Valencya's Whims

Wild trucks, trucks in the wild

Dormitory Coffee Table // Deconstructed Outfit of the Day

I do not know why I feel the need to keep secrets. 

Well, that is not completely honest. I know I have my guard up for good reasons; I know I have been burned. I know where I come from and how to survive in unfathomable circumstances by digging a small hole that only I can fit through. I’ve found my way out via unenviable actions, and I know that someone who knows too much is someone who can hold something over my head. I know that having something of my own — truly just mine to have and to hold — is intoxicating as much as it is sobering. 

I think some people move through the world wanting to be witnessed entirely. They peel themselves open at dinner tables, in parked cars, and they word vomit or trauma-dump or yap until they can be at peace. They confess and confess and confess until there is nothing left inside them that has not already belonged to somebody else. They give it to someone else, perhaps to relieve pressure. I have never been that way. 

There are parts of me I protect with almost animal instinct. Not because they are shameful, necessarily or objectively, but because they are alive and tender things die when touched too often. I learned that early, that precious things can be mutilated. I am full of shameful wont, and never learned how to share it productively — no, I mean openly. 

The crux of my issue is the fact that my shame is also a living thing, a hungry thing. It is a perverse cannibal, salivating at the thought of fucking and consuming me. I will not pretend to bravely confront this deep-seated shame, because I am incapable of not harming myself for it. Harming myself over harmless secrets. How very masochistic of me.

I am not a fantastical person, and I do not live in delusion. Delusion is worse than a lie, sometimes, to me. Delusion asks you to participate in your own deception. A lie at least knows itself. A lie can sit plainly in the hand and admit what it is. Delusion performs innocence. It wants to be believed. I want to be believable, but I do not perform delusion — I hide honesty. I have told many lies, but I have not often been delusional. Yet lately I feel dangerously close to it.

I feel like I am slipping through a thin seam of a silk garment, wiggling through an interstice of emergence and suffocation.  I cannot tell whether I am becoming myself or disappearing inside something I am ashamed to be. Sometimes a lie, a secret, or an impulse feels like the only way to clear an airway when I am in desperate need of a breath.

My secrets, though at times seemingly comedic, tragic, or romantic, are not always glamorous. My secrecy feels like survival. It is, at times, the safest place I know. And it is something I do not have to share with anyone else. Sometimes privacy is the only thing keeping you from dissolving into other people’s expectations of you. It repulses me when I think too hard about the prospect of someone who can see through me.

I have tried and developed a strong defense against my impulse to hide things behind my back. Having friends who do not judge me for my ill-fated impulses, or my shameful desires, or my history, has been integral to how I have learned to open up. I have, indeed, done what I have in order to fulfill some distinct self-sabotage because I think I deserve it.

It must be true that somewhere deep down, I think I deserve to be shamed and vilified. I willingly submit myself to shitty situations, only to attempt to suppress my involvement in them afterward, as though careful concealment can exonerate my participation. As though secrecy can cauterize consequence.

I have had friends who shamed me openly or behind closed doors. My dearest friends now will say their truth to my face, but only if I share my own. But why does honesty feel like pulling molars out with pliers?

Maybe that is my Scorpio moon. Not to sound too woo-woo about it, but I do think my cosmic assignment has influenced the architecture of my emotional life. Not in the shallow way people tend to speak about it online — all seduction and the dark divine femininity and siren eyes across a crowded room — but in the more pathological instinct to survive emotionally by remaining partially unknowable. To keep one room for myself and leave it untouched. To lock the door before someone else rearranges the furniture inside it.

I do not think I keep secrets because I enjoy deception. I think I keep secrets because exposure feels irreversible to me. Once someone sees something, they touch it. Once they touch it, they change it. Sometimes gently, without even meaning to. But they change it all the same. And maybe I resent that.

My secrets feel like part-weapon and part-oxygen, like held breaths inside me as I handle a loose-pinned grenade. I do not know if that is healthy — I think not. I do not know if it is loneliness or control or fear dressed up as my impenetrable intuition.

