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Kill the Buddah

TV I’’ve watched in the last 24 hours:

Poltergeist
Children of the Corn
Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 3: Dream Warriors
Prom Night
(Father to son: “C’mon. For a guy who’s so fast on the disco floor, you sure are slow.”)

I love scary movies. I just wish they’d make em better.

Last night after the candlelight meeting, the Tattooed Monk and I stroll slowly through the Castro. He’s aware enough to see that I’m not quite all there. As we pass the bus shelter on 18th St, something catches my eye. Someone has torn out a page of the phonebook from the payphone nearby and has fixed it to the plexiglass window of the shelter with a piece of gum. On it, they’ve scrawled “KILL ALL FAGGOTS”.

Maybe I am grieving, if only a little. This isn’t quite depression, it’s probably sadness. I look out at the world from an interior alcove, unwilling, I guess, to engage much. It was good to talk to TM, as he realizes the dilemma of a slow dying; the world won’t validate your loss until the actual death takes place. In the meantime there’s some other kind of existence to experience; one slightly removed from the ongoing reality surrounding you.

What I can see, lately, is that I’m envious of others, the ones who seem to blithely walk through their days unburdened; gregarious and earnest, the world is their playground. It’s like how straight boys seemed to me growing up; they moved and engaged with the world as though it was (and it was) made for them. I’m envious, but as I told TM, I wouldn’t trade it for what I’ve got. It’s certainly been a crazy kind of life for the last couple of years: a life extinguisihing through drugs and whiskey, giving that up for the raw ache of early sobriety, the end of my five year relationship, testing positive, gradually losing my mom over the course of months and months. And yet. I wouldn’t trade it, for it’s mine.

The Monk has lost both parents, has helped a boyfriend through his dying, and now has a sister and another ex dying; both from cancer. Why is it, I asked him last night, that some of us seem to get more than our fair share of grief and suffering? He told me he’s stopped long ago trying to figure out what a fair share is. Believing that God only hands you as much as you can take is to believe in a sadistic God. One who parcels out pain like a game. Instead, he said, God does not create suffering, but walks with you through suffering. If you want to believe in that God, that is. And I do.

I do envy the gregarious. I wonder if I carry this life a little too heavy around the shoulders. It helps, though, to have this campfire.

Looking back on this, I feel obliged now to temper my words a bit. In the wake of wars, of AIDS, of what we’ve come to call “September Eleventh”, my own suffering pales. Of course, I want to say, my burden is lighter than those carried by others. I don’t mean to be saying “Look at all my pain.” Rather, I want to join those other voices that have asked, since the world was young, “Why do we suffer?” and “How do we make it through?”

Maybe that’s why I like scary movies.

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