Trans/plant/portation

This is cross-posted from an article I wrote for I Fry Mine in Butter, a terrific popular culture blog.

In thinking about the anti-immigrant it’s-okay-to-use-racial-profiling law that passed in Arizona last week, my mind flashed back to V, all the way back to 1983. Knowing that it’s only a matter of time before the Gestapo, I mean, the Visitors, come to take them away for being illegal, I mean, scientists, they ask their former landscaper, Sancho, to get them over the border. Though this storyline and plot moment is fraught with all kinds of stereotypes about Latinos, Jews, police, and the power dynamics between these, it’s still written from the point of view of the smuggler as hero. Of the Latino smuggler as hero, no less. I can wrack my brain (okay, I have wracked my brain, through a nasty course of stomach flu, in fact) and I cannot come up with another instance in the last 40 years in which a mainstream television show or movie depicted illegal immigration by Latinos in this way. (To see the clip, start watching about a minute into the segment below.)

I can, however, come up with dozens of positive depictions of other people fleeing across borders illegally and/or without proper documentation, including, but certainly not limited to:

The Sound of Music

Holocaust (American mini series, 1978)

The Terminal

In America

The Visitor

Gotcha

There are also films too numerous to count with positive depictions of legal Latino immigrants in the United States. So why the gap? Wasn’t the U.S. founded by . . . uh, wait a minute. I suppose the U.S. was invaded, after all, over a course of hundreds of years, mostly by Europeans. So perhaps it doesn’t bother us to cheer for people who are emigrates from say, Austria to Switzerland. We can identify with wanting to leave the Continent, is that it? Those countries are so small anyway, it’s like you could sneeze from one sovereign nation to another, so it’s okay if you know, you happen to be on one side of the border, because it’s so likely it would like, be a total accident. Sure. We can get behind that.

Many of these positive narratives spend quality time explaining the circumstances that drove the characters to seek refuge in another country without proper paperwork, in fact, they justify why documentation wasn’t possible under the circumstances. Hell, Clan of the Von Trapps don’t skirt across the Alps until the last 20 seconds of the movie, and that shit is 3 hours long. So, for fascist governments, real or pretend, fleeing is okay. Emphasis on fleeing, as in leaving. Neither the Von Trapps nor the scientists in V are entering the USA.

The Arizona law also fascinates me because we’ve just passed the 10th anniversary of the Elian Gonzalez fiasco, in which his mother and he set out for the US, leaving behind Cuba and his father. His mother died en route, his relatives in Miami laid claim to him, as he was, after all, fleeing a Communist nation we would accept him once he set foot on U.S. soil. He was 6 at the time. The legal battle that ensued, the taking of Elian by gunpoint from his quiet Florida bedroom, those were shocking images at the time. But we were happy to have him here, even though he didn’t have a stitch of paperwork on him. He was fleeing from forces that weren’t his own making. He was running to a better life.

I think perhaps that’s where we all get caught up. It’s this idea of a better life that is possible here, and not in say, Canada. Mind you, tons of people immigrate to Canada every  year, but we don’t pay that much heed. We’ve got the damn melting pot. Those Canucks, as they told us last Olympic Games, have the tapestry. Whatever. My point is, we’re not paying attention to the circumstances of immigrants—legal or otherwise—when we talk about neo-fascist laws like this one in Arizona. We’re only debating the effects of the law. Immigrants in this polarized, often reductive debate get reduced merely to some monolithic infiltrator: they’re coming here, they want something from us. Maybe we don’t have enough melting pot goodness to go around, and they are looking hungry for s’mores.

It doesn’t suit hegemonic ideas about what the U.S. stands for to say this immigrant is not equal to my grandparents who were immigrants, because every new wave and new region of immigrants has received its due course of stigma in this country. But culturally speaking, as narratives go, the idea that new bodies are in our midst who want our jobs gets a lot more air time, and with the fear that Latinos will be in majority in just the next 20 years, well, that gets some English-only speakers a bit nervous, perhaps. Here, of course, jobs are watered-down as well, not the focus of the conversation, because once you get into which jobs we’re talking about, the hate-mongering around undocumented workers makes no sense. Are we really afraid that there won’t be enough migrant farm worker jobs? Or other poorly paid, under-the-minimum-wage jobs?

Maybe we could use some more narratives, some more instances to humanize the humans who are here with us. It would have to be better than nothing. I’m not suggesting that art and narrative changes culture, but I think the time has passed where we can continue to frame immigration from Latin America as a wave of less-than people coming to take something that isn’t theirs, when that isn’t the case and when that wasn’t the criteria for our Founding Fathers.

I’ve got a reading coming up Sunday evening as a local performer in the Tranny Roadshow, and thus I wasn’t terribly surprised when the Union-Bulletin, the local rag here in town, contacted me for an interview. I mean, it would never have happened had I remained in DC, unless one counts the Mirror company as a reputable newspaper. As it is, the “U-B” as people (affectionately) call it, is a bit more than a stone’s throw from being a paper that one retrieves gratis from the brightly colored  bins that litter the sidewalk like plasticized hawkers near a carnival. Apartment Guide! Great Jobs Listing! FREE Yellow Pages!!

It’s not that I have anything against the U-B, it’s that people I like have things against the U-B. Their Web site needs an overhaul, for one, with a one-inch column in the middle for the actual article content, and a thick bar at the right advertising things I will never buy, even if I live for 100 more years. I just can’t get worried enough about my nonexistent prostate, and I am not going to learn some random mom’s secret for white teeth. I suspect malware is part of her solution, see. But really, my indifference to the U-B is that there doesn’t seem to be any real reason to get a copy. I hear everything I need to from word of mouth or my news feeds. I know when the WW Balloon Stampede is coming, and I’ll be there. The rodeo happens the same Labor Day weekend every summer. If a resident of Walla Walla knows more than 5 people in town, then she probably will hear about every event for the next upcoming weekend that she cares about. If I wanted to know what the Elks Lodge is up to, I need only walk three blocks over and ask them. It’s just not that big a town. And I’m sure they know that’s a stumbling block to keeping revenue up.

So maybe I’ve been missing out by not procuring the U-B regularly, and now that one can’t read their articles online anymore without subscribing (even the New York Times is cheaper), perhaps I’m too cut off from the goings-on in my own city. After all, Walla Walla is light years away from having any interest in a Wallist-type blog.

The other thing that concerned me when I got the reporter’s email was that my bleeding heart liberal friends tell me the U-B is unflinchingly conservative. Now, I don’t care what they do in their own home, but I don’t want that stuff shoved in my face, know what I mean? Just what kinds of questions were they going to put to me regarding something called the Tranny Roadshow? On the other hand, I’m the one peddling my sex change memoir to every agent I can Google, so I’m not exactly hiding in a cave.

