Blogs are strange animals with voracious appetites. The constant need for new content, etc etc, blah, blah. I’ve always had a love-hate relationship to mine, since by nature it calls for rougher drafts and less reflection than a good book requires. And my more facile assumptions and least artful sentences hang there to dry as the weeks and months pass, preserved for all eternity in my archives, should anyone bother.

I used to have this policy, that once published to the web, I would never revise a post, since invariably the more vulnerable I made myself in writing, the sooner I wanted to hit “delete.” Which felt like a dishonest reaction. But recently I changed my mind.

Last week I wrote an essay here about the Christian preachers chased out of the Castro, an essay that brought me some traffic and a few dozen comments. I wrote it in about three hours, which is pretty average for a longer post. But some of the comments by some of the readers made me reflect more on what I was trying to say, and I realized that I hadn’t actually captured the full spectrum of my emotions around the event, which made the essay less than honest.

Since first hitting the “publish” button on that essay, I’ve been thinking a lot. Mostly about anger and violence, the role they played that night in the Castro, the role they’ve played in the history of civil rights, and the fact that so many of the initial readers thought that I was giving a wholehearted thumbs-up to violence, when what I really wanted to encourage was anger.

But I felt conflicted and doubtful about both, and I realized that I needed to introduce this doubt into the post. And the more I thought about anger and violence, and the role they’ve played in gay people’s fight for civil rights, the more I wanted to refresh my memory about Stonewall, which meant that I did a little reading. And that reading cleared away some of my more facile assumptions, like Judy Garland’s death being the match to Stonewall’s gas tank, an assumption that can’t be reliably supported by the evidence. So I had to change the title of the essay as well, and leave out Judy, who, like, had a tough enough life as it was without getting dragged around Stonewall.

Which is a very long way to say that I revised the damn thing, because it felt irresponsible to leave it up in its rougher stage. It’s just a matter of a few short paragraphs, and I don’t know if anyone else but me cares about such a thing, and I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about that night in the Castro, and about anger and violence in general, which means that the issue, for me, stays unresolved. Which means that I will keep reading what other people have to say, and studying our history, hoping that eventually the clearest path to our goals will be revealed. Which ain’t so likely, since only hindsight is 20/20.

Last Friday a couple hundred gays and their friends chased a small group of young Christian preachers out of the Castro, calling them “bigots” and chanting “Don’t come back!”

I wish I’d been there.

The video of the event, or rather part of the event, has now been posted on YouTube, along with a written account by one of the preachers, who claims that they were both physically and sexually assaulted.

“It wasn’t long before the violence turned to perversion. They were touching and grabbing me, and trying to shove things in my butt, and even trying to take off my pants – basically trying to molest me…”

Unfortunately for him the video doesn’t capture any of this particular “molestation,” but our little gay uprising has predictably garnered both scorn and ridicule, and our community is accused of hostility and intolerance, and all weekend I wrestled with my conscience over the primal anger that still sweeps through me when I watch this video.

Why so angry? Why so hostile? The reasons may seem obvious to us, but since all of the preacher’s buddies on YouTube keep asking those questions, let me take a stab.

We grew up wondering what the hell was wrong with us, why we were so different from everyone around us. We observed and learned how to act, and some of us could hide that part of ourselves and pass, and some couldn’t, and those are the ones who were mocked and beaten on playgrounds and in cafeterias and gymnasiums.

We started to figure out how we were different, and how we were perceived. And for the rest of our lives we were told that we weren’t good enough, that we were sick and immoral and doomed to Hell.

Sometimes we made it out of adolescence without slitting our wrists, and we grew up and started looking for each other but we could only find each other in bars, because any other place was too dangerous. And those bars were raided by the police and we were rounded up and thrown in jail and our names printed in newspapers.

We were thrown out of jobs, out of schools, out of the military, out of churches. We were disinherited and shunned from our own families.

Our own bedrooms weren’t safe, according to our government.

When we got sick and died by the thousands we were ignored, and then told that it was all our fault. “God’s punishment,” they called it.  Only when Magic Johnson revealed his HIV-positive status, after thousands and thousands of us had already died, did the media treat AIDS as a legitimate story.

We couldn’t join our friends and partners in their hospital rooms, or at their funerals, because we weren’t considered family. Or we were allowed at the funerals only to see Fred Phelps and his followers show up to console us in our grief with signs that read, “God Hates Fags.”

