A couple of weeks ago I lost my mind. A long unraveling – I trace it back about a year, when my personal finances collapsed in a single day, and I went from a fairly comfortable existence to trolling the Craig’s List job ads on an increasingly desperate mission to pay my rent. The coming days would be familiar to anyone looking for work during a recession: the endless resumes and cover letters sent into a black void, the gradual lowering of expectations, the mounting dread.

Finally a law firm offered me a temp job, each of my three interviewers pointing out helpfully that I was clearly overqualified, to which I replied, “I’m not above anything.” Words I sometimes regretted over the coming months (most often while elbow-deep in dirty dishes) but which I never took back.

The temp job led to a permanent, if low-paying, part-time position three months later. At the same time I found another low-paying part-time position managing content and social media for a small company. In between I wrote low-paying movie recaps for a porn company. Between the three jobs I had a little hope that I’d be ok.

But none of the jobs qualifed me for benefits. I was paying several hundred dollars a month for health insurance (which I was lucky to have), and any day I took off was a day without pay. The Manly Fireplug and I had a couple of weddings to pay for, and we wanted to live together. We’d managed to get through five years in separate places, but the back-and-forth was wearing on me. San Francisco, a beautiful city of cruel real estate, wasn’t making it easy. To live together, I’d need to make more money.

I felt increasingly fractured, working on so many projects that I was doing none of them well. Working as much, or more, than everyone else I knew, but seemingly making far less. An acquaintance on Facebook (I assume he had health insurance) posted a rant about the “socialism” of “Obamacare” (I really, really do not understand gay Republicans). My car broke down, and the mechanic said it would take $1300 to fix. I parked it outside the Fireplug’s house and tried to save up the money. Each week I’d meet with the three separate guys I was mentoring in their sobriety, but I’d show up distracted and grumpy and short of patience. The thirty pages of revision between me and the end of my book felt insurmountable. Then my laptop died.

I felt trapped. I argued with the Fireplug more often than I’d like to admit. I was angry and put-upon, and embarrassed by my struggle to accept my circumstances, which were, I had to admit, mostly of my own making. Because a long time ago I’d decided to be a writer.

What this meant, to me at least, was a matter of focus. I could go the career route, finding a comfortable salaried position with room to grow, but risk ending up one of the countless people I knew who wanted to be a writer, but who never wrote. Or I could write, and for the time being,  sacrifice the money and security of a career. There are people who manage to do both. So far I haven’t been one of them. About a month ago I almost switched sides, interviewing three times for a position with a start-up that would have paid me more than twice the amount I’d ever earned in one year.

A week after the third interview, I emailed my contact at the start-up and asked for an update. “Oops!” she said. “Oh my God, we’ve been so busy. I forgot to tell you. We decided to go in a different direction. Best of luck!”

My point here isn’t that I had it worse than a lot of Americans. Only that I wasn’t handling “it” well. My short fuse shortened some more, and all I wanted, from the Fireplug, from my friends, from my co-workers, was to be left alone. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, the Fireplug asked me to help him with some minor chore.  I responded with childish exasperation. We had words. My volume grew, and then it happened. I just lost it. A year’s worth of bitterness and anger and resentment came out of me, through my lungs. I’ll leave out the details, but trust me, for a good five minutes I was insane. I scared both of us. And the neighbors.

Cue regret and embarrassment. And a lot of silent reflection.

Then, last week, my supervisor calls me into her office and offers me a full-time job, with benefits. My little behind-the-scenes campaign of dropping hints to co-workers about interviewing for jobs with benefits seemed to have worked. The partners wanted me to stay.

I’m not sure if I can articulate the relief I felt. It was – it is – immense. I immediately went back to my desk and ran a few calculations. With paid health insurance, and another day a week in pay, suddenly everything seemed possible. The car repairs. A savings account with more than four dollars. Best of all, a home together with my husband.

My mood lightened. My lungs no longer felt tight. “It’s good to see you smiling again,” the Fireplug told me. Last night I drove my car back from the garage, and when I greeted the Fireplug, just home from work, I could actually see him. His handsome face. All the worries and grudges I’d been carrying around, which I’d let hang in the air between us, had fallen away.

I wish I could say that I’d achieved this transformation through some kind of spiritual shift. But no. What had saved me was simply money.

My mother would have been sixty-four today. Her birthday, as you might expect, sometimes prompts a bit of soul-searching, usually about time and priorities and this short thing we call life. I’ll be holding on to all of my jobs, at least for now. The relief about money seems to have whipped off the blinders I’d been wearing, and a few days of reflection have made it clear that I had a bigger part in my year-long stress. I hadn’t exactly made the most of my fractured time. So a personal inventory, just in time for New Year’s resolutions, on how I spend my hours and days is in order. It’s time to get more done.

You can have your astrology. No, really, just keep it. I have yet to read a description of an Aries that fits me, and no, I don’t care what light my rising moon might shed on that discrepancy.

But as long as we’re talking categories (and who doesn’t love, deep down, categories?) I will admit a soft spot for the Myers-Briggs. I don’t care if it’s out of fashion, or disproven, or simplistic. It’s the only kind of categorization system in which I’ve ever recognized myself.

