Go back to paving hell with them on January 1.

Making resolutions is silly for the most part, but I still like doing it. So there. I'd like to consider my 2013 ones accomplished :P Here's to a new life in Great Britania!

1) Climb a V7
Last year's goal was to climb just one V6 and I ended up getting five sends under my belt. Emphasis is still on staying injury-free!

2) Read 52 books 
My third year doing this, and I don't think I've regretted making room for reading while waiting for planes, commuting, etc. A quarter of my books were in French, which has been a nice way to brush up on vocabulary. More non-fiction needed though!

3) Write and publish 3 pieces
I decided against doing NaNoWriMo this year, but work gave me the chance to publish a bit about gay refugees in three countries and on what resources can assist them in the Bay Area. Looking forward to writing something about killer robots.

4) Keep in touch with friends & family
Everyone says that moving is tough in the first year, and I don't want to lose the excellent support system I have in the Bay Area. Plan on seeing more blogposts from me, and we will all keep talking, even if it has to be while wearing silly hats on Google Hangout. And come visit in London, even if I'm living in a British hovel! I'll make you some cat food pâté and some shampagne (it's the latest thing, you put a drop of shampoo in a whiskey glass, some cubes of ice, and a few glugs of vodka).



I moved out of the Oakland co-op yesterday. Going to miss that frigid little double room :(

Pretend you're a tree and I'm a lumberjack

I haven't posted in a while, and I swear I'll try to be better about it. Still waiting for a proper English summons, but this has been an incredible year, despite the many frenzied scuffles. Or is it because of? 

Lots to stick in a scrapbook if I had one. 

There are nights where I'm watching the Goonies while doing a passable imitation of a beached whale full of Thai food. And spooning is a magical phenomenon that can manifest in a one-foot width of sofa. 

Blinking awake in a rainy Berkeley morning with Tyler squeaking about everyone needing to get a fucking room, Jesus Christ. 

Chris is also up and buzzing about like Martha Stewart, frying up fluffy omelettes dripping with gouda and smoked turkey and caramelizing some raspberry banana pancakes. Many Saturday mornings where I feel incredibly lucky and I don't want it to end, and I'm hugging him close as we fall asleep again.

I stumble to the bus home in a carbo-stupor, overshoot my stop, walk along the 580 from puddle to puddle while continuing to read Molière plays.

And then we're on a mountain, looping around and the earth is indeed round in addition to green and being half sky.

There was a confusing night by the BART station bar after the dairy eating contest. The earnest poetess makes eye contact and announces to us, "I wrote two poems, one from the airplane to the wind, the other, the wind to the airplane." 

We try to leave, but we are locked in, garlands of chains and requiring a key, flashes of Triangle Fire. Poetry night with too much lighting is not a great combination.

And we're walking along burnt hillsides, filled with plebian scramble for brunch and I finally pick up the little tree I wanted for hanging necklaces and trinkets. 

Separate hikes, don't get it twisted. I still have a soft spot right there for the fire trail behind the Berkeley stadium. And there you run into Christian singles.

California is gorgeous, and it'll always be home. My safety net, those people you call as soon as something particularly good or awful happens to you, they're all tucked into the Bay Area crannies. I know you people will change and grow, but I want to have cake, eat it, and have some for breakfast as well. 

Can't you all just fit into a suitcase, stay quiet, and then emerge with a clowncar roar in Heathrow? Work on it, especially since Cirque is in town for pro tips. 

I swear I'm dressed for a costume party in the picture below. I'm a saint, a Russian one, patron protector of domestic workers. Fur coat and tea cup make me domestic, right? 

We wandered into the soupy rainbow lights of the theater, and led everyone back to the table laden with food. There were Oakland dock cranes and Sutro towers, and dresses, chocolate brownies.

I finished my second year of reading a book a week (currently on my 56th book)! Kicked it into high gear in October and November thanks to Talia (and to getting fired ho ho), and I ended up racking up solid slabs of literature. A quarter of my books this year were in French, which means that my reading skills are coming back! 

Once I tackle de Beauvoir's Les belles images, we'll see what I can engulf next. Reading French lesbian literature means I learn words like "un godemiché," but then I wrap up the book with the feeling that I just peered too deeply into someone's life and something blinked back. Messy, messy. 

There's a lot o' eating going on: goat vindaloo, sopa de res, bacon muffins with egg surprise. Even as a morning person, there's something amazing about waking up at noon, wallowing in warm sheets until hunger strikes, and then having delicious Salvadorian soup before realizing the sun sets in an hour. 

