Nothing to pour honey on an aching soul like people consistently made victims of trauma until it teaches them to do the same. I love Brokeback every read and will read more Proulx when I can get my eyes to focus a bit more.

I think often of the podcast Shit Town which has a place in my heart so few pieces of media hold. I haven't been able to listen to it in years, but I think about a gay man in Alabama mailing a copy of this story to his lover, and of soft curls in the car. Of intimacy in 50 mile wind. Of intimacy in sweltering, stagnant heat. Of a gay man who hated tattoos getting tattoo after tattoo to keep a kid he took in's shop afloat and dying after a life surrounded by clocks with cyanide in his belly.

This isn't a review of Shit Town or even Brokeback. Just a reflection. On pain and intimacy and death and love and sacrifice and stubbornness and the way they're sutured. On queerness.