inside/outside: loathe to explain

The air bit with a chill that didn’t match the bright sunlight. I was on a bus traveling from my apartment to a doctor’s office I’d never visited at the university of British Columbia. The view from the bridge might have been pretty, but to me it was nothing but a view of the recent oil spill. I did not know what to expect at the doctor’s office. Someone over the phone had dropped the word “cancer” into conversation as innocuously as a sugarcube into coffee. I didn’t have enough data, so I did not know what to expect. As a result, I failed to have any expectations. The unknown no longer holds any fear after the worst has happened.

I was recently in Los Angeles for three weeks. I stayed up an entire night and watched the moon’s light be eaten by our planet’s shadow from a barren desert near the border of Mexico. I learned how to drive an ATV and I sped in a race car on a track for the first time. I drove my first go-kart and only partially dislocated my shoulder doing so. I was introduced to shooting skeet and never missed, not even once, until the assault rifle jammed. I had dinner at the Magic Castle and discovered a secret door. I visited the spaceship Endeavor and a Banksy piece and the Echo Lake chandelier tree.

Luck was mostly with me. My company was always kind and funny and smart. My days were spent working and exploring, unearthing new places and experiences, and my evenings were often spent in the company of my host, one of my sweetest ex-partners, a man who pet my hair when he caught me keening with pain in my sleep.

Every day I think about Michael, his smile, his kindness, how much I would do if it would let me see him and hold him and let him loose on the world again. I would do unspeakable things. His smile, his wit. I would burn down houses. I would burn down cities. A life for a life. Ten lives for his. A hundred. He would be horrified and justified. He would be validated. I cannot say his name without twisting inside.

Everything in California made for easy stories. The sun shone almost every day, there were flowers everywhere, a downy brown hummingbird in the front yard, a familiar taste like metal in the back of my throat from the pollution in the air. I touched a tiny wild lizard, I bought books at The Last Bookstore, and sobbed until I thought I might die on the perfect sand beach at Santa Monica. I danced until last call in my underwear in a borrowed bear suit open to my waist in a bar on Hollywood Boulevard.

I try not to think about my coward of a most recent ex, M., and how much pain he’s left unaddressed inside of me. I shy away from it the way I now avoid mirrors, as if he literally slashed me with knives and then declared me too ugly instead of only figuratively. I cannot bear my unwanted reflection as I cannot rely on my heart. It is too broken. I am too ruined. Both have fractured and cracked and crumbled. The abuse, such a surprise, was too much. The trauma, as unexpected, destroyed what was left. I am used up and there is not enough left to put anything back together. I cannot say his name, nor that of the planet he named himself after. I can barely utter my own.

The difficult stories are harder to see, but they are bigger and deeper and wider and greedy.

Being in the desert was triggering, (he grew up out here, he told me stories, fixing his jeep with the gusset of his underwear, getting lost in gullies while looking for ghost towns, his words a footnote to every stone), but who alive has eyes that could see such a thing?

I cannot reliably keep down anything I eat. I have lost fifteen pounds. People are constantly saying, “Oh wow, you look so good!”.

This is also a trigger.

A terrible winter, leading into a spring that only looks better with eyes that cannot see.

Being alive is triggering. Everything hurts. Everything. Always.

My life since October has been a near comprehensive list of tragedy, injury, pain, disappointment, disability, death, and every wrenching heartbreak. I constantly wake violently throughout every night, usually crying, my endoctrine system certain that I am always under threat. Why else this much pain? I live stunned with it, trapped in the suffering cage of my own failure of a body, forcing myself to try to move normally through each moment even though its roar is deafening.

I try to be the sort of person who does not bring the tone down, does not to contribute to the disappointment, and I am sick of the world, so mostly I have been quiet. But, in truth, I am sick of living. I want to quit. Yet these habits die hard. When asked about such things, I have been telling the easy stories. “Magic!” “Race cars!” Tone. Keep it light, (keep it pointless), keep it bright.

I might say we went to the Salton Sea, went to Slab City, and looked at the art. I might say that the art was unexpected, that it was good to see the piano still present. Those are the outside stories, not the experience, not how I only went to East Jesus to visit a dear friend’s grave to try and make a genuine connection with his unexpected death, only to encounter a tourist destination and be force-fed a rote and rehearsed tour and a bizarre and misplaced lecture about my lack of respect. Both happened, but the latter is more important to me than the first fact.