More friendsgivings than I can consume turkey for, but I will always have room for more persimmon pudding with boozy cream. We contributed flawed rugelach, doubling and halving various things, but it's hard to mess up raspberry jam, walnut paste, bittersweet chocolate, served warm from the oven. For another, pan culde bread pudding with orange flower water and cranberries. 

Possibly overkill, but buying conches en masse ("two in each color, yes.") meant that David and I got matching heart cookies made out of very very white flour dyed very very pink. 

Chicken counting one two three

It's been like summer vacation, where I often have no idea what day of the week it is. There are simply four or five days of the week where friends aren't free to play during daylight hours, and then there are two odd ones where we romp around in the sandy valleys.

There's been bounty hunters that show up on our doorstep at 3 am.

And I'm sending out job applications into the Ether, each time counting chickens before the rooster even gets a twinkle in the eye. "I could see myself living in a war-ravaged and mega-homophobic country, why not?" That kind of musing and I'm catching up on my Book a Week vows. Seven novels in the past week and I just picked up my eighth. I've been reading about Burroughs and Ginsberg writing to each other about going face-deep in ayahuasca in South America.

It's kinda shocking that it's the 41st week of the year.

I've also been doing some writing on the side, definitely rolling around some ideas for Spoonwiz.

Here's a rough chunk I need to edit and add to about food and community:
There's something that touches the soft squishy side of me almost every time we have co-op house meals. It sounds incredibly crunchy granola made by Berkeley grandmother anarchists, but I think every culture has figured out on its own that putting certain things in your mouth is blissful, and that you want to be happy and warm in the comfort of other people. So we gather and swarm at various points of the calendar year. Thanksgiving, a convocation of urban tribes bearing turkey, oh-so-clever usages of pumpkin, and a joke about what corn is called back home. Tết, Hannukah, it's all about warmth, about family and close friends, about bringing your neighbor a pot of hot soup on a winter day.

Why did our cave ancestors stumble upon this ridiculous formula of Food + People = Joy, and then decide that civilized people would only indulge in the practice of being really happy a few occasions of the year? More simply, why aren't we all exchanging moon cakes every Friday instead of once a year during Lunar New Year?

Bags of gourmet Cheeseboard pizza often magickally appear in our house fridge, courtesy of a co-oper's boyfriend who picks up what the artisinal bakeries nearby can't sell. On most nights, a co-oper will bring a friend or two to dinner, and it's an endless flow of the global nomad community that centers on hubs like Oakland. I like the idea of people resting up, eating some homecooked food in our urban oasis before they make the long gorgeous curve down the Pacific Coast Highway. It's sometimes like an orphanage. Not to the extent that the trope is a sad one, but that we are always a port in the storm for our friends. Recently fired friends, traveling the world friends, broke ones, there would always be a small room with clean sheets off the living room waiting for you.

So yeah, life is pretty good even if I don't know what's next. Hazy and unclear, but it's been a lot of fun to have the time to think, to plan out what kind of career I want.

Standing outside my co-op after a caution cookie shard and I'm holding warm heartstopper pizza while Tyler wraps up his cigarette, the Vietnamese woman next door, Coi, smiles shyly at me as she walks into the orange light and then around her own small garden. We had finally met the other day when she thanked me for the paper bag of cukes we had left her. Her son will stand between our buildings and just scream and scream until Coi barricades herself into a room or the police come.

I'm wandering the Urban Ore aisles with my best friend and it all seems like one of the used doors will just get tugged on, a knob will turn, and we will just be in the past, an alternate dimensiom, or just fucked. An older man hovers over me as I flick through the crusty paintings, and as my flipflops pad through the musty innards of Ore, I'm thinking of the Yelpers warning about getting all your tetanus shots, but people are also hysterical in general practice.

Thought I'd lost this again, but the thread is regained. Obviously still rocketing along, it's like Kerouac is making fun of us, trolling us, it feels like the right time as I move through this pool of fog, Abhorsen bells tolling, moving backwards, simultaneous swirls and orbits of metal. I want to be traveling, getting to know a city by myself, learning customs, fitting in like I pride myself on doing, being the cat who has fun in a paper bag.

I don't think that it's a bad thing. Except for Jakarta and holding in liquid explosive shit while wearing my only suit in the smothering dripping heat of Indonesian summer, and there alternates clouds of bugs that nibble at you and smoky meats that emerge from the grill for you to nibble. It's all a series of nibbles, where this stand sells the best duluk from a particular province known for juicy, and I'm ready to get back to my hotel to sit on the throne, and the daily hour where my driver makes ten minutes of smalltalk before I give up, nod off, and my interpreter is still chatttering away, so I wake up to continue talking about his side business as an artist, he owns a printing press, and I'm talking to the precocious Gutenberg of Jakarta.