When we asked for the same rights that everyone else enjoys we were castigated for wanting “special privileges.”  Our fight for the same rights that straight people take for granted was called the “Homosexual Agenda.”

We were blamed for threatening the institution of marriage by people who drunkenly wed in Las Vegas chapels, people who committed adultery and beat their wives and their children and then preached and pointed fingers from pulpits on television every Sunday.

We were the scapegoats and the punching bags for Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, and Born-Again Christians, to name just a few. And our supposed allies couldn’t stand up for us because they might be mistaken for one of us, and that, as everyone knew, was the worst thing you could be.

We were barred from adopting the children of people who weren’t capable of parenting themselves, let alone someone else. We watched as people wrung their hands on television and cried that their children needed to be protected from us, that children needed to be sheltered their whole lives from even realizing that we existed.

Each and every one of us grew up surrounded by images, in magazines and television shows and movies and on every street in every city in the country, of straight people kissing and fucking and holding hands. But when we demanded the right to marry we were “shoving it down their throats.”

We were told by our families not to bring our partners home for the holidays, so we left our partners and flew home and sat around the dining table with people who pretended that we were something we weren’t, and that everything was fine when it wasn’t.

We read in newspapers  that “I-killed-the-faggot-because-he-made-a-pass-at-me” is a legitimate legal defense.

We were allowed to dress up straight men on television, and listen to straight women recount their relationship problems while we nodded sympathetically and told them that their shoes were fabulous. They let us plan their weddings. But the idea of a gay wedding was just too much, too soon.

We were told  that our love for each other was sick and immoral and undeserving of protection. They placed our love in the same category as incest and bestiality.

We were even blamed for Hurricane Katrina.

People who haven’t walked an inch in our shoes told their followers with unwavering conviction that we chose to be gay. That this distinction (this lie) therefore separated us from all of those who fought for their “legitimate” civil rights. That we didn’t even deserve to use the phrase “civil rights.”

We were told, decade after decade, by the political allies that we elected and supported, that we needed to be even more patient than we’d already been, that our time hadn’t come, that Americans weren’t ready for us to have the same rights as everyone else.

So we retreated from the scorn and the violence, and we built little communities, neighborhoods in cities where we could feel some measure of safety and belonging, however fleeting or illusory, where a few of us could feel bold enough to hold our partner’s hand when we walked down the street, in our neighborhoods, just a couple of square miles, here and there, scattered across the country.

And still they came. Over and over people who claimed that they were led by God came into our lives, came into our funerals and our bedrooms and our relationships, called us immoral and disgusting, arrested us, beat us, robbed us, and killed us.

And still they came. After we’d been given the right to marry, after we’d stood in line at City Hall, after we’d baked each other cakes and made cards and bought presents, after we’d taken each other’s photos and stood and witnessed our love for each other while surreptitiously wiping tears from our eyes, after all of that, they still had to come. They came into our private lives, and stripped away our rights.

And Friday night, after we’d lost at the polls, after we watched the entire world celebrate the “dawning of a new day,” after our rights had been eliminated, after we’d crawled back to our neighborhoods and licked our wounds and talked to each other about what we should do next, they came again, into our neighborhood, into the Castro, to try and save our souls.

They were just stupid kids, with the worst sense of timing ever, but they were led by “love,” right? They came into our neighborhood, after we had suffered such a defeat, to “worship and to sing.” How innocent it all sounds.

But why us, why the Castro? They came into our neighborhood because we’re still not good enough, we’re not worthy of respect, we are immoral and wrong and in need of their salvation, and their compassionate, Christian beliefs somehow prevented them from questioning the wisdom of their timing, in such a neighborhood.

And it comes as no surprise that after our backlash, after we’ve chased them out of our neighborhood, after we’ve gathered at their temples, and marched around their churches, after we’ve made public the already-public record of their campaign contributions, they wring their hands and cry to the cameras that we are the intolerant ones, we are the hostile ones, we are the ones denying them their simple human rights.

What’s surprising to me is that we waited so long to chase them out of the Castro.  That we haven’t chased them out a thousand times. What’s surprising to me is how tolerant we’ve been, for so many years.

Let me put it blunty. We’ve taken their abuse, and we’ve taken it some more, and then, just when we thought we’d taken enough, we took some more.

