Dear Friends:

Greetings from Centreville, Va.! I’m here on day 19 of a 24-day traipse around the country. I’ve hit all 4 U.S. time zones, slept on 11 beds and sofas (so far), and taken trains, buses, planes, cars, subways, speedboats, and jet skis to get around. Here’s a seasonal photo of me hot off the gasoliney stench of the latter:

Today I fly to Pittsburgh, the first place I lived that wasn’t Herndon, Va., where I came as close as one can to finding oneself while not quite finding one’s way out of the closet. I left there in 2003, visited last in 2012, and being there again will be like being in a dream.

You may have noticed Shenny’s been quiet for months. I really thought I’d have the final memoir revisions done before this trip, but then the week before I left, I reread the last 3 chapters, and I saw a dodge I was still trying to get away with, and some fakey, anxious parts written for imagined critics I guess I still have a hard time ignoring. I had to start the last chapter all over again, and I know exactly what I need to do to get it right.

So this hiatus will continue for a few more weeks. But here, in the home of my oldest friend from childhood, is a quick update featuring all the things I didn’t buy at antique stores on this trip.

Happy summer, everyone:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Taking hiatuses
Consistency is for coders and CrossFitters. The rest of us have better things to do with our noses than put them to a grindstone.

2. Pickled-Beet Martinis
Bill, one of my brothers-in-law, a retired bartender, poured on a whim some of the juice from a jar of pickled beets into his vodka martini, dirtying it in a new way, and then he let me have a sip. Tart, earthy, sweet: a smart and daring thing to try when you want to make a martini a bit more summery.

Things I Did Not Buy at the Antique Store

This week’s still from a thing I watched comes from the seatback of my flight to Richmond on Delta Airlines, who’s using the word ‘Landmark’ loosely:

Dear Friends:

The semester is over, and so the school year is over. Let’s sing it from the nearest rooftop. Plus we’re entering Gemini season this week and I’m a Horse in the Chinese zodiac. Add to it that May is International Masturbation Month and these days I’m feeling so seen.

Your burning question must be, Will Shenny take a summer hiatus? It’s likely. I’m about 30% of the way through the final revisions of the memoir’s penultimate chapter. I’d really like to be officially done with this manuscript before summer travel near the end of June. So I should take a hiatus, I should dedicate all my writing time to finishing, but where else am I going to get to write about toilets and throwing like a girl?

Actually, I’m pretty sure both topics come up in the memoir. I’m such a one-trick (two-faced, masturbating) pony.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Christine Hyung-Oak Lee’s Substacks on Story Structure
Over at her Substack, Cuddle Fish, Bay Area memoirist Christine Hyung-Oak Lee has been looking at story-structure traditions from around the world: Eastern, Western, Indigenous, African, and others. I’m full up on Western story structure, and so her writing on the kishōtenketsu’s 4-act structure has been a total eye-opener:

1. Ki: introduction of story elements

2. Shō: development

3. Ten: change; some twist alters or upturns those elements, or even the story’s form

4. Ketsu: harmonization, where all the old and new elements are drawn together

Lee points to how this structure is especially useful for memoirists, ‘Mainly because our experiences usually don’t include a dramatic climax.’ It’s hell trying to fit real life into anything resembling a heroic circle. Happily, none of us need to.

2. Courtesy Flushes
I know you know what I’m talking about here, but all the same let’s hear this useful definition from John Jeremiah Sullivan’s ‘Man Called Fran’: ‘A courtesy flush mean[s] flushing the toilet immediately after the first big push.’ Focus on immediately. This is advice coming from the eponymous plumber on how to avoid 99% of backed-up toilet situations, but it’s worth endorsing as an act of courtesy in a public restroom. Odors aside, the courtesy flush does a good job of throwing unimpeachable noise into an echo-y room that sure could use more of it. Let this also be an endorsement, then, for toilets that are easy to flush while you’re sitting on them. So: not autoflush toilets, which usually have some tiny little button somewhere near the small of your back, if they have anything at all. The ones in our campus building have a round button flush with the wall I need to press inward one whole inch to make a flush happen, and it’s just burdensome and disgusting. Let’s do better, folks.

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A Photo from the Depths of the Closet

Recently came across this old pic, and would you believe I’ve got a lot to say about it?

Discerning Nintendo fans will recognize that as the Power Game Calendar for 1991,1 which along with the candy canes hooked into the shadowbox displaying the porcelain animals my grandma saved from her Red Rose Tea boxes, signals that I—the homosexual framed by a theatrical red curtain—am 13 years old, and it’s Yuletide in Herndon, Virginia.

The photograph was, per a note I wrote on the back of it, ‘taken by Clay’, a friend who lived across Fall Place from us and is now a professor of Mathematics at Oregon State University, whose latest published paper is titled ‘Non-abelian arboreal Galois groups associated to PCF rational maps’. Between him and me hangs a plush softball I’ve just tossed manfully in his direction.

It’s fun to have fun with the closet—when you’re outside of it. But living inside there every day is no fucking picnic. You can’t look at this kid and tell me he’s not a young queer. I see it even in the carriage of my shoulders. But the more pressing question to me is how this kid took another 13 years to see himself.

I look at him, and I’m like, Girl you’re so close! But then I look at that Nintendo calendar, and I realize he’s not even halfway there.

When you’re young, people tell you who you are. It starts the moment a technician with a wand searches your sonogram for a penis. For me it continued in the comments teachers wrote on each quarterly report card. From those, I learned I was An Avid Reader (but not so avid I didn’t have to go look up ‘avid’). I was Very Energetic and Talkative. I was A Natural Leader. I Too Easily Became a Distraction for My Classmates During Lesson Time.

Parents, too, get in on this action. I was smart, they said often. I was good at school, therefore I would go to college.2 And I get it: what else is teaching or parenting than constantly steering a wayward ship?

But not one of those people ever said, ‘David, you’re gay.’

Instead, it was other kids who told me, over and over, how gay I was. Like the 7th-grade girl in gym class who heard me speak one sentence and said, ‘You’re, like, a boy-bop.’ (Bop was slang at the time for a ditzy Valley-Girl type, named after a print magazine for teen girls, back when kids read print magazines.) I called her a bitch, then went back to clapping hands with my friend Emily.

It was like I couldn’t even hear the voices of anyone under the age of 30. Of course, when other kids said I was a fag, it was never wrapped in a message of It’s cool that you’re queer and we accept you. Instead, it was always an affirmation, however inadvertent, that this core difference I felt from everyone I knew was a right and just feeling I’d need to live with forever.

The fag would not get to be One Of Us. Would you have had the courage, at 13, to accept it?

But let’s go have more fun with the photo. Here it is again so you don’t have to scroll, and this time I want you to look at the other art on the walls.

The lion’s given pride of place because it was, hands down, my favorite animal. Still is. Oh to have a pet lion who loves me and lets me cuddle up and put my head in its perilous jaws! And if Shenny hasn’t already established how much I loved Nintendo, I’ll just say I really couldn’t tell you what happened outdoors in the years 1988-1996.

But have I ever looked twice at a car that wasn’t the Batmobile parked promotionally at an event, or my car’s doppelgänger in a labyrinthine parking lot? The other day, when I found this photo, I had to ask N.—who’s loved cars since before I hung those posters—if those were both Lamborghinis. He confirmed they were. ‘The Countach,’ he said, and I had to go google the spelling.

Sometimes when I look at old photos and think about the things I chose to wear or hang on my walls (the anti-drug poster discussed in the 2 Nov 22 Shenny is to the right of the frame, stapled—let’s savor the irony—to the closet door), I feel less like a queer in denial and more like an alien spy: Okay your name is going to be David, and your cover story is that you’re a normal human boy.

A spy is a sneak. He’ll watch you more closely than you’re comfortable with, making formal records of words and actions you’re over here trying to be all casual about. But is that what we see in the eyes above? This is the problem with looking at yourself, whether at a photo or draft #90 of a memoir: You end up looking from the inside out, seeing all kinds of stuff that’s not tangibly there—and if you’re a writer, god help your audience to see much from your portrait that’s recognizable.

When that photo wasn’t a photo, but a living moment in my bedroom with a friend, I was just being myself. But that self, that kid, is so unrecognizable to me, it’s like I’ll never understand what’s going on in his mind, even though I can still feel the weight of the secret crush he has on his gym teacher.

Looking at him now, feeling so self-alienated, I write to fill the gulf between us with someone legible.

That there is every memoir.

This week’s still from a thing I watched is some of the cast of Star Trek: TNG looking at you also from the inside-out:

Dear Friends:

My last post, on how to keep living in / through midlife, got a lot more traction than I’d expected. It’s never easy to tell which of my fortnightly worries, concerns, or obsessions is going to connect with y’all. Shenny’s whole ethos is ‘Just throw it out there and move on to the next one. It’s only the internet.’

But maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. I think a lot of us are feeling that all the old cultural and societal signposts have been taken from us, that the folks we’ve long given power and attention to help us become better versions of ourselves aren’t actually interested in that future (if they ever were).

So we’ve got each other. This Shenny’s about one way I used to feel connected to other people. Likely it’s just an(other) exercise in nostalgia. I’m really trying not to look backward all the time, but also trying to ward off forgetting.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Tim Benzie’s Solve-Along-A-Murder,-She-Wrote
[Re-endorsing this one, as Tim’s bringing the show to San Francisco this week for four nights at the Great Star Theater. Get tickets today!] One of the better parts of the Angela Lansbury at 100 conference I presented a paper at last fall was getting to meet maybe the biggest M,SW fan in the world: comedian Tim Benzie. (You may be surprised to learn he’s another gay man.) He attended the conference for its first day as a dedicated Fangela (his coinage), and that evening half of us went to Birmingham’s Digbeth neighborhood to watch his touring show: Solve-Along-A-Murder,-She-Wrote. It’s a live screening of a select M,SW episode1 with audience participation. In the episode’s early scenes, we rank the guest stars in terms of their fame (after the myth that the most famous guest is always the murderer). Then we move them along on his Suspiciometer, based on who we think did it as the episode unfolds. Plus there’s a raffle, multiple costume changes, and the best part, for me, was seeing a replica of Jessica’s leatherette folio from the opening credits I’ve coveted for fifteen years:

2. Phyllis Logan
Continuing our theme of women-of-a-certain-age getting a second act in their careers being cast in cozy mystery shows, what a year Phyllis Logan has had! You likely know her as Mrs. Hughes, who ran Downton with a heap of Scots grit and a side of tender care, but this year she’s got 2 new series out. She has a supporting role in A Taste of Murder, playing the bon vivant mother-in-law of a widower cop with enormous hands vacationing with his daughter on Capri. Her task here is chiefly to understand the heart-messy granddaughter better than her father does. But then she’s got a starring role in what PBS calls The Puzzle Lady, a show where Logan’s eponymous cruciverbalism makes her an expert in solving murders. (Why not?)2 It’s always nice to see an actor be given range, but I’m foremost happy that Logan now gets costume options that can make a greater splash than, you know, dark and dusty spinster gowns:

Taking the Phone to Bed

It’s dark in the room, because I’ve got a lights-out curfew. Is it 10pm? 9:30? I’m 14 in this memory, under the covers, wearing just boxer shorts because I’m coming to think that pyjamas are for little kids. I’m curled on my side, facing the wall of my bedroom, the wall opposite the wall I share with my parents’ bedroom, and I’ve got tucked in with me on the pillow the slim telephone I got for Christmas two years ago.

‘You’re such a dork,’ Beth says.

‘You’re a dork,’ I say. I muffle my laughter behind closed lips, and I can hear Beth muffle hers—she’s got a lights-out curfew too—as clearly as a whisper in my ear.

Getting a phonejack installed in my bedroom was a big deal, because my sisters had phones and I wanted everything they had. Every teenage kid knows a phone is for grownups, a thing they have to decide you can be trusted with. I could be trusted to use mine more than necessary, tying up the line with conversations that were as vital as they were inconsequential.

On this night, age 14, I have my new girlfriend on the line and I don’t want to let her go. It’s dark, and I’m in bed, we speak in the lowest murmurs, quiet whispers, and it’s like she’s in the bed with me—a new, very grownup feeling. Beth’s telling a story about her brother, a certifiable dork, and how he messed up the family Monopoly game last year at their beach vacation. Or the lake? My eyes are closed, and she’s whispering to me, and I’m finding it hard to follow the specifics, and the day, the day has been long, and I’m not, I’m not all the way here, in bed, with bed, with Beth. In…? Or, and…? And I feel myself awaken, and there’s the headset lying face up on the mattress.

I grab it. ‘Hello?’ I ask, still murmuring. ‘Beth?’

But she’s gone.

I hate the phone. I hate phones. 14yo Dave would be confused by this. Why hate the thing that lets you talk to all your friends?

Well of course a phone became something very different roundabout 2010. Or really earlier: In the years after college, as friends moved all over the country (but mostly to New York), landlines got swapped out for cellphones, and something changed in how we kept in touch. I’d have little beefs with my pal Steve about calling me during his walk home from the subway, all the street noise making it hard to hear, being put on hold while he paid for his bodega purchase.

It was weird, a kind of newness I didn’t welcome. ‘If you want to talk then call me when you want to talk,’ was my argument, but it wasn’t just Steve. Soon folks were calling me from the car (‘wait I’m gonna go through a tunnel’), from vacation (‘wait can you hear me?’ ‘hello?’), from the toilet probably (‘wait why’s it sound so echo-y?’).

Tons of junk has been written about cellphones’ ubiquity, but what I’m trying to get at is the junky sound now of your friend’s or lover’s voice in your ear. The dirt-level quality not just of sound, but sound’s flow.

I got my first cell in 2004 and noticed it straightaway: I couldn’t hear my own voice in the earpiece, the earpart. The telephony term for this is sidetone: audible feedback to someone speaking as an indication of active transmission. Cellphones have limited (or zero) sidetone by design, because the mouthpiece and speaker are so close that you’d get that howling echo from a feedback loop.

Lack of sidetone is why older folks raised on landlines yell while talking on cellphones. ‘Cell yell’ some online writers call it.

There’s another factor at play: duplexing. Landlines were all physically connected to one another through copper wires that ran on a two-way circuit—i.e., full-duplex—so you and I could, say, sing along in harmony to a song on the radio. Cellphone networks, on the other hand, ‘store and forward’ bits of voice data, transmitting packets of that data at the microsecond to simulate full-duplex audio. So while two people on cellphones can talk at the same time, it’s more like ‘at the same time’.

I’m just giving you fancy jargon for what you already know. Consumer cellphones are nearly three decades old, and our conversations are still so clunky and fitful. Better just to text.

They told us smartphones would be better, that 5G would really make the difference. And look: I, too, enjoy walking around with an atlas in my pocket, and an encyclopedia, calculator, meteorologist, video camera, restaurant critic, etc. etc. But they made similar promises about buying books online, or microblogging, or posting selfies and videos of viral dances.

I no longer buy it. I’ve surely said it before, but more and more being on my phone makes my life feel more lonely than the reality.

Is your cellphone the first thing you see when you wake up in the morning? Because it’s the first thing I see, as my phone is my alarm clock. I hear it, I wake, I roll over, I pick it up, I poke the slide-button icon and swipe right. And like that my phone is ready for me to poke at it a lot more. Before I’ve looked at anything else in the world, I’ve looked at it.

I’ve got friends with a No Phones In The Bedroom rule, because that’s an intimate space and a phone these days is anything but. Likely you’ve read something somewhere about the ill effects that phones’ bluey lights have on our sleep quality. All my ranting aside, that it isn’t good, and doesn’t feel good, to bring it to bed is Reason #1 to hate a phone.

The next night, I’m back in bed with my phone. It’s just after dinner, so I’ve got time to tell Beth about every single thing that happened at school that day, and to hear every single detail from her. But first, an explanation.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I think I fell asleep last night.’

‘I noticed,’ she says. ‘I must have been sooo boring!’

Giggles, ‘shut-up’s. We’re impossibly young teenagers. Just children, really.

‘No, I stayed on awhile,’ Beth says. ‘I could tell you fell asleep from how you were breathing. I just listened and waited for you to wake up, but then I got sleepy, too.’

A long pet peeve of mine, a fear really, is being watched while I’m asleep. Too vulnerable. Creeps me the fuck out. But when Beth confessed she’d listened to me sleep, I felt something very different. Another new, very grownup feeling. Thank god for that phone.

This week’s still from a thing I watched is Rainer Werner Fassbinder being sexy as hell in his Love is Colder than Death (1969):

1

Mine was 'S04E06 ‘It Runs in the Family’, but I think this week’s episode is S07E06 - ‘A Body to Die For’, where all the biddies in Cabot Cove get fitness-crazed because the owner of the new gym, played by Jason Beghe, looks like this:

Dear Friends:

N & I went to Las Vegas last weekend. Have you been? There’s really no way to write about Vegas, if by ‘Vegas’ I mean the experience tourists have spending a long weekend in the city. What writing wants to do seems at odds with what Vegas wants to be. To write about Vegas is not to craftily catch some elusive animal. Writing about Vegas is not dancing about architecture.

It was Wrestlemania weekend, we found out too late, and around us indoors and out were Wrestlemania people. Our flight in was delayed two hours so the goddamn president could take off from Harry Reid. All told, we had a great time and I found my game in casinos is video poker.

Maybe one problem with Vegas is that what happens there is no longer willing (or even able) to stay there. Can you imagine a place people in 2020s America go to to legally do stuff they’d be ashamed to talk about back home? Either I’m naive about the levels of shame people still carry re sex, drugs, and gambling, or the whole world is Vegas.

Here’s a worldly pic I took:

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Brrrrng! Game
Whenever I walk in cities, I play a game with myself to pass the time, because walking is boring, it takes too long, my destination is never close enough, pedestrians are the slowest creatures God ever made, I’m not a patient man. Play begins as you approach a street sign pole, like the one here on the left:

Those other boxy perforated ones are no good; keep walking. But coming upon a tubey pole, you strum each of your four fingernails along the pole to make it make a sound like brrrrng!. Making a full brrrrng with all four fingernails (put a little force behind it) gets you 2 points. Make it with 1–3 fingernails and that’s only 1 point. Hit the pole with any part of your knuckle, skin, or non-keratinous body, and you lose a point. Strike with nails but in a way that makes no brrrrng! sound ring out across the urban landscape, that’s 0 points. Miss hitting the pole entirely? That’s a whiff, and you lose 5 points, and it feels like hell. Now: While it’s not against the rules to slow down or even pause to brrrrng your pole, if you ask me it violates the spirit of the game. I mean, who wants to get where they’re going more slowly?

2. Video Poker
All right let me get into it. So: I learned Blackjack strategy and practiced for free online, because one thing I imagined enjoying in my Vegas experience was sitting at a table and slowly losing, oh $100-200 over the course of a couple hours while being fed free drinks. Despite doing everything ‘right’, my Blackjack chips just like dissipated. Just gone in moments. They say Craps is another slow-losing game, decent odds, but all that standing? Slot machines are brainless, unenjoyable as a sudoku, but running an algorithm in my head, when presented with five cards, on which ones to save to optimize odds of getting a pair of jacks or better is, I found, a deeply satisfying experience. Everywhere I went I could bet as little as $0.15 across three hands and have bartenders come up to me, sitting beside a half-full Manhattan, and ask if I’d like another. Would I! Plus I got to stare into 1992-y screens like this:

N.B.: the above game has all-right odds, given the 9-5 payouts on full houses and flushes, but I think paying out the same $$$ for 2 pairs as for a high pair is some bullshit, so I aim for a 6-5-4-3-2-1 game if I can find it.

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How to keep living

Like you perhaps, lately I’ve been feeling unsure about what I’m living for. Living toward? If life is a swim, I’ve begun treading water, and all the old center lines and lane ropes are gone.

For example? Well, it’s clear that life on this planet, and in this nation, won’t get better—not for us working folks. The weather will get hotter, more wild, and more devastating. The rich will be given more allowances to hoard their money, and use their power for self-serving, punitive ends. Folks will continue to believe that tech—whether AI, social media feeds, or whatever keeps us staring into phones—will provide solutions to all the problems it’s caused.