That’s because, according to Myers-Briggs, I am a very special person. My type, INFJ, is the “rarest of all the types.” Which makes my personality “intricately and deeply woven, mysterious, and highly complex, sometimes puzzling even themselves.” I am a freak of nature and you will never get to the bottom of me. Fortunately you are just as self-absorbed as I am, which means you will quickly tire of my infuriating defenses and return to mulling over your own problems.

I mention INFJs here because our supposed first line of defense has been on my mind. “Mute withdrawal,” it’s called, and any friend of mine, and anyone who’s been a regular reader here, knows that I tend to drop out of sight every few weeks. I stop posting because, usually, life has once again grabbed me by the gonads, reducing me to the kind of of pre-verbal vegetative state that makes activities like blogging and cocktail parties challenging at best.

A few weeks ago I was involved in a car accident, an accident that sent someone to the hospital and an accident for which I was eventually deemed “100% responsible.”  I hadn’t had an accident in 18 years; it happened as the Manly Fireplug and I were picking up a pizza, and though I was eventually able to eat a couple of slices, I spent the rest of the night throwing them up.

As the Fireplug kept trying to assure me, accidents are called accidents for a reason. But I have a habit of looking for meaning in everything, a habit common to writers and maybe to the INFJs of the world. And so, traumatized, I turned to this habit with full force.

I can’t say for sure why the accident felt like such a rebuke, only that I harbor low-lying feelings of guilt at most times, and the $500 deductible cast a glaring light on my personal finances, and so that’s where I began my atonement. Somehow, through a deeply intuitive process of association,  fueled by dimly-lit anxieties, I came to believe that my eyes had been closed for some time. To life, to reality, what have you. I’d been blind, and now I wanted to, well, you know…

I gave up a few monthly subscriptions to various non-essential (i.e. porn) websites. I cut down on Starbucks and protein shakes and stopped buying clothes. Most importantly, I gave up my office, a little rental in the Mission, since I had yet to break even with my writing and it felt like an ostentatious display of…something.

Naturally I expected, having made the smallest of sacrifices, to reap immediate karmic reward. But life had other plans.

Due to circumstances outside of my control, money got incredibly scary incredibly quickly, such that as of today I do not know how I will be paying rent. Long story short, I must now get a real job.

I know. It’s so unfair. And though you will want to shower me with pity, I ask for my own sake that you refrain.

With a bank balance that makes it rather difficult to be picky, I’ve started casting my net. And though I just began my search, today I heard back from two prospective employers who had posted on Craig’s List. Asking for my name, address, telephone, social security number, and perhaps my bank account routing number, too, you know, just to get the wheels in motion…

So yeah, for a few seconds here I will set aside this self-protective self-deprecation, and admit that as I fast close in on the age of forty, I am as confused as ever by life. I have spent several years putting all of my eggs into one basket, writing a book, an art form that any cursory glance at media will tell you is going the way of dinosaurs. I did what they say, Follow Your Bliss, though they decline to tell you what to do when the bottom drops out.

All month I’ve been hearing the voice of my father, the most practical man on the planet, whom I have put in severe psychic pain by my lifelong ambivalence towards Jobs That Come With 401ks.

Yes, Dad, I hear you now.

I have a new recovery sponsor, who asks me every time I come to him with a problem, “Have you prayed yet?”  Yes, I usually want to punch him first. And though none of my gauzy-lit visions of a higher power include an omniscient dude who sits up there pulling all the strings, I try to take this question seriously. Really what he means is, “Have you asked for help?”

I hereby argue against the American myth of the self-made man. The up-by-his-own-bootstraps guy. No such man exists. We are helped, all of us, some more than others, all along our lives. Parents, maybe, siblings, friends, coaches, the occasionally stellar English teacher. Someone gave us a break. Maybe our first, maybe every single one. Someone opened a door, someone gave us a job.

Which is not to say that we ourselves don’t need to do most of the work. Only that we can’t pretend to be the complete and total masters of our own destiny. And now as the Manly Fireplug and various friends begin to circle around and prop me up, I must once again face a fact I’ve tried often to ignore. Though I retreat into mute withdrawal, though I’m no good at parties, though I think of “networking” as a particularly insidious form of torture, though I find other people to be at times absolutely confounding and infuriating and disappointing, it turns out that I still need them.

Last week I had dinner with the God of Biscuits at the Delfina Pizzeria on 18th Street. I’d never been there, never been to a lot of the new places that had sprung up since the time I used to walk that block every day. Back in 2001 I broke up with my boyfriend and moved from the Upper Haight into a flat on South Van Ness, a stone’s throw from Whiz Burger, a place that looked like it should have been on the side of some lonesome desert highway, not that piss-stained block of the Mission neighborhood.

