Recently chatting with my sister as her husband and I plan our upcoming falconry sessions and casually joke about us getting older and spontaneously getting into birds and she looks at me and says “Spontaneous? You’ve been a bird freak for… a while.” And a few things suddenly slap me in the face: I have a ten-inch tattoo of a magpie on my arm that is now about 10 years old, and based on my personal identification with the bird that goes back to my childhood. I see a turkey buzzard circling over head recently and remember camping under the oaks on center street in Provo for hours 17 years ago to watch their enormous committee hanging over the street, two dozen birds strong, annoying all my roommates with reports from my obsessive observation. And then there’s my eagle scout project, hanging ironically like a 26 year old albatross around my neck: sourcing, securing and spreading 12 tons of nesting material to establish a riparian preserve for 50+ species of migratory birds in Arizona that is now a major ornithological destination.

This is like when my psychiatrist asks if I consider myself an anxious person, or if I struggle with anxiety, and I truthfully and enthusiastically answer “No, not really! Anxiety’s never really been a problem!” and she looks at my medical history that I gave her not 10 minutes earlier and says “But you take Xanax anytime you fly to manage panic attacks, and have been hospitalized in the ER twice for anxiety episodes that manifested as full-blown cardiac events?” I guess if you put it that way.

Anyway, all this to say that I’m very excited that the crows and ravens are finally back. In January I had a good thing going: daily trips to the river at 3 to feed the birds, where they’d all but eat out of my hands. I got them to come when I called and could pick out individuals, and when I showed up they’d come congregate. I was living high on the fucking hog, and then suddenly… mating season, nesting, and they all vanished.

Seven long months later and the pink-mouthed fledglings are out making a racket, and their folks are taking them down to the river to scrounge and learn the ropes. I’m heading back out semi-regularly now to start to make their acquaintance. My goal this year is to get them taking food from my hands (as they’ve been doing for 30,000 years, calm down.)

So much mental chatter. I wonder what I am doing, I wonder what I want to be doing, I wonder what I want to want to be doing. This is a mid-life crisis unmoored from the props and set-dressing of good old' fashioned heterosexuality. Where does the panic go when it doesn’t have a red porsche or a secretary to lose itself in? I’m just supposed to be afraid of death and look at course options at the Berkeley extension and wonder if it’s too late to get a bachelor’s in Celtic studies on my own? Look at metalworking residencies at the Penland school of craft and know I could afford it but am maybe still too scared of that kind of confirmation of insipidity this late in life? What fun.

There’s a moment before each time we go out now where I briefly… I dunno, full body panic. I look in the mirror and am like… what? Why would this go to that party? This is an old person. I don’t feel old, the I that sits behind my eyes, the I that cannot shut up inside not for one goddamn minute, the I that is excited by birds and learning languages and the Book of Taliesin. But the him in front of me looks tired. Looks like he has not, cannot, and will not never develop a commanding set of pecs. Destined to be… sort of soft, shapeless… forever? The him in front of me is graying at an alarming rate, the him in front of me has eyelids that are beginning to wander, the him in front of me has to shave his fucking earlobes three times a week. Doomed to be further and further afield from one another, I’m afraid. Doomed to be further and further afield from one another = I’m afraid. What! fun!

We are about to leave for a birthday double header, first to Adam’s then to Ted’s, I try to pick and earring and think… an earring? Do you think you are 12? I look in the mirror and it becomes this funhouse mirror, from the front, fine, and I start to turn and begin to see… my sister? an old man? Have I always been this… deep? My head looks like it goes too far back? When did these wrinkles on my neck appear? Am I shaped like a trapezoid? It goes on. I push past it. We go to the parties and its fine. Or is it. Who knows. I’m haunted by this thing I read where a woman says she always asks “how do other people perceive you?” in job interviews because it’s the make or break question: self-awareness is a key component in wanting to work with someone. “But it’s IMPOSSIBLE to actually know that” I think. And boy do I think. “I cannot actually stop thinking,” I think.

I’m drawing a lot of shit lately, little graphic explorations. Trying to have something for a show in September. I read blurb in a course description about the opportunity collage gives to expand past the limitations of printing capabilities and have a huge epiphany, suddenly invigorated. But then I realize it’s a revelation I actually had months ago, I just never did anything with it. Worried this is what it’ll be forever. Breakthroughs un-acted upon. John and I have this big, knock down drag out emotional come to jesus. Not directed at each other, just both of us losing it at all of it. I tell him that I've been fixated on this lyric from Fever Ray’s song “Kandy” — “what if I die with a song inside?” And I realize that’s what all of this is — the realization that life is probably more than half way over and that if I don’t start drawing now, really drawing, really making, really doing, then I simply will find myself at the end of the track. The I desperate, the me expiring, and time. is. up.

