Tuesday was Pioneer Day, which is an LDS holiday. Most of Utah was shut down for it.

I had trouble getting an Uber or Lyft ride the first few times I tried. The car was a good half hour away from my hotel but there weren’t any available drivers.

I tried a third time and was informed that Stella would be there with a Toyota Camry in 24 minutes.

Oh, thank God.

Stella was 75 years old and had a little trouble staying in her lane, bless her heart. She was going to sign off duty and go to lunch with some friends but she said she had this instinct that someone was stranded because of the town being shut down for the holiday and needed a ride so she accepted it.

Yeah well, accurate.

We shared a lot on the drive. She talked about her addict son who passed away from HIV 20 years ago, and she had some funny stories about his addict behavior and the aliases he’d disappear for years at a shot under. He’d claim to be the illegitimate son of Anthony Hopkins. He’d get loans for cars that got repossessed two weeks later. It wasn’t a funny story, yet it was, because I just know it’s like.

I tried not to tear up when she talked about the end of his life.

I told her I was positive as well.

Stella is a wedding planner, “licensed officiant & ordained minister” according to her business card for Affordable Alternative Marriages by Stella.

I asked her if she was, by any chance, ordained by the Universal Life Church.

She said “Yes.”

I said “Me too.”

She looked surprised.

I asked her if she gets emails from the Rev. Amy Long.

“Yes, I do!”

“Isn’t she amazing?”

I took her card.

You never know, maybe someone I know will need some help with that whole marrying thing.

She said she does Grand Canyon weddings and other landmarks and parks and whatnot.

She was a doll.

She said she was glad she picked me up after all.

When she dropped me off she said “I just have to give you a hug, okay?”

“That which does not kill us makes us stranger.”

— Trevor Goodchild

I stayed up all night as the black sky had brightened
No reason to sleep, there was nothing worth waking for
The look on my face half serene and half frightened
No reason to dream there was nothing worth dreaming for
I took life in stride and said I’d never give in
For ever failure dealt me I laid down a win
But this day I realized there was no end in sight
I would live alone, die alone, sleep alone at night
All life was about was some sick god’s game
The end game was sorrow, loss and pain
Just when things get better it’s fucked again
It’s really no wonder I’m all fucked in the brain.

Just as I thought I had finally broke free
I saw three miles of taillights in front of me
The city was so grey today
And I’d almost reached the sun
But it was bumper to bumper on the US-101

There’s an exit to the right.
I’d turn on my blinker,
But it’s not polite to do that on the US-101

Traffic inches forward on a one way street
Lined with clapboard houses I could never afford
Oh Lord, you won’t even buy me a Honda Accord
The street signs have an italicized cartoon font
You can even live here if you want
There’s Sothebys and Keller and Century 21
With convenient beachfront access and the US-101

There are no restaurants here,
There are no stores.
I wonder what people in this town even eat.
They must breathe in the air and get the nutrition they need from their earbuds and iPods as they jog with their dogs
Making better time in the bike lane
Than all the people like me
Trying to break free
From the traffic situation on the US-101

I’m being passed by a skateboard
The occasional bike
A waving shirtless jogger
Some guy in a green Prius
Who must think that his car is a bike
I’ll see him again soon on the US-101

At every other intersection
A disembodied voice says “turn left here.”
No thank you.
I am not going anywhere near the US-101

Until I reach the reason for the delay:
A woman with a wrecked Mercedes
Being towed away
Second driver today
Who had managed to have spun
Across all three lanes of the US-101

Wrapping a fur coat around her tightly
It’s cold outside but she looks okay
Her yellow lab is relaxing in the sun
With his tongue sticking out,
Tail happily wagging
It looks like he’s been having fun today
On the US-101

Top down at the rest stop in Gaviota
With a wide open throttle
Escaping the last several inches
of the traffic and the smog from LA
Where the freeway ends
The PCH begins
And I have exactly three hours left
Until the ranger chases me away

Seven months and another transmission rebuild later, I’m reunited with my car.

I went to my old home group in Austin.

The only people really left were the ones I had been closest to.

They had welcomed a stranger and been kind to me.

