Go like water.

The Weekend.

2012-01-08T14:12:00.003-06:00

Things I did this weekend:

1. C and I went to Target, which oddly enough is about a 7-minute walk from our apartment, across the river to the Bronx, for laundry detergent, a cover for my Kindle, a plastic-coated whisk that I can use in the no-stick pans, dental floss, paper towels, and a couple other things I can't remember any more.

2. I installed the curtain "hold-backs" that I ordered from Home Depot. I ordered and paid for 4 pairs but they sent 8 pairs. No idea why. Because of the design of the curtain rods, it was difficult and took some time to open and close the drapes. Our windows open onto a 10-flight stairway that goes up from Broadway to our neighborhood in Inwood, and the stairs are flanked with streetlights, so curtains that close are necessary. Now, we can just hook them on the little things when we want them open and let them go when we want them closed. I can't tell you how much stress that relieved for me. Silly, I know.

3. I organized the office. I had ordered a bunch of stuff from the Container Store (my new retail crush): a wire hanging shelf so I have extra room for towels and napkins in the kitchen cabinet, another wire shelf for the freezer so everything doesn't slide out onto the floor when you open it, and 8 plastic bins to stack on the shelves in the office so all the little stuff we store in there can be stowed neatly instead of piled on the floor. The office is actually now a comfortable, attractive room where I can write. That's huge. Before, it felt like a garage.

3. I used my favorite Xmas present to convert an old recording of my first full-length musical, an adaptation of Frankenstein, from audio cassette to digital files. (I have a box full of cassettes of my pre-CD/internet/GarageBand work to convert. The machine is called a Tape2USB II, made by Grace Digital Audio and it's super-easy to use.)

Tim and another friend Liz and I wrote and staged Frankenstein in 1991. It was too quick (we wrote, rehearsed, opened, and closed the show all in about 9 weeks), and we were too inexperienced, and it didn't come together. Half the audience walked out every night at intermission, and I can't blame them. It just wasn't ready. The experience was eye-opening and heartbreaking, and we sort of never looked back.

But now, there might be some people interested in developing it, so I pulled it out. The recording is not great, the performances are awful -- I don't want to badmouth the very talented and game group of actors we worked with, but they were mostly as naive as we were about the challenges of a full-length musical -- and musically and lyrically it's a mess, but there's an atmosphere and a complex emotionality to the piece, not to mention the power of the story, that shows through and is still very affecting. It would take a lot of work, a serious overhaul, but it would be worth the effort. Remember that's what happened with Lizzie Borden. It was very old work that had receded into memory, but it was revived by people who saw its potential and created opportunities for us to re-write it and find a new audience for it.

4. C and I watched the Republican debates. It's mesmerizing, watching the old Reagan alliance of hard-hearted rich people and Christian reality-deniers fall apart before our very eyes. When Ron Paul is the sanest person in the room, you're in trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Please don't let any of these clowns and monsters get elected president.

***

Also from the Container Store, I bought a sliding contraption with recycling bins that will fit in one of our narrow kitchen cabinets, so we can get our paper, plastic, and metal recyclables out of the office and hidden away. I had a ridiculous confrontation with our landlord recently about garbage, which I lost but only because he holds all the cards, so I would rather the recycling bins not be out in the open to remind me daily of my economic powerlessness.

Owners of residential buildings in New York with more than 3 units (ours has 4) are required to provide an area and containers for their tenants to put their garbage and recyclables, and they are required to put the containers in front of the building on designated days to be picked up by the city. Our landlord does not do any of this. He expects the tenants to keep everything in our apartment until pick up day (3 times a week for trash, once a week for recycling) and then bag it and take it to the curb ourselves. It's not such a burden to deal with our own trash, but I think certain responsibilities come with ownership and the landlord should keep his end of the bargain. There's plenty of room in front of the house for garbage and recycling bins, so why should we have to store refuse in our apartments?

A few weeks ago, he sent us a note saying that he'd been fined for some improperly sorted garbage (recyclable stuff in with the regular trash) and asked us to be more careful. I wrote back saying that it was not likely us, since we're very vigilant about recycling, but that if he would provide containers for his tenants' garbage and recycling it might be easier for him to manage it. He told me that he's not a superintendent and doesn't do garbage, that part of the charm of living in a small building is dealing with your own garbage, and that if we didn't like it there were alternatives. He actually said that.

He's defying the law, but we of course have no leverage. We could insist, report him to the city, make a stink, but he could turn off our heat, refuse to make repairs, double our rent, make our lives miserable in any number of ways.

2012.

2012-01-01T19:33:00.004-06:00

It pains me to realize that it's been almost two months since I posted anything here. I told myself I wouldn't resort to this sort of excuse making, but I can't stop myself from trying to explain it. I have a job, that's what it comes down to. I have a job. It's the reason I get very little writing done, art made, or for that matter anything that isn't commuting, working, or relaxing for the precious few minutes left in the day after I get home.

No use fretting about it -- no use, but that doesn't stop me, from time to time -- everybody's got to pay the rent, right? When I look at the numbers of blog posts over the last few years, it's clearly unemployment that jacks those numbers up, right? It's funny to say that I was unemployed, to describe a period of my life when I was most productive as "unemployment." Oh, the irony.

So, anyway, it's January 1st, a new year, and as a nod to the idea that what you do on January 1st has some magical effect on the year ahead, I'm determined to get something posted, no matter how short, or cursory, unsatisfying, inadequate, whatever.

1. Maybe everything will change this year. We're in the middle of negotiating a new option agreement for Lizzie Borden with some new producers who have plans for a regional production or two or three that, if everything goes well, will land back in New York. Maybe. Maybe not. But, maybe. As I said to Tim one night last year when we were talking about how we deal with the relentless cycle of anticipation and disappointment, "The chances in this business that you will be disappointed are always exponentially greater than that you won't." That's just the underlying fact. If you can't come to terms with that fact, I don't see how you can have an artist's life.

2. C and I spent an hour or two this afternoon making a list of wedding guests. We have talked about a small wedding, just immediate family and close friends. The list is nearly 100. My guess is that about 70 or so will actually come. Even so. We're still not sure when. We'd been thinking December, but now we wonder if spring might be easier for everyone. I can't believe I'm preparing for a wedding. A wedding. FYI, anything can happen. Even the most unlikely thing you can imagine or contemplate. Especially that. Do not forget: anything can happen.

We had a small group of friends over for New Year's Eve last night. What a sweet, interesting, funny, smart, thoroughly enjoyable group of friends we have. Just one more reason for me to be astounded at how breathtakingly lucky I am. I made a red chile posole with a pork shoulder and blue corn. It takes about 3 days to make. Not 3 days of solid labor, but it's a multi-stage process and can't be rushed.

I used mostly guajillo chilies but I threw in a couple anchos, too. Our guest devoured it. Before that, I served a cheddar beer fondue (Gaston 3-year-old cheddar and Smuttynose IPA) with big cubes of toasted bread and chunks of apple and pear. C got a fondue pot for Xmas from his family. I was a little leery because our kitchen is so tiny and a new appliance can require some serious engineering, but this fondue was outstanding and I'm totally sold on the idea now. Again, our friends made short work of it. I know it's all about my ego, but it's hugely gratifying to me when people demolish the food I cook.

Most gratifying of all though is seeing C's and my friends come together and enjoy each other's company.

Tonight, I'm full to bursting with love for my life, my friends, my family old and new, after our sweet visits with first my family in Indiana and then C's in North Carolina, and then home to New York to be with our accumulated family of friends here (many of whom have been in my life for over 20 years) to welcome the new year. I'm a lucky man.

Back to Work.

2011-11-07T13:35:00.000-06:00

We’re about 2 hours from the city now, on the old grey dog again, and I’m starting to feel a physical longing to be with C. Except for I guess about a week last Xmas when he went to see his family – and we’d only known each other for a couple weeks then – this is the only time we’ve been apart for more than a couple days. Rough.

But there was honestly nothing else I missed at all. I know, I know, I would have eventually begun to miss it all, the people, the noise, the anonymity, but not after 2 weeks. In terms of pure output, pulling stuff out of the air and putting it on paper, I wrote more in the last two weeks than I’ve written in the last 2 years.

For two weeks I was an artist. I sat in a room and pondered and considered, wrote, paced, dreamed, imagined. The stories and images seemed to coalesce behind my eyes and fly around the room and land on the page. Page after page, and at times it moved me to tears, knowing that these ideas and words and sentences would not have emerged in an environment other than this miraculous place where the needs of the body and soul are taken care of so we can work.

And after a day of that, I ate dinner in a room full of people all talking about their work, sharing ideas, and books, and suggestions, never questioning the good of the enterprise, the worthiness of the labor. Those conversations and the force generated by a room full of artists vibrating with the electricity of their work, stimulated me to go back to my studio and often spend another 3 hours at my desk.

I don’t want to say that I’m entitled to that life – are we entitled to be our best selves? “the pursuit of happiness” makes it pretty clear that the guaranteed right is purely aspirational – but it weighs heavy on my heart this afternoon to know that it could all shut down this week, today, now. Because there’s so much other shit that has to get done before art-making.

Maybe, though, this burst of output will have its own momentum. I started writing what I’m calling a solo autobiographical musical theater piece. It's called Unprotected. The narrative structure is that the story starts with the end of a relationship and ends with the beginning of one, so basically from 2002 to now. That thread of the story will be told in present tense, but people and locations and themes from that thread will recall and resonate with other stories from times past, so there are stories nested within stories nested within stories. It has mostly to do with men, and mostly to do with sex. In a way it’s a reckoning with my sexual biography. Much of it will be spoken, by me, but there will be songs too, and video projections. Some of the video will be directly illustrative, like I'll mention a person and show a photo of that person. Other times the video will be more ambient or will comment obliquely on the subject matter.

It’s very far from finished, but I polished up as best I could an excerpt of what I had written and read it to the other residents on Saturday (it’s a MacDowell tradition for artists to present their work informally after dinner). I was nervous beforehand because, one, it's still in a pretty raw state and I rarely share work, even to close friends and collaborators, until it’s close to finished, and, two, the piece I read contained very frank sexual content, which is not something I’m shy about as subject matter, but this was, well, in the first person. It was very well received, with a hardy ovation, lots of compliments, suggestions, comparisons to favorite writers.

I have a strong feeling it’s good work, and I’m going to try like hell to finish it.

Greyhound.

2011-10-24T04:56:00.000-06:00

The bus still smells nostalgically of pee, but it has wi-fi.

I got up at 3 this morning to get to Port Authority by 4:30 because the only bus to New Hampshire leaves at 5:30 and the receipt said I had to pick up my ticket at least an hour ahead. Port Authority at 5 am met every expectation one might have of Port Authority at 5 am.

The attendant very gently loaded my guitar and backpack in the hold under the bus and the bus left on time. I am on my way to Keene, New Hampshire where I'll take a taxi to the MacDowell Colony where I'll spend the next two weeks alone in a room writing a new solo musical theater piece called Unprotected.

The title came to me a few days ago. It's good because, well, because it means more than one thing. And it gives me a template, something to measure against, to help me narrow down. I have so many stories. The subject is loosely the last 10 years of my life, mostly as regards men, but anything I write about the last 10 years seems to require a diversion into the previous 10 or 20 or 40, so it quickly becomes about everything.

My proposal to MacDowell for this residency was to write the text, because I already have a batch of songs, In fact the impetus for a solo theater work was that I have all these songs I've written since J and I separated which I have no opportunities to perform. But I might write a new song or two. I brought my guitar.

We're in New Haven. The sun is coming up.

Losing.

2011-09-25T10:52:00.001-06:00

I've pondered here before the subject of exercise and my effort to understand my motives or more specifically my need to tease apart the dreaded surrender to an "ideal" physical appearance (or vanity) from, I guess, some kind of real or authentic (virtuous?) health consciousness, both of which concepts are highly suspect but that's not exactly what this blog post is about.

C and I have both gained new-boyfriend weight, which I guess is a thing: the last time I gained 20 pounds was in the first year J and I were together. Here's how it works: 1) you snagged a man, you can relax now; staying in shape was all about attracting men, 2) snuggling on the couch is way more compelling than going to the gym, and besides, one of the things that motivated you to go to the gym was that there'd be hot guys working out and getting naked in the locker room, a kind of stimulation you're less interested in now, and 3) maybe this factor is less universal but a man who loves my cooking is license to go crazy with the butter and cream, cheese, casseroles, desserts, biscuits and bacon on Saturday morning.

Last time -- I'm embarrassed to admit -- I did Slim-Fast. I would mix up one of those things in a Thermos and take it to work with me for lunch (I was working as a word processor at a law firm), and every night J and I would have a half chicken breast each with a vegetable. I was rigorous about it. I lost the weight.

So, as we know, C and I bought an elliptical machine so we can work out conveniently at home now. The machine tells you how many calories you're burning, and so far I am spending about 25 minutes 4 days a week burning 250 calories a pop. And we're eating mostly protein and vegetables. Meat and salad, usually. For lunch, I have some fruit and maybe a small piece of cheese. I let myself indulge a bit on weekends. We don't have a scale, but my pants are not quite as tight as they were a few weeks ago. I'm making some progress, but I have a ways to go.

My mother told me once that in order not to gain weight she had to get used to feeling a little hungry all the time. What a great argument against intelligent design that what we want to eat does not correspond to what our bodies need in order to function. We all have that infuriating skinny friend who seems to eat and eat and eat and never gain weight. And some of us have to feel hungry all the time.

But what is even more difficult for me to summon than the strength of will to resist my cravings is the ability or desire to put aside my philosophical objection to the whole idea of deprivation. I don't just enjoy dessert, I believe dessert is important. Pleasure is essential. Especially and more and more as I get older, I have no interest in living a life without the things that bring me pleasure, one of which is food. But I do not want to weigh 300 pounds. It's a paradox I can't solve, and it drives me crazy.

What I do know is that the "healthy choices" rhetoric is mostly bullshit. Yesterday afternoon, C and I were sitting by the pool eating guacamole and chips, and one of the guys here for the weekend (we're on Fire Island, the Pines, where we've had a partial share -- this is something C has done every summer for years, but it's my first time here) walked by and said something about how unhealthy our snack was. Avocados, lime juice, cilantro, corn, vegetable oil, and salt. I don't know what could possibly be more wholesome, more healthy. But this guy has a body worked out to within an inch of its life and a pathological fear of fat and carbohydrates, and his attitude toward exercise and food is the one generally accepted as "healthy." There's nothing like the Fire Island Pines to distill this issue to its unadulterated essence and throw it steaming in your face.

I also reject the rhetoric of moderation. Moderation is not the magical answer, it's just one more way to cast puritanical aspersions on someone else's food and exercise habits. I will not lose weight by some vague notion of "moderation." I will lose weight by keeping a careful eye on what I eat and exercising religiously. By consciously, over and over all day, telling myself "no." No, you can't eat that. Potatoes are perfectly wholesome, healthy, but if you eat them, even a moderate amount of them, you will be fat for the rest of your life. Five days a week, I huff and sweat until my knees are wobbly and I can barely catch my breath, and then I eat a salad for dinner. That's not moderate. It's fanatical.

We.

2011-09-24T14:40:00.006-06:00

You get to an age at which you’re convinced you’ve discovered after decades of trial and error, a refinement of experience, the right or best way to do certain things, and just because C is 9 years younger than me doesn’t mean he hasn’t reached that age, too.

He has a bedspread, it was a gift from a family member, a patchwork quilt made from small squares of various dark wool tweeds, subtle grey and brown plaids and herringbone patterns like you might have had a suit made from if you were a schoolteacher in Scotland in the 1940s. When I first saw it, I shuddered a bit because it’s the kind of fabric I can’t get anywhere near without feeling like there are spiders crawling under my skin. But it’s backed with cotton so I don’t have to touch the scratchy side, and it is beautiful, looks perfect on the bed, and C is completely in love with it so I love it, too.

Now, I wouldn’t think that there would be any question, since this bedspread is wool and heavy and very warm, that in summer one would change it for something lighter. Or at least take it off the bed at night. Who would want to sleep under a wool tweed blanket in July? C would.

We actually kind of fought about it a little back in June. I got my way. C feels he’s made a significant compromise, and I won’t argue with that. If not sleeping under a heavy wool blanket when it’s 90 degrees outside diminishes his enjoyment of summer, it diminishes his enjoyment of summer. In the equal and opposite way that keeping it on the bed would make me miserable. So there you go.

The blanket we used instead all summer is a ratty cotton throw the color of a tea stain. Neither of us likes the look of it -- C says it looks like we have 9 cats -- but we never replaced it because I think C found the whole idea so infuriating he didn’t want to devote any energy or thought to it, and I am totally out of the habit of buying things to replace things that are old and stained but still function, and, even if I were not, a blanket is the kind of thing I would buy at a thrift store and there are no good thrift stores in New York. If C would even let me put a thrift store blanket on his bed.

The reason this is all on my mind is that we are on Fire Island this weekend, and the little gift store here in the Pines is selling off everything cheap at the end of the season, and they have a couple summer blankets marked down 40%. But they’re beige and boring, so I told C that I would look on line for something more interesting and probably just as inexpensive. This shop is pricey, so 40% off might not be a bargain. I was thinking probably L.L. Bean, and maybe something maroon. C likes red.

We are at that stage of our relationship where disagreements sprout like mushrooms after rain. All this business of living together, the relentless negotiation and small and large compromises that go into creating a “we” without battering the “he” too cruelly because after all it was the “he” we fell in love with and that’s the glue that keeps the thing solid. We are very different people, C and I, with different tastes, different sets of things that bring us joy, different things that irritate us. He likes Survivor, summer on the beach, and Christmas shopping. I like experimental theater, goat cheese, and inclement weather. But we both love spooning, C.K. Louis, and a good steak and an IPA.

L.L. Bean didn’t have anything, but I found several cotton summer blankets on Overstock.com that he might like, all in the $30 range.

Fall.

2011-09-18T07:05:00.004-06:00

The temperature dropped about 25 degrees Thursday night. It was crisp and barely 60 on my way to work Friday. The Greenpoint hipsters, having worn knit caps all summer, had no choice but to pull out their fur-lined hunting hats with earflaps.

C and I are exact opposites in our weather preferences. The feeling he describes of mourning and dread this time of year is just what I feel in May. My enjoyment of a beautiful New York spring is always tinged with sadness and apprehension that winter is over and there’s not much time until I’ll be damp and angry for 2 months.

In fall, I can let my hair grow out a little and open the windows. I can cook something besides salad. I’m going to make chicken soup today and roast some beets that I got yesterday at the Inwood farmer’s market. My mind wakes up after a long, heavy torpor and my body comes alive. I feel lighter and inspired, hopeful and generous.

Some Thoughts About 9/11.

2011-09-11T11:30:00.004-06:00

Cross-posted on The Bilerico Project.

This is a photo from my first trip to New York in 1979. That's me in the middle. I was a freshman in the theater department at Miami of Ohio. The department, or maybe it was just some of the faculty on their own, coordinated a Thanksgiving trip to New York every year to see Broadway shows. We'd leave in buses on Wednesday night, drive all night, arrive at the Picadilly Hotel in Times Square on Thursday morning. (The Picadilly was demolished in 1982 along with 5 historic theaters - the Helen Hayes, Morosco, Astor, Bijou, and Gaiety - to make room for the Marriott Marquis Hotel.) On that trip, I saw Sweeney Todd, the Elephant Man, They're Playing Our Song, Ain't Misbehavin', the Fantasticks, and fell deeply and irrevocably in love with New York. Two years later I moved here. (In case you didn't recognize the background of the photo, that's one of the towers of the World Trade Center. We're posing on a Masayuki Nagare sculpture, which was also destroyed on September 11.)

I've been avoiding all the 9/11 memorial stuff like the plague, so when I opened the New York Times Magazine yesterday morning to a piece by Bill Keller, called "My Unfinished 9/11 Business," I turned the page quickly. But I changed my mind, went back and read it, because I thought someone like Bill Keller might have something thoughtful and interesting to say. In it, he waxes at length as to whether or not, with the benefit of "hindsight," his enthusiasm for the Iraq invasion was justified in that it was provoked by the trauma of the 9/11 attacks.

Of course, with the anniversary of September 11, we have to endure a glut of if-I-knew-then-what-I-know-now, which frankly makes me sick and furious. (It wasn't the only reason, but it was the big one, that I became so adamantly anti-Hillary Clinton.) Let's be clear: hindsight, my ass. We all knew Bush had an agenda in Iraq and that it had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. We were marching screaming it in the streets in cities all over the U.S. during the run-up to that invasion. Spare me the sad-eyed regret. You wanted a war and you got it. And I don't want to hear about how the World Trade Center attacks were a horror of such magnitude, unleashing an evil upon the world like no one had ever seen before, which distorted our perspective, so we should forgive the excessive response. The events of 9/11 were monstrous, but they were just the next atrocity in a relentless timeline of atrocities in a tangle of conflicts if not caused by, then at least goaded on by, the United States and other Western governments' meddling in the Middle East.

A fifth grader can tell you that the answer to a problem caused by stirring up trouble in the Middle East will probably not be solved by stirring up more trouble in the Middle East.

So, yes, Bill Keller and everyone else who, with revenge in your hearts, cheered on Bush's war should be feeling regret and shame. The last decade has been an unholy nightmare -- for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, for our troops, for the people of the United States whose freedom has been limited in ways we can hardly imagine the consequences of. Sometimes I wonder if American democracy will ever recover from the power grab of the executive branch justified by these wars. Satisfied?

In September 2001, I was living in a camper on the road with J, my partner of 10 years and R, whom we had met on the road several months earlier and who had moved in to join our life and relationship. We'd been living for a year completely unmoored from place, possessions, friends, and family. We had taken to the road with only our relationship and artistic collaboration to affix us to the world. And now that was disintegrating. J's and my relationship, and with it our career performing together, was dying a slow, sad death.

On September 11, we were camped in a state park just outside Ithaca, New York. That morning, R had an infected hangnail on his thumb so he drove the van into town to buy antibiotic ointment and band-aids. When he returned, he said he'd been listening to the radio in the van and had come in on the middle of it so he wasn't sure what was going on but that the World Trade Center had been attacked by airplanes. We all got in the van and turned on the radio, I think to an NPR station. The announcer said that one of the towers had fallen. I remember we all looked at each other like "How could it just fall?" I also remember that, though we were shocked and concerned for our friends in the city, I felt like somehow I was floating just outside the world where this horrible thing was happening. Probably because my life was falling apart, because what was happening in the camper and in my heart was so compelling, I barely had room for this other thing.

A week later, we did a show at HERE Arts Center in downtown Manhattan. Driving into the city, we saw the column of smoke still rising from lower Manhattan. We saw our friends. There were no adequate words of comfort or reassurance after such a terrifying event, but we were reassured that our friends were safe and well. The next day we left.

Still on the road, we were cut off from most media during the aftermath. Just the radio in the van. Our dear friend A called us several times in the next weeks, sobbing. She said every time she'd pull herself together, she would see on TV the video of the planes flying into the towers and people jumping and the towers falling and she'd start crying all over again. I didn't know what to say to her except, "Turn the damn TV off! It was terrible but it only happened once. You're reacting to it as if it's happening 50 times a day. Just stop watching it."

I still have not seen that video, and I don't want to. But now I live in an apartment and we have a TV, so it's going to be hard to avoid during this orgy of nationalism and self-pity.

An Elliptical Machine.

2011-09-07T14:34:00.002-06:00

We bought an elliptical machine and they delivered and set it up today. It’s massive. Seriously it takes up half the living room. (The TV takes up the other half.) But we have both gained a lot of weight since we met – I’m about 20 pounds heavier than I’ve ever been – and neither of us has much motivation to go to a gym. I spend 11 hours of the day 4 days a week either on the train or at work, and I’m very protective of those remaining few hours.

So we bought the damn machine. I’m watching more TV than I have in a long time, so at least now we can exercise while we watch Big Brother.

Yes, Big Brother. Shut up. I know: first it was American Idol and now it’s Big Brother. My snob card is in serious danger of being revoked. Big Brother is actually pretty good. It takes me back to my drug trial stints at PPD in Austin. Last week gentle, sweet Jordan lost her shit. Isolate a bunch of people in a house together for long enough and sooner or later they start to lose their shit, and that makes good TV.

