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On Saturday afternoon, my friend Ashley and I headed South on coastal Route 1. We were headed to a barn dance at Pie Ranch, the farm responsible for the those great baked goods sold in the city at Mission Pie. Although every month the farm invites friends and family for a potluck and night of contra dancing (similar to square dancing), this barn dance was to be a special summer solstice party, as well as what my friend, farmer Dede, an apprentice at Pie Ranch, billed as the queerest barn dance in the land. This being June, all of Dede’s friends were invited to do what we do best in June: turn everything gay.

When we reached Pescadero, traffic stopped in both directions. Bystanders told us the road would be closed for 8-10 hours for an investigation. Ashley knew we were only about 100 meters shy of the farm, and could see the barn around the bend. So she parked the car in a dirt patch on the side of the road, and we proceeded to walk up into and along the scene of a five-car crash. As we walked, Ashley’s mind ran wild with the possibilities. I don’t know why mine didn’t. Maybe I thought car accidents happen to “other” people. And on this day, they did.

Several people associated with Pie Ranch, heading to the barn dance in a convertible, were involved in the crash, but suffered no injuries. The speeding, swerving driver who caused the crash died instantly, but remained stuck in his car for an hour. In another car, a man from San Francisco, badly injured, survived for 20 minutes after the accident, but not longer. For over an hour, his girlfriend was trapped inside the same car. She survived and was airlifted by helicopter to the hospital. Ashley and I arrived not long after the helicopter left.

Several workers on the farm saw the whole thing. The accident took place so close to the barn, it’s a surprise one of the cars didn’t fly into it. The bodies, the injured and the dead, stayed on the road for long after the impact. Between the glass and debris and the Pie Ranch folks at the picnic tables waiting to give statements to the police, there was nothing in the atmosphere that bespoke party.

Only two things could play out for the rest of the night. First, as guests continued to arrive, there would be lots of chatter about what happened, how it happened. Different people would recreate the accident, the collision dynamics. Others would ask questions upon questions, details so everyone could talk through the shock. Second, there would be lots of appreciation, thankfulness for being alive, about being together; a dangerous sort of collective sentiment to be let out in a hippie community of farmers.

I would’ve done anything to get out of there. To run, to flee, to turn back around.

One of the farm’s leaders suggested hauling the picnic tables by pick-up to another part of the land; I was all for it. But the avoidance plan was quickly shut down as over time the commotion along the accident strewn road quieted and the cops departed. So many people were already there for the celebration, that the leaders decided to go along with the potluck, the rest of the night’s activities to be decided.

Goat stew was the main course. Or to be more specific, “Fiesta” stew. Dede was the first person to say it, to reference the name of the goat. “Sorry,” she said right afterwards. “I’m not sure if that’s okay.” But it was apparently alright. Others who live on the farm referred to Fiesta by name, as well. They lived on the farm for a month with Fiesta, cared for her and loved her. “That’s the circle of life,” I heard someone say, clearly talking about both the goat and the accident.

The sun fell. The sky darkened. The stars would soon start to pop. A semi-sermon grounding everyone into the events of the day, our ecological surroundings, and as I expected, our reasons to be thankful ensued. A woman with gray hair and a dress that made it clear she didn’t care much about what other people thought, said that she wanted to dance. “I want to dance in honor of the people who died today. For their families who don’t yet know they have lost loved ones.”

I know that I didn’t think consciously about the families of the dead, or about the people whose blood still remained on the road within a stone’s throw of the party. I had eavesdropped on one conversation that day, a father telling his son of the debilitating fear he felt approaching the ranch. I witnessed one mother greet her daughter in an explosion of tears. I had walked alongside Ashley while we approached the accident, thinking that her best friend was in it. I never let myself feel that fear; express that relief.

My meltdown occurred after dinner, sitting at a picnic table. I started to cry, an almost endless stream of tears. Getting up and finding some privacy didn’t even occur to me; embarssment and self-pity were far from my mind. I was thankful that nobody said they were sorry I was sad, or tried to cheer me up, or make it to away, or treat my surge of emotion as a bad thing. My friends took turns rubbing my back, wrapping arms around me, holding my head. And maybe it was the physical contact, the warmth and compassion of their bodies, the connectedness and safety that made it impossible for me to stop.

