In hindsight, I can’t blame them. Pork and chicken look a lot alike on a restaurant griddle when you’re making my Cuban and everyone else’s orders. In their defense, I didn’t tell them I was allergic to chicken, thus “The Chickening”.

I didn’t even know until a couple of years ago, living most of 50 years in a near-daily state of anaphylaxis. Believe your children when they tell you they don’t like the taste or smell of foods modern American society deems normal. Their bodies are telling them something and generations of “clean your plate before I give you something g to cry about” isn’t going to override nature. I normalized feeling sick my whole life.

Now, since I’ve removed it from my diet, it’s damn near debilitating if I accidentally consume any. Enter: open mic.

I took a year off of performing because I wasn’t truly ready yet. Life on the spectrum has made me fearless in the form of crowds and taking stages. That said, why was I so nervous last night?

At least I thought it was nerves.

I played well, drank my room temperature coffee, watched a few other acts, and split. Even after two songs, I still felt shaky. I thought it was an unusual case of stage fright.

I’ll spare you the gory details but, two benadryl and almost twelve hours of sleep later, I’ve awoke to some fuzzy details. It’s 6:30 am on a Sunday and it’s cold outside. Strange for Dallas, but I’ll take it. Sipping fresh coffee and weekly deep-cleaning my Proto Pipe is on the agenda, and not much else. I can still feel the poison clawing its way through my guts. All that, and I still managed to entertain a room full of people with a couple of my original songs. This isn’t narcicistic by any means (and anyone who claims it is deflecting their own narcicism) but I’m as bad-ass as I think I am sometimes; I’m just spent.

My current book projects are hibernating until New Year’s. Until that time, I’m Dare Cloud: chicken-loathing musician. Also turkey, eggs, fish, seafood, and mushrooms. Possibly almonds. Many of us don’t belong on this planet – the political polls prove that humans are two different species of alien who got dropped off here out of desperation. How do we signal a pickup?

In closing, the local music community in Dallas is a f**k-ton more welcoming than the local author community. I said what I said. Don’t like it? Change.