My new favorite bumper sticker:
“Our child was inmate of the month at Pelican Bay State Prison. We can’t hide our pride.”
My new favorite search results:
“Compulsive cocksucking”
Archive for December, 2002
Lighten up, dude
Whenever I tell my “story” at an AA meeting, people cry. Sometimes I wish I had one of those stories that made everyone laugh every fifteen seconds. But no. When I finish everyone looks like they just received very bad news in the middle of a very fun party.
Maybe I’m exaggerating slightly. But, you know, I’m not that serious. And really? My life is pretty cool. For instance, this morning my cashier at Trader Joe’s was a girl with a Thrasher sweatshirt and a nametag that said “Rhiannon.” Now that is fucking cool. And right now I’m listening to Roberta Flack at work. And my dog is laying at my feet and tonight I get to have dinner and watch a movie with my buds the Studly Couple, while it rains and rains outside. And my instructor from the writing class I just finished asked me to keep working with her, and I have a shiny new Subaru and my arms hurt from the new biceps exercise I did yesterday and I’m going to have tamales for lunch. And I have you and your inappropriate sense of humor and my own bathroom at home. See?
Update:
One of my sponsees* in AA just called. He also has HIV, but his t-cells are below 200. Freaked out because his eyes are acting strangely and the docs think it might be CMV and he’s scared he’s going to lose his sight. Thank you, God, for relieving me of my stupid problems. I’m a blessed motherfucker.
*A sponsee is, well, someone who calls me everyday so we can talk and try to enjoy life and stay sober another day.
Confession
I’m telling you right now, I never pretended to be a grown-up. Just so we’re clear.
From some secret e-mails and comments I received yesterday, I get the impression that I’m not the only one having trouble with friends. The difference is that I will stop at nothing to embarrass myself publicly by airing such immature, gaudy-colored laundry on my proverbial clothesline. But if you can live vicariously through my humiliation, it’s all worth it. After all, I have this candid, ugly-truth-telling reputation to fulfill.
I’m like that spoiled little princess who can’t sleep when there’s a pea under her pile of mattresses. I tongue the tooth-ache, pick the scab. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Okay, you get it.
I told Bearbait yesterday that I’m dreading tonight. I’ve been asked again to “tell my story” at an AA meeting, a meeting with a special focus on those with HIV. It’s a rather small meeting, maybe 20 people, and my very very close friend goes there every week, as I do. Of course, he’s HIV-negative, which isn’t the issue at all. The issue for me is that I’m pissed at him but I want to appear calm, wise, and super-well-adjusted. I want to sound, at the end of my story, like I have all my shit together and that I am a sparkling pool of serenity and inner-peace. Which I’m not.
My very very close friend was so crucial to my success in early sobriety, and I usually mention this when I tell my story. But guess what? I don’t want to mention that tonight. Because I’m pissed. Because he’s playing a game and I hate games. And because even in the structure of the game he is breaking his own rules. Not that I’m playing the game. I’m not, I tell you, I’m not!
Isn’t that silly? Don’t you just want to pat me on the head and tell me “awww, that’s a cute DogPoet. Evwything is gonna be alwight. Now go take a nap.”
When I tell my story I usually talk about what’s going on in my life now. You know, the joys and the challenges. I can’t really talk about the challenges tonight, without sounding bitter and vindictive and passive-aggressive. Not that I would ever be any of those. Not me.
Actually, I think that testing positive was a milestone in more ways than one. At the time, my mother was still alive; it was another 7 months before she died. When I was actively using drugs and alcohol I often gave her tearful confessions, trying to elicit as much sympathy as possible in the hopes that revealing all of my problems would somehow explain and excuse the mess I was making of my life. When she was diagnosed with ALS I tried to get sober, mostly on my own. It would be another year before I became demoralized enough to slink into an AA meeting and ask for help.
I look back and wince at the spectacle I made of myself during that year. It was my way of seeking help, I suppose. But I was blind to the effect such confessions had on my mother, until her partner became exasperated and wrote me a very terse e-mail asking me to keep my confessions to myself, because my mother would get so upset that she couldn’t sleep at night. I still remember filling with hot shame as I read that e-mail. “Fuck,” I thought, “I am such a fucking loser.”
