Meanwhile, In 2006

Between reading a history of indie rock with The King of Carrot Flowers and getting deep into my Portlandia rewatch, my ears have decided they need to be filled with The Flaming Lips almost all the time. I like the way the bleeps and bloops and bwowwwmps bounce back and forth in my headphones.

So now it's time to write about one of the most beautiful and sad and gorgeous nights of my life so far: a birthday-weekend Flaming Lips show!!! The openers were The Magic Numbers, Sonic Youth (!!!) and (I can't believe I forgot this until the King of Carrot Flowers reminded me!) Ween. I don't think it was too long before my crush/our friend-breakup, but that night, it all worked together perfectly somehow. I felt everything all the way. I was overwhelmed with love and wanting-to-be-loyal about Sweetie-Now-BFF and I was frustrated as heck that I couldn't heap love upon The King of Carrot Flowers as well.

The longing was such a presence at that show that I feel like I should've bought her a ticket. Two wives, one best friend, one longing please! I think that's who I'm always buying a just-in-case extra concert ticket for.

The longing is what the music is for. Like edibles or good speakers, it makes the songs more vivid.

There was a loooong time of sitting in the bleachers and being low-key, listening to Sonic Youth sing "What a waste...you're so chaste.." (They do that one on Gilmore Girls, too! I love the way Kim Gordon bounces and shakes when she sings. I try to imitate it every time I'm singing loud/doing dishes.) The Magic Numbers played Mornings Eleven: "Call me if you're on your own, maybe you can meet me in the morning."

I WANTED to meet The King of Carrot Flowers in the morning, then return to my cozy home with Then-Sweetie come evening time. Sometimes that DID happen, but not for illicit snuggles! We would go for a swim or for ice cream or one time, with a bunch of his grad-student friends, the zoo.

By the time The Flaming Lips came on, we'd migrated higher up the bleachers and a few of our poet friends and work friends joined us. I felt elated, but also urgent, like WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING TO CELEBRATE THIS! How did we all get to be here, together?! How did we get loves and friends and friend-loves to all be in these bleachers with us!? As happy as I was, I was also a little mad--how could I possibly express this tsunami of affection? How could I be present hard enough to honor this unearned miracle?

Luckily, we were at a Flaming Lips show! Sparkles and confetti and martian girls and lifting up the sun and battling the pink robots (I strongly suspect that the Flaming Lips are Phish for hipsters. I'm trying to banish this thought but cannot! Now you have it too!) and singing along to Do You Realize?? under the stars in my hometown with my arms around my dear ones, it was a rare moment of being sure I was giving life the honor it deserves. A rare moment of loving exactly as hard as I wanted to.

Dear Sierra Leone, Part One

 

His face glowed so much there, in the WhatsApp pictures. I didn’t realize he was homesick ALL the time until, for twelve days, he wasn’t. Of all the empathies that came and went and landed or exploded between us, I wish I’d done this one more: Homesick boy. The fishermen pulling in their morning catch. Salone. Salone.

I didn’t know I could have travel compersion, but there it was, there he was. On his own, so maybe he felt a little bit more mine than when he was at home. Or maybe his lightness of heart was my lightness too, maybe we were both shining with you. Maybe we were hibiscus blooms in the dead of winter. Maybe I caught his tropical relief.

On his own, on three-wheeled motorbike cabs, or riskful and free on the back of the motorcycle taxis. (How could you ride one of those without snuggling into the guy’s back? But he wouldn’t have.)

And the beach. Second beach or second river and I didn’t ask where’s the first beach or the first river, but I did understand pink sky. The boyish sunset glint in someone so serious, so often downcast here with me.

Sierra Leone, I don’t exist there, nor should I. But also, I wanted to. And also, I should. Those wedding parades with their bright family-matched fabrics, their brass bands, their waiting outside for the aunties’ permission, where do queer lives go for their belonging? It wasn’t my place to ask but I did of course eventually. In his family, they go to straight marriages, they pretend. Like my own family, maybe everybody’s for most of history, they erect an architecture of lies as old as colonialism—be straight, be normal, be real.

There’s no way out of it. It’s his way to be real.

He told me he wanted to bring me to you someday. “Sure,” I said, “You can be like, mom, this is my girlfriend.”

“And then she’ll fight you.” He said.

“At least I’ll get to meet her,” I said.

I could have avoided it, I guess. The closet, the little humiliations. Becoming an object of fear, both rightfully and not. But then I would’ve missed you, and not known that I’d missed you, and we’d never have had (and not had) New Years together.

