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| “Lives cross lives idling at stoplights” –Lawrence Ferlinghetti |
My grandfather is a gay Buddhist photographer who’s wife died from eating hemlock two years after she gave birth to my mother and her twin brother. My grandmother was raised by catholic nuns; she met my grandfather when they were 13 and still sees his ghost walking around their apartment. My parents are atheists who met in the south of France and moved to San Francisco to go to art school together. I’m not sure who I am or who I have been or who I want to be. I once counted 20 different selves and they had nothing in common. There are people you meet that change you so profoundly that you are not the same after: I am the people that I have met. This is a story about them. A story about invisible people. A story about the ways in which communication, dialogue, and human interactions are twisted to form situations and circumstances that would be impossible if they did not exist. When we first learn to write in grade school we’re told that every story has a beginning middle and end but there is an endless sea of a million things that don't have a name and don't wear a watch that separate us.
I cried and kicked and screamed my way across the Atlantic. My piano teacher was a senile old woman plagued with emphysema and the day she tripped over the cord of her oxygen tank during our recital she retired and gave me her entire record collection. Then I met a bunch of high school dropouts at the local coffee shop and started writing. I think those have been the most significant events up to now.
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