I think I’ve mentioned that I have Wednesdays off. They tend to get booked up pretty far ahead since they’re the only days I can do anything. Lately Wednesdays are all about doctor’s appointments. I have health insurance for the first time in decades so I’m getting everything checked out and taken care of.

My visit to a dermatologist was a revelation. All the annoying, persistent skin problems I’ve had since I was a teenager now have names and some of them have treatments and cures. My favorite is Delayed Pressure Urticaria. It’s a condition related to hives. It causes me to break out in red welts a couple hours after I’ve had any pressure applied to my body. It especially affects my palms when I’ve been carrying shopping bags or doing any kind of manual labor (chopping vegetables, hammering nails). Sometimes it hurts quite a bit. I can prevent it by taking an antihistamine beforehand.

I’m also seeing a round of doctors about my double vision. I may have eye muscle surgery again. I had it in my 20s, and it worked until a few years ago. Lately, if I’m tired, I can’t watch a movie. Even if I’m not tired, I can’t focus on anything close up. Conversations at parties are taxing, since I can barely hear when there’s background noise, and anyone standing or sitting closer than 4 feet is a double image. I run into things, knock things over, all the time because I can’t judge distance well. Poor me.

Anyway, Wednesdays.

Before the guys arrived with the elliptical machine, I had a computer technician over to look at my G5. I thought I had another failed hard drive – a couple weeks ago, I was copying my iTunes music onto a portable hard drive so I could copy it onto my new MacBook Air, but the portable disk was full of old stuff, so I was copying the old stuff onto my G5 to make room for the iTunes music, and the whole thing just shut down and wouldn’t boot up again – and I was ready to give up on my dear, old Mac and only hope that most of the data was salvageable. But this guy had it up and running after about an hour and a half of tinkering. I was a little worried about a stranger coming to fix the computer because, okay I’m going to be really honest now, when the computer crashed I was, as I said, transferring files, but while I was sitting waiting for the files to copy I was reading my email, and looking at blogs, and then, well, xtube. Porn killed my computer. I was sure this guy was going to boot up my computer and there on the monitor would be exactly what was there when it died. (I was saved that embarrassment.)

My parents sent me the boxes that I left in Indiana last summer. Mostly archival stuff: cassettes of my old recordings, demos; some correspondence mostly from my teens and twenties; and manuscripts and journals. C has been reading my old journals. I’ve been a sporadic journaler – periods of years went by without writing – but even so, there’s a lot chronicled. Most of it I haven’t looked at in many years, but his interest in it has set me to thinking that I really need to go through it all, transcribe it. And I need to put the more recent entries, which are mostly digital on one computer or another, into some kind of orderly, safe format. (This afternoon I pulled up files from 10 or so years ago, and they’re in WordPerfect, which my computer won’t read. It’s funny how we all live under the assumption that all our media is permanent now because it’s digital. It’s actually much less permanent because formats change, files get damaged, storage media deteriorates. Paper might grow fragile but it doesn’t just disappear.)

All this attention on my journals has also got me to thinking about the process itself. This blog has replaced my journal. In some ways I think that’s good, as far as art is concerned at least in the short term. But there’s a lot in my private journals that I would not have shared here. That must seem hard to believe since I write about such intimate stuff here. But I’m very concerned not to write in my blog about anything or in a way that might hurt someone’s feelings, whereas in my personal journals I have written without inhibition. And, as much as I write about sex here, I was always more frank when it wasn’t public. Being an artist who exploits my own life for my work, I didn’t think of my journals as exactly completely private. I think I always thought maybe years later it would be safe to share them, but not in real time. Blogging is immediate and it has consequences in the world. The awareness of that has imposed a kind of discipline on the writing that has been good. But I’ve begun to wonder about what gets left out and whether I'll remember it or not.

Hot?

2011-07-05T17:05:00.005-06:00

My co-worker kept coming into the office from outside today, wide-eyed appalled about how hot it was. (There's a freight elevator from the 2nd floor office to the warehouse downstairs but it's quicker to go outside and around.)

It was 90 degrees in New York today. I remember years ago, when I lived in New York the first time, before I left and came back, how 90 was the benchmark, the point at which it was officially unbearable, but back then nobody had air-conditioning. And I think my 4 years in Austin vaccinated me. It was for sure very warm today but it didn't feel all that bad. Not at all what I would call hot.

"Oh, man it is hot outside! I can't believe how hot it is!" she kept saying.

Hot? I'm not saying I love it, in fact it's downright unpleasant if you have to stand in the blazing sun for more than a few seconds at a time and don't even mention the subway slash sauna because that's a whole nother story. But I would even go so far as to call it mild if you're in the shade and immobile. Hot? Go live in central Texas for a few years and then come back and we'll talk about hot. It's 90 degrees. Last year in Austin when it finally got down to 90 some time in October I got down on my knees and thanked the lord baby Jesus that I could stop hiding the razor blades and shoelaces. You don't know from hot.

Wednesday.

2011-06-29T15:29:00.003-06:00

I just wasted my afternoon at the DMV. For fear of sounding like a 90s standup comedian (“Did you ever wonder why …?”), I won’t relate the whole tedious episode, but I will just say that I wish there was some way they could tell you as soon as you walk in the door whatever fucked-up thing they’re going to tell you that’s going to ruin your day when you finally reach the counter after waiting in line for 3 hours so you could just turn around and go home. You might still be furious, but you’d have all afternoon to get over it. Because you know they’re going to tell you some fucked-up completely unexpected thing that’s going to make it impossible for them to do what you need done despite the fact that you did all your research, compiled the stack of documents proving that you are who you say you are and have been since the day you were born and that you live where you say you live and that you are not a terrorist.

It turns out that, if you’re trading your Texas license for a New York license, you need an additional sheaf of something or other because Texas, former sovereign state and all, decided to be unique and not put the date of issuance on their driver’s licenses, which information other states require in order to issue a new license. It’s probably not a big issue in Texas because not many Texans leave.

Well, anyway, I did get something accomplished today. I got an HIV test. At my first visit to my new general practitioner, weeks ago, he ordered a bunch of blood tests (syphilis, cholesterol, etc.), but suggested I go to the city clinic for a “rapid” HIV test since I could have the results in minutes instead of the days or weeks it would take to get results back from his lab. It seemed like a great idea at the time because I’ve always found it incredibly nerve-wracking waiting for HIV test results. But today was the first day I was able to get to the clinic (anything that needs to be done during the day has to be done on a Wednesday, my day off, so naturally my Wednesdays get booked up pretty far in advance) so I ended up actually waiting for several weeks for the results of that test that only took 20 minutes to get the results of. I’m still negative.

And I stopped at Whole Foods in Chelsea for my Weleda sage deodorant, which in this weather is only marginally effective but it’s the only thing my skin can tolerate. While I was there (I’m not much of an impulse shopper but sometimes I am totally seduced by natural body care stores) I picked up some Tom’s toothpaste, a jar of fancy Neti pot salt, and a pair of biodegradable flip-flops. Stop smiling, they’re cute. And I need them so I don’t burn my feet walking to and from the beach on Fire Island, which is apparently a thing I do now.

Thinskinned.

2011-06-18T15:35:00.004-06:00

Now that I have health insurance, I’m making appointments right and left with doctors, trying to catch up on all the stuff I’ve ignored for 25 years. I left my appointment with my general practitioner two weeks ago armed with a sheaf of referrals: an ophthalmologist for my double vision, an ear nose and throat doctor for my tinnitus, but the one I’m most looking forward to is a dermatologist so maybe I can finally discover just what the fuck is up with my bizarre skin problems.

Whenever I do anything that puts pressure on my palms (like carry a suitcase or put together book shelves from Ikea), later in the day I have dark red, tender spots on my palms. It doesn’t look like skin irritation but more like red bruises that itch like hell way beneath the surface. They last about a day, depending on how severe they are which depends on how long I carried that suitcase or how hard those screws were to screw in. To this day I don’t know if I’ve always avoided physical work because my hands are so sensitive or the other way around. I do remember, as a teenager, after mowing the lawn my hands would be swollen and painful but I didn’t connect that with my extreme resistance to mowing the lawn. I assumed I was lazy, like my father said.

In my early twenties I got a fiery and very persistent rash on my shins, intensely itchy so that it was impossible not to scratch it but scratching it made it worse until I’d scratch the skin right off and it would bleed and scab. It was the main reason why I was sure I was HIV positive and avoided getting tested until 1989. Fifteen years later, a doctor at a low-income clinic in Nashville gave me two rounds of steroids to get it under control. That and rubbing tea tree lotion on my legs every night for about 5 years finally stopped the rash. It tries to come back every once in a while but it’s not as bad and the lotion takes care of it.

When I was living on the road, spending a lot of time in the Southwest, my skin started to react violently to sun exposure. Even 20 minutes or so of sun can cause welts, blisters, and swelling. Sometimes I’ll lose the pigment in an area after the skins heals. I’ve become vampiric in my vigilant avoidance of the sun. In San Francisco last week, we were out walking around the city all day on a very cloudy day (not overcast – I know enough to beware of overcast days). The sun came out for about half an hour, it felt good because it had been chilly, and we stopped to rest at a café. We sat outside and drank iced tea.

That night my face and shoulders were pink and warm. By the next morning, my forehead was swollen and covered with blisters. Later in the day, the swelling had settled like a balloon along my brow. Over the course of the next week, whatever it was that had swelled up my forehead drained down through my sinuses into my throat and chest. It was like a bad cold but somehow different. I’m still coughing a little today but it’s almost gone.

Auto-Tune.

2011-06-01T16:32:00.006-06:00

I've been lately interrogating my anti-Auto-Tune stance because, I'm a little embarrassed to admit, I've watched a couple episodes of Glee and actually kind of enjoyed them or I should say found more in them to enjoy than I thought possible. I still find it too conservative for my taste, but it can be sneakily subversive. I'm finding it more interesting, and funnier, than I used to, and I don't know if it has changed or I have. Both, most likely. Anyway, because I was feeling a little warmer toward the show, I began to wonder if Auto-Tune as a tool to create a certain kind of shiny pop performance was possibly not so evil.

And then I remembered this.

And this:

These vocal performances are processed to be sure, but with analog technology that can add to but can't fundamentally alter the voice in the way that Auto-Tune does. These are perfect pop vocal performances, flawless, shiny as glass. Yet they retain the essential emotional quality of human beings singing, a quality that is erased by the overuse of Auto-Tune. Barry and Frida actually sang like that into a microphone and they brought yearning and heartbreak to every perfect note.

Call me an old curmudgeon, but something important is lost when you create that perfect pop vocal in a computer instead of in the human heart and throat. Something you can actually hear and measure. Something good. It's like when people look at you with a forced, sad smile and tell you that Stouffer's frozen lasagna is "actually very tasty." Well, okay. Keep telling yourself that.

Jane Austen't.

2011-06-01T08:17:00.008-06:00

I think I just don't get Jane Austen. Whenever I encounter passages from her books quoted in other books or articles, or when writers I love write about her, I think, "Wow, that's so good I need to read some Jane Austen." But then I do and I always end up feeling somehow unsatisfied.

I read Pride and Prejudice, and I think Sense and Sensibility though I'm not sure, and I'm struggling through Persuasion right now. It's not a long book and I only have about 30 pages left but I am finding it such a chore, I don't even think I'll finish it. Seriously it's so boring I can hardly make myself sit down and finish it. The story is dull. None of the characters are sympathetic. They're either silly and vain (and we're supposed to not like them) or they're tedious and judgmental and just annoying.

All the things people say Jane Austin is so amazing at: the social observation, the critique of manners, etc., George Eliot does with as much bite and humor as Austin -- and, I would argue, more subtlety -- and her books have passion and warmth, sorrow and beauty. What is it I'm not getting?

I'm Back.

2011-05-25T08:49:00.005-06:00

On Sunday I performed for the first time in several years. I could be forgetting something -- I do that -- but I'm pretty sure the last time I sang and played in front of an audience was in 2004 when I was living in San Francisco finishing Life in a Box and a friend invited me to perform in a popular cabaret-type variety show hosted by a drag queen comic. I sang 2 songs, as I remember.

So. Sunday, I took part in a songwriters circle that my old friend Monica Passin hosts at Banjo Jim's in the East Village. It came about because J was going to be here visiting and we were going to sing together in sort of a reunion -- J and I did lots of shows with Monica when we were Y'all and we were all part of the New York alt-country scene in the 90s that was centered around Rodeo Bar. In fact, Monica was instrumental in the development of Y'all in those early years. I happened to take a guitar class at The New School around the time J and I met and started writing songs. Monica taught the class; she was my first teacher -- before that I was self-taught. After the class ended, I took private lessons with her. She was already performing a lot and had a following as Li'L Mo and the Monicats. Through her we discovered that scene and they us.

Anyway, J was coming to New York for a couple weeks and we were going to sing together in this show. Monica asked J and J asked me if I was into it. I've been trying to find ways to get in front of an audience again -- I'm started to write a solo theater piece, with my new songs and stories about my love and sex life since J and I separated -- so this was a perfect, low-pressure situation where I could get my feet wet. As the date got closer, I think J got a little scared. Monica emailed asking for a bio and photo which I think -- it did for me, for sure -- brought back a flood of anxious memories about our old performing career, and J told me he almost wanted to back out but he would be okay just singing harmony with me, not billing ourselves as a duo.

Two days before he was supposed to fly here, J passed out while he was peeing, tore open the back of his head, and spent 3 days in the hospital. He has a congenital heart defect which was causing his blood pressure to fluctuate wildly. He had to cancel his trip. So I was on my own.

I have a batch of what I call my new songs though some of them were written several years ago and the newest of them is 4 or 5 years old. I haven't performed them much if at all, so they feel fresh to me. They are not shaped, the performance of them is not shaped, by interaction with an audience. Not yet.

I'd never been so nervous about performing as I was on Sunday. To be honest, I was feeling a little out of control. I can count on one hand the number of times I've sung and played completely by myself. In the end, I like it best. I love the freedom, the control over everything, the simplicity of the relationship with the audience. But I was nervous as holy fuck all day. I broke out in a sweat before the show, kept telling myself to keep breathing. The venue is a little dive bar on 9th and C, and there were only a couple dozen people there at most. It was most definitely not a big deal.

After the first song I was calmer. The audience was quiet, attentive, and my voice felt strong. They liked the song, the applause was reassuring. The second song I did has a fast finger-picking part that sometimes trips me up, and I stumbled a few times but never fell apart. (It's the song in the video clip which is an excerpt from Life in a Box.) After that I was cool and confident.

I'm energized and inspired to get moving on this new solo work. I sort of have all the material already, I just have to wrangle it. I may write a new song or two, but maybe not. And the stories are not written down but they're in my head and in some cases they're here in this blog and only need to be reconfigured. I thought that I would work with an accompanist or co-writer to create piano arrangements of the songs so I wouldn't have to play. But after Sunday I'm sort of thinking maybe I can do it. My guitar playing is rudimentary, remedial, but it might be fine in this context. The simplicity is seductive, not just in terms of the performance but rehearsals, booking, sound, everything is easier if it's just me and my guitar. I'll give it some more thought.

My left arm was sore all last week. I assume it's from my job. A lot of my work is data entry that involves a lot of scrolling with the mouse, and I can feel the stiff soreness in my forearm after a few hours of it. Sunday it was really sore which pissed me off because I needed all the strength I could muster in that hand after not playing guitar for so many years. But I noticed Sunday night after the show that the soreness had completely disappeared, and it hasn't come back all week. I guess it was psychosomatic.

A Change of Seasons.

2011-04-30T18:00:00.001-06:00

On Thursdays, T and I have dinner together. It’s so easy to fall out of touch with friends here, and I didn’t want that to happen when I moved out of T’s place, so we decided to have a standing weekly date.

Regardless of how much I look forward to seeing T, I was feeling anxious last Thursday. I hadn’t slept much the night before. C and I had gone to a fundraiser called New York Loves Japan, a huge, crowded, hectic, loud sushi and sake event, and then for pizza afterwards with friends, all of which I enjoyed but it wore me the fuck out. I have always had to summon a special kind of energy to deal with crowds, and now that when I am in noisy rooms I only hear about 20 percent of what people are saying, even when they’re only a couple feet away, well, I know I complain about it relentlessly but whatever, it’s exhausting.

After a long cab ride in heavy traffic on FDR Drive, we got home near midnight, wound up, not ready to sleep. We watched American Idol and went to bed at about 1:30. I slept fitfully and got up at 6:30 for work. That afternoon, as I struggled to keep my eyes open, I nearly emailed T to cancel our date. But we had some Lizzie Borden business to discuss.

C decided to get Chinese takeout since he was alone for dinner, and the Chinese place is next to Nueva Espana, the Dominican restaurant where I was meeting T, so we left the house together. On our way out the door, C noticed the big plastic bag full of plastic bags that I had left in the hallway.

When I found that our neighborhood grocery store accepts plastic bags for recycling, I started saving them. I try to use reusable grocery bags, but it’s nearly impossible in New York not to end up with piles of plastic grocery bags. We keep our recyclables in the office which is small to begin with and it bums me out when my writing space looks like a utility room so I moved the bag of bags to the hallway where, because it’s one of those errands that never seem convenient when I’m thinking of it, it sat for 2 or 3 weeks. I should have known that it was trying C’s patience. But I didn’t.

On our way out, C suggested I take the bags to the store because it was only about half a block out of the way. I said, sharply, though I don’t remember this at all and C only mentioned it later when we were back home, “I’m not doing that now.” I was preoccupied, feeling anxious because so little of my evening was left for the ration of idleness I seem to need. T was already waiting for me at the restaurant, and I didn’t want to take the extra 3 minutes to drop the bags off. When we got out to the sidewalk, C stopped and said, “I’m going to get the bags,” and he went back inside while I waited. When he returned with the bags, I asked him if he was mad at me and he said, “I had a flash of anger, but it’s okay.”

In some ways we are such different people. I’m a recycling Nazi and I make fun of the size of his TV. He is less selfish than I and makes more time for his family and friends. He won’t call the landlord to fix a leaky kitchen sink, whereas I wouldn’t hesitate to demand it be repaired. I don’t feel any particular urgency about paying my credit card debts, whereas he considers it an ethical obligation. He looks forward all year to a summer house share on Fire Island, whereas I have trouble imagining why anyone would want to be on a beach in the mid-day sun, let alone with a bunch of fashion-obsessed gay men. I consider the Mary Tyler Moore Show to be the most important cultural touchstone of my life, whereas he says, “I think maybe I’ve seen a couple episodes, but I don’t really remember them.”

On the other hand, in some more essential, fundamental way I think we have known and seen and understood each other from the moment we met. I have trouble articulating exactly what I mean by this. Maybe it’s because it started with the raw, specific solicitation of a Craigslist ad, which made our sexual compatibility undeniable from the get-go. I will not underestimate how powerful a bond it is to be able to know that we turn each other on, and, more than that, to know that we give each other what we most want. The confidence of that is a tonic. It’s a moment -- and good god they are rare, aren’t they? -- of feeling like I have exactly what is needed.

But it must be more than that. I know my heart was flayed and raw from my breakup with M in Austin. I hadn’t had time to recover my defenses, so C could walk right in. And I know that he was looking for someone to commit to. I know he had a specific idea of what kind of commitment he wanted to make (lifelong, monogamous) but hadn’t yet found someone he was willing to make it with.

After dinner, at home, I told him how vulnerable his anger made me feel, how this new experience of anger in our relationship had made me fearful and insecure. I thought it was a natural response, considering that this was the first time anger had surfaced between us. He said it wasn’t the first time.

I haven’t had any flashes of anger yet. No flashes, no flickers nor slow burns. I haven’t been mad. I don’t think I’ve even been slightly irritated. I don’t say this to paint myself as more virtuous in some way, more tolerant, loving, more serene. If anything, I want to say that I’m less. Less self-aware, less emotionally open. But I think I’m just more afraid. C is straightforward. The idea of anger doesn’t, with him, spin out into a wild paranoid fantasy, a terrible apprehension that everything is rotten, corrupt, wrong, false, over. I avoid anger because it terrifies me. He seems to understand that it’s just something people feel from time to time.

He said that if we're going to save plastic bags he wants to keep them in the office, not the hallway. And he told me, “This is not fragile. My love for you is not fragile. You don’t have to worry about it. For this to work, you have to know that.”

The temperature has been in the 60s and 70s the last week and our neighborhood is thick and smelly with flowering trees. It is spring and this is the first change of seasons since C and I met in December. (How could it be true that we have only known each other 5 months?) We joke about the weather. I say it’s hot, he says it’s chilly. I dread the summer, C lives for it. He can’t wait till it’s 95 and sticky. I love winter and particularly enjoyed this past winter, and I feel sadness and regret to see it end, because I spent the last few years in San Francisco and Texas where there is no winter. We both worry a little that our incompatible weather affinities will be difficult to manage, one of us always relieved while the other is irritable. All winter C half-jokingly complained about how miserable and cold he was, and I fell in rapturous love with each new ridiculous snowfall. As the tables turn, I wonder if I will play the role of the miserable one with such charm and humor.

Friday at work, C texted me, “I love you. And I don’t get mad and stay mad. Stupid bags are stupid. You are beautiful.”

I texted back, “I love you, too. I love our life together. And stop making me cry at work.”

Control Freaks.

2011-04-27T10:20:00.006-06:00

C, having been, before we met, a bachelor with a good income, has a guy come in once a week and clean the apartment, change the sheets, do a little laundry. Nothing serious -- for instance, I think he mops the bathroom floor, but he doesn't really get into the corners. Whatever. He cleans way more often than, if not as thoroughly as, I would, and I am deeply appreciative.

If we remember to run the dishwasher before he comes (and I won't even get into how little I understand the usefulness of the dishwasher, which, as far as I can tell is just a place to put dirty dishes to get them out of the way until you need something in there and have to pull it out and wash it and god forbid you put anything in there that hasn't been pretty much washed already -- it won't get clean) ANYway, if we remember to run the dishwasher, he'll empty it out and put stuff away. I wish he wouldn't. Over the course of the last couple months since I moved in, I've rearranged the kitchen to make it serviceable. C didn't cook much, so I have had free reign to make it over, to make it work for me. And I have accomplished that: I love cooking in my new kitchen. But our cleaning guy hasn't adjusted well to the changes. He puts stuff away where it used to go. Why would you put plastic bags in the towel drawer when it's obviously full of towels now and not plastic bags? And I want my good tongs hanging with the pots, not buried somewhere in the utensil drawer. Obviously I have some control issues.

C and I sometimes watch The Fabulous Beekman Boys, a documentary series on Planet Green about a gay couple who move from New York City to a farm somewhere upstate to raise goats and chickens and sell soap, etc. One of them is, at least as portrayed on the show, a total control freak micro-manager who drives his boyfriend and everyone else crazy, and as we were watching it the other night, C asked me (because our relationship was somewhat analogous in that we were domestic partners who also created and ran a business together) if J and I had a similar dynamic when we were together. I guess were were similar in some ways, but I think J and I were both control freaks, just in very different ways. He wore his freak on the outside, and I was the passive-aggressive one.

If you've seen Life in a Box, remember the argument in the trailer during a rehearsal? I was so glad to find that footage because it showed something essential about J and me and Y'all and that time in our lives, and because it showed how obstinate and controlling I could be, which is an aspect of my personality I don't think most people saw because I was the shy one, the yielding one, in the face of J's outsize personality, in the act and in our life together. If making that documentary was, among other things, an exercise in self-mortification, that scene is the one I find most difficult to watch -- because it shows an ugly side of me. The storyteller (and the narcissist) in me knows that that is what makes it good for the film.

No.

2011-04-27T09:29:00.007-06:00

The reason I'm so exercised about Raja winning this season of RuPaul's Drag Race (besides the fact that she came off like a shallow bitch with the totally repulsive Heathers vs. Boogers thing because, let's be clear, drag queens make catty comments about each other, it's part of the job, and it's not hard in the editing room to exaggerate or even create little backstage rivalries and to make anyone look evil or sweet depending on what's required to put drama on the screen) what makes me really sad and disappointed, not just about the show or about RuPaul but about the state of drag and by extension gay culture (and doubly, triply, disappointed because Drag Race was my bulwark, my beacon, my raft in the storm of conservatism that threatens lately to obliterate all that is campy and sick and delightfully wrong about being queer and loving a little entertainment and comfort at 2 a.m.) what has me, again, again, despairing that much of what I came of age loving and feeling welcomed and nurtured and inspired by, is that Raja is, in the end, just dull. Dull. This is what RuPaul thinks represents the future of this venerable art form? I watch Raja and yes her clothes are creative sometimes even brilliant and she can walk with her hips like nobody's business -- but there's no love, no generosity, no light, no sex appeal, no fun. And she has the comic timing of a turtle.

