The Lesbians Drink out of Paper Bags with the Dogs in the Park
The bug is creeping back in. Seeping through the cracks of my mind like the openings in my childhood home, the ideas running and infesting like those tiny cockroaches that are impossible to get rid of.
The last place I traveled to was Atlanta, Georgia in August 2018 with a man child who consistently told me that I was not high on his priority list. I thought I saw something in him, an author waiting to crawl to the surface and blossom but it turns out I was looking in a mirror. What I saw in him was the personality of an author and rampant alcoholism that matched my own but in the year and a half that I spent chasing him he only wrote one mediocre short film. I remember the female character as being a prop with no real personality traits which I later learned was how he looked at women.
I was thinking about moving to Atlanta at one point because that’s where the film work is, but’s then I got there I couldn’t think of any reason I would move somewhere that was hotter than Austin. I figured why would I leave one hot city where I had connections and a weak network for another hotter city where I knew no one.
As far as the guy goes, I spent 5 more months trying to show him that I was a complex, intelligent human being and attempting to coax some hidden talent from him like I could fix the broken parts. Spoiler alert. It didn’t happen but the time we spent together getting drunk all day every day and the terrible sex we had was a last push that I personally needed to stop drinking and showed me that maybe I could write the things that he flat out refused to.
Someone had to write, I just didn’t know it was going to be me.
Before that I had almost accidentally traveled to Costa Rica in 2017. I made one of those bipolar, vaguely desperate posts on Facebook telling the internet world that I needed to get out of the country and a saint from my 2012 wedding at Burning Man responded. He asked me where, and thinking it was kind of a game, I listed a few places that I dreamed of going. I left out of the dream that I might actually get there.
My boyfriend, Shay, at the time decided to go to Oklahoma without me and left me on my band mates couch to continue his adventure on his own. We were calling it “long distance” but the truth was I pushed him a state away with my addiction and crazy antics. I had been through a traumatic abortion that left my body and mind completely broken and I hated myself and I hated him but I loved him but I hated him. He was right. I never would have left him, so he made the strong decision to put the space between us that I wouldn’t have.
Because of his decision, I’d say we’re still pretty close friends today. Both sober.
I’ve always tended to date people who can keep up with my out of control drinking and drug use.
So after Shay left, I went to Costa Rica with this friend that I didn’t know very well, but well enough. He paid for the ticket. He knew I didn’t have money. He was reserved and more introverted and brought security and I brought spontaneity and an extroverted presence to the duo. I was hell bent on making friends and learning how to cartwheel.
The thing that impressed me the most about the trip was that he, in his checked bag, brought 40 grams of really good weed and the way he did it was the most brilliant thing I had ever heard of. He emptied the contents of a pile of K-cups and refilled them with the pot and then resealed the foil on top. He kept them in a vacuum sealed bag and tossed them in with his clothes.
I couldn’t believe it.
So for the entirety of the trip we smoked fat joints and were able to gift some to surfers and other strangers. I was pretty amazed that I didn’t drink anything on the trip, I didn’t party, and my friend and I stayed super high while we rolled through Costa Rica in a rented car. We visited beautiful beaches, a turquoise river and a forest above the clouds.
In 2015 I traveled with a man named Tim that I had spent 4 days with after meeting him on Tinder. A few weeks of him asking me to join him and I sold everything I owned, did some really sketchy Craigslist jobs, and quit my company due to unrelated circumstances and I was off to Los Angeles to meet up with him. The night before I took the plane to California, he told me his girlfriend from Oregon was coming too. The more the merrier and I was more excited than nervous.
I fell in love with the both of them and we traveled as a mutual love triangle from National Park to National Park around the western parts of the United States and let me tell ya, Utah is surprisingly the most beautiful state I’ve ever seen and Joshua Tree has the best stars.
In 2012 my new wife, Claudia, was going to a fish science conference in Edinburgh to flex her Marine Biologist biceps and asked me to go with her so she wasn’t traveling alone. At first I didn’t want her to spend that much on me, but in the end I gave up and we spent a couple days in London couch surfing with this guy Peter (who now owns a house a few blocks from me) drinking and going to gay clubs and eating Indian food and drinking coffee and eating pasties and wandering around the gray, beautiful city. I love London. Then we spent a week and a half in Scotland.
Because Claudia was at the fishy conference, I was free to wander the city by myself a lot. I became a regular at a coffee shop, I found a film festival and watched some movies, I walked around, I took pictures, explored the huge cemetery I listened to street musicians and walked around some more.
The airbnb host that Claudia and I stayed with last minute hired me to film an event called the Psychedelic Forest Disco at the Earl of Glasgow’s Castle affectionately known as the Graffiti Castle. Anywhere I go, I tend to fall into strange and magical situations like this. We went and it was basically a colder, smaller version of Burning Man. I filmed people dancing and DJ’s, art installations and other oddities. Claudia and I ate some molly and met this girl who was from Whales but insisted that they didn’t fuck sheep there, which was suspicious to me because neither Claudia or I had brought it up. She brought us into her house and wanted to make us toast and eventually we got out.
