Home; Again.

Have been living through a phase of transition, for sure: lots of DoorDashing, some freelance admin for a small writer’s org. Perhaps most seismically, I’ve moved into an “intentional community,” otherwise known as a house-share with a lovely group of Radical Faeries (or at least Faerie-adjacent, folk, as I think of myself.)

Put your hands on the wheel
Let the golden age begin
The window down
Feel the moonlight on your skin

More info about the Faeries another time, although you can learn more at Wikipedia. Suffice to say it’s been a good move; though anytime one leaves a place of one’s own (my 520 s.f. studio) and moves into an established community (my 120 s.f. bedroom + shared kitchen) there are adjustments to be made. My housemates are a well-established lot, most all of them multi-year residents of Salmon House.

Desert wind
Cool your aching head
The weight of the world
Drift away instead

—Beck, “The Golden Age”

Something I’ve come face-to-face with in this first 10-ish days of co-living is my instinct—neé kneejerk compulsion—to accommodate others immediately, thereby negating not only my own feelings, but dismissing altogether the reality that I might hold desires that exist apart from those I’m gathered with.

Diplomatically, I suppose there’s a great deal to be said for this way of navigating the world, but it doesn’t do much for advancing one’s self-interests. Let’s be honest: as with all human qualities, being unobjectionable has its pros and cons. It’s an unspoken assurance that I am not here to take up space; you won’t be bothered by me, Keep Calm and Carry On; as you were [polite smile]. It can also be a form of self-erasure in the name of being cordial while smugly earning bonus points to be whipped out at the gates of Heaven.

This quality of mine feels baked in; it’s innate AF.

No doubt it is a big part of why I have made and have kept friendships and community connections of many kinds over long years. I prefer the company of folks who are naturally empathetic and who don’t find it difficult to put themselves in other’s shoes, even if only for purposes of argument or addressing perspectives different than their own.

As the child of gracious, kind—genteel—Southern Presbyterian parents, this way of being—this demeanor?—is doubtless a quality passed along both family lineages (though, interestingly, only one of those lineages actually runs through “the South,” the other being a strong vein of Ohio farm folk). That quality of “nice” that embeds “selfless” from the get-go. It’s a quality of “well-intentioned white progressive,” too, and god knows I live at the epicenter of that community here in Portland. So, plus/minus for sure.

Something always takes the place
Of missing pieces
You can take and put together even though
You know there’s something missing

Back to Salmon House: in discussions around kitchen utensils (which I brought with me, natch, into a kitchen already quite full of them), I was quick to dispense with the things I’d brought to the table, since the house already had versions of them on hand. How many wooden spoons or bamboo spatulas can one house support, after all?

I know that sounds like small stakes—and by some definitions, it certainly is. But come my first day really cooking in that shared kitchen, my favorite bamboo spatula and spoon were not there; I’d moved them along so as not to discomfit any existing patterns of utensil use. And in reaching for the no-longer-here spatula, I had a twinge of “Mom gave that to me,” which she certainly had.

Here’s where it gets interesting (to me, at any rate): I’d brought into the house one of those padded kitchen mats (like chefs stand on, to alleviate foot pressure during long days at the stovetop) but the folks I now share a kitchen with weren’t particularly interested. So I offered it to another housemate who has a kitchen of their own. Upon hearing the story of the others passing on the mat, they observed, “you’re allowed to have things in the house, too, you know. We can also incorporate what you want.”

We can? How starkly that struck me.

The sun burned a hole in my roof
I can’t seem to fix it
I hope the rain doesn’t come
And wash me down the gutter

—Beck, “Missing”

Inchworm

One of the shared household routines at Salmon House are “Garden Days,” which—as you might expect—are days we all work together in the large gardens surrounding the house. This past Sunday was my first Garden Day, and after a long stretch of weeding, I discussed with housemates a good place to plant a dahlia bulb. It’s a particular variety of dahlia that Greg & I had planted for many years at our community garden plot. When it’s healthy, it provides large dazzling fractal blooms in the gradated colors of a sunset. Maybe that’s really “a sunrise,” since the name of the dahlia is “American Dawn” (not a name I’d have selected for it, but you get what you get!)

The spot we agreed on is in the front garden, tucked in a bit behind some daisies and among some decorative strawberries. So I sat a while and dug a hole in the soil and prepped the bulb’s new home with wood shavings, tomato fertilizer (dahlias share a love of the same nutrient balance), and a scant handful of Mom.

Her ashes, that is. I was careful to mix her into the other materials pretty thoroughly so that the bulb doesn’t wind up “inhaling” a mass of bone ash. There’s something particularly fitting about her cremains finding home in a quadrant of daisies and strawberries, because she loved both. For that matter, she loved tomatoes, too, so even the fertilizer is on-brand for Mom.

It’s not really meant as a memorial dahlia, though with connections to Mom and to Greg (both dead), I hope it thrives. It’s a gorgeous front garden. And I did weave in one additional piece of Mom herstory: when I was a child—kindergarten, I think—I made my mother a ceramic caterpillar. Balls and rings of potter’s clay, bulbous eyes and thick antennae, a variety of glazes that make little sense to me now but must have inspired me at the time. The flat base of the (surprisingly heavy!) caterpillar has my mother’s handwriting in Sharpie: “Jeff Made For Jan”. So he did.

I don’t know if old artifacts placed in gardens please ghosts or banish them. If they’re good luck charms or simply silly trinkets, call-outs (-ins?) to other versions of our selves or other chapters of our lives. I don’t even fully know why I’m still lugging him around—that caterpillar—he must have been on, or near, my mother’s desk when my sister and I were packing up her things a few months after her death in 2019. I’m glad she lugged it around a good long while, and I’m glad it takes up space in the garden at Salmon House

.

xoxo JDF

Didn’t take long for the jukebox that is my mind to dredge up Father John Misty’s “Pure Comedy,” which just about says it all on the subject; at least from my point of view:

“The comedy of man starts like this:
Our brains are way too big for our mothers’ hips
And so Nature, she divines this alternative
We emerge half-formed and hope that whoever greets us on the other end
Is kind enough to fill us in
And, babies, that’s pretty much how it’s been ever since

Now the miracle of birth leaves a few issues to address:
Like, say, that half of us are periodically iron deficient
So somebody’s got to go kill something while I look after the kids
I’d do it myself, but what, are you going to get this thing its milk?
He says as soon as he gets back from the hunt, we can switch
It’s hard not to fall in love with something so helpless
Ladies, I hope we don’t end up regretting this

Comedy, now that’s what I call pure comedy
Just waiting until the part where they start to believe
They’re at the center of everything
And some all powerful being endowed this horror show with meaning

Oh, their religions are the best
They worship themselves yet they’re totally obsessed
With risen zombies, celestial virgins, magic tricks, these unbelievable outfits
And they get terribly upset
When you question their sacred texts
Written by woman-hating epileptics

Their languages just serve to confuse them
Their confusion somehow makes them more sure
They build fortunes poisoning their offspring
And hand out prizes when someone patents the cure
Where did they find these goons they elected to rule them?
What makes these clowns they idolize so remarkable?
These mammals are hell-bent on fashioning new gods
So they can go on being godless animals

Oh comedy, their illusions they have no choice but to believe
Their horizons that just forever recede
And how’s this for irony, their idea of being free is a prison of beliefs
That they never ever have to leave

Oh comedy, oh it’s like something that a madman would conceive!
The only thing that seems to make them feel alive is the struggle to survive
But the only thing that they request is something to numb the pain with
Until there’s nothing human left
Just random matter suspended in the dark
I hate to say it, but each other’s all we got.”

Perhaps goes without saying that Father John Misty is an artist who has long struggled with depression, substance abuse, and life writ large. And is one funny motherf**ka despite all that. It’s a jaded, weary lens to tote around, but absolutely one that resonates deeply for me.

Special thanks to Michael Ruppel for introducing me to the song many moons ago…

xoxojdf

It’s a funny thing, re-visiting a piece of art you thought you knew, only to find its impact greater than you’d remembered. So it is for me and Lars von Trier’s DOGVILLE (2003). I’d chosen to re-watch the film in preparation for watching its sequel (MANDERLAY, 2005), which I’ve never seen before.

DOGVILLE is certainly as bleak as I remembered, with its Depression-era, small-town-America just-folks rotting away underneath a veneer of hokum, Puritan morality, and base hypocrisy. These “good townspeople” waste no time in pretending to accept the stranger in their midst, only to enslave and rape her repeatedly, while rationalizing every violation they inflict upon her. To be fair, Grace—the stranger in question—spends the movie attempting to forgive the town their every transgression.

DOGVILLE is almost more a stage play than it is a movie, with it’s filmed-performance affect and absence of any traditional set, save for the taped outlines of every building, animal, and gooseberry bush imagined into existence; the film is stagey enough that the cast mimes opening and closing doors. Yet that same artifice allows the audience to bear witness to the debasement Grace endures. For a von Trier film, it’s a very different tack to take—I’m no lover of his films, and I object to the obvious delight von Trier takes in inflicting horrific misogyny upon his lead characters in films like DANCER IN THE DARK (2000).

