I snapped a dozen pics of the rather dumpy house in one of San Francisco’s most far-flung neighborhoods when I told our realtor Matt, “It kind of smells like old people.”

It was a Saturday afternoon, and the pics were for the Manly Fireplug, who was working at the shop, and the house was the first stop on our first tour.  We moved to the window of the back bedroom, and Matt pointed out at something in the overgrown yard.

“It comes with its own boat,” he said. A decrepit rowboat had been propped against the sagging fence, half-hidden by weeds.

“Architectural salvage,” I said, “People pay extra for that.” Then I wandered into the pink-tiled bathroom (a vast number of the city’s bathrooms, according to real estate photos, are entirely tiled in pink) and snapped a pic of the cracked toilet basin. Then I followed Matt back down the stairs, and he pointed at a sign hanging on the back of the front door.

“Both hearing aids,” he said. I snapped the last pic of the house, feeling a little guilty about my earlier “old-people” crack. Ms. Martha had lived here, maybe most of her life. Maybe she’d died here, too.

Back in the car Matt kept asking me what I wanted in a home. Location? A garden? A stripper pole in the living room? I told him that after my husband and dogs, nothing was more important to me than my home, but then I found myself stuttering nervously that I…well…I kind of like a place that’s a retreat from the world, if that makes sense?

Truth was, I was scared shitless. Our first application for a preapproved mortgage had been turned down, due to the fact that I’d taken time off for grad school and to work on my book, and though our second application was supposedly “looking good,” nothing yet was certain, and I felt hesitant about this open house tour, and of real estate in general. I’m a writer with one 98%-finished book living in San Francisco, hardly the Danielle Steele of every banker’s dreams.

We spent the rest of the tour driving around the Outer Sunset, one of the few neighborhoods in the city we might possibly afford. I snapped pics of fake-wood paneling, tandem garages, and asbestos tiles. I snapped pics of illegal basement in-law units, and grimy bathrooms straight out of Folsom Prison. I snapped pics of a 12-room house carpeted entirely in, yes, pink.

But I also snapped pics of polished hardwood floors, Wedgewood stoves, and a back yard with cypress trees and a view of the Marin Headlands. We wandered through empty houses, and houses where the owners scrambled to make the beds in the next room. We wandered past a 12-year-old girl, oblivious to us, video-chatting with friends on a laptop at the kitchen table. We wandered through houses where it seemed nobody had ever lived, tastefully staged within an inch of their lives.

I felt the nervous, competitive energy of a house crammed full of prospective buyers – young couples and Chinese families, and more than a few start-up types – all of us pretending not to see each other as we tried to picture the living room in a different color.

After five or six houses I felt giddy and exhausted, a headache gnawing at the edges of my vision. “You have an interesting job,” I told Matt. “You see everyone at their absolute most stressed, teetering at the edge of sanity.”

The next day we got word that our loan application had been preapproved,  and the thing I thought couldn’t happen was now possible. Or near-possible. I felt superstitious and unrelieved.

“I’m getting an ulcer,” I told the Fireplug, who had been through real estate insanity in New York and San Francisco, and who, let’s face it, was the more stable, profitable, loan-worthy of the two of us.

“This is nothing,” he said. “Remember what I said. Roller-coaster.”

And I’ve flown off the tracks, full-out OCDing on real estate sites, my already-fractured attention span splintering atomically, unable to focus on anything else. I am writing this partly to distract myself from the fact that Matt is right this moment touring the house that has reached the top of our list, a house we’ve only seen in professionally-staged online photo galleries,  in another far-flung neighborhood, a house I want to believe is solid, a house we can both picture living in together, getting older and more crotchety, needing at first one, then two hearing aids, hanging notes on doors to remind ourselves of all the things we’d otherwise forget.

A while back the Manly Fireplug and I drove around the Twin Cities for a few hours, looking at all the houses where I’d spent my youth. Having finished my MFA thesis, which formed only the first two-thirds of my actual book, I’d turned our trip into a research expedition.

If you’ve hung around here for any length of time, you know I’m writing about my family, who’ve been awfully charitable about the whole thing considering that everybody (including me) comes out of the story looking like, well, singular pieces of work.

