THE tricycle TRUCK IS REALER THAN I AM

(a public ask, a private map, a threshhold, a field guide to needing)

There’s a truck I don’t own.

It’s electric. Three wheels like the father the son and the Holy Ghost. Chinese. Bright. Cute like a shoebox is cute.

It looks like it was made to deliver turnips, fireworks, or fugitives.

It costs $2,200.

Opportunistically this is an embarrassment of riches obscenity at about a third of what I would pay anywhere else’s.

I’ve never once touched more than eleven dollars and fifteen cents that I can remember and it burned a hole straight through my palms like John Locke and John Dee’s personal Jesus.

The full price feels like a mirage.

But if I challenge myself

if I sacrifice, scavenge, and focus, and stretching gets easier every day.

I believe I can cover half.

Because wealth moves like a vicious diabolical hallucination and all the wealth and liquidity of everyone you’ve ever met all added together is pocket change to those that own most of it.

Because I’ve helped others raise money but never asked for myself and always wondered what that would be like (scary and stupid in this case!)

because I really really really really really wanna zig a zig ha

I’m asking for the other $1,100.

It is the first machine I’ve ever wanted with my whole being.

I think about it when I wake up.

I think about it when I go to bed, which is also when I wake up.

This truck is not a metaphor.

But also: it is the metaphor.

tho tricycles are marked with the curse of whimsy to be sure I don’t think this is a whim for me.

Maybe this is a whim.

But without whimsy

and this I’m sure of

it is a vector.

This is a call for infrastructure, for survival, for carnival, for rerouted futures and necessary joy.

This blue trike is:

A fulcrum.

A wheel turning something larger than me.

A small engine for generating reality and life.

A way not to be stuck.

Haptic momentum.

A machine that knows how to say yes.

A beautiful open gate between the kingdoms of fools who survive and the kingdoms of fools who arrive.

I’m trying to raise $1,100 so I can buy it if the world would meet me in the middle

I have never made a GoFundMe for myself.

I do not expect anything.

But if you’ve ever loved me, or laughed near me, or learned from me, or seen me at work, or believed in or wondered how I move through this world the way animals migrate: without permission, with aching memory, driven by need but also by a strange, persistent biological altruism via the instinct to leave traces, to carry others, to make a path even if I never return

I hope you’ll read this all the way through and give it the sacredness of your serious consideration.

WHAT I WOULD DO WITH THIS TRUCK, IF I HAD IT

It would move materials for things I already do and things I haven’t named yet:

domestic, creative, community-based, deeply personal, and occasionally monetizable labor.

It would carry the tools of survival and the supplies of pleasure.

It would serve cultural events, carnival errand-running, rituals that need plywood, and people who don’t drive.

It would help me reenter horticulture, maybe raise goats again.

It would not make my life easier, but it would make certain kinds of help possible.

I would use it for:

• hauling

• gifting

• feeding

• creating

• escaping

• returning

• laughing

• getting it done.

I would not hoard it. I want it to be available, shared, deployed for joy and necessity alike.

because why am I like this

yes

it would be decorated. and obvi

yes

It would be named. Probably a spooky or scary one. Maybe absurd, Maybe reverently. Definitely totalized.

This truck will not be anonymous.

I HAVE NO EXPECTATIONS

But if you feel like you want to

give

*<3*anything*<3*

you’ll be part of this small, electric, radiant hinge.

If you can’t give or don’t wanna, that’s also real as fuck. Please check in and make sure you want to before sending.

please consider donating to other good fundraisers especially femme queens and Black and indigenous people who experience trans misogyny. msg me the link and I’ll share it when I share this page.

If you have advice, feedback, decoration ideas, let me have them.

If you have better ways for me to get the money, I’ll listen.

If you want to help me name the truck, I’m open.

WHAT IT COULD HAUL

ice, lumber and scavenged items, yes, but also friends, compost, flowers, pain, speakers, exes, small gods, live and dead animals, tarps, false identities, libraries or perhaps just zines, bricks, prepared foods, plastic chairs, feral children, mirrors, extension cords, ancestral debts, cables, banners, weed, oil, thread, temporary signage, tote bags full of tote bags full of tote bags full of dignity, little tubes of paint, big ass paint buckets, ashes, bike parts, tarot decks, rapid tests, gravel, buckets, silk, furniture, tomatoes with a rosary accidentally hiding at the bottom of the box of tomatoes, rubber gloves, wool, generators, old makeup, cordless drills, propane, wind chimes, chalk, LED everything, seeds, folding tables, medicines, moonshine, solar panels, laundry, trash, sawdust, historical items, fencing, plastic forks, silver cutlery, rainwater, hair, scarves, instruments, things that emit or reflect light, bodies, bodies, loopholes, beginnings.

WHAT YOU’RE GIVING TO

You’re not giving to a truck.

You’re giving to everything it will help me carry.

You’re giving to the outrageous possibility of someone like me moving more freely in the world.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for considering. Thank you for helping me try.

P.S.

Some supplemental truths for your further consideration:

The first time I learned about justice I was five or six and we were learning about king Solomon and the Sunday school teacher told me to stop crying so I did and I still haven’t started again and I once laughed so hard on Molly and the daddy’s nice bourbon at the corner pocket that I puked and it sprayed everywhere like a fire extinguisher and a drag queen scowled and howled it smells like a pet shop in here and one of the dancers shockingly asked if I needed help I said no and that was the lie that changed everything forever and my body is a country I’ve never been able to leave, with border guards who have my fingerprints but no map, and one day a very small wet raccoon came to me in a storm and held my gaze like we’d both seen the same betrayal and it wasn’t symbolic it just happened, and I tried once to name everything I’d ever lost and I got stuck on “time” for three weeks and had to eat liquid food through a straw because my mouth wouldn’t close, and there’s a dream where I find a pair of gloves and they already know what I’ve done and they forgive me anyway and I never wake up clean, and there’s a shadow the shape of a plow that follows me wherever I go and I’ve never tilled anything since the last time I did my dads required 8 hours of yard work a week, but I know it like I know the sun will rise that the shadow just wants to work.