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horizontal with lila

125. like a vagina wrapped around a pole: quickie with a bisexual femme poet ladyboss

in quickies on 14/03/21

LA in the photobooth at horizontal storytelling: the summer pride edition, June 2019. Image by Loz Photography


125. like a vagina wrapped around a pole: quickie with a bisexual femme poet ladyboss

Hello my horizontal lovers, my intimacy investigators, my horizontalists! horizontal is the podcast about sex, love, & relationships of all kinds, recorded while lying down, and usually, while wearing robes. If you’ve listened to either one of my ‘between two wizard’ episodes, 85. well-hung psychedelic sex wizard / no hookups or 86.

LA:  Sleepovers become really big in high school and we just love to paint our nails and eat snacks late at night and drink like — did anyone else drink like, a thousand sodas every night when you had a sleepover? (the audience titters) Like, how did we drink so many sodas, like, why do I still have teeth? (the audience laughs) […] So we’re drinking a lot of sodas and, finally, I make a couple friends who are not just in my church group. A couple girls that are more into sports, more into math and science, a little more substance to them than just, you know, highlights and manicures, and, one girl in particular really stood out to me. She was a, kinda like mean, bully sort. She was like, captain of the water polo team. She was Chinese by immigrant parents, they were kind of, really intense, so she was really into school and really into sports, and so funny, like, she was a breath of fresh air with my kind of conservative, whatever this is, group of friends. One day, we went to the bathroom at lunch, and, I don’t know how or why this even came up. There was no one else in the bathroom, it was one of those like, weird avocado green bathrooms with like the stalls, you know. And, she just, shoves me up against the, stall … and, is like, putting her hands all over my body! And just like, holding me there, with this intense, water polo bitch energy. (a moment, then the audience cracks up) And she, she looks me in the eye, and she whispers in my ear, “I’m gonna fuck you.” (and the crowd goes wild)



Hello my horizontal lovers, my intimacy investigators, my horizontalists!

horizontal is the podcast about sex, love, & relationships of all kinds, recorded while lying down, and usually, while wearing robes.

If you’ve listened to either one of my ‘between two wizard’ episodes:

85. well-hung psychedelic sex wizard / no hookups

or

86. you’re trying to porn sex me

or my most magical recent horizontal mashup episodes:

123. this ritual is horizontal

or

124. this horizontal is a ritual

you’ve become acquainted with my Wizard friend, Devin Person.

Because no one meets a Wizard by accident…


During both of our horizontal recordings (one in-person, in his former wizard bed in Greenpoint, Brooklyn…

About to record episodes 85 & 86 in said Wizard bed in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The Before Times. May 2019


…and the other virtual, mediated by the magic of the interwebz, between Louisville, Kentucky, and Canggu, Bali, Indonesia) a remarkable fact about his relationship surfaced: he and his partner (now fiancé) don’t text. Ever. It’s one of their cherished relationship agreements, a social norm within the co-creation of their dyad. They just don’t text. If they want to communicate with one another, they need to actually pick up the phone, and dial their partner.

Well, that fiancé he doesn’t text with… is our storyteller today.

I’m pretty sure this is when Devin & LA first met. They met so cute. Right, LA?


Typically on horizontal, each conversation is between 3 and 5 hours long and divided into two to four parts. The former half is available for horizontalists everywhere, and the latter half is available exclusively to patrons of the horizontal arts. With few exceptions, our conversations are languorous and long-form, as though post-coital, or stargazing, or staring out onto the open road in the wee hours of a very long road trip.

I consider it consensual eavesdropping.

When you become a patron you receive a key to the horizontal city, unlocking access to over 50 exclusive episodes.

Become a Patron!

You must click on that link directly, because sex-positive creators are still in quite a bind with social media these days. You can’t just go to Patreon and search my name, or the name of my show, because the search engine pretends all of its mature content doesn’t exist! I guess that makes Patreon sort of like the boyfriend who doesn’t want the world to know that we are dating, but it is the best crowdsourcing subscription service that I know at this moment. So. I take it as an indicator of just how far we still need to go to eradicate sex-negativity, stigma, shame, and taboo.

