Mad about the Boy
He's my favorite. Yeah.
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July 31, 2003
July 30, 2003
Huddlings of Warmth
Last night I was awakened at about 3am with the sound of thunder! You have to understand that in San Francisco, we almost never get lightning and when we do, there's usually no accompanying thunder (we called this 'heat lightning' back in Pennsylvania).
"It's crowded here today!" said one of the other customers here at Cafe Commons. "A cafe is a good place to be on a day like today."
The day is not rainy; it's July, ferchrissakes. But it is blustery, and it is overcast, far moreso than is typical. It's cold. I know the Midwesterners and New Englanders will balk, but cold here is not a number, it just is. Trust.
The cast of characters...
The customer who uttered those words has a 17-month old child. Another woman across from me has a 3-month old, Gabriel is his name. There is also a 14-month-old, Sierra, the child of a British woman.
Soonae and Jong, the proprietors, are Korean and simply the loveliest human beings you'll ever meet.
There is a youth hostel just down the street from Cafe Commons, and every few months, a group of hosteled youth show up each day for several days in a row, here at the cafe. Today, there are four young men, whose origin I cannot pinpoint from their language. At times it sounds German, but then it suddenly gets sloshy, like Russian. It's not quite as calisthenic for the lips and tongue as Polish, though. So let's just triangulate all those, or take a weighted average, and call it Bunyak (a Pennsylvania immigrant term for amalgamated Eastern European).
One of the young men is simply beautiful. Dark hair, small eyes. A spiky hair thing going on. Sideburns long, and a flat broad smile, perfectly symmetrical. The easy laughter of friends or travelling companions plays with no resistance on his face and the other faces.
Adventure! Itinerant or otherwise.
Adventure, and respite.
Bloggers, 3D!
I'm not going to step through the entire rota of bloggers who showed up at the Tonga Room last night (and officially, I am no longer a Tonga virgin, deflowered in a flow'ry place!), because Philo has done a far better job at capturing it all.
But I do have to mention the two men who I had not yet met, Jeff and Michael, who I specifically had been wanting to meet for some time now. I met up with Jeff at Martuni's, where we had pre-bloggerfest cocktails, and talked about biology, math, evolution, people, San Francisco, "home"....you name it. The list would be even longer if we hadn't already arrived at the top of the hill, the bottom of the Fairmont.
Having arrived on the early side (we were, at least, of the first 50% of those who showed up), we were sitting behind the tables, against the wall. Michael came in a bit later, with Vince ("the sermon is coming from inside the house!"). We made eye contact, and both made smallish waves at each other, but didn't get much of a chance to chat until later in the evening.
Last night, especially with Jeff & Vince & Michael, I was reminded of how much "real life" has to offer that the bandwidth of cyberspace simply lacks. Maybe knowing some of the personal lore of each of the bloggers there created a bit of mystique, but I think it's more that knowing the blogger side just gives you a better readiness to appreciate the core mystique of people like these.
Truly an honor to be in their presence. Last night I was about as close to being a Secular Humanist as I think I shall ever be.
July 29, 2003
Haikuesday!
Today's topic: CALIFORNIA'S RECALL POLITICS
Richie-Rich Issa
whose Party helped rape the state
now wants to run it.
Issa shameless whore
Issa vampire who feeds on wounded
Issa bad bad man.
Let's Deregulate
public utils! Makes sense for
big oil in Texas.
And those are all
Republicans! Owed favors!
We straight white males RULE!
Let's remove the head
of the body we have killed.
Where'd we put that pike?
Vote with the belly
Smile at promised pittances.
You get what's deserved.
Think of the long term
Spoilers can't offer value
Just teach you to fear.
Rape the land! Our right!
God said so, in Paradise!
Adam's guilt was greed.
Democrats spineless.
Won't stand up for themselves.
Ann Coulter sucks goats!
A non-sequitur?
Perhaps, but evil intrudes
anywhere she will.
What should we all fear?
Repubs will give you a gun
and hand you pitchforks.
And who is to blame?
Repubs tell you, with aplomb!
It's what they're good at.
Smell the grand set-up?
Davis needs to grow a pair.
Expose charlatans.
Think! Vote with your head
Select those who would create.
Not demolishers.
July 28, 2003
Nostalgia is a Weapon
I was talking to Sam about books, books and books. and about travel, and math. And vocabulary. The boy's got it goin' on.
I told him I'd remembered a rubber-stamp image in the margins of Generation X , "Nostalgia is a Weapon". And it is. And it's an insidious fucker.
Even though I'm a big fan of the present-tense, and have certain definable leanings towards the future-tense, the Past sometimes has its say. I say that because I sit here watching Inside the Actor's Studio, with none other than the redoubtable Billy Joel. So impressive, it's a 2-hour episode.
I don't believe there's any other phenomenon during my adolescence and young-adulthood that had more of an effect on me. Most people thought it was an obvious or safe choice; some thought it made me a lightweight. But i was absolutely certain of how I "got" his genius. I never wanted to BE him. I did not idolize him. It was his creativity, his genius, his ability to take the harsh and the mellifluous and make them harmonious.
