Low Magic

We have an occasional roommate. You knew that. She lived with us the majority of one summer and the minority of this summer. Now she's trying to get tangled up in the Los Angeles mess. Television and movie production. Back of the house stuff. The fingerprints you're not taught to recognize as fingerprints. Anyway, she's gone now. The tea kettle won't get used until she returns, whenever she returns. It sits on the back burner collecting splatters of oil from all the spices I fry.

There's a homemade meal almost every night. When there's not, Josh gets antsy. Don't read too much into it. We favor a routine. When our roommate's here, the routine becomes even more solid. We mimic a family. Special considerations. Our roommate is the only person I know who dislikes basil. I've told you. Even though it's summer, our roommate never found basil on her plate.

One night at dinner we talked about the big trial news of our childhood, OJ Simpson, and how our teachers either did or didn't allow us to watch the verdict in class. Our roommate learned the verdict in the hallway when a boy yelled, "THE JUICE IS LOOSE!"

I don't think we said a word about the Zimmerman verdict. I still don't know what to say. I continue to read. Read and read and read.

The sun is out, but I hear thunder.

The UPS guy just came up on the porch and shouted that he was the UPS guy. A woman was with him, training him in the proper UPS ways. She said he was doing a good job. Then, "Well, your parking could be better." He had stopped the truck in the middle of the street.

I had pork for lunch with a friend who refuses pork. It's the sacrifice he makes to pay for other sins. We talked about dabbling. I told him how several years ago I hollowed out an egg and stuffed it with herbs and desperate pleas for money. The plan was to bury the egg in the yard and see if money manifested. I never buried the egg. It sits on a shelf in a decorative bell jar. My friend said the desire for stuff like that was like the desire for pork. That it wasn't kosher. Neither of us said the word "sorcery." Not out loud. But I repeated it over and over in my head until it sounded like the stupidest word in the world.

You want to know what I'm doing with my time. I'm working on a novel. I'm working on some stories. I'm half-assing my tumblr called GUYS + PIES. If you ever wanted to see me in my underwear, now's your chance. It's summer. It's tumblr. I'm wearing a mohawk and not much else.

Seven Hills

Did you know I have a brother? Well, I do have a brother, and he's moving to Seattle. He flew my mother and me up there last week. It was a small family reunion. The first night, we had the freshest nectarines and a white wine that pretended to be champagne. My brother and mother salivate for the sweeter stuff. We sat on beds and uncovered the rocks in our family history, the ones we'd been stepping on for years. Good and bad but all ours. Under some of them, snakes. Under others, diamonds. We posed for a picture in the airport. Now I know we're all related. We share a nose.

A brief word on the men in Seattle. My eyes never went hungry. Let's just say. My brother took me to a gay bar. (Did you know my brother is also gay? He is.) I sometimes forget how handsy gay guys can be en masse. At this bar I was touched and groped and caressed and hugged. All in passing. Only once did I see the face of the guy grabbing my waist. I approved. Smiled. Drank something that was intended to taste like Froot Loops. It did taste like Froot Loops.

I recognized one of the go-go boys from "the Internet." He's in pictures, you see. A stranger pressured me to tip this go-go boy. The stranger said, "This is his job. Give him some money." I'd tried to pay my bus fare earlier, but my brother told me to save my money for souvenirs. I was trying to decide whether or not tipping a go-go boy counted as a souvenir. Yes, I decided, but the go-go boy was gone. Soon after, so were we.

We walked back to our hotel in the rain and talked about our different coming out experiences. I learned what happened when I didn't come out to my brother. Other people told him. One youth minister sat him down to tell him how hellish and wrong I was for being gay. If I'm getting the timeline right, that was probably the same year I met Josh, the man I've been with for over nine years now. Not a competition, but that's longer than some of the marriages in my family.

Another night in Seattle I ran around with Molly Laich. You know her. She's responsible for the second half of this VIDEO. We've only been in the same physical space twice. Whiskey is our mutual friend. We sat in the bendable accordion section of a bus and hugged each other over Roger Ebert. Maybe cried. I slept on her couch. Watched her backyard chickens peck the ground in the morning. Avoided goodbye by leaving quietly and Googling my way to the bus.

