A gay angel. A gayngel.

We go to Ken and Holly's because they have a fire pit and because, despite the fire pit, we did not go there the weekend before. Both seem reason enough.

Call it primordial -- I know I have -- but I can talk around a fire as I don't anywhere else. This is somewhat inhibited by the presence of Holly's father, visiting for the weekend. Though I am in my late thirties, I am always nervous around other's parents, as though I will cuss and earn a deserved scolding. (I am not this way around my own parents, who allowed me The Toxic Avenger and spicy HBO documentaries.)

Before the sun sets, Holly's neighbor comes by, a judge who assessed a traffic fine against me a year ago. He has no reason to remember me - I was polite and resigned in court - and it is not clever to remind him of our first encounter. He offers them leftover beer from a party he had, bringing over several bottles and unopened wine. Holly says this is his way and that, when she told people she bought her home, they all knew it in reference to this man.

Around a fire, one can actually have a conversation without distraction. Amber tends to the fire, which Ken finds impressive, but it is just poking the coals with a stick. Amber would do it anyway as a sort of fidgeting, to give herself something to do with her hands. Her skill in it is practice and patience, knowing she will be adept at it so she is. It is how she approaches most things in her life.

Activists

I talk all the time, but it is rare I say anything much beyond necessity and entertainment. I don't get anywhere deep and I don't try. Depth is too much to expect of the everyday, from everyone. It is making love to the reticent world.

It is impossible to sit near a fire and not imagine ancestors who communed around flames or used their heat for survival. Fire is one of the tools that made our species better than apes and homo sapiens the winner of the hominid wars. It is Prometheus's gift and it seems rude to his sacrifice to look the other way.

For all my fondness of technology that would have delighted my younger selves, I am not a fan of all the trappings of modernity. It interferes with what we are made to do, chief among this building tribes. I wouldn't want to go back to an era without what few civil rights we have and certainly not to the era of banging rocks together, but I want to disconnect. I do not feel close to those on the internet, even if I could know them in the flesh. No matter what we type to one another, I do not consider them in my sphere, as it were.

I want conversations on summer nights that stretch into the small hours. I want to reenact Kristina's party of last year, where we hung out beside a roaring fire for hours. Even if I did not like all those people, it didn't matter. We were Fire Mates for that night.

The following day, Amber and I go to the Gay Pride Parade in Poughkeepsie. Though I am not in the rainbow, Amber is bisexual. It rarely occurs to me that this is something she considers daily, an aspect of her personality on which she wishes there were more emphasis. I see it here, though, a connection to a community outI know she is bi. It doesn't affect our relationship in any particular direction. It is what she is. (We do not even have the same taste in woman, aside from her own justified narcissism toward finding herself sexy.)

The parade itself is considerable. I mention this to Amber, contrasting it with the one for the Pine Bush UFO Fair. "I guess more people believe in gays than Grays."

We go to Holly's booth, which I thought was for Dutchess Community College, but which mostly seems to sell square Pride medallions for $5 a pop. It seems a small thing, until she mentions upon selling them all that she had 70 to start and should have brought more. The only gratis one was for Amber, as payment for the use of her tent.

Here is a community in which I am not even a spectator. I am not watching or separating myself, but I am also not a part of them.

Spoiled by my teens and early twenties, I am now unused to having anything that feels like a community. Back then, it was as easy as being in the same classes. Now, community has to be decided and scheduled. I am no longer in a community as much as a clowder, with Amber and the cats, a statement even I, within it, find a touch pathetic.

Where were you when I was new?

At the festival is Coley, a woman whom I knew well in the past and want to know better now. She is dressed as one would imagine a garish unicorn, representing the local Rocky Horror Picture Show cast. We gravitate to one another several times, then I give her my number so we can stay in contact. We were once better than best friends. That fire never fully burned out over twenty years and I aim to rekindle it.

Soon in Xenology: Sanity. Writing. Summer.

last watched: Jessica Jones
reading: The Men Who Stare at Goats
listening: Damien Rice