I’d moved in there out of desperation, the first place to take both me and my dog. A co-worker whom I had disliked on sight was the master tenant, and he took me in with an equal lack of enthusiasm. He moved through work, and the new flat, like a black hole, sucking up all the surrounding energy. He practiced for his role in an amateur opera company (emphasis on “amateur”) in his little bedroom across the hall, then would sit down in the living room, on the other side of the pocket doors from my room, and catch up on reruns of the Golden Girls. He rarely spoke to me, but every day he would cackle in front of that television.

He’d adopted two cats and two dogs from the animal shelter where we worked. His dogs were skittish and annoying, so the cats spent all their time in my room. My roommate rented out the third bedroom to a couple who also adopted a dog, this one with severe separation anxiety, who would howl and chew through their bedroom door every time they left it alone. The cats were old, and one night while the dog chewed on the door down the hall, one of the cats up and died while lying in my lap.

Sober all of six months, I was one raw boy. My mom was dying and in a couple of months I’d test positive. In the past three years I’d burned a lot of bridges and had little to show for my thirty years besides my dog and a case of undertreated depression. I didn’t have a car back then, and after work I’d walk the stretch of 18th Street, from the Mission to the Castro, South Van Ness Avenue to Diamond Street, eleven blocks, to the 12 step meetings I attended every single night. I went there as much to escape the apartment as I did for the solace of sobriety. To clear for a minute or two my cluttered head. Eleven blocks, from Spanish language billboards to billboards for Stop Meth campaigns. From check cashing stores to lube-and-porn joints, from Mexicans to white boys.

After the meetings I’d walk home, slower this time. Around Guerrero Street my mood would darken again. I’d pass Linda, a tiny side-street where my meth dealer had once lived, always with my breath held, my dread building until I hit South Van Ness again, slid my key home, and opened the door into my little corner of hell. (I was a tad melodramatic back then.)

A few months after I moved in I started this blog. Two months later my mom died. I lived there for a year and three months, when a room opened in a friend’s place in Corona Heights, on the hill above the Castro, a room I still rent. My 12 step sponsor said that I started beaming the day I moved in, and didn’t stop beaming for another six weeks. When my opera star roommate found out that I was moving, he left a note for me demanding that I vacate his place within 30 days. Kind of a you-can’t-quit-I-fire-you situation.

This month marks nine years that I first moved into that little nightmare on South Van Ness, a fact I only just realized, writing this. Since then I got the depression treated, worked a few different jobs, went to grad school, got a degree, wrote a book, fell in love with two very different men.

In those nine years 18th Street changed too, as most city blocks do. In 2002 the Tartine bakery opened on Guerrero. Delfina opened their pizzeria in 2005, a couple of doors down from their main restaurant. In 2007 the Farina restaurant opened after gutting the old danish bakery. Bi-Rite opened their ice cream shop and the weekend crowds at Dolores Park increased tenfold. Bread shops and tea shops and nail salons opened around Sanchez.

Sometimes the Manly Fireplug and I would ruin a good work-out by hitting Whiz Burger after the gym for their damn good hot dogs. We’d sit at one of the picnic tables out front, and I’d look down the street, to the auto shop across from my old apartment, with hub caps hanging from its chain link fence. As we ate I’d tell him the story of when, nine years ago, I’d been sitting on the back steps when a young Latino boy poked his head over the neighboring fence and scanned our yard. When he spotted me he said, “Hey mister, have you seen a chicken?”

I told the Fireplug that story every time because it made us both laugh, and I guess I wanted to dispel the ghosts. I didn’t like sitting there for very long. Some streets, no mater how much they change, stick in your blood. The ghosts linger but weaken. They help me measure the distance I put down between me and that time.  I moved in there a scared kid but after a while I’d grown up, walking those eleven blocks.

Of course it’s hard to stay stuck in a tar pit when you have a little niece who looks like this. The first child of my only brother, Mallory and family are in town visiting, and I brought them in to see the Manly Fireplug at his hot new barbershop on Market Street. You can see she kinda digs him.

But what’s not to like?

I’m proud of the Fireplug and his new shop. He went from four chairs to eleven, and I now call him Big Daddy Barber Mogul. If you live in the city and need a haircut, stop on by. More barbers mean more walk-ins available, and I want him to make lots of money. So that he can bring it all home to me.

He’s having an opening party:

Saturday, February 21st
8 to 11 pm
2150 Market Street
(between Church and Sanchez)

I don’t care much for the term “depression,” as by now it’s been thrown around so often and so carelessly that it’s lost all its meaning. And for a long time I preferred Tennessee Williams’ term for that which ailed him, the “blue devils.” But even that term implies a sort of mischievous energy, and at least when I fall prey to it, there’s nothing energetic about it. This state blunts my mental faculties as well, so finding the right phrase may be beyond my reach right now, but it’s more akin to a tar pit, something I fall down into, something that slowly constricts me to the point where every movement becomes labor. And it’s only movement that saves me. But the things that would help me the most, when down in the pit, are also the hardest to do. Writing. Reading. Hitting the gym. Talking with friends. Inside the tar pit my compulsive tendencies escalate, and seize upon activities which don’t feed my spirit or my brain; they merely open a window wide enough through which I can escape for a few hours. Like Playstation 3.