Because it was his talent, and his works—and NOT him—that I idolized, I never felt the need to defend him, nor defend my love of HIM. And given that I knew, with absolute certainty, where the genius was, and even better, that parts of my love of his work were simply irrefutable: what was magically, individually, my visceral reactions to his melodies and my intellectual resonances with his lyrics.
This is very important. I cannot overstate this. I learned, at age 12, that my own opinions were simply that: MINE. When called upon to defend the castle-walls of self-respect, self-presence for that first time, and you're successful at it, you discover that inner calm, that poise of repose inside, where the noisy-without cannot penetrate. Your own garden of eden, but without the nettlesome boobytraps from the almighty.
In fact, it's just the opposite. The tree of knowledge is the tree of life, the tree of shade, the tree that is your own personal landmark.
So I guess I can heap 'gratitude' as yet another aspect of my relationship to Billy Joel and his creations.
Watching him on TV as I write this, I remember buying the 8-Track of "52nd Street" when it was brand new. I am fairly certain I got it through the Columbia Record House. I believe the tape's housing was beige.
Watching him on TV as I write this, I can remember singing along with my adolescent soulmate, Marti Lawrence. She 'got in' where no one else did. I remember telling her once, as we were about to celebrate our graduation, that I knew we weren't meant for each other immediately, that we'd marry other people, but that one day down the road, we'd be together. We were that close.
Watching him on TV as I write this, I remember having the temerity to rewrite his lyrics from "Lullaby" to suit the death of my partner, Allen, shifting its meaning from sleep to death. Tonight I discovered that he wrote the lyrics about what happens when we die, and to assuage the fears of death and divorce of his daughter, Alexa.
Tell ME I don't "get" his stuff. Go on, I dare ya.
We carry the Past with us. No avoiding it unless you're seriously disturbed or seriously in denial. None of us has the luxury of an Undocumented Life. Nostalgia isn't the Past, it's a manipulation of the Past, to suborn an individual, a group, a nation.
The Past is just the Past. Nostaliga is a Weapon. Never forget that.
A Confluence of Nicknames
I never had a nickname of any sort until high school was almost over. I was Jeff. Only Jeff. I am a fair-skinned, fair-haired (or was), blue-eyed, fair-temperamented person, not the type to stand out in much of anything except my intellect. And let's face it, who makes up terms of endearment based on being the smartest one?
It was a fateful day at the video arcade (it had been the pinball arcade until just prior to this story—THAT is how old I am) when, after a game of Breakout in which I did exceedingly well, but not well enough to get to put my initials in the top spot, that I rolled and clicked my way into my first nickname: spinning the machine's trackball wildly and randomly tapping out a staccato on the 'Fire' button, I entered 'C U B' instead of 'J J B'. (Fate would play a cruel trick later when that name became associated with the bear community).
I still hear that nickname from some when I go back to Pennsylvania for a visit.
I acquired "Skippy", then, when I was in charge of a biomedical research lab. A gleamingly handsome and very muscular surgical resident was spending the year in the lab with me, when I dismissively called him "Skippy". His response, in a deeply timbrous voice: "If anyone in this room is Skippy, it'd be you. Skippy."
Social structures being what they are in a gaggle of general surgery residents, it took no time at all for all of them (many of whom had already become good friends) to cement the name in place. Even my boss, one of the most gifted teachers and General Surgeon's on the planet, came to call me that.
In the same timeframe, my bestest friend in Pittsburgh, Lisa, came through with yet another one: BEEF. Short for beefcake, in turn it was in response to me calling her "cupcake". I was teasing her about her crush on a dermatologist. To this day, I am greeted in IMs and on the phone with "BEEF." and she is forevermore my "CUP".
Along the way, as a consequence of hanging out with friends of mine, who I still believe are the best live band that ever was, The Toll , gave me the name Verbose, a play on my last name. And also because I rarely spoke when I was in the company of the four of them—Brad, Rick, Greg and Brett. They thought I was being shy (yeah right), when really, I couldn't get a word in edgewise. This was all in the late 80s.
Fast-forward to the Pleasure Piggy . 'Nuff said.
That was just a few months ago, and just a couple of weeks ago, Rich, who is the most laconic IM'er I have ever known, chimes in from outer space with "Peaches". Dominic finds out, and broadcasts it. He's better than the internet. Here's Rich & me at the Fair:
Yesterday at Dore Alley, I was dressed like this:
Anyhow, I show up at the Dore Alley Fair and run into most of the gang, attempting a conserved comportment, a dominant deportment—y'know, just for kicks. Troy speaks up first, and says, "Hi, Peaches!"
And I'm thinking "Damn that Rich!", even though I smile when he's around:
Anyhow, I can't just let Troy go unchallenged. I don't want to be his enabler. So I reply, "That's DADDY Peaches to you, bitch," my eyes barely visible beneath the leather cap.
And he giggled!
No wait, that was me.
I told Marcy last night at the FUSION dance about the surge in sobriquets. His response? "No, no, no. It's ALL about the piggy."
Indeed.
July 25, 2003
Oh my god, a nun!
Yet another reason to love San Francisco, as if i were keeping a list, as if I could even count such a list if i kept such a list, which I don't, so don't ask.