I’ve read on more than one gay blog that our anger is a dangerous emotion, that we shouldn’t act on it, that we should just ignore it. But if a bunch of drag queens hadn’t gotten pissed off and thrown some bricks nearly forty years ago, none of us would even have a gay blog. They’d put up with the scorn and the violence and the police raids for so many years, and something that night put them over the edge. Instead of meekly surrendering to yet another raid, something that night pushed them in a new and exhilarating direction. The first to fight back were the drag queens, hustlers, butch dykes, and street kids, who threw pennies, bottles, and bricks from a nearby construction site. The same types that some of us still want to push to the margins and keep from television cameras.

Just like some of us want to pretend that we can only reach our goals by acting like Ghandi.

The anger of the crowd at Stonewall swelled and turned, over the following weeks, into an urgency for broader activism. Within two years there were gay rights groups in every major American city. We’ve continued their work but grown complacent, and overestimated our so-called assimilation.

But Prop 8 is our flashpoint. For the first time we had a right taken away, one that we had enjoyed and honored for five short months. After 18,000 weddings a simple majority of Californians, preached to by their church elders, persuaded by deceitful commercials funded in part by non-Californians, stripped us of that right.

Lately, the conventional wisdom in the Castro said that the neighborhood was changing, losing its character, its gay essence. Too many straight people were moving in, with their children and their double-wide strollers. And really, wasn’t that to be expected? As we were more widely “accepted,” as we were assimilated into society, our neighborhoods were bound to change. To disappear.

Friday night reminded some of us, at least, how important our neighborhoods still are, and that we all have our flashpoints.

In a perfect world we could walk down the streets of the Castro and pass the preachers with only a glance, and continue on our way, and let them sing and worship and maybe even convert a desperate soul or two. In a perfect world we could all sit down at a table and talk peacefully and reach some diplomatic compromise. We could work with the communities and the religious representatives that have opposed us, and come to a better understanding of each other, and reach our common goals.

I’ve never seen that world, and I never will.

Sometimes it takes anger, along with diplomacy. Sometimes a few drag queens need to throw a few bricks for things to finally change, or for things to at least begin to change.

We are human, with human emotions, and one of those emotions is anger.
And sometimes we need to fight back before others begin to see that maybe we’re stronger than we appear, and maybe they need to back off, and question their methods. We need our anger. We need our outrage. We need to fight back. Our anger could take us farther, in the next few months, than we’ve gone in the last few years.

Most of the time, when we live in the gay ghetto, our oppressors are abstract: a flickering image on a television, a cluster of words in the newspaper. Rarely do we get to see them face-to-face, as some of us did that night in the Castro.

I still wrestle with my conscience. I don’t know what I recommend. I don’t know what, exactly, is the surest road to our goals. There is a part of me, maybe the larger part, that feels only relief that I missed out, the part of me that knows that what happened was ugly and divisive, the part that questions if our backlash served our goals.

But it’s the other part of me that’s writing this, the other part of me that scares myself, the part I want to let loose, if only in words, to give it room to stomp around and fume. The part of me that looks back over the history of civil rights, to search out what role anger played.

That part of me wishes that I had been there, that night in the Castro, to have, for a few minutes at least, real, flesh-and blood examples of our oppressors, to feel the rage ignite within me, and around me, to watch in both surprise and elation my peers shake themselves out of that quiet place of resignation, to watch everyone around me cross the line that we’ve kept ourselves behind for so many decades, despite what the world keeps handing us. For one night, for a few short minutes, to chase our enemies from our home, and watch them flee, flanked by cops in riot gear, until they disappear from view, and we can turn back to each other and celebrate.

Note from Dogpoet:  I’m happy to report that this post will be published in Fourteen Hills, a literary magazine put out by San Francisco State University. Special thanks to my friend and fellow writer, Matthew Clark Davison, who helped usher this piece to Fourteen Hills.

I prop open the door to Folsom Street and blink against the sun for a second or two before retreating through the black leather curtains. Happy hour will be slow today, and an hour later only one customer, a regular who often dj’s at the bar on the weekends, keeps me company, sitting across from me on his bar stool, sipping a Jim Beam and Coke through a straw.

His lazy eye looks over my left shoulder as he tells me stories of the previous night. In his stories he is a fierce presence, whipping rowdy customers into shape with a single look, or a bullet-quick line. I sometimes wonder if these retorts aren’t shaped by wishful thinking after the fact, the kinds of things we think to say hours after the interaction, when our blood is only just beginning to cool. For in person he is a tad awkward if unfailingly helpful, dragging full kegs across the bar, checking coats, watching over the register when I need to take a piss.

