Shuffle Synchronicities: Volume 1 - #364
Guest Post by Melanie Zoey Weinstein (feral masochism) + "Everytime We Say Goodbye" by John Coltrane - 01/24/22
Today we have a very special guest post from filmmaker, actress, poet, writer, and force of nature, Melanie Zoey Weinstein.
I met Melanie at fellow poet and writer and performer and teacher and guest poster, Caroline Rothstein’s workshop Camp Caroline in 2021, which it seems Caroline is bringing back in the Spring BTW, so look out for that!
I was immediately impressed by Melanie’s ability to write spontaneously.
Because I am someone who could write ‘the longest sentence ever written and then published’ often without interruption and editing, their ability to extemporaneously create poetry like that, which I very much struggled with, made a very strong impression on me.
After the workshop was over we both gravitated toward hanging out with each other when we found out we were both in LA.
We’ve had all sorts of adventures.
Like swimming nude at night in Malibu, going to a LGBTQ+ poetry reading together where they performed, and getting into ‘conflicts’ about consent to write about them on this Substack LOL, but which then partly inspired them to start their own Substack ;)
And so I’m really excited to bring their voice to the Substack on the penultimate day of the first 365 days of posts of the first year of Shuffle Synchronicities!
Here’s a more formal bio!
(Melanie) Zoey Weinstein (they/she) is a filmmaker, performer, poet and playwright creating work at the intersection of sexuality, identity and healing. Melanie wrote, directed and starred in SPANKO, a dramedy short about an outcast teacher who explores her secret fetish for the first time. SPANKO has screened at over 20 film festivals world-wide, including Mill Valley Film Festival, Cucalorus, Cinekink, and Dan Savage's Hump! Film Fest. Melanie is director of WHY I DANCE, a feminist pole dance short about women who come together to reclaim their bodies and themselves. WHY I DANCE went globally viral on vimeo and was featured in Upworthy, Buzzfeed, Vanity Fair, HuffPo and more. Melanie presently lives in Los Angeles with their cat and Dominant, Rabbi Frankie Lovebug Falafel Meatball the Boss. Their substack FERAL MASOCHISM includes poems and prose inspired by life as a quaking lobster without a shell who is also a brave lion who is also a soft bunny.
SUBSTACK: feral masochism:
INSTAGRAM: @melaniezoeyishere
VIMEO: vimeo.com/melaniezoeyfilm
Okay, take it away, Melanie!
ALL I WANT IS YOU - U2 - 2005 LIVE FROM MILAN
“All the promises we break
From the cradle to the grave
When all I want is you
You, all I want is, You, all I want is, You, all I want is, You”
*
The way cars weave between lanes is ballet.
The mind says Seattle, but the body
drives to a small hill in New Jersey to speak
with the fairies of my youth.
*
I say I want You
I need: Slow. Hand to heart. Full glass of water. Meal of fiber, protein and fat.
I say I want You
I need: Sit. Frankie cat snuggles, arm-chills, weep to Bono. Write.
I say I want You
I need: Hot steam. 2x2 teal-tiled shower. All my parts speak to the Dominant I’ve given some power–- held accountable for daily messages reporting assigned tasks.
*
Anatomy of Wants
My inner little wants space (And to stick out her tongue - she likes You)
My inner middle wants to strut off into the ethers, flaunt pigtails and kinky boots,
flames of lingering destruction licking her ass, tongue Razz Berry Blow Pop Blue
My sexual self wants all or nothing.
What happened last week is one of the top two hottest of my life.
My mind is still blown, and I’m scared.
My romantic self smells a recipe brewing of split pea pining and butternut heart-squash.
My creative self wants High Priestess time; spacious connection to my inner divine
My adult self wants to store this neatly in a mason jar marked “Just Friends,”
‘cause that would surely fix All of the Above.
My most wise self wants a week to bond with all my parts, without expectation for daily reports to You. I don't expect one week to give singular clarity, but hope to create the causes and conditions to bear my own witness. My most wise self needs to break the wall where it’s expected I ask permission, and thanks You in advance for Your understanding that in the week ahead, I’ll be taking on my care from here. (Something my inner child really needed to hear.) Thank You.*
*this message was not sent
*
I say I want
(unedited middle-of-the-night posted-then-deleted on a Spanko Kink Discord)
hello! i am looking for five any gender daddies, minimum. there shall be rules and ruckus and joy. i shall brat and be held accountable and dealt with sharply and firmly, while spoiled wildly. as a bottom, i live in a middle-ish space. i desire ongoing care and dynamic. i require self-awareness and general compatibility and lots of laughs and sparks. seeking an ethically non-monogamous set up, so hit me up with your capacity levels. most of all, i am looking for an anchor partner with whom to co-parent, and that person must have their shit together in every way and be absolutely nuts over me. cool?
