BLOG #25: GREEN, MONICA.

This is me right now posting this. I blurred my deadlines wipeboard because it is scaring me.

I am pleased to share that I am now #TeamAndroid. If my texts turn green I will be hearing absolutely zero complaints. The whole green text blue text thing is probably one of the greatest marketing things Apple has capitalized on since the first iPhone. 

I don’t really have that much to say. I’m shocked too. Here’s some fiction I’ve been working on. I’ve been working on a collection of short stories all about a fictional world where every woman is named Monica. Except for a few outstanding women like Marie Curie, The Lady of Rage, and Gwyneth Paltrow. There are more exceptions to come I just haven’t thought of them yet.

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On GP

On March 4th, 2022 Gwyneth Paltrow did Heated Mat Pilates Core Sculpt Barre Plus Burn for the one millionth time. She went to the boutique spot commissioned by the Meditative Committee, president Monica’s latest edict. Full-scale department rollout had commenced on Sunset, the beta program before national implementation. Gwyneth was glad to be here, spearheading trials. She neglected to teach, though, in favor of timed instructions she pre-recorded in the infrared sauna. Truly, it was better to demonstrate live just how lithe of both the mind and body she was, and how each and every one of them can achieve that kind of physically natural plasticity with regulation to quote herself live from the studio’s speakers, now moving from the intro into the first movement sequence. The birch-floored room was suddenly a wave of ponytails, from whose too-big heads they swung were too-small bodies that began angling and folding in perfect rhythm for Gwyneth’s government-mandated self-discipline. The calorie deficit was oh so fashionable, and the room was oh so hot, and Gwyneth was on fire. Her flows blazed. She steamed tender while everyone else sweat. Smirking to herself she lifted to a teaser, pulsing her gapped bow-legs only touching together at the ankles, and observed her curatorial handiwork.

All of the other women in the room envied her and, obviously, were privy to her celebrity. She’d curated this particular session to be so, as a way to gather data for the Meditative Committee. Each of them were a bit pathetic if not purely aesthetically perfect. Monica was 11lbs underweight, which did nothing to sallow her glowy skin. Monica’s long brown ponytail gave her a bit of a facelift, making her catlike. Monica had an elegant clavicle where, when she tensed up to teaser, just a bit of her ribs poked out, just enough to make people jealous and not enough to make people worried. Before class, Gwyneth had caught Monica binging Altoids, both for calories and to disguise her puke breath. They’d made eye contact for just a brief moment as she darted from the stall. She was good, Gwyneth thought. Anyone less bulimically trained wouldn’t detect the faint acrid scent trailing behind her, masked by chamomile and eucalyptus. But Gwyneth did. This was her special talent. 

And now, a special stretch-burn segment. 

Gwyneth caught Monica’s eye again as she bent to place her palms on the floor before launching into a pigeon burpee, a move she created to be so complicated only she could do it. She focused enviously on the cleft where Monica’s thighs didn’t touch. She pointed her toes and smirked that ambiguous Mona Lisa smirk that won her an Academy Award because it was all according to plan. That inch and a half of space between her thighs, yeah. It was worth all the bulimia in the world added up and multiplied by itself forever. Gwyneth recognized Monica was the after photo Bella Hadid brought to Doctor Navami that fated year of 2017 when her supermodel transition began, but she never expected someone this gorgeous and tragic. The perfect sacrificial lamb. In fact, she was in a room full of them, Monica to varying degrees, as beta testing for the future of Monicakind. Every Heated Mat Pilates Core Sculpt Barre Plus Burn class Gwyneth had and would later curate with rooms full of near-perfect approximations to herself was a reminder of that. A familiar rush of blood to her head reminded her of the exercise at hand, she popped up to a standing position and immediately sank into her modified pigeon push-ups, tensing and flexing like a peacock does to earn the attention of a mate. Monicas sighed and trembled, Gwyneth closed her eyes. This was to keep her on her toes, their exhaustion. See, when Gwyneth had started eating between the hours of 4 and 7pm again, she needed to up her game in the laytime. Monica was beginning to weep silently while completing trembling pushups.

~

You have a job because I did yoga before. 