A few minutes later both of us – anxious for more customers – catch sight of a movement just beyond the gap in the black curtains; a strange movement, slow, methodical, made by something that neither one of us can quite make out. There is a flash of leather, and of the bright petals of flowers, and what looks like a billowing cloak.

“What the hell is that?” I say.

“I have no idea,” he replies.

I take a step towards the door when the curtains part and she walks in.

I say “she,” though her gender is ambiguous. I say “she” because it’s what the DJ mutters when he catches sight of her, “Oh, no,” he says. “Here she comes.”

She’s a large girl, dressed in a long black trench coat and a black hat, with a wide, dramatic brim that casts a shadow over her pale-face, her eyes rimmed with heavy mascara like some downmarket Boy George, circa 1985, without the braids, and with bad teeth. She carries a black leather purse over one shoulder, and in her arms a bouquet of flowers, which she hands to me after making careful progress to the bar.

“These are for Mitch,” she says slowly, speaking the words as though placing one careful foot in front of the other, maintaining the appearance of balance.

“I’m filling in for Mitch,” I tell her. “He’s out today.” She gazes at me silently through half-lidded eyes, as if waiting for my words to settle somewhere in the back of her head. I wonder if she’s simply misunderstood me, thinks that Mitch is coming in later. I am embarrassed for her, for the now-pointless extravagance of the flowers. “It’s his partner’s birthday,” I tell her, my voice more tender than before. “But I can make sure he gets them.”

But whatever she thinks remains a mystery, as she pulls her purse onto the bar and pushes her small pale hand inside, like a tentative animal. She rummages around for a few long seconds, and then pulls out a slender patent-leather wallet, mumbling something.

“I’m sorry?” I say.

“Absolut and soda,” she murmurs.

Any bartender worth his salt would refuse to serve her, as the security of his job depends upon discretion and common sense. During happy hour I’m the only bartender, the sole employee, responsible for the bar and its patrons, a hat that I wear uneasily. Feeling awkward about the flowers, eager to avoid embarrassing her any further, wanting, as always, to avoid confrontation at all costs, I pour her the drink, knowing that I will regret it.

She fishes a few crumpled ones out of her wallet to pay for the drink, and then hands me a crisp twenty.

“What’s this for?” I ask her.

She points at me unsteadily, arching an eyebrow.

“Do you want change?” I ask. She says nothing, eyebrow still arched. “This is for me?” I ask.

“You don’t know who I am, do you?” she murmurs.

I look over at the DJ, who merely shrugs.

“My name is Miss Michael,” she says meaningfully, and offers me a crooked smile as she pushes her wallet back into her purse. Then her gaze wanders up, across the bar, where she catches sight of herself in the mirror behind me. Years ago someone fashioned a series of lamps from old Crisco cans, and they hang over the bar, casting red circles across its battered metal surface. More red lights are strung behind the bar, above and below the very mirror she ponders.

What follows is, to date, the most bizarre thing I’ve seen as a bartender.

She places both hands on the bar, and begins to perform an exhaustive series of poses, as if from the pages of a fashion magazine. She raises her head and regards herself, like Norma Desmond, in the reflection, touching one finger to her cheek. She lowers her chin until the black brim of her hat obscures one eye. She turns in half-profile and fingers a small studded earring. She pauses in each pose a few seconds, sometimes for what feels like a full excruciating minute, her eyes never leaving her reflection, never wavering from their focus, seemingly oblivious to her own spectacle. “I wish I had on a different outfit,” she whispers, pulling the lapels of her coat together and giving herself a coy smile.

The DJ and I glance at each other, unsure of what to do in the face of such a performance, her intricate, elegant poses mere inches away. This goes on for a couple of minutes. She picks up her drink and coyly sips through her straw, arching her eyebrow again in self-regard, unaware that she has tilted her glass too far, and her cocktail is spilling down the arm of her coat. Wary customers stack up behind her.

I lean over and whisper to her, “I need this section open for my customers, sweetie,” and gesture at the bar between us. My worries, that she would cause a scene, that she would crumple in tears, or erupt in screams, dissipate as she responds, gathering up her purse and clutching her drink with an unsteady hand. Miss Michael makes her slow way up the small flight of steps to the back bar, where she finds a table in the dark, leaving the flowers on the bar and a thin trail of Absolut and soda in her wake.

