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From Joshie.
This reminds me of years ago, when I was living in Chicago[land], and my friend Rex outed me as a Karen Carpenter (aka "The Goddess") fan. He outed himself as well.
My admiration for Karen Carpenter is completely genuine. It's still her songs I hear when emotions run high (good and bad ones). I wish she were still around, she and her amazing voice.
Fuck that nonsense, Adolf.
I'm not proud to admit it, but for the last several weeks, ever since Bill & Edgar abandoned me to the East Coast and I acquired some furniture from them, said furniture has sat in the front rooms of my house, creating a sort of high-walled path from kitchen through to the bedroom.
Sad.
So, this morning, in anticipation of the big birthday bash at my place next weekend, I've started moving shit around...throwing shit away...this also involves a huge cleanup of the backyard, with folks coming in to carry away the stuff I've been meaning to get rid of for the longest time.
Flux, people. Flux. It's all about momentum for me. My coefficient of static inertia is high, y'all, but once the stuff starts moving, it moves. I don't suffer from the same material-nihilism that my mother and my younger brother are burdened with ("it's almost pleasurable to just throw things out!"), and on the contrary, I have a decided fear of spaces left empty (read that in every possible way), but changes are afoot, and there are a foot of changes to my list of things to do.
Ajax may clean like a white tornado, but you haven't seen Reverend Peaches change the world, gorrrrls.
Skippy Peaches the ssssssstupit Pleasure Piggy (aka ME) turns 40 on April 3. That's this Saturday, pumpkins.
I'm having a big ol' birthday party at my house and the boyfriend is going to be here. I'm so happy my head is going to fly off. Other contributions to the aforementioned giant charlie-brown head flying off include a long-overdue reconnect with Scott, and in general, just the giant aggregation of all these wonderful people in my life, including Felicia and Stork (the latter of whom is my heterosexual life partner, tho I am not his homosexual life partner, go figure), the astounding Chip and my sherpa-guides to Northern California from way back, Dave and Lisa.
FTP, of whom I have written, will not be attending, unfortunately, but tonight he gave me the first birthday present I've received so far....a hot-pink piggy with my likeness glued to its face. Oh, and inside, an iTunes gift certificate, one song for each year of my life (that's 40, wise-asses).
My folks are buying the birthday cake, and so tomorrow, when I call Citizen Cake I get to a) tell them I'm turning 40, b) tell them I want a Hello Kitty cake, and c) ask them if it's ok if my Mommy pays for it.
It just don't get better'n'nat, chil'rens.
The boyfriend called me last night while I was at a potluck (no, not lesbians....bears...they're like lesbians, but with less facial hair and more flannel :) to announce that he just became an ordained minister.
I asked him if he'd wear a collar for me...well, a ROMAN collar. Of course he said yes, dirty little pigboy that he is. So when I got home, I signed myself up as well. I felt that the God of Biscuits, lacking his own sect, needed a bit of self-promotion, I guess. The boyfriend has yet to decide where he's going with his own congregation, but I'm sure it's going to be flocking HOT as FLOCK.
So imagine two Reverends of the same Church but with differing positions getting it on. It's going to be crazy, the amount of sects were going to have. And we will likely keep switching our positions!
On a more serious note, why don't you also go get yourselves ordained? Think about the possibilities. Perform weddings, baptisms, etc.! Exploit the nasty non-separation between church and state! Be a religious official and get an instant right to perform civil rites! Make the government make the separation real. Praise the Lord and BE the ammunition!
"You can always be sure who your mother is, but you can never be sure who your father is." — Marie, attempting to derail an argument my father was actually winning. (she succeeded)
"Ok, ok, I'm sorry....two out of three of them are yours, but I'm not saying which two." — Marie, to my father, when, after 2 years of her repeating the above, asked her to stop saying that to "his" kids.
"Love, Mom & Dad(??)" — how Marie signs holiday cards to me.
"You can do anything you put your mind to." — Marie, to me, starting ever since I can remember, and to this day.
"I don't think they're ready for ME." — Marie, in response to me asking her if she was willing to engage in a discussion with the homophobic parents of a friend of mine....she's currently serving as proxyMom to said friend.
"My own mother died when she was 56. I'm going to be 65. I figure I'm on bonus time now, making up the rules as I go." — Marie, unprovoked.
