SIKEgeist

Lindsey Greer Sikes is a writer, creator, and performer who,alongside their furline alter ego, Purdy Mischief, are here to help set the HumAnimal free from the cage we call society. //themes deal with perception, unmasking shame, confronting binary ideologies, exploring viscerality and sensuality, and the importance of play. //A few of Sikes’ favorite things include dissecting stuffed animals, rolling in heaps of lush fabric, fruit juice dripping from mouths and loud sex noises. Follow on instagram: @sikesyart

[sikegeist]

you were not born to conform// . playing with some #bodyart. thoughts welcome. . #queerart #queerartist #bodyart #flesh #fur #selflove #resist #youwerenotborntoconform https://www.instagram.com/p/CAWQGQil5mb/?igshid=c16dkm4geh9u

[sikegeist]

#dontgobacktonormal #thiswasnevernormal #wearethemany #solidarity #solidarityeconomy #peoplenotprofits #eattherich #humanrevolution #mutualaid #revolution2020 #2020 #solidaritymanifesto https://www.instagram.com/p/B_0x2-vlE9R/?igshid=7i3usmz07dfn

[sikegeist]

Things are getting hard for a lot of people that I love and know and also that I don’t know and haven’t gotten a chance to love yet. I wrote you a knee note. The ink will bleed until you can’t read the words any longer and what was once so clear will become smears and then it will wash away as if nothing was ever there before. . . . #youredoinggreat https://www.instagram.com/p/B-vJ29elP2_/?igshid=yg4su7o54z1o

[sikegeist]

Thanks so much for letting me play at your virtual table today @salvagevanguard ! I had a blast!! 💋 . . 📸 by @ephotography28 💚💚 . . #performanceart #liveart #performanceartist #queerartist #theatre #atxtheatre #quarantineartclub https://www.instagram.com/p/B-n7jT6l16u/?igshid=1he9whw945vyc

[sikegeist]

The fine folx at Live Art Club London (@liveartclubldn) are LIVE this month with a virtual gallery! Check out some of my own pandemic-response-work (“Unexpected Bliss or the Quiet Rise or just Fuck Capitalism, this is better” and “The World I Want to Fight For”) that’s posted, along with some other unconventional work to fill your solitary quarantine heart with creative stranger bliss. 💋 https://liveart.club/?March . . . . #liveart #liveartlondon #internationalcollaboration #pandemic2020 #pamdemicart #pandemicartclub2020 #quarantinelife #quarantineartclub #quarantineart https://www.instagram.com/p/B-U1zpClLn2/?igshid=z67k0sae8093

[sikegeist]

I’M AFRAID TO DO THIS BUT I DONT WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT

I did it again this morning. I reached for my phone instead of my meditation pillow. I knew what I was doing when I did it but I did it anyways. I just wanted a connection. I chose people over god.

Trust is hard.

You have to have faith, they say.

I think what you really need is the willingness to be brave and afraid.

I was taking a walk yesterday--one of my new favorite activities now that my days have so many more hours to fill since we can’t be near one another despite the glorious weather. As I walked up and down the broken, jutting sidewalks of my neighborhood--an obstacle course created by the tree roots which have continued to defy man’s attempt to keep them hidden by BURSTING through the concrete prison laid upon them years ago--I tried my best to be present.

It’s easy to be present with the trees and the bees and the leaves.

It’s easy not to worry about what the birds and lizards think of you.

(There I went again. Checking my phone after hearing the ding. Missing some friends who are thousands of miles from me so dearly. Missing them just as I would any other day we are apart. This is not pandemic pain, it’s life.)

((And I think I cherish these relationships so much because I don’t feel afraid around these people. I don’t feel judged. And I don’t feel judged because I don’t need their approval.))

But as I’m walking up and down these jagged and jutting concrete paths, I notice there are more people out and doing the same: walking for walking’s sake. More people than I expected to see. Are we trying to deny the reality? Or has scarcity mentality slowly begun to creep in--making us hoard as much time with our natural resources before we return to a world of plastic and screens and forget how amazing the gift of this land we were *not* given, but lent for a time being, truly is.

I digress. I got sidetracked talking about the beauty of the world. But I was supposed to still be writing about being all in my head and my fears. Isn’t that always the way. Doesn’t the natural world always make our attention stray from what matters most: our ego?

