in praise of mohawked lesbians

maybe it was the music, maybe it was the time of year, but for whatever reason i found myself thinking about my friend Joan_e this morning. it was three years ago today that she and i went to Morikami Garden together on a Saturday afternoon. we had met some weeks before at a coffee shop, and i had told a bad joke about light bulbs, lesbians, and documentarians:

Q: "How many lesbians does it take to change a light bulb?"
A: "Two. One to change it and one to make a documentary about it."

from previous passing interactions, i already knew that we were political and aesthetic simpaticos, but i was still unsure of how these realms would interact.

(an axiomatic aside:)

oil and vinegar make a delicious dressing,

but oil and water do not mix.

the joke served as a (successful) litmus test for friendship, and since then i've come to reflect upon and ponder the role of humor in the process of building new friendships. it's almost as if comedic form structures conversation between strangers, allowing them to gauge the compatibility of temperament and personality.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that Joan_e and i strolled around the park that afternoon, learning more about each other and sharing our respective romantic predilections. this was the first of many platonic dates, the sublime tensionless state of a (mostly) straight boy spending time with a (mostly) lesbian girl. in the months that followed we undertook fruitful trips to Fort Lauderdale film festivals and aborted trips to Apocalypse Now.

then, one night in August,
we shared a night that started here:

Joan_e at her farewell party

and ended here:

Joan_e chasing a woman i came to know as Mardou

two years later,
those 24 hours looked like:

illustration by Saylor

the discrepancy between the indexicality of the photographic images and the subjectivity of the illustrative image may (or may not) adequately analogize the relationship between remembering, imagination, and nostalgia.

suffice to say that the distance between that April day in the Japanese gardens, that night at the now-defunct lounge, and the image above can be deceptively large or impossibly small...

of course, the inverse is also true.