Alexis Mateo shoulda won this thing. Please.

Teddy Thompson Morning.

2011-04-20T09:04:00.006-06:00

I downloaded the new Teddy Thompson record this morning (it's really, really good) and I'm listening and feeling a little rapturous about love and art and music. I couldn't find a good youtube clip from the new record, so I offer this great live clip of two of my favorite T.T. songs. In this pared-down version you really get the heartbreak of "I Wish It Was Over." The shiny production on the CD version buries the irony, making it a more complex, disorienting experience. Which I love. But seeing him sing it with the sadness right on the surface is nice, too. Anyway, I just think he's luminous.

Terrible sound on this concert clip with Dad, but I still love it.

Nesting, Not Blogging.

2011-04-06T16:32:00.003-06:00

If anyone has wondered where I disappeared to -- I’m nesting. I moved in with C two weeks ago. We did a little painting, I bought a bunch of stuff for the kitchen (he didn’t, doesn’t, really cook, and I really do). We hung some art, made a little room in his dressers and closets for my clothes, cleaned out his office to make room for me to work.

I’ve neglected my blogs. I can’t blame it on my new love. That’s part of it, but the real culprit is my job. I hadn’t had a real job in years, and now I’m working on average 4 days a week at the prop house in Brooklyn. It’s a good job, pays well, nice people, flexible, and a guy has to make a living, etc. But it’s a lot of hours to be out of commission. I get up at 6 a.m. to punch in by 9, and when I get home at 6:30, I just want to cuddle on the couch with my honey, smoke some pot, and watch mindless TV. Is that really so bad?

I’ve never been one of those people who can work a full time job and come home and write a novel all night. I’m just not. I am a diligent, disciplined, and prolific artist, but it only happens when I don’t have to work for someone else to pay the rent.

So I’ve neglected my blogs. Here’s a list of things that have passed through my thoughts in the last few weeks, or that I’ve written down on post-its and stuck in my pockets, that I thought I might blog about, that I thought I might have something interesting to say about:

Jacob Lusk, one of the finalists on American Idol. One part sweet, gregarious teenager, one part big black drag queen. He sings like Aretha Franklin crossed with Teddy Pendergrass. I have no idea if he identifies himself as gay, but he is so queer. He amazes and moves me to tears every week.

CMA Awards. Maybe not the worst TV ever, but close. A not-awful performance by Brad Paisley, then a numbingly stupid fag joke by Reba’s unmemorable (except for the fag joke) co-host followed by a sickening (in the good way) Steven Tyler/Carrie Underwood duet on “Walk This Way.” The homophobic joke was maddening. I keep hearing how homosexuality is not a big deal any more, so why is it that a fag joke, no matter how idiotic, is still the easiest way to get a big laugh on national TV?

But speaking of Steven Tyler and American Idol: A 60ish man leering at teenage girls has never been so fucking sexy. My high school Aerosmith crush is back with a vengeance.

All of the above are about TV. Hm. I haven’t had a TV for over 10 years until I moved in with C. Now I live with a TV that’s half as big as the living room and I watch American Idol. And look forward to it.

I should say, to be clear, it’s not as if I haven’t watched any TV in the last 10 years. J and I rented plenty of DVDs and watched movies and TV series on Netflix streaming on our computers. And last year in Austin, a group of us gathered every week at a friend’s house to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Drag Race is now my favorite thing on TV, by a long shot. This season is even better than the last. Full of surprises, fucks with your assumptions about gender and sex, gay culture, homophobia. It’s deep, seriously. It manages to be totally sweet and disarming and at the same time subversive and very, very dirty. Love it. Bam!

And I've been mulling over an essay about exes, how those relationships change and, especially, what they mean. I have a couple (exes, that is) and they are all very very different in the way that they figure in my life. This subject deserves a long essay. I have had so many thoughts, been so sure of my opinions, on the subject of ex-lovers, ex-partners. This is really mostly an effort to understand my relationship with J, who is so important to me, so dear to me, but it's been confusing and sometimes painful in the last few years to negotiate this phase of our alliance. So, look for that in the future...

You Said, You Say.

2011-03-31T07:25:00.004-06:00

Somebody seriously needs to do this mashup. I wish I had the skills.

They're even in the same key, for god's sake.

Are Our Politics Born of Immutable Principles, Or Are They Subject to the Caprices of Our Own Biographies?

2011-03-01T14:54:00.005-06:00

Since we plan to move in together, C, being more traditional than I am about these things, took me home to meet his family. Besides his mom and dad, his brother, his sister and her husband and baby were there. And his aunt and her two adult children with their spouses and, between them, four teenagers. For a Super Bowl party. C’s father is a retired Air Force pilot, taciturn but obviously thrilled that his whole family had come to watch his beloved Green Bay Packers win.

To recap, I went to North Carolina for the weekend for a Super Bowl party with a military family who are for all practical purposes now my in-laws. Can we count the words in that last sentence that blow my mind?

I don’t know how it came up, but Saturday night someone mentioned C’s dad’s “Kringle,” which is a pastry he’s famous for, made, I believe, from his mother’s recipe. I took an interest, so he decided to make it for Sunday breakfast. It’s basically a rustic tart filled with canned pie filling. That night, he mixed up dough for two crusts and put it in the fridge to rest overnight. When I got up the next morning, he had rolled out one crust but was waiting for me to get out of bed so he could roll out the second one and fill them while I watched. He reminded me of my own father, the way he warms up when he has something to show you.

(He sent us home with 4 quarts of home-canned tomatoes from his back yard garden. Today, the apartment smells like fennel and sweet tomatoes. I have a cold so I stayed home from work, but I walked down to the Italian butcher, bought sausage, came home and made a big pot of tomato sauce. Feed a cold.)

The week before our trip, C texted me at work to say that the trip was off, he’d just had a fight with his mom over sleeping arrangements. The married siblings and cousins would be sharing beds in various rooms, but C and I, along with C’s single brother, would be sleeping on air mattresses on the basement floor.

He asked his mom why his sister and her husband would be sharing a bed and not us. She said, “They’re married.” Yes, she understood that her argument was weak because we don’t have the option of being married, but “you’ve only known each other for two months. You’re just dating.” “So when can we share a bed?” “A year?”

I told C I didn’t think we should make a big deal of it. I didn’t want my first encounter with his family to be a showdown. (And C had taken one of my CDs with him for a Christmas visit and his mom told him that I sounded like James Taylor “but better,” so I was inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt.) Maybe this was not homophobia. It looked to me more like the old “not under my roof” argument that must have appeared at least once a month in Dear Abby in the late sixties/early seventies when “shacking up” was the frontline of the culture war.

The weekend was chaotic, wonderful, exhausting. I think I made a good impression. I think they trust me with C’s heart. I hope they believe that I will try my best to make him happy. We arrived at 3 a.m. on Friday, got to sleep at 4:30 and were awoken at 9 when the second batch of cousins arrived. I am not a morning person. Meeting new people, any new people, is for me stressful and draining, but all those parents and siblings and cousins and kids and everyone sizing me up because they adore C and he’s never brought anyone home before, at times it felt like an initiation ordeal, a rite of passage.

Shortly before the game started, a friend of C’s mother arrived with her husband and C’s mother was introducing her to the crowd packed into the basement den (where C’s brother had hooked up two very big TVs over a table crowded with snacks and a big pot of chili): “…and you remember C, and this is his boyfriend Steven.” “So nice to meet you, Steven…”

At that moment, I suddenly realized how unequipped I was to understand this world. Like most military families, C’s parents are Republicans. “This is C’s boyfriend, Steven.” No special emphasis, no slight lowering of volume like when my grandmother used to say “colored.” Just boyfriend, like it’s just what you’d expect. Whereas I practically choked. I must carry such a deep, rarely-conscious shame about my sexuality, such a wincing fear that a world where C and I would be folded naturally into this family doesn’t compute.

I have railed here and elsewhere about the danger of assimilation. And, yes, I believe that saying “we are all the same, we are only asking to be treated equally” ignores, thwarts, distorts what is essentially different about our queer lives and creates just another kind of closet, with all the pain and danger of the old closet. Yet, there I was watching the Super Bowl in North Carolina with Republicans and on the verge of tears just to be welcome.

I am proudly and adamantly queer, radical, and, most importantly, critical of a status quo that creates so much unfairness and injustice, a status quo that privileges certain people and leaves certain people out. And my unwillingness to conform, to compromise, is based on core principles. Like freedom (no one should have the right or the power to dictate how I express my sexuality) and fairness (access to housing and employment and healthcare should not depend on one’s wealth, class, race, sexual orientation, or gender identity), etc. But can we acknowledge that, to some extent, the passion with which we fight assimilation is also about our own pain? That we are wounded creatures lashing out? That we want no part of the status quo because it has abused and rejected us? And, knowing that, knowing that not just our emotional lives but our political convictions have been shaped in response to that abuse and rejection, what do we do now, when the world that has hurt us begins slowly, fitfully, to extend a remorseful hand?

I wonder if we, as a community, are capable of such profound forgiveness. I wonder if I’m capable of it myself, personally.

C and I this morning took the A train down to City Hall and registered our domestic partnership. This status will give us access to a few benefits from New York City as well as some benefits offered by the firm he works for. After we had shown our IDs to the guard and been given a number, we walked by a newsstand on the way to the clerk’s window and C bought me a bouquet of 6 yellow roses.

Almost every time I criticize the gay marriage campaign, someone responds with, “If you don’t want to get married, don’t get married, but some of us want to, so leave us alone.” The most frustrating thing, the saddest thing, about that response is that it sets me up as someone who is against love, against the possibility of a deep, permanent commitment based on love.

I have had deep, lasting relationships with men as lovers, partners, friends. Two, in particular, lasted several years each -- both were men I thought I’d grow old with -- but eventually ended when, in different ways and for different reasons, the partnership was no longer fulfilling. Neither relationship carried a promise of sexual exclusivity.

I wonder if all the qualifying language -- “we’re emotionally monogamous, but not sexually monogamous,” etc. -- is just an attempt to preclude disappointment. If fidelity is not what he promised, then maybe I won’t be devastated when he’s unfaithful. But is it the looseness of the commitment which lets it unravel?

Until this relationship, I did not think that self-actualization could be possible in a monogamous relationship. Monogamy was all about limitations, about narrowing possibilities, about shutting down desire. But now I see that not only is it possible but that an exclusive relationship might even be the cause of becoming my best, fullest self. Rather than expressing over and over with many men a tiny part, a small aspect, a glimpse of who I am, I feel myself unfolding with this man. Letting him completely in. Letting him see more and more of me every day and, in so doing, discovering those aspects of myself.

C and I have talked about marriage. He appreciates my oppositional view, but he’s more conservative than I am. He supports the campaign for same-sex marriage, seeing it as a crucial move toward the legitimizing of same-sex relationships and the equality of gay people. But he’s not sure he wants to get married until, and unless, same-sex marriage is widely accepted and equal to opposite-sex marriage. He doesn’t want his wedding to be a political performance.

I’ve always had a distaste for weddings which now I’m compelled to try to make sense of. As a feminist, I’m suspicious of marriage because it has, historically, not been great for women. But that objection doesn’t hold up to the many ways in which marriage has been reformed in the last 40 years to make it more equitable. As an environmentalist, I’m put off by the extravagance of weddings, the orgy of consumption, the money spent on clothes and jewelry and flowers, but certainly one doesn’t have to have that kind of wedding, any more than one has to have a certain kind of house or car. And the cynic in me distrusts the whole naive fairy tale which, let’s face it, usually ends badly.

So. Maybe I’ll get married. Maybe I won’t. I know if I do I’ll take some flack for it -- “Yeah, you’re all counter-culture anti-marriage until you fall in love, then everything changes…” -- but my own marital status will have no effect on my criticism of the role of marriage in our society and the priority of the marriage campaign in the gay rights movement, except possibly to strengthen my critique.

Eight months ago, I was living in Austin, Texas. I had been looking for work for months but couldn’t find a job. A brief, intense relationship had ended and I was heartbroken. An old friend invited me to come back to New York and stay with him until I got on my feet. Two months later, I met a man in the neighborhood who happened to need a roommate. A week after I moved in, I placed an ad for sex on craigslist, something I’ve only done maybe 5 or 6 times. My roommate’s friend who lives in the same building happened to answer the ad. I was hesitant, not wanting to create drama in my new home, but horniness prevailed and I went across the hall to meet C. We immediately found a sexual compatibility, then a musical affinity, and a similar sense of humor. As we’ve gotten to know each other over the last 3 months, we’ve discovered similarities in our ethics, our taste, and our attitude toward life and friends and family. He lets me cry about silly things and then reassures but does not coddle me. He laughs at my neuroses in a way that doesn’t hurt but lets me laugh about them too. He loves my cooking. He is unwaveringly considerate, direct, honest, clear. He perfects me. I have not had a moment of uncertainty of him.

The breathtaking unlikeliness of this ever having happened renews my conviction that essential benefits like access to affordable health care should not be dependent on something as miraculous and rare as finding someone you want to, and are able to, spend the rest of your life with in an intimate and domestic relationship and that, because it is something available to such a small percentage of us, we should put our energy and money into reforms that affect more of the community, like ending employment and housing discrimination.

I Won't Grow Up.

2011-02-26T13:23:00.004-06:00

This article about the juvenilizing of American speech has been making the rounds on Facebook, mostly among people around my age, of course.

Why are Americans unable to grow up? We no longer change the way we dress when we become adults. What's weird about that, though, is that American men and boys wear the same styles because men dress like little boys (oversize t-shirts, sideways baseball caps, basketball shorts) but American women and girls wear the same styles because girls dress like mature women (sexy dresses, makeup, fancy shoes).

The same is true of the way people eat. Taste in food doesn't mature. Grown people eat pop-tarts and Cap'n Crunch and prefer everything sugary and insipid.

I know I've made some massive generalizations here, but isn't there something true in it? I also know that I'm dangerously close to making some kind of class judgment (arugula vs. iceberg, etc.). And I don't mean to grumble, too much. I like that I can wear jeans and sneakers pretty much everywhere and don't ever have to put on a coat and tie.

I'm curious if all these trends are related or share a common source.

Gap.

2011-02-24T18:24:00.003-06:00

Dammit, I broke my first rule of blogging. I said when I started doing this that if there were gaps -- because I was away from my computer for a few days or super busy or things had happened that I didn't quite know how to write about, whatever the reason -- I would not be required to fill them in, that I would just keep going. That was what had always derailed me when I kept a journal. I'd stop writing for a while and then feel like it was impossible to go back and catch up. I wanted to avoid that pitfall, and I did until recently. Not sure why.

So ... I've been busy, I've been away from my computer a lot, and things have happened that I don't quite know how to write about yet, but I am going to plug ahead. Just so that I am not continually referring to things that you don't know anything about, here's a quick time line of the last couple months (some of which I've chronicled here, some of which not) with minimal commentary and analysis, and then we'll just forge ahead:

1. Early December, I moved out of T's place into an apartment farther up in Inwood with a new acquaintance. A few days after I moved in, I met my roommate's good friend who lives next door and fell in love.
2. Gradually over the last 2 1/2 months, I've begun to spend more and more time at his place and less and less time at mine.
3. He's a former actor turned attorney, loves theater as much as I do and makes more money, so he can afford to actually see it. We go to lots of plays.
3. He's got me watching American Idol and loving it. I tried Survivor but couldn't work up any interest. I turned him on to RuPaul's Drag Race, which he loves. Of course.
4. We drove to North Carolina to meet his family on Super Bowl weekend.
4. He took me to a very expensive restaurant for Valentine's Day. I gave him a dozen red tulips, and he gave me a heart-shaped box of chocolates. There was very little irony involved. I think.
5. At the beginning of April, I will move next door completely.
5. Mostly for practical reasons, we decided to register as domestic partners in New York City. I was surprisingly moved. He was, maybe not surprisingly, less moved. (He's a little more conservative than I am. For him, domestic partnership, though it will provide us with a few benefits, just points out the fact that homosexuals are second-class citizens. For me, it reified my commitment to him, which is a more stringent promise than I've ever made to anyone in my life.)

I am still working on that longer post about my new relationship in relation to my political philosophy. I think it's pretty close, but things keep happening -- in the larger world, such as Obama's shift regarding DOMA or Facebook's new relationship status options -- that I want to include.

Life Happens.

2011-02-23T13:19:00.005-06:00

No, I haven't given up blogging! I am blogging almost every day lately, just never finishing anything. What started out as a post about Super Bowl weekend with C's family in North Carolina (I know!) is turning into an essay about discovering that political convictions are shaped by circumstances and history just as much as by values and principles, maybe even more so. About how love changes everything. It's tricky, and I want to get it right before I share.

C and I went down to City Hall this morning and registered our domestic partnership. Stay tuned.

Pigs Fly.

2011-01-20T13:58:00.010-06:00

I’ve been reluctant to write much about this new relationship I think partly out of some vague, superstitious fear of jinxing it but, I think, too, because I want to hold it close, keep it to myself, protect it. It feels fragile -- though less so every day -- and sacred. So forgive me for ratcheting back the level of disclosure of my intimate life, those of you who are used to that from me and enjoy it. (Don’t worry, there has been no lessening of the pleasure I find in talking about myself.)

Another reason that occurs to me, for not writing much about C. and me, is that I don’t feel at all up to the task of describing just how good it is: I could never get it right or convey how happy I am or how wonderful this man is. Even going back and reading that last sentence disappoints me, how thin it sounds compared to what these days are like.

I will share this, though. I -- the original love skeptic, the anti-marriage crusader, the free love tutor, Mr. Monogamy-Shmonogamy – have, for the first time in my life, made a vow to be sexually exclusive.

The notion that this would be something I might want, or want to try, didn’t strictly arise out of my feelings for C. I made a lame stab at it with M. in Austin. But that promise was more like, “Let’s be monogamous until we don’t want to anymore and at that point let’s be honest as we renegotiate.” The fact that M. betrayed that promise (not the promise to be exclusive, which of course we hadn’t made in any meaningful sense, but the promise to be honest) is what makes me both scared to try again but also eager to give it another shot because it wasn’t me who fucked up.

So I was ready. But I wasn’t sure how to implement such an arrangement. The problem I have with this type of vow is that it places expectations on another person. It seems to place conditions on affection. This is about me. I want to try this. I want to make this promise. But the promise loses it power if it is not mutual, so how do you start? I decided that I would just keep these thoughts to myself for a while, that I would make this vow for myself but not ask it of C. yet. It seemed like unnecessary pressure so early in the relationship. C. and I had only known each other for a month or so.

But then he said to me one evening, “I rejected someone for you today.” He told me that he had hailed a cab after work, and, as he was getting in, the driver asked where he was going. A man standing at the curb heard C. say, “Inwood,” and said, “I’m going to Inwood, too. Do you want to share the cab?” Since Inwood is an expensive ride, C. said sure, and they rode up together. Some time in the course of the ride, the man asked C. if he could call him and C. gave him his number. The man called as soon as C. got home, but C., I guess having given it more thought in the meantime, said, “This isn’t a good time. I’m seeing someone.”

That night in bed, I said, “I’m glad you rejected that guy for me.” It seemed unnecessary to keep my recent thoughts to myself after C.'s story indicating that he felt similarly, so I told C. that I wanted to be exclusive but was hesitant to make demands of him. He said, “Let’s do it,” and I said, “Okay.”

My argument against monogamy, a big part of it anyway, always had to do with what I felt was an unnecessary loss of freedom. Why put restrictions on a natural, healthy desire? It’s repressive.

But with that sacrifice, which at least so far does not feel at all like a deprivation, I’m experiencing a kind of freedom I never expected, never considered. As soon as we had that conversation, as soon as we made that promise to each other, I felt unburdened. I felt energized and open and free. I wasn’t sure what this feeling was about, but after mulling it over for a few days, this is what I think:

One, I feel free to be myself, to share the aspects of myself that I worry may be unattractive. I don’t feel constant pressure to be impressive, worrying that if I show C. a side of me that repels him he’ll leave me. The promise is not provisional. It can bridge those moments when we don’t connect. I am free to be unattractive because the option to look for someone else to fill those moments is removed. Yeah, yeah, nothing is certain, nothing is permanent, I know, whatever. But it’s certain enough. It’s permanent enough.

And, two -- and this may be more the cause of this feeling of relief, this feeling that I am breathing deeper and easier than I have since I was about 12 years old -- I am free of the relentless, grinding search for sex. I’m not going to have sex with the cute guy in line at the grocery store, or sitting across from me on the subway. It isn’t going to happen, so I don’t have to yearn for that encounter to be any more than it is: just noticing someone attractive. I can’t describe how much lighter I feel having released myself from that. There is someone at home who wants me. Someone who knows me, and wants me. (Even porn is boring. My boyfriend is sexier. My sex life is hotter.) I never imagined that it would feel so good to have fewer options. To know. I never imagined that it would feel so good.

Who Am I?

2011-01-13T11:51:00.002-06:00

Today I set about recreating my identity from scratch. Or, I should say (knowing full well there’s no such thing as any sort of fixed identity), my official identity.

Somewhere, somehow, in my move from Austin to New York last fall, I lost a small file case containing every one of my “important papers”: birth certificate, passport, Social Security card, and the title to my car, among others.

I should say, hoping not to sound too defensive, that, in spite of the instability that has characterized my adult life (or maybe because of it), I am not one to lose these sorts of things. I can’t remember ever losing my wallet, or keys, or credit cards, or plane tickets (back when there were plane tickets). I haven’t kept much stuff over the years, but the important stuff I don’t lose. And by “important” I don’t mean significant in any real sense. I just mean those things that are a pain in the ass to replace. So I’m baffled. I had the file case when I was packing in Austin, and I don’t have it now.

I left a few boxes in Austin, boxes of unsold Y’all and Life in a Box Soundtrack CDs. (Don’t ask me why I didn’t just throw them in a dumpster on the way out of town, except that they cost a lot of money to have made, a fact which, unfortunately, doesn’t make them valuable. It just makes me laughably optimistic.) But J looked in M & J’s house for the file case. It’s not there.

I left a few boxes with my parents in Indiana, to be shipped to me when I got settled, which is, more or less, now. Mom looked through those boxes. No file case.

I left the “Y’all Archive” with a friend in Austin to store. He was a Y’all fan before he was a friend. He’s also an American Studies scholar, and I think a bit of an amateur archivist. When I told him how for years I’ve dragged around all this Y’all memorabilia (posters, letters, master tapes of our recordings, videotapes, etc.) in and out of less than optimal conditions for preservation, he was visibly worried. When I couldn’t fit everything in my car in September, I called him, frantic, and he offered to take care of the boxes. He’s in Cambridge for the year on a fellowship, but he had a friend go to his house in Austin and look through those boxes. Not there, either.

So, having turned over every rock I can think of, this morning I submitted an application to the Lake County, Illinois clerk’s office for a certified copy of my birth certificate, which I will need to start the process of obtaining a Social Security card, which I will need to apply for a passport. Next I need to contact the Texas DMV to get a duplicate title for my car. So I can sell it.

The legwork is annoying, but not difficult. Just lots of phone calls, web sites, lines to wait in. The only possible hitch I anticipate is the issue of my last name. In my twenties, I started using my father and mother’s names hyphenated, at first only professionally but then I decided I wanted to use that name for everything. I didn’t change it by court order -- a lawyer friend told me that New York is what they call a “common law state,” which means that one can change one’s name simply by stating that one has changed one’s name. So, he prepared an affidavit stating my new name, which I took to the Social Security office and got a new card with the name “Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer” instead of “Steven Jack Cheslik.” With the new Social Security card, it was easy to get other documents in that name: passport, driver’s license, etc. But my birth certificate will still have the old name -- that is, provided they don’t give me a hard time about even getting a new birth certificate, since they require proof of identity in the form of a driver’s license, which has my new name on it. Because of course I need proof of identity to obtain proof of identity. I will postpone worrying about this little Kafka scenario until it actually happens.

