Walmart Rotisserie Chicken

part of kayapó’s speech during this event

also! she’s still alive! that sort of thing is always worth pointing out to show that we really aren’t too far removed from events like this! here’s a 2019 photo of her:

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He is also 6'3", 300 lbs of Heavy Weapons Librarian.

This week, some karen showed up to take video of said storytime. She was unmoved by the director of the library telling her their policy against taking video in the children's room.

My brother was also unmoved. Specifically, he was unmoved from his position directly in the line of karen's cellphone. She got video of an acre of blue broadcloth shirt, and that's it.

Other people who showed up to scowl at the drag queen decided they had other things to do that day when my brother scowled at them. He inherited our Mama's scowl, and it's a good one.

By nature, I’m a fan of having 2 beers and meeting strangers at a bar somewhere you’ve never been, which is a thing that we don’t do in 2023 between COVID and being afraid of one another because of the prevalence of gun violence and regular violence and misdirected road rage and the million other little deadly social erosions of the past 10 years or so.

You have got to let go of this idea that any place is a complete nothing-burger full of nothing-people.

You have to.

Its vitally important that you navigate that airport with a stranger in Denver and realize he’s got a tattoo of lyrics from your favorite song. To sing House of the Rising Sun with four people you’ve known for 2 hours (and somehow managed to get into the DNCs private bar with) in the back of an Uber in DC when it’s pissing rain and entirely too cold for your southern blood. It’s important to cooperate and solve problems together and go about it laughing and singing. We are silly little creatures that love a puzzle and a story.

It’s also important to flee a tornado in the back of a shitty red pickup at pride in Oklahoma City and feel the sky break wide-open against the lazy /tick-lok/ /tick-lok/ of the windshield wipers while racing down what once was Rte 66. Its important to know that in the face of creeping fascism that place, of all places, has entire gay neighborhoods. It’s important to wake up in an apartment high, high up in NYC and watch the sun through the buildings and boulevards and watch the glorious great goddamn of that impossible number of people all cooperating and all not. To say Hyoo-stun, that way, on purpose just to get a rise of your born and bred NY friend who does NOT think you’re funny but will make coffee for you.

You need to see a beach full of people cautiously approaching and flinching away from a floating, dead horseshoe crab on Tybee Island, Georgia the way any troupe of wild animals approaches an unknown alien thing. Cows in a field, fish in the ocean flinching from a diver. Little children squealing and wide eyed behind their parents legs. You need to be the person that walks out and picks it up and watches the rest of the crowd creep in to investigate.

I don’t get to travel a lot in the way that most people do, when I go to a place it’s usually because something bad has happened there, but I have found it universally true that most people just want to tell you a story or show you a picture on their phone of the craziest thing they’ve ever seen and they don’t particularly care who you are or what your accent is. Sometimes they do, and those people suck, but those people are not the majority.

I was crying on the bus another time because my headphones broke and I had no cash and an older woman started talking to me because of my punisher hat. She gave me a handful of crumpled ones to buy food before she left on her next bus because I had sat crying in Arkansas thinking I'd be stuck there for a full day.

My first bus trip, a handful of us became layover family after being stuck at the same layover cities for hours. In Philadelphia a black girl got on the bus and called someone saying 'Hey, are you X's mom? I just called to let you know I gave your son some sweats because the security guard was harassing him and I didn't want him to get in trouble' before she went to sleep. There was a guy in the seat behind me who was talking to his girlfriend about how much he loved her and wanted to start a family and how he and his sister were starting a restaurant that would donate food to the homeless and how his sister was the soul of it.

And beyond all of these people being from nowhere and going nowhere else, people get it into their heads that the place they live in doesn't have that camaraderie. My mom helped an old man who fell on the curb. I stayed by a car crash that happened in front of me to try and help. A cashier at Waffle House said to not worry about it when we were a few dollars short (that same WH had a waitress named Miss Purple who sang to everyone). A woman gave me a ride home after a day of volunteering in the hot sun and bought me a soda and gave a homeless man a care package and a prayer.

Our waitress the other day got married by accident and had the same name as me.

A stranger approached me at a gas station and said "Jesus wanted me to tell you that it will be okay. You're going to have a problem with your heart, but it will be fine." She was, uhh, she was right. It was a totally benign arrhythmia. She was also the first person I gave my new, trans, non-legal name to.

I wear queer and neurodivergent pride pins on my hat and SO MANY people have given me a "me too", whether whispered or out loud. (That is why I wear them.)

I once sat on a plane next to an elderly woman whose husband had died in a plane crash and wow her attitude was amazing and it was weirdly reassuring to have her there as I was trying not to have a panic attack because we were flying over Nevada and there was a huge thunderstorm under us with red lightning.

I had a really cool conversation with a random patron at an Egyptian burial exhibit about the artists who made the exquisite little miniature grave goods.

The white as milk Midwestern dude at the gas station spoke fluent Tagalog and was a fuckin low key philosophical genius.

I just love people. Their stories, these moments, all the stuff that makes up the web of our social relationships to each other.