I haven’t written you in four months and I feel no guilt about it. Good for me! But I’m writing you now and maybe that will be good for all of us.

I’m in Berkeley, California right now. It’s my favorite town in California. Here I can pretend I have a future as a old hippie poetry professor with a little house covered in overgrowth and an ancient Weimaraner collapsed on her side in front of the fireplace. In my class we aspire to write sentences no one has ever read before.

Since my last dispatch I have been to (in reverse chronological order): Seoul, Osaka, Tokyo, Bangkok, Singapore, Iceland, Cardiff, Henham, Edinburgh, Halifax, and Manchester. Also Portugal (Cascais), Spain (Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao), Brussels, The Netherlands, Copenhagen, Poland (Gdansk), Croatia (Pula), Italy (Bari, Lucca, Marostica), Athens, Budapest, Prague, Stockholm, Oslo, and Dublin. And US dates in Baltimore, Bridgeport (CT), Virginia Beach, Durham, Nashville, Cleveland, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and St. Louis. There are eleven shows left in this 147-show tour, and I’ll be hoooooohme and done on September 20th.

I got exemplary haircuts at Queer Hawk, in Dublin (who captured my heart with their "Straight Friendly!” slogan) and at Union Barbershop St. Louis, whose kitschy vibe is anything but pastiche.

My feet are too big

Objectively they are not. They are my feet and for the most part they have served me pretty well for a long time and show no real signs of rapid or dramatic deterioration. But they are big enough that they are sometimes awkward and clumsy. They ofter trip walking up subway steps, they often ache at the end of a long day, my sisters used to call me a human “L”. The point is I am always aware of them.

When I am wearing shoes I am always self-conscious of their size and how the cuffs of my pants are interacting with them. Are they covered enough to pass for a size 9 (that golden size that men’s shoes seem to be designed at and then scaled up with such willy-nilly carelessness)? Are they shaped enough like my foot to feel comfortable, but not too much so as to look like caricatures of shoes?

When I am barefoot I actually really enjoy having feet and am acutely aware of the cool, or gritty, or warm, or giving, or wet, or rough sensations received by the surfaces and textures that they interact with. Tree bark and deep water are my favorites. 

You may not be surprised to hear that I have always had a morose and sometimes downright frustrating reputation with shoes. Finding a shoe that a) fits comfortably, b) scales up tolerably to my size, and c) appeals to my specific, unflinching aesthetic sensibilities, is a rare experience for me. And they never last. God forbid all my requirements be met in a shoe of lasting quality.

I’m talking to you about feet and shoes today because I’ve been thinking about them a lot. Partly because I have been walking a lot on this tour (sometimes in excess of 20,000 steps a day). And also because, well, there is a new shoe in my life. One that I love very much and has renewed my faith in shoes after several years of real instability, pain, hopelessness, and not a few tears.

I first saw the Onitsuka Tiger on the E train near the 5th Ave stop in Manhattan probably sometime in 2019. A white pair with blue and red stripes, worn by a man reading a paperback and looking effortlessly cool leaning back against the subway pole. One shoe sole-to-steel with the base of the shiny vertical rod. I didn’t take a picture but I remembered the stylized “Tiger” mark on the heel tab and looked it up as soon as I got home. Founded in 1949 in Japan, Onitsuka Tiger was a major early influencer in global sneaker design, with roots beneath Nike and a direct line to the globally embraced Asics brand. I was intrigued, but soon found that Onitsuka had no US distribution, and I wasn’t able to order any from UK or Japan websites (this has since changed). I would have been very hesitant to do so anyway, given my history of hit or miss fit. So I signed up for their email list, and opened up many promotional emails over the next few years, admiring 2-3 models out of a very wide offering.

When I realized that this tour would be taking me lots of places with Onitsuka Tiger STORES, I began to get really excited while at the same time preparing myself for the likely reality that these shoes that I had esteemed and even coveted for years may very well not fit my stringent criteria, and if that turned out to be the case I would have to be honest about it and let what I had loved from afar go free, before it had even been mine to hold for a brief moment.