I fall into the pit with frustrating regularity, though with the help of modern medicine, and with more thorough experience with its contours, the times I spend down there grow fewer and farther between. Which is progress. I used to live down there. I spent my whole adolescence and college years, and pretty much all of my twenties, down there. So I have a little gratitude.

Before the Manly Fireplug came into my life I’d been single for over five years. So I’d forgotten how much the tar pit affects not only me but those close to me as well, and it was his frustration, coupled with my own, with my absence, which led me a few days ago to start clawing my way to the surface. To be a tad melodramatic.

So my apologies to you, in case you’d missed me.

Another factor that led me to fight my way back to the surface was the simple desire for self-promotion. A while back I was asked to take part in another public literary reading next Thursday, here in San Francisco. The reading series is called Inside Story Time, and the curators do well at bringing in some great writers, so it could be a good one. This month’s theme is “What to Want, or the Lineaments of Gratified Desire.” The other writers will be Rodes Fishburne, Holly Shumas, Andrea Drugay, and Justin Chin.

Looks like they have a full bar, too, in case you need a little more motivation.

Inside Story Time
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Cafe Royale
800 Post Street (at Leavenworth)
6:30 – 8:30 pm
$3 to $5 cover

Blogging, like walking a tightrope, is best done without looking down. Otherwise you glance down and have a second thought or two. You wonder what the hell made you think that tiptoeing over a canyon was such a bright idea, when the world is full of less ridiculous activities. You…well, this metaphor is running out of steam, so let’s drop kick it and move on.

Moving to another city solves certain problems. Going from 80 billion people to 700,000 is a move in the right direction, as far as I’m concerned. Getting my dog back. Buying a car with a moon roof and getting a pleasurable sunburn on my scalp. Also nature, which I sort of dig. While I was gone the landlord had my back deck redone, and now I wander the aisles of Bay Area garden centers at all hours of the day and night, simply because I can. A pot of lavender is going gangbusters below my bedroom window, next to something called Kangaroo’s Paw, which hails from Australia, in case you were wondering. They’ve taken up residence beside an assortment of cacti that the previous tenant (my Ex) left behind, a dozen neglected cacti which I refer to as the Bad News Bears of the succulent community. Their health and well-being have become my personal mission. Blame it on the two years I spent holed up in my Upper West Side cave. The pendulum, it swung. This is what happens when people move from the East Coast to San Francisco. Investment bankers turn into yoga instructors, art directors become dog walkers, software designers join a landscaping crew, and everyone turns a bit soft. Perhaps you might even call them ineffectual, in the grand machinations of capitalism and power, but then you’d be a cynic, and you’d get run out of town.

But certain problems are loyal companions, no matter the distance you cover. Tennessee Williams had what he called “the blue devils.” This was long before the days of Paxil and Zoloft, and I’ve come to prefer his term over the clinical term of depression. The blue devils suggest an active, almost supernatural force, dogging you despite your best efforts, a far more malicious and tenacious foe than depression, which only suggests an emotional wet blanket, one you could cast off with a little effort.

The blue devils dogged me in Manhattan, but surrounded by a billion overambitious people and faced with a hundred books to read, I could only give them the most cursory attention. Now, in the relative peace and quiet of Bay Area garden center aisles, without a job or academic routine to tether me to the ground, the blue devils are throwing me a party, sort of a Burning Man of the Endless Night. I wake up every morning thinking, “what’s the point?”

I’ve faced more mornings like that than I could count throughout my life, so by now it’s less troubling than, well, dull. It’s so boring, thinking “what’s the point?” Take it from me, it’s not the kind of mental attitude that gets you invited to parties or the social circles of the chronically content, the bastards who think they’re doing you a favor by suggesting that you “lighten up!” or advise you that, surprise, you could just “choose to be happy!!” Yes, folks like this deserve to be chased through the streets with a pellet gun, but what if they’re right? How much of the blue devil dance is genetics, how much of it is the result of two-hits-of-ecstasy-and-a-bump-of-tina-every-weekend-for-two-years, and how much of it is just the comfort of old routine, the soft flannel shirt you slip into on Sundays? How much of it is fueled by self-pity? Or a lack of purpose and routine, easily fixed by a daily schedule of cardio and scribbling the rest of your thesis on coffee shop napkins? Second thoughts followed by thirds, questions that bring you no closer to an answer, a spun-out, strung-out path of consciousness, a rocky, rambling road to paralysis.

Overcast light reflected off a hill full of pale houses through your bedroom window. The dread of an open, cloudless day. Offers of friendship that feel like threats. The staggering weight of a telephone. The hopelessness of an afternoon TV court show, the sassy black-robed judge weighing your slender contributions to life. The bitterness of a locker room, the tyranny of a perfect deltoid. Covering your body in shapeless clothes, repeating a mantra leave me alone leave me aloe. The exhaustion of a room filled with laughter. Wind spinning a soda can in the gutter. A whore in bunny slippers climbing out of a pick-up on 17th Street.

Do you really think you’re in control?

Thirteen books down, twenty-seven to go.

