Waiter!

I’ve started having restaurant dreams again after being free of them for 25 years.

Anyone who’s ever waited tables knows these dreams. Your whole section is seated at once and you’ve lost your order pad and the tables have been rearranged so you don’t know how they’re numbered. Or you walk through the dining room and someone from every table you pass asks you for something — another round of drinks, a dessert menu, the check — and you think you’ll remember them but as they accumulate you realize you’ve forgotten them all. You go in the kitchen and there are dozens of plates ready but you have no idea where they go. You run to the basement for something — what? some mustard, a bottle of wine — and you never make it back to the dining room because you’ve taken the wrong stairs or the wrong hallway and you just keep trying and trying until you wake up. Everyone you pass wants something, the cooks, the customers, the manager, the other waiters. Everyone hates you. You’re running in circles, you have no idea what you’re doing. You’re crying in the bathroom.

I waited tables for a living through the better part of my twenties, mostly hated it, was never very good at it. But it was what you did, and sometimes it could be fun, certainly much more fun than sitting in an office. It paid MUCH better than retail and even back then when rent was cheap it was a struggle to pay the bills. We’d work till midnight, then drink martini after martini at the bar around the corner, usually for free or next to it because we knew the bartenders and we were all in this together, take turns disappearing into the bathroom to snort cocaine (our pockets were STUFFED with cash!), and find ourselves at dawn in someone’s apartment who we probably didn’t even know, clammy, grinding our teeth and waiting for the drug dealer to show up because as everyone knows you don’t stop snorting cocaine until there’s no. more. cocaine. Anywhere. Or I’d end up at St. Mark’s Baths at 4 a.m. and home by sunrise feeling downright virtuous.

Sorry. That was a tangent. But sometimes I think about my early twenties and wonder, “How am I even alive?”

So, the dreams. I’ve started having them again. They continued for maybe 5 years after I left restaurant work for legal proofreading at 29, and, though I have my share of anxiety dreams they haven’t involved restaurants for a very long time. Until the last few weeks. Now I have them just about every night. Sometimes several times a night, in variations. I don’t sleep well or soundly, haven’t for years.

Life is, I don’t know, heightened lately. There’s my show headed for Broadway knock wood. My mother-in-law was recently diagnosed with cancer, and there’s no way to spin that any other way than bad. My father had a scare this week, not as serious, but he’s 85 and alone. Crazy good, crazy bad.

And now I’m having those dreams again that I’m waiting tables and failing, failing, failing.

Greencastle, Indiana, or ...

I’ve thought a lot about Sherwood Anderson as I write about the small town in Indiana, Greencastle, where I lived from age 13 to high school graduation. Anderson’s hometown, on which he based his book Winesburg Ohio, finding its portrait unflattering, more or less disowned him. (I wrote a paper in a college freshmen English class about Anderson’s play, Tea and Sympathy, arguing that it was homophobia disguised as tolerance — its message being not that people shouldn’t persecute gay boys, but that it was okay to be effeminate as long as you’re heterosexual. I wish I still had that paper. I remember the professor gave me a good grade but said he thought I wasn’t being quite fair. I stand by my argument.)

My parents left Greencastle a few years after I did — my dad found work in Muncie and they settled there. I only sustained one friendship from my teenage years. More recently, I’ve been in touch on social media with a few high school friends, and have rekindled friendships, but I don’t have any meaningful ties to that town except my memories.

I have been, and certainly was at the time, very critical of the people and culture there, but my feelings, as they’ve ripened over the years, have sweetened, and that sweetening is one of the things that motivates and underpins this new work. I like to think my portrait IS in many ways flattering, or at least fair, but to be honest, I know it will hurt some people. I mean, one of the songs is called “I Always Hated That Town In Indiana.”

Anderson changed the name of his hometown, but of course everybody knew what he was writing about. I’ve struggled since I began writing this thing, and still, with the question of whether or not to use people’s real names. The work is autobiography, it’s confessional, so it seems contrary to the spirit of it to alter the facts.

[Correction! A friend just told me that Tea and Sympathy was written by Robert Anderson, not Sherwood Anderson. So, that’s embarrassing, but my college anecdote was not germane to anything except my compulsion to follow a tangent. Anyway, enjoy the clip. After watching this trailer, I really want to watch the movie, which I’ve never seen, have only read the play and that was many years ago.]

