Genesis Exodus
An earlier exploration of grief and medical vulnerability I wrote for my old zine, SCOOP.
I used to make a zine called SCOOP, it was all about poop and the following essay explains its genesis. The zine’s aim was not to be gross, it’s more like an exorcism by way of creating community around a specific “shameful” topic. Kind of like how this Substack has been for me in relation to processing the surprise trauma of all my miscarriages. All I ever want is for people to talk about the common things that happen that, in my opinion, go under reported/acknowledged. May creativity eradicate shame! All hail creativity!
It’s undeniable that one of my main creative themes is about contending with human frailty. Usually mine, sometimes another’s. As such, I’d like to widen the scope of the work I share here at The Demisery. Here’s an early work, from 2003 (!!) I wrote for SCOOP. It’s about contending with HIV and AIDS, another shame maker. Beyond this ridiculous cover image, you will find the piece…
GENESIS EXODUS
It happened in two houses, well three if you count the human body as a kind of house. And technically they weren’t houses, they were apartments, but homes nonetheless. For ten years I had colitis and suffered my own anal leakage and fecal urgency. Then, two places I lived seeped shit. If shit wasn’t leaking out of my body, it was oozing from my dwellings. One was overt, the second covert. Combined, they made me paranoid.
The Elms was the first place, a 1970s era apartment complex in Newhall, a working class neighborhood north of LA. It was made out of the thinnest and cheapest materials and had wall to wall carpeting. The place never felt clean, the walls were too porous to be completely disinfected, the carpet camouflaged god knows what, even the mirrors had this grime that cast a brown tinge on each reflection.
So, it’s August, 1998 and my friend Bill and I moved to Newhall to attend art school. We secure a two bedroom, two bathroom apartment at The Elms. We enter into a naïve fantasy that we would live together in that fabulous gay guy and fag hag who are artsy and often intoxicated kind of way. But it was more like AbFab meets Sesame Street – prematurely weathered yet childish wasteoids. We weren’t without optimism though and believed our artistic ideas and manifestations would flourish in each other’s presence. We would be each other’s muse and confidant and together change the world of theater and performance. Instead, it was more like drunk twins developing their own private language born from a womb of white wine, bong hits, cable TV and deepening denial about the fact that Bill had recently found out he was HIV positive and refused to do anything about it. It didn’t help that I was the only other person who knew his status and suffered the burden of having to choose between being a secret keeper or potential life saver.