Nobody asked me why I was so upset either. I think all who knew me understood I was grieving. For everything.

I cried for death. For Fiesta. For mortality. For the exhausting jig I’m doing while some yahoo out of a Wild West movie shoots bullets at my feet, screaming, “Dance, motherfucker, dance.” Bullets coming closer and closer, dust clouds rising by my shoes, I know there is nothing I can do to protect myself, my friends, my family.

I grieved for the tiny deaths, too, that of each moment, that which is sometimes called “change.” I cried for my own insecurity, an understanding that we are nothing, have nothing, death strips us of all that we build ourselves up to be, all that we hold onto.

For the death of my relationship, and the first spadefulls of dirt hitting the coffin, slowly filling in the grave. For the shoveling still left to be done, a mound of earth, level ground, a new relationship. For my brother who is ready to leave behind this country, this culture, me. For the uncertainty of his future and his hopeful leap across the ocean.

Why couldn’t I stop crying? That damn moon. Its pull on the ocean, the waves crashing in and out. The cycle of nature. Its pull on my body. The end of the month. PMS.

Eventually, I did stop. I even went into the barn and despite myself, I danced. I twirled my partner left and twirled my partner right. I traded partners. I skipped and sashayed, slapped my thighs and slapped my partner’s hands. I dosey doed. Repeatedly. I listened to a speech about how we transformed the energy of the evening, the implicit meaning: we turned tragedy into mindful celebration.

I wish I could say that I still head some strength in me to remain with my own discomfort and that of the day’s events and triggers. But when the last car was headed back to San Francisco, I asked for a ride. I barely knew the couple and we would have to cram in the front cab of a pickup. It didn’t matter. I thought that by leaving, I could escape to the comfort of my home, that it would offer me a sense of security, protect me. Instead of continuing to stare my own pain in the face, I fled like the chickens on the farm where I was supposed to be sleeping. I followed the couple, a husband and wife who were exceedingly warm and open, but whose names I couldn’t remember, out to their truck.

We walked out past the barn. The night, the space, the escape filled me with freedom. I finally felt the relief, that of thinking I had left it all behind. We walked in the dark, under a star-pocked sky, the moon not yet out.

“Watch out for the car roof,” the husband said.

The wife scanned the ground. It wasn’t that dark out, and the roof was huge, mangled by the five-car accident that left two people dead. I don’t know how she missed it, nearly tripped over it. I don’t know why he needed to say, “car roof,” so specific was the reminder.

I do know why I tried to escape, why I try to deny death, its omnipresence in the large and small. I am afraid.

For two months, I haven’t been writing. There have been some exceptions, like this blog, and the two composition books I’ve filled with chicken scratch. It would be hard to call those two books journals, or what my brother refers to as my “Dear Diaries.” I tend to think a journal involves some care, even if its the care to be legible, and that a person who journals has at least some vague interest in perusing the pages in the years to come, gaining insight into a previous state of mind, the past, change. Not me. My composition books are landfills of broken thoughts, swirling emotions, and redundant rhetorical questions. They are are repositories for mental trash, packed with putrid waste. That is the whole point.

Rather than calling them journals, I consider these books my “morning pages,” a term and exercise I got from reading the first few chapters of the Artists Way several years ago. The author, Julia Cameron, is kind of scary in that new age, creative cult leader kind of way. She suggests a three-page, keep the pen moving, don’t stop, don’t think, free write each morning as a means to blow out the stoppers blocking our natural artistic spirits. I can’t say I do “morning pages” to uncork my muse. I do it for cheap therapy. And that’s on top of paying for the expensive kind.

I also make it a point not to take the exercise of my morning pages too seriously. Although I almost never do it any time other than the morning, it’s not necessarily the first thing I do in the morning, and sometimes I drink coffee while I’m writing. As a result, my pen isn’t always moving; I stop mid-sentence; I occasionally cross a line out; I stare into space. Some days, three pages is just my beginning, a finger down my throat that has me hawking up endless pages, each one more unreadable than the previous.

