Punkrockdyke Barbie by S. R. Ekstein
Punkrockdyke Barbie
This morning over breakfast, slugged with smoothies between us, I prick the conversation on accident, bleeding until we are having our biggest fight to date.
I find myself yelling at her, ‘I am not a fan of the Barbie movie and I NEVER WILL BE!’ I screamed, globs of spit flying onto my mushroom egg toastie.
It’s not difficult for her to ignore common sense, she’s as erratic as an underwater volcano, but I’ve told her more than once that laying against her breastbone is my ruby cradle, and I want to stay there til the pressure bursts me into coral-flavoured pussy.
‘You can never let PEOPLE ENJOY THINGS!’ she volleyed back.
I caught that thought. Held it for a moment.
Balanced it on my proverbial racquet. Careful.
‘You’re right,’ I lobbied back, ‘I CAN’T!’
And this was the argument that has caused me to be late for work -
For the second time this week.
I love Nietzsche. I love to use his metaphysics as an ontological framework, especially when I’m talking to customers, as this is the kind of thing no one in my life really wants to ever discuss.
I bring it up again today on desk, not because I’m not busy, but because this customer is eight years old and wants to know why libraries are free but other places aren’t, which actually I think is a great first step into their journey of sociological and philosophical thinking.
You know what isn’t though?
The Barbie movie, and I have the text messages with all their 3am rants to prove it.
Nobody is interested in not enjoying things these days, which I’d argue is kind of the point. Except for this eight-year-old who is still here, colouring in an owl.
She looks up at me, mid nihilistic enlightenment, to ask ‘Why can my brother still run around with his top off but I’m not allowed to anymore?’
Because this is the future Greta Gerwig wants.
I answer, ‘Maybe because life is unfair.’ Which I hope doesn’t regress her progressive equanimity back too far.
Eventually she leaves, and work becomes a bit of a bummer, lax on the uptake of the Guardian speedy crosswords, rearranging receipts into order of transaction as well as -
date AND time!
(somewhere out there,
a manager just bolted upright
dangerously - & then paused
to correct their posture)
Lunch is a shadow of freedom, promiseland of checking FB messenger and reading two pages of my book, but mostly I think about the text she just sent me.
She’s asked me to come over tonight, and I contemplate it. Think of the first time we slept together.
Even back then we could never agree on anything - as we had stumbled back to my airtight apartment, mould driven into the sagging ceiling - I had pushed her down against my unwashed sheets. I climbed all over her, pulling down her briefs, and just as I licked the inside of her thighs, I remembered.
‘Wait,’ I gasped out, ‘I need to tell you something.’
She had looked down at me with genuine interest (this would later become a statistical anomaly).
I told her, ‘I’ll be frightening, I’ll rise like the pockmarked moon, arching my back, you won’t be able to look away from my ginormous assets!’
That’s always the most awkward part to get through in any new relationship.
There was a small silence at that confession, long enough that I began fingering myself instead.
Until finally, she had replied, ‘I never understand what the fuck you’re talking about.’
Back to work, slip out some lazy emails. I think I was a bit mean about the Barbie movie before -
- OR IS THAT JUST MY SOCIAL CONDITIONING FORCING ME TO APOLOGISE FOR HAVING AN OPINION AN EXTREME OUTBURST OR JUST LIKE THE WAY BARBIE HAD TO COMFORT KEN AT THE END OF THE FILM AND ACKNOWLEDGE THIS PAIN OF HAVING TO OPPRESS HER WAS MORE VALUABLE THAN HER OWN -
I just really don’t want to get into it anymore except -
- THAT I THINK IT’S WEIRD HOW NO ONE HAS A PROBLEM WITH
BLOCKBUSTER BIOESSENTIALISM THE FEMININE REPRODUCED AS ESSENTIAL AND UNIVERSAL -
- my shift ends as my alarm goes off and I look down at my phone. Oh fuck, I forgot to take my meds again.
Going home is also like work: public-facing and routine.
