my baby's in the white fluffy clouds

Tonight at Insomnia Cookies I watched a trio of very freshmen attempt the most mathematically inept bribery it has been my privilege to try to keep a straight face over. "I have a full scholarship to Boston University!" declared a person who was trying to offer five bucks under the table for a cookie that could have been legitimately purchased for two ninety-nine. She insisted on using all of her pocket change despite the counterman's heroic efforts. "God bless you! God bless this store! We're coming back here every day! We'll send our friends!" We had made sympathetic eye contact during the phase of negotiations which involved the other employee of the night, a disembodied voice emerging indistinctly from behind the oven racks. I think I got free ice cream for just not being eighteen.

My father has finally shut down the house servers that for thirty-one years supported my family's e-mail. I had assumed for years that I would inherit their maintenance, but the relentlessness of cybercrime and bots and algorithmically accelerating spam mounted past the capacities of a digitally fluent private citizen. It is the end of an era and one that feels choked out by corporations rather than naturally concluding. I had grown used to a personal e-mail address that hummed out of a rack in a basement. It went with the oscilloscopes, the soldering irons, the DC meters, the Geiger counter.

I heard earlier this week that David Kopaska-Merkel had died. He was one of the earliest editors to publish my poetry, including my one award-winning poem in Dreams and Nightmares #63 in 2002. We had not been in touch for years for no better reason than that I have not been in touch with most people for years and I hate the thought of him and his poems and his forty-year-old digest-sized magazine no longer in the world.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) feels occasionally like the one queer generational marker I share. Partly I grew up with it at the pre-VHS second hand of Bill Henkin's The Rocky Horror Picture Show Book (1979) which I would peruse in much the same way as The Complete Plays of Gilbert & Sullivan (1941); the real person of my mother's cousin had documented and celebrated its cult, but it almost never occurred to me as a child that I could see the movie itself. I don't know if the Brandeis shadowcast still calls itself Orgy in a Sock, but for three and a half years their semesterly performances in Schwartz Auditorium were one of the central events of my major friend group. It took until senior year for one of my first college friends to commit to wearing a corset. Another refined his drag down to the miscalculation of shaving his arms. To the best of my knowledge the couple who hooked up at our last spring show—he made an unparalleled virgin in the squarest of boomer sports jackets and ties and nothing but heart-printed boxers underneath—remain married with child. The hallmate who had to imitate an orgasm emitted a memorable batlike squeak. I attended the first time in black jeans and a black silk shirt and experimentally a borrowed and ornamental bra, but my standard costume emerged as a black half-slip and camisole, fishnet stockings and black jazz boots, the most femme ensemble I have ever donned for fun in my life. I walked three miles and climbed through a second-story window in it, too. If I could get one, I carried a pomegranate to the Halloween showings, initiatory Persephone. I continued the tradition into my truncated grad school career, including the time we put the movie on in the inexpressibly grody rec room and I did most of the callbacks. I can't make it not sound trite that it was transformative, but there has never been another space in my life where I went around in women's underwear.

For everyone who remembers the glories of Harry Hilfinger et al.'s "Obey Your Air Raid Warden" (1942), a_reasonable_man just sent me an article by Hilfinger about its creation. "For those who might ask how we matched the lip movements to the sound track during editing, we can say it was just a matter of reading lip movements on a Moviola film editor and positioning the sound track accordingly. Each scene had to be synced separately, of course. It was not possible to use the professional clap boards for a picture of this sort."

The thing is that it has generally been a steamroller of a summer and the fact that the light has flicked over such that I expect even after twenty years to be heading to classes any second now has not reduced the bituminous compacting feeling. I have been listening to Dolores Gray at the 1987 Royal Variety Performance with "I'm Still Here." I had known that most of her career was UK-based, but had not then understood that she would be existentially obliged to turn up in Doctor Who.

Eclipse first, the rest nowhere! The moon was just beginning to dent sootily in as we left the house. Our headlights caught a fox with a coat like copper-flooded seas trotting across the road with a rabbit in its mouth, the least subtle of metaphors. Our star-watching hillside was silhouetted with other observers and occasionally their telescopes clambering out of the false dusk of the horizon like the saucer-legged Zeiss projector of my childhood. The one nearest us mysteriously packed up a few minutes from maximum, but we heard others whistling and shouting as we approached 96% and one small child in light-up sneakers flashed down the slope like fireflies. We never saw the full red moon in the rolling clouds, but we could see its smoked-glass tint creeping toward the tenacious bright rind that winked so sharply out at one point in the haze that a whole set of stargazers yelled. The ebbing shadow gave it a cat's-eye look above the rooftops as we came home. It was kind of the fox to lend us back the light.