D O G P O E T

I’ve got your self-growth right here…

It’s clear God is trying to tell me something. Last night I ran into M.A. again, this time at my dentist’s office. Twice in two nights, after five years of no contact.

“I’ve been thinking about it all day,” he said, “seeing you last night was exactly what I needed.”

Sigh. I feel like such a fuckwad. First off, gentle reader, I need to change his nickname. M.A. is unwarranted, and all it does is illustrate my stupidity. Granted, it’s stupidity from the past, but even mentioning it in my post yesterday left me with a disturbing case of buyer’s remorse (a feeling I experience more often than you might guess.)

So I’m presented with an opportunity for self-growth. Vomit all you want, the writing’s on the wall. I must face my insecurities and throw them off a cliff. Or let them go, or whatever euphemism for throttling their bratty little necks you prefer.

There’s a common sentiment expressed in AA meetings that it is through helping others we lose our worries. And I need to get way lost.

The Bad Seed

Oscar Wilde once said; “It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.” (and Billy Graham said “The Bay Area is so beautiful, I hesitate to preach about heaven while I’m here, ” a feeling we wish he honored more often.) Nobody visited me in Minneapolis, but the longer I live in San Francisco, the more people I see from my past. Such is life in a destination city.

The first time I got sober, I was nineteen and still living in Minneapolis. There was a guy who got sober about the same time I did. People used to say we looked like brothers, but I often felt like the ugly sister in his company. Guys loved him. Hell- girls did, too. Though we both worked out, his body just took to it in a way that mine never did. It seemed overnight that his muscles grew; a speed so disheartening to me; the eternal skinny boy. He was truly stunning. Eventually he met a man equally good-looking and they became the unofficial Beautiful Couple of Minneapolis. They were whisked off on one of those gay cruise ships to be photographed frolicking in the surf, kissing in the pool, laughing over dinner on the Acapulco Deck. It was impossible to open a gay rag and not see pictures of them splashed all over the ad pages.

I developed a slight jealousy problem. Because his boyfriend was an economics professor, I nicknamed my friend “Mary Anne” behind his back (as in “The Professor and Mary Anne” of the 3-hour tour fame). I had some insecurities. But I was also human. After one hundred men asked me about my friend, the one hundred and first had his head ripped off. Metaphorically, of course. It became easier to spend less time with M.A., especially as he became lost in the first throes of a perfect romance. The jealousy never sat well with me (does it ever?)

That was when a certain segment of the gay population held an allure for me; a segment that was pretty and shallow and seductive despite its shallowness, maybe even because of its shallowness. The Beautiful and the Buff; an exclusive club tantalizingly out of my reach. M.A.’s membership was a given, and through him I saw doors open that for me had always seemed shut and locked. I saw rooms of men shift chemically at his entrance; I saw his modest awareness of his beauty, and the modesty made it worse; harder to like him, harder to hate him. Yes, the club too closely resembled popular high school cliques. Yes, I disdained it. But I desired it more. This is the club that we think of as mainstream, when really it’s only a sliver of our population; a sliver photographed far more than its fair share. I wanted membership. If only, I told myself, so that I could revoke it. Torn between pretty and punk, I became neither.

Eventually I met the man who would become my Ex, and we moved to San Francisco. When my mom got sick and I moved back to Minneapolis for a few months, I ran into the Professor. He told me that M.A. had fallen spectacularly off the wagon, ran off to a treatment center in Dallas, and then vanished into the city without a trace, leaving the Professor alone and confused. That was five years ago, and the last I had heard about M.A. I’ve thought about him frequently, wondering what became of him, feeling my bitterness wither and die.

Last night I looked around the fluorescent-lit AA meeting and spotted, under a flannel shirt and baseball cap, my Mary Anne sitting alone in the back, no longer buff but still cute and uncertain. Turns out he came to San Francisco last month to visit a friend who then got him admitted to a treatment program where he’s been ever since. Things do change. “Look how big you’ve gotten!” he cried, pinching my cheek. Serendipity is more than a John Cusack movie.

