Hold Up

Hi xTx,

I'm sorry you haven't written in so long, too. But don't worry about it! But also...don't let it happen again. But seriously, no problem!

Remember when you did that naked bike ride? So long ago, now, but not long enough ago that I'll ever forget it. I ride an exercise bike (clothed, surprise, surprise) at home, and sometimes my legs are sore after that. Give your legs a break and the soreness will go away and muscles will appear. I've seen it happen. But even so, I don't run much. I hate running. R is right.

You're talking about that other running, though. That running yourself ragged type of running. Usually for other people. It's OK to stop for a minute, a day, a week, a month, a year, the rest of your life. You've earned it.

Thanksgiving happened in three parts: dinner at a friend's mom's, another dinner at Josh's dad's, and then a brunch at Josh's mom's. Thanksgiving is Josh's favorite, so I haven't been back to Kentucky for it in 13 years. Our family tradition then was to go down to church and box meals and drive them to people who needed them. I remember a woman who was so grateful one year she gave my brother and me all she had, which was a couple of dimes.

T.F.P is walking, not running. I work on it, then I work on some drawings (I have another show in February!), then I do some work for the UFO reporter who sends me interviews to transcribe. The most recent one involved a stone doorway to another universe. OoOoOoOo. Spooky stuff, but the spookiest part was the guy who walked through the doorway and visited another universe and then decided to come back to Earth because he loved his wife so much. Uh, all right, guy, all right.

The year was terrible in big, planetary ways, but it was great in small, Casey ways. I turned 31, which meant I could finally post that Aimee Mann song on my birthday. My second little book came out. Josh and I got married, which you know because YOU WERE THERE! We met Shawn, fell in love, and are still in love, thanks. Oh, and remember in September when Josh and I came to L.A. and we saw Beyoncé with you and R in concert from the front row. Beyoncé! And she gave R a wave of recognition!?

Last night, Josh and I took a foggy Christmas Eve walk through a neighborhood of beautiful houses and understated light displays. My glasses were wet and visibility was low. Behind me, I heard the bright sound of chains. Loose dogs. Two full-grown but playful golden retrievers. They ran between our legs the way people who swim in shallow tropical waters are sometimes surprised by dolphins. And they kept running, away from us, keeping pace with each other like they knew where they were going.

Maybe next year can be like that for you. If you have to run, run like you know where you're going.

Love and miss you, too.

-Casey

The Other Coast

Last week, I went to LA for the fifth time, a place where I had no history for nearly 30 years but for which I now have a quick but unpredictable sympathy. Some of my friends have ended up there. Some of them have already come and gone. Another is deleting the Midwest from her system with each flight over the desert. For myself, I don't know about all that. I don't know about second homes. A long time ago I made my body my only home. I'm never not at home, except when I have a seizure, when I black out and my body jerks like it's cursed, but who knows where I go? Maybe I rest somewhere deeper and quieter. A dog under the bed during a storm. Even when I sleep I'm active. I always dream. Joan of Arc had visions some historians attribute to epilepsy. I have no such visions during a seizure. I just go.

I haven't had a seizure since January. I've been to LA twice since then.

Near the ocean, I hear a drone, the soundtrack to time travel. My friend suggests a past life as a sailor. I think more like a shipwreck. The sibling to a car abandoned in the desert. Josh and I ride to Venice Beach on our last day and are fooled by the breeze into neglecting sunscreen. Later on the plane home we turn pink in the dark. Our cooked bodies instead reading raw. We do what we can not to rewind into our basic parts, but then two nights earlier on the freeway after the Beyoncé concert our driver avoids another driver and we slide across lanes toward a concrete wall. Our unbuckled friend flies sideways into our other friend. We don't meet the wall like in Venice the knife thrown low across the boardwalk by a stranger doesn't meet our legs. But we glimpse the usually invisible thread, the thinnest thread there is.