Oh my love, a place I’ll never visit. A place I’ll always.

Pagan Boy Visits in a Dream

 

A few weeks ago, there was this dream. I’ve had variations of this one lots of times--Pagan Boy and I were getting back together. We had a whole sexy thing brainstormed, but then I stepped out of his apartment for a moment. We lived in an art installation, the way you sometimes do in dreams. I spent the whole rest of the dream (I think it’s Prozac that makes my dreams so long and Byzantine…) trying to get back to his place. There was an electricity map where you could check to see who was home. I thought I’d find him back there, but there was someone else.

I woke up so sad. We’d finally made a date, we were finally on-again, but I realized all over again that he’s gone. Passed away from Covid last year while we were planning a remote friend-date to watch The Apple. We’ll never get back together. We’ll never meet for coffee and flirt. He’s just gone.

The griefs of Covid and its attendant tragedies take a long time to sift though sometimes. Everyone knows the stages of grief don’t come like a ladder, step by step.

Like any other lover, he… visits? during self-love times, and that happened the other night. It was a real memory, a real day in the summer of 1994. He was moody and I was crampy, but we went to the local naked swimming waterfall anyway. We sat on the margins of the fun, barely stitched together in our own misery.

I was self-conscious then about my tampon string, but my present day remembers one moment with great warmth and shimmer. Pagan Boy watched me from the shore or on a stone in the middle of the stream while I crouched down in the shallow water and opened my legs to him. The cold water and his half attention lit up my clit in 1994 and in 2022. He couldn’t really see me and I couldn’t feel much besides the cramps, but still, an opening up, a fresh opening-up.

We re-broke-up not long after that sunny sad day, but we shared a bed as friends after club nights a few more times. His monumental snores drove my roommates crazy, and I was smushed into the wall by our two monumental bodies in the bed. The smush of him felt good to me, made me feel real and loved.

We’d overhear the roommates fucking in the next room and the air between us would get tense and frustrated, but still, he stayed. Still, we slept.

By the time, in the twenty-teens, we were having coffee in the same town where my sister lives, we were both poly and kinky. He was an oasis of being myself in the midst of any family weekend. Without that oasis, I really don’t know what to do.

 

Perfectly 1993 Guy, Part Nine

Someday maybe this blog will stop being a weird time loop, but for now we’re back in the late summer of 1993. Perfectly 1993 Guy and I had been fragmented all afternoon, ever since I accidentally used the word “temporary.” Still, we were back in my room, snuggled into the waterbed with its goldenrod yellow sheets. He had started making a mixtape for me before the trip, so he moodily clunked it into the tape player. The first notes of Blind Melon’s “No Rain,” not particularly our song but EXACTLY the song of that summer, made us both lose our defenses at once, made us melt into a heap of sweet sentimental slackerness, Slow kisses and maybe a few tears.

We lay there listening to what he had so far of the mixtape. It was…uneven. I was mystified by the inclusion of Nine Inch Nails’s “Head Like a Hole,”—I guess maybe he saw me as the one he served? There was nothing about that in either of us, so probably he just really liked the song. I still have it in semi-heavy rotation, so it’s not like he was wrong. I was tickled by Living Color singing “Everybody loves you when you’re bi,” assuming that the “everybody” in the song included him.

I don’t remember the auspicious, his-first-time, midnight-between-our-birthdays sex in detail, (sadly!) but I know it was sweet, kind, and halting, the first go-around endearingly teenage-brief. The second and third times, we found a quiet rhythm. I remember feeling a spark, a little asterisk of sure pleasure the last time he came inside me, less an orgasm than a…togetherness. A confirmation that I could be loved. A Bee-Girl-Finding-Her-Bee-People relief. A warm little flame of home in a body that often felt everywhere but.

Broke or modest that we were, we had only invested in a three-pack of condoms, so when we woke up the next morning with some exact small number of hours and minutes until his bus left, he wondered if we should go out and get some more. We didn’t. We stayed in each other’s arms until the last possible minute, until it was time for my dad to drive us to the bus station. Perfectly 1993 Guy had to get back to campus, and I had to figure out what my back-home life would be.

We promised to call and write, and we certainly did, glowing and fresh and sad as a not-yet-existent Get Up Kids song. I missed him SO much after he got on that Greyhound, and I a little bit pine for him still.

