Todd Clayton

[toddclayton]

July 6, 2015

I started working at Starbucks three weeks after I graduated from college. I showed up at 7am for my first shift in tight black jeans and a tucked-in polo and sat with Alyssa at a two-top in the lobby on the corner of Rosecrans and Sports Arena. Alyssa was a product of East County San Diego, same as me. She was blond and well-liked, and--most importantly--my new boss. Alyssa told me ours was the busiest store south of L.A. and handed me some papers I needed to sign before I could officially start. I agreed to  the pay--$9/hr plus tips--and she gave me my schedule for the week, a smattering of 7-hour blocks and a 4-hour pick-up on Saturday afternoon. I loved my job immediately. Having it meant I wasn’t giving up. I was 21.

I’d recently exploded my life with fantastic gusto. I had been a senior at a college where Jesus was your savior by contractual obligation and where men and women slept in different dorms and could only visit each other on Tuesday and Thursday nights, 7-11pm, doors open. Chapel was mandatory and they fined you for skipping. Drinking and dancing and R-rated movies were prohibited, and sex was grounds for expulsion. My sisters had gone and my mom had gone, too, and here I was, fourth in line, getting a degree in Bible. I worked as a chaplain, and met all my friends there and bought it completely for almost four years. That kind of college. I was a senior there and the plan had been: marriage, then Kansas City for seminary, and Rev. Clayton by 2014, but when I sat with my dad in a hotel room off the bay and said “I’m gay” for the first time that plan turned to garbage.There were only a few months between coming out and graduation to cobble together something different. I had no savings, growing debt, and could not go home. I was in the middle of the ocean, smack dab, no exit. Kaboom. Blamo. Flailing, and taking in water fast. The new plan: graduate, work at Starbucks, and figure out what the hell is going on with my life.

My co-workers were the first floating things I found. I could not have survived without their help. I clung to them that summer in their green aprons and non-slip sneakers, even if they didn't know I was doing it. They were my proof positive that the world extended beyond what I'd known of it before. They did not know my history, and I told it to them on my own terms, in wee pieces, omitting great swaths. Their reactions to the bad parts helped me understand how bad it really had been.

I said yes to every post-work invitation because I’d spent so long saying no, and in the process discovered a me who had been there all along. I played bocci ball with Stacey and Danielle on Kellogg Beach for the fourth of July. I went to bars in downtown and to Elaine’s apartment in OB where I smelled weed for the first time. I did everything with Katie and made out with her friend Andrew in the back of a cab. I went to my first pride that summer because Kenny invited me. He was engaged to a guy he met in the drive-thru and the two of them were my first glimpse at gay love up-close. I was enchanted. This was my Rumspringa and I knew from day one I was never going back.  

I learned the word “oxbow” this weekend while I was in Vermont for the holiday. It came up as a multiple choice question in Cranium and I got it wrong. Correct answer: a u-shaped bend in the course of a river. I’m glad I know it now because the summer after college was exactly that, the first time my river went U without warning and left me scrambling to figure out where I was heading. Full-blown oxbow. Wham. Five prides later I’m living on the other side of the country with my boyfriend-turned-fiance-nearly-husband in Brooklyn. Two weeks ago, I took Friday off work and we slept in, lazy and together. We showered, and after we dressed I got us bagels and coffee from a shop up the street while he put in a load of long-overdue laundry. When I got back with breakfast, we found out that our wedding next spring will be legal in every state. I am indebted to so many for this life I have.

My memory from that first pride is by and large static, but clear as when it happened: we’re driving up University in a convertible Mini Cooper, music blaring, hair askew from the wind, four of us singing and laughing, gay, gay, gay, gay and wanting to be no other way. Our hands are above our heads and my fingers interlock with someone else’s. I am a depth of happy that is without precedent. I am proud and alive and so glad to be free.

[toddclayton]

June 22, 2015

Albert Camus wrote The Plague about Oran, a city inundated with a disease that devastates its residents with exponential spread. The worse the plague gets, the greater the panic becomes. Dr. Rieux is a physician who endeavors throughout the book to help as many people as he can, in spite of bleak results and increasing danger. Camus calls his readers to locate the plague in their contexts and throw the weight of their being against it.

Last week, a white man convinced of his racial superiority murdered nine black Americans. The extinguished lives of Cynthia Hurd, Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Tywanza Sanders, Ethel Lance, Rev. Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Susie Jackson, Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., and Myra Thompson demand our attention. Of the 9 victims, 6 of them were women. And then there is the five-year-old girl who survived by playing dead.

We cannot be timid about calling this what it was: a terrorist act of racially-motivated hate, perpetrated by a 21-year-old man who penned his white supremacist manifesto 150 years after the abolition of slavery. He violated a place of sanctuary in the most brutal way. If we don’t see how Charleston is connected to our country’s history of racism, we are not paying attention. This is white supremacy in action; evil, undiluted; hell, here and now.