But the strange moderation DOGVILLE’s staginess allows for von Trier’s harsh view of humanity—not to mention truly stellar performances from a cast that includes Nicole Kidman, Paul Bettany, Patricia Clarkson, Stellan Skarsgård, and Lauren Bacall (among others!)—creates an altogether different viewing experience, at least for this particular viewer.

That greater impact I mentioned? The realization of how my own views of America—a shithole country if ever there was one—are mirrored by this contemptuous fable, helmed by a Danish director nearly a quarter century ago. The America of DOGVILLE feels truer than it’s ever been, and it’s proof of the hypocrisy of our legacies of murder, theft, grift, genocide, and gruesome inhumanity-to-most while slapping a commercialized smile on it, and whistling past our teeming graveyards.

Such horrors are not unique to America, obviously; humanity writ large is doing a piss-poor job of it by many measures around the globe. DOGVILLE, though, has America squarely in its sights, and the cloak of piousness laid on top of the horrors inflicted is very American indeed. In this political moment, with the particular thieves and grifters we’ve got in power, the film feels extremely prescient.

I jumped online afterward to see what kind of critical reception the film received in 2003: that response was largely respectful and marginally positive, but reviewers at the time clearly felt that DOGVILLE was a wild exaggeration. It doesn’t play that way now, Sec. Hegseth!

In some way, I thought I might despair while revisiting this misanthropic work of art; in fact, it felt more like confirmation bias, though I’m not sure I’m proud of that alignment.

I won’t spoil the film’s ending; suffice to say, through its icy indictment of our complicity as an audience, the film gives viewers what we, as base human beings, obviously root for. By some measures, that’s a kind of happy ending.

Two Cent Review: Christina Aguilera’s BIONIC (2010)

Ten years ago, I sat cringing in my seat at the Palace Theater as Liza Minnelli rasped her way through an embarrassing mess called “Minnelli On Minnelli”. Post-vocal surgery and double hip replacements, Liza literally limped through the show (she even rode a wheeled office chair through one “dance number”). Despite a ravaged vocal instrument, Liza bravely (foolishly?) assayed songs associated with her mother, Judy Garland, delivering them with a cotton-mouth warble and a lish-ping shlurr.

The show was intended as an homage to her father, and though I have no doubt Liza felt deep sincerity for the material, it came off mostly as ghastly psychobabble, poorly performed. Impossible not to despair that Liza might actually be without friends who could have talked her out of putting on such a grotesque spectacle.

Which brings me to Christina Aguilera’s new album, BIONIC...a spectacle if ever there was one.

Desperately derivative of the work of other female performers, this (never-ending) album manages to be both a generic beatbox and extraordinarily vulgar. On the plus side, BIONIC sounds expensive and slickly produced; it does have some good beats pulsing through the dross, which is to be expected of the A-list producers Christina selected. On the minus side, BIONIC is fatuously long (the iTunes Deluxe version robs me of 1.3 hours of my life).

Of a bloated 24 tracks, I can count the compelling songs on the fingers of one hand (with digits to spare); it’s obvious why her summer concert tour has been canceled, there’s just no material here to fill stadium seats. BIONIC is laden with tracks that sound like pale imitations of more original artists, recitations of brand names passing as lyrics, and a handful of truly pointless fillers a la the craptastic “interludes” on Janet Jackson’s “The Velvet Rope” (Aguilera has a habit of larding such nonsense onto her major albums).

It’s not as if Christina is a vocal pretender with no real talent (*cough*Britney*cough*); Aguilera has the most brilliant vocal pipes since Whitney Houston. Sadly, on BIONIC, Xtina spends most of the time singing monotone across a sea of electronic pulses. Some of this will be great on the dance floor, but the overall effect is that anyone could be singing: Britney, Rihanna, Madonna, Gwen, or even Miley (shudder).

Even less appealing are the “fuck you”s, “my bitches”, and endless references to omnisexual encounters: giving it up, riding it, tasting it, grinding it...and those just get you through the first three tracks. As she has several times in the past, Christina mistakes pussy-power for feminism, and it’s depressing to realize that there will soon be legions of impressionable adolescents listening to crap this puerile sung by a deeply insecure nearly-30 year old.

Most disappointing is the dearth of originality. There’s so much conceptual thievery on BIONIC that I look forward to reading of a class action suit brought against Xtina by Madonna, Gwen Stefani, Missy Elliott, and Lady Gaga. Aguilera flirts dangerously with coming off as little more than a Madonna manqué on “Glam” (a lame “Vogue” update) while the title track is a pale imitation of Gwen Stefani’s familiar drum-driven, cheerleader-friendly beats.

Madonna notwithstanding, Christina may be the first mother of a 2-year old to record a song encouraging boys to eat out her pussy: “all the boys think it’s cake/you don’t even need a plate/just your face/licky licky yum yum”.

Noël Coward, this is not.

Mind you, Aguilera is not the first woman to record a song about cunnilingus but “Woohoo” has nothing going for it: it’s lyrically insipid, and favors a sort of taunting schoolyard vibe that Aguilera frequently falls back on (including the fakest laugh on record; even when she’s pretending to laugh it’s always implied that Xtina would cut-yer-thoat; she’s the Joan Crawford of pop.)

Not until track 19 (of 24!!!) does anything remotely original kick in. That’s “Monday Morning” produced by John Hill & Switch of Santigold fame. With a deliciously reggae-funk beat, it’s suspiciously Santigold-ish, but it’s outside the usual Christina comfort zone and it bubbles along enjoyably. Other than that? Not much. There’s a Linda Perry ballad, natch, but “Beautiful” it ain’t; just banal bombast.

Christina hogs lead songwriting credit (a la Mariah Carey) on virtually every other track on BIONIC, so it’s clear that there’s nobody else at the helm of this epic FAIL. Nobody except a clown-faced drag queen with sequins running through her veins.

Better luck next time, girl.

Last night at the Reser Center for the Arts, The Portland Gay Men’s Chorus and The Eugene Gay Men’s Chorus combined forces for an incredibly powerful concert: Legacies. For this gay man of a certain age (one of the many traumatized queer souls who survived the holocaust of AIDS during the 1980s and 1990s), the program was an unexpected, tear-stained stunner.

Beautifully accompanied by piano and string quartet, Legacies shuffled assorted movements from a number of extraordinary choral works: Andrew Lippa’s “I Am Harvey Milk,” Kris Anthony’s “When We No Longer Touch,” and Robert Seeley’s “NakedMan,” among others. Also beautiful was the new work commissioned by the Eugene Chorus, Daniel Schreiner’s “Awakening,” with lyrics written by a chorus member.

Though I’m sure these works would each be powerful performed in full from start to finish, the curated selection of movements from these gorgeous song cycles was incredibly resonant. The resulting musical collage reflected the vast scope of the losses of that era of queer death, while speaking to our present moment, which promises more of the same through erasure of trans lives and further devastation of fragile systems of queer care. The curated fragments were individually enhanced by spoken recollections of members of the choruses, and of the large fabric panels in the lobby that honor and celebrate the members of the Portland chorus who have died (many from AIDS) across the history of the choir.

Queer folk have always been brilliant, creative, and resourceful (quite unlike the soulless fucks in charge of this shithole country at present; may all of them die agonizing deaths and rot in hell) and on the heels of a day spent marching No Kings in the company of the Radical Faeries, the music was both a balm and a sobbing tribute to the souls we miss so deeply (and the losses for which the world is decidedly not better off).

This post is likely a day late and a dollar short–there’s only a single performance of Legacies remaining: today (Sunday, March 29 at 3pm), BUT if you’ve got time and ability to get out to Beaverton for an afternoon concert you would be richly rewarded for doing so. Looks like they’ve still got a handful of tickets available…

Dashing Through Late Stage Capitalism

I began driving DoorDash last week; it’s about as hideous as you might expect.
Maybe it’s just as hideous as I expected.

I do understand why folks choose to drive delivery as a side hustle (and increasingly, as a primary gig); there’s very little real customer interaction: far less than you’d expect in a retail setting, and—at least in theory—you’re your own boss. You work the hours you want to, you accept the work you choose to…sort of.

Your vehicle logs the miles and takes the beating. Your wallet pays for gas and maintenance out of your meager earnings. Your patience is tried in traffic; your body is folded into the car for however many miles or hours (or dollars) you can stand it. It’s your eyes that roll when someone orders groceries that you then shop for on their behalf: Lunchables + Baked Flamin’ Hot Cheetos + a tube of raw chorizo from an Albertson’s in Portland, OR for delivery to an apartment in Vancouver, WA, 10 miles away, on the other side of the Columbia River.

Several shifts in, my average earnings seem to level out around $14.33/hour (before fuel, maintenance, and road rage enter the calculations). That’s considerably less than the current state-mandated Portland metro minimum wage of $16.30/hour, though perhaps slightly better than the state-mandated “non-urban” minimum of $14.05/hour. Of course, in this craptastic shithole country we live in, I’ve got little to complain about: federal minimum wage still sits at $7.25/hour (where it’s been since 2009), unless you’re in a “tipped” profession, in which case the federal minimum is just $2.13/hour.

