I wake up five minutes before my 6 a.m. alarm. I would prefer a 5:30 a.m. alarm, but there are reasons, as you will see, that 5:30 is not a great time for waking up.
First I take my pills, which is quite a handful: Four for my sad brain including three different dosages of fluoxetine and one tiny little white pill that has changed my life, called aripiprazole. Left to my own devices and somehow forced to pick one, that little white pill would be the one. I love him. Three for ADHD, including two bright purple bupropions and generic Adderall, and a B-complex. Two for my heart and veins, metformin and lisinopril. One of them is big and smells equally of fruit punch and semen, and the other one I hate because I’m meant to take one-and-a-half and they’re so very small that my fingers can generally only crack one in half before I resort to biting through them, as I fill my weekly pill canisters. And finally one for good luck, in this case a triple-packet of multivitamin, fish oil and probiotic, plus one of two allergy pills of the day.
It’s more medications than I have ever been on, or even seen someone be on, but on the other hand I am happier than I have ever been, interested in writing again and in boys, not to mention staying alive on this beautiful Earth with you, and generally having a blast. So I will keep poppin’ em.
Throughout the routine that follows, I listen to my morning podcasts: What A Day, and then Up First, local news, The Daily, and Democracy Now!, which is a sequence that gets me fired up. The rest of my morning is structured around my dog Zooey, of whom you may know.
Zooey can’t be allowed her morning runabout until 6:50 or so, or the possible — let’s face it, the likely — barking will annoy my nice neighbors. My neighbors aren’t that nice, but they’re good at faking it, and the older I get the more I appreciate the gesture.
(The barking is also something that really kicks in around 9 p.m. every night, which is why you can find me and Zoo in bed by 8 p.m. most nights. It worries me that she gets so excited an hour after sunset; I keep thinking it means her eyesight isn’t great, that there are more sounds to alarm her in the dark. This is a remarkably human way for her to be, if my fear is right. But I can’t think of another reason, and anyway I’m accustomed now to climbing into bed with her at this time.
She hangs out in the backyard, intermittently barking but mostly just watching, with her eyes and her nose — I call her “Paw Patrol,” I call her “little LEO,” I call her a cop — looking at all the backyard lights that have sprung up as we’ve gentrified. My alley, her regular beat, looks like a mixed-use zoned string of bistros at night, or what my friend Graeme described once as “looking like True Blood.” And when I come at this time, she will ignore me until I touch her softly and say, “C’mon,” and then she heads inside as if she had just been politely waiting. Anyway, that’s at night but important to know about upfront.)
Mornings I’m usually in the shower by 7, listening to Michael Barbaro talk in his. Halting. And. Staccatobyturns. Way that he has. This week it’s been all about Long Covid, which is a topic that makes me sad for a lot of reasons but especially my one true love, Heather Hogan, whose life has recently been utterly transformed as a long-hauler.
Here is a very intense but necessary read about that.
After the shower the stakes get higher: I need to trick Zooey into coming back into my bedroom while I get dressed. She knows this trick but cannot resist me if I sit on the floor, so if she hasn’t just randomly wandered in during my shower that’s usually what it takes. Today she followed me almost into the shower, more interested than she’s ever been in what I do in there. When I sat with her on the bed to tell her how magnificent she is, there was still shower water on her long nose, like rain.
The reason I must trick Zooey into coming back is a little harsh: It’s to trap her in my bedroom so I can leave. Because what Zooey has been thinking about since 6 a.m. is the gated front of our enormous backyard where I live, and through which I will be making my egress once I’m dressed. It’s all she is thinking about, any time she sees me putting on shoes or even just socks: That gate is her green light, her white whale, her one true desideratum.
Because what my Zoo loves most in the world is to take herself on little walks, walks on which I am not invited to accompany her. She walks once around the block — sometimes crossing the street if she’s feeling particularly her oats — and then zooms back into the backyard as if she has been gone for ages. It’s heartpounding and absolutely must not happen.