White supremacy is a plague, one that I fear is too insidious to unlearn, too ancient, too far-reaching. And yet, we cannot simply stand by and let it continue to ravage us. Millennial white Americans like me did not create white supremacy, but we inherited it, along with the privilege to choose how long it will continue. Our sin is not being white, but hoarding the power to which our skin affords us access. Faith is believing that the choice to oppose injustice extends beyond our individual efforts, even when those efforts feel futile, even when life is at its bleakest, even when that struggle leads us to death. 

It is long past time that whites started taking responsibility for each other. A few of my liberal white friends have confessed to me this week that they don’t know quite what to say, haven’t known what to say all year, and these are just the ones who could bring themselves to admit it. I imagine there are many more who feel fettered in the same way, afraid to say too much or too little and so say nothing instead. In The Elements of Style, William Strunk writes: “If you don’t know how to pronounce a word, say it loud! Why compound ignorance with inaudibility?” The only thing white people risk in talking about the racial situation in this county is embarrassment. To Strunk’s point: how will we grow if we do not speak clearly? Our silence protects our pride but erodes our humanity, re-inscribing a culture of white supremacy in the process. Meanwhile, people are dying.

I’ve thought a lot this week about our country’s racial wound, and how white people can participate in its healing.

To start: we don’t need white people who hate themselves. This might be an inevitable pit stop on our road to racial self-awareness, but stalling here will cause us to perpetrate more harm. If this is where we get stuck, we will either remain silent because of our guilt, or misappropriate cultures that do not belong to us (I have to think this was partly at play with Dolezal).  

What we do need is whites en masse rejecting systems of whiteness: legislated educational inequality, mass incarceration, stop and frisk, environmental racism. We need white artists telling stories that honestly deal with our history; white parents talking to their white children about the fact that they are white, and that they live in a world where that matters; white ministers teaching their congregations about a God who does not tolerate this kind of sickness; white liberals willing to say what they’re thinking in the wake of Charleston, and Baltimore, and Staten Island, even if it means betraying parts of ourselves we do not like to bring above ground. We will never heal unless we do. 

I heard once that white privilege is looking tragedy in the face and being able to turn away. To that I will add: white privilege is not having to deal with your racial identity until you are ready to deal with it. I was twenty-three when I finally started addressing mine. We are certainly not the first generation to be baffled that this plague persists and with such fervor. I do not want my children to feel the same way.

[toddclayton]

A ten-times better version of my post from Monday, up today on Human Parts. 

[toddclayton]

June 15, 2015

My co-worker lives above her landlords on the third floor of a single-family home in Astoria. The landlords are from Spain, long-married and newly-retired, and Virginia told me last week that during the summer they host dinner parties in the backyard that she can see from her window. She says they’re drawn-out, utterly-Spanish affairs with music, tapas, so much wine, and (I can’t remember if she said this said this or if I more intuited it) nice patio torches. They start at eight and unfurl with effortless panache ‘til well past midnight, never obnoxiously.

I told her that our downstairs neighbors also have dinner parties but they’re unfortunately very un-Spanish, so much so that on Saturday night I heard someone drunkenly chant “Americaaaaa!” through my through my wide-open window. It was hot and I couldn’t close it so there I was in my boxers watching Sense8 and smashing the volume-up button on the remote. IN ANY EVENT: she told me about her landlords and I sucked it right up because in less than a month, Dylan and I are flying to Madrid to visit his dad for two weeks [*joy-crying emoji* *party horn emoji*]. Miguel recently moved there from New York and you better believe I will be taking full advantage of the fact that my near-father-in-law lives in Spain for the next however many years.

I have been to Madrid exactly once before, for a whirlwind 22 hours on a layover during my flight back to San Diego from Prague. The trip to Prague (plus Berlin, Amsterdam, and London, before that) was absolutely unplanned and happened only because the wife of my alma mater’s president offered me a plane ticket anywhere in the world. Linda called my name as I was walking off campus for the last time, still in my graduation robe and mortarboard, and said she and Bob wanted to send me wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. It had been a hell of a year, after all. I asked if I could leave on a flight to England in five days, and the next morning I had a ticket in my inbox. I quit my job at Barnes & Noble to go.

Thank god I went because I had my first one-night stand in London with this guy I met at a bar in Soho. His friend grabbed my arm while I was ordering a beer and told me I was just her friend’s type, and would I come meet him? We danced, had drinks, and kissed, and I remember telling him I “wasn’t that kind of guy” when he asked me to come over. The words dribbled out, rote, and it took me only a few minutes to realize they weren’t mine anymore.

“He’s an investment analyst. 24. Beautiful accent,” according to my journal entry from the next day. On the walk to his apartment we kissed in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. “Kind of like the Times Square of London,” I wrote, “quite romantic.” I was feeling my way through the world with all my guideposts smashed to bits. My mind was tumbling, trying to make sense of it all, and the next morning I woke up beside him after not really sleeping. He was snoring quietly and we had sex again before I left. We’re still friends on Facebook.