As I type that note about “tipped” professions, I wonder how long it will be before Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart drop their wages to that sub-basement of $2.13/hour, since—by some demented definitions—all of these roles might be considered “tipped”. Surely their vast legal teams have already run mock lawsuits on that basis; I wonder what has held them back?

Installation of the DoorDash app was both clumsy and rudely invasive. I was required—unsurprisingly—to upload images of my driver’s license, allowing camera access to then take selfies, in which I was expected to face forward, then turn to the left, then turn to the right (supposedly for AI to compare my selfie to the image on my license.) Proof of auto insurance; social security number; banking info. Those bits and bytes are not unique to DoorDash, of course, and my interior impulse to feel galled by the invasions of my privacy are, in some ways, worn to the nub at this point, so frequently do I share my data with one app or another.

Despite the screamingly fast wifi in my apartment, and a damn good Smartphone (a Google Pixel, itself a tedious data harvester), the upload of license and selfies failed more than once, and the app required multiple re-dos of the the entire procedure, multiple times over. Having repeated the frustration of getting the requisite data uploaded (license photo + selfies 1, 2, and 3), three times in a row, it finally seemed to stick.

Also stuck was my notion that perhaps one upload was for DoorDash, another for the feds, and the third to some DOGE-related data-hacking incel, scraping all evidence of my digital self to sell for profit on some corner of the dark web.

Probably I’m overthinking it, though one need consider only the machinations of ICE in this country to wonder about the implications of governmentally-imposed data theft.

DoorDash won’t allow you to drive for them unless you grant permission for the app to track you at all times (you can’t select “only while using the app”). And once you’ve got the app open on any given day, notifications are a constant drumbeat, whether you are actively “dashing,” or not, e.g. “Update! Northeast Portland is busy right now. If you’d like to dash, simply open the app and hit Dash Now!” umpteen times a day.

While “dashing,” I’ve learned to simply surrender to the whims (and glitches) of the app, without falling prey to my internal dialogue, or to my split selves that do battle around capitalist imperatives or this literal existence as a wage-slave. I’m just here to do the app’s bidding. That means the moment one dash completes (having uploaded the photo of the dropoff outside somebody’s door), I sit and wait for the next “offer” to arrive, prepared to “Accept” the next Dash.

Wry, observant brain ain’t no help in this chapter.

No matter the shift, the affect is numbing, disembodied, removed from human interaction. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it really feels like an endgame manifestation of our current systems of power: having dispatched with human connection completely during COVID, we now exist solely to consume/be consumed.

Good ole Soylent Green: it really = People!

I’m not here to judge other’s life choices; my own have delivered me to driving delivery.

Burger King, Taco Bell, and ramen; cross-town, the Pearl, Northeast is busy!
CVS, batteries, and glucose test strips (out of stock; sorry Daydra, the order’s refunded and the driver’s fee reduced!)
Burritos to Hazel Dell, 15 miles away; Korean fried chicken to Troutdale; McDonald’s to shit-kickiest truck-on-blocks yards I’ve ever seen (for $8 delivery fees).
Baby gay at Chick-Fil-A flouncy and friendly, but he’s working where the sign proudly reads “CLOSED SUNDAY” (piety sells; it also kills).
Starbucks picked up and delivered a block away from where the order generated.
Nobody wants to engage: “Don’t Knock! Dogs will go crazy baby is asleep!”
(Leave it at the door).

There is technically an option to “decline” a job offer, but each time you “decline,” your driver ratings get dinged, so it does seem to affect the app serving you favorable work. I’d guess 90% of the time, the first jobs I accept on a Dash pay reasonably well (say, a bit more than $10 for the pickup/dropoff), but thereafter they tend to decline, often precipitously, so you can begin a shift thinking you’re gonna coast along easily, making your nut for that shift in short order, until you wind up picking up stale KFC in northeast Portland for delivery to a random downtown mortgage broker, five miles away (a 15-minute drive), for just a $3 or $4 fee.

Literally, scraps.

The App Will See You Now

That’s to say nothing of being monitored while Dash-ing. The bit I find most jarring is DoorDash’s in-app navigation mode (providing directions to the pickup and then to the dropoff), which tracks both my real-time geolocation AND records my speed. The moment I drive 21 mph in a 20 mph zone, the app frames my speed (now outlined in red) beneath the posted limit. Once I’m 5 or more mph above any given speed limit (say, if I’m on the highway passing a truck), my speed becomes a bold red square, emphasizing my law-breaking ways.

Last I checked, however, I’m driving delivery. I’d think it was to DoorDash’s advantage that I occasionally drive faster than the posted limit? For that matter, I’m the one at risk—of accidents, traffic cameras, or speeding tickets—not DoorDash.

I say to myself, again, the koan: Wry, observant brain ain’t no help here.

As with the formulas for driver pay (which seem to be some variation of mileage + peak time premiums + customer discounts or promotions + special-sauce-lettuce-cheese-pickles-onions-on-a-sesame-seed-bun), the whims of the algorithm are opaque to me. Clearly, I’m being monitored as I drive—to what ends, I can’t know.

Perhaps I’m rated more highly by the app for driving too quickly; maybe the bold red notifications of my speeding vehicle are simply DoorDash’s legal protection for itself: “we clearly indicated to Driver X that he was driving 7 mph over the limit, your Honor!”

It’s truly a frictionless system, and I am but a physical cog.

Thud.

“Desert” by Kelly Terwilliger

There are stretches of desert
so dry it’s hard to live
your life the way you intended.

The rocks watch you without
compassion. The shadows
they grow are more beautiful

than anything you’ve ever
done. But stay a minute. Dusk
pours from the hills

like water. And closer
than you had imagined—at your feet,
or there, beside your hand—

something stirs.

What to make of it?

del Rey famously got married off to a Southern good ole boy in 2024, and the song is co-written by her husband and his brother, so I have to assume the camp, twee, Orientalist twists are fully intentional…but I’m both fascinated and repulsed by this track. I do have to say that from the outset, the more I listen to it, the more I am seduced.

WFHTDH kicks off with a smoky, noir sample from Nelson Riddle’s orchestrated intro of Ella Fitzgerald’s version of the theme song to the movie Laura. It’s a straight sample—no interpretation or fiddling with it. And it’s a phenomenal beginning, putting audiophiles simultaneously at-home and off-kilter, because those who know the Fitzgerald track probably can’t place it (it’s an instrumental sample; no Ella vocal to guide you), and because as the sample concludes, we’ve already followed Lana down the hole to this particular wonderland.

Between the rattling of the rain stick, and the gorgeous string arrangement by Drew Erickson, the track sounds both lush and curiously luxe. Lana delivers with her typical disaffected vocal; a glib Disney-princess-disappointed-by-everything-in-life. Conversely, there’s a conspiratorial insider’s vibe, she’s happy in her marriage (“I know you wish you had a man like him”), she’s happy as a trad wife (“I wanted to know if I could borrow your stove”), so go ahead and judge me but fuck you cuz you don’t have my man.

The song is a narcotic—literally: “whoopsie-daisy, deposition cocaine”—but it’s also layered, chattering, and funny as hell (with a nicotine patch on her ass to avoid summer tan lines). It’s a gorgeously orchestrated inside joke (“how absolutely bad I’m with an oven / Take my hand off the stove, hun”) and I guess I’m reluctantly a fan.

Obsession of the Moment:
Raye’s Nightingale Lane.

We’ve been here before with Raye—but I’m not bothered by the redux:

Raye is the insanely gifted British vocalist who has been assaulting our ears with her big lungs on track after track: Oscar Winning Tears and Where Is My Husband! come to mind. She’s deeply jazz-inspired, which makes even her lower-key tracks true earworms: see Worth It. She’s theatrical, flamboyant, and the size of her voice is on par with Adele and Celine Dion. Raye can sang.

So we’re back with another slow-burn, hook-y fully orchestrated jam that builds and builds and builds into the classic Raye bellow of Proud Woman Overcomes the Wreckage and Dares to Hope: “Right here on this ground is where / Someone once loved me / And someday, someone will again…”

It’s honestly a bit scream-y in those final crescendoes…and again, I don’t think I’m bothered.

I’m a nearly 60-year-old single gay man and if I need another black diva to give me musical mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and pretend there’s still a romantic future out there for me…yea, I know better, but with Raye coaching I will pretend I don’t.

Like the waaaaaay you loved me on Nightingale Lane.
I know; never happened. Shut up, I’m listening to Raye.

Raye is fearless in her assault on these massive orchestrations—the instrumentation is enormous Wall of Sound-level production—rare are the vocalists who could rise to the challenge. But she pulls it off. As with most of her tracks, Raye has already released multiple takes in videos and social media posts; she is probably the least-rooted to a specific version of a track of anyone I’ve ever listened to. And that’s intriguing, too. There are already diehard fans taking to social media to cover the finale of this track (and some of them are even not bad).