For two months, I’ve done been doing my morning pages upchuck, at least 6 days a week. On work days, I set aside 15 minutes for it before leaving my house. Chump change. I used to set aside 1.5 hours to write before work. I used to write 5-6 days a week, working on “books,” essays, stories, articles. For years. Even before grad school, I wrote often, regularly. One of my very first writing teachers told me “writers write.” I understood immediately that entry into this desirable club didn’t involve skill or intelligence, but a willingness, or compulsion as it may be, to put the pen to the paper, to try. Sure, I could be a “bad” writer. At least 4 out of 7 days a week, I’m a bad writer. But ever since I turned my teacher’s truism into my mantra, I’ve considered myself a writer.

Even now, I haven’t stopped calling myself a writer, or defining myself as one. Yet, the friction created by being a writer who doesn’t write chafes me daily. Sometime in the past five years, everyone who knows me changed their standard greeting from, “Hi, How are you?” to “How’s the writing going? What are you working on?” When people ask me what I do for a living, I downplay the answer, explaining that my job is for the purpose of allowing me the time and space to write. When co-workers ask me about this writing, about what they imagine is my passion since it certainly isn’t my job, I wince a bit inside. I briefly mention what I was writing, what I could be writing, what I might start writing, fully aware that I’m not writing at all.

I don’t like misrepresenting myself. I feel some guilt about not writing. Some shame about my lack of discipline. Anger at myself for throwing away what to most writers would be a dream of a work schedule. Right now, I am drifting. I am waiting. Not for a mark on the calendar or a specific state of mind or circumstances. I’m waiting for an internal shift, a change that says I’m ready, even if it’s the boot camp disciplinarian in me waking up to yell, “At your desk and give me 800 words. Now!”

Two months is a long time not to write. But sometimes I think I’m doing my best work as a writer. I’ve heard you need to go out and have experiences to be a writer. I’m not really going out and having experiences, nothing exciting anyways, nothing worth writing about. I am, however, processing my experiences, I think. Circulating, grinding, teasing, hugging, fighting, and juggling emotions. Emotions that have names, names that don’t matter. I laugh and I cry and I laugh and I cry. But what I am feeling is on p. 2 of my book of morning pages. It changes on the top of p.3, the bottom of p.3, the top of p.4. So on and so forth for hundreds of pages.

My feelings are raw and urgent. There is no shape to them, no meaning to extricate, no essay to twist them into. There is nothing special about them. They are common and universal. They are human. And now, more than ever, I feel human.

Great writing, the kind of great writing I love, is connective. It overcomes and bridges; teaches us that we are not alone; leads us into a catharsis that might be too uncomfortable to open up into on our own. I tell myself that I’ve been using the last two months to build emotional depth into my writing, to dig into the gravity of my existence and the existence of all those around me, to understand humanity. Someday, I tell myself, I will be better off for this writing break, better able to relate and communicate and touch others with my words. I tell myself these things because they are the most encouraging things to tell a writer who isn’t writing.

1. Anything can be fried. In New Orleans, they fry health food, like fried green tomatoes, and they deep fry fast food, like oyster po’ boys. They fry shrimp in special tempura batters and flash fry dessert, like ice cream. But, are you ready for this: they fry cheese cake. And it’s damn good.
2. Cannonballing into a swimming pool makes you feel like you’re on vacation.
3. Sometimes New Orelans makes the most sense if you think of it as a northern part of the Caribbean instead of a southern part of the United States.
4. I still have a few lesbian friends, and although the distinctions between queer, trans, dyke, and lesbian do mean something, sometimes that something doesn’t matter.
5. Rain turns things green. Green grass, green trees, green plants… Green is the color of vitality.
6. Living a fulfilling queer and out life in many parts of the country is not easy.
7. Katrina decimated New Orleans, and the effects on the landscape, housing, people, and economy is present at every turn, during every moment, in every breath.
8. Republicans, and even gay republicans, are not just people I read about in the media; they actually exist in the flesh.
9. An artist needs her space; an artist with a studio is an inspiration.
10. Despite traveling all over the world, I find no place more exotic than New Orleans.
11. While there, you can incorporate “bayou” into your everyday vocabulary and remind yourself daily that you’re in Louisiana.
12. When I’m with two of my favorite people, and the three of us are side-by-side on elliptical machines, or trading sets in the weight room, or going for a run along the lake, I understand best the depth of our friendship; during a 9 am Saturday morning workout together, there is no place any of us would rather be.
13. Life may be short, but time is necessary to heal. I waited years for this picture, but what I’m left with is timeless.

