Still Life and Live Painting

"Is that the Whiskey Bar back there?" I asked the only other guy to turn up at the wrought iron gate leading to an alley behind the bar I'd found locked earlier.

"Yeah. You don't go in this way though. The front doors open at ten."

"I see."

Someone had told me the event began at nine, so arriving a half hour late to convey a casual attitude was now arriving a half hour early, conveying the bored desperation of a loner, or revealing it, if you want the truth.

We talked for a bit; he seemed to take me for just another regular or would-be regular. Doesn't he see how old I am? Probably, but not just how old. But one thing about Portland, it's less weird here for someone my age to show up at a club. At least I think so, and have been told as much; I haven't any real frame of reference. I hadn't been out to a proper nightclub in over a decade, I surmised.

"Wednesdays are a little weird." He said.

"I don't know. A friend of a friend is doing some thing here, so I came out. I thought it started at nine."

Turned out he was one of the artists for the live-painting event.

"So you know Tasha, then?"

"A friend of hers from work. I've never been here before." I don't know why I felt the need to explain myself.

Another guy showed up, a friend of the first. He immediately starts in about his new tattoo, a calf-job under a sheen of Vaseline. He doesn't know how many tattoos he has. Maybe forty. More and more people claim to have lost count.

"I have no ink." I confess at some point. I've been talking to the second guy as if I belong here--he has no idea who I am and takes it for granted. Turns out he's another one of the artists; he's the third. I help him carry his stuff--an unremarkable pattern on a canvas with which I assume he's going to do something interesting, some effect-lights, materials. I skip the cover charge by playing roadie like this.

"You need a stamp." The first artist said, just after I had decided I would go back up front and do this, and that it would be a good move, for which I would now get no credit.

He doesn't know how to take me, I can tell. No one does. But I'm more at ease having established rapport already, and with two of the performers, such as they were. The place is nearly empty, and that's just as well, too; the music is typical current club dance music, which I have no ability to categorize. Even when I stayed current with electronic music years ago I could not, would not, bring myself up to speed on the categories. I could not tell jungle from house, and still can't. Drum and bass is easy enough, though I don't really understand that it's all built around the "amen chorus". I recognize it when I hear it. The music is as seductive as it is idiotic, throbbing through the empty club.

About a half hour in the turnout was looking to be poor for the night. A pair in animal pajamas danced at one end of the floor, a guy who looked to be in his thirties, wearing a warm-up jacket is doing break-dance moves at the other.

The friend who invited me showed up. She's young, very young. Immediately it's awkward. I had expected a full house: I would see her, maybe not right away, we'd chat a little and that would be it. I would see her a couple of times more in the evening, have the friendly, shallow exchange I was good at, and that would be it. Now, here I am, having arrived early, the place is empty and she can't escape me, maybe she didn't even expect me to show up in the first place. To top it off I went in for a hug, that she did not intend, awkwardly and all but forcing it on her, spilling my beer in the process. I feel compelled to mention the awkwardness. But it's okay. I tell her I've been hanging out with the artists, maybe that will help. It's okay. I'm not a stalker! I'm not a weirdo! She shuffles off with an apologetic air.

Later I see her at the bar and recover somewhat. It's all like a journey back in time; nothing has changed from the days when all this meant something. Nothing is on the line now--I'm just trying to get out of the house--but it feels more fraught than ever. Just like years ago, in my head it's a campaign of reverses, advances, uncertain meanings, like a war with an opponent who may not even care that one's being waged. Nothing changes, even after everything has changed.

The friend of a friend shows up later--I do not know her well--and there's a quick embrace. She sees it; good, see, I'm not a stalker! I'm not a weirdo! I just don't know how to act. I never learned how to act--that is I don't know how to behave--I'm acting all the time, even when I'm alone. Was it still the goal--was it ever the goal--behind all of this, "going out", meeting people, love, sex, relationships, that one should meet someone with whom they no longer had to act? Or was it just me? I don't think I had even the good sense to pursue that hopeless goal with real conviction. If it happened, it happened, I thought, as I thought about everything else. Whatever the case, I never found it.

The first two artists made desultory and indistinguishable changes to the mostly complete canvases they brought in; there was no relation to the music. I had seen something years ago on television where a guy did a quick painting of Jimi Hendrix to a playing of some Hendrix standard (probably "Purple Haze"); by the time the song's over he's finished. I had thought this would be something like that, gimmicky as it was it would be worth seeing. Tasha does much better, opening up a sketch book and improvising ink-drawings from scratch, showing more talent and imagination than the other two.