Your patronage helps keep horizontal independent and uncensored, as well as unlocking access to all the part twos, the secret patrons Facebook group, & Intimacy Tips videos (like last month’s “Aftermath of a Fight or Regrettable Incident”)!

Usually, my Patreon tiers begin at $7 per month, but this month I’ve opened up ten $5 a month spots for access to The Full Horizontal. Two spots already got snagged before this announcement, so as of this recording there are 8 left. Claim one, and all the horizontality shall be yours.

At the end of each long-form recording, I ask my guest to tell me a story. It can be any tale that falls under the broad umbrella of intimacy. My only requirement is that they have a burning desire to share it with me. Because these stories usually take place in the part twos (or fours) of our recordings, most of you horizontalists never get to hear such tales as:

being carried down a mountain on the shoulders of a hunky guide,

or

donating your father’s body to science and then insisting on a connection with the medical students who studied him,

or

getting married every year — to the same person.

Occasionally, in pre-pandemic times, I’d host horizontal storytelling pajama parties. My launch party in May of 2017 was a pajama party! This quickie was recorded live during Pride Month in June 2019 at horizontal storytelling: the summer pride edition. 

Witness the glory (and rainbow undies!) of the horizontal storytelling pajama party: summer pride edition


We all donned rainbow pajamas, noshed on milk and cookies, and curled up together, horizontally, all 50 of us, to listen to the tales of five storytellers from across the LGBTQIA+ community, one after the other after the other.

This. Is LAMARKS.

In this particular quickie, I lie down with Lisa Ann Markuson, also known as LAMARKS, queer cis femme bisexual woman boss, founder + CEO of creative agency Ars Poetica, (which provides, among other things, experiential poetic entertainment for events and happenings). Her woman-owned, inclusive and sustainable business model celebrates the multitalented nature of her artists across entertainment, activist, consulting, and literary landscapes.

She was the co-host, along with Taz, of the National Poetry Month podcast, A Daily Dose of Poetry. I appeared on the show as their April 18th guest, and they wrote me poetic prescriptions for what ailed me in my romantic relationship. LA and her 35 artists have written poetry for celebrities & created a series of handmade poetic talismans to benefit Planned Parenthood.

You can find her, and them, on the interwebz at @arspoetica.us on Instagram.

Come lie down with us at a pajama party in the before-time, at Hacienda Studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, as LA tells us a tale titled, “In Fact, a Switch Hitter.”

horizontal with LA Marks at horizontal storytelling: the summer pride edition. June 2019. Image by Loz Photography


Links to Things:

LA’s creative agency, Ars Poetica on Instagram

LA’s Instagram, in which a certain Wizard features prominently

Lila’s April 18th, 2019 appearance on LA’s former podcast, Daily Dose of Poetry

Recording my Daily Dose of Poetry podcast episode with Taz & LA


125. like a vagina wrapped around a pole: quickie with a bisexual femme poet ladyboss

Hello my horizontal lovers, my intimacy investigators, my horizontalists! horizontal is the podcast about sex, love, & relationships of all kinds, recorded while lying down, and usually, while wearing robes. If you’ve listened to either one of my ‘between two wizard’ episodes, 85. well-hung psychedelic sex wizard / no hookups or 86.

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Lila Donnolo

Lila Donnolo is an Intimacy Specialist. Tell Me More…

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horizontalwithlila

Actress. Writer. Podcaster. Lover. Intimacy Specialist … 70+ exclusive podcast episodes for you on Patreon!

Lila
“You make a selfie look like a Titian,” said a “You make a selfie look like a Titian,” said a playwright I admire, after a staged reading I performed in. 

(Thanks Richard Alfredo!)

I’m not the blushing kind, but, I think I blushed?

Before I started this series, way back in the glory days of 2013 (it was the innocent of times, I tell you), I was, well, kind of maybe sort of possibly a tid bit embarrassed by how many self-portraits I took? Nevermind the fact that artists have been their own medium since time immemorial. It’s different when you’re using a cell phone. Right? 

{WHO SAYS.}

I think of the great quote (had to look it up — it’s Chase Jarvis): 

“The best camera is the one you have with you.” 

