I’m overwhelmed. The sky is on fire, the future feels impossible, and if the recent past has taught us anything, it’s that the ground is constantly peeling away like a treadmill with a snapped emergency pull.  

I don’t want to write a piece about transitioning. It feels like a frivolous self-indulgence when people are fleeing their homes from the plagues of a vengeful god and I’m stuck in my head, ignoring my good fortune to have time spent unmoving, eyeing the hairs snaking their way out of my chest, wondering if I’ll still be able to access hormones when supply chains crumble and, as an afterthought, the water I’ll need to wash them down.  

I’m supposed to be writing about Scooby-Doo 2. I haven’t watched it since lockdown, but my lasting impression of the movie is of the non-stop onslaught of monsters that appear over the course of its 90 minutes, and of one image that I’m still struggling to grasp. Every possible size, shape, and texture of monster threatens the people of Coolsville until at a certain point, one can no longer process any of them as singular beings to be defeated by Mystery Inc., but as an infinite wave. I remember Scooby-Doo 2 in the same category as the most disorienting of action movies, which deliver a kind of hyper-stimulation that—to my brain at least—interrupts any chance of figuring out what is actually happening at any given time. Everything engulfs the senses so relentlessly that it feels like nothing is happening at all. So many monsters are unleashed in Scooby-Doo 2 that it starts to feel like they encapsulate every edge of the world.  

 "So many monsters are unleashed in Scooby-Doo 2 that it starts to feel like they encapsulate every edge of the world."

I’m fixated. I was once given advice that I shouldn’t allow myself to become too hung up on the horizons of transition; that I should enjoy each stage of the process as its own distinct version of a larger being, extending in time. But in the present stage, I am ruining my future posture, craning my neck over each pore of my skin, waiting for my eyes to adjust to hairs I’ve never seen before, hovering in attack position with the tweezers that I’ve begun bringing with me everywhere. I’m playing whack-a-mole with my own body, seeing each hair as a compromise of a self whose ever-shifting states lead to feeling unmoored, latching onto any sign of where she may land. Craving a smooth landing, I spend the most beautiful summer afternoons inside a room that I’m soon to be evicted from, staring straight down, plucking for hours, ignoring the cacophony of the boxing gym below my feet. When I look up, all I see is a smoggy sky out my window, reminding me of the recent air quality warnings, and the next ones surely to come. When I look down, all I see are the same number of hairs as when I started, emerging from different pores. An object moving at a constant speed appears to be standing perfectly still; frozen at a breakneck pace.  

I’m still supposed to be writing about Scooby-Doo 2. Whenever I think about it, I recall one image from the final chase sequence that remains burned into my brain. When I first watched the movie, I was so lost in the madness that I couldn’t make out anything in this sequence but a shapeless monster suspended in air, falling in a classically cartoon fashion, arms flailing while defying the laws of time and space in unending airborne limbo. This image takes place in my mind in slow motion and high speed at the same time, standing in for the mass of monsters that make up the sum of the movie. The one in my memory may be gelatinous or fuzzy, reptilian or alien, giant or parasitic, but I only remember it as a singular being, writhing, mouth open, longing for a landing.

I still don’t want to write a piece about transitioning. My relationship to Scooby-Doo 2 is about being overwhelmed and stimulated by something so large and all-consuming that you can’t comprehend it. It’s about the movie’s introduction of real monsters into a world where supernatural forces were previously just the illusions and machinations of a man in a mask. The movie’s iconic image of Shaggy, having just ingested a mystery potion, instantly looking like he’s 2 years on HRT (with some choice surgeries along the way), is something that I now feel obliged to comprehend. “I’ve got a chick’s body!” he cries as he ogles his hairy double Ds. Mouth open, camera peeling back, he looks horrified. Then the camera stops, and his grimace lands on a grin, staring at the mirror with the delight of possibility, only for his new normal to vanish as he rejoins Mystery Inc. to deal with the possibility of apocalypse at hand.

I’m resolute. Lying with someone I love, we watch Scooby-Doo 2 so that I can finally focus on something else, while a party blares from the other rooms of the soon-to-be-evicted apartment. This time, the movie feels easy to follow: the monsters faced by Mystery Inc. are no more than a half dozen in number, all of which have been previously revealed to be empty costumes. When the costumes are animated by the dark magic of a vengeful villain, the gang splits apart at the possibility of a genuine threat, facing a series of personal crises until they ground themselves in each other, setting the stage for the climactic final chase sequence; the one burned into my brain. Calm and happy, I fall asleep in love’s arms before the sequence even starts. The next day, I spend another smoggy afternoon in my room, combing through the movie, trying to find that image of the monster suspended in air that I can’t seem to forget. After enough time searching, I realize that it’s not in the movie at all; it's shapeless in my mind because it was never there. I close my computer, pick up the tweezers, and look down. I hear the relentless pounding of the boxers in the gym underneath my apartment, fighting nothing. The ground shakes.