So, who the fuck knows who I even am anymore? or who I will be once I have gone through this very surreal process? I sure as hell don’t. Essentially what this is all about is proving that I am still the same person that I was when I was born, that I was when I was 14 and got my first Social Security card, that I was when I got my first passport at 25. A lot of effort to prove something that I know is not true.

Breakfast Tacos.

2011-01-05T10:53:00.002-06:00

It’s really too soon to be sentimental about Austin. I’m very absorbed in loving my new life here. But there are things I miss. Like my friends. And breakfast tacos. You can get decent tacos here, but they’re not ubiquitous like they are in Austin. And I haven’t come across breakfast tacos at all.

I’m not working today, but I got up at 6 with C. We went to bed early last night, and I slept well because I hadn’t slept well the previous two nights. The feeling of being close to him is more compelling than sleep -- I find myself sometimes not wanting to drift off.

I spent the morning reading. I finished Myra Breckinridge.

My roommate M. got up at about 10 and made more coffee. By then I was hungry, so I went downstairs planning to warm up a couple tortillas with some cheese for a late breakfast. The onions in a bowl by the stove caught my eye, so I cut one up, thinking I’d make a quesadilla with fried onion and hot sauce. But, since I had the pan out, it seemed silly not to scramble a couple eggs, too. Then I saw one red potato sitting there and suddenly I was slicing it thin and throwing it in the pan with the onion and some butter.

I put the rest of the onion in a plastic bag and was putting it in the fridge when I saw the bacon and the whole game changed. I had bought it for the bean soup I made a couple weeks ago, and there were a few strips left which I had sort of forgotten about. I threw them in the pan. (Normally, I would start with the bacon and drain off most of the fat before I cooked the potato and egg, but, since I didn’t find the bacon till I had the other stuff cooking, I fried bacon in butter. I fried bacon in butter. Which is illegal in San Francisco.)

When everything was brown and crispy on the edges, I turned down the heat and threw in the eggs. I warmed the tortillas, put a couple slices of sharp cheddar on each and then piled on the eggs/potato/bacon/onion. A little hot sauce. I would’ve posted a photo but they disappeared too fast. Nostalgia is fucking delicious.

Life, Love, Destiny, and Timing.

2010-12-27T16:14:00.007-06:00

The Saturday before Christmas I attended my friend Kristin's tree-trimming party. She has this gathering every year -- the first time I attended was in 1987, I think. She lives with her husband and child in Peter Cooper Village in the apartment she grew up in. Over 20 years ago, her fledgling theater company invited me to write music for two shows in their first season, and that began my career in New York theater. I even lived in her apartment for a few months in 1989 when we had both broken up with boyfriends around the same time. I had left mine and hers moved out, so it worked well.

At the party I saw friends I haven't seen in years and friends I still see frequently. I was struck with that sense of destiny-in-hindsight that reunions conjure up. A great deal of what has been important to me in the last 25 years of my life -- relationships, my work -- I can trace to my friendship with Kristin and the opportunities she gave me to create music for theatre, something I had never done before.

Tim, my friend and collaborator on Lizzie Borden, was also one of the founders and directors of Tiny Mythic Theater Company, which did most of its early shows in the recently-shuttered Ohio Theater on Wooster Street. I spent a good chunk of my late 20s and early 30s in that theater, and now that the physical space is gone, I feel an urgency to protect the friendships that have endured from that time, like the source of a spring. That is only one among many reasons why I cherish my long friendship and collaboration with Tim: it anchors me in a history that I had a hand in creating. It helps me to feel like there's a meaningful arc to my life rather than (what it more often feels like) just a lot of random reactions to whatever circumstances present themselves.

I don't mean destiny in the sense of a deterministic view of the world, according to which everything is the result of chemical reactions that can only go one way so that's the way they go. Maybe it makes some kind of poetic sense when describing the sense of inevitability of a certain biography, but to say that a chain of organic events led to, say, a love affair, gives a lot of weight to the idea of a discrete self, a notion which a deterministic view eventually makes hash of.

At the beginning of December, I moved out of Tim's place to an apartment a few blocks away. I didn't know my roommate well before I moved in, but we have a couple of mutual friends, he's a writer, and his apartment is one of those magical New York apartments you always wonder who lives in when you walk by. His roommate moved out I think in October and he asked me if I wanted to move in. I said no -- I didn't want to stay in Inwood, thought it was too remote at the northernmost tip of Manhattan, and the rent seemed high. But he still needed a roommate in November, asked me again, and by that time I had grown to love Inwood, and, after being back in the city for a while, the rent looked reasonable.

It's a sweet house with 4 apartments nestled among the type of huge pre-war brick apartment buildings that characterize most of Inwood. My roommate knows the other tenants in the building, a fact which I found reassuring, and in fact his best friend of many years lives across the hall.

A few days after I moved in, I got a wild hair and took out an ad on craigslist. I read the MFM ads from time to time, but more for entertainment than with the intention of responding to any of them or meeting anyone. The anonymity of them is what makes them sexy to read but it's also what makes me apprehensive to meet someone. Anonymous sex is one thing with someone you meet in a bar or club, but to invite someone to your house or go to a stranger's house without even meeting beforehand, well, I can be pretty fearless but that scares me.

My ad was basically a sex ad. I was specific about where I was and what I wanted. I got a handful of responses; one seemed promising. He was in the neighborhood, and he was as direct in his response as I was in my ad. We emailed back and forth a couple times. He sent a photo. He looked familiar, but I couldn't place him. I asked where he lived. Same corner as me.

Then I looked at his return email address. It was my roommate's best friend across the hall.

I emailed and told him who I was and that I knew who he was. We were both a little embarrassed, but by that time I think we both had a strong hunch we could have some fun together. He invited me over (I didn't even put shoes on) and we did.

All I wanted that night, frankly, was a blowjob, but he's handsome and he smiles with his eyes, he makes me laugh, and he's the perfect height to fit in the crook of my body. And now I'm falling, falling, falling. Jesus fuck me, why is this shit happening? After that first night, when we had ferociously intense, deeply connected sex and then spent a couple hours in each other's arms talking, we saw each other nearly every day for two weeks until we both left for Christmas. We've curled up on the couch and watched movies, shared with each other music we love, talked freely about our lives, our desires, our disappointments and loves.

I am not ready. It is not my turn. I did not want this. I did not look for this or pursue it in any way. I am not ready.

I've had several conversations with Tim. He's the one who listened to me crying on the phone from Austin when M and I broke up this summer, so he knows how badly timed this is and how afraid I am. He knows what I'm afraid of, a thing which is so recent and vivid and raw. Tim's advice is to enjoy this without fantasizing about what it might mean, what it could be, how it could end. Let go of the storyline, as Pema Chodron says.

It's good advice, but how to follow it? Isn't half the thrill of this moment the anticipation, isn't half of what gives this moment its charge, the recognition of a seed of a possibility of something deeper and more enduring? Isn't it all about the storyline? The sex is great, the physical contact, the ecstasy and comfort of being with someone who knows what I want and wants to give it to me. But there is also tangled up in it something more intimate, domestic, an affinity. How do I enjoy this moment without wanting what it portends? How do I not spin out the fantasy? He sees me. I feel like myself when I'm with him. I feel safe. Am I?

Is falling in love something that I just, for some reason, do? The timing could not be much worse. And I second-guess myself. Am I so susceptible to this new man because I still hurt, because I still feel the lack of M? Has M hollowed out a place where C fits nicely? Even if that is true, is there something wrong with that? It seems like an awfully punitive attitude to take, saying I should not be allowed to feel love because I am unusually open to it right now. Does it really matter where and when? Shouldn't love always be welcome and appropriate?

C is smart and soulful. He has great taste in music. He's funny. He likes my cooking. He's very, very sexy, and he wants to be with me. I just don't think you say no to that. I don't feel as though I deserve it -- how many chances do I get? -- but in what universe do you say no to that? He read my blog. He knows the worst of me. He knows stuff about me that not even I remember. And he still seems to want me.

I keep trying to bring what I may have learned from those months with M and how blind I was into this new beginning. What did I do wrong that I can do right this time? What did I say, how did I behave, what did I miss? But it doesn't work. C is not M. What M may have wanted from me won't be what C wants from me. All I can do is be myself. M didn't want that, and, though it's awfully early to tell, I think C does. The lesson is that there are no lessons. Every time you're flying blind.

Or the lesson might be: you are never ready for anything. Which is to say, you are always ready for everything.

In spite of whatever I might think about the timing, I find myself so willing, still wide open, yet in my head repeating, Don't hurt me, don't hurt me, please just don't hurt me.

Christmas Is Still Gay.

2010-12-23T13:08:00.002-06:00

There's an interesting essay on my new favorite blog, The Awl, about the gutting of Leonard Cohen's transcendent "Hallelujah," in order to make it vague and Christiany enough for Christmas.

Which follows in the long, noble tradition -- well, there's only one other that I can think of off the top of my head, but there must be others, right? -- of eviscerating songs to make them palatable for bland holiday records by the likes of Kermit the Frog (for real).

My favorite Christmas song, in fact my favorite Christmas thing period, is this song, which isn't really about Christmas as much as it is about despair. But replace, "until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow," with, "hang a shining star upon the highest bow," and it's still a bit sad, but not sad enough to do anything drastic like put you off shopping.

I guess, like most, I get sentimental this time of year. I am not Christian, but I love the story of a gift of hope and redemption in dark times. I like to mark this time of year by acknowledging in my heart the miracle of another year, another orbit, another chance.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Life Is Not A True/False Exam.

2010-12-12T10:33:00.006-06:00

This blog post (which Andrew Sullivan linked to this morning) says succinctly what I've been thinking, what I've been trying to put in words, regarding the billboard that some atheist group put up near the Lincoln Tunnel (“You Know It’s a Myth. This Season Celebrate Reason.") and the counter-billboard put up by some Catholics: "You Know it's Real. This Season Celebrate Jesus."

“Myth” is not the same as “falsehood.” Myth is a narrative structure used to convey some of the deepest truths we humans can glean. Myths are not believed in but unpacked and lived.

I am irritated to no end by the asinine "Jesus is the reason for the season" garbage we have to listen to this time of year. But I am just as irritated by a lot of the public atheists' responses, which are every bit as asinine. Though this organized atheist effort to rid the public sphere of Christian propaganda is inspired by writers like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, I don't like how Dawkins' and Hitchens' more distilled, acerbic statements along the lines of "Christians are stupid" get pulled out to support the exasperated atheists -- because both writers obviously are much subtler thinkers and have a lot more than that to say.

Which is to say that I find it unfortunate that the atheist statements in response to the literalist Christmas stupidity are often just as thick-headed. It's ridiculous to justify your Christian faith by insisting that all those stories relate events that really happened. It's just as thick-headed, in this context, to use the word "myth" to mean "lie."

The heart of my objection to this argument is that it cheapens, it disregards, it erases the value of what, as an artist, I do. Artists are myth-makers. Artists are storytellers. The work of an artist lives in that realm where a standard of literal truth or falsehood makes no sense, does not apply. Where the whole point is to be truthful, to say what is real, yet where stories are constantly told which are not objectively verifiably true. The story of Jesus's birth is no more actual than the story of Dorothea and Casaubon's marriage or the story of Mary Richards' job interview, but they all have the power to transform at the molecular level one's very being in this world.

(Also posted on The Bilerico Project.)

Give It To Me, I'll Keep It With Mine.

2010-12-05T21:45:00.003-06:00

It just occurred to me that I am living in an apartment that is very similar to M’s apartment in Austin: open living and dining room/kitchen and half bath downstairs, two bedrooms and full bath upstairs. My house is much older (his is new, very East Austin contemporary green building, mine I’m guessing was probably built in the 20s) but they both have simple clean design, lots of light, white walls and black granite kitchen islands.

Today on facebook, M posted a photo of himself with a man. The man is leaning to rest his forehead against M's, and they're both smiling sweetly. No caption. Several of M's friends have "liked" the photo. I'm not a rocket scientist, just an ex-boyfriend, but it's pretty clear. The guy is handsome. They look happy.

My house sits at the top of a long stairway up to my neighborhood from Broadway. There are two wide sets of concrete steps with a little green space in between, 10 flights. Anytime I want to go anywhere I go down these stairs and up again on the way home. (I could take a longer way around, through the neighborhood, but the stairs are more direct and I like that my legs get a little workout since I don’t have time or money for a gym right now.)

My bedroom window looks out over the top of these stairs, so, if I want to (and I do) I can watch people go up and down all day.

East Village R.I.P.

2010-12-05T11:40:00.003-06:00

More fodder for the relentless conversation about how New York has changed. I liked this article because it assured me that my moaning about the transformation of the East Village from a neighborhood of immigrants, artists, poor people, old leftists, Polish coffee shops (and, yes, bars) into a frat party is not just the nostalgia of an old man. Cities change, New York especially, but what has happened to the East Village and Lower East Side (and, then, Williamsburg, for that matter) is unique and very ugly.

A big part of my feeling good about being back in New York has been an almost-conscious decision to let go of my love for the East Village, which was my home for many years and which has been nearly completely obliterated by the sale of large sections of it to NYU for dorms and by its status, starting in the 80s, as one of the hippest neighborhoods in the world. The global East Village.

I knew -- we all knew and had a pretty clear idea of the importance of that declaration ("I live in the East Village") in marking who we were -- that I lived at the epicenter of cool. But it's sort of like, now, no neighborhood can ever have that status again because as soon as you say a place is the hippest it no longer is. I don't think this is true just because I'm older now -- I think it's because news travels too fast and faster and faster all the time. You used to have to wait for the New York Times article saying something was hip before you knew it wasn't any more. Now twitter can have the same de-hipping effect in a day or two. It's not hip if everybody knows about it, and everybody knows about everything immediately now.

I don't have anything against nightlife. Nightlife is one of the things that makes New York great. But the East Village is completely insane. If you know what 6th Street in Austin is like at night -- it's like that. Except that it's a neighborhood where people live. People live there. Y'know?

Home, Again.

2010-12-02T14:01:00.008-06:00

It's a gorgeous cold and clear day, and I spent the afternoon exploring my new neighborhood. Within a few blocks, I found a nice small grocery store (good produce, coffee, organic stuff, soy milk), a deli with decent beer, cigar store, divorce lawyer, a handful of pizza places, a pastry shop, little Dominican restaurants, a barber shop (I got a great haircut), florist, drug store, and a liquor store with a huge wine selection.

And a 24-hour donut shop. I’m in big trouble. (There's 10 flights of stairs up from Broadway to my house, so I might get fat but my legs will be in great shape.)

Not a Starbucks in sight, thank you Jesus. Inwood is an old New York neighborhood, that -- probably, hopefully -- won’t be gentrified, at least not in the horrifying way that the East Village and Williamsburg were gentrified, because it’s already sort of nice, middle-class. Ethnically, it’s mostly Dominican now. I’m not sure what it was before that. There seems to be a slow trickle of white folks moving in. Up the street is some kind of small stadium or baseball field or something where the Columbia teams play. And of course, there are huge wooded parks and the Hudson River within a few blocks.

Here I go, falling in love with New York again.

Fainting.

2010-11-22T17:46:00.003-06:00

(An edited version of this was posted on Bilerico.com.)

I was on the train coming home from work one day last week and noticed two boys standing across from me, typical kids with their iPods and goofy smiles. They could have been anywhere from 14 to 20, it's hard to tell, teenagers develop at such different rates. (When I say typical, I mean that their pants were more than halfway down their asses, and while I'm on the subject I've been wondering: does the average kid on the street or the train or wherever, a suburban grocery store, does he know that homosexual men are flipping out inside at the sight of a young guy in, essentially, his skivvies in public? Does he know? It's a real puzzle to me. I don't know how to interpret the trend except as some kind of sexual display, but it's their asses they're displaying. What? It's rebellious, so I like it. It makes regular folks blow a gasket, so I'm all for it. But aside from the discussion of what it means for young men to be offering up their backsides to public view, what I find even more interesting is the sheer quantity of attention men are giving to their pants, constantly adjusting, tugging, touching them. Have pants ever before in their history been so interactive?)

Anyway.

I was reading, so not really paying attention to these kids until one of them hit the floor like a sack of rocks in front of me. He had fainted, but he smacked his head on the floor hard enough to wake himself up. Several people jumped to help him up, tried to get him to sit down but he didn't want to. (This was a well-dressed, cute white kid. I couldn't help but think that if he had been, say, a homeless man, everyone would have scattered instead of rushing in to help.) He finally sat down, kept insisting he was fine. He was hating all the attention. I looked more closely at his friend and it dawned on me that they might have been a little high. I hate to assume, but his eyes were awfully red and he couldn't stop smiling.

At the next stop, the conductor came over and asked the kid if he needed a medic; the kid was mortified and said, over and over, "No! I'm fine. Really." A woman sitting near him insisted that he get off the train and get to a hospital. One of the men who had helped him up hovered over him and his friend, expressing concern, trying to convince his friend to get him to a doctor. Both kids -- the kid who had fainted really did look okay, the blood was returning to his face -- refused to leave the train. They just wanted to be left alone and go home.

The man kept getting closer and closer, more and more insistent, and the situation began to seem less like a person in distress being helped by a stranger and more like someone being harassed by a crazy person in the subway. Most everyone, now that the crisis was past, had returned to their anonymous shielded subway world, except the man and the boy, who was extremely uncomfortable with getting so much attention. He gave the man a look like "Oh my god will you please just get the fuck out of my face, old man?" Then the man raised his voice and said, "I care about you!" He said, "I have a son, and a daughter. I care about you."

Just a few days before this I was at the Eagle. I had a beer and had smoked a little pot before I left the house but it had been a couple hours. I was talking to a man sitting next to me. It was crowded and warm and suddenly I felt my blood pressure drop like I was going to pass out. I put my head between my knees for what seemed like a very long time. (Anyone who sang in choirs in grade school knows what it feels like when you're going to pass out, and what to do to prevent it.) The man I'd been talking to looked after me, sat with me until I felt better, and then -- we found we both lived in Inwood -- rode with me back uptown.

He turned out to be a fairly well-known actor and theater director and we had lots to talk about during our 2-hour A train odyssey to the North Pole, er, Inwood. (Will they ever finish that track work? It's been going on for at least 10 years now.)

(Incidentally, that has happened to me in bars a handful of times over the years -- one or two beers, a little pot, and suddenly I'm listing. Maybe I should find out what that's all about.)

So here's to the kindness of strangers. And not just strangers. I'm moving in a little over a week. I've been staying with my friend T since I came back to New York in September. Back in June when I was falling apart in Austin, crying on the phone with T, he said, "Come back to New York. We'll do theater together. We'll form a new company and make new work. Just come. We'll figure it out." And I did, and T has shown me unbelievable kindness and generosity, as he always has in the 20 plus years of our friendship and artistic collaboration.

Not only has it been a long time since I had a regular job, it has been a long time since I paid rent and a long time since I moved somewhere where I wasn't living with friends. I don't have sheets, blankets, towels. I'm going to be 50 in March, and I'm still starting over, and over and over.

Rent.

2010-11-17T19:01:00.008-06:00

It comes up from time to time, it came up just last weekend when we were at Baldwin-Wallace College where the musical theater students were singing several songs from Lizzie Borden in a concert of songs from new shows and they had us on stage for a Q&A after the concert, this question about Rent and why I don’t like it -- the students are rehearsing now for productions of Rent and La Boheme (the opera on which Rent is loosely based) to be performed in repertory -- and my pat answer is that it claims to depict a time and place and milieu, one which I have a strong attachment to, it having been my time and place and milieu, yet the characters, the songs, the story, don’t look or sound or feel anything like the time and place and milieu that I remember. In fact, it seems to me that it trivializes and sentimentalizes, reduces to clichés, the things that made the East Village in the 80s so wild and urgent, so heady, so riveting: performance art, drag, AIDS.

But I accept the possibility that I’m guilty of extrapolating my own experience too widely, assuming that my own experience of that time was the experience. I’m sure there are many people for whom Rent feels authentic. I may be too harshly critical. Lots of people love Rent. They can have it. In the end, I guess I just don’t care much for the songs.

T suggested wisely that Rent may be a younger generation's Fame, a movie which -- though I have known many people in the meantime who attended the High School of Music and Art, on which Fame was based, who say that it is a terribly unrealistic depiction of their experience -- inspired both T and I and many of our friends, showed us a New York where we might go to find aspiring artists like ourselves, a place where the streets were crawling with music and love and sadness and inspiration. I'll buy that. (The comparison breaks down when you compare the movies, though. Fame is a good movie. It holds up. The movie version of Rent is a piece of crap.)

I always think, afterwards when it’s too late, that I wish I would have added to my answer about how I feel about Rent that, though it doesn’t feel at all to me like the New York in the 80s that I remember, Angels in America does, and I don’t think I’ve ever been more grateful for an artist and a work of art.

She Thinks I Still Care.

2010-11-06T21:14:00.006-06:00

From here:

[They won't let me embed it, so click here. C'mon do it, it's George Jones.]

to here:

to here:

to here:

All beautiful, I think. The song is transcendent; you just have to sing it. If I have to choose, I have to say I'm leaning toward the Beck version.

Here We Go.

2010-10-30T10:32:00.001-06:00

Look at how weird my life is getting now. Meetings with lawyers, agents, producers. It’s crazy. I have to keep reminding myself to keep breathing and enjoy the ride because, frankly, it’s about fucking time.

I went for a 3-mile run on Monday and that made me feel sane and stable. I run on the hike and bike trail between the West Side Highway and the Hudson River down to the George Washington Bridge and back. I want to increase the distance so that I can get past the bridge to where the trail goes down closer to the river, but I don’t run regularly enough yet. I’m pretty lenient with myself about that stuff; it’s hard to do those things – run, work out, meditate – every day when every day is different from the one before and every week is different from the one before and every year is … Anyway, the run is beautiful and invigorating, lots of traffic and the gorgeous Hudson and that bridge is awesome when you’re right next to it. It’s so high up.

The temperature dropped yesterday from the 70s to the 50s and 40s overnight. I made a big pot of white bean soup with pork and chipotle. The apartment got all steamy and smoky and the soup was over-the-top delicious. Add cooking to my list above. One of the things that kept me happy and sane (and not fat) the last few years was cooking and eating regularly at home. But it’s a different life here. In the end, I’d rather be a successful theatre artist than a successful homebody.

Where I Am Now.

2010-10-25T18:36:00.002-06:00

Now, several months after the end of my relationship with M, it’s easy to see all the things that may not have been perfect about us being together, to see how maybe we weren’t as absolutely compatible as I was convinced we were, as perfect for each other as I begged him to acknowledge, and to say, “Look at all these wonderful things that are happening in my life now that I’ve moved on,” to adopt an it’s all for the best attitude, because of course now I’m doing this, whatever it is I’m doing without him, and if we were still together I wouldn’t be doing this and what a shame so obviously it’s meant to be, or not to be. Whatever. I still go to bed at night and sometimes just ache because I want so badly to throw my arm over him, my palm against his chest. To kiss his neck. To fall asleep and wake up not alone.

Saturday night I made out in a bar with a young man for what seemed like hours and maybe was. Long enough for my lips to be chapped the next morning. He was shorter than me, and several times he stopped kissing me to rest his head against my shoulder, and with one hand I cradled his skull. Near closing time, he took my hand to lead me to an area of the bar where it was dark, where guys go if they want to do more than kiss. As we passed the stairway to the exit, I let go of his hand. He was swallowed by the crowd. I ducked down the stairs and out the door quickly and went home alone. We never said a word to each other.

The last week or more it’s been generally in the 50s at night and the 60s and 70s during the day. The heat has been turned on in T’s building and apparently, like the heat in all these old New York apartment buildings, can’t be regulated much. There’s no thermostat; it’s either on or off. Even with the radiators turned off, the steam pipes that run through the apartment to the upper floors are still blazing hot. So, we have the windows open, because of course you don’t need heat when it’s 65 degrees outside.

Computer Love.

2010-10-16T17:33:00.001-06:00

I’m sure everybody knows by now because I haven’t stopped complaining about it that UPS lost my computer monitor on its way to New York from Columbus, Ohio. I visited my brother there on my way here, and I left my car with him because he has room for it in his airplane hangar. Since that was the end of the road for my car, I shipped my boxes from Columbus.