I only know that secrecy has become, for me, a method of maintaining psychic continuity. If other people possess too much of me, I begin to feel exposed and fragmented, distributed across conflicting perceptions and partial understandings. Once something is spoken aloud, it no longer belongs solely to the speaker. Once I invite in perception, critique and opinion inevitably follow. This is especially frightening when I am forced to come clean about my grotesque disguising. 

And then what becomes of me? My chest split open with a blade sharp enough to puncture the bones and tissue I spent years hardening around myself. My interior rendered observable, interpretable, and consumable. 

Summer in Oregon.

Willam Jam, Pink Trees, Waterfall Hike, Peach & Menthol

My tag, CYA

My old Jeep Wrangler. Interior / Topless

Simon repairing his truck. Accidental spatter!

I am still dreaming of you. You’re nestled in a cushioned chair, with its dainty flower patterns crushed under your thighs. You are hiding a book behind your knees, you are scrunched up, your brow furrowed. I want to know what you are reading. I want you to read to me.

In my dreams, we are still in love. We are in the same state, same house, same room. You are flailing with a pair of curtains, trying to latch them in place after opening the window. The wind is restless, you are obscured by white lace; you become the wind.

You appear in a yellow kitchen – not canary, but a soft eggshell that tiptoes toward sunny – like the rising sun contained in a room. You are pouring coffee, your bangs are sweaty and sticking out sideways. I am barefoot, sticking to the floor as I move toward you. Your back is to me, spine slightly curved, and your neck is a magnet to me. Yes, your neck, fuzzy with peach hair and a bug bite you got last night.

And then like wind, you are gone.

There is a rule on the dream-plane that I am not allowed to touch you. I don’t know who made it, but it feels enforced. It frustrates me more than the absence itself – that even in the only place I can find you, I am still held at a distance.

I wake up crying sometimes, on the way to work, still half inside that world. Then I gather myself. I tell myself I did this – that I can also undo it, if I try hard enough.

I keep a firm grip on reality when I can. I write letters I will never send, poems that live and die and mildew in Google Docs. I stretch, meditate, read, smoke, cook, drink water, speak when my throat allows it.

But I cannot talk to my mother right now without mentioning you. Really, I mention you to almost everyone I meet, as if explaining my own absence. I am trying to account for the way I have become unmoored.

I know better than to tell you any of this. I know better than to confuse longing with truth, or memory with invitation. I tell myself this is what it is: an imagination that refuses to close.

it seems as though

the year has not yet

found its solace

poor, bland thing

i should count my blessings

i have all my fingers and toes

two legs, eyes, tits

it seems as though the only

love that i can stomach

is feined and mesh

i should call someone

tell them my misdeeds and ask

for confidential advice

how am i to live without her

if i wrote her what i know

that i love — would turn over — could follow

her without regret,

what might she say

would i be absolved of this

grief — could she accept this

confession — will she say

it is too late

too far

too much to dream about

Perversion is one of those words I keep coming back to. It has a kind of wonderful syntactic mouth-feel — the way it rolls off the tongue, indulgent and a little excessive — but it also carries a conceptual weight that makes me linger and hover around it. It invites fine examination: for what it names, what it accuses, what it distorts, what it frees. I am a curious cat willing to die for art, if necessary.

I watched John Waters’ film Female Trouble on Easter Sunday in the small theater located inside the Portland Art Museum. Since then, I've become infatuated with his work.

I had known vaguely what I was walking into. I’ve known John Waters mostly through references — through aesthetic, through reputation, through the idea of “filth” that surrounds his early work. The filth genre that often hails his other films starring Divine, his muse, such as Pink Flamingos, is one that has intrigued me to no end. I have searched before to try to find his films on streaming services, but rarely are any available. Perhaps its scarcity is indicative of the controversial content of his films. To be fair, his early works are unrated and also dated to the ’70s, which makes finding anything like it difficult if you are not a Criterion member. Point is, when I saw the film was up for viewing on Easter, I had my heart set on seeing it.

And wow, what a gruesome watch!