I don't want these to be my last adventures, and I don't think they will. I remember having a giant shit eating grin on my face every time I travel, and especially one warm morning when I woke in Bangkok in a purple bed, slithered into some shorts and flip flops, walked into a cloud of humidity, looking to spend some baht on fresh fishcake and fruit, and doing the wai to the valet and doorman, and I watch the street food vendor's child carry a bucket more than half her size down to the brown torrent of a river under a pedestrian bridge. All of the rice noodles, pork and herbs float in the oily scum as the girl and bucket both submerge.

I'm waiting again and it's like last year and the ones before since I'm just waiting and hanging, not that I mind, there's something about staying hungry, being young and dumb, and wanting to see the world on someone else's dime. Last year, I had visions of Japan, Morocco, France, and I ended up feasting on ribs in white barbecue, talking to a very naked and very large man who insisted I listen for hours as he talked about struggling against the company and losing, about his roof leaking all winter, his kids going hungry, going around to six different soup kitchens. Another man told us to stop filming once he started crying and that it would be hard in a small Southern town, the neighbors talk, you know.

It's the twenties that are important because you're finally a baby adult, and you're making what feels to you and your friends like major life choices, and people a little older are looking at you and smiling at how you really have no idea what you're getting yourself into soon, and you're falling into a cliche. Where there are rivers of unmentionable herbs, milk, honey, ink black plumes of late night conversations.

Travis concert, cookie crumbs midway, smoking on an airy patio with a front row seat to crackhead shenanigans, succulents, dying tomatoes, and the golden virgin mary, we take a break out of the clouds to get Tu Lan vermicelli, "I hope it's still good even after the city made them clean their kitchens of rats."

The tornado is not a metaphor.

Moritz Aust | Watching The Storm - Day Seventeen

A little note known fact is the alternate title this photographer considered: "Let's go put on matching suspender outfits and watch the tornado tear up our corn. #nohomo"

People have been asking whether I had trouble adjusting to humdrum life after Burning Man. And it's vaguely embarrassing to realize that I do not have the right to notice much of a change, but this is because (1) I am funemployed and (2) I live in a co-op, (3) in Oakland.

I come home through ganja fog to smiley strangers handing me fried okra and pancakes on the regular, so yeah, it's a little dry out there in Nevada.

The not-working part of my life is certainly going splendidly, though it has only been almost two weeks. This means that it is still socially acceptable for me to tell everyone, "All I did today was climb, go to yoga, and pick tomatoes while half-nekkid in our garden."

Soon I'm going to say it less cheerfully and people will wonder if I have a trust fund. Or met a hippie sugar daddy, let's be real.

Life really is very much on the side of awesome, even if I occasionally feel like I'm off-track, whatever race we're running. I just know that currently I'm being paid on the side to write a screenplay about the Holocaust, I'm camping away, and I really want to complete the whole wave-soaked meander up the Lost Coast trail soon.

This past time was a scouting trip basically, and while it's a little tangled and mangled in some parts, the Tolkien views more than make up for it.

Our campsite on the last night of the backpacking trip

There were just a lot of surreal moments where you think, "So this is nature, eh?" The five of us slipped and sliced our way through immoderate amounts of wilderness, made camp in little glens fit for Bambi and his dead mom.

Places where some nice hobbit boy might run off with ya.

Just this month, I literally won four sets of free tickets to plays that I would have otherwise paid to see anyway. This year has been an excellent haul for my uncanny ability to win chance contests and drawings, an iPad and a trip to Canada for three being the highlights. And I swear that most of the time, it's because I'm the only that cares about winning.

And I was vindicated recently when I won tickets to a film festival by filming my stuffed Thai cat Dinga as he gyrated to the Scissors Sisters for fourteen hot seconds. I can now add "award-winning film-maker" to my list of titles, but again, I found out at the screening that I had been the only person to enter the contest.

Woo, go me, go.

So I'm applying for a few jobs on the daily, figuring that I'll land something ridiculous again.

Eventually.

The past two years since law school have been amazing experiences, so I'm trying to continue this upward trend toward whatever I'm supposed to end up doing with my life. I've embraced the fact that I'm somewhat off track for most lawyering, but if I can get people to continue paying me to do interesting things around the world, I'm pretty okay with that.

Next steps will mean a solid chance I'll be leaving the Bay Area, which will be interesting since it's been home for twenty-three years, if not twenty-seven for all that I remember of Hong Kong.



