I Finished the Memoir

Dear Friends:

Greetings from 2025! Since we’ve last um … spoken? no, that’s not right … I’ve denied myself any Shennying until the memoir was finished, and now it is (details below), and so we’re back. Welcome back!

In the meantime, I’ve been keeping busy and staying sane while once again our country has to fight a fascist regime. In January, I joined our local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and let me tell you nobody runs a more effective meeting than a group of socialists. I’ve very much found my people, and I’m very grateful for the work they’re doing to fight San Francisco’s tech-billionaire-funded rightward creep.¹

Speaking of billionaires worsening our lives, I removed Instagram and WhatsApp from my phone, likely for good, don’t miss them a whit. (X I left when it was still called Twitter.) I canceled my Amazon Prime and Washington Post subscriptions, for obvious reasons. That last one hurt, but it’s no longer the paper I grew up reading, and in 2025, I’m no longer giving any support to institutions—no matter how historic—working to make things easier for this regime.

To that end, I also emailed my congresswoman² to ask her, once again, not to run for reelection.

Offline, I’ve been getting out more, heading to DSA meetings or events around town, and scheduling—sometimes weeks in advance—hangouts with friends old and new. Social media was to having friends what Taco Doritos are to getting tacos. It’s been a great year so far, and I’m glad I’m back here.

Yours, again:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Newsletterss (sic)
Getting good news is more important to me than ever, but see above re WashPo and social media. And I’m turning these days away from national headlines and toward local, independent news outlets, because I believe the most effective change we can make starts at the local level, and I’m trying to get less distracted by the Department Of Unelected Creeps Hurting Everyone. In SF, we’ve got lots of good independent blogs and newspapers with email newsletters, and I’ve subscribed to all of them: San Francisco Public Press, Mission Local, 48 Hills, the San Francisco Examiner, Broke-Ass Stuart.³ The problem: Where can I get a single feed of news now that I’m off social media? And how to avoid an even more cluttered inbox? The solution: Newsletterss (with an extra ‘s’ for RSS). Newsletterss gives you an email address to subscribe to any newsletter with, and then puts it all in a single feed—much like how RSS readers worked back before social media feeds pushed themselves into the center of our online lives.

Now, when I reflexively reach for my phone, I look for new content in my Newsletterss feed—made not ‘for me’ by an algorithm, but for us by people who know this city and care about keeping us all informed together.

2. Stereolab’s ‘French Disko’
Fighting the right wing can’t always be a slog. So I was happy a couple months back to finally read the lyrics of this old fave and find an anthem about our capacity for struggle and making the future we need:

Though this world’s essentially an absurd place to be living in,
It doesn’t call for bubble withdrawal.
It’s said human existence is pointless,
As acts of rebellious solidarity
Can bring sense in this world.
La resistance! La resistance!

Where, greasy tech ghouls slavering at the feet of power, is the AI that can beam this earworm into the heads of sleepy Democrats looking, again, to reach across the aisle?

I Finished the Memoir

On Monday I did it. It feels pretty good. I thought I saw the ending coming my way last Friday morning. I even told N. about it: ‘I might finish the book tomorrow.’ But then Friday and Saturday were vertigo-visiting days, so Monday, back at my desk, I told myself just to finish it. Finish the book. I kept writing and thinking and writing a bit more until I typed out a sentence I liked as a last one. And I checked: Have I said everything I need to say in this chapter? And I had.

I should clarify that I finished a full draft of the memoir, not anything ready to show folks. And it’s the draft of this version of the memoir, the one in the shape I found after two other failed versions. Maybe an apt metaphor is that right now I feel like I’ve got a plot of land filled with piles of lumber, and nails, and sheetrock, and fiberglass insulation, and paint cans, and carpet, and appliances, and like … sconces and shit. All the material to make a pretty nice house.

But it’s in a pile. And I’ve got to make it not just a pile. Here’s what the pile looks like:

You can see the pile gets especially pile-y near the end. That’s me, a la Blaise Pascal, being in a rush and so unable to write less. It’s me wanting to get somewhere I’d dreamed for years of getting to. It’s me wanting, someday, to Shenny again.

I’ve been here before. In 2017, at an artists residence, I started writing the first words that would become this book. I didn’t let myself delete anything, and by the end of my 4 weeks I’d written more than 80,000 words of material about sex and shame. Talk about a pile. I went back to it here and there over the next year, and by 2018 I’d ‘finished’ a ‘draft’ (i.e., found a place I could stop) of 119,119 words.

Here’s its final sentence: ‘We were healing one wound and I trusted time to heal all the others.’

Less than 10 percent of that manuscript was readable. So in 2019, on my sabbatical, I started over, with the idea just to write what happened in chronological order, from age 4 to the present. I don’t know how, exactly, but I knew this was the wrong shape for the book. Like most stories, memoirs work poorly when written ab ovo. But I had to figure out how to write about stuff I’d never told another living person before, and the only way I knew how to do that was to go through it, in time, just for me.

You’ll recall that 2020 slowed us all down a bit, but in October of that year, the weekend after I flew maskfully to Virginia for my parents’ 50th anniversary, I spent a long weekend at Virginia Beach, cursing the fighter pilots screaming overhead every half-hour fuck them and their families forever, and I found my way to the end of the second draft: 109,792 words, ending with ‘I haven’t become somebody else, even if I often feel like I have, or would one day like to.’

Oof. Writing, clearly, is hard. And slow. This current version I started in 2021. I won’t share the final sentence I got to on Monday, four years later,⁴ because part of the promise to myself to get there, to keep going until I found it, was that nobody would ever have to read it.

I’d be shocked if it’s in the final manuscript, whenever that comes.

I texted N. minutes after I was done. He replied that he was proud of me, which is exactly what I needed to hear. ‘How are you going to treat yourself?’ he asked, and I didn’t know. Any celebration seems premature, because now I have to turn this into something other people aren’t just allowed to read, but might actually want to.

I don’t want that to take another four years.

Happily, I’m now at the best part: I get to make the mess I’ve made into something pretty. There are some parts of the book that are good, that are doing what I feel the book wants to do, but most of it is bad. Most of it reads like diary entries written to impress an imaginary friend I fear is losing interest.

Step one: make my school pay to print all 286 pages of it. Admire, for maybe an hour, the heft of all those pages, and then read them all, at last, in sequence.

Then what? Good question. Stay tuned for updates.

This week’s thing I did not buy at the antique store is this wise postcard:

1. Did you know San Francisco’s new mayor, a billionaire who’s never held public office, recently convinced the Board of Supervisors to let him (a) fire a Black progressive member of the Police Commission, and (b) undemocratically use his friends’ donations for contracts to fight his war on drugs? We’ve got our own Trumpist in office to manage.

2. It’s Nancy Pelosi.

3. Odds are you’ve got one or two local independent news blogs/substacks in your area that need your support. Contrary to popular belief, most print/online news orgs make their money off subscriptions, not ad sales. To support local news, count yourself among their subscribers, and pay what you can when you can.

4. I promise it’s better.