In the time since my last newsletter, I

• broke up with the woman I was not actually dating (well, she broke up with me, but it was my fault)

• got the vaxxy (although not the stimmy)

• visited Longwood Gardens for the second time in a year (why do so many people visit there so often? i mean, it's pretty nice, but not that nice…right?)

• turned 23 and celebrated in style (that is, I had my housemates play Secret Hitler with me, had a long videocall with many college friends, and had a small picnic with my good friends Lauren and Luke)

• attended Gamut Theater Company's abridged production of Hamlet, at the amphitheater of Harrisburg's Reservoir Park

• attended Joe Glass's long-delayed funeral

• got turned down for the one job I actually interviewed for :///

• played the part of a 17-year-old boy on parole for stealing a bicycle, in a training video for a local restorative justice program

• visited my three living grandparents (and also my high school prom date) in California and Texas (I'm back in Pennsylvania now)

I asked Twitter for possible essay topics, given my propensity towards piling up drafts for The Mind of Benj. Wesley and never sending them out. Whether my inability to finish projects, or my remaining sense of propriety (I want to write about my life! but my life involves other people! who may not want me writing about them!) is more to blame, I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Mitchell and Lauren were the only respondents to my query. Lauren thinks I should write about my trip to California—fair. Mitchell hit me with three succinct yet thoughtful prompts (no wonder he prides himself on his interviewing skills):

• what i love about theatre

• the Aeropress

• what names i would consider changing my name to

As far as my cross-country trip goes—let's see what I wrote about it already. On the morning of August 16, I was sitting in the Philadelphia Airport. How is past Benjamin doing there?

I am sitting at an airport bar, although not one that appears to be open, next to Gate B9 at the Philadelphia Airport. Which is kinda interesting, because I must’ve known airport bars were a thing but I didn’t realize they looked like this. Or that there would be so many—at least, this is the second one I’ve seen in Terminal B. I knew about hotel bars from Anomalisa.

I’m traveling light, almost comically so, it feels to me, with a single tiny fabric suitcase marked “T. Wesley” in acrylic paint (I have my own suitcase but I took this one from my parents’ place since it’s tinier — I went home, did some laundry, and found this case in the basement to stuff my newly clean clothes in), and a checkered black bag gifted to me by my former housemate and member of the 2020-21 Shalom Project cohort Lin, which I have filled with miscellany, including my recently burned DVD+R with 98 minutes’ worth of my “home movies” from the past 21 months.

It was that DVD, or the idea of it, that launched this trip. I figured I would mail it to my grandparents (my grandparents being about the only people with the right combination of interest and remove such that I could show it to them) in DVD format with maybe a link to watch it Unlisted on YouTube if that would be easier for them. But I ignored the last possibility and, to build anticipation, asked if they had a DVD player to watch my home movies. G-pa offered to pay travel expenses if I brought them out personally—was that a joke, it almost seemed like?—but two days later, I had my plane ticket. Out of Philadelphia, which is interesting since we’d always flown to and from BWI — I last made this trip in 2010, although not by myself. Actually, this is my first time flying by myself.

The Baltimore and Philadelphia airports turned out to be equidistant by car from my new place, but Philly turned out to have the possible advantage of being accessible by train from Lancaster. —Though getting me to the Lancaster train station turned out to be an endeavor involving the whole colloquial village. My thanks to my father, who drove me back to my place by Hershey after I dropped my car off in York so work can be done on it while I’m away. To Luke, my new housemate and old friend, who drove me from Hershey back to Lancaster. To Emily, one of my other former housemates in the Shalom Project, who kindly welcomed me into her home for the night (even though they have no power this weekend!) and gave me a thorough rundown of what to expect and what to do traveling from Lancaster to the airport, without which advice I might not be already sitting here three hours early. To Joe, Emily’s housemate, who likewise extended such gracious hospitality with no questions asked, even when, as I’ve noted, they had no power. To Alysha, yet another Shalomie, who let Emily charge her portable battery pack at her place that Emily then let me use to make sure my phone stayed charged overnight (because if I can’t get to these QR codes, things are gonna get…complicated). And to my final Shalom Project housemate, Olivia, who knew full well that I could walk to the train station, and still chose to pick me up from Emily’s and drive me to the Amtrak station at 6:45 in the freaking morning.

