Back to Work.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.