105. The Shape of Water (2017)

Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Written by Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor
Starring Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, and Octavia Spencer

I fed a bot every entry in this blog and made it write this post for me. There is youth and sometimes in high school it was night and everything felt important. I drank seven dollar bottles of whiskey in DC while X and I ate Ethiopian food but not in our house in South Philly. White people. The people at the Asian-owned liquor store on 14th St. NW were so nice and not-judge-y. What is a boy even. J and I walked for hours through the city until I felt pretty and we both wanted sugar. Lack of representation fucked me up. One time my dad took me to the mall and it was years before he let me go to the arcade by myself. The camaraderie of boys playing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, the one with four controllers and you needed all four players if you wanted even a sliver of a chance to beat the game, everyone so generous with their quarters whenever someone died. I probably wrote that before. Little Sasha as Raphael despite being neither cool nor rude. Some of my best friends are vulgar Marxists. I’m thirty-six now and how are things so different and the same. O the thrall of black and white films. For years I tried so hard to write a short story about an imagined monster flick set on Neptune. The thing about old movies is that salaciousness never feels that salacious. But the male gaze and how the creature from the black lagoon clawing at Julie Adams in a bathing suit. Catholicism ruined sex just like it demonized cats and burned the complete works of Sappho. Those words tattooed on my right arm so maudlin but fading. Alanis Morissette sings, How-ee-ow-ee-ow appropriate. If a road trip then a new kind of intimacy. Tell your loved ones you love them and omg how much more can my heart hold. You never change do you dear queer Sasha. If I were Elisa I’d probably choose a fish man over any cishet dude too. Trust is no shame pantomiming the mechanics of anthro-amphibious erections. But what other choice. We need a richer cryptozoological vocabulary. I play guitar in musical theater.