Olivia shrugged this off, saying she’s sure the favor will be returned—but last night in the Poplar place kitchen, lit only by a LED lantern, Joe said with a touch of…irony? in his voice that such action could only be explained by love, given how devoid of self-interest it is to wake up before 6:30 in the morning to drive someone to the train station. I do feel loved. Someone remind me to write these folks thank-you notes.

Of course, ten minutes before Luke and I were going to leave Hershey for Lancaster tomorrow, my grandmother messaged me to say I should bring a coat, given that it is apparently 60° in San Jose. I barely managed to stuff one or two blazers into my well-packed suitcase filled exclusively with short sleeve T-shirts for top wear. As for the coat — my $20 Community Aid find from this past winter, a grey overcoat that swishes around my ankles when I walk so I can feel like Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock — I’ve simply been wearing it. As Luke dropped me off on Duke Street, I thought that I must be a sight to see, with my long swishy coat, lugging around my suitcase and carryon bag. Twenty seconds later I saw a girl walking around with her own suitcase. But the coat garnered some concern: “Ain’t you hot in that, baby?” a middle-aged woman asked me (I tried to explain I just needed a place to put the coat so I chose to wear it), and a bit later a guy who might’ve been playing basketball saw me and called out, “It’s too hot to be wearing that, man!” To which I simply replied, “It really is!”

Several hours later, past Benjamin is waiting for the final, delayed leg of his flight:

I’m in Los Angeles, sipping on a coffee from Peet’s, and I don’t know if I did something wrong or if I just don’t like it. I should’ve waited till getting to my gate (the plane is delayed and won’t leave for another almost two hours), because there is a coffee vending machine near me (I am amazed! What a novelty! How deliciously low, how horribly dirty! —that’s a Pygmalion quote) which is not only offering cheaper coffee, but offering it out of a vending machine.

I told my friend who recently braved commercial flight despite their fear that I think I understand the terror of flight better now. I truly forgot how loud it is — but more than that, it seems (I’m about to use ideas that either came from C.S. Lewis talking about sex or, worse, Catholics on Twitter talking about sex) more unnatural than driving, even if it is safer. C.S. Lewis, in The Four Loves, compared…oh, something, probably one of the four types of love in one of its iterations — to approaching a city via an overhanging cliff. You reach the edge of the cliff, you can see right into the city, it is as if you were practically there. But if you actually wish to get into the city, you must backtrack, go far away from the city, and enter it at ground level. Similarly, acting in certain ways can feel holy, because in a very real way we are imitating God. But if we wish to get close to God, we must act in the ways we are commanded, not try to imitate God directly. And so, I say, with airplanes (disregarding the comparison of environmental costs), it is safer to fly than to drive, obviously, but it is still less natural to fly than to drive. You feel you are flouting the laws of nature. You wonder if we have not become altogether too inured to the miracle of flight, to gazing down godlike on the world below, where humans have become microscopic. You consider if the fact of your flight doesn’t make you more bougie than you care to admit.

What I will admit is that the use of Lewis’s analogy doesn’t quite work, and I’ll have to figure out and better explain the connection later.

Last time I was on a flight, we had actual screens on the backs of chairs. Now we have the option to watch movies on our phones, although there was no place to charge my phone on the plane. And my screen is cracked to begin with. Tsk-tsk—change is the illusion of improvement.

The following two responses to Mitchell’s prompts were written—or started to be written—on my phone in a California café where I got a hefty and delicious vegetarian sandwich with alfalfa (among other things, but I remember the alfalfa).

