She’s the One
The Anti-Kissinger Election
There are mornings my mind wakes me up early and I deny this. I will lay in bed tossing and turning until some other part of me has deigned this the right time, often defined as some measure of social acceptability. I feared for a long time that I was already unusual enough in this world: I didn’t need one other thing and wandering around in the darkness didn’t seem to be helping either.
I have this unyielding desire to fall in genuine, authentic, requited love with Brie Larson. I have no idea where this particular desire came from, and why, and it came drawn from some set of experiences I may have forgotten or ignored had I no mind to keepsake or remember, and so fondly drawn from the heart. But I look at her name and I feel the tickle of innumerable kisses dance along so many parts of my skin at once I want to call it my soul.
Earlier this month I found myself trying to describe what a mythic love feels like. I have grown old and mature enough to understand that there are parts of myself which go far beyond my conscious understanding. When I was younger, for instance, I used to listen to a singer sing a love song and believe that having a crowd of listeners implied that I had to have been wanting a woman in order to connect with that song. That literal understanding of why a singer may be popular was later replaced for me by the sense that we were listening to the song of the creator; the sense that the singer had created the song was the true draw. This seemed true, though nobody seemed to want to care, so I discovered that dancing and sweat can be a lot more fun sometimes.
None of this has to do with Brie Larson, per se, but does so towards the sense that we are all living our lives trapped within social prison with an unlocked door. But then I got older and saw the phase married couples seemed to go through in which a plateau of sacred personal security seemed to dawn upon them and they went exploring; the good ones went exploring cognitively and spiritually, and usually not too fast, to protect that discovery for both of them.
This implied questions and answers. Instead of searching for love as a physical understanding of beauty I went searching for the woman whose searching and senses of discovery I liked. This made a lot of sense. In graduate school, this is canonized in a thesis, and I even began to ask why we select our theses.
Earlier this month I found myself trying to describe a new sense of masculine love to a female friend and her married sister, both of whom had taken warm affections towards me, in desire of that way. The experiences of the previous two years had shifted my understanding of what women seemed to want, and thrown into reaction much of my liberal education of gender equality politics.
Brie Larson will probably not love me by any cosmic circumstance. Brie Larson will probably never personally know me. Brie Larson will probably never meet me. But I would be lying if I didn’t say I have a sincere belief that the equality and accountability of gender and identity roles wouldn’t be stronger if she did.
I sat down to write this on a chair across from Sephora in the King of Prussia Mall watching a young black woman struggle with her baby. Neither of the photogenic pair wore masks and the struggle was not abated by the woman’s mother nearby next to her. I watched with fascination until suddenly I felt the realization of experience. I’m unknown here and yet aware of my magnetism.
To belong to beauty need not be belonging to some privilege class, to separate oneself from the self-distinguished masses, to push upon others the projection of character we wish ourselves to transcend. These feelings yield hatred and conflict by forcing separations against ourselves and broadcast into the world. These feelings close down the world of dance and movement we need to live.
This creates real inner beauty. It is telling to feel my presence in the world and the change in the passersby as they connect with me feeling these thoughts. It opens my mind up to their beauty, their conflict, their wants, their desires, of which they came to this place to discover, identify, engage with, and satisfy. It is far more thrilling to simply play and dance with these passersby, to let their experience absorb mine, and lead me to an enlightenment of who they are. It is noteworthy that there are locations I have found that violently oppose such discussion of self on the interpersonal wordless wavelength of human being.
But I try to let that go, and invite myself to be invited into the places of their moment into where they want me to dance, play, and be. To some of them I wish they would pick me up and play me like an instrument. Those women seem to be few and far between in this world, and men must really carefully watch their motives, which ruins the experience. Such is the unlevel playing field of male romantic intrigue; love in the time of inequality. That these are so embedded in the entirety of the spectacle of American consumerism is the problem. It is the cross-cutting platform opportunity of a Brie Larson woman, Brie Larson.
The playlist of my phone shifted to one of Bruce Springsteen’s homages to classic Rock and Roll: the Detroit Medley, otherwise known as the Devil with the Blue Dress song and Good Golly Miss Molly. Every classic of Rock and Roll leaves no question who wins the battle between the devil and the blue dress.
And therein lives our common humanity and distress of organized oppression.
You can see the soul of the woman in her eyes when they want to feel desire, and they will stack themselves up against one another, building the pressure, rather than cross the room for the man, their man, when the fantasy of their eyes have taken over. Oh, where courage for men takes on priority, as it does for me, you can be sure conflict among the women will follow shortly. Lest you believe that men demonstrate their patriarchy by speaking this reality, oh, be sure this is the man’s enlightenment to be realized and long, far suppressed in our mode of society. We men need to be rescued as much as the women do.
And in this follow the leader economy of ours nothing instills more fear and anxiety in men at large than their leader not being rescued by the woman.
In this Sadie Hawkins America the men wait for their Princesses’ Charming.
That that is so deep as to be transformative across all culture is the point.
