You can take me to your bedroom
You can take me to your heart
You can take me up to the hill
But I won’t fall apart
But don’t count on me givin’ it
All back to you
Just because I’m hooked on livin
Don’t mean I’m hooked on you

Sitting in my shrink’s waiting room on Monday I picked up the new Harper’s and turned to the index, which informed me that the new San Francisco mayor donated $500 to George W. Bush’s campaign. This sums up why I don’t like writing about politics. I’m too much of an idealist, and while I have a good grasp of human nature and can understand complexity and ambiguity in others, in politics I don’t have the same patience. I’m aware that Gavin Newsom probably had his ulterior motives for kicking off this man-on-man/woman-on-woman love parade here in San Francisco. But I preferred to focus on the risks he was taking, and what that said about him as a leader. But politics is, well, politics. Decisions are made and actions taken that serve so many hidden agendas and interests that an idealist like me, who prefers to keep things simple, gets a little overwhelmed and feels all naive and trod-upon and generally indignant at how politicians just can’t act like normal people for a change. I naively expect a Democrat to support other Democrats. And I expect my left-leaning Democratic senators to support equal rights for all citizens, rather than whine about it being too soon and all that crap. Yeah, I know that most Americans aren’t ready to accept gay marriage yet. There was a time when most Americans weren’t ready for civil rights, either.

The U.S. government routinely sets deliberate fires to selected wilderness areas to make room for new growth. This is called a “prescribed burn”, and it sums up my life lately. I’m only hoping that the new growth makes up for the third-degree burns.

A couple of times a week I climb on the elliptical machine at the gym for an hour of cardio. This guy who’s usually there at the same time called me the energizer bunny. The only thing that gets me through is my iPod. And yesterday I was listening to this house mix from 1998, which contains my absolute favorite transition from one song to another: as “Annihilate” thunders on towards its climax, you can hear the woman who sings “Music is the Answer” warming up in the background. The beat stutters, kicks in place, holding the song back for several seconds. And then it springs forward like an adrenaline rush, taking you over. And when it sprung forward I got all choked up, and my eyes got wet but I squeezed down, refusing to cry while doing cardio at the gym. All the fires can burn everything down, but I refuse to believe that my lot in life is one of sadness, that I will always lose the things I care about the most. I refuse to buy into that story. And so I don’t cry.

And the way that song builds up, the beats intensifying, as though someone’s winding up a toy car before placing it on the floor: that is how life has felt for longer than I care to remember; I’ve been winding up and winding up and holding a part of myself off for someone who’ll never turn in the claim ticket. And now I’m ready, fuckers, I’m all wound up, and I want to take off.

Yeah, it’s just one long episode of Oprah around here. Next I’ll be using words like “processing my feelings”.

I made an appointment with a local tattoo artist for the end of March. I’ve been wanting to do an embellishment/cover-up of a tattoo I’ve had for over ten years. I decided it was time to forge ahead, and I found a local woman whose work is exquisite, which explains why I have to wait a month for the appointment. But that gives me time to make sure I’m getting what I want, and to fine-tune the details. I stopped into her shop over the weekend to look at her books and there was a nice vibe in there. Women can be so much cooler than men.

Spent much of the past week trying to teach myself Photoshop and Dreamweaver, in an effort to get a little more self-reliant around here. I’m using the “..for Dummies” series of books because, well, the shoe fits. Learning these two programs and their attendant vocabularies is like learning two foreign languages and knowing that they will both be extinct in a couple of years. It’s pretty cool tinkering around and creating new funky images, but I doubt I’ll ever become a web designer. It’s too time-consuming, and my writing is feeling neglected.

I rented lucky number 7 cabin down in Big Sur for this coming weekend. Going for a solo trip, two nights, my first time there. It’s time to start doing things instead of just talking about them.

Friday night I had dinner with Brian and Bearbait in the Castro. Afterwards I parted company with them for my weekly bookshop visit. On the way back to the car I passed this hunky bearded guy who was saying good-bye to some friends on the sidewalk before turning in the same direction I was headed. He had a new pair of construction boots on and one of them was squeaking a bit. I could tell by his footsteps that he was about to pass me. He pulled nearly even with me, then turned into the new Superstar Video store.