And I’m here for it.

xoxo jdf

“We know that hope is essential to social change because in order to make change, someone must first imagine that it can be so…Many of our ancestors experienced the end of the worlds they had known. During times of siege and enslavement…previous generations have found ways to organize for change and for collective survival. We must learn from their histories and traditions as we face an uncertain future…Following their example, we must allow our grief and hope to coexist and courageously hold on to both.”

—Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba, from Let This Radicalize You (2023)

Shithole Country

Finding the energy, focus, and will to write thoughts into action—let alone to write them into Substack—continues to prove elusive. I want to continue engaging my community here, but so much daily life feels damnable and heavy, as if to speak of the obscenities this country continues to manifest, or to point out how soulless and greedy the charlatans running the joint are, will just burn my tongue, and rot my brain, by saying the things out loud.

But here we are: our money and weapons are being used not only to exterminate the Palestinian people, but now to annihilate the children of Iran, likely Because Oil, or perhaps simply Because POTUS Needs Headlines to Distract from the damnable Epstein Files. This, after centuries of enslaving and murdering non-white races on this continent, mostly Because Jesus, or perhaps simply Because White People Being Richer in Capitalism.

And always again, currently, because the fetid pile of human excrement called “President Trump” is a bottomless pit of infantile id, believing itself to be “greatest,” “biggest,” “most powerful,” “richest,” when all evidence always indicates clearly how stupid, weak, wretched, ugly, pathetic, and vile it is. That id joked publicly about fucking its oldest daughter—more than once, while sitting next to her on couches on national television! That id surmised about the size of its youngest daughter’s breasts-to-be, before she was born, while sitting next to her pregnant mother on national television.

“Grab ‘em by the pussy” wasn’t uttered in reference to his own offspring, but it might as well have been, since he likely has: as one meme today noted—He’s Starting a War So You Will Forget He Rapes Children. And my mind is drawn back to the protest sign I was disturbed by at the last No Kings Day, the father holding the plain, ugly: DONALD TRUMP FUCKS KIDS.

Today I wonder why I was bothered by that quiet-part-out-loud; Trump certainly murders kids. And his callous disregard for human life—whether he’s fucking kids or just killing them—is the quality his venal followers love most about him. Watching his sycophantic staff rush to defend his stinking shit, or to press their inflated lips against his diseased chassis, tells us everything we need to know about far too many of our fellow citizens. For His nasty rot gives Them permission to be their very worst selves.

Fuck Off And Die

Today is March 1, and the State of Florida has just ripped HIV meds out of the hands of thousands of people who formerly qualified for subsidies that allowed them to stay alive, to stay healthy—and to avoid transmitting a life-threatening virus to others. There’s no prettifying these facts: the State of Florida is condemning to death people who live with HIV.

Who do you think suffers disproportionately from HIV/AIDS in the State of Florida? 40% of patients living with HIV/AIDS are Black (though they comprise only 17% of the Florida population overall).

Last week, the State of Kansas ripped state-sanctioned IDs from the hands of trans men and trans women who must now—immediately, if they are to comport with state law—obtain replacement IDs (at their expense) that revert their gender markers to that which was “declared at birth.” There will doubtless be lawsuits, but for now the law has already overcome the Democratic governor’s veto. The hatred is enshrined in law, just as these hate-filled, mostly male, Republican gasbags intended.

How large do you think the trans population of Kansas is? Estimates vary, but it may fall somewhere between 12,000 and 22,000 people, or between 0.56% and 0.99% of the Kansas state population.

Make no mistake, these outcomes have been the deepest wish of Christian evangelicals and the Republican Party for the past 45 years: they hate gay people, they hate women, they hate black & brown & indigenous & trans & disabled & creative & eccentric & unusual folk. They would much prefer all these people die, than to extend them charity, a kind word, or—god forbid—”Christian love”.

So there’s my vomit for the start of the month.

THE EMBRACE by Mark Doty

You weren’t well or really ill yet either;

just a little tired, your handsomeness

tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought

to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.

I didn’t for a moment doubt you were dead.

I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.

You’d been out—at work maybe?—

having a good day, almost energetic.

We seemed to be moving from some old house

where we’d lived, boxes everywhere, things

in disarray: that was the story of my dream,

but even asleep I was shocked out of the narrative

by your face, the physical fact of your face:

inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.

Why so difficult, remembering the actual look

of you? Without a photograph, without strain?

So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,

your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth

and clarity of —warm brown tea—we held

each other for the time the dream allowed.

Bless you. You came back, so I could see you

once more, plainly, so I could rest against you

without thinking this happiness lessened anything,

without thinking you were alive again.

xoxojdf

I mean…I know it’s been a quiet 2 week gap since my last entry but the world, man, the world!

I’ve got several things drafted—not quite ready—and the energy to get them over the hump these days is hard to find. What a world.

So for the moment, Imma leave it here with one of my favorite things ever: Mirella Freni singing my very favorite aria, “Io son l’umile ancella,” from Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur.

I don’t know the opera well; I do know it’s likely Mirella’s best-loved performance (with good reason). The title character is “a famous actress,” and the aria itself is actress Adriana’s way of humblebragging to her fans—it translates to “I am the humble servant of the creative spirit.” Which is about as pretentious as an actress gets, I suppose.

But when she’s singing this beautifully? I have not a care about the florid prose coming out of her lungs.

And before you ask, yes, it’s opera: she dies; poisoned violets. Who knew? But that comes much later, long after the humblebrag aria.

This is just one of those things that will never not give me chills.

And I hope you enjoy it, too! It beats paying attention to the current state of the world:

Lyrics in translation:

“Look here; I’m scarcely breathing.

I’m but the humble servant

of the brilliant creator;

He offers me the words

that I impart to the heart…

I’m the verse’s music,

the echo of the human drama,

the fragile instrument,

the lowly hand-maiden…

Timid, joyous, terrible,

I’m called Faithfulness.

My voice is just a whisper,

which, with the new day, will die.”

xoxo JDF

Living longer than those I thought of as my gay elders and queer ancestors isn’t a new phenomenon, nor is the sense that I have done so little in my own life when compared to the lives of those snuffed out obscenely early. But I so wish he had lived longer. I wish Paul could accompany us—raging all the while—into this present American moment peopled with hapless “leaders” I find so obscene that my own rage threatens to pickle me into bile.

Paul is one of the writers I most admire; he surely had a deep impact on me during the years I was volunteering with GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis). Paul’s memoir, Borrowed Time, published in 1988, is a harrowing account of the early years of AIDS and of the sickness and death of his first husband-of-the-heart, Roger Horwitz, who died of AIDS in 1986. Roger’s death made an activist out of Paul; he was already a poet, a Yale-educated classicist, and a novelist, though AIDS tempered his writing in incisive, splendid, biting ways.

Where Larry Kramer (the co-founder of both GMHC and ACT-UP) used polemic prose to judge and sneer at his opponents, Monette used memoir and autoethnography to unearth shattering universal experiences of self-censorship—gay life in the closet—and dying. He eloquently gave voice to the urgency for necessary collective action in fighting the greed, stupidity, and venal blasphemousness of those in power.

Paul lost a second husband to AIDS, then rallied to find a third great love before he died at 49. To read of Paul’s romantic companionships, my own voices of “done so little in my life” rise again, yet Paul remains a beacon of romantic possibility to me even from this aged vantage point.

Monette is one of those white, cis- male, gay writers I fear has fallen into what the French call la traversée du désert—it means “crossing the desert,” in that his works have fallen out of favor for a time and will need to be “rediscovered”. By today’s definitions, he lived as the beneficiary of many privileges: relative wealth, whiteness, an Ivy-league education, and yet to define him solely by his privileges, or to deprive younger audiences of his extraordinary voice because of those privileges, would be a terrible injustice.

If you truly respect your queer elders, read more Paul Monette.

I miss his voice dearly.

Rest In Power, Paul.

“All in all, a remarkable pageant of diversity. And from where I sat, the flow of force was most tellingly toward the young. Theirs was the first generation to grow up with the promise of acceptance, at least from one another, and a measure of self-respect that constituted our hard-won legacy to them. None of them had to be alone anymore, except by closeted choice. As for passing the baton to a fleeter team, I felt a measure of satisfaction—a family feeling, really—that was scarcely quantifiable. But it wasn't one percent of me, and was encoded in my genes for thousands of years, no matter if it had no name. Or as Sappho put it, in Love's terms:

You may forget but

let me tell you
this: someone in
some future time
will think of us.”

—Paul Monette (from “Mustering” in Last Watch of the Night)

xoxojdf

It was a low-res flyer, sent via text message and posted to Instagram. Laughably low-res; barely readable if we’re honest. Legible enough, though, to glean that it would be an afternoon interfaith ICE protest, led in “silent solidarity”. I have no particular faith, but the act of witnessing silently spoke to me, and so did the presence of the friends who invited me.

Bring Flowers, Protest Injustice, and Remember the Taken.

Downtown Portland Takes A Breath?