Gingerly on the train seat, I think about asses.
Not her ass, although I do think about it a lot when I see the moon through my window at night, that bulging temptress keeping me up. But right now, I think about the way my ass is warming this very train seat as all the asses have before me, and the asses before those, and I wonder about the very first ass to have sat in the very spot I am now.
Half a scholarly hour later, I get off the train, crushed by the societal expectation to look away, head down, earphones dangling leisurely like a noose around my neck.
My final stretch of commuting is a ten minute walk, and I’ve used up all my thoughts for the day on asses, like usual.
Spotify buffers and buffers, until the notification pops up that I need to renew my premium account, all $11 a month going towards no artist of my choosing.
I’m conflicted for a moment, wonder if I should brave the walk without music, if I dare to pass the vegan bakeries with their alternative French jazz. Are they really going to enrich my life, more than relistening to Gina Young’s Punkrockdyke, in her spoken word soft guitar universe?
And this is when my Wolves wake up for the day. I tried to tell her before (and you), but I guess the secret’s out now.
There are two Wolves inside me and they’ve always been there. They are real wolves, they’re not imaginary and not domesticated - they’re big furry-hackled giants that are constantly fighting or fucking, and at the moment they’re fighting over this monumental decision.
The first Wolf is the Alpha Male. Right now he’s going all out, testicles swinging and
awoooing all over the place.
This one is always weirdly sexual and all he really wants is for me to give him that sweet release, for music to melt my brain and drown out the 5pm traffic jams, to let loose my favourite late 90’s lesbian indie girlie of the month.
Come on baby, says the Wolf (but think of him not as speaking but awoooing), plug that earphone jack right into that hole, it’s open and ready for it.
The second Wolf however, is my favourite. This is the more high concept one, and right now they’re kind of watching the Alpha wolf grapple for his own throat, thinking simultaneously;
This may as well happen
and
You don’t really need the music, do you? Why not just enjoy the walk? Do you have an addiction to constant stimulation? Do you really think therapy won’t work on you? Are you sure you don’t want to finish that 3 month late library book that you didn’t read?
Oh, and awoo awoo.
Like always, the Alpha wins, and I plug in,
(YES! screams the Alpha in euphoric bliss)
and now I am power walking down King street, glare locked and loaded at any passer-bys who dare to use up the last of my social battery for the day.
As Gina croons of construction men weeping, I’m starting to get mad about the Barbie movie again, post-work haze of pent up bitterness redirected at one fluorescent pink blonde mascot of anti-feminist feminism. It’s really not that sexy of me to keep bringing it up, but the whole thing is so toothlessly corporate and mainstream, I jaywalk across the road, and barely miss the 370 hurtling past.
I finally make it home, and swerve past her roommates, shuck off my clothes and slip into nakedness.
I tuck the wolves inside me to sleep
(big day for them!)
and I pull back the bedsheets, smudge the assortment of pillows, crawl inside to stare up at the weakening twilight, and contemplate resenting interpretation as I wait for her arrival.
I wake up in the morning, look across, at her and her wrinkle-swept forehead, the obvious frown-lines denting the puckered corners of her mouth.
She’s getting old and it is
so
not
graceful.
Take that Barbie.
I lean down, brush a kiss across her temple.
As she begins to stir, I whisper gently into her right ear,
‘Like Stonehenge, I would tumble 289 kilometers of grassy loneliness for you, just to watch the night break against your ancient, ragged, grey-flecked, walls.’
That wakes her up, and grumpy already, she turns over her shoulder to groggily squint at me. ‘That’s not the compliment you think it is.’
The two Wolves inside me have woken up now as well.
‘Awoo,’
I say in response, ‘I think it’s magnificent. 5000 years later and they’ll still be talking about you.’
Rolling back over she grumbles, ‘I’m not in the mood’ and sags back into the second-hand Valevag Ikea mattress.
Over breakfast, slightly off avocado
(take THAT housing crisis!)
and the last dredges of oat milk, she doom-scrolls the Betoota Advocate’s Instagram while I’m trying to explain eternal recurrence to her.
