Last week, I found power in the naming, the telling, the presentation of power and accountability and responsibility to those it belonged to. In the best way I was able to. A small, actionable request that would meaningfully improve my safety. Sadly, they dropped it. The spiritual pablum that accompanied it, I won’t go into…

(image: bicycle chain whip, which is used to fix bike chains) Finally, a really great bike day in awhile where my body felt back. My very best bike friend is moving for work, and I put together a farewell ride for him. 56 miles, 5000′ of climbing, and I’m so proud of my body for…

Now I’m at a point where I realize just how little control I was able to exert in this last relationship, every choice seemed to be about choosing the least bad option, rather than have a both/and positive outcome, which was not even realistically possible. It’s handy to get granular with it, if also pretty…

Most of my sporting endeavors involve endurance and taking a long view, and as I’m focused on the distance, sometimes the details of my surroundings or of a moment become a blur, or I ignore them. I’m not a terribly detail-oriented person, unless I’m in hyperfocus mode, like for my work. It’s not like ball…

I’ve been thinking about mutuality, and querying the assertion that high asymmetry necessarily makes mutuality impossible even with safeguards. I’ve also been looking at what mutuality does and doesn’t look like inside of relationships with manageable asymmetries. While I don’t find myself feeling like some lesbian version of “barefoot and pregnant,” like Nabokov’s Lolita, I…

I absolutely hate AI, but it’s weirdly been a better source of analysis than the Magic 8 ball in the wake of my last relationship. I think the main things that drew me more recently to a high-risk relationship scenario have been some illusions (of safety, of having limited versions of one person over a…

Arriving in Zana, I was approaching full circle. The imaginary meeting at a place she had been, and still wore her sweatshirt from stopping at the coffee shop there while on a road trip, at approximately the time of my first coastal visit in my new state, more than a decade prior. Maybe we had…

Sometimes a memory surfaces of an experience I had while backpacking through Europe, at age 19. I carried the same heavy Mountainsmith 65 liter backpack I’d used to climb Mt. Rainier and lead backpacking trips at a summer camp in the Colorado Rockies, and the same attitude of exploration and desire for new vistas, carrying…

I recently had a disappointing experience where I got some disturbing clarity about a number of things. It’s painful to realize that others have used you and your private expression over a number of years in order to support their own psychodrama, casting you, baselessly, as a perpetual villain while they get to take turns…