I’ve never been a Hasselblad-chaser or anything. But I figured I should at least be using my mom’s old Minolta. For street cred. It’s from the 70s! It had an embroidered strap! The lens cap didn’t fit because the metal around the lens was dented! It still is! I still have it! It’s a bonafide film camera. You can feel that. Thing’s chonky. Vintage. Which means. That shit is heavy. I don’t want to carry it in my purse. It won’t even fit in half my purses! So. The best camera I had was my cell phone. It was always with me. 

(And when @thetravelingcreative Fiona taught me to wipe off the “grease filter” each time, it got even better. Fiona has taught me so many things, organizational wizardress that she is. Thanks Fiona!)

Read the rest of the essay (& see those bathroom portraits from 2016) on Substack! The link is in my bio, friend.
Summer & bae 1. Passport Photo Time! 2. She’s Summer & bae

1. Passport Photo Time!

2. She’s an interior decorator now, y’all! (Also, bae’s paintings are world-class! You could buy one!)

3. You can watch the sunset from this deck when you rent my apartment!

4. Last Day of Grief counseling at Suncoast Hospice, or as @mummybites called it, “graduation.”

5. Toastmasters supporting Toastmasters at @schoolcreativityinnovation ‘s immersive piece “Funeral for Someone You Didn’t Know”

6. Loralei Goes To The Beach!

7. A coupla lemons in downtown Safety Harbor

8. Whenever I see pictorial veggies I think of Tanja

9. Can you stand how gorgeous this retro candy apple fridge is?!!

10. This is Myrna.

11. Zach’s paintings in the kitchen!

12. WEIRD AL 

13. I repeat: WEIRD ALLLL!!!!!
The upper limits problem is a concept I learned fr The upper limits problem is a concept I learned from the book Conscious Loving. I tell people about this book. I recommend it to everyone. I buy it for friends. And of the entire book, the parts I continue to re-read are the passages about the upper limits.

The premise of the upper limits problem is this: at some point during our childhood, usually without realizing it, we made a decision about how good we are allowed to feel. We associated feeling good with, pretty much immediately, feeling bad. We were jumping for joy and babbling exuberantly and got told to keep it down; we brought home good grades and were told not to brag, etc. So at this point, most of us (not all of us, but honestly, probably the vast majority of us) created our own personal glass ceiling.

In the book, Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks put it this way: “Starting in childhood, most of us seem to put a lid on our positive energy in order to stay at the humdrum level of existence necessary to function in the workaday world.”

My upper limit is much lower than I’d like it to be. (Still!)

{Cont’d.}

Read the rest of the essay on Substack (link in my bio)!

@officialgayhendricks
Love Letter to Sarasota 1. Feets at the Ringing H Love Letter to Sarasota

1. Feets at the Ringing House mosaic

2. Band photo (band coming soon!)

3. Bathroom Portrait at the Ringling Museum of Art

4. Happy Hour with bae

5. Selfie with the most astonishing circus mural I’ve ever seen

6. Coffee shops are best offices — working on my Substack tiny wins essay @projectcoffee 

7. Always a kiss on the cheek when we selfie

8. Circus Museum!!

9. Backrooms, a movie without a why

10. Closer feets
When I was a kid, I used to win things all the tim When I was a kid, I used to win things all the time. Writing contests, penmanship awards, badges of excellence. (Games of skill, you’ll note, not games of chance.) 

I have no idea if I was able to celebrate any of these wins, because, as you may already know, I have hardly any memories before the age of 12.

I do know that after high school I stopped winning things. Maybe I won a single thing in college (an achievement scholarship for my final year). I went to NYU in New York City, my friend. The place where it happens. Small fishy in biggest pond. And I don’t know if this came into being when I stopped winning stuff, but about 10 years ago I realized that I genuinely did not know how to celebrate. I did not possess the skill of celebration. Or to be precise, I couldn’t feel celebration. In my body. Or anywhere else, really. Not on the inside. Not on the outside. And certainly not in a way that made my cells dance.

[You can read the whole essay — about how I learned to feel joy again — on the horizontal with lila Substack. Link in my bio!]
And even more Chiro office portraits: 1. About to And even more Chiro office portraits:

1. About to visit @jamesmuseum in my @tecovas & my @gigipip 

2. Happy that I finally found the perfect outfit (pants @farmrio collaboration with Adidas) to wear the forest green bomber that @czechmex gave me at my clothing swap years ago! These @l.o.m_design earrings are among my top 5 hero pieces!