I *FINALLY* got to meet up with Vince, my new favorite nun! We talked about a lot of things, some serious, many not, but all valuable things to speak about rather than just write about and/or think about.
And...I'm looking forward to making it a regular thing-thing.
Cheers to Vince!
July 23, 2003
Haikusday! + 1
I blame my 5 days with no watch, no calendar, no sense of time, but this is a day late.
This week's topic: Dubya.
Let the vitriol flow, folks.
President Dubya
"I'm the boss of everyone!"
Daddy says it's so.
President Dubya
Will of the people? Oh no!
Brother Jeb helped me.
Facial features drift
when I give my grand speeches
out of sync with words.
Smiles unexpected
like a baby who has gas
Not far from the mark.
WMD
shoulda coulda woulda found,
Oh Well, We're There
Free Coalition
a contradiction in terms.
So? We're Number One!
Patriotism
the best soporific
puts voters to sleep.
Liberals are bad!
Ann Coulter says so. And she's
a chupacabra !
Work to do. Must go.
Really don't want to piss off
Chancellor Cheney!
July 21, 2003
30,000 Words
There are events that happen that segment your life into Before and After. The LazyBear 2003 weekend is one of those events. Click here for all of the photographic evidence !
Home Sweet Home
I'm back in San Francisco! I had a great, great time in Guerneville, but DAMN, it's nice to have a bathroom to myself again!
I'm STILL jamming on how much fun it was on Sunday, dancing by the pool and having a helluva time.
I'll be posting pictures when I'm human again.
The Late Show (and Tell)
I'm so fucking tired right now. And I love every little moment of this moment, right now.
Today started in much the same way that other days here have started, with a pleasant little walk down the main drag in Guerneville to the Coffee Bazaar for my daily doses of caffeine and solitude. I didn't get anything more added to the huge leap I made yesterday with respect to the new novel, but I did get to surf the internet on the dialed-up iMac there, just to check make sure my server was still cranking away and accessible to the world, and to check in on other bloggers.
Good times.
As I was walking back to Fife's, the fire dept was being mobilized to a spot just past Fife's, just outside the western edge of town. Turns out it was my friend Lance's brand new car that got wrecked by a driver who fell asleep at the wheel. No one was hurt, but the driver managed to damage three parked cars. In the morning, he'll be renting a car so we can get back to San Francisco.
He was in good spirits, though, and the day went on with only little bits of gallows-type humor. We spent the day at Fife's pool; there was an auction, and then there was poolside dancing.
I must have danced for 2 hours, without shoes, shaking my ass to some seriously fun stuff. I was a different person after all that, a much less burdened guy with a brilliant perspective on the world. Happy-happy.
We all hung out at the gang's campsite (I am staying at a different site to most of them), just sitting there talking. Like old men on a porch or young kids on a stair.
I went to the bonfire tonight, but only stayed a little while. Too fucking tired. I did get a chance to hang a bit, though, with a newer friend, one I met in San Francisco a few months ago, a guy who is easily one of the most magnetic and beautiful men I have met in a very long time—and that's saying something, having lived in the City as long as I have.
He is married, though, and my interests have a pretty specific focus elsewhere. It just blows me away when those moments hit...where the five senses overwhelm you—or fail you utterly, I can't tell. Little tips and shards of light that zing back and forth, heat distortions in the air, sounds with unexpected harmonics. Forget opposable thumbs and walking upright; it's this kind of inexplicable magic that sets us apart from lesser beasts.
I'm glad the spiritual end of the event happened tonight, and finished off with a quiet conversation with FTP in front of the bonfire.
As I said, I'm a different man today than I was yesterday, a man I have been before, though because I recognize him. And I'm glad he's back.
July 20, 2003
In my mind and in my car
The Future certainly is an exciting concept, though often it's just plain scary. Usually it's scary when the Now sucks ass and I'm filled with worry about money and job and that kind of stuff, when even Tomorrow feels tenuous and the Future stretches out as nothing but a big fat stack of the same kind of bleak Tomorrows.
Even though the money/job situation hasn't changed much for me in a while (read: still sucks ass), I'm finding some leftover bandwidth to remember that Today has a way of changing like the wind. Fortunes shift, big and small, and Tomorrow suddenly looks a whole lot better. That big fat stack of Tomorrows is still an extrapolation of Todays, but it's a whole lot happier a prospect.
The ability and the wherewithal to even consider the Future, a good or bad one, is a luxury that many do not have, that many no longer have. Remembering this is usually the point where I stop beating myself up with worry and start kicking myself in the ass for being so dire in the first place.
Yesterday was a big-happy day for me. Hanging out with my friends, chilling after a full day of hard living with Dominic and Rich the day before, enjoying the company, the pool, the amazing weather here. Dinner at S & J's house in the woods last night. All just good, amazing, investing fun.
Unstuck, Abstract!
Each day here in Guerneville I am awakened by mockingbirds shrieking...or by some folks down the way dropping something called "FOXY", which keeps them awake and giggling all night and through the morning.