I thought about her offer, and talked to a few people, and said okay, let’s meet up. We agreed to meet at Cafe Perk, in the middle of downtown, which granted, is two blocks wide by six blocks long, but it has a heart, damn it. I tend to go to this place only when I’m having a meet up with someone, because the Patisserie has too many people I know in it, and I don’t want to blow the feeling of just rightness that I have when I’m trying to bang out another chapter or short story with memories of invasive questions and avoidant answers, the kind of repartee that Sarah Palin wishes she had with Katie Couric.

I got there a little early on Monday morning, and ordered a nonfat chai. I forgot to specify a vanilla chai, since out here in the Pacific Northwest, “chai” means “burn your mouth out” and true to form, I felt the tastebuds on my tongue sizzle and die. For some reason this made it a little difficult to speak, like I’d experienced when I’d gotten my tongue pierced at 28 and the thing had blown up to twice its normal size. Three days later I was fine, I swear, but in the meantime I sounded like I was wearing vampire teeth. Great. Maybe my mouth would settle down in the next 8 minutes.

It did not.

She seemed extremely young, like 4, so maybe she was a prodigy or maybe she would just ask softball questions, not wanting to get into the nitty gritty of What It Means To Be Transgendererer. I smiled. She looked like she was from Minnesota. Very Nordic. I guessed her father’s name was Thor.

Gosh, she was just so excited to write this article, to run in Thursday’s edition. Usually she got to write about things she knew. I could picture the small and worn-out newsroom: buzzing fluorescent lights in the ceiling, desk calendars filled with notes (buy ham) and doodles (Obama with horns on his head) dotting the desks, a ripped section of carpet fixed unceremoniously with duct tape, and one very tired entertainment editor contemplating retirement as he reads the press release that just came over the fax machine. Trans what? Give it to the pre-schooler, I’m not handling this.

I decided to give her a break. If I was the first trans person she’d ever met, maybe I shouldn’t be a total card.

We talked about how I’d come to know the Roadshow even existed. It’s not a very interesting story, and hopefully it will be revealed in tomorrow’s paper. It’s true that I met my future wife there, but it wasn’t our first date. I was still in the wake of a crappy breakup with a crappy person who’d spent two plus years being crappy to me, but I noticed that there was a cute, smart woman at the show. So what if our first date wasn’t until 10 months later? When she asked me why I thought people should go to the show, I had regular, plain, somewhat accurate things to say, but I did flippantly include the “you never know, you could meet your future partner there” line. I’m curious to see if that made it in there.

She didn’t ask either of the two worst questions to ask a trans person, which, for everyone’s edification, are:

1. What was your name before?

2. Can you come to the ladies room and drop your pants so I can see your hee haw?

Both of these have been asked of me, one on many occasions. I won’t say which.

She did ask, however, how I identified, and I didn’t want to answer that one, mostly because I didn’t think it was relevant to the article—it would be like asking the bronco riders how they identified as rodeo participants—but also because I didn’t want to be pinned down for all of my fellow residents to read, at least, not until they all jump on some list that gets hung on Main Street listing their most embarrassing moment, because that seems about equal to me. But her manner of asking was nice, almost apologetic. So I said that these terms are in contestation within the trans community and that they have different meaning in mainstream culture, and I didn’t want to take all of that on in this one article as my personal legacy.

See? I should go be a politician. We moved on to the show and I said it would be a lot of fun, tickets aren’t usually free, and people should check it out. She asked why I’d pointed the show organizers to the local liberal arts college. The smart ass in me wanted to reply that I thought it better than sending them to the local Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints church. But honestly, I don’t know about venues in town outside of the college. The Fairgrounds seem a skosh too big.

The reporter was nice, nodded a lot, didn’t seem to want to make me out to be a laughing stock—which we all know I do quite well enough on my own—and I felt pretty good after it was over. Now we’ll see, tomorrow, what the editors have done to the story. And come Sunday night, I’ll know how much of a success it was. For all of the LGBT folks in town who don’t get a lot of open air gay time, I think this will be a good thing.

And yes, I’ll pick up a copy of the U-B tomorrow. It’ll be the first one I’ve bought.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what I should do, occupation wise, when I grew up. I had a poster of a smiling Smurfette sliding down a powerfully bright rainbow, exhorting that girls can do anything. Being a precocious 8-year-old, I aimed straight for the top, Icarus or no Icarus, and settled on POTUS. Why not president, after all? After a time I saw reason, and selected doctor instead. This wasn’t as big a leap as it might seem, since I spent a good amount of time as a child in hospitals and medical offices, and doctor clearly equaled boss. Which is who I was. I was boss, at least until I stepped out of the house to wait for the bus and came into uncomfortable proximity with the bullies from my neighborhood, and at that point I was pretty much clear that they weren’t responding to my personal sense of leadership.

For a decade, I had picked physician, and it’s difficult for me to explain why I was quite so attached to the concept for so long. I was a kid who thought that there would come a point in my life during which I would have learned everything there is to learn. I hadn’t thought about the progress of humans, clearly, but I also hadn’t given any quality thinking time to the space after I’d absorbed it all. What would I do then? Reread it all? Become a globe of light?

Someone at some moment exposed me to the idea of histology, and my dreams of Dr. Maroon evaporated. That just seemed too hard. I went with the wave of young women giving up, perched as we were, at the precipice over the ocean, quietly taking our turns leaping in. So willing, those lemmings. My friends had gone from talking about fighting fires and scuba diving to find new marine life to being secretaries and nurses. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with office employment or nursing. There is something wrong, in my book, with giving up on one major life goal due to insecurity, but to add the arbitrary nonsense of insecurity from one’s gender, race, or ethnicity, and the world starts to go off the rails a little.

And yet, even as I write this, there are four women in orbit around Planet Earth. Clearly the confines of the 1970s have relaxed quite a bit. I only had the Space Camp movie and Sally Ride as models and hell, I was a long in the tooth teenager by then, my fate already sealed. Okay, of course it wasn’t but I also believed, having not yet acquired a distrust of stupid talking people, everything adults said to me, even when they were clearly incorrect or limited statements. For example, upon graduating high school after 12 years of Catholic education, I honestly believed that people were only ever one of the following:

• Catholic
• Jewish
• Protestors

I have no explanation; we all had to take world religions our third year of high school. I read about Confucius and Hinduism and the Qaran, but I didn’t see those kids in my world, so they must not have been in the United States, or at least, New Jersey. But these contradictions didn’t worry me one bit; I bought what was told to me soup to nuts, and trusted that I was not science-y enough to be a physician. I did get praise, however, for my writing.

Writer, however, was not a word that instilled happiness in my parents. It sounded to them like a straight shot to poverty and narcissistic delusion. Before I could blink my mother whisked me off to Philadelphia to take a battery of tests otherwise known as career counseling. I sat in a wooden chair for 6 hours filling out Myers-Briggs questions, a Stanford Binet IQ test, ink blot and other occupation-oriented tests. And voila, a couple of weeks later, a lovely letter came in the mail with the answer, as if a civil servant and a carnival fortune-teller had a love child with a fixation on material wealth.