And my mother. I hadn't seen her in over a year. Since the funeral of her mother. We were crossing the street on the way back from Pike Place, and a homeless man asked us for money. My mother stopped in the middle of the crosswalk as the light was about to change, touched the man's arm and said, "What do you need, sweetie?" My mother gave the man some money. The kindness in my mother's voice undid me. No annoyance. No patronizing. Simple compassion.

Later, my mother and I misunderstood each other and had words. We sat in silence by the water. I looked at my mother and saw myself. Except for the kindness. It's there for her as a force. A constant consideration. A choice she made somewhere along the line to balance out the darkness inherent in our family. If it's there for me, I don't know what it looks like.

Probably it looks like pie.

Terrible Lizards

June, huh? I've gotten to wear shorts, wanted to wear shorts, for the first time since 2009 or 10. On Facebook, my grandmother asked me where the pounds went. Come home and she'll feed me. She's in the country with the rest of my family at the big reunion. They've found a lake closer to the ancestral home. I made the call. Sorry I can't be there, but. One of my cousins jokingly accused me of faking my online presence. "That's not what you look like." Well, that's what I look like now.

I haven't seen my family in the flesh in a while. That's too bad. I'll see my mother and brother in Seattle next week. The last time I saw them was a funeral. Then my car lost the last of its lives. I decided not to replace it. I live an almost moneyless existence. Someone at Josh's work paid me for pies, and Josh told her to make the check out to him because he didn't think I had a checking account. I do. Still, there's so little money in it I understand his confusion.

But we like our life. It's exactly the life we want right now. I know my family worries. Maybe it's because I approach 30 and my list of accomplishments is short but pleasant. I wrote a book. It was published. I'm writing another book. I keep a house up. I bake a pie that turns a party prayerful. I've raised a snake from a snip of string to a garden hose. I'm as good as married and have been for nine years. In short, I'm happy. I'm content.

There's a tree out front with white flowers, and when the summer heats up, the flowers fall dead on the lawn. That charms me. It feels very Japanese to see our lawn that way. But only for a day. Then the flowers turn brown and come in on our shoes. Our floors are dotted. Spiders. The flowers look like flattened spiders. I'm fooled every time. This isn't Australia. The spiders don't get that big here. I've never peeled up a dead spider like it was a wet scab. These flowers, though. They stick.

I take it back about the spiders. There are tarantulas. I mean, not in Kansas City, but in America. So we've got big spiders, too. I heard there are some that eat birds. I wonder if they find poultry as disappointing as I do. For one, I will never understand turkey. I guess it feeds a crowd, and that's why it's an enduring tradition. There are wild turkeys near the airport. From a distance they always scare me into thinking they're something else. Dinosaurs, if I'm honest. We know now that dinosaurs and birds are more or less the same animal just at different times. The ostrich, above all others, is dangerous and efficient. A single kick and you're dead. Lots of organisms naturally work that way. But we had to invent the gun and justify its lasting presence by giving it fetish reverence. I doubt a rattlesnake gets dreamy about its own venom. There's no telling, though. I'm not a rattlesnake.

A friend is here for another month. She's been here before and will be here again. Our house can handle it. The library alone could trap a person. We added more shelves this week. There is now a wall of books separating the dining room and the living room. Formidable. I get the feeling I'm eating dinner in a used bookstore. In fact, some of these books still have price stickers on them. A few of them are wrapped in plastic, our own version of keeping the furniture pristine.

Josh is a good literary steward. There's an angel in a comic I'm reading, and his pet project is to collect all the written word of humankind. I sometimes wonder if that's the endgame here. Josh has admitted his ideal superpower would be immortality. All the time in the universe.

I have stuff HERE and HERE.

On the way home from the grocery yesterday, an older man and woman passed us. The woman said, "What time's the party?" The man looked over into our grocery bags. "Those are just groceries," he said. "Nothing fun."