Quick review of the basics:

• Parents separate when I’m ten and my brother five
• Parents both come out of the closet when I’m eleven
• Parents divorce and begin adventures in same-sex dating
• Parents both end up with long-term partners who were also previously married, with kids
• I come out at college, as far from my family as possible
• My brother, poor dude, turns out straight

So I did a lot of packing and unpacking, of boxes, suitcases, and duffel bags, in the midst of a complicated joint custody schedule. My brother and I lugged a lot of bags onto a lot of buses, and were forever leaving things at the wrong house.

So there were a few houses for the Fireplug and I to cruise past in our rented Sebring. Ten or twelve or more, I’ve lost track. But during the tour the Fireplug turned quiet. Silence is an unnatural state for him, so of course I asked if he was okay.

“My stomach hurts,” he said. It took us a while to figure out that he was stressed. He’d spent his entire childhood in one house, the house where his mother still lives, and our day-long tour was getting to him.

Ever since college I’ve had a deep, primal longing for a home. It doesn’t need to be big. I just want one. And only one. I like having all my stuff in one place. I don’t rent storage lockers. Whenever I have to move I unpack everything (and I mean everything) within 24 hours. I hate clutter, and my idea of hell is a bad roommate.

Seems like no matter how much we grow up, it’s the childhood stuff that sticks. So the five years that I’ve spent going back and forth between the Fireplug’s house and my apartment, bags in hand, have been challenging to my nesting OCD. Part of being an adult, however, is accepting life on its own terms, and San Francisco real estate is its own reality.

Following our wedding in New York (and our domestic partnership in California), we’d barely dipped a toe in the tepid waters of possible home ownership when a realtor friend called and said a family was interested in looking at the house the Fireplug shares with his roommate, a house which wasn’t even listed. A pocket listing, he called it. (A lifelong renter, I am mystified by the entire home ownership process, including terminology.)

The same realtor friend had just emailed us a photo of a cute little bungalow near Stern Grove with the subject line, “Your Next House.” Looking at the photo, we had to hand it to him, he was good. We weren’t so delusional as to assume that we’d end up in the cute little bungalow, but it seemed unwise in today’s market to turn down the family’s request.

My head that week filled with fantasies of a cute bungalow, with my husband and our dogs, and my duffel bags tucked away on a back shelf of a back closet. The Fireplug, who’s been through the process more than once,  kept cautioning me, telling me to expect an emotional roller coaster ride, with no certain outcome, and that I’d have plenty of opportunities to work on one of my, um, less noticeable traits: patience.

“We haven’t even applied for a mortgage yet,” he said. I tried not to pout in response.

When the realtor arrived with the family, the Fireplug’s roommate and I ducked out through the garage with the dogs. We drifted up and down the block three times waiting for the family to leave, the dogs giving us curious looks, and it was weird to look through the picture window at the strangers wandering through the living room, assessing the place that I couldn’t quite call home, but where I’d spent so many hours. I felt territorial.

The roommate had done his best to de-gay the house of its most egregious belongings, especially since the family of strangers included a grandmother, but you can’t catch everything. After the family left, the realtor told us that the grandmother had carefully examined the shirts hanging over the dryer and asked, “Who’s the sheriff?”

“Depends on which night,” I replied.

The realtor smiled. “I love my job.”

My father and I were strangers for most of my life. Our shared quiet exteriors hid contrasting temperaments. He was, and still is, the most practical man I’ve ever met. As for me, well, I wrote a lot of poetry as a kid, trusted dogs and kitty-cats more than people, and wound up in places like New York and San Francisco where I could barely afford the rent.

I was a gay dude with a gay father, and in our relationship at least, “father” weighed more heavily than “gay.” What I mean is that, like a lot of fathers and sons, we weren’t so skilled at talking to each other.

That began to change ten years ago after my mother’s death, and that change is a part of my book, and since I’m wary of giving away much of the book’s story on the blog, since I want the book to be fresh and full of new stuff for you to read, I won’t go into great detail.

But the years I’ve spent writing the book came with all kinds of obstacles and awkward moments, including the times I’d visit my father, as he struggled to understand why I was going so long without a real job and benefits and a 401k, working on something that might never make one single cent, and as I struggled to reframe the project in terms he might better understand:

“Hey Dad, it’s like, it’s like an investment! In my future. You know, with, like deferred benefits…”

But the benefits weren’t guaranteed. I could spend seven years working on a book that might still go unpublished, and my reframing explanation to my father worked about as well as you’d expect.

