memories – the cavarchives

correspondence nostalgia (part 1: dear diary)

Blog readers are to Blog as the front row is to performance. Yet Blog is also personal. Blog is (or, given the form’s steep decline in popularity over the last decade, was) curated and semipersonalized intimacy, the process of CC’ing personal reflections to a hundred or a thousand of your closest friends.

when good things happen to bad years

If pressed, I’d call 2020 the best awful year I’ve ever had.

3 weeks in

An arced bridge at the UC Davis Arboretum.

I don’t think I fully believed I would be Living in California until I got here, and even then, it was iffy.

things I hope to remember

I don’t know how to say goodbye to this house, not only because my memory keeps it close, but also because it hasn’t quite sunk in yet that I am Moving Out.

A hearty hand-flap for Mel Baggs

Mel Baggs, wearing glasses and a brown button-down shirt, faces the camera with a knitting project balanced on their chest. A grey and white cat sits perched on their shoulder.

Mel lived every day in direct defiance of death. As in, laughing heartily and heavily in the face of death, all between poems and blog posts and crochet patterns.

New Year, New Me(ans of resisting linear time and essentialism)

We are so desperate not only for a story about growing up but growing into ourselves.

returning & releasing

Painted rocks lined up to spell "uwu" and "trans rights"

“[T]hat’s what family is, at least to me. Being what we need to for each other, with each other, even if elements of it hurt.”

a convergence of passed/past lives

Mutually following some friends from high school leaves open the possibility for anyone to find me, forcing me to contend with the reality of my life’s non-segmentation. It forces me to contend with the fact that the segmentation is purely in my own mind, that it’s only in my own mind that my life comes in “eras,” and that I’m an extra in everyone else’s story with a long and continuous plot-line, not one that comes in parts or chapters.

In transit

A river surrounded on both sides by bare trees. The water becomes foamy in the places that hit rocks of several sizes, scattered liberally throughout the water.

As I write this, I sit in the Philadelphia airport, one that’s become very familiar to me over the last couple years –– I fly through here almost every time I go to Virginia to visit my partner, Ell. Despite initially having –– –– I just saw a guy drop his whole container of noodlesContinue reading “In transit”

a word of recommendation: cringy old tunes

Every now and then, when I’m cruising through Spotify, I spot a song that takes me back. It’ll be totally unexpected; I may not have ever remembered liking this or that song independent of Spotify’s prompting. It will likely make me cringe, especially because throughout my life I have been convinced of the superiority ofContinue reading “a word of recommendation: cringy old tunes”