“You shouldn’t have served her,” the DJ says, and I lie, telling him that I didn’t realize how drunk she was until after I’d given her the cocktail. He either takes me for a liar or a naive. Even his lazy eye seems to regard me suspiciously.

Her performance, like a cloud of perfume, lingers over the bar, and for the rest of the afternoon and long into the evening I glance up at her, sitting alone in the dark, her back resting against the chain-link fence that encloses the DJ booth, one arm outstretched, her fingers playing and strumming on the fence.

Occasionally she responds to some lyric in the music blasting over the speakers, and raises one arm, her hand curling open and pointing at the ceiling. Every once in a while she gathers together her coat and purse, the gathering taking a good ten minutes, and I pray that she will leave, and take with her my responsibility for her welfare. But she merely shuffles off to the bathroom and back, removing her coat, taking her place again at the lone table in the dark. She sits there for four hours, as a slow trickle of customers, all men, pass her on their way to the back room.

Then, sometime around eight o’clock, she raises her hand again and cries out, “MADONNA!!” in a voice that overpowers the house music. It sounds like both a frustrated demand and a cry of victory, as if confirming the singer’s unassailable power over our lives. The customers look at her with a mixture of humor, disgust, and pity.

The hours pass slowly and I make my rounds behind the bar, tipping chilled pint glasses under a stream of draft beer, opening bottles, scooping ice, now and then wondering about Miss Michael, about her life, or what remains of it, outside the bar. Where does she live, where does she get her money? What does she think when she wakes in the morning to memories of the night before? Does she even remember the night before, and throwing flowers and cash away on bartenders?

Not that she could answer my questions, not tonight, when she is too drunk to respond. Would she even answer truthfully, or would every word cohere around the image she has woven of herself – you don’t know who I am, do you? And what did I really know of that image, after a few short hours?

Her twenty-dollar bill rests in my tip bucket like a dark reminder of my passivity, of the single drink I poured onto the others she’d had before stumbling through the black curtains. If I truly cared for her welfare, I might have insisted she keep the twenty, but I am as selfish as the next guy; I will take what I can get on this slow Monday night.

When she makes her way back to me and asks for another, I tell her, finally, that I can’t serve her any more liquor.

“You can’t?” she asks, like a wounded child.

“No,” I say. “How about a bottle of water?” I ask her. “Would you like a bottle of water?”

“Okay,” she says meekly.

I place the bottle on the bar, telling her that it’s on the house. She regards it unsteadily, then catches sight of herself again in the mirror. She begins a new series of poses but I stop her again, this time more quickly, and remind her that I need to keep that section of the bar open. She takes the bottle of water and shuffles over to the bench behind the pool table, leaving a five for me on the bar.

There she appears to catch sight of the mirror again, and maneuvers herself a few feet to the left, undoubtedly to the best unobstructed view of her reflection, sitting within inches of a few of my favorite regulars, three guys with shaved heads who drink Skyy and sodas with a wedge of lemon and leave me big tips. She begins posing again, her elbow brushing against one of the guys.

A man at the bar asks for a Bud, and I turn away, rehearsing in my mind the words that will extricate Miss Michael from the personal space of my regulars, words that seem complicated to me but should be easy, just a few words every bartender must at some point say. “Honey, it’s time for you to go.”

I turn to the cash register and ring up the Bud, glancing up and catching my own reflection in the mirror, confirming what I had noticed a long time ago; under the red lights, we all look better. I regard myself for a second longer than necessary. When I turn back, Miss Michael is gone, the bottle of water, still slick with condensation, sitting unopened on the bench.

The more I’ve worked on the memoir, the less energy I’ve put into this blog. Which makes sense to me. Less clear is why I’ve kept the blog sputtering along on a quarter tank of gas for the last couple of years.

I suppose it’s a combination of motives: stubbornness, of course. Optimism that I might find within myself more energy than I’ve shown. And, worst of all, my grudging acceptance of the conventional wisdom that today all writers (or all artists, or pundits, or fourth-graders) need to maintain a “web presence,” a marketing tool, an idea that wasn’t around over six years ago, when I started this thing.

Back then different motives drove me: the need to start writing again after a long dry spell, the need to document the last couple months of my mother’s life, the desire for approval, and the yearning to connect to what used to feel like an underground community of freaks.