I insured my computer but forgot to insure the monitor, so of course that’s the box that went missing. It was a big, fancy monitor, 27” screen, I edited my film Life in a Box on it. It and my computer were paid for by the film’s budget; I never could have afforded such nice stuff. I was sad to lose it. Since I got here, I’ve been using a 10-year-old Mac G4 notebook computer, which is functional but pretty jenky. It doesn’t play video, for instance.

But, UPS automatically insures every package for $100, and I found a similar monitor on ebay for $60. (Nobody wants a 7-year-old computer monitor except someone with a 7-year-old computer whose monitor was lost.) And the shipping was $40, so I just broke even. It arrived today, by Fedex, which is a New York miracle because this is the only day I could have been home to receive a package since I’m in rehearsals every day now.

I love happy endings.

Speaking of happy, we’ve had a couple rehearsals now with the cast. Three of the women are back from last fall’s production and one is new, the woman who plays Emma, Lizzie’s sister. The new girl is great. The old girls are still great. Our director is wonderful, very smart. She loves and understands the show. And our music director is some kind of perfect.

There was a moment in yesterday’s rehearsal, during the scene in which Lizzie begs Alice Russell to lie for her to the police, and Alice, though she loves Lizzie, cannot do it, when I started crying, and I looked to my left and Tim was crying and then to my right and Alan was crying. All three writers were crying. Hate to brag, but this show is heartbreaking. I’m awed by what this cast brings to our words and music, to these characters and this story. It’s a wonder. And it’s a privilege to work with such talented artists.

There's A Place For Us.

2010-10-10T12:48:00.002-06:00

The song "Somewhere" from West Side Story is constantly in my head because the A train, which I take every day to wherever it is I might be going, as it approaches the station sings the first three notes. At first I thought it was an effect of the wheels on the tracks, but it is too regular and it happens at every station.

"There's a place..." That song always fills me with nostalgia. West Side Story was the first musical I worked on in a community theater production in Greencastle, Indiana. I was 13, on the stage crew, and Mike Van Rensselaer, who was lanky and handsome in a mid-70s way, played Tony. Every night as I stood backstage waiting for my cue to roll out one of the brick walls for the rumble scene, it was like Mike was singing to me. "There's a place for us...."

Anyway.

The other thing that's new about the subway since I lived here last is a woman's recorded voice on nearly every platform announcing the arrival of each train. She's super-cheerful and sounds like she's from Kentucky by way of Minnesota. It cracks me up every time, those hard nasal "a" sounds, an accent and tone so out of place here where daily one hears dozens of different accents but seldom that one. And she is announcing the arrival of trains, which is useless information. It's obvious when the train is arriving. It's big and loud. Information that might be helpful -- schedule changes, tracks changes, etc. -- is still bleated over a p.a., almost always garbled and incomprehensible. Just like the New York I remember.

I've been working part-time in a prop rental shop in Greenpoint. An old friend got me the job very soon after I arrived, and I'm grateful to have some income and to be working in a congenial place with varied enough tasks that I'm not dying of boredom.

The commute from Inwood to Greenpoint is almost an hour and a half door to door. So far, it's not bothering me a bit, though. After living in places where I had to drive everywhere -- if you know me, you know I hate driving -- I'm falling in love all over again with public transportation. I'm getting lots of reading done. I'm reading In Search of Lost Time again, the new Lydia Davis translation. (Which is great, by the way. If you've always wanted to read it but you're intimidated by its "great modernist masterpiece" reputation, don't be. It's a huge pleasure to read. I read the whole thing a few years ago when I was living and working in a very quiet, remote village in southern Utah for 8 months, but it's so long and rich and dense and entertaining that the first thing I thought when I finished it was that I wanted to go back to the beginning and read it again. Lots of time for reading may be the only thing the New York subway has in common with southern Utah.)

I work Monday next week and then I have two weeks off. I'll be working, but not for the man. As I’ve said, the two main reasons I moved back to New York were, one, because my heart was broken and I needed a change of scenery and, two, because big things are happening in my career. (I guess the real main reason I moved back is that I couldn’t make a living in Austin, but the heartbreak and Lizzie Borden are what spurred me to move now.)

The National Alliance for Musical Theatre festival of new musicals presentation is happening in a couple weeks. (If you're in New York, you can come to this event free. The performances are on Oct. 21 and 22, during the day.) I know I’ve said this before, but this is a huge fucking deal for the show and for me as an artist. Theater producers from all over the U.S. come to this conference to check out the most promising new musicals, and only eight are chosen each year to be presented. Eight. We start rehearsals on Tuesday!

Bags!

2010-10-02T14:14:00.008-06:00

So far the hardest thing about being back here, after having been away and cultivated a different way of living, and I knew this would challenge me, is shopping and eating the way I want to. I just stopped at the neighborhood supermarket on the way home from running some errands. I didn’t have bags with me. I was buying some fruit, lettuce, a quart of half and half. As the cashier was ringing up my items, I said to the guy bagging groceries, “You can put it all in one bag,” and he nodded as he pushed one plastic bag into another. While I was paying, he put the lettuce in the double bag and then grabbed another bag and started putting lemons into it. I said, “One bag is enough.” I don’t think he understood me – stressful moments like this are exactly when I need to use my Spanish, but they are the moments when I am least able to -- because by the time I had paid the cashier, he had my 8 or 10 items waiting for me in 4 double bags.

Feeling like a total asshole, I started pulling everything out and putting it in one bag. He said, “It’s too much!” I said, “It’s not too much. I live less than a block away. I don’t need 8 bags to carry home my groceries.”

Eight bags! It’s so absurd. I can’t even get my mind around what motivates that kind of behavior. On the other hand, I was able to buy local apples.

But it’s not just the bag issue. It’s the fact that natural food stores are in neighborhoods I can’t afford to live in, and it’s not easy to find local produce, especially not in the cold months. And because life is very busy and hectic here, I won’t be doing as much processing and preserving and cooking all my meals from scratch at home.

I’m not going to fret too much about it, not so soon. I’ll allow myself time to discover ways to get as close as I can manage to the kind of conscientious life I want to live given the circumstances of living in New York. One thing that will help a lot is having a bigger kitchen.

One thing I’ve noticed, living in so many very different places in the last 10 or 15 years, is that the dust in different places has very different qualities. Different texture and color, different rates of accumulation. I think it was Jersey City where the dust was blue. Like blue blue. Here it’s more black, but it has a bluish cast and it’s very fibrous, almost wooly. In Austin our yard was mostly dirt and there was often some kind of construction going on, so the dust was more like dry earth, powdery and brown, and it built up fast. I’d wipe things off on my desk and within a couple hours there was a visible layer of dust again.

I Love Where I Live.

2010-09-18T14:01:00.004-06:00

I just remembered that I got hit in the head with a chair last night! The first thing I thought after it happened was, “Now that’s why I moved back to New York!”

I had a date last night. A man I met and chatted and exchanged numbers with at the Eagle, a handsome man, a painter, asked me over for “dinner and drinks.” I left my job at the prop shop in Greenpoint at 5, came back to T's to shower and change. It would have been easier not to come all the way up to Inwood and then back downtown but I needed a few moments to relax and get my second wind. The new job, getting up at 6 a.m., walking everywhere again ... I was dog-tired.

He lives in a little apartment in Chelsea filled with his paintings. He made cocktails with ginger vodka and lemon juice. They were potent and I had two of them before dinner, which was beautiful and delicious: a chicken breast broiled with New Mexico chili, a baked sweet potato, spinach with lemon and capers, Israeli cous-cous. We smoked some pot.

I hadn’t noticed the night I met him the deep creases at the sides of his mouth which could have been age but more likely were the result of HIV drugs because he also, and I hadn’t noticed this before either, had the tell-tale distended stomach and lack of ass. I won’t say I didn’t have a slight reaction of, if not fear, apprehension, which of course is completely irrational because, even if you were going to have risky sex (and you always have the choice not to) you’re much less likely to contract HIV from someone who is on long-term anti-viral drugs than from someone who is not. But who ever said we were rational creatures?

At any rate, he was charming and eccentric, gracious, sweet, and the vodka and marijuana… After dinner, we had amazing sex -- if the quality of sex is measured by the intensity of physical sensation and I question more and more whether that is the best metric; my experience with M showed me that the whole sex and love thing may not be just propaganda -- the sex of experts, a kind of sex completely without mystery that only people who’ve been around the block so many times there’s nothing to discover can have. It was hot because we knew exactly how to make it hot.

But then it was over.

He said, “I hope you can stay,” and I said I wanted to wake up at home which meant I didn’t want to sleep with him.

It was only 11 when I left, and I was in the neighborhood, still a little drunk and high and craving a beer, so I stopped at the Eagle. Usually the Eagle is sort of all about horniness but I was a little spent so I went up to the roof and sat looking I imagined aloof and handsome. Maybe not too aloof because within a few minutes a very cute bearded man, young I thought, sat next to me saying, “There wasn’t anyone sitting here, was there?” I said, “Not that I know of.”

I tried to steal glances at him, sitting there right beside me, but I wasn’t at all sure if he’d sat there because he wanted to sit next to me or sat there just because it was a place to sit. Is he shy? Should I say something? Or should I pretend I don’t even notice him and thereby avoid humiliation? (Despite my feeling that I might look attractive, I always believe that anyone who I think is handsome is almost by definition handsomer than me. I’m not even sure what that means, but it’s true.) He lit a cigarette. He said something about the porn playing on a TV over the bar. I think he said it was mesmerizing. I said, “They usually play really good porn here, but tonight it’s kind of bad.” Which it was. But it was a TV screen and impossible not to look at. Then I said, “But I guess everyone has their own particular taste when it comes to porn.” And he said, “You just said a true thing,” or something like that. He had a strong Australian accent and used a lot of idiomatic expressions I couldn’t make out. I think he called the bathroom the dunney.

We sat and talked and got drunker and drunker till almost closing time (which in New York I’d like to mention is way too late). He’s a solicitor taking some time off to grow a beard and travel. He’s more or less backpacking with a buddy. They’re staying somewhere on the Upper West Side sharing a single bed to save money. We talked about traveling, the places we’d been. He was small with a bright disarming smile, black hair and eyes, and I told him I thought he was very handsome and he said, “Likewise,” which could have meant that he too thought he was handsome, but I don’t think that’s what he meant.

Several times he said things that, because I was drunk I can't recall today, made me think he was very insightful and sensitive and emotionally self-aware.

I was glad that I’d just had sex because, though I wanted to touch him and I did put my hand on his leg a couple times, I didn’t feel that intense urgency to go somewhere and fuck that usually backgrounds these types of encounters. I told him I’d like to see him again and he took my number. He texted me so I would have his, but it’s an Australian number and it came through as a regular phone call, not text. When I heard last call I said I had to go. I asked him if I could kiss him. I don’t remember if he said yes or nodded or if I just kissed him without waiting for an answer.

On the street outside, I texted him saying I’d enjoyed hanging out and looked forward to seeing him again. I’m doubtful I’ll hear from him, but who knows.

Around the corner on 10th Avenue, I stopped for a slice. There was something happening on the sidewalk in front of the pizza place, a big group of people shouting and looking agitated but I didn’t think much of it since at 4 in the morning on 10th Avenue there’s nothing unusual about that sort of behavior. I made my way through the crowd and was headed for the counter as a couple guys and a woman came running from the back of the restaurant toward the front door. On the way, one of them picked up a chair, one of those sturdy but light aluminum chairs, and lifted it over his head. As he ran past me, it banged the side of my head hard enough to hurt but I was drunk enough to be more amused and intrigued than scared or angry. I sat down at a table and watched the chaotic running around and shouting, someone saying over and over, “Chill! There are cops outside!” until finally they did chill, and I got up and ordered my slice and walked to the train at 34th Street. Miraculously, the A train came within minutes -- sometimes late at night you have to wait forfuckingever -- and I was home in bed by 5.

I have a slight headache today and a bit of a knot on the side of my head and I can’t stop smiling.

Almost Two Weeks.

2010-09-14T22:13:00.007-06:00

I've been here less than two weeks and already I have 4 jobs! I haven't started any of them yet. I interviewed last week for a job at a prop furniture rental shop in Greenpoint. They called yesterday and said they'd like me to do some work for them on an "as-needed basis, and we have a need now." I think they just want to check me out before they say anything too committal. In the interview, she (I think you'd call her a manager, though it was a small operation and it seemed like everyone did everything) said it would probably be 2 or 3 days a week.

I'm also going to babysit a friend's son (he's 9) about once a week in the East Village. And I'm going to help a friend of a friend organize her files, and then some time later in the fall I'm going to do some house painting for a friend.

***

It's been chilly at night and in the mornings, but I find myself superstitiously avoiding putting on a sweater or even a long-sleeve shirt. I don't trust the cool weather, I've been so traumatized by the Texas heat. It's been gorgeous out, the kind of bright, cool fall that New Yorkers live for. It's still hot in the subway. I've forgotten how long it takes for that hot air to be displaced in the fall.

***

I cleaned and rearranged T's kitchen yesterday, spent most of the day on it. T and I have been friends for 20 years. I love him with all my soul. He has many talents but keeping the house clean is not among them. The kitchen was a mess, dirty and cluttered with no place to work and no place to sit. I moved stuff around and created some counter space for cooking and a little eating nook by the window. It's very tenement civilized. Huge difference. And it made T happy to come home from work and see the kitchen transformed. That in itself made the effort worthwhile.

When people ask me for advice about cohabitation, whether it's as friends or lovers (and oddly enough, people ask me), I always tell them my one rule is, "If you think something needs to be clean, clean it." Seriously, stop trying to figure out how to get the other person to do it and just do it yourself. Then it'll be clean and you'll be happy. It doesn't matter who left the dishes in the sink. If you wash them, they'll be gone. Problem solved. What's so horrible about doing something nice for someone like washing their dishes?

People have different styles of housekeeping, different priorities, different levels of dirtiness that they notice or tolerate, and it's probably impossible to change them much. All the trying and the resentment it creates on both sides just corrodes the relationship. My threshold of cleanliness is somewhere halfway between clean freak and slob -- I've been on both sides of the dispute in my various households over the years.

***

It's hard to believe I've been here for almost two weeks now. I'm happy.

Fat People.

2010-08-31T13:04:00.000-06:00

The subject has been well pondered before -- it’s just so obvious -- but I’m still intrigued by the complicated connection between the rise of “bear culture” and the recent so-called obesity epidemic. I’m skeptical about the “epidemic” thing. Though anyone who’s been around for a while can see that the average American body size is increasing, I think most of the hysteria about food and fat people is just moral panic and scapegoating. Fat people are lazy and greedy.

And hot. Is there a subculture of heterosexual people fetishizing excess body fat, or is it just gay men? As soon as I ask that question, I realize it’s not hard to find times and places where fat women have been and are seen as more desirable (look at an art history book, or a shelf of porn), but men? The Judd Apatow movies, Seth Rogan, etc., must be somehow analogous, but how so? Those films seem to be less about the attitude of heterosexual women toward fat men than they are about fat men’s fantasies of their own desirability.

Stinky.

2010-08-30T14:47:00.004-06:00

The same friend who gave me movie deal advice also turned me on to Weleda sage deodorant about a year ago which -- I am not exaggerating -- changed my life. For the last 10 years or so I haven't been able to use deodorant without breaking out in a painful rash that takes months to heal. I tried dozens of them; the "natural" ones were the worst. And don't even mention that evil rock.

Luckily during my time in Austin, I was usually either at home or hanging around men who liked the smell of b.o. (I like it too, but I get extremely self-conscious when I'm in a close public space and I know I smell strong and I'm sure my nervousness only makes it worse. People can be so judgmental about body smells.) The one big exception in Austin was when I was in school, but the UT buildings were almost always freezing so I didn't have to worry too much about sweating.

So, finding a deodorant that actually worked and I wasn't allergic to was huge. But in the last few weeks it has stopped working! In fact, it seems to make me smell even worse than if I weren't using anything. I smell ripe! It could be the fact that I've been in a much more humid climate recently. But that's not good news because New York is just as humid as the Midwest, which is much more humid than central Texas. And I'll be in all sorts of situations where I don't want to stink: meetings regarding the show, job-hunting, various workplaces, etc.

Aaaarrrgh.

$.

2010-08-30T13:05:00.001-06:00

A friend in Austin who I assume knows a lot about money because he has a lot of it told me that if we’re looking for a movie deal for Lizzie Borden we should hold out for $10 million because 40% will come off the top for various agents and lawyers and accountants leaving $6 million to split among 3 writers or about $2 million each which safely invested would produce about $65,000 a year in dividends which would be enough to live on for the rest of my life. None of these numbers really mean anything to me except the $65,000, which would be a modest and completely reasonable income for an artist in New York. So ... $10 million, folks.

Less One Car and Halfway to New York.

2010-08-29T16:41:00.002-06:00

This big decision to move to New York, and all the packing and traveling and plans, the anticipation, all of it has pushed thoughts of M into the background. Mostly. From time to time the sensation of being near him will wash over me and, as soon as my brain identifies the feeling, sadness comes just as quickly as the initial feeling of warmth and comfort. With a clearer head and some perspective now, it’s not hard for me to see how imperfect we were for each other, how it was not as good for either of us as I thought it was, but I still ache when I think about him touching me.

I’m in Columbus now with my brother and his partner. I love visiting them. They’re sane and kind and they have a very sweet, simple life. They’ve been together for like 15 years and they still sit on the couch holding hands while they read the paper. How does that even happen?

This afternoon we took my car to my brother’s airplane hangar to store it for now. I don’t want a car, of course, in New York, but I don’t want to get rid of it just yet since I seem never to know where I’ll end up from one year to the next and it’s a great car. If things go well in New York and I get on my feet, I’ll probably sell the car in a year or two. It’s a 94 Honda and everyone tells me I could get a lot of money for it. On the way back from the airport (which is way out in the country, very pretty drive in rural Ohio), we stopped at a roadside vegetable stand and bought some sweet corn and tomatoes for dinner. I think they’re going to grill the corn along with some chicken and we’ll eat the tomatoes sliced and salted. August in the Midwest.

I have acres of free time, but I’m finding it very hard to blog much. Except my tumblr blog, which I’m enjoying hugely but it’s not writing. It’s turned into mostly porn because that seems to be about all I’m interested in looking at lately. But all the pictures I post I have chosen because there’s some interesting story behind the image. Some of them are hot, some are funny, some are mysterious. The best ones are all those things. I choose pictures that make me wonder, that send my imagination. Check it out, unless there’s some reason you don’t want to look at pictures of naked men.

Dad's Briefs.

2010-08-19T21:47:00.005-06:00

My mother calls male genitalia "outdoor plumbing." I had to stop running for a few days because it's been so humid I got a case of jock itch, the news of which I had little choice but to share with my mother. I can't make a move here without being questioned as to what I'm doing -- she notices everything and comments on it -- and I had to drive to the store to get something to treat it. And I have had to stop running until the rash clears up because sweating exacerbates it, but I wanted Mom to know there was a good reason I wasn't using the expensive shoes she bought me. Later, she brought in a pair of my dad's underwear, made of some high-tech fabric that keeps you from sweating or something and asked me if I wanted some. She would order me a couple pair if I wanted. They were sort of silky and metallic gray and not completely unsexy. My dad apparently has also gone from boxers back to briefs, just like I did a couple years ago. I do want to try the space-age briefs, but something, many things, about the idea of wearing the same underwear as my dad makes me very uncomfortable.

Weight.

2010-08-17T08:23:00.004-06:00

I haven't gone out running the last few nights because it's so ungodly humid out. I'll get back to it. I have continued my daily workout with weights, and I feel stronger already. I'm eating about half the quantity of food I'd been eating the last year or so, and I'm not drinking beer every night anymore.

I gained 20 pounds while I was with M. The last time I was this heavy was a few months after J and I started seeing each other. Our nightly ritual was to walk to Ray's on Ave A after sex for chocolate milkshakes.

Apparently, being in love is fattening. Or I just tend to fall in love with sugar addicts.

Running Again.

2010-08-10T08:13:00.003-06:00

I went with Mom to a big sports stores in Muncie to get some new running shoes yesterday, and while I was at the store I decided to get 2 15-pound dumbbell weights so I can work on my upper body while I'm here, too. With a very familiar mix of gratitude, relief, and shame, I let her pay for everything. Not that it was a surprise, her insisting.

On the way home, we measured a route for me to run. There's a path along a road near the house, and if I run out to the end of a path and back home it's a 3-mile run. Seemed like a reasonable length to start out. Well, just running out to the end of the path nearly killed me, and I walked back. In my defense, it's very warm and the humidity is heavy and thick, even at 10 p.m. But, there's no denying I'm in poor shape. My legs were fine, but I was flushed and soaked with sweat from head to toe. I haven't exercised a lick since I was hit by that car last summer. I stopped riding my bike, stopped lifting weights at the gym. I evens stopped walking much because I got a car. Apparently you just can't do that when you're almost 50 years old.

I got a little lost in the neighborhood. My parents live in an older sort of rural/suburban development. Big yards. Lots of huge trees. It's pretty. And very dark at night. In the car, the route seemed very straightforward, but it's not and I missed a couple turns. I thought I was more lost than I turned out to be. Or, I should say, I was lucky that I guessed right a couple of times and ended up finding my way back to familiar streets. So, I might actually have run more like 2 miles than 1 1/2.

This little spate of hot, humid days is supposed to end soon, so maybe the running will get easier. Maybe? My legs don't feel a bit sore today.

Equal Rights. Not.

2010-08-04T15:45:00.003-06:00

From the New York Times today, in their story about the California federal court ruling that Prop 8 is unconstitutional:

“Being gay is about forming an adult family relationship with a person of a same sex, so denying us equality within the family system is to deny respect for the essence of who we are as gay people,” said Jennifer Pizer, the marriage project director for Lambda Legal in Los Angeles, who filed two briefs in favor of the plaintiffs. [emphasis mine]

I don't think I've ever heard this stated quite so simply, and it's exactly why I don't consider myself to be gay anymore: because that is what being gay is about now.

So now, if I were married, I'd have rights equal to other married people in California. But I'm not, so I don't.

It's Monday.

2010-08-02T11:19:00.000-06:00

I dealt with most of the loose ends I’d been worrying about. My brother is going to keep my car in Columbus. He has plenty of room in his airplane hangar. M’s bicycle was stolen recently, so I gave him mine. I’m going to leave the boxes of unsold CDs here with J. I’ll store some stuff with my parents in Indiana.

This is it. It’s Monday -- in fact, it’s noon and I haven’t started, so I’m already behind. On my list today: 1) buy a big suitcase at Texas Thrift, to pack my clothes in, 2) go to the comic book store for more boxes, 3) buy packing tape. And I guess 4) would be … pack.

Hippie Clown Jesus, Etc.

2010-08-01T11:09:00.016-06:00

I have 70s New York on my mind today. I'd forgotten that Godspell was set in the city, too. It's odd, and I'm not really sure I like it, how art that depicts the World Trade Center now has an immediate potency and poignancy.

This opening sequence from Hair is my favorite opening sequence from any movie, ever. What I love about film is that there is seemingly no limit to the quantity and variety of genius that can be contained in it. The horses are dancing, y'all!

Bravery.

2010-07-28T21:54:00.002-06:00

People -- friends, fans, family -- tell me they think I’m brave, most recently referring to my move back to New York, but people said it about my first move to New York when I was 20, about my life of poverty and art in the 80s, about J’s and my decision to live on the road, etc.

Brave? I don’t know. I never felt particularly brave, just scared. I think sometimes I certainly did what excited me regardless of risk, did what I wanted to do while brushing aside any notion of danger, but many many times, those apparently courageous choices were actually just me doing what I thought was the least terrifying option available.

Absolutely the thing I am most scared of, because I am literally afraid I would commit suicide, is giving up art and getting a regular job. I’m not sure why that is so awful to contemplate because sometimes it sure seems like it would be a hell of a lot more pleasant than all this uncertainty, rejection, disappointment, poverty, frustration, but I can’t even contemplate it without starting to feel panicky.

Art-making has brought me countless moments of pure joy, thrills beyond anything I imagined, and deep satisfaction, but I also associate it with a constant background of anxiety. I don’t mean the economic anxiety that has resulted from choosing this life, but a more general “I have to do something but I’m not sure what it is” anxiety that I’ve felt ever since I can remember. It’s always there, and I regard it rightly or wrongly as the source of my creativity.

