ON THE QUESTION OF ARRIVAL

— by Libby D’Innous, Planet Parenthood Columnist

[Filed after 10 p.m., when certain truths stop pretending to be polite.]

Do you know where your future children are?

I keep coming back to that old Divinyls video—yes, that one:

Before meaning is respectable, it usually announces itself in a groove.—The Divinyls, doing nominative determinism by accident

The girls look a little trashy. On purpose. Big hair, lingerie confidence, a kind of erotic bravado that practically dares the viewer to clutch pearls. The song itself is unapologetically about desire—touching, wanting, impulse without a safety rail. It’s reckless, bodily, and intentionally unrefined. By most respectable standards, it’s trash.

And that’s exactly why it matters.

Phillip K. Dick once said that the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum. He didn’t mean this as a joke. He meant it quite literally. Before meaning is respectable, before it is moralized or managed, it appears where embarrassment, appetite, and material life haven’t yet been cleaned up.

Coming from a man whose own name never lets you forget the body, the remark carries a peculiar nominative honesty. Dick was not inclined toward antiseptic revelation. For him, meaning didn’t descend in white robes; it surfaced where desire, excess, and the physical refuse to be edited out. A nominative determinism moment—for our purposes— hiding in plain sight.

Sex works like that.

New life does not arrive through tasteful abstractions. It arrives through bodies—through longing, chemistry, bad decisions, good decisions, sweat, laughter, miscalculation, and courage. The Divinyls aren’t singing from a cathedral; they’re singing from the alley behind it. Not because they are fallen, but because that’s where creation actually starts. Fertility is not polite. Biology does not wait for moral language to catch up.

Planet Parenthood begins precisely there: in the unfiltered fact that desire precedes diapers.

But here’s the part we’re usually too nervous to say out loud.

For any of this to become divine, something has to be carried through. Potential alone isn’t creation. Fertility unrealized is just chemistry. The trash pile only becomes a shrine if something emerges from it—if the risk is answered with responsibility, if the impulse becomes a presence.

(An elk.)

A life.

A child.

A future person who actually shows up.

Without that, it’s just appetite circling itself.

The miracle isn’t that desire exists. The miracle is when it becomes someone.

That’s the difference between trash that stays trash and trash that turns out to have been holy all along.

— Libby D’Innous

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