gunshot acorns
smack the shed roof
always more water for rain
/ / /
2 October 2024
Charlottesville VA
Category: Random Musings
MY COMING OUT POST.
I’m bi.
It’s such a monumental thing for me to be able to type those two words. Over the past six weeks or so, I’ve been working through all this with two friends, initially, and then a couple other folks. But I didn’t start thinking about it a month ago. I started in 1993.
Back then, my friend Christian came out to me, and we started hanging out all the time, going to gay and lesbian clubs in Rochester, NY. I often found myself being attracted to genderqueer folks, although I didn’t have that term back then. I didn’t really know about bi identities either. The places we went were always “gay” or “lesbian.” I knew I wasn’t gay, and I knew I was a cis man (again, without that term being available), so lesbian was off the table. So I just assumed I was straight and an ally. I covered my car in pride stickers and wore a triangle pendant every day and dressed in cute overalls and followed Ani DiFranco on tour and was TOTALLY STRAIGHT.
Throughout my 20s and 30s I stayed connected to the queer community in various ways. I always wished I was part of it, but I never really thought I belonged in a real way. I danced outside Stonewall on the night same-sex marriage was legalized in New York. I wore “legalize gay” and “straight but not narrow” shirts. I went to rallies and marches and protests. A friend called me a “classic lesbian” and I thought it was the best compliment I’d ever received.
In my 40s I married a non-binary trans person and still said I was straight, even though I was just as into them when they presented as masculine.
Since moving to Charlottesville I’ve had some conversations that have finally caused me to really examine this part of myself. My friends Chaundra and Christian have helped me think about what it could mean to accept this identity, while also both saying they already thought I was bi, even if I didn’t. In Christian’s case, she’s thought that for 30 years. Another friend told me that someone we both know said in 2002 that they thought I was bi. So I guess I’m the last to know. ?
(Note 1: While typing this I’m also reminded that I listened to Depeche Mode in the 80s and thought David Gahan was super hot when he danced. Gosh I’m slow.)
(Note 2: After reading the initial draft of this, my cousin Lynne told me that I came out to her 30 years ago. Apparently I then bi-erased myself.)
As I’ve thought about this I’ve noticed some fascinating effects. For one thing, imagining myself as bi and queer has made me feel at home in my body in a way that’s never been true before. So many things about the way I move and carry myself and express myself just feel “right” if I see them through this new lens.
And as I’ve started to step back into an activist role, and thus to meet people in Charlottesville, I’ve had some chances to allow people to identify me as part of the queer community, so I’ve done that and it’s been wonderful.
I still have a lot of new territory to cover. I know it won’t all be easy, but right now I’m filled with a whole new kind of joy.
My name is Jason and I’m bi.
Nice to meet you.
Meet Gulliver. (UPDATE BELOW) I’ve said for many years that it’s not good for someone to be the only living thing in their home, whether that means having a partner or a pet or a plant. Gulliver is a wandering dude, aka silver inch plant, aka tradescantia zebrina. He was mailed to me all the way from Texas by my friend Amber, who cut him from her own plant. After many weeks and one additional trim, he’s tiny but he has roots. His dad plant has been around since 2004, so he’s got good genes. What you’re seeing in this photo isn’t the tip of the iceberg — it’s the whole iceberg. He’s got about a 1/2″ of stalk and some little root filaments in the pot, which I put him in yesterday. I named him Gulliver because of the wandering connotation, and because he’s tiny now but will hopefully get big, and there are many size and perspective shifts in Gulliver’s Travels, which is one of my favorite books. Send him — and his caretaker — good vibes, because I definitely don’t know what I’m doing.
(UPDATE: I took a photo of Gulliver in the Picture This app and it turns out he’s not a wandering dude [tradescantia zebrina] but instead a purple heart [tradescantia pallida]. But I’m keeping the name.)
Leave a CommentJust in case this site is the only place you follow me, I thought I should mention that my podcast A Brief Chat is back as of this month, and I’m also back as the host of The Jazz Session. You can hear all the free episodes of each at their respective sites: abriefchat.com or thejazzsession.com.
There are also Patreon accounts for both shows. For The Jazz Session, $5 a month gets you a monthly bonus show, early access to every episode, and a thank you on an episode. Join here. The main show returns in September, but there are bonus shows all summer.
For A Brief Chat, $1 a month gets you early access, a thank you on an episode, plus travel essays and photos from my life in a van. For $5 a month, you get all that plus a monthly bonus episode. Join here.
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After yet another van accident last year, I decided I’d had enough. It was time to move somewhere, find a job, and get out of van life and back into an apartment. Eventually I moved to Pittsfield, MA, where I got a full-time job and started saving for the roughly $3,000 it takes just to move into an apartment these days.
After a month or so I realized I should have moved to State College instead to be near my son as he finishes high school, so that’s what I decided to do. I’ll be headed back there late in July. And again my plan has been to find a job in town and an apartment.
In the past few weeks, though, I’ve started to wonder if that’s the right plan. Not the State College part — I’m definitely doing that. I mean the apartment part. I want an apartment because I want my own toilet and shower and kitchen. I’m tired of showering at the gym and pooping at the grocery store and eating mostly prepared food. (My current van set-up doesn’t have a stove, although it used to and could again.)
All those things, though, could be present in a better van or a tiny RV. My son plans to leave State College when he’s done with high school, and I plan to leave then, too. If I could find a remote job, I wouldn’t even have to start the dreaded application process over again when it’s time to move. And if that were true, and I had a better home on wheels, maybe I could live the nomad life I had hoped to live when I started this whole journey in December 2020.