What fun!

Here are the books I read in July.

Books read in June.

Books read in May.

Books read (and re-read) in April

I open my front door and the air is thick with the scent of citrus blossoms. The hills outside the house are shrouded in mist and it's cold again. Rainy today, suddenly cold again - I miss my morning meetings because, reluctant to get out of bed (it being around 55 in the house when I wake up), I fall back asleep after I cancel my alarm. At the river, trees lie capsized in the now-shallow flow after weeks of flooding and birds have returned to the riverbanks. Every tree in bud, soft lime-green leaves showing out while drenched roses bloom.

New baristas at the neighborhood shop, a twinkish boy with a chain of organic pearls, and another with impossibly smooth skin. Today the latter sings along under his breath with the Smiths while making my coffee. Hearing the Smiths I am reminded always of a video I saw where a woman, under the influence of a chemical that suppresses sweetness, tastes a variety of things — coffee, vanilla icecream, chocolate — and experiences them anew and finds the unbound flavor notes surprising. The Smiths remained undiscovered by me during adolescence, Tori Amos and Björk and any number of gay divas more than following the gas law and filling their container, so I hear them today without the unifying top-note of nostalgia that seems to inflate their impact with my friends. I find myself bopping pleasantly along to a ridiculous song that surprises me by turning out to be "There is a Light that Never Goes Out" — a title I've seen tattooed on more than a few friends and former lovers alike and cannot believe this is the song that has changed them so.

Been thinking about the inevitability of death the last couple days again (who needs the Smiths?) I began regularly taking my meds this week so we may just be able to conveniently chalk this up to the newly surging levels of Buspirone and Escriptolam in my blood, along with today's unpleasant eyeball pressure. In any event, there it is just under my last email of the day: you'll die; there it is after dinner: one day this will all just stop. Fortunately, there's always another email, and dessert, coming up.

Books read in March

Two weeks ago my 40th birthday. John takes me to Orsa and Winston for a 5 course meal, the wine pairing perfection. It’s a Michelin single banger, in a small no frills space in downtown. The food is truly excellent but you can also tell that’s where all the money is going, the same shoe string, no-forgiveness budget of all restaurants. I get a candle on my dessert, we also see 4 of the five other dinner parties get candles on their desserts: it’s a popular spot for celebrations, and I wonder, if like a Chuck-E-Cheese the staff is totally inured to any sort of fête in their personal lives at this point. Anyway that’s what my birthday would have been like without John: me attempting to stoic it away as a “it happens everyday” sort of nonchalance, a not-convincing veneer on the solid mass of midlife crisis beneath. I’m feeling this birthday coming and I know I’m aging and life is brief and blah blah blah. Forty!

Laura flies into town just because, crashes with us for a few days. She and I make a clarified milk punch cocktail she designed for me called the Seven Wonders, after the number of spices she infuses the brandy with, but in reference to a shared moment of bliss circa 2018 where we see the music video for Fleetwood Mac’s song of the same name at Moby Dick in the Castro for the first time and are all agog. The alchemy of a schlock song with a schlock video in a schlock bar some how adding up to a moment of perfection that somehow makes me emotional. The VJ that night was a 20 something barista from the Verve near my house in Duboce named Alejandro, a young Poz queer who always cracks me up, we went to cheer him on at his first VJ gig. Somehow knowing he picked it with fresh eyes, pure uncut nostalgia from a time that has informed every aspect of his life adds to this true transformation of lead to solid gold.

We head to John’s folks for a weekday birthday lunch, where my sister’s fam will meet us. I’m nervous because John’s folks house is like a medieval museum full of breakable wonders that I know my nieces and nephews will love but also potentially demolish. I can’t wait for it though, because I know John’s mom has always wanted grandchildren and will simply not be getting them, not ever, and I know she will love my nieces and nephews and they will love her. The biggest tragedy of my life is that my mom will never meet John’s because I know they would have gotten on like a house on fire. I love John’s mom like I love my own, but I know John’s relationship is more fraught, and that our time is limited, and anyway that’s what I’m thinking about as we walk up to the front door, me John & Laura with our big jug of Seven Wonders in a Chemex when the door opens and it’s John’s fam and mine and wait also my sister from Utah and Jon and Danny and Chris and Ian and Pat and Dave and Taylor and Justin and Adam and David and Sam and Miles and Will and it’s a surprise party for me and I never saw it coming not for a single second.

I don’t know how John did it, but I’m glad he did. I would have regretted not doing anything, but I just couldn’t bring myself to put something together.