Caught Patti Smith at Columbia with Derrick and Jennie. Patti spat on the stage of Miller Theater, about two feet from where David Remnick interviewed Joan Didion. Hot.

Best buddy Brian visited from Los Angeles. He took this picture:

I’m all, like, get me the fuck out of New York before I turn into one of these.

Over a nice pasta dinner and, later, a chocolate eclair at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, I think I sweet-talked him into considering a move back “home,” as I’m now calling it. I’m all about getting mi familia set up on the West Coast again, where we can age gracefully together, renting male escorts for each other’s retirement parties and breaking our hips on the hills of San Francisco.

What else?

I read Proust during the blizzard, er the Blizzard of ’06. I’m sorry, y’all, but a blizzard ain’t a blizzard when you don’t have a car, a driveway, or a sidewalk to shovel. My feet got wet crossing Broadway, but that’s all I can say. Between that and sitting in overheated, drafty classrooms with a bunch of coughing, wheezing Ivy Leaguers who can’t bear to take a sick day or two, and it’s caught up to me. So I gave myself permission to finish season four of 24. I know I’m coming to it rather late, but did anyone else get the creeps watching everyone on the show gradually turn into Dick Cheney? I thought they were going to take the lawyer from “Amnesty Global” out back and use him and the Secretary of Defense’s gay son for target practice.

Should be obvious by now; there comes a moment in every semester when my gym routine falls away, I catch the flu, and I turn into an insecure bitch. Or I reveal the insecure bitch, depending on your level of optimism. I’m burnt out, I’m sick of workshop, sick of turning in first drafts, sick of being critiqued. I feel like everything’s about six inches away from my face, and of the millions of words I’ve consumed in the last two years, my current favorite is retreat.

At one point in Proust’s Swann’s Way, the character M. Legrandin corners little Marcel and says, “I have every useless thing in the world in my house there. The only thing wanting is the necessary thing, a great patch of open blue sky like this. Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life, little boy. You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist’s nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.”

The great thing about books is that you can always find what you need in them; no matter what you want, there’s something in there that’ll fit.

I got my carrot on a stick, though. Columbia sent me an email last week, asking if I would be renewing my lease at the end of May. I wrote back, “no.”

Thanksgiving in Palm Springs, again: dinner at my father’s friends’ house on the edge of town. Outside, a rented table and chairs near the pool which was lit with colored lights. Over the fence, the mountains in the distance. Twenty, twenty-five people, family and friends. After dinner the straight people went inside to watch the game on the big flat screen hung over the fireplace. Seven gay men, myself included, stuck it out by the pool. The sun slipped behind the mountains, and Terry found fleece jackets for us as the desert air turned cool. Three couples, all in their forties and fifties and sixties, and me. Someone told a story of a road trip that two of the couples had taken together last year, on which they played a card game fashioned after Truth or Dare: how many sexual partners have you had?

“Um, twenty,” Steve had said.

“Fifty?” said Craig, thinking back.

Allen cleared his throat. “A thousand.”

All heads turned. Peter, Allen’s partner, was driving, and the car drifted towards the shoulder. “Excuse me?”

By the pool, in Palm Springs, everyone began offering, again, their own sexual mathematics. I looked over at my father, who hadn’t been on the road trip. He looked back, and at the same moment we said, “I don’t want to know.”

Over those three days I interviewed him and his partner on tape, five hours total. Later, after dinner, we headed to the movie theater for Capote, which I had just seen in New York. Half-way through, around the time that Capote decides to sell his interview subjects down river for the sake of art, for the sake of his book, I glanced over at my father and his partner and thought, “Why the fuck, of all the movies open, did I bring them here?”

As we’re leaving the theater his partner turned to us and said, of Truman, “What a piece of shit.”

///

Christmas in Indiana. The hotel room was about twice the size of my apartment.

My grandmother is now 88 and weighs 82 pounds. Sitting together in the living room, I ask her what kind of kid my father was. She thinks for a moment. “You know how he has a bit of wander-lust?” I nod. “Well it started early. He wandered away so many times that we finally put a harness on him, and tied him to the clothesline in the backyard.” Later, going through some photo albums, we find one of him, three years old, sitting on the grass in the backyard of their home in Gas City, Indiana. Over his t-shirt he wears a harness, and a leash trails off behind him. “That didn’t last long,” she said. “He took his clothes off, came around to the front door, and asked me if I had any cookies.”

Among the photo albums is a stack of papers: someone had done our family tree; it went back into the 1800′s. This is how I come to find that I am related, distantly, to homesteaders, and to people named Jimmy and Beulah Lee Turnipseed.

///

The last six weeks of the semester I became obsessed with San Francisco. Images interrupted my day, certain views I knew well: the Marin headlands across the Golden Gate Bridge, the houses on the hills from my bedroom window, the Castro Theater marquee from the museum parking lot at the end of my street. I daydreamed about my old car, my foot on the accelerator, driving somewhere, anywhere on my own volition, somewhere out of the city, surrounded by the colors green and blue, mist, air smelling of sea. Walking down sidewalks that I shared with a couple dozen people, rather than a couple of thousand. And light: through my bedroom window, through the skylights of Gold’s Gym. I dreamed about space, and light, and the sight of green things blooming all year. I pulled on my parka and slipped into the crowds on Broadway, and remembered the sound of fog dripping from the eucalyptus trees on my old block.

