On Body, Places and Predator(1987)

You just expect certain parts of your body to last till the end don’t you? You see people with one leg and stuff, but that’s... “out there” you think. Looking at youself is different, you take it for granted, you can’t help but.

What has amazed me most about my body is its regenerative power, pushing out hair after I’ve shaved, sealing up cuts after they’ve been opened and replacing countless toe and fingernails. However the problem is it also encourages a sense of complacency that allows you to damage yourself on a regular basis and expect everything to fit back into place. Only when something knits up badly you begin to recognise the strain you’ve put your body through.

I used to hang out with this guy, everytime I fell in with him, I counted on getting drunk. His born to fuckaround persona was comfortable environment in which to drink beer. At that time it had somehow got to me in my head that my punch wasn’t hard enough and that somehow this had something to do with me having weak wrists. So yeah that night after god knows how many beers we were like, “we gotta work on our punches bro” and we got into this punching and kicking lark, nothing big... just trashing our rooms and stupidly hurting ourselves. boys being boys.

My hand was left to mend itself as I went to bed that night. But the next morning it burned like fuck, feeling like it might have to come off. By then I’d told so many lies about how it happened that I wasn’t bothered when my mother asked me. However, after blushing as I explained how I fell off the ladder, I decided to come clean with my attendant. She’d heard it all before...

From my wrists, I remember, it happened to me when I was a kid, me and this buddy of mine used to go around cycling to the outskirts of the town where there was a big rocky slope and we were like “yk what would be a good idea...” It wasn't a good idea. Going down I slipped and got this huge gash across my wrist. When I finally reached the emergency ward after 2hrs (of which 1hr was my mom mostly acting like a mom and me being “yeah whatever”), and as the doctor was finally bandaging it up “it was just a few mms away from your nerves you know... you could have bled out in the middle of nowhere” and I was like “yeah whatever”. I wasn’t allowed access to my bike for a month. In school every second person seeing the bandage on my wrist was like “Kay, are you okay?” that was fun.

Weeks later when the bandage finally came off I was left to inspect the new outlook. A dark brown repair where the skin had the torn gash, but apparently nothing else. Now it just sits there, along with that small mark from that other night between my third and fourth fingers near the knuckles where the skin seemed overly friendly, almost like they fancied one another, when relaxed they cooried up. So that’s my new hand. One more bit of the many idiosyncratic damage that I carry to the grave.

This impulse, which is hard to reckon with as it is hard to control... curiosity, it is like this light that never goes out, and for that I am grateful, well most of the times. this crude desire to go out there and see and do and know and explore the other, leading me to places unknow until. until. I refuse to die because it’s simply too much of a hassle at the present moment. I think I have scattered my life across ports, and I will need to reach them all.

I was recently watching the movie Predator(1987, Jhon McTienan one) and it had this one great cinematic moment which explains this feeling when after chasing each other through the jungle for hours without uttering a single word, the predatory alien and it’s human prosecutor finally ended up wounded and trapped in a face to face encounter and seconds bef the creature blows itself up laughing, and the hunter blurts out in disbelief “Who the hell are you?”

There was this art installation in this museum that I visited when I was in Barcelona this summer. there were several huge monitors are set up in a gallery, a different video playing on each one, each showing a football ground in a suburb of a different city around the world.