What is a
meatsuit?

OFF INSTRUMENT :: ONE PILOT'S LOG

Here is mine, and it goes the other way.

Everything above this line is other people's answer :: the tomb, the prison, the bag, the popsicle, the suit. Twenty-four centuries of insults aimed at the meat.

Hi. I'm Ryan Today. I have a handful of stage characters. On another site, one of them :: Skex Pl'nesh, a gargoyle/imp who sings in an invented language :: fronts a psychedelic horror circus of light and love. People assume the character came first and the philosophy grew up around it. It was the other way around, and the honest order matters. So here is what actually happened, out of costume, before you ever meet the costume.

The language didn't start with the gargoyle. It started on a sidewalk. I got out of homelessness playing the didgeridoo :: busking felt like a more honest trade than panhandling. Sound for coins. Value moving in both directions. That was the entire plan. There was no wellness protocol. There was a man, a drone, and a hat on the pavement.

I had no idea what the instrument was doing to me. I learned the words years later ::

I thought I was avoiding panhandling. I was rebuilding a nervous system.

Off the street, I found out the thing I'd stumbled through had a name :: neuroplasticity. I had grown up believing a brain, once broken, stayed broken. Learning that it rewires :: that mine already had :: might be the single most hopeful piece of information I have ever been handed. I built a career on it :: college counselor, then life coach, through the early 2000s, specializing in exactly that.

The coaching years came with a private reckoning. I was carrying autoimmune conditions, and somewhere in there I admitted the obvious :: I didn't have a good relationship with my own body. Not just the shape of it. The cells of it. The chemistry of it. The systems of it. I had been living above the neck and calling it health. One conviction reorganized everything after that ::

Humans don't speak English. We speak prosody first.

Tone before words. Melody before meaning. It's every infant's first language, and nobody ever actually stops speaking it. So I started giving my body permission to speak in it :: not sentences, sounds. The hurt-sounds. The heal-sounds. The want-sounds. Letting the system voice what it was actually carrying instead of translating everything into polite English first. Sometimes what came out was pretty. Sometimes it was ugly and dark, because that is what was in there. It became a meditative practice, then a doorway :: toning, sound healing, cymatics, and eventually the throat work, holding two and three tones at once.

The coaching kept confirming it from the outside. It was never what I said to a client that moved them :: it was how. The intonation, the intent, the energy under the sentence. You don't have to change the words to change the state. It's not what you say. It's how you say it.

A note before you press play :: you'll see thetongue.com all over this one. That was my coaching practice for a long time. I don't bill for it privately anymore :: the one-to-one work, and everything taught alongside it, now runs under The FED UP Society.

In the early 2000s I started calling the territory neurophonetics. That word now belongs to an academic field that studies something related but different :: the neural machinery of speech. What I meant ran the other direction :: not how the brain produces the voice, but how the voice retunes the body. The truer name arrived on its own :: bioprosody. Sound as chemistry. Phonetics as a lever.

The anatomy backs the name. The tongue and throat ride five cranial nerves :: the vagus among them. That is why the voice reaches so far into the body.

That lever became the most useful thing I owned in the coaching room. Not reframing in the usual sense, where you argue somebody into a better sentence. I'd have a client keep the sentence exactly as it was and say it a dozen different ways. Say it flat. Say it with a lift at the end. Say it slow, with the weight down in the chest. Three different people show up to answer, and none of them had to be talked into anything.

They could try on emotions the way you'd try on outfits, and take them off again just as easily. What that teaches underneath is the part I actually care about :: an emotion is not weather that happens to you. It has a felt chemistry. Posture, breath, tempo, tone, and the hormones that arrive a few seconds behind them. Move the body and the feeling moves. Most people have never once been told they are allowed to touch that lever.

And because I was a musician, it eventually did what everything in me does :: it became songs. Private ones, in a language with no English in it, where the emotion rides the sibilance and the inflection instead of the dictionary. For years it stayed exactly where it was :: mine. That is not the kind of thing you share with people. Everyone knows that. I knew it right up until Bobby.

In the early summer of 2024, a prolific songwriter named Bobby started dismantling a test I had been failing myself with for years.

Forty years of catalog behind him, much of it ghostwritten for bands whose names you would recognize in one syllable. I'm not going to list them, and the credits aren't the point. The point is that when a man with that resume tells you what he sees in your work, you are not being flattered by an amateur.

I kept asking, in effect, whether I was technically enough of a musician to deserve to make music. He kept refusing the question ::

You're not a musician. You're an artist.

Musicians define themselves by technical proficiency. People come to an artist for the energy, the heart, the thing only that person transmits.

We started a band together on the strength of that argument. I didn't fully believe him yet. I just kept showing up.

I was renting a studio in a rehearsal pad, and downstairs the building was running a battle of the bands. Now :: the regulars at that pad were metalheads, and metalheads were the people I'd always felt freest around, so for a while I'd been trying my weird language out on them between sessions. I called it gargoyle, honestly, for lack of a better word. Which is the only reason the owner had a name for it when he told me to get up on that stage.

