David Davis
Body scan
Mind: Head? Psyche? Or should I say brain, as I did for my last body scan? I never know which word to begin with when describing my mental state, which is really my emotional state, which is really my physical state. How can I possibly deconstruct the bodymind when the difference between here and eternity is a geriatric Manx for an alarm clock, followed by 15 minutes of light stretching and a cup of coffee?
As the dirty election approaches, the genocide bleeds on, and the world tracks for temperature rises of 2.6-3.1C this century1, all the little tricks I’ve learned from therapy, S/M, and surviving into my mid-thirties aren’t enough to settle me. Why should they? All signs point to very bad things in the very, very near future. But it’s almost disturbing to discover how much settling is still possible when my immediate physical needs are met (and at the moment, I’m very privileged to say that they are). (Oh yeah, I forgot about COVID. There’s that, too.)
Accountability time: I’m trying to write less about doom here on DAVID because I don’t think I add much, other than despair, to already-well-documented phenomena like climate collapse, fascism, disease, etc. I don’t think it’s useful, much less interesting—to me or to you, my beloved readers—to pop up every fortnight or so with yet more, I’m fretting, I’m panicking, and oh boy, am I ever scared! I wouldn’t say that I’m entirely at peace with the ways I’m which preparing myself for what’s to come2, but I do think this tendency undermines what it is that I am doing. I’m involved in North Brooklyn Mutual Aid3! I recently got a pen pal through the Prisoner Correspondence Project! I have made peace with death4! I’m looking into gun ownership! It also falsely inflates my sense of what agency I do have: there is actually very little that I can do in the face of all this, not least because nobody knows what’s going to happen. Even the information shaping my expectations is limited, colored, and biased against what I can know and learn from the internet which is, famously, designed to propagandize and feedback loop me into compliance or usefulness.
Over the past few weeks, I learned that Aruba has a lot of cactuses because it’s an arid xeric landscape5, saw a movie about what it’s like to attend boarding school in the Himalayan foothills, and finally gave up on a book about quantum electrodynamics (though not without coming to a half-understanding of the concept of action within physics). Just the other evening, Jade was served a TikTok showing how cargo ships stave off pirates while passing through the Guardafui Channel. I was suddenly overwhelmed. “The world is so big!” I exclaimed. On this planet, there is a functionally infinite number of lives (human and otherwise) I know nothing about, in locales as strange and foreign to me as Mars. My understanding of the world is minuscule, as is my life. This isn’t to say that its vastness, or the future’s unknowability, means nihilism is an option. But how it all shakes out isn’t just not my business—it’s beyond my capacity. Almost everything is, except what I owe the lives around me.
Sinuses: I don’t know if this happens to any of you, but once a quarter I wake up with an insistent congestion that is suddenly and volcanically resolved by me blowing my nose approximately 50-75 times. What emerges is healthfully clear but just as satisfying to expel as the hot, green morass that comes after debarking a plane at the tail end of a severe respiratory infection. Anyway, it just happened again the other week and it felt really good. I wish it would happen, like, every other day. More sustained than sneezing or cumming and much more pleasant than puking, it’s the kind of bodily function that really makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something.
Left thigh: My carving is healing really well, thanks so much for asking. After various needles and a caning from my boyfriend, I’m taking a brief tolerance break from pain that isn’t brought about my newest hobby: the rowing machine. If you’re doing S/M as a masochist type, I highly recommend it!
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The world’s biggest producers of greenhouse gases aren’t even on track for our best-case scenario’s worst-case scenarios—more on that here—and that’s not to speak of the impending collapse of the main ocean current system in the Atlantic, which would have devastating global implications and which is increasingly likely to happen (if it hasn’t already, there’s no way to be sure).
What an ominous way to express the future.
Speaking of mutual aid, revisited a cool piece about Aileen’s, a hospitality space for women in the sex trade, in Federal Way, Washington.
If not aging or suffering lol.
This island (you know how I am about my islands), located in the Lesser Antilles, is indeed desertlike, but that’s only partially due to its climate (which is changing, like everywhere else); Spanish colonization brought massive deforestation, drastically changing its landscape.