It certainly felt like something came full-circle last night, just in time to test me or teach me a lesson. Which is silly, because it’s not all about me. But still. Residing within me is a creature that I think of as my Inner Child’s Evil Twin Sister. It demands total attention from men. It whines and wheedles and pouts if someone gets more than me. Granted, I’ve made enormous progress in exorcising this Demon Child. I don’t want everyone’s attention, and I don’t want a club membership; just some good friends and maybe a hunky man with a good heart somewhere down the line. But I felt her stir and kick when I saw Mary Anne, like an angry little fetus, like the ghost pain of an amputated leg. I may never be completely rid of her, but I’m getting better at seeing her for what she is; a whiny brat who needs to go to her room.

Freshmen

Put on New Order. No, Substance, please. Yes. Those first few dormitory walls with pictures ripped from magazines; beautiful, half-naked people, all. Naked men were newer then, and I would lay on your futon on the floor, gazing up at them, all the people we were going to be. I ate up everything gay in that shitty little town; the bars and the books and the boys dipping their big toe, testing the waters. What was that song; everyone smiling and barefoot, holding beers and spinning. They cheered at the end. I was known for my parties.

Warm nights the temperature of our blood; heat lightning across the gulf. We’d sit on the dock and stir the water with sticks; the phosphorescent plankton swirling like constellations underneath. One heron stood still, scanning for fish. You never knew; I’d disappear and hide down there; wanting him to look for me, but he never did. He only loved you. I wish I could tell you I never do that anymore.

“One life was never quite enough for what I had in mind.”*

1. I love jumbo paper clips. I’m on a secret mission, being the guy who orders office supplies, to quietly, steadily replace all small paper clips in our department with the jumbo size. Shhhh.

2. Lisa Shaw’s voice on “Ultimate High”.

3. I always laugh when people say “I didn’t think it could happen here“. Haven’t they learned yet? Shit happens everywhere. I’m starting a campaign today to encourage the use of original statements made by neighbors to the media following a death or disaster. No more “you wouldn’t think it could happen here” or “he was always so quiet”. Modern reporting requires more drama than that. Try “everyday I lay awake knowing a plane would drop on my house, and now it has.” Or “That guy was such a fucking psycho. I’m surprised more people around here hadn’t gotten killed already.”

4. Sometimes I’m terribly out of sync with the Americans.

5. “You may sometimes think everyone lives in the crotch of the pleasure principle these days except you, but you have company, friend. I live under the same pressures you do. It is still your work or role that finally gives you your definition in our society, and the thousands upon thousands of people who I believe are like me are those who have never found the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls.”

*-Seymour Krim, “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business”

It’s so bright tonight

My supposed former infatuation fiancé spent the weekend engaging in New York debauchery with other bloggers and drunken co-dependents. We haven’t had that talk about…er…boundaries, so I shouldn’t complain. And yet. I’m afraid to ask if the shine is fading.

I have been the most absurd gimp lately. Remember when I told you that retail therapy doesn’t work? Well, it goes further. It’s actually harmful to your health. Granted, I never should have worn a new pair of boots to work all day. I should have broken them in gradually; an hour or two here, a dinner out there. But no, I left the house and midway on my walk to work I realized I had made a really bad decision. Ouch. Ouch ouch ouch. Now my Achilles tendon is sore and every pair of shoes I own rub it the wrong way. Limp, limp, limp. No gym, no running, no pounding the sidewalk looking for a new apartment. And Louie, slow down already; your daddy is hopelessly pathetic.

