Usually, my brothers just called me "gay" or a "retard", so I spent most of my childhood in my bedroom with my best friends who lived in the books they wrote just for me; that's how it felt. It was warm, intimate, and always understood by me, which helped with the adversity in my childhood home that's also the world we live in. It's never easy to innovate, or "to become", or to be that thing people fear the most: powerful, educated, and righteous. It wouldn't have done me any good to talk about something so rare and special that eludes so many people for so long. Why chase after it?
Luckily, my dad loves history, government, politics, the military, and quotes, which gave me the plug-ins I needed to create space for my work to grow; work that was rough and under-funded so it would seem amateurish, though for the ferocity of the concepts underneath. "Concept is key" is one of his favorite sayings, along with this one attributed to Ben Franklin: "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." He and I were the only regular nighttime sleepers awake before dawn to the awesome silence of a tense house so often governed by my mother's manic cleaning sprees and dramatic scenes, especially the evening before another stress-filled holiday that felt more like torture than celebration to us.
Then, we would have an excuse to go hiking in the woods before anyone else in the house woke up with their needs that took precedence over two "morning people" openly disparaged in a dreamy, late-night t.v. world that made chronic insomnia seem like this hip, new thing. Where would we have been without history and a few good quotes to back us up? I still go to bed way before it's considered "cool", to take quiet morning photos of empty streets filled with big dark houses under beautiful Hudson Valley sunrises.
Wish you were here.