Around the fire that night the only thing I had been able to understand anyone saying in Scotland was a really dirty joke that has stuck with me my entire adulthood.
Brace yourself.
It’s bad.
”It’s not necrophilia if she was alive when you started, but it’s hard to convince the cops after you’ve been going at it for a month.”
I told you.
I have never heard a group of people laugh harder at anything than those Scottish people at that joke.
By the end of the night, Claudia and I were freezing because we hadn’t packed anything for our trip that was appropriate for camping. It was a wonderful and surprising trip. We made a friend, Callum, who was an odd man and came with us to the Castle. What made him so odd is he not only played with us like a giant child, but he invited us to dinner with his mom and was the kind of person who pulled the car over to drink some orange juice. As someone who drinks most beverages while driving, I couldn’t imagine pulling over to do it. Maybe that’s an American thing.
One thing that no one tells you about Scotland is that Stonehenge is a big pile of rocks and they rope them off so you can’t even get close anymore.
In 2011, When Claudia was still with her husband Jason, they took me to San Francisco to go shark diving off the coast of the Farallon islands with them. San Francisco is amazing, but I could never see myself living anywhere that has stairs for sidewalks. I am simply too lazy for that many stairs. The city should consider escalators and then we could talk.
We went to the famous park and climbed a tree and I played harmonica we rode on of the street cars saw a protest ate some amazing food looked for lesbian bars but the gay men told us that “the lesbians drink out of paper bags with the dogs in the park” so we danced at the gay bars Claudia and Jason were fighting because she wasn’t paying very much attention to him and he was justified I agree so I walked around on my own and brought coffee and tried to keep the peace but it was hard and I ate weed jolly ranchers and made friends with a boat captain and got to drive the boat we went cage diving to look for sharks we didn’t see any but Claudia and my dry suits leaked so our lips turned blue and we stayed in an amazing house with one of those sick bay windows.
The bug is setting in for me to travel again, but with quarantine I am stuck dreaming about The Redwoods in Northern California and thinking about who would go with me to split the gas costs.
I think it’s taken me so long to start writing because I had to collect a lot of experiences to write about first. I know this seems so obvious, but it took me a long time to figure out and I legit cannot stop telling stories now. It’s almost like I’m afraid if I don’t write it all out, the stories will leave my mind and be replaced by darkness and an empty void.
The last place I traveled to was Atlanta, Georgia in August 2018 with a man child who consistently told me that I was not high on his priority list. I thought I saw something in him, an author waiting to crawl to the surface and blossom but it turns out I was looking in a mirror. What I saw in him was the personality of an author and rampant alcoholism that matched my own but in the year and a half that I spent chasing him he only wrote one mediocre short film. I remember the female character as being a prop with no real personality traits which I later learned was how he looked at women.
I was thinking about moving to Atlanta at one point because that’s where the film work is, but’s then I got there I couldn’t think of any reason I would move somewhere that was hotter than Austin. I figured why would I leave one hot city where I had connections and a weak network for another hotter city where I knew no one.
As far as the guy goes, I spent 5 more months trying to show him that I was a complex, intelligent human being and attempting to coax some hidden talent from him like I could fix the broken parts. Spoiler alert. It didn’t happen but the time we spent together getting drunk all day every day and the terrible sex we had was a last push that I personally needed to stop drinking and showed me that maybe I could write the things that he flat out refused to.
Someone had to write, I just didn’t know it was going to be me.
Before that I had almost accidentally traveled to Costa Rica in 2017. I made one of those bipolar, vaguely desperate posts on Facebook telling the internet world that I needed to get out of the country and a saint from my 2012 wedding at Burning Man responded. He asked me where, and thinking it was kind of a game, I listed a few places that I dreamed of going. I left out of the dream that I might actually get there.
My boyfriend, Shay, at the time decided to go to Oklahoma without me and left me on my band mates couch to continue his adventure on his own. We were calling it “long distance” but the truth was I pushed him a state away with my addiction and crazy antics. I had been through a traumatic abortion that left my body and mind completely broken and I hated myself and I hated him but I loved him but I hated him. He was right. I never would have left him, so he made the strong decision to put the space between us that I wouldn’t have.
Because of his decision, I’d say we’re still pretty close friends today. Both sober.
I’ve always tended to date people who can keep up with my out of control drinking and drug use.
So after Shay left, I went to Costa Rica with this friend that I didn’t know very well, but well enough. He paid for the ticket. He knew I didn’t have money. He was reserved and more introverted and brought security and I brought spontaneity and an extroverted presence to the duo. I was hell bent on making friends and learning how to cartwheel.
