When I was a teenager, I had a radio in my room and I could record songs off the radio

onto a blank cassette tape and it could also record speech.

One time I recorded myself saying, my name is Padre Gautuma and I stopped it and rewounded

and played it back and I was shocked to think, is that what I sound like?

I didn't like the sound of my own voice at all.

I thought, if this is what I sound like, why would anybody be friends with me?

There was a question of who am I?

There was angst.

There was a desire to fit in, desire to know who am I around other people and huge questions

about the world that I was trying to condense into the sound of my own voice speaking back

to me.

So important, so limited, so expansive, all held together in the experience of knowing

my own name and trying to figure out what the sound of my own name was in my own voice.

So by Sasha, talk to Blue La Point.

I emerge from our yellow, linoleum bathroom, blue at one end of our single white trailer

and I have the length of narrow hallway to consider before reaching the living room,

blue, blue and I know my mother is furious.

You look ridiculous, it's all she says and I do.

I had torn the pages from a magazine, lined my bedroom floor with them and studied those

punk rocks, biked hair, white teeth, high fashion, popped collar leather, studded glossy

photos, strewn across my small space like a spread of tarot cards, telling me a future

I would never get to, not out here, not in the white trailer, rusting amber, thick of

...