A couple years ago, I was blown away to be approached by Penguin Workshop to produce not one, but two books that reflected my art. I am thrilled to announce the first of those will be released in two short weeks! Putting Balloons on a Wall is not Art a Book comes out on April 28, 2024, to be followed by The Writing’s on the Wall: An Interactive Journal and Coloring Book, in the fall of 2024!
It hits out of the blue sometimes, the strange reminder that time is linear, that you’re broken in ways you didn’t know possible before. It’ll hit in the grocery store, or when you return from a trip, or even when you’re on a bike ride in the crisp spring air. The grief comes over you like a weighted blanket; it washes over and drowns you. In the beginning, after your dad and beloved cat passed in rapid succession last year, you were fearless and didn’t care. You fully expected “LMFAO saw Balloon Guy weeping in the aisle at Safeway” tweets, but that didn’t happen. You cried whenever you needed to, and often.
Continue readingIt’s the fall in 2022, you celebrate your 49th birthday a few days after Thanksgiving, at work. You’ve worked in retail for 30 years, so you’re used to it. Every year, your birthday falls around the holiday, a few days before, sometimes on the holiday itself, or sometimes on Black Friday weekend. People are always surprised that the store you work at, the Louis Vuitton store in downtown Portland, is busy on Black Friday weekend, but so many people visit to save money, since there isn’t any sales tax in the state of Oregon.
You bike home like always, in the frigid late fall darkness, you stop for a slice of cake at the World’s Saddest Safeway on your way home, You open the door to your apartment: Ned greets you of course. He’s a little thinner than he was a month ago since the diagnosis, but he’s not in any pain. You’re grateful for that. You eat your cake, Ned purring softly on your lap, while watching Star Wars and mentally going over your checklist for Miami: balloon pump, rolls and rolls of duct tape, drone and batteries. Life is good, but you’re about to have both the best and worst year of your life.
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On your last day, you got in bed with me. Well, to be fair, you came up to the edge of the bed and looked up, imploringly, and I dutifully scooped you up. You weighed almost nothing, and I could feel your delicate, fragile bones under your soft grey fur. The cancer had taken your fat first, then your muscle, and finally, inexplicably, everything else. On the check-up trips to the vet, they would weigh you as you got lighter and lighter. A couple trips ago I asked them to stop telling me your weight. I used to joke about a month ago about how you were slowly evolving into one of those Spirit Halloween plastic skeleton cats, and that you would eventually be just bones. I don’t make that joke anymore.
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You’ll remember later, it was the mention of the kitten food that did you in; that made the floodgate of tears start flowing, that made you start sobbing. You’ll think of this a month later when you get the call from the unknown number, you’ll cry in much the same way even before picking up the phone.
Months earlier, you’re getting into Miami: your flight got in just before midnight, and you groggily caught a cab to the Airbnb, a self-entry hotel with no front desk. As the cab had pulled away, you realized in horror that you had left your phone in the cab. You went into a kind of paralyzed shock as you kept pawing your pants pocket where your phone should be, start panic-sweating in the humid, warm Miami night. You frantically got your work phone out to try to log into your email or Instagram to contact Christina, your assistant for the trip, but in your panic couldn’t recall any passwords. You took a deep breath. Just get into the room, put your bags down, you reasoned. Then solve it from there. You started calling your personal phone with your work phone, praying that the cabbie would hear it and answer. No answer, of course.
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You get the text at work one day, the text you’ve feared getting for years, from your half-sister Jeanne: “Dad has fallen”. Your 88 year old father, whose mobility isn’t great to begin with, was found on his bathroom floor by a neighbor who noticed he didn’t collect his paper from the driveway the day before, or the next morning either. The neighbor entered through his garage door, knowing the code. Your dad had been there for a day, his walker was tangled around his legs, his MedicAlert bracelet and cell phone on the counter just out of reach.