3. Feelin’ like a fiesta— skirt is @farmrio / shoes are @unitednude / hairbow & necklace come from happy place treasure trove @riskgalleryboutique in Bushwick, Brooklyn!

4. And she thought she wasn’t a baseball cap person!

5. THIS SCARF from @pookieandsebastian — all I need now is a 1960s stewardess uniform and a Pan-Am bag, baybyyy!

6. Grumpy in sweatsuit #1

7. Grumpy in sweatsuit #2

8. Currently obsessed with majolica & majolica-adjacent designs. Don’t even know how to pronounce it!
Did you ever make a list of the experiences in you Did you ever make a list of the experiences in your life that could (even subliminally) be affecting your behavior to this very day? We did. I found it incredibly powerful.

You can read mine: I called it “trauma with that lowercase t.” 

(The link to my horizontal with lila Substack, where I keep my writing, amongst other bits of expression, is in my bio.)

And if you would like to be witnessed in this, I’d love to read yours too. Send it my way.
Love Letter to Palm Springs Featuring: Enormous Love Letter to Palm Springs

Featuring:

Enormous hat (from Marianne’s of Palm Springs)
The Love of My Life
A Selkie Dress
Street Art
&
A moste excellent scarf (gifted by said love of life)
There is a cure for this crisis of loneliness, and There is a cure for this crisis of loneliness, and it is intimacy, but *only if* we can expand our definition of what intimacy is and can be. […..]

{I’ll show you how to do this! I gave this keynote speech at my dear friend Adam @mindmaprenovations event, Lifelong Learners. You can read the whole transcript and/or watch the full speech on my Substack!}
See that resting frown face on my mom as she slept See that resting frown face on my mom as she slept?

I’ve started to make that same face. I wake from a dream or a doze to find that I’m frowning. I touch my lips to make it stop. After a few moments, I discover that they are making the frown shape again. I can’t make it stop because I’m sleeping when I do it. I’ve started doing it when I’m not sleeping too. When I’m awake, I think it’s a cross between a grimace and a frown. A frimace? (I mean, it can’t be a grown. Or can it?)

I don’t really have that much to frown about anymore, except, I suppose, for the onslaught of fresh horrors perpetrated by the country I live in on the daily, the greed of the few and desperation of the many, the natural disasters that are frequenter and hotter and wetter and gnarlier as the earth continues its job of beginning to shake us off its back… yeah I guess there’s not much to frown about, really. 

I took Mom to FloridaRAMA because she had been complaining for months that she didn’t do anything anymore. She mentioned concerts, plays, ballets. But by the time the sun went down, she would be sundowning and wouldn’t want to go anywhere anyway. So that afternoon I decided to pick her up and take her on an outing — which was always a pain in the ass, and especially a pain in the ass to do solo. It involved going to her room and making sure she was dressed, convincing her to get dressed if she wasn’t, which was a laborious process, insisting that we needed to take the wheelchair which of course we did because she was falling all the time and brachiating (holding onto walls and less sturdy things like chairs, tables — at least, some nurse told me that this is what it’s called but the internet seems to only relate it to apes swinging from their arms to get from place to place) […]

Continued on horizontalwithlila dot substack dot com (the link is in my bio)
In the bathroom of the Italian restaurant after Da In the bathroom of the Italian restaurant after Dad’s cold rainy rural upstate funeral looking like a sad British clown / Nowhere, NY / April 12th, 2025

Right after my father died, there were Anthonys and Tonys everywhere. 

Suddenly everyone was called Tony and everybody else was talking about their Dad or playing songs about death. 

* Passing a girl on the street talking to her friend, and the only words you catch are “My dad had…” 
* Walking into your favorite gluten-free café, and they’re playing the Flaming Lips song “Do You Realize?”

Do you realize / that everyone you know / someday / will die?

