symbol). We thought science was simple, elegant, and objective, like a math formula, a game of equation, of finding perfect equivalence, but the underlying reality is that of decimal points, assumptions, approximations, the whole question that formulates the equation, and what kind of possible answers it leaves out. Partial truths, points of view, distortions. All of that has to do with our growing understanding of the subtle energy of the very small, behind nano-technology and quantum theory. The subtle power of observance. It's not that anything has really changed, it's just that now we see things differently and then everything opens up and it never goes back to being the same old familiar. It's an ever-shifting experience. So we are here trying to make sense of this melancholy, this sense of longing, of loss and mourning of our illusions. The castle made of clouds, to be seen, requires specific coordinates and a limited time frame, before the wind changes it's shape. The perspective is the precondition to see that “the beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety but also of variety in unity.”

The open possibility of multiple perspectives leaves me lost without perspective. (Why) is Kanye West (promoted to be) a genius? A man who condensates musical sensibility, raw talent, nourishing contradiction, and composing upon polarization. Could he be another attention clown that will jester like the famous drag scene in "La Cage aux Folles", so that things can happen right under our noses but we can't smell it because we are easily entertained? Fooled by the hazzle-dazzle. Does it matter that my references are all getting old and I can't reach the people who outta be reached by making the most appropriate up-do-date analogy? (which reminds me of Kanye dismissing Dr. King or Malcolm X as not relatable creatures of the past?) When God is dead and we see the rise of Nietzche's Uberman, in it's negative aspects, create egomaniacs with a sense of superiority so high that they belittle anyone in the margins, people who are victims, suffering with "no confidence" (to paraphrase Kanye once again), that they see nothing besides their own desires to possess, to take, are we not on the verge of barbaric pre-social contract society, in which the strong and powerful kill and take by force what it wants, without remorse?

I see now; fiction as the building blocks of reality. How I choose to connect the dots, how causality is not necessarily 1+1=2, how everything is and is not what it seems, depending on the point of view. How do we entangle ourselves in the mantle of reality before we are trapped in conditional reality? How do we organize and arrange data? To say it better, how are we organized and arranged by data to be harvested in labeled boxes and fixed categories? Before we wield our power, or illusion of power to that of being a pawn, cattle in a herd led by a shepherd called Algorithm. How we are as we are named/called/invoked (and things are they are named); How things are as we name and rename them; how we are as we name things — De te fabula narratur: About you, the tale is told– how I make sense of how I feel, and how hard it is to change how we process a feeling. Changing a feeling feels akin to a lobotomization, like self-manipulation. Is it's possible that in the process of sublimating things we end up being our own personal tyrants? A horrible parent who wants to care for the child within, but ends up traumatizing the kid by making it comply with rules and norms that will be later be debunked as far-from-ideal? If we keel channeling things, diverting the natural course and flow of the river, won't the river die? The tragedy is to think that we know anything and walk on the verge of the precipice, the white rose in the hand being what saves us. No affirmation is possible, only the right questions echoing, reverberating.

It's morning, but I've wondered for so long. Thoughts, dreams, visions, textures, temperature, smell, the myriad of feelings I need to make sense of, that Siddharta cleverly chooses to meditate as an escape, to cheat life by impersonating momentaneous death; that we call this oceanization nirvana. Orgasmus, the little death. The irony, sweet sweet irony of seeing truth only in the form of contradiction, in the tension of a rope in a Tug of War game. I get up, I make the bed. Square pillows first, then rectangular pillows piled up, I fluff the duvet cover and as I throw it, I see it glide in the air, hovering in slow motion. The third time I try really is a charm, as the mantle settles on the king mattress perfectly. I've got the swing, and occasionally, doing chores can be fun, so I do the same with the Throw, but then, due to it's lightweight it's not so easy, the airflow coming down from the ceiling fan gets in the way. I feel frustrated and stressed out as I move to each corner to stretch it out. Now it's time for coffee. I look at the Breville machine, the"clean me" light is on again, I grind the grains, make my double espresso. The floor already has dirt, why do I bother swiping? There's laundry to the folded, dishes and wine glasses to be washed and cleaned before I cook dinner. I look to the yard, to our beautiful forest, we are so privileged and I'm suffering from anxieties. Last night’s storm broke down a few of my heliconias and I'm pissed at how fragile they are. Their beauty easily destroyed. The broken branches. So many leaves lie on the patio waiting to be collected. They keep falling. Dirt accumulates. Never mind, ar this time, that some people don't have a roof over their head. Should I think of them to feel lucky by comparison? To be more grateful (which I truly, truly am, despite all these thoughts, and now I feel guilty for having them). Do we need inequality to assure ourselves that things could be worse? To make sense of who we are and where we stand?