Don’t get me wrong. Most of the time we got along just fine, and when the Manly Fireplug came with me, he amped up the fun factor (as he tends to do) and I even one time, after years of second place, BEAT MY FATHER THE EDITOR AND ALL-TIME REIGNING FAMILY CHAMPION IN SCRABBLE. I tried not to gloat. Wait, I’m still totally gloating. Sorry, Dad.

But at some point during every visit we’d find ourselves alone, and he’d ask me about the book, and work, and money, and down the rabbit hole we’d go. I walked away from these talks frustrated and angry, convinced that he wanted me to be someone I didn’t want to be, with a different set of priorities and dreams, and though I won’t pretend to know how he felt after our talks, I doubt they were any easier on him.

Eventually, as I’ve told you here before, the money ran out, and I was forced to get a couple of jobs, and struggle, and feel broke since I was paying $500 a month in health insurance, and after a year the two jobs turned into three, one of which finally offered me benefits, and for the first time in a very long time I had money in my interest-bearing savings account, and dreams of a house with my husband.

And a new energy swept through me.

I found myself finally using my Mint iPhone app, categorizing my spending and planning monthly budgets. Every day while waiting for MUNI I’d check the balances of my linked accounts before opening my Kindle. Checking my balances turned out to be more fun when the sums went above the double-digits.

This led to me creating all sorts of spreadsheets and lists that I uploaded to Google Docs, where I sorted everything into collections. I don’t know if any of this will actually lead to greater productivity, but man do I feel organized.

This led to me taking ownership finally of my desk at the firm, no longer assuming I had one foot out the door, but instead committing myself to making the three jobs work, and I cleaned out the desk drawers of the last guy’s junk and set up a couple of framed pics of the Fireplug and our wedding, and blew half a can of compressed air into my keyboard (OMG GROSS!).

This led to me taking greater ownership of my second job, where I grabbed hold of the weekly conference call reins and created a brand new categorized agenda template, and got more done in two weeks than I had in the previous three months.

This led to me taking on more freelance clients for my third job, and having a lot of fun with invoices.

This led to me writing down all sorts of tax deduction questions to ask the tax preparer when the Fireplug and I meet (for the first time as a couple) next week to figure out how a domestic partnership (not to mention three jobs) will affect our returns.

This led to me cleaning out my desk at home. Which led to me cleaning out my closet and finally getting rid of clothes I hadn’t worn in two years and all the underwear I’ve been wearing that have been falling apart, since I now had money in an interest-bearing savings account and could spend some of it on underwear that the Fireplug agreed were worth the price, since they made me look, well, like that.

I can be a stubborn ass sometimes. I don’t always acknowledge other people’s influences on me. Dead writers, sure, but real live people? Don’t hold your breath.  But I’ll say this much: the Fireplug is also a practical man, more practical than me, and it has served him well, and it fills me with pride to walk into his shop on a Saturday afternoon and see every chair filled with waiting clients.

He’s a practical man who allowed me the space and time to work on my impractical dream of writing a book, and he allowed me to work on it without complaint until my circumstances changed and I could see for myself that I also had to change, to meet those circumstances. He let me get there at my own speed.

And though this burst of energized productivity, all aimed towards the larger goal of affording us a home together in a beautiful but prohibitive city, feels new, it also feels too thorough to lay entirely at his feet, as much as I love the guy.

Every parent echoes within his child. There was a practical man lurking within me, all this time.

I took this photo in Palm Springs, from the passenger seat of a borrowed car, on the Fireplug’s birthday, as he drove us downtown to meet my gay dads for a birthday lunch at Tyler’s. I like this shot because I remember how I felt, full of this new energy and hope, a feeling that had spilled out and colored other feelings, like my love for the man beside me, which felt like it had expanded in recent days.

And when we met them for lunch I told my father about my three jobs, and the benefits, and the money in the bank, affecting a nonchalance, since I didn’t want to appear, at the age of forty, like a man in need of his father’s approval.