Zero Sum Gender.

Gender is on everyone's minds now. Just in the Op-Ed section of the New York Times today, there’s an article about genital surgery on intersex babies and an article about the myth of sex hormones behind the policing of Caster Semenya’s gender.

I think about this stuff, always have. As I’m writing this autobiographical new piece, about my teenage years, I’ve been looking really closely, at least in terms of my experience, turning this notion over and over in the light, this notion of one’s gender as a part of oneself or “one’s self,” which is to say one’s own feeling about one’s gender, or gender identity (if they are not the same thing). (That was a chewy mouthful of a sentence!)

Where does it come from, this neurotic belief, against all evidence, that gender is strictly either/or? It's ancient, though not necessarily universal. For Western Christians there's Adam and Eve, and whatever older stories that story is based on. Are there any anthropologists in the house who can recommend some reading?

I did not, as a kid, feel necessarily “gendered,” except in that I felt very much like not a boy. I felt pressure to be a boy, but I felt more like a girl; still, I understood that identifying with girls, being with girls and enjoying girl things, was crossing an important line.

Then puberty brought physical evidence that in some possibly immutable way I was going to be a male person in the world. Well, and by then I think I’d thoroughly internalized the idea that life would go more smoothly if I could figure out how to do boyness, so I did, quite consciously, start to study and teach myself. Maybe all people do that at some point, consciously or not, learn a gender, I don’t know. It is something I feel like I’ve done over and over at each phase of my life. In my 20s, I learned young man-ness; in my 40s, I learned older man-ness.

I’m almost certain that if '“non-binary” had been one of the choices when I was a kid, that’s how I would have chosen to identify my gender.

Hoofers.

It’s International Dance Day. Who decides that? Well it’s a good excuse, not that I needed one, to watch a few of my favorite clips of people dancing. There are a million of them from old MGM musicals, but here’s a short one I love.

Broadway performers are demigods to me. I live in awe of what they do. Literally nothing brings me more joy than a stage full of people tap dancing.

And finally Agnes DeMille's dream ballet from Oklahoma! I've been thinking about this show a ton this season -- well I'm kind of always thinking about it if I'm honest -- but now especially with this new revival on Broadway and the fact that the Tony best musical category looks to be a contest between dark and experimental vs. classic-style musical comedy. Which is funny because Oklahoma! is the original dark and experimental but now it's the show everyone mentions when they want to share their misconceptions of classic-style musical comedy.

Everything's All Right.

I love the spring holidays. All of them. Renewal, fertility, resurrection, turning. I know a bit more about the Christian holidays and the pagan holidays because of the culture I grew up in and have traveled in. Holy week fascinates me, in the same way that Advent fascinates me, the ritual marking of days passing. It feels cosmic.

I wouldn’t say I’m not a believer. I don’t like the label “agnostic” because there are things I do know. And I don’t like the way most atheists talk about faith vs. reason, and I don’t like the way a lot of Christians equate their beliefs with faith. I don’t believe in “God” per se, but I have faith. I am a person of faith. Why would I get up in the morning if I didn’t have faith? I go to bed every night full of faith that tomorrow will come, that there will be love and beauty in the world, still.

My own beliefs regarding the nature and meaning of existence are somewhere in the sort of Emersonian Universalist camp. I believe that everything is one and is immanent within us, that our moral code comes from within, that every moment contains the universe, that intelligence, beauty, poetry, metaphor, art point to our connectedness, but that the whole project is essentially mysterious. I believe that love is all.

Anyway. It’s Holy Wednesday, for those who observe.

To use Pete's favorite word: tectonic.

It’s hard to put words to how moving it is watching this. It literally took my breath away.

Most straight people have no idea what the closet is and what it does. The experience of negotiating withholding or disclosing a secret that carries such a high social risk — and not just the one big coming out, but the multitude of little daily comings out — will always be a marginal experience. It’s just math. We will always be explaining ourselves. It will always be a fact about us that we will have to, at some point, at many points, decide whether to accept the risks (of suspicion, pity, disgust, distraction, violence, etc.) and disclose (the upside being to live as a whole, integrated person in the world) or keep hidden (and remain fragmented, superficial, false, afraid). The constant vigilance is exhausting. The psychological and emotional toll of the closet shapes every relationship, every encounter, shapes our lives.