Spending four decades having faith in Progress Toward A Better Future made living easy. We were all living to make such a future happen together. Maybe I was naive, or blinkered, and this was never the case. But it’s not the case today.

I have lived for a career and all its trappings of success and fulfillment. I’ve got a fine career; as a professor, I’m at the top of where I can go. As a writer, I’m somewhat below that point. Live to keep writing? Sure. I mean, that’s always been the plan. (Why else does Shenny come out so consistently?)

But these days it’s feeling like I’ve wrapped my life too tightly around what a career could do for it. It’s like socks. From age 14 to age 44, I wore argyle socks, exclusively. The story of why is uninteresting, it was just A Thing about me. Did I even like argyle socks? Sure, I guess.

But at some point it hit me: What other socks was I saying no to, because of This Thing about me?

Or more to my point: Take away the argyles, and who’s left?

Which brings me back to my pool metaphor. Maybe the now-missing guides don’t mean I’m lost, but I’m free. I can swim anywhere.

One way to keep living is as an exercise in letting go of things that have long mattered, and seeing who remains. Argyle socks. Career success. Nationhood. Identity emblems. Am I writing about a midlife crisis, again? Very well.

Daniel J. Levinson (et al.)’s The Seasons of a Man’s Life is a book I found in my school library, searching under the subject ‘Middle age -- Psychological aspects’. I was looking for non-corny and non-obvious frameworks on this time of life, stories from folks who’d gone through it, tips on how not to fall in any traps.

‘Humanity has as yet little wisdom for constructing the “portrait of the hero as a middle-aged man,”’ Levinson writes. ‘That archetype is still poorly evolved.’ J. Alfred Prufrock? Eleanor Rigby? It’s even worse for queers, as Alexander Chee writes in his essay, ‘After Peter’:

Understand that in 1989 there was AZT and that was basically it. Understand that those of us in my generation who lived in San Francisco had to overcome the false impression that no one like us had ever existed before, because the ones who might have greeted us when we arrived were already dead. We lacked models for bravery and were trying to invent them….

So: one way to keep living is to fashion, and then become, the hero you’ve long needed. We gays sometimes call this ‘entering one’s daddy phase.’ That got applied to me when I decided to grow a mustache. But a mustache is not a personality. It’s sure as hell nothing to live for.

The Seasons of a Man’s Life was published when I was: 1978.

The authors interviewed 40 men and looked for connections across their individual journeys. The breadth and diversity of their sample—across races, classes, and sexualities—is admirable for 1978, if not quite for 2026. Two of the many findings and conclusions they draw are worth noting.

It’s Time to Rethink the Dream
The Dream is whatever fantasy we held in youth about our happy and successful future. Career success? Fame? Family life? Here’s Levinson’s expression of the faith we put in it: ‘If I attain the Dream—if I become a great novelist or scientist, if I make a special contribution to humanity or to my clan, if I gain great power—then life will be good and everything important will come to me.’

You live for the Dream, and then you live the Dream. That’s how I’ve kept living, and now it’s time to stop all that.

Why? Well, the Dream is an illusion: And as an illusion, it’s a poor arbiter for success or happiness. To live for the Dream is to live by rules, values, and guidelines I set back in my youth—back when I still thought I was heterosexual.

I think of it like I think of gradschool. The message I got from day one in my PhD program—literally, this was told to us by the chair of the department at orientation—was that we were preparing to become members of the professoriat. Everything I did in those 5 years was aimed at the tenure-track job that meant I’d succeeded at PhD school. I got the job, teaching creative writing. I knew everything there was to know about books, except how to write one. To take the analogy out of academia: My eyes had all along been on the destination, not the journey. And I was worse for it.

But the Dream I’ve dreamt isn’t like wearing argyle socks. Letting go of this thing that’s long mattered to me feels like giving up, calling it quits on my youth, even my life. Instead, Levinson suggests rethinking where I believed I’d end up, climbing the Dream’s ladder of success:

A major developmental task of middle adulthood is to find a better balance between the needs of the self and the needs of society.... When you no longer feel that you must be a remarkable writer, craftsman, or leader, you are more free to be yourself and to work according to your own wishes and talents. The chances are that you will contribute more to society when your life contributes more to and expresses more of your self.

In this light, we’re all always becoming ourselves. One way to keep living is not to miss out on the transformation.

Which leads us to...

It’s Time to Dissolve the Boundaries between Femme & Masc
Levinson found four binaries that folks in midlife must resolve:

1. Young / Old

2. Destruction / Creation

3. Feminine / Masculine

4. Attachment / Separateness

We only have time today to look at Feminine / Masculine—which of course has been something of A Thing lately here at Shenny.

To define these murky terms, Levinson goes, fine, to reproductive biology:

The masculine form of creation is to produce something by making it according to one’s own design: planning, molding, erecting, transforming raw materials into a new product.... The feminine form is represented by begetting and raising children. In a sense, a woman creates an embryo, an infant, and an adult. But she does not ‘make’ the child grow. Rather, she enables it to grow, and she does this best when she accommodates to the inner laws of growth that govern its evolution.

Emphasis mine, and let’s get our groans out of the way. Yes, I know: ugh. But it’s useful to remember that biology is not destiny, and that ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ don’t define any one person, or group of people, but rather point to archetypes whose qualities lie within each of us. Indeed, this is Levinson’s point: ‘A young man struggling to sustain his masculinity is frightened by feelings and interests that seem feminine. One result of this anxiety is that much of the self cannot be lived out or even experienced in early adulthood.’

As a boy, I loved playing Barbies. My favorite, hands-down, was Peaches ’n Cream Barbie, with the chiffon gown and velcro’d boa you could wrap in all kinds of fashionable ways:

I mean look at her. Elegance. Drama. Effortlessness.1 Jesus.

In time, I learned never to tell anyone about this, because of what I feared it might reveal. And so what ‘the feminine’ is, or means, or contains, or provides, or enables—its power, I’m talking about, its whole ancient force—all these years later that remains something of a mystery to me.

One way to keep living is to find my own solution.

All right so it’s not non-corny, but The Seasons of a Man’s Life is great for how it frames midlife as a time of newness, exploration, adventure, and connection—things I’ve assumed were now behind me.

But one thing I’m ready to put behind me? Me. Or that project. What I’m going to fail this morning to put into words is how Levinson’s books inspired me to see how I’ve both achieved the project of Finding Myself and am always undertaking it. In that contradiction, or overlap, or reality lies room for others. For that planet I’d given up hope on.

This week’s still from a thing I watched is Lenny and Carl reminding me there’s more to folks:

Dear Friends:

Welcome back from Spring Break! N & I spent it in New York, where we toured like tourists: NBC Studios, Grand Central, the Frick, the Met, the Whitney, the Merchant’s House, backstage at the Lion King. It was brisk and chilly, 30s and 40s the whole week, whereas back here in San Francisco they had 80+ degree days in mid-March.

Everywhere is hotter than it should be, I get it. But these last 5 or 10 years of climate change being a lived reality, and not a warning about some scary possibility, have cemented the fact that, in many aspects, the life I’ve lived, and the world I’ve lived it in, are over. An earlier draft of this Shenny was titled ‘How to keep living’, as lately I’ve been asking such things. What should I be living for, now that the future looks so dim and small?

It got too bleak even to finish. Let me just say that finding an answer is a work in progress. In the meantime, I have today to try to make better than yesterday.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. The Lambs Club, Times Square
Say what you want about Times Square,1 but odds are you’ll find your way there someday, likely for a Broadway show, and if you do, book an early dinner at the Lambs Club on West 44th, because it looks like this inside:

Plus they’ve got a pre-theater prix fixe menu that was some of the most exquisite food I’ve had in New York. N. got the steak tartare and duck confit, and I got some kind of ravioli with a mushroom foam, and then the ocean trout. It’s not avant garde food (anymore). It’s the sort of food you want to eat in such a perfectly lit and blessedly quiet restaurant. Plus: inexpensive for NYC prix fixe. And yes, those are photos of Broadway / Hollywood greats lining the walls. And yes, looking down on me throughout our meal was our gal, Angela:

2. Eli Cugini’s ‘It’s Time To Grow Up’ (Defector)
Maybe you’ve heard that HBO is making a new Harry Potter series, which will reportedly cover all the original novels and last a decade. This was, initially, a huge fucking shame because for God’s sake, Hollywood, Underwrite new stories! Then I read Cugini’s excellent essay in Defector:

I personally do not actually care if people like Harry Potter or not. It does not matter if you have emotional investments in the books, the films, the other, worse films, the theme parks, the merchandise, or anything else connected to the franchise. I mean that in both the callous and the benevolent sense: It does not matter.... What matters is what you do, because J. K. Rowling is out there doing a lot of things.

Rowling isn’t just a batty old TERF edgelady who likes to shitpost a lot, she’s an unfathomably rich person who uses her wealth to found a rape criss center that excludes trans folks, for starters, and fund the case that led the UK Supreme Court decision to define ‘woman’ as a biological sex assigned at birth. I’ve written before about how we can’t stop supporting evil and fascism because of their Very Fun Toys! Except we can. It’s not difficult to keep power from the powerful. Don’t buy a Tesla. Stop letting ChatGPT do your work. Get the hell off X and Instagram. Hold onto your memories of these books all you want, but let’s skip this sure-to-be-disappointing show.

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Scrolling for the Real

Welshpool is a town in the South Gippsland region of Victoria, Australia. At the 2016 census, Welshpool had a population of 331. Welshpool is a town with lots to offer with many shops from general stores, fuel station, hotel motel and a rural transaction centre supported by Bendigo Bank. Close proximity to Port Welshpool beach and boat ramp.

Here’s a pic of the main street:

I’ve never been to Welshpool, or Gippsland for that matter, but I’ve learned all about it from Wikipedia. Did you know Wikipedia has a Random Article link? Clicking it is like hitting shuffle on the quadruple album that is our world. My opening paragraph above is the town’s Wikipedia page copied verbatim.

Whoever wrote the article is likely wrong about the town’s having a lot to offer, given what I’m seeing in this pic. But the town’s Wikipedia page is another matter. As short as it is, it offers another reminder that the world is bigger than we’re often told.

At its origins, the promise we got was how the internet would connect us to one another. Now, the internet feels more about connecting people to the internet. It seems to offer up fewer stories than are really out there, and paradoxically to keep people at a distance from one another.

Here’s an example: A few weeks ago, I was watching Roku City scroll on our TV. Are you familiar?

It’s a screensaver full of movie Easter Eggs,2 and sometimes they change things up. N. was in the kitchen making lunch when I saw some kind of creature on the leftmost edge of that theater marquee. I missed it as it scrolled and had to wait for it to come back from the right. Was it a little boy? No, it was a monkey. A monkey?

‘There’s this new monkey in Roku City holding what looks like a stuffed animal?’ I called to N., and he ran in from the kitchen.

‘Oh that’s Punch the Monkey!’ he said, and that’s when I learned what Punch the Monkey was.

I didn’t know what to do with the information, other than feel sympathy for one of what must be thousands of orphaned animals in the world. But mostly I felt old, left out. Not being on social media is like not watching Must See TV Thursday in the 90s. I’m not going back, but two things have resulted: I can’t follow people’s watercooler conversations. Also, the real world often feels faker, almost scripted.

When a thing in the world becomes a meme on the internet, something real turns into a cultural product, which we all collectively own and operate. It’s similar to the work we nonfiction writers do in creating our characters: You have to take the enormity of a person and shrink them down to a literary character with a storytelling function.

If that’s ever happened to you, you know it doesn’t feel great.

Then again, nonfiction delivers to (reduced, mediated) lives we may never get to know, just as taxidermy delivers us animals (or at least their outer shells) we may never get to see. And the internet brings us parts of the world we’d likewise never know. How would I ever learn about the admittedly sad story of a Japanese zoo monkey if it weren’t for TikTok?

But memeification confuses my relationship to reality—i.e., other people. Actually, as smarter writer Will Self writes, it’s much worse:

What the meme represents is the derogation of any genuine affinity between people beyond the amusement they experience through recognizing the evanescent intersection between an image’s pop-cultural origins and their own pretensions to give a damn. [Boris] Johnson and [D.] Trump are perfect for this era. Both men can be reduced to a caricature in seconds—and best of all, they don’t mind!

The question is: Do any of us? Here I’m thinking of this Knausgaard essay I taught a few weeks back, where he tries to come to some understanding of what technology is and is for. I loved the essay when I first read it, and found in the classroom an unexpected disconnect.

Here’s a ¶ from midway through the piece:

Images draw even the most distant things closer, but their presence is illusory; it is a fiction…. The ambivalence of the image—showing us reality but not itself being the reality it shows; fictional and non-fictional at once; both near and far—can shape our relationship with the world in ways that aren’t entirely clear to us, since the way we see the world always is the world. When I recognize, for example, that forests are disappearing, species are going extinct, the polar ice caps are melting, the oceans are getting warmer and rising, deserts are expanding, fires are ravaging ever-larger areas, there is something unreal about it all. I know that it’s happening—it’s not that I don’t believe it—but at the same time it’s like it isn’t happening. It has a whiff of the abstract about it. And although I’m horrified, I’m not connected to it, not really. It’s something out there that I see in here. I’m not a part of it; I’m standing outside it, watching. Surely the most precise word for that condition is “alienation”? The loss of the world.

Many of my students were frustrated and turned off by this ¶, particularly Knausgaard’s belief that he’s ‘not connected to’ climate change, ‘not really’, when all the choices he’s spent his life agreeing to as a capitalist consumer make him as complicit as the rest of us.

We didn’t have time to interrogate the adverb, but I saw the disagreement lay in his use of ‘really’. Ice caps are really melting. Israel is really committing genocide. The Executive Branch is really governing to make (most) Americans’ lives and health worse. But few of us have direct, lived experience with these realities. Mostly, we get images—or, better, stories.

Knausgaard says he can’t quite access the real through (technologically replicated) images of the real. My students saw no such difficulty. What remains unclear is whether they saw a difference, or even if there is such a difference anymore. Ceci, in fact, une pipe.

In looking it up to cite, I just got reminded that Magritte titled his famous painting The Treachery of Images. Treachery (n): betrayal of trust, deceptive action or nature.

In such a light, all the internet becomes a deepfake.

Okay: most of the internet. Wikipedia’s Random Article feature presents me many images: Like the streets of Welshpool. Or data tables re the Russian Bandy Super League. Or the cover art to Alanis Morrisette’s Such Pretty Forks in the Road (2020).

So what about those images feels real, or delivers me to the real? Perhaps I’m only hungry for the unknown, amid so many images of the known, the memed, the grieved, the think-pieced. Or maybe it’s more about what this world is capable of.

History was my worst and least favorite subject in school, but I was reminded of its worth when in New York, getting an impromptu tour of Grand Central Terminal from a registered guide.3 All of tourism tells the same story over and over again: People made this. People sculpted the oak leaves and acorns that adorn the stairwells and friezes throughout the terminal. People made the cast-iron eagles on the roof with 13-foot wingspans, and people somehow got them in place.

Hell, even tourism TV shows do this. N & I binged the Shenny-endorsable BBC series Great Canal Journeys over the hot Easter weekend, and I thought of how many people built canals where there was once only dirt, dug canal tunnels that are over 5,000 yards long, died doing both of these.

So maybe the difference between images and reality isn’t as treacherous as it can seem, scrolling through the internet’s eternal now. But any time tourism or the internet shows me what folks have made, I feel better. I’m reminded that we’ve so long been larger and more powerful than the internet wants us to believe.

This week’s still from a thing I watched comes from Richard Ayoade’s fun show Travel Man (Rome episode, 2017), which I grabbed because of that welcome graffito:

Dear Friends:

Happy Women’s History Month! Two years ago at this time, you may recall, I was secret-fighting with the student workers at our campus gym about the spelling of Amelia Earhart’s name on their celebratory whiteboard. But this year, I’m trying to be more chill.

It’s not working. I’m nervy lately, choosing all the battles. Where are they coming from? I think it’s been easy this year to forget the world’s abundance. Every story is a story of less now. Budget cuts at my school. Our mayor wants to get rid of a wealth tax we voted for to fund social housing. Southwest Airlines changing all its good policies by the demand of its private equity overloads.

Stories of less make me assume more is under threat. So let this Shenny be at least one story about more, abundance, and love.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. The Face of Fehinti Balogun
N & I recently watched the outstanding Mick Herron series Down Cemetery Road (AppleTV), starring two women with brilliant and beautiful faces of their own (Ruth Wilson and Emma Thompson), but the best part of the show was any time Fehinti Balogun came on screen, looking, usually, exactly like this:

I first fell in love with that face when I saw Balogun in Ewan McGregor’s all-around great A Gentleman in Moscow, playing the tragic Mishka. It’s something of a fluid stoniness, a face of great gravitas and weariness that carries this full emotive weight in every role. Amos, his character in DCR, has these moments when his face explodes like a firework, with the widest smile and eyes that dance, and that contrast—just the range of what that face can do—stuns me every time. He’s so good. Everyone cast him in everything.

2. 1978: The Year in Music
On a recent playlist challenge, I had to find tracks released in the year I was born. I dug through Spotify curated playlists and the Wikipedia page on 1978 in Music, and soon I had a working sandbox of more than 4 hours of songs. I wanted to find things I hadn’t heard before, a mix of 70s-y sounds and sounds that could be from any year of my nearly 48-year life. Here’s the end result:

‘Sensation’ by the Motors might be the best song I’ve discovered in years: ‘Didn’t they say that Jesus Christ himself was here? But he’s not! He’s living in America! Working on his image as a life-siiiiiiize SENSATION! LIVING IN AMERICA! LIVING IN AMERICA!’ Insane and singable and exactly the more of the world I need.

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The woman of my family

From the name itself, Shenny has always intended to pay homage to these women, the women who made me, that sister-energy still informing so much of how I live in the world. And in honor of this month of women, I want to look closely at this old family photo:

This is not your typical All Three Generations Of A Family Together photo, but that’s for sure its genre. The scene: Aunt Alma’s much-loved indoor pool (here’s a shot looking the other way), Monogahela, Pa., some summer in the dead center of the 1980s.

Alma’s older sister was Gladys Madden (née Collin), our paternal grandmother. That’s her dressed kinda like the Queen:

Fitting, as Grandma Madden was born in County Durham, UK, to an English coal miner and his Welsh wife, Harriet. She was, in the 9 years her life overlapped with mine, my favorite grandmother, or at least the one who was closest to me. I remember her as warm and affectionate, always arriving with gifts, happy to give me sweets, etc. She called me Master David, like some young sire in short pants, and later Wesley, because I reminded her of the youngest boy on Mr. Belvedere.

I’m named for her father, David Collin. In 1941, Gladys and her parents and brother sailed to Ellis Island on the Tyrrhenia, a ship named for ancient pirates. Their settling in Monongahela had something to do with a church sponsorship, or maybe with coal mining, or both? This is part of our ancestry I’m still researching. Appalachian hill folk. All of the women in my family are such women.

This is Dorotha ‘Dot’ Myers, Mom’s mom, a quiet fenceplank of a woman with a wry sense of humor and a near-fetishistic love for cardinals. She and her husband lived over in Bentleyville—Coal Center more specifically—in a house they’d dug into a hillside surrounded on three sides by a cattle farm. Their house is where we Maddens stayed on our visits to the motherland. Dot drove a milk truck during the war, and made apple dumplings we all wish we still had the recipe for. (Shani has her recipe for goulash, which I made recently, and while evokes certain warm memories, I can’t recommend it.)

During one of the Myers’s visits down to Virignia, Jenny (pending) came out of the bathroom and complained loudly at how I’d peed all over the seat. I’ll go to my grave insisting I didn’t, but before I could make my case, I heard Grandma Myers from all the way down the hall go, ‘David, do you aim where you shoot or do you shoot where you aim?’ Laughter among everyone at my expense—a common occurrence. One of my favorite photos of her is from the day my dad, bored to tears on a visit up to Pa., went out and bought us a BB gun, lining beer and pop can along the fenceline. Dot kneels on the ground to shoot, in a sleeveless top and sensible knee-britches. Appalachian elegance.

