Shredder
Crush versus shred. You choose.
In a crush state, I am open to the full potential of the most loving people in the universe. I am full of the confidence of every single lover at their most heightened state of affection; wanting and caring, attentive and spread. It feels like universal light, and I am unfazed by its tendency toward religious cliché.
After a crush state, I invite the most hateful people and the most hateful aspects of everybody else into the parts of my body that want it least. Suck it up. Am I going to tempt showing my hateful armpit tonight or is that the kind of temperance I want to demonstrate a world of enemies? Either way a decision is made in nihilism. Because I hate everybody I am determined to create an environment for forgiveness, but only because condemning everybody to wont of absolution will force me to accept everyone. Make everybody despicable so I am forced to understand them, love them.
In a crush state. What was that you said?
It’s Pride Month so I want to raise a glass for the person who coined “I wouldn’t be caught dead in/at/with [something or someone that is probably not that despicable].” Definitely gay, whoever first said that.
“Eat your heart out” could also be gay, but it’s psychotic if you think about it for even a moment. The vindictiveness of its meaning tells me it was probably a straight-leaning or straight-adjacent person who first said it. “Eat your heart out” is something says if they ever get anything else they want after losing the first time. Queers never lose.
I’m not good enough for anyone. That’s what she said. Straight AF.
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My son has figured out a way to use the paper shredder as a toy. Tasked with shredding a stack of old business checks from when I did business shilling gay manga, he realizes the illogically sized sheets of checks do not conform to the width of the machine. He starts folding each oversized sheet of paper. Simple folds at first, but after something like 60 pages, he moves into primitive origami. He takes time composing odd figures and feeds a marginally three dimensional paper being into the easily-triggered teeth of the machine. After a while he learns new limits to the mouth of this machine. It won’t activate if the paper is too dynamic, but it will take purchase of any flat corner. He crumples the sheet, opens it back up, makes partial openings of the checks by tearing halfway through the individualizing perforations and feeds what would be the tip of the paper’s lip—the fulcrum of cupid’s bow. The machine grabs, and the paper is flattened through the shredder as it is pulled in. It gapes one last time before closing up to its original form. My son voices a character for each sheet’s demise. They’re dinosaurs, they’re monsters, they’re bad people, they’re food.
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I like to think our ability to be in love is the only thing people have in common that matters. That I fell over and over and over, and now do not ever want to feel that again, is my clearest indication that a) I have finally learned from my mistakes, and b) not wanting it is an illness. No one should feel this way. If I could just imagine the toy in the machinery of all of this incessant consumption, I could be the child instead of the story.
