I hate tradition, that is exactly what I have found out about myself over the years. I would say it all started when I was around ten or eleven years old. I was still living in my cozy little childhood town of Peine, Germany.
Pink Clog Fantasy
Helen sat on the toilet in her workplace bathroom with her black denim jeans pulled down to her ankles, checking her oxygen with an oximeter she had purchased over the pandemic. There was no reason for her to be checking her oxygen this early in the morning, except for the incessant worry that she could drop dead at any moment.
Sutter Street
Mini was the first schizophrenic person I ever actually knew—besides my Uncle, who I only really knew of, and the people on Eddy Street that talked to themselves, who never really knew anybody. When I met her I was living in Daly City, renting a bedroom from a man I pretended to be Republican for; in the rental listing he stated he was looking for someone with “strong family values.”
Collect
This is a story about compost, and it ends—fittingly—with death.
It begins, however, on a Tuesday: the first Tuesday of the month, at six o’clock in the evening. Six o’clock in the evening on the first Tuesday of the month is a time which, if you were in the know, would signify to you that the residents of 77 Lilac Street are almost done with their House Meeting. Outside the moon takes its time to rise, cannot be rushed.
Earning your Lighthouse
There was no time for tears when your bilge pumps failed. Somewhere about two hundred miles off Cape Hatteras, where the HMS Bounty sank and left its captain drowned. You tried not to think of him, swallowed up in those same waters. All you should have been thinking about was keeping your heading, two hundred-five degrees, with some variance to take the ocean swell on the boat’s quarter.
Elisabeth's Leg
We named you Elisabeth after this street, Elisabeth Street—look where I’m pointing now—on the south side of the city, starting at Fifth National Bank—that’s the square building with the bronze cuckoo on top—and it ends somewhere around the big convention center—the glass circle building where they hold the dance recitals and the spelling bees—where it becomes Convention Center Dr. and no longer Elisabeth St.