All of us still alive in the family, any time we see a cardinal, we take it as a visitation from Dot. Dot’s daughter is my mom. Here’s the back of her, with just a peek at her wide 80s eyeglasses:

If you want to know about Mom, Pamela Kay Madden née Myers, I wrote all about her in a special Mother’s Day Shenny some years back:

What I’ll add here is how much I love, in this photo’s composition, Mom’s body’s function as a kind of hinge, or the vertex of an angle running from my grandmothers to my sisters. Jenny (pending) is much of the focus of the pic, but the eye can’t quite get to her without going through our mom—a Leo, if that means anything to some of you.

Which brings us to Shani:

Easy to agree that everything about Shani in this photo roolz. Her cool-eyed stare at the camera’s lens, the poise with which she holds her plate and styrofoam cup, and that pose she’s striking: mallrat primadonna. I love the socks bunched over her hightops, the pastel pink, the long bob. Shani was (remains) 6 years older than me, and this put her in my eyes in a mythic position: grown-up without being as boring and embarrassing as an actual adult.

Shani, an only-child for all of four years, likely remembers this differently, being tasked as ersatz mom while Mom worked bookkeeping jobs. She was her own kid and then she had Jenny (pending), and then me to walk to class every morning, get home right after middle school to latchkey us in. Fast forward three or four years from this pic, and Shani and one of her headbanger girlfriends are hanging one summer afternoon in Shani’s room in the basement of our split-level (the farthest from our parents’ room).

Magically, they’re letting me hang, too. Out of the blue, with almost a kind of telepathy between them, her friend says ‘Should we order a pizza’ right as Shani’s already grabbing her phone. And they order a pizza to be delivered to the house, 2:30pm on a Thursday, without even asking Mom for permission. They pay for it with their mall-job money. Hard to explain how glamorous this was to me at the time, a pair of celebrities.

It was ham and onion, the pizza. I’ll never forget the taste of it.

To bring us to Jenny, the final woman of the family, let’s return to the pic as a whole, because it’s clear that she’s the star of it:

Again it’s the composition: I love the way Jenny’s head is bent at an angle counter to Shani’s akimbo front leg, her cup in the opposite hand (Shani’s the family lefty). And with the foreshortened perspective, it’s hard to tell if all these women (save Mom) are looking at the camera, or if they’re looking at Jenny be beheld by it.

It’s a happy possibility. Jenny was the only one of us kids our parents planned to have, the middle child, who often found herself stuck in that position. Jenny herself was pending, or rather family attentions to her were. She got the smallest bedroom, a lot of Shani’s hand-me-downs, the only one who had to pay in full for her first car. At 102 weeks older, she was close to me in age, and one feature of youth is how that closeness caused much distance, and disdain: we fought and embarrassed each other. Some nights, it wasn’t easy even sharing a house.

In adulthood, the closeness has become closeness. We text often, get each other’s jokes. It’s even geographic: in 2024, she left a lifetime in Virginia and moved west with her husband and brother-cats to Fort Collins, Colo. It’s a house of big boy energy she’s in now, and I know she’s happy there, even if I’ve yet to see it firsthand.

That’s the women, all of them. My parents had no siblings, so no one is missing. Before Mom pointed herself out at the food table, I assumed she took the photo, so now I’m left to wonder who it was. I wish it were me, but given the perspective I would’ve had to raise the camera above my head, or climb up on something, and the fact that none of these women is pointing and going David, get down! means it couldn’t have been me.

Plus, I’m in the photo already. That’s me in the center, that back of a boy’s head, lost in my own who-knows, surrounded by everyone most important to me.

This week’s still from a thing I watched is another perfect composition of a family, from Mike Leigh’s Another Year (2010):

Dear Friends:

Yesterday, I was invited to climb to the top of the east belltower of St. Ignatius Church, the church on my school’s campus. Here’s the view, facing Virginia:

If my office had a window, it would be behind that tree. It had been a warm day but the clouds rolled in just before we set off, and up there the wind whipped our hair back and forth. On the way, paint peeled in little bursts that ran vertically up the walls and must have been from 100 years of hot sliding suns. I saw graffiti going back to the 1960s. One person drew a Cool S, another wrote ‘TCB for Jesus’, replete with Elvis’s lightning bolt.

Hundreds of feet below me, I’d once sat every day for nine months, learning the prayer practice I detail below. I don’t have a church, but if I did it would be St. Ignatius. And yet, up in the belltower I found I had few thoughts, just like wow and neat and I wish the bells would go off right now, while they’re inches from my head.

Did you know that Quasimodo, the hunchback, is named for the Sunday after Easter Sunday?

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Skipping intro ¶s when reading online
Over the last 15 years of everything online being designed to stand out in a feed scroll, editors have retooled headlines to hook you with the meat of the matter. And yet writers keep writing intro paragraphs to ease you into things. It’s like being told, ‘Here, meet my friend, Dave,’ with Dave right there ready to shake your hand. ‘But before you do, let me tell you some things you already know on what it’s like to meet new people.’ Last week, I saw this in my feed: ‘How to turn an acquaintance into a friend’. It’s something I’m keen to learn this year, and I knew the moment I tapped that I’d have a few ¶s to skip until I got to that How-To. Sure enough, here was the opening: ‘Sometimes you meet a person and just know: You. I want to be friends with you.’ As a writer, I get it: you want a piece that has a kind of wholeness; opening right on your actual advice or news feels too abrupt. But that’s how the internet has taught us to read. The allure of an intro can’t compete with the tug of a headline, so the former now feels redundant to the latter. Let’s call it a cost of getting a vastly larger audience than in the time before phones (this ain’t an essay in some book), and agree to start reading (and writing) somewhere around the fourth ¶.

2. An insulating layer on your air mattress
We keep the house cold, especially at night, because studies I don’t have time to link to agree that lowering your body temperature helps you sleep. When we have overnight guests, we’ve got an air mattress for them, set up right where I’m sitting as I type these words. Guests remark how comfy it is for an air mattress, but originally things got too chilly overnight. The issue: they’re sleeping on a thin layer of vinyl and more than a foot of cold air. Now when setting up the air mattress, we lay an old comforter or thick blanket down first, then secure the fitted sheet, thus giving a nice foundation to hold onto their bodies’ warmth. Maybe this is one’s a broader Endorsement of spending a night in your own home as though you were a guest.

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Draft like a Catholic, revise like a Buddhist

At a bar the other night with my friend, and colleague, Laleh, I was telling her about the weight I felt, having to start another round of revision on my memoir. Feedback had come in from my initial readers, which was such a gift, thoughtful and thorough, but it revealed (and affirmed) some sizeable problems in terms of characterization, perspective, and tone. And the final chapter? Oof.

Laleh listened and gave me, at first, some very obvious advice: ‘You have to go back and read it as though it’s not yours.’ We all teach this to our students, but it’s easier said than done. But then, she asked a not-obvious question: ‘Have you heard of Zen Master Suzuki?’

Oh here we go, I thought.

I’m you’re not a Catholic, but a decade ago when I wanted to learn (among other things) how to pray, I was taught how to in a Catholic tradition—specifically the spiritual tradition of St. Ignatius of Loyola.

One form of Ignatian prayer has two parts:

1. Read a passage from the Bible and then, in prayer, imagine yourself in that world, make it alive and real. Hear what people are saying, picture their faces, see where you’ve placed yourself, watch the scene unfold, smell what you can smell, etc.

2. Then, in what Ignatius calls a colloquy, go talk with a deity or saint about it, or about your life. Meet them somewhere, and start a conversation.

So: render a moment through rich sensory detail, then think about its import and significance? I can’t imagine a spiritual practice better suited to a memoirist.

I’ve never taken confession (I’m not a Catholic I just draft like one), but I’ve spent almost ten years doing my part to prove Foucault’s repressive hypothesis: mining my own history of sexuality, and sex, putting it all in words, thinking about why and how any of it could matter.

I made a mess. An organized mess, and a productive and instructive mess, but one thing I got from this initial feedback is that it’s sometimes hard to handle this mess.

Well, of course. This mess—my confessions and colloquies—it was all for me.

As someone who feels most alive when his mind is firing all at once, I’ve always looked at Zen Buddhism as at a kind of death, a cliff, a chasm. ‘Do not try to stop your thinking; let it stop by itself,’ suggests Shunryu Suzuki in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, the book Laleh suggest I read for help in my revision practice. ‘Our body and mind should not be wobbling or wandering about.’

But what if wandering and wobbling are pleasurable?

‘I am interested in helping you keep your practice from becoming impure,’ Suzuki writes in his opening paragraph, and I got wary. Life is impure. The truth is impure. What the hell else are we supposed to write about?

But I stuck with the book, reading as a kind of cheat, not to find my zazen practice, but to listen to a master reviser.

When you listen to a lecture, you should not have any idea of yourself. You should not have your own idea when you listen to someone. Forget what you have in your mind and just listen to what he says. To have nothing in your mind is naturalness. Then you will understand what he says.

Hard not to have any idea of yourself when the ‘lecture’ you’re ‘listening to’ in your revision practice is the memoir you’ve written, but that’s what I wanted to go into it with. I wanted to go in with nothing I needed to hold onto, nothing I had to ‘figure out’.

So long as you have some particular goal in your practice, that practice will not help you completely…. The way to practice without having any goal is to limit your activity, or to be concentrated on what you are doing in this moment. Instead of having some particular object in mind, you should limit your activity. When your mind is wandering about elsewhere you have no chance to express yourself. But if you limit your activity to what you can do just now, in this moment, then you can express fully your true nature, which is the universal Buddha nature.

Whether my MS was expressing my ‘true nature’, or some story I figured people were looking to read, was one of the questions I had from my initial feedback. I like how the above bit reframes obvious notions of Focus and Concentration not as tools for good work, but as the means by which that nature, and self-expression, come forth.

With Suzuki’s Zen mind in mind, I reread all 278 pages of the thing last weekend and saw it very much anew. I saw its narrator as both me and not-me, a guy who’d done a lot of work, clearly, but who got boring at times. Fakey, too. He had a lot of smart things to say, smart findings and citations to show off, and Suzuki’s book helped me see when this was working for the story, and when it was only working for itself.

He also had moving things to say, this narrator. He went through (and caused) some hard and sad shit. But somewhere in each chapter, he and the writing lost its way, or its focus. It’s hard to describe how clearly I saw these things. I saw the writing die, or go wayward at the same time I say myself drafting these words, so excited at discovery and detail.

I honored that dude I was while noting now I don’t need to be him anymore. And when the writing found its focus again, it felt like I was reading a book I liked.

That’s probably my main goal now: revise this to a book I don’t want to stop reading.

Drafting is for you, revision is for everyone else. I mean, maybe revision is for you, for a while, helping you get your thing closer to your ideal. But soon we need to revise with strangers in mind, and what better way than to become a stranger to yourself?

How did it work, this injection of Suzuki? Maybe the better metaphor is that reading his book (it helps that it’s only 134 pages) was like a perfume I waded in awhile, an aroma I eventually forgot about but which stuck around. I’d read a ¶ of my own work and recall all those original intentions I had, and then the whiff of him would return: ‘If you reflect on yourself, that self is not your true self any more. You cannot project yourself as some objective thing to think about.’

Wait, what? says the memoirist.

This week’s still from a thing I watched is Jeff Hiller and ‘Roger’ waiting out a tornado in Somebody Somewhere (HBO), the show about queer community I’ve been looking for:

Dear Friends:

Last weekend I saw a movie (see below) with a character named the Doctor, who spent his days drinking alone in his dirty room taking notes in many journals on anything he saw out his window. Neighbors’ comings and goings. What the stray dog ate. He served in the movie as comic relief, but for me he was more of a warning.

What, I wondered, did he hope to be when he was a boy? What did he picture his life being like? How had this, instead, happened?

Unwisely, I turned these questions on myself. As a boy, I wanted to be famous and have twin sons. Fame is banal—for this insecure kid it was about knowing I mattered. Those twins? Mattering, too … but also magic.

When I got cut from the hetero storyline, that desire for kids didn’t fade so much as wait in certain rooms I’d sometimes pass. Oh right … you. Had I really wanted sons? Or had I only been customizing (what felt like) an inevitable future?

Fine: the life I live now resembles the Doctor’s more than whatever the kid I was once pictured. How does anyone matter? What made mattering such a virtue? I’ll say this: I dream a lot, as I’ve written about before, but in none of those dreams have I ever been a father.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Rickie Lee Jones at Bimbo’s 365
I didn’t know a thing about Rickie Lee Jones when my friend offered me a ticket. I guess I pictured something like if Joni Mitchell did a side project with Beverly D’Angelo. I’d also never been to Bimbo’s in North Beach, but Jesus what a room! The sort of place a gangster might hold his daughter’s wedding reception in 1977.

Weird, I know, to endorse an event that’s already over, but consider this a twofer: an endorsement of venue1 and of RLJ live, who instead is fully her own thing, sometimes jazz-inflected, sometimes chanteusey, sometimes even zydeco-y (and the source of maybe half of Sheryl Crow’s whole vibe). An astoundingly good songwriter. (I teared up during ‘I Wasn’t Here’.) She played among a stripped down combo: percussionist, accordionist, and violinist/vocalist. After song #2 she introduced them, and I caught no name but the violinist’s: Petra Haden.

P E T R A H A D E N ! ! !

Petra Haden! Petra Haden! Petra Haden! Petra Haden! The boy I was at 17—working out, on an acoustic Yamaha, all the violin parts on Return of the Rentals—sat up in his Bimbo chair and couldn’t believe: What a gift!

2. Buying 2 of any good apparel item
The thing with Levi’s, despite its proud history, is that they hate making the same jean for more than a couple months. Sometimes the 511 slim has 85% cotton, sometimes it’s 70%. Lately it’s 68%, and fuck: how’s it supposed to fit the same way? Being a man of a certain age (that age is 47), I’ve settled into a style that works. Call it Assistant Softball Coach Starts Taking Night Classes And Wants To Impress The Hot Prof.

I enjoy clothes shopping, but by the time my jeans wear out, or my Nikes are looking real rough, ever-shifting trends leave no hope in buying replacements—not without starting the hunt all over again. So now, when I find a staple garment I like, I immediately buy a second and stuff it in the back of the closet until it’s needed. What’s the state of that closet? Don’t worry about it.

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Men reading women writing about men

I’ve told this story before, and I’ll keep telling it.

The night after my partner caught me cheating, we went to our scheduled couples counseling session, where our therapist suggested I go to a meeting of Sex Addicts Anonymous.

I went that very night, and I went back the next week, and then I went as many times as I could. Each time, I said I was Dave and I was a sex addict, and each time everyone said not ‘You’re a what?’ or ‘Gross’ but, ‘Hi, Dave.’

Meetings were full stories from other people (most of them men, many of them gay men) about feeling ashamed and out of control. If they were poems I’d’ve been all-snaps. They were full of affirmations that we were all, still, good and beloved. I understood each night that I had a lot of work to do to regain N.’s trust, but I always left those rooms feeling better about myself than I did walking in.

That was the opposite of our therapy sessions, where I felt stupid, ugly, wrong, and beat up. Which is often how I feel reading women writing about men.

These terms ... talk about stupid, ugly, and wrong. Which women? Which men? I’m talking here about a practice in writing/media/takes which sees any one person as (a) heterosexual and (b) representative of their whole (binary) gender. Jillions of writers have shown the boneheadedness of this. I’m continuing a dumb practice, but hey they started it.

Who did? Well, last week I read Rebecca Solnit’s ‘Masculinity as Radical Selfishness’, which from its title throws down a gauntlet.2 ‘Wearing masks, it turns out, is not manly,’ she writes. (The essay was written in May 2020.)

... when the definition of manly is not having to do fuck-all out of concern for others. There are a lot of other things that turn out not to be manly, including, according to recent studies, caring about climate change and environmental problems, and even recycling and handwashing. Taking care of things is not manly.

As evidence, here’s Bolsinaro, Putin, Trump, and Johnson. Soon the essay looks at the wide gulf in caregiving done by women vs. men in the heterosexual 2-parent home, with much of the evidence coming from an article in the Washington Post’s (RIP) women’s section—i.e., The Lily, a name Solnit wisely disparages for the way it signals to men, You don’t have to read these stories, despite how much they may be responsible for them.

One woman, the Lily reports, had to leave her job during lockdown because her unemployed husband wouldn’t (he said couldn’t) handle their child care. This idiot then becomes emblematic of What’s Wrong with Men.

Now, this Shenny is not a feeble #NotAllMen rebuke. We can all use more stories of men’s failures—but not only by women. Whatever Solnit’s aims were for the essay, its overall effect is to tell a certain story about COVID, a story for people who needed a story. It goes like this: We are here because of men’s ‘manly’ refusal to care for others.

What that story can’t (or won’t) do? Help men think about why, then how, to care for others.

A few issues here. One: when masculinity is pleasurable (and in a patriarchy when is it not?), anything coded to it—no matter how hideous—is going to feel good, or at least fun. Take ‘mansplaining’ or ‘manspreading’ (please): If you’re gonna put manliness right in the name, good luck getting men to stop doing it.

Another: Most of us don’t respond well to a scold. We get defensive or we feel ashamed—neither’s a good place to effect radical change.

I felt this back when Jeffrey Toobin was caught jerking off on a work Zoom. Remember that? It was also COVID era, election season, seven months at that point of all-day sweatpants and regarding every other person outside your home as a toxin.

When the news broke, nearly all the takes I could find were from women:

• If your zoom dick take is anything besides ‘don’t jack off during a work meeting for goodness sakes’ you are wrong

• So. Man (with fame, clout, authority) in work meeting pulls out his dick and masturbates, thinking nobody will notice. HOW is that not sexual harassment of the highest magnitude?

• Masturbating at work is neither normal nor acceptable—it’s sexual harassment. These Toobin defenders are telling on themselves.

• If you’re [masturbating] in a Zoom business meeting with the camera on, you *should* feel weird and guilty. It’s called ‘shame’ and there isn’t enough of it.

Like Solnit’s essay, these takes are written to and for sympatico readers to just mash that Like button. They’re expressions of what some people needed to hear in the moment to affirm their feelings about the news. None is interested in hearing from, much less considering, men who have in one form or another been Jeffrey Toobin.

Men like me.

You can see this in their proud, happy unwillingness to think or listen or inquire or imagine. Now: that’s a tall, and I’d argue unfair, order for people who year after year have been harassed at the workplace and told it’s no big deal. This is not a call for women to be more rational or nuanced. Everyone gets to tell the stories they need to tell.

Which is why I kept looking for men’s stories. Then I found one, in an op-ed from the New York Daily News:

So let’s suppose Jeffrey Toobin had been caught on camera having sex with a partner instead of touching himself. Would he be the most mocked man in the United States right now? Of course not.... That’s what this pseudo-scandal is about: our collective unease with masturbation.

Stupid! Stupid! It was self-satisfied idiocy on one side, and self-satisfied ignorance on the other.

Why did Toobin do what he did? What was it about, and if we want to stop it: how to?

There was only one person who could answer, and we all made damn sure he’d never get the chance.

As good as I felt coming out of every SAA meeting, I wasn’t necessarily getting good advice in there. The advice was: Let your 12 steps absolve you of past evils. The advice was: Keep coming back. SAA—almost immediately—rid me of my shame anxiety, but it always upheld the shame, my noble lifelong burden.

What finally got me to face what I’d done, and change my habits, was individual therapy. I needed a space to fill with words that were met always with acceptance. Not always affirmation. And often with disagreement. But I knew I could say anything I wanted to in that room, and it would be okay.

That was also true in SAA. When I saw I had to leave, what made it difficult was giving up contact with this group of understanding people who felt like me.

My affinity group.

I love men. I have, you could say, an affinity for them. I’m interested in their stories. Like The Lily: what exactly was going through the head and heart of the dude unwilling to parent his children? Was he afraid? Was he angry? Was he feeling bereft of something he’d felt entitled to?

