I’m proud to announce my T-shirt and tank line! Most of the designs are based on my balloon-quote photography, and they were illustrated by my talented friend Jen Van Horn. The profits from two of these designs will go to SMYRC, a Portland based resource center for sexual- and gender-minority youth.
In addition, they’re available in extended sizing, and a ton of color combinations. Please click here to browse the designs and thanks for supporting queer art!
I’m repacking my snake shirt, hoping no one sees it and reports me to airport security for trying to smuggle snakes onto a plane. No, no, they’re not real snakes of course: I spent the night before hot-gluing plastic and rubber snakes onto an old shirt that doesn’t fit me anymore. See, it is Pride month and I am naturally celebrating by embracing my dadbod and making bad food choices, and only the softly screaming side seams of my fitted button down shirts are my witness. In the meantime, I’m also planning the staged photo I’m going to take after everyone deplanes: “Snacks on a plane”. It’s not my best idea.
I walked up to the podium at the gate. “Wow, looks like someone really did a number on your heart” quipped the chirpy gate attendant as I handed her my ID. My eyes grew wide and I caught my breath. Jesus, does it still show in my eyes? Can people still see the pain I sometimes feel? Does she know I still have occasional dreams of him and I together, like a cruel glimpse into some parallel universe where-
Her brow furrowed as she saw my reaction. “Oh wait, I meant someone did a good job on it. Your heart.” She gestured to the heart tattoo on my arm that was extending my ID.
“Oh. Yeah! Thanks,” I stammered back. One of the rubber snakes coughed, cleared his throat awkwardly, inside my duffel bag. Continue reading
We meet like any other guy I meet online: “Hey how’s it going? You’re handsome and seem interesting.” He either replies, or does not. If he does, it then becomes a delicate conversational dance to eventually work up to meeting up. In my case, that delicate dance is usually a stumbling waltz to bad music and I end up falling onto the other guests, grasping at a tablecloth and then I’m pulling the buffet down on top of us. In this instance, though, this guy Jerry is startlingly handsome, and is weirdly nice. He compliments my photography and we chat about our jobs, our art. We seem to vibe well, the chatting is easy and kind, which is a relief after a couple recent incidents online with clearly unhinged people. Jerry mentions he travels a lot and it’s then I look at his profile closer, he lives across the country. Because of course he does.
It’s around this time that someone else messages me. It’s Jerry’s partner, Ben. He says they’re in an open relationship and he finds me attractive too. Oh! Continue reading
It’s the moment. Max and I are looking at each other outside the restaurant, their slender frame smaller than my larger, lumpier one. I am wearing what I thought would appeal to them: a pink linen shirt, slightly flowy, I wore my light chinos and rolled up the cuffs, wore derby shoes with non-visible socks. In short, I look like a queer snack. They are wearing a poncho, blue eye shadow, I swear that there is glitter in their beard that I have been staring at all night over dinner. They stretch their arms wide for the embrace and I lean in for the kiss; they turn their head and I get a mouthful of beard and glitter. Okay, friends, I think and pat their back in a brotherly way to let them know I’m on the same page. We walk our respective ways and I look back to see if they turn around. They do not.
Later, I ask them out again over text. They reply “Sorry, had a blast. you’re not queer enough.” Continue reading
“Maybe this is how it starts” you think to yourself, as you wait at the passenger arrival gate at PDX. This isn’t the first time you have had this thought, and you have even been close to being right before. You look at the faces of all the other people there: the gruff, hardened, emotionless middle aged man. The white family who has signs made for whomever they’re waiting for. The young black girl, she’s wearing a knit hat and coat maybe a little too large for the November weather. You love her the most, she’s also wearing headphones that may or may not be plugged in to anything, and a headset microphone in front of her mouth which reminds you of Janet Jackson’s Rhythm 1814. Your suspicion that she may be high-functioning autistic is reinforced when she lets out a loud squeal of pure glee when she sees who is probably her brother coming out of the doors, only then does she tear off the headphones. Continue reading
The leaves rustle, in the morning there’s a chill in the air, shopping bags start becoming aggressively seasonal, and I suddenly crave every pastry near me within a ten block radius. It’s fall, jerks! And I have never embraced my dadbod more: it is the daddest of bods. Wait is that appropriation?
The text from the guy comes at work while I am lifting a pastry up to my mouth in the break room at work. I consider telling my coworkers that this is my first cheese danish. It is, in fact, my third pastry, but really I only count it as my second because I had the first one before I clocked in. I look at my phone, log into social media, bury my face in the screen. I really don’t appreciate the stares they’re giving me, I can practically hear their whispers to each other as they giggle at the crumbs in my beard, their-
I lift my head. Oh. The break room is actually empty. Ahem. Continue reading
We’re hard at work on Episode 2 of This Ends Badly! It’s titled “From Bad to Worse” and people familiar with the classic 2014 post The Date With Myself will recognize a particular sequence.
