into the sludge

these are diary entries from february, march, april, and may all mixed together. i've been having trouble writing for this newsletter, and this feels like a way to unclog the block. it's a blog post, not sure if there's a real thesis here – maybe there would be like three essays if i was really keen – but it felt nice to write and to paste together.

When you cut a thread in two, the end points are clear. What was once a singular, cohesive entity is permanently severed. I've been thinking a lot about endings lately because there are a lot of endings lately. There's my book, obviously, which felt like the ending of my girlhood, this election and new president which feels like the ending of a lot of things - the exhausting election cycle, the destruction of many institutions. But this part, the part that comes after a big snap, the huge election, the book tour, a break up, it's less clear to me. It feels as if we're at the beginning of something new and I don't necessarily know how to go forward.

I think the only way is to go forward and see what happens. I'm going to look towards the earth, even as we push its normal rhythms to the brink. Spring in Chicago is tumultuous and chaotic, like waking up from a deep nap and running directly into a marathon, juggling your coffee and breakfast in hand - it's 30 degrees and snowing, then it's 70 degrees and pelting down rain, then it's somewhere in between with gusts of wind that blow your bangs back and your skirts up. It's gross, but I like to think of it like the big energy of the city waking up, shaking things loose. It's going to be a spring full of flowers and mud and sex and sludge. I think it's going to be messy and confusing because the astrologers on my phone keep giving me foreboding warnings about eclipses (I think I'm going to block all astrologers, I don't want to know about planets being in retrograde anymore).

Maybe it was April that took a spiky baseball bat to the back of me knees, with all the traveling for work before I had really recovered from traveling to promote my book. Maybe the 4am bus-to-train ride into O’Hare to take a five hour flight, followed by a week of working in an office – my tolerance for which has been atrophied by years of remote work and freely exercising the privilege to follow the inscrutable rhythms of my body and my mind, to juggle a work task with tummy time on my carpet or to answer a work call while I fold my laundry – maybe that was what put my immune system in a weakened position, preparing my body to accept foreign viruses with open arms.

The brutally pleasant qualities of California, its long cruising on winding highways across valleys, its amazing, simply prepared food that Californians like to remind me will let the quality of produce speak for itself; to have every decision made for me by my friend-host-coworker-boss so that my brain and mind and spirit sort of softened, the sharp edges of solo city living being worn away by a surrogate dad-type taking care of me – I think it broke my body down.

In the place of wide-eyed sincerity and hope I had become an ungrateful bitch. I was not really feeling grateful for the travel stipend provided by my day job, which timing my bi-annual work trip so I could go do a panel at the LA Times Festival of Books - where I felt very self-conscious about being called a Cult Classic and let Ben – a Taurus, my host in LA, and one of my best friends – know that I was feeling ungrateful and self conscious ad nauseum, so much so that it prompted him to ask me if he was somehow not doing a good enough job of taking care of me while I was eating for free in his house.

Realizing that I was making him feel bad because of my bad vibes forced me to do some reflection. Why was I being such a bitch? Flying on someone else's dime, being in the big, fancy, Coachella For Books or whatever – isn't that the dream?

I guess I resented being called a cult author, I felt like it was some kind of curse or a recursive prophecy that would eventually fulfill itself because I was labeled as such.

What's wrong with being a cult-anything? I love cult artists, being an avid cultist myself. But it wasn't sitting right. I guess my aspirations had become bigger than I realized, that I wasn't just so humble and honored to even be invited. I want to be one of the great writers from the former united states of america. HTFLAG is weird and raunchy and low brow, but I believed in it and I’m proud of it as a stepping stone, but Cult Classics in the Making? There are plenty of mainstream books full of weird sex dreams and stuff right? I mean, in hindsight, my book has a lot of corny transgender journey tropes in it, too, so it's not even that niche.

It felt like The Man said my book - and all my co-panelists' books - were cult classics because they were written by queers who happen to be funny. Maybe if we were less gay, less campy and less melanated we could be instant classics, classics-in-the-making, or future installments of the literary canon. I'd said all of this, in so many words, over so many days, to Ben, until his patience with me was exhausted and then I was embarrassed for all my whining. I felt like a diva and I was not practicing gratitude. And the key to contentment is to practice gratitude – or something like that.

My plan was to go to Los Angeles for work, then swing around to Seattle on the way home to celebrate a friend's 30th birthday. By the time I got to Capital Hill, I was exhausted. Apparently I had been exposed to enough air-commuters and breathed enough office air to swallow a notable amount of Influenza. I spent most of Jena’s 30th birthday weekend sweating a feverish puddle into their couch.