Really, though, this retail injury only serves to highlight the issue that I stumbled upon round about 4 a.m this morning. Tossing and turning, I gave up and logged on, drifting from link to link and realizing, comparatively, that I don’t have enough fun. I need more corporeal satisfaction and bliss. I have been far too cerebral and grief-stricken, and the physical specimen that is dogpoet has been missing out. Really, it all ties together. A drought of sex, the disruption of my gym routine, a sense of uneasiness about the self I project. I haven’t shown other white people how to dance in over a year and a half. What I mean to say is, my body needs some attention. From me, mainly, then others as they see fit. I wake in the morning and hate all my clothes. I want to look the way I feel; I want to look like a human bullet. No more sensitive poet bullshit. I want to be a solid hunk of tattooed manhood. No more plaid boxy campshirts. No more oversized raingear. I want to look like walking sex, even at work. Especially at work. I want to be inappropriate and distracting. You can read my books later. Right now, just want me.

“I want to be the things I see-
give every face and place my name.
I cross the street, take a right-
Pick up the pace, pass a fight.
Did I grow up
Just to stay home?
I’m not immune-
I love this tune.”

No, but this song does…

I’m warning you now: navel-gazing therapeutic bullshit ahead. Click elsewhere if you can’t stand trainwrecks. With that said, I want to openly declare my present love for music, people, and writing who aren’t afraid to show their hearts. Cynicism will be the death of all art, unless there continue to be people who fight the good fight. More creators and less critics. Who would we be without the expression of honest emotion? A cog in the corporate wheel, another film critic, a consumer. All I want to do lately is read, write, listen to music, hike in the woods, and fuck. Yes, really.

“Despite what your high school English teacher may have told you, literature does not make us or our society better. To be seduced by fiction is to live at cross-purposes with most of the really important things in life. I’ve never entirely succumbed to a story without blowing off housework, neglecting social obligations and flubbing career-critical deadlines.”

“You Read Your Book and I’ll Read Mine”
By JUDITH SHULEVITZ

I feel I am living at cross-purposes with most of the really important things in life. The irony being that they’re not important; the job, the bills, the social upkeep. I keep fantasizing about escape, which is really a fantasy about death, or a kind of death at least. Not the morbid kind; just the unrealistic.

My mind is in a strange little orbit lately. My first year of sobriety was basically about survival; getting clean, breaking up with the Ex, starting a new job, testing HIV-positive, watching my mother’s health deteriorate knowing there wouldn’t be a cure in time to save her. I kept holding on through it, held on through her death in February. I cried at her memorial, for the first time in months. Now it seems like grief is under a single layer of my skin; welling up after all my successful avoidance. I never felt my break-up; not really. It was a matter of details; finding a new apartment, packing, moving, AA meetings at night. I never shed a tear over him. I didn’t think about him. Sometimes I would marvel over the sheer absence of drama. He’d come over to get the dog and stand too close and smile that let’s-fuck smile and I couldn’t care less, couldn’t want him less. Now it feels more like a dead clump of cells in my heart. Me; the guy who tattooed a heart on his sleeve.

Attended a dinner party for the man whose dog I watched last week. His boyfriend made faralitos and placed them all around the backyard and we sat out on the patio in the cool night until long after dark, the lights glowing around us. A couple of other writers attended, and the conversation was easy and fun. Louie sat near the closest hand of food at all times.

My friend was plugging the Campfire, so if any of the dinner guests are reading this, welcome. I made a remark that night, which is true, that I am grateful to be writing again. So grateful I could cry. If you were to stand near me for long enough, you’d most likely end up drenched.

Oh, hell. Others say it better:

“Seriously, Tommy, yeah. I believe that love is immortal.”
“How is love immortal?”
“I don’t know, perhaps because life creates something that was not there before.”
“What, like procreation?”
“Yeah, but not only…”
“What? Like recreation!”
“Stop! You come in here crying and you want to recreate with me!” (pause) “Maybe just…creation.”

I was holding it all in

Monday night I was still housesitting.  I turned out on the lights and crawled into bed at ten p.m.; decent hour.  The dogs slept next to me, and when the bed started to shake I thought one of them was scratching his ear, but there was no jangle of dogtags, and then suddenly it felt really creepy, as though someone were standing at the end of the bed and shaking the bed back and forth.  