“what you love about theatre”

In 2018, I discovered Amanda Palmer’s album Theatre Is Evil in the most delightfully serendipitous of ways. I was working on a script for a short film in which, to add a touch of surrealism, I used the phrase “fish heart” when I really meant something like cold heart, or hardened heart. I looked at what I wrote again. Too generic. “Trout heart”—that was more specific. Had the phrase been used before? I googled “trout heart” and was soon listening to the song “Trout Heart Replica” from Theatre Is Evil, where Palmer sings along similar thematic lines:

And killing things is not so hard

It’s hurting that’s the hardest part

And when the wizard gets to me

I’m asking for a smaller heart

The song’s title itself is a reference to a separate album called Trout Mask Replica.

Anyway, people have their complaints with Amanda Palmer, and apparently she outsourced this decision to a vote by her fans — but I cannot approve of the decision, on both Amanda Palmer and Mitchell Atencio’s part, to spell “theater” as “theatre.” Amanda Palmer can perhaps be excused on grounds of being married to Neil Gaiman (a Brit), but come on, Mitchell. We’re Americans. No need to go around adding an extra “u” to “color” or an extra “e” to “judgment” and certainly no need to swap around letters in “theater.”

The fascinating thing about theater contrasted with film is the leeway it’s granted to be representational. Having neither read nor seen The Elephant Man (I believe the movie is not based on the play, although they’re based on the same real-life story), I am nonetheless aware that when the story of Joseph Merrick was brought to the stage, his physicality is evoked by the actor’s posture; when brought to the screen, extensive prosthetics were used. The point is this: films are not the descendant of stage theater, but of the photograph. They’re co-parents at the very least. With films, we expect what’s on-screen to look exactly like what it’s supposed to represent. In the theater, that’s a lost cause from the outset. Which is how something like Hamilton can work so well on the stage: we understand that the show is not contending the Founding Fathers were people of color, but that people of color are the ones ‘telling the story’ of Alexander and Eliza and the American Revolution. (And in theory, reclaiming it, through the somewhat dubious selective focus on and framing of A. Ham as an immigrant and abolitionist—as if we were dealing with something like Shakespeare’s Tempest and not actual history. Then again, whenever people talk about the Founding Fathers, they’re more likely than not engaging in somewhat dubious framings in the service of myth-making.)

The closest that film comes to being allowed to be representational is animation, and I can’t figure out the balance on that. The element of “what you see is what is, in the reality of the film” continues to exist, on a lowered level of reality: we do not demand that everything look realistic on screen, only that everything on screen at the same time have similar levels of realism.

Are musical movies “representational” to an unusually high degree? That question is outside the scope of this paper.

TikTok, which I use infrequently but gratefully, introduced me to a fellow who spent over a decade of his life playing the Genie in an Aladdin stage show at Disneyland; the comments of his videos introduced me to the concept of the British pantomime show, elements of which showed up in the Aladdin production.

I had seen references to British pantomime before, but had always gotten confused because I assumed all pantomimes were silent performances. What patient children the British must raise, for them to be so enthusiastic about mimes, I probably thought.

Not so. Across the pond, the term apparently refers to a children’s musical — not just a family friendly show, but one with sly jokes for adults and rude jokes for kids, men dressed in women’s clothing for laughs, sneering villains who insist to the booing children that they really will take over the entire world — bwa-ha-ha-ha-haa!!!

(Be right back, adding “pantomime villain” to my bucket list.)

Interestingly, the closest thing to such a show I remember seeing was a 1990s VHS tape of a Bibleman live show. It was not exactly high art. Would rather see a comedic stage play of Pinocchio or Peter Pan, which I understand are popular pantomime shows in England.

Aeropress

Is the Aeropress coffee maker a West Coast thing? I never heard of it before my Californian grandfather introduced me to it, and I was surprised when Mitchell said he used it as well — before I remembered Mitchell used to live in Arizona! I even saw one for sale in a Staples here in California!

The Aeropress coffee maker is like a vaguely upside down French press. You push the hot water & coffee grounds mixture through a filter instead of pushing a filter through hot water & coffee grounds.

The most fun part about making coffee with the Aeropress is shoving the filter and grounds into the trash (no compost here, sadly) with a satisfying thunk. Much cleaner than trying to clean grounds out of a French press.

