Those of you who’ve been following this blog for a while know that I now spend a good chunk of my time with a guy I call the Manly Fireplug.  I don’t call him that to protect his identity – he’s just fine with notoriety, thank you very much – the nickname just cracks me up.

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.

The nice Asian girl at the bagel shop points at my splint. “Still hurt?” she asks. I nod. She says, “I think you have lost weight, no?” Cue my creeping look of horror. Does she mean good weight or bad weight? Gay weight or straight weight? Is she talking about my face or my shrinking biceps? I want to reach across the counter and shake her for the answer but the CULTURAL DIVIDE BETWEEN US CANNOT BE OVERCOME!

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.”

The thing about three-legged dogs is that they never whine about the missing leg. Even those two-legged dogs run around with their little wheels, tongues hanging out, giving you that “what’s up, dude!” expression. I hope to be more like them.

But I am human and fallible, with a long memory studded with grudges, regrets, and small slights for which I pledged but somehow fell short of forgiveness. Plus I somehow made it through 39 years without ever breaking a bone, without ever having a limb encased in a cast, and the novelty of the last week hasn’t quite lost its shine.

This morning on MUNI a man standing next to me offered me a seat when it opened up in front of us. He was the first person to do so in the three crowded rides I’d taken to and from work after getting the cast. Three crowded rides during which I alternated from self-righteous indignation at my fellow commuters’ selfishness and rudeness, to self-castigation at my sense of entitlement. Flip flop, flip flop. I felt sure that, hypothetically, in their place I would have at least offered my seat to a guy in a cast. Even a guy who looked reasonably strong and healthy. But then I am always a better man in hypothetical situations, which are made for acts of disarming (ha) generosity.

In the end I did what I swore I’d do, hypothetically; I smiled and let him take the seat.

But yes, there are things I cannot do, like tie my own shoes. Or cut a bagel in half. Or open a stubborn jar. I cannot get the casually-perfect distribution of pomade on my admittedly short bangs, and really, what’s hurting most is simply my vanity, as my hair refuses to cooperate and my hard-won muscles slowly fade from view. Not to mention the decidedly UNFUNNY things perfect strangers yell from passing cars. Something about walking around in a cast elicits a barrage of unrequested comments. The last one, from a coward in an old pick-up, implied that I’d had an accident with a Shake Weight.

Shut up, it’s not funny.

I don’t know how single dudes and ladies navigate the world with only one arm. I suppose they rely upon a lot of Velcro. But I’m a lucky man, with a devoted Manly Fireplug to call my own, a Fireplug who seems to appreciate helping me take a shower, an ordeal that requires garbage bags, duct tape, and a small plastic footstool.

During this morning’s shower I looked over the Fireplug’s shoulder to see our three dogs sitting in the hallway just outside the bathroom, gazing at our spectacle with an unusual solemnity. The Fireplug was using the hand-held nozzle on me, the same nozzle we use when giving them their baths, and I recognized their plaintive looks as sympathy. “Oh man,” they were thinking, “I wonder what poor Mike rolled in now.”

I can safely say that my thirty-ninth year has not been my easiest. From the devastating, if short-lived, breakup with the Manly Fireplug, to the car accident, to my sudden financial insecurity and hasty return to the world of pecking orders and cubicles, my self-worth has been, well, frequently challenged over the last few months.

The most beneficial and unexpected development, running counter to these obstacles, was D-league gay softball, which pretty much shocked me with how deeply and thoroughly it transformed my confidence, self-esteem, and overall world view. One season with the Lonestar Inferno and I now totally get why people go nuts over sports, and why teams inspire such bizarre devotion. A whole substring of the American vernacular opened up for me.

Even in the post-season, as I consoled my softball cravings with the Fall Ball’s pickup games, and as the Fireplug and I enjoyed a whole new sense of camaraderie, spending our days off playing catch or hitting the batting cages, that newer, stronger sense of confidence, so foreign but so welcome, carried me along in its sure, steady arms.

And as a ragtag division of our team convened – between rain-soaked weekends – for a couple of practices before the Sin City Shootout, a gay softball tournament that brought teams from all over the country to Las Vegas this past weekend, that confidence surged as I watched the balls I hit sail farther and farther into the outfield. I began to harbor secret fantasies of transforming, in the space of one year, from a guy who could reliably strike out every time he stepped up to bat, to a guy who could hit home runs.