First though, lunch with other friends of more than 40 years (those Colorado, pre-NYC days), then casual shopping downtown (window shopping, at least; jobless and broke at rent time, this boy is look-see only!) I rode the bus downtown—the second such bus ride this week, and I couldn’t help but notice that something? Maybe? Possibly? Felt less druggy, less unhoused, less catastrophically unhinged. Not just on the bus—no one losing their shit, just one slightly odd dude who couldn’t stop picking his nose—but even along the walk from the bus stop to the restaurant…

…almost zombie-free.

I can’t remember the last time I felt anything like that in downtown Portland. Maybe/possibly our enlarged city council and Mayor of one year have effected something like change? May it be true.

Oh—the weather! Stunning. In the 50s, sunny and bright, not the gray day the weather app had forecast. Vitamin D for everybody; people running in shorts with their shirts off. A spring day; something like happiness in the air.

Vietnamese for lunch—Luc Lac—very good, indeed, with a Vietnamese coffee concoction that was like shooting an 8-ball of caffeine and condensed milk straight to the heart. Then Mubi, Kinokuniya, Kiriko, and Koroko…out of town visitors meant Asian shops, all of them delightful. A hat I fell in love with (tho can’t afford) at Kiriko Made; a sign on some shopping bags at Koroko I now want on a tee shirt: Please Use Me While You’re Shopping!

Then a pass through the food court at the Portland Ritz-Carlton (don’t get me started on the uselessness of a downtown Portland luxury hotel, or the missed opportunity of an incredibly poorly designed food pod). Then briefly, Powell’s, where I bade my old friends goodbye and boarded a bus (my third this week!) headed for the afternoon protests at the South Waterfront.

The bus was already chock full of folks headed for the protests; good signage, good moods, folks boarding in motorized wheelchairs, all ages: kids to senior citizens. Due to road blockades (the feds were ready for us), the bus had to go past the ICE facility, and then drop us out along the highway, a few blocks south and west of the main protest gathering in Caruthers Park.

Phones On?

All manner of thoughts in my head as I made my way north to the park and the main gathering: should I really be using my phone? Should I have brought the foil I set out in my kitchen? (and then promptly forgot: the foil to wrap my phone in, after turning it off, to prevent the surveillance we know they are using to track us, one and all).

I passed a group of about 5 folks, walking away from the ICE facility, carrying a TRUMP flag and signage declaring '“We Support ICE”. I winced and muttered a curse under my breath, but whatever they’d been doing, they seemed done, and they were heading away. The ICE building itself now completely boarded up with plywood, no exposed glass anywhere to be seen. It was an unremarkable building to begin with, but it’s now a concrete bunker encased in cheap plywood. It appears abandoned, though it is still—so far as I’m aware—very much in use.

The marches hadn’t stepped away from the park yet, so the clusters of protestors and anarchists immediately adjacent to the ICE building were few and far between. Several of them dressed as I’d anticipated: all in black, with face masks and neck gaiters and ski masks + respiratory masks at the ready. I understand practically the impulse toward anonymity but I mulled the value of it—if we’re to protest fascists in masks, shouldn’t we have the courage of our convictions and show our faces in solidarity?

Did the Bloody Sunday marchers cover their faces when they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma? In 1965, though, the protestors weren’t being tracked by cell signals and facial recognition algorithms. Palantir wasn’t buying and selling all of us (without remunerating any of us, save the billionaires).

I haven’t got a clue what the sanest response today might be: my phone stayed on through the duration.

A Cluster of Marches

I’d thought the whole thing would be the Silent Protest—but ours was one of many. All the others, the huge contingent of unions, and folks in costumes and inflatables, with clever signs and children and dogs—they were in full voice. For a time we stood at the corner of Moody & Gaines and watched the unions go by: SEIU, the nurses union, and many others, had turned out in droves. News accounts today say “several thousand people” attended, and that’s surely how it felt.

Then we found our interfaith folks; were handed orange roses, and we began to follow a leader with a big red sign of silence, walking toward ICE in the opposite direction of the larger group of vocal protests.

Our silence was clarifying: it was powerful to hold our flowers and simply march toward ICE, while witnessing the long stream of folks who had already passed the facility and were walking away from it. Our marches ran counter to one another, but shared in purpose. One stream of silence, the other of rowdy chanting. I appreciated the symbolic balance, and took comfort in having space in the protest without needing to raise my voice in any particular way. A kind of hiding out, perhaps, but the emphasis on watching and witnessing was reassuring and it did, indeed, build solidarity.

We turned the corner and walked west, the facility now clearly in our sights, one long block ahead. At this corner, a Tesla dealership under lockdown (of course!) some protestors and anarchists taunting the security guard as a “pedophile protector” (whether they meant Trump or Musk wasn’t clear, but the recent Epstein release included several damning exchanges between Musk and Epstein, long after the famous pedo had been convicted the first time).

The street here was fairly wide, and it allowed for our two streams of marchers, moving in both directions at once, to share space comfortably, everyone falling into their own pace and space.

And then…the first flashbangs.

“There’s F*cking Children Here!”

We’d passed a number of upside-down American flags, and a small brass band was blatting out a woeful national anthem. I think it took us a moment to process: yes, those are flashbangs and smoke bombs of some kind being thrown directly into the crowd ahead of us, launched from the roof of the ICE building.

Can you understand how peaceful the whole thing had been, up until that point? Thousands of people, plenty of activity. But peaceful.

Close to the ICE facility? Yes, quite close. Adjacent to it.

Many of them families with children. Some with pets, elderly folk, queer and BIPOC and nonbinary. Some in motorized wheelchairs, others with walkers or canes. Some chanting, some silent. None of it a mob; nothing we witnessed could remotely be characterized as “unruly”.

Even as the flashbangs went off, I think we didn’t quite process it, even as a woman near me shouted “there’s f*cking children here!” Interestingly, there wasn’t a panic.

Alarm, yes: it was shocking to witness. But though there were cries of protest, we didn’t feel caught up in a mass effort to flee in one direction or the other. I will be interested to learn more about folks who were actually right at the intersection when the bangs and smoke bombs were unleashed on them; it’s possible that many of them were prepared with masks and inhalers (though I can’t believe all of them would have been).

We reversed course, and we were lucky, in the sense that the breeze was carrying the smoke away from us; we never smelled whether it was just smoke or tear gas: whatever it was released a visibly dense smoke, but the winds and our reversal ensured we didn’t sense it on our return. And though our retreat meant we wound up passing the park again, I never sensed a panic in the crowd at all, no evidence of folks choking up, or screaming or crying—though many people angry on behalf of their children’s safety.

[the song accompanying the video = “Sunshine (Woke Me Up This Morning)”, performed by LaBelle; written by Nona Hendryx; produced byVicki Wickham.]

Mean & Petty

I have no doubt that Leavitt, Noem, Homan, Miller, and their many flunkies will lie about the peacefulness of the protest. POTUS surely will, since every breath that soulless fuck takes is a goddamn lie. The dead-eyed gold digger he’s married to will have nothing to say, sitting as she does astride the literal mountain of money Bezos bribed her husband with, to make a shitty documentary about his Epstein-vetted wife, the Slovenian Eva Braun. Reportedly, 28 million dollars of that bribe go straight to the lining of her pockets; probably just enough to take the sting out of the critical drubbing her movie has flopped into: She Really Don’t Care, Do U?

And I catch myself, venial and snide, and wonder to what degree I’m infected by the same batch of bad American-ness as the aforementioned awful people. For I do wish them ill, and take smug satisfaction in calling out the womenfolk the rotten men hide behind. It’s a petty misogyny; I’m not proud of it, and too, it’s an impulse many centuries older than I am, though that’s no real excuse.

So Now What?

I’d like to think our silent protest march was our better angels in action.

Yet, I don’t know what it means that all of us are connected to these digital devices and we’re recording, recording, recording all of it, not just the protests, but every goddamn thing that happens around us. And with each byte of data we record, knowingly feeding it up into “The Cloud” where again, we’re bought and sold and tracked and surveilled. Those actions make us complicit, whether we consider them or not.

Those recordings and posts (this one, too) a distraction from the awful. But also core components of the awful whole.

We’d just borne witness to a branch of U.S. federal law enforcement stirring shit into a peaceful pot. Or perhaps more accurately, watched them turn the heat up, in hopes of inciting a boil.

I don’t think fascism is “on the way.” It’s very clearly here.

We’re the frogs in the pot, and we haven’t yet realized the heat is very much on; we’re about to collectively boil alive.

“Unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty”

—from The Scottish Play, Act 1, Scene 5

In Noem’s Own Words

“I have relied on God and placed my faith in Him throughout my career in public service…Every day, DHS works with the Christian community engaging in faith-based outreach to confront bias wherever we encounter it. In this country, our motto will always be: ‘In God We Trust.’” (@Sec_Noem)

“And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you…”

“I have given suck, and know
How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you”

—from The Scottish Play, Act 1, Scene 7

In Noem’s Own Words

“My relationship with the Lord is my foundation in all things. As a result, the values I hold according to biblical principles impact my decisions: we are called to love, but we’re also instructed to stand for truth. I’m hopeful my leadership reflects that.” (Woster)

“What’s done, cannot be undone…”

“Out, damned spot! out, I say!”