Do you ever feel like pulling out an emory board at a meeting and snarking “soooo, where’d all the winners go?”

I forgot about that sweet spot at about 79MPH when the whole car has this weird industrial sounding hum.

I lock into that sound and resonate with it. It’s pleasant for some reason.

I am sitting in the nuclear reactor.

Click, set, go.

I drove through all the hues of Texas and watched the lightning lick across a wide open desert sky for hundreds of miles late last night.

It was neat. If I could be anywhere right now this is exactly where I’d like to be.

Melissa Etheridge’s “Brave and Crazy” is on the mandatory playlist in Arizona.

I used to listen to that all the time when I was 15 and working as a tour guide for the city museum.

It was a small town. Visitors were few and far in between.

I got picked on in school because I “wasn’t from around here” (hey dumbfucks I am literally related to Benjamin Edgerton by marriage) and didn’t go to their church. And they all laughed at my ankle monitor in the gym shower. People started to whisper about how I’d transferred here from the juvenile prison.

Their nickname for me was “Church.”

Suicide was starting to cross my mind when Lizzy Londerville handed me a cassette tape of Marilyn Manson’s “Antichrist Superstar.”

She wrote a sweet and encouraging note and said “evil within will allow you to be you.”

Never underestimate what a kind word will do to someone who hasn’t heard one in a while. I’ll circle back to this and underline it again later.

From that point forward I huddled with the goth crowd. They took me in and people mostly stopped fucking with me.

One of the times I was heckled one of the goth boys grabbed me and made out with me.

We hated the army recruiters. I’d walk up holding hands with one of the goth boys and we would flip through their brochures feigning STRONG interest in enlisting. It was hilarious.

We didn’t really have the internet just yet — BBS and dialup shell accounts, sure — but I was born a troll. One of the goths figured out that the admin password for the LanTastic software was “Football” and I started going into home directories and downloading test answers.

I deleted the principal’s resume and I kept her dot matrix printer busy from time to time printing out Marilyn Manson lyrics. I preferred to do it when she had left for the day and I could waste all of her paper.

• One “Dr” (phd in some stupid shit like English) Jennifer Gottlieb, who is very enthusiastic about putting children in literal jail for dress code violations but refused to do anything about queer bashing or queers being beaten – very typical of the petty small minded tyrants who run the K12 to Prison Pipeline.

I got her into trouble with the state for fraud – she would simultaneously try to have me arrested or my license revoked because I had run away from home — while collecting $40,000+ a year and falsely claiming her school provided me special education for those two years. She had to pay it all back:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190201061210/https://dpi.wi.gov/sped/idea-complaint-decision-99-003

The one asshole who used to physically assault me and shove me into lockers and shit (no one would do anything about it) used to drive by and scream “Hey freak are you going to church?” at me when I walked to work or school.

He crashed into a tree drunk and died at 21.

Today I listened to an old favorite album and gave my first thought in decades to those long, hot, and sleepy afternoons sitting in the Tobacco City Museum listening to Melissa Etheridge and k.d. lang, waiting for the occasional visitor who I’d be forced to say something nice about Edgerton to.

If I could go back and give some advice to 15-year-old me, it would have been to throw away the tour guide script and make up my own until someone fired me:

“Welcome! So, they used to grow tobacco here but that was a hundred years ago. Now there’s just a Piggly Wiggly store and a bunch a racist shitheads. My favorite part of Edgerton is Highway 59 leading right the fuck out of it, you can see it out of this window on your left. Do you want me to show you some rusty old shit that people have found in barns and farm houses in the local area and donated to us? Some of it’s kind of neat. I guess.”

Melissa and k.d. were my main points of reference for being gay at the time, which everyone but me knew that I was by then. I would look at the cover of Melissa’s self-titled album and I knew right then and there that I wanted to dress just like a lesbian.

Our ignorant ass principal would look at my leather bracelets and my turquoise bandanna with a rainbow on the front of it and she’d say I couldn’t wear it because it was “gang related.” Like she’d know what that meant even if it blasted past the place in a drop top blasting Dre and [redacted].

