Life can be a dream

​Sometimes I feel as if I am living in a waking dream of my own life. Social reality shifted around me as if it were a force field this past year, like I began again for a second or third time, that field shifting first in 2021 perhaps masked by the scale of upheaval around me.

Is this waking dream rather acute alienation? Or living inside a rubber mask of the devil's face?

Some meetings this week, trying to mend things.

A cobbler's terse hello and reluctant agreement, "I can do it, but don't shout at me" left me asking why would I shout at him? 

The tailor's claim "we don't have what you want here."

At the builders merchant, the cashier turning to the till screen at which point she says "I wish you were dead." 

 

A simple exchange and a smile at the pound shop "how are you doing today?"

Two things that cut through it all:

Proc Fiscal - Uhazsh music video (so of a present time but also deeply unalientated, a love story <3)

&

Aya - Hexed pitchfork review (thoughtful music journalism and some of the only writing on the UK trans backlash I've seen that gets to the core of what is at stake - the body and desire)

 

No matter the epoch, fear and disgust cling to those who manipulate reality in ways that aren't supposed to be possible. That's the dangerous thing about transition: It really happens. Plug a hormone into hormone receptors and the body changes itself according to genetic code it already contains. Dress a new way, change the way you move, modulate your voice, and social fabric shifts: People perceive you differently. Sufficiently advanced deviance might be indistinguishable from magic to some but it literally happens all the time. It makes some people very angry to suggest that reality might be more moldable than they've been raised to believe. It might just force them to consider the unendurable stagnancy of their own lives.

It is my birthday this weekend, the one I chose.