Being hot inside system collapse

beauty secrets of entropy

Yesterday I went to my dentist’s office for a yearly routine cleaning.

While in the bathroom before my appointment, I noticed a stack of pamphlets for Botox, cozied up next to a figurine of a pantless Santa Claus, ironing his red trousers.

I imagined the cheery-ass hygienist put in charge of office decorations this year, randomly choosing Domestic Santa as opposed to the Skiing Santa or Golfing Santa figurines bedecking the waiting room, thoroughly unaware of the irony in this washroom still life - there shall be no wrinkles around here, people!

While having my gums jabbed at, I kept thinking about all the spaces in which I am subtly and not so subtly influenced on the topic of ANTI-AGING. Particularly as a woman, as a femme-forward body in society, regularly attempting to decondition my sense of value from what I look like.

I was thinking about how much I now focus on fine lines on my face and on everybody else’s.

FINE LINES - a refrain I remember hearing in my very wee youth blasting from the Olay, Noxzema, and Revlon commercials on tv. I hear it now like a song lyric from a nursery rhyme. Ubiquitous, everyone knows it, and it’s baked in from a time before you can remember.

And now the rhyme has come for me. The spectre of the thing I’ve been subliminally shaped into being terrified of has shown up in the mirror, and now I think about Botox everyday. I hate that, I want my attention back. I want to give people their lines back without me noticing them so much.

I want my attention to be more preoccupied with my feral-body experience, one that is wholly disinterested in the denial project of anti-aging campaigns. 

On the drive home, in a frenzied swirl of both inspiration, and tired indignation I dictated a kind of manifesto into my phone notes. Now it lives as a graphic carousel on the internet.

I want a framework for hotness that doesn't depreciate with age.

I want beauty that includes entropy.

I want a beauty that isn’t in denial about being a hot-blooded animal, writhing in its own vitality and simultaneously on the daily path towards decay.

I want a beauty that isn’t afraid of its own dissolution. I am vain for a body unbothered by the wane of perkiness, freshness, dewy ewwie infinite youthiness.

I want to unbind my attention from the societal pressure to preserve, to freeze my face and my body in time, further distancing myself from the truth that I am raw meat, baby.

Made of Earth materials, designed to unravel, designed to droop and sag in the slow motion free fall back down to the ground where my cells shall return.

A love story at a glacial pace.

To be clear, I’m not against aesthetic augmentations like fillers and botox. As we’ve established, I think about them all the time, lol. But I am thoroughly critical of how my attention is preyed upon by a billion dollar industry, hellbent on indoctrinating me into the very colonial, patriarchal project of severing people (mostly women)  from their bodies and their body’s most inherent feature—ephemerality.

I want to be more comfortable with aging, with the necessity of cellular degeneration, so I have more of a stomach for other systems in collapse - ecosystems in collapse, financial institutions in collapse, relationships, material resources, etc.

I want my sense of what is attractive to expand to include it all — to obviously always swoon for the dew, but to also make room for what is weathered, what is gnarled and warped and falling apart. I wanna be absorbed by the beauty of what is really here, what is really happening. In my body and on the planet.

Does sitting with the truth of my aging body make me more aware of planetary unraveling? Maybe! 

Not to say accepting forehead trenches on my face should be conflated with accepting the disappearance of sea ice. But I am interested in expanding my capacity to sit with painful, complex realities of changing landscapes and entropy.

Entropy is a scary word, but really it's another way of saying ‘you get to be here because something else ended and made space for you.’ Cellular degeneration is inextricably tied to the promise of something else magical and wonderful and beyond our imagination arriving in the void. We cannot be afraid of the void. We cannot be afraid of endings. Honoring endings is, again, really about shapeshifting. Which get us fired the hell up to wring out every morsel of juicy juice from what it is we have right now. I will never be this young again, as I write you right now. I will never be as smooth, taught, tight, plump, fresh-faced and whatever the fuck as I am right now. Let me tear into it then! Let me sink my teeth all the way into this moment then! Look out, I’m motorboating the most out of this right-now-ness. 

I do not want to be lulled into believing that I can hold onto something forever. A something that is designed to teach me profound truths about reality if I let it have its way with me. If I do not flinch in the face of entropy.

A question for ongoing personal research: what if my hotness didn’t depreciate with age? What then would hotness have to be made of in order for that to be true?

If you want more spicy content on how the beauty and wellness industries are absolutely colonizing our minds-bodies-spirits, may I suggest anything written over at The Unpublishable. Grim, but fascinating.

As always, open to your thoughts, your questions, alternative perspectives, poetry anthology suggestions, etc. 

BIG WRINKLE FISH LOVE TO YOU (that’s what my dad used to call a turd in the toilet btw, wrinklefish bahaha)

xo M

PS. IT IS GOOD TO BE BACK, PEOPLE! I’ve let the newsletter field go fallow for a few months but I’m delighted to feel the zesty return of inspiration. Thank you for being here with me, it’s a dang delight beyond delights. 🖤

image credits:

1. ANA MENDIETA, IMÁGEN DE YÁGUL, 1973/2018, from The Paris Review

2. from this tumblr blog, artist unknown