Not that I haven't considered it before, but it's much more real when I'm looking at postings in Bangladesh, South Sudan, and Afghanistan. I'm in adventure mode, and I want to get out and tilt at windmills.

And it's simply been easier to think about it once close friends moved on to other places: Danny to Japan, Erik to Madison, Tristan to his own jetsetting adventures, etc.

While I still have a good circle of amigos here, it's hard not to think about leaving too when you have to hug a friend really hard, realizing that tonight is the last night you'll be clinking beers for a while.

But we're still on the hunt to recruit for Musketeers. I just might take the search abroad.

Dark Horse creating his "Chris Kosienski" identity while I stand amazed.

Soup dumplings, then goats at the zoo, and then Dolores Park make for an excellent Saturday.

Feeling rosy today, Mysterio?!

We have a habit of fitting both of us into small places. Or big chairs.

Okay, I have to go back to tending my cardamom kombucha. And in other news, we have fleas in our house.

I have spent two months with permanent night-time itchy leg, and more than one morning has me waking up and watching small black dots bounce on my blankets.

Again, remember that part about how normal life presents no culture clash?

Motorists, this is the last stop for gas and outrageous lies before Black Rock City.

Cloud construction

I suppose every gas station near Gerlach can be the last one from its own frame of reference. 

Dusty feet up on the window, and the four of us are driving in an exit caravan formation at 5 mph through a pure white dust storm. And as we're pulling away from the playa, I'm watching various camps folding up to go. I'm still feeling like I'm made out of buttery sunshine and warm honey, and I don't even care that that's probably an Herbal Essences scent of shampoo. Can't stop grinning like a maniac Cheshire, and the raggedy little book I've been scribbling in all week is just covered in kid-like serial killer font.

And I'm jotting down images and memories from the week, knowing that it's all running by me like the tide and waves, and that I'm writing some down in the same way that you'd run your hand over sea foam. 

I played My Heart Will Go On in this organ in the desert. 

I remember dancing like a gerbil on crack next to a two-story pink sheep that pulsed with the beat of the DJ riding its flank. And being upside down in yoga when a massive sandstorm hits, and everything is blinding but completely illuminated. 

Buying into a roda in center camp when I saw the berimbaus headed into the tent. Planning my days about snowcone camps, foam dome DJ parties, and the occasional hemp bracelet weaving class. Being chased into a side alley by the Running of the Bullshitters.

I don't think Burning Man is about changing your life, but just a way to remind yourself that there's a lot of happiness and humor in just about every situation and with almost anyone.

Burning Man is like discussing at midnight (on a school night, gasppp) how churros would make awful sex toys, musing about whether they would be easy to fry up, and then churning out a few batches of lemon verbena churros in cinnamon-sugar beds to surprise the house. That giddy kiddy joy both churro maker and churro-ee glow with  is basically how Burning Man feels, but for eight consecutive days in the middle of a dusty desert.

And we did make churros like that last night.

But back to BRC:

Yes, joy and thrills, but also tiring. and there are days where you're convinced that the past two days were just dreams you're having from Monday. And I know that in the future, there will be days when it's great to be able to tap into this deep storehouse of memory and good times, of how it feels to watch sunrise while biking through dust devils.

Timing of things was excellent since (1) my nonprofit had just told me they were out of money and would need to drop me like a hot potato and (2) there is a sweet boy who I could actually see myself dating.  No job responsibilities, potential beginnings, and I'm already sufficiently steeped in the Bay Area granola. Which is to say the Burning Man culture felt like a jazzed up Big Daddy version of what living in an Oakland co-op is like. Tasty food popping up with no warning, new people circulating your house all the time, occasionally being dirty but A-OK with it all. By Tuesday, Chris and I had gone native and Dark Horse & Wombat were prepared to live out their brave new lives in Black Rock Desert.

I recall that I spent one full day with a boy named Sasha that I will never see again, and that it involved an Orgy Dome, breakfast waffles, and a giant narwhal.

I'm not going to try documenting it all in detail, both because I don't think I've fully wrapped my mind around it all, but also I don't know that I want to. There's just a pleasant haze over it all, of dust storms and mayan pyramids, cold apple pie and getting lost, being found.

There was a lot of , "wow, everything that I ever wanted to do all in one place." And then someone hands you a cornbread waffle with ice cream.

I thought it was amusing that my handwritten journal during the week devolves in legibility like a parody of Algernon. I start in neat and tight cursive rows, and by mid-week, it peaks in there being pages of one giant scrawled letter per sheet. 

I'll definitely be back, and next time with reinforcements and the cavalry! 