To watch, on a mainstream TV show, a viable popular candidate for president, speak so candidly and thoughtfully about this experience changes everything. Especially a candidate who is exceptional for so many reasons having nothing to do with his sexuality.

My White Knight.

The last few days’ conversations about, one, Pete Buttigieg and whether or not he’s too well-read to be elected, two, the primary candidates’ visits to Iowa, and, three, the new Broadway revival of The Music Man coming next year have distilled, in my brain, into this song.

That’s the late, great Barbara Cook singing. Hers is my favorite recording to listen to, though I’m much more familiar with Shirley Jones in the role since it’s the movie version of the show that I grew up. Also, I was a fan of hers from the Partridge Family before I connected her with these earlier classic movie musical performances.

Speaking of those performances, it’s difficult for me, even all these years later and having seen several other women in the roles, to separate my idea of Laurie in Oklahoma, or Julie in Carousel or Marian in The Music Man from Shirley Jones. Even after discovering years later that the films so bowdlerized the R&H musicals, especially in the case of Carousel, which hardly even makes sense in the film. (Not as bad as what MGM did to Babes in Arms, the film of which didn’t even retain any of the Rogers and Hart songs, or maybe one or two, I can’t remember.) Anyway, I still see Shirley Jones’s sunny face and bright soprano when I think of those characters.

On that note, even though I think this film adaptation is very good, inexplicably they rewrote this song, using parts of My White Knight but creating an entirely new swingy refrain. I like it, but I think the original is far superior.

And then there’s the much later TV movie adaptation with Matthew Broderick and Kristin Chenoweth. It’s not great, though I do like Broderick’s performance quite a bit, which is sort of slyer, drier, than Preston’s. Though he’s more youthful and cuter than Preston in the role, somehow he reads as more cynical, a more convincing criminal. I also love Chenoweth in this one. Her conception of Marian is more adult, less petulant, less prickly than Jones. But I think because her face and voice are so preternaturally pretty, the more knowing quality she brings to the performance gets a bit lost in the film’s overall too-sweet tone.

Support Community Theater!

The flurry of press about LIZZIE yesterday, and it being World Theater Day, has me reflecting. This photo is ground zero — not that my theater career is a nuclear bomb. But there is a sense that it is about to explode.

My mantra for a long time — I’ll call it my post-disillusionment period — has been, “Relax. It’s always more likely NOT to happen than to happen.” Because that is true. My favorite Buddhist lo jong mind-training slogan is, “Abandon any hope of fruition.” Pretty often people read this slogan on my arm and think it means that everything is awful so just expect the worst. It means something more like, “You don’t know how things will turn out, so don’t base your happiness and sense of well-being on a particular outcome.”

Anyway, that’s me in my first play! It was a production of The Emperor’s New Clothes, produced by Putnam County Playhouse, in the Indiana town where my family moved when I was 13. They did — and still do! — a season of 3 or 4 plays every summer: a musical, one or two straight plays, and a children’s show. I had I think one line, maybe two, and I was SERIOUS about it, and I loved that costume, which I think my mother made but I’m not sure of that.

Something I remember, more clearly than I remember anything I did in the play, is this very short scene where a “herald” comes in and announces something and the director, Nancy McFarland, set his lines to music, so he sang them instead of just speaking them. It blew my mind that one could just … do that.

Some Stuff About Memory.

Shades of Black Mirror and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind aside, do we really need to remember everything our minds insist on remembering? It’s hard to imagine not; our memories seem so essentially us, so inextricably a component of “self.” This article in the New York Times today, about the wisdom of intentionally forgetting is, to me, chilling, dystopian.

I think a lot, since my mother died, about that platitude that says grief keeps your loved ones close to you after they die. Usually I think it refers to good memories, because even and maybe especially the sweet memories are the ones that hurt the most, and it’s a neat way to manage the pain they cause.

But I also, and more often, think about that idea in terms of my memories of the last week and especially the last full day before my mother died, because that period of time was — I always use this word — harrowing. It was many things, but mostly it was harrowing.