I began to feel like an animal in a zoo, and spent most of my time in my apartment, just recovering from the onslaught of New York. Everyone knows this is a hard city. And people who live here strike that bargain because they get something back from the things the city offers. I began to realize that I didn’t really care so much about those things. I didn’t want to go out to bars and clubs and cool restaurants all the time. I like the museums and plays, and the readings. I saw Joan Didion read twice here. But neither meant as much to me as the book she had written. And what did it matter where I read it? What if, at heart, I’m one of those people who say it’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there…

I’ve been struggling here since day one. Struggling to stay on top of everything, struggling with my depression, struggling to find some kind of balance. I know that grad school is part of the problem, and most of my friends here have said that if I just waited till after school ended, and maybe moved downtown someplace, then I would really come to love New York.

I try to imagine an ideal New York life, with an amazing apartment in a great part of town, with enough money to take part in everything, but it still doesn’t solve the essential problems for me of living here: having to share the sidewalks and the subways with millions and millions of people, all of us in each other’s way. Weather (gross summers, cold winters) that drives you inside for much of the year. The difficulty of getting out of town without some major planning.

After Christmas Bearbait picked me up from the airport in San Francisco, and dropped me off on my little dead-end street on the hill. And when I stood on the sidewalk outside my old apartment, all I could hear was the wind through the trees, and I breathed in the smell of damp eucalyptus leaves, and that moment mattered more to me than just about anything I’d done in New York.

I can have that apartment back. My ex, who took over my room, isn’t getting along so well with my old roommate, and told me he’s ready to move on. The roommate misses me. And I saw that I had a one-of-a-kind deal there: a great big apartment on the side of a hill, on a quiet street that always has parking, surrounded by trees, with views from all three floors of the houses on the hills above the Castro, for only five hundred bucks a month, far far less than what I am paying for my dark little studio here in Manhattan.

And though it stormed the entire week I was home, I didn’t care. I sat in the living room looking out at that view, the rain falling across the hills. It took me moving to New York to understand how important a certain balance of city and nature was to me. I never would have thought of myself as a nature boy, but so be it. I loved living in a city where I could hop in my car, and within an hour be at Mount Tam, the Marin headlands, Stinson Beach.

Even with men, I realized that I was becoming more attracted to guys who had some ability to survive out in the wilderness, rather than men who knew the hottest drag queens on the Lower East Side. I don’t really care where you bought your couch, but if you can read a compass, you’re a hottie.

There are less than 800,000 people in the city of San Francisco, a small fraction of New York’s population. And for the first time I saw this as a tremendous asset. I had breathing room, empty spaces, quiet sidewalks, sleepy, foggy streets to drive home with the windshield wipers on low.

I’ve had friends argue that one can live in New York and vacation in these quieter places to recover. I’d rather do the opposite: live in a quieter place, and visit the more rambunctious places.

I would sacrifice some things by leaving New York: some valuable friendships; a greater, truer diversity; an incredible cultural vibrancy. Most of all I could lose out on some professional contacts. But I’ve made a few already, the internet has come a long ways in helping writers stay connected, and though there may be more opportunities for writers, there are also a hell of a lot more writers here competing for them. I’m not convinced that I need to live here to make it as a writer. Most writers, after all, don’t live in New York. I’m going to have to work a little harder to make those connections from San Francisco. But at least I’d have the energy to do so, rather than spending my days recovering.

Most important is the sense of family I have with my friends in SF. One night, Bearbait and Joe the Barber and I were walking down Polk Street when we came across an intersection blocked off, fire engines surrounding an old fish and chips restaurant on fire. Thick black clouds of smoke billowed out into the night. Flames licked up through the windows. We stood with the crowds on the sidewalk, watching the firemen work. Joe bought a slice of pizza and the three of us leaned against a building and watched another burn.

One afternoon Jeff and I took the ferry over to Tiburon and found a coffee shop. I sipped my hot chocolate and pointed out the window behind him at Angel Island, which was wreathed with a low cloud of fog. “I know this is cheesy,” I said, “but that image right there is feeding my soul, dude.” Of course what I neglected to say was that his company was doing the same. Even later that week, after he’d had his accident, I had the same feeling sitting in his hospital room. Good conversation, comfort, none of us having to rush off on neurotic errands. Of course he couldn’t rush off, since he had a couple of cracked ribs and was tied to a few pieces of medical equipment, and I didn’t need to rush off because I was on vacation, and maybe everything I’m saying here is an elaborate justification of a decision I’ve already made. But that’s how I work. I have to justify it to myself first.

Even the Ex and I had fun. Nearly five years apart, we’ve reached a point where we still know exactly how to make each other laugh, but without having to put up with each other’s ugly boyfriend characteristics.

And Louie. If I moved back to SF, the Dogpoet could have his dog again.