Quebeckerin' Goodbye

Our final train ride to Quebec City, and we're seated next to some teenaged québécoises ladies. The swapping between English and French is more distracting than anything else: "Tu sais que I already bought it?"

I pay for my coffee with Canadian dimes, and the train attendantrix yells at me, “You think I like change?” She smiles and threatens to give me salt with my coffee, but we compromise on her giving me two heavy creams instead of the coffee whitener I wanted. She's a feeder.

I end up making my way through a third of City of Night, and somehow I’m committing myself to a one-man festival featuring Disillusioned Gays Finding Themselves Through Meaningless Sex in Urbania.

We hop off the train and after a sweaty walk that left a racing stripe across my chest, we check into Chateau Laurier. Our room is a boiler room from the Titanic, but we have a visual line of sight to the jumbotron of the concerts across the street. We again have not eaten anything that day again, so Yelp leads us towards a bistro called Le Hobbit. Based purely on the name itself, I was sold, but I was somewhat disappointed that it wasn’t a cozy nook in a grassy hill served by furry people about yay high. We’re told by the maître d’ that there is a forty-five minute wait for plebes with no reservations, and when we assent, she scoffs.

The time is spent well, and I pick up half a dozen French novels from the used bookstore for eight bucks. By the time my birch beer is swigged and we swag our way up the street, we’re seated at Chez Hobbit. For a decent price, we split duck leg confit and boudin noir.

As the shadows get longer in Vieux-Quebec, we wander down the cobbles towards La Korrigane. It’s empty when we enter, and I excitedly claim us a corner lookout, but we find that the locals are on the patio. Candlelit and tired, I have an excellent cream ale, something that gives a strong tea kick at the end, nothing of cream froth. I’m sad later that I missed out on Coeur du Pirate while we were in the lower town, but what can you do with insufficient information and opportunity costs. Little french-speakin' blond sprite spirit with a piano, and I am sold.



We head back like homosexual salmon against the throngs of concert folk going home, and we’re picking out potential mates. I don’t understand it, but there’s definitely a big part of me that wants the dark-haired orphans of the world. Points if they have cockney accents. Think chimney sweeps with stable income.

Poutine pops into my head at this appropriately late hour, and with a negligible amount of advocacy, we’re in Chez Alston, getting ready to feast on the emblematic dish of Quebec. Chris somehow manages to almost pick a fight with a large Tabarnackin’ bro, but we exit unharmed, vinegar and curdy gravy fries in hand.

Erik has the one fry he restricted himself to, but because no food must go to waste, he saves us from a dozen more. Who says chivalry is gone from this age and world?

Our second day in Quebec City starts off meeting a 400-year-old woman named Guillemette who guides us on a tour of Vieux-Quebec. UNESCO heritage site! We’re told how 40,000 cannonballs once destroyed 90% of the city, and about the French victories that involved rain, snow, and very little fighting. Lunch is with a little crazy pig, and I get quiche’d up before we wander the touristy outgrowths tumoring the old village square. Tire d'érable happens, though there are no pickles or coffee on hand.

We find the well-hidden hot tub on the roof before having a picnic worthy of Downton Abbey in the cemetery beside St. Michael’s. Tins of foie gras, pesto mustard, salted mackerel, pickled anchovies, olives, smoked meat, all on baguette. We toss a Montreal bagel to the punk barely has enough English to ask for something to eat before taking an epic nap at the hotel. Night wanders us towards different bars and in the deserted streets of Vieux-Quebec again. We clink cherry beer’d glasses to our last night in Canada at Sacrilege, which of course has a sweet patio out back.

Erik heads off to Grand Rapids early in the morning while Chris and I walk down to the water so I can pick up everything in maple flavor that I’m unclear I ever wanted. The little vendor lady outright lies to me when we have a brief conversation in French about whether beurre d’érable can be taken onto airplanes. Maple butter is what I was explicitly told to get in Quebec, and by the old gods, I was committed to picking up a family-sized tin of it. “But isn't it considered a liquid?” “It’ll be fine,” she murmured as she pocketed my loonies.

Chris and I split a enormous (and undoubtedly healthy) pie of curried lamb, a second basket of the best little strawberries I've ever had, and another two beers from Dieu du Ciel. The taxi driver is somehow okay with us paying him in a mix of currencies, lint, and prayer. The maple butter also magically survives two Canadian security checks, both because I decided to keep my birch beer bottle as a kombucha fizzer and it is an adequate distraction for both bag checkers. "This is not the maple butter you’re looking for."

We’re now an hour from SFO, and I’m looking forward to sleeping in my own bed with Dinga, and spooning some maple butter onto some co-op bread.