* Realizing that the second title for Billy Joel’s song “Movin’ Out” is “Anthony’s Song.” I never truly registered this until I was trying to write one morning in a blessed cacao shop (yes, for real) and I paused to listen to the opener:

Anthony works in the grocery store
Savin’ his pennies for someday

* Ordering fries from the surfer guy at the beach shack on my pilgrimage to the ocean, when his co-worker shouts, “Hey Anthony!”

If you put this stuff in your feature film script, your screenwriting teacher would tell you it’s too pat, too predictable, “don’t put a hat on a hat.” (The Writer!)

It’s like that old quarters experiment on attention… you start looking for quarters on the ground, and suddenly, you see them everywhere.

The drugstores full of Father’s Day crap. Marketing emails about “Dads and grads.” Only one company sent an email that said, Hey, we know that Father’s Day time is tough for some people, so click this to opt out of all Father’s Day related emails.

Click. CLICK!

I wish I could click that link for the universe. No father stuff, please. No Dad shit. But there were quarters everywhere, of course, because the back of my mind was attuned to all things Dad.

{You can read the rest of the essay on Substack. Link in my bio, bb.}
Love Letter to New York, whom I miss so much 1. S Love Letter to New York, whom I miss so much

1. Straight out of a fitting for “The Deuce”?

2. Free Friday at @whitneymuseum 

3. Basquiat makes me feel like home

4. Madison Square Park photo op (irresistible)

5. Candid

6. Got to see the lovely @josescaro & @benbecherny ply their craft at @bricktheater 

7. Charming marquee!

8. Closing night vibes (not pictured: the succulent plant I brought in lieu of flowersof)

9. Chuck Close in the subway!

10. More subway Chuck Close!

11. Man Ray retrospective at the Met

12. Love a good silhouette

13. A rare VERTICAL bathroom portrait in one of the finest bathrooms of them all, at the lovely New Mexican food joint with the rainbow cookies Of My Dreams, @ursula_brooklyn 

14. My man is a photographer too. 🤩

15. Cannot. Resist. Photo Booth.
I wrote a list in 2020 titled “How to love me wh I wrote a list in 2020 titled “How to love me when I’m ... depressed”... and in this essay, I encourage you to write your own version (How to love me when I’m... anxious, How to love me when I’m... burned out, How to love me when I’m... in despair)...

And if you write one, how I would love to read it. (Or even learn about one of the items on your list, here in the comments).

Here’s an excerpt:

 “One of the characteristics of my depression (and most of my other tizzies, such as but not limited to anxiety, severe procrastination, adulting paralysis, etc.) is that while I’m in it I have no idea what — if anything — will help me get out of it.

It’s more like I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE BUT I DON’T KNOW HOW TO GET OUT SO I’LL JUST HIDE UNDER THE COVERS UNTIL I WANT TO DO SOMETHING AGAIN CALL ME IN 6 MONTHS.

Ergo, therefore, if I’m in a state, and you ask me what I need, or what you can do, I may or may not have the wherewithal to tell you. Emphasis on the not. I may not even have the wherewithal to know.

And if I don’t know, how can I tell you?

I can’tdon’t, then.

If I’m not in a state I probably have plenty of things I could say but that’s when I don’t need the help so badly. (A lá it’s not the worst while you can still say the worst.)

As I mentioned in the subtitle: You don’t come with an operator’s manual. Your model came out of the fleshbox with zero instructions. And since no one possesses your operator’s manual, no matter how much they love you, you are going to be the supreme author, the expert on you, since you’ve been studying you your whole life. Please for the love of Pete & Ashleigh, do your people the great good turn of writing them some instructions. Triage options, if you will. Trust me when I say that they (nearly all of them) need it.

If you write it for them, they will have it when you need it.

This little list could, quite without exaggeration, save your life.”

The link to the whole essay is in my bio. (Join me on Substack darling!)

#substack #substackwriter #depressionandanxiety #communityiseverything
Love Letter to St. Pete @stpetefl Where we met, Love Letter to St. Pete @stpetefl 

Where we met, where we re-met ❤️‍🔥

1. An afternoon at @grandcentralbrewhouse with my handsome gentleman in @warbyparker 

2. Bb’s first @nineinchnails concert (okay, technically in Tampa) in @selkie & @viveylife . It was stellar. Trent sounds just like he used to and the projections were gorgeous!

