Hour 1
Fergie knows her own power.
Fergie knows that death awaits us all.
I’m doing laundry.
“They don’t know I’m listening to the ‘Fergie does Cartwheels’ 10hr loop” I say to myself as I walk to the laundromat with a tired resolve, fueled by the repetitive cadence of a YouTube video that I prefer to classify as a healing modality.
I feel the weight and malaise of the world, radiating.
Fergie does too.
She probably got up at the crack of dawn to prepare herself for the early morning taping of the Today Show, in which she performed four one-handed cartwheels back to back during the climax of a live performance of “Welcome to the Jungle” to an audience of preteen girls waving at the camera and smiling through their braces, seemingly unaware of the public exorcism unfolding several feet away.
I struggle to leave the house before 3pm unless I absolutely have to.
As I walk down the street, everyone around me seems to radiate with Fergie’s cries. From the most sullen faces of passers by to the laissez-faire park goers brimming with summer optimism, I hear “OHWOAHWAH! OHWAH-OW!!!! NOOnononononononono!”
I’m in the most chaotic heart of downtown, where the ever-present sounds of road rage, construction, and a barrage of sirens eat away at public life. In this moment, everything is drowned out by Fergie’s voice in my headphones and my world is buoyed from below, lifted from on high by angel wings, a cropped purple zip jacket, a painted-on pair of glossy leggings, and beachy wave highlights.
This video carries me.
I love this video like life itself.
In the first of the loops that span 10 miraculous hours, the band vamps into a tension setting breakdown, Fergie pants and moans in anticipation, then lifts her left hand high, announcing her incoming stunt to the world like a daredevil about to jump over a gorge and touch the void in a futile war against gravity.
With every successive flip, her back arches into more extreme positions as she succumbs closer to the unstoppable force, and yet still manages to flip her hair out of her face to continue reminding the audience “YOU’RE IN THE JUNGLE BABY! YOU’RE GONNA DIE!!!!”
Fergie knows what we know, but she can’t accept it. She won’t.
After the first two cartwheels, she screams “NO”, she curdles and begs, she returns to her catwalk and goes back for more. She presents us with two options and dares us to deny her.
As the guitar shreds through the fretboard, each note caught up in the windswept tornado of Fergie’s passion, it blows off its central axis to harmonize with her desperate pleas against gravity, letting out a wail that makes every other guitar solo make sense. In the second round, it’s echoed by the drummer, accentuating the madness with the kinds of bombastic tom rolls that hit so hard you can feel the microphones as they begin to distort and compress.
Pop stars are supposed to rise above us from unachievable heights. Meanwhile Fergie performs her death-defying stunt on a two-foot platform, barely above the concertgoers who hold bristol boards with pictures of their grandkids, just so those kids can get two seconds of fame in the background of the “I Got A Feeling” singer doing one-handed cartwheels.
By the fourth flip she seems as though she might vomit, then regains her composure, and returns to the duty of her life.
Her body starts to look like something other than itself. It has an elasticity that can only come through force of will to bend space and time.
I watch the laundry tumble in the dryer, notice a single sock suspended in air, unmoving until it succumbs to the cycle, then kicks itself back up again, unmoored from the legs that stubbornly remain rooted to the ground.
Hour 2
This moment has altered something within the universe. It has collapsed the boundaries between physical objects as representations of the forces holding atoms together, revealing everyone and everything as a fluid part of some larger mass.
I start to hear all sounds within the amorphous folds of this mass. Sirens wail and amplify the guitar amplifying Fergie’s cries amplifying the spark in my chest when I know what it means to feel alive. A passing breeze sneaks through the cracks of my earbuds as I am taken away into the smooth gray day that ebbs and flows with chaotic bursts of rain and hail, each stone upon my roof hitting like the tom rolls of Fergie’s climactic resonance.