A double dose of ZZZquil and Imodium put my body in stasis for the flight home - no diarrhea, no coughing, no consciousness. Jena offered to extend my stay so I could continue soaking her couch with my sweaty excretions and convalesce under their Taurean care, but I had to go home.

The flu, the travel, the hole in my bank account from my tour which i was still trying to fill. The tarriffs or whatever and the laws threatening to de-nationalize me. By the time I got to the middle of May, my apartment was a mess and I had mostly dropped my ability to be optimistic. Everything felt pointless, and the concept of Giving Up seemed appealing. Maybe I would always be like this: depressed, no energy to do anything more elaborate than watch bad movies.

I've been having trouble writing lately. Humans are delusional when we believe we're always capable of forward progress, infinite energy charging forward, I know. I know I mentioned earlier about our homeland of earth tried to teach us about the rhythm of the moon and the dance of the tides, the way trees go to sleep for a couple months and flowers die after a couple days. I know it takes a lot to make something and I have aspirations, big aspirations to be an important Somebody, a writer that has made a mark on the world, and I know that sometimes you spend 5 months not writing very much. But I think it's been hard to find my voice again after such a grand declaration of who I am - or who I was. As soon as the tour was over and I had spent the winter telling America exactly the kind of person I was, I felt like I was done being that person. And now, how can I write without knowing anything?

I've been frustrated with the idea that I should count my blessings, be mindful of all the good stuff in my life.

A friend, in an earnest attempt to assuage my anxieties about the Bad Shit Happening Around Me, recently said that I shouldn't worry about being taken away by government workers in unmarked vans. That I don't need a plan to flee the country, that it's all scare tactics to keep me from being myself, and that ideating on it was a kind of masochistic fantasy. While it's true that I am probably fine in a blue bubble city, and that I was definitely unproductively fixating on several bad endings for my life, I am sometimes haunted by the ways in which class gaps alienate us from each other. This friend's list of gratitudes and comforts was long, and it was true that they certainly did not need to worry about systematized violence, that for him it would be a total masochistic fantasy – an unrealistic one at that.

The gratitude list - it's meant to remind those of us on the edge that life is precious and wild and beautiful and that there's so much to live for – so much to be grateful for. It's true, I do feel in awe of this city, my big beautiful life and all the friends I'm entangled with. In many ways, I've very recently moved up in the world – most debts repaid, slumlords abandoned, a job that pays the bills – but I can't help but feel I'm still so close to the bottom – which I've always lived so close to – the place where you can get eaten up by the world and no one cares. It feels like my place, a couple notches above that gaping hungry maw, is precarious – not a real ledge to sit on. And anyway, I don't want anyone to be shredded into pieces, to be annihilated for having the bad luck of not being born to rich parents in the right social caste. I don't want to become comfortable in this system, this country, which is so flawed. I want to remember that every small comfort I have is haphazardly kept, that I and anyone else in this country can lose everything they have in a day. The comforts, I do have, I think are bare minimum tokens of dignity, the kinds of things most people on our planet should just have.

I'm not grateful to live in America where it seems like my friends might be kicked out at any moment and where my money and labor goes into destroying other people's lives and yet I also don't have enough money to buy a dozen eggs. I'm not grateful for my current health because I know my life can be ended at anytime by some transphobic dick with a blunt object or some cop or that I could catch the next plague and there won't be a bed for me to rest on or that something inside me will burst and the hospital won't want to give me my surgery because I can't afford an up front payment or something, and then it would all be over. I'm not grateful for my below market rate apartment, which is huge and cheaper than other similar apartments, because it's still too expensive for me and I know they're gonna increase the rent no matter what and they're going to keep raising the rent until I move to a shittier apartment to start over again. I'm not grateful to have a passport with an F gender marker on it, issued right before the new president took office, because I feel like it could be ripped apart by a pissy border patrol agent if I ever try to visit another country.

I felt ungrateful and stuck and useless for a while. I'm not sure what happened - rest, movies with friends, or maybe it really is just Spring and it's time for me to get moving.

I woke up today and I de-greased my kitchen stove, which has been thick with carbon and grease for a year, I made my bed, I switched to a cheaper phone plan because I'm trying to care about my finances in a real way, and I’m dreaming of visiting Rome and Mexico City and Paris and Dublin and Manila, I’m dreaming of seeing the world. I’m not living in fear, anticipating navigating a planet in ruins. I can’t wait to use my passport. I can't wait to use my voice. I can't wait to help. I have decided to give a shit and try to be brave.