Brian has pointed out that I should stop whining, because I get cruised all the time but I never cruise back. So I actually turned around at the same time that the hunky bearded guy did, and I smiled at him which was about as brave as I could get. I turned around and I kept walking. And I hoped that I might hear that squeak again behind me.

And I did. My heart kicked up its pace as the squeak closed in, increasing in frequency and volume and in about five seconds he’d catch up with me and he’d say something that would make me smile, but in those five seconds I thought about how my butt looked in those jeans and I thought about the dinner I ate and the gum I didn’t have. I thought about how your movements change when you know you’re being watched, and I thought about the sparkle of the new sidewalk outside Superstar. I thought about the stories we buy into and the risks we never take. I thought about the smell of stale beer coming from the Pendulum, and how San Francisco men are such flakes and if men on the East Coast are the same way. And how it doesn’t matter since there’s so many other things to do now. And how a friend who had his own heart broken told me afterwards I want to hire someone to beat the shit out of me so that my outsides match my insides. And how my barber and his boyfriend want to introduce me to their whip collection, and how I want to and don’t want to. And I wondered what he was going to say when he caught up with me and if it would even matter.

And it did and it didn’t. And later as I drove up 17th Street I opened the windows and let the cool air in. And the song was quiet and it was Friday night and I was all wound up and set down, the streetlights tracing patterns on my windshield. And I thought about the things you can predict, and the things you’ll never figure out.

Not long ago I was at a restaurant with a friend of mine when he interrupted our conversation. “My mother would never let you eat at our dinner table. Not with the way you hold your silverware.” I stopped mid-bite and looked at him. He was only half-joking. I knew that his mother was a former Miss Rochester, New York. Undoubtedly she’d place high premium on decent table manners. It’s true – I held my fork like a barbarian, but nobody had ever commented on this.

“How are you supposed to hold it?” I asked. He demonstrated by lifting the fork to his mouth, his palm facing upwards. I mimicked him a few times. “Like this?” He nodded. My fingers looked graceful resting against the handle, though it felt awkward.

Later that week I had dinner with Bearbait. “Have you ever noticed the way I hold my fork?” I asked. He nodded, his eyes downcast as though he had always been ashamed to tell me. “Gee, thanks for telling me,” I said.

I hold my pen the “wrong way”, as well; my fingers scrunched down around the tip. My hand cramps easily, which is why I prefer the computer. But it’s too late; I’m not changing the way I write.

Following that dinner, however, I started holding my fork the right way, palm facing upwards, my fingers cradling it rather than wrapped around it like a four-year old’s fist.

A couple of weeks ago I brought a couple of pairs of jeans into Lee Loy Cleaners on 18th St in the Castro. One pair’s zipper was broken. The other pair’s zipper would never stay closed, always sliding open as I walked around, which meant I spent the entire day doing little zipper checks, pressing my fingertip against the zipper like a nervous tic. The man at the counter took this latter pair and played around a bit with the zipper, then showed me that, in fact, the jeans were fine. He zipped them up and then turned the tab back downwards, pointing towards the ground. He showed me that there was a little groove on the back of the tab that locked with the zipper. All I had to do was turn the tab downwards after zipping up. He handed the pair back and gave me a claim ticket for the other pair. “Thursday?” he said.

“Sure.” I said, grateful not only for his generosity (he could have taken both pairs and made a little more money replacing each zipper) but excited from learning one of those little facts of life that you can go 32 years without knowing.

“Yeah, you didn’t know that?” my friend asked as I joined him outside on the sidewalk.

“No.”

He admitted he had done wardrobe for his college theater department. Later that week I asked two other friends and neither knew the zipper trick, which made me feel better.

In each circumstance, especially with the silverware, I had initially felt that old insecurity of being somehow less equipped to deal with the world than most others. How come my parents never taught me how to hold a fork, I wondered. It was a knee-jerk reaction; reducing me instantly to the scrawny twelve-year old who only owned one Ocean Pacific hooded sweatshirt and who could never get his permission slips signed on time.