When pressed further by people who know about the other narratives, the shadow, less superficial stories, I have been still replying defensively until very recently, habitually, with the only good thing left unharmed – “but the pets are fine!”

Even this, however, is no longer true.

The day before I flew back to Canada, my flatmate David sent me a panicked note over Facebook. The unthinkable had occurred; Tanith the cat swatted Selenium the ferret and ruptured her eye.

He was worried she was going to be blinded and didn’t know what to do. I arranged for hospital care, I arranged a ride there, I arranged to borrow space on a credit card to pay for it all. I did everything from California, hoping her vision could be saved, stressed out and over stretched, breaking down whenever I thought about how much she must be hurting, no matter where I was or what I was doing. All of our options were scary and expensive. The vet referred us to an optical surgeon. Two hundred dollars. The optical surgeon suggested her eye be removed. Another two hundred. We scheduled the surgery. Eight hundred. She had a rough time on the table. Another hundred. The mask became harder to keep in place.

Posting to social media about Selenium’s needs and ordeal covered the costs. I am grateful, we’re not going to be wiped out, but my grateful allayment is muddled. I am conflicted. There is no justice. She is home now, looking more like a prize fighter than a pirate. This is the Red Queen Paradox with a knee to the kidney for good measure; we run and run and run to stay in place, everyone throw in! Yet no matter how much is given, how much support is offered, (where was this before?), the best that can be possibly attained is a new equilibrium worse than the previous norm. It’s like my life’s theme, if such things existed outside of the convenient packaging of construct or English lit.

Now that April’s Big Bad Trauma has arrived and (mostly, as best it can, a bankruptcy disguised as success) been neutralized, I am waiting for whatever happens in May. It will be rough, it will be tumble, and I refuse to try to imagine what awful unexpected there is left. Who’s next? What’s next?

It’s my birthday this month. Thirty-three on the twenty:ninth. Ten years plus one from when I promised Michael I would fight to stay alive and try, no matter what, to find joy. Ten years “and a day” of failure and pain. If I can’t succeed at such a small thing, in that length of time, I can’t succeed, full stop. My promise runs out on my birthday. It’s almost a relief. Ten years and a day of fighting and struggle, just to confirm: My best isn’t good enough and it never will be.

“I am the captain and I sail a sea of dreams.”

Woke up this Valentine’s feeling sick and hollow. During the inspiring decade+ that Michael Green starred in my life, the glorious, mad wit that so well defined him always astonished me. (I’m not sure I’ve ever known anyone to be more dynamic, vital or alive.) And, like the great actor he was, he mastered and treasured every role in my life he could get his hands on – mentor, lover, pen-pal, partner, parent, tantrum child, art king, collaborator, curator, smart-ass student, responsible educator – with an effortless, beautiful sincerity I couldn’t help but admire and reciprocate with my entire heart. I am devastated with this loss.

There has been no one better in my family, no one brighter or more essential to my life. He could, in turn, both amaze and terrify, but he cared deeply and he graciously made certain that his love supported me during the darkest times, such as what we’re all experiencing now.

So today, as a comfort to my heart and yours, as he would prefer, as he would be proud to be, may he also always be The Whaler.


The Whaler, performed by Michael Green of One Yellow Rabbits at Performance Works as part of the Here Be Monsters theater festival 2006. Recorded by myself.

it will feel like injustice when the sun begins to rise

One of the brightest spots in my entire life has just been torn away by a car crash.
I am really, very deeply, not even a little bit okay.

Michael Green was killed in a car crash this morning.

CBC news has some of the details.

It’s very likely that very few of you know what our relationship was or what he means to me – as very public people sometimes do, we had a very private connection – but Michael lines this journal like silver. He is, in many ways, why large swaths of it exist and why I have persisted in spite of so much of the pain that has come my way. He lifted me out of darkness. My darling Michael Thomas Green, one of the most important people in my adult life, his care and support, even at such a distance, sometimes have been my only secret weapon against the coming of the night.

I don’t know what I’ll do now that he’s gone. I’m in tears. I’m in shock. I am scraped raw.

