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Hi, all.

I have made the jump over to Substack, a platform with a lot of resources, possibilities, and a nice community.

My new project there is called Notes From the Night Shift, and it’s all about loneliness and its opposites. Feel free to subscribe (I love subscribers) or follow along. Hope to see you there and connect.

My new life, as it were, in Los Angeles came to a crisis point a month or so after my arrival in September. My consulting-agency employer unexpectedly ended my contract with a major internet services provider due to some kind of “business model conflict,” and even though all of my colleagues assured me that I’d easily land another contract with a different client, I had no faith in that outcome.

My Chitty Chitty Bang Bang mental health contraption teetered, flipped, and crashed to earth as a soul-crushing dread consumed me in the final months of the year, as my contract end date drew closer.

Having once lost everything that mattered to me, those old wounds got scraped open again by an anxiety that I was about to lose my “new life” in LA, and I’d have to crawl back to the valley and, I don’t know, move in with Court and John till I could get myself righted again. The truth is that the job had changed my life with its salary, and I was terrified to sink back into poverty and chaos, and be forced again to leave the city of my choice for a place I’d only want to flee. I felt shame for all of the furniture I’d bought—with money I’d saved from said job—for my new apartment, sure that I deserved none of it.

The dread was deep and deadly. Everything—people, Zoom meetings, social media, my new city—felt like a threat, and I pulled back from all of it. Knowing that I needed their support couldn’t compete with the terror.

I had to isolate myself in my apartment and try to endure. Life narrowed to the same small bunker I lived in back when I was that astronaut, in the wake of the batshit stuff with my father. I spent a lot of time in my bedroom, listening to true crime podcasts and playing Candy Crush, a combination that kept my head occupied just enough to retain some sanity, with the warm weight of my life-saving chihuahua against my leg.

I developed a compulsive knuckle-rubbing kind of gesture and felt myself revert to a small kid with no confidence in his ability to navigate the adult world. Peter visited LA in the middle of all this, and though I managed to break free from my bunker a few times to see him, that kid wanted to beg him to assure me that I would be ok. That I would be taken care of. I was too embarrassed to say this out loud. And I was in a kind of shock at the depth of my old wounds, and how quickly they re-opened. Wasn’t I better than this?

But I scraped by, and did what I could to land an initial three-month contract with a new client, and spent those three months trying to prove myself in the role, and though I only got the assurance of another three-month contract recently, it’s better than nothing, and I’m learning to relax.

The dread drained away, and I’m beginning to navigate my new city, trying to find some community, or at least a friend or two. Writing, this, I’ve let my half-inch-long attention span drag me to the internet to click around, and after reading a transcript of a focus group of financially anxious Americans, I’m reminded, again, that I’m incredibly lucky to have found a way to make a decent living and save for the future. It’s taken a lot of work, but the job changed everything for me, and my new 829 credit score is about 200 points higher than it was when I first got hired and had blown through the little money I had. Maybe I’m too attached to this new standard of living, but I’m hoping I can hang onto it.

I don’t know why I decided to commit this to the blog, after so many months away, rather than in the 250-page Word doc journal that chronicles the many embarrassments of the last five years (so fucking happy I’m not obsessed anymore over some dude who won’t give me any time).

But I’m looking back on the series of bogeymen my mind created throughout my move to Los Angeles, to see that not a single one of them made it through my door. None of them did what they threatened to do. And I’m raised, again, from the dead.

“Doing this interview frightens me, but I believe that if something makes you feel that way, you should do it.” – Hilton Als

Oh, believe me, I was scared as shit.

In the wake of the release of my interview on the This Is Actually Happening podcast, I rode waves of pride, panic, shame, and reflection. An international audience now had access to my deepest (no longer) secrets and traumas, and I’d attached my name to the whole lot of them.

Although I’d written about most of them at one point or another, many times on this blog, this was a whole new level of visibility. At one point I made the mistake of reading the iTunes user reviews and although one reviewer said it was the most impactful episode she’d every heard (five stars), another said that this type of excruciating content should be left in a therapy session (um, yeah, no stars). At several times over the past week, I’ve thought the same.

Ultimately, though, I return to my belief that there’s value in sharing dark times with others, in order to make others who have endured their own dark times feel less alone. And I was overwhelmed with the hundreds of messages of support I received through various platforms from all over the world.

