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 I could spend seven years working on a book that might still go unpublished, and my reframing explanation to my father worked about as well as you’d expect.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.

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.

“By the way, I occasionally read JoeMyGod, and grinned when I saw your image smiling back at me yesterday.  You haven’t written about your career as a model!”

Mainly I hadn’t written about it because I grew up in Minnesota and calling attention to one’s “modeling career’ felt immeasurably immodest, and for a Minnesotan there’s nothing worse than everyone thinking you’ve gotten too big for your britches.

Instead I told him I hadn’t written about it because I hadn’t “figured out how to write about it yet.” But then I remembered that I’m the kind of writer who figures out what he thinks about something after, not before, he writes about it.

Plus the “modeling career” (i.e. one photo for one ad) led to another offer which dragged me straight into a moral quagmire, so maybe there’s a story there.

Long story short. The photographer who takes all of the images for the Daddyhunt site lives in San Francisco and saw my photo online somewhere. He asked if I’d be willing to model for Daddyhunt for a bit of cash.

I talked to the Manly Fireplug and he expressed concern that they’d pair me up with some other dude and splash our pictures in bus stops and billboards all over the Castro (like they’d done with previous ads) and he’d be forced to look at multiple, larger-than-life images of me with another man every time he went to work or the gym or Walgreens.

An entirely understandable reaction. I’m not exactly proud to admit that I argued with him. I was broke at the time and could really use the money, I told him, but looking back I was motivated less by money than by pure vanity. Fortunately my conscience worked its way past my vanity and I could see that stroking my own ego at the expense of my partner’s feelings wasn’t the kind of thing that would help me sleep at night. So I said no to Daddyhunt.

A few months passed. The photographer contacted me again and asked if I’d be willing to model for his own freelance business portfolio. I checked with the Fireplug, who’d recently told me he’d had a change of heart about the whole matter (I think marriage and the fact that I now legally belonged to him made the whole thing easier). He said sure, and so the guy took a few shots, then showed them to Daddyhunt, who again asked if they could use them. This time the Fireplug gave his blessing, and I signed a waiver.

And literally the next morning I woke up to find a tweet from JoeMyGod with one word: “Daddyhunt?” I was still groggy and confused and I clicked to his site and saw an ad for Daddyhunt with a picture of another guy. I clicked “refresh” and there was the virtual me, smiling as the flesh-and-blood me turned beet red.

In the next few days a couple of friends mentioned seeing the ad, and one guy said it was rather strange to see a married friend modeling for a gay pick-up site, and yes I’ve wondered what I’m implying to people by selling my image in this context, particularly to people who know me and/or the Fireplug, and the Fireplug himself has said that he himself feels a little weird when he sees the ad, and has to recalibrate his initial feelings, and I myself have avoided this dilemma by avoiding JoeMyGod’s site for the time being.

I tell myself that the vast majority of people who see the ad don’t know who I am, much less the backstory I might bring to the ad, and will forget the whole thing in a few seconds, and frankly yes, it’s rather nice that at the age of 40 I got asked to model for something since nobody asked me to model for anything at the age of, say, 22.

Then last week as I was writing my post about a local porn star, I got an email. I didn’t see the email until after I’d posted the story, which was kind of funny and surreal because when I finally did see the email it said the following:

“I just saw a pic of you in an add for a porn site somewhere. Are you interested in doing a movie for_____?  I have a project coming up in April you would be perfect for!”

The email was from an acquaintance who directs movies for a well-known porn studio, and if I told you the name, some of you would immediately picture men of MASSIVE musculature and butch handsomeness, which is what I immediately pictured, and so of course my very next thought was:

“Is he smoking crack?!?”

And then I thought, “Hey, he confused my ad for Daddyhunt with an ad for gay porn!” And I wondered how many people reached the same conclusion, and that of course raises all kinds of questions about the difference between modeling shirtless for a gay pick-up site, and having gay sex on video, and what that says about our culture and oh, hey, my reputation – even though I’m 40 and supposedly too old to be worried about such a thing.

