Insomniac nostalgia, a brief history of illness, and anticipatory grief
All of a sudden, it’s June again. Pride and its cyclical struggles rear its [monstrous, glorious, beautiful, overwrought] many heads, with a few new petty annoyances biting at the ankles of the regulars, trying to make themselves relevant. I had a brief gig as a government contractor in Northern Virginia. Then I got Covid.
Overshadowing all of this are, of course, the atrocities America’s favorite rabid dog rains down on an entire people. Biden’s “red line” is crossed, and Time Magazine’s transcript of their interview with him after the fact is almost beat-for-beat the cadence of simpleton President Jimble in season two, episode two of Smiling Friends, “Mr. President,” a twelve minute nightmare where Pim and Charlie are tasked with making “the President” smile before Election Day.
I’m listening to the Killers’ 2004 “coping with the existence of the Strokes” album, Hot Fuss, launched twenty years ago yesterday to critical acclaim. My friend Lulu reminded me of it via text, though it had been playing on my mind for awhile since Jack showed us that lefty “I hate Bush” clusterfuck, Southland Tales, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, Justin Timberlake, and the entire cast of Saturday Night Live circa 2008. There’s this absolutely deranged scene where a crucified JT lip-syncs along to “All These Things That I’ve Done” while a bunch of pinup combat nurses writhe in the muddy background, which itself reminded me of the much cleaner, trippier “Happiness is a Warm Gun” scene from Across the Universe.
When did we stop making antiwar movies? I try to imagine an antiwar film with our current villains—an octogenarian from Delaware with a chronic stutter so severe, mine seems tame in comparison. A white supremacist Philadelphian who claims Indigeneity to the holy land, his nickname making him sound like one of those little suburban dogs with shit in their eyes. A barred-out VP whose greatest, most positive contribution to the public discourse was the endlessly quotable “you didn’t fall out of a coconut tree” diatribe. And I imagine who faces off against these war pigs. The movie never gets made and I realize this is what they meant when they said “the revolution will not be televised,” that it won’t happen on here.
I’m careful with my hope and I’m careful with my faith. I will say I’ve been in some beautiful basements with some furious-bright people, seen the shimmering filaments shooting all the way out into the better future, heard enough to know the luxury of despair will always escape me. This is my clumsy gift of credence, by the way, my imperfect acknowledgement of the world at large before I get small again.
I’ve always been bad at sleeping. I’ve always tried to get better. When I was a baby, I didn’t sleep at all until my parents took me to a chiropractor, at which point I slept for twenty-two hours. I know I should probably go to a chiropractor at some point, but one of the first things I discovered upon leaving my parents’ world is that apparently “chiropractic practice” was invented by a ghost? And I’m just not sure I can trust my fully adult spine with something that ephemeral.
Getting sick forced me to sleep. I slept a lot. Now I’m up way too late, writing to you from my sick-bed, sweaty and miserable and opening Instagram, closing Instagram. Opening Instagram.
I push my phone away in distaste. A little shard of glass from the shattered screen protector lodges itself in my thumb, and I pry it out idly, wracking my brain for what to do. There are no notifications, which is odd. I mark it down—three days. That’s how long it takes my friends to accept that I am sick, that there really is no use in sending the same “I miss you” text ad nauseam. We all accept this reality. I don’t want to open my Instagram, look at all the local events I’m missing. I’ve missed so many local events anyways, even without being sick, but every feverish pang sends a wave of FOMO coursing through my enervated form and I make vows to myself I know I’ll keep.
Earlier, I’d accidentally skimmed the comment section of some comedians with a podcast. I’ve never been driven—I should say, as an adult, certainly as a teenager, yes—to get into comment wars on the internet, to speak to strangers as if I knew anything about them. Yet here there were people addressing these pasty for-hire clowns in stern, watchful tones. “Well played” and “we’re onto you” and the like. I blinked and swiped out of the comments, suddenly disturbed.
There’s something so desperate, so pathetic and lonely about the internet. While in the shower—my first since day one of testing positive—I ruminated on the discursive phenomenon of “Nobody’s talking about this.” “Nobody talks about” how hard it is for people with ADHD to know what to dress up as for Halloween. “Nobody talks about” how difficult life is when you’re a white-coded lineal descent Native American living in a hi-rise apartment with six housemates and two cats. “Why don’t I see anyone talking about?” And I finally realized what bothers me so much about that little verbal tic, as baked into the Internet’s lexicon as “I can’t even” and “you gotta hand it to [insert corporation here].”