—from The Scottish Play, Act 5, Scene 1

In Noem’s Own Words

To end her speech, Noem suggested to the crowd three actions:

“Stop being offended by each other.”

“Start talking to people you’ve written off.”

And, “Just be happy.”

“You woke up in the United States of America today. You’re better off than 99.9% of the people,” Noem said. (Abrego)

“Why I Became A Pacifist” by June Jordan

Why I became a pacifist
and then
How I became a warrior again:

Because nothing I could do or say
turned out okay
I figured I should just sit
still and chill
except to maybe mumble
‘Baby, Baby:
Stop!’
AND
Because turning that other cheek
holding my tongue
refusing to retaliate when the deal
got ugly
And because not throwing whoever calls me bitch
out the goddam window
And because swallowing my pride
saying I’m sorry when whoever don’t like
one single thing
about me and don’t never take a break from
counting up the 65,899 ways I talk wrong
I act wrong
And because sitting on my fist
neglecting to enumerate every incoherent
rigid/raggedy-ass/disrespectful/killer cold
and self-infatuated crime against love
committed by some loudmouth don’t know
nothing about it takes 2 to fuck and
it takes 2 to fuck things up

And because making apologies that nobody gives a shit about

and because failing to sing my song

finally
finally

got on my absolute last nerve

I pick up my sword
I lift up my shield
And stay ready for war
Because now I live ready for a whole lot more

than that

—from Haruko/Love Poems

My seasonal warehouse work having come to an abrupt conclusion early this month (more about that experience in a future Substack entry), I’m back in the ranks of the unemployed (as opposed to just under-employed). Neither a desirable nor a comfortable place to find myself—again—but it is what it is.

But ya' got to have friends…

Yet despite the discomfort, I am reminded—again—of how extraordinarily fortunate I am, and have been, to construct my eclectic life in the company of many good friends. Friendship has long been something I’m good at, and among the talents I can call my own, it is probably the one I would consider both externally defining (to folks outside myself) and internally core (to the Me I Want to Be in the world).

So, there’s a deep pleasure in realizing that one of my regular readers in this Substack community—and indeed, one of the most engaged commenters—is a friend I’ve known since, I believe, we were about 7 and 8 years old, respectively: my dear friend, Barb. I’m now 59 and she’s 60, so for well over half a century, we’ve been friends.

In looking back over old cassette mixes, then, I was struck by Barb’s recent Substack comment:

“Come to think of it, I think I still have [a] mix TAPE that you gave me years ago, too!”

My guess is that is a birthday cassette mix I made for Barb’s 25th birthday in 1990. There’s a handful of tracks that aren’t available for streaming, but despite those omissions, the streaming versions still play as a heartfelt tribute to someone I had known longer than anybody, other than members of my family of origin.

I’d been in New York City just shy of 3 years when I made this mix for Barb, who was living in Colorado where she was born, raised, attended college, and married her high school sweetheart, Darren (hybrid couples names were a thing even then, and yes, we occasionally called them “Barren”). Barb and Darren, and their two grown kids, still live in Colorado.

Though I’d lived in Colorado, too, from age 7 - 21, my life before Colorado was already far-flung, thanks to my Dad’s job hops: California (where I was born), Illinois, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Florida were all places we’d lived before my 7th birthday. So perhaps flinging my life as far as New York City when I’d turned 21, made a kind of sense to my internal compass: in an Eriksonian developmental sense, far-flung is how I’d been wired since before I could talk.

Celebrating Barb from afar, after our life paths had diverged, I can sense the struggle to remain connected to our long-standing, heart-connected friendship across not only geographic distance, but lived experiences that headed in different directions; the way lives do! Barb was growing roots into the places she (we) established who we would be in life; I was more like a tumbleweed—or maybe a seed pod?

Rites of Passage

Not all queer people (certainly not only queer people) travel far from home, but many of my dearest friends in NYC left homes of origin far behind to get to the City: friends from Lansing, MI; from Pittsburgh and Reading, PA; from Kansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, California, Connecticut, Indiana. Some just from Long Island. It was a rite of passage: leave home and go to the City.

Too, by 1987, moving to NYC was something I felt compelled to do. I hadn’t gone to college after graduating high school in 1984—a complicated life twist that had a great deal to do with being gay, and with being adrift, depressed, and confused by my mother’s abandonment as she revitalized her own life by moving to another state with the (married) woman she fell in love with after my parent’s divorce.

The summer before my senior year of high school began, my mother moved to Montana with my younger sibling—my sister—in tow. Officially, I’d been “invited” to move to Montana with the Moms and their youngest kids, but to make a move from the town where I’d spent the previous decade of my life—spent those years bonding with friends like Barb—wasn’t anything most high school seniors would choose. Can you imagine being a burgeoning, nearly-out-of-the-closet gay boy of 16 dropping into Helena, Montana, as a complete stranger, to do a senior year of high school—in 1983? No, thank you.

I helped the Moms make the physical move to Helena that summer, but then I returned to Colorado to finish high school; living with my father for the first time since my parent’s separation two years earlier, when Dad had moved out of the family home.

As with all things emotional in my family, nothing was discussed. It just transpired. Whatever my father felt about my mother was packed up and kept away (from his children, at any rate). If Mom felt loss about leaving me behind, she didn’t—to my memory—show it, and we now were 700 miles and two states apart. She was excited to walk out of the life she’d led and into a new adventure and her excitement was palpable. She was not yet 40, so time was on her side. As her eldest child, and the son who felt very akin to her indeed, and as someone who grew up to exit lives and enter new ones on a wing and prayer, more than once: I understand her anticipation of a new chapter; I get it.

From my vantage point at 59, though…I’m acutely aware of the prices paid to exit one life and to start another. Starting fresh is a wonder, a shot in the arm. It’s also an escape hatch. And escape doesn’t only exact a price from those heading for the door; those who are left behind pay, too.

What’s the adage? “When God closes a door, he opens a window”? It’s not from the Bible—it’s from The Sound of Music, for chrissakes. Mama was off to a new life, a new love, a new business she was co-founding with her lady love. Dad was in Bachelor Mode, smarting from his own confusion and alienation from the divorce.

In 1983, though, we coolly and unemotionally (on the surface, at least), plodded forward; my people share too much DNA with the Keep Calm and Carry On crowd. But somewhere between being a closeted gay teen—a total mama’s boy who was suddenly without his Mama and little sister—and a high school senior who had always been a B+ student and a piano-and-sax-playing music geek, I got lost. My grades tumbled; I’d never nearly-flunked anything until then, as I almost-flunked Chemistry (late nights at Perkins with a sympathetic friend meant I pulled a D).

Emotionally, it was awful; I think I can still fairly characterize it as the worst year of my life.

Not through any fault of my father’s, mind you: he was as supportive as ever, attending all my musical and theatrical events, and happily allowing me to host friends for sleepovers and very elaborate theme parties, including Sophistication! (“slobs will be bounced”) and The Weirdness Party (“Come Experience Something Utterly Fantastic”).

Depressed and confused, I certainly was, but I could still throw a fabulous party.

Not that I could have defined any of that emotional territory clearly in the 1980s; during the years I might have gone to college—and virtually all of my friends did go to college—I would have resisted the suggestion that I was depressed. I would have offered as contrarian proof: working multiple jobs (a business marketing newspaper, a candy stand, a card shop, and a lesbian-owned bagel café) plus my thriving northern-Colorado theater career, for a time being the only performer cast in productions put up by all three of the city’s feuding nonprofit theater companies.

By any definition, sexually-speaking, I was a late bloomer; I exited the closet at 17, into the world of theater where I could plausibly be an out-gay-man without having (ever had) a boyfriend, and I could be a never-been-kissed virgin, during an era of intense cultural obsession and revulsion with the sex lives of gay men.

Parents pulled their kids from productions I had involvement with—sometimes because the production itself was too sexualized for their conservative religious beliefs (Pippin), but other times because their kids spoke admiringly of me at home and happened to mention in the same breath that I was unashamed of being gay. Those rejections hit hard, and in some perverse way they seemed to echo my mother’s choice to leave me, despite all we shared in common.

I developed powerful emotional attachments—particularly to two male friends, two and three years younger than me respectively. But for as deeply as I wanted those relationships to develop sexually, to them it seemed I was the sage elder queer, knowledgeable in all things art and music and culture (deeply ironic, since I had zero game, a void of experience in love, and sex was as terrifying to me as it was to the culture at large).

If there had been opportunities to turn those affections in a different direction, I hadn’t the self-knowledge or the experience to pull it off. My attraction to both of them led to a predictable dustup when they wound up briefly sexually involved with each other (never intending that I would find out, which I accidentally did). After lashing out at both of them, and taking other beloved friends down with me in my rage, I wound up stuffing the sexual parts of the attractions to both of them into muffled, joking, wounded expressions of unrequitedness and longing.