Sometimes — those times being whenever a memory from that week pops into my head and forces me to go like a slideshow through the sequence of events — I wish I could un-remember it.

Because it hurts, but also because it’s disruptive. Almost anything can trigger recall — exiting a highway in a car on a hot sunny day, seeing a bandaid over a wound or a scrap of 1/4” plastic tubing, my father’s face, anything to do with hospitals, even just walking by one — but once a fragment of memory is in my head I’m on a runaway train that will stop when it crashes. I have to mentally recite the whole sequence at least to the point of arriving at the hospital where the nurse put Mom on a fentanyl IV which quickly transformed her from rigid and terror-stricken back to some loopy semblance of my mother 

The process takes a while and takes me away from whatever I’m doing. If I’m alone, it literally stops me in my tracks. If I’m not, then I’m compelled to run two mental tracks at once, the present and the past. But what about that word “disruptive”? It’s only disruptive if I consider it to be less important than whatever else I’m doing. Or unimportant. How do I know?

I don’t have any desire to erase those memories. The thing, the thing where grief keeps our lost loved ones close — is holistic. The feeling is experienced holistically. I remember Mom and feel her with me when I eat chicken noodle soup because she taught me how to make chicken soup when I was a teenager. I remember her when I see an office chair on wheels because that’s how we got her from her bed to the car when she was immobilized with pain.

I don’t want to forget that last week, that last day. I never felt closer to my mother than I did those days and hours, never felt more intimately connected to her than when I was helping her (I think I was some help, I tell myself that I was some help) through that grueling (grueling? all the words seem quaint compared to what they try to describe) episode.

I don’t feel guilt or regret, not too much anyway, about anything I did on that day, any decisions I made, so as bad as it feels I don’t necessarily want to forget that in fact, I think, I functioned pretty well under a kind of emotional and physical and spiritual strain I’d never felt anything remotely close to in my life. Because those memories are still with me, intense, vivid, maybe next time I will be more focused and clear. I have no idea. But this will happen again. It’s not like you’re tested once and you pass or fail. If anything is certain, it is that there will be no end to the suffering of people we love. 

The Baby And The Bathwater.

I can't wait for this one!

But I have to push back a bit on this: "Broadway has been reckoning, slowly, imperfectly, with the idea that musical comedies need to offer female characters full interiority." I know there's a ton of sexism and misogyny in the musical theater canon, and I'm all for addressing that OF COURSE, but can I point out that every single Rogers & Hammerstein "golden age" musical, and a whole bunch of others as well (My Fair Lady? Gypsy? West Side Story?...), have female protagonists? And not just female, but fully realized women characters who are grappling with big, complex problems and are the authors of their own lives (Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, The King & I, The Sound of Music, etc.).

I completely support this moment of reckoning in the theater, but I want to give credit where credit is due. American musical theater has often been way out front on this stuff.

I Just Want To Sleep.

Monday night I went to bed at about 10, as usual. By midnight, I hadn’t fallen asleep, so I got up and read for an hour and a half. I went back to bed, lay there till about 3, fell asleep, woke up at 3:30. I wasn’t completely awake the whole period from 3:30 until my alarm went off at 6, but I wouldn’t say that I really slept. I dozed off a few times for a few minutes.

That was a particularly bad night. Here’s a good night:

I go to bed at 10 and fall asleep within 20 or 30 minutes. I wake up around 2 or 3 for maybe 20 minutes, and then again every hour until 5 when I wake up completely and wait impatiently for my alarm to go off at 6 so I can get out of bed. That’s a good night. Most nights are somewhere in between, maybe I wake up 2 or 3 times an hour, and I almost always wake up around 5 and don’t fall asleep again no matter how much or little sleep I got before that.

When I was young, I had night terrors, lots of recurring dreams and intense nightmares, sleepwalking, waking dreams, through my 20s, but never difficulty sleeping. Used to be, if I didn’t set an alarm I was in danger of sleeping all day. It used to be, in fact, difficult to wake up. Now even when I take a nap I wake up every few minutes.

I’m fairly certain I started having trouble sleeping a few years before my mother died, but that’s when I remember it getting bad enough that I felt like it was an “issue.” That was also when I started having difficulty reading, or concentrating on anything for more than a few minutes. Those problems have abated somewhat, though not disappeared. I can read for long periods again, but I still have a hard time with the sort of dense non-fiction that used to make up most of my reading. 