I was strongest in expressing myself, I had a genius ability to handle spatial relations, and I was scraping genius on verbal ability, with an exceptionally average ability at math. So of course they decided I should be a lemon grower. Okay, they didn’t say lemon grower. And sadly, there is no Lego Building major at our institutions of higher education, anywhere. The letter said I’d be good at mass communication, journalism, writing, and oh gosh, this was probably the worst news for my parents. And now they were out $400 to boot.

I considered a career as a book editor. That was steady salary and I still got to play with books and words. And suddenly, it was my career path, until I realized that I could easily lose my mind doing such a thing.

I hit college and realized I’d been letting everyone else make my decisions for me, however well intentioned they’d been. I took classes in television writing and directing, only to learn that collaborative writing entails other writers, who are sometimes burned out, sycophants to someone else, or mind-numbingly closed off to learning new stories. One workshop had Sally Field’s son in it, and he was a good writer, but the professor couldn’t do enough to rave on and on about every word he farted out of his ass. For what it’s worth, I thought his work in the workshop was boring and a little too misanthropic for me, but hey, we were all there to learn and grow, right? Over time the prof started showing up drunk, and then he stopped coming altogether. Word in the Hall of Languages was that he was going through a divorce. I just wanted feedback on my story, or for some of his colleagues to help him out. Neither happened.

I realized the end of my college career was fast approaching, so I did what any reasonable person would do, I took the Graduate Record Exam and went straight into graduate school. Even deferring the real world for two years was better than nothing, and when that was over, I looked at my 24-year-old self and still wasn’t sure what the hell to do with my life. I knew I was tired of living on a $9,000 stipend, but I didn’t—still—feel any confidence in my skill set. So I puttered around my college town for a few years and finally took a job selling and buying books down in the nation’s capitol.

It was a terrible, painful, unproductive job, with overworked staff who wanted to know why the boss had hired outside of them, who the fat white girl was, and how long I would last. Anyone who’d placed a bet on less than a calendar year, I hope you made some good money off of me. Ten months later I was out the door, scrambling to find anything in the very-more-expensive-than-upstate-New-York city. Four months into my search—it was well before the tech bubble burst—I found a job as a publications coordinator. This started me down a waterslide of jobs into the heart of information technology, and 8 years later, I was pretty much at the top of the technical ladder. None of this had come from an ink blot.

Moving out to Walla Walla, the people who read this blog regularly already know, has been a helluva big adjustment, and not just because I haven’t found a single decent job lead since we moved. But I do think that it’s given me some things I haven’t had before: time to write and work on my craft, a sense that I can really sit back and think about my next career move, absent the kind of heart-pounding pressure I’ve felt before, and an opportunity to re-evaluate self-evaluation. Maybe I am not my career. Maybe I don’t have to take job names: usability specialist, bookseller, writer, and pretend they are all I am. Those are good things.

I’m not sure what my next move is, although I did get a call from the Census (two, actually, which makes me wonder how many people they’re actually about to hire this spring) to do enumeration for the next ten weeks, and I may have a job with Microsoft, which up until this move has been like spokesperson for Satan. And yet I know that if I go with either of these options, I don’t have to make them about me. I can just be me.

Smurfette taught me I can be anything, after all. And while I didn’t really take any vocational advice from her, that rainbow in the picture? It made me kind of gay.

There’s a scene early on in Juno where the audience meets Allison Janney’s character, Bren MacGuff, and learns about her dog obsession. She’s got sweaters of knit dogs, a dog mouse pad, dog statuettes galore, they’re everywhere. I at least appreciated the absurdity of her character’s predilections, but it also served a purpose in Diablo Cody’s script, namely to knock us off guard. For she is the last person, this stepmother, who we all know are supposed to be evil doers in the world of the protagonist, to support the pregnant teenager. And then, she does, wonderfully, in fact.

And that is why I like absurdity, and humor writing, or in this case, a comic screenplay. It helps of course, that Allison Janney played her, because the woman has some really good timing, as evidenced throughout her Emmy-laden career on The West Wing. For what it’s worth, I would really love to see a series about congressional staffers and the polarization of the political parties, told in the same quickfire and witty way. I hear NBC has a few time slots they could use.

But seriously, humor is not easy to write. Good humor, anyway. Often, it demands accessible cultural reference, or audience identification with the situation and punchline. Some of the funniest stuff out there takes a common experience and turns it around, creating a completely new take, like making an origami swan out of a greasy KFC wrapper and giving it to one’s older brother as a lunch treat, since one had previously eaten the chicken inside that he was expecting to receive. Or something.

I was not a regular viewer of Seinfeld, but Larry David is very funny to me when it comes to showing the annoying side of people, and laughing through it. Elaine, stuck in a toilet stall, begging her neighbor for just one square of tissue paper, George’s unintentional killing of his fiancee because he insisted on buying the cheapest invitations to the wedding, and those came complete with toxic envelope glue, these are moments I remember even though it stopped airing in the last millennium. There’s also something about how humor makes for a full and breathing character—it takes loving big parts of George for viewers to be okay with the fact that he’s relieved he doesn’t have to get married, because otherwise, he’s an abhorrent person. Well, he’s kind of abhorrent anyway, but he’s still got his lovable parts. For me, David sometimes gets a bit too mean-spirited, so I can’t be counted among his big fans, but that’s okay, there’s a long list of folks I have to admire for their contributions to comedy.

All of this is to say comedy writers and humorists are supposed to make it look easy, to tap into our frustrations or insecurities and turn them inside out, exposing the fluffiness on the inside, if our experiences were like socks. My experiences have a couple of holes in them but mostly look okay, thanks to OxyClean. I just try to remember that my goal isn’t to make writing funny, it’s to reveal that finding life funny in general should be documented, in case anyone else agrees with me. I didn’t venture out to be a humor writer because most young writers really, really, powerfully want to write the next great novel, American or otherwise. But the humor kept showing up, like Uncle Lloyd at our Friday night dinners, and we never really knew why he kept hanging out with us until we realized his wife made really awful Van deKamp fish on Fridays and he was just looking for a non-fishy-smelly house. Two weeks in a row of Gorton’s finest imitation cod and we were free. No, I haven’t found a way to banish humor, but I’m not looking for one.

I am the prepackaged fish dinner of writers, and I’m okay with that.

A guy, his wife, his mother, and 25 million frozen sperm go for a road trip to Portland. No, it’s not the beginning of a joke. I took a road trip to Portland with my wife, my mother, and a million frozen sperm. Just for kicks, really. Okay, not for kicks. If it could have been avoided I would have, trust me, avoided it like the plague, like . . . oh, forget it. Who would wish such an event on themselves? But I’ll at least start at the beginning.