Around the time that people started throwing up blogs featuring nothing but photos of half-naked boys, blogging went from something I loved to do, to something I felt obligated to do. A total snob I sometimes am. Unwilling to pull the plug, however, I need a different motivation.

Over Christmas, in the long lazy hours at my father’s Palm Springs condo, I picked up a copy of Newsweek with a cover story on Amazon’s Kindle– the new digital “reading device.” I belong to the camp that can’t imagine an expensive piece of plastic holding the same allure as a bound book. But I can acknowledge that times change.

But the section of the article that most disturbed me was about the ways in which technology could, or would, change the very nature of reading and writing. The article quoted a guy who heads the Institute for the Future of the Book (paging George Orwell…):

Stein sees larger implications for authors—some of them sobering for traditionalists. “Here’s what I don’t know,” he says. “What happens to the idea of a writer going off to a quiet place, ingesting information and synthesizing that into 300 pages of content that’s uniquely his?” His implication is that that intricate process may go the way of the leather bookmark, as the notion of author as authoritarian figure gives way to a Web 2.0 wisdom-of-the-crowds process. “The idea of authorship will change and become more of a process than a product,” says Ben Vershbow, associate director of the institute.

This is already happening on the Web. Instead of retreating to a cork-lined room to do their work, authors like Chris Anderson, John Battelle (“The Search”) and NYU professor Mitchell Stephens (a book about religious belief, in progress) have written their books with the benefit of feedback and contributions from a community centered on their blogs.

“The possibility of interaction will redefine authorship,” says Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation, an association of libraries and institutions. Unlike some writing-in-public advocates, he doesn’t spare the novelists. “Michael Chabon will have to rethink how he writes for this medium,” he says. Brantley envisions wiki-style collaborations where the author, instead of being the sole authority, is a “superuser,” the lead wolf of a creative pack.

An-ever updated book, written by a thousand keyboards. I couldn’t help imagine picking up a copy of Lolita, only to see Nabokov pecked to death by a thousand earnest voices. Not to sound too dramatic (too late, I know) but what a fucking loss that would be.

When I read a book I want to dive down into a world, or a consciousness, and listen to just one voice tell a story. I want to absorb just one person’s insights. I want to stay, listening to that story, and that voice, without interruption, for more than two minutes at a time. The thought of that one voice interrupted by a thousand others disturbs me to no end. But I’m not sure I buy that my preference for one author, and my distrust in the “wisdom of the crowd” means that I’m somehow against democracy.

I suppose this is why I prefer a nice long dinner with one or two friends over the chatter of a cocktail party. A good conversation with one friend makes me inordinately happy; it pulls me out of the gloom of my personal obsessions, the abandoned carnival of my mind, and briefly restores my faith in humanity. As in books, the more time I spend with one person, the better I understand them, and selfishly, myself.

In the month since I turned in my thesis, I’ve lost several days surfing the web, emerging at one or two a.m. feeling irritated and disgruntled. Certain things, like the internet, Playstation 3, and a tub of pudding, feel good in the moment. But they never feel good at the end of the day.

Unlike Philip Roth, who apparently doesn’t own a television, and spends his hours, when not writing, reading and rereading the classics of Literature, writers of my generation grew up with television and the internet. Some of them seem able to balance the twin pulls of literature and popular culture remarkably well. But I’m no good at it. Popular culture, so shiny and bright and sweet, swallows me whole and spits me out later with nothing to show for it but a more well-developed case of cynicism. Books feed me more, but they require more of me, too.

This isn’t so much a declaration of a new motivation for blogging, so much as a reminder to myself of what I’ve been trying to do all along. I don’t want to offer only hyperlinks and jpegs of naked rugby players. Not that I have anything against naked rugby players; I’m sure they’re very nice people, and if you sat down with them over coffee you might glimpse the richness of their inner lives.

But I guess I want to strive for the feel of literature conveyed through this form of pop culture. I’d like to try and offer one voice, one consciousness – flawed, grouchy, and a little too earnest – and hope that every once in a while somebody can relate, and maybe recognize themselves. I guess I want to give back to those writers who kept me company, and to provide a place where other people might leave feeling a little less alone in the world. That, interspersed of course with photos of Manly Fireplugs and my adorable puppy. Too much self-seriousness leads to bloating, and drives people to poke you with sharp sticks.