I also connect this change to the 2016 election — I am without doubt more constantly anxious than I ever remember being since adolescence — but, again, the trouble sleeping started before that.

Somehow related, though I’m not sure how much or in what way, is my sleep apnea. For as long as I can remember I have from time to time woken up abruptly, feeling like I was being choked. It’s terrifying. At some point I read about sleep apnea and thought “yeah that’s exactly what I have.” I figured out that it always happened when I fell asleep on my back, so I started sleeping on my stomach. Some time later I realized that the chronic neck and shoulder pain I’d been feeling, which I’d assumed was due to playing guitar, was actually a result of sleeping on my stomach, so I started sleeping on my side. It’s not the most comfortable way to sleep, but it’s better than worrying about whether I’ll die in my sleep.

For years I felt like I was managing. Until this insomnia thing.

A year or two ago, I mentioned this problem, the insomnia and the self-diagnosed apnea, to my former G.P., and he referred me to an ear, nose, and throat doctor who sent me to the Cornell sleep center for a sleep test, which did in fact show mild obstructive sleep apnea, for which they prescribed a CPAP machine. I guess most people are familiar with those now, they’re pretty common. You sleep with a hose connected to your face through which a machine pushes air into your mouth to keep your passages open.

I had resisted the CPAP for a hundred reasons (I happen to like falling asleep with my arms around my husband, for one) but the sleeplessness was obviously untenable, so eventually I gave in. I thought, finally, I will sleep! I really thought it was going to change my life.

It was a nightmare. Not only did it not help me sleep, I couldn’t take a deep breath on my own so it made me feel like I was suffocating, and after about 3 hours of meditating, telling myself “it’s okay, you can breathe, you’re okay, just relax,” I would start to panic and rip it off. But I persisted, assuming it could take a while to get accustomed to. After two weeks it was still the same scenario every night, no sleep, no increase in the time I could tolerate the machine. I got a phone call from the vendor who leases the machine telling me I was noncompliant and my insurance company would cease paying for the machine rental if I didn’t wear it at least 4 hours a night. I sent it back. (That’s something you might not know about CPAP machines. The vendor is monitoring in real time when you go to bed, your breathing patterns, when you put on and take off the mask, when you wake up. Not your doctor, but the pharmaceutical vendor.)

My old G.P. moved away and now we have a new primary whatever they call it. (He’s a N.P., so I never know what to call him.) At my first visit, he asked if there was anything else I wanted to address so I reluctantly brought up this sleep issue. I say reluctantly because I feel a little shame about not being able to use the CPAP. I got the feeling he thought I was trying to score some oxycontin or something. I didn’t ask for sleeping pills. If I thought it would help and not just cause more problems, I’d take them in a heartbeat, but I’m a Judy Garland fan. I know where that road goes. (I think it’s a bugaboo of this nurse: a few months later he was strangely adamant about not prescribing pain meds for my broken toe, meds which I hadn’t asked for and didn’t want anyway because it didn’t hurt that bad.)

So he said, well, if the CPAP didn’t do it, then “we need to talk about sleep hygiene,” and he gave me that litany — the weight of your blanket, temperature of the room, no alcohol, turn off the TV and computer for a while before you go to bed, yada yada. I know it all, have tried it all, it has no effect.

(My apprehension about drugs notwithstanding, I was for the last few years occasionally taking Benadryl on particularly difficult nights. It seemed to help a bit. I could go from waking up a dozen times a night to waking up 4 or 5 times. But in the last few months — I think only on those nights I’ve taken Benadryl — I’ve woken up a few times feeling the beginning of a panic attack, so I stopped taking Benadryl.)

So that’s where I am. I read and work in the morning until I can’t keep my eyes open, then I take a 1/2 hour nap, which often will at least keep me awake for the rest of the day. But if I start dozing again later, I take another 1/2 hour nap. It’ s not ideal, obviously. Those half hours are disruptive and they add up. I get less done. And even with the naps, I am always tired, always sleepy, always a bit dull-headed.