///

In my continuing efforts to read more writers that I probably should have read by now, I went beyond the class reading assignment and came across the deliciously catty essay by Gore Vidal on Tennessee Williams, “Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self”.   Essentially a piece on the contrasting memoirs famous people write about each other, it contained such passages as this:

“Tennessee is the sort of writer who does not develop; he simply continues.  By the time he was an adolescent he had his themes.  I am not aware that any new information (or feeling?) has got through to him in the twenty-eight years since our Roman spring.   In consequence, we have drifted apart.  ‘Gore no longer receives me’, said the Bird to one of his innumerable interviewers; and he put this down to my allegedly glamorous social life.  But the reason for the drifting apart is nothing more than difference of temperament.   I am a compulsive learner of new things while the Bird’s occasional and sporadic responses to the world outside the proscenium arch have not been fortunate.  ‘Castro was, after all, a gentleman,’ he announced after an amiable meeting with the dictator.   Tell that to the proscribed fags of Cuba.”

And my favorite:

“In the ‘Memoirs’ Tennessee tells us a great deal about his sex life, which is one way of saying nothing about oneself.”

I have decided that it is in my interest to be as bitchy as possible to guarantee for myself a bright career in writing.  After all, nobody wants to read about heartfelt life experiences (well, Oprah used to, but witness the case involving Jonathan Franzen).   Rather it would seem that an acerbic wit and a gossipy “voice”, gilded by lyricism, is what gets you into the Establishment.  

This is what NOT gets you invited: sitting in the car for an extra three minutes after parking because “Piano in the Dark” is playing on the radio.  Brenda Russell, anyone?

///

Yes, I like Hella Good.

Yes, I already adore 18, even more than Play.

///

So, like, God.  Tell me what to do with these angry days of mine.  It’s like having hot flashes.  Is 31 too young for male menopause?  A rush of hot steely wind that I set my chin against and squint.  I’m on the outside looking in again.   A room of alcoholics laugh together and damnit I’m not gonna laugh.  I sit in the back, I cross my arms, I glare at the floor.  My life does not feel like mine own.  I’m over here, it’s all over there.  One thousand steps to take, and I’d rather just sleep.  

Hello?

Are you there, God?  It’s me, dogpoet.

(We must, we must, we must increase our bust!)

///

“When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off the DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again.   In fact it never was.  Some time later there was a song on all the jukeboxes on the upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that.  I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.”

-Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That”

///

Is grief, then, like a depth charge?  Igniting below the surface, rolling outwards from the center, pushing up at farther places, exploding outward?  I find I want to bury my face in another man’s chest and disappear for awhile, as if I could hide, as if I could be saved.  

Crazy then, this preoccupation with unrequited emotion.  Movies where they stare and linger and want.  A self-defeating gesture.  What good is unrequited love?  No one pins a medal on the loveless lover.  Here, you’ve suffered enough.   Fuck, no.  Nobody watches you; nobody rewards you. It’s up to you alone.  Fuck unrequited.  Who needs that?

Oh man, he’s gettin all spiritual and shit

I think I will install a blood sugar tracker on my computer. If I try to write without eating anything that day, it will lock up and tell me to get a Clif bar. I’m certainly melancholic enough. I’d like to retain my audience, rather than lose you to hopelessness and despair. You can get plenty of that elsewhere. You could read about, say, oil drilling in Alaska.

Behind the building where I work they’ve thrown up a brand-spanking new Best Buy. Along the outer walls of the green and purple structure are various light windows with multiculturally-correct displays of beaming consumers holding PDA’s, video cameras, and joysticks. Their smiles betray the truth I’ve gradually uncovered; you can’t buy happiness. No, really. You can’t. This may come as a shock to many of you, but I feel that it is my duty to act as a consumer watchdog and to Tell the Truth. In my recent shopping expeditions (done as research, to serve your interests) I’ve realized that despite massive capitalist efforts, retail therapy does not actually work. Rather than inner peace and satisfaction, you’re left instead with ambivalent gifts and a smaller checking balance.

