Right before I left for Cape Cod, a girl at my local coffee shop said, “I bet everyone is super laid back there.” I couldn’t help laughing. Growing up in Massachusetts and moving to New York City right after school, I first encountered a laidback person when I visited California at the end of my twenties. “Ooooh,” I remember thinking as I struggled valiantly not to interrupt the slow-talkers and slam into the slow-walkers. “This is laid-back.”
The truth is that native Massholes are impatient, skeptical people who loathe airs and whose only form of pretentiousness is an avowed hatred of pretentiousness. Regardless of their ethnicity, religion, or sexuality, almost everyone in this state dresses terribly, drives even worse, and prides themselves on their frugality and inability to suffer fools. I find it all totally endearing, especially because, since nobody shines you on, the friendships you form are life-long and right as rain.
I know I’ve been quiet on this blog. I’ve been quiet everywhere for a week as I find the rhythm of writing this book. It’s forcing me to evaluate how I expend my energy, because being of body means we have limited battery each day. I’m figuring out when and where to eat, when and how to exercise, who and how to see. Most of all I’m figuring out what to say and when, for communication requires the most energy of all. I have about a month to squeeze as much of this book inside my heart and head and hands into the world, and I’ve never better understood the double entendre of such words as produce, create, birth. Continue Reading →
I’ve been thinking a lot about the AIDS crisis in terms of the Trump/GOP coup. We are in a moment in which our ostensibly elected leaders are hanging women and queers and people of color and Muslims and Jews and immigrants out to dry. Actually, that’s the best way to phrase it. The worst is that they are hanging us out to die.
I was in elementary school when AIDS first became nationally recognized, and a teenager when ACT UP first came on the scene; I remember joining the Philadelphia chapter and waking the fuck up because you couldn’t not the minute you entered those meetings. I graduated from college and moved to New York City, where so many beautiful young gay men wore stocking caps and four coats in the middle of summer, were covered in black sores, were walking skeleteons held together by scotch tape and four kinds of antibiotics and a strong community of love. Continue Reading →
Right before I left for Cape Cod, a girl at my local coffee shop said, “I bet everyone is super laid back there.” I couldn’t help laughing. Growing up in Massachusetts and moving to New York City right after school, I first encountered a laidback person when I visited California at the end of my twenties. “Ooooh,” I remember thinking as I struggled valiantly not to interrupt the slow-talkers and slam into the slow-walkers. “This is laid-back.”
I know I’ve been quiet on this blog. I’ve been quiet everywhere for a week as I find the rhythm of writing this book. It’s forcing me to evaluate how I expend my energy, because being of body means we have limited battery each day. I’m figuring out when and where to eat, when and how to exercise, who and how to see. Most of all I’m figuring out what to say and when, for communication requires the most energy of all. I have about a month to squeeze as much of this book inside my heart and head and hands into the world, and I’ve never better understood the double entendre of such words as produce, create, birth. Continue Reading →
I’ve been thinking a lot about the AIDS crisis in terms of the Trump/GOP coup. We are in a moment in which our ostensibly elected leaders are hanging women and queers and people of color and Muslims and Jews and immigrants out to dry. Actually, that’s the best way to phrase it. The worst is that they are hanging us out to die.