Slices, Moments, Making it Back
Invitation, impermanence, preciousness
So here’s something maybe you didn’t know:
For the last three months, i’ve been a professional box fort builder. This is because i’m a teaching artist and in September, i was offered a job — through a set of winding circumstances—at the lovely Filament Theater in Zhigagoong (or Chicago, if you want — i’m personally tired of colonizer names).
I had given up professionally on acting a couple of years ago; at this point, i don’t audition ever (it’s vile, in case if you’ve never done it before) and even though i was technically invited to be in this, i’ve been more skeptical of invitations for the past three years: in 2020, my fourth-to-last audition was an invitation by then artistic director Kurt Chiang to audition at the Neo-Futurists, a weird non-fiction/performance art theater company… and at that time (since 2012!!!), my dream job, one that i had auditioned for three fucking times (now four; my last audition was also for the company.)
I did not get the job (still have not got the job), but i DID get the nicest rejection email i’ve ever received that was incredibly validating; unfortunately, i was experiencing a long year of depression so one of the last three days, before we went into the 2020 lockdown was me drunkenly crying in a bar too nice, too crowded, and too familiar for me to be sobbing in it. Anyway, i no longer audition for things and i’m skeptical of invitations (i received in the last two years, three separate invitations by “friends” and Friends to audition, from all of which i was rejected.)
That’s for the best, ultimately. I don’t like to say it because an artistic home is something i’ve always wanted and an ensemble theater is something i’ve always wanted because i’ve always wanted to belong somewhere — i, a (mostly) uncompromising weirdo, do not often feel like i belong so an invitation (to audition!!!) seemed like the best i would ever get sometimes, far more possible than being invited because of who i am, with no barriers to me or gates kept. (it should be noted at this time that some of my favorite creative projects were through by unauditioned invitations: 1) at the Neo-Futurists, (invited by Kurt and also Lilly Mooney, both wonderful people); and 2) The Little Match Girl Passion, an experimental opera pictured below, which i was invited to move in by director Dado (who i am perennially too intimidated to talk to even tho she’s the friendliest person in the world; she once made a joke about forgetting who i was which is the most brutally i’ve ever been read. she quickly remedied this though by laughing loudly after seeing my widened eyes, almost hurt enough to cry.))
Anyway… professional fort box-building. I was invited to it through a teaching artist gig and then a friend—who i met through another show dated 2017 that i was invited(!!!) to be in— who turns out to have been one of the people in charge (i think, though, that he would laugh boldly at the claim that he was in charge.)
But so for the next three months… we built boxes. The show is accurately called FORTS!, officially in caps and an exclamation. It is essentially as such: a large living room, with lampshades hung from the ceiling and six couches of different textures and softness, surrounded by five pyramids, made of cardboard boxes, stacked impeccably by myself and the other guides in such a way that they invite wonder and, more importantly, they invite being knocked down, only to be reconfigured as living rooms, submarines, unicorns, and forts by participants; neighbors, campfires, rain, birds, waves all pass through in the soundscape. It’s only an hour long and it’s mostly for young audiences; we had children as young as one year old. There is an art to building a box tower in such a way that it is better to push over.
Yesterday was my birthday and i am 32. In May, i will be moving out of the Midwest—out of this area just to the southwest of the lake, Mama Michigan—for the first time in my life. This feels momentous and scary, even though my good friends and my partner remind me, again and again, that i can move back at any time. But, in all likelihood, FORTS! is my last show in this city.
Let me digress for a moment because that’s how i get to the point usually. On December 22nd, i went for a long walk after a friend’s birthday party and i, unsurprisingly, ended up at the shore of Mama Michigan near 1 am. where, in December, there is normally a solid sheet of ice breaking waves before they reach the sand, there is just water.
On the beach, there is a sculpture built from tree branches and other bits; maybe it was just put up earlier today, but it still stands. I look at the many small parts of it, tied together. It does not seem stable in the face of the world, the biggest world: a missile would incinerate every piece of this strange little thing; a sudden bout of hard rain would twain the thread holding it together at the center and destabilize the sand it stands on. An eight year-old could run up and knock it down. It was not designed to be knocked down, but i’m sure that the person or people who stood this up knew it would be inevitable: this thing will not stand.
This is Foster beach, which did not exist fifty years ago and it would have had a different name. It is not my favorite beach, but my friends usually gather here for parties in the summertime and it’s a fairly straight shot from my apartment as the crow flies — i simply walk east from my home and then don’t stop, passing through Asia on Argyle, originally a predominantly Jewish community, then one of the city’s original Chinatowns, then a little Vietnam; now, one of its two Vietnamese grocery stores has been demolished, making way for expensive commuter apartments and two previously empty storefronts have been filled with a new mid-range pizza place and an empanada spot. When i take the underpass from the city to the beach past Lake Shore Drive, i find these massive stickers on the wall:
We sit in the jaws at the mercy of something that no longer has agency, muscles, or even blood flowing through. The only deciding factor in how long we’re safe is time. The dead teeth loom like many small threats, offending our sense of security even though we’re passively seated, educating ourselves on the threat, even as time draws it closer to us.