Naturally I’ve been mulling this decision over and over and over, and burdening my friends with long monologues about the advantages and disadvantages of each city. A guy who reads my blog, in a stunningly generous move, sent me an email that contained a few dozen quotes pulled directly from my blog, all concerning New York and San Francisco, and my feelings about both. There, in black and white, was the writing on the wall. “Notice here,” the reader pointed out, “that you say you love New York on the days you don’t hate it. I’m wondering if you’ve ever said that you hated San Francisco. I couldn’t find anything on your blog.” He couldn’t find it, because I never wrote it.

I have no regrets. I wanted to come to Columbia to become a better writer, and I wanted to move to New York to see if I could live here, and I’ve succeeded on both counts. I’m a better writer, and I’ve seen first hand that New York is not for me. It’s such a relief to finally realize that I don’t have to somehow “live up” to New York, that I am happier in a smaller, backwater kind of city, and that this preference is something I like about myself. And isn’t it rough, to have to make this kind of decision? Yeah, I know you really feel sorry for me.

“You can’t go back again,” someone told me. But I’m not trying to recapture something I once had so much as putting myself in the place from which I want to go forward. I can move back this summer, and finish my thesis in my apartment on the hill, the view through the window, Louie curled at my feet. And maybe, with a little bit of balance, and a little more humor, I could stop writing such amazingly self-absorbed posts like this one, and actually engage with the world a little more.

New York hasn’t been an entirely negative experience. In San Francisco I got my hair cut by Joe at his barbershop. Joe lived in New York for quite a few years, and he works with a certain hunky barber who grew up in Brooklyn. This hunky barber has a hot, tough exterior, but I’ve always suspected that there’s something else underneath. I asked him how he was doing, and if he was dating anybody. “Nope,” he said.

“If I moved back to San Francisco, would you let me take you out on a date?” I asked.

He paused for a second or two, then launched into this long speech about the different kinds of dates in the gay world: the coffee date, which could be just between friends, the sex date (self-explanatory), and the date-date, which would be dinner and a movie with the possibility but not the guarantee of sex. There were a few other types as well, but I interrupted him.

“Dude, just tell me what the fuck I should ask you when I move back.”

I’d never seen him speechless before. He may have actually blushed. “A date-date,” he said, quietly.

“Alright,” I said. “But just so you know, I don’t put out on the first date-date.”

He nodded. “That’s fine.”

Joe caught my eye in the mirror and patted my shoulder. “New York’s been good for you,” he said.

One Year in New York

Well kids, today’s the anniversary. I’m too sentimental to let it slide without comment, and too tired to do it justice. How about a list? Everybody loves a list.

Read about three books a week during the school year.

Let a bitch in my fall workshop work my every last nerve.

Wrote about it later.

Wrote the first fifty pages of my memoir.

Rented an absurdly large number of dvd’s over summer break.

Read maybe two books.

Grew much more conscious of my physical appearance and clothing, producing more confusion than results.

Eventually grew to understand that grocery shopping in New York is not about driving to Safeway once a week, but requires daily trips to about three different stores in my hood: One for meats, one for produce, and one for chocolate sorbet.

Bought raspberries from a sidewalk vendor around the corner at midnight.

Became slightly more aggressive about putting myself out on the dating market. Grr.

Fell in love every two blocks with some straight boy. At least the ones who hadn’t started plucking their goddamned eyebrows.

Realized that wasn’t getting me anywhere.

Went to a gay bachelor party and a gay wedding. Stayed out till nearly five a.m. both nights.

Accepted after much kicking and screaming that one has much less personal space in New York.

Felt constantly overwhelmed by the embarrassment of riches the city has given me through new friends. Flaked out on hundreds of phone calls and emails, trying to figure out how to be an introvert in New York.

Realized that New York is the ideal city for introverts.

iPods help.

Accepted the inevitability of everyone reading over everyone else’s shoulders on the subway.

Discovered that the subway was the only place I was ever going to keep up with my New Yorker subscription.

Realized that a New Yorker’s most important possession is a decent apartment.

Spent an amazing amount of time in said apartment, frequently described by visitors as “cozy.”

Lived without a pet for the first time in ten years.

Became all-too-familiar with the comings and goings of Little Miss Slammy Slammerstein across the hall.

Lived through four seasons for the first time in seven years. Bought a parka. And later, some shorts.

Became a much better writer.

After I wrote that last sentence I spent about thirty minutes attaching all kinds of qualifiers and defensive clauses to it, anticipating those who’d argue otherwise. But ultimately it doesn’t matter. I know it, that’s what counts.

Moving to New York was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Getting sober and watching my mother die were the others, and quite honestly I’m not sure which one takes the cake. There were so many moments, especially in the beginning, when I didn’t think I was going to make it, moments where I still don’t think I’ll make it. I whined a lot this year. At school I grew cranky because I wasn’t twenty-five anymore, till I realized that the twenty-five year olds didn’t have much to write about. In Chelsea I got sick of hearing about everyone’s half-shares on Fire Island, but only because I’d never been invited. “New York has more snobs per capita than any other city,” I told friends back in California, “and the gay boys are all legends in their own minds.”

