We're here

For all the irrational hatred and the isolationist hypocrisy and the manipulative demagoguery the GQP and their vile, desperate, defiantly hypocritical sycophants use to tear this country apart morally, socially and intellectually ... for all the ignorance they've perpetuated and the lies they've parroted to shore up their base ... for all the ugliness and hostility and racism and sexism and phobias they've unleashed from the dungeons and the shadows and the basest instincts of humankind ... they've ironically and unintentionally and no doubt regrettably inspired something quite beautiful: a mass uprising of love and support for every person they vilify and every minority they oppress and every demographic they scapegoat in their bloodthirsty quest to dehumanize and destroy us all for their own gain.

And if you're a trans person—especially if you're a trans kid—we want you to know we're here.

There are legions of us who have been and who currently are and who will continue to be your friends and allies and champions with no judgments, no condemnations and no barriers. We may not have been as visible to you as we'd have liked in the past out of consideration for your privacy or lack of a forum to communicate to you or even out of concern that we might inadvertently say or do something awkward or uncomfortable or insensitive around you. But we're here. And it is now our moral and social and just simply human imperative to make sure you know who we are.

Whether you're just coming to terms with your need to transition, beginning to comprehend the emotional and physical and social journey ahead of you, taking the first tentative steps in changing your persona and your presentation and your name, or standing bravely and confidently and proudly at any point on the transition continuum ... our primary interest in your trans identity is that you are safe and healthy and happy.

We may never fully comprehend the extent of what your personal or collective journey has entailed—and we may ask a lot of questions both out of curiosity and a sincere need to better understand where you've been and where you're going.

But we're here. And we stand with you both in person and at the dawn of a new sense of community. And we want you to know we love and respect you just as you are. Or just as you need to be.

We're here.

Happy 340th birthday, Johann Sebastian Bach!

Fun Bach fact 1: Johann Sebastian Bach is considered to be one of the definitive composers of the Baroque Period in music, which lasted from 1600 until Bach's death in 1750. Following the Renaissance Period, which explored independent, interweaving melodic lines in a style known as polyphony, Baroque music introduced the concept of tonality, where music was written in an established key. The highly ornamental and often improvised music of the Baroque followed the key-based chord progressions played by the lower instruments of the basso continuo.

And though all symphonic music from the Baroque Period forward is collectively known as "classical music," the official Classical Period as we define it today directly followed the Baroque, lasting from 1750 to 1825. Its definitive composer was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Fun Bach fact 2: The formal title of every work composed by Bach is followed by a BWV (Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis or Bach-Works-Catalogue) number. First published in 1950 by Wolfgang Schmieder—who was probably very boring at parties—the BWW system assigned a unique number to each of the 1,126 known written works of Bach. Unlike the far-more-useful-in-my-humble-opinion Köchel catalogue that assigns numbers to every known work of Mozart chronologically, the BWW assigns its numbers by genre. Which isn't even a German word.

Books: North Woods

If I were going to assemble my favoite literary themes and tropes into a novel like it was a Build-A-Bear at the mall, North Woods by Daniel Mason would tick all the boxes on my checklist: an ancient house with generations of occupants and fascinating stories, ghosts from that rich past lingering to make sure their stories get told and their lives don't end up forgotten, nods to historical events both to establish context and to celebrate our shared experiences, richly drawn (and inherently messy) characters who on some levels end up feeling like your favorite friends, a trust from the author that you'll connect the dots and follow along when you're given only scraps of tantalizing information, bread crumbs and Easter eggs that follow the house and the characters through literal centuries, nerd-grade information about very specific topics you find yourself wanting to learn more about, metaphors large and small that weave through the narrative without smacking you on the head ... and sentence after sentence after sentence of evocative, lovingly crafted prose that sometimes makes you stop and catch your breath because it's just so brilliantly gorgeous.

And if THAT'S not enough to tell you how much I love this book, try this: I read it in September and it's stuck with me so much that I just re-read it in the space of five days.