Before Europe, I was working through the mountainous shame I inherited about sex. I bought myself a purity ring when I was a senior in high school, which symbolized my promise not to have sex until I was married to my wife (MULTIPLE issues here, I realize), and in a weird-ass, self-hating move I bought one that was a sterling silver crown of thorns that hurt to take on and off. I mean come ON with the guilt. It has taken years of therapy and healthy sex to unlearn, and even still it creeps up. As we were rolling around his double bed in London, naked and sweating and trying to remember each other’s names, I realized that I was entitled to a sexual life on my own terms. I knew I was going to need to find new people to trust, and a new God, to boot, but hadn’t the slightest idea how.

The church has sacraments (like baptism and communion) that we call “outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace,” which is just a fancy way of saying “times when we see God.” I think back on that trip to Europe, almost five years ago now, and I’m able to see it for the genesis that it was: a sacramental, holy time that taught me shame and guilt have no place in my sexual life. One of my greatest sadnesses is that I did not learn that sooner.

[toddclayton]

Monday, June 8

I am sixteen years old and my hands down, 10-out-of-10, favorite album is Stadium Arcadium by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I get a burned copy from Lynn a few months before it officially releases. Lynn has straight black hair and is both cooler and more popular than I am, so for a rare moment I am an insider. I listen to it on a Sony Discman that I’ve connected by cassette tape adapter to my car speakers.

It’s March, Bush is in the middle of his second term, and I know exactly zero percent about politics. My screenname is SanDiegoGuy9187 but I’m starting to use gchat more, and texting killed instant messaging anyway. I lost 60 pounds last year after I ran every day for three months and stopped stuffing my face with shit food. My arms are spindly and my face is sharp. I feel attractive in flashes and it surprises me when I do. I still won’t take my shirt off in front of people.

I go to church every Sunday, same way I’ve done my whole life. A lot of weeks my dad will ask me to sing with the worship team or play trumpet during the offering, and even though I’d rather be running or sleeping or anywhere else I say yes. My parents are pastors, and they deliver sermons to the congregation about a God I’m believing in less and less. If Jesus knows everything we’re thinking, then he already knows I believe he died and stayed that way. I don’t know how I’ll break the news to them.

I’m a junior and have been harboring fantasies about my friend’s dad since middle school. Sometimes he’ll walk around his house in running shorts and nothing else. I don’t realize I’m memorizing the way hair economically covers his athletic body until I recall the image involuntarily. I think about him when I’m in the shower and before I’m falling asleep. We live in the church parsonage where pastors and their families have lived for decades, and there’s a hallway in it with pictures of my sisters and their husbands and kids. I spend a lot of time wondering what my family picture will look like.

I drive a maroon Chevy Prizm that we got when I was in second grade, this zippy go-kart of a car that I use to get to work. My desk is in the business office of a Ford dealership in Redwood City, which is like 15 miles from my high school in Palo Alto. I work from 3:00-7:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays when it’s not track season, plus 8 hours on Saturdays. I file invoices, answer phone calls, and run errands for the women in my department, and in return they teach me how to swear in Spanish and show me what happens when you put a tampon in a cup of water. They ask me about the girls I’m dating and whether or not I’m having sex, and I tell them I’m going to wait until I’m married. I become their surrogate brother, they, my wide window to an intoxicating world beyond my reach.

I have a TV in my room and thank god. I sleep with it on. I’m so anxious and the noise competes with the voices in my head long enough for me to doze off. I have a Ziploc bag in my dresser with a fistful of my mom’s sleeping pills that she doesn’t know I’ve taken from her cabinet. I only take them on nights when the TV doesn’t work.

Jane is my friend and we’re in Chemistry together. A few weeks ago she and I drove my car west on the 84 for an hour until it came to a dead end at the coast. The sun had set hours before so the sand was cold and we couldn’t see the ocean so much as we could hear it; crashing in on itself over and over and over.  

I have no way of knowing that I’ll go to college in San Diego and meet a woman there, that I’ll get engaged to her because I’ll think it’s the only way I can hang a picture on my parents’ wall, that I’ll call it off four weeks before it’s scheduled to happen and will spend the wedding day at Disneyland instead, that I’ll feel unbound, finally, and will write in my journal at a bar up the street from the hotel that “it’s nice to be at peace with myself,” that I’ll learn to demand a better life, that I’ll date one boy and then another, that sex will be fun and make sense, that I’ll go to seminary in New York to understand it all and will fall in love, that I’ll get engaged again but this time for keeps, that I really will be alright in the end.

This post was published on Human Parts.

[toddclayton]

Monday, June 1

For the last three years, my student loan servicer has sent this ridiculously gauche email to wish me a happy birthday. I work hard to safeguard my joy from the looming anxiety of debt, and I'd say I win 75-25, which is a hell of a lot of progress. Confidential to Nelnet: those emails do not help the effort.

At $47,766.92, my debt is slightly above the 2014 national average of $30,000. When I graduated from seminary last May, the total number was floating around the mid-fifties and I have begrudged every one of the $7,000 I have thrown into the black hole of my debt thus far. $12,000 of my loans (or 22% of them) were taken out to pay for health insurance, and the vast majority are from undergrad. Attached to them are interest rates between 5.4 and 6.8% so all told I’ll pay closer to $73,000. I owe $645.17 per month, which is more than I currently pay in rent (a miracle in New York, I know).