The real truth is that none of this honestly would bother me — I often think if we lived in some sort of village it could become just another feature of provincial life: “There goes wily ol’ Zooey, on her daily constitutional” — but the continued existence of other people makes it a very guilty, bad-daddy occurrence. She has a tiny head and less neck than I have ankles, which means not much, so until recently I couldn’t even fit her with a collar and tags. It has led to, as of this date, only one helpful “rescue” which involved picking her up less than a block from my house and driving her twenty miles away to a suburb. Now she’s got tags and I have a system to keep her from roaming, which works like so:
I leave her in my bedroom, which has an outdoor-facing door because the layout of my house is mostly outdoors, with two smaller areas for living and sleeping connected by a breezeway. It is my most beloved thing, and I have lived here for over ten years which is three times as long as I lived in my last place, which was three years, which was three times longer than I’d ever lived anywhere before that.
After I have left her there, which generally it doesn’t take her too long to realize what’s happening and start barking at the iniquity of it all, I head out to catch my morning ride. If I let her accompany me to the gate, all her muscles and animal senses would be aimed, pointed, directly at getting through that gate by any means. It opens inward, which means I must navigate my big ol’ body through it to the width of my big ol’ body, which is more than enough space to rush when we’re talking about the most important thing there is, which is prancing about triumphantly in the front lawn before taking a victory lap around the block.
Her pleasure — which is to say her absolute, Walt Whitman celebration-of-self — is both wonderful and terrible in these moments. Wonderful to see, terrible to deal with. She dances like a stallion, so proud and so beautiful. Gleeful. I wish I could do something that would make her that happy (besides coming home, which makes her so happy she doesn’t know what to do with herself, and seems more like a frenzy than a celebration).
Why don’t I just walk her every morning? That’s a good question, dear reader. The reason is that a leash or harness acts on her the same way a fence does, when it comes to barking and car-chasing: She feels utterly safe in my hands, which means physically hurling herself at passing cars, knowing I will jerk her 45 pounds of muscle back just in the nick of time — often by the skin of our teeth. Walks are the only thing more dangerous than the possibility of gatecrashing, which is another reason I wish we lived in a world where she could attend to her walkabout without the fear of judgment or helpful rescue.
Once I am gone, by minutes or hours, the tenant renting the Big House up front comes to, as she calls it, “rescue the Princess,” and frees the dog without ever going near the gate. It’s a solution that has the benefit of being one of those favors that costs you almost nothing to perform, but feels like a life-saving, death-defying, unbelievable kindness to the person benefiting. The best kind of favor, in my experience, to perform and certainly generates the most gratitude in receiving it.
And it’s only possible because of our unique arrangement, the genuine heaven-sent nature of my fellow tenant, and the layout of my funny treehouse of a living space. Zooey is free, having hopefully not taken a ladylike crap in the exact middle of my bedroom rug so I will easily find it, and can spend the day aromp.
By this time I am at work, a small elite preschool, and the day’s begun. At 8:40 a.m., it’s time for carpool — something I dread until it’s happening, and then remember I adore it — which entails, in this time of Covid, a good deal of theater. A wave of mostly now four-year-olds (the Green Room) is followed at 8:50 by a wave of three-year-olds (the Blue Room).
I take their sleepy temperatures through the car window, murmuring welcoming sounds as I do it, and cheerily responding to whatever the driver of the car has going on that day. Then it’s down onto the pavement, backpack onto the back, shuffled onto the playground, repeat. And in twenty minutes, my Blue and Green kids are in their classroom or playing on the playground, and I head inside to do some work.
The reason I love carpool is twofold: First because it’s a daily reminder that you can do anything for twenty minutes. Second, because it’s the only time I see the parents. They’re mostly younger than me, even the parents of the oldest kids, but because of certain aspects of capitalism, they feel older — both to me, and I’m pretty sure to themselves. I am a youthful-looking person of unknown skillset who shepherds their children lovingly, and that signifies class and customer service ineffables that, if I tried to parse them, would break both our hearts.
So I play young and they play fond, and we muddle through. They bring me flowers, coffee, little treats. I am their beloved “Mr. J,” and what I actually do during the day is opaque to them, but the kids love me — I am in their lives just enough that I can be fun without being authoritative, the ol’ fun-uncle bit — and so the parents approve. I still feel very strange reaching into a person’s car with my huge male body to grab their kids, but they don’t seem for the most part to suffer the same twinge.
