why bad boys limp

being on holiday

It’s the last day of holiday. 5 nights in Dorset at an old-fashioned hotel by the sea (patterned carpets and framed memorabilia) my eyes are permanently half-closed because the holiday has taken its toll (in a good way)—holidays are funny like that. They can actually “work” or “do wonders” or something though they’re backwards for that reason too like it can take three days of a five day holiday to shake off the petty grips of reality and settle into the wonder of beach, breakfast, each other’s laidback company…. and with a good holiday, by the end, usually something has been cured (human meat in salt & sun) and some truth has been negotiated—really tho. A surprising amount of transformation can occur in such a short amount of time. It should definitely be called holiday therapy (of course sometimes it can go wrong…)

But not this one. My sisters are delightful savages. And my little brother is a god-send from the land of human lap-dogs (an Elvis to be). Ella their mother is bold-faced and shameless in her excellent parenting and Dad is, sweet, in surprising moments. What he gives sometimes it’s hard to see, but it’s also what makes the trip and our family so unique, difficult, special: driving around in his old car, talking to everyone, eating food off the floor,—letting the girls run around nakkie… I felt some shame at the start of this holiday for being the feral family in the old age pensioner’s home (this hotel) but then what I learnt from spending time with Forest (little bro 1) and Marnie and Meadow (little sisters 2, 2) is that you can style anything out...

Like walking across a room for example.

You can sustain yourself in the journey by being lost in thought or listening to music or being on your phone (these are the tried & tested adult mechanisms for filling space time) OR you can fall down and zoom-in to inspect something on the floor, entering insect mode—this is the way of Forest; OR, you can go the way of Marnie and Meadow and expand & lift to fill the moment, get large and lumber your arms around to create momentum and bounce off physical plains like a human skateboarder (without a board)… it’s as if, in any given moment, they are choosing to be starring in their own music videos with their eyes as the cameras, their wills as the directors, and their bodies as the principal actors… then, all that’s left to do, is to style it out. Except of course what they’re focusing on is not what it looks like but what it feels like… that’s what’s getting them the grammies. The only way to move through life then (like you’re in a music video) is to feel it… this is what I understood by the end of this holiday, and it answered one of my semi-long standing fascinations with bad boys and why they limp—or, rather, why that limp is a sign of power and why when embodied correctly it is the ultimate swag.

The bad boy limp or lilt (or bop lol) is one of my favourite movements on the street because it registers like an implicit acknowledgement of how much power there is in the off-beat and how much good there is in delay—it’s how a man swings his hips, inhabits his body, fills the second with promise of what’s about to be... sometimes the bad boy limp is a battle scar, genuinely, and maybe that’s when it’s in its most perfect expression… but more often than not it isn’t and doesn’t need to be because it still resembles one so it still suggests perseverance in the face of adversity where adversity can be as simple as the adversity of doing out-doing being… until the bad boy limp comes along and twists doing into being so effortlessly—on the street, going from A (aaaaaaaaa) to B (beeeeeeee) which is probably why when it’s done performatively (when they’re operating from how they think it’s looking over how it’s feeling) then it can seem very grotesque and cringy (yes Michael hello Michael you’ve deepened my thinking) though truth be told I still think the attempt is admirable & sweet from my perspective of dancer & space cadet because seems to me if he’s doing the bad-boy limp he’s not in a rush, he’s probably, paid his dues—he’s, made peace with his past and now he’s allowing himself to get giddy in the smallest moment that there is that of

walking down the street &

there he goes he’s

becoming to you and

if he is then

when he does

he’ll

sneak in effortlessly like joining in a jump rope

close

his eyes (partially) feel the swing

the

hummingbird hover—stay,

stayyyyyyyyyyyyy

leave. Sorry. I think the city started to creep back into my parlance there. I became a bit more poetic/ambiguous/self-protective (?) but now I’m back in this multi-textured, multi-patterened, multi-decaded lobby and it’s 2am and I’m going to be very real with you again. Cold coffee in front of me, parcel of chocolate from Ella, melting…