And though I played poorly – addled by nerves- in our first game in Vegas, I began to redeem myself in the second, snagging a fly ball in right field. My next time at bat I exhaled, let a couple of bad pitches pass, then nailed the third. As I scurried towards first I could see, from the corner of my eye, the ball pass over the outfielder’s head and fall short of the fence. This was it, this was my first chance at a home run.

I ran as fast as my stiff, 39-year-old legs could go, and as I rounded second I locked eyes with our third-base coach, who gave me the sign to run for home. I could hardly believe it; I had never hit anything more than a single at games, and as I rounded third I could hear the growing roar of both teams as the ball and I both headed for home plate, where the catcher crouched in anticipation.

I should have slid, but to be honest with you I’m still green, and I thought my speed could carry me. Everything that followed took less than half a second, and in no discernible order. The ball sailed into the catcher’s mitt, and he rose just as I touched home plate, and I felt a low pain where we collided. I could not tell you at the time where our bodies met, only that the umpire cried, “He’s out!” and my team’s roar of outrage swelled around me as my heart fell and my lungs sucked for air.

A couple of guys in the stands questioned the call. “Good hit, number 20,” one of them called to me as I walked back into the pen. “Don’t worry about it, that was a home run,” my coach whispered in my ear, and the Fireplug hugged me with, I was touched to see, tears in his eyes. “You were robbed,” said a teammate, but I was too out of breath to answer.

As the minutes passed and my adrenaline waned, I could feel, with growing dread, a pain slowly consuming my wrist, and by the end of the game (we lost) I already knew the tournament was over for me. The Fireplug (who made me so proud with his stellar softball debut) and I went back and forth over our limited out-of-town-out-of-network health insurance options as my wrist and hand swelled and bruised. Ultimately he was placated by my assurances that it was only a sprain.

So it wasn’t until yesterday, two days later, that the doctor at Kaiser glanced at my x-rays and pointed to the rather long fracture in my distal radius, and hinted at the recovery, which stretched ahead of me several months, well into my team’s regular season.

So I am writing this to you with one hand and a brave if broken heart. Also with the dawning realization of what challenges exist for a one-armed man. Like button fly jeans after a restroom break at the firm. Also, if one more queen makes a fisting joke I will shove this cast up his….well, you know.

I grew up on TV and movies, and I still struggle, daily, to reconcile myself to the limits of real life, which is not like a Nike commercial. Sometimes you do not prevail. Sometimes you are clumsy and green and a split-second too slow. Sometimes you are called out. Real life is lived in the spaces after such times, when like a child you place your feet in your partner’s hands, so that he can tie your shoes.

The thing about “showing up for other people,” or, if you want to take it a step further into Northern California speak, remaining open to the beauty of your fellow human beings, is that the smallest thing can derail your noble intentions, and lightning-quick you revert to moody adolescence.

Obviously few if any of you ever revert to moody adolescence. But I do, every other day. I’m a grown man who morphs into a sullen, recalcitrant, bitter baby if he doesn’t eat. Maybe you’ve had the misfortune of dating someone like me, someone who must be handled with increasing degrees of diplomacy and delicacy while his blood sugar level plunges.

Last week the Manly Fireplug and I were invited to a friend’s birthday party at Buca. On a Saturday night. At eight p.m. Utter mayhem spilled out from the lobby onto the sidewalk ­‑ parties of four and seven and thirteen jostling for tables, presided over by a harried hostess totally regretting her job that night. Our table had not yet been cleared, and everywhere I chose to stand I ended up in someone’s way.

Knowing of Buca’s carb-laden family-style platters, I’d earlier made the unfortunate decision to show up hungry. But thirty seconds in that lobby turned me into a muttering Grinch, and I fled our party to push my way back out on the sidewalk for some “fresh air.” The Fireplug, who’d smartly had a snack, offered to run interference, letting me know when our table was ready.

Maybe you’ve been to Buca, maybe you’ve sat in the Papal Room, which features, at the center of a large round table, the Pope’s head sitting on a lazy susan, the surrounding walls covered in framed photos and paintings of the long line of popes. Maybe the campiness amuses you, but that night I was not amused. As our friends passed around party favors I grumbled about the Vatican’s response to homosexuals, and its indifference to the pedophilia scandal. Everyone around me pulled kitschy plastic crowns over their heads. The Fireplug put on a plastic crown. It will not surprise you to hear that I did not put on a plastic crown.

