You Can Look Stupid When You're Having Fun

I went to a reading last week at Dad’s Garage for “A Night At The Sweet Gum Head”, a great book about Atlanta night life in the 1970’s and 80’s, with a focus on a groundbreaking drag club. Local history is extremely difficult to write, and I admired how the author artfully covered some of Atlanta’s more notorious and entertaining figures from my childhood when the book came out in 2021. The author read some of his work in progress on another bit of Atlanta history that has national impact, and I was so happy some of my friends had convinced me to attend. I needed a night out, and challenging material, and the reading provided both.

Also at the reading were some really good poets, and the theme of the night was one of Atlanta gay club subculture. After the reading, I was talking to some friends, and one of the authors came up to say hi. Someone introduced me, and I could tell the poet was confused as to why I (a giant cisgender woman) was there. I introduced myself and was nervous because of the racy theme of the readings, so after I said my name I meant to say “I hope to see more local gay poetry like yours available” as a compliment, but what came out of my mouth was “I hope to see more local gay porn available”, and even the author, who had just been reading about fisting or something, looked a little shocked. Because I was too embarrassed to fix my mistake, and we were inside an improv venue, I then decided to double down and stick to the bit with a completely straight face. I just went ahead riding my embarrassing verbal slip as if it were intentional for another awkward minute or two. There are likely now a few people in town who think I’m some sort of edgy activist trying to get gay porn into local libraries or something. I’m not, but fuck it, there’s always been a fine line between the racier Harlequins and soft core anyway. Eventually I’ll meet the poet again and we can laugh it all off, I hope.

One day I’ll be able to talk to people without shoving my whole foot down my throat, and then broadcasting my mistakes. That day is not today. What I actually said was way more embarrassing and possibly professionally damaging, so the quotes presented here have been edited. I swear on the grave of Truman Capote, the spirit if not the letter of the truth has been represented here. The gaffe happened because I was tired, and outside my comfort zone, and I was just a few days away from my annual January vacation week. Me then riding the gaffe into the conversation was one hundred percent the result of poor socialization though, but I think Capote would have enjoyed the whole thing immensely. What is Southern Literature but an embarrassing bit of history overlaid with self-serving mythology anyway? For a few years now, I’ve made a point of taking the week of MLK Day off. Not only is traffic more intense around the national holiday in Atlanta, but I tend to work through the December holidays as much as possible, so by mid-January I need the break. The need for a week off was especially pressing this year, with the water damage from the winter weather and unsellable house pressure becoming so unbearable that my two full work days before the week off were full of errors. I probably should have just called in sick, but so much needed to be done before I left for a week. I still showed up those last two days, and did my job, if much less than at my best. The guilt of mistakes made Thursday and Friday a week ago haunt me, if no one else. It’s like I started stumbling the night of the author reading, and couldn’t recover out of exhaustion until the end of the week.

I love my job, but I think it might be hurting me. This is more often the case when working for non-profits than not. I know the signs of burnout, the confusion, the late starts to meetings. What I really need is a vacation, but like everything else that’s on hold until the house sells. The husband has suggested FMLA, which I could easily get with all that’s going on, but I’m trying to hold that option in reserve. We can’t afford any missed paychecks anyhow. I truly do want to keep my position at least until I’m fifty, or longer if I can. The only question is how much my own professional pride – a dumb, stubborn sort of pride that means I agonize over dumb mistakes likely no one else will remember a week later – can take.

Which leads me to wonder what sort of work I’ll have at all between fifty and seventy-five. My goals between twenty-five and fifty have mostly been accomplished, and my youngest child will graduate High School just a few months before I hit the half-century mark. I could just continue to push forward at the job I love, pushing to help make the city easier to live in the best ways I know how, but there’s a big question of how to handle the stress in healthy ways over decades. I’m looking for answers, and I have just a few more years to find the key that will help me stay more than eight years, my current record with a single employer. Like a lot of people in my generation, my work history is checkered with organizational lay-offs and long stretches of contract work. I’ve never really had the opportunity to work for an organization more than five years, except for the international corporation I had eight years of before leaving sick with the knowledge that corporate America was not for me.

Someone I was once quite close to leaves Atlanta tomorrow. He’s striking out for Portland, like my sister did, like others I know have in recent years. I know he’s making the right decision for himself, and I’ll see him again. I’m still here fighting to make Atlanta better, but for how long? I feel like the city is right on the edge of something even bigger and more beautiful than it has ever had before, if the empty office buildings can get converted to housing. I can stay, and watch the dirty south become a little shinier and better, or I can leave when my daughters no longer need me to hold their hands daily, and homestead in a state safer for young women. I could live in a state where my job would be protected when I make a dumb verbal slip at a reading, should it come back to bite me in the ass professionally. There are states where I can publish stories about my life more truthfully, without fear, the way the poets I heard at the reading do.

I admire the way the author of “A Night At The Sweet Gum Head” was able to relay a truthful story about Atlanta without fear or over editing, even though he admitted in the talk after that he struggled with what to publish and what to keep private. That’s something I wrestle with too, constantly, even though I largely publish just for myself. The comedian Michelle Williams once said “Blogs are a conversation no one wanted to have.”*, and I’m okay with throwing these posts out once a week solely as a form of personal record keeping. I need to keep track of my own mistakes, so that I can figure out how not to repeat them. I need to find the keys to managing stress better, both personally and professionally, so I can quit shoving my foot down my throat. Local history, at its best, shows us how much better we are now than we were in the past. I hope that’s true of my own writing, too.



*“Joke Show”, Michelle Williams. 2018, Netflix