All My Exes

April 10th
Texas was a whirlwind!
No, literally. Texas was a whirlwind. As we continued down I-10 toward the Great State That Wished It Was It Was a Country gale force winds came at us from the Mexican border like Nature herself was saying "You built a fence? Well stay on your side. We did see plenty of border patrol agents, all of whom had sunglasses I have to imagine were pitched as “For Douchebags”. Jori was initially skittish, being a Canadian, but that wore off quickly as none of the ICE agents were on the lookouts for folks from the land of driven snow.

All of my photos from the first week or so of the trip are lost because my phone started glitching for some reason. We stopped at a mall in Las Cruces to see if we could find a Verizon store, but no dice. Some folks at a gas station eyed the cameras and asked us if we were storm chasers, which we found flattering. One of them noticed my Rand McNally atlas and asked if we were taking “Blue Roads”. This wasn’t another dig at my hair, but in fact a tip that scenic routes are marked on the atlas in blue. We planned to alter future courses accordingly but stuck to the interstate until we made it to Austin at the very least.

There was no gig planned for Marfa, the little arts town known for its extraterrestrial light shows. We didn’t see the Prada store thing people talk about. By the time we arrived in town only one joint was open: Some Hotel Restaurant. We ordered burgers and bemoaned the fact that we’ve watched the price of this staple sandwich balloon in price over the course of our life times from $5 to $15 and no one bats an eye. I remember thinking everyone at every other table looked incredibly bored.

We drove on to a lawn that advertised itself as a campground. There were several trailers around but we figured pitching our tents would be alright. It was slow going among the gusts and even once I managed to stake my little orange footpad to the ground the buffeted nylon made it near impossible to sleep. I capitulated around 2, 3 in the morning and slept in the diver's seat of the Prius. Jori and Camen returned to the vehicle not long before dawn and we are all less than chipper.

April 11th
Bright and early, with the winds wearily insisting they still had some fight in them like a Santa Con attendee on the PATH train home, we left the patch of grass and found a diner that was open. A kind old pair of couples asked us about ourselves and we told them about the tour. They asked for a little taste of material and despite this being not-at-all the set I gave them a small piece of CLOWNFISH about giving a girl I had a crush on a dozen roses and receiving a cactus in return. I think they were a little bewildered by it but they bought our breakfasts before heading to Big Bend for some camping. It was my first time “singing for my supper” and it felt antiquated, but charming, like a 40s musical that managed to not be overtly racist.

We got back on the 10 and came in to Austin. I did the whole show at the Fallout Theater in the downtown area and there were 20 or so people there: none of which I knew. It was a promising marvel, that I could go to a town I’d never been to before and people would go to see me based on faith in the venue. I had high hopes when planning the tour that this would happen and that people would get on social media to tell friends in other cities about it and the momentum would grow and grow! We left the Fallout filled with confidence and in search of pizza to pair with it.

April 12th

Our lodging for the next few days was with Camen’s Dad’s best man and his wife. They were a lovely, childless couple who had the sort of art and disposable income that lovely, childless people can. They were incredibly generous to us, giving us beds and water that the gentleman of the house collected from the rain — a process he apparently had to fight to be able to sell, but it earned him the comfort he enjoyed in his lovely, childless home.

We all recuperated, explored the downtown area everybody likes (6th street?) and swam in the public river that runs through towns but is still separated into a “rich” area upriver and a “poor” area that we visited. We found some young boys messing with a turtle and I cowardly and passive-aggressively peed upstream of them. Camen and Jori returned to the house to work on proper mounts for the cameras and I went to a sex party a friend of mine was throwing for some (I’m assuming tech) mogul in his spacious, childless manor.

Much of the show is about sex and it has always been a motivator for me. In part because I mistakenly equate it for love and my trauma-laced early childhood left me with a vacuum I’m always trying to fill and in part because when my friends in high school started experimenting with sex and that was not an option for me it became a mysterious taboo. Much in the same way a child forbid from having any alcohol will overcorrect for lost time in their early twenties I would binge sex whenever I could find it in mine. It made for botched romantic entanglements, sloppy unsatisfying tet-a-tets, and even dangerous and damaging meet-ups. I’ve always thought of people who claim sex is a vice as skeezy and a little self-important, but looking back at the way I tried to negotiate for sex and affection I went about “getting” sex in much the same way a drug addict would — meeting in the dark with strangers and taking other unnecessary risks lying to my friends and family to sneak away and get a quick fix, paying people to be in an environment where it could be accessed.

This party, ironically, was the first step on my (fights the urge to vomit) “healing journey” (loses fight). It was the first time I approached sex outside of a relationship with a sense of purpose, with a sense of holiness. The facilitators of this event (who I won’t name in case they don’t wish to be named) began the evening with a ritualistic demonstration of consent — both how to ask for it and how to give it, there was an encouraged breath to check in and make certain that you really wanted whatever was being offered and not just “people pleasing” — and a slow ramp up of general arousal. When I was younger I’d been to grimy video stores just outside Times Square, poorly lit Vegas clubs with porn blasting from TVs in the corners, and bathroom glory holes. This was the first time that I had been in a space intended to facilitate sex without facilitating shame. Even though it did not evolve into the hedonistic bacchanal of HBO fantasy I was able to connect to several people of several genders for authentic, mutual pleasure. And in case you were curious: yes, some things really are bigger in Texas.