 He's inspired by life as a San Francisco native, a second-generation punk, and a trans man of color. He's an artist, activist, and recovering asshole. Please welcome the excellent Mason J. Right now, I'm focusing on kind of, you know, revisiting and like kind of coping with the trauma of growing up in the 90s in San Francisco with a mother who worked almost exclusively with queer men of color dying of AIDS. So I'm working through a lot of that now and kind of exploring, you know, how because that was also normalized for me that I didn't really have the chance to, you know, mourn and cope with a lot of the things that happened. So this first piece I'm gonna do is called the Dementia Pantume. I figured, you know, a Pantume would really kind of capture the repetition and just the process of, you know, how I just watched grown men turn into like little babies mentally. Okay. All of my uncles are dead, dosing with visions of William Shatner's corpse under their hospital beds. Dementia's twisted each of their lives into a fantasy, made them forget friends, lovers, five-year-old me. Dosing with visions of William Shatner's corpse under their beds, their bodies withered and tangled, reacting to guinea pig meds, made them forget friends, lovers, five-year-old me. As I sat next to their hospice beds reading kids books about grief. Their bodies withered and tangled, reacting to guinea pig meds. Dementia twisted all of their lives into a fantasy. As I sat next to their hospice beds reading kids books about grief, all of my uncles are dead. All right, this next piece is actually just three short haikus. I have I'm a recovering serial dator and so the way I've been kind of coping with a lot of my relationships is Condensing them as small as I can into haikus and so beginning middle and ends of relationships as summed up by haikus I don't know why, but it's just been really helpful. One, I whisk you back home to avert my attention from a senseless tryst. Two, amidst loss and lust we sank into Mission Creek and shared rescue breaths. Three, under the harsh weight of your father's old sea coat I broke like chopsticks. This next piece is a piece that I wrote I want to say two years ago because it was for a friend of mine who I'd actually never met in person. It's a trans man of color and a queer and a disabled person and just a general weirdo. The internet is like kind of where I live. I have a really strong internet presence. A lot of my friends I've never met in person and I was really inspired by an artist named Mark Aguhaar who You know, we lost a few years ago and their their blog which you should check out if you haven't already It's called Call Out Queen. It was really imperative to a lot of you know The race and gender stuff I was working through at the time and just to have them disappear was like I don't know really really a thing for me. So I wrote this. I think the week they passed away Photos of you soft and peach-like with perfect cop not contoured apple cheeks and wide colored lips Still graced my dashboard and I'm thrown back to the first Tuesday in 2012 when I awoke earlier than noon. I packed my boyfriend's girlfriend's home grown weed into biggie smalls the two-foot bong and went looking for you like I did every morning But you would decided to sleep in that day without glamour glamour pizza or even art to wake you from your slumbers No one was ever going to be worth your strength your love and rage, but damn it. We were trying So this was actually written today, it's totally unedited it's just kind of my musings I Live in San Francisco's Western Edition. I've lived there my entire life My mom has basically lived there most of her life sons, you know the first five years of her life And we're experiencing like rapid ridiculous gentrification and so I've recently been doing a lot of research into you know the history of the area, you know Before before the first wave of colonialism happened and I've just been thinking about it a lot a lot Okay When I was born I was so small I had to wear goggles to keep my eyes from falling out of my skull because I wasn't ready to See the world My joints now twist and contort my lungs fill with black mold as they sleep next to a cement wall and every day on my way Into my front door I pass a sign with a vague warning for expectant mothers about their fetuses possibly warping due to radiation The only place I've ever known shelter is mirroring the state of San Francisco and making me equally Unrecognizable and uninhabitable The irony being a toxic den unfit for even the unborn is worth kicking me and my family out for I'm chain smoking today a vice given to me by colonizers and historical hiccups Because I cannot handle these new settlers who have replaced the blooms with comms communities with commodities War horses with fixies and ships with cranes to build condos with different names for the same thing in an attempt to make Anyone who's been rooted here feel happy about the small plucks blankets. They are offering us. I Don't actually care if you live in a ride co-op with chickens and compost. I'm about to get columbus And so as I stand here on Yalamu Indian land near the old side of the San Susie Creek Looking east towards downtown only seeing pilgrims that this the same pilgrims that my native ancestors saw approaching I Can feel the ground beneath me labored and scared just like me as I walk past new and improved cop cars and another fucking cafe All right, the last piece. I'm gonna read is Just something kind of in a similar vein to that but just a more poetic approach to it in the drawn-out gazes of coastal Wind I slept in the elbow of caliphas with one eye open too close to the ocean losing me. Tierra. Yeah more The unknowns turned into coral graves, and I swam from them by any means necessary Across Jonestown into Jamestown through Montgomery under the Alamo beneath the mission Not to oscillate in and out of consciousness I decided to settle But to find there's nothing down here for an insatiable mind is worse than seeking beneath white foam and blue skies All right, thanks Thank You Mason Jay