
Last night I got to attend one of San Francisco’s longest running literary shows “Happy Endings” where every month, five local bay area writers get eight minutes to share some work around a theme. This month’s theme was “Cultivating Calluses” —it’s all very fun, community-oriented and casual, but I did win the judge’s prize, which was very special for my first ever live reading.
My husband doesn’t want you to look at his feet. Wait, sorry, we’ll get there...
A few weeks ago, I was on all fours when a text from my brother pinged my headphones. I took off my gloves, dusted myself off, and opened the family group chat. It was a photo of us at Coachella. 12 years ago. (Climate change who? Fascism what?) Not a care in the world. I was wearing... a neon tank top, metallic sunglasses, I had paint on my chest ... sigh... a boy scouts handkerchief folded as a headband, and there’s a random girl (?) on my shoulders. No no, look, It’s fine. I love every iteration of myself. I had just come out as bi so... I wasn’t “straight” at the time but I also wasn’t quite gay yet either. I love the unbridled joy, the unpoliced fashion sense. The complete cluelessness.
I think they call that nostalgia. This photo had snuck on airwaves into my bubble of flow and suddenly — a stark contrast had eclipsed and interrupted my work. I thought, “It’s Coachella weekend”. That used to mean something. But here I am with my thirty five year old knees pressed into the dirt. Quietly shuffling concrete pavers and adjusting their height to level as I build our community compost hub quite literally brick by brick. I had dragged a yellow umbrella over to shade out the same spring sun I once danced and sweat under. And like Carrie Bradshaw before me, I began to wonder am I missing out? Is this fun? Is this better? In these precious lives of ours, do we trade-in one currency of sweat for another?
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It’s funny. That was the Coachella that brought me up from San Diego to LA to date my first boy. We met at the Lacoste Party. We made out by an artisanal popsicle stand after my brothers had left. He was a West Hollywood Ken-doll fighter-pilot and... competitive ice skater. Okay, fine he was just a normal pilot and competitive ice skater - but could you imagine? In any case, I was so young dumb (and full of…) I fell for the literal poster boy of gayness.
Fittingly, he ghosted me on Valentine’s Day, which made me abandon the entire project of WeHo. And thankfully, I made my libido over to Silverlake where it belonged. That was 11 years ago.
This past winter, I was back in Silverlake. I hadn’t lived in the area for over 7 years but every time I return, I reunite with the same constellation of familiar faces at reminiscent house parties. And every time it’s a blast. But this time, it felt different. I was different. I found myself in a quieter corner of the party with one of my dearest LA friends, Drew. We began reminiscing — Girls, when you start reminiscing at the party, you know you’ve become a gay of a certain age —anyway, we were reminiscing about the fact that it had been 11 years since my dewy-eyed, 24-year-old, fresh-meat-self had taken the train up to LA to get laid. And here we were a decade later, surrounded by the same familiar faces that populated my first imaginings of queer community.
But, now, the chaotic twink was raising a baby, the hot stud was old news, the fresh faces were certain of their attractiveness, and the wheel churned.
My friend looked about on the edge of something, curious of the leap. He began the admission. He said he and his friends were standing around at a party not too dissimilar to this and, they began wondering “Well, should we all just keep doing this for another ten years, (*he gestured at the party*) or do we do something else?” He said “Everyone I know is trying to figure out what to do. We all want to know ‘What’s the project?’”
What’s the Project? What is it that I am to apply myself to, what is it beyond myself that I can come closer to? That I can be in service of?
He was telling me this because my husband and I started a farm together 5 years ago: “A Project”. We both work in climate and sustainability and we felt a deep desire to create a land regeneration project from which we could invite as many people as possible into the process and joy of regeneration. After all, one of the smartest things ever said about climate change was, “What’s the point of an apocalypse without the rapture?” If we were going to stop the apocalypse, it needed to promise us a type of joy that couldn’t be found anywhere else. Drew knew a farm was not his project, but still he wondered, what was it?