Some gentle readers may recall that we’ve tried this whole conception thing before, specifically last fall. It did not take, so we’re trying again, many months and lab results and sonograms later. Whereas the delivery fella from FedEx was uncomfortably cavalier the first time, on this occasion he was terse, almost gruff. It seemed he was frustrated with our incapacity to already be pregnant so he didn’t have to haul the 22-pound thermos to our doorstep.

“Good morning,” he said to me, loudly, with twelve minutes left before post meridian would take over. I’m glad he wished me a good 12 minutes. It was almost like he was casting his bet to Drew Carey from Contestant’s Row, but with no enthusiasm.

I didn’t really know what to say back to him, so I kind of nodded and kind of grunted a salutation.

“Guess I’m back here again,” he said, relishing in my humiliation, or something. I could have told him he was being redundant, throwing the shame of the moment onto him, but I was more interested in just completing our little transaction and having a door between us, as it was meant to be.

I hauled the plastic container inside. My mother, who was visiting us, took one look at it and suddenly seemed touched.

“Aw, it’s like a little robot,” she said.

I rolled my eyes at her, even as I appreciated her support.

Truth be told, our little million friends were joining us late; they were supposed to arrive the previous Saturday, but the bank in San Francisco hadn’t sent them out, and were horrified on Monday morning when I called to inquire. In their haste to make things right they reversed all of the shipping charges, which trust me, were plenty expensive, and promised we’d have them on Tuesday morning. So with a dozen minutes remaining, we had just gotten our guaranteed delivery.

I had disclosed to my mother earlier about our attempts at creating what Susanne still called a “parasitic fetus,” changing this to “baby” when I communicated with Mom so that she wouldn’t worry about our hearts being in the right place about this. Mom was on board and excited, as was Susanne’s mother when she was told of our plans. I actually wonder if there isn’t a room in her house, back in the Midwest, where all sorts of toys and clothing and supplies are piling up in expectation of our announcement that we’re having a child, because she seems that thrilled about it. But as we’re 2,600 miles away, we’re not privy to any potential hoarding, and we’re not about to ask.

Also, we considered it bad timing that my Mom’s visit was coinciding with the probable ovulation date, but I at least was willing to stick my fingers in my ears and shout, “blah blah blah” to pretend there weren’t any strange boundaries being crossed. Mom and Susanne really just seemed to prefer that I not discuss the issue with either of them.

So there we were, all standing around in the foyer, looking at our friend the robot with his little stash of swimming life-bearers. Should all sperm feel so attended to. Or not.

An ultrasound the day before this delivery indicated that we should attempt to knock Susanne up at precisely 11AM on Wednesday. This was not convenient news, as my Mom’s flight back home was scheduled for 12:15PM on Wednesday, out of Portland Airport, 3 and a half hours’ drive from here. So our options went from uncomfortable to awful to worse. We could, it appeared, pick from the following:

1. I could take Mom out to Portland and Susanne could do the whole kit and kaboodle herself, back at home. That was a non-starter.

2. I could take Mom out to Portland really super early and speed right back and do the deed. Grossly unrealistic, and risky, in terms of my driving at the end of the 8-hour round trip, and then being able to see my hands in front of me to know what I was doing back in Walla Walla.

3. We could take the robot and entrails along with us to Portland, stay the night, take Mom to the airport, and attempt to conceive in the hotel room.

We picked the last option, feeling like the first two were really just red herrings.

I broke the news to Mom, who was fine with it. “Well, you have to do what you have to do,” she said. I figured no matter the situation, it was pretty much always a little weird anyway.

Susanne had taken to calling it the Bargain Baby, because it was half off with the free shipping and all. That would be her kind of baby. I told her we couldn’t ever tell a child we’d called it that. She questioned my commitment to frugality. I attempted to reassure her.

Receipt of robot completed, our plan swung into action. I had already loaded up the car with everything else—foodstuffs for the trip, our suitcases, laptop computers, a pillow, and an updated iPod. Down Route 12 we traveled, out to the gorge west of Walla Walla, Lowden, and Touchet, along the banks of the Columbia, the deep blue water coursing through red rock covered in sage brush that stretched to the cloudless sky. It was a nice farewell to my mother’s visit, direct from Washington State, the Pretend Evergreen State. Mom oohed and ahed at the landscape but noted how lonely it looked out here. I agreed.

Susanne, for her part, slept almost the whole trip, until we pulled over at Mulnomah Falls just outside Portland. We walked around, and I tried not to think about everything in the trunk. Of the car, that is.

We’d driven so long, and not eaten much, so by the time we made it from our airport hotel to an Italian eatery in the Hollywood neighborhood, everything tasted like heaven. I nearly ate the table, just for the fiber.

“Oh, isn’t this marinara sauce wonderful,” asked my mother.

“It really is,” said Susanne, agreeing exuberantly. Jesus, we were eating cheese toast with red sauce. You’d have thought it was black truffle on top of foie gras and drizzled with saffron oil and Beluga caviar. But wow did it taste good.

Coming back to our hotel we settled in for some laptopping and crossword puzzling time. We slept like rocks until, at 5:30, with the sky still in stubborn nightfall, there came a great rumbling from the room above. Smash, went the ceiling. Pound, pound, pound, pound, said the heavy-footed occupant upstairs. It was like an elephant practicing her catwalk. Back and forth, back and forth. My mother sent me to the front desk. I looked a sight, with dark bags under my eyes, my face somewhat puffy, dried drool on my cheek, and my hair pointing in so many directions I looked like that guy from She Blinded Me with Science.

“Hi,” I announced. This is where telepathy would have been handy, but darn it, I had to use words.

“Hi,” he said. I could only guess at his expectation for why I was standing in front of him with an inside-out t-shirt and dingy Old Navy pajama pants.

“The person in the room above us is very loud, and has woken up my mother. Next my wife will be up. Please help.”

I probably should have explained my predicament in a different, better way, but he seemed to understand enough.

“Are you sure it’s the room directly above you?”

This was not a question I’d anticipated. I didn’t really even understand it, come to think of it. “What other room would it be?”

“You know, maybe it’s to one side or the other.”

Well, screw me for not memorizing the building blueprints before selecting this gem of a hotel on Priceline. I thought about the pounding noises.

“No, it was directly above us, right in front of where the beds would be.”

“Okay, I’ll take care of it,” he assured me.

I reported back to my bunkmates. There was hardly any way our circumstances could have been more awkward.

Susanne, who was of course awake after all of this, remarked that no way would the front desk knock on the door of the prancing pounder. She had worked at a hotel, and no way would she ever have checked on someone in a room unless she heard screams of bloody murder. But lo and behold, a few minutes later, the pacing ceased, and we went back to sleep for a time.