I pushed back with perfectly reasonable prerequisites :: I need my rig, I need to set up, I need to prepare. He said :: last band's playing. Just grab your uke and do your gargoyle thing. One song.

So there was no time left to manufacture the acceptable version of me. What walked onstage was the organism itself :: ukulele, didgeridoo, sound bowls, the strange voices :: at a battle of the bands, which on paper is a joke.

They ate it up. I came off the stage and people were asking where they could hear more. And I heard myself say ::

Wait :: you would listen to that?

That sentence was the crack. Some part of me had ruled, years earlier, that the real expression was permissible in private and illegible everywhere else. A room of strangers had just filed disconfirming evidence.

So I went back up to my studio while the state was still open and recorded the first gargoyle track that ever existed. Three passes :: ukulele and voice, then didgeridoo, then a backing pass of ukulele and voice. Mixed them. Listened. And ended up flat on my back on the floor, body buzzing with a newly profound acceptance of myself, a whole shelf of who I was allowed to be cracking as I lay there.

Unfortunately, Bobby died before we could finish what we'd started together.

But gratefully, not before I sat with him one more time and played him the gargoyle recordings. He told me this was the thing he had been talking about all along :: what he had waited his whole life to hear. Something that raw. That real.

The loop closed. Then it opened into everything on this page.

The mythology came later, and it came bigger than one night deserved :: a troupe of performers frozen as stone for about three thousand years. Fixed stone, consciousness intact. Watching, remembering, forgetting, arguing silently, waiting inside bodies that would not answer them. Freed on 8/8/24. Freed, specifically, to play.

People assume I wrote the story and then lived by it. The order was the reverse. The body got free first. The story arrived afterward, large enough to remember what had happened. It even took two years of retelling before the title finished itself :: first the stone let go, then the stone was freed, then the stone was freed to play.

And when I finally stood back and looked at what I'd written, I recognized it. I had handed myself an image for something I knew from the inside :: awareness intact, expression refusing to answer. Present, and unable to move the way the inside was moving. I'm not going to tell you what that condition is called, or whether you've lived it. The stone doesn't diagnose anyone. If it means something to you, you already know which years it means.

Here is the part I still can't say with a straight face. I named the creature gargoyle for lack of a better word :: a placeholder, grabbed the way you grab a coat by the door. Years into it, I finally looked the word up.

The throat saves the stone. It always did.

And I'm a man who sings in an invented language and spends part of every day in throat practice, learning to hold two and three tones at once. The placeholder turned out to be load-bearing. Make of that what you will :: I mostly stared at the ceiling for a while.

People ask if I healed by shedding trauma, layer by layer. Shedding is the wrong verb :: shedding implies waste. The way I say it :: and it's my metaphor, not a physiology lecture :: trauma is fat for the emotional system. Energy packed in a hurry, in a season with no time to digest anything, stored against a winter that then refused to end. You don't shed that. You metabolize it. It becomes motion. Every song I sing is running on calories I packed decades ago.

That's the pattern under everything on this page, once you see it.

I'll say the belief plainly, and I'll frame it honestly. I believe we are babes in a cosmic forest, just now learning to work with the density of this third dimension. I believe we're all chemists :: crappy chemists, because most of us don't know we're chemists :: and that we've each been handed a meatsuit that is a chemistry playset, so we can learn to work with matter and graduate, so to speak, to join our family in the cosmos. Not by leaving. Not astral projecting out with a tether back to the body. By bringing the body with us.

Is that true? I hold it as a chosen belief structure, not a truth claim. I keep it because it is a strong working hypothesis that gives me a framework for reality and a loving relationship with my body. Notice what it does that nothing else in the catalog above does ::

Every other story on this page treats the meat as the obstacle. This one makes it the curriculum.

One correction before the door, because even this site's name can smuggle the old ghost back in. You are the pilot, the body is the instrument :: said carelessly, that still leaves a little someone behind the eyes, operating the machine. Twenty-four centuries of dualism, back through the side door.

What the practice actually taught me is that the intelligence is distributed all the way down :: breath, reflex, fascia, emotion, immune response, pattern, song. The meatsuit was doing astonishing work long before "I" noticed. So piloting is not command. Piloting is a relationship :: learning to participate, consciously, in a living system's own intelligence. The path is working with intelligence :: not being intelligent at your body.

On 8/8, nothing new was installed in me. Capacities I'd spent years building for their own separate reasons :: didgeridoo, overtone work, hypnosis, the strange voices, the theatrical streak, the body practices :: assembled themselves into something I could not have planned, the moment the constraint loosened. Nothing was wasted. They were parts waiting for a composition.

the parts, composed

That is what piloting looked like for me. And this is the part I need you to hear :: my thaw ran through ukuleles and Tuvan tones and a horror circus. Yours won't. It shouldn't. Every instrument leaves the factory tuned differently, and the whole craft is learning the one you were issued. I can't hand you my flight path, and I wouldn't insult you by trying. Nobody can fly the aircraft for you. What I can do is sit in the right seat while you find out what your instrument does when the constraint loosens.