I am most certainly not a morning person, but during my time here I'm up with the birds and the foxy's, usually by 06.45. I walk down the way and take a shower, brush my teeth, walk back to my tent. I grab my iBook (don't say it) and head for a walk down to the coffee house that has internet connectivity—well, it has a lone Blueberry iMac running Mac OS 9, with a dialup connection. I don't use it; I can't easily use the connection to post blog entries, and well, fuck it, my email and the news of the world can wait a few days.
Besides, the hour or two I spend there feeds my need for solitude, or at least for reflection in this weekend of people-people-everywhere.
This morning was a landmark session. After having spent the last couple of weeks digging out notes and other preparatories for a nice long story I wanted to write, I finally pulled it all together into a serious timeline, fleshing out details with almost frictionless ease.
Odd that I had only brought up MacJournal, the app into which I have been entering all the materials (including writing) for the new novel, as a shield for the blog entries about bears. I figured if someone I knew came into the coffee shop, they might not.....appreciate....the subject or the tone of the entries. So the work on the novel was busy work, a cover up.
But lo and behold...there it was..the story laid itself out for me..or at least most of it has. And this is very different to how I wrote the first novel, which was a shoot-from-the-hip kind of thing that was character driven and finished up quite nicely even though I didn't know where I was going with it before I started.
This one will also be character-driven, but I knew plot points in advance, and so I wrote timelines and filled them in in order to be sure that explications, foreshadowing, pattern and locations were all included.
To quote Sam, "it makes me happy in the pants."
Bear-Naked Emperor
After walking around the pool at RRR, casually listening in on conversations, not with intent, but rather picking up bits here and there, there seems to be a self-awareness that is not sanctioned by the Book of Woof.
While the same sense of "Thou Shalt Act in Excess" comes into play as it has always come into play with sex, with "making out" (very 'high school'), with eating, with drinking, with mirth, with girth; a new way to be excessive is on the rise: steroid use.
The evidence of the so-called musclebear is clear. So much so that someone I met today, who is a friend of friends of mine, offered up the prediction of a backlash against the musclebear and all other non-bears.
The definitions of 'Bear' will be reigned in, he said. A Fundamentalism will grow. The standard-model bear will react, calling a bear a bear and not-a-bear no-longer-a-bear, and the core Bear Image will contract (hold your irony) and the musclebears will be on their own, a sub-sub-sub-culture in search of an organizing principle, likely the one to be found in a syringe full of juice and the attending 'cycling': more standard behaviors!
Other folks made other comments which convinced me I was wrong in my previous postings. Wrong that there was a majority blind-obeisance to the group mentality. There is critique, wry or vulgar, and a healthy sense of humor about it all.
I guess we each take from the phenomenal those actual things that suit us, and discard the rest. I wonder if it can ever be more than that: can we change the phenomenological by assaulting its conscious elements?
July 19, 2003
My Life as a Bear
They say that the loneliest place in the world is in a crowd full of people who don't understand you at all, who don't care to understand you at all.
Lazybear Weekend is not the event you want to attend if you have no interest at all in sex. Which is me, for the most part, these days. I'm not entirely sure why, but I've decided to accept the fact and ride it out (so to speak). Even that aside, it has been a very long time since tricking was much fun for me, as it always seems to leave me wanting something more than just friction with another body.
None of the Ladybear Weekend folks know this, and yet because I am hairy, and because I have extra poundage on my frame, everyone assumes I am toeing the line on expected behaviors. It might also be the simple fact that I am attending such an event which would lead to the assumptions, but a) I am here to spend time-away with friends and b) these same assumptions come into play wherever I am wherever there are bears.
Because I do not have an internet connection here in Guerneville, no one will see these words until long after the fact, creating a bit of a safe-zone for me to vent freely.
Ostensibly, the Bear Movement (hey, stop snickering) began as a reaction to the Castro Clone look in the 1970s, bifurcating the gay population into Haves and Have-Nots insofar as muscly bodies go.
In the Have-Not's, I'm assuming, that there was another bifurcation, into those who wanted to be Have's and those who chose to expend their energies into reacting to the prevailing attitudes.
Those became the bears—or rather, the Bears—and turned that reaction into a force to be reckoned with, possessing gravity, if not gravitas, and long-tonnage, if not a longer-term view.
And like all movements which lack vision, it remained a simple reaction, even as it grew until it took on the worst in those it opposed. Lookism is what I'm talking about (yes, I've been a Northern Californian for 10+ years now, can you tell?), and if you're not a bear, you're not part of the club. There are loopholes for this, which wear the labels 'cub' and 'otter' and even 'wolf', a whole pantheon of critters to flesh out the umbrella bear movement, but those are satellite designations.
If you look like a bear, you're in. Done. Nothing else need be explored. You have your E-Ticket. If you're not a bear, you have the choice of a secondary designation (see pantheon, above) or you're just an outsider.
The behavioral monoculture is confluent within the looks-imposed walls of beardom, and here's where the lonely-in-a-crowd part comes in. The Primary Assumption of bear culture is simply this: If you look like one of us, then you act like one of us.
There is no first-blush. There is no Beginner's Mind. There is no "get to know me". There is only the package deal that comes with the Beard, Belly & Beyond.
The Primary Sin of bear culture: thou shalt not behave contrarily.
