CANCELLED

my life has been cancelled because of work, still may end up in DC, Baltimore, Chapel Hill; either way you should go see jessica and al read because they are terrific and funny and passionate.
Or just read about Jessica’s an my night of stories.: Of reds and yellows and “lost boys”, days when Avenue C was a place you didn’t go so much unless you were squatting there or wanted to score, even before the Koch years, even before Jessica and I were born. Appropriately, we were power chilling in the kind of oldschool East Village walk-up I used to fantasize about living in when I was 14: incorrigable, dank, creaky, cluttered with perf. art props and artists who paint their entire apartment the color of slightly dried blood, unequivocally their own domain. After the reading, Al pointed to Larry and Aaron Cometbus and said to me, half-smiling and slightly breathless, as breathless as Al gets anyway, maybe more like windswept: “I wish the “me” at 19 could see me now and say ‘look! this is you! you are reading FROM YOUR OWN BOOK in a radical bookstore, a reading attended by all these other writers you admire.'” That’s how I felt in Kembra’s apartment. I felt like time-traveling to my alienated teen self in Wyoming, so lonely and angry and sloughed off but still dreaming about the world around me, knowing it must have a wider range than “home on the range,” and telling my young self, “Don’t cry now, you’ll get there.” (I would probably also tell myself to lay off the herb and go to college, but now I’m just being maternal.)
There, incidentally, was standing between a human-sized stuffed shark puppet and a giant upside down crucifix. Totally awesome.
Larry walked us back to our car, talked UK riot grrl and we explained to him the definition of gender radicalism, and lamented the use of the words “gay” and “fag” as “cool slang,” and the subjectivity of reclamative language. He said whenever someone uses the word “queer,” he grates, because for him in in high school it was an epithet in the vein of: “Fuck you queer I’m gonna kill you.”
Larry lived in a squat on Ave C in ’68. Buy his autobiography when it comes out. Meanwhile i will stay in the internet age and superglue my eyestrings to the computer’s face.
there is only love,
sheptronica