"I wonder if I'm going to look older than my own mother when I get to heaven and she's there waiting. That'll be weird, huh?" — Marie, unprovoked.
"I told you that if you ever were going to do drugs that I'd do them with you so you could see how freakin' stupid they make you." — Marie, while punching my arm, after i told her I had smoked pot in the past. I was 32 at the time.
"Too many big words I don't understand. And too many F-bombs." — Marie, on why she stopped reading my blog.
"That was offensive to me. You forget I have a gay son who is more a man than those who mock him. At least he doesn't sit in judgement of others who are different, as a bigot does. And i was in SF for the history making of same sex marriages and proud to be there to witness equal rights for all of us. Wasn't so long ago that lefthanded people were forced to be right handed. I'm really amazed that educated people can be so narrow minded and hateful." — Marie, to a life-long friend of hers who'd emailed her something that trivialized San Franciso's same-sex marriage efforts.
Is there any wonder why I consider myself so goddamned lucky to have grown up at the hands of this woman?
On Friday, March 26, she turns 65. If you've met her, please wish her a Happy Birthday. Even if you've never met her, please consider it anyhow. She deserves every blessing and joy I can heap upon her.
I love you, Mom. Happy Birthday!
There develops a kind of pattern in a long-distance relationship that forms when enough of the situational participants sit still for long enough.
Some of these one can control: choose the same airline, through the same airports/connections. Choose even the same flights, on the same days. One person is the default traveler. The other is the default housing provider.
Some of these things one cannot control: weather, daylight, food, prevailing custom, prevailing politics.
Some are in between: mealtimes, sleep-patterns. And, of course, sex. There is clearly a choice in whether to have sex, but time apart, sometimes nearly a month at a time, pretty much limits the 'when' to ASAFP. Mmmmmmmmm....
DistractionDistractionDistraction.
[beat]
The accumulation of time, where the objects at rest and objects in motion tend toward simple location and simple repetition, respectively, steers you decidedly towards a particular look and feel in the proceedings. And that look and feel gets more and more blatant with each lather-rinse-repeat.
As I sit here in the long hallway of Terminal A of the Las Vegas airport (I can never remember its name)—at one of the only available electrical outlets in the entire building—people walk by and gawk at the gi-normous PowerBook. One man went so far as to say, aloud, seemingly to the Universe at-large, "God DAMN, I wish I could use a Mac!" I kid you not. People mostly smile in that knowing Macintosh-user kind of way. The look that suggests we'd also have a secret handshake of our own if both our hands weren't already sitting at the home row. That, or they're in the throes of the softly glowing Apple logo on the back of the display. Likely it's a combination of the two.
It's Las Vegas again. It's the standard-issue 75-minute wait between arriving at my gate and awaiting permission to board. I'm still in Arizona-stubborn Time, which this time of year looks a lot like Mountain Time while go-with-the-flow Las Vegas is in the Pacific. I'm tired, but not sleepy. I'm horny, but complete. I miss him, yet Pattern tells me I'll be fine, if a bit zombie-fied, until I see him again. Pattern also tells me that he'll have it a bit rough, especially for the first few days. He'll wrestle with his demons without me there to assure him, and I'll wrestle with my dispossession of the sense that lets me know the character of those demons. He can see my demons, too, dammitall, even when—especially when—I cannot. But panic has no hold: this is all just Pattern.
It's a Pattern that begs to be obliterated, like the Buddhist sand drawings whose name I'd know if I had an internet connection (again, I'm in Las Vegas) whose only fulfillment comes from sending them back to chaos.
This pattern will get a few more cycles, a few more chances to accumulate into traces of here-and-there, when-and-where, until it gives way to the new math of here-and-now.
If any of you think the computation of this situation fails to produce favorable results, you haven't been paying any attention. Or I'm a lousy math instructor.
Today the boyfriend and I drove up to Phoenix to spend time with Anthony & Jess. It's always a shock to me when we show up to see him; it's not that he looks different, physically, than what I expect. Not that his voice is different or he looks older. None of those attributes are far off the mark.
The stopper is that he's smiling all the time...that he's relaxed. And that he's just plain happy. Once again I have to credit Jess with a strong assist in sustaining the happy. And, of course, I have to credit my brother for setting out to make serious, fundamental, potentially identity-fucking changes to get himself happy. Well done, to both of them.