It's hard to fully describe what the book is about. On its surface, it follows the centuries-long story of a tiny stone hut built in the 1600s in Western Massachusetts as generations of people come and go through its doors and build onto it almost as if to create enough room to hold its ever-expanding history and the stories that echo through it.

The people who come and go are sometimes generations of families and sometimes unrelated buyers and sellers. Some of the stories exist in their own time and reach their logical conclusions and some echo through the centuries and continue to drive the various narratives. Some of the stories are told by an omniscient narrator. Some are first-person accounts. Some are heartfelt letters. Some are even metaphor-laden poems with sing-song rhythms and dark Victorian themes.

One chapter is a graphic, turgid description of lust and wanton, depraved sex between two beetles. (You will need smelling salts and a cigarette after you finish reading it, so be prepared.)

I can't recall ever reading a book twice in the space of a few months, but I'm so glad I did with this one; since I already knew the basic plot points, I could spend my second reading focusing on the gorgeous prose, the larger themes and the tiny details—a lost button, a rusty axe head, a forgotten note tucked in a family Bible, buried bones, the catamount (an old name for a large wild cat) sitting placidly on the book's cover—that trickle through the narrative, sometimes just for fun and sometimes with deeper meaning.

The novel is so packed with characters and moments and delicious coincidences that it's impossible to focus on just one thing to love ... or to worry about possibly giving away as a spoiler. There are twin spinsters I want to be best friends with. There's an unrequited love story that just breaks my heart. There are satisfying, well-justified murders. There's an exploration of worldly insights hiding in a schitzophrenic mind.

Above all, there's an underlying theme that time and nature and humanity are interconnected in both obvious and clandestine ways, that we're all part of a larger, beautifully messy narrative, that small details can tumble quietly through time and space until they snowball into overwhelming influences ... and that reading a beloved novel more than once can fill you with even more joy and wonder than you'd experienced before.

Books: All the Light we Cannot See

The masterful novel All the Light we Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is, on its surface, a story about two pre-teens—one an orphaned German boy with a self-taught gift for building radios and one a blind French girl with a fascination for science and adventure and access to an entire museum of discoveries thanks to her father's job—whose separate worlds slowly collapse around them (and occasionally, tangentially intersect) in the early years of World War II.

The book is filled with imagery and metaphors and cultural references subtle enough that you don't have to get them to be engrossed in the narrative and beautifully relevant enough that they bring deeper meaning—sometimes profound, sometimes merely observational—to the lives of the characters, their changing circumstances, their collapsing worlds, and their dawning understanding of the cruelties and horrors of war.

Those cruelties and horrors of course extend to the Holocaust, which Doerr acknowledges with the most deft touches; Jewish characters pass in and out of scenes long enough to leave an impression and then sometimes disappear many chapters later with a dreadful understanding told in a few sobering, artfully constructed phrases.

The allusions to Light and Seeing in the book's title filter through the narrative in obvious ways (young Marie-Laure's blindness) and in ways that slowly dawn on you (the invisibilities and abstractions of radio signals that engross young Werner). And the metaphor of light—or lack thereof—lingers in the hushed, unspoken evils of Fascism, the sudden disappearances of beloved characters, and the illuminating discoveries of both children on their individual and tacitly shared journeys.

Doerr has a gift for creating characters you find yourself knowing intimately and caring about deeply ... and since they live in the crosshairs of a brutal war, some of their fates will break your heart.

He also trusts his readers to connect the dots between offhand comments, minor characters, historical references and other pieces of ephemera that slowly coalesce into richer understandings of the characters, the themes, the contexts and the worlds they occupy.

The novel is not new and it's been adapted into a Netflix miniseries so you may already be familiar with its general narrative, but I don't want to reveal any more plot details than what I've said here. The first three or four times someone recommended the book to me, the plot summaries they gave honestly didn't grab me. But I'm truly glad I finally listened. I was instantly engrossed in the book, and now that I've finished it I'm finding I miss the characters as though they were friends and family in a long-ago life in a terrifying chapter of our shared history.