Am I brave? Most of the time, I feel like these big life choices are out of my hands, like someone or something else is pushing me along.

Giving up, it seems to me, would take real courage because that’s where the real demons live.

Leaving.

2010-07-27T11:40:00.002-06:00

I’m leaving Austin a week from Friday, which is two weeks earlier than I had planned. It turns out Labor Day weekend is a good time to begin work with the woman who is directing Lizzie Borden for the festival showcase, so I’m going to be in New York by Labor Day instead of mid-September, which was a more or less arbitrary arrival date anyway. But I still want to spend a few weeks with my parents, and that’s why I’m leaving here so soon.

There’s really no reason to stay, except to have more time to procrastinate. I don’t have a ton of stuff, but still I don’t enjoy packing. It always surprises me how much stuff “not much stuff” looks like when you have to put it all in boxes. The bulk of what I’ve carried around with me the last 7 years falls into two categories: 1) unsold CDs -- I have 6 or 8 big boxes of Life in a Box soundtrack CDs and 3 or 4 boxes of Y’all CDs (mostly The Hey, Y’all Soundtrack, our Nashville album); and 2) the Y’all archives -- I have 5 or 6 boxes of miscellaneous stuff that I think is historically important and I won’t throw away, such as the masters to our recordings, a box of old posters and programs and scripts and press and letters and other printed stuff, a couple boxes of videotapes and audio recordings in a variety of obsolete formats, and all the Life in a Box stuff: the original tapes as well as hard drives with backups and rough cuts of the film and some printed logs and stuff like that.

Other stuff I have: a few photo albums, my grandmother’s scrapbooks, a box of my journals going back to high school, my high school yearbooks, a box or two of other personal stuff I won’t throw away, such as drawings I made when I was a kid, old report cards, some letters. I admit that I am sentimental about some of this, but seriously it’s pared down to next to nothing. Our living situation on the road didn’t allow for an excess of sentimentality about objects.

And then there’s the stuff I use in my life. Clothes (a very small dresser full, a few shirts in the closet, and a couple jackets and a winter coat. And my computer, which is kind of a big honking old Mac tower but it has served me well and I’m taking it with me. I also have an even older G4 Macbook or whatever they called them back then. And a printer. I have some good kitchen stuff, but I might leave some of it here for now since I don’t know when I’ll have my own kitchen again. There’s not really that much.

This week I am devoting to goodbyes. I have lunch dates every day all week. Next week I’ll pack.

It All Comes Back to Liza.

2010-07-22T22:50:00.004-06:00

I was thinking today about the period of time when I was logging and editing Life in a Box and all my living expenses were covered by the film’s budget, a period of about 2 1/2 years that I spent in front of a computer in Jersey City, Nashville, and San Francisco, when not only did I make a feature film that I’m extremely proud of, I wrote several short stories and a screenplay. It was a really fruitful period of art-making for me. I think what made that possible was that I didn’t worry about money during that time. I knew the bills were paid, rent, and I’d have a little left for cheap entertainment and a few beers on the weekend. I literally had no worries. My life was basically perfect.

Now I have all this idle time. I do a little writing every few days, but it’s slow-going and it’s a struggle to stay focused. Worrying about money occupies way too much of my brain. I hate it.

Which reminds me of this bitter, hilarious op-ed in Huffington Post that a facebook friend posted. I sort of in my head substituted “artist” when she wrote “writer,” and it’s all still true. Nothing is supposed to be about money, but everything is about money.

And that, because I'm gay, reminds me, of course, of this. My favorite movie ever.

Words.

2010-07-21T23:11:00.001-06:00

I just now successfully resisted the urge to have a second beer. Though I’m temperamentally and philosophically opposed to abstinence of almost any kind, I’m also not at all in support of my beer gut.

I had a wicked cold that started late last week and just today started waning. I always get whatever nasty shit virus that’s going around, without fail. I just had a cold (though that one wasn’t as severe) when was that? when I was getting out of the drug study, a couple months ago I guess. Time is so compressed this summer. I don’t even have a clear sense of how long it’s been since M and I were together.

Speaking of that, I don’t know if it’s obvious how I stumble over language when I refer to that relationship. I have this obsession, ever since the complicated unraveling of my relationships with J and R, with precision, which I think mostly has to do with a desire to be scrupulously honest. For instance, I don’t think it is accurate to say, “When M and I broke up…” We didn’t break up. He rejected, or maybe more accurately, sent me away. By the same token, when I’m talking about the end of my relationship with B, the man I was involved with for 6 years in my twenties, I don’t say, “When B and I broke up…” I say, “When I left B…”

But does the expression “to break up” necessarily mean a reciprocal action? I always thought it did. Breaking up is something 2 people do, not something one person does to another. But then, I guess most separations are to some extent 1-sided. Am I making a meaningful distinction?

My Dream Life.

2010-07-20T21:20:00.001-06:00

So, as an addendum to the previous post about goals, here’s the life I simultaneously aspire to and struggle to let go of wanting. My dream life has acquired detail along the way, but this is basically the life I’ve wanted since I was about 13, when I first started thinking about New York and a life in theater:

I live in Manhattan, somewhere below 14th Street, in a small apartment. I like small spaces. I make a living from my creative work, writing, performing, etc. I can afford to eat in decent restaurants, and to go see plays and movies and live music, take cabs every once in a while. I prefer to cook and eat most of my meals at home, and sometimes to have friends over for dinner, but when there are shows I want to see I don’t want to have to worry about whether I can spend the money, even if it’s Broadway.

Schedules vary from project to project, but I might spend my mornings writing, and go to rehearsals in the afternoons. Evenings, I might be at the theater if I have a show running, or I might have friends over for dinner, or just spend the evening at home, alone.

I can afford to travel a bit, nothing too extravagant. I prefer travel on a modest budget; modes of transit and choices of lodging are more interesting. Some travel might be built into my theater work, when shows tour, etc., which is even better. I never enjoyed traveling more than when J and I traveled with Y’all, such amazing generosity and hospitality we always received.

If there’s one luxury I would be tempted to indulge in, it’s to hire a personal trainer. I feel old and out of shape. I want to be stronger, to look and feel better.

That’s really about it. It looks very humble now that I write it down. I just want to make a decent living doing what I love, what I’m good at, what I feel compelled to do. I’ve never had a taste for fancy stuff, cars, clothes. I don’t particularly like dressing up, and I don’t like expensive furniture because you have to worry about messing it up or breaking it.

Summer Cold.

2010-07-18T20:46:00.003-06:00

It's cool outside this evening. I just checked the temperature and it's 79 degrees, which is undeniably wonderful, but a little eerie in July.

Rough day. I have a nasty cold, I feel trapped in my room, and I was hungry all day because nothing in the house looked tasty to me and I didn't feel like going to the store. MP brought me a cheeseburger from P. Terry's for breakfast which cheered me up, and finally about an hour ago, I drove to El Chilito and had two fish tacos and a beer.

We're in the thick of the initial planning and preparation for the Lizzie Borden festival performance: casting, hiring a director and musical director, cutting the show down to a 45-minute presentation. All these crucial decisions at a time when my confidence is so battered, and now I'm sick. I know I'm a big whiny baby, but I just ... that's how I feel. Sad and lonely and overwhelmed.

I did a lot of reading today, anyway.

Goals.

2010-07-17T11:19:00.001-06:00

So there are two schools of thought regarding goals, right? There’s the idea that if you want something, you should visualize it, imagine that you already have it. Put yourself there; make everything in your life about realizing the dream. And there’s the school that says don’t get hung up on where you’re headed, live for now. (Sorry if I’m trivializing anyone’s philosophy of life here.)

Whenever Dolly Parton is asked for the secret to her success, she says, “Work hard and dream big.” I used to find that very inspiring. You hear it over and over in different words from different people, and it has the ring of truth. Dolly Parton is one of the most successful entertainers and songwriters in the world, so it must have worked, right? The problem is that you know there are millions of people out there who believed the same thing and it didn’t bring them fame, success, whatever. But they don’t get interviewed.

You have to believe in yourself, you have to believe that you have something important and unique to offer, and that it is inevitable that you will find your audience. It’s only a matter of time. Keep at it. It’s a powerfully motivating frame of mind. But it does not account for failure. Failure is not an option, as they say. Okay, it’s not an option, but it is the most likely outcome, and then what?

“Work hard, dream big, and remember that more likely than not you will never have the kind of success you dream of.” It loses its ring.

I’m more inclined to the second philosophy -- or at least I say I am -- which is to work at letting go of those dreams, learn to relax into the moment, cultivate contentment with whatever happens. It’s the Buddhist view, and it has brought me some peace in the last 10 years. If my happiness depends on a certain outcome, then I might never be happy, right? And I want to be happy.

But I’m realizing now that perhaps the only way I’ve been able to find any contentment with the present moment is by seeing it as a moment on the way to a moment that I’ve been visualizing since I was 7 years old and that I still want so bad I can hardly see straight.

My urge for fame, I think, is one and the same with my urge to create. My urge to create is the only thing that consistently makes me feel like life is worth living. Love, beauty, pleasure -- all the things I’m drawn to -- come and go. The urge to make art never leaves me.

New York.

2010-07-16T20:31:00.002-06:00

I just watched a documentary called The Heretics, about the women who published the magazine Heresies, a feminist art magazine in the 70s and 80s. It’s making the rounds of the festivals now, and I have a screener. And I’m reading the recent Edmund White memoir City Boy, which is about his life in New York in the 60s and 70s. Both the film and the book are about, well they’re about many things: art, politics, memory, aging, but mostly what I’m getting from them is how great New York was for artists in the 70s.

I have to be careful about romanticizing New York. I’m on my way back there, to a city very different from the one I landed in almost 30 years ago at the age of 20.

My First Published Essayn't.

2010-07-16T10:59:00.002-06:00

Update on my dispute with the magazine editor:

After saying on Monday or Tuesday that we should call it a day (this was when he saw how much I had revised his revised draft), he emailed a few hours later and asked for help deciphering the document I’d sent him showing my changes to his draft. (I had used Word’s “compare documents” thing, and he was flustered by all the red and blue.)

We went back and forth a couple more times. He insisted that he’d made only cosmetic changes to improve the flow, but it seemed obvious to me that he didn’t understand or agree with what, to me, was the main idea of the essay -- he had changed or deleted most of the language pertaining to that idea. I don’t know how we could have resolved our differences without sitting down together and looking at his changes more closely, but there was no time for that. He was frantic about his deadline.

What a frustrating experience. I’m trying to be more flexible, more open, because my rigidity about artistic integrity might be one of the main reasons I can’t make a living. So this seemed almost like a test of my new attitude. I was flexible. I think I met him halfway. But he didn’t budge.

He put a lot of time into the piece, and I would have tolerated a lot of his revisions in order to have a first magazine article in print. That meant a lot to me. But, on the other hand, I didn’t want to have my first published piece be something I didn’t even know how to defend because I didn’t know what it was about. Especially when the topic, gay sex cruising, is so controversial and would surely generate questions and argument.

This was quite a struggle for me. My impulse early on had been that he didn’t understand the piece, but I questioned that feeling. It’s not like I enjoy cutting off my nose to spite my face. I fretted and pondered and fretted some more, and, after two more days of back and forth with the editor, I told him that I thought we were at odds regarding the main ideas of the piece and, since we didn’t have time to do a closer rewrite together, we should call it quits.

He wrote back and asked me to show him one example of a change he'd made that altered the meaning. I went through his changes one by one and sent him a list of all the changes I was troubled by.

I guess what I got out of this whole experience is an unpublished essay and a magazine editor who doesn't like me. Sweet.

(Just to be clear, he made a lot of changes, small and large. Besides deleting a couple longer passages, sentences and paragraphs, a lot of his revisions were simple changes in word choice. Sometimes his change of a word changed the meaning of the sentence. Other times he added stuff that was way off base, either in style or content. The essay was heavily revised.)

First Date.

2010-07-13T23:58:00.001-06:00

I just got home from a first date with a 19-year-old man. Months ago, before I met M, this boy pursued me online. We chatted off and on pretty intensely for a couple months, but I resisted meeting in person. I came very close a couple times and got cold feet at the last minute. Finally, I told him I needed to pull back, that I wasn’t going to see him and didn’t want to lead him on.

I knew that, even though I found him interesting and funny and we had other things to talk about like music and movies, most of my interest in him was sexual, and I had myself worked up into some kind of ethics tizzy about that. You might be thinking, “What the fuck was your problem? A beautiful 19-year-old boy wants to hang out and have sex with you.” That’s pretty much what I think when I look back: What the fuck was my problem?

He texted me out of the blue a couple weeks ago, when I was feeling very low. This time I felt no compunction about making a date.

We met on the pedestrian bridge over Town Lake. Walked up a rusty trestle to some dark train tracks. (He said, “Do you want to go up there?” and I said, “Sure.”) He wanted to walk across the bridge on the tracks. I had to be the adult. We found a dark grassy spot to sit and smoke some pot. Then we drove to another park and kissed in the car. We got out and walked a long way down a path. The moon is a fingernail tonight, so it was very dark, and no one but us was out on this path. We stepped off the trail every once in a while to make out.

How beautiful it is just to be 19. And that’s where you start. Motherfucker wore. me. out. All that unspoiled beauty. I think that’s what gave me pause months ago when I rejected him. I question whether I am a good influence on the innocent. I’m like the uncle who tells his nieces and nephews that Santa Claus is a lie.

We had a sweet time, and I think we’ll see each other again soon.

There’s so much ill feeling in our culture about sexual relationships between older and younger people, yet it’s so common. Most of my gay friends at some time in their teens had relationships with much older men. I did. I liked older men for the same reasons young men now tell me they’re interested in me: older men are more relaxed, smarter, have more interesting things to talk about, and can show them amazing stuff in bed. And there’s something about the quality of attention that older men pay to younger men that can be irresistible and addictive for young men. It must be equivalent for older men and young women.

Heterosexuals denigrate these relationships with expressions like “gold digger” and “dirty old man.” Homosexuals downplay them because we’re always trying to convince straight people that we don’t want to recruit their children.

I think it’s a perfect arrangement. They enjoy our experience and wisdom. We enjoy their beauty and innocence.

Almost Published, Twice.

2010-07-13T16:32:00.002-06:00

My last summer at UT, in a class on American Childhood, I wrote an essay about Where the Wild Things Are, reading the book as a coming out fairy tale for homosexual boys. I thought it was original and timely (the Spike Jones movie was about to be released), so I sent it to a couple magazines, and two responded. One wanted me to change it in a way that didn’t feel right to me. The other liked it the way it was and committed to publishing it. It was supposed to appear in the June issue. When I didn’t hear from the publisher by May, I sent him an email. He didn’t respond. I checked the web site, and it hadn’t been updated since the spring. The magazine has vanished, along with the window of timeliness for my essay.

In the meantime, even though I didn’t want to edit my essay for this other magazine, I enjoyed my interaction with the editor/publisher. I sent him another piece, this one about online sex cruising. It would need some work to make it fit this magazine’s profile (it’s a gay and lesbian semi-scholarly journal), but I thought it might be worth it. He was intrigued but had some problems with it that made me think he didn’t “get” it, and I wasn’t sure if that was a problem with the piece or with his reading of it. At any rate, this was around the time of the New York production of Lizzie Borden, other stuff was happening and I let it go.

But a few days ago, he sent me an email. He’d gone back to the essay and found he liked it more than before. He’d done some editing to make the essay flow without the illustrations and he wanted me to take a look. From his email, I understood that he was open to another round of edits. I liked what he’d done, but he had downplayed an idea that was central to the whole point of the essay, so I restored a couple sentences that he’d taken out. Besides that, I made several small changes where he had used words and phrases that I would never use. Basically, I liked the shape of what he had done, but I wanted to return it to my voice. I still think I have something unique to say about the subject, and in the months since I wrote the essay I’ve continued to think about it, to research, and take notes. So I also made some changes to clarify and strengthen my argument.

Well, he wasn’t happy at all. He was dismayed that I’d made so many revisions and that I had restored some of his changes back to my original language. His deadline for having the essay ready for publication is this week, so he suggested we call it a day.

It was an interesting episode for me. These were my first couple of magazine submissions, so I have nothing to compare the experience to. In all our correspondence, he has been generous, appreciative, smart, and interested. But it seems awfully weird to me that an editor would make changes which alter the character of a writer’s work and then be disappointed to get some pushback. We didn’t have time to get into specific changes, why he made them, why I didn’t like them, etc., so it’s hard to assess what happened.

I’m disappointed. This was going to be my first published magazine article.

Mourning Austin.

2010-07-13T11:01:00.003-06:00

Okay, sorry if you’re averse to this type of thing, but I’m gonna get all Buddhist on your ass. As you know, I’m a big fan of the writing of Pema Chodron. I want to share this short passage because it’s the gist of everything she teaches. Since I discovered this particular brand of Buddhism about 9 years ago, these are the words I have tried to live by:

Bodhichitta is a Sanskrit word that means “noble or awakened heart.” Just as butter is inherent in milk and oil is inherent in a sesame seed, the soft spot of bodhicitta is inherent in you and me. It is equated, in part, with our ability to love. No matter how committed we are to unkindness, selfishness, or greed, the genuine heart of bodhicitta cannot be lost. It is here in all that lives, never marred and completely whole.

It is said that in difficult times, it is only bodhicitta that heals. When inspiration has become hidden, when we feel ready to give up, this is the time when healing can be found in the tenderness of pain itself. Bodhicitta is also equated, in part, with compassion -- our ability to feel the pain that we share with others. Without realizing it we continually shield ourselves from this pain because it scares us. Based on a deep fear of being hurt, we erect protective walls made out of strategies, opinions, prejudices, and emotions. Yet just as a jewel that has been buried in the earth for a million years is not discolored or harmed, in the same way this noble heart is not affected by all of the ways we try to protect ourselves from it. The jewel can be brought out into the light at any time, and it will glow as brilliantly as if nothing had ever happened.

This tenderness for life, bodhicitta, awakens when we no longer shield ourselves from the vulnerability of our condition, from the basic fragility of existence. It awakens through kinship with the suffering of others. We train in the bodhicitta practices in order to become so open that we can take the pain of the world in, let it touch our hearts, and turn it into compassion.

My internet connection was down for a couple days. I got lots of reading done. Imagine! I finished Man in the Holocene, the Max Frisch novella that T is looking at for inspiration for a new theater piece. Not a direct adaptation, but he’d like to collaborate on new work using some ideas in the story. It’s kind of all about memory and aging -- right up my alley lately.

And I started a novel called Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman, who is apparently a popular writer of futuristic fantasy-type books, so no surprise that I’ve never heard of it or him. I’m enjoying it so far. Very fast-moving.

J had a big party here on Sunday, I think the purpose of which was to show everyone the progress on the container house. The floor is all built but not much in the way of walls, so it was a great party space. It hasn't been too crazy hot in the evenings lately, and there's a nice breeze. My time now with friends here feels elegiac. People tell me they're sad that I'm leaving. I can't say that I'm exactly sad to be leaving, but I am sad that I had high hopes that were unfulfilled here. I regret so much.

My Body.

2010-07-09T13:07:00.001-06:00

Another reason to go back to school is that I would probably have a gym to work out in. When I was at UT, I lifted weights and used the elliptical machine 4 or 5 days a week. Nothing too intense, but I kept my upper body strong and my gut reasonably in check. And I rode my bike, so my legs were strong. After the accident last summer, I stopped riding my bike and going to the gym. By the time I was recovered enough from the injuries to start working out again, I was out of school and didn’t have access to the gym any more. I am not unconscious of how much my body changed in the 7 months I was with M.

Food, Love, etc.

2010-07-08T23:57:00.001-06:00

I’ve eaten almost nothing but scrambled eggs for lunch (I haven’t been getting up early enough for breakfast) and big salads with some kind of meat on them for dinner for the last couple of weeks. The meat has mostly been chicken, which I’ve marinated in lemon and garlic and sautéed and sliced about 1/4 of a breast onto the salad. Today, though, I bought a fat sirloin steak on sale at Whole Foods, cut it up into 4 pieces, rubbed one portion with olive oil, salt and pepper, and cooked it in a very hot skillet for about 3 minutes on each side. It was very rare. I let it sit for about 10 minutes and then sliced it and put it on the salad. The salad was simple: romaine, radishes, red onion, roasted red pepper, simple vinaigrette. It was delicious.

Perfect food for my state of mind, my physical health, and the weather.

Later, when J came home, beer and pot and 3 episodes of Strangers with Candy on Netflix streaming. God bless Netflix streaming.

Cooking is still fraught. One, because it still reminds me of M. One of the things we enjoyed together very much was food, and I miss his cooking, and I miss hanging out in the kitchen with him while he cooked. But it was more complicated. When we were together, I would help M prepare meals, sometimes, but he was definitely the cook. That was strange for me, because I’ve been the cook in the family for many years. I love cooking for people, I’ve done it a lot, it brings me joy and satisfaction and comfort. I’m good at it and it’s very tied to who I am, to myself and to others. It gives me a comfortable role in social situations. But I wasn’t the cook, M was. I wanted to insinuate myself into his kitchen, but had a hard time actually doing it. It was another way in which I became passive.

But salads don’t ever remind me of meals with M.

The crying is past, for the most part, though I still have spells of heavy, heavy sadness at odd times throughout the day. I still think we could have been great partners. We could have had a singular relationship. I think that, whatever problem there was, we could have fixed it if he had wanted to. Unless, I guess, the problem was that he didn’t want to be with me anymore. Not sure how to fix that.

I mourn the companionship. I’m lonely. We were together nearly every day for 7 months and now not at all.

Rain.

2010-07-08T17:29:00.000-06:00

It’s been raining all day in Austin. I drove to Whole Foods this afternoon because I needed a certain brand of body powder they sell, made with corn starch and tea tree oil.

(When it’s hot, sometimes I get a rash in my crotch. It’s like an allergy to summer. For many years I thought it was jock itch, and I was treating it with antifungal lotions and Gold Bond powder, which was making it worse. But a couple years ago, when I was at U.T., I went to the student clinic one time when it got really bad, and I saw a sports doctor who told me it wasn’t jock itch, just irritated skin. He also told me that he had seen several athletes recently who were using Gold Bond lotion for masturbation and the menthol in it had caused severe skin irritation on their penises. I love it when doctors tell me stuff about college athletes’ penises.)

I still have some funds on my food stamps card, so I bought groceries we needed, too. On the way home, the rain was really heavy, so heavy that everyone on Lamar Blvd. (a crowded 4-lane road) slowed to a crawl. I kind of love that, as long as I know I’m not stuck there for a long time.

The two big questions related to moving are, one, what do I do with my car? and two, what do I do with all my stuff until I have long-term lodging in New York?

I don’t have that much stuff. I have my computer and camera equipment. My guitar. My clothes will probably fit in a couple suitcases. I have about 8 boxes of Life in a Box soundtrack CDs, which I should just throw away, but can’t bring myself to do it since I spent all that money to make them. (I suppose I will carry that brand of stupid optimism to my grave.) I have a few boxes of archival stuff from Life in a Box, like hard drives, CD backups, paper logs, the raw tapes, etc. A few boxes of Y’all archival material. And I have a couple of boxes of personal stuff, like old journals and photographs. I don’t keep books and CDs to speak of anymore.

It’s not a lot, but still I have to put it somewhere. If I spend a month or 6 weeks with my parents or my friend MS in Indianapolis this summer, I want to be packed and moved out of here by then. New York is closer to Indiana than it is to Texas.

It looks like NYU, CUNY, and Columbia are the top MFA film schools in New York, so those are the ones I will apply to. CUNY is smaller and I think less prestigious, but it looks like the program is more experimental and it’s way more affordable than the others. NYU of course is crazy expensive.

M is on a train excursion in Mexico this week with his two best friends. I can’t remember exactly where, but I know they crossed the border in West Texas and the train takes a spectacular route through mountains. He showed me pictures a long time ago when they were planning the trip. I sent him a text to say Bon Voyage. I have to consciously resist typing little kissy-face emoticons. It still feels so right to give him that kind of affection. But of course it’s not right.

Still Trying To Figure It Out.