I don’t know if straight people do this, but I imagine a large percentage of gay dudes have pondered the question of whether they could ever do porn, which I quickly found out is not the same as actually being asked to do porn.

I texted the Fireplug with my OMG WTF news. “Wow!” he texted back. “That is cool. You thinking about it?”

I don’t know if he actually thought this was cool. Texting is…well, you know. Trying to interpret his real, unmasked, uncalibrated reaction, I’m leaning towards “complicated.” In any event we agreed that the issue was perhaps a little too unwieldy for our iPhones.

But I won’t lie. I was flattered. And in the hours before dinner I found myself giving  the matter serious thought for a number of reasons, which I’ll try to break down.

1. Vanity.
2. The urge to confront my own fears and inhibitions. (see “raised in Minnesota,” above).
3. The urge to flip the bird at America’s puritanical, hypocritical fear/hatred of sex, etc.
4. The usual writerly curiosity that leads me into entirely new and uncomfortable situations.
5. The idea that appearing in a gay porn movie might actually lead to more people buying my book, should I ever actually finish the damn thing. (Doubt me? Look at the number of Facebook followers a gay porn star attracts, versus, say, your average mid-list author.)

When the Fireplug and I finally had dinner I made my argument. We talked for a while, and he made a few counter-points, three of which stuck with me:

1. “You’re a writer, which means you may want to teach someday, at like a university, and right or wrong, let’s be honest about how a hiring committee might look upon this.”
2. “I know you, and I don’t think you’d like the process of actually having sex in front of a lot of people, with lights and cameras and later the whole freaking internet.”
3. “I want to be generous and supportive, but really I’d have a hard time sharing you like that.”

None of which I really wanted to hear, and I got quietly petulant. But really he was right. On all of the above.

In the next couple of days, though, I kept giving it some thought, and I talked to a friend who’d done porn, who said he didn’t think he had performed all that great on camera and didn’t like not having control over his image, and that he’d recommend I take a pass, if I was at all on the fence. Another friend said he’d never even considered porn because he wanted to actually, you know, enjoy sex.

Then I read a few blogs covering the gay porn industry. I even forced myself to read the anonymous comments, and OH MY GOD PEOPLE, NEWSFLASH! THE INTERNET IS MEAN!

I also think about something one of my favorite writers, David Foster Wallace, once said (I keep quoting him this week). He was interviewed about what it felt like to get so much media attention for his bestseller, Infinite Jest, and he admitted it was nice but that ultimately a writer needs to observe, not be observed, and if he were to lose this skill his writing would suffer.

The email from the porn director arrived seven days ago, and I’ve spent that time thinking about the difference between shirtless modeling and porn, about vanity and morality and the value of not hurting one’s husband.

I’ve written nineteen drafts of my memoir and with each passing day I get a tiny bit more insight on my younger self. So seven days is nothing, and I don’t have much insight on my “modeling career,” as it were. I’m still vain, and flattered, and conflicted, and immensely grateful that I have one man who knows me as well as he does.

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.

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 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.

“What the hell?” I asked the Manly Fireplug. “Are we the only homosexuals in the whole state going to New York to get married?”

I joked to friends about feeling overexposed. That even I was tired of us. Media whores, a couple of friends called us on Facebook, with what felt like an even mixture of humor and bitterness.

I grew increasingly uncomfortable, due in no small part to my upbringing in Minnesota, where the greatest sin is calling too much attention to yourself. But there were other reasons, too.

After the first article appeared, I received two emails, spaced five days apart, from someone I began to refer to as my “Secret Internet Admirer,” someone who used an anonymizing email program to cloak his real address. I’ll spare you the admirer’s particular vitriol, a confusing mixture of jealousy and homophobia that indicated less than full mental health.

