My first session was Wednesday. The clinic—parlor, salon?—was in "Portland"'s historic gay district. I checked out a nearby bookstore beforehand. They had the _Hamilton_ soundtrack playing, and a table setup encouraging customers to write postcards to our Congresscritters to protest GOP villainy.
-Meatspace bookstores never fail to conjure up a healthy sense of greed and ambition in me. O books O knowledge! O vastness of human thought, O connectedness of the readership graph! O _searing pain of wretched humiliation_ that I've been so slow and lacking in my own contributions to the graph. (Lest we forget, _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_ is [more than a year old](/2016/Sep/apophenia/), and I've barely _begun_ the Sequence of things I've wanted to say for a long time.)
+Meatspace bookstores never fail to conjure up a healthy sense of greed and ambition in me. O books O knowledge! O vastness of human thought, O connectedness of the readership graph! O _searing pain of wretched humiliation_ that I've been so slow and lacking in my own contributions to the graph. (Lest we forget, _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_ is [_more than a year old_](/2016/Sep/apophenia/), and I've barely _begun_ the Sequence of things I've wanted to say for a long time.)
I bought a copy of _Counterexamples in Topology_, and a short story collection with a 2017 copyright date, subtitled _The New Trans Erotic_ [_sic_]—research for the blog, I told myself; I should understand the competition, the bright young gender-dysphoric literary minds sworn into the service of the victimhood identity-politics mind-virus and accordingly shunted down the transition track, rather than the repression track or—whatever you want to call what I'm doing. (And if _they_ can write and produce a meatspace book, why can't I?)