The thing that impressed me the most about the trip was that he, in his checked bag, brought 40 grams of really good weed and the way he did it was the most brilliant thing I had ever heard of. He emptied the contents of a pile of K-cups and refilled them with the pot and then resealed the foil on top. He kept them in a vacuum sealed bag and tossed them in with his clothes.
I couldn’t believe it.
So for the entirety of the trip we smoked fat joints and were able to gift some to surfers and other strangers. I was pretty amazed that I didn’t drink anything on the trip, I didn’t party, and my friend and I stayed super high while we rolled through Costa Rica in a rented car. We visited beautiful beaches, a turquoise river and a forest above the clouds.
In 2015 I traveled with a man named Tim that I had spent 4 days with after meeting him on Tinder. A few weeks of him asking me to join him and I sold everything I owned, did some really sketchy Craigslist jobs, and quit my company due to unrelated circumstances and I was off to Los Angeles to meet up with him. The night before I took the plane to California, he told me his girlfriend from Oregon was coming too. The more the merrier and I was more excited than nervous.
I fell in love with the both of them and we traveled as a mutual love triangle from National Park to National Park around the western parts of the United States and let me tell ya, Utah is surprisingly the most beautiful state I’ve ever seen and Joshua Tree has the best stars.
In 2012 my new wife, Claudia, was going to a fish science conference in Edinburgh to flex her Marine Biologist biceps and asked me to go with her so she wasn’t traveling alone. At first I didn’t want her to spend that much on me, but in the end I gave up and we spent a couple days in London couch surfing with this guy Peter (who now owns a house a few blocks from me) drinking and going to gay clubs and eating Indian food and drinking coffee and eating pasties and wandering around the gray, beautiful city. I love London. Then we spent a week and a half in Scotland.
Because Claudia was at the fishy conference, I was free to wander the city by myself a lot. I became a regular at a coffee shop, I found a film festival and watched some movies, I walked around, I took pictures, explored the huge cemetery I listened to street musicians and walked around some more.
The airbnb host that Claudia and I stayed with last minute hired me to film an event called the Psychedelic Forest Disco at the Earl of Glasgow’s Castle affectionately known as the Graffiti Castle. Anywhere I go, I tend to fall into strange and magical situations like this. We went and it was basically a colder, smaller version of Burning Man. I filmed people dancing and DJ’s, art installations and other oddities. Claudia and I ate some molly and met this girl who was from Whales but insisted that they didn’t fuck sheep there, which was suspicious to me because neither Claudia or I had brought it up. She brought us into her house and wanted to make us toast and eventually we got out.
Around the fire that night the only thing I had been able to understand anyone saying in Scotland was a really dirty joke that has stuck with me my entire adulthood.
Brace yourself.
It’s bad.
”It’s not necrophilia if she was alive when you started, but it’s hard to convince the cops after you’ve been going at it for a month.”
I told you.
I have never heard a group of people laugh harder at anything than those Scottish people at that joke.
By the end of the night, Claudia and I were freezing because we hadn’t packed anything for our trip that was appropriate for camping. It was a wonderful and surprising trip. We made a friend, Callum, who was an odd man and came with us to the Castle. What made him so odd is he not only played with us like a giant child, but he invited us to dinner with his mom and was the kind of person who pulled the car over to drink some orange juice. As someone who drinks most beverages while driving, I couldn’t imagine pulling over to do it. Maybe that’s an American thing.
One thing that no one tells you about Scotland is that Stonehenge is a big pile of rocks and they rope them off so you can’t even get close anymore.
In 2011, When Claudia was still with her husband Jason, they took me to San Francisco to go shark diving off the coast of the Farallon islands with them. San Francisco is amazing, but I could never see myself living anywhere that has stairs for sidewalks. I am simply too lazy for that many stairs. The city should consider escalators and then we could talk.
We went to the famous park and climbed a tree and I played harmonica we rode on of the street cars saw a protest ate some amazing food looked for lesbian bars but the gay men told us that “the lesbians drink out of paper bags with the dogs in the park” so we danced at the gay bars Claudia and Jason were fighting because she wasn’t paying very much attention to him and he was justified I agree so I walked around on my own and brought coffee and tried to keep the peace but it was hard and I ate weed jolly ranchers and made friends with a boat captain and got to drive the boat we went cage diving to look for sharks we didn’t see any but Claudia and my dry suits leaked so our lips turned blue and we stayed in an amazing house with one of those sick bay windows.
The bug is setting in for me to travel again, but with quarantine I am stuck dreaming about The Redwoods in Northern California and thinking about who would go with me to split the gas costs.
I think it’s taken me so long to start writing because I had to collect a lot of experiences to write about first. I know this seems so obvious, but it took me a long time to figure out and I legit cannot stop telling stories now. It’s almost like I’m afraid if I don’t write it all out, the stories will leave my mind and be replaced by darkness and an empty void.
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