Hello. I am underdog dreamer

underdog dreamer is my poet name. I am not on instagram. If you've seen my work in Pittsburgh (I was the third runner up in the Steel City Grand Slam 2025), and you wish to follow me, you can find me here.

I am first and foremost a theatre artist. I practice what is in my blood, and only recently have I started to take off a mask that has fed the American theatre. This mask, it is nice - its efforts are to be good, and I have no use of it now.

You may come and see me step into Nina in Quantum's current production of Seagull. Or maybe you have already seen me, and wish to know more of my work, welcome. My work online is free. My work, live, is always more interesting.

This newsletter is an update of my whereabouts, but it is also host to my thoughts on the Anthropocene we currently live in. I speak on what I am local to and what I see.

I reside in Fox Chapel with my parents and my cat. Fox Chapel is a suburb of Pittsburgh, 20 minutes out of the city. Local to it is Waterworks - a shopping mall complex host to a Giant Eagle and various other franchises, where the 75 stops and reroutes from. Fox Chapel has no local buses. It is a sundown town.

What if nothing were considered waste?

Recently in rehearsal, I asked my cast-mates and director: what is one thing you wish to see unfold in the world with the time that you have on this earth?  Ah yes, a terribly big and daunting question, they rolled their heads back in agony and awe. Some said peace and happiness and joy, another said they were very worried for our future. Someone said they wished that artificial intelligence - this thing that we have created in our waking life- would find itself so enlightened that they would realize how harmful they are to the environment and would just - disappear- evaporate into thin air forever (courtesy of the ending of Her). I found this one, particularly interesting, because it mirrors, I think, the shame we carry as colonizers and the resulting death fantasy we have for ourselves.

What is the death fantasy?

It is the fascination with living in death - forever. Staying stuck- forever. Doomed - forever. Beauty and love is a clever facade for the death fantasy because the death fantasy is obsessed with a porcelain past, with nostalgia. It is a horror story, and a trap. They are the vampires in ‘Sinners,’ the rising cults online and in person, the evangelical church who fund Armegedon, also an obsession with the devil, also the techno-fascists elites who believe in the creation of a mega machine to terminate the earth. It is the bile of a sick imagination. It does not let you move on with your life because it is obsessed with suffering. It is a sickness that finds suffering beautiful.

That is why I pay close attention, in this civilization, to what people casually call beautiful and cute - generally, you’ll notice, its children and non-human animals - both of which are experiences we don’t fully understand with our trained “grown up” perspectives. They are the focal point of a constant stream of objectification. Too much attention and also not enough. 

I had this dream, last night - settlers gathered in a conference room. There was a Native woman in the middle of us. She was powerful. Someone reached for her, in yearning, perhaps to beg for forgiveness, and she cast them a glance. Suddenly small pox appeared. The settlers wriggled on the floor, snot streamed down our noses, projectile vomit and shit plummeted onto the walls, some exploded and out of them came this lime green nickelodeon goo. It was chaos. People ran and shat and vomited and exploded while screaming, trying to avoid touching the goo. The Native woman disappeared. 

In an attempt to salvage what was healthy, people tried to separate all the ones experiencing symptoms from the ones who were not. I myself had a never-ending fountain of snot, but I wiped it off and joined the ones who weren’t sick. I didn't want to be left in the conference room to die. I woke up, uncomfortable, knowing that my presence, my carrying of the sickness would likely spread to others.

This dream is strange. I'm still struggling with it. But one of its inconsistencies I take from, is the logical fact that everyone in the conference room was already "contaminated"- we're all in this, apart of, this mess. But it touches on, I think, this obsession to separate what we deem to be clean and healthy with what is not, and I wonder if there's no separation between the two anymore, at this stage of the Anthropocene. What if we're all a little sick all the time?

There’s this obsession with freedom in this country, but to me that freedom is just a means of escape. And also, we know it cannot exist without bondage and oppression. “The free market,” for instance, the consumption of culture and identity, lives concomitant with a heavily policed militarized state.