The place never filled up, but that's okay; I got to talk to a young beautiful woman for much of the night. It's also okay she had nothing better to do and I served as a sort of backstop to a disappointing evening. She tells me all about herself, the way people do to half-strangers; I don't know. I'm consumed with how I'm perceived by everyone, right now it's this person who in a few short months will be gone from my life like countless other people I never really got to know. They so outnumber the true intimates, who are so few and precious, that any single one of them--this charming, beautiful, messed up kid whose only interest for me lies in this selfish need--feels like a dread weight I can no longer carry. I wonder if this is cause or effect of my solitary life.

 She invited me to hang out with some of the other youngsters after, but I thought it would be better to quit while I was ahead. Later I excused myself and fumbled the goodnight, just as I fumbled the hello, knowing the quick hug was probably out, but the awareness of it was there in the air. I don't even like the quick hug routine so much--I just don't know how to act.

I spent the next day in a typical psychological funk--a day shorter than last time--ruminating over how I came off, how pathetic it is that I care, how it probably means nothing to these other people whose image of me is so important and so meaningless at the same time. Plus ca change.

But I will get out of the house more, and drink less.

 

Punk and Politics

I was at the bar at Kelly's Olympian in downtown Portland for three pints of Irish stout before I realized the leftist fundraiser in the next room was already in progress. Unaware of the live show annex next door, I had thought they were going to set up somewhere in the back of the bar. Why I didn't take note of the muffled, loud, obviously live music coming through the wall is just my oblivious nature. I walk about in a bubble; my consciousness barely extends beyond arm's reach even, or especially, when I'm out. But I still long to get out, even if only to trade escaping myself for escaping other people. Sometimes you long to be alone in the midst of the crowd, if only to fool yourself that you're not really alone.

On the televisions at the bar it's all sports, you wouldn't even know it was Oscar night. I'm in that awkward limbo of waiting for someone and feeling as if I need to justify my presence to people who are barely taking notice of me. The bar is unpretentious enough. Occasionally I can't help but look at the television in front of me showing professional basketball. The players look more alien than ever, radiating the same dull and sullen hostility I recall, and though I can't hear it, I know the announcer's repartee is an incongruous, oblivious counterpart of white earnest cluelessness. Baseball is available at the other end of the bar for a dignified alternative, but I'm intent on not sitting here watching television, so I keep looking around, looking to the door, smiling at the waitresses.

After figuring out the show was already in progress I waited through a few more songs before seeking it out. The show was almost over so the Nice White Lady at the door waved me in.

I went inside to find a tight middle-aged punk band playing for maybe a dozen people. They later claimed to have raised a couple hundred for the ACLU.

The angry refrain: "our town", presumably intended for Donald Trump and reactionaries like me, makes the only discernible lyric. I imagine the song might as easily as not be something from their past initially intended to parody the territorialism of working class whites, now being repurposed to rage against the intrusion of Trump and his working class white support.

Territorialism is very much a feature of the politics and culture of the city now. I'm welcome as long as I keep my mouth, mostly, shut. But that's okay. I'm not a proselyte. I'm a witness.

Tonight it's a "live painting" at the Whiskey Bar. Should be interesting.

 Tomoki Martens plays the violin across from the downtown library in Portland Oregon.

Portland

Police will only say robbery suspect Quanice Hayes had a replica gun on him when he was shot three times and killed earlier this month. A grand jury gets another two weeks to decide. This protest was on the 16th.

Diary, February 9, 2017; Bittersweet Decay

The girls from work are all young and pretty, and in various stages of wreckage. Taylor is delicately featured, pale, a classic red head except for the not quite red hair. She's done up too much, with the excessive eye liner and dark red lipstick that is a current, unfortunate fashion; it cannot overcome her natural beauty, which bleeds through with all the bloom of youth. I suggest a trace of her Indian ancestry in her high cheekbones, complimenting her, taking advantage in the presumed harmlessness of my age what I wouldn't have dared as easily as a young man, always perceived as being on the make. The worst part is I am harmless. She had been talking about a Native American great grandmother down the line, maybe I'm indulging the flattery too much there, but it's okay, she's genuinely beautiful, tragically, hopelessly beautiful, all for naught.