A gull pulls out what's good from a washed up skate, the cousin to a stingray, the shark flattened into a triangle with an eel's tail. Josh stands back so his shoes stay dry. I pick up empty shells for Shawn. His history is Santeria and his present is squirming between a future with us and that original history. He's a quick collector slow to jettison the unnecessary. We part with a little liquor in the yard if we spill a sip while laughing. A sign of upset spirits. Even ghosts could use a drink. Other belongings are more solid, more permanent. A placemat Josh and I drew on during our six month anniversary dinner with Shawn is kept safe under a bell jar in Shawn's apartment. We joke he's saving these pieces so he can cast spells on us. The truth is he doesn't need charged ingredients to make us love him.

Out to dinner before the concert, our friend, Roxane, orders a cocktail with Hendrick's, but the bar only serves California spirits. Whatever comes out tastes good, but can't be replicated. No one remembers what's in it. Some actors you've seen on TV are with us. We talk about tattoos and weddings and the Industry with a capital I. I hug someone I've met several times but who's never needed to remember my name. The restaurant is new but the circumstances are familiar. I email a friend that some days I'm content to be at the table, but others I want to be the reason people are at the table.

That night, I'm content. Most nights, I'm content. Today, I write to keep the drink in the glass, to feed the ghosts without getting them drunk. Tonight, Shawn comes over to do laundry. Tonight, Josh tells us about a comic he received in the mail. Tonight, I make dinner and ignore the invisible thread. I sit down and follow the other threads, the ones I can see.

And I thank you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Twister

I know one day I'll swallow this wedding ring. I tried smoking a few years ago to calm the fidgeting, to ease the eating, to excuse myself to be alone. Now I'm never truly alone, as the ring reminds me and excites me, a thin band I place between my lips when I draw, write, read emails to which I say I'll respond but never do. Why?

Anne Boyer talks about publishing as ego-making and writing as ego-depleting. Two forces in rotation. The rise and the fall. The rise and the fall. It's hard to get going when you're feeling good. Some people liked my recent book, The Three Woes, and even more than that, I liked The Three Woes, which has prevented me from writing almost anything new since it was published.

Instead, I drew.

And now my art is being shown in a gallery downtown. At the opening, I read from The Three Woes, some of which inspired my drawings. Other moments in the art are taken from life. There's one of Josh, Shawn, and me. Simple but colorful. We're admiring each other. It's the image The Pitch used when they ran this great review of the show. Scroll down, scroll down. Yes, there. More ego-making. I haven't drawn much since the show went up, and now, near the end of the high, the removal and maybe sale of (some of) the art, I want to draw again but also finish writing a nearly there short story collection and a far from formed novel. The dip. The distance. Not that I'm feeling bad. I'm just feeling normal again. Less up there and more down here.

And so instead of smoking or snacking or staring out the window like a cat, I'm chewing on my wedding ring and feeling antsy to make more work.

(Oh, fine. I'm still snacking. One of our wedding gifts from a good friend was a subscription to a monthly snack service. Currently, I'm unable to stop with these honey hard candies.)

Elsewhere, I'm still high. Josh and I are doing great together, like you'd expect if you know us. We've been seeing Shawn for about eight months now. I told you this last time, but some of you didn't get it. In fact, that drawing of the three of us has been misinterpreted as what would happen if Josh and I combined to become one person. A visualization of our marriage. But no. That third man is Shawn, and we love him, and like I said last time, if you have your doubts, they're your doubts. They're not mine. I'm sure. Josh is sure. Shawn is sure. We're all sure, and we're all that matters.

Other things I love right now:

-Gilbert Hernandez's "Heartbreak Soup" and "Palomar" stories from Love and Rockets.
-Josh finally having a phone that works.
-Playing and beating old Pokemon (Yellow) and new-ish Pokemon (X).
-xTx writing again.
-My mom, the Storm Chaser, running out the door where she works to take this picture of a funnel cloud yesterday:

Us

Over a month later, and I can't recount it with accuracy. Like forgetting a dream as soon as you wake up, then remembering it in the shower days later. You were there, and you were there, and you were there.