So the Manly Fireplug brought his iPod dock to Hawaii, and there we got laid to the sounds of Amy Winehouse, whom I liked much more than I thought I would. I mean, the song “Back to Black” kind of burrowed its way into my head, reminding me romantically of some of my past misdeeds. None of my current misdeeds, of course. I’m nothing but an honorable man now.

In the mornings we ate in the restaurant of our hotel, the Queen Kapiolani, affectionately nicknamed by our posse as “The Queen Krap.” The restaurant, like the rest of the hotel, had seen better days, but I appreciated its down-at-the-heels aesthetic. Kind of like Amy Winehouse, now that I think about it. A hotel forever caught in the tropics of 1973.

The Fireplug tore open a packet of C&H sugar for his coffee, then read its label. “Guess where this came from,” he said.

“The Big Island?” I asked.

“No. Yonkers.”

It was a repeat of our last year’s trip, though this year it was more of a working vacation for me, as I spent the two five-hour plane rides, and several hours a day in the Queen Krap, working on my thesis, which I Fed-Exed back to Columbia yesterday, in time for Monday’s deadline. Yep, that part of my life is now over. In May, if all goes well, I should get my MFA, which the Fireplug in Hawaii decided meant, “Mighty Fine Ass.” He’s sweet like that.

In January, upon first print, the thesis totaled 369 pages. I spent the next month cutting, fleshing out, and polishing it into a 270-page, leaner, meaner manuscript. And though it’s far from perfect, I’m proud of it.

I surpassed the 120-page minimum for thesis requirements, but at 270 pages it’s still only two-thirds of my intended book. I still have a lot of work ahead of me before I send it off to agents. So today I went back to my new office and back to work on the rest of the book. I read some interview recently with Michael Chabon, who writes 1000 words a day, five days a week. I figured I could do that, too.

Not too long ago the Fireplug was running into Spike’s coffee, across the street from his barbershop, and a boy at one of the outside tables yelled to him, “Hey! Tell Dogpoet to put some excerpts of his book on his blog!”

The Fireplug yelled back, “Fuck no! He’s done with giving it away for free!”

I really do love the guy.

Unfinished Manuscript                        Puppy
370 pages                                        18 weeks

So instead of taking yet another year to finish my thesis, I’ve decided to graduate in May. Which means turning in my thesis by the end of February. I’m way past the minimum page requirements, so I’ve gone back to the beginning to revise, edit, and polish up the first big chunk. Turn that in, graduate, get my degree, then go back and finish the rest of the manuscript, and start looking for an agent.

The little monkey is good for distraction and comic relief. Right now he is hiccuping, again.

On Sunday, I stood blank-eyed in front of a display of Hostess products at Safeway. The Manly Fireplug came up behind me. “Think of it as sitting shiva for Louie,” he said. “You can eat whatever the fuck you want.”

I pondered that for a moment. “When did they come out with Caramel Ho-Ho’s?” I asked. He shrugged. I bought some tapioca pudding instead.

Sharing custody of Louie with the Ex, and my two years away in New York, have accustomed me to not seeing him for certain lengths of time. So it’s not like I’m hysterical with grief. I tend to cry during stupid television shows, or when I make the mistake of replaying parts of the euthanasia in my head. It ranks up there as one of the more intense experiences of my life. I think about the Ex now the way I imagine you’d think about someone with whom you survived a plane crash.

The numbness began wearing off today. I pruned some trees around my back deck, and sat in the sun looking around at my container garden, which I had repotted last weekend. Oy vey, the symbolism!

Otherwise I’ve been trying to remain vigilant; monitoring myself and doing my best to separate self-pity from normal sadness. I don’t always know the difference, nor do I really understand why this distinction is so important to me right now, other than the fact that I’m self-conscious about how self-centered I’ve become. I suppose writing a memoir, and keeping a blog, will do that to you.

Which is why I welcomed a new freelance job offered to me, writing profiles on Bay Area artists for a small newspaper. I doubt you’ve heard of this publication. Still, for the first time in my life I was getting paid to write, and I could build up clips to show other papers or magazines, should I end up liking the work. But interviewing another artist for an hour or so, transcribing their words, and then shaping those words and a few observations into something coherent, was a way of thinking about someone else for a while.

But then my editor asked if I’d cover this local conference for high tech investors, and wanting to please him, I said yes. I should have listened to my gut. The conference ran this past Thursday through Sunday. Louie died Friday, and I had to go back the next morning and bravely blink back tears as I sat through presentations on semiconductor design and investment strategies in the renewable energy sector. (Hmm, I think that might qualify as self-pity).