But it takes one to know one.

I made the rather humbling discovery this summer that the most important weapon I have in the New York battle is my gym membership. Endorphins, vanity, who the fuck cares? I don’t whine after the gym.

I miss my friends in San Francisco so much some days it hurts. I miss day trips to the Marin headlands and beer busts at the Eagle. I miss Joe’s Barbershop. I miss Peet’s Coffee and Trader Joe’s.

I only realized after I moved away how much Wade aka Bearbait saved my life.

New Yorkers have ambition. San Franciscans have, arguably, a better quality of life. There may be, as someone once told me, something “lotus-eater-y” about SF, but it makes for ripe daydreams. I’m still stuck between the two.

New York has more artists, and they’re the best kind of peer pressure. New York has the fall. On Sundays I can walk two blocks to Riverside Park and sit on a bench under the golden leaves and call friends back in Cali. At midnight I can get raspberries from a street vendor around the corner and on the nights I don’t he’ll still smile at me. At one a.m. I can get sorbet. I can hear Joan Didion read at the 92nd Street Y. I can get tickets to “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

I can walk towards the 23rd St station in Chelsea, carrying a carton of Chinese leftovers, and a boy with big arms in the window of Better Burger will smile at me and everything’s okay in la vida dogpoet.

I guess that’s my way of saying that I love New York, on the days I don’t hate it, and that I’m not leaving anytime soon. And if I ever do it will be on my own stubborn, pig-headed terms.

After six movies I’m still a little fuzzy on the whole Dark Side of the Force thing. From what I can tell, it allows bitter old men in last-season hooded cloaks to shoot blue lighting from their fingertips. Which, admittedly, is somewhat alluring. But it hardly accounts for all of the fuss, much less the money I’ve wasted on tickets to Loews Cineplex. Maybe I wish we were still back in the day, when Han Solo and Princess Leia squabbled on the tarnished deck of the Millenium Falcon, displaying some of the personality that the franchise abandoned in a galaxy far, far away.

Lately I’ve been fixated on my own dark side, which lost some of its bite when I got sober. When one no longer passes out from too much GHB at the Pleasuredome on a crowded Labor Day weekend, waking up in the arms of a security woman in a cowboy hat who dragged one out the back door into the alley, well…after that one’s dark side is a little less dramatic.

When I was fifteen my shrink recommended that I try anti-depressants. He and my parents left the decision up to me. This was the eighties, when the pills had a greater stigma, and I declined, wanting to prove myself self-reliant. I try not to harbor regrets, but sometimes I wonder how my life might have turned out had I taken him up on his offer. Dogpoet’s darkside is a fairly simple, if unrelenting, depression. I’ve learned, through much trial and error over the past five years, that I can win temporary reprieve through a combination of conversation, medication, and kicking ass on the treadmill. In my better moments I accept it as a chronic condition, and that compared with some people’s problems it’s a minor one.

But it’s a daily struggle. The stakes rose when I left the comforts of San Francisco for New York, intensified during the school year, and blindsided me when classes let out. I realized, with growing frustration, that my usual efforts were no longer working. My natural aversion to the telephone grew into a phobia, cutting me off from friends and family. Emails piled up. The voices of self-doubt multiplied into a Greek chorus, a cacophony with one common goal: assuring me that I had nothing to contribute to the world. I shut down, withdrew, rented entire seasons of stupid television shows and tried to pretend that I could make a pint of Chubby Hubby last two days. My dark side does not resemble Darth Vader so much as Jabba the Hut, lolling in squalid depravity. Jabba, however, took pleasure in his condition. Maybe (he says, taking a thin metaphor and running for the hills) my dark side looks more like Han Solo at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, dipped into liquid ice, helpless, his smirk frozen hard.

Like a tetherball spinning around a pole, its path diminishing with each revolution, my dark thoughts grow circumscribed till I’m all I can think about, convinced that I’m hopeless, my self-pity complete.

I’ve had a few years to reflect on my depression. To wonder at its origin, its shape. Is it a simple matter of brain chemicals, or do I play an active part in its propagation? Am I paying for the damage done by ecstasy and crystal meth? Or could I, as some sadists suggest, choose to be happy? Sometimes I’ve believed them, and sometimes I’ve believed that sustained happiness is a myth, that our natural condition is one of dissatisfaction and yearning, and that’s why we either create or consume (or both). “As sleep is necessary to our physiology”, wrote Janet Malcom in her book on Sylvia Plath, “depression seems necessary to our psychic economy.” Maybe I adopted this strategy as a child, and it’s now a question of repetition and routine. I come back to the familiar.

Fortunately I’ve joined Tom Cruise and the Scientologists, and am curing myself with massive amounts of Vitamin E. I don’t know what causes it. Mid-June I crawled to the doc, who upped my dosage. I hit the treadmill daily, interval training till my sweat flew. I got out of town, saw some family and friends. I came back, caught the F train to Coney Island, rode the Cyclone, and took some pictures. I smacked the ball in the other direction, and wanted to say hello.