There was here. Right here in Kansas City.

Josh and I got married, though we've acted married the entire time we've been together. We met in 2004. I was a year out of high school, and Josh was a year out of college. Jumping from one institution into another. As a teenager I'd been obsessed with a future I couldn't quite imagine. I just knew the present was untenable and the only way forward was to keep my hands busy and maybe move somewhere I could meet the man of my dreams.

And I did.

The dreams weren't the ones anyone told me I should dream. I was working against the dreams I was given. Making up new dreams even before I could be grateful for that wherewithal. That privilege. I'd abandoned the afterlife, and this life became more urgent. Marriage seemed impossible and unimportant. Never in my lifetime, I thought.

And so what?

I moved on. It's hard to spare feeling for institutions that feel nothing for you.

So last summer when marriage became accessible to me for the first time, I wrote against it. Not marriage as something you claim when you're ready, but marriage as something you're finally allowed. Josh and I were in New York on the day the Supreme Court released its decision, which also happened to be Pride. We watched Ian McKellen walk down Christopher Street followed by a small car with his name on it followed by a happy rainbow of everybody else. Josh and I just wanted to cross the street to get to a bakery. We'd been together 11 years at that point. We were having a summer fling with a friend back home. Marriage did not exist on our level. We were above it, in theory, and we were busy testing that theory.

If marriage is just a commitment, we made it a long time ago. We made the only promise we can hope to keep as humans. We promise this life. We're partners on a level that operates against the cold machinery of the universe. We're one and we're separate at the same time. No wonder people in public confuse us for twins. It's not our faces. We don't look alike. But we're knitted together in a way most people never see two men knit.

More than anything else, we gave in and got married because of our one dividing line. I have a history of seizures. Josh has witnessed some of that history. It runs concurrent with our own, and likely will for as long as I live. We decided marriage was a pretty way to stay protected. If anything were to happen to me because of my family curse, Josh would have the legal right to be close when I need him most.

That closeness is love, of course, and we have more than enough. So much love we're sharing it with our boyfriend, Shawn. Another dream we weren't handed. A dream we found. Six months in and every lesson we learned with each other we're learning all over again with him. If you think you have something to say about this, you don't. You're not qualified.

We are.

In spite of mass murder against our community, we continue the work we've done our whole lives. We define ourselves while we can. I write the stories I wish I could have read when I was younger. I make the art I still want to see. We're visible now because we can't afford to be invisible. No wonder I used to try moving objects with my mind. It's the only tool I have to move you.

What I'm saying is look at us while you can.

We're beautiful, and we're here.

Get Lucky

I used to whistle "The Ballad of the Wind Fish" from The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening while at work in an art museum. The gallery I worked was large enough to fit a Buddhist temple. An openness that carried and sharpened my whistle. High ceilings. No windows. Few visitors. Only statues that stared wherever I stood and me, whistling to soundtrack the emptiness, soothe the ghosts, glimpse the future. Minutes elongated on that job. I watched the old get older. The paint was dry and had been for centuries. A statue's face was cracked. Time is a vandal. One day I fell asleep walking the marble floor and ran into a fabric covered wall. I could have paced there forever. I walked miles but nowhere. Circled a square room. At best, a dream. A game where the puzzle of the place held an open secret: nothing I make with my own hands will ever end up there. A block away, the art school I attended. One of my former professors caught me working the museum temple and told me something that sounded like the truth, though I still don't know. He said museums are where art goes to die. Still, he sat in the temple for almost an hour and stared into a statue's eyes.

Saying I wasn't prepared for life after graduation isn't true, even if the only preparation I paid any attention was, "Get lucky." Artists came in to talk about the path to success. Less a path and more a lottery. "We got lucky." Four years at school trying (and sometimes not trying) to be the best, but what it's always crumbled down to is this: "Just be the best in front of me right now."