Over the last few years I’ve had to confront and manage many activities that I knew nothing about. Paying taxes. Renting an apartment. Buying a car. Activities that nearly paralyzed me with fear. Maybe everyone feels this way the first time they take on such challenges. But I’ve always suspected that other people’s parents held their hands through the initial stages, and it’s this suspicion that has fueled my twelve-year old self’s resentment at always being different, less able to move through this world as though he had the right to occupy it.

When I was writing my grad school admissions essays, I mentioned my love of learning for its own sake. I invoked feelings of passion, of “waking up” from the stupor that envelopes me working at a job I dislike. I spoke of classrooms and lecture halls as places that energize me. Which is true, for the most part.

But learning, true learning, can be painful. How could it be otherwise, waking up to the fact that what you thought you knew doesn’t work anymore? Whether it’s learning how to hold my fork or how to stop using crystal meth, each lesson hurt. The pain of the silverware lesson was far briefer and less intense than the lesson in addiction. But I had a moment of red-faced shame, followed quickly by self-deprecating laughter.

It’s foolish of me to look for the lessons of the past year, this soon after the game of love and prizes. Any attempt to pick apart this experience leads to self-help type conclusions, which aren’t good enough. It’ll take awhile before the lessons are fully illuminated. I can only say that I would have to be incredibly stupid not to learn something from this, even if it’s just the realization that the only promises that matter anymore are the ones I make to myself.

Learning is like that one time when you were walking to dinner through the Castro in the early evening, hordes of commuters emerging from the MUNI underground and political aides handing out flyers on the corners and it seemed like every great looking guy was totally checking you out and giving you a smile and you’re thinking you must look really hot and then you get to the restaurant and your friend points out that your zipper is down.

And then you zip up and you sit down to dinner and you pick up your silverware the right way, and then you eat.

Whew. Not to worry, I am just playing on the mood swingset and will refrain from operating heavy machinery. Luckily for everyone the self-pity has left the building. An hour on the elliptical machine at the gym and a few hours of therapy does wonders for your complexion. That and a $20 haircut. Besides, life beckons and giving up is too easy. Times like these I like to find inspiration in various heroes like David Sedaris’ brother, The Rooster.

“‘The Rooster’ is what Paul calls himself when he’s feeling threatened. Asked how he came up with that name, he says only, ‘Certain motherfuckers think they can fuck with my shit, but you can’t kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up sometimes, but, bitch, nobody kills the motherfucking Rooster. You know what I’m saying?’

…My brother politely ma’ams and sirs all strangers but refers to friends and family, his father included, as either ‘bitch’ or ‘motherfucker’. Friends are appalled at the way he speaks to his only remaining parent. The two of them once visited my sister Amy and me in New York City, and we celebrated with a dinner party. When my father complained about his aching feet, the Rooster set down his two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew and removed a fistful of prime rib from his mouth, saying, ‘Bitch, you need to have them ugly-ass bunions shaved down is what you need to do. But you can’t do shit about it tonight, so lighten up, motherfucker.’”

This weekend nearly 2500 gay couples were married down at City Hall here in San Francisco. They came from all over the Bay Area, and many from out-of-state. They camped out overnight in the rain as if the Rolling Stones were set to play. Today two conservative groups, the Alliance Defense Fund and the Campaign for California Families, will bring the mayor to court in an effort to protect the sanctity of marriage, which is hilarious considering the bang-up job that heterosexuals have done with the “sacred” institution.

Meanwhile Valentine’s Day came and went and I spent the weekend nursing my stupid broken heart. Stupid because it cares about nothing but its own pain. It’s a black hole in my chest; sucking up everything around me, wind howling at its edges. It doesn’t care about all of the giddy love catching hold in the City. It won’t let me read because nobody else’s story is good enough. It allows certain songs to play if only for accompaniment, a soundtrack for its soap opera. It wallows in its painful stew, sighing dramatically so that everyone around can, you know, hear it.

Seriously though. There’s no getting around it, the only way through is through, or whatever it is they say. Too close to write about it, and too distracted to write about anything else. There’s a thickness behind my ribs and a heaviness behind my eyes, though I’ve been listening to The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry” as if it contained instructions for becoming a less sensitive man; somebody who could move through his days more blithely, immune to the arrows slung from Cupid’s misguided bow. Someone who could lie to himself and still sleep at night.

