Scaffolding a Blasphemy House

We live in three split houses that span one chosen family. There are eleven of us, including a witch who moved in yesterday. We also have a carpenter, a cook, a clown, a soldier, a potter, a poet, musicians and writers, teachers, lovers, children, and chickens. The children and the chickens are make-believe, but not for long. Sometimes the people with eggs discuss distributions of sperm and who will be fertilizing whom. (I think such talk is worse than politics. Kids are cute but parents aren’t, and chickens look like demons.) 

The walls have fresh paint on them. They shine and yawn up the rooms a bit so the house stretches like a spoon dance even as it falls apart behind a new coat of skin. This home is humble and splendid, a marvelous resting place for dreams that can’t stand to wait out the apocalypse. We say the best remedy to the end of the world is resilient community; do with that what you will. Visiting hours are in the afternoon. 

We have benches by the fire and sometimes a guitar will play. Sometimes a clumsy accordion. (I have NOT been practicing.) Sometimes dreadful and frankly unacceptable group scream-alongs to garbage songs from trashmusic seasons of old. These moments are actually pretty controversial since we’re getting the neighbors involved, and we’re pretty much split fifty-fifty when it comes to noise, particularly that which swerves toward chaos: elementary school recess vibe, manic rave in the closet vibe. 

Most of us are nonbinary except a few who are adjacent. It means each of us is many, of course, and we frequently shrug off flakey social skin like flamboyant snakes in drag. We are scaffolding a scandalous blasphemy house. Many of us are in love with each other and . . . oh boy! . . . do we elegantly! . . . artisanally! . . . resolve the shit! . . . out of our fights! We communicate like a bunch of hopeless translucents. It’s not easy but it’s awesome. Tension and residue grow their own bodies and talk amongst themselves, often exchanging limbs or making other spectacular sacrifices to one another. As they ought to, yeah? Wonderful, wonderful, yes. 

If you visit and spend the night (on a couch or in one of our pillow forts), when you wake up we will serve you Broken Person Breakfast. It is a family specialty, among some other blasphemous snacks we have. There is actually a Broken Person Breakfast theme song and you can listen to a draft of it here: Broken Person Breakfast 

At Broken Person Breakfast we drink caffeine and we eat whatever we can find. With feather brooms from craigslist, we sweep up wee piles of all the shattered bits of person that have dispersed in sleep like a disruption of dust that has yet to settle. Sometimes we even scoop up the splinterdream dust and sweeten the coffee with it. Everyone is broken in the morning, whether or not you’re hungover. It isn’t a bad thing; it means you can wake up and decide the configuration of today’s pieces. 

Wandering here is encouraged and re-wandering is inevitable, for time loops in containers, even the ones with holes in them. Our home has grown from the desire to blaspheme the systems that shake unbreakable people. And it is safe here: to decipher the wreckage that we wander through, to bitch about the crumbling landscape and endure, making homelove with dumpster-dive-debris logic/queerness quilting. We are defiant of the sickness children teach to one another because they drink the world like experts. Here is where toxicity starves, because it usually doesn’t want to be looked at with twenty-two amplified eyes. 

But anyway, when was the last time you were casually blasphemous? Gently outrageous? Do you want to come over and help us build our house? 

Here’s the thing about scaffolding a blasphemy house: it always falls apart! Because the scaffolding is blasphemous! And of course, this especially encourages various gods and such to mess with us. But the system is broken, not the people. 

After each collapse, our profanity fortress takes a new, unimaginable shape. Then it breaks again, because it is stronger than us and cannot bear to see us cracking all the time like blister august ice. The blasphemy prevails, nonchalant about death like recycling, and the house quickly revives itself again. This time there are no walls but the windows are immaculate. It soon breaks again, then reconfigures into warm, fresh walls but in the place of windows are billowing curtains of wind. Insulation reaches out of outlet holes and swoons mischievous from the ceiling of every closet. None of this lasts very long before the house sags defeated and sighs resentment breath at us, the irresponsible builders who haven’t cleaned the bathroom in decades. We rub love on the sighs as we peel ourselves into beds and under blanket lips we rest until Broken Person Breakfast. Our house will be a reminiscent stranger in the morning. I look forward to discovering it, to becoming-home over a chipped cup of coffee and a blasphemous everything bagel.