D O G P O E T

When in doubt, quote somebody else. I know I’m not the only weblogger who has figured this out. Most of you probably know this, which means that most of you can see right through me. Some of you have even written to comment on my little mood swing, such as Anthony, who reached over from the East Coast and slapped me like Cher and shouted “Snap out of it!” He sweetly followed this up by pointing out how far I’ve come the last couple of years. Sometimes I forget.

One of the 12 steps suggests that we become entirely ready to have our “defects of character” removed. Nobody on this planet is free of character defects, so it’s a gradual, life-long process. “Character defect” may not be the best choice of words. I think of my defects as the things that keep me from the life I deserve. Cheesy, sure, but let’s face it, recovery always sounds cheesy. My most glaring defect (I have many) was fear; of everything, of failure, of success, of men, of family, of love, of being naked or even half-naked around other people. But mostly fear of other people, naked or not.

After the first raw months of sobriety passed, I started challenging these fears, because they were holding me back from a better life. I broke up with the ex and moved out. I got tested for HIV. I sat in the front row of AA meetings. I looked at the floor most of the time, but it was progress. I made myself go to that AA conference in Palm Springs last summer and be half-naked around a lot of other half-naked people. And I had that moment of grace, sitting in front of 500 gay men on a conference room stage. Where I understood that I didn’t have to be afraid of anyone, that I was no more and no less a man than anyone else. A moment of grace that lifted a lot of fear away.

The removal of one character defect sometimes reveals another. Once I stopped being afraid of everything and started living, new problems ensued. I wanted more. Of just about everything. And the problem? I am a very impatient man. I want to take writing as far as I can, whatever that looks like. Now. And I don’t want to sit around at a job answering stupid phone calls. And I want to get my hands on the space monkey. After several months of correspondence and phone calls, my right hand needs a break. Sorry, I went there again.

I was impatient with my career path but hopelessly confused. I had no clue what my step should be. Should I keep the job, should I look for an internship, should I keep taking extension classes, should I start sending stuff out to editors?

I’ve tried to keep Joseph Campbell’s idea of “following your bliss” in mind the last few months. I got a little impatient with him, too.

“That all sounds really nice, Joe, but I don’t know what that means. Where the fuck am I going, and how do I get there?”

Of course Joe is dead, so he didn’t say anything. I also asked my mom for a little sign, or maybe even a thousand-watt arrow over the next fork in the road, but perhaps she is busy. Maybe she and Joe are having a good laugh together at my expense:

Joe: “He looks really funny when he gets impatient.”

Mom: “I know! Look how red his face gets. Wait till he starts pouting, it’s really cute.”

After ten years of real life experience, I’ve decided to go back to school and get an M.F.A. (Somebody in “The Liar’s Club” called it “Mother Fucking Asshole”). Not so much for the degree as for a focused time of writing and feedback. This isn’t an overnight decision, it’s taken a few years actually. And honestly, I just love learning, I love classrooms and research and conversations. I love hearing how other people are doing it. I love being around other people who like learning, who are fighting the good fight. And if taking this step leads me into a life of academia, well, it’s better than answering the phone all day. Or getting into the oil business. When I think about it, it just feels right, in my gut. The nice thing about being sober is that I can actually trust my gut.

Joseph Campbell also said that when you find your bliss, don’t let anyone shake you off. When something feels right in my gut, like my connection with the space monkey, I have that strength of conviction. I know it’s right, and I go for it.

So now I have the spring and summer to look at schools and get a really strong admissions manuscript together.

Also, having a goal makes answering the stupid phone a little more bearable. But only a little. Which means if you were hoping I’d stop bitching completely, you’re out of luck.

Running half-empty on four hours of sleep, mind saturated with the language and the images of the three books I’ve consumed in the last two days, guess that’s one way of getting by. Or shutting out the world and my impatience. Because I’m too tired to write I will let James Joyce sum it up:

“- In pursuing these speculations, said the dean conclusively, there is however the danger of perishing of inanition. First you must take your degree. Set that before you as your first aim. Then, little by little, you will see your way. I mean in every sense, your way in life and in thinking. It may be uphill pedaling at first. Take Mr. Moonan. He was a long time before he got to the top. But he got there.
- I may not have his talent, said Stephen quietly.
- You never know, said the dean brightly. We never can say what is in us…”

Yay, team! Three cheers for sodomy.

Some of my little brother’s friends were tear-gassed last week at a demonstration against the war in Albuquerque. They blocked an intersection near the UNM campus, four or five hundred students and other assorted radicals. Despite the peaceful nature of the gathering, the police broke it up with tear gas and rubber bullets.

“I want to do something,” he tells me, his voice wavering over the distance between us, “but I don’t think anyone cares. I don’t think they’re listening.”

I’m watching Louie sniff around the courtyard outside my office, cell phone pressed to my right ear. The wind is picking up. I turn my head slightly till I can hear him again.

“Now the protests are only a couple of hundred people.”

“I went to a couple of the big demonstrations here in San Francisco before the war,” I tell him. “But that was it. I don’t get the sense that it makes much of a difference anymore.”

I feel like I should have something to offer him, my little brother, some kind of wisdom, especially now that Mom’s gone.