Sandra

It snowed here two weeks ago, which set a record. I was in Montana one June, and I stepped down from a van onto fresh snow. It all melted the next day. I'd never seen the stuff in summer. The lakes there were sky blue with what? Sky? No, it was the cold, I guess. But that was Montana. Here is Missouri, and the cold was grey, not blue. Josh and I were wearing t-shirts and looking for a UPS drop-box the night before the snow. It'd been warm enough for me to sit on the porch that day and watch the guy across the street mow his lawn in shorts and a tank top. Then the temperature fell. The wind rose. It rained, then iced, then snowed. Josh and I crossed our arms against the cold. I joked we were in Scotland. I've never been to Scotland. 

A new friend tells me the currents are erratic from the melting ice caps. That's probably right. If I were more superstitious I'd say the snow was an omen. My people are having a time. One of my cousins, Sandra, died last week. I saw her most years at a family reunion on a lake in North Carolina. But not these last few years. I couldn't get there, but I would call. When it was Sandra on the line, she'd say, "Who's going to bitch with me if you're not here?"

Sandra and I liked to gossip. We shared a watchfulness of our family and a delight in the more ridiculous elements. You don't realize your family teaches you anything until well after you've learned it. Sandra taught me to pay attention to conversations. Good and bad and confusing. I wanted to know. I wanted to be included. Sandra and I would swap remarks on the patio, and I felt adult. My voice barely carries beyond my teeth, but I would murmur something smart, and Sandra would hear it. "We're bad," she'd say. Yes we were. That's another piece of it. We were just as silly as anyone else in our family. We made fun of them, but they made fun of us, too. The keyword: fun.

Last night, I reran my memory of Sandra standing in the kitchen feeding pickles and bologna to a meat grinder. I wore myself out crying. Pickles and bologna was a tradition I couldn't appreciate when I was younger, but it was still a tradition. Sandra would get us kids to turn the crank while she tamped down the meat and brine. We would pretend to vomit. Someone would tell us not to be rude. There's no shortage of people to teach you manners at a family reunion. People rush to it like you're on fire. The result of the cranking and the tamping was this cat food looking pâté you could spread on crackers and pretend it was gourmet. I didn't try it until I was old enough to drink. I was making a point to acquire tastes. Well, I acquired pickles and bologna like I acquired eavesdropping a long time ago. Fast and easy.

I miss you, Sandra. I've missed you for years, but I still had your voice. Now I have some pictures and a recipe and memories. It's not enough, but it's something. You were always something.

Happy Happy

Thank you for the birthday wishes. I'm older but not old. Josh is thrilled by my grey hairs, so I'm thrilled by my grey hairs. My grandfather has white hair and lots of it. Josh taps the table in patience. I'm only 28.

I almost shared a birthday with my sister-in-not-legal-in-Missouri's newest son. A day apart, but he's still a Taurus. Even if you didn't know that, you'd know he's going to be a good one. He was passed around to all arms but mine and never cried. I have a personal code where I don't hold babies. I've had nightmares I drop them. The closest thing to a baby in my house is a small plastic newborn I found in a cake. Aside from that, I have a preserved tadpole in a jar. It's almost a frog, but it retains a tail. One of my friends thought it was a chicken leg.

Necessary Fiction asked me some questions about writing. I learned answering questions about writing makes me nervous. I'm still at the stage where I'm waiting for someone to knock on my door and take it all away. Sometimes my mail delivery person will be loud on her headset out on the front porch, and I'll think it's "the authorities." Also, there are no authorities. No one is going to take my writing away (I keep chanting to myself).

Well, I ran yesterday. Not much, but. I was in the grocery after, and a woman hurried up to me and demanded to know what cologne I was wearing. I wasn't wearing anything but sweat and shorts. Pheromones, I imagine. This makes the second time this spring. People are insistent I smell like spices.

There was a brown recluse in a sink last night where Josh and I were staying. Spiders scare me more in sinks. It's the shape of the sink, the bowl of it, and the suggestion that the spider crawled up and out of the drain. Josh says he found a snake in a sink once. The same principle but larger. The snake slipped over the lip of the sink, down the base, onto the floor, and into a hole in the wall.