And then we needed to get Mom to the airport, which was around a corner, down a street, next to a highway, make another turn, and voila! Kisses and hugs goodbye, chirps of “what a wonderful visit” and “good luck with robot,” and then we were back in the car, making our way, making our way, making, our, uh oh, we missed a turn. And then another turn. And somehow we were at IKEA, and wow, 4 grand, 64 indecipherable instruction sheets, 2,387 tiny screws and dowels, and 28,291 swear words later, I hate IKEA. Especially when I’m trying to get to the frigging airport hotel so I can impregnate my wife. This is exactly when I am seriously not interested in buying an $89 POANG chair.

We needed to admit we were stressing out. Susanne gruffly suggested I call 411 and get directions from the airport to the airport hotel. Who was I to argue?

Finally, we pulled into the parking spot we’d left earlier that morning. Eleven o’clock was our time to trot, and it was 10:49. We raced back to the room, and I took off my shoes, because of course shoes would inhibit bargain baby robot creation. Susanne pointed to the storage container. Almost invisible, hanging loosely around the metal clasp, reveling in its securityness, was a thin plastic cuff. We had remembered to bring oven mitts to get at the vial in the frozen nitrogen—not wanting to sacrifice fingers to the cause—but we’d forgotten scissors. I scratched at it with a key.

I might as well have been trying to scratch my way out of Alcatraz. This was not the Shawshank Redemption.

I returned to the front desk. There was a new employee there, a young woman. Maybe I would impress her with my street clothes, since I’d changed out of my sleep wear.

She was reticent to lend me scissors, but I must have looked just pleading and pathetic enough. I went back upstairs and cut the plastic. Victory! I turned back to the door.

“Wait, there’s another one.”

Thank goodness one of us had some intelligence. I cut the second cuff. Back downstairs, return the scissors, back upstairs, sweating and really not in the mood for any of this nonsense anymore. I donned the mitts and opened the tank inside and pulled out the vial holder thingy, and . . . .

THERE WAS NO VIAL.

Now then, at this point, to say we were on our last nerve would be a bit of an understatement. I believe I screamed, and I believe I heard Susanne take in such a quantity of air as to resemble any kind of animal that has great lung capacity, and no, I would never call my lovely wife a whale. But a large lobed lungfish, maybe.

I plunged my mitt in again and pulled out the whole canister, and dumped it upside down on the desk, freezing the fake leather blotter, as the vial tumbled out. Screw you anyway, fake leather blotter. I put all the robot bits back and let the vial thaw on the desk. It was 11:06.

Finally, we were back on the road home, having made our checkout time of noon, and we enjoyed the sun and the light traffic as we sped through the rainforest side of Oregon.

We like the trees.

I had an epiphany yesterday, round about 2 in the afternoon, that I should be contacting LGBT agents for my memoir. Why, I wondered, have I been trying only the mainstream folks—that’s like dressing up in my nerdy best and asking out the lead cheerleader to a rodeo (no offense to cheerleaders who like nerds). Trouble was, I didn’t really know how to find them, aside from searching for them on Google, your friendly neighborhood search engine. And that approach was fraught with danger, read, the Big Bad Fraudulent Agent. Apparently, they lurk everywhere, in the corners of the interwebs, waiting to steal one’s money (I don’t have much, so I’m safe there) and ideas (hey, if they can do anything with them, more power to them!). So I figured that for every name I identified, I’d just double-check them somewhere else. This presumes, of course, that there is a long line of clearly identifiable gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender literary agents just lined up for writers like me.

Perhaps I was off the mark a little. Or maybe I can blame the search engine algorithm. I did get some lovely lists of agents, and then . . . then I had to do some text searches. In a list of 100+ agents, there were maybe three or four who admitted they worked with GLBT writers specifically, or who represented gay/lesbian work. This was going to take some time.

I did come up with one name, for the few hours of my effort, and I sent along a queery [sic] to her. And then it was bowling time. I made the hour-long trek, grumbling that my iPod strangely decided not to play about a quarter of the songs I’ve fed it over the years. Damn update.

My bowling mate asked me how I was doing and I said I’d figured out I should try to find GLBT agents. She gave me a look.

“See, and I thought you were all smart and stuff,” she said. I lovingly punched her in the shoulder.

I figured the hunt for an agent would be renewed in the morning. But again, it’s like looking for a four-leaf clover. I’ve already gone through the small gay presses and not heard so much as a ping back, but looking at their book releases I can see why. I don’t write about being drug-addicted, or living in San Francisco, or going through a string of abusive lovers, or being homeless, or anything else edgy. I do write about mental illness, but well, that’s been done by very good writers. I write about the wonderfulness and insanity of city living, and we all know that great writers have tackled that one, many times over. So I think to myself, well, being an Arab American formerly gay transgender professional city-turned-country dweller who survived a bout of major depression, a bad relationship, and a dozen years of Catholic school, and grew up in a mixed race and ethnicity, mixed religion household in New Jersey and somehow came out of it without a Jersey accent, well, there are some marketable things in there, somewhere.

I’ve been working on something like a short story a month, cranking out the ideas that have been crowding around for attention, and then launching into rewriting for a few versions before beginning another one. I’m sure I’ll go through and revise them again, but my point this winter was just to keep writing, identify my best simmering point of productivity, and play with all of the things I love about the craft of writing, until I either decided it was time to go back to the super/stupid power story (in which queer folks save the world) or I decided to tackle another long-form project. The superpower story needs a major rewrite/redesign, and I have to change one of the stupid powers because I really can’t allow myself to reference Dan Savage anymore, after he came out with that ridiculous column last week about the Washington State Attorney General.

I’ve got a good outline for a mystery novel I began a few years ago, and I’ve wanted for a very long time to tackle a memoir or close-to-real story about my childhood, centered on my epilepsy. Really, I’d like to try to relay the experience of having memory gaps and false memories that petit mal and grand mal seizures gave me. They each had their own strategy. The petit mal seizures (which no one calls petit mal anymore) stole time away from me, leaving me hanging in the middle of a sentence and restoring me, many seconds or half a minute later, either attempting to finish what I’d started, or leaving me disoriented about my thoughts. My mind was wracked with 90 of them a day before the doctors—who wouldn’t tell my mother what was wrong with me—got them under control.

The grand mal seizures (they’re not called that anymore, either) played a different trick. They filled in the lost time with whatever my child’s experiences could cobble together. Singing Thanksgiving carols around a grand piano my school didn’t own. Winning the Showcase Showdown in a bright orange t-shirt. Seeing buildings by Route 33 in Hightstown burn to the ground and feeling, really feeling, the thick wave of heat it gave off. I’ve spent hundreds of hours thinking about this book, even as the gender change story was more urgent for the telling of it. I want to write this book in a way that isn’t trite or cliche. Agents apparently loathe book openings with dream sequences, but darn it, false memories aren’t dreams. They’re closer to near-death experiences, in the way I’ve encountered them, like reaching to a different plane or a sticking one’s face into a parallel universe for just a moment and then trying to write down everything seen. I want to write this book.

And I’ll write it even if there are no agents for it. Because writers are supposed to just push on and write.

