Pope Joan @fidgety@hackers.town

“I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.”

― Roger Zelazny, The Courts of Chaos

I am full of good coffee, mediocre intentions, and bad ideas.

I need to isolate myself from the rest of the world, or something’s going to implode.

I’ve deleted the Mastodon app from my phone, and I’m blocking it on all of my browsers. I don’t know when (or if) I’ll find my way back home. If you need to get ahold of me, I’ve already told you how to do it.

There are other things I need to do, and this has been a longtime coming.

(As in, this post has been sitting in my notes since Thursday, and I’ve only worked up the courage to post it today. I’m not really invested in today’s events, but I also hate drama, and I definitely don’t have the energy for it right now.)

https://youtu.be/DtQOlErK2bI

The first time I heard this song was on the last day of June, 1997. I had waited through the end of ninth grade (and then some) for “The Fat of the Land” to drop, and the reckoning had finally come. I had been excited for other albums, but this wasn’t Radiohead or even Bowie. This was pure aggression: Palatable enough to dance to, but with teeth so sharp that it drew blood.

I remember exactly what I was wearing, too. And I stood outside of the Southern Park Mall, looking up at the kind of blue the sky only turns when its warm enough for thunderstorms, but hasn’t buckled under the full weight of summer yet. I slipped the CD into my humble Discman and pushed play. My eyes rolled back and closed, and the world went from smelling like warm concrete and the food court to ...hot pavement and blood.

I don’t remember what happened, exactly, but, if I had to guess, I had probably gotten into a fight with my platform sandals and lost. All I know is that I had fallen off the sidewalk, my shirt was torn, and my elbows and knees were bleeding.

I was fifteen, and I prayed to whatever possibly lived in that deep blue sky that nobody had seen that. That’s the only thing that matters when you’re that age — that you’re eternally cool, and nobody gets the chance to think otherwise.

Right then, the song picked back up from the bridge — that savage tire-squeal crescendo, that slam of the brakes, and that final impact into that side of your skull: “Smack my bitch up! — BAM!” Your whole body flies forward through a windshield. It’s a closed head wound set to music.

In that moment, I didn’t care if anybody had seen me. That’s what this song does. That’s the only reason why it was called into being. If you fall off the sidewalk at the mall and scrape the shit out of yourself enough to draw blood, “Smack My Bitch Up” makes damn sure that you’re too much of a badass to even blink.

It turned out that a group of older boys had seen me go down, and while they did start to laugh, one recognized me from the Barnes and Noble Speaker Incident™️ that had happened a few months prior. They shut right the fuck up and offered to buy me coffee instead. I did nothing to stop them, either. They didn’t have to know that I wasn’t actually a badass.

I was never a badass, after all, but “Smack My Bitch Up” taught me how to pretend with intent. It still has that effect on me. “Fat of the Land” has never left constant rotation — in fact, I wore out the original CD long ago — but this specific song has been the soundtrack to a lot of stupid shit. Most of it probably wasn’t good, but a few of those risks paid off in the end. My nature is nothing if not timid, so I often forget how brutal of a scrapper I am, underneath it all. “Smack My Bitch Up” is the best kind of nudge.

Well, that’s enough nostalgia for ...ever. Thanks for reading, if you’ve gotten this far. I just woke up and haven’t had coffee yet, so I’m sorry if it went all over the place and doesn’t make sense.

https://youtu.be/iIMVbL1rq5c

Say goodbye on a night like this, if it’s the last thing we ever do.

The Cure - A Night Like This

https://youtu.be/FT1agIo1e5U

Just a reminder: I have a federated writing notebook. It’s fragmentary at best, and it’s not meant to be entirely coherent. If you ever have an ache to read surreal word experiments, this should serve your needs.

@fidgety