And I could see the change in his eyes as I told him the news, and he smiled broadly and reached out and patted me on the shoulder. We had never been a physically affectionate family, and I’m telling you this so you can feel the full weight of his gesture.

At the end of the meal I slyly handed my new debit card to the waiter.

“Cash only,” he whispered. I blushed, for I had none.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” my father said. “It’s his birthday. Our treat.” He reached for the check, and I let him take it.

Writers are wallflowers. A sweeping generalization, and one that can’t possibly describe all writers, but in my limited experience the more extroverted exceptions to this rule know that they are exceptions.

We don’t quite sit right with life, filled with what Martha Graham called the “queer divine dissatisfaction,” which compels us to spend an inordinate number of hours each week either creating things for little or no pay, or feeling like crap because we haven’t done so. And since it makes my skin crawl to speak for other people, I’m going to stop. For now.

My little run-in last week with the porn industry, after a few more days of reflection, seems to fit a familiar pattern, one it took me well into my 30’s to discern. Although I’m hardwired to lurk on the edges of life, taking it all in, I’ve always had the conflicting desire to stop observing and just experience life. An internal battle between wallflower and prom queen, if you will.

Underneath, or within these two desires was another one, which seems obviously related to growing up as a scrawny little gay dude. I wanted to prove myself as a man. What this has to do with prom queens, I don’t know. I’m sort of making this up as I go along, people.

These motives pulled me in a few directions over the years:

1. Theater actor. Someone who walks around on a stage pretending to be someone else while other people watch. And applaud. In this job I pretended to be, depending on the role, more naive, more salacious, and more heterosexual than I really am. You get to be other people, without serious consequence, which explains why a lot of introverts take on this job. I have a feeling Meryl Streep is the type who needs a little alone time every day. And she still gets to be Margaret Thatcher. Let’s be clear: by pretending to be other people I felt more like a participant in life, but the urge to prove my manhood wasn’t assuaged by joining the drama club.

2. UPS Unloader, one summer in college. I heard somewhere that in the world of manual labor, this job was considered the toughest. From 10 pm until 2 am at breakneck speed I unloaded boxes from semitrailers onto a very fast conveyor belt. I came home each morning ravenous, covered in dust and dried sweat and bruises, like a guy in a Chevy truck commercial. Apparently I still did not prove what I wanted to prove (see #3)

3. Bicycle messenger. In Minnesota. In the winter.

4. Bartender. Shortly after moving to San Francisco at the age of 27, I stumbled into a South of Market leather-ish bar and watched with hunger and envy the shirtless bartenders sling drinks. Just standing there I could feel some of my Midwestern good-boy aura, which I was desperate to shed, rub off. I figured that getting hired at this particular bar would prove that I was hot in the way I wanted to be hot. I got hired, and though the external validation never sucked, I discovered that flirting for a few seconds with a long line of customers on a packed Saturday night depended upon an entirely different skill set than listening to two or three alcoholics complain for six hours on a Tuesday afternoon.

5. The boyfriend (now husband) of an International Mr. Leather. I will let your imagination fill in the details here, but let me state the obvious: this is a relationship, not a job. Still, attaching myself to a man with that kind of title, who has no qualms being the center of attention, seemed partly motivated by the same desires as above. Fortunately for me, after those desires faded a little, I found myself falling for the actual man.

6. D League Gay Softball Player. Hitting a ball with a stick in front of a bunch of people.

7. Blogger. The perfect job for the guy who wants to narrate his observations from the sidelines while courting attention. And I suppose over ten years I’ve proven something here, but it probably wasn’t my manhood.

8. Potential Porn Actor. You can see the pattern by now. And frankly I’m tired of talking about it, which means you probably got tired of it two weeks ago.

It took me a long time to understand that proving my manhood through external indicators like jobs doesn’t address the internal desire, which lingers long after you’ve punched the clock. I often forget this.

As for wanting to experience, and not just observe, the thing we call life…

I never believe people who say they have no regrets. (And if you leave a comment saying you’ve never once wanted to be a prom queen, even for a minute, no one else will believe you, either) I’m full of regrets. I’m a greedy man. I want to live, if only for a few minutes, and without consequence, every possible story. I want every road not taken.