‘Alice.’ She moans, which I take as a good sign, as she hasn’t spoken to me at all since she got up. ‘Do you ever not?’
I’m not sure what she means, but we had just been discussing Nietzsche again.
‘Are you mad because of Ubermensch?’
‘Stop it!’
‘Stop -’
‘You always do this. Say what you want, take what you want, do what you want - do you ever think of other people?’
Licking my wounds now, I’m getting testy. ‘Take what I want? Well I’m sorry Ravenwood College, not everything in life comes for free - I’ve got to use the five finger discount when I can!’
And then I wink.
Frustrated
(but not sexually - sad!)
- she raises her voice as she says ‘Everything is about sex with you!’
My high concept Wolf
AWOOS
sadly, which has distracted me for a moment and I think that maybe she does have a point somewhere with the wanting or not-wanting, but mostly that’s because I’ve got two Wolves inside me trying to fuck all the time.
I also realise I shouldn’t have stopped paying attention because uh-oh, this is quickly turning into our biggest fight to date, and now she’s accusing me now of never taking anything seriously and how her wilting blue-flax lily is somehow dying because of all the negative energy I bring into the abyss of her bedroom, and amidst all this I am now furiously screaming inside my brain
I AM NEVER WRITING ANYTHING FOR YOU EVER AGAIN!
But I’m lying.
I’ve already started writing this one, even as she’s yelling at me, which is really getting very personal and overboard and off-topic.
I interrupt her mid-rant: ‘Well there’s no such thing as exoteric morality so this argument is kind of meaningless and if you had ever read the copy of Beyond Good and Evil I leant you then YOU’D KNOW THAT.’
Suddenly
Silence…
…lingers…
Her Instagram FYP reels have been playing loudly in the background since she started yelling, and I watch as she slowly reaches out and taps it finally to mute.
She looks up at me - brown on brown eye contact.
‘Listen,’ she says, her dark hand reaching out, trembling, to take mine, ‘we’re never going to agree on anything. Let’s just leave it for now okay? We’re going to be late to the movies.’
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Shit.
Awoo.
Okay, this one really is my fault.
I frantically look around for a white flag, but it’s too late. I’m not in the trenches, I’m over the top, on the front line, it’s only a matter of time before the snipers take me out in a chariot of intersectional martyrdom.
I grip her hand tighter, increasing our eye action by 26%. ‘I thought you had the poetry slam today,’ (I didn’t) and ‘I’ve got to get to work soon’ (I do).
There’s a lull in the dark chasm.
She blinks away our eye contact.
(0%. Critical failure).
Withdraws her hand from mine.
I can tell - she’s resigned now.
And she says quietly, so quietly that I strain to make out the words -
‘I wish you believed in using commercial products beyond the bare necessities to better your life so that we could have a shared Google calendar.’
That’s something I won’t back down on - it’s a first date hurdle that I made clear from the start.
And then she continues - lines me up in her scope. ‘I just wish you’d put more effort in. We were going to see a rerun of the Barbie movie with Gabby and Ciara - I told you this weeks ago.’
Bulls-
Eye.
At
the
mention
of
the
B-word
I
Go
Full
Lunar
Eclipse
- disappearing behind the light of my own conviction that I would never have agreed to something so unethical and oppressive.
Before I can stop myself, I push back my chair and stand up. Taking a last stand, rising indignantly, shining celestial, I grip the kitchen table and I say -
‘I am NOT a fan of the Barbie movie and I NEVER will be!’
She rises to meet me - my dear full moon, my howling ass-pocalypse, and she finally lets loose an
AWOOOOOOOOO
of her own.
‘YOU CAN NEVER LET ME ENJOY THINGS!’ She volleys back.
And I catch that thought. Hold it for a moment.
Balance it on my proverbial racquet. Careful.
‘You’re right,’ I lobby back, ‘I CAN’T!’
And this is the argument that causes me to be late for work -
For the third time this week.
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