He was rushed to the hospital. You find out later that while he was on the bathroom floor, waiting during that day for help that may never arrive, he made peace with God, prepared for his end. It’s with a complicated mix of relief and grief, then, that your family is told the reality of the situation: he is lucid, he is stable, but he has a litany of health problems, many exacerbated by the fall, and they inevitably will start domino-ing and lead to him passing soon. The medical care switches gears to hospice care. He understands this, and the first thing he says on the phone when the two of you talk is his matter-of-fact, “Wellp, I guess this is the place where I’m at for the rest of my life.” He is in no or very little pain, and over the conversation you both express wonder at how decent he feels when there’s such a final diagnosis looming. He is his usual funny but German-stoic self, and you’re grateful that you have time left with him, however uncertain the amount of time.
A few weeks later, you’re on the plane to Albuquerque. You don’t remember the last time you booked a nonstop back to your hometown, you’re there in an instant and you wonder why you didn’t fly this way all the time. You get in, in the early evening and at the airport you text him: I’m here! He texts back right away, out of character for him. “Welcome!” “Are you feeling up for a visitor?” “No, let’s just see each other tomorrow.” “Love you dad, goodnight.” The Uber drops you off at his house and you put your code into the garage door, which reluctantly grumbles and creaks open. Continue reading
It happens like this, like this exactly: you celebrate your 48th birthday the Saturday after Black Friday of 2021. You’re at work of course, at your day job as a retail leader at a luxury goods store. You bike home, order fancy takeout, eat cake, pet your cat. Having a birthday the week of Thanksgiving and working in retail, usually means compromises on when you can celebrate it, but in general after almost a half century of birthdays, even the celebrations are pretty low key. You look forward more to Thanksgiving spent with friends, with food, with drink. Being surrounded by people who love you is a better gift than most.
You hunker down and make it through the Portland winter. The city has milder winters than most places, but it’s still cold and grey and you never realize how much that affects your mood until spring comes. You have a tense exchange with a troll in real life at a shoot, eat half of a stale edible cookie to chill out, and trip balls so hard that your neighbor has to call the EMTs and your friend Nick, until you come down from the terrible, unmanageable high. This is gonna make great content, your brain thinks through the fog, as your jaw clenches and your claw hands scratch your thighs and you rock back and forth in her kitchen.
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Having Sundays off from work just hit different, and this Sunday hit different than any other Sunday of all the Sundays in my life. I woke up and lazily made coffee in my french press, fed and medicated Ned, pumped up that stubbornly underinflated front tire of my bike before running errands and heading to the studio. I looked out my window at the midwinter grey: partly cloudy with a chance of At Least It’s Not Fucking Raining Again. What’s the next milestone? I thought to myself. That’s right. 30 days to daylight savings and then it’s light when I leave work.
In front of my apartment building, I kick off and ride, the sunlight peering past the clouds and on my face during the ten minute bike ride to my studio. I get there, get organized, lower the bags of balloons from the ceiling by pulley, and start sorting today’s quote out, kicking balloons into place on the floor of the studio.
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It’s subtle, quiet at first, but then gets louder quickly. First of all, it’s hot in the plane, sitting on the LaGuardia tarmac in the July heat. Still at the gate, this plane has joined the other flights on your journey to and from the east coast in being 100% late. And to be clear: this is okay. It’s your first time getting on a plane since being vaccinated, and you’re headed back to Portland from the east coast visiting a friend group whom you’ve know for 20+ years. You’ve heard that flying, for the vaccinated, is very safe: the air circulation and filtration systems inside planes are unrivaled, but the real heroes are the flight attendants. They are not taking your bullshit, Karen. And you know the feeling; you work in retail, for a company that is pretty damn protective of its employees. You yourself have a great deal of leeway when it comes to insisting on customer compliance to mask wearing: wear ’em or get kicked out.
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I never wanted this.
Okay, let me be a little more specific: this wasn’t exactly my plan.
This sordid tale starts years ago, in 2012. A crush who I spent a weekend with offhandedly suggested getting on Instagram, which he was on. The fledgling app was not even two years old and I resisted: I didn’t need another social media presence, wasn’t three enough (RIP Vine)? Besides, my strength was in my words, not in my photographs. He eventually rejected me, I didn’t take it well (wow big surprise), and I started my Instagram account to spite him. No, I don’t know how that works either but it made perfect sense at the time.