Josh told me to do something about the brown recluse. I did something.

Good Days

People came to watch me read stories in an art gallery on Saturday. The gallery was empty but for a little step stool and a dog toy in the shape of a football. People sat on the floor. I brought two pies, and people actually ate them. The reading went well except for when my mouth dried out during my third story. I had to walk across the gallery and fill a wine glass with water. The residue of the wine in the glass turned the water blue. It looked like I was drinking cleaning supplies. Everyone was so nice about it.

There are pictures of me reading, but I won't post them here. My chin disappeared into my neck when I looked down at my book. I've heard words for people with weak chins. "Thumb" gets passed around. 

I've been tall, and now I'm skinny like I used to be when I was short enough for gymnastics. I can't hide anymore. I try. I have prescription glasses that turn into sunglasses when I'm outdoors. But I couldn't hide at the reading. My book is too small to cover my face. People call my book a baby. Publishers Weekly calls it a star. There are reviews, then there's THAT review. Josh made me read it out loud to him before we went to sleep last night. It was a celebration night. Those nights are like undiluted vinegar. Be careful.

After the reading, we all went to a bar and drank two beers each. I talked to poets. One of them was wearing a hat to protect from sunburn. It was after dark. I guess the sun is always out for poets. I developed a crush. Those are easy to develop. I develop them whenever I leave the house. Mostly, I don't leave the house.

Josh, his mother, and I were at an Indian restaurant on Sunday. Josh's mother told a story about her father as a boy. Every summer, a man would come to live in a hut by the rock quarry in her father's town. The quarry was filled with water. The man would take a large jar and dive down where the water was coldest, and he'd bottle the cold water and bring it back up with him to share. The way she told it made it seem like a simple miracle. We were eating dry cooked okra. The dry cooking kills the slime. Another little miracle. 

I can imagine diving down deep enough for something precious. There was this time I was in the ocean, and I tried going under for a shell, but the shell was too far down, and my ears began to hurt. When I came up someone warned me about reaching for strange shells. That sometimes the creatures living inside are toxic. OK. That's fine. But sometimes they're not.

New York and Now

Josh and I are on the bus. I don't know what state we're in, but it's grey and wet. We're curling up to Boston from New York. I think that's the direction. A northerly curl around some serious water. Bays? I'm unsure. I've seen a lot of seabirds. One of these states beckons to the Atlantic like a witch's finger.

I looked it up. It's Massachusetts. It has a tail sticking out in the ocean.

At least one other person on this bus is going to AWP. The woman standing between us in line tried to play matchmaker. "Oh! He's going to the writing conference, too!" The other person looked at me and said, "Great."

We just passed an IKEA. I made the sign of the cross for all those poor horses in the meatballs. No, I didn't. I admit curiosity about horse meat. Odds are strong I've already eaten it in something somewhere. I'm being blasphemous. I'm from Kentucky. Horses are chestnut gods.

I've used context clues to figure out we're in Connecticut. It's like when someone asks if you feel older on your birthday. I'm in Connecticut, but I don't feel any different. I felt different in New York.

Josh is asleep. His mouth is wide open.

We were in New York for a week. We stayed with friends. Their dog licked me awake from a nap. She licked my arm tattoos. Other people have licked my arm tattoos. Some of them only kissed. I don't get the allure. My tattoos have been a part of me for so long. I want more. I have ideas. You don't care, I know.

When I say I felt different in New York, I mean I felt like no other place in the world existed. That's dangerous. We saw five plays. The ticker in Times Square was delivering news, and it seemed like fiction. People are right. New York is a bubble. It should be no surprise I want to move there.

I had a hard time taking in all I saw. There were so many beautiful men. I've been overstimulated all week. A flawless young man was onstage last night in his underwear. Sigourney Weaver climbed him like a pole. She tongued a wall sconce in failed seduction. I got to see that on Broadway.

I get to see you soon.