Perfectly 1993 Guy Part Seven

 

 

So, just like at the beginning of summer, I was in waiting-for-letters mode as I settled into my Dad’s apartment in a suburb of Small Hometown City. His was a quintessential divorced-guy apartment, rent-to-own cream-colored furniture and nondescript lamps. Where were vertical blinds on every window. There were pretty pine trees around the front balcony though!  Dad was (and is) a man of routine and coffee, as I eventually grew up to be. (Coffee always, but the routine part of my heart took a while.) It was comforting and monotonous there, great for feeling safe and figuring out what was next.

 

During the intermittent times I lived with Dad, my bed was a waterbed, sheeted with mustard-colored cloths from my Grandpa’s restaurant days. It was heated and welcoming. There was a nice big closet for my not-many clothes and a yellow landline phone perched on top of a moving box. There was room on the windowsill for my thrift store tchotchkes.

 

The immediate challenge as my long-distance relationship with Perfectly 1993 Guy began was having anything to say in my letters. The main emotion of my early adulthood was exquisite boredom, still one of my very favorites. (These days, on the rare occasions when I’m called in to my college bookstore job, the boss saves the most tedious tasks for me and I’m grateful!)

 

But I could put off the letter writing troubles, because Perfectly 1993 Guy planned a visit almost right away. He and I had consecutive birthdays, though he was a year younger than me, so we planned for him to visit me at my Dad’s on the weekend of both birthdays. It was truly one of the top two most adorable weekends of my young life. It might take me a while to get my head around it but I’ll do my best to not take a million years.

Quarantine Crush (Because of Course!) Part One

How’s your shelter-in-place? I’m doing okay now that the Pelosi money started coming in. Sweetie and I considered moving her into my apartment for quarantine, but I’m so, SO glad we decided to be a quarantine household while still in separate apartments—our wonderful, wonderful separate apartments.

To explain how I got to Quarantine Crush, we have to go back twenty years. Why not?! Time means nothing anymore. In 1999, when I was twenty-four, I left Small East Coast City to go to art school in Fancy Southern California Beach Town. I chose to go to school there because a. I wanted to go to California and b. The name of the town sounded pretty.

Obviously, this person becomes a poet. I was half-assedly taking my art classes, pining for my newly-ex girlfriend back east, working in a dress shop in true rom-com style, and walking a bajillion miles of canyon and beach. One morning when I was crying in the campus courtyard because I missed the ex, a guy I thought was cute invited me to a poetry reading, and that was that for like the next ten years of my life. (Wouldn’t it be awesome if the art school guy was Quarantine Crush? He isn’t, even I’M not that much of a rom-com.)

Southern California was the place where I felt both most alien and most welcome. The poets were almost instantly one of the Friends-style families I’d been collecting for the entire Nineties.  We spent Christmas and New Years together, like it was the most natural thing in the world. I didn’t have a car! In Southern California! How did I do anything? Poets! They drove me everywhere, which is really, really saying something in a place where every single thing is at least forty-five minutes away. My mind is absolutely dazzled by the sheer number of hours my friends spent shuttling me back and forth to readings, despite the fact that I never gave them gas money (I never, never, had any money ever) and I sometimes forgot (or just didn’t know) my freeway exit, and my personality was a complete nightmare, I’m sure.

But still! They drove me and drove me and DROVE me and that strikes me as such an act of unquestioning, unconditional friendship love that I really wish the Sex Tardis were up and running so that I could take it on a little platonic stopoff at the millennium to be more grateful.

Quarantine Crush only crystalized as a deep sort of one-that-got-away-situation after a few years of pressing like on his gorgeous nature photos on Instagram, but in retrospect, I can’t help asking my younger self WHY DID YOU NOT KISS THIS PERSON? Right up there with the Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, he’s in contention for The Actual Best Guy. Let’s add a “so far” so I don’t get the blues.

I’m not even sure if I knew him before the day I leapt into his arms. We were competing in a Slam Championship. His voice was (and still is) such a ravenous, glorious bluster. When he finished his poem I didn’t stop to think, I didn’t wonder if it made sense, I just jumped, and he held me without difficulty, and theatrically carried me out the door.

Of course shelter-in-place and too many corona feelings and counting the hand wash seconds would make me hanker for some leaping, to see what kind of advice me-in-my-twenties might have. The results were…mixed, but decidedly THE BEST.

