Burst Reach #41

Hello. October has been overwhelming and non-stop and I keep telling people that I’m tired, and I am, I really am, but things keep moving and so do I.

I have, roughly, been working six days a week since late September. Four at the day job, modeling for a figure painting class on Wednesday mornings, and I’ve done two of the three markets I was signed up for this month: TriPride and a little vintage market.

TriPride was exhausting and incredible. I was in the park literally from sunrise to sunset, made more money than I ever have at a single day event, sold out of most of my zines, and finally found one of those damn Godzilla PBR beers I’d spent the last week or two looking for since they’ve been announced. I could only manage to drink about a third of it with the tacos I’d ordered and got the bartender to just pour out the rest so I could take the can home.

This last week was the most intense of the month. I went right back to work for a few days after TriPride, modeled on Wednesday before going to the dress rehearsal for the sexy assassin dance I would be in with the other members of Embodied Art Dance (but not performing AS Embodied), Thursday was a chill vintage market (that I was less prepared for than expected due simply to how much stuff I sold at TriPride), Friday was the dance performance itself, and Saturday I was back at my day job trying to remember how to sell books and realizing I’d sort of kind of made money four different ways this week.

Since it was announced that he’d be performing at the Super Bowl, Ashley has started listening to Bad Bunny and fallen in love with him. She shared some of his music videos with me, and two knocked me dead. The first one is for his latest single, ALAMBRE PúA. Nearly the entire video is centered on the legs of a dancer in a traditional Puerto Rican dress as they dance in the sand, swinging the skirt of the dress around, and I sat transfixed and said “oh, yeah, dude gets it.” Which is to say: the video captures how incredible it feels to dance in a dress.

The other video, for BAILE INoLVIDABLE, choked me up. In it, an old man goes to a dance studio and signs up for a salsa class. As the class begins, the camera moves to the right of the man where he stands in a line with others. When it comes back, he’s been replaced by Bad Bunny himself, looking incredibly nervous. Much of the video focuses on this class, as he awkwardly progresses through it, and it reminded me so much of the first dance classes I ever attended: the slow, confused footwork, the stopping stiffly after messing up and watching as everyone else moves with relative ease, the difficulty of interacting with those other dancers.

And, during an exercise where the dancers all form a circle and take turns pairing off in the middle of it to show what they can do, the fear of stepping into that circle knowing you’re nowhere near as good as those who surround you. And how they don’t care about that. You can tell they’re having fun and want Bunny (can I call him that?) to join them, encouraging him to jump in. Being in a studio with other super enthusiastic people who want to dance, want to see you dance, and want to dance with you, despite your own lack of ability and confidence, your own lousy self esteem, is a hell of a thing.

Again: Bad Bunny gets it, the full emotional spectrum of dance.

I think it also struck a chord because despite having been dancing for over four years now, I really felt like a nervous beginner for this assassin dance, which I think we decided was going to be called Danse Fatale? Maybe?

Most of the time when I’ve performed as a dancer, it’s always been kinda weird and inhuman: a beetle getting sacrificed, an artist possessed by a demon, a deer that’s not a deer…you get the idea. But this was a sexy dance, where we’d be playing assassins on a mission that involves seducing the audience. Even after deciding I’d base my costume off of Elektra Natchios, who I’ve been obsessing over lately after getting back into Daredevil, it was just way out of my comfort zone. How do you even BE sexy? What even is sexiness? I still don’t know! This was a level of femininity I haven’t approached before in dance.

The first class in which Eva introduced the choreography back in August, she asked about performing it at this October show, and I didn’t really feel like I could do it, but said yes anyways because I missed performing and because it felt important to do this dance since the show was right on the cusp of me being on Estradiol for a whole year. (That anniversary is tomorrow, by the way.) At some other point, she asked how we felt about the dance itself, and I admitted that I didn’t feel like I had the body for it. There’s twerking, there’s chest popping and booty slapping, and well, I am still a lanky, male-bodied nerd. But without hesitation, and in unison, both Eva and our other Embodied partner Devorah declared “you do” repeatedly in response, and I took that as the sign to just set my insecurities aside and do my best.

My best was not great on the night of the performance, but I still had fun and we made some money in tips and I’m so glad I pushed through and did it despite my insecurities, exhaustion, and some other difficulties.

And now I’m prepping for my final show of the month, the Johnson City Zine Fest this Saturday. Like TriPride, it’s another favorite show that I’m excited for, even if I may be dead on my feet that day. I finally remembered to actually post about my newest figure drawing zine too, so hopefully people will be interested in it.

Some other bursts: I’ve been struggling to keep up with my Godzilla portrait project but that’s still going all the same. I drew at least fifty, maybe even a hundred little Sharpie Godzillas at work for some donation drive we were doing, and by the final week was actually kind of tired of drawing him. I’ve been watching Ashley play the new Pokemon Legends and the NPC dialogue is just as unhinged as everyone online has been saying. The screenshots I was seeing were NOT photoshopped, it turns out. I finally cancelled my Spotify subscription because I was tired of all the AI shit going on over there and switched to Tidal, which apart from missing a few favorite punk songs, Spanish bands, and video game scores, is superior in almost every way. I haven’t watched a single horror movie this month, which is awful, but we’re planning on seeing Frankenstein and I’ve been watching Fake Documentary Q on YouTube, an episode a day, which is an enjoyable series of short Japanese horror mockumentaries. I’m also reading Ring and liking it, though I doubt I’ll rewatch either the Japanese film or Gore Verbinski’s remake afterwards.

And that’s it for now. Have my latest Godzilla, his Terrestris form from 2021’s Godzilla: Singular Point:

Take care!