I signed for my first one at age 17, four months before I was legally allowed to vote. I had absolutely no way of comprehending my decision. At that point, I’d never seen a balance in my bank account over $500, and it would be three years until that changed. The good news (?) is my loans are all from the federal government, so they die with me. I know people with private loan balances that are impossible to pay back within their lifetimes. Their loans become a generational concern.  

I knew what $55,000 felt like precisely when I made my first payment on it, and I had a full-blown panic attack after I did. For months, I was utterly immobilized. I lost my vision for the future and feared it wouldn’t come back until the debt was gone, all the while having no idea how I was going to pay it off. I budgeted and re-budgeted, filling dozens of scrap papers with arithmetic that I hoped would yield a different answer each time I did it, but however I figured it, there it was: 10 years at $700 a month, or 30 years at $350. It’s like the amount I owed was indirectly proportional to my capacity for creativity. Also good luck ever ordering shrimp or a cocktail without feeling guilty, let alone going on vacation/buying a ticket to visit your family/replacing clothes/doing anything but connecting your paycheck IV to that deficit. I'm working on my relationship with it, but even still it's always there, tumor-like.

My debt has made a valiant attempt to kidnap my capacity for risk, and it succeeds more often than I’d like to admit. I have friends who have rushed headlong into financially unpredictable but personally fulfilling careers, propelled forward by passion and curiosity and gritty determination. They are ministers, artists, and entrepreneurs, risk takers who are changing the world, often for little to no pay, especially at the outset. They are people with that down-for-anything, adventurous spirit that comes with so much social currency. But God it's hard take those risks with your doctor’s appointments from 2007 and four years of college meal cards tied to your social security number. I so envy them.

I can't quit my job to travel across the world, or work in a field that doesn't pay me enough to be responsible to my debt, not now at least. I am bound by decisions I made when I was a teenager that I did not fully comprehend until much, much later, but then maybe that's just what it means to be an adult. In any event: I want my grand adventure. I refuse to let debt take that from me.

[toddclayton]

Monday, May 25

I started seeing my first therapist five years ago when I unhinged in the middle of a whirlwind depression. It was September, and I still lived in San Diego. I’d come out ten months earlier, and was dating my first boyfriend—an illuminating flash romance that only lasted twelve weeks but cast a disproportionately long shadow. I told Susan during our first session that I was doubly scared because I’d thought coming out would fix my depression but here I was again, low low low and struggling to see the way out. I was working as an AmeriCorps member and had woefully inadequate insurance that didn’t cover mental health care. I made $18 a week more than Susan’s $250 hourly fee, and could only afford three sessions, one of which she threw in for free. My dad sold antiques that he bought at garage sales to help defray the cost but even still, I think I still owe her some money.

My second therapist had an office on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. Andrea, but I never used her first name.  It was the winter of my second year of seminary. It snowed on my birthday that year, and when we woke up Dylan took me to the southeast corner of Central Park, both of us bundled in long johns and sweatshirts and scratchy wool socks. We ran through the park to a synchronized soundtrack he’d made of my favorite songs, into which he’d interspersed two-dozen messages from my family and friends, all of them telling me why they loved me. There were snowflakes in my eyebrows by the time we finished, and I was crying hot tears. I felt so unlovable that December.

I started therapy for the third time six months ago. We meet at 7 on Thursday nights, so a lot of weeks I’m eating Chipotle or something else that I pick up on my way to his office from my own. He eats, too, but always the same thing: a salad from home with Thousand Island in a blue, rectangular Ziploc Tupperware, and plain rice cakes. I call him Andrew comfortably. He is the first therapist I’ve started seeing in a time of stability (I highly recommend it), and he takes my insurance. When I asked him a question recently, somewhere in the answer he said, “I mean, I know you,” and I absolutely believed him. I told him a couple weeks ago that I’m relieved I don’t have to worry about finding someone to help me when life gets hazy again. A lot of sessions, I don’t have anything too important to say, but now I won’t be out of practice when I do. Therapy’s a lot like writing that way. 

A non sequitur: I’m on the west coast again, this time back home in California, and I spent all day yesterday with my parents and cousins and aunts listening to them tell stories about what life was like before my memory starts. For example, forty-nine years ago my aunt and uncle took my parents on a double date when they were both seniors in high school. It was the first time my mom had been to a sit-down restaurant, and the salad had tiny shrimp on it that my dad swallowed whole to avoid the taste. During one of the conversations, we realized that my dad was exactly my age when his dad died.

It’s been two weeks since I busted my head wide open, and my scar is healing remarkably. My mom told me over dinner that my face only looks unbecoming when I turn my head sideways. Certainly progress.