Thirty agonizing minutes later, when our party had chosen its family platters from the menu, and the waiter finally appeared, notepad in hand, it will also not surprise you that when he said, “And what can I get you?” and when one of our party said, “Guess!” I took matters into my own hands. “We are not making him GUESS!” I hissed. “We are telling him we want two orders of garlic cheese bread, the calamari appetizer, a large Caesar salad, and a large chopped antipasto salad. And since he’s here we’re also going to tell him that we want an order of the baked ravioli, a spicy chicken rigatoni, the chianti braised short ribs, and the chicken marsala.” The acquaintance across the table who’d told the waiter to “guess” shot me a wounded look, but too bad for him.

I resisted the overwhelming urge, the need, to inhale the entire fried calamari platter on my own, and sent it around the lazy susan, watching with barely-veiled dismay as the others had the nerve to take their fair share.

About an hour later, having gorged myself into a stupor, I reached a state of serenity and could finally act my age. Or nearly my age. I still refused the plastic crown.

“Feel better?” said the Fireplug.

I garumphed, but ultimately gave him a wry grin, one that both admitted my earlier immaturity and thanked him – barely – for his patience.

My one piece of rather obvious advice here, dear reader, is that if you want to show up for your fellow man, think about eating first.

Later, having hugged our friends good-night, the Fireplug and I drifted down Howard Street, making our way back to the car, when we passed a storefront so dazzling with color that I could not resist pulling out my cell phone to take some rudimentary shots.

So many wigs of so many colors lined the shop’s walls, and in the back, working absurdly late, a stylist combing her client’s hair, the two women laughing together at some joke we couldn’t hear, and I was struck by this shop I’d never before seen, and this glimpse at what it contained and implied: a whole set of lives unknown to me, each wig, each color, a person or a party or a trick or a night. And an old odd desire seized me, one I’d had my whole life, riding in the car through tiny towns on road trips, glimpsing ramshackle cabins, farmhouses leaning back from the wind, pools of light on wooden porches, and cramped rooms over noisy bars. I wanted to walk like a ghost through each of those rooms. I wanted to try on, for a few seconds, every single life the passing world contained.

Very happy to be included in this collection of family stories on The Rumpus, some holiday-themed, some general…trying to sum up my family story in 400 words proved, well, challenging for this blowhard:

“In 1981, when I was ten, my parents sat me down in the living room and told me the real reason they’d separated six months ago: they were both gay.

I could hardly grasp what that word had to do with my parents, nor did I understand the slick warmth that rushed through me when I paged through my father’s copy of International Male: a glossy catalogue featuring mesh tank tops, a bewildering array of athletic supporters, and casual wear suitable for places like Puerto Vallarta …”

Read the rest at The Rumpus, a kick-ass literary site based here in San Francisco, run by Stephen Elliot and featuring far and away the best advice columnist ever, “Dear Sugar.”

I believed in God as a kid, a little boy damned early to hell, way back when in the series of Midwestern suburbs my family called home. I came to this belief more or less on my own. Dad was raised a Methodist, Mom a Catholic. She’d long chafed against the confines of the Church, where the boys always came before the girls, even when entering the sanctuary for First Communion.

After I was born, over our long northward migration, from Oklahoma to Minnesota, we drifted from one church to another. I remember none of them. Dad tells me we just went to wherever he and Mom felt most comfortable, regardless of denomination, though to appease Mom’s parents we’d hit the local Catholic church during their visits, and pretend to be loyal members. My brother and I were both baptized twice, once at a Methodist church, once at a Catholic, for each set of visiting grandparents. Fortunately they never visited at the same time. After Mom died, when I was 30 years old, I tried to dig into her past a bit, and for a long time I thought the Church had held a serious grip on her. But when I learned that, according to Catholic doctrine, she had damned us to hell by having us baptized twice, I decided she probably didn’t take it all that seriously.

When I was ten years old Mom and Dad separated, and within a few months they both came out of the closet. In the ensuing upheaval, as we tried to adjust to a complicated joint custody arrangement, and to the series of men and women that soon entered our lives, men and women referred to these days as “same-sex” lovers, my brother and I often fell through the cracks. Our parents had a lot to figure out, about themselves, and what they wanted now from life. They were both younger than I am now.

With their new boyfriends and girlfriends, my parents continued to drift, separately now, from one church to the next, their two sons sometimes in tow. I remember two or three Sundays at a Lutheran church, a month or two at a Presbyterian. I still couldn’t tell you the differences between the Protestant religions, and the only thing I remember was the utter boredom I felt in those hard wooden pews.