July 18, 2003
Neither Pastoral nor Lyrical
Irony and Satire have no place with the bears, it seems. I speak, of course, about the large, lumbering creature that is all of Beardom and not any one person, necessarily.
Irony appears only in the vast arrays of creature comforts lugged here from far and away in order to lend a Hollywood tone to the bucolic; think of it as a sort of Epcot pavilion for the great outdoors. But even then it's as the object of irony and not observer of such. And co-opting is not the same thing as satirical commentary.
Nothing is ineffable, and the only nuance or complexity you'll find is in the scattered and skulking and sketchy definitions of coupledom.
It's all one note, folks; the big social monolith that is the Bears opens its mouth and sings, "Woof!"
July 16, 2003
Spotty Piggy!
So I'm off with a bunch of folks to Ladybear Weekend (ok, really it's called Lazybear Weekend) with some friends. I don't know if i'll be able to post anything between now and when I get back, but I'm sure i'll be writing something or other, and will, at the worst case, post things en masse after I get back.
Cheers! (oh, and woof-grrrrr)
July 15, 2003
Haikuesday!
Look at me, forgettin' my own meme.
Good thing I had Scott to remind me. He picked a movie that he saw. Since I didn't see it, i'll have to write about what I saw at the theater most recently, Legally Blonde 2.
I mostly wear pink.
Haven't I been here before?
It worked once before.
Bruiser's mom locked up?
Animal testing is bad!
D.C. Here I Come!
Hello Patriots!
I am Capitol Barbie!
Where is my office?
Bob Newhart is rad!
My Bruiser is a gay boy!
Stan uses Product!
A Million Dog March
Activate the Delta Nu's!
We Saved Bruiser's Bill!
I mostly wear pink.
Haven't I been here before?
It worked once before.
Schmaltzy vs Schlocky
My phab phemale phriend, Jeanome , refused to allow me to email her an AAC of "Beach Baby", fearing that it would be too much schmaltz. Schmaltz???
Scott "Palo-stud-puhpet" actually disagreed with my assessment of the Best Pop Song EVER...I am shocked to inner stillness. But his suggestion of "Lonely Boy" is schmaltz...NOT schlock.
Clearly, we need a distinction.
A schmaltzy song, to my way of thinking, involves one or more of the following topics:
- passing of generations
- passing of a loved one
- passing of a pet
- are about luv, not LOVE
- say 'baby' a LOT
- usually have complex harmonies that sound simple
In other words, maudlin maudlin maudlin!
Now, a schlocky song, on the other hand, is one that isn't very well-made, but it's dumb fun, and makes me smile. Schlocky songs:
Schmaltzy songs: "Alone Again, Naturally" -- Gilbert O'Sullivan (rolling eyes at the name) "Seasons in the Sun" -- Terry Jacks "Shannon" -- must have blocked it out...Henry Gross, I think.
So...death of family, death of self, death of dog.
Schlocky songs: "Heartbeat, It's a Love Beat" -- The DeFranco Family "Beach Baby" -- First Class "Julie, Do Ya Love Me?" -- Bobby Sherman
Here we have....a 12 yr old boy and his brothers & sisters singing about nebulous 'Luv", a song about a summer and a girl and spilled soda....and an anthemic nod to girl from a boy with a crush.
Schlocky songs make me happy...make me want to bounce around. Schmaltzy songs, on the other hand, make me uncomfortable in all those same places where, say, sand would be uncomfortable.
Very simple. Very easy.
Candor, Can Do
It's strange, the things we're taught should go unspoken. Like the good feelings we have about our friends and our loved-ones. Stranger still that when we do break through to say those things, the session of being candid becomes something that we don't speak about after the fact: when a brutally honest, brutally candid, brutally sober instance of taking a friend aside and reminding him or her how important s/he is to me, and how much I enjoy and even dependent on the relationship occurs, it's almost embarrassing to call up the memory later, much less reminisce openly about it.
The resulting silences, when measured against the sheer noise of the negativity that rains down upon us all the time, would suggest that those instances of positivity are rare.
For me, they simply aren't. Many of my friends remind me, bluntly or in more nuanced ways, that they are happy I am around, that I am their friends. My sense of abundance, as I have referred to it priorly, demands that I burden my friends and family with my feelings in kind, or just as often, that I get the ball rolling.
My friend, Dominic, is a rare bird (and a dirrrdy bird, but that's another story). He and I are a perverse and, dammit, QUEER, pair. Honesty runs rampant between us; candor has its say. It's a beautiful thing; he's a beautiful thing.
This is us at Pink Saturday (our Saturday-night-before-Pride party)...
So do me a favor....go grab a friend (figuratively and literally, if you must/want), and tell that person how amazed and lucky you are to have him/her in your life.
July 14, 2003
Dirrrrdy Birds
I have to fess up something significant: I'm coming out....again.
Keep in mind that I'll be the same person after I tell you, but you'll just know more about me.
Whew. Here goes:
I *LOVE* schlocky pop music. And i don't mean bubble-gummy stuff..i mean dirrrdy, sleazy, SCHLOCKY stuff. The Partridge Family (dirrrdy birds!), Bobby Sherman. First Class (Anyone remember Beach Baby, perhaps the most finely-crafted POP song in history?)
