Rahne Alexander

Feb 29

One time I booked a reading and I kind of had nothing new worth reading. I got this idea that what I probably ought to do was just go into some random section of my unexpurgated writings, perhaps something nice and jittery from the heart of my absolute meltdown. It wasn't easy to choose because if I just read whatever it would just make me look like a big gross pile of garbage. I don't like to go on stage completely unrehearsed, and whatever I read it needed to still be pretty raw to be of any use, so I couldn't rehearse. So I did my reading, and it was fine but I couldn't tell you what I read and when it was all done the writer Michael Kimball, who'd booked me, said to me something to the effect of “So what you're saying is that naming something equates to alienation?" as if he thought that idea was perhaps a little bit crazy but was willing to entertain the notion that I knew anything about what I had said and then my response was, "Yes." And then I thought about it for second and I still agreed with myself and I repeated myself. "Yes, I think that is true for me."

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That may have not been exactly what I said but it's what I meant. We were standing on the second floor of Minas, the historic Baltimore shop and gallery which closed this month. 

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I asked my friends. Not all of my friends. Some friends that I felt like asking at the moment. Some friends I wanted to hear from. Some that I know all too well. Some that I barely know at all. All of them friends who I thought would have something to say about redefinition. So much depends today on what I was concerned about last October.  

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When I was a child I often wished I had been born on February 29. It seemed equal to hitting the lottery, although there were adults who tried to cast it as a sort of a tragedy. Those kids would only have a birthday every four years, they’d say. Who’d want that? 

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Why aren’t there more kindly ways of telling another person that their ideas are ridiculous and completely dismissible? 

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February 29 was invented to patch the calendar like a robust piece of duct tape. It was invented as a buttress to steady a slightly-teetering structure, When those adults started in with their weird birthday dogma, I realized that not only were those with February 29 birthdates members of an elite percentage, they would be granted a certain amount of leeway in the ways they mark passing years. Which led to the realization that without February 29 my own birthday would sort of migrate through the season. Were one to live long enough, one might find that their springtime birthday would wind up in midwinter -- revealing time itself to be an elaborate, if necessary, fiction.  

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In which aspect ratio are your mythologies? 

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I went around asking everyone to tell me what they think about redefinition. It was hard not to feel like I was cheating, because as far as I’m concerned every word I write is a redefinition and I pretty much expect the same of everybody else.

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I write this sentence and I go back and read it. Then I write this sentence, and I go back and wonder if that is what I meant. I may not think that anymore, but now I’ve written it. Maybe I’ve changed my mind. Maybe I should erase that. Maybe I should delete it. Maybe that’s not what I meant to say. Maybe next year I’ll be appalled. At my short-sightedness. At my jealousy. At my immaturity. At my lack of articulation. Maybe I should never write again. Maybe I should destroy all my false starts one more time. 

Rahne Alexander is a performer, multimedia artist, and writer from Baltimore. She has a band called The Degenerettes and a variety talk show called Everybody All The Time and she apparently can now perform weddings. She thanks Publishing Genius profusely for allowing her to run rampant this cold, cold month.