She's one of these girls you think don't know they're beautiful, you hope she doesn't, but she probably just isn't at peace with it; she's admirably not in control of it--despite the make-up. And all the young girls look better without the war paint; but I won't tell them. It's no use. She has no chance either way, she's too frail, too delicate; none of us do. I can see the brief grace of flowering youth just burning out of her, I can see it evaporating with the alcohol fumes in the haze of smoke and the godawful vape mist, but not dissipating, not yet, like some short-lived nuclear reactor inside is still outpacing the awful, relentless wasting away of time, burning itself out with indifferent, mystical precision.

 I can only think it is good to be young and to go any farther in trying to describe it, why it is good, or how it is good. is not just pointless but wrong somehow. At any rate I cannot bear that it will not last, and despite that something sadder still, I think, that if it did last it would no longer be good--there is nothing for it but to avoid these too melancholy reflections on it. To not look upon beauty without despair gets harder as we age and soften; it just comes through more piercingly as you near your end. Everything else fades away with you.

Youthful ardor obscures somehow, even in intimacy, just what you're up against. That too may be a necessity. But I can't help wishing we were in simpler times, and they weren't awash in options, and the boys too--that they might make honest men and women of each other. That these kids represent a generation; it's too much to bear. I don't know how we will reclaim them, but we have to, somehow, for tradition, for the future.

 I have been drinking. I rarely drink, especially now, but I can put it away like my torso is just a hollow cask; I don't know where it goes. Some of the young guys are crashed out here and there, and I just keep going. I should leave, I think, I don't belong here, but I don't want to go. I take my harmonica over by the decks--they're dj's here--and I'm playing along. It sounds amazing; I'm finding the right key by accident, somehow, maybe it's the alcohol. I don't really know how to play but I can fake it, and I'm lost in the music, and the dj approves, he likes it; it's pure joy for a while, but I won't play too long. People are watching, I'm putting on a show, it's like a fantasy I have of playing an instrument on stage--always a great music lover, never able to play a musical instrument--and it's good but I don't want to overdo it, so I don't go on too long.

And somehow I can just keep drinking. Until I wear out from exhaustion I only get more sharply gregarious, too much really. I hope I'm not boring anyone; my conversation is way over their heads, my best stuff wasted. I'm wasted. Occasionally one of the guys falls apart, trying to sound smart, or cool; they don't know how to take me. They're in worse shape than the girls, even: they have to put on a front. It's so important to be interesting; I try to make small talk and find them uneasy; they can't talk about themselves. They just fall apart trying to sound interesting. I don't care; I'm not so interested in them--I don't know how to take them. They're incapable of jesting self-deprecation. They're hopeless; there's nothing I can do for them. But the girls, they break my heart.

I'm thinking about what it means, about countless kids like this living like this--I'm a hypocrite, for I might be right there alongside them if I was young, and I mourn for my own lost decadence along with their lost innocence. But none of us know what's good for us, until it's too late.

And then it's over.

Diary, January 19, 2017

The weather improved just in time for Portland's first scheduled anti-Inauguration protests, having gone from sub-freezing cold snap (the last three days have been the first days above freezing this year) to warming just enough to turn the precipitation into cold, sometimes freezing, rain, then today easing up to cool but dry, even sunny at times. I went downtown to witness the only protest I could find scheduled. Students from Portland State University were to march from the school's campus at the south end of downtown to Pioneer Courthouse Square a few blocks north, where they would speak against the nomination of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

A few people milled around waiting, mostly curious civilians like myself, for the scheduled four o'clock beginning. Sometime after four enough had gathered, arriving alone or in small groups rather than in a marching body, to begin. The specific reason for this particular protest was the nomination of Betsy Devos, charter school advocate, for Secretary of Education. Eventually a quorum was reached and people began making speeches with a bullhorn. I was watching a young woman try to excite the crowd with a little call and response, a black man approached and struck up a conversation.

He was heavyset and unremarkable looking; he could have fallen into any category, but the moment he began speaking I read him, with relief, as what some--certainly not me--would describe as a nerd. I was relieved he wasn't crazy--though I suspected still he was at the least flaky--or, I soon realized, a lefty. I didn't reveal myself right away as he cautiously sounded me out with some mild criticism of what was being said. Finally he just excused himself before asking me where I stood.
"Well, I'm definitely not with them." I said, indicating the protesters, still not entirely sure about him. The way thus cleared, he started in on a sort of running critique of the protesters and the whole "resistance". At some point I realized I had seen him before at a pro-Trump rally last May that was disrupted by anti-Trump protesters with noisemakers and sirens. He's a Trump supporter. He proceeded to impress me with his range of knowledge of current affairs. Good guy, maybe a little flaky. Just like me.

