Just a nibble

I’m at the beach by myself, and I decide to lay down in the sand and close my eyes and enjoy the sound of the waves.

A woman standing nearby starts singing, it’s a song about the water.

She seems to be making up the words as she goes.

I try to look up at her.

To do so I must shield my eyes from the sun. I say “all I can see is your silhouette but you sound really pretty.”

She leans over my face and smiles and I’m like “yep, I was right. You look as good as you sound.”

She keeps singing while looking down at me, but now the words are about me.

At this point her face is like a foot from mine, upside down from my perspective. Her hair is dangling against my face so I reach up to brush it aside.

Then she kneels in the sand near the top of my head and leans further down so her hair is all in my face.

She’s…. Tickling my face with her hair and laughing at me as I try to turn my head.

I can’t seem to evade her.

I reach up and pull her hair into a gentle bundle behind her neck, to keep it out of my face.

I absentmindedly feel the tracks of her weave at the base of her scalp.

I stare up at her.

We’re both silent for a moment, but then that moment is interrupted:

Some random dude comes over and lays down in the sand next to us. He asks me what I would pay for one hour to do whatever I want to with him.

I tell him I wouldn’t give anything because I’m not interested.

He looks visibly hurt and asks what’s wrong with him.

I tell him “There’s nothing wrong with you! I’m just not interested in men. But you are interrupting our moment here.”

It seems he hadn’t even noticed her, he turns and says “oh my bad. Well then what would you give for one hour to do whatever you want with her?”

I’m like “I dunno. She’s pretty and fun and I love her voice. But I don’t even know her.”

At this time it, it doesn’t occur to me to object to the premise of paying for access to a person.

At this point I ask that dude to leave us alone, and he meanders off down the beach.

I ask the woman if she’s thirsty.

Next thing I know we’re at a restaurant patio overlooking the water, I’ve ordered us each a smoothie but these haven’t arrived yet.

At this point I’m crushing on her but I still don’t know her name.

We’re chatting and I can’t stop glancing at her lips.

They look so good.

It’s almost unbearable.

I wonder if her lower set looks this edible.

Suddenly I have forgotten about the smoothies.

My limbic system wants one thing only: to put my lips on hers.

Either set will do.

I hold her hand for a second and have this ridiculously powerful impulse to bite her fingers.

But I remind myself we’re in public.

And she’s a human being.

I resist.

Then she makes eye contact with me and she bites her lower lip and whatever small self control I had disappears.

Restraint is now a vapor.

I pull her hand up to my mouth and start gently nibbling on her fingers.

Her skin is salty, but in a clean way. In an invigorating way. She tastes like the ocean.

She giggles and says “damn. I can tell you’re mad kinky.”

I shake my head, as I chew on her hand a bit more. Then I say “I promise you I’m not. Why would you even think that?”

She gestures with her eyes, at what I’m doing to her hand.

With my teeth against her skin, I shrug and say “I just like to eat it.”

She says “eat what?”

At this point I look at her lips again and I’m like “you damn well know.”

I ask her to put on some music on her phone.

She plays another song which I’ve never heard before. But the singer sounds a lot like Azealia banks.

That’s when I notice: this woman whose finger tips I’ve been biting and nibbling, she looks exactly like 2010s era Azealia banks… and she sounds just like her too.

I drop her hand like it’s on fire.

I say “hey that song sounds like… Azealia Banks.”

She just stares at me and slowly smiles, in a very toothy, frightening way.

Suddenly she looks like 2020s era Azealia banks… she hasn’t aged gracefully. She is paler now. Worn thin. She’s a little more plastic… she hasn’t grown the confidence of age, she has withered and withdrawn and squeezed herself down, to better fit a particular mold.

And the worst of it is, she seems to have hidden her eyes. There are pale lenses now, where there used to be depth. Her irises are masked. Whether she’s wearing contacts to obscure her beauty or her pain I cannot tell, but the overall impression is that I’m holding the hand of a woman who is deteriorated and deranged.

The salt on my tongue is very bitter now. The aftertaste of her fingers is not fresh, nor is it the taste of the sea. This is a sticky, rancid flavor.

I want to brush my teeth.

My last thought is “fuck I can’t believe I was just thinking about eating out a skin-lightening, homophobic Zionist”.

Then I wake up.

I guess dreams and subconscious can have all sorts of meaning and non-meaning and usually mine just feel like visual gibberish.

Pure chaos, believable in the moment but totally disjointed and absurd upon waking.

But this dream, which I had a while back, seems to be an expression of one of my very real and conscious fears.

Obviously I don’t have any actual fear of accidentally chatting up or hitting on or hooking up with Azealia Banks specifically, she and I will almost certainly never even cross paths, neither in a beach-front restaurant, nor anywhere else.

Still. Fake and imagined as all dreams may be, I have been left with this distinct and troubling “memory”: chewing on the fingers of someone I want nothing to do with.

Even though she is not on my menu, and that’s for damn sure, I “remember” what it felt like to sit across the table from her. I remember feeling the wind on my skin, tasting her skin on my lips, and enjoying all of that, until the moment where realization caused it to sour.