This is one of the cuntiest things ever said in the record of recent human history and Gwyneth said it. The receptionist that day was sturdy enough to take the blow. Not gracefully, but she took it, with the same face connected to the neck connected to the arm connected to the hand that took Gwyneth’s heavy metal Amex, the kind that only celebrities and inside traders had, and tried to tap it on the card reader, then tried to insert it into the chip reader, but it was too thin and pedestrian to read a card of that weight. Thin and pedestrian, like patron after patron wasting away in that studio probably, the receptionist thought, all of them covered in that fermented sweat one sweats when they’re anxious and excising demons that can’t be excised, or exercised for that matter. “Thanks for nothin, Oberlin,” thought the receptionist, not caring if the phrase actually escaped her pudgy mouth or remained in her mind where she’d thought it in the first place. “You’ve really got lovely freckles, hon.” The voice, chirped and in the real world, emerged from a pointy woman poised behind Gwyneth. She was wearing an identical outfit to every other woman who’d callously doled out eyerolls while being checked into today’s session, an all-black legging-sports bra situation. She stepped to the front of the line, giving Gwyneth a polite smile as she pressed her hands in fake prayer, and softened her tight jaw to mouth “namaste.” Gwyneth followed suit and greeted her clone with the same contrived grace. She grabbed the receptionist’s arm and examined it for a moment. The receptionist was still holding her heavy card, not knowing what to do with it. She was about to ask “what should I do with it?” when—

What moisturizer do you use?

“Lubriderm.”

Where do you get it?

“Any major drug store.” 

The receptionist forced a smile and placed Gwyneth’s Amex on the front desk with an audible plink. “You’re all set.” She’d pay with her body. 

If Gwyneth were a gun she’d be, like, a really skinny gun, like the kind that hookers carry in their garters to fend off creepy Johns. She’s on trial every day of her life. People make her into a singular enemy, for her vagina candles and verbal assaults and that one time she allegedly murdered someone via ski. And it’s so strange, to think that the face she wears in plain sight is so normal it almost has that effect on Monicas, that is, until she reminds Monicas where they are, where she is, and how there’s no road to her. Gwyneth is a proud member of the NRA. Defending her freedom and her secrets to eternal youth with her very skinny gun. You can buy health like you can buy a gun, you can disguise biological advantage like a hooker with a gun in a garter belt. 

~

You are a gun. A really skinny gun. And your obliques are loading the chamber. 

Monicas and Gwyneth are slowly bicycling on their backs. She upon she. Girl sweat and “I’m hungry” breath now heavy in the air, Gwyneth did something she never did, which was forget where she was in the sequence. She didn’t know what was supposed to come next. Apart from the experiment, Gwyneth’s biggest aspiration, biggest fear, is that she wants to be Monica, a part of something that still possessed the ability to want something outside herself. Gwyneth thinks about the first time she put Lubriderm on. How magical it was. Fresh. The final burn is here, side plank pushups, rotations, half-mountainclimbers. Physically, this is impossible. The breath in the room becomes a cohesive groan. 

Shoot. Monica gun, gun Monica. Shoot.

Heated Mat Pilates Core Sculpt Barre Plus Burn is a very serious, very dedicated practice, and it requires the kind of discipline and study that bucks competitiveness. How do you measure growth in spirit, anyways? Growth in connectedness? Verisimilitude to a shiny blonde presence, buffed by Hollywood and nourished with Irish sea moss and collagen? Gwyneth pumped her legs harder. Shooting led her down a path of dangerous self-awareness.

“There are girls who we need to know the names of and then there’s the rest, the masses who study, whose studying leads to studies touting mysterious statistics. How do we know that one in five women masturbate daily? The masses are the women who would seek representation via completing a poll like that. Ironically the main people to bring up statistical thinking in casual conversation are men. “Less than 1% of mentally ill people are violent.” Well, define violent. Does that statistic include mentally ill people who conceive of violence, or only those who carry it out? Is that violence directed at themselves, or other people, or both? How do you quantify violence, is it measured based on crime? Is that crime collected from reported crime, or crime that results in conviction? These are the hard hitting questions that most women do not ask. Although, how would we know that they aren’t asking, if they aren’t completing a poll.” There should be a poll for that. She was shooting projectiles with her legs now. 

You can stop now. You are floating.

Monicas and Gwyneth let their positions go, and begin to curl into the fetal position on their mats. The lights dim to a warm low pink.

Monica is a lover and a fighter. Monica is wild. Monica fights her enclosure. Monica isn’t in love. In the hours of entrapment, you imagine you are. There are more things you want, so many you go beyond it, outside watching the very act of wanting bloom in your head. Coveting though, is a bit beyond what you can want. You may be trapped, but you can understand the difference. Coveting is something you can want, but wanting isn’t something you could covet. Coveting is love. Which is why Monica must hate herself. 

Gwyneth and Monicas rolled onto their backs accepting the pink light now pulsing with half-lidded eyes shaded from an unsatisfying conclusion that they are all alone, and will never be in love even if they might feel its shadow time and time again. 

In many ways I’m learning to be a group thinker.