But having regrets isn’t the same as being unhappy. I like my life, and the dude I’ve turned out to be. After seven years of writing a memoir, though, I keep thinking about the possibilities of fiction, where you can make shit up, and live more lives than the one you’ve been given.

Writing about gay porn is (excuse the pun, but I can’t help myself) harder than it looks. I landed the gig, writing scene recaps for a local studio, through my husband, who regularly cuts the heads of several hundred men and who often comes home bearing free tickets, baked goods, and the occasional job lead.

I don’t know what they do with the recaps. Probably use them in online marketing, to tell potential customers exactly who does what to whom in their flicks, though I’ve never asked and I’ve never checked their site for confirmation. Some of my writing I don’t feel a need to revisit.

It’s a challenging job due to the repetitive nature of porn scenes (“Insert Tab A into Actor B. Rinse and repeat.”) and because there are only so many words for parts of the male anatomy that are both:

1. Hot
2. Not silly

Think about it. You can come up with several dozen slang words for penis, yes, but how many of them don’t make you giggle? Porn depends upon, as the writer John Gardner once said about fiction, “a vivid and continuous dream.” Giggling breaks the dream, and deflates the mood.

While writing my first-ever recap, I turned to my copy of the Oxford Writer’s Thesaurus, which had cost me $30 and which (despite its contributions from writers I love like David Foster Wallace) I’d barely cracked. I paged through the “P’s” only to find no entry for “Penis.”

Cowards.

Over time I’ve settled on a small but trusted stable of terms that don’t make me break out in hives (tool, cock, shaft, piece, meat, etc.). I watch each film (movie? title? whatever) twice, taking notes then revising. Some actors appear in more than one film, and like every viewer I have my favorites. As you might imagine, I find it more challenging to write about the ones who don’t do it for me.

One of the guys that I don’t mind repeatedly watching in action goes to my gym, and we frequently end up in side-by-side squat racks on leg days. Like most local gays I am completely capable of affecting a jaded air of can’t-swing-a-dead-cat when it comes to porn stars. And yet.

I’ve written three recaps starring this guy, spending at least six hours in his virtual company, and though I’m well aware of how this will sound to you, more than once I’ve nodded at him as we paced back and forth between sets, expecting him to recognize me.

He regards me long enough to no doubt lump me in with other slack-jawed, secretly envious porn fans, until I finally break eye contact to salvage my pride. “But no,” I’ve actually thought to myself, “Dude, I’m different.  You and I – we’re in the same industry.”

Thankfully I’ve kept this line to myself.

I suppose it’s a regular event for all celebrities – some stranger tugging on their sleeve and whispering, “I feel like I know you.” But, well, I sort of do know him. Or rather a narrow version of the man in the next squat rack, well-lit and well-framed, engaged in very specific activities. I don’t know what he looks like when he wakes up in the morning, or when he visits his parents, or when he thinks nobody’s watching.

I recently came across a photo of him in the earliest days of his career, before he’d discovered facial hair and anabolic steroids, and it looked like the photo of an entirely different person, and now whenever I see him I am conscious of these bits of knowledge in my head and of the imbalance, since he knows nothing about me.

This month marks ten years of DOGPOET, a project I’ve sustained mostly through stubbornness. Once or twice a week some stranger will come up to me at the gym, or at a party, or at Café Flore, and mention this blog, and I find myself on the other side of that imbalance, and I usually blush because, for the moment at least, I feel naked. Sometimes I wonder about the people who don’t come up to me,  strangers wandering around out there who know little bits of my life. But then, why else did I start a blog?

That’s how it is for all of us. I glance across the gym at guys whose names I don’t know, but whose bed linens I’ve seen in their cruising site profile pics. I don’t know what that guy does for a living, but I know he’s circumcised. I know this other guy’s opinion on Sarah Palin from a comment he left on my friend’s Facebook post. I know that guy just got dumped by his boyfriend, and that other guy listens to an awful lot of Florence and the Machine.

We’re all walking around with small stray bits of knowledge of strangers with whom we’ve never even shared a meal. We’re all briefly naked, now and then, revealing carefully chosen parts of our lives. But no, that’s wrong. Nakedness implies a full reveal, and what we offer the world, online at least, are edited frames spliced from our lives, well-lit, and well-framed.