A preschool especially is a uniformly feminine place, which means we have no conflict to speak of and support each other wholeheartedly and work out problems together and share labor. Growing up, my feminist single mother carted me into women’s spaces and even when very young, it made me highly conscious of my maleness. Bead stores, yarn stores, craft stores, Joanne Fabrics — to name a few consumer destinations — all make me the bull in the china shop as I trip over myself trying not to trip over myself. Trying to simply exist and fine-tune the nature of that existence to be in harmony with the energy I am disturbing.
And there’s that, when it comes to this place too. I am conscious of my nurturing and authoritative skills — of letting other people do my labor, like a man would. I am split into two bodies when we speak as a group: One of them speaking or not speaking, and the other one monitoring my input to make sure I’m not talking over anyone or negating or well-actuallying or any of the ten million other fruits of my manhood.
My aesthetic — a sort of antler-y, forest-y, leather-y faux West Texas masculine — had to be drastically rewritten for this space. My clothing — trad male, khakis and button-downs — similarly has been utterly made over. Now I’m all band-collars, linen yoga pants, cult-leader chic in a variety of earthtones. Nothing so much, in the mirror at least, as the lesbian art teacher of your dreams.
All of this to say, “I am safe. I am quiet, I am wholesome, I am somehow more porous, softer than other men, but still gendered so as not to be confusing or frightening either. You don’t have to think about this at all, in fact. Assume I’m gay, but the benevolently romantic kind that goes to church. I may have a husband, the world isn’t sure — but one thing I don’t have is sex with strangers.”
To say, “If you get even a sense of my sense of humor, that is a rare gift and you need to perform gratitude for the fact that my mask slipped just for your benefit.”
Most indelibly, this switch-off impacts my ability to control the children themselves. It’s not a role I’m comfortable with anyway, being a rowdy sort of person and certainly when I was young, but there is a not-yet-discernable line between authoritative and aggressive that I, male giant in a world of tiny women and children, am a year and a half into and still searching.
My voice must be soft but not prissy, loving but not mawkish, tender but not improper, loud but not loud, quiet but not quiet, knowing but not arch, enthusiastic but not too silly or too much or too interested or too disinterested, all-knowing but not wearied. My voice must be a lot of things that my voice has never been before, in order to be the male version of the perfect woman, which is absolutely what each and every one of my fellow teachers are.
Office work fills the morning, after carpool. Then comes lunch. I spend midday in one or two ways: Recess with the Orange Room Kindergartners, or lunch with the Lime Green cohort, or both.
Thrice-weekly Orange recess is mostly about powers. Powers and legislation: Who is on which team, who is allowed to have which magical powers, who administers and who receives the magical potion, who is Team Ninja or Rainbow Team or Team Unicorn or whatever battle lines are drawn today. What is and is not “fair,” what is and is not an appropriate level of magical power, what is and is not in vogue for today.
A few of them are the creative engines for the rest, which gives them inordinate authority for having the talent — or the audacity — to create worlds. And those who create them often find them too precious to share.
I can identify with all of that, too. “Have you tried playing a combination of both Fairy Garden and Gods & Goddesses games?” A perfectly reasonable sentence coming out of a perfectly reasonable mouth, with a thousand fun ideas bursting and ready to be supplied. I would CRUSH it as a Kindergartner. But I don’t suggest fantasy play, that would deprive them of the whole point. So I watch and I silently judge their fantasies instead. This one too corporate-defined, that one too solipsist and personal to really sell.
Lime Lunch, on the other hand, is about… Let’s say personalities. They’re mostly five at this point in the year, and there are eight of them. I love them deeply, and dread lunchtime with them. I prefer spending time with them over their twinned cohort Hunter Green because two of the denizens of Hunter (8 students in each Green Room, to limit Covid exposure) have figured out I’m a soft touch and would let them do — or happily do for them — literally anything.
(If there were a way to invoke J.M. Barrie that didn’t also imply a hell of a lot of creepo negatives, I would do so here. I am helpless before these children, there’s after all a reason Smee was beloved by all the Lost Boys. But once they know this it becomes impossible to control them. And two of the Hunter kids have definitely figured this out, that I love them more than I can command them, much to their horrible and quite inventive glee.)
So I do lunch with Lime, three times a week. Lots of big talkers, loud imaginers, wiggly-sitters, stand-on-the-tablers, beggars to be read to (followed immediately by unlimited talking over the reading they just asked for), sly sneakers, bored fidgeters.