Still, I remember believing. Maybe it was just optimism on my part. In the years after my parents’ divorce I began to harbor doubts about Mom and Dad’s enthusiasm for parenting, and I suppose it felt better to believe that something up there, or out there, watched over me.

My conception of God had little to do with the churches we’d attended. This God was benevolent but distant, hard to fathom, and neither male nor female. My belief stuck with me, even as a teenager, even as an adult, when Mom was diagnosed with a terminal illness. I didn’t believe God could intervene in human affairs, and a seething anger at that impotence filled me, as I watched what the disease did to her. Still, I kept believing.

At the age of 29, to save myself from the utter misery closing in around me, I got sober through a recovery program for drunks, one that suggested I cultivate a belief in a higher power of my own understanding. The “of my own understanding” made it easier, and though the understanding of drunks at meetings in the Bible Belt may skew heavily towards that dude in the Old Testament, I got sober in San Francisco, where you could believe in pretty much anything. I heard people talk about trees, or Buddha, or the Group Of Drunks. I heard the stories of atheists and agnostics and the utterly confused, all of whom managed to stay sober. I heard plenty of people say “…my higher power whom I choose to call God.” I heard lapsed Catholics and exiled Mormons and ex-fundamentalists struggle with reconciling their new God with the one they’d always known.

Nobody told me that I had to believe in anything, though my first sponsor said that there would be days when absolutely every single person in my life would fail me, including him, and that on those days in particular a little belief could go a long ways.

This past October marked ten years clean for me, and what I find most liberating about life these days is that I can keep changing. I can start a new job or join a softball team or rethink old beliefs. Sometime in the past couple of years the God of my understanding began to feel…off, somehow. I began to distrust this God, this external power, hovering up there or out there.

And maybe it was fear of the black void I’d find in God’s place, should I give this God up, that made me look around for something else. Something that, based on my own lived experience, felt more true.

I tried to pay attention to those moments when I felt most alive, when I felt plugged into the beauty of the world, when I felt free of the cramped cage of my own self-pity. And without exception those moments happened in the company of other people.

This is still a hard pill to swallow. I crave solitude more often than not, solitude that fills the rechargeable battery on which I run. I’ve made a lot of noise on this blog about my introversion, and at times I’ve flirted with its extremes, grumpily muttering about rabid extroverts, dipping my big toe in the cold pool of misanthropy.

But I can’t argue with my lived experience, with the fact that, as I hugged a friend after an hour over coffee, or watched a friend sing a song on a tiny stage in a Mission bar, or helped Mom’s partner clean their house after Mom’s death ­- when I put aside my own misery for the five seconds it took to help someone out with their own problems, five seconds after which I turned back and could no longer find my own misery…after all that I began to believe in a new kind of God.

This God had something to do with other people, with the energy that flickered to life when people were good to each other. I am still a Midwestern boy at heart, and I cannot say the word “energy” with a straight face. If I could call it something else I would.

But this God is not some external force outside of myself. This God is not a noun. This God is a verb. This God comes to life only in those moments when people do something good for other people.

This can be a much harder God to believe in. For it shifts the responsibility away from that external figure, away from that Graybeard in Heaven, and puts it squarely on me. On us. If I want this God to come to life I need to pull myself from the bitter swamp of my own morass long enough to help someone else. And just for the record let me say that none of this counts as original; I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard over the years that the quickest way to happiness, or contentment, or maybe just a slighter more diluted crankiness, is by showing up for other people. It just took me a while to believe it.

I won’t lie. I find this exceedingly hard to do. Most days I am not capable of it. Most days, as I come to the end of another nine-hour shift at my new job, and I step out on Post Street downtown where it is already dark, and I push my way through the after-work crowds to Montgomery Station, to find that the M train is stuck somewhere under Market Street again and people are standing six deep on the platform and everyone is bent over their phones playing Angry Birds, and my feet hurt and my back hurts and I’m hungry and I know I need to hit the gym and walk the dog and find something to eat for dinner with the Manly Fireplug, the very last thing I feel like doing is keeping a part of myself open to the dead-eyed strangers around me, especially when the track frees up and we squeeze onto a train and some fuckhead with an outdoor voice and a backpack keeps knocking into me.

