Played Like a Fucking Fiddle
After twelve-hour workdays, all I want is to spend time with Dawna. Unfortunately, she's trying to squeeze two households into one, and apparently my constant presence isn't particularly conducive to concentration. So she came up with a brilliant solution: send my annoying ass on errands. One light bulb, a pack of cigarettes, several hours riding Nyx and Aurora, and an overcooked swordfish dinner later, I discovered on Facebook that my future wife had played me like a fucking fiddle. And you know what? I wouldn't have it any other way.
What the Fuck Am I Trying to Say?
I'm finally getting serious about publishing Undertow, my collection of short stories. But somewhere between thinking about cover art and waiting for my fucking omelet, I started questioning what the collection actually says. These stories are fictionalized versions of very real experiences from my life as a transgender woman. They're painful, uncomfortable, and not particularly happy. But does a collection need a happy ending to have meaning? After dying three times in 2022 and nearly dying again in a motorcycle crash in 2025, I've become obsessed with impact and legacy. I'm not writing simply to publish another book. I'm writing because I need my life, and my words, to fucking matter.
I Don't Need Any Fucking Help Shopping
Two Le Pera motorcycle seats. Nearly $1,400 spent. Two failures at roughly 20,000 miles apiece. So naturally, I found myself shopping for yet another fucking motorcycle seat. And just when I thought the morning couldn't get more irritating, Microsoft Copilot decided I needed help shopping. Seriously? Ask my wife. The last fucking thing I need is help spending money on motorcycles.
The Fucking Public
Albuquerque has collected more than $11 million through automated speed enforcement, and now there's talk of letting cities keep an even bigger share. Meanwhile, the cameras keep multiplying. Government calls it public safety. I see an expanding surveillance system, an addiction to revenue, and another assault on individual liberty. Here's a fucking reminder: I am the public. You work for me. Not the other way around.
Don't Let Your Day Fuck Up Your Night
Some weeks, the weight of leadership, bad decisions, and life's bullshit gets pretty fucking heavy. But when I walk through the door at night, I don't want to dump that weight on the woman I love. Life has taught me how precious those ordinary evenings really are, and I'm not about to let somebody else's bullshit steal them.
One Fucking Year
One year ago, an evening motorcycle ride left me broken on Cerrillos Road. Broken bones, surgeries, months of rehabilitation, and nights spent crying when nobody was watching. But somewhere in the hardest fucking year of my life, I found love, purpose, and something I hadn't truly possessed before: a sense of my own worth. I'm not grateful for the accident. I'm grateful I survived it.
I Just Wanted to Know What the Fucking Camera Was
I just wanted to know what the fucking camera was. Instead, I found myself wandering through ordinances, policies, contracts, departments, and a municipal bureaucracy so complicated that understanding my own city government became a fucking research project. Government belongs to us. It shouldn't require a map through the labyrinth to figure out what the hell it's doing.
The Final Chapter
My day job woke me up. My writing career kept me awake. Somewhere between midnight emails, publishing expenses, Undertow, and another book I haven’t fucking written yet, I realized writing isn’t just something I’m doing. It’s what I intend to carry with me to the final door.
The Reaper’s Kiss
There’s a difference between watching somebody face death and being the person staring through the fucking door. Once you’ve crossed that threshold and somehow come back, mortality stops being an idea. Tomorrow isn’t promised. You know that in your fucking bones.
Twenty Fucking Feet
There was a trash can twenty fucking feet away. Instead, she left her cup, spilled drink, wrappers, and the remains of a jelly donut in the street for somebody else to clean up. It’s a tiny thing, until you realize how perfectly it represents the difference between liberty and entitlement.
We Wanted R2-D2. We Built Fucking C-3PO.
We spent decades imagining artificial intelligence as R2-D2: the competent little machine that quietly rolls over, plugs into the problem, saves everybody’s ass, and shuts the fuck up. Instead, we built C-3PO, a know-it-all that desperately wants to explain everything. George tried to fucking warn us.
Thanks for the Material, Asshole
The danger of putting your work into the world is that everybody has a fucking mouth, and the internet gave everybody balls. One anonymous asshole decided to make fun of a tooth I’m still dealing with after nearly dying in a motorcycle crash. Unfortunately for him, he picked on a fucking writer.
The Procedural Fucking Dance
I spent hours watching people move through a courthouse where the enormous power of the state had somehow become routine. Dates were scheduled. Names were called. People were told when to come back. Everyone played their part. But somewhere underneath all that fucking procedure, I kept wondering what happened to justice.
The Fucking Cage
A car gets you from one place to another. A motorcycle puts you inside every fucking mile between them. The temperature, the wind, the smells, the landscape. You don't pass through the world. You enter it. Unfortunately, sometimes love and logistics mean climbing into the fucking cage anyway.
Get the Fuck Out of the Left Lane
The left lane isn't the “I'm going 68 in a 65, so I deserve to be here” lane. It isn't even the fucking speeding lane. It's the passing lane. Pass somebody, move the fuck over, and stop turning an incredibly simple traffic pattern into a clusterfuck for everyone behind you.
Dear MS Copilot, I Can Fucking Write
I’m fucking Gen X. I learned to write by hand, type on an actual typewriter, build an outline, stare at a blank page, fuck it up, crumple it up, and start again. AI can be an incredibly useful tool, but I’m not convinced we should outsource the basic human ability to take a thought out of our own heads and turn it into a fucking sentence.
Apparently My Fucking Motorcycle Owes Albuquerque Money
Albuquerque says speeding is dangerous enough to justify automated enforcement, but apparently not dangerous enough to actually stop the fucking vehicle. Instead, a camera takes a picture, you keep driving, and weeks later the registered owner gets a bill. Ignore it long enough and eventually a debt collector comes looking for the money. Sorry, but I don’t fucking buy the safety argument.
Apparently, I’m an Author Now
I fucking hate marketing. I hate self-promotion. But apparently, somewhere between making sell sheets, sending books to festivals, volunteering at booths, and planning a motorcycle trip to Tucson around a fucking book festival, something changed. I finally stopped treating writing like something I do and started accepting that being an author is part of who I am.
I Earned That Fucking Picture
Someone at work told me the picture I submitted was too unprofessional and suggested I replace it with one that’s a fucking decade old. Nope. I don’t look like that woman anymore. I’ve aged, changed, died, survived, learned, led, and earned every fucking stripe on my shoulder. The woman in this picture is the woman you asked for.
The List
Almost a year after the motorcycle crash, I showed Dawna the list of everything that had been broken, torn, punctured, crushed, or otherwise fucked up that night. I expected her to understand what I survived. I wasn't expecting the fucking list to remind me how much of it I'm still carrying.