The lies we tell ourselves to move on, a game of pretend in which we fake it until we make it (or don't). What makes anything true? The facts are meaningless without a narrative to organize them, without the pragmatism of syllogisms to guide us thru and show us the way, instruct us with the easy recipe of a simple equation, a step-by-step guide to be a good housewive in the smooth voice of Julia Child, floral aprons and everything. Little boxes. The urbanism of suburbia seen from above. The escape from mediocrity being success, number one on the podium as the prize for bursting your ass off, for being good disciplined Olympic athletes, for what? For swimming the fastest? What's the point? Why? Being adored or envied? Beyoncé wouldn’t be on Top if she hadn’t hustled, which is what immobile-me denies doing. To do all of that, to be the perfect circus monkey in order to be worthy of love and admiration. To say anything, to vent without being able to retract, to repent, to change course. Even worse, I'll be doubting my own words and disagreeing with many many points made just now. Why fall in the trap I set (for) myself? The tragedy of it all.

As a teenager I went to this very expensive Madonna concert in Rio, the tickets were half a month's salary or minimum wage, and I don't mean VIP tickets. Pyrotechnic light effects in the huge Maracanã stadium, huge prodcution. In the middle of the concert she pauses for breath. Lights go down. The times' square style led screens show images of poor kids in Africa, the dancers light little flickering candles and we all say a little prayer ?¡ before Madonna screams — READY TO ROCK BITCHESSSS– and the loud music and choreography is resumed. She does social work, right? I'm just a skeptic critic I guess. Lady Gaga makes no sense to me. Did she ever? That meat dress, those animals died so that she could impersonate a tacky Jeff Koons opportunist criticism. The people who dare to shine under the light of a good polemic provocation and use it as a way to self-promotion. Everything makes me cringe. The fact that it's genius, that in doing so they way for the world than I'd ever done here in my skepticism, yet the status quo is hardly ever really challenged. Some people say we have come a long way, that slavery is over, that Jim Crow's law is over, that this is the age of BLM and RuPaul's Drag Race, but I'm suspicious, I'm disillusioned, and amidst all the "progress" the planet is dying under fake autocratic leaders, who are not really leading, they are the frontman designed by lobbyists to hide ulterior motives of the real anonymous enemies. Some other victims are being preyed on, a lot more people are thrown in the margins.

In the news, I see and hear that hunger is back in Brasil, the enormous graveyard of covid victims, indigenous people being assassinated, criminal fires, a post-democracy as fake as the wizard of OZ, an empty shell. I can't really process the video of an old lady saying that she will share a plate with the family, two forks each, the same dish for lunch, and then for dinner so that nobody will sleep without eating at least a bite. To partake in this generous self-giving distribution, I feel distressed, deranged with awe and terror that people who have so little can be so generous when I have so much and feel lacking. The broken heliconias, the expresso machine. The country I was born in, the culture that nurtured me in what it could give me, and that, in spite of everything, I love. As I love the US, as I love the Americas, or this planet, as I strive to love everything.

Brasil is half a continent with over 210 million people, and for them to exist it’s contingent that we not only see them as we see fit behind our lenses, but that we listen. What it’s like to be Brazilian in the context of the world. How it's like to live in Brasil or Africa, or my displaced and dispossessed neighbors, anyone wearing another uncomfortable shoe. So that we can accommodate each other as a society, and preferentially not just as a localized solution for self-salvation such as charity. In this very specific sense, fuck the Uberman. Let’s not equate catholic guilt as a mean to ignore the cry of the weak and meek, to having love, empathy, and good consciousness. I think of "Regarding the Pain Others" by Sontag and how appropriate it is for this age of post-truth; framing and narrative confer upon images most of their meaning, and yet, how we, who watch from the sidelines, cannot grasp, imagine, understand what they really mean. So we feel impotent, sorry and comfortably numb. We realized that we are always implicated.

“So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent- if not inappropriate- response. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may- in ways we might prefer not to imagine- be linked to their suffering, as the wealth as some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.”

Here I am, pleading. Whenever I do this I feel like I shouldn't be that naive. That I should know better not to pretendo to know anything. That this partial truth or affirmation won't be sustained. I think of the movement of the Franciscans advocating for poverty and how they were then persecuted for heresy. How they were pawns in the crossfire between the Church and the Emperor, and the ones dying in the field. All the hypocrisy we have to face, theirs (forced down or throat) and our own in our naivety. The lack of truth, of someting to believe and die for, but also all there is to live and love for, and while I don't have an answer, a map, or a direction, I have all that is to have.

Hope.

The dreamer, thirsting for the shining heights, had first to descend into the dark depths, and this proves to be the indispensable condition for climbing any higher.