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Fifty-three years old today, somehow... How keenly I still remember, throughout my twenties, not expecting to live to see thirty in the shocking early years of the AIDS pandemic and the height of my activism, then feeling much the same thing about living to see forty after moving to San Francisco from Atlanta to go to grad school and study with my heroes. The last few years have been quite a personal and professional struggle, with serious scary health crises and an ugly protracted union fight and the whole Trumpmerican catastrophe to contend with on top of my usual insomnia, introversion, pervasive anxiety, and relentless self-recrimination... And yet here I am at fifty-three, fitter than I was a decade ago, knock on wood, and somehow this fraught itinerant adjunct teaching life has provided an ongoing living and passion, whatever its exactions and precarity. Hell, this year I paid off my student loan debt and got a three-year contract at one of my schools for the first time! Amazing. To have found and maintained love, friendship, conviction, and vocation in the face of the relentless cruelty and selfishness and stupidity of the world is something to celebrate. To my friends, here and elsewhere, I love you and thank you all for making life better...