I’m sure we’ve all heard the narrative a hundred times over: I’ve been a writer since I first held writing implement to fingers. And my Mom loves my stories, and all my friends say my book is a bestseller. And then we’re supposed to laugh condescendingly, because this little intrepid person is so clueless, clearly, about the publishing industry. Oh, if they knew about the publishing industry, we think smugly to ourselves, they’d know that Mom’s opinion doesn’t matter, and all their friends are wrong.

Just to give this some dimension, the US published 172,000 books in 2005, according to the geeks who count such things. Of these, let’s be generous and say that 200 of them counted as “best seller” status. (Anyone remember French Women Don’t Get Fat?) That’s one tenth of one percent of everything published that year. Of course, most of these books don’t even dream of topping any list: Unsolved Problems of Noise and Fluctuations, a fantastic tome on physics, probably didn’t make it to people’s holiday wish lists. But even taking just the fiction, memoir, poetry, and narrative nonfiction into account, the likelihood is very, very low, trust me.

This isn’t to say people shouldn’t write down their stories, or whatever things they have cavorting around in their heads. It just means that most stuff goes nowhere, but on a page, in a notebook, or onto the hard drive of a computer. And that’s really okay, because the vast majority of our human endeavor to create the amazing is actually quite awful. Total drivel. Buzzard crap, or that Canada geese shit that turns everything green and stinks of high heaven—hey, it was a life experience I won’t ever forget.

So why write, even? If it all sucks, why bother?

My answer is my answer alone. I write because it gets better when I rewrite it. The third time around, it starts to sound nuanced. The fourth revision I’m making specific language choices, listening to the rhythm of the words, the believability of the dialogue. The fifth time through I may do something drastic, like change the tense, cut the first 7 pages and have the narrative begin at a new point. Actually, I usually chop out my beginnings, trusting that the quotation I heard a long time ago is true: One should start a story like one would pick up a puppy, a little behind the front. I have no idea anymore who said it, maybe St. Vincent Millay or Doris Lessing or Eudora Welty. Now that woman wrote a lot.

By the time I get around to the tenth revision, I’m just nitpicking words and it’s more like talking about nothing at the end of a coffee date than actual editing. I just need to declare it’s over, we’ll meet again someday. At this point I’ve cleaned it up, swept out excessive prepositional phrases, changed sentence structure, evaluated my tone, simplified, simplified, simplified, and attempted to really cast a light on my characters without overwriting them. I like it when readers pick up different aspects of my protagonists, when they almost like the foils to those protagonists, but for the fact that they’re really despicable.

If enough time goes by, my relation to my stories changes. I used to think of this as watching the story fall behind me as I charged ahead, a steam engine train of a person. I now see that we’re both moving, in some kind of random, and certainly unpredictable direction from each other. Sometimes we swing back around, like a comet passing through a solar system every 76.2 years, and old ideas make a new kind of sense to us. But sometimes we never occupy the same space again. Maybe that was the story best understood by my 17-year-old self, and my 39-year-old brain simply doesn’t want to hang onto it anymore. Or maybe I’ll enjoy seeing where I once was in capability, craft, and idea, even as I acknowledge that I’m in a new place.

In any case, I’m glad I’ve written down as much as I have. And while I would be thrilled, say, with an appearance on Ellen, I’m not presuming anything I write would be a bestseller. It’s true that after years of messing around with fiction, with literary analysis, and the reading of thousands of books, I really needed to write a memoir about my transition.

I really haven’t talked about why with anyone except my writing coach, Lea, who has more than one hand on the pulse of the universe and who I see as a really friendly, astute guide through this whole publishing rigamarole. First, I had some demons to exorcise, and writing was the best way to do that. A lot of that writing was just for me, not for any book, and most certainly not for anyone else’s retinas. But it did let some of the experience percolate and then steep, and gave me a blueprint for organizing the past 6 years into a sturdy narrative. There was some motivation stemming from my “mentoring” of a young female-to-male transsexual who was asking many of the same questions I’d pondered at the start of my experience. I’ve spent copious hours online, asking and later, answering the strangely narrow-banded litany of inquiries people have about transitioning: will my family hate me forever? Will my partner desert me? Am I just disfiguring myself? These are really all smaller branch questions that have popped out from one solid root question:

Am I crazy?

The answer none of us wants to admit is, maybe. Maybe we/you/they are crazy. But we’re probably not crazy, because crazy people don’t formulate questions on the Internet, research their options in a rational way, get opinions, sift through information, try different methods of managing what turns out to be an illness—crazy people behave less from a place of information gathering, and more from a place of irrational. Crazy people respond differently to the therapies around gender identity dysphoria. Transsexual people see their happiness and sense of well being increase dramatically after even the most mundane or simple changes to their sex and gender identity.

Could a memoir bring these points across? I thought so. Could I tell a story in which a fairly ordinary person realizes something extraordinary? And has the daring to see it through? Could I make getting a sex change seem like the right notion for a protagonist? I thought about it and decided yes. I don’t think I’m the trans Messiah; this isn’t an especially rare narrative, even as it’s certainly a twist on the boy meets girl tale.

And heck, in this memoir, there is boy-meets-girl, if readers are okay with boy-who-used-to-be-girl-meets-girl-who-usually-likes-other-girls.

Perhaps agents think the concept is too out there, and that’s why I’ve had trouble selling this. But I believe in this story and this project. I know that there are thousands of people who would guffaw at the hilarity I’ve lived through, and fret through the hard parts, and have questions like I’ve had, about medical services and people’s judgment and how strange it is to see the world through completely new lenses. I have faith in this book, and I just have to keep pitching it, even as I work on other stories that want their 15 minutes of fame on my keyboard.

I used to spend a lot of time getting stuck as a writer, but then I pushed through on the memoir project and now everything I bottled up wants to come out to play. And that’s how I know the memoir is a story that needs telling. And though we may cross each other in space at some point, hurtling in new directions, it will retain at least a core of interest for me, and hopefully for some agent and publisher out there.

And hey, my sister thinks it’s great.

Ever since I read in Stuff White People Like that Moleskines are a staple of white pretentiousness and posturing, I’ve been self-conscious about mine. Christian Lander had me nailed, right down to the MacBook Pro sitting next to it as I sipped at a non-fat latte in an overpriced coffee house. At least I hadn’t procured mine with a credit card—I’d scraped together cash from around the house, on the premise that if I only used loose change, it was like a free purchase, like how sucking on a mint after an outing to Sonic is free of calories. How idiotically white of me.

To make matters worse, this is not my first Moleskine. It is, in fact, my second. And if anyone cared to study this little black ruled book, they would discover a “2” written  in on the bottom, where the gold leaf should be, I guess.

Perhaps it’s better that I used up a whole book already, because at least I write in them, and no, they’re not just full of grocery lists and directions to IKEA.

