Disease and identity. Our culture is one where identity begins at birth – you are who we say you are – shut the fuck up, regardless of what is real, regardless of roles we are expected to play, and when you are on a public stage of simply being in public, you will pay a price for those moments of political wrangling. Circumcision is exactly the same game. We want you to know we can cut your cock off. This small foreskin is political. Anything can turn political on a dime.

Politics is its own stiff god, and the awareness that you, too, are your own god stiffened to resist resistance. And not obligated to follow the herd over the cliff. I drive a dirt bike. It separates me from suits. It is the finger I make them sit on while I wear a mask, and motorcycle helmet. You do not know who I am because I am not accessible to you from the other side of the face shield. Anonymity is liberation. When your second selves step outside of imposed roles (worker, mom, dad), where you are validated for following rules that are arcane, nonsensical, degrading, humiliating, and exploitive, you nevertheless cannot find the words to articulate our tentative hold on who we are, what we are allowed to say, to write, we are what we drive, we are what we post to instagram (imagine 5 billion people, and none of them are who they say they are). We are a mysteriousness, we are embedded in what we wear.  To wear a mask is to pull the rug out from other human beings who do not understand, and never will, that there are those among us who are what we say we are.

This is it. I’m the kid who is going to defeat cancer.

Or, I’m the kid who will make a billion bucks.

Or, I’m the kid who will discover time travel.

What of it.

How is it that we are relevant. We are not the suits, the punishment police whose job is to shut us up, and I am told fingerprints are unique. Not true. If I chose to wear a mask, and I do, I am pitted not against other Homo sapiens, but against death.

You spend your entire life outwitting death in a choreography of balls out dead ahead. We think we are giving back to the world, when, in fact, we’re takers, and our second selves know it. Why are we here. No one knows why we are here. We are here to offer our hands and fingers to the fingerprint cop who holds our hands gently, rolls our fingers in the ink, and presses down. There is light behind every eye. They think they know where we exist.