June 9, part three: swallow (12.5 minutes)

I swallowed the words again, had to repeat it, felt like I was being clear but the listener said "The What Festival?"

I haven't had a strong urge to perform since my ten-year gig ended five years ago. Well, that's not exactly right. I've had an urge, but I also have an overriding fear that has prevented it. I did a little community theater in Florida when my music and life partner and I went our separate ways.

And I tried a little stand-up in Tennessee, but it was unsatisfying, mostly I think because I was performing for a room sparsely populated by other people waiting anxiously to perform their five minutes.

And then I came to Austin. I read the audition column in the arts section of the Chronicle occasionally, but never really feel inspired enough to go through with it.

I took an eight-week comedy improv class recently and that was somewhat satisfying but also very terrifying for the first three weeks (until I had to pay the $200 fee, at which point I acquired the shit-or-get-off-the-pot attitude).

An acquaintance wanted me to sing children's songs with her here. I met with her, we sang a little, but it didn't feel right. I backed out. She was okay with that.

And then my former music and life partner moved to Austin, moved in with me -- we're best friends and not much more -- and the two of us sang harmony with a fairly famous lesbian rocker acquaintance we met in NYC 15 years ago who is from here.

And today, in about four hours, I will be performing with her -- in fuzzy orange pants and a gold lamé top -- with a bevvy of other musicians, dancers, etc. (I don't know exactly what the "etc." is, but believe me, it's there) at the Gay Pride Festival in Waterloo Park.

The what? The Pride Festival. That's what I've been saying. People say, "The what?" I say it again. One woman said, "I'm sorry, the What Festival?" I don't know what I'm afraid of. I don't know what I care so much about.

I don't think I really fit in with "those" people all that well, so I guess I'm afraid of the assumptions people might make about me if I say that word. I guess I fear they'll see me the way I see "them."

I think I'm more queer than gay, but that's a term that seems to set people on edge even more. I guess I'm just "not so proud."

June 9, part two: fiction (12.5 minutes)

It's all fiction, isn't it? My birth, life, my eventual death? It is only real in the minute second and then it is memory. Written down or told it is fiction.

The people I meet in my life inspire me, engage me. I don't know who I am, don't know my age, my history. I can make something up. Sure, it's all based on the real thing, based on the memories, but it's all fiction.

I remember very clearly living in New London, Texas, having to take my dogs who got mange out into the government-owned field with my father and shoot them. I remember looking down the barrel of a rifle, seeing the eyes of my faithful puppy looking back saying, "What game is this now?!" I have written that story so many times. I know I exaggerated when I wrote there were piles of dogs, but I remember the one. I was in the fourth grade. That was 35 years ago.

Recently, I saw my sister, and since we don't see each other often enough, are not nearly as close as we would like to be, we found ourselves recalling old stories. Tragedies then that make us laugh now. She said, "Oh, no! You've got it wrong. You and Daddy and the dog went off to the woods, you and Daddy walking slow, the dog bouncing along. Then about 30 minutes later, you came back, the dog bouncing along behind you...!"

Even that story is a fiction. My sister doesn't speak like that. I can't capture how she speaks right now. I would have to work on that, would have to maybe call her or write something shortly after the next time I saw her.

I meet people and am surprised at how young they are. I mean people I have connections with. I know they're younger than me, but I'm surprised to find out they're 19 or 20. Usually 24 or 25 is the age I connect with. They usually are surprised that I'm 43 years old. But we are connected somewhere in the middle I guess. These are not "normal" people. These are freaks. Freaks like me.

43 is a fiction, more so than 19 or 20 is a fiction. But sometimes there are special people who defy age. I've always been that type of person, "young for my age" and now "older than my age states." I don't know if there was a time, a year or two, when I actually "acted my age." If so, I'm sure I was making it up, creating something that I believed was that age.

Maybe I was 28. That was an important year for me because I was born on the 28th day of the month and some new agey woman had told me that would be my Golden Year. I had that in mind when it came. I wrote a lot that year, as always, but I think maybe a lot of my writing that year had to do with that, with the actual number being important.

It's all fiction. I don't think I believe anything I just wrote. But if it's entertaining, that's really the important thing. I will put fact aside any time if fiction is more interesting.

June 9, part one: between... (12 minutes)

...the rows, the little ditches thrive with weeds and grasses -- some kind of monkey grass, some of that annoying St. Augustine -- and there I am on my knees, pebbles crushing into them, sore, coarse, the sun pounding down on my back, my naked neck, my bald head.

It's somewhere between 9:30 and noon, somewhere between breakfast and lunch, a coffee mug sits on the coffee table on the front porch, a few gnats hovering around the remains of cream and coffee drying, coagulating in the bottom. Sitting there I was thinking "I need to do some weeding, get the garden back in order, let the flowers and the vegetables have a little more space, show them I appreciate their effort, make an effort to do so," and the next think I know I'm in the middle of it.

I crawled out of bed to pee an hour before I was ready and went back to bed, lay between the sheets, no cover, that was kicked off in the middle of the night as the humidity rose, the barometric pressure fell, or whatever it does to find its way into my sinuses and throb. The space between my eyes pulls at the top of my mouth and the insides of my nostrils, the back of my throat feels constricted. I lie there naked between the sheets, the ceiling fan making them ripple, the box fan pointing out of the window pulling the breeze over me. No a/c. I don't want to turn it on. My house is situated between bamboo and pecan trees, a veritable forest of green; breezes blow throughout the summer. The hotter it gets, the greener the plant life gets, the taller it grows, the more shade, the better the breeze.

I had wanted to get on the computer, do a little writing, finish that poem. But it's no use. I can't read between the lines, I can't fill in the blanks. If I don't let it all flow at once, the drain goes dry. I know what I wanted to say, but I'll never go back to it. Maybe I'm a lazy poet.

A day when the sun waited for rain,
A day when there was nothing but pain--

No, that wasn't it.

And so I made my coffee, went to the porch, watched the grackles steal dog food kibbles from the neighbor's porch. I could have slept an hour longer. Now I find myself pulling grasses, pulling stubborn little vines that look pretty but turn monstrous, take over everything, climb the sunflower stalks, nine feet high, and choke them like in a horror movie.

I have small pile of already withering weeds piling up between the rows in the garden.