I piece together jigsaw puzzles on my Mac, as if by completing a digital puzzle I could answer all the questions my stupid broken heart keeps asking, its needle stuck in the groove. Stop asking unanswerable questions. Finish your sentences with a period instead of a question mark. Dream smaller. Aim a little lower. Stop circling dates on the calendar. Finish off the groceries you bought. Come down and brush your feet along the ground. Give up and look around at what’s left. You still have Art. Art will never let you down. Art is more important than love, you tell yourself. Though you thought you had room for both. Let the self-pity flow, for awhile, then make it stop.

The sadness following a thwarted daydream like the sadness after you come; your underwear looped around one ankle like a ridiculous talisman.

New design created by the Talented Mr. Jockohomo. Is it hot in here or is it just me?

The rumors of my death are gr…oh shut up, Michael.

How have I spent this unintended vacation?

Filling several pages with writing inspired largely by a chronic case of heartache, writing which is too self-indulgent to show to anyone.

Falling far behind on my e-mails. All apologies.

Watching a numbing array of scary movies on cable during the week of Halloween.

Enjoying the crisp weather that has come to San Francisco, weather that justified a new jacket and a couple of thermal shirts.

Working with a new sponsee/mentee in AA. I don’t know why the good-looking guys ask me to sponsor them, it’s God’s form of punishment. Fortunately, as the weeks pass I come to realize that they’re even more insane than I am, which kind of dulls their sex appeal.

Leaving an AA meeting and wandering through the closed-off streets of the Castro on Halloween evening, in the few minutes before the hordes arrived. It was only seven p.m., and there was a girl sitting on the steps of a house on 18th Street, puking her guts out. At first I thought she was an amateur, then I realized she probably drank like I did. Which means that if the party started at 8pm, I started just a little bit earlier. Like at noon.

Breaking out of my funk by finally working my ass off on the grad school applications. Selecting and polishing the pieces for my writing portfolio, writing why-I-want-to-go-to-your-school essays, tracking down transcripts and letters of recommendation and daydreaming a little about the future.

Planning a couple of short trips to New York to attend information sessions at two of the schools, looking forward to imposing on Jennie and dressing up her dog Malcom in that big furry hat of hers.

Cracking open my window last night so that I could hear the rain pouring down through trees on the side of the hill.

And finally, enduring my second root canal of the last two years, which has required endless hours in the dentist’s chair with my mouth propped open. Hours made more bearable by my new iPod, which I bought from Jonno when he upgraded to a newer model. The celebrity patina that lingers from J-no’s touch is worth the price alone. After today’s dental marathon I treated myself to a white chocolate mocha from Peet’s, which I sip while I write this, savoring the warm flavor on the unanesthetized portion of my tongue.

Obviously I’ve been slipping into a state of creative inertia. See also writer’s block. See also laziness. As someone pointed out to me yesterday; “You’re making lists now. That spells trouble.”

I have nothing to say, certainly nothing illuminating to add to the universe. I’ve even thought, in my lazier moments, of taking a little vacation from writing, but I’m too afraid that I would never return from such a vacation. And if writing is what brings me the most satisfaction and serenity, not writing feels like a living death. And since I equate not writing with the period in which I was snorting a lot of crystal meth and hyperventilating whenever I’d leave the house, I get a tiny bit anxious when the well seems to have run dry. It hasn’t run dry, but I let myself get too tired to haul up the bucket. Or too afraid that a couple of snakes will be swimming around in there. How’s that for a heavy-handed metaphor? That’s just brilliant, Michael.

I need a certain amount of silence to write. If a few days pass without writing, I start becoming afraid of that silence; I fill the void with music, television, movies, anything that will “keep me company” rather than sitting there with all the schizoid voices ricocheting around my head. Honestly, I’m always just a few steps away from winding up in an institution. I don’t mean that as a slight against the mentally ill, for I most certainly belong to that club. I heard someone share at a meeting the other day that when he was in a treatment center, his counselor told him that when he’s spending too much time alone at home, Get out, there’s a KILLER in the house!