I feel better. Please love me.
July 13, 2003
Cosmic Convergence
One Intense Boy
Words escape me. He RULES.
July 10, 2003
Silly PAGS
Metrosexuality...I've been hearing it a lot, lately. Soi disant straight men who have embraced (ahem) gay culture. All of the fabulousness without all that annoying stigma.
Yech.
In another sense, it's fag-lag that has finally caught up. "Fag-lag" was always my name for the testosterone-imposed delay between gay fashion and straights espousing it. History is littered with trendoid macho-shitheads who, after years of 'bashing' on the homos for things such as earrings and relaxed-fit soft-leather bomber jackets, end up wearing said trend-fodder cuz,y'know, "it's ok now". Well, it's fag-lag caught up, i think.
For my part, i'm going to refer to them as PAGs....Penis-Averse Gayboys.
If they're going to fuck with the boundaries, so will I.
July 09, 2003
Ask you, Askew
So in the entry, Skew, Skewer, Skewest, I had set out to ask a particular question. In fact, it was that very question which presaged the entry.
However, as the polluted, rainbow-colored stream of consciousness flowed out my fingers and onto the page, I ended up in a backwater, an eddy, where I asked a question different to what I intended.
The question I wanted to pose was not about expectations of primary relationships, honestly. It was about more common, work-a-day (I dare not use 'quotidian' again), more local and immediate expectations from meeting someone, from hitting it off with someone, with first-dating.
I'm not one of those queens that leaps from "hey, you're kinda hot" to "happily every after" in a single blue-leotarded-red-caped bound, so the question I did want to ask was of a much less grand scope.
In a local-cosm where sex is like tennis (but with less preparation) or a game of pool (but with more equipment); and where the unchecked growth of open-relationships has polarized sex and love into near-opposites instead of natural adjuncts, have put coyness and subtly on the endangered list and have managed to make secrecy tantamount to privacy (it ain't, folks), I have to wonder: is there still a place for those of us who, by choice or by accident or experience, are at odds with a culture which has simply lost the knack of moderation?
In my mind, that's what it's all about: the knack of moderation.
Ever more extremes, ever bigger, wider, deeper, faster, more intense, harder, more dissociated, less personal, higher, louder, brighter...
Now, before those knees go a-jerking, I acknowledge there are race-conditions everywhere. In politics, bombs fall on countries who have something we want. In evolution, giraffe necks and peacock plumes occur. In religion, Torquemadas and Popes JP2 abound. In Republicans, there are adrenaline-junkies and testosterone addicts everywhere.
Who has learned the lesson of the Closet? The Gay Bash? The stupid, antiquated christian fuckers who either point fingers or stand, arms akimbo, being all judgy 'n' stuff?
But I digress.
Has entrenched gay culture led to in-the-trenches thinking?
I have hoards of friends that I simply adore, who I assume feel the same towards me, but there's rarely an opportunity to test the mettle of the relationships. I suppose that's good, that I don't have strong need in any given direction, but I'm not all that certain that most of my friends would approach me out of need, even though I try to be sure they know I'm there for them.
These fragile, tender, subtle things do not seem to have voices that can be heard above the noise created by those in search of their next fix of a laugh, of sex, of a high, of an ego-stroke.
Those are the Moment-Seekers I described in the op-ed piece I wrote for Frontiers SF and that also appeared through QueerDay.com.
Who still believes in the Spannungsbogen—literally, the Span of the Bow—that self-imposed delay between recognizing the desire for the thing and the act of reaching out for that thing? How do we get our knack of moderation back?
Prelusion
It is, at first, a terrible thing to live amongst the legends and lore, the symbols of this or that, or of him or her, of It, existing unremarkably amidst the dull and common esoterica of Everyday.
For instance, nearly every morning he saw “CASTRO” written on each slender white street sign, at every intersection of most of his daily round-trip. How often as a teenager had he dreamed of CASTRO STREET, with all its attendant allure, all the concomitant freedom and delectation? Before he’d moved here to San Francisco, he was certain that in “The Castro”, the sun always shone, day or night, that everyone was “Out and Proud” and that “Closets Are for Clothes”, not for people.
He chuckled at the T-shirt wisdom he once took so seriously, but the smile on his face drooped with a sudden sadness as he mourned his lost innocence and his move away from such simplistic purity.
How sure he was of the world back then! How sure he was that the world in which he’d grown up, even the world he’d inhabited at the time would most certainly not have the final say in how he was to live his life.
But that was when he lived in their world of black and white, with sharply and rigidly defined lines, to be crossed only at the risk of punishments just as clearly defined. No, that kind of existence, living on the sufferance of the world around him, being the Good Son, the Clean-cut All-American, no, that just wouldn’t do.
Still, he had managed to exist under those exact conditions for better than the first quarter century of his life. As a creature of that society, molded by the pressure and the experience of living according to those strictures and that system of rewards and punishments, he could do no better than to get by. It was not so much a fear of reprisal and exile as it was that he knew of nothing else, of no one else: he’d simply failed to understand that there was indeed a Without, a place to stand apart from the world, the only world he had ever known.