It’s lonely, sure, but it’s also untrue from the jump. “Nobody’s talking” but you are. You are. Are you nobody? There’s this bizarre relinquishing of power going on, a sort of passive-aggressive surrender. As if to say, I’m not pointing fingers or naming names and I’m certainly not enough of a person to be the one to start this conversation, but someone who is more self-actualized than I am should definitely broach the subject on behalf of my chronic illness, my queerness, whatever marginal piece of me is giving me the most grief in this moment. It won’t be me, of course not, but someone really should.
This Pride, while we recycle the same old arguments we’ve been having for decades now, I hope we have the brass to open those tombs with our claims staked. No more of this passive bullshit. Somebody’s talking. Right now, it’s me. When I’m done, maybe it’ll be you. That’s usually how conversations tend to go, right? PVP, back and forth, tit for tat. Or, if you’re in my family, it’s everyone talking over each other, cutting each other off, bursts of rapid, wild laughter. The long stretch of the land and the arguments and the anger and the decompression and the returning to the room calmer.
Summer reminds me of them for reasons that will elude you, but will be obvious to them. May inspired me to write Mayday, which you can purchase from Bottlecap Press here, if you’re so inclined, but June inspires me to bedrest. Never on purpose. It just struck me all of a sudden that every June since the first summer post-vaccines, I’ve spent a significant amount of time in bed. 2021, it was with MRSA, my legs pebbled with lesions and boils so tightly wound, I couldn’t walk. 2022, I could walk just fine after top surgery, but just beforehand, I’d had my first Covid infection. It was kind of a blessing in disguise, though, because I’d been terrified all spring at the prospect of suddenly contracting the illness just days before I was supposed to go under the knife. 2023, if you’ve been reading this blog for awhile now, I was hospitalized in Albany with full face herpetic lesions and had to give my closing talk at Cranberry Lake Biological Station slightly mottled.
The day I tested positive for Covid, our client wanted us posted out at a governmental center that was maybe fifty minutes from my Auntie Mary’s house. I woke up around three thirty in the morning because I had to—the activation was supposed to start at five. A lot of us had been filing in late the past few days, so the client expected photographic evidence of us at the job site, five on the dot. I felt like garbage but I thought that had more to do with being up so early than anything else. I trawled the house for what might help and popped two Baby Motrins. I shuffled into my uniform—Fairfax County Connector—and pulled my bumbag over my head because I always wear it like a bandolier.
A fine mist clung to the suburbs. It was neither day nor night. I took a moment to drink my coffee and admire how apt the term “witching hour” was in describing this.
In my car, I spent way too long fiddling with the Bluetooth radio transmitter, trying to find a vacant station. My ETA steadily ticked up until it tipped over from 4:59 to 5:01, and I grumbled, “Ah, fuck it,” before reversing down my auntie’s driveway.
Normally, the drive south enchants me. Watch the trees double in size, see the green change, greet God face-to-face in the burgeoning clouds where they split in furious pinks, oranges, and goldenrod. At night, however, the roads take over and transform everything into a pitted void with the occasional stack of white lights. We all sped more than usual here, as if the cameras were asleep. I saw my first Cybertruck and I hated it. It was even uglier in real life, somehow. But I thrummed with the old excitement I’d get whenever I had somewhere to be, something to wake up for. It was a feeling I chased when I worked as a background actor for American High. Before then, a foreground actor. I love being forced to get up early and see the whole day through.
I pulled in with two minutes to spare for the requested group photo, and then my friend Theryn and I sat down in front of the governmental center to wait. There’s a lot of “hurry up and wait” in these little “be good looking and do something productive with it” gigs. We shared a Yerba Mate and I coughed, once, as the sun behind the slick grey buildings painted the sky, our whole morning cast in a periwinkle haze.
Nothing really happened. Nobody showed. We watched an undercover cop pull into the vacant parking lot and taser the shit out of a bug on a leaf. That sucked. His hands were a knotted ball of heat lightning and his face looked exactly how you’d expect. Yeah, with the sunglasses.
The haze gave everything a dreamlike quality. None of this was real, not the parking lot, not the midcentury moving truck with its old school font, not those hi-rise buildings in their suburban fortress, surrounded by small businesses that seemed straight out of the Sims. Theryn talked to me about their time as a lifeguard, which this morning reminded them of. In exchange, I told them about the Yakama Nation trailer park the kids and I used to go to summer camp in. Our friend Audrey just drove by it the other day. It’s abandoned now.
