Don't quit before the miracle happens!

If I tell you this is a horror dance number it still won't prepare you. That last move was so terrifying even the judge was like "Let go! Let go!" If you told me they're actually possessed I'd believe you.

The music is a remix of the song Mere Dholna from the Bollywood movie Bhool Bhulaiyya, a remake of the classic Malayalam horror-comedy Manichitrathazhu. It's about a young bride that seemingly becomes possessed of Manjulika, a dancer of the ancient royal court whose tragic death has turned her into a vengeful spirit, one who evokes the wrath of the goddess Durga Kali. In the iconic scene that is repeated across remakes, the groom and his family discover his bride dancing in the dead of night in a manic, disassociative fugue, wearing a moth-eaten dancer's costume and a face smeared in kohl, ash and vermilion. She's hallucinating that she's Manjulika dancing carefree for the court with her lover. The upbeat music is deliberately incongruous with the pathos and creepiness of the scene in reality, especially as it crescendos in the bride's head to the moment when the king decapitates Manjulika's beloved in a fit of jealous rage.

This specific number is by the all-male troupe B Unique, performed for the Indian reality talent contest Hunabaarz. It's a modern fusion based on Bharatnatyam that turns up the creep factor by 200% and is basically a showcase of contortionism and synchronicity. One of the most perfectly choreographed and executed dances I have ever seen. Truly incredible!

then I looked in the notes and y’know.

some people seems confused.

Why a shopping cart with stained glass? 

or This would be cool to shop with

or something about religion and NO

NO

THIS. Is about HOMES.

That style stained glass? Those diamonds? They speak to me, and they say “Townhouse”. and FANCY townhouse, at that. They say “City home, old home, a home that is RICH, a shelter from the storm and a safe place for a family”.

But on! a! shopping cart!

That evokes - to me - Homelessness.

The person on the street who had no other choice but to steal the best cart they could from a store’s corral just to have a way to transport the meager belongings that are all they fucking have in this world. And it’s NOT a home or a safe place or a shelter but it’s all you fucking have!

And this piece goes and puts them fucking together! AND NAMES IT.

The scientific versions of this make me feel very glad that I’m no longer a lab rat, as the life-defining version of this for me was when I was a young lab rat tasked with tracking down an extremely defrosted armadillo from Texas.

When the consignment of armadillo parts - decorously placed upon dry ice, in accordance with the finest scientific principles - was shipped to a young British scientist and summarily lost in transit, it was one of those academic problems. You know what I mean by that. That means: Problems that only happen to academics.

The late armadillo was too late. Despite earnest emails promising that it had arrived a few days before, this was meant in a sort of spiritual sense, and what you might refer to as the “material” aspect of the dead armadillo manifested many days later. This was the subject of some fraught discussions between the ivory tower and the US Navy, who said rather stiffly that they had shipped a dead armadillo in perfectly sensible dead condition to us, and had no idea why the American postal service had interpreted their instructions as “send the dead armadillo on a quirky little road trip and lie about it.”

Intense discussions about the dead armadillo revealed the US Navy had no sense of humour about Schrödinger’s Armadillo (“we sent you a dead armadillo, and have washed our hands of any downstream issues”) as well as their rather uptight announcement that they would not be sending us any more free dead armadillos unless we could prove that WE were not in the habit of carelessly losing them. The implication being that this important military armadillo corpse had been lost entirely because the postal service had received it in a spirit of unbecoming whimsy, and this was the fault of Elodie, lab rat and designated representative of the United States Postal Service. As the military arm of the imperial core are naturally the primary suppliers of high-quality scientifically reliable dead armadillos, this censorious and frankly ungenerous cooling-off was a topic of some consternation.

Elodie, a very young person at the time, who rather fancied the British postdoc who looked so enthralling in riding breeches, was thus tasked with tremulously arguing with the Navy about how grateful we were for everything, but how fresh armadillos were far more academically interesting, while we were on the topic, if they didn’t mind, and if they could spare another one, if we promised not to allow the mail to become whimsical.!

The academically interesting part of the metaphysical armadillo was eventually run to ground significantly after the point at which the dry ice had become academic. The state of the armadillo inside the box at that point was an extremely academic problem. The late armadillo had become so late that it had surpassed biological interest, yet had not quite entered the realm of palaeontological significance. It was, however, a stage of lateness that was officially Too Late. It smelled of an unusual kind of death, simultaneously pork and mouse.

As the most junior of junior lab rats, it fell on me at the time to sneak the box into the medical waste in someone else’s laboratory (as is only honourable.)

Melanistic fallow deer filmed by Jakub Wencek in the forests of Barycz Valley.

Now take this logic and apply it to things like ADHD, autism, clinical depression, and other less visible/divergent disabilities. You cannot think your way out of feeling.