Yes, that sentence was swole with sarcasm.

Back to me. I’m walking. So are other people. And as we come to pass, I know what I want to do is look them in their eye and smile and connect oh so briefly and wish them, “Have a nice day.” But I notice something happen, again. Something that had stopped happening recently, but now seems to be happening more frequently. A pain wells up behind my eyes--it’s a strange pressure which I’ve identified as fear; a biophysical response mechanism I’ve learned I had anytime I sense danger.

But what is dangerous about this?

What is dangerous about looking another person in the eye?

I first noticed this physiological response approximately 5 years ago. It began at a time when I realized I had very few people around me in my current life that I could trust. And I realized that although, as my friend had made me aware a couple of years earlier, my heart was truly wide open for the first time in my entire life--I felt accepted and wanted in a way I had never experienced in my body/community while growing up--I was not taking care of my heart. I was giving it away too freely, and it was being used and abused. I was being left confused; so unsure of who to trust.

Yes, I am responsible for my own actions. No, I did not know any better at the time. I did not have teachers or mentors in my life when it came to what to do with my heart--perhaps with the exception of my grandmother: Honey. And I spent approximately two decades of my life believing that that was because I had to earn others love by giving myself away, piece by piece, until they deemed me worthy of a return. I have finally stopped beating myself up for the things I did not know before. I am still developing a nurturing and compassionate relationship with my inner child who is still learning so, so much about vulnerability and trust and connection.

I think the pain that wells up behind my eyes when I try to connect with others belongs to that child. I remember doing it sometimes when I received a lot of attention as a child. Once, on a family vacation in Hilton Head, South Carolina, I was called up on stage by the most famous man on the island at the time (well, famous if you were a kid at least): Gregg Russell. Russell was a children’s entertainer who would perform once a week on a little stage overlooking the coast and this giant, glorious lighthouse which I loved so much for no real reason and don’t believe I ever even visited. Some of my favorite songs of his included “Purple People Eater”, “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up”, and “Is That A Booger In Your Sugar? No, It’s Not, It’s Snot!” He was my childhood rockstar.

Every week he would select a child to come up on stage and sing a song with him. Kids would spend all day working on signs to take to the little concert, which they would hold up in the hopes that Gregg Russell would pick them.

(Damn...I looked at my phone again. My erratic mind is my own fault, it seems--a side effect of consistent access to technology.)

Back to Gregg. Short story short: I got picked. And I was thrilled! This was my dream!

I was six years old at the time and mostly wore my lightning blonde hair back in a ponytail. I walked up on the stage, full of excitement and fear, and Russell picked me up and sat me on his lap--his face confronted with my bright blonde spray of hair. As was his custom, he began to try to engage me in conversation, to joke around. But suddenly I realized all eyes were upon me, and I both wanted it and I didn’t. I was excited that we were all connected in that moment, and also felt the immense pressure of living up to everyone’s entertainment expectations. The result: I could hardly talk. I was anxious, but the adults in the crowd read me as coy and thought perhaps I was just being cute. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But as a child that’s not how my mind interpreted the situation.

Why do I mention my ponytail? Well, because my strongest memory of that night is now the memory of me smacking Gregg Russell in the face with my ponytail as I shook my head back and forth as if to say No! rather than opening my mouth to just say, “No.” I wasn’t protesting--he had asked me a question. But I was too nervous to let anything come out of me, for some strange reason. Maybe I was afraid of disappointing my audience.

This childish anxiety and this pain behind my eyes returns to me often in periods of intense worry and self-doubt. It’s very hard for me to escape my head sometimes, but I have done enough work over the past decade to know the difference between what’s real and what’s my pre-programmed story. Still, a second is a short moment, and often in those moments, my fear--my feelings--overpower my logic.

Now back to the present (which is actually one day in the past): I’m walking about my neighborhood and I notice that people are being incredibly friendly. People want to connect and say hi. Only two people I see are actually staring at their phones. A couple walks past me and is smiling and I try to smile back and notice immediately that, instead, I dart my gaze away and look at the ground with a smile on my face, as if to say, “I’m not mean, just shy.”

Why did I just do that?

I don’t know.

I may never know.

I accept that.

I keep walking.

I pass by a woman, who is listening to something on her phone. She keeps her gaze forward though and here comes the moment we are about to connect! But then, I do it again.

