Play & Pleasure

For those of you who don't like grammar, but do like links to devastating short stories.

When Isa was still a baby, but she’d reached the toddler stage and was sleeping in her own bed through the night, I finally had a chance to kind of breathe and realize that I hadn’t done any serious writing, songwriting, or creating period since she was born. So I decided to start getting up at 5:30 every day to make time to write. Maybe they’d be poems. Maybe they’d be lyrics. It didn’t matter. I just needed to create again.

I put my little desk next to my bed, the same desk I write this on now, which was a desk me & my Abuela found on the side of the road, prepped for the dumpster. It looked like it still had some life in it, and it is solid wood, so we dragged it to our living room. Come to think of it we got much of her furniture that way – walking the neighborhood and dragging pieces home that had run their course in someone else’s life but were just beginning their run in ours. I remember once, when we brought home a couch with a pull-out bed, (which I slept on many nights – the one with the metal bar that ran straight through the middle of the mattress that sagged on either side, and no matter how you tossed or turned you could never stop it from gauging into your back) Anyway – after we’d gotten it home we found it’s hidden surprise – what must have been hundreds of roaches, big waterbugs, that had made a home of the couch, and as soon it was dark they just poured out of it. I ran away screaming. And Abuela stood bravely to battle. She clearly won because we had the couch for many years, and like I said, I, along with many others, slept in its secret bed many a night.

The desk became where she’d sit and balance her checkbook, which she did with alarming regularity. As an adult though it makes sense and puts me to shame. How that woman ran a household making $7/hour is a mystery to me but she did it, and she did it alone, and with good credit too. And we were never hungry, in fact, the opposite. Anyway. This desk has been with me for years and has seen many epochs. Both my own many faces and her own as well. I think by the time I’d started my morning writing practice again I’d passed my black and white phase so it had been stripped and stained the honey color it remains today. 

I kept up my 5:30 am writing practice as long as possible until a change in life circumstances switched up everything, including where we were living and who we were living with. Once it became just me & Isa, it became harder to find a regular practice for anything, though I think at that time I opted for a 4:30 wakeup to ride my Peloton bike and cry, because I had the self-awareness to acknowledge that as a single mom, those Peloton rides where what was keeping me alive. To be clear, I didn’t intend to cry through my rides, it just happened most days. Best believe that I’d get off that bike feeling like I could make it through another day, and that was the purpose. 

So the year of 2019 was the “adjusting to single motherhood year,” and 2020 was, well we all know what 2020 was, and 2021 was kind of like 2020, but now we had to go back to work in our anguish, and our masks, and 2022…the infamous 2022, the year the transphobic Governor and AG of Texas kicked us out of our state so I moved our asses to LA. I won’t get into that, that’s a whole mf book not just a podcast episode. But 2022 is coming to an end. By the time this episode is released, it will already be halfway through March of 2023. That’s wild. By writing this I’m a time traveler. Anyway, we’ve been in LA almost 6 months. Though it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like we’ve been here only a few weeks but I think that's because I’ve only had a few weeks to breathe and kind of plant my feet and look around. 

All that to say, we’ve been here long enough now and things are “settled” enough that I’ve revived my morning writing practice. It’s funny because when I first started up again I was worried. I wasn’t sure why I was doing it. I Worried that my time would be better spent getting the extra sleep or doing the Pelly rides again. I was worried that my Muse wouldn’t show up anymore because I had taken such a long hiatus. And I think that was the real fear. That I’d open up my laptop and have nothing to say. Thinking about that now makes me laugh the fuck out loud and probably anyone who knows me too. 

I think growing into an adult inevitably ends up putting too much focus on the “why.” Why get up and write? What purpose does it serve? It’s an understandable question. Time is both my most precious and my most scarce resource so whatever I use it for must be up to snuff.

But. Pleasure. Pleasure with a capital P is the purpose. Play is the purpose. To feel alive is the purpose. Because I won’t always be. And if I don’t feel alive while I’m alive then what’s the fucking point? 

That’s got me to thinking about Paul in Willa Cather’s story “Paul’s Case,” and that phrase, “kitchen odors” makes me shudder still. I viscerally relate to Paul. Somewhat dangerously so. There were days that I thought I’d end up like Paul because I’d gotten myself too saturated with the mundane. Luckily, my morning writing practice is an antidote, as are my guitars, and my APogee Hypemic, my Ableton Live, and frankly, this podcast. 

Here’s the definition of “play” from the book Homo Ludens – A Study of the Play-Element in Culture: “play is a voluntary activity…having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy, and the consciousness that it is “different” from “ordinary life.” Reminds me very much of Octavio Paz’s definition of eroticism. That it exists for the sake of itself. Which also reminds me of religious texts and the concept of being in the present moment. I’m not a scholar of the bible or any such western religions but I do remember reading somewhere that someone, maybe God? Said, “I am that I am.” And to me, that sums it all up nicely. “I am that I am.” So I fuck that I fuck. And I play that I play. I don’t fuck to procreate. I don’t play to make a buck. Though that would be nice considering the price of rent in LA.

I honestly never understood sports until I read that chapter on “the play-concept as expressed in language.” OF COURSE people love sports. Of course people love to watch sports. If you can’t actually play the sport, what's the next best thing? Watching someone else play it. 

I got an electric typewriter again. (It’s my third. I had two in the course of the last 20 years that I bought, then donated. Bought, then donated. This time I’m gna keep the mf and if I can be stuffed into a 1br apartment with a seven-year-old and hold onto the typewriter that is the size of a small child, you know I mean it this time.) I wanted to play with the feel of words again, the way they used to feel, before Google docs.

The author of this book also “[ventures] to call the category of “play” one of the most fundamental in life.” I would certainly agree. As would Paul from Paul’s Case, I dare say. The word play is even associated in different languages with concepts like shining and radiance, the movement of wind or waves, enjoying the moonlight, fluttering like a bird or flickering like flames, sex, strife, and even death. According to the author’s research into the etymology of the word play, the one thing that play is not, is work. He says, “the opposite of play is earnest, also used in the…sense of work.”  He then goes on to take two pages explaining the linguistic antithesis between play and work. Forgive me if I quote the whole last paragraph of this chapter but there must be no doubt left in your mind: 

Leaving aside the linguistic question and observing the play-earnest antithesis somewhat more closely, we find that the two terms are not of equal value: play is positive, earnest negative. The significance of “earnest” is defined by and exhausted in the negation of “play” – earnest is simply “not playing” and nothing more. The significance of “play”, on the other hand, is by no means defined or exhausted by calling it “not-earnest”, or “not serious”. Play is a thing by itself. The play-concept as such is of a higher order than is seriousness. For seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well include seriousness.

Mic drop. To this entire fucking culture. Imagine what a different kind of society we’d live in if the question wasn’t “So, what do you do for work?” but “What do you do for play?” Imagine a society that saw play as a given, that assumed everyone had time for play. 

That would never work in late-stage capitalism because too many people be breaking their backs working for less than a living wage. Sigh. The Covert Capitalist Inculcation. Some day that will be the name for this chapter of human history. 

Check out the other weird shit I do for fun at adultpapers.com or linktr.ee/lunarviolet