As long as I can remember, my father has talked about waking up for an hour or two in the middle of the night. He says that he used to use that time productively, that he felt extra lucid and would lie in bed and solve problems that vexed him in daylight hours. (He worked as an engineer for an electronics company, so solving problems was, I think, his job.) Now, 85 and retired, he says his mind is not as clear and he doesn’t have pressing problems to solve, so those middle of the night vigils are just frustrating.

Super Worm Equinox Moon.

I think of the sun as a necessary evil, but the moon I am in love with. I love that we name them now, like Hindus name manifestations of a God. I love all the moons, but I think my favorite is the Super Worm Equinox Moon.

I have a thing for the Spring Equinox because I love the balance of it, of two equal parts, and because it falls on the most auspicious cusp, between Pisces and Aries, the end and the beginning of the astrological calendar, the cusp on which I was born.

The Trocadero Is Closing.

I just heard the very sad news that the Trocadero in Philadelphia is closing soon. I haven’t been there since some time in the 90s, but it’s vivid in my memory and has a special place in my heart. One (actually 2, we did it twice) of my very favorite Y’all gigs was taking part in the Big Mess Cabaret, a sort of neo-vaudeville burlesque evening of music, variety acts/performance art, and strippers. We had never felt so understood by an audience.

The Troc is the archetypal decaying turn of the 20th century burlesque/minstrel/vaudeville theater turned movie house turned rock club. The Troc has always been my model for the ideal venue for LIZZIE.

Sometimes I Change My Mind.

I found myself at times having an immediately skeptical reaction to this new thing of coming out as “nonbinary.” But I’m coming to see it differently.

The idioms that queer people use to try to pin down, to name the things that are different about us, that feel different, these idioms evolve, shift, change, but they still describe phenomena that are essentially mysterious. The evolution of the language doesn’t move in a linear progression toward clarity; I think it changes for more ordinary reasons: words get tired, we get tired of using them, labels that were once neutral accumulate negative connotations, words that were negative get reclaimed as expressions of pride, new generations need to set themselves apart, create their own way of speaking, create their own lens to see the world and themselves through, assert their newness.

The current lexicon (transgender/non-binary/genderqueer/pansexual, etc.) is no more accurate or “correct” than the gay/bi/lesbian/butch/femme/transsexual lexicon that I grew up with, or homophile/pederast/invert/trade/fairy/Mary Ann/sodomite/urning/Uranian/Sapphist/third sex/intermediate sex, or all the way back to Plato, a bunch of Greek words that are hard to translate, which is not even to get into the various ways indigenous peoples all over the world have understood and described unconventional sexual and gender expression.

We still have no earthly idea why there are variations in sexual expression and desire. And is “why?” even an interesting question? We know these things are “natural,” or we safely assume they are because we see them echoed in myriad species and persisting in our own over the course of history.  

When a younger generation coins new terms, invents new language and metaphors, paradigms, rubrics (is there a word that includes all these things?), they might think they are offering new information, or believe that they are getting closer to objectively describing queer lives or queerness, and sometimes to their elders it feels like — and this is what I realize I’ve been so defensive about — they are, in imposing this new language (and the set of beliefs it implies), rejecting OUR beliefs about ourselves, our ways of describing ourselves and our experience, telling us we were wrong, that we misunderstand ourselves.

But I think I’ll try to stop being defensive. It is the prerogative of the young, not to mention a longstanding European tradition, for people to give things new names and tell us they’ve just discovered them. I’m okay with that.

How Many Degrees of Separation Between YOU And A Serial Killer?

Here’s a list of things:

1. C and I have started going to this great new barbecue place down the street every Saturday. I think I’ve mentioned it before. It’s the kind of place where you sit at the bar and have a couple beers and then do a shot with the bartender. Also great barbecue, sort of modeled on Texas-style, meat by the pound served on butcher paper. It turns out the bartender graduated from the same high school as me (30 years later, but it’s Greencastle, Indiana so not a lot has changed in 30 years).

2. It also turns out that Megan, the bartender, is the grandniece of the notorious Indiana gay serial killer Larry Eyler, the “interstate murderer,” and, as she showed us a photo on her phone last night to illustrate, quite resembles him around the eyes.