The online world’s been good to me, mostly, but I’d like to keep it in perspective. In the new year I hope to have a little less Facebook, and a little more flesh-and-blood. The hour-long face-to-face chats over dinner, or coffee, where the knowledge we accumulate is more evenly-balanced, and usually more revealing.

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.

Butchie is a judo target and t-shirt model for the Manly Fireplug’s barbershop, though he’s been guarding its basement now for several months. Just so we’re clear: he’s in the basement. I know he’s in the basement. Yet every time I go down to the basement he scares the crap out of me.

Butchie stoically presided over last night’s frenzied literary reading preparations, as I dusted off the folding chairs, iced the drinks, and searched for that damn corkscrew. An hour later, after the folding-chair-up-the-basement-steps bucket brigade (thank you volunteers and Fireplug!) I ducked outside to try and air out my damp shirt. I sweat a lot before every barbershop reading.

So I expect the sweat. But I didn’t expect the tears. Last night at the podium, in front of the capacity crowd, I got choked up reading a chapter about my father from the end of my book. Last year, at the Queer Arts Festival reading, I got choked up reading a chapter about my mom’s first girlfriend.

Both times took me by surprise, and embarrassed me. I find myself aspiring to a particular writerly image, the dude who reads, say, at the 92nd Street Y in New York, and sells just enough books to stay – with the help of the requisite side jobs – just above poverty.

That dude writes literature, which requires emotional distance from the subject matter. His work isn’t a barely-digested therapy session thrown on the page.

An emotional distance I thought I’d acquired. By now I’ve written nineteen drafts of my book, and have read through each draft at least ten, but more often twenty or thirty times, tweaking the stray word. I must have read the chapter on my mother’s first girlfriend, and the chapter on my father, at least fifty times each.

So the tears felt like the mark of an amateur, or worse, some kind of performance trick I was pulling on the audience. A schtick.

I used to be the kind of kid that others called sensitive. Code word for homo, maybe, but I’ll admit that I was ruled by my feelings.

In recent years I’ve tried to lean a little more often on my thoughts, if only to reach for a bit of balance, and to become a better writer. And in some cases my lack of emotion began to surprise me.

During those dreary few months when the Fireplug and I split up, for example, I seemed to only feel cold disappointment. I never cried.

But then one day I’m driving to work, listening to a Death Cab for Cutie album I’ve just downloaded, and the sad opening piano chords of their song, “Brothers on a Hotel Bed” throws a hook into the depths of me, and reels up tears. Tons of them. I spend the next few weeks driving around the city with that song on repeat, endangering countless San Franciscans with my blurred-vision driving.

Last week, as the Fireplug and I drove down to Palm Springs, listening to my iPod, up pops that song, and up come the tears. Again. Tons of them.

“Oh G-god,” I said. “I’m sorry, I f…forgot it was on this p…playlist!”

After we’d got back together I’d told him all about the song, so he knew what I meant.

“That’s okay,” he said, grabbing my hand.

“I don’t know why it still m-m-makes me cry. It’s st-st-stupid!”

“It’s not stupid,” he said. “We almost lost this.”

He was right, and really, the only stupid thing is to pretend like you’re someone you’re not. To jam yourself inside an image of a writer that doesn’t fit. We can’t all be Butchie.

So yeah, I cry, and maybe the only thing that’s changed since I was a kid is that I let my tears surprise me. I was embarrassed at first, last night, but then I got over it. Time’s wasting. I’ve got two last chapters to get right, and if I’m lucky, a slew of future readings at which I can freely bawl my eyes out.

I spent seven heavenly days crashing at a friend’s house (thanks Fred!) in Palm Springs with the Manly Fireplug. Sort of a combination honeymoon/sabbatical where I worked on my book – writing six hours a day – took a dip in the pool, then an evening with the hubby. World Gym, dinner, then a cigar in the hot tub. In this case sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. At least at first. It was a honeymoon, after all.

And a very hard honeymoon to leave for the real world again. Since then I’ve been back to the three jobs, interviewing for others, and trying to get the last 3% of the book finished so that I can send it off to a few agents.

