You are afraid of the sound of your own heart. Anytime you sleep, you have to sleep on your back, lest you hear the beat of your heart pulsing through your ears. Anytime you workout or ride your bike far, and have your earbuds in, you have to take them out before you pause the music, lest you be confronted with the noise of your rushing pulse. You admit this shyly, maybe sheepishly, to a new friend as you have drinks in the rainy, cold food cart pod in downtown Portland, the heaters doing their best to keep the vinyl tent over the picnic benches warm. He probably nods or shrugs, you hug goodbye, you go back to your life.

Life feels like it’s on pause, in January of 2025, with the presidential election going awry and the entire country, your entire city of Portland, holding its breath to see How Bad It Will Be This Time. You’re entering your second year as a full time artist and content creator, and it’s going okay, but after the election, the brand deals and jobs you were used to getting started happening less and less often. You make the choice to archive your politically charged art to make your online presence more homogeneous, more tame. The inauguration happens, and what follows that week is the most divisive, racist, unsurprising policies and executive orders oozing out of the White House. You promptly un-archive your art, make a new blistering installation that goes viral, and lose a lucrative brand deal with Absolut Vodka, among others. You don’t know it then, but this sets the tone for how scrappy you’ll have to be as an independent artist.

You find a balance between constant outrage and the peace and bliss that comes with making your art. You start to host firearm safety trainings in your apartment for queer, trans homies, facilitated by the Shuten trainers, because after a lifetime you’ve learned to intuit which way the wind is blowing, then go to a gun range to practice. The last time you shot a gun was at a range in Los Angeles with your bestie Michael, and before that, with your big brother John before he passed. Unsurprisingly, you’re a pretty decent shot.

In March, you bring Michael with you to Austin, where you give a talk at SXSW alongside the smart and funny Sarah Jones. It’s about the intersection of art and content and some people’s instinct to gatekeep those definitions, and in the week afterwards you make installations around the city, and do an installation collaboration with the wonderful, wise poet Maggie Smith. You see your sister, her family, your mom on the trip too. Your mom is fiercely independent, but as her age advances, you worry about her more and more, and the plan slowly forms to get her to Portland.

The incredibly talented Jason Hill makes a mini-doc about you and your art for Travel Portland’s Portlanders series, and you open up your art studio to the public to host the watch party. Never has your heart been fuller.

Two years earlier you lost your dad, and then your beloved soul cat Ned, back to back. Now, in present day, you have a thawing of your heart in the form of your new cat, Steven. At the end of 2024 you fostered him reluctantly, since he looks just like Ned, but his personality couldn’t be more different, which made the decision to keep him permanently easier. He is a sleek bundle of wires and cords in a chunky, sturdy teenage-cat body. He is barely-repressed chaos in a grey-furred onesie. You glimpse his past trauma when he’s fearful, or in the mornings when he burrows under your bedcover, time-traveling to his kittenhood when he curls up and quietly mewls in the soft dark, next to your sleepy thigh. All rough scars get tender, eventually.

Spring in Portland arrives, as a cavalry made of flower and tree blossoms. Every winter you dutifully take your Vitamin D, insist that you don’t have seasonal depression, but when Portland hits that first 70°F day, you’re grinning ear to ear like the Joker, smiling at dogs and babies. “Wow, maybe I do have seasonal depression” you muse as you high-five a confused stranger.

You’re invited to make art at Summit, a thought-leader conference, this year in Detroit. You know almost nothing about the city, but you pack up your flowers, your balloons, and Michael (and your other friend Michael), and spent a little over a week in this incredible city on the rebound. Detroit reminds you of no other city, it’s unique and beautiful and historic and complex. The people are some of the friendliest and most curious you’ve met, and after the trip you feel like a walking billboard, a living advertisement for this metropolis. This is your favorite part of what you do as an artist: making art in different places and meeting curious, friendly people.

You planned to go to Los Angeles, where you lived for 12 years before Portland, in February, but something about the timing of that timeframe felt tone deaf in the wake of the horrible fires that devastated the city. You go instead for the entire month of July, and team up with over a dozen incredible guest models and collaborators. The long month also allows you to reconnect with people not seen in years, and it feels weirdly and reassuringly healing and nostalgic. No, you are not moving back: Portland is your home, hopefully forever. Your favorite cities, New York and LA are great, but they also do a great job gaslighting people into thinking they’re the only place one can be successful.

You spend a few days in Columbia Missouri for the wedding of your dear friends Jessie and Tim, along with the other members of The Hive, a tight knit friend group for decades. It’s probably the first trip you’ve gone on in years where you don’t do an art installation while traveling. Enjoying the company of friends and living in the moment? What even is that?

You come back to Portland and immediately dive into promoting your second book! It’s a whirlwind of local TV appearances and interviews, which culminates in a book signing at Powell’s, a local icon and the world’s largest independent bookstore. Your sister and brother in law fly from Texas to surprise you at your signing, it moves you to tears.

A creative highlight of your year is always going to your hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico in October for the International Hot Air Balloon Fiesta. This year, they welcome you with open arms and you make some really great installations there, and plan for a huge 2026 with them. This trip always lets you reconnect with friends you’ve had for decades. You love this city, and the people in it, unapologetically.

Today, the first day of your 52nd year, you get on the plane back to Portland, sit in your window seat as always. You see your reflection in the glass, then look beyond as the luggage handlers load your duffel bag that holds your flowers, load the large hard case with your LED letters, your deflated traveling balloons. The plane takes off, you look down with such love on Albuquerque, all the people there you love, and you could swear you even see your dad waving goodbye. It flies higher, you see Texas, your mom and sister and bro in law, your niece and nephew, the plane flies higher still. You see Los Angeles, Detroit, New York, the plane flies higher and higher, you see the curve of the Earth, you see Portland and Seattle, you see very place you have ever been and every place you have yet to go. You realize with a start that it’s not round, it’s not a globe. The shape of the Earth is a heart, and the people you love are the beat of it.

You’re not afraid of your heartbeat anymore.