But I was also angry. If I couldn’t tell my mother the truth, who could I tell? Although she would live for another two years, I lost my mother in stages. I lost my confidante, and I lost my parent. She became, slowly, someone who needed my care. I lost my mother’s voice when the muscles that controlled her speech stopped working. The dementia wore away her sharp intellect. Her written sentences became shorter, and after many months, nearly incomprehensible. She’d get one word stuck in her head and she’d write it over and over. No amount of questions or gentle prodding could push her from that stuck spot. The woman who was my mother was changed beyond recognition, but she was still my mother, and she still needed us. And even at the end she was, at her core, the same generous, warm, funny soul she had always been. She gave everyone hugs, several a day. If you happened to glance her way she’d raise her arms and you’d lean over her in bed, wrap your own arms delicately around her, and accept her hug.
Man, I miss her.
At six months of sobriety I broke up with my partner of five + years, and I didn’t tell her. At nine months of sobriety I tested positive, and I didn’t tell anyone in my family. For once I could see that sometimes the truth hurts more than it helps. I finally had enough sense to see that I needed other confidants during that time.
And my very very close friend was my confidante, and I miss him very much right now. Oh, I know we’ll be okay. Enough time will pass and this will look in retrospect like the tiny bump in the road that it is.
Funny, I started out writing about him and I ended up writing about her. Who knows what it is; her birthday on December 21st, or this being the first Christmas without her. There’s nothing quite like losing your mother. In many ways the world becomes a colder place, but without her I’ve had to grow up. I’ve had to make my own family, with a rag tag bunch of queers and alcoholics. Like any family they sometimes drive me nuts. But I need them, I love them, I can’t get by without them.
Shane, Shane, come back Shane!
First off, I must say how awesome it feels to receive such warm regards on DogPoet’s anniversary; thank you to everyone who wrote or commented. I have never pretended to write only for myself: I view writing as a form of communication, and DogPoet is not a private journal. And though I often remind myself that it’s my site to do with as I wish, it does not exist in a vacuum. DogPoet is the strange marriage of writer and reader, of self-expression and community in the truest sense of the word. I’m not sure I could have stuck with DogPoet as long as I have, if it weren’t for that community. So thank you, and may the gods of creation and inspiration reward your labors of love.
Also, it was a true privilege and pleasure to meet Richard for dinner last night. How lucky our city is to have him back. If you don’t already read him, you are missing out. (Also, I am pleased to report that he said I was thinner in real life. Apparently I look fat in some picture or another. Richard, please point out this picture so that I can photo-shop it to death.) p.s. see how everything is about me?
Sigh. Okay. I don’t think I can hide the fact that I am sad from you much longer. Honestly, I wasn’t kidding when I said that life would be perfect if everyone would just do what I wanted them to do. I mean, really, wouldn’t that be ideal? Sure, it would take away mystery, but mystery is overrated.
Okay, now I am lying. I like mystery. But only when it’s warm and comforting and opens your eyes to the greater powers of nature and human compassion. Otherwise it just fucking hurts.
I am one of those Meyers-Briggs type INFJ’s, who do really well with two or three close friends, rather than a huge crowd of fabulous extroverts. And two of my friendships are very confusing to me right now. One of them, who I think of as very very close, has not called me in six weeks. I left him another voicemail yesterday pointing this out, telling him I miss him, asking for a holler-back, yo. Which he didn’t, thank you very much. Yes, he is probably going through some MAJOR SHIT and this has NOTHING TO DO WITH ME, but my vain little heart ain’t trying to hear that right now. And I miss him even more because I want his advice on my other friend. I want him to tell me it was okay to leave a Dear John kind of message on my other friend’s voicemail yesterday (it was a big day for SUPER EMOTIONAL voicemails). And that even though the other friend left a hurtful, angry voicemail in response, essentially denying everything, that I’m not crazy and I’m not imagining things and that I’m still an okay person for not wanting to be my other friend’s friend anymore. This is what I want to hear. Instead I must sit, alone, with contradictory evidence, sifting through lies and exaggerations, and decide what I believe, which is a very tricky business because the older I get the less confident I am of everything, especially my beliefs. I’m not trying to be coy here by leaving out juicy bits of information, but really it would just sound like so much dumb drama and if there’s anything I hate in life, it’s dumb drama. And my secret big/little fear in all of this is that I am the one committing drama.
If this is some Buddhist lesson in change and letting go of earthly attachments, well, I think I’ve had a few doses of that over the past couple of years and now it’s time to leave me alone and let me hold onto stuff for awhile. I mean, with that kind of discouraging lesson I am feeling one of those recurring urges to run away, travel the globe, fuck the loved ones. Leave ‘em behind. I don’t want to practice lovingkindness, fuck you very much. I don’t want to challenge my heart to open each day like a fragile blossom. On days like this I want to be mute and bulletproof. I want to be every destructive cliché of the solitary, anguished artist. I want to be the lone cowboy riding out of town. That stupid, stubborn cowboy you wish would just cry and get it over with.
feliz cumpleanos
I’m looking for a way into this and I can’t find it.