In the meantime, please enjoy this short, “How To Get Ready for a Date”! Thanks to Colt Schafer and Hannah Brady for their help making this.
I wake up much later than the alarm clock says I should. I sit up in the bed, the sheet falls away. I take in the room: decent sized, comfy queen bed, there is a vintage bike mounted up high on one wall. Maybe it’s not vintage maybe it’s just dusty? Anyway. There are books and comic books high on the other wall. The light through the window is high and hitting the floor, it’s almost noon here. There is no one else in the bed, I slept alone, but then a memory comes fast and sneakily: a perfect morning almost two years ago, not this bed, when I had flown in overnight and got under the covers. I kissed the back of his neck repeatedly; he made a soft, pleased murmur in his half-sleep every time I kissed it, his neck always got so so bristly in between haircuts. I shake my head, literally swat the memory away. Ugh, that again? And then another even more disorienting thought: Wait, where am I?
Oh. That’s right! I’m in New York. Continue reading
The flight is bumpy, the flight is turbulent, the flight is a flight designed to turn my knuckles white.
It touches down in Albuquerque at midnight. My hometown airport is almost deserted except for a few huddled families. I realize for a small self-pitying moment that no one has ever met me inside an airport. I roll my eyes and call a Lyft to take me to my dad’s place. He volunteered to pick me up at midnight. I politely declined but was secretly horrified: what the fuck, dad? You are 83. You are not picking me up at the airport at midnight. Continue reading
I feel it the minute I get off the plane: the air itself is different. It’s warmer, drier, thicker, if the air was a tortilla chip it would be stone ground. I leave the terminal, look for my rideshare. I glance across the airport at the Theme Building, the midcentury UFO-with-landing-gear, whose restaurant closed a few months after I left this city in 2013. It’s then that the chorus swells with the noises I rarely hear in Portland: the car horns raise their frantic duck voices in harmony, I hear the nearby lilt of a family speaking Spanish and I smile. I’m in Los Angeles. I am home.
Los Angeles is everything people say it is. LA is shallow, LA is awful traffic, LA is that guy on Tinder you matches with you and never, ever replies. LA is a city of broken dreams and loosely made promises. Los Angeles is an acquired taste, if you like the taste of garbage. LA is that spoiled child that falls down and looks around to see if anyone is watching before starting to cry.
What I mean to say is: I love every inch of LA. Continue reading
You are afraid of the sound of your own heart.
You whispered this over dinner, a secret you had only told a few men in your life. You would wake suddenly when your head was sideways on the pillow, you would hike with your headphones in and rip them out when, in between songs, the timpani of your pulse would pound in your ears. It’s not the sound, you explained to him, it’s the fear of it suddenly stopping. You’re afraid you will hear the moment your heart just stops.
You explain this to him, you drop it like a cat dropping a dead bird at his feet. This is what you do, you play the clown so often you may as well have a red foam nose. Maybe he laughs. Maybe he nods solemnly, understanding completely. This beautiful bearded one tilts his head, his lips purse. It is not you, you say to yourself, and offer to get him another beer when you get up. “I’m not good at giving compliments” he says later, handing you the most beautiful red flag you have ever seen. This cruelty is a kindness. Continue reading
I’m slogging through the holidays, like I do every year. They’re a combination of sweet and hectic: this is my busy season at my day job, and it makes December rush by in a blur. It’s colder than usual, so cold that when I walk and fart I’m scared people walking behind me can see it billowing out, a beautiful white cumulus smelling of my colon that expands forever, slowly engulfing Portland. I’m lonely, too. All I really want is a boyfriend for the winter I can cut open like a TaunTaun and nestle inside wait not that.