In LA this past weekend my friend drove me up La Brea after dark and told me I've changed a lot since we were in school. "You were kind of a kid, then," she said, which is to imply now I'm not. I'll accept it, but the truth is I'm still making fun of bad dreams.

The darkest nightmare to me is a shipwreck. I snorkeled once in clear waters and could see the entire wing of an airplane 20 feet below me. On the same trip I watched my father climb a rusted out shipwreck and jump off the bow into the same water I'd just seen a barracuda. What possesses us?

My new book, The Three Woes, is out at conferences and festivals right now. You can pre-order it online here: http://threewoes.sporkpress.com/. I read selections from it last Thursday at the Ace Hotel in downtown LA. A small dog barked when I finished, and that's good enough praise for me. I wonder if a dog has ever barked at a painting?

I stood in another museum last Friday. A guard came up and asked me to please carry my backpack at my side like a bag of groceries. The same thing I used to say to strangers at the museum I worked. I would have stayed all day and stared at the walls and never seen anything close to the work I make now. My boyfriend claims there's nothing original anymore, that every fire we light is just the same fire over and over again. Well, he's wrong.

I didn't light those other fires. I lit this one.

Untitled

I'm doing a lot of invisible work (you'll have it on your desk by Wheneversday), meaning I sit and type and my hands are still soft and clean. People say that. Josh says that. It's hard to point at some of my other work as work because it's equally soft. Every once in a while someone will order a pie. The dough is soft. The filling passes soft and arrives at liquid. You hardly notice the work on your hands, and that's fine. Cutting in the butter. Rolling out the dough. All by hand, but really all by forearm and upper arm and back. Push, push, push. It's no one's business and the soreness doesn't last long. Nothing lasts that long, especially the pie.

This time last year I finished writing a small book. This week I'm going through the edits the publisher sent and simultaneously patting myself on the back and covering my mouth because how did I miss that or that or that? I'm reminded a book is like anything else I've ever made. It's mine while I make it, but when I'm done it's someone else's. Let's say when I was 25 I would have had a problem with the passing of ownership, but let's also say when I was 25 I tried cultivating bad habits just to look cool.

And it didn't work.

I held a cigarette like I learned the pose from a cartoon character. I drank bourbon fast. Now I drink bourbon slow if at all. I smoked one cigarette last October because I wanted to keep a cute guy company in the cold. I did what I usually do, what one friend accuses me of doing too well--I pulled out the cute guy's history like I wasn't pulling at all. When I can't do that, when I can't find the thread, I'm at a loss. 2015 was me finding and losing, finding and losing, my own thread. The older I get the less I fear intangibles and so the less pressure I feel to make a scene with my words. I work on a lot all at once, but the stuff I really care about is physical and immediate. I've cycled back around from ideas to objects.

Drawing comes from a different hand than writing, and I've been drawing. This is no indictment of anyone but myself, but I can do a drawing and the same day get the approval of a hundred or so people on the Internet. Wait a month and maybe a thousand people have seen that drawing and approve. Writing takes longer and maybe seven people approve of a story unless that story wins me something, which is to say someone loudly approves of the story and gives you the permission to spend your time reading it. Even a few months ago this would be where I judge you.

Now I get it.

Maybe I should have gotten it earlier, like when I started getting tattoos. People ask what they mean, and I always say something different. Here's the truth time and distance deliver: I got tattoos to give you permission to acknowledge my body, something I neglected for a long time and now can't stand the thought of neglecting ever again. Repeat, the physical, the immediate, the shorthand in the interest of saving time. Typical Taurus.

My hands might be soft, but my fingers are crooked, and deep under the skin of my palms there are points of graphite, unpullable threads, stories I can't dislodge without a knife. The work's not so invisible then, just small and only as long-lived as I might be.

That said, I find new reasons to write. New routines. Coffee, which I never drank until last month, I now make and drink daily. I play records while I try to finish a story for someone who asked nicely. Josh wonders if I can concentrate on telling a story while listening to someone else (Neko Case, currently) tell another story. Good question.

We'll see.