I can’t be certain that my admirer was the same troll with whom I’d recently exchanged a volley of ridiculous emails, but the timing seemed suspect. He (I thought of the admirer as a he, though I couldn’t be certain) looked harshly upon the particular nature of my relationship with the Fireplug. Those who know us would never accuse us of being poster boys for traditional marriage, and so the admirer’s opaque argument fell flat with me.

What concerned me was how he ended both emails, two sentences in all caps: DO NOT GET MARRIED! CANCEL THE WEDDING!

I didn’t want to get melodramatic about a troll (and legally this post right here could be construed as encouraging him), but my admirer was talking about the event that would gather together my husband, our families, and our closest friends. So when the rental hall sent over our contract, I paid close attention to the security guard clause.

The Fireplug encouraged me to shake it off, as I spent the next few days scanning friends’ and acquaintances’ Facebook posts for anything vaguely suspicious, and examining anyone in public who looked at me a half-second longer than necessary. As the days passed without another email from my admirer, my paranoia faded. Mostly.

I told the Fireplug the interviews were starting to feel weird. Like we were putting this deeply personal event up for public dissection. So when Channel 11 called, the Fireplug told them we weren’t available.

Immediately I felt regret. Like we were passing up the chance to do some kind of greater good. Bring attention to the cause of same-sex blah blah blah. A lofty sentiment, sure, but maybe I really wanted the attention. So we did a couple more interviews.

And nothing happened. The articles and stories were little more than sound bites, hardly noteworthy, even to me. For the story they told – a couple of guys going to New York to get married – seemed like distractions from the story forming inside my own head.

I dutifully answered the reporters’ questions about why New York, and why now. After the third interview I stumbled upon my own sound bite, which I worked into subsequent interviews: at some point you just have to live your life, and not wait for California’s stamp of approval.

But all the while my conscience nagged at me, asking me a question that, with my handful of part-time jobs, book-writing, volunteering, etc., I hadn’t had the space or perspective to answer.

And that question wasn’t, “Why New York?”

It was: “Why marriage?”

A question I wasn’t sure I could answer. Which, let’s face it, is a tad disconcerting. For I was about to make the most important promise of my life. To a man making the same promise to me.

The reporters’ calls stopped, and the media moved on.

I’ve had a little more time to reflect on that enormous question. And I’m still not sure that I can articulate a worthy response. As the wedding edges closer, what strikes me most is that the promise I’m about to make doesn’t fill me with fear or doubt.

I had one of those unstable childhoods that left me hungry for affection and afraid of abandonment. Common stuff, I know, but they formed me. And though there are no guarantees in life, especially in love, the Fireplug was about to offer me the closest thing.

All I know is that as the big day nears, those long-held fears are diminished not by the prospect of his promise to me, but by my promise to him. I forget myself for a few seconds when I think of what I’m about to pledge: that even in the toughest times I will be his companion. That I won’t give up on him.

It was disingenuous of me to call our wedding a “deeply personal event.” We’re inviting our family and friends. It’s not personal, it’s communal. Others will have opinions on our mutual suitability and future prospects.

Hell, there’s that tense moment in every movie wedding when the minister asks, “If anyone has any reason why these two people should not marry…” (And if any of you are planning on dragging my Fireplug onto a city bus like Dustin Hoffman, I will hunt you down.)

What comforts me aren’t big answers for that big question. Rather, it’s just a feeling inside me when I picture our big day, an intuition, a sort of quiet space in the eye of the storm, impervious to trolls and judgments and Channel 4, a space big enough for me and one other man.

“She was a nut. Too bad she didn’t try harder to live.”

“Coming soon, the Michael Jackson/Amy Winehouse reunion album.”

“Boxed Winehouse.”

I realize that making fun of messy celebrities on Facebook is the new American pastime, and I run the risk of appearing way too earnest here (I pretty much always run that risk here) but there was no part of me that found anything about her death funny.