I’m not cut out to be a reporter. A artist profiler, sure. They know they’re getting interviewed ahead of time. But walking up to complete strangers with a tape recorder and asking them questions about a subject that I have:

a) no real knowledge of, and
b) no real interest in

was utter torture for a well-documented introvert like myself. I realized that this new-found Interest in Others doesn’t extend to Vice Presidents of Marketing Strategies.

So I had to turn in two articles on this conference, which I worked on until the last second, all the while nursing a resentment that was nobody’s fault but my own. In fact, I turned the whole assignment into this major crisis in my head, such that when I finally finished, I’d blown more than a few synapses, which is how I ended up sleepwalking past Hostess displays and (imagine this) turning down the Manly Fireplug’s proposition of hot sex.

But today is a gorgeous day in San Francisco. The Fireplug and I have front row tickets for Kiki and Herb on Sunday. I’ve recently perfected the art of making a grilled ham and cheese sandwich and, emboldened, bought The Joy of Cooking. Tonight the Fireplug will play guinea pig for Fettuccine with Salmon and Asparagus. After which, allowing an hour or so for proper digestion, I hope to get lucky.

The other night my new thesis advisor was in town to read from her recently-published book at A Different Light, where we arranged for me to give her my book-thus-far. That evening also marked the end of the first week of the semester, and my first weekly ten pages were also due. This breaks down to two pages a day, five days a week, and I’m happy to report that I met this goal, and am three days into my second week, with equally satisfying results. Two pages a day may not sound like much, but I’m quietly ecstatic about fulfilling my rather narrow, self-defined purpose in life.

After months of not-writing at distracting coffee shops, and not-writing in my bedroom (despite my beautiful new desk from Room and Board that – since it couldn’t fit through the hallway –had to be carried down the side of a hill and pushed gingerly through my bedroom window), I discovered that if I took my laptop upstairs to the dining room table, turned off the internet connection, drank a Red Bull or three, and stared at a blank Word document for an hour, I could crank out two pages of really bad writing. The months of not-writing have left me thick-headed and rather stupid on the page, and every five minutes or so I stand up and pace the fifty feet from the table to the living room window and back, several times, till I grow a bit dizzy and have to sit down again.

By the end of two pages I’m so proud of myself that I have to text the Manly Fireplug and tell him of my progress. He very kindly congratulates me on this stunning achievement, and then I sort of collapse in an exhausted heap. Did I tell you I’m currently writing about the period when I was fourteen, and…well…was ANYONE happy at fourteen?

So I printed out the book-thus-far for the advisor, and tallied it up; as of today, I’ve written 200 pages. This probably isn’t as interesting to you as, say, my sex life with the Manly Fireplug. Maybe neither of these subjects interest you. But I don’t have much else to offer you, becaue I’m not really thinking about anything except these two subjects, more or less continuously. It’s what I got, people. Cut me some slack.

To my blog, which turned five years old this week. I’m two days late, in fact, but then that’s appropriate; this is, after all, a frustratingly sporadic, coy, late-to-the-party weblog, one that’s spent its entire five years unsure of its “purpose,” driving in the dark without a mission statement or a proper theme to light the path. (One that runs fast and loose with mixed metaphors, and can’t adhere to the proper Chicago Manual of Style, either). Thanks to everyone who’s danced at my party.

-After nearly five years of whining blogging, I finally got nominated for one of those pesky awards. Clearly I’ve been blowing the wrong bloggers all this time.

- My inner Encyclopedia Brown has not yet solved the case of The Birds in the Bag. I’ll pick up the trail again after nap time.

- After many failed attempts, I cannot figure out why my sidebar appears incorrectly on Internet Explorer for Windows (at least on version 6). Since no generous geek has stepped forward to help me, I’m willing to fork out a little cash to someone who actually knows what they are doing with the Internets.

- To the two people who asked: I did not get shot last night in the Castro. The rest of you obviously don’t care about my welfare, and that saddens me.

- Last night I sat with the Manly Fireplug in his hot tub. It was cool out, the dogs were sniffing around under the trees, and we brought out glasses of ice water with our towels. The moon was behind the house, and it lit up the clouds moving slowly across the dark sky. Far overhead, a plane flew by with its lights blinking. This was after chicken lasagna from Trader Joe’s. And vanilla gelato.