Bread and Bread

1. not so much a litquake but a lit-tremor We left the West Oakland BART station at a reasonable time. It was raining lightly. I reviewed what I was going to read that night as the train rumbled beneath the bay. AK made sure the brakes were set on Dash’s stroller and kept him entertained until we arrived in the Mission. In the Mission, it was pouring. I’d forgotten that San Francisco has a completely different microclimate from the East Bay. We were up north for a long weekend, staying with Pedro and Stephen, who were brave enough to put up two adults and a toddler for four whole nights. Their pit bull, Sugar, spent a lot of the weekend shut in Stephen and Pedro’s bedroom, so she made the biggest sacrifice. (Thank you, Sugar, if you’re reading.) The catalyst for the trip was my reading, which was a small part of Mutha Magazine ’s event, which was a small part of LitCrawl, which is a big part of LitQuake. Author photo. #NailedIt We followed my map app for six blocks befor...

Every few months, I try to write a letter to Dash. They’re descriptive and mundane. This one came out as a kind of prose poem, and it captures my current mood. Father G says heaven is the present. I repeat this to myself, which is an act of memory, which is to say: the past. This is the time of year when the future shakes its fist. Late afternoons in Los Angeles are a Maxfield Parrish painting. As if your 20-month-old skin needed any help. It is the color of toast, smooth as flan. You look west and I spy on you from inches away, your legs against my hip, your face even with mine. In low light your irises and pupils blend to black, but here I see the clear brown ring. You want to ride in your green plastic car, the one with the handle in back, for a grownup to push. I am shoeless, but you’ll cry if we go inside again, so I lap the block barefoot, feeling trashy and wrecked, which I am. Pods dropped from trees bite my soles. You have discovered the joy of dragging your feet a...

Lately I’ve been binge-listening to The Jackie and Laurie Show , a Nerdist-network podcast by comics Jackie Kashian and Laurie Kilmartin about women in comedy. I’ve seen Kashian perform locally a bunch of times, including once in someone’s backyard. A thing I love about both of them is that they love comedy so much, and are so eager to hone their material, that any shred of diva behavior goes out the window. At the same time, they’re both refreshingly honest about their envy, ambition and exhaustion, three major motifs in my life that are often swept under the rug by artists when they talk about their work. "Standup is making fun of podium culture." The general mood of the podcast is “I want to do gigs and learn things and think and make people think, and also goddamn it I’m tired and want to just sit in my favorite chair.” That’s how I feel pretty much all the time. Kashian and Kilmartin are both about ten years older than me. As a pigeon mom /writer seeking viable ...

1. tgif A couple of Fridays ago, I came home from work, relieved AK of Dash duty, fed him, put him to bed and set to work cleaning the house while she caught her breath after a day of childcare. I picked up the remnants of the day’s Dash-nado: blocks, balls, plastic eggs, a floppy-limbed Angels monkey, a squeaky Lamb Chop that is actually a dog toy, multiple Wubbanub pacifiers, keys, clothes and so many books. He likes sitting in our laps while we read to him (and if I teach him to love reading my life’s purpose will more or less be fulfilled), but he also likes flinging the ones he’s not interested in from the shelves till he finds his favorites. He also likes stacking them on top his toy drum and occasionally drawing in them. I changed the sheets on our bed and ran a Swiffer Wet cloth over the floors. I wiped down the sinks and toilets (it’s still weird to me to live in a house with toilets, plural) and did a couple of little extra things: dusted some floorboards and hung a ...

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...