The goths discouraged my desire to dress like a lesbian and steered me towards such edgy and original apparel as black mascara and dog collars and Nine Inch Nails T-shirts. I sighed at everyone saying “this is the real me, expressing who I am,” honestly I only dressed like that because I enjoyed that “dead inside” look in the principals eyes that told me how badly she was wishing that I would go home and put my old clothes back on.

I finally met Annie after talking to her online for a year.

She said something about a meeting at Rivers Edge Hospital.

I grinned and said “I escaped from that place.”

She laughed and said “good for you! The staff are terrible there, they treat you like prisoners.”

I agreed. I said “it was just like being locked up in county.”

I was at the hospital for some other reason and a doctor told me I was “tangential and all over the place.”

I explained that I’d been up for a few days doing crystal meth, so of course I’m tangential and all over the place. How many years did you spend in med school to figure that out?

Well, that got me committed fast. 

The doctors at Rush put several false statements on their paperwork and I would later learn that quite a few people had reported the exact same thing to the state.

“High and not interested in getting help” is not a valid reason to invoke that process and they know it and I know it. So they made some shit up.

After detaining me under false pretenses and sending me to such squalor and filth (how this oubliette is even licensed as a healthcare facility is beyond me) these fuckers at Rivers Edge were screaming orders at me and I took exception to that. 

The first thing I did was talking them into making it a “voluntary” admission. I don’t need that shit on my record. They actually agreed because now it meant they didn’t have to take me to a judge in the morning.

Then the second thing I did was to rip the placard with my room number on it off of the wall and then I used it to jimmy open the social workers office.

There was a ring of keys in her desk drawer next to a pair of running shoes. 

And if that isn’t Providence, I don’t know what is.

I used her keys to silence an emergency exit alarm and open the staircase.

Then I walked to a bar and panhandled for bus fare and beer money.

None of the staff noticed because they were all too busy being assholes to the other inmates— errr, “patients.”

When I got home I faxed them a copy of their ring of keys and my middle finger. 🖕🏻

I think that’s when they went “oh shit” and did a census of all of their patients and noticed one missing.

I ended up on a missing and endangered list for a minute. I negotiated with them to return the keys and sneakers in exchange for my cell phone, keys, and wallet. It cost $800 in lawyers fees to make them fuck off and not press charges for stealing her sneakers.

That said, I would have gladly paid even more then that to not spend another minute in that filthy fucking shithole being treated like an inmate and screamed at by those awful people.

I also think they were all talk. I argued with Cliff a little and said there was no way in hell they were actually going to go on public record and admit to their incompetence or woefully inadequate security in any detail. Trust me, if the keys were not in that drawer I could have still gotten out. But he talked me into hiring “his guy” to mop it all up, and so I did.

You’ll have to excuse me for not “getting help” considering that’s the kind of place you’ll get sent to in this city. It’s a fucking joke. You just eat paste and shitty jail food for five days and they punt you out on the street and you fall between the cracks again.

Miracle on 34th street in my mind, hallelujah! I’m not an addict or crazy anymore! And all you had to do was put me in a filthy room and scream at me!

I’m banned for life from Soldier Field for a drunk and naked streaking incident witnessed by Margaret Cho, Mayor Daley, Megan Mullalley, George Takei, and my horrified mother watching on television.  

Cho said something about “balls whizzing past my face” as I was tackled, handcuffed, and dragged off.   Squee! Margaret Cho joked about my balls! I’ll never wash them again!  

The rest of the story’s pretty funny: Since I was booked in a garbage bag I had to do the perp walk from South Michigan to Rogers Park in a paper suicide dress the next morning, and like every 50 feet someone asked me if I was okay and what happened. Kinda humbling and humiliating.   

If you’ve been in county and/or on suicide precautions before you get kind of a morbid and cheerful sense of humor about wearing the “paper yellow sun dress.”   I had the deputies rolling in the hallway when I called it that.  

I raised some eyebrows climbing my building in my paper yellow sun dress, owing to the fact I had lost my keys in the process and needed to get in through a window. I have no idea what the neighbors made of me after that.

Half of them already hated me for the loud music and sex parties. I think I got a few cocked heads and something along the lines of “what is that cracked out idiot doing now?”  