Hour 3
FERGIE PLEASE I’M JUST TRYING TO DECIDE WHAT TO WEAR TONIGHT! I DON’T KNOW IF THIS SKIRT AND TIGHTS COMBO IS GOING TO MAKE MY LIFE MORE DIFFICULT AND I COULD NEVER DO CARTWHEELS IN IT BUT I’M JUST SO OVER WEARING THE SAME PAIR OF PANTS, I WISH I HAD THE EFFORTLESS ROCK CHICK POWER AND GRACE YOU DO WITH THOSE GLOSSY LEGGINGS AND CROPPED PURPLE TRACK JACKET WITH BIG SHOULDERS THAT PROBABLY DON’T MAKE YOU FEEL MANNISH, MUST BE NICE
I’ve progressed from headphones to speakers, I’m caffeinated, the sound feels intrusive in my space and prevents me from inhabiting an internal world of my own. I can’t think. I turn it off. I go out.
Hour ??????
It’s the crack of dawn I’ve missed my bus I don’t know where I am in the city I don’t know what time it is my phone is on 1% I’m crying I feel like my relationship to life is broken I can’t separate myself from the world around me I don’t know what my boundaries are I don’t know why I’m yelling into the birdsong of the morning I wish someone would carry me home I try to turn the video on it won’t load my phone dies
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NONONONONONOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
ooooooooooooooooooooooo
ooooooooooooo
oooooo
oooo
oo
O
.
Hour 1 (0)
Every day is a repetition that you open your eyes to face. The sun stares back too brightly to see beyond the barrier your skin instinctively provides. You feel the edges of your body pulling back into the sheets, against the mattress, through the air pockets of memory foam, between the floorboards, cracking the foundation, into the belly of the earth. In the lightless limbo, a familiar image stays burned into the back of your retinas, timeless and constant, spinning from a restless core that lifts your feet above your head and back again. Sounds waft in from the waking world; horns and sirens belt and wail. Fergie’s been up for hours already, if she ever slept at all. Her voice merges with your own as you stifle a yawn, draw the world inside of you, and extend your limbs in all directions.
Hour 1
Fergie knows her own power.
Fergie knows that death awaits us all.
I’m doing laundry.
“They don’t know I’m listening to the ‘Fergie does Cartwheels’ 10hr loop” I say to myself as I walk to the laundromat with a tired resolve, fueled by the repetitive cadence of a YouTube video that I prefer to classify as a healing modality.
I feel the weight and malaise of the world, radiating.
Fergie does too.
She probably got up at the crack of dawn to prepare herself for the early morning taping of the Today Show, in which she performed four one-handed cartwheels back to back during the climax of a live performance of “Welcome to the Jungle” to an audience of preteen girls waving at the camera and smiling through their braces, seemingly unaware of the public exorcism unfolding several feet away.
I struggle to leave the house before 3pm unless I absolutely have to.
As I walk down the street, everyone around me seems to radiate with Fergie’s cries. From the most sullen faces of passers by to the laissez-faire park goers brimming with summer optimism, I hear “OHWOAHWAH! OHWAH-OW!!!! NOOnononononononono!”
I’m in the most chaotic heart of downtown, where the ever-present sounds of road rage, construction, and a barrage of sirens eat away at public life. In this moment, everything is drowned out by Fergie’s voice in my headphones and my world is buoyed from below, lifted from on high by angel wings, a cropped purple zip jacket, a painted-on pair of glossy leggings, and beachy wave highlights.
This video carries me.
I love this video like life itself.
In the first of the loops that span 10 miraculous hours, the band vamps into a tension setting breakdown, Fergie pants and moans in anticipation, then lifts her left hand high, announcing her incoming stunt to the world like a daredevil about to jump over a gorge and touch the void in a futile war against gravity.
With every successive flip, her back arches into more extreme positions as she succumbs closer to the unstoppable force, and yet still manages to flip her hair out of her face to continue reminding the audience “YOU’RE IN THE JUNGLE BABY! YOU’RE GONNA DIE!!!!”