I also don’t have anything in here worthy of da Vinci or Hemingway, two of the Moleskine’s more famous users, and Hemingway was a stuck up misogynist anyway. His best short story is six words long (his assertion, not mine).

No, I write in this notebook to keep track of query letter submissions, the inevitable rejections, submissions to journals, and the places I might submit to someday but for what I consider exorbitant submission fees (read, $10). I also keep track of my work in progress’ progress, scheduling deadlines for myself like an agent or editor would. That way I can have arguments with myself over why I’m giving excuses on missing important dates and don’t I know what this is doing to my career, and who is going to want to work with me after this?

I’m sure I still have my mind. It’s right in a box over there.

All of this ponderance about Moleskine notebooks comes because I’m sitting at PDX airport waiting to meet my mother who will be visiting us or a week. A technology professional is at the table next to mine, speaking loudly into his cell phone describing the apparently delicious and speciously nutritious drink he’s just purchased from Jamba Juice: a little bit of banana, strawberry, and mango, he declares loudly to his wife, plus some SOY PROTEIN! and ESSENCE OF WHEATGRASS! It sounds particularly disgusting to me, but then I’m the schmuck with a $4 nonfat mocha in a world-preserving, 100% recycled cup, so what do I know? And writing in a Moleskine. Damn Moleskine.

I don’t feel particularly pretentious, but then again, white people never do. We’re pretty much blind to it, save the very extreme examples—here I’m thinking of German avant garde artists from the 1980s, or say, people from Massachusetts named Biff Wellesley or Chauncy Milton who wear plaid shorts unironically and race in regattas around the Cape. Maybe I feel a bit incognito partly because I am sans my titanium Apple accessory this evening, and partly because I am in green cargo pants and a black hoodie. I fit right in to PDX, the city, not the airport. Come to think of it, who nicknames their city after their airport? I bet if I asked everyone in earshot who had a Moleskine to whip it out and wave it like they just don’t care, 39 percent of the folks here would be showing off their pretentiousness inside of 16 seconds.

The airport announcer is saying, for the fourth time, that Jesse Bauer really needs to meet his party at the Panda Express. Jesus, Jesse, get moving, their dinners are going to get cold.

I left Walla2 right after receiving notice from an agent in Seattle that they just didn’t quite connect to my manuscript, so they won’t be moving forward with me on this project. Moving forward. I note that they didn’t rule out moving left, or upward. Perhaps those options are still open.

My mind reads this rejection sentence and immediately thinks of a shoreline. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it goes back to that oft-repeated line about the footprints of Jesus as he carries his ignorant follower who somehow doesn’t get that hello, JESUS IS CARRYING YOUR DUMB ASS. I’m not sure with whom I’ll be moving forward, but if Jesus is doing any agenting, I’m open to the idea. I bet he could work wonders with publishers, yuk yuk.

She went on to say in her letter that it wasn’t me, it was her, and just, perhaps, a matter of taste. This Dear John letter tone didn’t sit well with me. A matter of taste? She was looking for a Prada clutch, and I was a Jacqueline Smith pocketbook on the clearance rack at KMart? Or perhaps it just wasn’t what she was looking for right now. Maybe three years from now humorous memoirs about klutzes who get sex changes will be all the rage. But why say perhaps? Doesn’t she know? It’s her opinion she’s offering.

Well, it comes down to platform, I get that. Mr. Dan Savage of the Stranger, another GLBT author working with a Seattle agent, has readership. So okay, I’ll work on having a platform and see if my words suddenly sound better, or become more connectable to people.

The second paragraph of her letter was just as brief. She wanted to encourage me to continue trying. I genuinely appreciate that. But why? Or more to the point, how? She said there was much to recommend about my writing. What, specifically? The font? The careful avoidance of split infinitives? The witty banter among urban dwelling queers? What? I’m left, as after my other rejections, in the middle of a guessing game. So far, my guesses have been wrong, if success is measured in contract proposals.

But I’ll tally ho and try again, because I am a writer with nothing to lose. JK Rowling got 13 rejections of her original Harry Potter book. I have just surpassed her with this 14th rejection.

Take that, JK!

As an avid watcher of the Daily Show, I watched this week when Jon Stewart “investigated” Chatroulette. For those of you blissfully unaware of this impertinent corner of the online universe, Chatroulette is a Web site in which you get on your Web cam and are randomly matched with someone else on their Web cam. It’s an anonymity-loving paradise, except that, as Jon showed, it’s mostly filled with horny middle-aged men. And reporters looking to find out what the story is.

I wanted to know if that was the beginning, middle, and end of the whole thing, so I fired up my built-in Web cam and I moseyed on up to the Wild Wild Web. Okay, I don’t have to fire it up, it’s just automatic because it’s a Mac, but whatever. I sallied up and got ready for some roulettin’ good time. I will say I was annoyed by my camera, because to be able to see my screen is to have it aimed at a really unflattering angle for my face. But I need to see my screen, so double chin it was.

My first random assignment was . . . a black screen. And yet Chatroulette was telling me to feel free to start talking. Talking? To what? This was weird, too weird. Was it talk therapy? A technical glitch? A–and suddenly, my “partner” disconnected from me and hopped to the next shuffled cammer.

Cammer? Okay, I was a fish in a frying pan with a pool of spilled milk next to me. I was a mess of metaphor. No sooner had I been bumped by the first person than I was wham-blam bumped two more times in extremely rapid succession by other people I barely even saw! Gee, maybe my ego isn’t ready for this, I wondered. It was rapid-fire rejection! After 18 months of job rejection, and 7 months of query letters to agents rejection, could I take this? Was I up for this?

Of course I was! It’s Chatroulette! I steadied myself as the computer hunted for another random assignment. What’s taking so long, I wanted to know. And then, out of the darkness, came. . .

A bald man, with furrowed brow, staring very closely at his screen. I could have sited good places for hair plugs on his scalp. I disconnected. I! I took the power, my power, into my own hands and clicked next! Banished, middle aged staring man! Next up, a bald man? And another. And another.

You know, there was a mid-semester fall break that I took my sophomore year of college, and to save on gas I gave a couple of people a ride back with me. One of them lived in central Pennsylvania, so it wasn’t very far out of the way between Syracuse and New Jersey, but it was unfamiliar enough that I didn’t really know my way around there. I dropped her off and had one more friend in the car, who lived in Clinton, NJ. We tried to find our way back to the highway, but we’d gotten lost and just as I was certain we’d been riding in circles, we spotted a restaurant of the Pennsylvania/New Jersey variety. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s a low building with 70s-era brownish brick, big industrial windows and a bakery counter at the register. The only thing not making it a proper diner was the lack of polished chrome and the absence of tableside jukeboxes. It was that kind of restaurant. And even though it was late, it was open, with ten million cars in the parking lot. We walked in to the front, relieved that we could be back on our way soon, until we saw who was in there.