My friend, Mikaylo, had an open mic at that birthday and i decided to read this piece, which is finnicky and filled with strange loose ends of thought, and i found myself connecting briefly with friendly acquaintances who then became friends. That piece was precious to me and now, when the night herons have gone back to Argentina or Florida, or whatever central American country they might have gone to, i think about how this year is the year that Mama Michigan did not freeze over and this is the year when the robins and squirrels did not go quiet with the months of November, December, and January; the grass did not cease to be green this year. The Palestinian people are being starved, murdered, and pushed out of their land for oil and real estate; tech companies are extracting the life from the Congolese people in exchange for minerals. An airplane flies overhead when i step out to have a cigarette; my friend Emma recently said that the best flying years of our lives are over.
The easiest times of our lives have passed, necessarily. This is how the world works — dinosaurs die, the lake is not meant to stop ebbing and flowing, nor is the box tower meant to stand.
The times that have passed, the people who have been lost are not less precious for their having passed—but their preciousness (a word which i currently prefer to “value”) has frozen in time; the preciousness they have does not accumulate, but is recontextualized through our current state of becoming. There is no route through which people and things from the past can create new kinds of relationships and connections; what they have left behind is, outside of mysticism, locked in stasis, waiting for our discovery. But the fact of their passing and that we are still here, writing and reading and talking and dancing, means that what is here accumulates preciousness. The robins are still here. The lake is still here. And they are different. And my time here is different now.
This is why it is important to give more love to what is in front of us. Because it does not need to be, nor will it be.
FORTS! performances last almost exactly an hour and when it’s finished, the space is usually an astounding accumulation of huts, beach houses, secret doors, sheets and windows. Breaking it to children results sometimes in tears, sometimes in moments of astounding destruction of what was deeply precious to them just a moment ago. Often, they’d try to extend their time in the space by hiding in boxes or just running in and out of the lobby.
The adults don’t care much when the show is over; a lot of them just sat on the couches and looked at their phones anyway (not all of them; a lot of them also played actively and that is delightful) Regardless, when i see these older folks sitting on the couches, out of play and bored in spite of everything, i’ll go over and tell them i need one of the couch cushions. When they stand and give me the cushion, i then hand it back to them and ask them to go add it to a young person’s fort (with the young person’s permission of course.) Sometimes, after contributing the cushion to a lovely unicorn, they keep playing. Other times they go back to the couch.
In small ways (because this is a small moment), i wonder what they have lost, what they have commited to no longer grieve, and in what ways this makes them numb. I wonder what i have committed to no longer grieve and what i am too numb to even perceive. I wish i could grieve what i cannot perceive, what i cannot understand, and what i do not try to preserve because i have given up on the preciousness of it. I still find that performance and theater give me so much because they are often invitations to be awake and alive to every moment, each slice of reality a brief little treasure.
I do not have a tidy bow for these thoughts; they are all ultimately wound up too strangely to produce a single thread that can be unwoven and in some ways this is just a response to the fear and excitement of moving somewhere else and finishing up a period of my life (i graduated from college in May/June of 2014). Nonetheless, this is the only place i have ever known in any deep way and as the world spirals and changes faster and faster, i wonder: What is precious to me here that will not be here when i come back? How can i give it the attention that makes it even more precious? How can i invite others to indulge in the lake and the herons in such a way that we will fight for them and resist the ongoing crisis of death worshippers and extractivists in the world?
I don’t know. I haven’t fought for much throughout my life. But that’s what this moment is for. To come back around and invite myself into the fold. Happy birthday to me.
Here’s what i’ve been reading+listening to this week:
“The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein. Look, i know that we’re all a little salty at that dumbass shit Klein said about Palestine like two months ago, but this is a thoroughly reported history of a specific economic and military strategy formulated by U of Chicago academic and literal scum from a chainsmokers lungs Milton Friedman, tested by military dictatorships in Indonesia and South America (these are the CIA-supported coups from the 1960s and 70s), and supported from start to finish by the United States military. It’s a deeply fucked up strategy that utilizes crisis to keep entire classes of people in economic crisis and then enforcing physical duress and torture to soften populations against national policy shifts. That will not surprise anybody, but there’s something very disturbing in how Friedman said something that parallels the most visionary community organizers:
”only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that criss occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
Not sure if it’s a helpful read strictly speaking, but i am learning.
What it will do for you: get you to a local university’s econ department and tear out every page that mentions Milton Friedman’s godforsaken legacy.
Endure by Special Interest. I’m a year late on this because i started listening to Special Interest dogmatically last last year after seeing a reality warping concert by them at the Empty Bottle. With absolute slaps like “Midnight Legend", deeply emotional tracks (“L.A. Blues” and “Herman’s House”), and pits of fury that grab your hand and drag you into fights with them (“Concerning Peace”), it’s peak listening through and through.
What it will do for you: party hard and put a cigarette out in a bastard’s eye.
H.R. 3266 - Peace and Tolerance in Palestinian Education Act. Our actual government is deciding that they can enforce education curriculum in a colonized state and, specifically, that schools and teachers in Palestine can only say positive things about Israel. We live in a hellscape! Call your reps!
What it will do for you: remind you that Palestinian liberation is the key to unlocking liberation for us all! Fascism is here and it’s always been here, baby!!!
Thanks all! Have a beautiful week, free Palestine, love the earth, and love your people.
These words are windingggg their way all around my heart. Thank you for them and for you.