Camp Here

Welcome to my blog, a place where you'll Find love, Understand life, Change your mind, and Kiss boredom goodbye -- to your heart's content.

Ever since I was a kid growing up in a small, rural town in Texas, I have been drawn to things partly outlandish, partly mainstream. Amusement didn't seem to follow a logical path to me: what others found engaging I abhorred, what others found abhorrent I treasured. To my surprise, this pattern of cultivating strange tastes continued even as my surroundings radically shifted. At Yale I expected to occupy a niche among the intellectual elite, but the moment of belonging -- despite the rich variety of choice I was offered there -- came only in brief, bright flashes. A year after graduating and moving to Houston, I was hosting a party/poetry reading I called "Waltz Whitman" when a verbally astute, new friend of mine named the pattern she saw in me -- "just a touch of camp." I knew what "camp" was, but for no good reason I'd never thought much about how it related to me. Instantly, however, I saw that she was right. "Camp," strictly defined (which it probably shouldn't be), does not summarize everything about me, but I have found no other word that comes closer to describing the strange yet banal, colorful yet gloomy, anarchic yet precise set of cultural artifacts and aesthetic objects I store in my ever-widening Santa's sack of beloved gifts. More importantly, what had seemed like an increasingly isolated life of re-watching "The Craft," jamming out to The Pointer Sisters, and toting "X-Men" comics to darkly lit dive bars began to seem less lonely. There are untold numbers of campers out there, each of them secretly yearning to kick off their Sunday shoes and enjoy life not for what it could be but for what it is -- ostentatiously, senselessly, fabulously flawed.

Visit often. Leave hungry.