I’ve been sober nearly eleven years, with the help of other drunks and drug addicts. Stay sober long enough, and well-meaning friends who don’t have the addictive personality, or the disease, or whatever it may be that kept you from applying moderation to your life, will praise you for your strength and willpower. (We call these well-meaning friends “normies.”)

But here’s the thing that every sober drunk and drug addict knows. Strength and willpower had little to do with it. None of us can say with any certainty why we were able to “get it,” and hold on to it, when so many couldn’t. The statistics were against us, rehab or no rehab.

Listen to enough of our stories, and you’ll hear a common thread. There was nothing special about the last time we got drunk or high. It was rarely the worst day or night of our lives. Rarely did it involve the worst consequences we’d faced. Sometimes no matter how much we drank we couldn’t get drunk that night.

Maybe the right friend said the right thing at the right second, or the perfect stranger opened a new door. Maybe that afternoon we just got tired of the emptiness where our souls used to be. Every story involves luck, or coincidence, or, if you prefer, a bit of grace. It took more than five or six tries until it happened to me.

I was late to the Winehouse bandwagon. I often stubbornly resist the zeitgeist, and her “Rehab” song turned me off. But during one visit to Hawaii, the Manly Fireplug added Back to Black to our iPod. We listened to it nonstop that week. There was something about our hotel, a rather seedy, down-at-the-heels tropical outpost called the Queen Kapiolani, that fit Amy’s lyrics.

Back in San Francisco I developed a back-up singer hand gesture routine to my favorite song, “Tears Dry On Their Own,” which I’d perform in the car while the Fireplug was driving. That song contained my favorite of her lyrics:

I cannot play myself again
Should just be my own best friend
Not fuck myself
In the head
With stupid men

Here’s the thing about Amy. She knew who she was. A drunk, an addict, a cheater. She slept around behind her boyfriends’ backs. She had bad taste in men. She didn’t whitewash her sins or blame it all on the other guy, which so many pop songs seem to do.

She made me feel less alone with my own sordid past. With the part of me that is still, to this day, less than virtuous.

I don’t know Amy’s story. I know she did, despite her song, attend rehab, more than once. I don’t know what it was like for her to wake up in the morning, to want to write her next record but find it impossible. I only know the smallest slices of her life, fed to me through headlines and grainy photos.

I don’t know how badly she wanted to get sober. All I know is that her time ran out before grace found her.

His name is Joe Gallagher, he owns Joe’s Barbershop here in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco, and we’ve known each other a few years now. Back when he first picked up a pair of clippers, he rented a chair in my barber’s shop. I used to sit in Pasha’s chair and just stare at Joe. A few months after Joe rented the chair, Pasha up and died of a heart attack in his mid-40′s, and so I naturally used the occasion to switch barbers. (I never said I wasn’t capable of cold calculation.)

Joe had a partner at the time, so I contented myself with feeling his hands touch my head every couple of weeks. He wasn’t stingy with advice. After hearing the 22nd installment of my doomed long-distance love affair with another blogger, he spun me around in the chair, looked me in the eye, and barked, “You just need to get fucked. Really hard.”

He had a point.

I went off to grad school in NYC and Joe opened his own shop. When I moved back to San Francisco in the summer of 2006, Joe was single. We started working out together and one thing led to another. He swears I spent a lot of time bending over in front of him at the gym, putting weights away. I never said I was a fool, either.

Fast-forward a couple of years. Joe proposes to me as I lay sedated in a hospital bed with a collapsed lung. I think the experience clarified for us that we wanted to spend whatever time we had left in this world together. The sedation just made it easier to say yes. Not long afterwards, California passed Prop 8, taking a legal wedding off the table.

Like most couples we hit a rough patch, but came back together with renewed purpose and respect. “People don’t change,” the cynics say, but I have first-hand experience to the contrary. With every passing day he became more solidly the partner I’d always wanted. I had to work to do the same for him.