I had just paused my retail career for a year to work on my artistic resume. I did everything creative I could get my hands on: designed sets, started a novel, and started my blog about, ostensibly, the journey from having a steady (if mundane) job to kickstarting one’s creative life. Taking photos with my iphone4 and posting them didn’t really seem like it would factor into my overarching creative path, but during this time I took a staged photo with my friend Jennie Kay at Disneyland, our deadpan faces registering nothing as we stood among the happy parkgoers and under a massive canopy of, of course, balloons. The photo was well received and a theme was born: “I’ll make art that makes fun of social media!”
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2020 seemed to hold no surprises at this point. Your country on the brink of fascism? Ugh yes. Murder hornets? Sure. Pandemic? Well yeah of course. You’ve rolled with it, and you consider yourself fortunate: your art is taking off, you still have a job you love, and your family and friends are taking the virus as seriously as you could have hoped, and they’re safe and healthy. So no one can really blame you that you enter the holiday season with a sense of optimism. The bad news? You work in retail during a global pandemic.
Back in 2012, you quit your retail management job to make space for a sudden urge to be creative, so you took a year off and started your artistic sabbatical. You did everything creative you could during that time to fill out your artistic resume including set design, writing a novel, and even begrudgingly getting onto Instagram. You didn’t miss retail management and the time off creating felt like a permanent vacation. You slowly realized that Los Angeles was a great place for established artists, but not great for someone just starting out, and also was a poor fit for the type of person you became while living there.
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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.
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I’m bonkers-excited to relaunch my merch line (and yes, I feel dead inside for even using that word “merch”). With designs by the talented Jen Van Horn (@jenjen64), we added 🚨five more🚨 classic balloon quotes to the existing line, and now the letters come in different colors, so you can make zillions of different color combos. I’ve even added pillows, phone cases, masks, wall art, and totes in all the designs! Check ’em out here.
You are a creature defined by your routines: you wake up, gulp water, then go pee while your cat gallops into the kitchen to show you his food bowl, which he assumes you have never seen before and wouldn’t even remember to feed him if he didn’t remind you. This is where the routine slightly diverges, because your kitchen part of your morning is a juggle of feeding Ned, starting to make breakfast, and making coffee. Always french press coffee, and always the same thing for breakfast: two eggs, scrambled, with spinach and mushrooms and lentils what??, topped by cheese. Yes, you’re boring, but you’re also dull! In reality, it’s just easier to make a habit of your first meal while you’re groggy.
You hop in the shower, throw clothes on, and tackle the day. If you’re working that day, you make sure you have everything before you leave: keys, wallet, phone, work keys, work phone, mask. You bike to work in the radiant Portland summer. You get to work, to more routines. The staff at your job has been split into two teams (that way if someone on one team gets sick and that team quarantines, the other teams splits again). This means that you work a regular pattern of days, interwoven with the other team doing the same. You like your coworkers a lot and miss working with the coworkers on the other team. You are not writing this only because you know they might read it. You promise.
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You stare at the ceiling, the midmorning sun filtered through the blinds in your bedroom. What woke you up? A sound? You hear it again: the sound of a creature, gray and rotund and starving, galloping full tilt through your apartment. It gets louder and louder and then the leap! to your bed and he stops on a dime, staring at you, eyes wide and blazing golden-green, this living creature that, bizarrely, lives in your apartment with you. And just as fast, he spins and jumps off, trots back to the kitchen at full gallop. You stare at the ceiling for a few minutes. Huh. There are a few patches of discoloration from where you hung your phone to take photos (the silly kind, not the salacious kind) and the tape peeled the paint off. I have time to repaint my ceiling, you think absently.
What day is it? Friday? Sunday? This all feels, oddly enough, like your years living in Los Angeles, just on a smaller scale. You loved in Los Angeles for 12 years without even feeling like time was passing. Without strong seasons, the time felt like it was passing strangely or not at all; every day was another sunny day more beautiful than the day before it. And just like that, your second alarm clock goes off: in the other room, you hear Ned start to retch vomit onto your ivory flokati rug. “I’M UP” you yell, leaping to move him to a spot on the wood floor.