What is the project? What is all this striving for? What *could* it be for?
I’m not clear whether this search for A Project is a midlife crisis or a coming-of-age or whether it reflects a broader societal transformation. Zadie Smith did an interview recently where she talked candidly about how she didn’t enjoy aging. How she loved youth. In the comments I was compelled to write, I can’t differentiate between a nostalgia for youth, and a nostalgia for a world that doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did. And I think we’re trying to figure out how to exist not just as gays of a certain age, but in a world we no longer recognize, if we really got close enough to look at it.
It seems the arc of our becoming maps the arc of our society. Self-expression was the project. An ultimately individualistic endeavor. We’ve been told our most sacred project is differentiation to the degree that we become severed from all else. I sensed in the larger queer community, and perhaps society at large, that particular party had run its course; a search for new meaning beyond the individual was underway.
In so many time-constrained words, my husband and I’s Project, revealed itself to be about relationships. In the broadest sense. A coming closer. Traveling backwards against the path of individualistic differentiation. And I could sense in Drew’s question a growing awareness of a hollowness that fills, like water a sinking boat, a life lived at a distance. So many of us get through life by attempting to protect ourselves from it. Shield our wounds, through abstraction, removal, detachment, constant stimulation. And into that distance our armor affords, an emptiness grows, until a yearning takes root.
The children yearn for the mines, as they say. This easy vacuum of distance, pulls at us, until we yearn for the friction of closeness.
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Do you want to talk about my husbands’ feet now ya perverts?
My husband does not want you to touch his feet. Ideally, don’t even look at them—even though they are testaments to what makes him strong. Years of long distance running have yellowed the toenails and hardened his pads into, not the soft curvy shape of a plump leisurely foot, but a precision tool with streamlined edges and purposeful ridges.
I find it interesting that both to be callous (with an o), and to develop a callus, are about protection on some level, are responses to pain. But I’ve seen too many people develop callousness where they should develop calluses.
We apply the callousness of detached irony or hedonistic indifference like armor - that type of callousness protects us by giving us distance from something. On the other hand, to develop calluses is to interface, to come into contact so frequently, that your body becomes the task. We develop calluses so we can go deeper, get closer, work harder at it. Calluses are created by the repetition of distanceless attempts at joining that with which you toil. A callus is a relationship.
My husband’s feet are the feet of a Runner, not the feet of someone who is distant from running. There in the word “Runner” is what I mean, when a person becomes the activity.
And so, if “The Project” begins to call you, I can only wish for you the raw friction of closeness. The beginning is always the most painful, it is when you are softest, newest, most tempted to retreat. After that first bloody blister tears open your skin, all that is required of you is that you keep interfacing, keep pushing up against the work until the work begins to shape you in return.
This, I think, is what it means to develop calluses—not to guard against the world, but to give yourself to it. Not to escape the effort, but to become the kind of person who finds, in that arduous repetition, a new kind of pleasure through the slow and sacred thickening of skin, which is not a barrier but an estuary where you and the world meet.
I gave a little forehead kiss to the boy with the Boy Scout headband, put my phone away, and dug my thirty five year old knees back into the dirt. I honor that old joy, that old sweat. But I’ve traded it in for something that blisters, something that builds. Whatever your Project might be... lean into the calluses. It’s the only way to stay close to the thing you’re building. It’s the only way to become it.
Loved this! Such a randomly well timed read for me personally; been thinking a lot about protection and distance versus this raw friction closeness you describe, and I’ve been reminding myself that I’m in a constant state of being undone, in one way or another - or as Virginia Woolf said in the Waves, “I am made and remade continually”
What a great read! Thank you so much for sharing it. Very moving. I don't *need* to read thoughtful pieces like these from fellow gay men, but I must say it's nice once in a while to see some of those specific life angles, moments and perspectives (and humour!) mixed into an otherwise more universal reflexion. Thank you!