3. Matching denim jumpsuits ( but his is a @onepiece )

4. The finest pizza in all the land (even with my dietary restrictions!) from @noblecrust (OMNOMNOMNOM)

5. He even makes doctor’s appointments fun.

6. I love matching him sooooo muchmuch. 

7. Just us and a zebra, nbd.

8. Theme Park joy

9. At the art show @wadastpete that my gentleman curated for his students. 🪐☄️🛸👽🚀✨
When I was a kid, I used to read myself to sleep. When I was a kid, I used to read myself to sleep. 

Actually, I don’t know when I stopped.

I read myself to sleep in my childhood bedroom, with a flashlight under the covers of a trundle bed (drawers filled to the brim with dress-up clothes) when my mom said it was too late to be awake. I checked out 25 books from the Freeport library at a time, filling the trunk of my parent’s car, and devoured them in weeks, partly from my perch in the flowering dogwood tree in our backyard (were the blooms ivory? or cherry blossom pink?), partly while curled up on an orange-and-yellow-ticked seat cushion I dragged down to the crawlspace in the basement — my “secret hiding spot,” which was neither secret nor hidden and so can only be termed a spot, armed with Oreos and flashlight, and the remainder under the covers before bed.

I suspect I knew more words then than I know now. There are still words like “vehement” that I’m only about 70% sure I know how to pronounce. I learned them in context. I can spell them. I can use them in a sentence! But am I saying them correctly? 

Unsure.

I read myself to sleep in high school, even though I had to get up unconscionably early to get bussed in to my magnet program — Pinellas County Center for the Arts — 35 minutes away from our sad little apartment. Like a magnet, @pcca_gibbs PCCA grabbed young artists from the whole county.

I had a major in high school, which is more usual now, from what I hear, but wasn’t so usual then, and what I majored in was called Performance Theatre (as opposed to Musical Theatre, the love of my life I never thought I was good enough for). 

I really wanted to go to the Fame school in New York — LaGuardia — but when I was 12 my Mom divorced my Dad and forced me to move to Flah-rida. So I went to PCCA instead. (To be honest, she probably wouldn’t have let me commute into the city to go to Fame even if we had stayed on Long Island.) 

Read the whole essay (link to Substack in my bio)!

#booknerdlife #readingforpleasure #readingrainbow
My man and I got our nerd on at @nerdnitestpete ! My man and I got our nerd on at @nerdnitestpete ! 

We had the opportunity to support my lovely, engaging, and compassionate Happiness Ambassador friend Adam Peters aka @mindmaprenovations as he changed some lives by teaching us how to begin developing a preference for positivity. I’ve seen him give this presentation a few times before, and this was the best one yet — and to the biggest crowd, over 300 human nerds!

I love us.

I consider it my sacred duty to paparazzi my friends when they do marvelous things, as I hope to have done unto me!

P.S. Applied to give a Nerd Nite presentation myself … fingers crossed bb’s! 

1. My gentleman is so handsome. (Also, I got this stellar skirt in excellent condition from my favorite thrift store with a cause @casapinellas !)

2. Toasties supporting Toasties! @dtsptoastmasters members: me, Steve Diasio, Dawn Cecil (two-time Nerd Nite Speaker alumni!), & Rick! (Not pictured here — but later in the carousel) Christian Carrasco.

3. Fit check baybeeee.

4. Caryn, Nerd Nite boss extraordinaire, introducing the evening.

5. Caryn introducing my friend Adam (did I yell “THAT’S MY FRIEND!” at the end? WHY YES I DID.)

6-10. Adam rocking the casbah.

11. Fellow Toastmaster Christian.

12. I love mein mann!

#nerdnite #nerdnitestpete
A woman approached me. We collaborated once, a yea A woman approached me. We collaborated once, a year prior, I think. Time is weird. She reached out both her hands.

“What a beautiful mourner you are,” she said.

I took her hands.

I think I said thank you.

She was referring, I suppose, to the gloves, the dress, the shoes, the lipstick, the earrings. 

But what does it mean, to be a beautiful mourner? 
What does it mean to mourn beautifully? 
To have good grief?