What is wrong with me?

Why does this pain naturally make me glance away?

I keep walking.

The next few people I pass by I keep staring at the ground.

I don’t want to mess up kindness again.

I keep walking.

I see another woman walking her dog.

This time, I’m going to try to keep the connection.

I look her in the eye, and she does the same.

We both smile as the distance between us shrinks.

And then--

Again--

The pain wells up behind my eyes. A stabbing that makes me turn my head away quickly.

I fucked up again.

I pony-tail face-smacked this perfectly nice, perfectly harmless, perfect stranger.

Why is this happening to me again, so suddenly?

I don’t know.

I can only work with it.

Because the truth is I’m too tired to fight anymore. I’ve been doing it for a few decades now and could use a bit of a break from wrestling with worry.

Last night I was journaling about how tired I am of myself.

Not in a morose or pity-party kind of way, simply in the way a child becomes tired of a toy or a game because the magic and wonder has worn off.

And here I am again, writing about myself.

(Write what you know? Do I really know myself that well?)

I don’t remember what I was writing when I started this exercise.

I am nervous to share this today.

I would rather pony-tail smack everyone who attempts to read this than post it.

That’s my natural instinct.

Even though I don’t want it to be.

But as my friend who is thousands of miles from me now once told me, “You have to face the fear and do it anyways.”

I hope, one day, that pain that comes up behind my eyes--that fear of connection I have which is actually just a fear of rejection which is actually just unhealed wounds from childhood and later life experiences I haven’t fully overcome--fades away, just like the lightning blonde color of my hair has faded to something more like straw in the summertime.

I hope the world never stops changing, and me with it.

[sikegeist]

New challenge: Wake up and Write for one hour max and share, ideally unedited, the results, every day for 30 days. Hypothesis: I will freak out, I will doubt, I will question, I will worry, I’ll be my own worst enemy. I will do it anyway. Later hypothesis: I will stop worrying about the outcomes. I will begin to find my way back to doing what I love without need for it to be for any reason—other than the love of my own expression. I’ll post each day’s writing in my story, in case you’d like to follow along, and I’ll save it to my highlights as well. I’m curious—what is something you love to do but have stopped out of fear or self doubt. Or maybe something you still do but it brings you pain because you are not fully doing it out of fear of the outcomes or others perception? What’s your challenge to get back to yourself? 💋 love + language 💋 -L.G.S. . . . . #writersofinstagram #writingchallenge #writingchallenges #facethefearanddoitanyway https://www.instagram.com/p/B-QeMj6lIOk/?igshid=1fjplygz8rdu3

[sikegeist]

Finally got together a little trailer of some work 2018-now. Hope you enjoy. ((Sound on for the full experience!)) // \\ // \\ While I’m taking just a wee breather from performing for a couple months, I’ll be sure to post some updates on my upcoming shenanigans in due time—post relocation. Stay tuned, I guess? * * * * #performanceart #liveart #performanceartist #liveartist #queerartist #queerperformance #queerart #qweird #humanimal #genderfucking #femmeperformance #feministperformance #sploshingonstage #feedthebeast #purdymischief https://www.instagram.com/p/B9xTJsplp5p/?igshid=ptrcuttbj1m3

[sikegeist]

Hello instagram it’s 2:30am in Central America zonage and I still can’t sleep despite retiring nearly four hours ago so I wrote this after realizing I had started to do a very very bad thing. #writersofinstagram #insomniapoetry #everythingsfine https://www.instagram.com/p/B722q9mFhKt/?igshid=1jlqn8tb9gc0n

[sikegeist]

Hit that note in Spanx. #singinspanx https://www.instagram.com/p/B72Z2aUFDDl/?igshid=pvirhbnefa8m

[sikegeist]

Purdy Mischiefs Playtime: kind of a photo story! Here’s a few of my fave 📸’s thus far from this past weekend at FronteraFest at @hydeparktheatreatx. I had such a blast!! Many thanks to the awesome crew that makes this madness happen and for giving me a space to get weird in public. What more could a Purdy ask for? 😽💋 . . #performanceart #liveart #queerartists #bodiesonstage #animaldrag #sploshingonstage #genderfucking #purdymischief #breakthecage (at FronteraFest) https://www.instagram.com/p/B7y8TXRl4Hk/?igshid=1j9o2798o03c9