It was the discovery of the World Out There that heralded his return to innocence—or rather, his arrival at a new kind of innocence. It had given him better eyes with which to look at the ordinary live-a-day world around him. Imbued with a sense of wonder and joy, he remained astonished at the breadth and depth of simple and subtle variation in all the little things around him.
Many people come to such a place, come to that kind of an understanding through diligence and hard work, through choosing to ignore that which would bring them down. Many are forced out of the nest begrudgingly, cast out into a bitter atmosphere. Still others cling to the fringe, clearly defiant since their early days, contrarian in an almost doctrinairish sort of way.
He would have to categorize himself as none-of-the-above. For him, it was an epiphanic leap.. He wasn’t so much pushed into revelation as he was pulled toward it. If he had his feet firmly planted in his ordinary world, then he was liberated from his very shoes, stolen away in an instant, only to soft-land barefoot in the tickling grasses of a new world. And he could identify the exact moment when the world went from subdued tones of off-gray to fierce and blossoming riots of color.
Such a moment is a thing too bright and too vivid and too sudden to comprehend, something that can only be endured. But eventually, the eyes adjust and the mind accepts, leaving only the memory of the leap, in itself a source of joy, but certainly not of the substance of continuance.
But his world was not the same, never the same. No longer even familiar. Those elemental, firmamental things that he’d depended upon were all vanished, demolished or changed into things undependable, into configurations ununderstandable.
Put another way, he had been grounded and contented—if not entirely happy—in his own backyard, knowing what was where, how far away each and every known thing was, only to be suddenly yanked away in one glorious, terrifying, eye-opening, over-flight. To have been limitless for a time, unbounded, capable of touching the sky itself and knowing and seeing all, and having it be too much to accept, to the point that the mind blanks and consciousness is lost. And upon awakening, nothing is familiar: he was afloat, but even that did not last. He panicked, scrambled.
The façade of mystery had been blasted away. Mystery, that brute force phenomenon that often masquerades as magic.
And when that ostentatious display and florid din of Esoteric Mystery had given way to plausible pragmatism, when the shouts of dogma were carried off on the ordinary breezes of the practical, the apparent silence was nearly ruinous. It was a vacuum that threatened the context by which his life had been given form.
For those with a strong sense of place, to have one’s station in the universe suddenly made irrelevant, suddenly torn and rent from the fabric of Time, there emerges a despair bordering on terminal. No longer is there a taskmaster-parent. No more are the absolute principals which delineated the world into slots or bins or queues clearly labeled as Good or Bad, Right or Wrong, or any neat categorizations into polar opposites which ordinarily serve to make Sense of the world on one’s behalf.
And there remains nothing but a new and lovely sensitivity to the special and little and frequent gifts that the Universe hands you every day.
July 08, 2003
A Meme of My Own: Haikuesdays
To kick this off (or, indeed, perhaps to render it stillborn), choose a person, preferably a stranger in a crowd you can make up something about spontaneously, and do it in haiku form.
Princess
The dream comes to her.
As all things come to
her. There before requested.
Crystal clarity
Her manifest destiny.
Frictionless journeys.
Skies made of diamonds,
mountains, piles of colored gems.
Her delectation.
Perfect excretions
are bodily deletions
Perfection maintained.
Prettily squatting.
Make waterfalls idyllic
Tink'ling cf clear bells.
The Amazing FTP
I just got this photo from a friend of mine who was snapping digipics all day during Pride. It's my new favorite picture...me and my amazing friend, FTP, at the Lone Star Saloon.
July 06, 2003
"Nice" is different than "Good"
Mother said, straight ahead, not to delay or be misled.
I should have heeded her advice, but he seemed so nice.
And he showed me things, very beautiful things
That I hadn't thought to explore.
They were off my path so I never had dared
I had been so careful I never had cared.
And he made me feel excited...
well, excited and scared.
When he said "come in" with that sickening grin,
How could I know what was in store?
Once his teeth were bared, though, I really got scared...
Well, excited and scared.
But he drew me close and he swallowed me down, down a dark slimy path,
Where lie secrets that I never want to know.
And when everything familiar seemed to disappear forever
At the end of the path, was Granny once again.
So we wait in the dark until someone sets us free
And we're brought into the light and we're back at the start.
And I know things now,
Many valuable things
That I hadn't known before.
Do not put your faith in a cape and a hood.
They will not protect you the way that they should.
And take extra care with strangers even flowers have their dangers
And though scary is exciting, "nice" is different than "good".
Now I know, don't be scared,
Granny is right, just be prepared.
Isn't it nice to know a lot?
And a little bit not.
"I Know Things Now"...from Into the Woods, by Sondheim/Lapin
July 05, 2003
Bush vs Bush
You must check out this video.
July 04, 2003
Skew, Skewer, Skewest
I didn't mean to start this off glibly, but a) sometimes I can't help it, and b) sometimes I can't help it.
When I consider the people around me, past and present, as I embark on my 11th continuous year as a discrete San Franciscan, I wonder exactly how askew my own personal concept of status quo actually is.
And when you add in the very few ex-boyfriends I have had, well, maybe that cinches it: my worldview is simply fucked up.
