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.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Food.
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.
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.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Who Scared Who?
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.
*
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
In Other News of Disappointment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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