Bitter Herbs

Longing and unrequitedness—bitter herbs, but you learn to gnaw on them. You can survive on bitterness, if you have to. After all, in a state of perpetual longing, you can imagine any damn outcome you desire. It’s a warped way of developing emotionally, and it would pay terrible dividends as I continued to obsess over my idealized love objects rather than love them for the complicated, messy human beings they were/we all are.

What’s more, as the son of a public health nurse, knowledgeable enough about HIV transmission to fear what it might mean for her eldest child, I was also deeply fearful of AIDS and the sex with which it was so bound up. Mom had, by then, thrown another wrench into my sexual and emotional development, by refusing the coming-out version of me I presented to her, despite the obvious same-sex attractions she was embodying in her own (very closeted) life.

No one who knew my family predicted that my mother would be the parent to have problems with my coming out; the conventional wisdom was always “your mom will be excited—obviously, she’s gay, too!—but your father will have a harder time.” As it transpired, Mom expressed disbelief that I could possibly know I was gay if I was still a virgin. This from the woman who knew her musical, flamboyant child as no other in the world could. It was, in a word: devastating.

In a family with a legacy of so poorly addressing anything emotional, though, it was also a rupture I’m not sure we ever completely repaired. I never doubted that my mother loved me—I know she did—but the timing of her move to Montana, and the subsequent train wreck of my declaring my true self to her, were unexpected and wildly alienating. Not just a rupture of son & mother but, from my side of the divide, a sort of shattering of self. If the person I’d always believed I was closest to was so insistent that I was not who I told her I was…then who was I to make of me?

By 1986, all that frantic job-hopping, theater-making, obsessive romantic-imagining is what JDF would have shown as proof of living. Never mind that the boy in the bagel shop, prepping wholesale orders late at night, played on the turntable only the saddest music—Rickie Lee Jones’ After Hours, Phoebe Snow’s Don’t Let Me Down, jane siberry’s The Taxi Ride—and sobbed between the trays of boiled bagels and honey calzone. (The hippie markets wouldn’t buy baked goods containing refined sugar; if you’ve ever baked with honey as a sugar substitute, you might cry, too.)

From my current vantage point at 59, the compassion I feel for that younger version of JDF is big: to the moon and back big. For I honestly don’t know what kept that boy from the brink. I already knew friends contending with HIV; the association of death with being gay was indelible. I missed my mother terribly—and too, I was indignant at her rejection of my coming out. More bitter herbs; maybe that was what kept me going.

Something I do know for sure: friendships got me through.

Which brings me back to Barb.

Happy Birthday, Barbar: The Ballad of New York (1990)

Access this playlist: via Qobuz / via Spotify / via YouTube Music

I’ve known Barb so long that my earliest memories of us date to the early 1970s, at recess in elementary school, playing with another classmate, Carrie, while pretending to be horses. I didn’t know from horses, but Barb certainly did. Her family lived in a subdivision that was then at the far southern end of town: Fairway Estates. And if memory serves, Barb owned a horse that lived at her family’s property in Fairway.

Our school, Beattie Elementary, was rooted in a 1970s-era progressive teaching approach called Individually-Guided Education (IGE). IGE schools had pods and units, rather than walled classrooms (Barb and I were in the Hopper pod, and later we aged up to Pioneer II). We kept our materials in tote trays and rotated units for different classes, without being shut out from other learning spaces. During my time at Beattie, we didn’t have a traditional grading system (receiving my first GPA and letter grades, when we reached junior high school, was a huge shock to my system!)

IGE wasn’t for everyone; there’s another friend from the old days who I know struggled with the absence of formality. I thrived in that hippie-dippie collective approach. I got to adapt and write plays, participate in school musicals, attempt outdoor science experiments, garden in school beds, even design a covered wagon for the 1976 Bicentennial Celebration (to be fair, I’m sure the design & execution were 99.99% my father’s efforts!)

I don’t remember precisely how or why Barb and I bonded, but by junior high school, we were very close. Barb wrote me a letter in the summer of 1978, so I know we were already Star Wars fans (we were both fantasy & science fiction nerds, as were many of our friends), and I know she’d sold her horse, BJ. That fall, I played alto sax and Barb played flute and we played together in many iterations of bands through the next six years of school: Symphonic Band, Glee Club, Marching Band, etc.

Socially, our lives just naturally intertwined; Darren, too, was a friend from Beattie days, so when their romance began in high school (junior high? Barb will have to weigh in) it was pretty organic. Fort Collins was a college town, and we all lived in subdivisions from the 70s and 80s, we knew each other’s families, we gathered for meals out and movies and adventures. We vibed.

Barb and I have long shared an affect through nostalgia: according to Oxford Languages, “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period or place with happy personal associations.” Nostalgia can play a big part in the process of making a mixtape for a friend, and indeed, our friend circles began doing just that when we were in junior high. I’m sure there were cassette mixes I made for Barb that predate the mix I’m sharing here—unfortunately, my documented mixes only date back to 1984, the year we graduated high school.

I know I made mix tapes on Barb’s stereo equipment during high school; I can remember sitting upstairs in her room at her Mom’s condo, recording tracks from LPs to cassettes. Knowing Barb and I, those tracks were likely off albums by George Winston, P.D.Q. Bach, and the Fresh Aire/Mannheim Steamroller oeuvre. Oh, and Dan Fogelberg.

The Family Tree

Nostalgia is why Barb and I were both drawn to collaging and scrapbooking. It was why I took it upon myself to save every note we passed back and forth to each other through junior high and high school (!) and preserve them in a 3-ring notebook I titled “The Family Album.” It was an inside joke of sorts, but it was also a culmination of a shared, collective storytelling through which we’d cast all the friends we knew as members of a sprawling, soap opera-worthy “family”:

According to this archival storytelling document [🤷‍♂️], I can see that Barb was my “granddaughter” through a previous marriage to an unnamed person who was “deceased” when this family tree was created [🤯]. Apparently, my first marriage to the unnamed person resulted in two daughters: Jamie (who adopted a daughter, Cathi), and Cyndi, who became Barb’s “mother”. Then “Barb” gave birth to two illegitimate children, Chet & Bev, who themselves had an affair which resulted in their incestuous offspring, Carl. Scandal! [🤣🙄]

Blame hormones, or vivid imaginations, or nerd culture of the 1980s; blame Agnes Nixon’s All My Children! In retrospect, I see very clearly my own need to re-fashion family, while my nuclear family was coming apart.

Barb’s Mom was another “mom” to me; one of several friends’ families I sort of adopted myself out to in those years (my sister wound up doing much the same in reaction to the dissolution of our family of origin). And Barb, who I shared classes with constantly and passed notes to and knew the ins and outs of her romantic travails, Barb was in many ways, “my best friend”. She was a safe space, a known quantity; when you’ve known one another for so long, that relationship becomes a version of “home.”

Circling Back

Long friendships ebb and flow. Barb’s relationship with Darren became primary during high school and that meant a shift in our friendship, too. The senior year during which everything collapsed was also the year I began—very selectively; very cautiously—coming out to friends. But I didn’t come out to Barb until months after we’d graduated. I held complicated feelings about that at the time; in many ways, it would have made perfect sense for Barb to be the person I came out to first, but in retrospect, I likely hesitated because I feared the possibility of losing her foundational friendship. Having lost so much that year (a good deal more than I’ve described in this entry), to have lost Barb as well would have been devastating.

Then again, as she was off to college and I was beginning a 3-year period of stasis in Fort Collins, our day-to-day vibes weren’t as simpatico as they’d once been. As noted earlier; even (maybe, especially?) in the best of friendships, lives diverge. Yet even at a great distance, I held Barb (and our “us”) in great esteem by the time I made Happy Birthday, Barbar (my long-time nickname for her).

Musically, it’s a real early-90s gay vibe: lesbians Phranc and k.d. lang are front and center; the musical theater diva, Betty Buckley (of Eight Is Enough TV fame) is featured from a live concert she performed at St. Bart’s in NYC—Buckley’s album of that concert was one I played until my cassette tape wore out (and the entire 1986 album is criminally unavailable for streaming anywhere!)

Orpheus is David Sylvian’s gorgeous paean to his muse and to the creative impulse. That album, too (Secrets of the Beehive) is one I wore out on my Walkman, and I’m sure I sat on the subway untangling the magnetic tape if it snagged. Orpheus is a tune I associate fully with my early experiences of New York, “the beauty here I cannot deny.”

Tess’ Theme, from the movie Dick Tracy, is one of my all-time favorite pieces of music. Brief as it is (just over one minute long), I think it calls out to perceptions of both Barb and myself: Tess Trueheart (played so sweetly by Glynne Headley in the film) is a sort of Penelope character, long-suffering but always, always true to the relationship over many decades. I think of it as a sort of Theme for Friendship writ large. Danny Elfman’s composition starts as a simple melody for strings, but as it it builds it also sets in motion a clear longing, perhaps regret. It’s Orpheus looking back over his shoulder at the world he’ll lose in so doing. It’s nostalgia to its core.