I say I want
(actual unedited profile on Feeld)
Would love to find my Person: partner & co-parent.
Open to finding my People & growing together: polyflexible/curious.
Kinky brat/sub into strict discipline:
Tenderness and communication first.
Reveal ourselves like onions…peel slowly and wear goggles?
I say I want
(actually written right now for Substack Dave’s Shuffle Synchronicities)
To be polyamorous, to find an anchor partner and a co-parent, to birth my own children, to partner with five any gender Daddies (minimum), to cut my first name and go by Zoey. Every part of me to be witnessed, held, answered to, disciplined, fucked, loved, played with, inspected, coddled, celebrated, adored, expressed, challenged, seen.
To emotionally want for nothing.
But what I need cannot be written.
What I need is to be lived; somatically revealed.
*
He wails “Yeaaaaaaahoooooooo yeaaaaaaahooooooo,” primal truth of a yearning heart.
He rasps “All I Want Is,” the audience answers “Yoooo-uuuuuu,”
collective embodiment of the time-old tradition called burning desire.
May we call this prayer.
May we feel this ecstasy forever.
May we want til we burst,
eager mouths open wide, full body sway, cries out-stretched to
Sun Daddy, Moon Mommy,
Our Celestial Constellations
*
All I Want is the tension of desire and denial.
A liminal-seeming place.
To call my self home.
Melanie!
I’m so proud of you for writing this!!
And thank you for sharing it with us on this Substack!!!
I had never heard this song before and it is so exhilarating, like your post ;)
Matt Chambless pointed out after his guest post on Saturday that the style of collaboration is a form of ‘exquisite corpse’ writing that the Surrealists developed.
Which was a technique similar to an old parlor game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution.
And it’s funny, I was a bit anxious about collaborating with Melanie, because of this.
As Bono sang in your song:
You say you want
Your story to remain untold
Melanie specifically requested that I not talk about their sexuality in my half of the post after I initially shuffled to a song after reading a draft of their post last night that seemed to be about their and my sexuality.
And so I wondered if I could promise that.
But all the promises we make
From the cradle to the grave
But then I shuffled today and got:
"Everytime We Say Goodbye" by John Coltrane
Which is one of the songs I most associate with my dad who has passed and who I often think of as the spirit of the Shuffle.
I first heard it when I returned home after my visit to see him a week before he committed suicide.
Which I mentioned in the long sentence book:
and we had a dinner party the next day for my sister’s birthday, and he sat at the head of the table, and had a lot of witty one-liners and belly laughs, and I went home to LA and listened to John Coltrane’s “Everytime We Say Goodbye” and “True by PC Music/Hannah Diamond,
and my dad was proud of his daughter for she was about to graduate from medical school to become the doctor that his father wanted and tried to force him to be, but my dad never pressured her, he was proud that she was doing what she wanted to do with her life, which is what he always wanted for me,
Somehow I both did and didn’t know that we had said and hadn’t said goodbye.
And I didn’t know until now that it actually has lyrics written by Cole Porter:
Everytime we say goodbye, I die a little
Everytime we say goodbye, I wonder why a little
Why the Gods above me, who must be in the know
Think so little of me, they allow you to go
When you're near, there's such an air of spring about it
I can hear a lark somewhere, begin to sing about it
There's no love song finer, but how strange the change from major to
minor
Everytime we say goodbye
There’s something especially poignant about the line:
…the Gods above me, who must be in the know
Because I believe now my dad is one of those Gods/spirits who in the know about our lives ‘down’ here.
And from a music theory point of view, the melody itself when the song ‘says’…
how strange the change from major to minor
Actually goes the other way from minor to dominant.
Perhaps suggesting that loss and gain, happiness and sadness, pain and pleasure, right and wrong, good and bad are also strangely not so easily defined by our perspective at one time.
I think more than anything though this song came on from the spirit(s) to remind me today to try my best to never sacrifice being kind or responsible to someone I’m collaborating with or writing about for the sake of an artistic or spiritual idea or ideal.
That this 21st-century version of the Surrealists’ technique of ‘exquisite corpse’ writing collaborates with both living alive people like Melanie and living dead people like my the spirit(s) Shuffling the songs.
And so if I want both not to say goodbye to me.
I need to honor both.
And so, Melanie, I say to you, as Bono sang:
all I want is
all I want is
all I want is
You
To get what you want ;)
Okay, that’s the three hundred and sixty-fourth Shuffle Synchronicities.