Every year it happens at the same time: November rolls around, and your birthday heralds the beginning of Portland’s descent into winter. You say descent, but really it’s just a gentle slope, maybe even a stumble into the mildest of winters. Unlike other places you’ve lived like Chicago (which has a slapstick faceplant into the deep snow), your city sometimes doesn’t even have to cope with the snow some winters.

Instead, you brace for The Grey™️. Maybe chilly, maybe rainy, maybe dry, but always, always grey, for months on end. After seven years in the city you should be accustomed to it, but no, your desert blood will always do better in the sun, in the heat. Even as a child, you couldn’t wait for the New Mexico summers, you would sunburn and peel over and over as you played outside, burying your Star Wars action figures in the backyard clay and making forts out of the leftover adobe bricks. You find sun when you can, here in the Pacific Northwest, which means summers spent outside floating down the river, or at Rooster Rock (where you wear as much clothing as possible at the clothing-optional queer beach there), you leap from outdoor patio to outdoor patio, from beer to beer.

But no, here comes winter, and you make it through the Christmas season at your day job, one day at a time. You’re an old retail dog, you’ve done it your whole life, and you like your coworkers. Getting through the holiday season comes easily and naturally at this point.

You make it to New Year’s Eve, you can’t remember now if you actually stayed up until midnight or crashed early. You wake up to a new decade: it’s 2020! This is going to be a great year.

Work keeps you preoccupied for the rest of the winter: the store you work at has remodeled, the new store is a gleaming futuristic starship, and you move away from your temporary location and into the new one with fanfare.

On your days off, you make art. While difficult in the winter, it’s not impossible. Once, maybe twice a week, you and your friend Andrew diligently tear the cheap dollar store duct tape in 40 degree weather, roll it, stick it to the ladder. Depending on how long the message is, you repeat this dozens, maybe a hundred or so times. The colder the weather and the more humidity in the air, the less the tape sticks, so you have to make more tiny tape rolls the colder it is. Your hands freeze, you have to take breaks every once in a while to thaw them out again, you wonder absently if this is somehow how you will die, making your silly fucking little balloon messages. I’ll fall of the stepladder, that’s 100% how it will happen you think to yourself. A couple times you almost do; you and Andrew laugh and breathe a sigh of relief but inside you know you came close: Stupid old man, the voice mocks.

A couple times, the wall is simply too cold to hold tape. Read that again: sometimes you make art when it is so cold that tape doesn’t stick to surfaces. And that’s fine. Making art calms your soul, it helps you cope, it soothes your anxiety. On a cold rainy day in January, you’re faced with a wet wall which would be impossible to dry completely to stick letters to it. Instead, you and Andrew innovate: You stick the letters to lengths of string, and then dry patches at either end of the string to stick the ends of the string to the wall. And voila! It works, just in time to take the photo before the sun goes down.

It’s around this time that you start hearing the news reporting about a mysterious virus causing illness, first diagnosed in China. You’re been through this before: Hantavirus, SARS, Ebola. You know the containments mechanisms will kick in and it’ll be stamped out, as usual.

You visit Los Angeles. Living here was a bummer, but it’s fun as hell to be a tourist here: you visit the Broad and pay homage to a Jeff Koons balloon-dog, you see your old friends at Sacred Fools, you spend time with your dear friend Michal. You have a threesome with an incredibly sweet and gracious (uh and HOT) couple. You are so, so awkward and apologetic during the encounter that it’s a wonder they still talk to you to this day. Little do you realize at the time that this will be the last time you touch someone with tenderness and affection for months and months after.

It’s hard to overstate how bizarre the second weekend of March is. Rather than the government providing any clear-cut guidance, states and companies are forced to make decisions to close down, to restrict crowds. As you and your boss shut your store down on Monday the 16th, you don’t know that this is the last time you will see their entire faces, that after this you will learn to transfer all expression in your face to solely your eyes.

It’s a strange time to be making art. You and Andrew stop making the pieces together and you learn to do it on your own again. Yes, people tell them your art helps them, helps their mental health, makes them laugh in times of darkness, but there’s something that feels like the band playing while the Titanic sinks about all of it.

You plug along, during various phases of your workplace adapting to the changes: work remotely, then reduced hours, then not working but still home, then back at work but working in teams apart from each other. Everyone is doing the best they can is the mantra at work, and it’s startling to work in such a forgiving environment full of grace. It’s startling to realize that everyone is experiencing the same similar trauma at the same time, but frustrating to not know how it’s going to manifest.

You feel puffy. Whether it’s the lack of exercise or the unsettling amount of wine you’re drinking or the stress, your body seems to be…shifting in places, retreating in others, expanding in yet others. This is okay and is a natural and healthy response to unprecedented circumstances you think to yourself, almost believing it.

Desperate for more creative outlets, you start a COVID-era webseries, about a small puppet-doll named Mike who is living in a haunted dollhouse. So, basically an autobiography. You’re able to make it with friends doing the voiceovers and playing themselves, and recording them both in person and distanced, and remotely. You quickly and predictable become obsessed with all things 1/6 scale and your friend Charley gamely tackles making some incredible tiny sets for it.

On May 25th, George Floyd is murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, which starts the long overdue national reckoning with racism and police brutality. You confront your own prejuduces and ways in which systemic racism has warped you, and you know it’s only the beginning. It’s not a moment, but a movement, and you commit to finding ways to express and amplify it in your art without taking center stage yourself.

The slow stumble into Fall and Winter happens again, it seems surreal and like the past few months have been both the longest and shortest of your life. You turn 47 this week, you feel 27 and 67 at the same time, how is that possible? You don’t know what 2021 holds. You hope you can see your family again. You hope you can visit your long distance crush. You hope you can travel again. You hope a vaccine comes out, that people stop dying. You hope that Biden’s cabinet has progressives in it. You hope 45 goes to jail. You hope humans sprout wings, learn to fly, fly higher and higher towards the sun, God it is so bright, fly higher and higher, across the vacuum of space and leaving atmosphere behind, our skin blisters and peels like it did when I was a boy burying my action figures, fly higher until the solar storms lick at my face, face open, eyes open, mouth open and laughing my God it’s so bright, it’s so bright, it’s so bright.