We’d talk about heading off to one of the other states that had legalized same-sex marriage. Joe turned 50 . “I’m not getting any younger,” he warned me. But I kept dragging my feet, wanting to wait until it was legal in California again, wanting to celebrate such a day in the place we call home, with our friends.  But there were no guarantees that Prop 8 would be overturned, and eventually I realized that we could both get what we wanted. We could get married somewhere else for real, and still come back to celebrate with friends.

Which is a very long way of saying that I’m getting married. In like five weeks.

I now understand why people take a year to plan these things. “What are your colors?” a florist asked Joe a couple of weeks ago.

“Um, colors?” he said.

Yeah, we’re not that kind of gay.

The Bay Area Reporter ran an article on some of us heading to NYC to get hitched. You can read it here. My only caveat is that I now better understand why some people feel slightly misrepresented when interviewed by the media. The whole Cher thing was sort of a joke. Also, the idea of a “traditional” wedding matters less to me than the idea of sharing the day with friends. But if that makes it traditional, then I guess I want a traditional wedding.

Two days later CBS radio interviewed us as well. It’s a nice, short piece, and you can hear it here.

Then ReyRey of ReyRey’s Photography offered to shoot some engagement pics, including the one above.

Joe and I had talked about keeping the whole thing low-key. It’s not like we can afford to throw a party for 500 people. But there is no low-key with Joe Gallagher. Frankly by now even I’m starting to find myself overexposed. But it seemed wrong not to mention it here, where I’ve chronicled ten years of my life, and where some of you have been kind enough to follow along.

Goddamn, I’m going to have a husband.

I’m writing this now – a vain, deeply impatient man half-crazed by a deficit of endorphins.

Last Friday I drove down to South San Francisco on a very early Friday morning for an appointment with a hand therapist, scheduled by my surgeon, only to be told by the embarrassed hand therapist that she could do nothing for me until after the surgeon pulled the three pins out of my wrist. Minutes later I was ushered out of the lobby into a back hallway, after I’d begun yelling at a flustered cast technician who’d just given me diametrically opposing information about the procedure for replacing the dingy splint, catching and pulling now against the heads of the three pins sticking out of my wrist, that her co-worker had given me two weeks back.

Later I found myself sitting in an exam room, deeply ashamed and confused by my behavior.

I tried to talk myself back into a state of humility with the fact that the combined doctor and ER visits, pharmacy runs, and surgery had cost me less than $1000.

I’ve wrestled with my impatience, driving the Manly Fireplug to softball practice where I watch from the stands.  I nodded, as if I agreed, when a friend told me that there is always next season, thinking to myself that having watched my mother die at the age of 55, I no longer think that there will always be a next time.

I then tried to remind myself that we were talking about D league gay softball and, like, chill out, dude.

For perspective I told myself that I do not live, say, in Japan. I’ve never seen a tsunami or an exploding nuclear power plant. These thoughts distracted me about as long as you’d guess.

I wrote a story for a local magazine, cobbled together from this blog, about my first season playing softball. Just before I sent it to the editor, I cut out the part about breaking my wrist in the Vegas tournament, because I didn’t want people to pick up on my self-pity.

I decided to be a little less vain here.

My team had their first games of the season, a double header, bright and early this past Sunday. I drove the Fireplug to the field and stood on the sidelines, shivering a bit in the cold morning air, recognizing the nervous looks on some of my newer teammates’ faces.

I’d gone the whole last season, my first season ever, avoiding base coaching, always a bit unsure of the rules. But this year, without anything else to do, I stepped in, figuring like everything else in softball the best way to learn was to just throw myself into it and make a few mistakes.

I stood there just outside the foul line, watching where each of my teammates hit the ball and gauging how far they should run, signaling to them to stop, or to look, or to just plain run. And after each single I’d slap their shoulder and tell them good job, and when the next guy hit I’d tell them to run. “Go,” I’d say. “Go, go go.”