The next night the Chicago Spirit Brigade recognized me at a bar, gave me a big round of cheers jeers and applause, bought me drinks and gave me a team pin. Hey, this is the asshole that ran naked through our formation!   Best night ever. Charges dropped. Literally laughed out of court and told “You’re lucky the judge is a Bears fan!”

Why would I do this?

Because the Victimized Generation was put in charge of the ceremonies and they had a huge presentation with the aids quilt, some queen sobbing that he was going to suicide because someone called him UGLY (gasp) and it greatly offended me how fucking contrived it came across because I’ve actually experienced that. Then the lights went dim and the Jumbotrons all said “VICTIMIZATION.”

I told Wayne, “fuck that I ain’t no god damn victim, hold my beer. I’m putting the fun back in funeral.”

I waited until the “wave” hit the north end of the field and security’s attention followed it. 

Then I dropped down on the field from the south side and was completely unnoticed until I was halfway across.    

A year ago I wrote this:

“There’s hundreds of people in the group that all think you’re fabulous and either want you, want to be you, or want to be your friend.

Being you looks pretty fabulous on Facebook and Instagram … but I know what’s really going on. “

I used to take it personally when she wouldn’t return calls or texts or make any time for me.

Found out she flipped out and tried to kill herself and vanished.

I don’t even know what TV show they’re watching in the living room but I overheard a snippet:

“You ever notice how all of his stories are like, this one time, I got so wasted? Or, this one time, I woke up in a dumpster in Connecticut?”I usually ignore the TV, but —

I snorted a little too loudly at that for reasons I would rather not elaborate on.

When I’m lying next to you,
I can’t help but think what life would be like
With a person like you
Somehow I think only you would do 
We’ve been friends for years now 
Somehow I think it wasn’t meant to be
The first time we saw each other 
We stared with the gaze of lovers
You 
stay 
on my mind
Time keeps on passing us by
It wasn’t meant to be 
Time keeps on passing us by

It wasn’t meant to be 
Time keeps on passing us by 
— Cuba Luna

The local volunteer FD has a message up on their marquee that says “a mind is like a parachute, it only works when it’s open.”

I think I’ve been supporting this product for a little too long because my immediate thought was:

“A mind is like a parachute. Sometimes it doesn’t work, even when you open it!”

Wayne and I were both perplexed by our friend Derek’s behavior ever since he’d bought something called an “iPad.”

Wayne said “He just sits there stuck in a loop staring at everyone’s profile pictures. I think something’s wrong with him. He sat underneath that tree all day. And when I went to check on him he was staring off into space and he had tears rolling down his face.”

I found the song in Spotify’s weekly recommendations a couple of days ago.

I had heard the tambourine in the opening notes and it reminded me of Tears for Fears’ Shout.

So I grabbed the phone and played that song instead.

Over the next few days it came up on shuffle and I ignored it.

A couple words got my attention though.

I remember thinking there was probably a message in that bottle for me and that I’d get around to it later.

It would be a.. little while longer before I would learn about St Therese of Liseieux.

“Forgiveness is a great stress reliever, for we receive it in abundance.”

they set my aunts house on fire

i cried the way women on tv do

folding at the middle

like a five pound note.

i called the boy who use to love me

tried to ‘okay’ my voice

i said hello

he said warsan, what’s wrong, what’s happened?

i’ve been praying,

and these are what my prayers look like;

dear god

i come from two countries

one is thirsty

the other is on fire

both need water.

later that night

i held an atlas in my lap

ran my fingers across the whole world

and whispered

where does it hurt?

it answered

everywhere

everywhere

everywhere.

— warsan shire 

First time I heard this song I was on my way out to California exactly four years ago and I wasn’t sure if anything was ever going to be alright.

I remember saying something about how exciting it would be to have another place to not belong.

I remember shrugging and thinking that this, too, would run its course.

I had a dream that I was walking across a prison yard drenched in cum. Total bukkakke disaster.

Everyone was smirking and snickering.

I giggled and told someone “I look like I’ve just been hired by CBS AND Fox News!”