Good For My Body, Good for Your Body

Clockwise from left: Tasha, Me (Alexei in the back), Heiruspecs, Heiruspecs with a random, Me. All 2003.

Today in therapy we spoke about photos of ourselves, about how we relate to our body and how we present our body. Especially how we present our bodies on stages and in public. I have unique feelings about this. I am a white man from a notably white part of the country, Western Massachusetts. I didn’t see a lot of people dancing growing up. I didn’t see a lot of people expressing themselves with their bodies. I didn’t see a lot of people engaging with their bodies or other people’s bodies. It was a physically distant place.

I started to feel something different when I got comfortable playing with Heiruspecs. I felt a freedom on stage that was nothing I had ever felt before. I felt a freedom to move my body and to let the energy I felt for the music come through my fingers but also through my legs, through my face, through my arms, through my whole body. I felt an ability to send my emotions out to the world through my body. It felt freeing, it felt revolutionary, it felt sexual and it felt sexy. And I felt special doing it being fat. We ask fat people to keep their bodies quiet. My best friend’s on Earth will say “I don’t even really think of you as a fat person”. We’ve made that verboten to say for black folks; it isn’t a compliment to tell black friends that you don’t even consider them black. But we agree that the ultimate goal for a fat person is to transcend fatness. But on stage with Heiruspecs I felt I was forcing my fatness, my talent, my charisma, my sexy into the space. It was all a part of what I was expressing. That felt powerful, to not be apologizing for my size, to not be hoping it would go unnoticed. Notice it, love it, and dance with me. Dance with us. Dance with this energy we have. This was good for my body, this was good for my soul. I don’t get to be in that space very much anymore, a couple Heiruspecs shows a year and your mind is different when you are dusting off the bass for the first time in months, I’m using different muscles, I”m thinking about different thing.

The overarching work I’m doing with my therapist is about blame. I have a lot of blame issues, they go way back. Everything I’m working on goes way back. I’m a scorekeeper. I’m a get even guy. I’m a definitely don’t forget and probably don’t forgive guy. That’s served me in the past but it doesn’t serve me now. Not everything gets a ledger line, you can’t titrate karma. And I know that this scorekeeping has done tremendous damage to my soul, to my body. In our touring days I was an evangelist for something more elevated than blame, something that raised me and hopefully our audiences above that self-doubt, that self-critique. There was something bulletproof about the magic we had on stage and my body was an ingredient in that magic. But it wasn’t just goodness in that magic.

For the first time in my life I’m not taking the good with the bad wholesale. There was something magic there, but I was vindictive, I was impossibly overbearing, I was controlling, I wasn’t living my best life. And I can keep the good in, take the bad out. I can titrate my formulas, I can find better paths. Paths that let the hard times wash over me without me finding someone to blame, so often finding it to be me or my wife.

But right now I think about how good that time with Heiruspecs was for my body. Finding a new way to show my emotions. Finding a new way to show myself. Showing the small but dedicated group of people who like Heiruspecs that a young, fat man could talk through his body, could share his spirit with his movements. It’s a line of communication that goes so unused by so many and I’m glad I used it, I’m glad I found it and I want to dance again.