Sitting down to write an “important” post is an exercise in futility. And if there’s anything I’ve learned over the last year, it’s that it’s all about the process, baby. Just write, and let the rest take care of itself. So, write. Right.
A year ago I was a little less happy than I am today. I was living in a flat in the Mission with three other guys, three other dogs, two cats, no privacy. One of my roommates, who was also a co-worker, was an emotional black hole who sucked the energy out of every room he ever entered. We didn’t like each other much (he actually got fired yesterday for time card fraud or something and I can’t say I’m torn up over it). Those of you who’ve been stopping by this little campfire for awhile know the rest of my litany of pain and trouble: i.e. early sobriety, HIV diagnosis, my mother’s terminal illness. She was clearly near the end. I was depressed and out of shape. I hadn’t written much in the last six years.
Then I received an email from a friend with a link to his new online diary. Though I had read, off and on, the blogs of two other men for the past couple of years, it was my friend’s email that inspired DogPoet. With Blogger I didn’t need to know HTML or how to build a website. When Blogger asked me for a title, I put two odd words together in the hopes that no one else had a blog called DogPoet. To be honest, I have only one poem about my dog, but I guess that’s enough.
And so it began. Back then I would get two or three hits a day. I remember the first day I got thirty hits! Most of them were people in Saudi Arabia who didn’t know how to spell the word “lesbian” when Googling. Jonno graciously linked me when he saw that I intended to stick with it. I figured out some basic HTML, linked to a few blogs. Maybe four or five. A couple linked back. And it grew from there.
DogPoet, you saved my butt last winter. You were there when my mom died. You went with me to Minneapolis for Christmas and then later for the funeral, and you kept me company. You let me write some stupid shit sometimes, and helped me grow up a little along the way. It was always you, my constant companion, and to you I cried and laughed and threw tantrums.
And it was you, my gentle and perverted reader, who kept me coming back. I couldn’t let two or three days pass without a post. And many of you linked to me (oh, how giddy I got, each and every time) and many of you wrote to me and encouraged me. I met some of you in real life, and I know I’ll meet some more. I get many more visitors than email, though, so if you need a reason to say hello, you’ve got one. Say hello.
During this year I moved into a wonderfully quiet apartment with my own bathroom, a view, and plenty of street parking available. For much less money than I was paying in the Mission. I started working out again, lost some fat, gained some muscle, went out on a few dates. I celebrated two years of sobriety and recently started sponsoring two men in AA, which basically means they call me everyday and I listen for long stretches of time, saying “uh huh”, “right”, and “you’re doing great.” I signed up for a writing class through Berkeley extension that I will finish on Monday. I somewhat gracefully handled an unrequited attraction for my friend Ski. I’ve made some great friends along the way who keep me company, make me laugh, and challenge every single notion I have about being a grown-up. I bought a car. I paid off my credit card debt. I kept my job through four or five rounds of lay-offs. My t-cells are high, my viral load is low. I’ve successfully handled depression, with a lot of help. And damnit, DogPoet, you got me writing again. Yes, I can look back now and I have a year’s worth of posts, some stupid, some not so stupid. It’s helped, more than you’ll ever know. I have this feeling, no, fuck that, it’s faith, that life is just getting better and better.
Today DogPoet turns one. Which is, like, eighty-four in blog years. I hope you’ll stick around.
One of the reasons I daydream of being an expatriate:
From the Times:
Also shopping at the Ritz were several young single women for whom fur represented a kind of emotional compensation. Aiysha Stokes, 25, from Jamaica, Queens, was picking up from storage a stone martin coat that she bought two years ago. “For a young woman my age to be working and going to school, I thought I deserved a present,” said Ms. Stokes, who likes to wear her coat to church functions. “I encourage young girls, if you’re working, go out, treat yourself, buy a fur coat.”
A few feet away stood Kim Herman, a graphic designer, married and in her 30′s, who was wearing thigh-high leather boots she got on Eighth Street and who was about to buy a used full-length white mink for $1,500. She bought her first fur, a ranch mink with fox trim, last winter. “There was just such an undercurrent of unhappiness,” Ms. Herman explained, “and it just made me happy to go out and buy the coat.”
Oh yeah, here’s some pics. I entertain myself quite easily.