A Brief Gilmore Guy Revival: Part Two (Concern-Trolling Is Gentle Voter Suppression)

We didn’t talk much, at least not in the fun/deadening let’s-discuss-all-of-our-interlocking-relationship-dynamics poly way. After three hours of easy bliss, we lay in the afterglow. I was holding him tenderly as he started to talk, first about his day and then about the then-four-days-away Midterm Election:

“I want to believe there’s going to be this big, sweeping Blue Wave, but I just don’t think it’ll happen. I think we’ll pick up a few seats but…”

He went on to talk about how bleak things were going to be over the next few years. When he got to the part about how the Democrats didn’t have any strong candidates for 2020, my body went from being a sparkly cloud of bliss to being an angry spring. I disentangled from him as if I was disentangling from the entire last three years.

“Who do you want it to be then? BERNIE?!”

“No, actually I don’t really care for Senator Sanders…”

“WELL, you’ve got that going for you.” I hissed.

Part of my reaction, I have to admit, was good old-fashioned daddy issues. Gilmore Guy’s erasure of Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Corey Booker, et al felt too much like the anti-Gillibrand conversation I still felt trapped in with my dad. (OF COURSE dad didn’t acknowledge the letter I sent. OF COURSE he didn’t.)

It was also too much like the role-flipped therapy session I’d had earlier in the week, comforting a clearly-not-a-match therapist by trying to convince her that the Resistance does, in fact, exist and have an impact.

I’m so happy to have the election results to back me up as I continue to un-gaslight myself about this!

It frustrates me so much that they can’t see it, that they can’t see US or our work, even as it slowly but surely lifts the country out of our mess. I realize that as a member of the Resistance, it’s part of my task to HELP people see it, but having my own reality denied so often really hurts—it’s too much. The time theft is too much. The emotional labor is too much.

I’m not here to try and convince anybody of my existence, to convince anybody that the movements I love are not helpless or worthless or stupidly hysterical. (I’m all about reclaiming the word “hysterical” but that’s another post for another day.)

(My off-script textbanking exchanges with Republicans earlier in the Midterm process have really gotten to me as well, but the right is clearly not the only problem here.)

“I’m just worried about voter suppression,” He said. Of course! We all are. We were both up off the folded-out couch and I was angrily putting on my clothes.

“You’re DOING voter suppression when you tell us we can’t win!”

Concern-trolling is definitely not as evil or insidious as governors who purge voter rolls, exact-match laws, or Native Americans suddenly having to root out street addresses from obscure bureaucratic labyrinths, but it IS part of the problem and definitely should be voted most likely to keep me from snuggling.

I argued probably not very well. He said:

“Let me explain why Kamala Harris can’t…”

Perhaps realizing that I will be having some version of this conversation until she is elected, I fucking SNAPPED.

“I told you I don’t want to have this conversation. Do something about it or Shut. Up.”

(That may have been mostly for dad, sorry. But also yes, shut the fuck up.)

“Don’t scream at me in my own house.” He said, apparently out of arguments. My voice was raised, but screaming was an exaggeration.

The saddest thing about writing down that moment is realizing that he was happy to have me raise my voice in all of the sex-wails that I wanted, but not to stand up for myself, not even to defend my own worth.

“Have fun SITTING ON YOUR ASS and criticizing everybody who’s doing the WORK!” I hollered as I grabbed my purse and umbrella from the kitchen and headed for the door.

“Get. Out.” He said in that annoying I’m-the-reasonable-person tone that I know so well from back when I was married to Sweetie.

After I’d splashed through the rain to my car, the dash clock read 12:06. I’d aimed to turn myself into a pumpkin by midnight and he had (inadvertently, I hope) helped me along.

I wish I could say that I feel righteous and free after that, but I just miss him. I feel lonely about it, and sad. I’m glad I blocked his number and deleted his texts, because I keep wishing I could reach out, somehow repair the connection, somehow be in those arms again.

But even causally, I can’t be with someone who doesn’t live, at least mostly, in the same reality as I do. America has changed so deeply since 2016, and I’m one of the lucky many who can see the underlying positivity: The networks of activism, the interlocking movements full of loving, fiery momentum. Resistbot, Pantsuit Nation, Solidarity Sundays. THE MARCH FOR OUR LIVES KIDS, for god’s sake. The way PEOPLE ACTUALLY CARED about the Midterms!

I want a partner who, no matter how bleak and scary things get, can see the goodness and care that’s growing every day. I wish, in that afterglow moment, I’d mustered the empathy and strength to convince him, to bring him into that hopeful view and keep him safe there. I know I can’t keep him safe, can’t keep anyone safe no matter what. So I run when my body tells me to run, fight when it tells me to fight, and I hope for the best.