I still stubbornly protect my right to stay mired in misery. Most days I find it hard to show up for other people, and most days I fail other people, several times over. And if you are a real life friend reading this I have no doubt failed you more than once and I am running the risk of sounding like a major league self-righteous blowhard, and maybe I’m just trying to head you off at the pass here.

And believing in this kind of God is hard because every single one of us is fallible, and every single one of us has failed other people, and every single one of us has sometimes taken more than we’ve given.

And I don’t know if this kind of God, the God as verb, is the real one. Or if there even is a real one. Or if a verb can even count as a God. Maybe I just don’t want to face the black void in the absence of belief. But something about it feels right to me; it’s the highest kind of power I can imagine these days, and so that’s what I’m going to try out, for now.

So I had one of those dark-night-of-the-soul moments last week. Like a lot of my fellow countrymen, I’d recently found myself unemployed, flat-broke, and scrambling to pay rent. I had a Master’s degree from an Ivy League school that qualified me for no particular job, a not-yet-finished book that I’d been working on for six years, and a promising freelance gig that seemed to be dissolving before my very eyes. I’d just interviewed for a three-month entry-level job at a downtown law firm, where three separate interviewers asked me why a guy with my “credentials” would, in essence, bow so low.

I am now writing to you from their cubicle, a hired gun sneaking in a few sentences on my lunch break, a large turkey chili from the SF Soup Company rapidly cooling on my desk. I’ve just spent four straight hours folding the company holiday cards, which, in keeping with the pro-labor stance of the firm, are multicultural, printed on recycled paper from “well-managed” forests.

Given these rather prosaic surroundings, it seems like a million years since last week, when I found myself stuck on a thought that had regularly occurred to me over the course of my adulthood; after 39 years I had yet to figure out my niche in the marketplace. On the heels of this woe-is-me sentiment came another: what’s the fucking point?

This was not a casual what’s-the-fucking-point. This was the kind of what’s-the-fucking-point that morose adolescent girls who’ve read all of Sylvia Plath entertain. I then found  myself wondering what it would be like to check into a psych ward for just, you know, self-protection.

I’m not sure how long I entertained these thoughts – a few minutes, an hour or two. Long enough to remember that self-pity only feels good for a very short time. Long enough to realize how stupid it would be to throw in the towel just because the world hadn’t given me what I thought I needed to be happy. Long enough to know that I didn’t want to end up like David Foster Wallace.

DFW, the genius writer, was a hero of mine. He’s still a hero, but a dead one, since he hanged himself two years ago. I don’t know the reason or the reasons he hanged himself, but he’d long suffered from depression, and the one drug that had made his life bearable had stopped working.

He’s my hero not just because he was a genius writer, but because by all accounts he was a pretty amazing human being. I’ve read a few dozen interviews with him by now, and that quality is hard to miss. Normally I’d steer you towards a few of those interviews so you could see for yourself, but I’ve been folding holiday cards for four hours and I have exactly 27 minutes left on my lunch break. So you can just check out this memorial site instead.

“Good writing,” DFW once said, “Makes the reader feel a little less lonely inside.” Before reading that, my reasons for writing had all been intuitive, amorphous, and unspoken. But with those words DFW articulated my internal mission statement, or at least what I secretly hoped to do with my writing. Like most good writers DFW could put things into words you’d long felt but had never expressed.

Turning to the writing of a suicidal man when you yourself have been teetering on the edge is a questionable decision. But though DFW may have died of an incurable loneliness (and what is depression, really, but acute, soul-killing isolation?), he had accomplished his goal in making at least this one reader feel a little less lonely inside.

I turned to an essay (in this book) he’d written about attending the Illinois State Fair, many, many years after his childhood there. He wrote hilariously about dessert competitions, steer judging, and the dangers of observing teams of pre-teen girls whirling batons, many with more enthusiasm than skill, in an enclosed space.

Then, strolling through the midway, he turns a bit more somber: “It strikes me hardest here that I am not spiritually Midwestern anymore, and no longer young ­­– I do not like crowds, screams, loud noise, or heat. I’ll endure these things if I have to, but they’re no longer my idea of a Special Treat or sacred Community-interval. The crowds in the midway – mostly high school couples, local toughs, and kids in single-sex packs, as the demographics of the Fair shift to prime time – seem radically gratified, vivid, actuated, sponges for sensuous data, feeding on it all somehow. It’s the first time I’ve felt truly lonely at the Fair.”