In an affinity group, a place of understanding people who felt like him, we could draw some useful answers. Outside an affinity group? The truth of him gets lost in the needs for something else.

The problem of being a man in a patriarchy is that any affinity group you might join will look like a Proud Boys rally, or one of those barechested wilderness retreats that just never turns into an orgy. As I saw with SAA, an affinity group isn’t always full of good wisdom. Yes they fee good. But are they changing your outlook?

Is why when women write about men, I listen: I know the value of an outside perspective.

It’s the inside perspectives I’m not hearing enough of. I don’t want podcasts or op-eds—all always written for mass online liking. I want to read men’s diaries, texts, personal essays.

Another tall order. In the years I’ve been teaching nonfiction, men comprise 25-ish percent of any class. Ours is not a genre they’re drawn to.3 But listen to me: the personal essay—that private space between author and reader—forms a really great affinity group that doesn’t become a mob.

Why aren’t men interested in nonfiction? What is it about nonfiction that forms better affinity than fiction? Where are my blindspots; who am I overlooking; how to get Jeffrey Toobin to apply to our MFA program? All Q’s for a Part 2. Let me get to work.

This week’s still from a thing I watched is from Béla Tarr’s 439-minute epic, Sátántángo (1994):

Dear Friends:

Since I saw you last? Well, I drove a rental car through whiteout blizzard conditions in rural Minnesota. I put my mom in the hospital with COVID. (Mom, forgive me.) I saw the Bill & Ted Waiting for Godot. I started renting a locker at the gym. I heard artist Nayland Blake read from their collected essays. N & I upgraded our mattress. I watched and loved all of Pluribus. I spent a night with three folks who smoked crack from separate implements and passed the time mostly talking about a fourth crack addict they disliked. I met David Sedaris, who—inevitably, it felt—asked N & me if we were watching Heated Rivalry.

I’m not writing a whole Shenny about how much I hated Heated Rivalry, but man I’ve had enough of stories about the impossibility of queer community. And I’m done with stories that insist anyone’s sexuality is always accidental to their identity or achievements. Those are hetero stories.

I myself wrote such a story, in an early version of the memoir. (And many probably, in my debut collection.) I’m not making that mistake again. One of my goals for 2026 is to sell this memoir, finally. The feedback from my initial readers is coming in, and I know there’s more work to do. The book I’ve been imagining is every day becoming a reality. To help make it happen, I’m keeping in mind something Jarrett Earnest wrote in signing my copy of the book he edited with Blake:

‘Porn is everything, and art is everything else.’

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. A better way to get through your New Yorker stack
I had just 8 waiting for me after all my travels, which isn’t bad as far as NYer piles go. But here’s the problem: Starting at the bottom of the stack (the past) ends up giving me, say, a Talk of the Town about a funny thing that happened at a Coldplay concert. Oh, spare me. But starting at the top (the present) makes me worry I’ll never get down to those outdated issues. The solution: alternate present and past. I read the latest issue and get caught up on things. Then I go to the earliest and read whatever stands out. Back to the top, then bottom, until I end somewhere in the not so long ago. It makes for a happier catching-up, where I’m somehow more ready for whatever’s on offer.

2. Bring Back Doors
Capitalism’s evils are everywhere, but no evil is more evil than what’s happened lately in hotels:

Likely you’ve stayed in such a room, where instead of a door to the bathroom that closes (and locks), the only thing separating the toilet from everyone’s ears is a sliding piece of wood, or—god help us—frosted, stripteasy glass. The first time I experienced such a calamity was with N in a hotel in Reykjavik, whose bathroom had a hinged frosted glass door that didn’t go to the ceiling and left a good 2 inches of space above the floor. We made, each morning, much use of noise apps. Clearly, a mental illness has hit hotel owners; wealth has rotted their idea of what a door is and is for. (I mean, why bother with clothes when you can just drape a barrel over your body?) Some hotels, like the ‘luxury’ 1 Hotel Central Park in NYC, have even done away with doors altogether:

Note: that’s a shot of its 2-bed room ($618/night). Have fun with those sound- and sightlines, siblings and coworkers! As a light in all this darkness comes Bring Back Doors, a database of offending hotels that, listen, do not deserve your business. And if you find such doorlessness in the wild, let’s all do our part and report those sick bastards.

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Getting Cruised as a Straight Man

The first job I ever had was at the Old Navy in Cascades, Va. The second job I ever had was as a room service waiter Service Express Associate at the William Penn Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh.

Orders came in to the ladies in the call center, they typed up the slip, and we assembled trays and rolling tables of everything that wasn’t hot. Everything that was hot came from the kitchen at the other end of the prep area. I hated hot orders. The kitchen chefs all seemed born with the belief that we in room service were peasants, infidels, no one ever to talk to.

All chefs but one: Ricky. Ricky was squat and solid, with bright brown eyes and soft cheeks that spread real wide every time he smiled, which was often. Ricky liked to play with you, but you always knew he was playing.

I liked Ricky well enough, because he didn’t give me too much shit when I dropped plates. Ricky was tight with Tammi, a classic Steelers-fan Yinzer gal who never buttoned her vest. One morning, in the lull after the breakfast rush, Tammi came over to me when no one else was around. ‘I was talking with Ricky this morning,’ she said, a little under her breath. ‘He said to ask if you wanted to go out sometime.’

‘With you?’ Tammi was 15 years older than me and we had nothing in common.

‘No with him, dummy.’

That’s how I learned Ricky was gay.

I wasn’t gay, to be clear. This was the summer of 1998, and I was living with 3 other friends in a one-bedroom apartment, one of whom was dating a gal named Karen who was two years older than us and majoring in Theatre. Somehow, I came to be friends with her; we’d go out for lunch or walks around campus, and sometimes I’d take photos of her posed near windows or lying on the grass. I wanted her to be my girlfriend.

I had no understanding of how make such a thing happen. I wanted a girlfriend like I wanted a Nobel Prize: something given to me by dint of my virtue and worthiness. One obstacle: everyone kept assuming I was gay.

That morning with Tammi, hearing her messenger message, I chuckled in a way that I wanted to sound very knowing and mature. ‘Oh, gosh, well tell him I’m flattered,’ I said, ‘but I’m straight.’

‘Oh,’ Tammi said, as her face dropped. ‘Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to offend.’

‘No, no, not at all,’ I said. I may have even said This sort of thing happens all the time.

And it would continue to happen, long after I left that job. One year later, I’d secured a girlfriend, and weeks afterward, we were out at a party together when some random woman, a friend of a friend, told me in drunken vowels: ‘I know you’re gay, but I don’t care.’ And then she kissed me.

My girlfriend—a bona fide real one!—was standing right there.

I protested but she didn’t seem convinced. Was there some kind of vapor I expelled? Some invisible element? I hated it every time someone revealed it to me. It was like one large civic gaslighting project: If everyone said I was gay often enough, I was afraid it would turn out to be true.

And: apocalypse.

My girlfriend broke up with me once it became clear that my interest in her was only going so far. After, I lived alone in Squirrel Hill, where I felt both happy and full of resentments. I was out at bars four nights a week, working in the local arts scene, and editing a fortnightly magazine I’d started with some friends. But: I was alone while those friends were all dating. I was not on any path to be a film director. I had been rejected from every writing MFA program I’d applied to.

On a friend’s recommendation, I started taking my laundry to a place in Shadyside that had reasonable rates for wash-and-fold service. One night, I handed the clerk my pickup ticket. He was blond, boxy, a little rough around the edges, with that relaxed, slack quality seen in skateboarders where you can tell they spend a lot of time sitting on pavements. He went into the back room for a bit and came back moments later with my laundry bag, except now he was wearing a ballcap he hadn’t worn when I came in.

It was this one:

The import of that ballcap—what it was meant to signal—hit me only on the drive home. From gay-porn spaces online, I knew what he did was called cruising. He’d just cruised me, this dude my age who with his fingers had maybe folded all my underwear.

Here’s the thing: I saw him. I watched him cruise me. Like a detective, searching, I noted the anomaly of the hat, assessed its purpose and function, drew the logical conclusions. I see this now like I see a puppy dogpaddling back to the shoreline. My body was ready. It knew what to do.

My mind, on the other hand? Back home, it entertained a little daydream of cruising right back, writing my phone number on the receipt and sliding it right back across the counter. I don’t need a receipt. Maybe I’d even wink?

Impossible. Impossible! I mean, I never even went back to that laundromat.

If I was in a closet those years, I wasn’t hiding there so much as blind. Whenever the straight dudes from rich houses called me a fag in high school, it felt like a pounding on the door. We know you’re in there. Any response, I knew, would only be met with more threats.

But with Ricky and the laundry boy, their signals and sallies felt like a door being unlatched, open just a peek. They let a little light into that dark, these gay men who saw something sympatico in me. Welcome! they said. Join us, sweet dummy!

God bless them forever and ever.

Look: cruising is a mindset, a way of facing this smartphone’d world. It says something like, This stranger, too, is an opportunity for connection. For us homosexuals, that connection is often genital. But that’s not cruising’s limit.

What being cruised has taught me?

We can’t ever know what kind of service we can provide someone. Not until we choose to signal what we have on offer.

This week’s still of a thing I watched is from I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967):

Dear Friends:

Greetings from Vermont! I’ve spent the last week at the peerless and perfect Vermont Studio Center, talking with the resident writers about their work, sharing a little of my memoir, and delivering a talk on toilets, sewers, filth, shame, and evil. It snowed big fat impossible flakes of snow 3 times in the 7 days I’ve been here, and you bet your ass I felt like a gal in a Hallmark movie.

I mean…

I even got to be an extra in that scene where the town has a tree-lighting ceremony and pods of kids roast marshmallows over open fires while people sing carols:

Here I learned I was A Summer, in terms of the colors that work best for my skintone, which I find odd given what’s clearly my favorite time of year. I hit the United Church of Johnson’s thrift store in town and found this sweater for $3 (paired with the pants I got for $3 the last time I was in town):

Does it suit my colors? Ahead of me now are three weeks of travel to visit friends and family, meeting up with N. in South Dakota just before Xmas. I’m looking forward to every damn second of it. It’s been a busy, heavy fall of finishing my memoir, writing a paper on Jessica Fletcher, writing this talk, writing Shenny. Now I’ll be on hiatus for a few weeks, writing hopefully nothing.

Whatever your wishes are this year, or next, I hope your holidays keep you warm and full of love.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements: Last-Minute Holiday Gift Ideas

1. Sears Wish Book from Recipient’s Youth
This mammoth bit of print was mailed to seemingly every home in America each fall, a catalog themed around Christmas consumption. We Madden kids would lie on the carpet and flip through each page and race each other to claim the best thing on the spread. Some years back, N. found the 1980 Wish Book on eBay, and it turns out lots of copies are out there for not much money. If you have someone on your list who’s a nostalgist (and over the age of 40, as the last one came out in 1993), this makes a nice gift: both for the toys they might remember wanting, and for the fashions they’re happy to have moved on from. And if you don’t have this kind of nostalgist on your list, a great similar gift is a Holiday issue of Playboy or Playgirl magazine from some year of their adolescence.

2. Digital Copies of Beloved Media
I like to find gifts for people which they would enjoy but never buy for themselves, because too expensive or too frivolous or too unavailable in their part of the country. And few things feel more frivolous, in these days of streaming everything, than owning digital media. But streaming sites pay piss rates to the artists whose songs or movies or TV shows we consume freely; so giving a FLAC of your person’s favorite album, or MP4s for all of season 6, say, is almost like making a donation in their name. Plus now the recipient has high-quality media files to play on a plane or when the wi-fi goes down, or a PDF of a beloved book to handily quote from, to screenshot and post on social media—far more photogenic than a snapshot of a printed page. Nobody needs analog and digital copies of things, but people buy themselves what they need. And if you put the media on a thumb drive, now they’ve got another handy thumb drive.

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Checking In on Christmas Wishes

This is my fourth year writing Shenny, and as long-time readers know every year ends, uninspiringly, with a holiday issue. Actually, my first year out, I wrote, like a giddy schoolboy on Xmas eve, not one but two holiday issues:

Last year, I made Xmas playlists of songs past and present, and typed up a bunch of tips for throwing a better holiday party, which if you’ve got yours coming up is, I promise, worth a reread:

But I want to talk today about the 2023’s year-end Shenny, a blowout double-issue of cookie recipes, cranky/sentimental opinions on old carols, and some Christmas wishes I hoped to see come true in the future:

Two l o n g years later, I want to check in on these wishes to see whether any of them came true, or need to be revised, or added to.

Or maybe dropped all together.

Here are 2023’s wishes:

I wish for my country, and the representatives I elect, to stop funding Israel’s genocide. And I wish for the UN Security Council to find a way to take a stand against the US in our continued veto against a Gaza ceasefire.

When I look at this I’m confronted again by the skinny little divide between hopeful and naive. In what country do I think I live? And yet…

I wish for more compassionate and more populist leadership on the political left.

Here in Vermont, I had a dinner conversation one night that was cresting into one of those whirlpools of bewildered anger and frustration among a group of folks on the left re our current administration. I hate those conversations. They go nowhere but around and around their center of understandable bafflement and shallow-pond analysis. And so I said, ‘Well not to get into it, but I was really optimistic for the first time in years about the results of the New York mayoral election.’

And everyone seemed to exhale. Zohran Mamdani! I’m still stunned that a populist Socialist Democrat is now the mayor of the U.S.’s largest city. The world we need is possible, and I’ll forever be grateful to New Yorkers for showing us that.

I wish for San Francisco to get leaders whose ideas on how to make life in the city better for all don’t end at more cops on the streets and shooting laser beams over Market.

Well, we got Daniel Lurie as mayor, whom I’ve complained about enough for one year. If you read SF local news media, Lurie’s mayorship has been a total success, with unprecedented approval ratings, bang-up job on Insta, etc. Let these be signs not of his effectiveness at leading an ailing city in 2025, but of what has happened to San Francisco since the rise of tech. Here’s a man who’s never held public office, who’s never needed public services or had much use for public transit, whom SF voters in the Sunset gave the ability to appoint his own supervisor, and in that moment chose someone who’d also never held public office, and reportedly couldn’t even run a pet store without health-code violations. San Francisco’s bought the lie that we don’t need a government by the people and for the people, but that’s an American necessity, in every city. No billionaire should be eligible to run for office, and I’m skeptical of millionaires doing it too. And yes thank you I’d love to die on that hill.

I wish for snow in South Dakota in the days we’ll be there, even just some flurries that don’t stick around. Just an hour of getting to see snowflakes float past a window, or land on my mustache as I gawk slack-jawed at the falling sky, would keep me going another two years.

Here’s a pic I took on Christmas morning, 2023:

I wish to see my family all together at the same time.

Likely somewhere in the last four years I’ve written about how small my family is: Jenny, Shani, Dad, and Mom. We kids have partners but no kids. Last year, Jenny and her husband moved to Colorado, with the aim to go back east every other year for Xmas, like N. and I do. And since this year is a South Dakota Xmas, I don’t think I’ll get to see my family all together in the same room for another calendar year. Just typing that out is getting me a little choked up, because as regularly as I’ve seen individually each of these people I’m of and from, I miss getting to be part of the easy familiar energy of us all in a room together. Soon, though. Soon.

I wish to fall back in love with writing, both as a practitioner and a consumer of it....

Sometimes, this wish feels like time travel, like getting to go—20 years into a career on writing—back to when I fell for this private, almost illicit thing that led eventually to a job. But today, I’m thinking that this wish is about being allowed to get outside of a long project. Sometimes writing a memoir as hard as this one has felt like being that gal locked in the coat closet in Bradbury’s ‘All Summer in a Day’, missing the thing everyone else gets to enjoy. That thing is play. I’m not all the way outside this memoir, fully ready to play, but I’m getting there.

I wish for all my friends to get that thing they want but don’t have yet, that thing they can see coming closer, yet just out of reach. I wish to be the friend who helps it happen, as much as I can be.

Typing this Shenny up on an airplane soaring over the white-quilted landscape of Vermont, I can’t know whether this one’s come true. But if you’re reading this and think of me as a friend: What have you received in the last two years that you didn’t know you wanted? What’s closer to you now than ever was?

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I wish for a new diagnosis, an explanation, a treatment plan, to return me to the health I’ve enjoyed up until this dark year.

Not unlike 2025, 2023 was a bad health year, particularly for vertigo, sinus stuff, back pain, and chronic hives. I still have all those come and go, but 2024 gave me doctors who gave me all the means I need to manage those. You can read all about it here, but if I were a millionaire who wanted to make a difference, instead of running for public office I’d give my money right to the Mayo Clinic.

I wish that Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom gives me as many hours of pleasure as Breath of the Wild did.

Oh my god, it’s like some days it’s not even a contest. And how is such a thing possible, when BotW was so fucking good?

I wish for a bigger heart in 2024, and a more open mind. Not necessarily a more capacious mind, the sieve-holes of forgetting are getting wider each year, but a mind more nimble and flexible.

Some weeks back, I described myself to a friend as a small-hearted person, and when I said it I heard the inaccuracy in the term. She thought I was being too hard on myself, or talking out of some blind spot, and began pointing out ways this wasn’t true. What I meant is that I don’t feel adept at connecting with people on an emotional level. I think I’ve learned sympathy better than I can feel empathy. So like: I’m good on an open mind. Opening my mind to a new idea feels as easy as opening a credit card as a college freshman. But the heart stuff remains an open question. The problem with this wish is that I didn’t spend any time asking myself what I meant by ‘a bigger heart’, or what I would need to see or hear to feel that I’d acquired one. So let me revise this wish for 2026:

I wish to worry about the size of my heart only when I feel its smallness like a clenched fist, rubbing together the two pennies of all my meager-er emotions: envy, impatience, suspicion, disgust. Instead I wish for a heart that readily opens—not like a floodgate, because I’m still unsure how much is really in there, but more like a door. I wish for a heart that’s not hung up on how much it’s feeling from/alongside others, but instead sets each good person in my life square inside that doorway and sees the whole hard truth of them. I want a heart that assumes we have more in common than I could fathom.

The holidays are here, happily for all of us.

This week’s still from a thing I watched is the old guitar, with the mother-of-pearl inlay, that Ma Otter wants to get Emmet in the Christmas-Eve must-watch classic Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas (1977):

Dear Friends:

This past weekend I took a trip to Los Angeles. This is something I do annually, the weekend before Thanksgiving, with friends I made at the University of Pittsburgh, back when I was trying to be a film director and heterosexual person. We pick a neighborhood and spend four days shopping, touristing, eating, drinking, drinking, drinking, and talking about the difference between cheesy and corny, or which musicians had an island phase.

We also share about our lives, the many things each of us has been through over the last year, which things—now that we’re all at 47 years—can turn more somber and serious than they did in the past. It’s not that Los Angeles enables such talk so much as it steadies the hand, in a sense. Easy to be and say what you want when you’re in a beautiful city it would take a lifetime to explore in full.

They’re on Substack, Beth and Steve, which itself feels like the most intimate of social media networks, if that’s what Substack is now, though I don’t know if I’ve made new friends here. Making new friends (i.e actual real-life people in my town) was a goal for 2025, and with that goal I succeeded in finding at least 2 candidates, though time and travel and health kept me from turning those acquaintanceships into friendships, so the goal continues for 2026. Here’s to more friends for you next year as well.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. 2025: The Year in Music
Another thing Steve and Beth and I have done over the year is playlist challenges. Shenny issue No. 1 featured a mix that remains a favorite of mine. Beth usually assigns a year-end mix, which I sometimes face with dread, but this year I looked forward to exploring. I wanted to include no artists I’d heard before,1 and as much as I wanted to prioritize new sounds, I couldn’t help indulge in what seems to be young bands’ ongoing excursions into 90’s retro rock. My happiest find of the year was Sharp Pins, which sounds like Guided By Voices meets Alex Chilton. Also Zenxith, whose sound I can’t begin to describe. Our collective Song of the Year was clearly Insecure Men’s ‘Alien’, as each of us independently included it in our mixes. (A first!) Here’s mine for your listening pleasures, named for a phrase I heard too often in 2025:

2. Detectorists (BBC/Acorn)
I’ve been rewatching this brilliant sitcom from Mackenzie Crook, whom you might recall as Gareth from the UK Office. He writes and directs and stars in each episode, about a pair of middle-aged friends whose obsessive hobby is metal detecting. They’re not detectors, the machine’s the detector, hence the show’s title and one of its running gags. The performances all around are stellar, particular from Toby Jones, an old fave who plays Lance, the recently divorced friend to Crook’s Andy, who doesn’t have a job but dreams of being an archaeologist. It’s a show about dreams and how hard they are to achieve, particularly as you get on in years, and how spending hours in wandering isolation staring at the ground can feel like a step forward to some hopeful future.