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I’m thrilled to present the coping mechanism I’ve been using to keep my mind preoccupied during the stay at home orders. It’s a new series of shorts on IGTV called Social Distancing. Set during a pandemic, it follows dolhouse-sized Mike and friends as they reconcile their new lives in friendship, romance, and art. Please click here to check it out, or click this link for YouTube (which has captions), and thanks for watching!
It’s your usual routine: Get out of bed. Make coffee and breakfast. Breakfast is the same thing day after day, a two egg omelette with spinach, mushrooms, and cheese. Bike to work. Change out of your bike clothes and into your uniform. Read your emails. Your routine defines you, it grounds you, it’s the bread to whatever is in your sandwich that day (turkey. It’s always turkey).
On your way in to work one day you notice that the shopping mall seems abandoned. Coworkers are huddled around the computer screen. They look up when you walk in the door, then back down to the news. There are few clients that day. This is how it starts, and each day after that is different and strange from the day before, maybe forever.
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Do it like this:
It’s late November of 2018, and you’re cleaning out your cat Ned’s litterbox and wondering if the toxic plasmosis has finally seeped into your brain and your cat is now mind controlling you. If he is, he has pretty reasonable demands, like feeding him on a regular schedule and opening the blinds so that the sun can come in. You’ve just turned 45, and as you flick the cat turds into the toilet (wait wait wait is this something I’m not supposed to do?!), you pause at the bathroom mirror and look at your dumb, dumb face. Your eyes have permanent dark circles, and you’re getting your dad’s bags under his eyes. You’re getting greyer and greyer, too.
Your friend Jen emails you: the tarot cards are ready! Earlier in 2018 you had a big hit with an art project called Box Wine Boyfriend, a photo series where you made a boyfriend out of boxes of wine. Everyone laughed but underneath the humor was a deeper message about loneliness and sadness, and you’re happier when some people pick up on this. So now you’re planning the wedding to your fictional boyfriend to be a big fundraiser for the ACLU of Oregon, and the tarot cards Jen made are a big part of one of the circuslike elements of the evening.
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I am waking up to the sound of beeping. First soft, probably interjecting into my dream, then more insistent, then finally a claxon pealing into the soft, soft tissue of my gentle brain.
I sit up in bed…I do this lately. Long something I only saw in movies and TV shows, I now wake up with alarming quickness and sit straight up instead of lazily curling up and lounging in bed while my body wakes up. Now, about half the time lately I’m sitting bolt upright in bed, startling my sleeping cat Ned, jumpstarting my day with the feeling of misplaced anxiety and panic. I’m not gonna lie, autocorrect just changed that to “jumpsnarting” for a second and I am now going to make it a thing.
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I’m bonkers-excited to relaunch my line of merch, designed by Jen Van Horn and based on my popular balloon quotes. They come in extended sizes, and now include buttons, hoodies, stickers, totes, and other fun stuff! Please visit this link to check ’em out. Fun fact: 100% of the profits of the “F#CK TERFS” and “It Wasn’t About…” products are donated to SMYRC, and trans and gender non-conforming youth resource center, here in Portland!
It’s here! Episode 5 of This Ends Badly, starring Nick Fauble, Eric Woodring, Kate Schroeder, and Louis Peitzman. In this episode, puppet Mike is determined to take a bite out of the big apple…or will it take a bite out of him?
I had a blast filming this episode (mainly in April of 2018) in Manhattan and Brooklyn with dear friends of mine. The episode was assistant directed by Noah Fecks, and I couldn’t have done it without the help of Phillip Miner, Roland Sanner, and Travis Wellendorf.
It’s (finally) here! Episode 4 of my semi-autobiographical webseries, This Ends Badly. This episode guest stars Nick Mattos as a prominent writer with a prickly personality, and features Andrea White as Marge; it was AD’d and edited by the extremely talented and patient Travis Wellendorf. Check it out here and on IGTV, too!