Fortunately I’ve suffered through enough of these periods that I am beginning to see them as all part of the process. This morning I again picked up my copy of Art and Fear (which he recommended), which always reminds me that the only way to get art made is to just make it. I hate it when they make it that simple. It takes away all the fun of drowning in my own little sea of neuroses.

Part of the problem is that it’s late September already. Back in the spring and summer it was easy to say “Yeah, I’m going to apply to grad school for next year”. But now, with only three months before application deadlines, the reality is setting in. I have to start organizing a million disparate pieces; essays and transcripts and letters of recommendation, each school with its own set of peculiar instructions. And above all, I must choose 20-30 pages of my very best writing, as 90% of the schools’ decisions are based on the manuscript, no matter how glowing those letters of recommendation may be.

Which reminds me, I’m open to hearing your opinions on what (if any) of my various “pieces” are the strongest. It’s a lot to ask, I know, but I’m not always the best judge of my own writing. I’m also stubborn as hell, so in the end I may just pick a couple of pieces regardless of anyone’s advice. But I’m trying to be a little more open-minded about asking for help. Also, if you or anyone you know has some personal knowledge or experience with the nonfiction departments of various MFA programs, I’d be happy to hear from you. I’m specifically looking at a few schools in/around NYC: The New School, Columbia, and Sarah Lawrence. I got some good advice from Phillip Lopate when I worked with him, but more info is welcome. I feel strangely superstitious about identifying the schools I’m interested in. But there’s so much information that you can’t glean from a school’s catalogue; the kind of information you want when considering investing a chunk of money into your education. As in, does the program suck or not? Is the school a snakepit of insecure, backstabbing bitches? Which professors require bi-weekly blowjobs to get an A? You know, normal questions.

I can’t quite believe that I am setting into motion a chain of events that could result in major changes to my everyday life. Just when things were starting to quiet down. Maybe that’s the reason. Maybe I need a little chaos in my life. I guess there’s one underlying motivation: I don’t want to be an old man, looking back and wondering “what if?” I’m sure that everyone else in the nursing home would get SO tired of me asking that, over and over, driving them all away from my table in the corner of the cafeteria.

Pour le soldat atomique, si je suis qu’il veut.

“Do not allow yourself to be confused in your aloneness by the something within you that wishes to be released from it. This very wish, if you will calmly and deliberately use it as a tool, will help to expand your solitude into far distant realms. People have, with the help of so many conventions, resolved everything the easy way, on the easiest side of easy. But it is clear that we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance. We can be sure of very little, but the need to court struggle is a surety that will not leave us. It is good to be lonely, for being alone is not easy. The fact that something is difficult must be one more reason to do it…

…Love is a high inducement for individuals to ripen, to strive to mature in the inner self, to manifest maturity in the outer world, to become that manifestation for the sake of another. This is a great, demanding task; it calls one to expand one’s horizons greatly.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet”

and

“Alice: Oh, Gertrude, we had wonderful adventures. Remember during the war, we were caught in the snow and I was sure we were on the wrong road, and I wanted to turn back? But you said, ‘Never mind. Right or wrong, it is the road we are on, and we are continuing on it.’
Gertrude: And we did. That is what we did.
Alice: Yes, we continued.
Gertrude: We always continued. We do still. We shall. We always shall.”

-Win Wells, “Gertude Stein and a Companion”

I’m a little heartsick. As in, I want to throw up. So it’s safe to say that I’m a tad oversensitive this week. Check back next week – I might be a little more solid. So it was a little disconcerting to read about myself on a couple of other weblogs this week. One of them said that I was a good writer but that my site was “depressing.” Another blogger said that I was a good writer but that I “wasn’t ready” for publication. I won’t identify either source because I have a personal rule about not critiquing other bloggers on my site. I’m not much of a critic and I don’t really think the world needs another one. Besides, I generally find that such behavior ends up biting me in the ass. So out of self-preservation and a fear of confrontation, I resist judging other bloggers publicly.

I am not mentioning this as a way to elicit your pity (or maybe I’m deluded and that is exactly what I am trying to do). I’m mentioning it because the comments left me feeling a little defeated, and as a result I’ve been thinking a lot about writing and criticism.