We all have our own takes on reality, our own sets of expectations. Beginner's Mind requires effort, and we don't always bother to get There before every new situation. We have experiences, we have memories. We have reactions to both experiences and memories.
While experiences are often shared, there are always outliers. Situations or events or people that fall out of ±2 standard deviations from everyone else's.
But what happens when you're subjected to a veritable litany of outliers, relationships/people/expectations so extreme that they pull your center off kilter, skewed from those around you?
Longer-term San Franciscans, as a group, know what I'm talking about, as I'm sure New Yorkers do (though I can't say personally).
Fine and dandy. But what about when it happens to yourself alone?
All the (however fluid) expectations and assumptions we make are all relative to our centers; when that center shifts, the assumptions go along with it.
I had a partner, once upon a time (and what time are we upon? —Witch Baby), and our relationship was closer to ideal than I should have had the right to expect. Intimacy was there, dark rooms of the heart suddenly well-lit, but almost none of that intimacy could be expressed in sex—his libido and his health were already waning to the point where that was not a bonafide option. But we found it aplenty in other ways until he passed away. And that was nearly eight years ago.
The next boyfriend, who appeared on the scene nearly three years past that, was intensely into me, physically, as I was to him. It turned out that a year and a half of usually spending 5-6 nights a week together was little more to him than a one-night-stand run on a tight loop over and over and over again (can you feeeeeel the denial, children!). No past, only present. No future.
And the one after that, who I was with for a year, was physically affectionate in public and in private (something the previous boyfriend never managed to do), but there was never any passion for me. Though there was passion from me, towards him, that cannot last when it's unrequited.
So I got it right the first time, though (or because) it was under the duress of extraordinary illness.
Then I end up with a control freak who did and still does a surprisingly complete job of maintaining his Undocumented Life.
The last significant boyfriend? Well, he and I are now extraordinary friends, and thank the goddess for that.
I'd had the good sense—and the courage–to call it what it was, and change the configuration of our relationship accordingly. I think had I failed to do that, I'd be in one of those "open relationships" that are all the rage these days here in our little hamlet, married to a brother/best-friend and reserving sex as a thing you do with strangers-with-candy or people with whom there's no chance of emotional accessibility.
Tidy.
There should be an amusement park attraction that mimics this hippity-hopping from one outlier to the next. Like any good ride, if it doesn't make you puke, it'll make you go 'wheeeee!' and 'again, again!'.
When I go out to a bar or a potluck or go out dancing, I expect physical affection from most of my friends, those who have no interest in me romantically. And I expect, typically, to be propositioned only by marrieds for whom it's "okay to play" (they rarely bother to ask if it's ok with me that they're married).
I expect that it's no longer possible—or at least it's highly improbable—to find a relationship where there's affection, public and private, and passion and lust, and where energies are directed inward and towards each other, instead of spent outward and away in the quest to have as many meaningless orgasms as possible, where quantity and frequency are the metrics for our own worthiness.
Am I jaded? Post-ironic? Or just askew?
The 4th of July, the Twelfth of Never
Drunk, drunk I tell you!
Self-promotion. Giddy with it. Sloppy with it.
Marge, i'm soaking in it.
This blog thing. Damn. I just had to stop and point out what a trip it is.
Everyone has their "it's all about me" moments/hours/days/lifetimes, but with a blog, you get to broadcast it.
Channel Biscuits, 24/7 and its sister station, Premium Piggy, pay-per-Pleasure (alliterations and consonances are free and copious).
But I'm worth it.
July 01, 2003
It was Ten Years ago Today...
This is an entry from ten years ago to the day, during my first waking hours as a new San Franciscan. I wrote it in (a more legible then) longhand-scrawl in a cheap, red spiral-bound notebook bought in Iowa, apparently, on the drive out here from Chicagoland. I wrote it at the Just for you Too cafe, a terrific place no longer there, alas. Forgive the schlock! and the exclamation points!!! Not surprisingly, however, the tenor of this entry, of my outlook on life and living here, has not dimmed over the last decade. I do so love this place.
7-1-93
9:45am
This morning I brushed my teeth from a gold-plated faucet and rinsed in a cheap wine glass (of all things).9:45am
A few minutes later, as I was beginning to despair of ever evidencing any of my new PC-dyke [as Rex called them at the time] neighbors: a sneeze! I looked out the window of the bedroom. Yup! Neighbor number 1.
As I walked outside—discovering that it was much warmer than my indoors would suggest—I wondered exactly what combination of wild-ass circumstances got me to this place, this neighborhood! Geraniums growing like rosebushes, rosebushes growing like trees! And impatiens like shrubbery! An iron railing (painted light-blue—where else but SF?) to the right, upon which a butterfly lights. A butterfly the likes of which have never been seen in the East.
In an alarmingly short jaunt over to Church & 30th to a totally primo breakfast café (now under new dyke management, as I just overhears—but still primo), the people the plants, the tiki-majesty of the J-Church, there's nothing calculated, nothing planned, nothing in particular that would suggest—or rather, betray—that any of this was a set piece. Wow.
The huevos rancheros were excellent, but I suppose that Mickey D's would've tasted great on my first meal as a San Franciscan.