2010-07-07T15:51:00.000-06:00

Soon, I will stop scrutinizing my breakup with M and just let it be. After our dinner together Sunday, a lot more of the whole ordeal makes sense to me. I realize that there were incompatibilities I didn’t see, or maybe that I ignored or denied. And I know now that M was frustrated for longer than I knew, and I understand why. I understand better why things went south for him. Now that we are in contact again and will, I hope, have a friendship that endures this episode, I want to think about the future.

But there’s one point I get stuck on. Let me try to articulate it:

I don’t get how his feelings changed so quickly. Or why it seemed to me that they changed quickly. What made him so sure so fast that he wanted out?

I think I understood him to say that the differences in our lifestyles, our philosophies regarding financial security, etc., were possibly negotiable but the fact that he didn’t want to have sex with me made it impossible for him to want to be boyfriends.

We didn’t have sex every day, but when we did he was … good to go. We had great sex. You can tell when a man is turned on, and M was, until a few weeks ago, turned on. It wasn’t like he had to work up the enthusiasm. So, from my point of view, what it looked like is that less than a couple weeks after we were having great sex, he told me that he didn’t feel attracted to me anymore and didn’t want to be together. That’s an awfully short period of decreased interest to base such an irrevocable decision on, isn’t it?

He suggested that his frustrations with my life, my way of getting along in the world, may have contributed to the waning of his interest in sex with me – maybe that’s the key. Maybe that’s why he’s so sure the change in his sexual response to me is more than temporary. He said that when he started to feel like he had to take care of me (because of my stressful, insecure life), his sexual interest waned. This is fascinating and heartbreaking to know, because I’ve recently started to realize that I have always used my insecurity, my vulnerability as a way of attracting men. I’m like the woman who acts all hapless and girly to get the big man to change her tire. And that’s exactly what turned M off. Maybe.

I wonder if I’m trying too hard to connect the sex with the other problems he had with the relationship. Or maybe I’m trying too hard to separate them.

So … I just needed to get these thoughts down.

I will probably never have an answer to this question, and I’m almost ready to drop it. That’s the hardest thing about love for me, the fact that I will never know what’s in his head. We all have things we don’t tell or can’t tell, things we lie about with various degrees of self-consciousness and intentionality. I’m not likely to change that. Life and love certainly don’t depend on my understanding them. Every day is a mystery.

All Roads, Etc.

2010-07-07T11:23:00.002-06:00

We’ve known for weeks, but they made an official announcement today, so now I can tell everyone: Lizzie Borden was selected for the NAMT Festival of New Musicals, a prestigious industry showcase. It’s kind of a big deal. Only 8 shows are chosen each year. In the festival, NAMT presents staged readings of the shows to a crowd of theater industry people -- specifically, people from all over the country who are looking for new musicals to present, for example, producers and directors of big regional theaters. Lots of shows, as a result of being seen in this festival, go on to high profile productions.

I found out about this right in the middle of breaking up with M. It was a big secret until the press announcement, but they told us we were allowed to tell “significant others,” so, because M still sort of was that, I told him. The excitement of finding out was dimmed, to say the least, but this morning I feel giddy and short of breath and very optimistic.

This is one of the reasons I decided to move to New York. I have to be there for a week or two in October for the festival, so I figured I should think in terms of being moved there by then.

I couldn’t sleep last night. I went to bed at 2 but didn’t fall asleep until after 5 and then slept fitfully. I had gone to a friend’s house, a bar buddy from Chain Drive, not a good friend but a sweet man who I’ve had a chatting acquaintance with the whole time I’ve been in Austin. He lives with his partner somewhere in the northern suburbs. It was good to get out of my room/prison cell and hang out with people who are very different from the people I usually see.

The pot was veeeery strong. I got home by midnight but my brain was dancing all night long. I have a stack of scrap paper here on my desk, notes I got out of bed to write down. Some of them have great stuff on them, in particular some ideas for a film I’ve been writing for years called Wall of Angels. It’s a kind of surreal Ingmar Bergman/John Waters-style film about a woman who survives a house fire and goes on a road trip.

Grindr.

2010-07-06T13:03:00.008-06:00

I downloaded Grindr again. In the days after M and I broke up, the idea of Grindr was depressing beyond words and it still makes me roll my eyes at how boring it gets to be a man and horny all the time, but there you go. How many millions of years of evolution have led to this moment when I'm advertising on a cell phone because I just need someone to touch my penis?

But, I remind myself that I met M at a trashy gay leather bar. Technically, I met him through a mutual friend, but the introduction took place in a trashy gay leather bar. There are opportunities everywhere.

This is the picture I posted on my profile. I hope I don’t look too much like a leering pedophile.

Summer.

2010-07-06T10:32:00.003-06:00

I’ve set the end of this week as a deadline for making some kind of rough plan or timeline for the rest of the summer and my move to New York. I asked J to sit down with me and help me, or probably just listen to me, list and organize all the possible things I could do and all the considerations and contingencies.

How much would gas cost for a drive to Utah and back? I want to go to Utah to see my friends and clear my head. Maybe a week there? It’s at least a 2 day drive, maybe 3. And do I want to spend time in Indiana, with my friend M, or with my parents? Or both? Do I want to go for a long visit with my brother and his partner in Columbus? Will it make my move to New York easier, or more difficult, if I go somewhere else in between?

*

I think I wrote this before, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how this breakup has thrown it in my face how much I really do want to be in a long-term relationship. I think, to, y’know, oversimplify, M was, is, my fantasy perfect boyfriend, he was the boyfriend I’ve mused about since I was in high school: a scholar, an artist, solicitous, handsome, well-traveled, worldly, has sophisticated taste and an ironic sense of humor. He sounds like something out of a Jacqueline Susann novel. Ha! But he is all those things.

When I was younger, that man in my fantasy was older than me, more confident, had his life together. The fact that M is younger complicates my relationship to the fantasy in an interesting way that probably wasn't good in the end. I'll have to ponder that one.

There’s nothing too special about wanting to be with someone. Most people do. I think I thought I was unique. Or I was too strident to admit that there’s a difference between a mindless longing for Prince Charming and a simple human desire for companionship. It's embarrassing to find out how much of my disdain for romance was just a way of protecting myself from getting hurt. Lot of good that did me.

Liberty Bar.

2010-07-05T11:56:00.002-06:00

M and I met for beers last night at Liberty Bar and food from East Side King. We talked for a couple hours, and then his roommate and best friend both joined us for a couple more.

It was strangely not difficult. The last 3 weeks have been harrowing for me here in my room, but heartbreak almost takes on a life of its own. Last night I was just having beers with this man whose wishes didn’t happen to coincide with mine but who is obviously very fond of me.

I’m sitting here trying to resist analyzing the evening. I want to let it sit there and be what it was, which was very nice.

School.

2010-07-04T14:37:00.001-06:00

I think I’m going to apply to NYU’s graduate film program. I think I’m gonna do it. The application deadline is December 1, to start in the fall of 2011. I just need to forget about the age thing. What does it matter if I’m in graduate school in my 50s? Really, what does it matter? I was reading on the admissions web site of the MFA program a statement by the chairman of the department describing the program and what kind of candidates they look for, what kind of people succeed in the program, and I felt like he was describing me.

So why the fuck not? Why not apply? It’s extremely competitive, but what isn’t? If anyone can think of a reason why I shouldn’t, please tell me.

Saturday Morning Meta.

2010-07-03T09:05:00.002-06:00

I wonder if this is something that only artists do, or if it’s common or universal, to move through life while simultaneously watching and mentally composing and memorizing the story for later use. Now that I think about it, I suspect it might be very common now, in this age of Twitter and Facebook status updates; but, then again, maybe these new social networks don’t create, but just provide a convenient forum for, a natural human tendency to crystallize and flourish.

I have to say it has felt a little edgy, writing about my breakup here, immediately making public all the really intense, awful stuff. Live-blogging my heartbreak.

I feel compelled. It’s like when J and R and I were on the road and things started spinning out of control, there was a part of J and me that was like, “Grab the camera and point it this way, some shit’s about to go down.” I just feel compelled.

Besides whatever value it might have for others to read, the writing is where I organize my thoughts. I write down whatever I’m feeling or thinking about, but then I spend a substantial amount of time rewriting and editing, moving stuff around, finding a better word, with the goal of being as simple and clear and truthful as I can be. I’m not just organizing the writing: organizing the sentences and paragraphs is a way of organizing my thoughts.

And it suspends the pain and pressure for a while, too, it really does. I think it’s because when I write I am at a critical distance, a philosophical distance. And the fact that I can sit down and do this reassures me that, when everything is fucked up and I can’t manage my life, at least this one important part of me is functioning.

A couple friends have sent me appreciative emails about this little chronicle; so I feel like it’s okay.

The only thing I’ve been slightly reticent about is some of the specific content of communication I’ve had with M. In the last few days, we’ve emailed a couple times about my bicycle, which I left at his house. I took the opportunity to ask him questions about what happened, and he has shared some of his thoughts, and it’s been calm and clear and nice. We have plans to meet this weekend and talk more. I’ve been reticent to share much of that conversation because for some reason I don’t want to make him feel like it’s his life being scrutinized along with mine. (But actually I just remembered having a conversation with him a couple months ago about the ethics of an artist working in an autobiographical idiom using the details of others’ lives in his work, and M expressed a much more permissive attitude than I did, so I’m probably safe.)

I don’t know if he even reads this. I think he used to from time to time, but I’ve never imagined him as being in the audience. Hm.

Future.

2010-07-02T10:35:00.000-06:00

T and I have been emailing and talking on the phone the last couple weeks about Lizzie Borden (the new exciting thing about which coincided with my breakup freakout so it got a little overshadowed but about which I still can’t tell anyone dammit! -- but soon), and also about me moving back to New York, and about the two of us forming a company to do new work together. New theater work, film/video, hybrid performance. I’m excited about the possibility of performing again, and about writing songs again. I haven’t done either in years.

My creative energy kicks in when I have someone to work with, someone else’s ideas to bounce around, someone’s confidence in me, and someone’s expectations of me. I know this fact says all kinds of interesting things about my personality, about non-art aspects of my life, my history with men, my relationship with M being particularly in the news lately, but is it a bad thing that I need to overcome? Can it just be a way of working, and not a disorder? Independence is overrated.

School?

2010-07-01T18:43:00.001-06:00

If I’m not going to make a living as an artist, I would love to be teaching college kids -- I think I could do my work and teach, and in fact the two would feed each other, right? That’s like a thing that people do.

In order to teach college, I need another degree or two, an MFA or a PhD, depending on what it is I want to teach. I love being in school, so it’s not like I would mind spending another few years getting a degree. The big question is, is that a good plan if my goal is to change this state of never-ending financial duress? Smaller questions are: what would I study? where? is it financially feasible?

The main reason for going back to school 3 years ago was that I thought if I had an MFA in film I would be able to teach college. I spent 2 years finishing my BA so I could apply to the MFA program here at Texas. I didn’t consider other MFA programs because at the time I wanted to stay in Austin. I was tired of moving around, and I wanted to make a home here. Well, one, I didn’t get into the MFA program, and, two, I haven’t made a home here, and in fact I’m pretty sure I’m leaving.

Do these circumstances add up to say that I should be looking at MFA programs in New York? Should I be applying to NYU film school? What the fuck? Why am I so unsure of myself? I just want to relax and feel like I made the right decision for once.

Thursday.

2010-07-01T17:54:00.000-06:00

I’d say I’m doing quite a bit better the last couple days. No crying to speak of (though that’s untested, since I’m good at avoiding the triggers). The contact I had with M yesterday made me feel a bit less crazy. Besides everything else, just the physical fact of apruptly not seeing or talking to him, suddenly spending evenings alone in my room with no one to talk to, was disorienting.

I’m clearheaded enough now to be embarrassed about some of my behavior in the last two weeks: returning M’s gifts to him, driving by his house at night,, unfriending him on Facebook. Embarrassed, but inclined to forgive myself and be glad I didn’t do anything worse.

I spent hours yesterday and today looking up and applying for jobs in New York. And there’s been a flurry of activity with Lizzie Borden. I’m dying to announce some news, but I have to wait for a few days for an official press release before I can talk about it. I’ve also been watching movies for the film festival, so my days have been full.

I’m meditating. Hard to say if it’s helping, it’s such a slow, incremental process. I’m not finding the Pema Chodron book to be, as I thought it would be, what I need right now, but her voice is reassuring and the words are wise. I’m also reading a book by Max Frisch called Man in the Holocene, which is a long story or a short novel and a bit of a slog. T is interested in it as a possible source for a new show. It’s not exactly straightforward.

Reading is a frustrating experience. My glasses -- which are not that old (I got new ones after my accident last summer) -- are for shit. I can either hold a book at arm’s length and the text is clear but so far away I have to strain to make it out or take off my glasses and hold the book 6 inches in front of my face where it’s crystal clear but … well, 6 inches in front of my face. My lenses cost about $8-900. I have bad eyes.

I’m still eating virtually identical salads for dinner every night, though tonight I varied it a bit with my sister’s simple Greek dressing (lemon juice, olive oil, oregano, garlic, salt and pepper). Eggs for lunch, no breakfast. Beer.

What I Miss II

2010-06-30T23:14:00.002-06:00

Other things I miss are M’s misanthropic, possibly slightly insane, but very funny roommate and his maybe girlfriend (I never was quite sure), who made me feel liked, and her sly daughter. And M’s roommate’s very sweet and very needy but well-behaved black lab, and M’s two gorgeous, affectionate, and funny cats. And M’s two best guy friends, colleagues from work, whose company I enjoyed very much. I had become an adjunct member of M’s household, and I felt comfortable and appreciated there. I miss that.

M and I have had a couple of emails back and forth the last two days. Until a few days ago, I had forgotten that I left my bicycle at his house. I had to contact him about that, and I was grateful for a reason. I also asked him again if he could articulate some of his thoughts about the change in his feelings. He sent me a long reply explaining some of what he was thinking about me and us and what was wrong. After reading it, I felt like a big portion of the weight on my heart had been lifted. I want more than anything to learn from this.

One thing I’ve learned is that I really do want a partner. I don’t know exactly what that relationship would look like, and I think the parameters are wider now after this experience, but I don’t want to be alone. I feel somewhat relieved to admit that. For a long time after J and I separated, I thought I did want to be alone. I thought I was better alone. At the time maybe I was, because I wasn’t very good at being with someone. I didn’t know how to not lose myself.

But I think I am learning. I think eventually, maybe before I’m too old to enjoy it, I’ll get good at being in a relationship. It doesn’t have to be with just one man -- two or three would be fine with me, but I don’t want to be alone.

Tonight I watched a short doc, one of the films submitted to the festival, and it blew me away, gave me hope for the future and for New York. The subject was a burlesque performance artist and total gender freak and devotee of some Hindu religion making a life for him or herself in New York. I was very moved.

Rain.

2010-06-30T14:05:00.002-06:00

Maybe it’s my age, but lately I seem to second-guess every decision I made about my career. I wonder lately if I ever even made any decisions or if I just went along with whatever came at me.

If a return to New York is going to be a fresh start, I need a new way of being. I want to have learned at least some small thing from this time, this experience, not just this relationship with M but the last few years of what has felt to me like trying and trying and failing and failing.

I know sometimes I’m a know-it-all. I profess to know myself very well. I always think I know what’s going on. Sometimes I do. But obviously sometimes I don’t at all. Whatever I’m doing lately, or ever, is not working.

I think I’ve always felt a bit like this, but lately it’s really intense this feeling of “why is it so hard? why is every little thing so hard?” I know it’s all of my own making – that’s what I’m trying to figure out: how it happens. So I can change it. What is the process that gets me here? What can I be doing differently?

I think I need not necessarily to be examining what I was attached to and disappointed to lose in my relationship with M. I need to be examining what I am attached to in myself, what is it about me that I think, “this is who I am, this is the way I am.” What is it I’m doing, what is it I believe about myself that is creating so much friction?

It’s raining hard today. I opened my window. It smells good.

What I Miss.

2010-06-29T23:32:00.001-06:00

A couple times yesterday and today I looked at the craigslist mfm ads and at a site called adam4adam.com. I used to check them out on and off, sort of compulsively at times, before I met M, and I very rarely met anybody that way but still looked, just sort of voyeuristically. I guess I like looking at naked pictures of random lonely people. Not that it wasn’t always a bit depressing, but now it seems extra pathetic, guys saying they’re looking for a ltr and uploading close-ups of their anuses. That’s what I’m back to. Yay.

Not that anonymous hookups can’t be fun and hot, but that’s not what I crave, not what I miss. I miss sitting up in bed watching a movie, M’s head on my shoulder. God, that was nice. I miss falling asleep with M’s back against my front. I miss smiling and kissing and his hand on my knee. And fucking, too, yes but only along with all the other stuff.

Mom.

2010-06-29T16:27:00.001-06:00

My mom had been emailing lately, asking how I am, and I’d been kind of vague -- that’s a project for another day, taking apart why I’m always reluctant to let my mother know I’m in pain -- but today I sent her a note telling her that M and I had broken up and I was feeling low. She hadn’t even met M, and I guess I was a little embarrassed because I’d been telling her all about him and saying how much I knew she’d like him. (She would.)

Anyway, she said her mother’s intuition had told her something was wrong and she extended an invitation to come stay with her and my dad for the rest of the summer, room and board in exchange for cooking for them. I got an almost identical offer from a friend who lives in Indianapolis. And another friend, in the town in Utah where I lived and worked a few years ago, invited me to come there and lick my wounds.

Of course what I hope will happen is I’ll find a job in New York soon and I’ll move there. But the odds lately of what I want to happen actually happening are not good, so it’s comforting knowing there are people who want me around.

Food.

2010-06-29T12:24:00.001-06:00

Here’s what I ate yesterday. Does this seem like a reasonable amount of food to eat in one day?

1 slice of rye toast with peanut butter.
4 cups of coffee with 1/2 & 1/2.
2 eggs scrambled with sautéed mushrooms.
1 Dr. Pepper.
A big salad with romaine, radishes, red onion, roasted red pepper, cucumber, sautéed asparagus, white beans, chicken, parmesan, vinaigrette.
3 beers.
2 flour tortillas with feta and olives.
1 scoop of vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup.

Who Scared Who?

2010-06-28T19:52:00.002-06:00

After getting such a good start last week on eating better, I was really compulsive over the weekend. My friend whose house I’m staying in buys lots of snacks -- chips of all kinds, cookies -- and that stuff is like crack to me. If it’s in the house I want to eat it till it’s gone. Even when it’s not really mine, I can’t keep my hands off it. When I live alone, it’s easier to abstain. It’s easier not to buy it than it is not to eat it.

M wasn’t able to articulate much of what he was thinking and feeling that led him to want out, but three things he was fairly clear about. One, he was no longer interested in having sex with me. And two, he worried that I was, as he said, putting all my eggs in one basket (our relationship, him). And he made a tentative connection between the two. He said that his concern about 2 may have led to 1. And three: he said that when he started to feel like he needed to take care of me -- because I’ve had so many worries about money and career since I met him -- he started to lose interest sexually.

Maybe this is obvious to everyone but me -- it wouldn’t be the first time -- but it occurred to me today that I have been wrong in saying that M was scared of how deeply invested in the relationship I was. He was scared of how deeply invested he was. Right?

The day after the last time I saw him, I unfriended him on Facebook, and I regret it now. It still hurts to look at pictures of him, but at the time it felt unbearable. I wish I’d had the foresight to just hide his posts for a while. He doesn’t post a lot.

I’ve been thinking a lot about B, the wonderful man I was with from the age of 23 to almost 30. We were as close to married as I think I will ever be. We lived in a floor-through apartment in a brownstone (granted, a very run-down brownstone) in Ft. Greene in Brooklyn with 3 cats and a dog. It was a very sane, stable, comfortable arrangement. And then one day, suddenly I decided that I needed to be alone, that my life was not satisfying, that I had become someone I didn’t want to be, that I was missing something. And I left him. I wasn’t able to articulate why, except to say that I still cared for him every bit as much, but that I wanted out. After 6 years.

I don’t want to say that this is the same, but I sympathize with M not being able to tell me what’s in his head, whether he knows or not.

B and I have stayed loosely in touch, more so since Facebook. A few years ago, almost 20 years after leaving, I wrote him a long note trying to explain more fully, with the benefit of hindsight, what was in my head back then. Apologizing, in a way. I think that experience is why, despite my confusion and frustration, I don’t have ill feelings toward M. But I hope I don’t have to wait 20 years to know what the hell happened.

I’ve cried very little the last two days. I feel blank, but I’m finding some pleasure in preparing meals and eating. I still don’t have any desire to spend time with friends, except J. I meditated again today for 10 minutes, and it wasn’t at all difficult, so I’ll increase the time to 15 or 20 minutes tomorrow.

Dreams.

2010-06-28T09:25:00.002-06:00

It’s been over two weeks since the last night I slept with M.

It does begin to seem like it must have been a dream, because the world changed so abruptly, like waking up. It saddens me that it doesn’t feel like a good dream but a confusing, disturbing dream, incompletely recalled. All those sweet hours and days, the little things we enjoyed together, the trip to Mexico, look almost sinister in retrospect because I question my perception of it, I wonder if I was badly mistaken about what was happening then in light of how he ended it. In my heart of hearts I want to believe that he loved me, that he wanted to share his life with me, that what we were doing together was reciprocal, mutual -- it felt that way at the time -- but … I don’t feel certain now. That, more than anything, breaks my heart – not that it ended, but that I’m not even sure what it was anymore.

I think the reason I feel so calm and assured when I’m writing here, the reason I take comfort in this, is that I like who I am when I’m writing. I like this me. I spend way too much time not liking myself. Changing that is a lifelong project, but I make progress. This experience has been self-mortifying in a way that’s good in the long run, I guess. I’ve had a chance to take a hard look at myself in daylight. Possibly some day I will have benefited from this experience, even if I’m panhandling on the feeder road. Maybe I’m inured, vaccinated.

Packing, farewell parties, teary goodbyes in my dream this morning, and all of it happening in a movie theater while movies were playing. Not surprising. What’s odd is that the only person I remember in the dream is my friend Monica, who lives in New York.

In Other News of Disappointment.

2010-06-27T17:36:00.001-06:00

One of the last classes I took at UT was a seminar course in children’s literature and the history of American childhood. The professor was brilliant and fun. It was hard, but it was one of the best classes I took.

I wrote a paper about Maurice Sendak’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, discussing it as a coming out fable for homosexual boys. It was a short paper, but I think it was some of my best academic writing. My argument was original and strong, and I think the writing was fresh and engaging.

I reworked it a bit and submitted it to a couple magazines, got bites from 2 of them, and a commitment from a New York gay literary and arts quarterly to publish it in their summer issue. It was supposed to come out this month, but the journal and its publisher seem to have disappeared. He doesn’t answer any of my emails and his website has not been updated since late last winter.

This is particularly annoying because another publication was interested in the article and I turned it down.

Back Is The New Forward.

2010-06-27T12:58:00.002-06:00

I’ve talked to my old friend and collaborator T on the phone a couple times in the last few days. I think after reading what I’ve been writing here, he was a little worried about me, which is not surprising. I’d be worried about me too if I loved me. We’ve been in close touch recently because of all the stuff that’s happening with Lizzie Borden (which I am not at liberty to discuss just yet, but soon), and we’ve been throwing around ideas for new work, since the writing part of Lizzie Borden is pretty much done.

Because I’ve hit such a hard dead end here, I’ve been thinking a lot about the trajectory of my career.

Opportunities to do good work always came to me, things landed in my lap: the Woods, Tiny Mythic, Y’all, Life in a Box.

In my early twenties, a couple years after dropping out of art school, I met B who played drums and wrote songs and was forming a new band. I tagged along, bought a guitar, taught myself a few chords, and started writing songs. I wasn’t very good, but over the years I got good.

B worked at a restaurant with some people who were starting a theater company called Tiny Mythic. They asked us to compose music for their first production, which was Strindberg’s Dreamplay. We did that, successfully I think, and then we did the next show. I left B soon after that but continued to work with those people, eventually just with T, whose sensibilities, of the directors in the company, meshed most closely with mine. We did Lizzie Borden, Frankenstein, The Scarlet Letter, and other shows, and we became good friends.

