Can you ever go back? Chapter 1 As I’m hustling around packing for my trip, my boyfriend asks me if I’m excited about my vacation. “Vacation?” I asked. “This isn’t a vacation.” Is it possible to go on vacation to a place where you lived for 20 years, and you’ve…

What “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” gets right about women’s sexuality I remember when the movie “The Sessions” came out in 2012; I was super excited to see it, as I am well aware of the power of surrogate partners, and how doing triadic therapy with a surrogate and a therapist can put a person on a road to happy, healthy…

My first experience with psychedelics was unplanned and unexpected. I was 14, and had crawled out of my friend’s bedroom with another friend on a warm July night and headed to downtown Reno. In the 70s, cruising Main was a thing, and people inched their way up and down Virginia…

A Day on the Line of Emergency Food and Water Distribution Post Winter Storm in Austin I can’t believe I’m getting a sunburn. It’s the last Tuesday in February and a balmy 75 degrees in Austin. The weather isn’t unusual for this time of year, and it’s the type of…

Is there any room between locking yourself in your home indefinitely, and living life as though nothing has happened? Can you walk through that gray area? If you are going to try, here are some tips for harm reduction whilst traveling during a pandemic. Road trips, a fixture in my…

Where’d you go, Responsibility? In late July, a story started going viral in several of my friend circles. On the Fourth of July weekend, a 3-day ecstatic dance event took place in Nevada County, California. Nearly 200 people took part in it. Attendees began testing positive for COVID-19 two weeks…

At 7:15 a.m. on the first Sunday in January, the Colorado sky is beginning to lighten, and I can see the contours of the snow-covered mountains. I peer down the hill toward I-70, which is surprisingly quiet. My friends are packing up the SUV in preparation for our 16-hour drive…

As far as I know, this is the only picture of my paternal grandparents. I’ve had this image in my home since 2006. I originally printed it out for an altar that honored dead relatives that was created at my wedding. More recently, it hung on my wall in my…

I guess you could call it a date, but sex and romance were not on the table. I knew exactly what I wanted from the night and it had little to do with getting naked. We were grabbing an early dinner at a surprisingly quiet restaurant in a busy part…