The protest was a bit of a dud. The real action is expected tomorrow. Business and the city's light rail are shutting down in anticipation. I shall be out there. No getting arrested this time.

Diary: "Bernie, Bro!"

The James Cromwell-lookalike with the siren spent a good hour following around and drowning out pro-Trump speakers (for a frail old player he was effective boxing out in the Paint, I mean Hate). I broke away from him here and from across the square I see this guy heckling Trumpenproles and I can't help but mess with him. I didn't even realize the extent to which we were talking past each other there until watching this later.

I don't know that he and his friend there count as true Bernie Bros. They were bystanders, not involved in the counter protests. I think the first kid was trying to describe himself as a nihilist.
I'll lift my response from the Big Lebowski, wherein the Dude, seeing a man passed out in a cuckold's luxurious swimming pool, empty fifth floating alongside, described as a "nihilist": that must be exhausting.

Things were starting to get more hectic at this point, so I turn into a sputtering prick. Re-watching this I have to suspect I start stuttering and making no sense precisely at the point I say "Israel" because I'm chickening out. A few people were gathering around, fixated on what I was saying. I was flattered. I don't even care if they thought I was nuts. But the looks on their faces didn't suggest that. They suggested something else. I mean, we've got people ranting on the street here everyday. This was something different.

So here I am standing in my town's central square raving about the myth of terrorism and Israel. I always knew it would end this way.

I'll manage it better next time.

Diary: Yesterday Afternoon

A tall man standing in front of Mary's strip club steps purposely to the curb and leans into an automobile grill. As if he's trying to be heard through a hole in a wall he shouts, no, screams into the car's impassive plastic faux-metalwork.
I head upstairs. The wood steps feel solid but still creak plaintively underfoot, even if you step lightly. All day like this, I think, this desiccated wood pleading for the fire under the plodding feet of junkies, addicts, head cases and those just-in or just-out of homelessness. For them this is home. And I can just make out the man out the street, screaming again.
I come back out and the man has resumed his position against the wall between the club and the motel. He's standing still but somehow you can just see the familiar manic energy--of the long term homeless crazy--coursing through him under the old army jacket he fills out no better than a coat hanger. Maybe he's not that, maybe I'm wrong. Why was he screaming into the car grill after all? To mute the sound, that's all. And it is an ideal sound attenuator! The face of a car's radiator, with it's countless cataracts formed in thin metal, the vibration-absorbing liquid behind it; it's as if it's designed for the purpose, right down to the box of contained air formed between radiator and the narrow slat in the grill through which he--thoughtful, resourceful madman--directed the barely controlled wail of his profound, building misery.
And I'm off down the street.

Diary: Fragmentary Life

I passed a man and his young son on the street. I turned to look and caught a glimpse of the boy looking up at his father, having asked him something, with a look that was all trust and expectation. Nothing profound, nothing special; the scene was commonplace. But so much was told on his face, of how much he depended on this man, how much he respected him, loved him; how much a mystery this towering figure--just some guy on the street!--is to him. You can spot a loving father a mile away. I see them all the time. They haven't a chance. Some of them know it. They can't help but be committed, tireless, against all evidence. Some even understand--how can one not, in this day and age?--how ultimately futile their efforts at nurture are. Not that it would matter; you could prove beyond a doubt that every effort of theirs is pointless, that all is for naught, and they'd go on, holding hands, pulling up trousers, patiently answering questions.

You get these glimpses of other people sometimes that are too close for comfort. It's as if you've stumbled into their homes. But they don't know; I try not to look too closely at other people. I can go all day in public without making eye contact. I try to remedy it by looking directly at them sometimes. I can be very charming sometimes; I surprise myself. If it's this easy, why don't I just do it?

I'm interested in people; I'm always looking for something in them that will surprise me. But I'm mortified by the prospect of intruding on them, so I mind my own business. Still, you can't help it sometimes; people intrude on you, wandering into your line of sight. You can't spend your day looking at the ground--it's been a bad habit of mine since childhood, to walk with eyes to the ground. But I instinctively don't look people in the eye. In the city I'm often looking up--over the heads of people. You can do that in the city. I've always had a problem with other people, with relating to them. But I love the idea of people. I only now realize these things are related. It's so much easier to appreciate people in the abstract than to love them in person. I like to walk the city streets to be among the crowd, but I rarely engage anyone. But then, who does?

But here was this little guy, an awkward kid, scrawny, sensitive, heartrendingly earnest; it was all there on his face. With no idea what's really in store for him. But no; he has to have some idea what's in store. He can sense what's coming, and that sense is getting clearer along with the progress of aging, crystallizing into realization. Childhood is all premonition and foreboding and, maybe, hope. No one ever remembers the precise moment he learned what death is--do they? I don't. It's as if the understanding was always there, gradually taking form with the same inexorable, unceasing certainty of the physical growth and decline of which it is a part. The precise moment you understood death, that you came to know it, can't be pinpointed because it doesn't exist.

Everything outside the small world of a child is mysterious and grotesque, enticing and terrifying at the same time. You graduate into the once mysterious world of the adult beyond, and realize how vast childhood was after all. For all its greater dimensions, possibilities and dangers, adulthood is small, constrained and contained, its boundaries too early known, too early they become depressingly familiar. Speaking for myself, solace from this can only be found by turning within, and there I rattle around inside my psyche, tinkering like a hobbyist, fashioning rationales, molding denials, tricking out fantastic scenarios. I kid myself that I'm not like everyone else; I kid myself that I'm just like everyone else, as the moment requires.

I confess: I've imagined alternate lives, the life I could have led, should have led. It's always better than this one. But then, just as the madman is always a reincarnated Napoleon, not a reincarnated Nobody, these other lives are better, more fruitful, more pleasing--I'm better. I can imagine these alternate Dennises do exist, right now, in neverending variation, an endless hall of mirrors out there, redeeming this dull life, this squandered potential, these venal sins. That moment, that deja vu moment we all have, when your life suddenly feels unfamiliar and alien and you find yourself tripped up and you think, like the song says, well, how did I get here?--maybe that's the glitch-in-the-Matrix moment when you come too near on some dimensional plane to one of your alternate selves. Your frequency is momentarily lost to the interference.

I should imagine how much worse life could have been, as a sort of therapy. I mean, in my imagination I'm out here in the foggy ether of all possible realities, and the bottom is no more visible than the ceiling. But what would be the point? What I need is what we all need, what we can never have: to escape myself. Intoxication, meditation, medication, various obsessions: all these are means of momentary, simulated escape. I don't disapprove, even if I don't indulge myself in any of these, at least not any more.

When you're a kid you think, hopefully, that you're going to know things. This, I thought, was the true measure of a man. A man knew things. Cruder souls sought to acquire things. "He who dies with the most toys..." At least I thought knowing was my aspiration. He who dies with the most knowledge. But I'm lazy; I'm always content to know just enough. I stop short; "okay I get it" I tell myself with a shrug, and interest evaporates. The moment I pick up a thing is the moment just before I lose all interest in it. But knowing is not everything. Knowledge can only reduce the world--down to formula, predictability, measure ever more precise. Mystery is boundless. But you can't fake mystery. People try. People are driving themselves mad right now, everywhere, trying to conjure up mystery and resuscitate wonder lost to maturity. Should I have sought "enlightenment"? I don't know what that means. I should have been a man of action, I tell myself. Ha! I wish. I envy these men, respect them, but I do not understand them. I am another species entire--but what species am I then, I keep asking myself. I honestly don't know.

So I couldn't help but be moved by the sight of the boy. And I don't think it has anything really to do with my own lack of a relationship to my own father--that was the last thing on my mind. It had everything to do with my relationship to my daughter, now grown; to that relationship lost, that position, as someone else's towering figure, lost. Lost not in a flash but in a bittersweet, gradual dissolve; every parent is fated to diminish in his child's eyes. I envy no one more than the young parents of young children. That I couldn't see the beauty of it when I was young, that parenthood had to happen to me by accident, is less a shame than a mystery.

