Hard times, soft pants

Outwit the terror with trickster energy

That feeling? The hair standing on the back of your neck? It’s not just vibes, but an electrical storm that tastes like armageddon.

The fear is the anticipation. Knowing the danger is creeping up, behind the shower curtain. Maybe you can’t see it and you don’t know exactly what it looks like, but you can feel it.

That’s terror. A Hitchcock movie. Reality now.

If it were a sound, it would be the trilling of the cicada as it grows louder and louder before it explodes.

If it were a smell, it would be burned paper and singed hair.

A cantaloupe-sized pit in the stomach, tasting of iron and salt. Paralysis.

Photo by Luan de Oliveira Silva on Unsplash

It feels like we’re building to the climax, culminating in the worldwide “No Kings” protests on Saturday. That is, until Israel bombed Iran. Now, who knows if this one will have a sequel?

Don’t look to the psychics—they will tell you that we will see the outbreak of World War III before year’s end. Except this time, it will be tech and cyber warfare.

I am paralyzed. I can only write and seek answers on my glass oracle, my 2-D simulation.

Joseph Campbell would tell me it’s time to venture into the dark cave I fear, wherein lies the answer I seek.

Bayo Akomolafe would say it’s time to make friends with monsters.

Christine Ahh

would join Bayo in calling forth trickster energy. Like how Jamaicans rebelled through hyper-sexual dance and aggressive music when Kingston had the highest rate of homicide for any city in the Americas.

Or flamenco, which I heard recently described on NPR as “tragic ecstasy.” (May my memoir be described as such, amen.)

Or the Winchester widow building a house with doors that lead nowhere, stairs that end abruptly, and rooms within rooms, all to confuse the ghosts killed by Winchester rifles, whom she believed were haunting her.

Or the undergroud burlesque scene during Nazi Germany. (Once upon a time, I played a Kit-Kat girl in Cabaret.)

“Cabaret in the Weimar Republic.” Source: Carnegie Hall

Hard times require soft pants. Rage needs music. Fascism pairs well with sequins. I used to alchemize my PTSD by writing satire.

Trickster energy turns something inside out and upside down, like that rascal Puck. It takes sorrow and suffering, and makes light of it. It takes death and adds life.

Behold, trickster energy:

A tree stump uprooted one year ago to make room for a new road. Notice the life that has already sprung up around it, turning something new once dead into a home for new life.

It’s paradox. Duality. Completion. The Mystics and Skeksies healing the crystal together in The Dark Crystal.

It’s turning south to move onto an on-ramp that takes you north toward Los Angeles.

I suppose that one of the less obvious signs of civilizational decline is the rise of tricksters. — Bayo Akomolafe

We must outwit the terror like tricksters. They bring tanks, we bring flowers.

Who’s with me?

Xo, Summer

Banksy: “Love Is In the Air”

“One Crazy Raven,” by Gene Tagaban