I also end up a little surprised when the boyfriend becomes so animated around the two of them. It's not him, and it is him. I mean that in all good ways. Like me, he can be shy as hell...unlike me, he can't hide it when he's nervous around new folks. My brother and Jess both seem to enjoy his company, and I certainly end up ebullient when we all four spend time together.
All of this wasn't exactly unexpected, sort of.
What was unexpected (but unsurprising) was the rather heavy-duty conversation the boy and I had in the jeep on the ride back home. We had an hour-plus to kill, so we had the opportunity for the conversation to go places, and it did.
Turns out that while my mind had silently gone racing to the chemistry and physics of water and ice and crazy details on relative densities and how good old H20 is one of the only naturally abundant molecules to get less dense in its frozen form and how that has permitted life to continue and evolve in places where things even seasonally freeze....where was I? Oh yeah, so I was on this existential and ironic (hey, we were driving in the desert) turn of mind about the beginnings of life here, the exquisite boyfriend pipes up with exquisite timing and tells me he was thinking about the universe, about galaxies, about solar systems, and about the chances of life forming on other worlds out there.
This, naturally, progressed to individual- vs. species-level survival, and what humanity's chances were of still existing a short time out (10,000 years from now) and a slightly-less-short time out (1M+ years out), to Gödelian systems, to chance, to odds, to evolution, to faith, to belief, to death, to after-death and eventually swung back around to the beginnings of a previous conversation about religion and how it's a soporific for the pangs of worry about dying.
I swear to God (of Biscuits) that I tried every trick in my considerable brain-arsenal to trip him up in his line of reasoning, every trick to enjoin his thinking towards the same inescapable (at least to my mind) conclusions.
I did not do this to satisfy any short-sighted and petty need for him to be just like me, think just like me. That's just (in the words of Happy Bunny) "ucky". I did it to see what would happen.
So what did happen? I learned a lot about what happens when a strong force of personality combines with a shrewdly incisive intellect, especially when both are in the same head, fronted by a beautiful face.
Damn, it's going to be an amazing ride, this rest-of-our-lives-together business.
There is a particular genius in a well-executed business. And that goes triple when it's a service business.
Bentley's Coffeehouse here in Tucson is even yet more than that. It's a University social hub and a Women's confab and a pillar of the community.
For me, it's a great place to work while I'm in here in Tucson, a great place to eat, a great place to blog. I get to work with Richard. Where's the downside?
I just wanted to thank them again for such a great environment; they're part of what makes Tucson so cool-funky and special.
Oh, and happy 20th Anniversary to them, too!
I'm realizing in bursts that learning is more of an accumulation than a gathering. Our memories, our enlightenments, our lessons, our repetitive stupidities don't form a collage so much as a pile or set of piles. We are presented with experiences that are too much to abide, too much to compass, but we walk away with something.
In the political arena, everyone knows that fortune favors the brave (until they become part of the bureaucracy, but that's another story and an ironic corroboration), so long as the brave consider themselves fortunate when they're handed even half of what they're asking for. Example: Ashbury Park may have gotten shut down in issuing same-sex marriage licenses, but NJ civil union legislation followed.
Learning causes conformational changes in worldview and thoughtview; the brain redirects its own pathways. Thresholds matter. What wasn't learnable before is learnable after a certain line of experience or learning or maturity has been crossed.
It also strikes me that changes happen in clumps. Another kind of threshold is crossed and changes pile on by the bucketful. The BF and I decide to be together. Friends move away. Other friends become closer. Brilliant writers are rewarded. Termination-dates hop around, but come closer. The overall flux become palpable.
Times of flux like this are times I've learned to not only go with, but to take advantage of. The sails are full, why not set off in the direction of all those other changes you've wanted to make, those things you've wanted to learn, those people you've wanted to pursue or reconnect with?
May you live in interesting times. May you take advantage of interesting times.
Tucson is a night city. Oppressive days are to be endured; nights to be savored. Darkly lit roads, orange and amber and black and blank. Balmy desert night-air, before things turn decidedly cold, gives lift, comes from underneath, buoyant. Desert daylight air comes from above, beats down, dry and dessicating, installing torpor front and center and circumlocuting the mind. Carrion eaters draw funnels in bright skies, drop through onto a next meal—something else's last meal, some other creature's last breath.
