 I just came back from the National Harm Reduction Conference, which, unless you're in, I guess, direct services or, I don't know, some of you may know what it is, some of you may not. We had 1,500 people there. It's the most people we ever had there. That's my day job. I'm the director of that conference. And it was really amazing. It was so amazing and so perfect in terms of timing for what's happening in our country right now. And I guess I feel like I've been walking around the last day and a half feeling a really deep sense of culture shock. Because with those 1,500 people, many of us have known each other for almost 20 years. Our lives have intersected through working on domestic violence issues, on sexual assault, on LGBT issues. And we were in this space together where we just, you know, you could depend on a certain kind of response. So anyway, I don't know why I'm sharing all of that with you. But yeah, but I am. Asylum mythology. The knowledgeable doctor says, this condition is like a chimera, monstrous fire, the hybrid is some of our parts. Yes, I believe in nostalgia. Most of us come from a divided place. And there is always someone who will say, this story is familiar. We are animals, sure, a switch of snake head tail, Hydra, and my mother, her father, the endless heads. Nothing stops this kind of brain matter. Mother is dazzling, animal parts disparate. Everyone loves a crazy woman who can blame them. A disaster, sometimes naked, sometimes in pale lilac platforms, always a volcano of vulnerability, and fire breathing. She breathed me terrible flame. This swift foot, this chimera, I want to say to the establishment, these women, mothers are never mythological, straight jacket. The term insane asylum gave way to moral treatment, gave way to mental hygiene. The definition of hygiene points to conditions related to a purity of health. The art of health conforms much like corsetry, wood, ivory, bone, and baleen. To tight lace a woman's body to prevent the soft lobes of her from expanding. How to achieve when everything is like calisthenics during an earthquake. Is it a disorder when a woman tears her clothes off in public? Take catatonia, the shape of waxy flexibility of which grandmothers have said, everyone loves a girl who sits still. I understand now why a woman might tire of such heavy garments. Patron saint of wayward girls. Santa Alicia, saint of oil slick to mission street, bless us in the taquerias, cantinas, botanicas, and in the mortuaries, and at the end is Italian bakery where ballerinas dance on frosted birthday cakes. Deliver us Santa Alicia, we don't want to cut our feet on broken glass. Patron saint of the forgotten girls, pin eyed girls, pregnant girls, and girls in high heeled shoes standing on 18th street. Have pity for us Santa Alicia, we hear demons speaking to us from bedrooms and alleyways. Pray for us who have grandfathers, brothers and fathers, priests, uncles and strangers who will not let us leave. Bless our eyes and our tongues. Take us away, give us a chance to numb the pain. Blessed are you among virgins, for you are the one who got away, unlooking and seeing. We used to wonder, show me, what do you look like, onlooker, onlooking, the meaning of all your is twofold, the pleasure, the pain, the politics of photography absorbed into the everyday like a preface, private, public, and sometimes revenge porn. Sense of possibility makes us hurry to strange things because familiarity breeds a certain kind of blindness. We are a new generation of selfie evangelists. How do you look when you look at me? You must know, judgment is the oldest profession, shaming, naming, capturing the holy temple of our bodies, we are all that we are and more. The risk, multiple focal points, all of that gaze, all of that glory, all of our incarnations, holes. How do you fill your emptiness? Rules for the modern girl. One, freedom is attainable as long as you stay. Wear a t-shirt that says, beware the amorphous wet mound. Three, you are allowed fancy underpants. Fly them like you would a flag. Watch out for symbols of vexation. You might have to fly your flag half-mast. Five, someone will say something about a cow more commonly referred to as a heifer. Remember that in another country she is sacred and that she shits in the street while she's walking away. Seven, all of this is cause for celebration. Decide what to wear at the debut of your re-virginalization. That grand poetic tradition, you know, because it's been so quiet in here. And since I rambled, there's just one more, just one more, hold on everyone. I'm not as scary as the elections. I eat respectability politics. Shining in the wake of disapproving looks from nuns who teach sixth grade classes, dare stare. I kept it inside me. Want to see? I carry animals, princess, the house cat in the sable puma. Look at my not so hidden hyena. I cradle hysteria in my pelvic progression. Animals named family tried to teach me to be proper, pose perfection on a plastic covered couch, made mad to wait and watch the Lawrence Welk show on Sunday afternoons. Mutual of Omaha sponsored the wild kingdom. I leaping deer, I pacing jaguar, I growling grizzly, was no animal planet, no zoo parade. Sunday practice tried to swallow me whole. No prey, no mouse, no prim. Slink, snake, encircled myself. I swallowed my tail. I swallowed Sunday. I swallowed Lawrence Welk's entire brass band. My animal halo rides high. I'm cat headed. Play with my food and bite the hand. Don't hate me. I was born to shine, tooth and nail. Thank you.