Female Trouble is abrasive, chaotic, deliberately excessive — almost cartoonishly so — but underneath that exaggeration is something bulging. Like many other works from Waters, the film is meant to make humor directed at the idea of morality, of taste, of all the things that make America horrible. Divine takes the role of Dawn Davenport, a juvenile delinquent turned underground celebrity. Dawn is, I think, best known for her cha-cha heels, criminal record, modeling career, acid-burned face, and quick ascent into notoriety via murder. Dawn is one of my favorite female characters ever.

Dawn embodies every moral panic about powerful women — sexuality, vanity, violence — and she stacks them on top of each other until they collapse under their own weight. Something is fascinating about the way the film treats crime and beauty as interchangeable. The idea that notoriety itself is glamorous. That being seen — no matter how — is the ultimate goal. Dawn doesn’t just want attention; she needs it, feeds off it, is ultimately destroyed by it. But she is not the villain in this film — no, she is our heroine — no matter how objectively horrifying she becomes in the film (physically and famously). The film never really punishes her in the way traditional narratives would. It celebrates her, even at her most grotesque.

It’s as if Divine herself is consuming and eating away at the Dawn we see at the start of the film. Divine is, well, iconic — completely magnetic, completely uncontainable — as she always is. There’s no attempt to make her digestible. The performance is loud, physical, and hyperbolic to the point of bewilderment. It resists subtlety entirely. Divine and Dawn (as one and as the other) harness their socially rejected characteristics — fatness, overly caked-up makeup, big teased hair, expletive tongue, hypersexuality — and empower themselves.

If you’re one type of audience, you cringe and gag at this. If you’re another type, you are tickled by the boldness, by the inherent reverence of watching a mad woman build her empire on the shit that others would never touch.

The filth in Female Trouble is visual, piercing aesthetic-wise, but it’s ideological as well. Surely, the love of filth and bad taste is exemplified by the strike of a big bold woman in tight clothes, bulging out and striking the eye out of passersby. But the film also oozes anarchy in the way it rejects structure, rejects redemption, rejects the idea that characters need to be likable or even coherent. It’s messy on purpose — offensive on purpose. It’s not asking for permission, and it’s definitely not asking to be understood in any clean or moralizing way.

I’ve been consuming as many interviews of Waters as possible since seeing Female Trouble (and soon after, Hairspray). One thing that I love about watching him in interviews from the ’80s and ’90s is just how much confidence he has, even while sat with a square white man late-night show host who does not understand his work in the least, and doesn't want to try. These interviewers constantly interrupt, assume, and distance themselves from Waters. It irks me to see these guys sat with one of the most intriguing creative minds of the time, and they ask no interesting questions and hardly listen to his answers. But John Waters? Well, he is cool as a melon, perfectly suited and mustached. He is level-headed and eloquent and witty — he is defensive of his work only when he has to be. After years of being called disgusting in reviews (sometimes in ways that are genuinely funny), he’s embraced it. If something is meant to shock you, and it does — then it worked; and I am sure Waters would agree.

There’s something about filth — especially in film — that feels important for unexposed audiences. Not just dirt, not just grime, but filth as a category. Filth as accusation. Filth as identity imposed and then reclaimed. Waters doesn’t simply depict filth to get a rise out of mothers and fathers; he elevates it, drags it into the spotlight, and makes it undeniably apparent. He asks: who decided this was disgusting? And why? And who cares even if it is?

Waters wants you to sit in that discomfort, and to laugh about it.

It makes me think about how often “filth” and "perversion" has been used to describe bodies, desires, and whole groups of people. The word itself has been weaponized — against queer people, against women who refuse to behave, against anyone who exists a little too loudly outside of what is considered acceptable. To be called filthy or perverse is to be pushed out of the frame of what is considered human, proper, clean. And yet, in Waters’ films, filth is a super power.

Divine, especially, feels like a kind of living contradiction — grotesque and glamorous at once, excessive in a way that feels almost sacred. There’s a refusal there. A refusal to be palatable, to be softened or made legible for comfort. She is not a starlet in the way of Marilyn Monroe — more like Godzilla.

I like Godzilla more than Monroe.