[sikegeist]

More wonderful 📸📸📸 from #performance #art night @ @notsuoh314main!! Many thanks to @experimentalaction & the uber talented @officialjpclifford for the shots. 😽🐾💋 #purdymischief #performanceart #queerperformance #animaldrag #iwanttofuckyourfat #fleshy #fleshart (at Notsuoh) https://www.instagram.com/p/B7Th5FhFahU/?igshid=rdb1u2jc9b0i

[sikegeist]

Thank you so furry furry much @experimentalaction + @notsuoh314main for letting me get sticky on your stage. I feel so #blessed. . . #notsuoh #eatass #postshow (at Notsuoh) https://www.instagram.com/p/B7EX0silDSX/?igshid=vqj5q1ld4iye

[sikegeist]

TONIGHT: Purdy gits dirdy! 🐾💋🐾💋🐾💋🐾💋🐾 @ @notsuoh314main @ 9PM!! . . #performanceart #performancearthouston #liveart #queerart #queerperformance #fleshy #animaldrag #honey (at Notsuoh) https://www.instagram.com/p/B7ByxkJF8ya/?igshid=z6o7hsdbyhmt

[sikegeist]

💋🐾TICKETS ON SALE NOW!! 🐾💋 //\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\ Purdy Mischief's Playtime, by Lindsey Greer Sikes. Indulge yo-self in a wild romp through fields of animalistic fury disguised as a surreal vaudevillian stew—freshly served by the HumAnimalian Trickster, Ms. Purdy Mischief (and a few furry friends too!). Lindsey Greer Sikes (creator/ certified weirdo) transforms into the hyper-femme-sexualized Human-Animal hybrid to declaw and deconstruct the shame and glory of flesh, gender and food fetishes and invites bodies of all varietes to come play along as they/it revolt agains their own social domestication. //\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\ 🎟 link: www.hydeparktheatre.org and select “short fringe” 😽 (at FronteraFest) https://www.instagram.com/p/B6vjRlhlr7e/?igshid=1mb2ulg78szpx

[sikegeist]

Today, remember humanity.

Today, this is what I’m wondering: Were we meant to take from one another, or to take care of each other?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“The way, the only way to stop this evil, is for the red people to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and should be now -- for it was never divided, but belongs to all.

No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers.

Sell a country?! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?”

-Shawnee Chief Tecumseh, speaking to William Henry Harrison, an American militant and future president (who would come to be referred to as the Father, and citizens of the new country as his “children”), while attempting to procure Indigenous lands through lethal force and legal trickery for the new white settlers in North America, 1810

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The first Thanksgiving is said to have happened in 1621.

This speech was given approximately 200 years later.

Today, approximately another two hundred years after that, what are we celebrating?

What do we remember?

Most importantly, what have we chosen to forget?

I believe today is a great day to remember that nothing in this world belongs to us, other than our own bodies. This land does not belong to us yet today we celebrate a perversion of the story of how greed (a building block of the patriarchy) nearly destroyed entire cultures and decimated a civilization, amongst a slew of other inhumanities. We spread this fake news in order to make ourselves feel better about our insecure need to own property. In 2019, our way of living reflects the truth that this is what we do in order to feel like we are living: we consume, we collect, we equate our worth with our monetary value, our possessions, our status and popularity.

This land does not belong to us, was not created by us, and yet it is living. Thus, today is a great day to show reverence and then express our grief for the native wisdom which once nourished this land. The earth is dying not because she is sick, but because we are poisoning her. We are taking and taking and taking from her like ravenous cannibals. We have abused the gift of this land, from which our own bodies came. We abuse ourselves. What’s worse, we scoff and ridicule those we do not understand (“uncivilized people”) because in order to control something, first we must make it make sense (it’s true, capitalism does “make cents”).

Four hundred years later are we still not behaving like the colonizers? How civilized have we become, actually?

Because what happened in this country then is still happening centuries later: here, with the pipeline, and everywhere—such as in Turkey (the country, not what you will eat today). Its dictator (the “Father”) has now killed hundreds, possibly thousands, of innocent people and is prepared to kill thousands more in order to claim “their land”. This is a crime: people willing to take other people out of this world in order to say, “This belongs to me, not you.” How incredibly childish; are we not toddlers saying, “Mine, mine, mine!,” instead of fully formed beings saying, “Thank you, I will cherish this, and I will nourish it with you—because I know that power only grows when it is shared.”