[toddclayton]

Monday, May 18

I am a man in big-time, stuff of legends, totally requited love that I grew up believing to be impossible. (An aside to any budding and wondering queers: it’s totally, totally possible.) This Saturday, Dylan and I celebrated our two-year anniversary. I am more expansive because he is in my life.

We walked through Harlem on our first date, from my new apartment to my old one and back again. I was moving that week and to save money I’d decided to do it entirely by bus, lugging my things suitcase by suitcase onto the M4 to ride the mile and a half across town. One of the first ideas for our date was to capitalize on the extra set of hands and have him to help me with one of the trips, but I ended up finishing earlier than I’d thought I would (thank God). All that was left was to drop off the old keys, if I remember right, which we ended up doing instead.

We’d met a couple days earlier at a play he’d written. I was there with our mutual friend Jill, who’d been insisting for months that the two of us were destined for love. He and I both resisted, I think weary from set-ups gone awry with many a gay friend-of-a-friend, which is why it’d taken as long as it had for us to meet. Jill finally suggested I come with her to his play so she could introduce us casually (“look at this, all of us in one place!”), which was a good enough idea to me.

Jill and her fiancé picked me up in Manhattan, drove me to the warehouse in Brooklyn where his play was showing, and Dylan asked for my number at the end of the night. On the drive home we started texting, and planned to see each other for a proper date later the next week. He was going on a trip with his dad to Vermont in a few days, and I was headed to New Jersey for an 8-day wilderness EMT course, so we were both really busy and couldn’t do anything sooner. This was Thursday.

On Friday, he sent me a note. “Next week feels far away. Any chance I can see you before I leave?” or something utterly adorable like that and I said, “yes absolutely 100 percent however I am moving by bus across Harlem and have to finish this weekend which is such an unglamorous first date.” I watched the little bubbles pop up on my iPhone until “who said I need glamour??” replaced them.

The next day we got lunch after dropping off my keys. Our legs touched under the table while we had tacos and margaritas and these horribly, horribly dry yuca fries, all the while baffled by a shared recognition that we’d bumped into something completely extraordinary. I interrupted him in the middle of a story to tell him I liked him and wanted a second date. When we finished lunch, we stopped by a shop up the street and bought books for each other. I got him Baldwin’s Fire Next Time, and he got me Bechdel’s Fun Home. Back at my apartment, we kissed and kissed on the twin air mattress in my bedroom, which was the only piece of furniture I owned.

Ours is an  inherently conditional love, and we reminded each other of that this weekend.  By that I mean: the love we share is not a never-ending given but is contingent upon each of us holding up our end of the bargain—to respect each other, to support and not sabotage our respective dreams, to challenge each other, to have fun together, to listen. In short, to be good partners. We proposed when we knew that we both wanted to commit to doing those things for the rest of our lives. Anniversaries are great opportunities to celebrate. They’re also good for remembering that we both fully intend to be good to each other, and that we are not without recourse in the event that we’re not.

Dylan’s on a two-month, cross-country tour right now for work, so I took Friday off to meet him in Pittsburgh. The day itself was fairly ordinary. We went to the Apple Store to fix his recently crashed computer (success!), had a nice brunch, looked at butterflies and flowers at a botanical garden, got beers, ate fried zucchini, saw a movie. Normal things worth remembering because of their being done together.

[toddclayton]

Monday, May 11

I had trouble writing all last week, and even though I had a couple vague ideas I couldn’t get anything out that I actually liked. My journal is full of a half dozen false starts. The plan for yesterday was: go to the doctor for my annual physical, take the subway to work, start drafting something on my lunch break, keep writing on the train ride home and post whatever I came up with before going to bed. But like so many days, yesterday did not go how I thought it would.

I got to the doctor’s office just fine. Early, in fact, and filled out my intake paperwork. When they called me back, I peed in a cup and stripped down into one of those blue gowns that opens in the front. I was wearing a pair of red and black trunks that I think are cute, and I remember being glad I hadn’t worn old stretched out boxer briefs or something.

Anyway: my doctor asked me all the normal questions, and after I answered them her nurse came in to take my blood, which is where this whole story goes rapidly downhill. The nurse even checked to see if I had a problem with needles or blood or whatever and I was like, “Oh god no, I’m totally fine. Is that a problem for a lot of people??”

Well apparently I *do* have an issue because after she took three small vials--and I’m talking really little tubes--she turned around to send them off for testing and all I remember saying is “Wow I feel really lightheaded.” 

I woke up what I now know was about a minute later in a pool of my blood with my head in my doctor’s lap, both of us sprawled out on the linoleum floor. She was pressing my forehead to stop the bleeding, telling me I’d fallen from the table and hit my head on a metal stool, and that an ambulance was on its way to take me to the ER. And MY neurotic ass was thinking, “There’s no way I’m getting a post up today.”

The EMTs stabilized my head when they arrived and quickly put me on a backboard, just in case I’d injured my neck or spine in the fall (I didn’t), and then stretchered me out of her office. I did manage to snap a selfie on the ride to the hospital.