“And he decreases the number of clocks by exactly one”

Thank mercy for young boys. Young boys who will drive, at the slightest provocation, many many miles to come see me. On a whim. Then take me for dinner. Then dessert. They are splendid creatures. Rare and exceptional, wicked and sly. Somewhere there is a poem waiting in all this. Thank mercy for young boys.

what colour eyes would your children have?

There is a boy of my acquaintance who is far too old to be considered a boy by most standards, who is also likely coming to town soon. Any day now. There is an annual event he attends here that begins on Tuesday. We used to be close, me and this gentleman I persistently call a boy, (as well as a dove, another pet name misnomer), but there was a falling out which felled us apart, and now I am terrified that if or when he comes, he will not call.

It used to be we would talk every day. Months of it, mostly out of the same city. Logging in long distance every night before bed, turning on the camera just to have company. Reading to each other, waving, singing, writing our lives out like diary entries to be late night tattooed on our skin. Always, as ever, it was the thought of you that held me through. An entire dictionary range of love letters and affectionate inspiration. Calling in the morning, saying good night. We were perpetually in presence, even over mountains. I could not imagine a day without saying his name. When, after a very long while, he finally topped my patience, a significant amount of time after our relationship had smoothed from flame into family, my letter said I didn’t want to talk for only a week. Once that was done, I sent another hello. “I miss you.” After all, some people you can’t but help to continually love. Almost all I’ve received in the year since is silence. Now, somehow, the possibility that he may not even call.

I cannot help wonder what it is I could have possibly done to be so wronged.

ps. by the way, if you happen to come across a copy of Fever Ray, (the new solo album from The Knife’s nice howling lady), fallen off the back of the internet truck, I would like a copy, for it is Good.

meme: inport support {now it’s your turn}


Me and Marissa, July 2007, by Lung

The ever groshing Meredith Yayanos (and now Alice and Sara) tagged me in the 16 Random Things meme, “Once you’ve been tagged, you have to write a note with sixteen random things, shortcomings, facts, habits or goals about you. At the end choose sixteen people to be tagged, listing their names and why you chose them. You have to tag the person who tagged you.” I’m no good at this sort of meme, but I love rock star Mer (and Alice and Sara) with the warmth of six suns, so for her I will try.

1. “Even your voice has changed,” he said, looking at me, hearing the wounded strawberry tears that caught all the way up from my heart to my tongue and out into the air. The freeway was so familiar I felt I could have drawn it in my sleep, divided the roads into lanes with a cunning accuracy I didn’t understand I had. It was like the promised land, green signs marking exits as well as the graves of so many dreams. “I’m not sure what it is, but you sound softer, like you’re an entirely different person here.” “I am,” I replied, “too full of history to burn.”

2. I used to write fortunes, love letters, and wishes in spidery black ink on the dried leaves I found fallen under trees in the fall and let them go in the wind to fly without watching to see where they might land. They weren’t for me, they were for other people to find.

3. Perhaps if I killed him, he would live on as a ghost, feather light and improperly dead. I woke up earlier this week, wishing I could secretly stab him in the heart with rusty kitchen scissors and open him up like he did to me with his fingers. The only thing that keeps me clear is that I don’t think his murder would change anything. You can’t erase memory like a stain. It would just mean a little less money coming in around my birthday.

4. When she speaks on the phone, I know my place is to quietly do nothing more than make encouraging noises in the appropriate gaps and pauses. She is like a colouring book with everything but the eyes filled in with religious illumination, as if someone spent thirty years merely shading in her skin. I love her, so I don’t mind. Maybe someday it will be my turn to talk.

5. There is a pile of books in my room which do not belong to me. They are borrowed books that represent less what I would choose to read and more what people think I should. From top to bottom they are: Blade Runner: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Mistress of the Empire, The Complete Robot, The War of Flowers, How To Not Get Rich, (which I never read), So Far From God, A Little Larger Than The Known Universe, What Colour Is Your Parachute, (which I also never read), His Dark Materials, and Brandjam. Some of these books have been with me for years, yet I refuse to incorporate them in with my own books, believing somehow, tenuously, that they will eventually be given back to their respective owners.

6. I loved him like no one else I had ever met in my life, but recently it eased back and closed over. All it took was sleeping in his bed, knowing it wasn’t mine, then driving away the next day. Now I’m absolutely stone terrified I will never care about anyone like that again.