If you’re in San Francisco and free tomorrow night, I’ll be reading at the Fireplug’s shop as part of Litquake. Decided I’ll share the What-Happened-When-My-Dad-Found-My-Blog chapter (new material in case you’ve heard me read other sections). Hurt feelings, D.C. snipers, a Banana Republic sales boy with a lopsided mullet, and much more…

A Little Off the Top, and Over the Top
Tuesday, October 11th
Doors open at 8:30 pm; show starts at 9:00 pm
free; $5-$10 suggested donation
Joe’s Barbershop
2150 Market St (between Church and Sanchez)

The other day I stood in the living room, punching buttons on the dvd remote control as my roommate wandered through. Together we watched as the big flat-screen TV filled with quick-edited shots of naked men – accompanied by the requisite throbbing pulse of a tribal soundtrack – engage each other in activities you’d never find on prime time television.

“You should keep a journal,” my roommate said. “To chronicle your life.”

“I hope you don’t mind,” I said. “But I can’t get this #%#$ review copy to work on my Playstation.” Nor would it work on either of my two laptops. I grunted and punched at the stupid buttons, my eyes bleary after a full day at the law firm, now faced with an absurdly short deadline for my second job, writing a series of 300-word scene recaps for a local gay porn company.

I don’t know what they do with the recaps. Throw them up on their website, I would imagine, giving prospective buyers a glimpse at who does what to whom in each particular movie. Which may sound like fun to some of you, but honestly, there are only so many words for certain parts of a man’s anatomy that are hot without sounding silly.

My roommate wandered off to his bedroom as I settled onto the couch with my laptop, trying to forget about the four newsletter articles due soon for my third job, a marketing-and-social-media gig. I began typing:  Shay Michaels and Lance Navarro swap spit in a dim-lit dungeon…

“How’s it feel being married now to the Manly Fireplug?” people kept asking me.

“Who?” I said.

Somewhere between job one and job two, as the Fireplug buzz-cut the evening barbershop crowd, I’d stumble outside with our three dogs, on three leashes, pulling at three speeds, wagging their tails and weaving in and out of each other’s paths in what I swore was a canine conspiracy of entanglement. As they pulled me along I calculated costs of weddings, health insurance, and real estate.

Who am I? What am I doing? How could I be working so many hours and making so little money? Yes, I had three jobs at a time when many had none. Still, I’m human, which is to say that within each hour of each day I’d dizzily swing between the poles of gratitude and self-pity.

At night in bed the Fireplug would wrap his meaty forearm around me and I’d try to slow my pulse, pondering Steve Jobs.

The man who’d just stepped down from Apple had been bouncing all over the news cycle echo chamber, and I’d clicked on a link and read a commencement speech he’d made, six years back, at Stanford University.

At first his words had moved me, words outlining the kind of philosophy you’d expect to hear at such ceremonies:

 Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

I believed in his words, and I felt lucky that I’d known for a very long time what it is that I love to do, even if I had yet to make a living from it.

But yesterday at the law firm I fielded a call from my car mechanic, who gave me, in an apologetic tone, some fairly bad news. And when I hung up I found myself blinking back tears.

I was not proud of this. I’m not proud of it now. But I felt tired and defeated and pissed at Steve Jobs, who’d exhorted a crowd of impressionable youth to live each day as if it were their last, and Joseph “Follow Your Bliss” Campbell, and every figure of inspiration whose quotes leave out the compromises we must make, one foot in bliss, one foot in life.

Which is not to say that I could give up what I love, with a 98% finished memoir that gets exponentially more wrenching to write with each page, and which has all but convinced me to turn next to fiction, where you can just make shit up, a 98% finished book waiting, like my new husband, for the scraps of between-job attention I can muster.

And I need the Steve Jobs and the Joseph Campbells and the Anna Quindlens of the world to remind me that it’s all possible.

Just as I need to know that I’m not alone in my one-foot-there, one-foot-not: that there are folks like Seymour Krim, who once wrote about “those who have yet to find the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls.”

I need to remember that life falls somewhere between dreams and compromises. That there are worse things than being tethered to competing claims on my time, pulled along in three different directions, at three different speeds.

Happy Birthday to Joe’s Barberhop!

I’m proud of you mister for making more than a business; you’ve built a neighborhood institution.

And thanks to all of the customers who’ve come through the doors in the last seven years. Because of you, we might someday get to buy a little real estate in San Francisco.

Hey, a guy can dream.