Fergie knows what we know, but she can’t accept it. She won’t.
After the first two cartwheels, she screams “NO”, she curdles and begs, she returns to her catwalk and goes back for more. She presents us with two options and dares us to deny her.
As the guitar shreds through the fretboard, each note caught up in the windswept tornado of Fergie’s passion, it blows off its central axis to harmonize with her desperate pleas against gravity, letting out a wail that makes every other guitar solo make sense. In the second round, it’s echoed by the drummer, accentuating the madness with the kinds of bombastic tom rolls that hit so hard you can feel the microphones as they begin to distort and compress.
Pop stars are supposed to rise above us from unachievable heights. Meanwhile Fergie performs her death-defying stunt on a two-foot platform, barely above the concertgoers who hold bristol boards with pictures of their grandkids, just so those kids can get two seconds of fame in the background of the “I Got A Feeling” singer doing one-handed cartwheels.
By the fourth flip she seems as though she might vomit, then regains her composure, and returns to the duty of her life.
Her body starts to look like something other than itself. It has an elasticity that can only come through force of will to bend space and time.
I watch the laundry tumble in the dryer, notice a single sock suspended in air, unmoving until it succumbs to the cycle, then kicks itself back up again, unmoored from the legs that stubbornly remain rooted to the ground.
Hour 2
This moment has altered something within the universe. It has collapsed the boundaries between physical objects as representations of the forces holding atoms together, revealing everyone and everything as a fluid part of some larger mass.
I start to hear all sounds within the amorphous folds of this mass. Sirens wail and amplify the guitar amplifying Fergie’s cries amplifying the spark in my chest when I know what it means to feel alive. A passing breeze sneaks through the cracks of my earbuds as I am taken away into the smooth gray day that ebbs and flows with chaotic bursts of rain and hail, each stone upon my roof hitting like the tom rolls of Fergie’s climactic resonance.
Hour 3
FERGIE PLEASE I’M JUST TRYING TO DECIDE WHAT TO WEAR TONIGHT! I DON’T KNOW IF THIS SKIRT AND TIGHTS COMBO IS GOING TO MAKE MY LIFE MORE DIFFICULT AND I COULD NEVER DO CARTWHEELS IN IT BUT I’M JUST SO OVER WEARING THE SAME PAIR OF PANTS, I WISH I HAD THE EFFORTLESS ROCK CHICK POWER AND GRACE YOU DO WITH THOSE GLOSSY LEGGINGS AND CROPPED PURPLE TRACK JACKET WITH BIG SHOULDERS THAT PROBABLY DON’T MAKE YOU FEEL MANNISH, MUST BE NICE
I’ve progressed from headphones to speakers, I’m caffeinated, the sound feels intrusive in my space and prevents me from inhabiting an internal world of my own. I can’t think. I turn it off. I go out.
Hour ??????
It’s the crack of dawn I’ve missed my bus I don’t know where I am in the city I don’t know what time it is my phone is on 1% I’m crying I feel like my relationship to life is broken I can’t separate myself from the world around me I don’t know what my boundaries are I don’t know why I’m yelling into the birdsong of the morning I wish someone would carry me home I try to turn the video on it won’t load my phone dies
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NONONONONONOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
ooooooooooooooooooooooo
ooooooooooooo
oooooo
oooo
oo
O
.
Hour 1 (0)
Every day is a repetition that you open your eyes to face. The sun stares back too brightly to see beyond the barrier your skin instinctively provides. You feel the edges of your body pulling back into the sheets, against the mattress, through the air pockets of memory foam, between the floorboards, cracking the foundation, into the belly of the earth. In the lightless limbo, a familiar image stays burned into the back of your retinas, timeless and constant, spinning from a restless core that lifts your feet above your head and back again. Sounds waft in from the waking world; horns and sirens belt and wail. Fergie’s been up for hours already, if she ever slept at all. Her voice merges with your own as you stifle a yawn, draw the world inside of you, and extend your limbs in all directions.