7. For no particular reason, somewhere in my room is a birthday candle I kept from my third birthday cake.

8. Reading back entries into my journal can be like reliving the relationships I wrote about. When I started this journal, I had no idea what it would be like to have such a static essence of memory waiting at my fingertips. People I can talk blithely about now, or some that I mention not at all, are waiting for me there, frozen in time instead of (decently?) dissolved like jet streams. There is nothing in my life that can compare. My valued moments, they are not trapped in objects, they are there, freely available for the whole world to read. How I felt when that one danced or when that one cheated on me. It’s unreal, the immediacy. Photographs are not the same.

9. Sometimes horrible pop music is just going to happen in my house. Life isn’t all gamelan, mystery, poetry or jazz. Occasionally it is Blackstreet’s No Diggety on repeat for an hour. I’m not sorry.

10. “Will you sleep with me later if I ask you to?” He looks at me, blinks a moment, and grins. (We’ve only just met, though we’ve known each other on-line for years.) For a moment it’s like I’ve kissed him, then he ignores my question as if I never asked it, because it didn’t need to be said, and reaches out his hand. The girl next to him look confused, uncertain if she heard what she thinks she did, my words a spectre in the tiny industrial kitchen.

11. I dislike religion and ritualistic behavior. It is fine and wonderful and inspiring that people like to make themselves meaningful, that people try to be more than themselves, but to require emblematic props to do it offends me somehow, as if intelligent people should know better, should know they do not require symbols to attain self worth. (Also, I will judge you if you actually believe in astrology of any kind. Quietly, but it will be there. You! The offended one. Half a point. Docked.)

12. The last time I was sick, it was because of him. We had quarelled. I had walked home. It was freezing. Standing within his gravity again was sensory overload. Had it really almost been an entire year? My hands shaking as we said hello. Watching him stand at the podium, I tried to pretend I was a solid being, but my eyes tripped, caught by the enigmatic living miracle of his face. He still had me on a string. I didn’t want even a week to go by without a hello, but after the last time we’d seen each other he wouldn’t even answer the phone when I called. Instead I had to crash his party, all cameras and politicians, as if I was welcome, as if it were planned instead of a lucky accident of bus arrival.

13. If there is a book in the lavatory, it’s because I like to read while I brush my teeth.

14. Though Marissa, (who I later renamed Mishka, which stuck), and I were ten when we met, neither one of us had pierced ears. Mine because my parents thought it was cruel to do to a baby, her because her parents treated it as a coming of age. From this, I couldn’t have cared less while she could not wait for her sixteenth birthday. As it approached, she was practically vibrating with excitement about how she was finally going to get it done, so for her birthday party, I gathered all of our mutual friends together at the mall downtown to get our ears pierced with her in solidarity. (This took some managing, as one of the boys we knew, Charles, had a highly evangelical mother, who thought this was a terrible sin somehow). After an hour of waiting for her and calling her in vain, we finally got a hold of her. She couldn’t make it and had completely forgotten to tell us to call it off. Rolling our eyes, the group of us went through with one ear of the procedure anyway, with the intention to do the other one with her later. About a month after this, she went off with her mother one afternoon and had them done alone at a tattoo parlour, forgetting again about our group effort-in-waiting. As a result, I still only have my left ear pierced. For all I know, so does everyone else involved.

15. “When my husband came back from Iraq,” she said, and it struck me as it has before, completely new again, “I am in a foreign country”. Curled on the bed with my friends, it was easy to forget, the same way it didn’t occur to me later while I was away on my trip. Even when guns were involved. Too much about the USA will always feel implicitly like the word belonging.

16. I will not tag anyone in a meme. It is far too interesting to see who will pick it up for themselves without prompting.*

Where it’s gone from here: Ben Peek, Duncan Shields, Sarah Edwards-Noelle.

the only theme I could find is black

Sidewalk Psychiatry graffiti.

365 day one hundred & eight: have a nice day

This is a story: ink hair, Queen street, where the roots are, I walked barefoot, crucified by how beautiful he was, how beautiful he could be, I was unknown, achingly young, it was perfect enough for me. Learning the boundaries of narrative, learning the theme and flow of biography. Another: ink hair, on stage in love, wings as wide as geometry, meeting, a lobby, a lost book, a romance of hotel rooms and late night cameras, smoked with his passions, it was more than it seemed to be, and sometimes less. Summaries, diagrams, lists. An old project is percolating in my head with a newer idea, photographs, coloured string.