How much of this blog has been me telling you about places we can never return to?
I looked at the shiny buildings across the way. They were carefully planned to be as ideologically impenetrable as possible. Later in the morning, we’d be expected to cross that six lane highway with all our stuff and see if we couldn’t salvage our tasks, but at that moment, all I could see was a vast glittering nowhere. A placeless location with no people inside.
“Who lives there?” I asked aloud. “What do they do?”
Our trailer park had hookups for RVs on one side, and a bunch of concrete bases for real tipis on the other. We slept in the tipis, girls in one, boys in another. Chaperones in a third, maybe, but I always suspected they got rooms closer to the motel office. It was where us Seattle kids stayed during our collaboration with the Yakama Nation Multimedia Club. Yakama Nation had their own sort of techy, computer science based program for the rez kids there, and us urban Native shitasses would ship in to act in the plays they picked. It was fun and often weird. If I keep going down this road I might cry.
When I look at my partners—that is, the guys I’m dating and living my present-moment adult life with, not, like, legal firm or criminal enterprise—I rarely, if ever, find myself in dire need of understanding. There’s a current memetic moment, a fixation on whoever we sleep with knowing all of our “lore.” If you’ve been even a little bit online you’ve probably come across it at least once. It’s being superseded by the “match my freak” meme and all reactionary subsidiaries thereupon, but it’s still there. People have “lore” and they crave another to comprehend it. I don’t have that problem. Most of my friends and lovers have noticed I just tend to drop things, no context, and move on. There’s no deep breath, no, “did I ever tell you…” and no real deep, intimate knowing you can reach with me through my past. Everything has to be present. Current. Here. This, I realized recently, is due to my strict adherence to protocol. Beyond what I’ve already told you, the readers, about my amnesia, my transness, my family history, there’s an entire life that cannot ever be shared unless it is with the one I’m sharing my life with.
I’m talking about marriage.
For a brief moment, all I cared about was marriage. Most of my older siblings were paired off and so was my younger brother. The youngest hadn’t yet gotten engaged, but he dated healthier than I did, so I thought it was only a matter of time. There was the small matter of my own estrangement. I didn’t go outside. I didn’t ride the bus or walk or even have the imagination to leave the little L-shape I walked in the old house. You already know this story, to tell it again is to tell it to death. But when I look at the lonesome nature of the internet, the increased estrangement of everybody else, I remember how I felt then versus how I feel now. Even now, I don’t get out enough, and the small blessing that comes with every sickness I weather is that I remember I’m going to die, and maybe sooner than I think. I’m going to die and therefore I must change again.
Our old house was instructive to my development. It was two stories and a generous basement, beautifully built on a hillside overlooking one of Ithaca’s less-known gorges. There was a big red barn we used for storage and working out, with a punching bag hanging from one of the cross-beams. Sunlight drifted through the coke bottle windows and I’d savor it on the rare occasion I’d find myself out there, using the natural light to film self-tape auditions or take selfies. When the pandemic hit, all of us lived together in that house. Me, my partner at the time, our dad, my little brothers, and one of my little brother’s then-partners. We had been training all our lives for this, so we weren’t caught off guard or overwhelmed or underprepared. We simply settled into an idyllic post-apocalypse. Thick snow melted into a quiet spring. Spring into summer. I thought maybe this was where the marriage part would come in. We certainly talked about it often, made soft plans for it. But I was unformed and insecure and while those two aspects very seldom stop others from making this leap, they stopped me.
That house was a spiral. Our late mom haunted it, not in the literal sense, but in the ideological sense. It had been hers primarily, and she wasn’t there anymore. A mere month before lockdown, our whole family sorted through her things, decided what to keep and what to give away. The baby tried to laugh when we laughed or talk when we talked. An old friend of mine once said when a matriarch dies, she takes the family with her, that all families fall apart. Ours hadn’t. I pray we don’t. We didn’t talk about the illness sweeping across the world. We tried to be ourselves without her. My oldest brother and his wife walked through the snow or tended the fire. My oldest sister found a bundle of photographs of our mom’s second husband and pressed them into my hands. I took care of them. We found old pictures of her through her various phases. Black hair. Platinum blonde. Auburn and sixties-inspired. Always captured like she’d been a minor celebrity followed by paparazzi. Strange, flattering angles, artistic and evocative.