My face is all stitched up now, and the CT scan and EKG showed that my head and heart are totally healthy. I told the surgeon while he was sewing my face that he was fulfilling my childhood fantasy of being Harry Potter, though I have to admit my scar won’t be quite as cool. It resembles less a lightning bolt and more, I don’t know, a lazily drawn check mark. Now I just wait for my face to look progressively less gruesome, I guess.

Thank god for technology, because as soon as I hit my head my doctor called Dylan, who--even though miles away on tour--managed to orchestrate an amazing team of people to take care of me all day (I’m looking at you Glenn and Sondi and Charlotte and Eliza and Rachel and Thompson). By the time I was settled into my bed in the ER, my almost mother-in-law was sitting on the end of it, rubbing my feet, telling me she loved me and that everything was going to be okay. And then my co-worker showed up, sent downtown by my office to make sure all was well. For the whole ordeal, I was surrounded by faces I knew and overflowing buckets of love in a city that just three years ago was utterly foreign to me. Amazing how that works.

[toddclayton]

Monday, May 4

I am the baby of my family—the younger to two gorgeous sisters. I wholeheartedly revere them like little brothers do. For a decade, I only got Strawberries Wild at Jamba Juice because that’s what Karla ordered one day when we were driving around San Diego. I’ve logged hundreds of hours on the phone with Annette. They are my role models, my confidantes, my kin by birth and by choice. I will always want them to be proud of me.

I became an uncle at 12, and have acquired five more nieces and nephews in the years since. Raiden and Hannah are now as old as I was when they were born. I haven’t lived in the same city as my family since I went to college in 2007 and when I moved to New York, the flight home got five hours longer. I promise the kids regularly that no matter where I live, I will always visit. I rarely go more than three months without getting back to see them.

For the last two weeks, I was in Portland and Seattle (where both my sisters live) for work, which had me feeling adult in a major way. I even rented a car for the first time without having to pay that surcharge for people under 25. I had appointments in the day, and little league games, track meets, and math homework at night.

So much changes so quickly when you’re growing up. Hannah is learning Mandarin, and she gave me a little lesson while we were together. Turns out kids are better at learning new languages, and it’s for a couple reasons. The obvious: their brains are still growing, and neural pathways more readily form and stick the earlier they’re created. But the other reason strikes me as far more poetic. Learning a language requires making sounds out loud that you’ve never made before, sounds that you’ll probably botch, and that may make you look stupid until you master them. To learn a new language, embarrassment can’t shut you down, and kids are more willing to make fools of themselves than we are.

Kids give themselves permission to reinvent as much as necessary. They’re trying to figure out who they are, what they like, and—as they get older—what they believe. Why do we ever stop giving ourselves that freedom?

Like always, I vacuumed up the everyday-ness and tried to get as many tidbits of information as I could about what life is like for them these days. Roman gave me directions back to his house from baseball practice and told me that the way he remembers right from left is by thinking in his head about which hand he uses to throw a ball. I beat Hannah at Battleship, and we fell asleep sharing a pillow while watching Paddington, her legs stacked on mine. I cheered for Raiden during his first 800m race, and took him to breakfast one morning, just him and me. Micah and I climbed rocks on the beach and flew remote control helicopters.  Amelia showed me her chef’s hat, which I’d seen before, and I heard her say Netflix for the first time. Kayla built castles with me in the sand. 13 days of blissfully ordinary proximity.

Every time I say goodbye, I wonder why I left in the first place.  It would take only slightly longer to fly to Reykjavik from Brooklyn than it does to fly to the Northwest. And yet, here I am. Our parents remind the three of us often that they raised us to be independent, and that we should go wherever it is we need to go to be become the people we need to be. I followed that advice all the way to New York. But damn if I didn’t wish it were closer.

I ugly cried for the first 26 miles of my drive out of Seattle, and then again after pulling out of Portland. I mean like red eyes for an hour, hand over my mouth cried. God it was so good to be with them.

[toddclayton]

Monday, April 27

To my fellow white Americans:

My queer predecessors (many of them people of color) rioted 40 years ago at Stonewall in New York because enough was enough. Today, the SCOTUS is hearing arguments in a case that has the potential to make marriage equality a ubiquitous reality in the United States. God bless the queens who threw bottles and heels in 1969. I can get married because they fought back. Protest is the language of people who have been refused a seat at the table, stripped of agency and voice.

And yet, people of color have been protesting their exploitation for centuries and still aren’t safe. We add the name Freddie Gray to a list that should not exist in the first place: those who have been lynched by a protected and militarized police force.

White supremacy is a violence stitched into our flag, and it poisons us. Baldwin describes white people as being trapped by a history that insists on black inferiority, a history that we refuse to fully understand. “Many of them, indeed, know better,” he says, “but people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”

Our country has been on fire since it was founded. Those in power should not be be surprised when their currency of violence comes boomeranging back at them. That we are betrays the depth of our dysfunction.

When your worst fears about the safety of your community are realized, when you’ve never known a world without systemic oppression, when poverty has been weaponized to destroy your hope for change, it’s not indiscriminate and senseless violence. It’s self-defense. There has been an untelevised state of emergency for decades in Baltimore.