“My dad dropped dead,” I said, to get myself used to the shock of it. 

“My mother is dying,” I said, to reconcile myself to the fact of it. 

I don’t wear mascara anymore, because I cry every day.

People hugged me in airports, at rental car counters, in line for a sandwich. They hugged me in the TSA line. At the chiropractor. The grocery store. My father dropped dead, I told them. My mother is dying. I told them and they hugged me. I was glad I did. I was glad they did.

Sometimes, when people were truly asking, if I had the time, and I had the spoons, I repeated my litany of 2025. So they’d understand: it has been this kind of year. It seems that everyone has this kind of year at some point, or, devastatingly, at several points in a life — a maelstrom, a dervish, a crucible, a nexus, a whammy, a time — an Alexander’s-no-good-very-bad-terrible kind of year. 

There were so many months in February. So many years in April. So many decades in the first half of 2025. I didn’t want to become an adult, but 2024 made me, and 2025 sealed the deal. 

It’s amazing I managed to get this far without growing up.

READ the whole essay on Substack
SUBSCRIBE through the link in my bio and make my day, darling 

💋 

#substackwriters #goodgrief
Love in La La Land 1. “So this is where they ke Love in La La Land

1. “So this is where they keep the LIGHT!” -SATC … At our first @lacma member preview, enjoying the majestically empty Geffen galleries before the permanent collections moves in.

2. Urban Light, and me (installation by Chris Burden)

3. A historic view at LACMA, never again to be seen!

4 - 13. Art, mostly part of the Digital Witness exhibit

14. Love at the @gettymuseum 

15. Queer exhibits! 

16. Sunset at the Getty with my love

#museumnerd #lacma #lacmamember #digitalwellness #thegetty #loveinlalaland
For you, when you need it, and for the people in y For you, when you need it, and for the people in your life, when they need it.

Here’s an excerpt from the essay:

[To read the whole thing, follow the link in my bio to my Substack (and subscribe there, darling)!]

My chiropractor called me out a few weeks back. 
He said, with his characteristic smile (he has nice little teeth), “I read your essay.”

“You did? Thank you for reading,” I began, genuinely surprised and moved.

“But I still don’t know what to say!” he admonished. “You only told us what not to say!” 

Then he gave me an enormous cashmere-scented candle in a plastic bag. 

This was not apropos of nothing. I mentioned that scent in the essay. 

That giant cashmere candle, so big it has not one but FOUR wicks, means something. And then he had to go and ruin it. (jk, jk, Dr. Brian!)

“Hang in there,” he said, at the end of our session.

I cringed a liddle. (That’s not a little, not a lot, it’s right in the middle, a liddle.)

But you see, he was completely right! I told him I’d give him a list! I hadn’t given him a list! So I began compiling. Every time someone said a thing that made me wince, it went on the list, which lead to Part 1: What NOT to say when someone dies.

Each time someone said a thing that felt like love, made me farklempt, I took a screenshot, and it went on the list. 

This is the farklempt list.

As I wrote in “what NOT to say,” the useful things people say are fairly varied (and tailored to the griever), while the un-useful things tend to be generic variations on a tired theme.
“what TO say” will be a living document, updated whenever I have something useful, or supremely un-useful, to add. Here we go.
Love in Louisville. 1. Photo credit to my love, Love in Louisville.

1.  Photo credit to my love, Zachary

2.  Selfie with Street Art by the windy, windy river

3.  Horsies! Street Art! (Do you know how much I love murals?!)

4.  Looking like an award-winning art teacher at the art teacher conference (ahem, he is the award-winning art teacher!), wearing a @riskgalleryboutique necklace & big fcking bow!)

5.  A Wizard interlude! What a delight to witness my friend @personisawake absolutely Rock @cm_louisville & inspire a roomful of humans

6.  When your love matches the art. 🖼️ *chef’s kiss*

7 & 8. Major interior design maxi inspo for my ADU reno from @21clouisville by @fallen_fruit 🌺🌷🌸🌻🌼💐🪷

9.  The crayon shirt, bow, and soft rainbow chiclet necklace style brought to you by my inner 6-year old!

#ilovelouisville #wizardry #creativemornings #21clouisville #21c
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