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Letter from Los Angeles

A while back, I wanted to write about standup comedy. I told a lot of people, just like everyone I could, that I was writing a book about standup comedy. I never wrote that book. I wrote two proposals for different books about standup, but neither of them sold. Then I stopped wanting to write about standup, which had always been about showing off how smart I was.

In 2012, I went to Los Angeles for the first time, because I knew that was where the best standup was. This was back when you could line up on Melrose outside the Improv and hear people in their early twenties say, ‘So who is this guy?’ ‘Oh Rob Delany. He’s so good on Twitter.’ I spent 7 nights there, seeing 1 or 2 shows a night, then spending all morning in my hotel room typing up my ‘reviews’ for my blog, then tweeting about my blog posts and tagging the comedians mentioned.

I was thirsty for attention, access, proximity. Somehow I scored an hourlong interview with Maria Bamford; we talked over sandwiches at Quiznos. Judah Friedlander replied to a blog post, saying how wrong I was about his comedy. Even Dom Irrera answered a few questions, singing the praises of The Laugh Factory’s Jamie Masada.

Today, I look back on those years with bewilderment. I didn’t have anything to say about standup, just the wish to say something. But at one point on that trip, I went to a place called Marty’s, which was an all open-mic standup club. Built out of a former officer of a document reproduction service, the place had nothing inviting about it, nothing pleasurable. There was nothing I could say about Marty’s, but I had lots of things I wanted to know.

Marty’s was my scoop. It was the one time in LA that I saw a story to tell, and a year later I went back to tell it. The story, called ‘The Speakeasy’, appeared in Harper’s magazine ten years ago, as a ‘Letter from Los Angeles’. I’ve changed a lot in those ten years. Standup has changed a lot in those ten years. But being in Los Angeles last weekend made me think of Marty’s—which closed sometime before the pandemic—and of how long ten years can feel.

Here’s the opening to the story:

Marty’s comedy club sits at one end of a strip mall on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, above a cleaner’s and a take-out pizzeria. The entrance is up a side street and easy to miss. In the club, color eight-by-tens of past performers line the walls. Many of these photographs suffer from red-eye; some of the faces have penises drawn on them. On a low countertop near the front door, a clipboard holds a sign-up sheet with the heading Funny and Funny Looking. For five dollars, a stand-up hopeful can perform a set in Marty’s main area, which resembles an abandoned factory showroom: bare concrete floor, sparse track lighting, and a dozen or so seats, most of them rolling desk chairs. Though the walls are painted a bright cherry red, the place has little cheer. The headrests of two beige easy chairs, which sit in front of the stage, are stained black from the oily scalps of nervous comics. At one end of the room, the stage rises six inches off the floor, with a haphazard drum kit in one corner, a wheeled wooden throne in the other, a metal stool between them, and a microphone stand in front. A decal on the back wall, with text in Comic Sans, reads Marty’s. Next to it is a poster-size sketch of the club’s owner, Marty Foster.

There’s no bar at Marty’s and no kitchen. The club is open six evenings a week, from five to eleven o’clock. The only thing to do there is to watch open-mic stand-up comedy or get onstage and perform it.

Harper’s lets you read a couple stories for free before paying. You can find ‘The Speakeasy’ here.

This week’s still from a thing I watched is this representative moment of utter despair in Detectorists:

Dear Friends:

The Jenny half of Shenny visited us over Halloween weekend, the first time I’d seen her since she and her husband moved from Virginia to Colorado in 2024. We went to the mall and the flea market, got food delivered, and watched movies from our youth—plus a Hallmark Xmas movie why not. All parties agreed it was the perfect visit.

Family Season is nigh. N & I will spend Thanksgiving with friends in town, and then I’m on the road for a while. I’m the visiting writer at the Vermont Studio Center for a week in December, then afterward I’ll train down to Virginia to see my parents for a few nights, then fly to meet N in South Dakota for in-law Xmas.

It’s a lot of the country to see in a month. I think I like the U.S. better when I run through it quickly, when different geographies and accents and customs clump into each other. Seeing the country as 50 different places all fighting for sovereignty makes me want to flee.

But would I vote for California to secede, if ever given the chance? Ask me in 2026.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Voluntary Land Taxes
I live in a home that’s on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples. I learned this some years ago while listening to a Land Acknowledgement, when those began appearing before literary readings. You may have heard by now how land acknowledgements rarely achieve much beyond a performance of humility among the crowd. They don’t per se do anything about land justice or sovereignty. Then I went to some readings at Green Apple Books on the Park, whose land acknowledgement ends with an invitation I’ll need to paraphrase: Each time you hear a land acknowledgement, make a donation of time or money to support indigenous peoples. That night, I went home and found the Ramaytush Ohlone’s Yunakin land tax, a means for residents of the San Francisco Bay Peninsula to pay for the land we’re using. I set up a monthly donation, a regular reminder. If you’re not sure whose land your home sits on and what you’d like to do about that, you can start by checking out this map here.

2. Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped
I recently taught this 2013 memoir in my undergrad intro to NF class, Ward’s story of growing up in a small town on the Mississippi coast, and her attempts to understand how four men in her community died at such young ages. Midway through the book, I came across this paragraph:

What I did not understand then was that the same pressures were weighing on us all. My entire community suffered from a lack of trust: we didn’t trust society to provide the basics of a good education, safety, access to good jobs, fairness in the justice system. And even as we distrusted the society around us, the culture that cornered us and told us we were perpetually less, we distrusted each other. We did not trust our fathers to raise us, to provide for us. Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless. Some of us turned sour from the pressure, let it erode our sense of self until we hated what we saw, without and within. And to blunt it all, some of us turned to drugs.

I drew a line down the margin and put a star next to it, once I saw that this is everyone’s life now, after this presidential administration we elected, and then reelected to seal the deal of ensuring nobody trusts our governments ever again. Men We Reaped has a more historical scope than I’m getting at here; this distrust has been sown in her community for decades, if not centuries. This is part of what makes it so good, a master class in memoir. Everything the form can do, this one does better than most.

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How to Get a Bully Off His Pulpit

One weekend in 7th grade I had my mom buy me nice clothes at one of our semi-annual clothes-shopping trips to the mall. I was coming off a late boyhood of wanting to dress like a headbanger and/or skater, and looking around at this new wild school of 1000+ students, I saw many happy-seeming people who looked like they knew how to dress and saw how I basically didn’t. At the mall, I got, alongside some rayon shirts, a turtleneck sweater that was black-red-and-white (our school colors) and a pair of black fitted slacks. I thought I’d look like a singer in a music video.

Monday, I wore the outfit to school, tucking the sweater sleekly into the slacks, and my girl friends complimented me on it, and I felt very good about having taken a risk with nice clothes. People liked me when I was in nice clothes. In pre-algebra, I had to use the restroom. The hall was empty, I did my thing, and when I left the boy’s room I turned to the right to walk toward my class. Too late, I realized I’d turned right in front of Alex and Ray, somehow walking together through the empty hall.

In high school, Alex and Ray would play on the football team, and I would conduct the marching band during halftime at their games. These ancient rituals, meting out types of people. We three were those types of people.

‘Dude maybe pull up your pants a little tighter,’ Alex said from behind me, and I kept walking. I heard Ray snort-laugh, and then haw haw–laugh, and I could hear his steps stagger from laughter, and I kept walking. Alex kept at it, confidently dissing every aspect of my nice clothes, how uptight I looked as I was walking, and I kept walking. My face, I could tell, was burning red, but I kept walking, telling myself the best reaction here was no reaction.

When I got back to the classroom it felt like I’d been dunked in a pool and finally let up.

‘Most bullies act like self-satisfied little pricks not because they are tortured by self-doubt,’ writes anthropologist David Graeber, ‘but because they actually are self-satisfied little pricks.’ This is from his useful essay, ‘The Bully’s Pulpit: On the Elementary Structure of Domination’, and to help us understand what bullies are and how they work, I’m going to quote him fairly heavily on that elementary structure.

By the way: do you know David Graeber’s work? His monumental Debt: The First 5,000 Years helped me understand more about the abstract nature of money, invented wholesale by banks and markets, never historically tied to things like gold reserves or whatever. But my favorite of his is Bullshit Jobs, which argues that the majority of jobs in America are unnecessary, and shows that the rate that people get paid is often inversely proportional to the necessity of the job, almost as a way to justify their uselessness. Compare salaries between custodians, say, and Vice Presidents of Mergers and Acquisitions.

David Graeber died in 2020, and it remains a loss I grieve. I’d have liked more from him on how to live in our present.

At any rate, here’s more from the essay:

Usually, when we try to imagine the primordial scene of domination, we see some ... dialectic in which two parties are vying for recognition from one another, leading to one being permanently trampled underfoot. We should imagine instead a three-way relation of aggressor, victim, and witness, one in which both contending parties are appealing for recognition (validation, sympathy, etc.) from someone else....

Now: Alex wasn’t always concerned about a witness. Once, on the busride home, we were among the last students to be dropped off, and he put me in a sudden, unrelenting chokehold because I hadn’t adequately complimented the looks of his girlfriend at the time. She wasn’t there, didn’t even ride our bus. I couldn’t breathe. And then in the moments he readjusted his grip I tried to breathe but ended up just coughing. When I could breathe, I just kept repeating ‘She’s pretty, she’s pretty’ until he got bored of choking me.

All the same, I find Graeber’s 3-way relation very useful in understanding how bullies succeed at their shitwork. Looking into the psychological literature, he finds that bullies aren’t exactly looking for weakness in their victims (as I’d long assumed), but rather how their victim reacts.

The ideal victim is not absolutely passive. No, the ideal victim is one who fights back in some way but does so ineffectively, by flailing about, say, or screaming or crying.... Doing so is precisely what makes it possible to create a moral drama in which the audience can tell itself the bully must be, in some sense, in the right.

It’s not that bullies are looking for an audience, so much as we’re always drawn to acts of aggression. And if that aggression is a more attractive or interesting show than the response, we see the inadequate response, Graeber writes, ‘as retrospective justification for the original act of aggression itself.’ We adjust our moral positions to make more space for the entertaining bully. (Psychologists have found that bullies and their victims tend to be equally disliked.)

If Graeber concludes with anything like my title, it’s that as audience to aggression, our best bet may be to flee rather than risk falling into the structural trap. Also, we can learn to recognize unwarranted, immoral aggression when we see it, and work together to shut it down.

Or not, in the case of our doubly elected president.

Did you get caught up in the pointless exchange ‘between’ Elon Musk and Joyce Carol Oates last weekend? If you aren’t aware, a number of book-nerd outlets threw up headlines about how Oates ‘obliterated’ Musk on his own platform! They praised her ‘devastating critique’ and ‘brutal takedown’, and before I even looked into what happened, I knew these folks were living in a fantasyland.

If we ever lived in a world where a billionaire could be effectively cowed or shamed by a novelist ‘in public’, those days are long behind us.

So, what happened? Well, a blogger posted a screencap of Musk tweeting about how, by any rational understanding of civilization, he as ‘a maker’ should be given free rein to make whatever he wants. Then Oates replied to that screencap (not, to be clear, to Musk himself):

In sum: a bully threw his weight around to shut someone up, and Oates, as (distant, unintended) audience spoke up.

So many questions here. How long are tweets now? Why is Oates still on Twitter? (Why is anyone?) And why was she responding to the tweets of a pick-me blogger who doesn’t want people to decide their own genders, but really wants to be taken seriously using the name ‘Stepf’?

Most pressing though, is whether Oates’s response, per Graeber’s moral drama, was an effective takedown of Musk’s aggression.

If you hate Musk and love Oates, your answer is yes. Maybe even Yass! But I’d argue otherwise. As evidence, here’s the editor of Lithub, banging out a quick blog to grab some clicks while this forgettable moment was still in people’s minds:

Only a novelist could be this brutal, for unlike your average shitposter who relies on soy boy/chad memes, JCO opts here instead to get at the heart of Elon’s broken humanity, itemizing with a surgeon’s precision that which he has so clearly lost, and will likely never regain.

I don’t think there’s a word in that sentence that holds up to scrutiny. That Musk has likely never read one of Oates’s 398 novels, while she remains on Twitter long after the rest of unbroken humanity has smartly gotten the fuck out, proves that Musk isn’t living in Oates’s world. She’s—and we’re all, by choice—living in his.

For Oates’s response is to have any worthwhile effect, his audience needs to hear it. And as accurate to what I’d see as The Good Life her description is, I don’t have faith in it reaching them. Here I’m reminded about novelist Hari Kunzru’s recent review of Netflix’s Adolescence in the 9 October New York Review of Books, which by its nature will never reach anyone in the manosphere, but does perhaps the more useful thing of describing it effectively for those of us who dismiss it:

The online world of twenty-first-century young men is a loveless wilderness of ‘zero trust’ interactions and constant hustle.... It’s a place where the weak go to the wall, where only a mental ‘grindset’ and relentless self-optimization will keep your head above water. In the churn of online gambling, AI agents, drop-shipping scams, biohacking, e-sports, and meme coins, the winner will be the most ruthless exploiter, the one who can maxx most effectively, grabbing resources and leaving the losers ... in the dust. A nine-to-five is for suckers. The man who discovers ‘one simple trick’ will be victorious. It is a bleak and lonely place, and no one feels that more than teenage boys.

My Christmas wish is for someone not of this culture who knows how to reach this culture to rise to international fame.

And what about little 7th-grade me? The hard part of writing about this is how sick it makes me, seeing myself commit to just ignoring him, the exact inadequate response that fed fuel to Alex’s fire. And sharing this story of another bullied gayboy with all of you: pathetic writing matching the pathetic behavior.

This is me falling into Graeber’s trap, seeing my inadequate response as justification for how I got treated. The way out is to remember that Alex was a dick, and what he did was shitty.

Even if we were friends just a year before, walking back to our separate classes from the Gifted-and-Talented class we’d attend once a week. And even if he had his own shit going on that might explain this aggression. As Graeber points out, this is the trap stoking our instinct to morally equate attacker and victim.

Here, in the end, is yet another reason to give kids sex and sexuality classes early. And I mean early. Because one thing about me in 7th grade is that I really liked vogueing. I was good at it kinda! I’d practice all the time in front of my bedroom mirror, with the door not just closed but locked, because I knew, as a boy, I was not supposed to like vogueing.

And so, in my fantasy of rewriting the past, I’ve been given enough self-awareness to hear Alex and Ray behind me, feel their eyes on my body, and see the endless hallway before us as a catwalk I can vogue down. Turn everyone into audience for my very awesome show. If there’s anything I love about queerness it’s how it baffles every paradigm. If only I had that tool in the years I really needed it.

This week’s still from a thing I watched is late genius Paul Reubens in the hard-to-endorse Midnight Madness (1980), one of the movies Jenny and I watched together, for the millionth time. (Don’t worry, that gun only shoots quarters.)

Dear Friends:

If you’re reading this, I finished revisions on my memoir. What was, in March, a 100,452-word monster is now a lean 90,104-word monsterlet. From Grover to Elmo, like the reverse of the story it tells.

These revisions, and this issue, are about 2 months overdue. A lot has gone on since the summer. N & I sold our 2015 Chevrolet Volt and bought, just under the wire for the now defunct IRS EV rebate, a 2023 Volvo C40. We ended up with a black model with black interior, and that’s just something we need to accept.

For around two months, I became someone who could talk shop about the specifications and feature packages of crossover-size EV cars, from the Bolt to the Mach E to the e-tron—it was not living my best life, but N loves cars and I love N, and so I loved getting to love cars with him for a bit. Now I have an app on my phone that lets me obsessively check our car’s battery level the way new parents check their baby monitors.1

Earlier in October, I flew to Birmingham, the UK one, the one where you put the accent on the first syllable and swallow the rest: BURRmngm. I was there to deliver a paper, ‘Jessica the Trickster’, at the Angela Lansbury at 100 conference. My audience for said paper was 7 people, with 6 others on Zoom. I got just one question afterward, on the function and role of The Aunt in narrative as distinct from The Mother.

I also ate pretty well:

It may be the most frivolous thing I’ve ever done, flying halfway around the world mid-week, mid-semester to quote Jameson and Kristeva at 13 people in a paper about a TV show our grandfather watched with the cat on his lap. And maybe that’s the point of frivolity: to stymie the people we used to be, who could never imagine who we’ve become.

It’s good to be back. Here’s to more frivolity in your life soon, if not today.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Amanda Goldblatt’s What Was the Internet
My good friend Amanda Goldblatt is launching a new project on what she calls the ‘pre-millennial internet’, that thing we built and used and shared before social media and streaming video became nine-tenths of what people do online.2 She’s put together a very cool questionnaire to gather your thoughts about the internet before 2000. If you’ve got some, consider filling it out. I miss that internet, and my missing it is a strange form of nostalgia. It’s hard to pine for a lot of old media—like 70’s pornography, say, with its clippy edits and tinny soundtracks and corny slomo cum shots. Or even vinyl: cool but so unportable. We’ve improved on those old products. But the internet, originally, wasn’t really about product, because the tools of the form were so shitty. Slow baud rates, 8-bit graphics, ASCII art—it was like making papyrus technology new again. The real beauty of the pre-millennial internet was about process: It put people next to strangers in a neutral anonymous space of uncommodifiable goodwill. That’s essentially impossible to achieve online now. Like: I fail to have an imagination of how to do it, even though we did it, for a very short time, 30some years ago. What was the internet for you? Amanda wants to hear about it.

2. Tim Benzie’s Solve-Along-A-Murder,-She-Wrote
One of the better parts of this frivolous conference was getting to meet maybe the biggest M,SW fan in the world: comedian Tim Benzie. (You may be surprised to learn he’s another gay man.) He attended the conference for its first day as a dedicated Fangela (his coinage), and that evening half of us went to Birmingham’s Digbeth neighborhood to watch his touring show: Solve-Along-A-Murder,-She-Wrote.3 It’s a live screening of a select M,SW episode4 with audience participation. Now: I don’t care to participate as audience, but Tim’s got a smart approach that opened the door to nerds like me to have fun. In the episode’s early scenes, we rank the guest stars in terms of their fame (after the myth that the most famous guest is always the murderer). Then we move them along on his Suspiciometer, based on who we think did it as the episode unfolds. Plus there’s a raffle, multiple costume changes, and the best part, for me, was seeing a replica of Jessica’s leatherette folio from the opening credits I’ve coveted for fifteen years:

Tim tells me he’s coming back to SF in April at the Great Star Theater in Chinatown. Tix on sale soon. Don’t miss it.

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What Amity Wore to the Halloween Dance

The town of Herndon used to throw dances for us intermediate-school kids—7th and 8th graders alone in one building—once a month in the Community Center gym. I remember lines of cars with parents or older siblings doing drop-offs, maybe $5 at the front table to get in. Some suburban DJ on risers with appropriate party lights. Relentless wallflowering. You know the drill.

The October dance was Halloween-themed, and folks dressed up. Likely I wore my dad’s old Army coat and one of his plaid flannels and went as ‘a bum’. At some point I was hanging out with my girl friends—i.e., the girls this closet homo felt more comfortable around. Emily, Tae, Jill, Nikki. One of them was likely dressed as a cat. ‘Oh my god have you seen Amity Lastname?’ said the cat, and the rest of us prairie-dogged the room to find her.