One last essay prompt remains from Mitchell’s suggestions. For the answer(s), we will check in with Benjamin of only four days ago at the time of writing, continuing to type on his phone, Internet-less in the air between Texas and Pennsylvania. He will address how he came to be in Texas as well.

“If you were going to change your name, what would you change it to?”

Don’t think I forgot the question, posed by Mitchell Atencio when I asked Twitter for essay topics for this always-too-irregular e-newsletter.

Three other essay topics were proposed, two of them still from Mitchell: what I love about theater, my thoughts on the Aeropress coffee maker, and what I’ve been doing in California. That last one was from my good friend Lauren.

California! Yes, for indeed I am typing this out on my phone, disconnected from the Internet, as I hurtle along in a Boeing 737 on our merry way from the Dallas / Fort Worth International Airport to the Baltimore / Washington International Airport.

How I ended up in Texas as well as California is its own tale, which many of you know already. My last email updates were from the beginning of my year (well, eleven months, but close enough) in the Shalom Project, through which I lived and sometimes even worked in Lancaster City alongside my four inimitable, wonderful housemates. But all good things must come to an end, so, watching somewhat enviously as three out of four housemates found new places to live in beloved Lancaster City (the fourth returned to her home country of Malaysia), I found myself moving into a small farmhouse less than ten minutes’ drive from Hersheypark, of all places. The draw was my new housemate and old friend Luke, who used to be the one friend I could never remember when attempting to make a complete list of my friends. I remember him now.

Unemployed and not exactly affluent, I had resigned myself to silently reneging on my loosely made plans to visit my Grandma Wesley in Texas. (My paternal grandfather died before I was born, though he and Grandma were long divorced then.) Then—a chance text with my maternal grandparents, an offer to pay for travel expenses, a phone call or two—and I had my plane ticket, not for Texas, but California, to see my mother’s parents.

We were going to drive back to Pennsylvania—a foolhardy, once-in-a-lifetime trip with two octogenarians and their 23-year-old grandson chauffeuring them most of the way to Mount Rushmore and the Iowan farm town of Grandpa’s youth. For my own entertainment, I had worked into the itinerary a stop in Ann Arbor, Michigan to meet the legendary Phil Christman.

But Grandma determined she couldn’t make the drive, and Grandpa didn’t want to leave her. They offered to put me on a train back, since I had proposed making the trip out to California via Amtrak instead of American Airlines. I counter-proposed that I would be just as happy to fly back if I could spend a week in Texas along the way.

“If you were going to change your name, what name would you change it to?”

Wesley is my grandmother’s married name. After hearing the stories she told about my grandfather, I wondered why she didn’t change her name back after the divorce. I wonder if it occurred to her. After a while, it occurred to me that her opinion of her family of origin seemed plainly just as low, probably lower, than her opinion of her ex-husband.

I repeated some of these stories in confidence to Luke, who responded by suggesting, without prompting, that perhaps I could get married and take my spouse’s name. The thought had occurred to me before, though mainly because my ex’s surname would sound cooler alongside my given name than “Wesley” does. If we had gotten engaged, I would have been pushing hard for hyphenation.

But I won’t be getting married, at least not anytime soon. So Luke suggested I could take my mother’s maiden name. As it is, my mother herself didn’t keep her maiden name—but more importantly, the name Wesley does not belong to my grandfather anymore. It belongs to my father, a burgeoning patriarch—sometimes to my annoyance, but at least a generally decent one.

He’ll be picking me up at the airport in a bit. “What’s this you were saying to Mom about ‘generational curses’?” he’ll ask me. My parents seemed a bit offended when I posited my father’s bloodline is under such a curse. I suspect they fail to see, or cannot accept, the utter seriousness of my theory, precisely because they fail to see that it is first and foremost funny. My grandmother’s parents and my grandfather her dead ex-husband seem to have left a dark, generation-spanning legacy—whether they themselves inherited it, I do not know. Even my grandmother perpetuated it. What I am suggesting is that every time something in the house breaks and Dad gripes, “I feel like God is testing me,” that somehow this is the fading demonic remnant of a nearly-dead but still extant curse handed down from our ancestors. Again, perhaps you have to accept this as my joke in order to accept this as my truth.