We have fashioned God in our alabaster image. Our knees are raw from years of adulation. Until we repent of our worship of whiteness, there is only more violence coming, and come it should.

[toddclayton]

Monday, April 20

Today I present you, in Seussian verse, 

a list comprehensive--no lies interspersed. 

It’s a catalog of all the stuff that I placed 

in my gym bag around April 7th or 8th. 

I know, I know--blah, who would bother to read

such a fun-crushing dud of a post, guaranteed? 

But I am the godmother, this list my Ella, 

encased in both cinder and dreams of a fella.

To enliven these ho-hum, pedestrian things, 

I rhymed them together, gave a misfit its wings. 

Without further ado, with no more evasion, 

I give you my gym bag, oh joyous occasion!

To start: of the bag, this most glorious bride, 

with its thinly striped candy cane red-white inside. 

The bag is dull blue, like a cloudy sky sea, 

and made up of canvas, way most bags would be. 

A cylinder stuffed, a glass jar filled with jelly, 

it has sturdy handles that wrap ‘round its belly. 

A shoulder strap, too, like the handles--in red, 

clips on in two places. What’s left to be said?

I guess that it’s Herschel, and has sundry pockets, 

where I keep my possessions, just like Davy Crockett. 

Unzip the two zippers as I do each day, 

and waiting for you is this lovely bouquet:

An IPA bottle cap left from a time 

we snuck beer to the movies in Fort Greene. One dime.

Green hardcover Moleskine with elastic strap.

Electric blue headphones. Turquoise baseball hat. 

Pair of lime running shoes that I bought for a race

last summer in Brooklyn. Got a medal, no place. 

A Geoffrey Beene wallet from 2006, 

brown leather, quite faded, with a badly snagged stitch. 

Pack of wintermint gum with 10 pieces for sharing. 

Grey tank top from Target I feel sexy wearing. 

Three tabs of ten milligram loratadine

for visiting loved ones who have cats felines.

A bottle of fragrance by Yves Saint Laurent, 

the traveling size of their classic L’Homme.

A FedEx receipt, $33.48.

Can of ultra-shine Göt2B citrus pomade. 

Container for formula--faux milk for kids--

filled up to the top with raw protein instead.

Two books, both half-finished, that I read on the subway

L. Wright’s Going Clear and Joan D.’s After Henry.

3 crumpled up wrappers. An essay I’m sketching.

Black athletic shorts with a waistband that’s stretching.

A handwritten draft of an email that took

over six weeks to write. Countless edits—look look!

White ankle socks, balled and stuffed in my sneakers,

there’s a hole in the left one, a sock’s sad grim reaper.

Brick red Masterlock, the second I’ve had

lost the first after one week, same color. My bad.

There’s a yellowing liquid that’s festering inside

a tumbler I cannot get washed. Swear, I’ve tried.

A deodorant stick that’s aluminum-free,

“Intense Sport”, nice smelling, made and sold by Degree.

A quintet of keys, three of gold to my office

(Including the square one that opens God knows what)

and two for my home, peacock and zebra print

he gave me years back to a house once just his.

Alas, my dear reader, you knew this was coming,

was destined, the same as the Drummer Boy’s drumming.

All dressed up in rhythm and given a cadence

these things really danced! Got their moment of radiance.

Oh gym bag, my gym bag, I hope you did cherish,

your debut at the ball, your soiree in Paris.

But that time is passing, slip slipping away.

We’ve all seen enough of this sordid ballet.

The clock has struck midnight, the list is fast ending:

a ticket from Feb 8 for Jupiter Ascending. 

And just as it started it finished, it’s through.

I listed all that could be listed for you.

But if you would let me for one second more

Draw out this bizarre and rough-hewn metaphor:

I’d say that my bag is a stand in for life,

unspangled, oft boring, a dulled carving knife.

It’s loans with high interest, leftover lo mein,

it’s bowls of dried oatmeal: unholy, mundane.

We make our own meaning, demand that it matter.

We’re doomed if we don’t. We’re swallowed. We’ll shatter.

This post was published on Thought Catalog.

[toddclayton]

Monday, April 13

Before last Monday, I hadn’t written in public since June 27, 2013. I love writing, love how it enchants everything a bit. I am the me I like most when I’m doing it. Between 2011 and 2013, I wrote close to 100 articles, and then--without clear reason--I stopped. 

I’ve thought a lot this week about why I quit, and these are my best guesses.

1. Other people write better than I do. 

New York is weird because you meet people who don’t just do a job, but who do whatever job they do at the highest level possible. So: I didn’t move here and meet other people who wrote, I met people who worked as staff writers at The New York Times and “just had a 6,000-word placed in Harper’s,” people who got started at 21 and didn’t stop for two decades, who turned manuscripts into bestselling books and then won the goddamn Pulitzer. “Did you say you write as well?” Eventually, I stopped saying yes. 