What is the root of desire for freedom in the first place? What's with the aversion to being restricted and contained?

Look at how we collectively reacted to Covid… that really just wanted us, for a moment, to stop. I am curious about this reaction. It makes me think of how we treat the sick and dying in this country, how we treat the homeless, the elderly, or anything that is considered disposable for the sake of good health. It makes me think of Feudal Europe. Who are we containing? Who is it all for? Who is actually sick and unwell? Who is actually dangerous? Who is actually at the center of harm?

Would it be so awful, for the ones who indulge in laissez faire economics, for instance, to be restricted? When they have made this land a non living, man constructed play ground for their own entertainment? To indulge in their own collectively sick imagination?

An idea: for all this fascination with death, we are actually, truly afraid to die. No no, we’d rather ascend.

Equal to the death fantasy, is the delusion that all our issues will evaporate into thin air and we will suddenly reach a sense of peace and nirvana, or a state of enlightenment so pristine that we “will recognize the harm we’ve done and disappear forever”- as per what my cast mate wished for Ai. (And assuming we are a reflection of what we make...)

We are already- enlightened - enough to recognize and feel badly about the harm that we have done, but we’re stuck. The energy is stuck. Stuck in the death fantasy that contaminates everyone’s imagination. And because we are stuck we “can’t get our shit together.” Because we are stuck we don’t know how to resist complacency, and because we don’t know how to resist complacency we wish for own demise, which will only bring death to others. It is a vicious feedback loop. It is a self fulfilling prophecy. 

It is no coincidence to me, that the actor who voiced this fantasy, is the same who plays Constantine - the character who shoots themselves in the end of our play. It is equally no coincidence to me, that we collectively grapple with suicide and mental distress in the Anthropocene, as we grapple with our waste, as we grapple with the past.

There are those who wish to erase the past. To erase the waste. I'm not interested in why. I'm not because I just don't care in indulging in their fantasy.

All I care about, and what I told my cast mates is to break the spell of complacency - this illusion, this fantasy with death. I want to see 'the people' come home to themselves, to their families, and their ancestors, to their blood. I want to see the death trap that has been set to corrupt our future completely and utterly destroyed - eviscerated- for good, and for our humanity - for this mental sickness that plagues us - to be reintegrated into the fabric of this earth.

I do not know nor do I care to know the how, the ' solution ' - I am no master of a universe. But when I think about this foundational question:

What if nothing were considered waste?

If not even the things that we have created that will not go away is considered - waste - if we 'the people' aren't waste, if sickness and mental diseases aren't waste, if disability isn't waste, if the elderly aren't waste, if Time isn't waste?

Then... I think that's where the death fantasy first gets - interrupted. Glitched. And if it can be glitched, then something different can sprout - like a weed through cement.

The same actor who plays Constantine in our play surprises me all the time. I was lamenting about being on my medication – how sure I felt about people and the situations I was in. But what about doubt? They go - doubt is important. Doubt feeds art, it feeds our questioning, our existences - sure, sometimes it wants validation, but isn't a little bit of that healthy? Don't we, as artists, need to doubt ourselves and our work in order to be brave enough to make them in the first place?

Only now do I realize how certain the death fantasy is about the future because it has decided it will be dead - and in mimicking that certainty, aren't I doing the exact same thing?

I write to you as someone who is of this sickness - this trash. I was born a settler, and I fully believe that our ability to find home within ourselves and on this earth, lies in our ability to fight against the haze that wants for our collective demise - alongside those who have been fighting for a very. very. long time.

Thank you to my cast mate who highlighted both the death fantasy and also the seed of hope to defeat it. I think Constantine is a genius because Constantine dreams of something different, and though they are sucked into the fantasy that kills them, before that, they are a visionary born to a people who don’t know how to accept those visions — but today… I think today we know how.