If the unexamined life is not worth living, the examined life is simply a tragic loss of denial. Oh sweet slumber, what a blessing it would be to never wake up. Imagine it. I could walk through life comfortable in my skin. I could buy lots of stuff and put it in the back of my Chevy Tahoe. I could work for the Gap, live in the Marina, find satisfaction in catalogues, and regard Abercrombie and Fitch models as rilly hot. Ok, that was cheap. Sorry.

Over the weekend someone tacked a cartoon over my computer; one man saying to another, “I’m not a dog person. I’m just a guy with a dog.” That it’s such an accurate depiction of my current moods shows that my internal ennui is showing through the cracks. I watch myself withholding affection from Louie some days; he beseeches me to snap out of it.

Bearbait and a mutual friend (who shall remain nameless) spent time together hanging out in the Castro yesterday. The friend, however, was so busy chasing boys that Bearbait felt ignored. This friend is very attractive, to many men, and he reels them in effortlessly (at least, from my perspective). Bearbait walked away when the friend ran across the street to introduce himself to yet another boy. A rush of sympathetic indignation rose up within me when Bearbait told me the story. It’s so easy to see other people’s desperate attempts to fill the void we all carry. Yet in his actions I stood reflected; distorted perhaps, but there nonetheless. I also saw my jealousy of the attention he commands, though if pressed I wouldn’t trade it for my meager share. For it’s mine.

During my mother’s illness I put happiness on hold. The waiting was the worst. Now she’s gone, and I’m still waiting. For a new apartment, a car, a relationship with Ski, a different job, a different body. I can get satisfaction, I just need to change perspective. I can’t afford to keep shopping.

///

I’m having Internet connection challenges both at work and home now; posts may come infrequently for a couple of days. But you’ll live.

Sleeping Dogs

Tranquility, yes. I could not fall asleep last night. My friend’s place was eerily quiet after lights out, and I heard something I had almost forgotten about: Wind through the trees, creaking limbs, absence of traffic. Plus I had forgotten my anti-depressants at home, the ones that make me nice and sleepy. At 2 o’clock in the morning I turned on some Beethoven to play in the background, and the dogs regarded me wearily, woken again by my restless movements. Strange scenes flashed repeatedly when my eyes closed; me hissing something like “It’s either me or the dogs” to my boss, to which she dryly replied, “We work at an animal shelter”; bitchy alcoholics cornering me in a church basement, upset at how I was running the meeting; erotic encounters with Ski spliced with a dinner conversation in which I say to him, “I’m not really your type, am I?”. Sigh.

Catching up on my class reading last night; Scott Russel Sander’s memories of his drunk father, Mary McCarthy’s accidental brush with Communism, Richard Rodriguez’s portrait of San Francisco in the 1980’s, the facades of Victorian homes and the growing absence of gay men. I’m not worthy. I think again; so many wonderful writers I haven’t yet read, who am I to think I could do this, my words are immature, derivative. In choppy times the sullen critic gains ground, doubts trail after him like shrieking ghosts in my head, emptying the meaning from my life. He likes it when I lose sleep.

And please, feel free to eat any food that’s in the house

In what could only be an act of contrition, the Chinese tucked two fortunes into my cookie today:

“Good things are being said about you.” and
“Your talents will be recognized and suitably rewarded.” (That is, if I don’t die from eating so much Chinese food.)

///

Rather than put myself through the hassle of finding a new apartment here in San Francisco, I think I will instead become the guy who watches your house and dog while you’re away. Tonight through Tuesday Louie and I begin another mini-vacation away from my roommates, sequestered in a studio apartment in the Mission with a lush green backyard, and a car available in its own garage. And a sweet dog named Basil. Plus there’s something about just disappearing from my house for days on end that appeals to my passive-aggressive side. Not that they’d notice.