I could talk myself hoarse if I were able to use my real voice at all, but since we’re right back to the thin line between authoritative and aggressive, I err on the side of whining, repeating, nearly begging. It’s a demoralizing half-hour. By the time their teacher returns from her lunch break she’s generally surprised (but hiding it) at the amount of chaos I have allowed to be unleashed.
But again: A person can do anything for thirty minutes, I tell myself. A person can be any shape.
The time goes fast here, because almost everything is measured in fifteen-minute increments. It’s inordinately helpful for a late-in-life depressive: There is a truth in Titus Andromedon’s “But I already DID something today” although in my case it can be extended ever outward. “I can’t possibly see my friends today, a Monday, when after all I have a doctor’s appointment on Thursday.” The entropy of the soul that says energy must be conserved until there is no energy left.
But as they say, and it’s true: If you want something done, ask the busiest person you know. And these incredible women are the busiest people I’ve ever met. The synchronicity and orchestration and details and choreography of a single day is more than I’ve ever had to juggle in a week’s worth of days. And I try, and mostly I’m winning, to live at their pace, which is 15-minute bursts without stopping before the next 15-minute activity.
After Orange and/or Lime is done, it’s post-lunch and there isn’t a lot of school left. Like the longest stretch of the morning, my actual work day takes place in the spaces about and betwixt the daily mix of other duties.
Administrativia by the bucketloads, spreadsheets and flyer designs and letters home and reminders of who is in what enrichment class after school, who has been given permission to have a Covid rapid test should they need it, how old everybody is, and their parents’ telephone numbers, and looking forward in documents and spreadsheets toward the summer program, and after that: Next year!
A new crop of children, not just unknown ones but old children coming back new, having changed perceptibly and still recognizable. All of that lies implicit in my spreadsheets, like a magic spell waiting to be uttered.
After lunch it’s also time for the youngest to nap, which means I can hear from my office at least one classroom’s white noise and whalesong and softly playing folk music.
That same Red Room, in the earliest morning, emits a joyful series of activities every morning: From dancing out the sillies to different surprisingly curated music, to the daily mantra — “I am brave, I am kind…” — to singing a song about those students or teachers who are not here today and wishing them well, to discussion of the day’s weather, and thence to my favorite favorite: A classroom of two- and three-year-olds laughing themselves silly, belly-laughing, as a class assignment. The slow but implacable shaping of that hollow fake laughter into real, giddy, sometimes hysterical glee.
I say until you have heard a roomful of two- and three-year-olds laughing their asses off, high pitched and squealing and real, like the peals of bells almost too small to hear, but louder than bombs, you simply don’t understand what we talk about when we talk about God.
At 1:40 I walk two Red Room students (naptime-stoned three-year-olds) to the front of the school to wait with their older siblings, then spend some time cracking jokes with the Kindergartners while they wait to be picked up or otherwise disposed of.
The Stay & Play coordinator (one for each class) picks up those who are in for an extended day of projects and playtime, and the Enrichment Teacher (one for each day, Monday through Thursday) picks up those who are taking special weekly after-school classes: Science, Yoga, Fairytale STEAM and Hand Gymnastics/Brain Games. Much-beloved and highly desirable among all students, the Enrichments are another way to extend the day — to 3:15 rather than 2 p.m. — while also doing hella cool things every day.
Fairytale STEAM uses fairytales as a thematic framework to do engineering and art projects. And HGBG, or “huggabooga” as it’s lovingly called, is about fine motor and executive function. Science is about what you think it’s about, and Yoga is all about mindfulness and checking in with oneself, in addition to the poses. I am jealous of them all, but Yoga most. I have thought about joining, but can’t imagine forcing my big male body into poses among the limber, tiny children. I’d feel like a galoot, and distract the kids besides. That’s the opposite of mindfulness.
For the most part, the teachers clear out at 2 p.m. once the kids are by and large gone, and I leave at 3 p.m. I take a Lyft to and from work, I left out that detail above. I live just far enough away from work that it’s not feasible to walk but also not expensive to ride, and while I would love a car or a bike I have not gotten around to either.
That’s not true, I have had two bikes. I am too big for both and they languish, which is bad for bikes. In any case I’m not going anywhere. Plus I have this ankle injury that kicks up if I walk too far anyway, which sucks because walking used to be my favorite thing to do, and I probably would get up an hour earlier to walk to work, or partly there, if I could.