I spotted her first, over near the doors to the hallway: cargo pants, utility belt, cropped tank, round shades. It was the fall of 1991, and there was no question who she came dressed as:

No rifle, of course. Or dagger or cigarette. But otherwise she’d nailed the look of Sarah Conner in Terminator 2: Judgment5 Day. Now: Amity was not lithe-and-lean Linda Hamilton. She was shorter than most of us kids, with round hips and sturdy shoulders. But from halfway across the gym all I could really see were her boobs.

I likely would have said ‘boobs’. Possibly I said ‘tits’, like I thought a man would. None of us ever said ‘breasts’, not without giggling. Like saying ‘penis’, are you kidding?

It was the cropped tank. Or the cropped tank with no bra underneath (a la Sarah C.). Amity already had the biggest breasts in school, and now they were her costume’s salient feature. Or we 13-year-olds made them the salient feature? I just remember cackling among my group of gals. So embarrassing!

Amity’s actual last name is lost to memory. Amity Thomas? Thompson? Amity Bainbridge? But I remember that, even though she was the only Amity at our school, we always referred to her by her full name. Listen to what Amity Lastname said in pre-algebra, etc.

I have long been such a person people refer to in full, It’s Dave Madden!, and I’ve assumed it’s because there’s all these other Daves. Too many Daves. Or maybe it’s that my name can sound at times more like a syllable than a name.6 Regardless, getting addressed by my full name feels like being turned into an event. This was not the vibe behind ‘Amity Lastname’. It was like she was too strange a specimen for us not to use both the genus and species.

Amity was in gifted-and-talented classes with the rest of us nerds, but she didn’t fit that bill exactly. She wasn’t spazzy, a word none of us would have used to self-describe but that was the energy we brought to each other, to teachers: a giggling self-awareness, a near-obsessive search for any moment to drop an inside joke. Hard to situate anything like gravitas in a 13-year-old, but Amity seemed to have it. She just plainly was herself, is the poor way I’m putting it. She sat at her desk, did her work, when she talked it was like none of us knew what she was talking about, and somehow in classes and hallways she became this presence that both stole our attention and warned us away.

Maybe she transferred in over the summer, or moved to Herndon late enough to not have pre-made ties to kids from any of the four elementary schools that fed the intermediate. I don’t recall Amity having any friends. That’s the kind of irony a novelist would find irresistible.

The DJ played ‘Feels Good’, ‘Gypsy Woman’, ‘Everybody, Everybody’, ‘Poison’, ‘Good Vibrations’, ‘Back to Life’, ‘3am Eternal’—all the Club MTV hits. ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’ made some boy-girl pairs teeter-totter back and forth in the darker parts of the gym. We took breaks from the music in the rec rooms with pingpong and pool tables. Did they serve punch? Cookies? What the hell did we do at these dances where I only once in two years remember slow-dancing, with a girl friend, ironically of course, holding each other’s hands in the air like two doddering teapots?

We socialized. We talked about nothing important. We laughed. We sat on the bleachers annoyed when someone got their feelings hurt and ran off to cry in the restroom. It was just a joke, etc. Not an hour had passed before the news got around.

They sent Amity home.

Did she get in a fight? we wondered. Who would have fought Amity? She certainly didn’t have enemies; in those years, friends and enemies were the same people on different days. But there was no fight, we discovered. They sent her home because of her costume.

Her costume, we were told, was inappropriate for a school dance. It had nothing to do with being Sarah Conner. It had to do with her breasts. That night, when you looked at Amity Lastname in the costume she’d put together, you saw her breasts—not bared or uncovered—just in existence. They were a fact of her, and the adults in the room sent those facts home.

The worst part of this story is how glad I was of the news. I mean, who did she think she was?

Who are you dressing up as on Halloween, if not necessarily for Halloween? That we all wear costumes every day is a perfectly adolescent idea. We dress for the jobs we want, etc. There’s an ideal we like to imagine ourselves stepping into, and clothes/costumes hold our hand.

What I’m saying is that little kids dress up as superheroes and likely adults do, too. What’s interesting to me about this idea is how so many adult Halloween costumes are various iterations of ‘Kinda Slutty’—our hero selves.

In my 40s now, when I think about Amity Lastname I imagine myself as her father, getting the call to come pick my daughter up because chaperones decided she can’t wear the costume she chose. Where would my anger go? Maybe Amity snuck out of the house in her costume without her parents knowing what she wore, but my guess is that her parents knew everything, that one of the things that gave Amity that gravitas was having a mother and father who saw her choice of costume—1991’s most badass woman—and saw her comfort with her body at that age and thought, We’re proud of you.

This is the fantasy I have to play out to cover for my shitty reaction at the time. I likely called her a slut in my mind, if not out loud among my girl friends. The courage she must have had to arrive alone in her costume. Amity, if you’re somehow reading this, you were stronger than all of us. I’d go as you for Halloween if I could.

Of course the other option for Halloween dress-up is to go as something scary, which from a certain point of view is what Amity did. She had the scariest costume in the Community Center. The fear it stoked in all of us? I’ve spent three decades trying to escape it.

This week’s still from a thing I watched is Blazing Icon Desiree Gould as Aunt Martha7 in Sleepaway Camp (1983), the world’s best horror film:

Dear Friends:

It’s the 75th anniversary of Shenny!1 (75 issues, that is.) I wish I had celebrity guest stars for you, like on a TV special:

The closest thing to celebrities Shenny has are the gals it’s named after, so this week’s issue features endorsements from my sisters, Jenny and Shani. Millions of thanks to them for playing along, still, after all these years.

I’m about to finish revisions on chapter 7 of 9 in the memoir, and my goal is to complete it all before the start of the fall semester, which keeps creeping around the corner and waving at me. To help, I’m putting Shenny on another brief hiatus. Let’s all enjoy our time off, from whatever you want to take time off from.

See you when the summer’s through:
Dave

Endorsements: Shenny Namesakes Edition

1. Shani endorses the Simple Tomato Sandwich
There’s nothing better on a hot summer afternoon than a tomato sandwich for lunch. Not just any tomato sandwich...a simple tomato sandwich with nothing but toasted white or wheat bread, a big red beefsteak tomato, salt & pepper & mayo (Duke’s preferred). Keep your three-cheese semolina or rosemary and olive oil bread, keep your heirloom tomatoes and garlic aioli, and absolutely no arugula, microgreens, or bibb; for this one I want just the basics. Don’t get me wrong, I love cooking & plating fancy meals, just ask my family & friends or check my Instagram—it’s always about the happy belly. There’s a time and place for fancy, but with the tomato sandwich, the simplicity is what makes it a happy belly meal.

2. Jenny endorses Antique Row
There is a 2-block strip of road on S. College in Fort Collins, Colo., where you can find six flea markets / antique stores all lined up. I call it Antique Row, and it’s a little over a mile from my house. I have visited these stores for years while vacationing in Fort Collins. Now that I live here, I find myself making monthly visits to curate unique treasures for my home. Even though the stores are packed with other people’s passed-on possessions, there is a joy I feel digging through each stall. Of the six stores, Vintage Marketplace and Foothills Flea Market are the two I frequent most due to (a) their grid layout, which allows a different flow each visit and makes it easy to circle back in case you missed something, and (b) my purchase-success rate. If you’re ever in the area and looking for a way to get out of the hot summer sun, I highly recommend perusing these stores and losing yourself in nostalgia for an afternoon. And now, a Shenny first … Things I DID Buy at the Antique Store:

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Why Write Fiction When You Can Dream?

The other night I had a dream that N. and I were on a house rental with some friends, and the thing about the house was that it had a ghost. Nobody could see the ghost, but we knew there was a ghost because it kept harassing me. By the time the dream ‘started’ it had already become a joke that the ghost had a crush on me, and as I walked up the stairs to our bedroom I worried it would strike again.

It did. I felt myself get pulled onto a chair and held there, as though on the ghost’s lap. It wouldn’t let me go, until I either struggled hard enough to get free, or it was done with its horny prank. All my friends laughed. N. looked unimpressed. It was embarrassing.

I woke up feeling a little ashamed over the vanity of dreaming about a ghost that likes only me. But the reason I’m sharing it here is what happened later, near the end of the dream, or maybe inside another. ‘I bet you believe in ghosts now,’ one of our friends said, referencing my historic disbelief.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘every time I see a ghost it’s within a dream, so not really.’

What strikes me is that position—I dream it all the time—of knowing you’re inside a dream and going along with it anyway.

I started wanting to write fiction just after college, because a number of my friends were doing it, and what they wrote seemed very cool. In other words, I wanted to write the way folks want to get on TikTok or try a cronut.

I was not good at it. I remember asking my friend Miki how to come up with things for characters to do. ‘You just make it up,’ she said, confused by the question. ‘Make them do whatever, it’s your story.’

It took two attempts over two years, but eventually I got into a grad program to learn how to write fiction. I was not good at it. My stories were either slices of life that didn’t have much movement, or 40-page monsters where I worked the plot like a dough I long should’ve stopped kneading.

Writing short stories was sometimes fun, but usually I was faced once again with my poor imagination. What should these people do next? What else is here in the room with them? The frustration I felt came from being the dreamer I was. Asleep, my brain was writing all kinds of crazy stories, and filling in the settings and characters with rich and vivid detail. Awake, my brain struggled to slap fakey dialogue on the page in the hopes to make characters interesting.

I kept trying to figure out how to access my dreaming brain while awake at my desk. Too much of a square to try psychedelics, I thought writing down my dreams would help,2 but that’s the thing with dreams: They’re vivid fictions, but they make lousy stories.

Back in April, I dreamt that N and I drove to his boss’s house to pick something up. I went inside with him, but I’d parked illegally, so I soon went back to check on the car. The car was gone, and the simple street outside her house had become a large open public square. N came running out, stressed and worried that his boss wasn’t even there. I saw a large scar or rash on his upper arm that he didn’t have going into her house.

‘Oh this is a dream,’ I told him.

‘What?’ he said, even more stressed. I cited the car, the square, the rash.

‘Trust me, it’s a dream,’ I said. ‘None of this is real.’

And then we split up, to see what a dream world might show us.

Back in 1992, psychologist Deirdre Barrett surveyed 50 lucid dreamers about how or whether they experience these four aspects of lucid dreaming:

1. People in the dreams are dream characters, i.e., they are not their waking counterparts, they will not awake remembering the dream.

2. Dream objects are not real, i.e., actions will not carry over concretely upon awakening.

3. The dreamer does not need to obey waking-life physics to achieve a goal.

4. Memory of the waking world is intact rather than amnestic or fictitious.

She found that dreamers were most lucid about number 1 and most unaware about number 2. I find the fakeness of dream objects to be obvious in a lucid dream, dream characters, too—much more than I do the laws of physics. In any lucid dream, I’ve never been able to just start flying, say, or manifest a car to get me out of a situation.

Which is to say: I’m good at understanding myself and others, as we are, inside the dream situation, but I can’t write the dream from that point.

What better evidence that I’m a born essayist?

I got better at fiction. Not great, but better. It helped to learn, years after grad school, that the art of writing lies in revision, not drafting. I also needed to free myself from the assignment (is how I took it) of approaching every story as a paint-by-numbers outline someone else created, filling in each part with my own color.

And I had to finally take Miki’s advice from all those years ago: It’s your story. Also my advice to N. in the dream: None of this is real. I had to stop getting hung up on the real, on convincing people of anything.

Which brings me back to ghosts. At some point in the last ten years I went from being a ghost atheist to a ghost agnostic. Who was I to know whether people’s experiences were ‘real’ or not? (How would I ever define the term?) Ghosts, whatever they may be, have not made themselves apparent to me. Maybe there’s a reason they’re keeping a distance.

In that time, I’ve been writing nonfiction almost exclusively. It is, as I’ve said, my mode, my factory setting. I know much of what I’m about to say is coming from exhaustion with this memoir I’ve been writing for 8 years, this return every day to another story about myself, but here: I’m really missing fiction. What a dream it would be just to get to make things up, as hard as it is.

This week’s still from a thing I watched is an Italian boy smoking in Summertime (1955), starring Katherine Hepburn as an American who falls for an antiques dealer.

Dear Friends:

Greetings from South Dakota! N & I are flying back today from our annual trip to his onetime home, where something like 4 dozen of his 9 million relatives live, half of whom amass at Aunt Joan’s lakehouse each Fourth.

I’ve been here pretty much since our last issue, and what with all the seasonal cooking and drinks-making, and playing the family’s variation on Liverpool Rummy they call ‘Gorgeous’, and figuring out which of the 3 nearby Hy-Vees to run to, and bruising a rib hauling my 47yo ass up out of the water and into a wobbling speedboat, I haven’t had much time to write.

So this week’s issue is … let’s call it a photo essay? of Summer 2025? (Including an abrupt return of Things I Did Not Buy At The Antique Store.) Odds are this Shenny will be too long for email, so be sure to click on the relevant link at the bottom, or the above banner, to get all the goods.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Aunt Carrol’s Pasta Cucumber Salad
Simple but brilliant, (N’s aunt) Carrol throws two summer salads together by adding pasta to her cucumber salad. This one (other than N’s orzo caprese salad with corn1) is the cookout side I got seconds and wanted thirds of.

8oz bowtie pasta
1 lg cucumber, thinly sliced
1 lg vidalia onion (or 3 green onions), thinly sliced
1 1/2 tsp dried dill
3/4 cups white vinegar
1/3 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
1 tbsp oil
1 tbsp prepared mustard
1/2 tsp each salt and pepper

Boil pasta in salted water per instructions (about 12 mins). Drain and rinse with cold water until cool, shake or let sit until well drained. Stir pasta, cucumber slices, onion, and dill in large bowl. In a small bowl, whisk vinegar, water, sugar, oil, mustard, salt, and pepper until sugar is dissolved. Pour over pasta and stir. Chill at least 2 hours.  

2. Hayman’s Old Tom Gin
This one’s for gins and tonic you want to make a little fancy and a lot more smooth. I ordered a martini at the airport lounge in Denver and this was the gin they used:

The bartender kindly dug the broken empty out of the trashbin for me to snap that pic. It was one of the best martinis I ever had, and I grabbed a bottle when we got here. Then, less exhausted and airport-ragged, I realized Hayman’s was a bit less dry and more floral than I tend to like in a martini gin. But Jesus was it perfect with tonic. (The bartender said it’s also best in Tom Collinses.) And that label!

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Shenny’s Super Summer Photo Essay

If I were on social media, these would be Insta posts I’d check a few times an hour to see how many likes they were racking up, but those days are behind me. Now I Substack, which provides its own metrics to obsess over.

In June I went to a Giants game by myself at always-pretty Oracle Park:

Where I learned CPR via jumbotron:

And also learned how grey my hair is in indirect ballpark sunlight:

N & I caught a screening of the Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley stage adaptation of Dr. Strangelove, with Steve Coogan in the Peter Sellars roles. It showed at the Vogue Theater, whose concessions counter had this very good (and effective, for me at least) tip jar:

I caught Esa-Pekka Salonen’s final concert as music director of the SF Symphony, with just Mahler’s 2nd on the program, with full chorus:

Longtime Shenny readers will recall my lifelong love of fireworks, so in South Dakota, I had to go shopping. Here are some Things I Could Not Possibly Buy at the Fireworks Outlet:

I did, however, buy some very good Roman candles:

And I couldn’t resist a slow stroll through our favorite antique store outside town. For the final time (though I can’t promise), here are Things I Did Not Buy There:

Finally, we made it to the lake. Here I am on a boat. Hat from TJ Maxx. Shades from Aunt Joan. Body from lifelong indoorsy-ness:

And here I am in the water:

Wherever your summer takes you, I hope it makes you as happy as I was in that lake.

This week’s still from a thing I watched is from One Crazy Summer (1986), which is sort of my Jaws.

Dear Friends:

Recent calculations have shown I might not finish revising the memoir before the fall semester starts. There are worse problems to live with. One solution = put Shenny back on hiatus. But no longer being on social media (for reasons this week’s Main Matter spells out) puts you in a kind of cave. Writing a book, without publishing short stuff here and there, does the same.

So here’s another Shenny, right on time, to help me feel less enisled. And here’s another expression of gratitude for all of you reading.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements: Summer Semi-Hiatus Edition

In the interest of balancing Shenny time and memoir time, I’m re-endorsing old timely endorsements this week, from summer-y issues from long ago. New to some readers, skippable to others.

1. Aunt Ghyneth’s Baked Beans
One forgets that baked beans were once a recipe, a process of baking beans in the oven and not just warming up what you opened in a can. No summertime family cookout growing up was absent of Aunt Ghyneth’s baked beans, which have this sweet, tangy, rich depth of flavor, and something of an actual texture to them. Structural baked beans, let’s say.

Aunt Ghyneth's Baked Beans

56oz Campbell's* Pork & Beans
3/4 cup light brown sugar
1 tsp dry mustard
1/2 cup Heinz ketchup
6 slices raw thick-cut bacon, chopped into 1-inch pieces

Stir all ingredients in a bowl and dump into a casserole dish. Bake at 325° for 2 hours.

* Aunt Ghyneth (i.e., Mom’s dad’s mom’s cousin’s daughter; the closest thing I have to an aunt) warns off swapping brands. Van Kamps will disappoint you, I promise. When Ghyneth first shared her recipe, Campbell’s sold 28oz cans, but now in America we all get less than we used to. So try Dollar Tree, where I’ve found 19oz cans, and buy 3.

2. Raglan-Sleeve Tees
Or baseball T’s, people sometimes call them. ‘Raglan’ refers to any shirt where the sleeve pieces go right up to the neck, named for FitzRoy James Henry Somerset Lord Raglan, a British army officer who lost his arm at Waterloo and took to wearing such shirts. They seem suited for men who’ve lost something, mainly their youth. Anytime I see a man over 35 in a raglan tee, I think about dads who play on softball leagues, not fully out of shape but no longer in the shape they were once proudest of (that whole mien = very sexy). Also, they make great retro band tees, which in my own youth I called poser-y, but now at 44 47 I'm embracing my Jason-Bateman-in-Juno tendencies, and trying to be a little gay about it, hence this, my favorite T-shirt (from Bread & Water Print Shop in Pittsburgh):

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Saving Democracy is Easy

These last couple weeks, I’ve been paying more attention that I should to the New York City mayoral primary race, which Shenny’s publishing schedule has led me to write about before the news is in.1 So, to be quick about it….

The big news is that Zohran Kwame Mamdani, a socialist, is surging in the polls over a serial sexual harasser from an old political dynasty. His name is Andrew Cuomo. You might remember him as the governor of New York who stepped down amid the rise of abuse claims he and his lawyers all settled out of court. Also, his dad was NYC mayor.

There are a lot of reasons I can’t imagine a worse candidate for the world we have in 2025 than Andrew Cuomo, but the one I want to focus on this week is money.

The way we can save democracy is to vote against money.

Excited about the possibility of a people’s mayor for New York—who wants a flat tax on millionaires, a $30 minimum wage, free buses, and publicly owned grocery stores—I went last week to Zohran’s website to donate money.

I wasn’t able to.

That is, there was nowhere on the website where I could send them my money. I persisted in finding a donate page, where I learned the campaign had already raised the $8 million they are legally allowed to spend.

Now: you can donate all you want to Cuomo’s campaign. Not because they haven’t raised $8 million yet, but because your money will go to ‘Cuomo for NYC, Inc.’, a PAC corporation not barred from any spending limits.

Cuomo has all the money in this race, and all the wealthy elites in NYC and elsewhere are spending everything they have (most of us can’t really tangibly fathom how much they have) on getting him into power again. Pro-Cuomo PACs have broken campaign finance laws on their ad spending, and city housing-depleter Airbnb spent $1 million on digital ads attacking Zohran with lies about how not giving Airbnb free rein will … make New York more expensive?