I am here, dear reader, to tell you that sometimes…love prevails. The shoe fit. The shoe scaled up. The shoe looks great. And the first pair of black Mexico 66 that I bought in Sydney, and have worn almost every day in the intervening seven months, are still in great shape and have at least two more months in them. I’ve splurged on few things for myself on this tour, but am coming home with five pair of Onitsuka Tigers.

Hooray for love and hooray for feet.

I’ve been playing with color in this episode.

How do you feel it’s going? Be honest.

How was your sex ed?

Not good. I know. Mine either. A joke, really.

In school a tentative dip by an uncomfortable teacher into a shallow pool of information, using dated curriculum and buttoned up as quickly as possible with a Q & A begging for no Qs and with no candid As. Just don’t get AIDS. Maybe sex ed in schools is better in 2026 than in 1998, but my brushes with it in my kids’ schools so far are not indicating much movement in the right direction. 

At home obviously thought and cared-about, but equally cringey and quickly veered away from at every possible on-ramp.

I imagine a society and world that works toward normalizing candid and appropriate conversation about sex with kids from before they can talk. At early ages there’s a lot of non-sexual groundwork to be laid (ha ha): Explicit and sub-contextual messaging about bodies (their sacredness and usefulness as well as their capacity for pleasure, fun, and frivolity) and expectations around speaking up about touch (we had it out a few times with grandparents over whether hugs were obligatory).

But I’m not sure I think Sex Ed needs to be provided by parents in like a pedagogical sense. I sure couldn’t handle it when my parents tried, and so far my pre-teens are showing similar patterns, even though many avenues of communication are open and strong between us that were not between my parents and myself at that age. I think a blend of making quality resources available, and being available and trusted for questions is probably the approach that makes most sense to me at this moment (this is why I love the Netflix series Big Mouth so much and maybe it’s a hot take but that show is quality and engaging puberty/sex education).

Enter quality resource:

This is Shan Boodram, who I first became aware of as sort of a sex/relationships influencer, podcaster, and product designer? I’ve listened to some of her podcast episodes with her husband and there’s some great stuff going on over there having to do with honesty, transparency, advocacy, and open relationship dynamics. 

And then I stumbled on this 16-part Sex Ed series that Shan made for the educational organization Crash Course. It’s produced with support from the Kinsey Institute (be still my fluttering heart), and the ~10-minute episodes cover topics including genitalia, contraception, sexual orientation, gender, virginity, STIs, orgasm, even porn and kink!

The series is light and funny and relatable and thoughtful and serious and if I had had this available to me as a pre-teen and teenager I probably would have gotten a lot less of my badly needed information about sex from kids in town and dial-up internet porn in the middle of the night. And even watching it as an adult—I learned stuff!

So I’m planning to send this to my 11-year-old, who is very interested in relationships and their dynamics, and even has kind of a proto-girlfriend situation going on. His pediatrician talked to him recently about the HPV vaccine and threw out the idea that in a few years he may start being interested in experimenting with sexual activities and he was horrified at the supposition, as was he when I told him I was planning on sending him a link to Shan’s series. But he’ll watch it. Probably in the middle of the night.

Mean Hand: a maniacally beautiful story for a font

I came across the font “Mean Hand” and want to share it because it’s pretty great as a font and because the story of its creation is a fascinating sociological one.

The writing samples came from nearly a million handwritten characters collected by the US Census Bureau in the 1990s and visually composited into a set of “mean” characters then used by the bureau as a way of creating systems for machines to recognize and translate handwriting into digital formats. And now you can use it for free in your gig posters and gender reveal invites (you know the kind I mean).

Ok one more thing that maybe shouldn’t be this buried, but I trust you all have been so rapt that you’ve made it this far

So if you’re feeling spicy or baseline rebellious against a fascist government, please join me in the following small act of resistance:

1. Navigate on over to the Stonewall Monument page of the  National Parks Service website.

2. Scroll on down to the box labeled “Was this page helpful?”.

3. Click “No”.

4. In the box labeled “How could we improve this page?”, tear ‘em a new one for the complete and intentional erasure of the mention of trans folks and in particular the black, trans women who are the literal only reason the Stonewall Monument even exists. Seriously, dig through the page. You’ll see phrases like “LGB rights” and zero mention of queer folks other than “gay men” and “lesbian women”. It's infuriating.