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I was down in a place where they quote with these << >> instead of these “ ”. So the newspapers end up looking like old code written for a paper reading generation. I scribbled thoughts onto my own papers that survived a monsoon and were creased safely in the bottom of a backpack for months:
To be <<anti>> (anything) means to contain all the necessary prerequisites of the thing you’re against. For every positive claim there is you, hidden in negation. For every point, mirrored in a dualistic waltz: you. This is academic philosophy.
Which is just a convoluted way of saying: don’t speak in binary when it comes to <<revolt>>. There is so much more than this regime of pro/con, for/anti, build/destroy. Black/white. For every highway there is a whale that doesn’t fucking care. For every abstract and actual system of oppression there is someone to tango with, at night, where only neon lights shine in an old concrete basketball court in the heart of a city only locals know the real name of.
Which is an ugly way of referencing a moment I’ve had. And within that moment there was revolt. But no one was doing it just to—<<just to>> report back later to others that you too had lived. There was living. There were 3 lights broken by poor circuitry. There was no sense of ignorance to the laws passed to limit foodstuffs and broaden surveillance, but the way people were living didn’t match up to code and conduct, and folks danced. And there was living; the kind that is so vivid that single sentences fail to grasp. Policy was voided by stark and mountainous <<living>>.
Which, to correct myself, is a resistance to vivisection. There was no Tango that night that was <<Tango only>>. There was falling, shouting, and such movement of bodies, weights and organs to sonic sorts of percussion that someone who studied in Western schools, who looked for a moment from afar, using book chapters to understand, could call it “Tango”. But there was no Tango like this tango because it was never written down. Which is a <<revolt>>. Not against, not anti, not a headshake in a LED-energy-efficient university hallway.
It wasn’t anti-lonely, but it sure wasn’t lonely. It was like the air, which was masked in cheap combustion and fried meat, contained a separate sense of being. To breathe in that space meant you could be there. Even to not-breathe, to hold air in, was to dance in a way.
Then turn blue.
Then laugh and cry. Then someone breaks out the whiskey and things take on that delirious hue where metaphor feels all-too-real. Everyone’s drunk.
Which is not really <<Revolt>>. At that point you are within Joy and drinking [glass, glass, glass] and your line of thinking fades. And one final thought surfaces before vague fluidness consumes you:
I want this to be forever; I want to be able to share this sort of Joy, dance drink food bad lighting that feels so not bad and right even when the moves I make are more sludge than smooth.
And I would fight for this.
What ever this happened to be.
Text: Conner Bouchard-Roberts
Images: Tudor Etchells
For more of Conner's writing, check out his blog: seesomething.org