Omnivores, metavores cruise the Tucson streets at night, honey glow of streetlamps hides all except motion. Stealth requires nothing but stillness. High Science too busy looking at the stars, a task so necessary to Big Futures that this town must remain so lit.
No beacons proclaiming. No cannons of light nor canons of bright for Everyman and Everywoman. Just so, serendipity descends. No crushing glare, no defensively-aimed shafts of haze.
Shoulders drop in relaxation, the rough rumble of an old engine doing its best, sighing relief at each upshift. The head clears; the laser-straight streets are becoming known...manual transmission goes to auto-pilot and anticipation builds: him.
Parking lots are measured in football fields, even less well lit than the pavement of the streets. White jeep is night-white, sits, quiescent, cooling in tick-ticks and slight-spoken groans.
He arrives, and for a moment, just a moment, he's a stranger. A deadly handsome stranger unknown to me. Blood races, heart throbs in my ears and my throat, and in ten fingertips. Night knows that it doesn't see what it sees; "I was never here"; "this never happened."
The moment passes as moments do, and he is the One, again. The blood races on, the heart throbs happily now as the fingertips reach for the car door. He is over there, and that's too far away.
We walk into the fast-food place together, the harsh fluorescence thrumming danger at 60 cycles per second. This light is where tragedy happens. This light is where nerves fray to the point of impact or knifepoint or trigger-squeeze. Menace, a contrapuntal baseline, drives the crass, comical calliope of saturated fat, high sodium, cholesterolic infinitude. No one can live peaceably at this speed.
Fast food that is anything but fast. The queue fills up behind us. Two men in uniform. I check myself unconsciously, subconsciously, way too consciously to be sure I don't cause alarm or alert. Then I remember that these are military persons, not police. Then I remember when they used to be different things. Then I remember that any conflict that might arise in this en garde, en passant, on the corner dive is beneath such. Expecting to feel safe because of their presence is expecting a jumbo jet to appear graceful on the ground: wrong millieu.
We eat in near silence. Alien spaces, compared to our usual haunts of home and high-tea. He must return to his duties at work. I must return to my own work, my own schedule time-shifted to match his.
We speak softly, walking to the car, attempting a semblance of selves, falling short of the mark. I get in my car, he in his. Peripheral vision catches motion and I turn, contrapposto, and he stares me down. My face is a mask, matching his. He's giving space to those parts of each of our bodies that cannot say no; pure animal thrill. He tips his head back and I feel the throbbing in ten toe-tips, then all twenty-one "digits". I remain motionless, except for the tip of my head, acknowledging.
He breaks the spell, smiles his dazzling smile. He breaks the spell only to replace it with other, more powerful magicks: familiarity and love.
He backs out and heads off. I do the same, back on the bedimmed streets. By now, the desert has claimed enough heat that the windows must be closed. No matter, the comfort remains, the pale of the dim lights lets the wild things frolic for a bit, as they must.
For my part, this atmosphere, this town, this man, this love, slows down the pace, restores the knack of moderation in all other things. "What now?" gives way to Now; "What's next?" is sated by "just more of this, here."
The human heart is a night city; the human soul can be seen only when in motion, only when the world is darkly lit.
Riddle me this, Batman....how does one drive through a parking lot, stop and unlock a mailbox, then stop at an ATM, then stop at a restaurant and THEN realize he no longer has his car keys with him?
Leave it to my man to find the edge-cases in everything. He's like a piglet on a truffle.
I sat down with my quiver of superlatives at the ready after having read the news on Michael's pages, ready to bring to bear my out-sized vocabulary on such an amazingly well-deserved bestowment.
Instead, nothing. But then out of the Nothing comes a visceral happiness for my friend, Michael; a sense of reassurance that sometimes the world works how it should; a feeling of loss (that I will put off until after he leaves San Francisco); a sense of historical import: today will be one of those days that defines Before- and After-times.
I'm so very happy for him. The world is a better place because of the Dogpoet.
"Pattern.
"It's not matter that matters, but the patterns it contains.
"We consume matter for the purposes of casting it into a new pattern, one that better suits.
"Matter moved from one place to another, flowing from one to another. One inside the other, a single pattern formed out of two which remain themselves intact.
"Nothing is better than this."
— Thus Speaks the Well-Situated Orgasm.
Big-ass Happy Birthdays today to Unca Dale back in Pixburgh, and to Stork, my heterosexual life partner. (Hey, the BF has one; I do, too).