I’m sure the Dr. John is courtesy of my friend Kirk—Gregg’s boyfriend in those days—and until re-listening to this mix recently, I’d forgotten how fantastic the brass arrangements were on that album. The Alberta Hunter is a tune of many meanings—Hunter, a black lesbian, covering Josephine Baker’s ode to her divided love (J’ai Deux Amours) for both her country of origin and the city of Paris (a city I wouldn’t visit myself for many decades yet, but which I could understand through my love affair with NYC).

There’s much more in the mix, deeply informed by movies and musicals I loved at that particular junction in time (Off-Broadway’s Oil City Symphony, the films Beetlejuice and Empire of the Sun). Another couple of tunes nail precise emotional moments for me: Maggie & Terre Roche’s “West Virginia” was a tune I wept to in the late-night kitchen at the lesbian bakery, and Kate Bush’s “Watching You Without Me,” with its “ghost in the house” heralds another dose of nostalgia through its crystalline take on loving someone you can’t be with.

And Cyndi Lauper’s mysterious Kindred Spirit a perfect callout to a friendship.

Thanks, Barb! Loved you then; love you still! xoxo JDF

If you think you’re hearing something and you can’t think what it is

If you feel a quiet longing, lift your heart into the wind

There you’ll find my kindred spirit, there you’ll meet me as a friend,

It is just a kindred spirit and a song to let you in.

—Cyndi Lauper

Come ready and see me

No matter how late

Come before the year’s run out.

I’m waiting with a candle

No wind will blow out,

But you must haste on foot or by sky

For no one can wait forever

Under the bluest sky

I can’t wait forever,

For the years are running out.

In the land without sunsets

I’ll wait till eternity’s at rest.

Come home while the years have days,

Before time runs out.

Don’t stop to think of anything like doubt

Come before the candles snuffed out in the black

Come home you’re all I’ve got.

Hard to find words amid the current horrors of our shithole country: the public execution of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, the invasion of Venezuela, the unspeakable cruelty of the monsters Vance, Noem, Rubio, Miller, and that pile of excrement in a bad suit impersonating an actual POTUS. The ugly bullying, the thieving, the amoral excesses and lip-smacking delight these gargoyles take in exacting petty revenge while snarling at anyone who doesn’t kowtow to Herr Drumpf—that vainglorious moron—it’s utterly ghastly.

Giddy Distractions

And so, filled with a spirit of ill-wishes for the aforementioned gargoyles, I went to take homemade chicken soup to a friend.

The sun had come out—no small thing, these days—and as I started the ignition, the CD that was already loaded began playing mid-track: soprano Joan Sutherland warbling—wobbling might be more accurate— the Sweet-hearts refrain from “Will You Remember?” from Maytime, a 1937 Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy vehicle.

The mood lifted, at least for a time—and I started to laugh.

“Will You Remember?” is a track from Sutherland’s album Talking Pictures (1987), her tribute to the film music she loved in her youth, during the 1930s. When she recorded the album, Joan was 60 years old, well past the prime of her towering vocal abilities. In addition to the warble/wobble age bestows on all singers to varying degrees, she had reverted to, uh, shall we say, the very lax diction critics had accused her of through many phases of her career.

But no matter: Joan so loves those tunes from the thirties that the effect winds up being a dizzying, giddy, bubbly mass of noise. As usual, it’s conducted gorgeously by her husband, Richard Bonynge, so the accompaniment is top-notch, but most importantly those orchestrations positively pillow Joan’s swooning, careening utterances (there’s so little enunciation on most tracks that it very nearly comes across as a parody from The Muppet Movie, IYKYK). I don’t mean to suggest Sutherland is singing poorly, just that the vagaries that age visits on all voices + the obvious nostalgia and magic the tunes instill in her heart is infectious on a level that borders on camp.

It was the medicine I needed; may it never end.

The prompts—which must be honored in order to meet the challenge—were: “A drama + a slum + a candlelabra”. Once the prompts are issued, authors have 48 hours to complete an entry.

The Chestnut Trees, The Wishing Well

A Flash Fiction by Jeff Donaldson-Forbes (2019)

The insistent scratching sound was in my dream. Something about our old cat, Mittens, using the fine wire of the back screen door to sharpen his claws, matched the Kid—who was not in the dream—pulling on the boards. I jolted awake when the Kid got the plywood off the opening to the stage entrance.

In my parents’ day, this neighborhood was Skid Row. That was back when this place was a porn theater, after it was a second-run house, after it was a movie palace, after it had been a “legitimate stage.” That’s way back before we lived here, back when Tallulah toured with real plays and I guess that’s why they named it The Bankhead.

Which is amusing, really, given its later provenance as a porn theater; the bank-head. These are the alleys my brain goes down when I’m this hungry. How many days hungry now? Six, I think. Last soup kitchen was Sunday morning and now it’s Friday night. I think it’s Friday night.

The Kid is looking at me insistently. He’s got the boards off the stage entrance and it’s gaping at him in the dark like an opening to another, drier, world. I know he wants me to get up, to assure him we should go inside. It’s going to rain again and it’s probably dry-ish in there. God knows if the Bankhead has a solid roof these days. Seems like grass would be growing up through the parquet by now. What’s that song about the parquet growing up through grass?

“Hey!” the Kid hisses, vying for my attention. Seeking praise, which, honestly, he deserves. I’m not able to pry boards these days, so he’s done us both a favor.

I look at the Kid so he knows I’ve heard him. But I’m still half in dream. Mittens is looking at me through the screen, wondering if I’m going to scold him or let him back in the house. If I stay here looking at Mittens, I won’t have to get up from this position and I am so fucking tired, I honestly think I might just die here now.

“You did it,” I say weakly, attempting a smile.

“Yeah! I think we should go inside. Do you have the flashlight?” he asks in a hushed voice. His eyes are bigger than Mittens’.

I turn my head to look down the alley toward the night street. There’s no light, other than the stars, and there’s no sound or motion from that direction. So I reach into the pocket of the terry robe I’ve worn as a coat for the last many weeks, rooting around for the plastic feeling of the small flashlight I keep for just this purpose.

But moving my body, at all, stirs up odors, which are pervasive. I’ve never been good at smells, always hated jasmine and scented candles. The pungency of my own flesh now disgusts me, and it kicks up the sick sweetness of my filthiness whenever I rustle the fabric of my clothes.

I pass him the flashlight. He peers at me in the dark, and I think he looks proud of his dominion over the plywood. The Kid knows better than to go shining a light that alerts man and beast to our presence, so he cups his hand over the lens before turning it on. Then he takes a deep breath, leans forward into the open door, and keeps the light very low, near the floor. We both listen acutely for sounds of life inside. There aren’t any.

I lean hard against the brick wall of the alley, and leverage against it as I attempt to rise. The pain in my knees and ankles is agonizing, so I stifle a groan, and decide to crawl forward in my robe instead. I’ve learned to crawl reasonably quietly, but I disturb a pile of stray paper, which rattles and echoes so that the Kid looks back at me, pushing his face near mine, scowling.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, “let me in.” He shines a bit of light to the right, indicating nothing but empty wooden floor. Could the stage really go right up to this door? I crawl over the lip of the door and collapse as quietly as I can in the light where he’s indicated. The Kid crouches next to me.

“I think we’re the only ones,” he whispers. I nod and wonder if it’s wise for me to just go to sleep here, so near the alley.

The Kid is close to the wall now, shining the light increasingly more broadly around the stage we’re on and up the brick walls, painted black. The glow catches sight of several old posters, for shows that once played this place, in another lifetime.

“Wow,” the kid mumbles, almost too loudly, “look at that fork!”

“What?” I mumble back.

“I’ve never seen a fork that big!” So I look and there’s a poster of Liberace, in full rhinestone regalia, with his hands up like a religious icon with gleaming white teeth, and a gleaming white grand piano and a big silver…

I slap my palms over my mouth and begin to shake, making a guttural sound like dry leaves rattling in a pail. The Kid looks alarmed, and I can feel tears in the corners of my eyes so I know I’m actually laughing. Liberace’s “big fork” is the funniest thing I think I’ve ever heard in my life.

“What are you doing?” the Kid asks, worried.

“That’s a candelabra,” I say, and then I make more of that awful noise, before stifling my laughter. I want to thank the Kid for making me laugh again, even if it’s the last time.

I think I can sleep here tonight. Curled up under Liberace and his rhinestones. I bet Mittens will even come and light the tapers, and we can climb the screen and sing “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

---

[Lana Turner Has Collapsed] by Frank O’Hara

Lana Turner has collapsed!

I was trotting along and suddenly

it started raining and snowing

and you said it was hailing

but hailing hits you on the head

hard so it was really snowing and

raining and I was in such a hurry

to meet you but the traffic

was acting exactly like the sky

and suddenly I see a headline

LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!

there is no snow in Hollywood

there is no rain in California

I have been to lots of parties

and acted perfectly disgraceful

but I never actually collapsed

oh Lana Turner we love you get up

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting,
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.