Though I appreciated the ones who thanked me for my bravery (at times over the last week, I’ve replaced “bravery” with “foolishness”), I was most grateful for the ones who found their experiences reflected in mine. Dark times have a way of isolating us from others. It was good to hear that a few people found some level of connection.

The episode is a weird, dark, at times bleak series of events, edited into a single narrative. From childhood abuse and neglect to addiction to HIV to one parent’s terminal illness and the other parent’s betrayal via batshit stories posted to the internet, I’m aware that it’s not an easy narrative to endure for most listeners.

I didn’t really want to listen to it myself. I put it off until late one night, turning out the lights, crawling into bed with the chihuahua, and pressing “play.” But strangely, once I got past the discomfort of hearing my weird voice, I ended up not completely embarrassed by the story.

In fact, I’m hesitant to admit this, but I listened to it over a dozen times in the last week. Something about hearing the whole story in one hour was helping me in some way that I can’t yet articulate. Like I could finally find a through line through a jumbled chaos of painful events.

It’s also not the whole story. I mean, how could it be? A three-hour interview edited down into one hour can’t also contain all of the joy and moments of genuine human connection that made that narrative endurable for me. So many people, with their humor and compassion, helped make my life worth living. They help me still.

Happy to share that my essay, How I Got Caught Up in a Global Romance Scam, was just adapted for The New York Times’ Modern Love Podcast, read by a voice actor. Big thanks to Robin and Michelle, interviewed afterwards about being targeted by scammers using my pics. They were brave (and very funny) when sharing their experiences. There’s a bit more background on the essay here. Listen to the podcast.

This Is Actually Happening is an intense podcast that shares stories by people of their darkest times, whether that be surviving trauma, terrorism, or growing up in a cult. They interviewed me last fall about a batshit series of events I went through in recent years, and the episode airs today. If you’ve been hanging around this blog for awhile, some of the story will be familiar to you.

If you find value in sharing stories of hard times in the hopes that it might help others enduring their own hard times, it’s a good podcast. It’s available wherever you get your podcasts. I still have to get up the nerve to listen to my own :). Listen to the podcast.

If you came here from the podcast, welcome, I appreciate your interest and curiosity.

Literary magazine River Teeth has published a very, very short, dark little essay/prose poem I wrote about working on a virtual voiced assistant from a major online retailer. “Talk to Her” is part of their Beautiful Things column that limits all essays to 250 words or less. It’s free to read and to leave a comment, if you’re into that kind of thing. My gratitude to the editors.

Agnes is thrilled, obviously, to announce that I have a short essay appearing in the new issue of Brevity. “How I Learned to Hide” is now online and free to read. Leave a comment, if you’d like, or skip the whole thing and take a nap. It’s still a free country. I think.

I’m very happy to report that I’ve had a couple more essays accepted by really terrific literary journals recently, and they’ll be published in the coming year.

I’ll be updating this blog with any news and links to the essays in Brevity and Michigan Quarterly Review for anyone who’d like to check them out.

2020 is a strange year.

From our dysfunctional family to yours.

My pal Tiny Dancer drove up from Providence and stayed the weekend. Saturday morning, after corrupting him with the best breakfast sandwich on the planet from Small Oven (dangerously close to my apartment in the Pioneer aka Genocide Valley), Agnes hovering at our feet for the inevitable rain of crumbs, we cruised up 91 and over 2 on our way to MASS MoCA. October leaf peeping and cultural field trip—two bugs, one windshield.

He played some 80s tunes with his Sirius subscription. We’d met three years ago when I’d crashed for a few months in my sister’s basement in Boston—he was my first New England friend, and we’d regularly drive the 90 miles between my town and Providence for weekend visits. We shared a love of dogs and Saturday night episodes of Dateline.

I told him that my first concert, back in Minneapolis, was Thompson Twins with opening act Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, circa 1985. That year I grew long blond bangs over one eye, and wore grungy, black, thrift-store clothes that didn’t meld with the overall Benetton ad of my high school, so I spent lunch hours hiding away from the Darwinian cafeteria tribes, till sophomore year, when some cool chicks in leather jackets and torn black leggings rescued me. We called ourselves, only half-facetiously, the Rebel Posse.

Tiny Dancer snapped this shot at a hairpin turn on route 2. I think I look old, but I guess I am old, and people seem to like the pic, or they “like” the pic, and the colors are pretty cool, so here.