You wake up disoriented, fuzzy. Your knees hurt, you do know that. Your phone is in your lap, it is warm from being connected to the charging cable. There is a large polyp you are resting your head on. Wait, no, that’s a neck pillow. Your knees hurt because you are eighteen feet tall (okay, maybe just a smidge over six feet) and you are crammed into a seat on a Frontier airlines jet. It all comes back to you now: you are going to see Denver, and to see Brian.
Just a week or two before, you were at work and getting ready for a couple days off. You and Brian were texting, and on a whim you looked at flights and found a ridiculously cheap one. Well, it was cheap, but at what cost? You’d heard horror stories about bargain airlines, and yes, you were pretty cramped in the seat (when you first got on the plane you rubbed your eyes to make sure it wasn’t an optical illusion: how the hell did they fit so many seats on this plane?), but otherwise it was fine for a cheap ticket. And how the hell privileged would you be, to complain about the opportunity to travel to meet a friend and see their city?
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I stand there, staring at her. She paws through my belongings, I can do nothing to stop her. Something is wrong. This is why she pulled me aside just now, asked me if she could go though my personal belongings. Her authority is total.
She pauses, maybe an eyebrow arches, maybe my anxious brain is making that up. “Traveling alone?” she asks as she holds up a bottle, peers closer at the ounce capacity. “Yeah, it’s my first trip to Europe!” I start in on my oft-told story: “You see, I couldn’t fly for quite awhile…” I trail off, my face goes red. The bottle the TSA agent is holding up is the lube I brought in my shaving kit.
There I am, cowboy hat on, dusty plaid shirt, the sun is low on the horizon in front of me as I ride towards the sunset. My nosehairs are caked with dirt but hey that’s their job. I swipe at my eyes with my bandana for a second…neckerchiefs are having a moment, let me tell you…and then clearly see it up ahead, its furry body running as fast as possible, trundling with its shorter-than-normal tail flopping behind him.
In my mind’s eye the camera zooms out slowly, slowly, revealing me on my trusty steed: a miniature pony. We’re at a full gallop, his tiny hooves furiously clopping along the hardpacked desert so fast you can hardly see them move. A team of other miniature horses surround us, we are noble and brave and heroic, we are also chasing my cat Ned, he is scaled up to horse size. As we approach the cliff’s edge, I paw at my lasso hanging at my hip. Ned suddenly brakes and turns, his green-yellow eyes flashing with anger. Some mini ponies rear up on their hindhooves, squeal in surprise, some deftly circle Ned instead. My mini pony trots to a casual stop.
Ned opens his mouth. I think it is to roar, but instead he says, in an older woman’s voice: “Are you up?” I tilt my head, open my mouth to respond. Instead he interrupts me, “Are you alive up there? Michael?”
I open my eyes, stare at the ceiling, and the ceiling fan. My mom’s voice carries up the stairs, “Good morning?” I take a deep breath, “YEAH MOM I’M UP.” I know she doesn’t hear me so I pick up my phone and text her. It’s now a competition between her and my dad whose hearing is going the fastest. He was in the lead the past decade or two but she’s making a comeback from the rear of the pack.
I pad downstairs in the Texas morning light and say hi in person. She’s still in bed and smiles wide when she sees me, it’s been a year since my last visit. I go into the kitchen to make breakfast and coffee. She can only drink about a cup a day now. I make my usual, unimpressive breakfast: an omelette with spinach, mushrooms, cheese and sometimes tomatoes. I only make it for two for my mom, and for lovers who spend the night with whom I want to spend more nights. I have not made it for two in a while.
I hear her get out of bed, dress, get her walking cane, and come in to the kitchen just as I’m plating the eggs. Before I carry them in to the dining room I check her fridge. Of course there are tortillas. I heat up the comal on the stove and flip a few tortillas on it, turning them over with my hands until they’re piping hot. She sees this and laughs, “You are a Chavez.”