Via Crash:
All I ever wanted was to be able to say: I am sure of you.
When a day begins to end; when bright clarity gives way to murky dusk; when the vivid of night exhausts; when a sunrise demands its due. If sight fails, if hearing falters, if touch goes dull. Here by the sea; there by the mountains. Upon the demanding desert; in the lush canyon. Waking beside, walking beside. Geography or situation intruding, or free and clear togetherness. Sex. Drugs. Drink. Illness. Physical. Mental. Emotional. Confessional. Wherewithal, have-it-all.
"I am sure of you" is attainment.
Sure of Me. I wanted them all to know that: Sure of Me, now let me be Sure of You.
Today was a difficult day for me. I don't have many of those, I'm not complaining. Sometimes the Present has a nasty way of showing you that you shouldn't have been so Sure there, back in that Past. Makes you want to put safety-orange traffic cones around the Future, so that you remember it when that future-present snitches on a future-past. Habit and Certainty ride side by side in me, keep me driven, keep me focused, keep the breeze of happy in my face. Today they were at odds.
Tucson awaits again, so soon but not soon enough to save me from today. But I am sure of him. More, I am sure of us. Habit and Certainty await me in Tucson.
Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. "Pooh!" he whispered.
"Yes, Piglet?"
"Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. "I just wanted to be sure of you." — A.A. Milne
And there's no mystical design,
No cosmic lover preassigned.
There's nothing you can find
that can not be found.
'Cause with all the changes
you've been through
It seems the stranger's always you.
Alone again in some new
Wicked little town.
So when you've got no other choice
You know you can follow my voice
Through the dark turns and noise
Of this wicked little town. — Stephen Trask
When someone you love is hurting, of course you want to make the hurting stop. Of course you want to take it further and turn the hurt into happy.
You hurt too, but not like they hurt. Hurting through a proxy is a weak substitute, which is no substitute at all.
In times where you selfishly—but not necessarily ignobly—want to share in as much as possible, there are a string of desperate moments when the realization (but not yet acceptance) hits that you're just on separate horses, that the best you can do is hope for something approaching a parallel path.
The mind shrinks back from the prospect that some paths are too narrow to accommodate two such riders riding abreast (to say nothing of tortured analogy riding side-by-side to tortured soul).
Being a mere spectator is an option that disappeared a long time ago. There's no stopping the ride, either. No willfully choosing to just go wait at the finish line of a race you didn't even realize was a race in the first place.
My unfortunate over-emphasis on intellect as the Best Solution to most problems has colored my dreams about all of my Achin' To Be, all of my wanting to be near, my wanting to solve (goddammit!) the negativity.
But Life has never been a problem to solve; I'm only learning this now. Life is more and less than that. It's more than fodder for masturbatory intellectualism; and it's less than a well-known quantity or clearly delimited geography.
Life is merely that it is. That it happens, is happening, has happened. It's just base experience. We reach for different things along the way, but those things are the fruits (and banes) of life, not life itself.
I'm only realizing all of this because I've set my Intellectual Self off to do what it does best: solve a problem. Only the problem I gave it has no solution: "Why can't this be October and/or why can't this be Tucson?"
I love because I can do nothing else when it comes to him. The rest is just circumstance. I understand this now.
Buying a 17" PowerBook necessitated buying a Brenthaven backpack that was specifically designed to insulate said PowerBook. Yesterday I spent a good 15 minutes looking for my iPod mini (silver) and realized that it was so small, it eluded my rooting around inside the PowerBook backpack three separate times. Technological farce, one of those "oh, for fuck's sake" moments.
It's also kind of odd, looking at this picture, that so much of my waking life can be represented in one camera-phone-snapped picture: my PowerBook, my iPod, a motorcycle (well, Vespa) helmet, all on a table at Cafe Commons.
At least one thing about me is succinct. Terse even.
All that's missing is my exquisite boyfriend sitting across the table from me. Then my waking (and sleeping) life will be complete, or at least full-to-brimming.
Just wanted to wish my older brother, Anthony, a very Happy Birthday.
It's been a tumultuous year for him, lots of difficulty, but also lots of happy. I suppose I should thank his girlfriend for the latter. And credit him for making the changes that were necessary.
Hang in there, bro. Things will work out just fine.
(Even though you're waaaay fuckin' old now)