And honor just being happy to be twenty.

One hour left. Just a number, just a number, just a number. But the heart says different.

It's my eighth birthday and I'm at school, fourth grade, orange shag carpet, even twelve seeming impossibly distant. All is bathed in holy self-assurance. Pain, yes. Loneliness. Purity, though. Selfness.

Then I'm bored and gradually diluted until the self-assurance is buried, seemingly irrevocably.

Then I'm burying friends and part of me secretly thrills at the thought of my house burning down.

And the only really heartwrenching thing, truly agonizing, is the ineffability. The story is too big. There is too much holiness. It can never be retold. It can never be understood, even by ourselves.

So I honor what I can.

Honor finding my mistreated pet hamster dead and stiff on the living room carpet.

Honor a dream of absolute, searing LOVE and togetherness, ONLY SIX YEARS OLD, waking in tears at the beauty of it and kneeling beside my bed, praying with clenched hands that it not be only a dream.

Honor the impeccable sanctity of the first years of a family.

Honor my first kiss, stolen, then given.

Honor the pain, HONOR THE PAIN, the dilution, body hatred, HONOR IT, loneliness, fear, HONOR.

Honor the joy of looking into friends' eyes and seeing there a home.

Honor the dead poets with black and white faces. Honor my desire to throw their books into the ocean and walk away forever.

Honor death. Honor change, which is death.


Honor Bryan. Honor to you, Bryan. You are here in my heart forever.


Honor my component realities. Honor Skate Town and Superbad. Honor Kerouac's Great Emptiness. Honor the cripple. Honor the hermit. Honor the King. Honor a distrust of the pointedly cool. Honor the pointedly cool. Honor inconsistency and the freedom to travel between these realities without fear of congruity.

Honor the bullies. Honor those I have bullied.

Honor Miramar Ranch Elementary School. Honor Thurgood Marshall Middle School. Honor Scripps Ranch High School. Honor The Evergreen State College. These places are in my blood. I trace their geometry with fondness and tragedy.

Honor moving at the age of five, telling my dad I want to go back and suck all the memories out of the house through a latch in the door.

Honor wanting to suck all my memories out of the world and keeping them in a chamber close to my heart where they will stay warm and I can protect and preserve them.

Honor this weblog, which is a chart of my sincerity.

Honor overwrought tone. Honor the ability to laugh at anything, even staring down the barrell of two decades with damp eyes for the spectacle, the IMMENSE, CRUCIAL, YET UTTERLY UNGRASPABLE IMPORTANCE OF THE THING.

Honor the spectacle.

Honor the past.

Honor the future.

Honor the present, which is both.


Honor to these things.


Honor to these things.


Honor to these things.


Because that's all we can do.