Later in the essay he looks down at the fairway from a distance, in the middle of a storm, describing it as, “A whole lot of neon in the rain.”

That sentence stuck with me. With a handful of simple words he turns something garish and cynical and seedy into something almost beautiful. With those words he let me step into his head for a bit.

It didn’t take me long to get a little angry with myself. How stupid it would be to give up on everything just because you couldn’t find your way into the right job. And a couple weeks of work, even folding holiday cards, put some money in my pocket and filled a bit of my soul with some sense of purpose and satisfaction.

I’ve been thinking about changing the course of Dogpoet a bit. Not so much the format of stories and anecdotes and random snapshots of scruffy terriers. More like a change of focus. On the things that do and don’t make me, and maybe you, feel a little less lonely inside. I am going to risk looking way too earnest and defenseless and uncool in an effort to look at the things in life that do us some good. Which is not to say that I won’t also poke fun at the things that DO make us feel empty and sad and disconnected. Cause those can be instructive too. My little “Neon in the Rain” project.

I’ve always been a moody dude, but lately it’s gotten ridiculous. Depending upon the hour – and sometimes upon the minute – of the day, I swing from one emotional pole to the next. Rage at my recent financial collapse, anxiety that my overly-sensitive, creative soul, trembling in the wind, will never find a home in the professional world, and writ-slitting despondency, when I’ve realized that I’ve sent out a dozen resumes with two typos. For writing and editing jobs.

In the space between mood swings I distract myself with complicated job search plans that essentially boil down to three phases: long-term, mid-range, and oh-my-fucking-god. Long-term means I filled out a LinkedIn profile, since the only responses I’ve received as of yet from Craig’s List jobs are three internet scams, and it’s clear that I will find work the way everyone else in the world finds work: through people I know.

The emergency, oh-my-fucking-god phase means I swallowed my pride long enough to shake a couple of hands and pick up an application for seasonal work at a large national chain, and dragged myself to another national chain to fill out the application over a cup of coffee. Which was when I heard a voice over my shoulder:

“I sometimes think I should just make like several dozen copies of those.”

I looked up and found an acquaintance, a recent transplant to our fair city, a few years younger than me, smiling down at me. He pointed at the application.

“I can’t tell you how may of those I’ve filled out.”

Frankly I welcomed the interruption, and leaned back so we could chat a few minutes about our shared misery. At least, I thought of it as shared misery until he said the following words:

“So, yeah, I’ve been living out of my car.”

End shared misery. End self-pity. Begin other, more complicated emotions.

Being a somewhat private guy from the Midwest, I was hesitant to poke too forcefully into his circumstances. He told me a little, but his face stayed guarded, the way your own face would stay guarded should you find yourself in a similar situation. He made a point of saying he wasn’t looking for hand-outs, and he also made a point of saying his pride had sometimes cost him a night or two on a friend’s couch.

I found myself at a loss for words. I wanted to help him, but didn’t know how. The only thing I could think to say was “Where do you park at night?”

“I tell people I live at 18th and Noe,” he said, with a wry grin.

“The cops don’t bother you?”

He shook his head. “I just have to get up early every day, otherwise I wake up to someone peering in at me.” He sipped his coffee. “It makes dating interesting. The other day this guy asked if we could go back to my place. We ended up fooling around in my car. I asked him if it bothered him, but he said it was sort of dirtily romantic.”

I couldn’t help dwelling with fresh perspective on my own more fortunate situation, a situation that just an hour before had led me to a very dark place. My circumstances hadn’t changed, but in the space of 24 hours I’d swung like a deranged monkey from one wild branch to the next, around this same set of circumstances, my view changing with each swing, my breathing and heart-rate, too.

The older I get, the more I see that this is one of the secrets to happiness: a change in perspective. If I was going to come up with an aphorism I might say something like, it’s not what life hands you, but how you look at what life hands you. But I don’t do aphorisms here so just pretend you didn’t read that.

But this is why – when you are sunk in despair, dressed in your pajamas, scrolling through Craig’s List for a golden ring of opportunity – it’s a good idea to get out of the house, to give yourself the chance to stumble across others doing their best in trying times.

I still didn’t know what to say to him. Of course later one idea came to me; I should have just asked him, “What can I do?” and let him supply the answer, the answer his pride would allow. But that afternoon we just shook hands, and gave each other a kind of what-the-fuck-are-you-going-to-do shrug that said more than any words we could manage, at the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, Dad, I hear you now.

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

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

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