Nobody to whom I’ve said any of this has supported this idea. Everyone just reminds me how much I want to be out of my van. But I don’t know. Do I want to be out of a van, period, or out of my series of busted minivans? I have more thinking to do, and in any case I won’t be able to act on either path until I’ve saved up more money, so some thinking time is built in.
Leave a CommentOne of the most challenging parts of life for me is the tension between living in the moment and understanding that the moment changes. I want to be someone who is getting the most out of life as it really is. But sometimes life sucks, and I find it easy to get bogged down in the idea that the sucky bit is how life will be going forward. That’s not true, of course. If I look back I can clearly see how much things have changed, and how often things that seemed hopeless turned out not to be. What I can’t see if I look back though, is any period where the relatively better times lasted very long. One of my missions these days is to try to figure out why that is, and if there are fundamental aspects of my behavior or perception that have led to the constant upheaval I’ve experienced, or prevented me from finding … contentment, maybe? I get that these questions are both ancient and common, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need to answer them.
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Soup’s On!
My skull is filled with alphabet soup. Occasionally the letters make a word, but mostly they slosh around, defeating my every attempt to make sense of them. It wasn’t always this way. My brain used to be a series of filing cabinets. The drawers were shallow but numerous; an inch of information about any particular subject, miles of breadth. Just enough knowledge to stay in most conversations, not enough to truly master any one subject. That was fine. I liked that. A friend called it “librarian brain.” Who doesn’t like librarians? But “soup brain”? That has neither the same ring nor the same positive connotation. Soup brain means never quite having the details at my fingertips; a blank spot on the tip of my tongue. I don’t think it’s a sign of disease. Rather, it’s a symptom of discombobulation. The circumstances of my external world are so disordered that my internal landscape can’t help but reflect them. My prediction is that the presence of family and friends, along with a place to live and a more stable life, will slowly drain the soup, revealing the long rows of shallow cabinets that have been there all along.
/ / /
18 May 2022
Pittsfield MA
Thought process I went through just now:
1. I wonder if I should have a conversation with my sister about what my intentions are when one of our parents dies.
2. I might feel differently about that situation when it actually happens.
3. There’s no need to deal with it until it occurs.
4. That applies to so much of life. Too much planning and overthinking and playing out stories.
5. The better way is clearly just to deal with what’s actually happening right now.
6. That @#$%& Buddhist approach sure does get proved right quite often.
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The idea of living in the present moment is central to Buddhist practice, which I’ve been trying my hand at for more than two decades. As I’ve come to understand it, the basic concept is that the past has passed and the future is unknowable, so the only time with which we can interact is this moment right now. And right now. And … you get it.
The instruction to remain centered in the present is one of my favorite parts of Buddhist philosophy. It’s also remarkably difficult to do, at least for me. No matter how much the present might be demanding my attention, I still find myself caught up in memories and daydreams, returning to past successes and failures, and turning over future visions in my mind.
Poetry can be an aid to present-minded living, serving as it does — or at least as it can — as a textual photograph of a moment. This is supposed to be one of the main methods of creating haiku, for example, though I find even in that form I am often mired in the past. The more I deviate from the nature-word-plus-present-description method of haiku, the more likely it is that my tiny poems will contain sharply pointed thorns of memory.
I overheard one of my coworkers this morning talking about an “on this day” post they’d received on Facebook and how it had dredged up difficult memories. I’m glad to not be on Facebook, because I have too many memories I’d prefer to avoid. And yet, when left to its own devices, the Zuckerberg in my skull is all too happy to pull up some scene I’d sooner escape.
Perhaps one problem, if that’s the word, is that my current life is — or seems — very small. I work in an office during the day. After work I retreat to the 32 square feet of my van, which is where I spend most of my non-work time. This might be an excuse, but I feel like these circumstances don’t lend themselves to the kind of noticing so fundamental to poetry. So instead of seeing things in the world around me, I mine the shafts in my brain for the ore I need to write.
That last paragraph does feel like an excuse now that I read it again. Noticing can happen in any circumstances, and the present moment is the present moment, no matter what it contains. Maybe this whole essay can serve as a call to action for my own writing (I accidentally typed “righting” — a useful accident?); a reminder to pay closer attention to what might seem mundane or confined. I guess we’ll all find out together whether I heed that call in the weeks and months ahead.
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If I did the math correctly, which is highly suspect, this thumb drive has more than 31,000 times more storage capacity than the first computer I owned, which was a Commodore 64.
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In about 1977, my mom bought me a bag of popcorn from this cart, and then we walked into England Brothers department store, in front of which it was parked. There was an escalator, and as my mom and I went up it I was eating fresh popcorn from my bag. Near the top of the escalator I lost my balance and tumbled all the way to the bottom, popcorn flying everywhere.
From that day onward, I could never eat popcorn without feeling nauseous. I tried many times. My family loved popcorn and made it frequently. I tried when I’d go to the movies with friends. Every single time, I’d take a handful and immediately start feeling sick. That lasted until my early 40s, when I ate some popcorn with no ill effects. I can still eat it today, though I spent so many years avoiding it that I usually forget it exists until I go to a movie.
I took the photo above during my lunch break today. I’m not sure if this is the exact same cart or a replica, but it sure looks the same as the one in my memory. I’m also not sure if this cart is still open for business. There was nobody in it today, but perhaps it’s only open on certain days or at certain times. England Brothers, where my grandmother worked for years, was razed during Pittsfield’s urban renewal.
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