I don’t need to tell New Yorkers (esp. those who lived there from 2002 to 2013) what it’s like to have a billionaire mayor. But if you want to know what it’s like to have a billionaire mayor in 2025—with a ‘billionaire’ fascist in the White House and another tech billionaire fascist having just left—just look at San Francisco.

Last year, a billionaire heir to the Levi-Strauss fortune spent millions of his own and his family’s money to essentially buy the job of San Francisco Mayor. Despite never having held public office, he outspent every other candidate ever in any SF mayoral race, and he ran on ‘clean and safe streets for all’—meaning fears of rampant crime, despite crimes being at all-time lows in the city—and that all got him voted in.

Here’s what he’s done just six months on the job:

1. Removed a civilian police commissioner from office because of his work exposing city corruption and working for police reform.

2. Convinced the Board of Supervisors2 to let him skirt democratic oversight on city contracts and instead use private donations to fund his ‘war on fentanyl’.

3. Released a budget that cuts public services and city jobs in the name of ‘responsible budgeting’ (i.e. ‘government efficiency’), a budget that also raises police overtime, despite the SFPD’s longstanding failures to recruit and retain cops so as not to need $100 million+ in overtime,3 and even though the mayor’s crime-prevention strategy—i.e., arresting folks for ‘drug-related loitering’ then releasing them without any charges—isn’t working.

4. Allowed a crypto billionaire to donate $9.4 million to the police to fund drones cops are excited to ‘cover the entire city’ with.

5. Totally ‘blown it up’ on Instagram!

In other words, he’s using crony capitalism and social-media talents to shut down public services he can’t imagine anyone needing (because he’s a millionaire, with a millionaire’s poor imagination), in order to give more money to what—for the sake of comparison—I’ll call ‘defense’. It’s all right out of the D. Trump playbook.

Don’t be fooled by party membership. D. Trump was a Democrat. E. Musk voted for Biden. ‘Vote Blue no matter who’ might be the biggest lie Americans have ever been told.

Okay but what does all this have to do with saving democracy? Well, let’s look at this bumper sticker I saw just this morning:

Is every third car on your roads a fucking Tesla? Odds are you’ve seen such bumper stickers lately:

A lot to unpack here. A car is an object, soulless and inert, and couldn’t ‘endorse’ a thing if we wanted it to. The sticker above intends to mean that the driver of ‘this tesla’ doesn’t endorse fascists—and if the sticker said as much, I wouldn’t have an argument.

But it doesn’t say that.

The fact is, when the CEO of a car company is a fascist, continuing to drive that fascist’s car in public endorses the fascist. It agrees that the fascist’s products, the source of his wealth he uses to promote fascism, are good and useful.

Actually, I’m wrong, it’s this sticker that’s the problem. The message is this: I don’t like fascism in theory, but I’m okay helping to fund and buoy fascism in practice.

It’s the message all of us spread when we post on social media.

Democracy means one person gets one vote. We all know the people who hate this idea most:

We know that Facebook and Twitter helped spread the lies that got Trump elected. We know that Bezos bought the Washington Post and turned it into a PR tool for oligarchy. The richest people in tech have made the U.S. less democratic by using their unfathomable amounts of money to buy influence and spread lies to voters.

The weird thing about these people is the source of their power. They weren’t born with wealth. They’re not the scions of some Cuomo-like dynasty. They all got their power from us.

We gave it to them.

Without much money, we’ve done this with attention, devotion. We fret over creeping authoritarianism on Facebook, or post #NoKings selfies on Instagram, or follow progressive podcasters on X—and it’s all like going to the track to try to win what we owe in gambling debts.

We know these toys are bad for us, bad for democracy, but we seem to like playing with them too much.

Which brings me back to the cognitive dissonance of Tesla owners. I get that E. Musk turned into a fascist around 2020, about 15 years after he took over at Tesla, but I didn’t see those bumper stickers when he fought union efforts at Tesla plants. I didn’t see them when he tweeted that ‘pronouns suck’ and made ‘cisgender’ a slur violating Twitter’s discrimination policy. I didn’t see them after he bought Twitter and made it X and amplified claims of ‘white genocide’ in his native South Africa.

But something, likely his one-time role in this administration, tipped the balance for Tesla drivers. And now, instead of just buying a different union-made electric car, and no longer driving around an advertisement for the world’s richest and worst person, it’s: Stickers!

‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’

That’s Audre Lorde. I’ve cited her so many times. It’s likely the wisest thing anyone ever said in the 20th century.

Let me provide more context around that quote, delivered at a feminist conference in 1979:

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.

If you read Shenny, odds are you’re outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable people, by dint of not having millions of dollars at your disposal to buy whatever influence you need to be safe, secure, and healthy.

We the people have been marginalized by folks like A. Cuomo and E. Musk. (Which is why the wisdom of writers like Audre Lorde is what everyone needs these days.)

And yet that’s strange, because we outnumber the people who’ve put us in this precarious position, and held us there. We have all, just all of the power, and by agreeing that we need social media to stay connected (even in resistance) or that we need Amazon Prime’s ‘free’ delivery (that costs $180/year) because shopping in neighborhood stores is too expensive, we give all that power up to them.

I was wrong up above. The biggest lies we Americans have ever been told is that money makes people smarter, and guns make people safer. More and more people are coming around to the latter. Today, I’m hoping we can start coming around to the former. Please God, please New York, help make Zohran win this election. I need to believe in we the people again.

This week starts a new feature at Shenny, where instead of ending with a picture of an antique I didn’t buy at the antique store, I’m showing you a still from a thing I watched on TV. This inaugural edition is from S04E05 of Downton Abbey:

Dear Friends:

It’s summer, and I’m not directing an MFA program. That hasn’t been true since 2017. What am I doing? What aren’t I doing? Since our last Shenny, I’ve toured friends from Boston around the city, rekindled my love for Zelda: TOTK, and walked out of an unsuccessful documentary about drag artists in Greece. Last week, I even ‘met’ a San Francisco Giant:

His name was Matt Chapman, and when I said, ‘Nice mustache’ (note his T-shirt), he said only, ‘Thanks.’ It’s summer, so I’m not taking it personally.

In addition to packing my schedule, I’m also changing things up here at Shenny. Our Things I Did Not Buy At the Antique Store feature has had a grand run, but this issue will mark its 40th and last appearance. (And this one’s a doozy of a thing not to buy.)

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Pearls
If you weren’t too distracted above by that rugged vascularity on Matt Chapman’s forearm, you maybe noticed I’m wearing a pearl necklace. N gave it to me for X-mas, by request, and it’s been my 2025 look. Certainly, I’m not the first queer to throw on a string of pearls. Not claiming to break down walls here. But isn’t it a hot look? What I like is how pearls femme up a butch top—they’re ideal for crewneck tees and sweatshirts, and bonus if you pair them with a bomber jacket:

Just the other night, the bartender at Sugar Lounge complimented me on my pearls, and when I said thanks, I noticed he was wearing two strands with a Manny Pacquiao tee. So he gets it. Of course I complimented his pearls, too. I’m no Matt Chapman.

2. Kate Folk’s Sky Daddy
It’s June and I haven’t yet finished Genet May, but that’s okay because I’ve been loving this debut novel from Kate Folk:

Linda is an online content moderator in San Francisco whose greatest wish for herself is to marry an airplane—and for her, ‘marry’ means dying with it as it crashes. (Sorry: as he crashes; Linda genders planes male.) Sky Daddy is her story of trying to make this happen. Sure, fun premise, but what I love most are the ways this novel codes queerness:

I feared other people would discover my connection with planes, and the fate I was bound for. I knew they’d be horrified and shun me. I’d tiptoed through life, keeping myself under tight restraint, afraid that an excess of feeling would cause me to reveal too much, ushering in my social demise. Though my isolation sometimes weighed on me, I reasoned that my bond with planes more than compensated for my disconnection from people.

This is just as solid a description of closet-mind as any I’ve read. Kate’s novel is engaging, funny, tragic, even a commentary on the evils of tech. Let it be your 2025 beach read.

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Wait, Define ‘Toxic’?

Some weeks back, I came across an old Substack from Mary Gaitskill, a writer I’ve long admired: ‘The Despair of the Young...and the madness of academia’. I couldn’t imagine tastier clickbait. Gaitskill is telling a story about past visiting writer jobs, and making an argument about how college students—or at least those enrolling in her fiction workshops—are not in a mentally healthy place right now.

Why, exactly? Good Q. Here’s Gaitskill early in the piece:

In 2019, one of my male students repeatedly used the phrase ‘toxic masculinity’ in an essay on Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, and while the words were not completely inappropriate, they struck me as empty. I asked him in a private conversation what he meant by the phrase, and he basically said that he learned it at a talk held during his freshman orientation; it meant entitled men treating women badly. I said I didn’t think that those descriptors applied to the character in the book exactly, that there are more interesting ways to talk about him. At some point in our conversation, I asked him how he felt about the neutral trait ‘masculine’ being linked with poison. He shrugged affably and said it was okay with him, he didn’t mind.

Of course he didn’t mind! He was a handsome young guy with a perfectly good mind and a winning combination of confidence and politeness. I wonder, would anyone tell this guy that he had ‘toxic masculinity?’ Maybe a girl angry because he failed to text her back, or a girl flirting with him—and now, courtesy of the mandatory talk, he can win points by saying it first, plus he can use it in papers and get points that way, too. Easy peasy!

I read this and felt despair. When even someone with a mind as sharp as Gaitskill’s can show such boneheaded incomprehension of a topic as simple as toxic masculinity, the signals between generations, and maybe cultures, feel almost irrevocably jammed.

When some of us want to have conversations about toxic masculinity, we’re not saying masculinity is a toxin that’s destroying people’s lives. We’re saying toxic masculinity is destroying people’s lives.

It’s not an epithet, like Sunny California, but a demarcator, like Southern California. We’re talking about this version or approach to masculinity that is bad for people: not just the folks having to handle the toxically masc person, but bad for that very person.

So the task is to tell Gaitskill et al. two things they haven’t figured out just by looking around:

1. Just where the Central Coast of masculinity becomes Southern California

2. What exactly is so bad about Southern California1

Let’s get cracking.

One of the ways cool and happy masculinity becomes toxic is when it needs to disparage or hurt others to be experienced. Like wealth. Here’s an example: I used to follow here a Southern Californian who after the election got very LGB Without the T, lamenting the lack of gay-white-male exclusive spaces, dropping over 2 grand to fly to some UK conference against ‘gender identity ideology’ and, like Gaitskill, bristling against people calling masculinity ‘toxic’.

You hate to see it, but he’s not the example. The example is from one of his other followers’ comments I once read (which like a dolt I didn’t screengrab and can now no longer find), which ended with the phrase: But anyway, cock is better than fish.

Now, if you’re not a Boomer gay, this phrase may baffle you. Or, I dunno, do toxically masc Gen Z-ers joke about how vaginas smell like fish? What’s toxic here isn’t the preference for dick over vagina. That’s just gay. What’s toxic is the jokey use of misogyny (i.e., reducing a woman’s genitals to their [imagined] smell) as in-group code to affirm solidarity with other men.

Toxic masculinity believes that being a masculine person2 is something you have to prove, but this is incorrect. Since anyone can be masc if they want to, there’s no need for proof—just as nobody would expect you to prove you’re a Windows user or registered Democrat.

There’s nothing to be proud of, or ashamed of, about one’s masculinity. Masculinity is not heterochromia or ambidexterity or eidetic memory. And it’s not an IQ score or a Zodiac sign. It’s a Simpsons T-shirt in 1989. They sell it fucking everywhere, and it’s not very expensive, and once you put it on it feels awesome.

That’s one way masculinity becomes toxic: thinking itself better than femininity, and needing to disparage the feminine to assure itself. The other way is how it traps you in an unwinnable contest.

Another gay man I recently came across online had the username ‘100% Masc’, and I noted the figure. Like there wasn’t room anywhere in his self for the feminine to live comfortably. Plus, it was just begging the argument, it’s so eager to prove itself. And not to step into the argument, but he described himself as a ‘cat dad’ and I was like, Girl, what?

Nobody is 100% of anything. Or maybe it’s that 100%-ness, the certainty and rigidity it bears, is nothing we should value. Because imagine it, the 100% masc person cannot bear any stain of the feminine—cannot, say, rock a strand a pearls with his crewneck. When he sees a glimpse of the feminine on the masculine person, he sees only the feminine part. This means femininity has, in his mindset, the power to destroy masculinity, to stain it irrevocably.

Among the toxically masc set, masculinity isn’t strong, but weak, fragile, delicate. There’s like this constant purity test at play. It’s not unlike the U.S. slavery laws that said ‘one drop’ of Black blood made a person a slave, no matter which White slaveowner was their father. If Whiteness can’t bear even a fraction of Blackness, that gives Blackness all the power, strength, and resilience.

If there’s any supposed ‘White erasure’ happening, it’s White supremacists’ fault for being so fey and fussy about Whiteness. Likewise, a masculinity that can’t take in the feminine, make room and respect for it, will leave you forever conflicted, even trapped. That’s the toxin: This identity you’ve chosen for yourself has made you way less free.

To return to Gaitskill, her ultimate point wasn’t to disparage how she thinks we’re talking about masculinity, but to spell out how traumatic it is to be a young person in America today, when active shooters in schools are neither a surprise nor (according to Congress) a problem, when climate change is delivering once-in-a-century disasters every year, White nationalists are running the federal government, and genocide is just allowed to happen in front of everyone’s eyes.

That young people, including my students, are reacting to all of the above with fear, anguish, and rage is appropriate, even rational.... That they are fixating on problems they can control and maybe solve (the pronouncement of offending words, gender madness, ‘shitty’ men, ‘problematic’ assigned reading material) is understandable. That they want the safety—or the illusion of safety—provided by the corrective apparatus is also understandable. Only a fool would not crave safety in the face what is happening now. But while the corrective apparatus is providing a measure of control, it cannot really provide safety. Metaphorically, it is making sure that the crusts are cut off all the sandwiches and that no dishes are left in the sink while zombie hoards beat on the walls and stick their hands through the windows.

I join Gaitskill in lamenting how the task of providing people with safety and security has fallen to our colleges, so desperate for tuition funds. That desperation is a result of the long slow depleting of support from our government, which also used to be the institution we turned to for safety and security.

But those days are over. Our federal government’s central project now is hurting people, making lives more precarious, dropping them further into debt to give more capital to rich dicks.

In such powerlessness, the Simpsons T-Shirt of masculinity can feel even more awesome to wear. What’s toxic about masculinity is thinking that shirt is armor—or worse, some weapon you’ve stockpiled. In we’re living in deeply insecure times, what we need is a masculinity that helps everyone, regardless of gender, not just feel safe, but be safe.

Our final thing I did not buy at the antique store is this framed photograph of a hunter shooting a buck on the landscape of a woman’s body:

Dear Friends:

Greetings from 47! I had a birthday Tuesday, which the internet told me corresponded with the new moon entering Gemini, a ‘dark, wet, fertile time for setting intentions.’ Also, Mercury, which I’m told is my sign’s ruler, has also just entered Gemini:

In astrology, Mercury represents the principles of communication, mentality, thinking patterns, rationality/reasoning, adaptability and variability. Mercury governs schooling and education, the immediate environment of neighbors, siblings and cousins, transport over short distances, messages and forms of communication such as post, email and telephone, newspapers, journalism and writing, information gathering skills and physical dexterity.

I’m into astrology as much as Chandler was into Janice. If anything, I like the way it can suggest possibilities. I am, however, a big huge fan of Mercury, the way I respect and admire all trickster gods. (Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes this World: Mischief, Myth, and Art is required reading.) As I wrote in the chapter of this memoir I’m revising, Trickster doesn’t care to save face. Trickster bears his ass, which makes him a hero.

O Celestial Bodies of Astrology: I intend more trickster heroics in this my 48th year living under you.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. A Man on the Inside (Netflix)
In just about every episode of this new(ish) Michael Schur show, I cried a little. The story: Ted Danson is a widower college professor who ends up working as the eponymous spy for a private investigator, planted in a senior home in what seems like the Nob Hill part of San Francisco. The plot is a little ludicrous, but it’s a show that wants to think a lot about death and perseverance after loss, and finding new connections with friends to stave off loneliness and isolation. All that shit I find very moving, plus the local setting is a nice touch. The show is way less cute and clever than The Good Place, which Schur and Danson did together. And it’s an adaptation of a Chilean documentary I now want to watch. Anyway: 8 easy episodes, and a new season just began shooting.

2. Joanna Cassidy
A recent episode of Matlock reminded me how much I love this great character actor. Who’s Joanna Cassidy? If you’re a Gen-X elder, you likely know her from this:

But if you’re a Gen-X lil’ miss like me, you definitely know her from this:

Yes, Sue Ellen, she’s the Rose you want to be right on top of that for. She’s also Brenda’s mom on Six Feet Under, played a Vulcan once, and did a great turn as a brassy broad owning a fancypants honkytonk in S10E09 of Murder, She Wrote. Whenever Joanna Cassidy pops up on a screen, it’s like a new Beyoncé album dropping, or when your soccer team finally scores a goal. It’s like some balance is restored. I love her for soft steeliness, like a letter opener made of pewter. She’s like if Karen Black got some effective HR training. ‘Joanna has created a successful career in film and television with uncommon ease,’ says her website, which I guess says it all. Here she is with Taz, wearing an ostrich-leather jacket and branded merch:

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7 Writing Prompts You Won’t Hate

My thing with writing prompts is that they too often feel like improv. Okay so we’ve got Dua Lipa and … Dracula getting boba? Or, to be less cute, here are some actual prompts from the textbooks on my office shelves that send me to paralysis as a writer:

Begin a story with the line ‘I never told this to anybody but…’

It is said that Adolf Hitler, one of history’s truly evil beings, loved music, including popular music like Cole Porter, and that he was a wonderful whistler. Pick a wicked figure and try to find or create some sympathetic talent or good habit. What happens?

Make an exhaustive list of historical events or figures who have long intrigued you. Do some research and then write a short story that centers on one of the events or figures.

Write a story with no main characters, only minor ones, none of whom is mentioned more than twice. For setting, take a beach on an out-of-season Sunday afternoon. For theme, the unbridgeable isolation of the human soul.

Take an ordinary and domestic scene that you have already written and turn it on its head by inventing a magical event to occur in its midst.

Take a few paragraphs of the story you are writing and substitute an animal or a monster for one of the characters.

Set a short scene in a place as banal or characterless as you can think of. Make the dialogue bizarre.

The paralysis comes, I think, from having to work inside other people’s ideas of what’s interesting. Or maybe it’s a staleness from having looked at, and away from, writing prompts for 20 years now? You may as well ask me to find an old photograph and write the story of what I see. What a horrorshow.

Two things I should note. One: writing prompts aren’t really for me, but for students of writing. (Sure, yes, we’re all lifelong students of writing but you know what I mean.) I, too, was once someone who wanted to write but didn’t know what to write about. I just loved reading fiction and wished I could do it. Prompts gave me a way in, and a way to try out certain formal effects (1st vs. 3rd person, lots of dialogue vs. no dialogue, etc) I wouldn’t have otherwise known what to do with.

Two: my dislike of prompts is about control, and not wanting to cede it. Don’t tell me what to write, Janet Burroway!, etc.1 But there is something in prompts that can shake up your process, or voice, or style. Here I think about homosexual trickster genius John Cage.

Here’s Lewis Hyde on Cage’s pursuit of chance in his art:

It is especially by our ‘likes and dislikes,’ Cage says, that we cut ourselves off from the wider mind (and the wider world). Likes and dislikes are the lapdogs and guard dogs of the ego, busy all the time, panting and barking at the gates of attachment and aversion and thereby narrowing perception and experience. Furthermore, the ego itself cannot intentionally escape what the ego does—intention always operates in terms of desire or aversion—and we therefore need a practice or discipline of non-intention, a way to make an end run around the ego’s habitual operations....

In recommending non-intention, [Cage] once explained, ‘I’m not saying, “Do whatever you like,” and yet that’s precisely what some people now think I’m saying.... The freedoms I’ve given [in a musical score] have not been given to permit just anything that one wants to do, but have been invitations for people to free themselves from their likes and dislikes, and to discipline themselves.’