I met J through that work, indirectly. He was the recent ex-boyfriend of one of the performers in A (our adaptation of The Scarlet Letter) and a writer for a local magazine, and he came to see the show several times. We fell in love, we found that we both loved the same country gospel music, and we started writing and performing within a few months of meeting. We did that for 10 years, it took us out of New York, to Nashville, then to the road. And through a chain of circumstances too complicated to recount this afternoon, we ended up making a movie about our last year together, which I spent 2 years finishing after we separated.

One thing led to another. But Life in a Box, which of all the work I’ve done had the most promise of leading to new work, didn’t. Pretty much since then I’ve been floundering. I thought certainly I would make another film -- I’d discovered this new medium that exploited my visual, my musical, my storytelling talents, and it just all seemed to make so much sense. Now I was a filmmaker! But I couldn’t figure out how to make it happen. All my schemes came to naught. I had, I have, no shortage of ideas, but I have not been able to put together the whole operation. Turns out I am hapless when it comes to the infrastructure.

And then there is the return to theatre, which somehow snuck into the story a few years ago. I don’t want to discount the creative energy I’ve put into Lizzie Borden in the last three years. It’s been tremendous, and very satisfying artistically. I think I viewed it as an anomaly – and maybe even a step backward to keep my artist’s mind occupied while I tried to figure out the future. I guess that’s the wrong way to think about it. Maybe the return to Lizzie Borden, return to theatre, return to New York, is the direction forward. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe this was all a dream.

Midnight Snack.

2010-06-26T22:01:00.003-06:00

I just have to say that life is not all bad. I just made myself an omelet with sauteed cremini mushrooms and sharp Vermont cheddar cheese. It's almost like being in love.

Saturday.

2010-06-26T21:15:00.003-06:00

It’s a cliché but true that keeping busy helps. Today I met with the programming group of aGLIFF (the Austin Gay & Lesbian Int’l Film Festival) to put together a rough draft of a schedule for the festival, which is in mid-September. Several hundred films were submitted. Each is screened by at least 5 people, and about 35 films I think are programmed in the festival.

There were about 20 of us there from 10 to 6 today, discussing which films we liked, which we didn’t like. It’s my first year being involved, so I’m trying to lay back a bit and give it a chance, but I have some serious reservations about the method used to program the festival. There’s no strong curatorial voice -- the program is really dependent upon the tastes of a random group of volunteers. They consider that to be a virtue. A festival programmed by the community. I’m not convinced. I think there’s a skill to curating art and that it helps to have some specialized knowledge. The reason I got involved is that I’ve thought the festival in past years was kind of lame for such a hip film and media town as Austin. So I’m laying back sometimes, asserting my opinions strongly at other times. The program has to appeal to a broad, mainstream audience, so I accept that there are a lot of films people will love that I think are crap. And a lot of films that I adore which most people wouldn’t sit still through.

When I got home from the meeting, J asked I wanted to go to P Terry’s with him and his summer love, A, and afterwards to see the Joan Rivers documentary, A Piece of Work. So I did that. The movie is great, go see it. Inspiring, and kind of riveting.

Before the show there was a trailer for a new doc which seemed to consist of interviews with important filmmakers, and watching it I had a moment of feeling quite strong, pondering how life is full of heartbreak but if it weren’t I wouldn’t have any subject matter. As bad as I feel right now, I know the experience will make my work more empathetic. I don’t think that thought makes me any less sad, but it makes me less hopeless.

Everything reminds me of him. Everything. I pour myself a beer and it makes me think of Liberty Bar, where we would order a couple pints and take them to the patio where we’d get food from East Side King. I read some random food blog, it mentions a farmer’s market, and my eyes tear up. Jesus Christ, we only went to the farmer’s market together twice, but immediately I’m back there with him picking out tomatoes.

I play Angry Birds on my iPhone and think of him because he turned me on to it. I updated and got new levels a couple days ago, which I’ve been waiting for for weeks, and I was so excited I wanted to text him to tell him, “Angry Birds! new levels! :-).” I didn’t. I avoid most things that I know will evoke his memory, but I defiantly hold onto Angry Birds. He can take my belief in love, my self-esteem, my hope for the future, and everything else in life that brings me joy, but he can’t have my motherfucking Angry Birds.

I feel the absence of him on the inside of my arms, on my chest and stomach. I long for him. I told him, the last night we slept together and he didn’t want to have sex, that just being near him made me hard and that I understood we wouldn’t both always want to have sex at the same time and I was afraid my arousal would be creepy to him when he wasn’t in the mood -- I was apologizing for being turned on by him really is what I was doing -- and he said something like, “You shouldn’t feel like a totally natural desire is creepy.”

Can you get dehydrated from crying? How much water are you actually losing when you cry nonstop for say like an hour? It’s like a PSA about water conservation when they tell you stuff like, “When you have a dripping faucet, you’re wasting 4 gallons of water an hour,” or whatever. I’ve sprung a leak.

Spoke Too Soon.

2010-06-25T19:58:00.000-06:00

I read for a bit, meditated for 10 minutes, and then cried for an hour.

It’s Friday, I don’t have plans. I don’t want to go out. I don’t want to meet anyone. Before I met M, I used to go often on Fridays to the Chain Drive alone, get stoned and listen to loud music because I liked the Friday deejay. Maybe there’d be people there I knew, maybe not. Maybe I’d make out with somebody. It was all very mindless and fun and low key. I don’t want to go there tonight -- that’s where I met M. I don’t want to sit in the corner of a gay bar and cry. Jesus.

I’m halfway through When Things Fall Apart, and somehow it’s not as convincing as it was when I read it last time. It’s all very wise and true, but it hasn’t struck me as the lesson I need to learn now.

How did the story of this heartbreak become all about my unreasonable expectations? My inability to relax with impermanence? I think I’m pretty good with impermanence, thank you, and I believe my expectations were extremely temperate and flexible. M worried that I was hanging everything on my relationship with him, and he said that scared him and made him lose interest.

Yes, I loved the comfort and safety of his company. I loved knowing that he wanted to be with me. I loved getting his texts that started “hey sweetie,” and I loved returning his affection. I loved sleeping with my arms around him. How is that wrong? What is love supposed to be, if not that tender feeling? And it hurts like hell to have it one moment and then have it snatched away. Maybe it hurts for a long time.

How about this story: I’m despondent because I fell deeply in love with a man, thought with good reason -- he told me he did -- that he felt similarly about me, thought with good reason -- we expressed the desire to each other -- that we both wanted to be together for a long time, and then, out of the blue, he told me that he didn’t want to be together any more. That seems like a damn good reason to be freaked out and very, very sad.

So Far, So Good.

2010-06-25T19:00:00.000-06:00

Well, a little random weeping here and there today, but no major sobbing fits. It’s only 7, but still I think that’s progress.

I composed letters to several of my New York friends, testing the waters for a move.

Human Centipede.

2010-06-25T10:52:00.007-06:00

J and M and I went to see Th e Human Centipede last night. If you like scary movies, go see it because it’s absolutely terrifying, but also fucked up and hilarious. I loved it. The Dobie had some projection problems about halfway through, the DVD froze so they had to start it over and fast forward. They started the movie a few minutes before the spot where it stopped, so we watched a couple scenes twice. I was grateful for the break -- though several times it made me laugh out loud, it’s a seriously scary and upsetting movie and it was starting to make me more anxious than I like to be at a horror movie.

Afterwards, on the way to the car, I started crying again because the movie was on campus and we walked near the building where M works, and it set me off. There’s not much in this town that doesn’t remind me of him.

When will I stop thinking about him all the time? When will I stop missing him? I must still somehow believe that he’ll come back and say he wants me after all because why would anyone let someone he loves suffer so much if he could end it? I know, it’s insane. Yet at the same time logical.

I guess my task is to find a way to relax with not being able to reconcile what’s happening between us now with what was happening just a matter of days ago. Maybe I’ll get there. Right now, it’s still driving me mad. I still can’t accept it.

I lost confidence with the high school diary project. I just don’t know if the text, even heavily edited, has in it what I feel when I read it. I’m not sure it supports what I want to do. It’s possible that I’m just getting cold feet now that it’s starting to become labor, but it feels more like a real art problem. I’ll mull it over for a while. Meanwhile, I have 3 short stories, which I dug out recently and made notes for revisions, some of them very simple. I’ll do that first. One of them I want to turn into a screenplay, so that’s a little more work, but I think I have a pretty good outline, so the fun part is left: writing dialogue and description.

I cooked some stuff yesterday for salads. I marinated 3 chicken breasts in lemon, orange, garlic, and black pepper, then sautéed them, sliced and froze 2 of them. They were beautiful, delicious, and juicy. And I fried some tempeh for J. The salad I made us for dinner had red bib lettuce, some Romaine, a little cabbage, sliced radishes and red onion, with my regular vinaigrette (lemon, red wine vinegar, Dijon, and olive oil -- I left out the garlic or onion I usually put in it because there were onions in the salad), and I put sliced chicken on mine and tempeh on Jay’s, and half an avocado on each. Yum! I also bought feta and some Gaeta olives, red peppers and asparagus, to vary it a bit since I plan to make salads every day for a while.

I’m cutting back the amount of food I eat and trying to limit fat and carbohydrates for a while to lose some weight. I’m about 15 pounds heavier than I like to be. I also like eating lighter and using the stove less now that it's close to 100 every day and will be for the next 4 months.

More On That Subject.

2010-06-24T12:23:00.001-06:00

To continue and elaborate on that earlier line of thought, it is important to me to note that that was the first time I had been in that situation -- where I was so aroused by someone who 1) didn’t physically match any idea of mine of what a sexy man is, and 2) was, as far as I could tell, less into my body than I was into his. M was sweet, affectionate, and responsive to my touch, but it was usually I who initiated any kind of contact. I didn’t feel insecure about that. I was okay with it and in fact enjoyed it. I enjoyed being the pursuer.

That was a huge change for me, a huge positive change, because the usual scenario for me -- going all the way back to the middle-aged men who I knew were turned on by me when I was a teenager, and the fact that I turned them on, turned me on, even though I found them physically repulsive -- the usual dynamic was that my arousal depended on someone being turned on by me. I loved this change, this new way of feeling sexy. I thought it was more honest and real and healthy. I felt like I was dealing with getting older, finding a way of being an older man in a relationship.

Last Night.

2010-06-24T10:32:00.003-06:00

Last night, for the first time in a week and a half, I didn’t take 2 Tylenol PM before I went to bed. Too soon. I managed to slow my mind down enough to fall asleep after about an hour, but I was wide awake again at 3 a.m., trying to reconstruct the sequence of the last few times I saw M, what we did, what was said. I was worried I would forget, so I got up and wrote down what I was able to remember. It’s like a riddle, a mystery; I think if I recall the right bit of conversation, if I look at it from the right angle, it’ll come together, it’ll make sense.

I fell asleep again quickly after writing, but awoke again at 5. I stayed in bed till almost 10, drifting in and out of sleep, dreaming vividly about watching a Stephen Sondheim musical on TV in a dirty, cluttered house with some people whose company I was enjoying. There was a bunch of other weird shit going on in the dream, but I don’t remember any of it now.

I know, I totally know, that 90% of this pain I feel is the sting of sexual rejection. I’m not proud of it, but I have to admit it. If there is any good to come out of this, maybe it’ll be some kind of watershed in my letting go of my vanity.

Sex for me had always been about trying to discover what it was that another person found sexy about me and then maneuvering to show that off and camouflage the rest, whether that meant literally being conscious of in what light and from what angle I was being seen or modulating my attitude, stance, mannerisms. But I let M see me from every angle. I don’t know why I felt safe doing that, but I did. Maybe it was because I didn’t think he was sexier than me, objectively speaking. He has a big belly and hair on his back and bad teeth and didn’t make any effort to conceal the fact that he sometimes wore the same pair of underwear for 4 or 5 days if he didn’t have time to do laundry. He’s fussy and a bit of a snob. I was turned on by him in spite of all that, or because of all that – I was turned on by him, not by an idea of how his body reflected a fantasy I have of a sexy man. I think I assumed the feeling was mutual. I let him see me in unflattering light. I felt like he was attracted to me, turned on by me, not by an image of myself that I was carefully managing for him, displaying for him.

To be rejected at that level of vulnerability is a true rejection. He saw me, and he rejected me. That fact, that he is not sexually attracted to me now, that fact is what stops in its tracks any scheme I devise for reconciliation. I want him. He doesn’t want me.

I’m old. I’m old. I’m not a senior citizen, but I am older than most of the people I encounter in my life. I am older than anyone I know who is still floundering, still cobbling together an artist’s living with no security and no real prospects of it ever changing.

I’m still thinking about moving back to New York.

Bought Groceries Today.

2010-06-23T19:09:00.004-06:00

I think the world has always been for me a scary and difficult place, and I’ve always looked for someone who could help me negotiate it. Despite how headstrong and confident I can be, I’m really scared shitless most of the time. It’s true.

I accomplished one thing on my list today. So far. I might still get to editing that script -- it’s only 7. If not, there’s tomorrow.

I went grocery shopping at Whole Foods because I wanted to get some meat. Chicken breasts were on sale and pork chops, so I got a few of both. I put the pork in the freezer. I think I’ll marinate and saute the chicken and then freeze some of it cooked. I don’t plan to prepare much but salads for a while, and I’ll put some cold chicken on mine for protein. For J, I’ll cook some beans, and there’s tempeh in the fridge.

I had a little mental breakthrough last night as I was lying in bed waiting for sleep: no major revelation, just a moment of seeing clearly how my being so agitated isn’t helping anything and will never change what happened. I need to read the Pema Chodron and start meditating again if I want to get sane. I know it works. Marijuana helps also, to loosen up my mind, get some air in there.

I was thinking about when I met M. It was at the Chain Drive, he was there with a friend of mine. They had just met at a party through an acquaintance, and M was interested in my friend. I thought M was handsome, and I was drawn to him because he was smart and funny and he knew who DeAundra Peek was. But he was interested in my friend, and I just thought of him as an interesting guy to have met, someone I enjoyed talking to.

A few days later, I saw him there again. I had just been stood up by a guy I’d gone out with a few times, I was miffed, and I decided to go out carousing by myself. Some time between the night I met M and this night, my friend (the one M was interested in) told me that he wasn’t interested in M.

M was out on the front patio with his roommate. He lit up when he saw me, and he called me over. He and I and his roommate talked for a long time, had a friendly, boisterous, increasingly drunken argument about race in America, which was so stimulating I was giddy; I so seldom had those kinds of conversations, and I was eating it up, how smart these guys were and how much fun. It’s the kind of situation where I feel like I blossom, I become my best self, my most impressive, or something. I don’t know how to describe it, I just felt alive. I felt like who I am, or who I like to think I am, anyway. Some time after midnight, M’s roommate wanted to go. M had come in his roommate’s car, but I told him I would drive him home if he wanted to stay. He did.

We talked non-stop for another hour at least. M was pretty tipsy. I was a little less drunk, but we’d smoked some pot. We sat on a bench, and M leaned in toward me, and we talked about art and sex, gay culture, the South, and I don’t know what all, and I have such a strong memory of how that hour or so felt. Maybe we were a little flirtatious, I don’t know how to gauge. It was a loud bar, so we had to be pretty close to each other to be heard. It wasn’t at all like a pickup, I didn't at all have the feeling that we were going to go home and have sex, but I was really smitten with him.

Eventually, I drove him home, and, when I pulled up in front of his house, I asked if I could kiss him good night because, I said, “I have a bit of a crush on you.” He made a sound like “aww,” and he let me kiss him. We made out a little. I felt awfully good driving home.

A day or two later, he invited a group of friends to a talk by Heather Love at a conference at U.T. In the email invite, he said that he didn't know what Ms. Love was talking about but that everything of hers he'd read had been "gorgeous." My crush was deepening. It ended up that I was the only one to join him. We both enjoyed the lecture, but he had to rush somewhere immediately afterwards, so we made a date for coffee a day or two after. We met at Caffe Medici across from campus. I think of that as our first date, but at that point it was still unclear to me whether the smooching in the car was just a drunken impulse or if we’d try it again.

My next memory -- and I can’t place it exactly, but it was in the first week or two of our acquaintance, it was probably the next time we saw each other after the coffee date -- we’d been somewhere together, I think, but we were back at his place, sitting on the couch. Which is interesting because it’s seldom that anyone sits on the couch in his house. But we were there, and by that time we’d started to kiss a little, but it still felt tentative. I was telling him how, at the Heather Love talk and our coffee date, I hadn’t been sure of his interest in me. And he said, “I was interested in you.” And he said, “I think you’re actually kind of amazing.” Inside, I was swooning.

That’s how it started. I wonder now how things would have played out if I hadn’t asked him for a kiss that night when I drove him home. Would we have become just great friends, instead of lovers?

My interest in him at the very beginning was not sexual. That came later. So it’s easy for me to imagine that we could have had a very different kind of friendship if we hadn’t become lovers. I miss him so much. I’ve lost the first person with whom I felt like I brought my whole self, without fear, into the relationship. The hardest thing about this breakup is that, because he lost interest in me sexually, everything is lost. There was so much more to our partnership than sex: he turned me on emotionally, sexually, intellectually, artistically, politically. But somehow the sexual aspect is the keystone and none of it holds without that.

I’m conscious of the artfulness of what I’m doing here, but still I’m trying not to exaggerate anything for the sake of a better story. If anything, I would say I’m downplaying the maudlin aspect, all the crying and moaning. It is emotionally harrowing. I’m half-expecting to wake up one morning and find that my hair has gone completely gray.

A Week.

2010-06-22T21:51:00.003-06:00

It was a week ago, almost to the minute, when M told me -- reluctantly, but unequivocally -- that he didn't want to be together any more, "like we were."

I’m avoiding people (except for a few very close friends I feel comfortable crying in front of). I don’t feel at all stable, and I don’t want to do some cliché breakup ritual where my friends take me out to get drunk and badmouth M. I don’t want anyone to be angry with him on my account. I still love him. I still think he’s amazing. How could I not still love him? He was so sweet and loving and generous to me. I’m not angry. I can’t let go of this irrational notion that we just had a misunderstanding that we can clear up. None of this is rational, so why not? Okay, so maybe that’s not likely, but at the very least I hold out hope that we’ll be close again in some way. I don’t think I’ve ever fallen out of love.

A few friends, either because J has talked to them or because they’ve read my blog, have sent me notes of sympathy and support. I keep repeating the refrain, “I have nothing, I have nothing,” but what I do have is very sweet friends.

What I hate most is that I regret the last 7 months. I wish it had never happened. I wish I had never met M. I wish I could erase it. Nothing is worth feeling as awful as I feel right now. But what that means is going back to a time when I sincerely believed I would never fall in love again. And that makes me crazy with grief.

What it comes down to, and M even said so though not in so many words, is that he lost interest in me because I’m basically a loser whose life has ground to a halt at 49. Okay, that's not fair, he didn't say that; he said that it made him panic to see that I didn't have anything else in my life but him. I had nothing to offer him. I grabbed onto him like a life jacket because he’s young and ambitious, talented, successful, etc. He has lots of friends and interests and confidence and promise. What would he need with me? What would he need with a washed-up artist who fell short of every dream he had, whose every frame of reference is in the past, who can no longer envision his own future? You’d run too.

Tonight I took out a piece of scrap paper and wrote “Wednesday” across the top, then “1. buy groceries,” and “2. edit HSD script.” HDS refers to the video I’m making based on my high school diary, which I've barely touched in the last week. And I haven’t wanted to do any cooking to speak of, so there’s nothing fresh in the house. I can’t keep eating chips and beer and takeout. I have $300 left on my food stamps card. I’ll buy a bunch of stuff to make salads -- M didn’t care much for salads, so making them and eating them won’t remind me too much of him, and it’s so hot now already that even turning the stove on makes the house uncomfortably warm.

If I can accomplish these two small tasks tomorrow, it’ll be some small step forward.

After I made the list, I cried harder than I’ve cried in the last week, realizing that it’s inevitable that I must leave my life with M behind. That I can't be with the man who brought me such joy, that all the wonderful things I looked forward to, the life that I was so sure was about to happen, will never happen.

Did I Fucking Dream This?

2010-06-22T11:07:00.002-06:00

I keep thinking that if I misunderstood M’s intentions or his feelings about our relationship in such a fundamental way, I must have missed many clues all along, and that somehow it was fucked up from the beginning, that I must have been missing something or misinterpreting what was happening all along. All that time I thought I had my eyes wide open I was blind.

My memory of our trip to Mexico City turns from a sweet, wonderful reminiscence into a kind of Gaslight nightmare when I think about it. It was in Mexico that M started to talk about the future. And he encouraged me to think of us being together for at least a couple years when he discussed possibilities that could allow him to work there but not until at least the fall of 2011. It was all very tentative and contingent, but I didn’t ever think of it as contingent on anything that was happening between us, only contingent on the availability of opportunities to make a living there. I don’t think it was just the romance of being in a beautiful, exotic place on vacation because we continued to talk about it for weeks afterwards. He would bring it up. I wasn’t pushing the idea, I swear to fucking god I wasn’t. As recently as a couple weeks ago, he mentioned wanting to take another trip to Mexico City together this summer.

I’m going insane trying to figure out what happened, and being well aware that I might never know makes me even crazier. If I was so wrong about this, how can I trust my perception of anything.

It's a big perfect storm,this breakup, exacerbating all my fears about money and success and aging and home and love and family, blah blah blah, and I can see it and know what's happening but that doesn't make it any easier. God damn, it hurts!

Once again, I have to create some kind of life for myself from scratch. I'm tired. I'm tired of going back to nothing and starting over.

When Things Fall Apart.

2010-06-21T19:26:00.003-06:00

I went to Bookpeople tonight and bought a new copy of When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chodron. This is the book that I read -- or I should say that R read to J and me -- when things got so tough for us on the road, and the ideas in it -- which come from Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, through Pema Chodron, who was his student – got me through that difficult time and profoundly changed the way I live my life. Though my meditation practice has lapsed the last couple years, I still refer to those teachings and ideas daily.

I looked for this book on my shelf last week -- I must have given it to someone, because it wasn’t there. But the more I thought about it, the more hesitant I was to read it again. I have begun to worry that this notion of detachment from desired outcomes -- a central idea in these teachings and one I’ve strongly believed (I have “Abandon any hope of fruition” tattooed on my arm) -- is somehow behind all this chaos in my life the last 5 years. Is my success at letting go of any expectation of getting anywhere the reason that I can’t seem to get anywhere? It seems to me that what I need right now is to get my shit together, not to be cultivating contentment with the fact that I can’t get my shit together. I don’t want to be content with living in a homeless shelter and panhandling on the access road.

On the other hand, the source of this pain I feel now is my inability to let go of the future I had envisioned with M. I’m scared to let go of that vision because it feels like letting go of the very possibility of an enduring bond, a lasting partnership based on love and affection. I didn’t believe that it was possible, not for me, before I met M, but I let myself believe in it with him because I thought I was witnessing it happen. It felt miraculous. And, like most miracles, it was just a lie somebody wanted badly to believe. How will I ever let myself be that vulnerable again?

Monday.

2010-06-21T16:33:00.003-06:00

I realize now, because it's all rushing back, that being with M alleviated a lot of my fear of aging. That I was interesting to a man 15 years younger than me was very, very reassuring. So, him losing interest had an extra punch.

I'm sort of wondering now how long it's normal to be so intensely sad. I'm still -- it's been what, like, well over a week? -- crying uncontrollably several times every day and avoiding the company of anyone but J because anything can set me off. I'm basically sitting in my room most of the day watching movies and maybe reading a bit. I don't want to pathologize what might be just a run-of-the-mill broken heart. On the other hand, I feel like I might need help.

I've thought about suicide a lot the last few days. I can't say I've contemplated killing myself, but I've ... pondered it. I've found some relief in googling “clean painless suicide” and reading all about the pros and cons of hanging and decapitation by train and various poisons. I don’t have the guts to kill myself, but it’s a way of imagining an end to this pain. I can’t imagine how else it will stop. The idea of living without love is too bleak to imagine, but the idea of ever being open to it again is terrifying.

I've been thinking about moving back to New York. The argument against it was always that I didn't know how I would make a living there, but lately I can't make a living anywhere, so New York isn't any more intimidating than any place else. There is no place that feels more like home to me than New York, and it's been so long since I've felt like I was home.