Wikipedia calls MASS MoCA the largest contemporary art museum in the country, a rusted, renovated factory complex, a postmodern outpost in the Berkshire hills, near the Vermont border. I spent some formative years working at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (even won my first poetry slam there, ha ha), so common museum elements—flickering video in dark exhibits, somnambulant security guards, gift shop t-shirts, catalogs heavy with artworld jargon—made the whole trip feel kind of homey.

And fuck, I love October. I wish it would last six months. But I guess its brevity is what sharpens its bittersweet taste. I fell in love with October as a lonely, skinny kid in the suburbs of St Paul, a melancholiac drifting home solo from grade school, shuffling through leaves, smelling wood smoke, and finding a comforting warmth in preteen sadness. Shut up, I had my reasons.

The museum road trip was a bit of a symbolic gesture on my part. I’d landed in this valley at the long-sputtering tail end of a very long tailspin, and couldn’t quite pull myself out of the wreckage.

Instead, smoldering in its ashes, I’d taken daily inventory of all the ways I suffered here, compared to San Francisco.

Guys, I didn’t get cruised here for A WHOLE YEAR. I was an actual ghost. Humans walked through me. And when a guy on campus at UMass (where I worked for awhile) held my gaze and turned to watch me walk past, I was so startled that I smacked face-first into a door.

Between that, and the alienating, Christian-heavy leanings of local 12-step groups, and the long winters, and my inability to find work that would lift me above paycheck-to-paycheck existence, I resisted Genocide Valley. Like, picture me being dragged across the ground with my heels dug in.

Things began to shift when, instead of dropping local AA entirely, I supplemented it with a dose of Refuge Recovery, a program based on Buddhist principles. It’s currently caught up in some Me Too Movement fallout, and is quietly getting swapped throughout the country with other frameworks, but my long curiosity in Buddhism, and my increasing disbelief in an external, omnipotent god, found some solace and much food for thought there, as well as a place to practice some monkey-brained meditation every week in a room full of quiet, breathing, shoe-less folks.

I met a dude there I’ll call the Sinful Saint, a well-read, well-lived, intellectually voracious man who’d sit with me at meetings, drink coffee in Northampton, tea on my living room couch, and dig with me into our pasts, sitting in my car in his driveway as the frogs of the valley began to sing at night.

I told him the nickname was because he’d read through my blog and had texted me a line from a poem I’d forgotten I’d written:

The scattered collection of men have all had their hopes,

and, left alone, they have called themselves fools. Is that so

uncommon? Even saints dream of sin.

(In other words, I kind of made his nickname all about me. This is a recurring trait that is dawning uncomfortably on the horizon of my recent thoughts. I’m self-centered. Isn’t that what my father, Hank the Blank, once said? He could be both a narcissist and correct. That’s an entirely possible combination. In fact, they are probably connected. My excessive, self-referential introspection, which he hates, was my childhood strategy for survival. “Hello, Frankenstein,” I told him, once. “I’m your monster.” He was not amused.)

I’ve said here before that, following my split from the Manly Fireplug and my exile from San Francisco, my brain and body rife with fear, that the one thing I needed was the one thing I couldn’t sustain—human connection.

I’m a dude who wants to see himself as strong and solitary, but who desperately needs others to survive. It turns out that to endure Genocide Valley, I needed a pal.

The Sinful Saint took me to the top of a mountain. The mountain was next to my apartment. I’d lived in that apartment for three years, but that was my first journey to the summit. He began to chip away at my resistance to my locale, not through instructions but through companionship.

I left one job because it was a dead-end nightmare of bigoted dysfunction. I took a new job, my first job as a full-time professional writer, one that pays me a few dollars above paycheck-to-paycheck. Maybe someday I’ll have enough saved, for my vague plans to escape to an undecided city. Being a single gay dude here is like trekking with an empty stomach across a bleak and forlorn field to a hut built for one, leaning back in the howling wind.

Yeah, sue me—I’d like to be loved again.

But for now I have work—to squirm out of the wreckage and brush the ashes from my Adidas. To take a chihuahua for walks. To bench press steel plates. To calm the swinging monkey. To slip the armor of resistance and take scenic road trips to rural museums with good pals. To make the most of Genocide Valley, while I’m here.