I spot the guy on social media, he is my type, maybe even My Type: tiny. Bearded. Professional. We hit it off, follow the steps, I follow the script to the tee. “Super handsome, how’s your week? I’m Mike.” “Wanna get off this app? I don’t get notifications, text is easier for me.” “Want to grab grub sometime? I promise I’m not a psycho.” The joke is on him, because I am actually a raging psycho. I make sure he is truly single: the hot trend is guys on social media who are in super committed relationships who pretend to be single online just to be more popular. Continue reading
Set the story in the winter of 2015, in Portland. You will have just been broken up with by a dude you were bonkers in love with, in a way that rattled you to your core. Go grocery shopping, feel it coming on, leave the grocery store before you burst into tears on the way home. Think to yourself, Can we all agree that grocery stores should not play slow, sad Christmas songs any fucking more, please? Or at least have a trigger warning beforehand? Imagine it like that, fully: a red and green-striped rotating light descends from the grocery store ceiling, spins silently. Shoppers look up: some keep shopping but others abandon their carts, drop their baskets. Eggs shatter, a ball of iceberg lettuce rolls down the aisle as they leave the store in a row: the lonely old cat lady in her housecoat, the gutter punk in the pleather jacket, the middle aged bearded gay man wiping back his tears. Behind them, the beginning strains of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” start playing in Safeway. Continue reading
You bike home from the coffee shop in the crisp early fall drizzle, your legs pumping the pedals as fast as they will go, which is not very fast. You have a rainjacket on but you also know that you’ll be soaked by the time you get home. This was not a Good Date. It started inauspiciously anyway, when he told you that he just came from another date. Having a date tell you he just came from another date is like watching someone coming out of a bathroom stall chewing on food. Continue reading
I’ve been in Portland three years. I love the summers here; they seem like they go on forever and then disappear in the blink of an eye. They say summer is a great season to fall in love. It’s been a while since I fell in love. I’m not on the dating apps: they alternately bore and frustrate me. But once in a while, someone catches my eye in real life and I give it a go. This is one of those stories, this is a story of my worst date, if not ever, then certainly this month. This is the story of my date with Mike Schneider. Continue reading
Damnit. It’s over. I know it in my heart, I can feel it every time he and I touch: the magic is gone. What do I do when our love has reached its expiration date? How do I tell someone who trusts me completely and might still be crazy in love with me that I don’t feel the same way?Â
Okay, hold on a sec. Is it actually over? The more empathetic you are, the earlier you’ll be able to tell when the feelings are fading for you. If you catch it early enough, you can talk it out with your partner and see if the fading feelings are mutual, or if it’s something just one of you feels, and the two of you agree to try to rekindle the feelings.
Uh but the feelings are fading, dude.
Um, did you just call me “dude”? Anyway, don’t confuse fading love with just being in that comfortable, “boring” stage: Continue reading
You do this: you ride the bumpiest, smallest plane on the planet from San Francisco to Albuquerque. You have white knuckles and the Xanax is taking the edge off the anxiety you feel, but just barely. You wonder if the plane falls out of the sky will it spin or tumble. Maybe it will just dive down nosefirst, and for a beautiful minute everyone will be weightless in the freefall inside the cabin. You decide that if that happens, you will unbuckle your seatbelt, you will enjoy the last few moments of your life like an astronaut. Continue reading
It’s usually like this: you catch his eye, usually it’s online, maybe it’s in person, you get his attention. He sees past your currently questionable facial hair choices to the real you. Maybe he is good at texting back, though more often than not he’s not: “Sorry I’m bad at reminding you I’m interested in you wait why am I still single?” You flirt back and forth and you’re excited for when the two of you spend time together, which is frustratingly seldom because your work schedules are opposite. You’re eager to explore this because this one is local, for once you’re not FaceTiming or coordinating time zones or coming up with clever photo ideas to send him selfies. A few hours before a dinner date with him he texts you his apology and promises to stay connected. “I didn’t feel the chemistry but let’s still be friends” is nice to hear, but it’s also the sound of never hearing from someone again for the rest of your life.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BEMAxEZujdB/?taken-by=blcksmth&hl=en
You’re in the waiting room of the doctor’s office, you are called in by a tight-lipped nurse. You sit in the examining room, look around. It’s the usual suspects: the boxes of latex gloves, the canister of cotton swabs, the paper-covered vinyl-cushioned examining table. The doctor’s assistant comes in, updates your information. She’s warm and sharp as a tack: she remembers that you live in the neighborhood, that you moved from California a few years back. She notices you haven’t had a refill for the Xanax you take to fly lately, asks if you need more. “No,” you exhale, “I’m not flying as much anymore. That relationship ended.” Suddenly without warning David’s ghost is there in the room with the two of you, standing behind her. He never says anything, this ghost that appears sometimes, his blue eyes just stare at you. Continue reading
You do it like this: you get through the anniversaries, one at a time. Your first FaceTime date, his first trip out to Portland from Milwaukee, your first trip together to New York. Sometimes your brain plays tricks on you, you dream of an alternate universe where the two of you are still together, but it happens less and less often. He’s like an actor making appearances in your dreams that the writers are trying to write out slowly, making just cameos, then finally his contract running out.
