(fade out sound using computer volume, hit pause, reset sound level on computer)

   Like everyone, I try my best to function under the daily crush of performed violence and curses of language, precarious economy, and now, the ever-more-so law-less governance we find ourselves in. 

  I find myself searching my own tendencies and limited agility with timing and language, including navigations of such things named as tenderness and wishful belonging alongside isolation, social illegibilities, and suspicious survival strategies. Writing becomes a place to wrangle, worry, and sex up the body’s desire in relation to questions of performativity. One step in front of the other somatics (reign down on me).         In the essay The Promise of    \\ Happiness, Ahmed illuminates how positions such as the sense of safety, trust, intimacy and happiness tend to work – like social contracts such as marriage. Here she notes ways to make meaning (whose/what kind of meaning, though?) through (and without) a potentially nostalgic sense of “being together.” 

   Here I feel we are challenged to notice for ourselves how a sense of “alike-ness” or value may be constituted -  how, too, the energetics of happiness are intentional – can be weaponized, pointed with, garnered. 

The surveilled position that is not broken with a break with social media - the dirty overpriced handbag.  Happiness, and its alignment and it’s promise to “function as a displacement of a social wish, and a defense against an imagined future of loss.” (121)  It is the link to the debit card.     

                     Neoliberal bottoming, 

 autonomy swallowing, 

              penetrated happiness feels and smells so no-good. Noise. Taking up the space in-between to at least look back in at what that desire is all about. More queer – not white boy queer. More web, more thread. Trans*positionality. Ack, I should have linked us to Eva’s red web.[ix]

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[ix] Eva Hayward’s Spiderwoman in Trap Door by Gossett, Stanley, Burton, pg 255