“If you were going to change your name, what would you change it to?”

I started when I read the question, because it’s a question I have thought about in different capacities. I asked Mitchell the intended spirit of the question. He was wondering if I, like him, in childhood had come up with an alternate name. (“I just always wonder if other people considered changing their name when they were younger and if they do what they think about it,” he wrote to me.)

Well, in 8th grade someone told me I looked like a Timothy. I never forgot that, because I kind of do.

In 2nd or 3rd grade, I learned about Louisa May Alcott and her book Little Women in a history book, and I was so struck with delight at the concept of pseudonyms that I attempted my own autobiography in which I referred to myself as “Joshua.” This in mind, I later came to think of Josh as the name I would give my kid if I ever had a son. (Y’all picked out names for your future kids in childhood too, right? If it was a girl, I’d probably go with “Amanda.”)

But those aren’t the names I was thinking of.

I don’t know how I came up with the name Ellie, and I have no plans to use it. I think I used it in a story I wrote years ago, and then it popped up again when I tried writing a script in which I would find myself confronted with four very different possible versions of myself from the future: a sad-sack bum, a Catholic monk, a Presbyterian family man, and a trans Episcopalian woman who had considered becoming a priest herself but decided against it.

If I ever did change my name to something feminine—you must promise not to read much into the fact that I’ve thought about this—I might prefer Talitha: the name I would’ve been given if I were assigned female at birth. (Infinitely more unique than “Benjamin,” is it not?) But I consider that name the property of my parents to do with as they will, as it would’ve been used for my brother as well. All the same, “Talitha” would (in my view) be a beautiful name for a devoutly Christian trans woman—it comes from the Gospel account where Jesus raises a child from the dead by saying “Talitha cumi“: “Little girl, arise.” Moments earlier, Jesus had won the ire of everyone gathered by saying the child was not dead, only sleeping, when to everyone else she was plainly deceased. So too, I imagine, where some say there is no girl living, Christ may, just possibly, look beyond the outward appearance of the body and say: no, the girl inside is only asleep. Little girl, arise. Talitha, cumi.

Names have a seemingly talismanic power. I suppose I have changed my name before, in smaller ways. Indirectly hearkening back to my dad’s Air Force days, I went to summer camp as a 10-year-old and more-or-less got “Wes” to stick as my nickname for a full five days. In high school, returning to public school after seven years of homeschool, the way I introduced myself on the morning announcements as “Ben-Wesley” solidified my status as—my friend Kelsey said—a “firsty-lasty.”

The name persevered into college some. I liked being Ben-Wesley, liked how it made me feel. But then, maybe a year and a half, two years ago, I began noticing that Ben-Wesley wasn’t my name. That was the name of my cartoon self, a literal caricature of myself I drew probably thousands of times, so that I could see what I wanted to be and yet never was.

I’ve begun asking people to call me Benjamin.

Benjamin in the Bible had his name changed, though not of his own volition. His mother Rachel, dying in childbirth, named him Ben-oni: son of my sorrow. Jacob took the second son born to him of his favorite wife and called him Ben-jamin: son of my right hand.

“Seated at the right hand of the Father”—Hamilton to Washington, Jesus Christ to the First Person of the Trinity, and Benjamin. Whose right hand, and how? Time will tell.

In the time since writing most of this very newsletter, I have

• gotten my first full-time job! the pay is low but the work is romantic (would not have occurred to me to use that word except that my interviewer told me people who come to him because of the “romance” of the work—bookbinding!—do not tend to do well).

  More importantly, the workday ends at 3:30pm and my new boss said it’s been years since anyone has had to come in on a Saturday. (That’s not something that I used to think could matter to me! But then Luke spent 10 months working nightshift and I spent 11 months with a workday that ended at 5pm and every weekend off.)

Stay well, friends. Feel free to write me back, either by replying to this email or directly at [email protected].