3. From 1982 to 1984, Larry Eyler picked up I think 21 young men, some of them teenagers, raped and tortured, murdered and sometimes dismembered them, and then tossed their bodies in fields along the sides of highways. He grew up in Crawfordsville, which is just a few miles down the road from Greencastle.

4. 1983 just happens to be the year when I spent a few months back in Indiana, trying unsuccessfully to finish a college degree, and, just a few months ago, researching another crime from that same period of time for the show I’m writing, I repeatedly came across coverage of the “gay serial killer” in the local newspaper on microfiche in the library. They knew at that point that he was targeting young gay men, but they didn’t catch him until late 1984, so gay people were a little spooked.

5. Many of his victims were never identified, likely because they were kids who’d run away from or been kicked out of their homes because they were gay, so it wasn’t like anyone was looking for them.

6. I now know there is such a thing as Murderpedia.

Also This To-Do List From 1982.

This makes my heart hurt. In a good way. As I get older and my mind goes to all those I’m getting older places, what have I done?, etc., and because I work with a lot of young people, I think often about the idea of youthful optimism and I don’t remember really ever having anything you’d call that. The constant grinding mental state I remember (which hasn’t changed in any quantitative way but maybe I’ve made friends with it or learned to recognize it as inherent in the process of art-making) is one of uncertainty or more like fear that I wouldn’t be capable of making art that was authentic. It was always hard for me to imagine achieving that, let alone sustaining it for a lifetime. I was not optimistic, I was terrified.

To say something authentic, something TRUE, always seemed to me to be the whole thing, and a terrible burden. I was so afraid of making work that was false, of being a hack, a conman. That to me wasn’t just failure as an artist, it was criminal. I might not be so strident now, but I still believe that more or less. It’s the reason I would never stay in school, not until I was almost 50. I felt the encroaching sense that in school I was learning mostly how to talk about the work, not how to make it. (The fear I think came from a confidence that I WAS capable of faking it. I was always smart enough to do that, or I thought so anyway.)

I always felt like I had to start from the beginning every time to make sure every element was genuine, honest, accurate. My journals are filled with entries like, “A stage, 2 characters, one onstage, one off. They are having a conversation. (Figure out what the conversation is about.)”

To discover this tiny fragment of hope (and let’s be honest, it’s tiny) in my 1982 mind makes me want to hold my 21 year old artist self in my arms and cry.

1990.

I read yesterday that the White Horse Tavern is closing or has closed or may close, and though I’ve only been there twice that I know of, I feel a certain feeling, sadness or something like it, every time I walk by it, and I felt moved to write a little something, and I may still later or tomorrow but I always get waylaid when i pull out old diaries.

Not to get too far into the weeds of what I’m NOT writing about, but the thing about the White Horse is that the first time I went there was in the early 80s with a man I dated for a short time. I met him at a bar on the Upper West Side (I would go up to the Works when I wanted to cruise and didn’t want to run into anyone I knew) the year after I dropped out of Parsons and was living on East 10th St. and working at Pearl Paint, he lived in New Jersey or White Plains or something, I don’t remember back then ever being at all concerned with any distinction between the places people lived that weren’t Manhattan. He lived with a woman who didn’t know he was “bisexual,” he smoked Nat Shermans, and I was obsessed with him. Also he was handsome and, I don’t quite know how to say this but he treated me like a girl and that turned me on hard.

He (I don’t remember his name!) specifically wanted to take me to the White Horse and tell me about how Dylan Thomas drank himself to death there. I know I wrote about this man in my diary at the time because I ran across mentions of him last year as I researched the essay I wrote for a book my friend Joan is making. He is somehow connected to my decision in 1983 to spend a year in Indiana finishing school which I only half did because … well, that’s another story and probably one I’ve told a million times. He, I guess it’s fair to say, ghosted me, which was a much easier thing to do back then.

So I was reading old diaries this morning. Somehow I haven’t found what I set out to look for. I guess it would help if I looked at 1982 and not 1990. I’ll get there, but in the meantime, here’s a fun excerpt. In 1990, I had just left my first long-term serious boyfriend Brian, and I was living alone for the first time in my life. I was temping as a legal proofreader to pay (well, sort of) my bills, and I’d just started writing pornographic stories and scheming to get them published. I wrote several but I never finished them. This was before computers or even word processors. I had a manual typewriter, and the process of revising was too tedious to live. I still have drafts of them somewhere in the drawer with the old journals.