He doesn’t like it when I chew gum, but he watches me take out my hair pins as if the act carries the same intimacy as removing my clothing.

Being constructed naturally of disciplined angles, his only defense was to move with a maximum of constant, weightless grace.

Chapter headings in the shape of their hands, page count off how much poetry I can wring from their skin. Something is taking shape: ink hair, a familiar bar, an unfamiliar feeling of awe, music parallel to skill, traveling the next day, his unmatchable grin, every day always too far away, a myth, circling the world twice to end everything thirty feet from where it began. If I took a photograph of every one and layered them, there might be details submerged, but perhaps a clarity for all of that. It looks like: ink hair, eyes meeting, singing in the street, a miracle, his poetry, his children later on the phone, impossible, the sweetest thing.

Digital culture-inspired oil paintings.

I’m waiting for my man

Twenty-six dollars in my hand

Took pictures of a doctor today, got off the phone with a photographer friend, made plans with a painter for later, going to a gallery tomorrow, giving spare keys to somewhere else, promised to wear a kimono, promised to find a home for a house-pet. A mask waiting in a box on my bed. Cats asleep. Words glistening like the fruit juice at my wrist as the sun falls down behind clouds, too far to warm my city, to light my room more than this screen might. Double exposure, the different brands of cigarette collected in a tiny bottle on my windowsill I do not empty, a model museum of names who’ve stayed the night. The times I’ve closed my bedroom door.

Feel sick and dirty, more dead than alive

I have a cough for the first time in years. Walked home in the cold on Sunday night, upset, throat tight, by the time I arrived my clothes had frozen in patches where the sweat from my skin had wet my shirts. When I was done, after I had peeled off the cracking frost of frigid threads, I sat curled in front of a heater and sent a letter trying to explain why, what had been decided. Hat off as fire licked me. Silent. Too close. My body cracked open, left without a voice.

Oh pardon me sir, it’s the furthest from my mind

Daily photos continue, more than a month now, though always in stolen moments, never more than five minutes. Trying to stay alive has been fighting, trying to catch up from where I have been behind. All of my books have been read as my writing is put aside. My back arches, hanging from one ankle, I’m relearning, examining where I put my punctuation as I redesign where I keep my bones. New skills tying into old ones, applying left onto right. Cloth flaring from my shoulders as the fever breaks. Ink and memory soaked into silk, the shape of this fall the same as my pen. Someone shouting at me about Kafka as I remember to point my toes.

Here he comes, he’s all dressed in black

I keep hoping to hear from certain voices, dark haired creatures I’ve tied to the surface of my heart. Jumping in with both feet solidly planted on water, the waves of our phone numbers, the little cards I buy at the corner store late at night, embossed with maple flags, red and white, all the better when we flip through the books together, contrasting prices against countries, microscopic lists, the ritual of me and the girl behind the desk. She smiles like the taste of someone’s home rests behind her teeth, waiting to get out. Scratch off the possibly carcinogenic silver with a coin, enter the pin number digits, type the long distance, make a song of it, and wait for it to ring. Terrible, the wait for it to ring.

He’s never early, he’s always late

There was a promise of shirts off, standing where I asked, the placement of a camera, the fixing of a light. No time, in the end, as expected, suspected, being justified is never any fun with the things I believe of people. It’s not being negative if it’s realistic, however precious hope can be. Another time, some future we don’t know enough to plan, season shift, other cities, the places we choose to live, the furniture we fill them in with. Conventional wisdom. Dark lines drawn under every eye, cuffs and collar matched, like these are checkpoints to cross the same way I insist I buy flowers for men.

First thing you learn is you always gotta wait

If there’s one thing to learn, as much as anything, I need affectionate goodbyes.

Until tomorrow, but that’s just some other time

life as therapy, a plague on the workhouse

Conversations like unsatisfied lovers, humming melodies around the truth, leaving dishes of promises over night to congeal into something a little more honest. All I can hope is for the best. I hold my head up, nod when it’s appropriate, smile like I don’t know precisely what will happen once the lights are off. I’m not a miracle. What they make of me isn’t even very real.

Violins sway, paint a pretty fabrication, a space built up like a palace of what they think I mean. Rescue, some sort of shift, a princess made of dragons who can take them away from the same scenarios they live day after day, shake up the routine, make it bearable, make it change. The foundations of fiction. Everything ideal, nothing unusual, nothing thought quite through. Such a shame.

