low stakes friendships

victor heights

The way our cell phone battery charger cords get all tangled together in our kitchen is one of the many reminders of us coming together under a roof of love in a studio apartment we pay very little for while entwining what it means to be ourselves

the night donny got stoned (and helena saw a ghost)

something i wrote in sep, 2016

Last night I was in a bar bathroom washing my hands and glancing at myself in the mirror. I thought to myself, I am in the prime of my life and in seven minutes my dad will have been dead for one year.

This morning I am driving up the 101 North with a hangover like I did so many times when he was healthy and when he was sick. I am picking up tax stuff from my dad’s best friend and distributing the bits of his final return to siblings.

A year ago today my dad died in my arms. As a psychiatrist for Ventura County, my dad would periodically speak to police officers about non-violent approaches to handling the mentally ill. He said some of the cops would listen, some were dicks. He said they’d warm up to him after he made a couple jokes. He loved that I did stand-up comedy. He would pitch me ideas all the time. Three days after he passed away I went to the Nerdmelt open mic cuz I had no idea where else to go. And it felt better being there. My friends, community, couldn’t have been kinder to me. Comics have the biggest hearts, chaotically so, but gigantic.

My dad died a couple weeks shy of his 75th birthday, a white man’s age to die. I watch videos on the news of young black men losing their lives at ages they shouldn’t. Fathers, sons. I have all kinds of things I want to say but I can’t articulate em, I’m not qualified, I can only support black lives mattering. I see the cell phone footage. I read the media skewing the facts. The transcripts, how they called Philando Castile, “the suspect” as he bled to death. An innocent man in a car. Compared to the atrocities perpetrated against the black community by a corrupt oppressive system, my dad dying of cancer was a luxury for me. And losing my dad to cancer was hell.

There was so much beauty in hell. He waited for me to get there. He was sitting up, who sits themselves up on the side of the bed to die. He was so strong while being quiet about it. We ran to him, held him. I had left the front door open behind me. We sat around his dead body when a hummingbird flew into the house. It circled and then left. We had asked him for a sign. Trav and Britt had asked him to send a bird that night before. All those nights before, camped out as children. All those nights before, camped out as grown ups. He sent us a hummingbird into the house. 

Here is a joke premise cuz my dad wouldn’t want this getting too serious: As he was dying I was getting Tinder matches on my phone. 

A year of mourning. I climbed Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The air was thin. 13,000 feet. It was physically the most difficult challenge I’d given myself. I got to the top, then realized I needed to go higher. I got to the top finally and I cried. My brother Trav did the same thing in Scotland. Climbing mountains and tears. Gratitude. Gratitude for my dad. Gratitude for my family. Gratitude for my friends. Gratitude for my planet. Gratitude for my body, while I have it. 

Us in this big body, a bunch of organs and veins and collections of cells arranging ourselves into something showing all kinds of hints of a creation pointing to a larger creation and it doesn’t have to be Frankenstein we can be constructing something like the love I feel for my dad today cuz this love is not mine this love it belongs to all of us and it is the only building block worth using in our construction.