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Hundreds of years ago, as Andrew Jackson pursued his mission of removing humans from their native lands, he justified those actions in the same way capitalism and the laws of property do: by making these different humans seem less than—by assigning both them and the land a value. Thus, war was made (for it is easy to destroy what you do not value); human lives exchanged for land.

In 1832, Chief Black Hawk made a devastating concession speech after invaders ravaged his lands and people:

“You know the cause of our making war. It is known to all white men. They ought to be ashamed of it. The white men despise the Indians, and drive them from their homes. But the Indians are not deceitful. The white men speak bad of the Indian, and look at him spitefully. But the Indian does not tell lies; Indians do not steal.

An Indian who is as bad as the white men, could not live in our nation...The white men are bad school-masters; they carry false looks, and deal in false actions; they smile in the face of the poor Indian to cheat him; they shake them by the hand to gain their confidence, to make them drunk, to deceive them…”

Is this deceit not what we are celebrating today? Is four hundred years enough time to forget?

According to Chief Black Hawk, apparently not...

“We told them to let us alone; but they followed on and beset our paths, and they coiled themselves among us like the snake. They poisoned us by their touch. We were not safe. We lived in danger. We were becoming like them…”

-Chief Black Hawk, surrender speech of The Black Hawk War, 1832

Four hundred years later...what have we become?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Today, I am glad that this earth is waking us up to the devastation we have caused.

And maybe Today is a great day to begin to let go of what is, naturally, not in our control.

People are not your property.

And neither is this land, which is on loan to us only for as long as we are alive.

Because we came from the land, and to it we will return.

Man decided he could steal land and sell it to other men.

That was not a directive from whatever god you believe in,

Nor from Mother Nature itself.

No god ever gave man the gift of land so that he could benefit off the misfortune of those who have less of it.

Power grows when it is shared—health and happiness, too.

And yet the idea of our identity dying, our legacy ending, our ego not existing, terrifies us. So we find ways to take and to stake—to claim something that has no owner as ours, so that we too may remain as eternal as this land once was believed to be.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Today is a great day to...

Resist capitalism.

Resist the idea of land ownership.

Resist commodification.

Remember that the only private property we have a right to is our the property of our own body.

Remember that attempting to claim or control what is natural is, in fact, completely against the laws of nature.

And thus, today is a great day to remember that you have every right to resist the unnatural laws made by man.

And to be inspired to do whatever we can to repair. The very least of which is to show reverence for both this land, and one another.

If we want to repair—if we want to suture this wound—we have to stop slicing ourselves open and piecing our worlds apart.

Four hundred years later, how will we show our thanks giving to our true Creator—the Great Spirit as Tecumseh named it—who gave us this land, from which our bodies, our lives began? Because whatever or whomever you believe that creator to be, of this I am certain: our Father is not another fallible, murderous man—and to that man, because he is only a man, because he is like us—flesh and blood and someday dust—because of this, we owe him nothing of our existence.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

And if you need a little extra encouragement—a reminder of what today should be revered for, Tecumseh’s (supposedly, as this quote may also be attributed to another indigenous ancestor...if only the history were better preserved...) spirit whispers to us from beyond…

“Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself.”

[sikegeist]

I am so vurry vurry stoked that my furry flesh will be joining this years @waterfronttx Festival! Come play with @purdymischief in the woods and explore the possibilities of booties without boundaries with my new interactive version of Flesh Museum and let your taste buds tingle with my live performance of “Feast of Fat Fucking” (featuring muh fave original work: The Orgasm Symphony) 🙀😻 I can’t wait to play in the woods with y’all, and best of all: it’s a weekend of FREE ART & MUSIC with a ton of rad southern artists. Come camp and amp with us!! This Fri-Sun 11.1-3.19 // see ya hair! 💋🐾💋🐾💋🐾💋🐾💋🐾 #purdymischief #queerart #queertexas #artinthewoods #texasfestivals #performanceart #liveart #fleshart #waterfrontfestival #waterfrontfestival2019 (at WaterFront TX- Immersive Theatre, Art, & Music Festival) https://www.instagram.com/p/B4OBgdZl0jO/?igshid=13vx4lq3rp1n2