Bread and Bread

Note: Contains spoilers, so if you’re an even slower viewer than me, move along. Pop culture has an unfortunate history of killing off both Black characters and lesbians as plot devices. So how did Orange is the New Black manage to violently kill a Black lesbian and make it the complete opposite of gratuitous? Which is to say devastating, and a tragedy in the true Aristotelian sense. I took some mental notes as I was watching/sobbing, and I’m writing them down because I think they’re relevant to anyone who cares about narrative and social justice, and narratives that advocate for social justice without feeling like a Very Special Episode (see: The L Word, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman ). Here’s what OITNB did right in the episodes leading up to and following the one in which Bayley, a young, gullible white guard, accidentally strangles Poussey while fighting off Suzanne, aka Crazy Eyes: The show doesn’t introduce a character solely for the purpose of killing her. We got t...

At this very minute, my innovative writer friend Bronwyn is hosting a "hashtag book festival" about parks. What does this mean? It means that if you go here , you can encounter interesting things to read about parks, and post your own thoughts, writing, pictures and recommendations, all from the comfort of your phone or computer. A genius locale for a book festival in the middle of August. I'm taking this as a call to jot down a few of my own #ParkLit thoughts; I was inspired by a photo Bronwyn posted of Mesa Verde, the national park where she just did a writing residency. I doubt she was housed in an actual cliff dwelling, but that's how I like to picture her: sitting inside an adobe house, laptop on her knees, gazing at the valley below. Great view. Tough commute. My family took one kind of vacation when I was a kid: We visited state and national parks in our 1979 Dodge Four Star motor home. We always left no later than 5:30 am. My sister and I rolled out o...

I’m doing a few unusual things right now. 1) I am writing (an uncommon enough occurrence in itself) in our home office. This is notable because a) we have a home office—at our old place, half of the office was Dash’s bedroom and the other half was packed too tightly to do much in—and b) I am writing in it. Long before Dash set up his crib where our file cabinets used to be, I was a coffee shop kind of writer. Home was both too quiet and too distracting. Even now, I hear the siren call of a dishwasher that needs unloading. But new house = new habits, so I’m trying to start one today. Don’t worry, I’ll still spend approximately 73 percent of my disposable income on lattes, but I am determined not to let our lovely, light-filled office become a storage room. Right now I’m enjoying a truly idyllic view: front porch, little yard with drought-resistant greenery, quiet street, small teal house belonging to the second neighbor we met, a filmmaker named Diane, who brought us a giant bag...

Laterblog, from a July 18 journal entry. As I write this, I'm watching mist filter through pines and redwoods and trees I have no name for. I'm staying with my aunt and cousin and their respective husbands on the outskirts of Loleta, which is on the outskirts of Eureka. "Behind the Redwood Curtain" is a thing people say up here when they're talking about how there are no good jobs or doctors. Dash just woke up from his nap for a minute. I soothed him by taking him to the window and pointing out the trees, the mist, the propane tank, the cars on the highway, the billboard for Cheech and Chong's appearance at the local casino. Maria and Al's little house in the big woods. Aunt Vanessa has lived here since the seventies, when she moved here to be with Richard, her second husband. My grandmother joined her when her house was taken by eminent domain to make room for the Santa Ana City College parking lot. I learned all these details from my cousin ...

1. inconsolable Several people in my feed shared a news clip of Alton Sterling’s son bawling and crying out “Daddy!” I try not to be a look-away type, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn the sound on. The headline and a few seconds of silent video was enough. I kept thinking of last year’s Homeboy Family Picnic, when a little boy temporarily lost his dad, a Homeboy trainee. The boy was maybe seven. He had a chubby face and a buzz cut; a smear of barbecue sauce had defiled his ribbed white tank. He was in tears, calling out “Daddy!” “Who’s your dad?” asked the crew of women who quickly gathered around him. “Raul,” he said.* Raul had to be nearby, playing volleyball or grooving to oldies in the shade. But his son was inconsolable, despite the women’s assurance that we’d find Raul momentarily. He sobbed and sobbed until finally he stopped and threw up on the grass. This year's picnic. Families lost and found. As a kid I’d been quick to panic when separated...

1. find out what it means to me A common trope in the queer rights movement is “Children of LGBT people deserve to see their parents treated with dignity.” I’m not a huge fan of invoking “the children” (it’s cheap and it implies that non-parents…don’t need dignity?), but of course I agree. After the Orlando shooting this past weekend, I tried to put myself in the shoes of a queer person’s kid. I tried to imagine what it would feel like, on a visceral level, to see my parents attacked physically, verbally or systemically. When I pictured my actual parents—when I pictured Chris and Valerie Klein—I felt immediately embattled. I wanted to throw myself in front of their tender bodies and souls. Then I tried to imagine how Dash must feel about AK and me. At 16 months, it seems to be: Mommy! Mama! (Actually: Mama! Mama! We haven’t managed to make different names stick yet.) His invocation is a mix of delight and possession, often mixed with the need to tell us something very impo...

1. something to (es)crow about When we were going through the adoption process, other hopeful adoptive parents compared the “match”—the time when the expectant mom and the adoptive parents have agreed on a plan, but before the baby is born—to escrow. I had no experience with home ownership, but I understood what it meant: a period of limbo when hopes were high and a lot could go wrong. Now the adoption process is helping me understand the process of buying a house. I know how that sounds, comparing a human being to a piece of property. And that’s exactly why adoption is so frustrating, because it attempts to translate a relationship into a transaction. Anyway, we are now in escrow. Regular escrow. By “we,” I mean my dad. AK and I are just the grateful, probable future tenants. If adoption was a creaky wooden roller coaster, this process has been a buttered luge—that quick and smooth. A very expensive luge, where someone else is doing the buttering. A fairly accur...

Each day at Homeboy starts with a Thought of the Day--a personal story or short inspirational speech by a staff member or trainee. It's part of the reason I don't bother going to church anymore; I live at church (a church that welcomes atheists, a church where even the priests meditate with gongs and burn sage). (I also know how the church sausage is made, which both dims and enhances the magic, but that's another post.) Naturally Fr. Greg's TotD's get the most accolades, followed closely by TotD's from especially vulnerable and courageous trainees, the taste of both tragedy and transformation fresh in their mouths. But my personal favorite TotD-giver is Jose Osuna, Homeboy's Director of External Affairs. He is a former client, who started as a solar panel program student and worked his way up through the ranks. But he's quick to point out that he was never one of those kids who grew up in Boyle Heights with Fr. Greg as a shadow-dad even during their...

1. the turns our lives have taken My last post was so melancholy. I mean, that was the space I was in, but sometimes I think I only know how to write in Sad Voice anymore, even when I’m happy. I’m like the most emo 39-year-old you’ll ever meet. But I’m healthy—those quarterly appointments are a new lease on life, no matter how much I try not to let my world revolve around them. And I just got back from vacation.* So it seems like a good time to try my hand at writing about a good time. That's Amy on the left. This is 2008, which in my mind was two years ago. It was a pretty simple trip—a few days with friends in a rented house on the Central Coast—but we’d been planning it a long time. Amy and AK go way back to a women’s group at the Gay & Lesbian Center, and Amy and I go back almost as far. I remember the night we stayed up late eating cheese and talking at her friends’ gorgeous Craftsman house where she stayed in raw early days after her breakup with Kim, her...