In the meantime, you cautiously put your toe back into the dating waters. The last time was way too soon, it was a disaster and you weren’t ready yet, you took things too fast (dated pop-culture references not to say when having sex with someone for the first time: 1. “Brace for impact” 2. “Can you smell what The Rock is cooking?” 3. “Autobots, ROLL OUT!”). This time you decide to take it slower. It’s funny, you muse to yourself before a beer with a handsome guy you met on Tinder, I was one of those guys who used to be like “Let’s go on a date, let’s not call it “hanging out”. Now you realize that this is all the energy you have for anyone anymore. You can’t call it a date yet. Maybe you’re waiting for the thunderclap that hit you when you first saw David in person for the first time. Maybe you’re scared you’ll never feel that again for anyone. Continue reading
You keep it together like this: you wake up, you get groceries, you pick up cat food for Ned from the vet. You do this all successfully without crying! You celebrate these little victories since the breakup, these small signs that you’re getting better. You get online on the dating apps (major shout out to the dudes trying to look serious and smoldering in their profile pictures, who come off looking crazy and murder-y). You look at the New York guys to see who might be available to date once you move out there, but instead you’re interrupted by a vivid mental image of every single one of them taking turns on your ex who lives there, all of them lining up for a chance at him, the line extending around the block, extending across the Brooklyn bridge into Manhattan, all the men eager with hungry, mean eyes and bodies far more muscular than yours, and at the head of the line your former love’s door, occasionally opening, letting one out, letting another in, him closing the door gently like he used to with only you, and now a revolving door of sex with anyone but you. You shake your head of this image, grab your keys, head to your first therapy appointment. You have no clue what you talk to therapists about, it’s probably a bad fit because he’s not even gay and what the fuck would he know about your life. You go up to his office, greet each other, look at his walls lined with books. Maybe one of the books has the right sequence of words to make you better again, the magic incantation to make you as good as you were with David. The therapist says: “What would you like to talk about?”
You burst the fuck into tears. Continue reading
Part 5 of 5. To read previous parts, click here for Part 1.
It’s the holiday season in 1991, and I’m a freshman in college. I’m coming back home to Albuquerque from spending time in Los Alamos, New Mexico, with my first boyfriend Max. I met Max’s family there, saw Star Trek 6 with him in an empty movie theater while I whispered the complicated galactic politics to him. We secretly made out whenever possible: to this day, I have a soft, nostalgic spot for the Drakkar Noir cologne he wore. We get back to our dorms on the UNM campus, and I get the call from my sister: something is wrong, come to the house right away.
I open the front door to my parents’ house, and my life is never the same after that. I see my sister’s tear-stained face, she’s in the living room with her husband Bob. My Dad is stoic but barely keeping it together while my grandmother shuffles around in her slippers, not understanding exactly what happened. My mom is wandering from room to room in the old Victorian house, incoherent, apoplectic, wailing with grief. I know then that my big brother John is dead. This is what it looks like when a family explodes from the inside out. Continue reading
I was honored to be interviewed for Matt Baume’s Sewers Of Paris podcast series. *Thrill* as I recount stories of my childhood sci-fi crushes! (I didn’t give Quantum Leap-era Scott Bakula’s legs due credit in the podcast; apologies Scott) *Wonder* as I recall formative music of my youth like Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814! *Cringe* as I audibly start crying when I talk about my ex! My gift to you is the feeling of being profoundly uncomfortable, so please click here to listen to the podcast.
Tears of happiness stream down your face as you think: thank you God. You are sitting across from him on his bed in his apartment in Bed-Stuy, you flew here a week after he called you and said he was sorry, that he’s had a rough time without you in his life, that he’s missed you since the breakup. You didn’t tell your friends about the call, you secretly flew out on a redeye after work one day. You went to his apartment, and after hasty greetings to his roommates (who scrammed the fuck out of there quickly), the two of you went to his bedroom and talked about everything: the expectations, the communication that was absent until it seemed too late, the pressure that social media puts on a public relationship. You find a common ground, you make commitments to mend what was missing, you hold hands, you cry together. The two of you call your families, your close friends, agree to keep it off of social media for the time being, maybe forever. Later, you hold him in your arms, you smell the familiar smell of his neck, of his hair and his sweat, and you get a full night’s sleep for the first time in almost two months. Continue reading
Do this, exactly: Wake up on your forty-first birthday in 2014 on Thanksgiving, and finally feel happy, feel ready for what’s next. Realize that although there’s a lot you have in common, break up with a very sweet man who you’ve been seeing for a few months. Hunker down and make some fun art, take some silly pictures, spend Christmas in a snowless Portland winter. Spend time with friends, miss your family who you can’t see very often around the holidays because of your day job. Continue reading