I think to myself, this will be less, but at least for now we’ll be okay.

Dan & Shane’s show was excellent

He’s young in that way that teenage girls find attractive, fizzing with ginger enthusiasm, wiry, laughing, his arms beaten with a couple of tattoos. They come into the bar, feeling daring, drunk before they hit their drinks, maybe a little under age, and vie to pick him up, their phone numbers written in lipstick on the back of his neck, butterfly smudges that all start with six-oh-four. They rarely last more than a night.

He talks about girls, I talk about boys, we find a middle ground where we both get to air our complaints and offer advice. Our dissatisfactions live as mirror images, as perfect bell-curve opposite as narrative could ever wish, satisfactorily littered with cussing and laughter. Though we have dissimilar grievances, it helps. I taught him the term emotionally unavailable and he, in return, assured me that the strangely puritan streak I seem to have hit can’t last forever, if only because I’m far too stubborn.

Eventually we found ourselves sitting at a table full of strangers with one of my dearest friends, samurai movies playing on the wall, music too loud to hear, uncertain entirely how we came to be there. From across the piano shaped table, too far away to say anything, he winked at me when no one else was looking, in on the joke of who I was sitting with. I couldn’t wiggle free, he caught me. What else are friends for?

Later, I thought of how much I need, how little, as the man I had been sitting with fell asleep lying in my lap, tired from an overly long day. “Oh, three meager words, how they can mean the world.”

the things I want to see for myself

The silence is suffocating, I can hear not only my heartbeat but the quiet susurration of my blood. The cats are both asleep, two soft weights draped over my hips. I can’t hold them close, they’ll wake and wander away in search of a late night snack or some invisible ghost to chase. I wonder, briefly, if it’s possible to dream while so awake, at least rest the brain, but discard the thought, preferring to try and imagine where the people I love are right now. Various time-zones away, some of them aren’t all that far.

South three hours by plane, he’ll be asleep, strewn like an elegant game of pick-up sticks in his bed, lying feral on his left side, pillow loosely clutched to his head, hair caught in his fingers, cute in a way that tugs at my lungs, steals my breath, inspires me to slowly cut away his invariable black t-shirt with a pair of silver scissors and wake him with my tongue whispering poetry to his closed eyes. Stories of drinking in Vegas, Passover, his panic at the word marriage, how we laughed into every single night. Somewhere there will be a red curtains, a disco ball, a potted palm tree, and a video game console.

Another mind-set, seven hours hard drive in the direction of the impossible dawn, someone older, obsessive, more emotional than I could ever learn to be. Skin a different texture than mine, our hands exactly the same size. A half-fictional time-line, we’ve only spent time in hotels, I don’t even know what colour his sheets might be. The only picture I have is comfort, taking second place, offering a place of safety to someone falling apart. When we were together, there were no camp ground rules, if he fell down, he would try to take me with him, though accidentally. Eventually I cut the tether. Life got better. Now we could stand on a roof and scream at the stars together, if we were so inclined. Which we’re not. So don’t ask me to.

One day ahead and five hours behind, another sweet Jewish boy, like a new melodic theme, currently so far away the seasons have flipped, but not so far that we don’t have darkness at similar times. It’s not late enough for him to tucked into bed with the rest of us, however, so I lose my thread, can’t kiss him awake, begin mentally scanning pictures I’ve seen of the general antipode of the North Atlantic Ocean. Lush beaches, insanely colourful coral reefs, endless summer, dry dusty wastes, and ridiculous movies I love dearly. Lethal wild-life, big bouncing rat-things with gigantic feet. Some big rock right in the middle. Nowhere I can clearly place him. I’m bad at this game. Instead, I can picture him playing, his incredible, wry smile drenched in sweat, the effort of his music literally dripping off in waves. I can picture a stage, something festival, hemp clothing, om beaded necklaces, something wide and tent-like, people dancing, and the perpetual threat of rain. Completely and utterly wrong. He’s probably at dinner, I should go to bed. This is presumably the sort of thing that drives little girls mad in Victorian novels. Oh Herr Frankstein, only speak when you’re spoken to. Don’t use the wrong cutlery. Remember to sleep.

Seattle: March 18th.