Writing prompts, like tarot, or the I Ching, or reading online about a moon entering a part of the sky, can throw a bit of chance at you, free you of chasing after your likes and dislikes.

If those are the lapdogs of the ego, as Hyde says, mine get more pampered than the Queen’s corgis.

Weeks ago, after finishing the draft of the memoir, I sat down and tried to come up with some writing prompts I could use to make interesting things happen while revising. First, I laid out a few objectives. I wanted prompts that would:

• Get me out of my intentional head and give me some space and toys to play with

• Not require too much memory or selection

• Put emphasis on association and leaping

• But also: attention and close seeing

That second one is key for me. I don’t have a great memory, and I’m a terrific ditherer, so prompts that being with ‘Think of a’ tend to freeze me up. Another need was for prompts to be prompts into ‘my own writing’ and not exercises in themselves, so I’m using the acronym TKW for ‘then keep writing’, meaning see where what you’ve already done can take you.

Here are the prompts I came up with. Maybe you’ll hate them? Maybe prompts are like toothbrushes, everyone needing their own.

Write song lyrics about an object within eyeshot. Turn it into sentences, TKW.

Find a random word in the thesaurus. Write 4 sentences that each start with that word, TKW.

Take a random ¶ from your manuscript and rewrite it with the sentences in reverse order. Play with it until you like it, TKW.

Grab a book of poems and take a line or two. Copy it word for word, TKW.

Write a lie or thing you don’t believe about your topic. Keep the lie going until you almost convince yourself, TKW.

See in your mind an object or person connected to your topic. Start describing it as if to someone who’s never seen it before. Keep going for a whole ¶, 200 words or more. Save only the final sentence, TKW.

Use Wikipedia’s Random Article link to land somewhere unexpected. Read the article and come up with a question you still have. Type it out, then ask the same or a related question about your topic. Write the best answer you can, TKW.

This week’s thing I didn’t buy at the antique store is this ‘old’ oil:

Dear Friends:

Ooooh this Shenny snuck up on me, what with the end of the semester and my general disinterest in doing anything for a while. But also, I’m full-steam-ahead on revising the memoir I finished back in March, which has been both a smack in the face on how fucking bad I can write sometimes, as well as a reminder of how fucking good I can be at writing sometimes.

It’s taken me years to get to where I understand this: drafting is horrible. Horrible! Very little of drafting this book has felt good. Every now and then an idea would hit for a move I could make in the chapter at-hand—I felt good about remembering a certain Pinocchio doll I had a child, to deploy thematically in chp 2—but then I’d need to ‘make it work’, the idea.

It just rarely ever worked.

For so much of this book on sex and shame, it’s been hard to figure out what I even could say, much less what I should. What do you need to know, and what’s just TMI perv garbage?

Here in revision, I don’t have memories I need to emotionally process or mine for detail or find the words for so much as I have a printed manuscript in front of me:

And I know what to do with a manuscript in front of me. I feel very good looking with cold compassion at a MS in front of me.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Absolute Pleasure: Queer Perspectives on Rocky Horror
Last year, I got the honor to contribute to this anthology about a movie that has been, ever since I first watched it in 1991, a total lodestar in how to be a human. My essay is about my attraction shifting through the years from Rocky to Eddie to Frank, as I came to understand what sex was and invited us into. Editor Margot Atwell and the folks at Feminist Press have put together what looks like a very cool and very queer collection I can’t wait to get my hands on:

I speak from experience when I say that Rocky Horror Picture Show is one way young queers get their closet doors opened for them, and much of this happens through midnight screenings that still take place around the country. (I was 13 when I went to my first one.) To help tour this anthology around and help it reach its audience, Atwell has set up a Kickstarter campaign I hope you can help support. (You homos can even get a clack fan, just in time for summer.)

2. Jean Genet
‘Be gay, do crime’ is, yes, the rally cry of queer anarchists, but also a short and accurate biography of Jean Genet, who of course doesn’t need my endorsement. But Jesus can he can get it:

I read Genet in grad school, speedily, as part of my comprehensive exams, and recall very little, which for sure isn’t his fault. In the 16 years since, Genet’s popped up periodically in my reading, called some kind of queer thief-saint we all owe much to. (Sartres even titled his biography Saint Genet.) In April, I decided to embark on a Genet May, checking out The Thief’s Journal, Our Lady of the Flowers, and the Sartres from my school’s library. I’m only on page 40 of TTJ, with little to report other than Genet’s quick and honorable commitment to twinning homosexuality and criminality. I don’t yet know how it’ll be instructive, though I have some thoughts (stay tuned!), but I’m endorsing him here at the onset of the month in case anyone wants to Genet May with me.

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So You’re Also Never Buying a House

Maybe twice a year, when the weather starts getting hot, I’ll notice the lights are on in the house next door, which for 50+ weeks of the year is empty. Usually, the person or people there will stick the end of their air conditioner exhaust tube out the window that faces our windows, and then a few days later there’s a garbage bag sitting in front of their two-car garage that the trash collectors won’t collect. It sits there until the coyotes tear into it.

Zillow tells me the home, a 1900-sqft 3-bed 3-bath, was assessed last year at $1,400,000.

Living next door to this house often feels great, because what hell to have neighbors you don’t like, and the best neighbor I can imagine is an absent one. But more often I feel anger. I mean F those brainless dirtbags. San Francisco, maybe you’ve heard, has so famous a housing shortage that its housing shortage has its own Wikipedia page. A whole house nobody wants to live in or rent or sell is a public menace.

Walk and bus around this city, doesn’t matter the neighborhood, and you see empty units everywhere. Just everywhere. One where I switch from the 35 bus to the 33 bus has been vacant for 2 years. I look up at the big picture windows, the blankness inside, and I wonder what world the landlord thinks we live in. As I type this, I’m looking out my window at a house that was gutted years back and nothing has been touched since. The windows are all half-open. Animals have made it their home now.

Zillow estimate: $1,750,000.

We rent our place, to say the obvious. We’ll rent to the day we die, unless we get out of this broken city. Or is it a broken country?1 Where does the problem lie?

Twenty-five years ago, I was a renter out on vacation with my family. Or maybe I was just home visiting? It was nighttime, us 5 Maddens sitting around outside talking, and somehow the talk came to home-ownership. I told everyone I couldn’t ever imagine buying a home: When would I ever have hundreds of thousands of dollars? Dad tried to explain about mortgages and down payments, but like: When would I ever have a ‘down payment’?

Shani, another renter, agreed with me. Owning homes was for the suburbs. If you wanted to live in a city, as I did, in Pittsburgh at the time, it’s like good fucking luck. ‘But you gotta build equity,’ Dad kept repeating. These were words coming from a man who used the Vietnam draft to get job skills he needed to climb into the middle class,2 which is to say he was privileged to grow up in a time when this country wanted such things for its citizens.

Now, not so much. Helping renters buy a home is too costly compared to helping landlords make money from owning homes plural. Was this always the way? The U.S. Census’s 2023 numbers count 143 million housing units out there for just 131 million households, so this can’t be a supply issue. Or it must be? What else are we short of in a housing shortage? Fewer than 2 million of our housing units are classed as second homes, I read, but that number just seems low.

The end of this anecdote is that, 25 years later, Shani owns a condo that gives her rental income. (She’s also a realtor now in the District of Columbia.) Jenny’s also renting out the home she and her husband bought, while they rent their new home in Colorado. My sisters are both doing it, building that equity. I’m paying rent checks to a company in Stockton with a 2.2/5 score on Yelp, praying that whoever owns this house doesn’t sell it.

Conservative, pro-business types insist that high rents and homelessness stem from not building enough housing. There is very much a supply issue, the YIMBYS argue. If it’s true, and if building housing is going to be so costly in California that developers won’t bother unless it’s luxury homes,3 then one quick solution might be to make it disadvantageous for landlords to keep their rental units empty.

Stop sitting on those units, waiting for costs to come down to renovate it for greater income. Fill those homes with people who need homes. In 2022, we San Franciscans passed a tax that would charge homeowners $2,500 per 1,000-sqft per year for units that sat vacant for six months or longer. That tax was slated to go in effect last month, but after rampant lobbying by landlord groups, it got struck down by a SF Superior Court judge.

In this broken city, or maybe this broken country, it’s apparently unconstitutional to impel people who own excess homes to rent them to people who need homes. Landlords should be able to do whatever the hell they want with their homes—even, especially, hoard them from those who need it.

Apparently fewer of us do. Homeownership is up since the pandemic, mostly among young people, did you know that? I sure didn’t. But then again I live in a city where the median home price is $1.4 million.4

I don’t give a shit about building equity (sorry, Dad). That’s not what this Main Matter is about. If we wanted to build equity, N & I could afford an 850-sqft condo in a building somewhere in town, provided we were ready for our home payment to nearly double to $5,700/month.

So if it’s not equity, what does owning a home mean to me? Stability. Security. Putting down roots. Investing in a place. Hard to really ever feel like ‘A San Franciscan’, even after 13 years here, because that’s the thing about renting: your home is never really your own. Someone can just decide to kick you out.

Despairing, I think about the estimated $38 million the vacancy tax would’ve pulled in each year. Half of it would have gone to housing subsidies to low-income folks. Subsidies—where cities pay landlords the difference between what they believe they deserve and what’s 30% of their tenant’s income—is a proven way to get homeless folks rehoused. Homelessness and inequality are policy issues not economic trends.

Instead, market folks want to build more housing that we only arguably need, with an unhoused population of 8,300 people and an estimated 60,000 empty units in the city. The problem isn’t that we don’t have housing, it’s that too few can afford the housing they need. By paying fairer taxes, San Francisco homeowners can end homelessness.5 They just refuse to.

What are we short of in a housing shortage? Compassion, probably. Imagination. New ideas. BTW, the judge who struck down the vacancy tax we voted for is named Charles F. Haines. He makes $222,000 a year and is as ancient as this hill I’ll die on:

He also struck down a 10-day waiting period before serving eviction notices, helping landlords kick people out more quickly. Haines’s term is up in 2027. Here’s to kicking the right people out, together.

This week’s thing I didn’t buy at the antique store is this $22 empty bottle of California Home catsup, made in San Francisco:

Dear Friends:

It’s been a week of synchronicities. A father and son who left the doctor’s office twenty minutes before I got called in ended up, an hour later, checking out in the same line ahead of me at Safeway, far on the other side of town. I dreamt in a dream starring N that we were in a dream, and I told him: ‘Oh this is a dream, none of this matters.’ N woke up and told me he’d had a dream where he realized he was dreaming. I moderated a panel of MFA alumni, where one of them mentioned this perfect Sister Rosetta Tharpe performance:1

And I needed a song to round out a mix I’m working on of songs from the 1950s.

This will end, as all good times do, until it comes around again. Where is your week turning?

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Copi’s The Queens Ball
At Booksmith last month, I judged this book by its cover:

That’s Copi there on the front, a promotional shot from one of his plays I believe. I’d never heard of Copi before, he was an Argentinian writer and cartoonist living most of his life in Paris, in queer scenes that seem as transgressive if not more so than anything we see today, this was the 1970s. The Queen’s Ball is about a writer named Copi who needs to deliver a novel to his publisher, but his lover Pietro/Pierre is causing too much drama and distraction. The novel is wild, mad, violent, funny, and astounding. I love it for its sex scenes especially:

I lie [sic] him down on his back, lifting my skirt, and I sit on his cock, which tickles my asshole with that gentleness definitive of Pierre’s entire charm, his elegance. Together forever, he whispers, sempre insieme! Sempre, sempre, sempre! I sob, cumming. My sperm rains down upon his hairy torso, I use it as lubricant on his bellybutton, sticking three fingers in, and he shouts in his baritone, vengo! vengo! And he cums, at last, I feel his little cock stirring around inside me like a teaspoon in a cup of coffee, while I move multiple fingers inside his bellybutton, it’s like a mucous membrane corkscrew, I push my entire hand inside, my bicep begins to spasm and, for the first time in my life, my right arm has an orgasm. In his belly, my hand is like a fish in water, he contorts, screaming, Miracolo! Miracolo! then collapses, bloodless, pale, hardly breathing, a strand of drool falling from the corner of his mouth.

Equally silly and beautiful, fun and dangerous—that’s sex in Copi’s imaginary. If I had more time, I’d get into how one of the treats of mid-life has been watching me get turned off by fixed rigidness of gender roles—tho this applies well to this week’s Main Matter so fuck it, it’s my Shenny.2 Yes, I find masculine men hot, but they’re always hotter when they can be femmey on the spot. Masc men who fear the feminine (not getting manicures or wearing pink, never sitting with their legs crossed ‘the wrong way’ etc.) seem like boys to me, circle jerking in a tree house they should’ve outgrown: NO GIRLS! Copi’s fluidity is in his very grammar, which makes him a must-read.

2. David Sedaris’s Diaries
And speaking of fixed ideas about genders: I’m not loving A Carnival of Snackery as much as I did Theft by Finding. The title alone of that earlier volume tells you you’re in for more complex and darker material. This new one is mostly the jottings of a rich celebrity writer baffled by people less wealthy or famous than he is. (It’s no wonder Sedaris now has a codgery Andy Rooney–style gig on CBS Sunday Morning.) But what I love in the new book is how well he renders heterosexual ignorance. Like Tim Pawlenty, Herman Cain, and Sarah Palin all calling homosexuality a choice, and Sedaris struggles to recall that moment of choosing: ‘What with the excitement of choosing my blood type, I guess I blocked it out.’ One of his drivers asks if he’s married, and hearing no, says ‘Maybe you can find a girl who likes to read. Maybe you could let her read your writing and give you comments.’ Another woman’s co-worker clearly presents as gay and she’s aghast by the suggestion: ‘When would he have the time?’ She mentions his working for the Drama department and the glee club, and a chorus he sings with on the weekends. ‘To me it was like saying, How can he be a vampire when he’s shut up in that coffin all day?’ Straight people don’t even see queers unless we throw ourselves in their faces, then they complain about how we’re so ‘in your face’.

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On Leadership

Here are some words of wisdom I heard recently:

It’s better to go for what you want in life and get rejected than have the shot and not take it. We have one life.

Good to remember. Now, those words of wisdom were given to me by this person:

And quickly we come to our first problem of leadership: Who the hell is trying to tell you what to do?

Here it’s Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of one of the most masculine men on the planet—if you see masculinity as achieving a certain body shape, or a certain set of roles you play in movies. Or rather, the above wisdom isn’t Patrick’s, but the role he’s playing: Saxon Ratliff, a rich straight white Southern shithead who’s never really had to consider other people.

Saxon (another of Mike White’s subtleties) says the above to his brother in an episode of White Lotus 3, which was ultimately as disappointing as the first two. The line comes right after this:

Confidence—that’s how you get people to do what you want. Because most people don’t know what they want, and a lot of them ... here’s a little secret: they just want to be used. They don’t have the vision. They’re just sitting there waiting for someone to come along and tell them what to do.

Saxon is bad at a lot of things, but here he shows himself to be terrible at leadership.

In this Shenny I want to figure out why.

Talk of leadership always makes me feel like I’m at a corporate retreat, or staring at a poster I hate:

But lately I’ve come to see that Saxon is half-right: Most people prefer to be led. To test this theory, here’s a quiz. When texting with a friend you haven’t seen in a while, which would you rather hear?

1. We should totally grab a drink sometime!

2. There’s a preview screening of the new season of Poker Face at the Vogue next Thursday. Want to join me? I made a reservation at Garibaldi’s afterward if we’re hungry.

I’m a #2 guy all the way. Almost as much as moving and listening to complaints about this administration, I hate having to pick a place to go to. I’m always grateful anytime someone comes with a plan.

That’s all leadership is: You make a plan to suit everyone and have the resources, ability, and tact to carry it out.

You know, like a mom.

That men make more effective leaders than do women is an old, dumb lie. Look at our president and tech CEOs. Just fucking look at them: anxious, frothy, fearful little boys making things worse for everyone but themselves.

It may be true that masculinity is a more efficacious leadership trait than femininity, but not having bothered yet, in these series of posts, to define (or even really write about) femininities, I don’t trust that assertion either. I think part of the problem is the undue status we give leaders, as though they’re somehow better or more desirable people. What stories do we tell of good followship? But a leader is just a person the rest of us have given a job to; all we should ever need from them is the ability to execute a considerate plan.

Instead, we seem to conflate leaders with role models, people to look up to, admire, emulate, dream of becoming. A fatal mistake, if only in how folks have poor imaginations becoming someone of a different gender.

In such a muddle, we tend to dismiss, or flat-out disdain female leaders—witness the average public school teacher’s salary. Such is the mindset political scientist Yoshikuni Ono found in his work on perceptions of female leadership. For the first 18–22 years of their lives, young men look around (at schools, mostly) and see women leading. Women lead the classroom as teachers and the school as principals. Ask those dudes about the percentage of women in Congress, as Ono did, and they tend to give wildly overestimated answers.

This finding makes me think of another from the Geena Davis Institute, which looked at crowd scenes in Hollywood movies and found that, on average, women comprised 17 percent of the faces in crowds. When men look at such crowds, they see 50-50 representation; when you up the women to 33 percent, they believe they’re seeing more women than men.

I’m straying from my topic here because I can’t get past these numbers. It’s like men look at women and see something extra, something beyond reality, and fearful. There’s a too-muchness when it comes to women that must make the thought of them in charge seem like a threat.

Rot and nonsense. Let’s wrap this point up by reminding ourselves good leaders see the world as it is.

Driving a car, I have a single goal: Get to my destination as quickly as possible. I swerve around slow cars that seem to be trolling for parking spots. I crawl through every stop sign and ‘run’ red lights—after first stopping, and there’s no one around, and it’s not a busy time of day. I tailgate people going under the speed limit, because how else to indicate they’re fucking up?

Oh, so you’re an asshole driver, you may be thinking, and fine: you may be right. But my point is that in driving, I’m a terrible leader.

Ask N or anyone who rides in a car with me: they don’t feel safe. I’m in full control of the car—I’m watchful, aware, deft with timing, I don’t get in accidents—but from their perspective, it doesn’t feel like I’m in control. I don’t explain my lane changes or prepare them for sudden surges of speed to pass, and so their experience of being in that car with me is one of disarray and recklessness.

Note: in control of the car, I’m in my kind of control, for my ends. A better leader3 is in control for others’ ends, which in this belabored driving metaphor means a ride of comfort and meaninglessness for those in the car.

So back to Saxon’s ‘Confidence—that’s how you get people to do what you want.’ This is bad leadership. It’s rape-y. Cult-y. Capitalist. Toxic.

Good leadership uses confidence (et al.) to get people to do what they want.

(Oh no. Maybe I don’t hate that poster above as much as I thought.)

If the patriarchy is going to insist that only men make good leaders, or on cleaving leadership qualities to masculinity, it seems we have (at least) two choices:

1. Fight the patriarchy’s anti-feminine perceptions about what makes good leadership

2. Teach healthy masculinities to girls and boys and enby kids, to help them get to power and dismantle the patriarchy

I haven’t had time to expand my thinking about masculinities since our last post, so I’ll recap its main takeaway—i.e., that patriarchal cultures tend to identify masculinity through three traits/roles: (a) provider, (b) protector, (c) creator.

Technically that last one was ‘procreator’, but—and this is another post for another time—it’s crucial we free these roles from anything resembling the family or tribe.

So: what do leaders create? A vision. A new idea to put out in the world. Then they provide the plan or means to achieve the vision, all the while using their granted power, status, and privilege to protect the folks working to make it happen.

That last bit is the troubling bit. Leadership these days seems directed at protecting only leaders—which is, again, rotten, impeachable leadership. In this void, women ‘don’t make good leaders’ if you don’t grant them the power, status, and privilege to make their leadership good. Tell that to your relative the next time they say, ‘I just don’t see [female candidate] as presidential.’

This week’s thing I did not buy at the antique store is this book about the patriarchy: