My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

The Western Seaboard misses me. Those whales are trying to find the Eastern Passage and bring me back. I appreciate the efforts, but I’ll be back soon enough. It’s been a great visit. The weather is perfect, and the bugs haven’t hatched yet. Well, I did find one little tick crawling up my shin, but since it hadn’t bitten me yet, I won’t count that.

Coming home to New Hampshire always puts me in a bad mood. I see all the new houses in the apple fields I used to know and think, “That’s an ugly square with a stupid triangle on top of it.”

My mom is hiring a guy to mow the yard this summer.

“We pay for 20 visits, and if due to rain, there’s less, we’re shit out of luck,” she said. She swears about once a day, either hell, shit or damn. But that phrase stuck in my mind. Shit out of luck. I tried to write a country song about it last night in bed. Too much caffiene, couldn’t sleep. All we do around the Rolston’s is put another pot on. Throw ice in the old stuff and drink it with cream and sugar while the fresh stuff brews. Take the hot stuff black. Repeat.

Shit out of luck,
but not stopping

put a bottle in your coat
and keep walking

that’s all I could get.

if you walk a mile in their shoes
before you condemn
you’ll have their shoes and be
a mile from them.

I made a rhyme out of that little phrase I read somewhere.

My dad is down in Peru right now, helping his Rotary Club who sponsored a group of doctors who are down there operating on poor people with cleft palates and in need of plastic/reconstructive surgery. One guy had lost his nose after an infection from a spider bite in the Amazon. Hopefully Pop will be sending some photos so we can all get a better idea of what life is like for those folks.

My Grandmother is in great spirits, and is so calm and happy. She asks about how the orchid is on my aunt’s windowsill, and tells stories about some of the old stores in downtown Portsmouth. Just everyday stuff. She is terminal. When I was young and in college I would get drunk and talk about things that “really mattered”: politics, art, ghosts, god.

Things change as you get older. She perks up when she sees squirrels outside the window, and laughs at their efforts to shake birdseed out of the feeder.

Sunday I stopped by my cousin’s house and he was burning a pile of brush in the back yard. As the sun went down the crickets started up and the sky was clear and the fire snapped and licked up the brush. His son came out, he’s three or four, and peed at the edge of the woods. He stood there with his pants to his ankles and used both hands to hold his shirt way up, and yelled over to let us know what he was doing.

“Good job Nate,” Jeremy told him. I don’t get that cycle of life in San Francisco, because I don’t have family out there. It’s nice to come back and see.

Yet, San Francisco is where I feel comfortable. Just last week I had a job cleaning out the basement of a lesbian couple’s Victorian in the Castro. They were so happy I showed up on time and did a good job.

“It’s so nice to have someone normal!” she said. Which struck me speechless. I don’t know if I’ve ever been called normal in New Hampshire. Ever.

“Normal as they get in S.F.” I told her. She was right. I’m pretty normal out there. At the junk mail factory there is a woman I worked with who is now a man, with a beard and two sleeves of tattoos that start at the wrist and disappear under his work shirt. Once you’ve met two or three people like that, find out later they were once biologically different and you didn’t know, you start to understand the spectrum of potential. That angsty college discussion about what normal is now has real life destroying the arguments.

an old Ghetto Boys rhyme comes to mind…

shit out of luck
stuck in Cal-fuck
thumbs up to those who down with us

So Gram, Jeremy, the transgendered dock workers at the junk mail factory, all of you who kept reading this far…thumbs up to you