When she was still alive, she’d tried to get me to go outside more. The insular, cruel cycles of internet discourse were poisoning me against her and every other human being. I had that “nobody’s talking about this” attitude even if I didn’t say it in so many words. I depended, like so many others do now, on people I viewed as being more self-actualized than me, saying what I would not or could not say, but angrily demanding they say it perfectly the first time. Once, in the dining room, she turned to me.
“You know what your generation’s problem is?” She’d cut me off, I don’t even remember what I’d been saying before. I looked at her. “It’s that everything’s a trauma with you people. Everything has to be trauma. Sometimes something isn’t a trauma. Sometimes it’s just a bad time. And that’s a good thing.”
I opened my mouth and closed it again. She was right and I had nothing to say to that. When I look at my own trajectory, when I map my own path to self-actualization, I trip up on the snarl of this interaction and I laugh. I had been maybe twenty, twenty one years old at the time. I thought I knew everything because I performed moral goodness better than anyone else. Because I had everyone fooled that I was pure forever. And here she had just handed me this grenade, blowing up the unimpeachable, and gone right back to what she was doing.
Walking backwards more. Through June. June is my portal. God smothers the earth and we push back, painted rainbow, locked to our cycles until we find our way out. Summer fills me with anticipatory sadness. Everything reduces me to tears, from the ambient family dialogue in the background of Jenny Nicholson’s astounding four-hour-long Star Wars Hotel video to the one-and-done “Bruce Willis” by quiet indie crooner Raffaella. Hearing Jenny Nicholson’s family talk excitedly at a theme park reminds me of my own family. We were all such nerds, Mom especially. I have her shirt in my drawer, a drawing of a tipi made to look like the TARDIS with the words DR. INDIGINERD emblazoned across the chest. I keep it there because it’s hers and because maybe I will get a PhD one day, when I can claw my way out of my own infections.
When I was nineteen, Mom and I had brunch with a student of hers who went to Cornell but lived and worked at Akwesasne. We were there to help out with the harvest. We got on the subject of marriage and the student declared that one should never marry for love—only power. Her defense was sound—a love-marriage had rendered her bereft any political power, since her parents belonged to the same clan. Double-clan babies are not legally allowed a say in most political proceedings, and people who marry their clan-cousins cannot hold political office. I nodded and absorbed this information into my worldview because it made perfect sense to me. I’d already been in two abusive relationships because of that thing called “love.” Whoever I married, I decided right then, I’d marry them for power. If we loved each other that would just be a nice little bonus.
Mom asked the student about their nation’s policies on LGBT people, with an emphasis on transgender participants in ceremony. The student faltered and said there were plenty of gays and lesbians on the rez. Mom shook her head.
“That’s not what I asked.”
I’ve missed Pride every year since I was thirteen. Thirteen was my first and last Pride parade. I’d been in Seattle. I marched in it, inexplicably, between a bunch of Star Wars cosplayers and furries. I had a metallic faux-leather jacket on over my red spaghetti strap tank top. My hair was cut like a member of the Beatles. Across the city, unbeknownst to me, my little brother was almost decapitated by a fighting robot. I’ve definitely said this before, maybe even on this blog. See? I’m in my own cycles, too. When we sing, we sing four times. We do four rounds. I’ll be marching in this year’s Pride parade as well, God willing, having filled out my form to walk with Native American Lifelines here in Baltimore. It will have been thirteen years.
When my parents were dating more seriously, Mom was getting her PhD at the University of Washington. They lived together in student housing on the UW campus. A basement suite. She had a bright yellow Mexican cabinet and on top of it was a TV set we hooked up to our Wii, which we now mostly used as a vessel for Netflix. I passed my summer days watching anything and everything. I was sheltered and slow and one day, sick of this fact about me, our dad dropped me and my less-sheltered older sister off in the middle of the city and told us we could find our way home. It was one of my favorite days ever.
Now we stand back up. We’re twenty-six again going on twenty-seven. What prompted this post was actually day one of Covid. Three in the morning popping baby Motrin. I got in my car and thought, Jesus Christ, am I just like this forever? I kept mulling it over for the rest of the day, even as I tested positive and my symptoms worsened. Here I pause, getting up to pour whole cloves in my mortar and pestle, black soapstone with a spiral carved into the side of it. I crush the cloves and remember when, this time last year, I was hospitalized. A clown entered my room to give me my discharge papers and I said something to her. I can’t remember what. She looked befuddled and said, “You’re a funny one, ain’t you.” Even the clown thinks I’m weird.