Every single person other than the hostess was a middle aged bald man. 250 bald men.

It’s not a bald thing, really. I’m losing my hair; I know I’ll be among them someday. If they were all blue I would have been just as rattled. Or wearing the same clothes, whatever.

I whispered to the hostess that I needed to find the highway. She wrote down directions for me. I leaned in and asked if this was a convention group.

“How’d ya guess,” she asked me, blandly, chomping on her gum and looking at me like I was the stupidest person she’d ever seen. Not only was I driving around with no idea that the highway was three roads away, but I couldn’t even put it together that the bald convention was meeting here. Sheesh.

We left quickly, agreeing that we should never speak of the experience again. And apparently I have left Georgette in the dust on that one. Sorry, Georgette.

Anyway, maybe the bald men of America have moved into the 21st Century and are now meeting on Chatroulette.

I clicked again, and there it was, a man and his little man. And I mean little. I moved on quickly, hoping to rid my retinas of the sight in short [sic] order.

Three teenage girls sipping at drinks obviously procured at 7-11, giggling. Perhaps they’d just seen what I’d just seen. I made a mental note that any future teenage girls in my household will not have access to Chatroulette. Maybe the Web will be gone by then.

A very fat woman in a light blue bra and matching panties. The moment my face came into view on her screen she began jumping up and down. I clicked next.

Someone had put a Jesus bobblehead figurine on his desk and left the camera there. I heard myself laugh on his computer.

Along the line somewhere, I had drifted into performance art. I tried to look behind me to see the bend I’d gone around.

Another wanker. He and I clicked next at the same time. I wondered who he was looking for. Those giggling girls, I guessed. That thought made me frown, and my next “partner” saw it and typed, “why the sad face,” before they clicked next. It was a rhetorical question, apparently.

Two teenage guys lying on someone’s bed, looking bored. I suspect they were gamers, because they next’ed me faster than anyone else.

A whole room of young women. I waved and clicked next. I was too intimidated!

Another blank screen. Again, what am I supposed to do here, I asked myself. “Hello? Are you there?” No response. Okay, that was just creepy.

Two teen boys again, one in profile. I could hear that they were getting yelled at by a female authority figure, probably because they were on Chatroulette.

I exited the screen, having had enough of all that.

On Twitter I had posted that I’d checked out Chatroulette and sure enough, five minutes later I had three Chatroulette-affiliated friends following my Twitter account. One of these led to some funny screen captures of the way two random chatters can juxtapose in funny ways: two people dressed as Jesus (so maybe Jesus is a thing on the site?), one person dressed as a cop while a wanker looks rather afraid, a person playing air guitar and someone looking like some approximation of Jimi Hendrix.

As a cultural text, it could be interesting. As a way to chat with people, well, I didn’t actually “chat” with anyone. I learned no names, knew any of their stories, and really, I didn’t care to know. But wow, there are a lot of lonely guys out there. I’d say it warranted some evaluation by the government, but I don’t care that much.

Next.

I try to listen when the universe at large brings up points for me to consider. A few weeks ago, the message I heard was “be comforting.” I was actually told no fewer than three times, by three entirely different people—a student with twitchy senioritis, a transgender woman on the edge, and a professional who is having difficulty with a superior—that my words to them were comforting. These conversations happened in the midst of the anguishing last stages of a woman’s life here in town, a woman about whom I’ve written before and for whom many people have a particular fondness. And as I’ve seen her caretakers looking increasingly exhausted, the concept of what is comforting, when, and for whom have swirled around in my head. We often forget, it seems, to support the caretakers, and they, the front guard, need a lot of comfort themselves.

On another level, we attempt to provide comfort for the terminally ill, in the form of hand-holding and increasingly desperate dosages of opioids. It’s the medical equivalent of building a sea castle. We wring our hands when we fear our efforts aren’t enough, and of course they’re not enough. And so we hope that our well wishes, our prayers, our food offerings—for surely they can’t concentrate on cooking, for God’s sake—will do enough for now. Sometimes hope and a bite of warm supper is all we have.

The message this week, if I’ve got it correctly, is not to lie. Surely this is something my parents and a plethora of clergy attempted to teach me when I was a child. The script back then was simply that lying is wrong, a concept predicated on a young person’s monolithic understanding of morality: you do right just because. You avoid doing wrong just because.

What I see about lies now, on the cusp of my fourth decade, is the devastation in their wake, like the wrecked ideals of a partner who has put such effort into someone he then realizes doesn’t have his best interest at heart. Or the sudden calamity that avalanches down on a person who gets laid off after disingenuous promises from her boss that she can trust him. It’s not the lies themselves, necessarily, that are wrong, because who really wants to hear that they look awful in their favorite pair of trousers, it’s the shock wave from the lies and the intent in the heart of the liar that we want to avoid.

In an online writing chat today there was much discussion about lying in fiction. Yes, I know, it’s fiction. I think “lie” stood in, on several occasions, for “believability.” It does raise an interesting question to me. We’re so quick as readers to spot flaws in what makes a story believable or not—we come into a book with cynical expectations and have our guards up for the first sign of trouble. But these are just books. Raise the stakes and talk about people and relationships, ask us to make an investment in what they mean to us, and we become myopic, willing to believe even preposterous tales just to keep our vision of reality stable. And then we lose, bit by bit, our own sense of well-being and comfort, because while we may not want to admit to it, our confidence erodes under the constant swell of those lies.

I am not immune to any of this, and when I was ten, fifteen years younger, I went to lies as a coping strategy, oh sure, I did. I am a storyteller, after all, but I’d lost sight of where make-believe was okay and where it wasn’t. I’ve spent time in the prison camp of cowardice, aligning myself with dominant personalities and then wondering how I could squirm out from under them. Mostly I just figured out how to exist in the cramped space they allowed me, but one of those survival skills was lying. It didn’t even matter after a time what the lie was about, as long as I had something all to myself, a tiny corner of truth about which they didn’t know. These were infinitesimally small victories; stacked all together I could have fit them on the head of a pin, but they were mine, mine, mine, and somehow they were enough, mostly because my dreams were absurdly small.

And then, though they were so tiny, they were numerous, and like the Big Bang that arose out of a submicroscopic particle, they exploded all over me and I had to admit to them and myself what I had been doing. I was a juggler of little lies who had slipped. But it helped me to see what a waste of time all of that nonsense really was. I hadn’t been ready to let go of them, but they left all on their own, and lo and behold, I found new ways to meet people. In fact, I met better people, ones who would never corner me until I found my 5-year-old self’s coping strategy. It was like moving to a house with a dishwasher, me promising never to go back. Who wants to go back to scalding their hands, after all?

I’m inclined toward direct, unwavering truth-telling these days, even as it has sometimes meant making difficult decisions, like oh, turning my life upside-down and living as the opposite gender (and not just so I could write a book about the experience). But it is a life unafraid, at least.

And uh, I take comfort in that.