Diary: Leering Arabs

At the University downtown school is back in. Groups of young people are everywhere on the street, moving furniture, some carrying bedding, as they move into the apartments near the school. As I cross the street I'm cut off by a distracted driver in an SUV pulling up to the far curb in front of one of the student apartment buildings. I go around behind him and pass him on the sidewalk to his left, before changing my mind and turning around to go the other way. As I pass the car I hear the driver from inside calling, with a Middle Eastern accent:
"Hey. Hey you!"
Great, I think; this asshole is starting trouble, after I was so gracious in not so much as giving him a second glance after he cut me off. I stop and approach the lowered passenger side window, ready for whatever--there's only one of him, at least. I lean toward the car and he says:
"No. Not you."
I look the other way and see two young girls, attractive, lively, utterly oblivious to me and the skeevy looking Arab in the car's shadowy interior.
"You. Hey you. You want a ride?" He calls out. They don't even seem to see him, as they move off in the other direction. I move along myself, thinking, would it really be such a bad thing if I was to drag him from the car and give him a lashing (assuming I could pull it off )? Is "stay away from our women" really such a bad sentiment? Is it really bad for women?

When I lived in California I used to joke that I wanted to start a band called Leering Mexicans. People, even Mexicans, got the joke. The leering Hispanic would-be street-suitor is a commonplace in Southern California; it's a commonplace here in the Northwest now--I recall once experiencing revulsion at the sight of a Hispanic man in a car who appeared to be in his thirties making a gesture with his mouth--that I can only compare to what Hannibal Lecter does after that ridiculous "...fava beans and a nice Chianti" line--in the direction of two girls on the street who looked to be barely out of middle school. He did it in the same instinctive way I've noticed cats call out to birds (and the expression was very similar):




But this is Portland now. Young vulgarian Muslims and others (make that Others, capital O) mingle with tattooed, decadent American youths.

Diary: As a Christian

Storefront Preaching

Diary: Desperately Seeking Stalker

Portland State University is scattered across the city's downtown. I pulled my car up to the point where a city street ends and the school begins, at a stop sign beyond which only foot traffic is allowed. I was leaning against the front of my car waiting for someone and looking out over a near empty square; here and there were lone souls or pairs walking, students heading back to their dorms.

A pair seemed to announce themselves from across the expanse by their purposeful bearing. They were making for me. They wore long, form-fitting gowns; one tall and slender and the other all boxy, sharp angles, like a cardboard cutout slipped into a sheer gown. Encumbered about the legs by their close-fitting skirts, they took short, swiveling steps. The tall one seemed to float along in a ghoul-grey number, while the other telegraphed a subordinate status with clumsy, mincing steps. What could they possibly want?

"Why are you following us?" Asked the tall one, revealing as he came near a full beard of short, fine dark hair--the sort that looks painted on. He had a Mediterranean complexion and long hair; he looked very much like the bearded transsexual who won last year's Eurovision contest. His companion eyed me with confusion; I couldn't tell if he was embarrassed or fearful of me.
"Excuse me?"
"You've been following us all night."
I laughed with the same humoring condescension I employ when addressed by the occasional street crazy. It's a skill you learn and refine over time without thought; to give neither cause for offense nor the taking of further liberties. It helps to signal craziness of your own; let them think you're the unpredictable one. If you have any size advantage you should use it; lower the chin and level the gaze while squaring up to the subject, as if ready to fight. But let your words contradict this posture: smile affably and return their idiotic comments in kind. Street crazies are some of the most rational actors out there, relying a great deal on the good citizen's confusion and fear of Crazy. They are continually sizing you up as a potential mark, and almost always bluffing their own prowess or capacity for chaos. Keep them out of arm's reach and bluff them back and they usually slink away. Predators seek the easier prey.

But these two were harmless, even as the tall one towered over me like a comic wraith. He had it in his mind that I was stalking them--they had seen my car earlier in the evening, as I had been back and forth between the school and work all night. They were positively enlivened by the prospect that this middle-aged man was tailing them, for God knows what purpose. Now I was pissed.

"When is this going to end?" Tall Boy challenged.
"As soon as you walk away." I said. Looking down at the shorter one's feet painfully pinched into his heels, and turning to answer my phone I couldn't help adding, "if you think you can manage it."

"You should know we're going to report this."
"By all means." I said. Eventually they moved on. Later I imagined myself getting caught up in some great scandalous misunderstanding, having provided these two with their very own psycho-political drama; they would be victims of trans-phobia, hounded by a cis-gendered straight right-winger. Old blog posts of mine would reveal me for the racist I am. I would be fodder for the cause. It would be Hitchcock meets Tom Wolfe.
So there I was, just like my new adversaries, fantasizing my own heroic victimization. None are sane in the asylum.