That’s where this all started, really. I was thinking about the panopticon, as usual, and the social control having everybody so online has given us. Those TikTok screenshots I come across where people are saying “Is it just me, or is everybody dressing the same?” I open the aperture and overexpose the image. Before the pandemic, I was socially inept, awkward, getting by on good looks and an earnest vibe. When the first wave of panic came, my dad and I stood very still in the middle of the supermarket, watching everybody. People spoke to each other hurriedly and too-candid, their faces flayed open by fear. Emotions bled everywhere. He turned to me.
“Now everyone’s as weird as we are,” he said. “Are you ready?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter if I’m ready or not. It’s started.”
Do you dress like everyone else? Are you traumatized? Are you waiting for someone better than you, smarter than you, more established than you to say what you want to say, what you won’t take any responsibility for saying?
I can’t go outside right now. Could you do it instead? Would you do me a favor and step outside? Can you do that for me?
I still think about marriage, but it’s less of a priority. My primary concerns are with pleasure and experience. I’m a remarkably selfish person with a hedonistic streak. Not with drugs or alcohol—I want to feel everything, and feel it deeply—but with food and flesh. Thus my concern with the present. How it might shape the future.
The government hired my team to talk to people, but that same government has created a world where nobody wants to talk to anyone. Furthermore, nobody was out when we were, because the infrastructure of these places is deliberately hostile. You are meant to think of yourself as an island, all alone on this long concrete interruption. Not only are you alone, but you’re helpless, incapable of forming your own opinion and sharing it without abdicating the moral, sociopolitical responsibility of your thought to some invisible other, presumably someone with more power and sway than you. You are the bug being tasered in an empty lot with only me and a friend to watch your unmaking. You are the bird in the poison bath, the hi-rise resident under lock and key by your leasing office, the vacant, Millennial grey future we labor under for pennies while the world gets hotter. It’s perfect for me as someone carrying an extremely debilitating, highly communicable illness—you were nowhere to be found when I coughed into the bushes or sneezed, open-mouthed and shocked, into the humid dawn. But it’s bad for us, people for whom the recent old ways of America are no longer functioning. We can no longer rely on marriage as our primary method of political engagement, nor can we rely on work for life.
So where does that leave us?
Mom couldn’t get a straight answer out of her student, so she looked at me and my sister, both trans.
“When the social starts,” she said, “you two go in whichever door you feel most comfortable entering.”
I nodded. My sister chewed her bottom lip. I had a beanie on that made me look bald and if I didn’t talk at all, most Native guys addressed me as “brother” in that gruff, cold way all cis Native guys learn to master.
We both went through the men’s side and took our places in the longhouse. Years later, a nonnative guy said to me with his whole chest, “What are you? You know, ethnically? You look pretty far out of the longhouse, if you know what I mean,” and these memories would bubble up in the back of my throat like bile. I push him out now and return to the longhouse. The sharp scent of the wood. How the rest of the men filed in after us, big and burly, their skinny braids all the way down past their asses, their tiny sons barely reaching their knees. The social’s singers took their sticks into their hands and sat down in the center of the longhouse. There was no drum.
A child in a headscarf stared at me shyly until we sat next to each other. They had a rainbow band in their hands they worried at, their deft little fingers pulling out the nylon threads. A two-spirit Mohawk, another student of Mom’s, glanced around the longhouse intensely, his light eyes sharp and preoccupied. I knew neither of these people then, but I know both of them now.
“That’s Abe,” Mom whispered, pointing with her lips at the light-eyed Indian. “The handsome one.”
“Who are you?” I murmured to the kid next to me.
“Ionawiienhawi,” they said. At my confused expression, they snorted. “Say it like this. Say ‘you owe me a Harley’ but mess it up a little.”
Then the first strike of the stick. We shut up. We sat still.
The purpose of the social is that. To be social. All the community goes down to dance. The songs are often call-and-response. I write this now and find myself at a loss for words, because this particular social served as the foundation upon which my recent past was built. Now I drink my lemon echinacea tea, cut with ginger and cloves, and I think about my earlier question—where does that leave us? Perhaps a better question, a more prudent one, is where do we go from here?
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