West Gray Multi-Service Center Blues

This is not like the stories I usually tell. There are no monsters here, no ancient cults, no demons. There is a whole lot of city bureaucracy, however, and as some of us know, city bureaucracy can be nearly as horrifying as the worst baddies the imagination can conjure.  

This is a story about the West Gray Multi-Service Center. The Center looks like this:

Or, well, it used to look like that, anyway.

Free Bee Stings! (A Prospectus)

“Careening. Yes, that’s it. I like the word ‘careening’ for this. I am a twin and my twin’s name is Antony and the two of us forever risk careening off into literary cliché.

“I assume you know what I mean here. Abel and Cain? The good son and the bad seed? Darkness and light? Yin and yang? Cage and Travolta swapping mugs in that old action flick?

“It’s a really well-worn trope.

“I’ve never liked cliché and I never wished to go careening off into it. I never wanted it because it is bad: Bad to be only half a person. Lousy to possess half a soul. To bomb science class while the other one excels in it. To be the slightly-too-boyish sister of a slightly-too-girly brother.

“I said ‘No thank you’ to that. Never out loud, of course – that would be crazy – but in my life, my actions, my thinking? I said ‘No thank you’ to that from the start…

“…and wound up constantly careening into bad twin clichés.

The Heroine, Victorious

I voted today.

The sun came up this morning and it was the first morning for early voting in Houston. And so from my office on Brazos and Dallas, I walked the blocks all the way down to 1001 Preston and voted. Then I walked back.

It felt like some kind of victory.

D-I-V-O-R-C-E

This was the week when I got divorced.