Now more than ever, I need you to go shake your ass.

We need all asses on deck.

I’m listening to Lil Jon right now, and when I say listening, I mean LISTENING AND LEARNING. My playlist is fucking blasting from the window to the wall, I’m bouncing on a buoy of good beats and slick one-liners. This week, sad songs feel useless, and I’m done with longwinded melancholy musings. It’s Friday, and I want to crank the bass until my ears explode and I get scolded at the ER for shaking ass on top of the big speaker.

My stomach and brain have been underwater all week, searching for rare sea life. I’ve been gargling poisonous news, trying to filter clean water out of the sludge. The heaviness is dense and I want to powerlift it over my head, swing it like a helicopter, then gently place it underground where it can decompose in peace.

I see people closing themselves off, isolating in exhaustion and fear, the grey slate of January atrophying desire like a TV marriage in crisis. I feel that impulse in myself, the desire to hide until some invisible force floats down a cloud with answers. But we’re not living in a Kirk Cameron movie where a square-jawed blonde man gives us answers. Or more accurately: we ARE living in a Kirk Cameron movie, but the blonde square-jawed man is a cryptofascist whispering policy into the highest office, causing a domino effect of gratuitously shitty Kirk Cameron knock-off movies.

I (we) desperately need to shake ass. I need to stop sitting, and laying and praying, and start releasing the energy that clenches on my lungs like a torture-chamber corset. The vibes are fucking insane outside: rancid, morose, desperate, one could say, and we need to remix it over a beat and uno reverse it.

It’s time to let the insanity drop low, touch the ground, and snap back up with the beat. It’s time to get some fucking somatic release, because there’s only going to be more weights stacked on our heads like a game of depressive Jenga. The machetes raining down are more prolific than Jason DeRulo singing his own name, so we might as well choreograph a huge number, and turn them into throwing knives.

AI does not have ass to shake, and it never will. Not in the gelatinous, humiliating, and horrifying way that humans do. Can you even imagine ChatGPT trying to simulate the unhinged joy of headbanging to Andrew WK or twerking to Usher? It’s fucking impossible. The terrifying fact of being human is our acid-bathed organs are just one stab wound from the elements. We have systems so nuanced one man can eat an airplane while others die from bread allergies. We hold multi-season arcs inside our bodies, for better or worse, which is why some days you’ve gotta shake limbs until your blood gets hot.

I’m angry. I couldn’t finish my other writing this week, because I have too much anger to sit still and finish a clean draft. Instead, I want to carve my name in the fucking ocean. I want to break laws I won’t put in writing. I’m not a control freak, but I deeply hate feeling helpless, and that sentiment seems to be endemic. I see the fog of helplessness choking people, I feel the ice spikes of “what can you do” forming a tundra. I want to shake ass until the ice thaws and a new track starts, until my hyped indignance jetpacks me to the moon. Once on the moon, I’ll cuss out the Man on the Moon for being a bystander, for not using his lunar connects to choke out Elon in space. I’ll call him a coward, before hypocritically asking if my astrological chart is correct.

Imagine a room of billionaires shaking ass without a kilo of drugs in their system, without humiliating staff to get themselves off first. It’s hard to picture a financial hoarder connected to their own body without paying a normal person’s wage for the experience. It’s a silly picture, yes, but that’s exactly why I need to shake ass.

The assholes in charge are deeply unserious losers who can’t keep a beat. They’re deeply inept, disconnected cowards who can’t think for themselves. So they outsource it to wealth managers, fascist playbooks, grifter specialists, they fucking trade memes on fire and they want you to stay in your room and cry. They want you to stare at their emptiness until it infects you, draining all your empathy and energy until you can’t even shake your own ass.

Fuck that, I’m going dancing.