As for the charge of being “depressing;” I’d like to think that my subject matter may often be depressing, but that my writing isn’t. Here again I may be hopelessly deluded. This comment about my writing doesn’t interest me very much; it’s clearly a matter of individual taste, and there’s not much more to say than that.

As for being ready or not for publication, my immediate reaction was to defend myself with a disclaimer: I’ve always considered dogpoet to be a rough draft. There isn’t anything on here that I would send out for publication as is. Even the linked “stories” need more work. In fact, I cringe a little when I even think about them now, months after I wrote them.

I would also point out that a blog is a blog; it’s not the New Yorker. The internal push to post several days a week almost precludes the idea that the posts would be anything but rough drafts. And no writer I know gets his first drafts published. So the judgment seems misled; critiquing out of context. And if I can be snarky for just one second, I believe that there is a saying that would apply well to this critique: “Consider the source.”

You don’t get to make disclaimers, however, when you want to be considered for publication. Your writing will stand or fall on its own merits. Being judged is just part of the business. Someday, if I am ever lucky enough to be ready for publication, there will be negative reviews (if I’m even lucky enough to get reviewed). So I might as well get used to it. “Following your bliss” sounds like a path strewn with pastel-colored rose petals, but the reality is far less romantic. Once you declare your passion, you’re fair game. It’s far safer to never admit any aspirations than it is to call yourself a writer, for example. Some may argue that it’s far wiser. The stakes are raised; you are no longer just a guy with a website. You’re that guy who thinks he’s a writer.

Part of me actually agrees with this blogger. Maybe that’s why I haven’t yet sent anything out for publication. I think there are definite weaknesses in my writing: I think I lean towards sentimentality almost automatically, and it takes a little distance for me to weed that out. And when I’m tired and it’s late and I haven’t posted in awhile, sometimes that internal editor loses out over the easy, sentimental shit. There’s a sentence in my last post that I wish I had edited. I also don’t think I’ve mastered the art of the final paragraph; my ability to end a story or essay isn’t quite strong enough yet.

This is becoming an entirely self-absorbed post, but I want to get at the truth. That was always my intention, when I started this site: honesty. I thought I was being honest a few months ago, but now I see that there are several more layers of truth underneath. I want to avoid the easy answers, I want to dig past them.

There’s that part of me that longs for those early days, a year and a half ago, when nobody read my site, when I could post anything I damn well pleased. When I didn’t have to take into account other people’s feelings or privacy. Before my father found my site, for example.

But if I didn’t want anyone to read my writing, I would keep a personal diary, not an Internet site. And there is the crux. I have that need to communicate with others, to share my writing with others. And then there are my less honorable motivations, like selfishness and insecurity. Needing people to think I’m talented.

I would like to prove my homosexuality by saying that this issue of public criticism reminds me of not just one, but two scenes in Madonna’s Truth or Dare. The first is backstage following a concert, and she tells us that while 99% of the people may have loved her performance, she cares more about what the other 1% thought. The other scene is when Warren Beatty, her then-lover, gets fed up trying to have a private moment with her, away from the camera. He says, sarcastically, “Yes, well, what’s the point of living if it’s not on camera?”

Now, I last saw Truth or Dare when I was like 21, so it must say something about me that I have remembered those scenes, and that I identify with Madonna. (Perhaps every queen does, at some point). I care more about the 1%, and I wonder what the point is in writing off-camera. I’m not proud of this, but pride doesn’t take well to honesty. I think it speaks volumes about my insecurities that I have failed to acknowledge that both bloggers said I was a good writer.

I think it says even more that I have gone on and on about two minor critiques. I know people, whom I admire, that let such words roll like water off their back. And honestly, by the time I finish this paragraph I’ll be over it. Each critic is just one person, with one opinion. At the end of the day it’s just me, alone with my work, and what matters then is only how I feel about my writing, whether I’m proud or wincing in embarrassment over some sentimental turn of phrase. If I don’t like what I’ve written, it doesn’t matter where I get published. Publication doesn’t stop the little voices that come in the middle of the night. The voices that like to point out when you’re being a phony. What matters at those times is whether I’m satisfied with my own work. And that’s a whole other story.