hi, i’m woods & i am a copaganda addict
Structural energetics, pt. 4
I was addicted to copaganda. Still am. I’m sober, since the spring. I traded the desecrated sex of SVU for sacred sex on Quinn. But we’ll get to that later.
Copaganda helped me upregulate my nervous system just about 24/7 while I tried to finish my dissertation. I was up almost 24/7 for a very long time, using caffeine - namely Diet Coke and Dunkin’ Medium Iced Coffee (black with extra caramel), Adderall (which is prescribed and there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just a stimulant), and EDM and showtunes to get me through.
All the while, I wasn’t moving from my chair. I’d stay there for days, weeks, months at a time - my body crumbling and decaying all at once yet so slowly in a way that was almost imperceptible. I couldn’t move - I had to finish my dissertation.
But the thing about dissertations is that when you are trying to go all Roger from Rent - “One Song, Glory” - and prove in one paper (let alone, *at all*) that you are human, when your chosen discipline has no point of reference for such a thing, you’re gonna have a bad time.
And so I stayed. I stayed in that physical economy of (non)movement. In that frozen physical economy; the occupied flow state of Flow State University.
It wasn’t until I said NO (which you can see in The Choreography of Gender on chthonic circus’ YouTube or hear in Pan’s Lament on the haunted woods on SoundCloud) and started playing outside of discipline that I was able to unsettle the settler epistemic economy (Ruíz, 2020) within my body.
In “terrified,” the first poem of the Lavender Libretto and “the purple notebook” chapter of Sunflower Moon, I talk about how the closet sediments and cements inside *all* of us - no matter who we are, what our orientation or identity, we are all always already performing (all the world’s a stage, all the men and women merely players).
But what about nonbinary and trans people? In the translator notes of Lecoq’s Le Corps Poétique (The Moving, or poetic, Body), a foundational physical theater and commedia dell’arte text, the difference between (a) play and (to) play is noted. In my work, I talk about this as the difference between play and performance. After “terrified,” “comp het aftercare” discusses this idea of performance, as does “pencils down.”
This idea of sedimentation and cementation connects to many different audios and videos of mine, but particularly stands out in the first chapter of the Neuro*Trans* Theory-Methods Package.
There, I discuss how my fifth concussion in 2018 ‘unsettled’ the brick walls that existed outside of my brain and made it infinitely harder and, honestly, almost impossible, to perform within neurotypism and cisheterosexism.
There is a lot here about cognitivism (part of neurotypism), the entwined nature of ableism and settler colonialism, the ways that ableism still distances itself from neurotypism and cognitivism, and language such as covidiots and the resurgence of the R-word, and grasping onto rhetoric about intelligence and being smart within even covid “conscious” communities. We won’t discuss that now.
Through songwriting, somatics, and energetics, I recently realized that this sedimentation and cementation is just ice. Honestly, I only realized that whole frozen flow state thing when I wrote it two seconds ago.
The way we exist within settler movement economies is choreographed to make colonization easier - to train us to sit in cubicles and to perform, to produce, for capitalism.
The remainder of my post is my résumé for this discussion - it’s a lot, so we’ll pick up with actual content on the next post.
On tv at the time of résumé
Mondays
NCIS
NCIS: Hawaii
Tuesdays
FBI
FBI: Most Wanted
FBI: International
The Rookie
The Rookie: Feds
911
911: Lone Star
Alert: Missing Persons Unit
Will Trent
Wednesdays
(Anyone who knows me knows I never missed my Chicago Nights)
Chicago Med
Chicago Fire
Chicago PD
Thursdays
Law and Order
Law and Order: SVU
Law and Order: Organized Crime
Elsbeth
SWAT
CSI: Vegas
So Help Me Todd
Fridays
Station 19
Fire Country
Blue Bloods
Sundays
Tracker
The Equalizer
Other
NCIS: LA
NCIS: New Orleans
NCIS: Sydney
NCIS: Tony & Ziva (haven’t watched but is on now)
Bosch
Bosch: Legacy
The Bear
The Good Wife
The Good Fight
Flashpoint
SEAL Team
The Guardian
The Mentalist
Rizzoli & Isles
The Closer
Major Crimes
Body of Proof
White Collar
Burn Notice
NYPD Blue
Hill St. Blues
Rosewood
Bones
Drop Dead Diva
Castle
Elementary
Scandal
All Rise
Burden of Truth
Boston Legal
Damages
For Life
Only Murders in the Building
Death and Other Details
For the People
The Resident
Revenge
The Hardy Boys
Nancy Drew
The Morning Show
The Afterparty
L.A. Law
Ally McBeal
St. Elsewhere
ER
Numbers
Code Black
Psych
Hawaii Five-0
Original Hawaii Five-0
Leverage
Leverage: Redemption
The Newsroom
West Wing
Madame Secretary
The Diplomat
Scorpion
Bull
Saving Grace
Magnum PI
Sue Thomas, Private Eye
Quantico
Cold Case
The Catch
Catch Me If You Can
The Ghost Whisperer
Medium
Crossing Jordan
In Plain Sight
Elementary
Without a Trace
CSI: Cyber
Unforgettable
Graceland
The Good Cop
And, last but not least at all, Rookie Blue, one of my gay awakenings
But not Grey’s Anatomy because in 11th grade I came downstairs to watch it and it stressed me out so much I had some sort of cardiac event that landed me in the hospital lol