Placeholders 2-4

We start with an idea…

“Chicks with Dicks”: Two male lovers simultaneously figure out they are lesbians born in the wrong bodies, and their transitions into womanhood are so perfectly synced that they remain in love the whole time, and forever after.

Someone should write that story. I don’t know if I could. I sometimes feel queasy about assigning characters identities, with genders, races, names, wondering if it amounts to an abuse of power (I was going to say “sick power play,” but that sounds too mean). I’d prefer stories in which characters’ skin and genitals continually disappear and reappear differently, and not in a way that is tied to the arc of a story, but just as something that happens in a world that challenges the one we really live in, where everything is determined, and even the good ones, the artists, only spend their time making further determinations. Someone will tell me to read a book, remind myself why art is good, but even that doesn’t cut it, I just have to wait for the feeling to pass.

drops – famous – trans

Usually a word is enough to bring an entire dream back to memory, but if you leave that word sitting alone long enough on a scrap of paper, the word too will lose its memory. I’ve become very bad about writing down my dreams. I found those words written on a scrap of paper, and know they refer to a sequence of dreams I had, but what they contained I’ll never know. Also these:

mtn view – birds – ease of death

I do actually remember that dream (a single dream), it was sort of what you might expect from the words.

El Paso

I enjoyed a wonderful night of barhopping last Saturday, after driving into downtown El Paso with the windows down, listening to Odelay and feeling really cool and lucky, looking at the big yellow moon. Gay barhopping, I should specify (four bars all next door to each other, and one around the corner, and yet all pretty distinct), because in how many places is that possible? Plan your upcoming stay in El Paso accordingly:

8 1/2 – It didn’t occur to me right away, though it should’ve, given the principle of gay bar names, that most of these names are euphemisms for something, including 8 1/2, which I thought was just a movie reference (is this where the makers of half-made things come to drink and die?) until I saw the ruler in the bar’s sign. A small corner bar, gateway to infinite wonders mere cement slabs away, probably a good place to start, but having started late, elsewhere, we surveyed the scene and spent no more than a minute in here.

Tool Box – Kind of like a high school locker room reclaimed as a non-traumatizing place for adults. Two dirty and possibly insane older men, who I might normally try to avoid looking at, were captivating with their unwatched gestures of affection toward each other. Two threats removed by one of the happiest pairings-off I’ve seen, I watched.

Briar @ Hyde – This one’s euphemistic name, which I saw listed online as Briar Patch, is obscured by the more confusing way it now appears. I have no idea where Hyde is, but I know where the men of El Paso are, out back on the patio. Among them, a couple that was Zac and I in 20-30 years except we’re both Hispanic. Also our hair is more likely to be silver/gone, not black/silver.

Epic – The only used dance floor on the whole block, bypassed for the dark sloping driveway out back, a void a wall away from Briar’s fleeting mirage(s, mmm).

Chiquita’s – The “oh wow, yet another gay place around the corner” that you might as well stop into for a minute on your way back to the car.