How is it possible to be contaminated by the memory of something that has never happened?

For those who don’t know, she’s been very vocal about defending Israel, and has gone so far as to outright identify as a Zionist and to further say “no Black person should be supporting Palestine”.

If it wasn’t obvious from my profile picture, I’m not Black. But still, I take some offense at that comment of hers— because I’ve seen and admired Black activists who have taken a courageous stand in support of Palestinians.

I’m anti capitalist, anti fascist, and anti imperialist, so as a far leftist of course I’m opposed to political Zionism. But aside from my admiration and respect for Black activists who hold the same opinions as me, I also just get the ick when anyone tries to question or dilute someone else’s identity because of their stated political positions.

Being anti Zionist doesn’t make any Black person less Black, any more than being a Zionist makes Banks herself less Black.

She’s also said some nasty anti LGBTQ stuff. Especially, she’s said hateful things about gay men. As a straight man these kinds of sentiments don’t attack me directly but they still make me angry. Some of the men I look up to and root for the most are gay, and I hate the idea of a public figure saying cruel things that could hurt them.

Lastly, Azealia Banks also used skin lighteners which I find really unhealthy, psychologically and spiritually. I don’t know about her case specifically but it reminds me of people I’ve known who were afflicted with deep self hatred and internalized colorism….

I want people to love themselves. And to me skin lightening, like many other cosmetic procedures, constitutes a rejection of self. I’m not saying I’d never be friends with or date someone who’s had some work done. Im definitely not trying to shame people who have changed or wanted to change their appearance. I just find her case sad.

My conscious fear is this: I hate the idea of stumbling into any kind of relationship with a woman based off superficial stuff like physical attractiveness only to discover that she and I are totally incompatible in terms of ideology and politics.

Like, in general.

Imagine how much it would suck to really hit it off with someone and start nibbling her fingers and thinking everything is about to lead right where it will, only to discover that as much as y’all seem to mesh in terms of personality or vibes, she’s fundamentally opposed on some essential political ethics?

Before I sign off on this post I want to say:

I think a lot of this dream came from my thoughts about Azealia Banks as an artist.

I’ve only heard a couple of her songs, and I guess her genre isn’t necessarily my thing. I like rap and hip hop, but electro house doesn’t usually do much for me.

That being said, her biggest hit, 212, is a banger.

The musical base is written by a Dutch duo, Lazy Jay. And her vocal delivery over their track is exceptional. Her lyricism and her flow are both undeniable. And ultimately, that track is down right infectious.

If you’ve seen the video, the visuals are infectious too— the artistry is obvious.

Anyway this is a song that randomly gets stuck in my head, with some frequency.

I think she was in her early twenties when she dropped that track, and the combination of talent and charisma/ presence implied an optimism for a future body of work that would have been quite powerful.

But hearing that track causes me some dissonance, because I know the direction she’s taking as a public figure.

So I’m in a weird place where I like the song but regardless of how good she sounds I can’t approve of the singer.

I feel drawn to the art. But I feel repulsed by the artist.

I think on some level my dream about accidentally hitting on (and nibbling on) someone I’d never be willing to mess with speaks to my thoughts as a creative on the concept of separating the art from the artist.

I guess what I’m saying is, when it comes to separating the art from the artist, I can’t quite do it.

I try to look at works of art as stand alone pieces, to better digest and enjoy them. But it’s like eating junk food. If I’ve seen the nutritional label, I know what the hell is packed into that edge of cake or handful of candy, I feel a sense of guilt around consuming it.

Did Azealia Banks make some great art? Hell yeah.

Do I want to support her? Hell no.

Does enjoying her art even support her? Not really. But any enjoyment I might feel is tainted by the knowledge of the person it came from.

And that internal conflict definitely makes me recoil from taking any deeper dives on her fuller body of work. She’s got a song that’s gonna remain stuck in my head, and for all I know she might have made lots more incredible music. But I’m not likely to go looking, because her public statements give me the ick.

Anyway, here’s that song of hers. 212, on a historic NYC and modern Manhattan area code.

Final notes:

I also want to shout out an artist who I’m happy to admire on two levels: 1) his artistry, and 2) his humanity.

Paul Stewart.

I’m perpetually behind on reading his stuff, and rather than blame myself for being scatter brained and the walking archetype of Attention Deficit Disorder, I actively choose to blame him for writing with such a great frequency that I cannot begin to keep pace with the reading!

An amazingly prolific writer, with an incredible output and track record of Vocal wins to attest to his skill, Paul’s voice truly resonates with a lot of people, myself included.

I began following him for his horror. He writes dark themes with a level of grit and darkness that feels both jarring and captivating but he’s great across the board. His poems are especially good.

The reason I’m mentioning Paul is because he’s the reason why I decided to share a write up about one of my dreams here. I read a write up from Paul sharing one of his dreams a few days ago and enjoyed the concept and thought to myself: I’d like to see more people write out and share their dreams like Paul did.

whether those dreams be weird, unsettling, insightful, comfortable, funny, sad or anything else, I think they’re fascinating.

Check out his write up, in the link below:

Author’s note: never mind I’ve said enough.