Activity for intellectual stimulation:

Doggie friends or enemies made (100 words):

Size, color, shape, and approx. weight of feces:

Duration and quality of urine:

I immediately agreed. Sid had known I was trans from my height, my beautiful face, and my irregular beard. I knew he was trans because he properly identified me. Even though he got on my case for not taking the job seriously enough, we were each happy to have a trans buddy in the dog-care world.

We spent a blissful year together, and then Sid asked his business partners to buy him out and he moved to L.A., like every trans person who found themselves wanting resurrection in a less gritty place. Who doesn’t dream of waking up from gender-affirming surgery to palm trees?

Still, there weren’t any good top or bottom surgeons in L.A., and the fantasy, like all fantasies, remained even more potent in its insubstantiality.

After he’d settled into a studio apartment with pea-soup-and-bacon-shaded carpeting, Sid texted me: I was at a party at Aiden’s place and the putz (he liked to interject a little Yiddish now and again) has a goose named Agatha.

That was all I needed to know to make a complete character assessment of Aiden Chase.

The laws of common internet decency rest on the understanding that if you have a goose named Agatha, you are obligated to overrepresent her. The fact that he chose to micro-document the reddish hair growing at the tip of his chin when he had Agatha running around, eating bananas, told me that his value system was all askew, and yet there he was, instructing an entire generation of young white queers on how to cock your snapback just enough to denote rakish young non-str8 without crossing into either “urban” or skater poseur territory.

Now that you know how disgustingly seductive Aiden was, I can proceed to the day when the balance shifted and the gawking voyeur and the flat subject were thrown into an industrial blender and wholly reconstituted, like that new meal-replacement line, Whizzerd.

Let me set the stage. The Black Rains had not yet begun, tho forest fires, flooding, and next-level storms had been reshaping the terrain for many years. I was still a lowly dog walker, creeping in and out of other folks’ homes. In my own apartment, I’d become a worn-down receptacle of my roomies’ substances. Walls did very little to stop the passage of the Witch’s beetle-shell extracts, asparagus decoctions, burning angelica leaves, moss, and myrrh, and the Stoner-Hacker’s weed, Mexican food, laughter at his video games, angst at his video games, and loud thumps every time he picked up Infinite Jest and then threw it back down on the floor.

I was no longer in the deepest part of the Shadowlands, nor was I in the light; I had found a ledge between the ooze below and the crisp air above.