I keep thinking about how “good taste” has always been used as a gatekeeping tool in art history. What is refined, what is worthy, what belongs in museums versus what belongs in the gutter. And then someone like Waters comes along and collapses that distinction entirely, insisting that the gutter has just as much to say — if not more.

I am alone in my apartment writing as quickly as I can before the sun goes down. When the sunset has been drained from most of its ephemeral color, I will cease. I need the last moments of light to smoke. 

On the deck, I give myself a dose of medicine: tobacco and hash smoke, April air, the faint hand of Spring lifting my chin to the sky. I put on my headphones. I move my arms in circles. I could take flight. I could lift off the ground, float above the city, perch on the steel beams of the Fremont Bridge. There, I could balance on the beams. Here, my feet stomp too hard on the boards beneath me. I might fall from this second story. 

I’ve tried everything to shake the weight of this emptiness. I’ve busied myself with work, travel, new faces, new routines, new objects — each one a small attempt to outrun the ache in my chest. But it lingers, stubborn and metallic, like clouds I can’t push aside.

I slide the glass door open, fleeing back to my hiding place inside. And yet, even in its heaviness, there is Solange, swaying with me to a strange kind of rhythm.

I am dancing, caught and entranced by the beat. I take off my socks, go barefoot, crack my toes as I bend them. Again, my arms and chin lift, my hips drop into a pattern of figure eights. As I dance, I let myself hear her song as if it were the first time.

Solange is singing to me:

I tried to drink it away I tried to put one in the air I tried to dance it away I tried to change it with my hair I ran my credit card bill up Thought a new dress make it better I tried to work it away But that just made me even sadder I tried to keep myself busy I ran around circles Think I made myself dizzy I slept it away, I sexed it away I read it away Away, away, away, away, away Well, it's like cranes in the sky Sometimes I don't wanna feel those metal clouds

I feel the echo of every attempt I’ve made to escape. I see myself in the small acts meant to erase the hurt: the crowded bars, the empty bottles, the avoidance of eye contact, the impulsive purchases that promised relief. Solange names it all, and in naming it, she reminds me how normal it is to fail at forgetting. 

How many times have I felt this way? I am urgently searching through the things that have helped me cope in the past. I try to write it away. I try to smoke it away. I try to dance it away. Each time, I feel a momentary relief, a shallow lift, and then the weight returns, reminding me that these clouds are not mine to command, but to inhabit.

I recognize the futility in flight. I, too, have sought recovery in novelty and distance. I have thought that changing my surroundings might change the way I carry my heart.

When she sings about cranes in the sky, I picture those relentless, hovering steel shapes starting at the ground and stretching into the sky. I know what it is to feel something impossible to move or outrun. No amount of noise, motion, or consumption erases it. Solange, I, too, can sense the invisible machinery suspended above this mundane life.

I tried to run it away Thought then my head be feeling clearer I traveled 70 states Thought moving 'round make me feel better I tried to let go my lover Thought if I was alone then maybe I could recover To write it away or cry it away (don't you cry, baby) Away Away, away, away, away, away Away, away, away, away, away But it's like cranes in the sky Sometimes I don't wanna feel those metal clouds

I am perplexed by myself. I let my heart slip away. I watched it move to California and yet I feel none of its warmth within me. 

Solange’s song maps the ways I, too, have tried to anesthetize myself from heartbreak. I see my own reflection in it: the late-night walks to nowhere, the empty chatter meant to fill the quiet, the relentless motion in hopes it would stir something inside me awake. Every act of avoidance, every desperate attempt at “moving on,” is captured in her voice, gentle and relentless at once. 

Solange names it, all without actually naming it. The it I feel is so different and yet in parallel with her it. I am dancing, and she is singing. And suddenly she is dancing with me, and I am crying. She gives me some permission to feel — permission to stop pretending that effort alone can cure grief.

The effort I am exerting to find myself as I am away from heart ache is in not in vain. I want to find the perfection of contentedness again. I want to free myself of the dread. But I cannot right now. I cannot fight it. But still I try. I try and I try. And I fail. And it’s fine.