Many people cry at weddings. But this morning, I woke up and cried over pictures and videos for a wedding I didn’t attend, for people like Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, whom I don’t know.

I started watching Sex and the City in 2000. I was 21 years old, had recently moved to San Francisco, and lived in an overpriced flat in heteroville, Cole Valley, with three Craigslist roommates. On almost any given night, the four of us could be found either at Finnegans Wake playing ping pong, or in front of our TV with a bottle of red wine and a six-pack.

On Sundays, we were always in front of the TV, and shortly before 9pm, the reminders on my very first digital cable box would inform us that it was soon time for Sex and the City. Not like any of us could forget. My roommate Jill would sit cross-legged on our ugly plaid couch, the pattern hidden by a department store slip cover, clap her hands and bounce up and down for at least a half an hour prior to the start.

In our own ways, we all shared in Jill’s pleasure, even if torturing her was one of our ways. Once, the two boys locked HBO, using the child protection feature. When Jill discovered this, she stood in the middle of the living room and screamed something like, “If you don’t fix that, I’m going to get a knife from the kitchen and kill you.” We all believed her, and the boys unlocked the channel with a few minutes to spare.

Like the two straight boys who sat by my sides, I never understood myself as being a part of the show’s demographic. We watched because Jill made us. We watched because the women were hot and they liked to have orgasms.

Truth be told, Sex and the City was just my warm up for Queer as Folk. When the Sex and the City credits rolled, one of my guy roommates always ran from the room, and the other stayed for a few minutes to show he wasn’t homophobic, then yawned to show he just wasn’t interested, and went to bed. Jill fled, too, leaving me all alone with Justin and Brian, and the most important revelation of my twenties: gay male sex is my biggest turn-on. The Sex and the City romps were nice and all, but nothing was better than a head bobbing in the back alley of Babylon or Brian pushing Justin into the glass wall of a steaming shower.

With the opening of the Sex and the City movie last weekend, I was reminded of those long lost Sunday nights. I hadn’t realized how badly I had actually wanted to see the movie until I went with a friend to the theater on Saturday afternoon, only to discover the movie was sold out. Despite reading lots of movie hype, I guess I also didn’t realize how many Jills were out there, bouncing up and down, clapping their hands, and counting down the days to the release. On Sunday, my friend and I learned from our mistake and bought our tickets in advance.

I’m not going to do any spoiling here. The Sex and the City movie was everything I thought it should be: on orgy of fashion and style, a showcase of wealthy glamorous New York, a heaping of melodrama. The length of the movie worked to its advantage, allowing for a plot that carried both the characters and the audience through a range of emotions. The biggest shock was the success of the slapstick comedy, which had me laughing more than I ever did watching the show. Then again, I haven’t seen much of the show in years. I can’t watch the TBS version, the edits and commercials annoy me even more than Carrie. And besides, I don’t have cable or a TV anymore.

I loved the movie, and I think that maybe I did because it reminded me of my early adulthood. Sex and the City was the first show I watched commercial-free. It was the first show I watched with explicitly sexual content. It was also the first time I ever paid my own cable bill, my own rent. I was living in my first house in San Francisco, with my first friends in San Francisco. Or maybe right before you turn 30, which I do in July, everything is cause for reflection.

The characters in Sex and the City movie were older, wiser versions of themselves. When the four of them sat at brunch, cracking jokes about sexless marriages, I was reminded of my former roommates in that Cole Valley house, all four of us sitting around the coffee table with the enormous bowl resting in the middle where Jill tossed all of our crap. I can see the four of us sitting there on Sundays, our living room illuminated by the women of Sex and the City. We, too, are older, wiser versions of ourselves, at least I hope. I searched my old Kodak disks, looking for a picture of us back then, but my digital pictures do not go back that far. It was a long time ago.