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Becoming a parent is like joining a subculture of the majority. Like queer culture, it is structured around the illegibility of love, but it’s not remotely queer, it’s the least queer love of all: the heavy paste of parenting’s social form completely conceals its destabilizing, romantic heart.

My family is still the one I was born into: mother, father, and brother, all of them alive and well — the ultimate luck. Many friends have already lost their parents or slipped into sandwich-generation duties, raising their kids while scrambling for elder care. Others of us have traded reproduction for something like filial piety. I can think of quite a few childless friends who have moved to be near a parent or had a parent move in with them. Midlife for them — and for me — is an open-faced sandwich. The defining event of my adulthood will not be birth or adoption, but the deaths of my parents, especially my mom.

I do not know the language of my father, my mother, or my ancestors, not any of their languages. I recognise no soil or tree, no soil was ever mine in the way people mean when they say ‘that’s where I’m from’. There is no land where I would ever feel a sudden longing for childhood, no place for me to write who I am. I do not know what sap I fed upon, the word ‘native’ does not exist for me, nor the word ‘exile’, though even so, it’s a word I think I know, but that is false.

I build a man I can love out of his vulnerabilities, but it's hard to keep them in mind, because he is bent on ignoring them.

Long before queer theory had become an established means of making a career in academia, I started serving an apprenticeship to a way of being that helped me survive the minor catastrophe and miracle of having been born a girl who was supposed to transform into a woman. I don’t know what else to call it but drag. The label now seems rather opportunistic because of recent developments in politics and the media, but at that time, drag was about a  constant celebration of the powers of excess and imagination. Drag let me live the dream of feminine omnipotence. In drag, girls could keep their eyes on the prize. Drag allowed us to feel rich when we were poor. It was about the power of the moment. It was about useless expenditure and wasting time. Queens would put on their drag for one night and looked fabulous, but their riches would turn to rags the next day and they would have to start all over again. Drag took every expectation that this meant that and turned it upside down and spun it around, demonstrating that there was no way to keep anything, especially when it was in language, straight. When someone said, oh, that was grand, it was never certain whether grand was an insult or a compliment. Grand, let it be both. It was all about style and delivery. Work was a heavy word in this dialect. You could work someone in and you could work someone out. You could work a piece and you could work a party. You could work together or you could work alone. Drag let us live outside the logic of capitalist accumulation, the logic of success and failure. Everyone could be a queen for a day. Drag became a way of protecting myself from the deadly seriousness of my youth.

I crush my "need for self- Expression" all the time Even though it's my profession

(I wonder if doing what I do–not separating my life from my writing–means spontaneously transforming all experience into description.)

A life of writing is a nonlife devoted to the possibility of fire.

Inner life is a kind of greed, desire, a form of personal profit.

There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.

The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.

To organize events sequentially is to take away their power. Emotion's not at all like that.

All present men are stand-ins for former men. And all men are stand-ins for our fathers. And even our fathers mean less than our own self-preservation. May you not go around the world looking to fill what you fear you lack with the flesh of another human being. That's part of what this story is for.

The primary task here is to comb through the historical clues while constantly following the central axis northward through the uniform darkness, otherwise I will completely lose my way. There’s a good possibility that this axis already exists in our pineal glands, although right now I know nothing of it. The primary task also includes: bidding farewell not only to my relatives, but also to humanity, in entering the one-person isolation module.

So What

I learned that when I am traumatized, I make a line and I say dangerous/safe... Sometimes when you stay in that mode too long, the line becomes good/bad, nice/evil, angel/devil, not me/me, friends/enemies. But the line is not real. I’m not saying remove the line, but if we understand that it isn’t real, it may enable us to look at the thing that we are calling over there differently. And when you acknowledge it and look at it — that enemy, that evil, that bad thing — the more you learn how to master it and temper it.