This is also why I don’t catch a bus — Austin’s transit is worse than most large cities but better than most small ones, and there are pretty direct routes between my home and my school, which are the two places I go, but between the walking issues and the timing issues, it simplifies my Zooey routine immensely knowing I only have to plan for a six-minute car ride.
By 3:15 p.m. I have arrived back home, and Zooey has put on her daily firework show, which involves running in circles, sometimes whimpering, mouthing at my hands and eventually the bedsheets in order to keep herself from nipping at me, and just general enthusiasm. By 3:20, that’s over and she’s back to the old paw patrol.
How do I get into my backyard without being bum-rushed by a girl with a plan? I do not know. She has yet to figure out the afternoon routine, so most days I find her lounging on my bed, happily drowsing and ready to lose her mind when I arrive. The harder days are those when I do come home to her waiting by the gate, knowing that once I open it she’ll have to make the hardest decision of her life. So far, she’s chosen me… But freedom calls.
That gives us 4 hours of bonding time, generally, before the nightly routine starts. We watch TV — she likes to hang out in her crate, but also thinks it signifies treat-time, so two different needs are present there as well, and I can absolutely identify — or play videogames, or tug-of-war, or catch, or this new game we made up where she chases me around the kitchen island until she is lost in delirium, an ecstasy of shepherding.
I talk to boys and wish they could visit, or engineer safe-distance backyard hangs with friends, or put myself and some other person through a true quarantine, so that we can actually spend time together without fear. Zooey begs for pets and scratches until the three-pat signal that I’m done, then moseys toward my guest until they get tired of pets and scratches, and then back to me. Shameless. She loves beans but not rice, and gets table scraps almost never.
But she hopes! She wishes and she hopes that one day the rules will change. I’ll leave a pizza where even her short little Corgi legs will let her reach, or I’ll take the string cheese out of my mouth and hand it over; even just a single Frito. Zooey has an important lesson to teach regarding never giving up hope, and that there is no limit to how high you can turn your cuteness up, when it counts. I think I’ve gotten better at begging, or at least non-verbally cuting, as a result of her shamelessness.
And at 7:30, or 9 p.m. sometimes, once I’ve stolen out into the dark and hush and called her back home, she hops up onto the bed for a full-body rubdown. She parks her forehead against my chest like a power animal, like a Patronus, and fills me up with love for the night ahead. I take my Vitamin E and my metformin, equal parts fruit punch and semen, and lay out the morning’s pills. I turn on a podcast I won’t mind falling asleep during, and toss and turn for a few minutes.
She’s not a cuddler, my Zooey — she likes to have just her butt touching me, and will react to a full-body embrace with something like poise for a few moments before pulling herself out of my reach. But she does snuffle my ears, and kiss my face and lips, and she does push her forehead against my body like she’s willing me to be stronger, wiser, freer at the gate. Which almost makes up for the lack of the cuddling I thought I was signing up for.
That’s my day. I got through it without telling you a single kid’s name, not that it would matter. I got through it without telling you how my heart aches when I think of them outgrowing our sweet little school, getting old, getting jobs, getting heartbroken and getting angry and getting over it.
I got through it, too, without telling you more than necessary about Zooey’s infrequent ladylike craps on my bedroom rug.
I am happier than I have ever been in my life, which is to say I benefit from a combination of chemicals.
Chemicals supplied by a million different little pills, including one medication in three different dosages at once. Chemicals induced by being around people I admire and children I love all day everyday. Chemicals stimulated by the love of a very good girl, chemicals sometimes from touching skin, chemicals from remaining in contact with my beloved friends through this year-long spring. Chemicals most of all activated by living a quiet small life, fifteen gorgeous minutes at a time.
And now, chemicals aroused and maintained by you, and the absolute perceived impossibility of ever having this space to think and read and watch and share with you. If I had started a Patreon seven years ago, when you started telling me to, would I have fallen so far?
I think the answer is that I would have fallen a little bit, disappointed a little bit, fallen a bit more. I think I needed an emotional rock-bottom, that Goetic exorcism that sometimes has to happen.
So I’m glad you’re here. And I’m awfully glad it’s now.