For two years, I was my own saboteur. I would sit down to write, and think, “there are so many people who could say whatever I am going to say with loads more panache,” which may be true, but is a shitty, shitty reason not to write. At some point--maybe last week?--I realized that I need no one’s permission to write. I haven’t said everything I want to say yet, and even though I know tons of talented writers, many of whom write better and more and in fancier places than I--they are not telling the stories that only I can tell. 

2. I became embarrassed by my old work.

I used to keep a blog and I had to pay $18 a year to retain my domain name. In September of 2013, I started getting emails from WordPress that my license was about to expire and, “would you like to renew it for another year?” I purposely let it go defunct, and it’s now owned by a cosmetic dentist. 

In a cab back home from JFK, I saw an interview with Moby on one of the little backseat TVs. He said that instead of casting judgment on his old songs, he sees them as time capsules for who he was at different moments in his life. We are a reinventing people, or at the very least heavy redactors. The hazard of writing is that it keeps us on the hook for who we actually used to be, not who we wish we had been. 

To the Todd of 2027: off my nuts. Let me be who I am today and do not virtually erase me. Try to remember what it felt like to be 25--full of dreams and the fear that you will never reach them, in equal parts. Be proud of yourself for trying to say something. 

3. Writing is hard and it’s easier not to. 

I happened to fall in love with a writer (go figure), and after last week’s post we were texting about my feelings (bless him). I told him that I want to publish something once a week but that I am afraid I won’t have anything to say. Dylan--vat of wisdom that he is--said that writing is constant trust falls. “You need to keep trusting that your mind will catch you when you sit down to put ideas on paper,” he said, and I thought: a, my sweet, sweet guru, and; b, yes, yes, yes. 

Being an artist means failing in full view and making more work after you do. The common denominator among artists that I respect is not that they make magic every time they sit down to create, but that they keep sitting down to do it. Writing is fun when it’s fun, unbearable when it’s not, and hard all the way through. I stopped because it’s a risk every time, but then to risk is to grow and I’m not done growing yet. 

For whatever reason, last Monday I laid belly down on my bed and tapped away at the keyboard until something came together. Just like that: a writer again. 

[toddclayton]

With you in Texas I'm Goldilocks, unsettled In a too big bed

[toddclayton]

Monday, April 6

I’d love to say that it happened somewhere cinematic--like while I was driving across the Mojave Desert or on some barren, wave-torn coast in San Francisco, but--truth be told--I don’t remember when it happened, exactly. I just know that when I got back to college to start my junior year after traveling across the country by bus, I didn’t believe in demons, or Satan, or hell anymore--at least not in the fire-flooded oblivion and crimson, horned tormentor I’d seen on flannel boards as a little boy. More likely than not, it had something to do with the fact that I’d spent the summer at church camps--watching week after week as junior high and high school students rushed to the front of auditoriums to dedicate their lives to Jesus after sermons about salvation and escape, the same ones I heard growing up, left them teary-eyed and vulnerable. They were promised that prayers would guarantee them a place in that famous, holy un-hell, the heaven of lore where God was, and evil was not, and everyone sang and ate and celebrated forever. That, and I read Camus. 

Yesterday was Easter, and for the first time in my 25 years I did not go to church. Instead, I flew to Georgia to be with my fiancé--a winsome actor traveling across the country on a two-month tour. We went to brunch outside of Atlanta with the 12 other people in his show, and held baby bunnies that were huddled in a wagon on the restaurants’ porch. Utterly bucolic. 

On my flight back home to New York, I was thinking about how far I’ve come since I was a teenager. I grew up in a church that insisted on the physical details of the Christian mythology: the Garden of Eden was a real place, Jonah was swallowed by a literal fish, and Moses walked a herd of Israelites across a barren sea floor. On Easter, we celebrated that the flesh-and-blood Jesus, after being murdered, came back to life. At some point, far later than I’d like to admit, I stopped believing that these things happened the way I’d been told they did--including the resurrection. Too many of my questions went unanswered and because no one told me there was an alternative, I figured that meant I was no longer a Christian. 

Thankfully, I went to seminary. I learned that both religion and art play freely with fact in order to symbolically represent their subject--the mysterious, irrational givenness of things. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche visions the chaos and absurdity of a meaningless world as a molten pit, above which stands humanity--some peering over the lip to the fire below, but most ignoring the chaos as earnestly as possible. Artists are those people who--so hungry for meaning for themselves and for the rest of the world--travel down from the surface toward the pit, getting close enough to understand it as best they can. This process of observation, however, comes at a cost, and Nietzsche calls these brave persons “burnt children,” who are singed by the fire but not consumed. From the bottom, they create bridges of meaning through art and myth to help those above pass safely across the chaos. “We could count religious persons among the artists, as their highest class,” he says. 

Like portraiture, religious mythology allows us to capture the uncapturable. Gods help us make sense of it all. 

If we look at this picture and declare that it’s impossible for a person’s fingers to bend the way hers do, we’re completely missing the point. Jesus didn’t have to rise from the dead to be resurrected. And I don’t have to go to church on Easter to be surrounded by ministers.