My favorite thing here is that I considered using the name of Judy Garland’s fourth husband as my porn nom de plume.

Mourning The Old Neighborhood, Not So Old.

It’s not a big surprise that Moishe’s has finally closed. The building was sold a while ago and I’m sure that storefront is more valuable sitting empty.

In the very early 80s, when I waited tables at Banditos (the Tex-Mex restaurant that used to be on Second Ave, I think between 10th and 11th but I’m never quite sure anymore), and lived on Pitt between Rivington and Delancey, I stopped at Moishe’s every morning on my way to work and bought two (TWO!) raspberry hamentaschen and ate them for breakfast. I always thought of Moishe’s as a vestige of the neighborhood’s early 20th century Jewish immigrant past, the days of the Yiddish theaters on Second Ave and pushcarts on the Lower East Side. There must have been a few kosher bakeries in the neighborhood back then, but Moishe’s opened in 1977, long after that era had passed. There were still Jewish businesses around — 2nd Avenue Deli probably the most famous — but beatniks and Ukrainians and Puerto Ricans and artists and drag queens had all staked big claims too by 1977.

I’m glad — though I’ll admit kind of holding my breath — that Moishe’s smaller satellite store down the block from me on Grand St. is reportedly staying open. I walk by it almost every day and like to swoon at those big-as-a-brick hamentaschen and black and white cookies all lined up on trays in the window AND I RESIST. Well, not every time, but I sure can’t eat 2 of them a day anymore.

The Four Fivers Will Make Up For That.

I knew there was something missing in contemporary porn. Where are the book deal negotiations? Everything was better in the 1880s.

From The Sins of the Cities of the Plain.

Do You Read Kevin Drum?

Is anyone else following Kevin Drum’s blog posts about climate change?

I’ve been thinking along these lines for a while now, which is disorienting, unsettling for a person who grew up internalizing the three R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle). I think these ideas, in my family, were more about thrift than about the environment, at least to begin with, because my parents believed this, lived like this, and demanded it of their kids, before the environmental (or ecology, as they used to call it) movement was a thing.

And as an adult I never really questioned the wisdom of this ethos. I was always scraping by on not much money, so planning meals so that nothing was thrown away or, say, cutting up my worn-out t-shirts to use for rags so I didn’t have to buy paper towels was just necessary. Not that I didn’t see the big picture and believe that reducing consumption and waste was good for the earth. And of course being a lifelong liberal Democrat — well, pro-environment policy was just one of the things I believed in and supported.

But more and more I wonder (for instance, when I take my recycling, which I’ve rinsed and obsessively separated) downstairs and throw it in the bin that my neighbors have filled with dirty takeout containers, plastic bags, and pretty much whatever the fuck else they feel like throwing in there, knowing that even if there were a market for all that “recyclable” plastic — there isn’t: most of it ends up in a landfill — recycling plants will reject it because it’s “contaminated” with non-recyclables) I wonder, “why do I take this so seriously when most people can’t be bothered?” I mean, I’ve always assumed I’m helping, but am I helping?” And this is New York, a supposedly enlightened, liberal place. Good luck even trying to make an effort in Mississippi.

And then there’s the bigger idea that Kevin Drum writes about, which is that even if we pass all these GND laws here, get everyone’s behavior here, get everyone on board here (which, let’s be honest, will never happen), most of the world is not trying, not interested, in making the same changes. So if we really believe that this is an emergency, why are we so focused on these things that so clearly are not going to help at the massive scale required to save the world? Is it just because those are the things we’ve been relentlessly pounding away at for decades. Is it because we’re locked in a battle with a bunch of fucking idiots (that is, 1/2 the population) who still deny basic proven facts like evolution and global warming and the age of the planet and getting them to listen to reason has become the goal?

I don’t know. Like I said, pondering this stuff lately is disorienting. But I can’t find anything to disagree with in Drum’s assertion that if we actually truly believe we only have a few decades to reverse emissions drastically if we want to save the earth and its human population, shouldn’t we be laser-focused on finding something that stands a chance of doing that, instead of expending all our energy trying to implement green building and municipal composting programs?