Am I though? I tell my mom about a fight I got into on social media a few months earlier. How I defended my credibility by bringing up the Mexican side of my heritage, how I was humiliated when someone replied by screenshotting my dating profile, where I had clearly indicated I identified as white.
“I don’t know why I put that, mom. I don’t even remember putting my race. I’m not ashamed of my Mexican side.”
“I know that, Michael.” She calls me Michael, only. She will not call me Mike. I did not name you Mike, so why would I call you that? she reminds me whenever I bring it up. Then she shows me her stretch marks.
“But that happens every time I’m forced to choose. I stare at the choices, like what am I supposed to choose if I can only choose one? When I was a kid, I identified as “Hispanic” on those multiple choice dots, even through college.”
“I remember, you wanted to change your name to be Ignacio Chavez .”
“That was…not an elegant name.”
“Why don’t you change your last name now?”
My eyes grow wide. What I want to say is “yikes”, but instead: “I think it’s a little…too late for that, mom. It would be a little…pandering.”
We eat in silence for a minute. What it comes down to, really, is that I don’t feel like I have a right to it. I’m proud of my culture and of the (scant) Spanish I can speak, but I grew up in white culture. And I pass for white, or maybe it’s that I don’t look like what some Americans think Mexicans look like. My last name is Schneider, not Chavez or Padilla…and I live in Portland, Oregon, a city that isn’t exactly known for its diversity. It’s not that I’ve rejected my Mexican side, far from it. The real question is, how could I honor my Mexican side and live both sides authentically, while living in a city that historically favors whiteness and devalues Latinx expression?
How does privilege affect my queerness? I rarely think about it since I’ve identified as gay or queer a lot longer in my life than I haven’t, but I walk through the world and the world assumes I’m straight and 100% white. In many ways, passing as straight is a defense mechanism learned early, as a form of self protection, as a form of not getting my ass kicked in high school. As much as I’m proud to invoke my Mexican background, I feel like I haven’t “earned” the right: I don’t live the culture, I’m not Latinx-presenting to most of this country. I remember a story my mom would tell (much to my dad’s embarrassment) about a time she went to his family reunion in Wisconsin. Everyone complimented her tan; everyone wanted to know the secret to her olive complexion.
The next day we’re walking around Target. Well, I’m walking and she’s tooling around in the store’s Hoveround scooter. It’s always a challenge to find the charged-up ones. I’m sure we made about 6 trips to Target during my five days in San Antonio. Maria isn’t great at steering the vehicle so she’s careening into fixtures and people; a wake of debris and bruised bodies trails behind her. Her impact! Literally.
Later that night we go to a drag show at a bar called Luther’s. The host recognizes her: she’s been there before! “Hi Gracie, where’s Frankie?” our host teases her to the laughter of the crowd. “Living your best Lily Tomlin life!” Reader, we howled. We drink a little too much tequila that night, Cazadores is her favorite. One time, I made the mistake of giving her a margarita kit for her birthday. Never will I make that mistake again. My mom passed to me her disdain of sweet drinks, in additional to our bizarre toes.
The host banters with the crowd more; there are a surprising amount of straight people at that bar that night. They ask if I’m straight: “Oh no way!” I exclaim, but I think later about this, about “passing” as straight. What are the ways, as proud queers, that we can unlearn these defense mechanisms like “passing” once we are old enough to defend ourselves? Does one armor give way to another when we embrace our true selves and stop performative masculinity? Can we unlearn to “pass?” Being soft is a strength; being soft is its own armor. I don’t get into arguments with “masc4masc” gay men on the apps anymore. I used to be them. I just view them as men who still have yet to shed something like a snake molting its skin, or how baby teeth fall out someday.
It occurs to me on the plane, after our sad goodbyes, that I spend so much of my time traveling to people I love. I am so lucky to have so many people in my life who complete me, so many pieces of my heart scattered across the country, across the earth. Of course I am my mother’s son.
I got her heart, too.
Like this post? What is wrong with you. Seriously. Anyway, here’s a post about my first threesome, and here is a post about a journey of a few dates with a dood. Let’s be horrible people together.
