On Thursday, May 15th, I did a reading of Borg Like Me at Curator’s Office @ Studio 1469. It was a near-perfect night and all of the attendees were so enthusiastic and supportive. I read my essay “Tears in the Rain” and excerpts from “The Lemon Song,” “The Internet is Punk Rock!,” and “Mein Führer, I Can Walk!.”
One of the more entertaining moments came during the Q&A, when my friend Janine Tursini asked: “You said in your “Tears in the Rain” story that there were ‘things you people wouldn’t believe’ in your past. It begs the question: will you share some of these?” That line is actually taken from the movie Blade Runner itself (which the essay is based on), and is in quote marks in the text, but I was happy to oblige sharing some of my own hard-to-believe past. I tried to think of something suitably out there and luckily came up with the story of living in a mountain cave for a few days in my youth, naked, with another dude, fasting, bombed out of our brains on hashish, chanting and praying to a statue of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god. Hopefully that was suitably strange enough to establish my “things you people wouldn’t believe” cred. Although, for anyone who knows me, which was nearly everybody there, I doubt there’s much about me that could shock them at this point.
After the reading, Janine joked that she took notes. She wasn’t kidding. On her Facebook page, she posted a little summary of the night for her:
I take away with me: “guerrilla scribe, do androids dream of electric sheep?, molting moments, music as invocations of sexuality, things you people wouldn’t believe, celebrity isolation, and dressing up to confuse the spirits.”
I’ll go with that.
Endless thanks to Andrea Pollan and Curator’s for hosting me, Forward Fest DC (which my appearance was part of), Jonathan Monaghan, whose show, Alien Fanfare, is currently up at Curator’s. And to Bradley Chriss, for being my lovely sales assistant for the evening, Jason Horowitz for printing my cover posters, and Kristin Guiter for taking the above pic.
If you missed the reading and would like to pre-order my book, or order the two chapbooks I had for sale there, you can find them all here.
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