“I’ve never been arrested,” he says. “I suppose I should keep it that way.”

“I just had that one arrest, during the Contra War.”

“I remember. Dad was pissed.”

He sounds sad and defeated. His girlfriend’s left him for the second or third time. He wants to quit smoking, he wants to go back to school. I want him to get a computer and join civilization, so I can e-mail him. I try not to push. He’s been pushed his whole life, to be different, motivated, educated, goal-driven. To be more like me. I just want him to be happy.

The sun feels good on my face. Louie’s confused by the change of routine; he sits by the door, waiting to go back inside. But I stay still. There’s something I want to tell my little brother, I try to think of the right words…when Mom was sick I tested positive for HIV and I kept it from everyone, I didn’t want them to worry, but now I want you to know…

I almost say it. I can feel between us a short, taut rope, one that I could balance on and walk in his direction. But I don’t. I don’t want to tell him over the phone.

The irony is not lost on me, that I won’t tell him but I’ll post it on the Internet. The still-sharp memory of the September morning I checked my e-mail and found a message from my father, who had just found dogpoet. The subject line of his e-mail had said, simply, “Devastated”.

“Do you feel like Mom’s around?” I ask my brother.

“All the time. Do you?

“Yeah. Not at first. It took awhile, but yeah. I’ve met this guy. Well, not really met. It’s a long story.” I hate describing it. “But I feel like she has something to do with it.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s what I’ve been looking for.”

“Cool,” he says. “That’s exciting.”

“Yeah. And hard. I’m impatient.”

“Uh huh.”

“And fucking horny.”

He laughs. “I know how you feel.”

Louie watches me. I’m smiling. “I gotta get back to work.”

“Okay. Thank for calling. I love you, Mike.”

“I love you, too.”

“The religion of the poems is aesthetic; they worship in the church of Hart Crane and Proust - may I add Chanel? But their mission is ethical as well, since they are after redemption. What, in our harrowed and harrowing cities, can be held up as lovely, genuine, human?

One response to horror is silence. Another is to make what one can, to create with all the more ardor and fury.”

- the poet Mark Doty writing about the poet Lynda Hull

Here’s to a woman who creates with such ardor and fury and love. Here’s to someone who pours herself into words and art, who shares her grace and humor, her terror and her ecstasy, with all of us lucky bastards. Happy Birthday, Jennie. I can’t wait to meet you!

Thanks to everyone for the housewarming regards and the updated links. You’re beautiful and I like having you around.

It feels a little strange to launch a new site, considering the state of the world. A little less relevant than winning an Oscar, say. I’m at a loss for words. As in, there is so much atrocity occurring that I don’t even want to start. So much hypocrisy and arrogance and bitterness. And now just a lot of death set in motion by men who will never be remotely touched by the loss of these people. I haven’t changed that much since I was fifteen, not much in regards to war. This story pretty much says it all.

My stepsister and her boyfriend are still sailing around the world, just now leaving the coast of Africa. Here is a little of the e-mail they sent today:

“We went over 120 miles upstream without encountering another white person or sailboat and it was surreal, though on the way out we came across 3 other sailboats that were headed up river. And then that seemed surreal too. There were literally only a half dozen motorized vehicles on the river during that entire time. Everyone used dugout canoes and paddles, it was something else…

… We get very little news, and what we do get is often in a foreign language, but it sounds like things have gone a bit amok at home. We are quite safe here, the only thing people say to us when we say we are from the states is ‘oh nice country, will you take me there?’ but everyone in the street is glued to the news radio here and it seems like people are as conflicted about the war here as they are at home.”

I keep thinking about that Onion parady: “Bill of Rights Pared Down to a Manageable Six”. So funny it hurts.

I feel a little like the man I heard speak at an AA meeting tonight:

“I’m kind of having a hard time lately. I mean, as I was walking to the meeting I was feeling proud of myself for getting up and dressed and out of the house. But as I’m sitting here I look down at my feet and I see I am wearing two unmatched shoes.”

I understood.

And we keep living. We drive in the dark across a bridge stretching over the bay; a bridge that could explode, it could fall. But it won’t, at least not tonight. We drive with covered dishes on the floor of the car; food we’ve brought to share. We get lost in the hills of Oakland, following streets named “Snake”. We walk into a house and everyone calls out our name, as though we were regulars on “Cheers.”

Thanks to Jhames and Min Jung for hosting a warm party at their house. There were a lot of great people there. And thanks to several blogger get-togethers over the last few months, I already knew half of them. I especially enjoyed hanging out with William Ted on the couch all night. It was the first time I’d stopped moving since I finished the film, and besides, he was great company. Welcome to town, Jhames. The Bay Area will never be the same.

“… Later, the science teacher wrote me a four-page handwritten letter about the Bible’s teachings on homosexuality, telling me I would be condemned to hell. I threw it out.”

Arkansas school accused of outing and then harassing gay student.

Well, well, well. What can I say?

Welcome to my new home, glad you stopped by. The new look of dogpoet is a collaboration between me and Jockohomo. (Screw that, all I said was “I want it to look clean and inviting and um….uh…um” while he did all the work.) I am a very lucky boy, don’t you think? Thank you, Jocko, you make me look great and I am one happy dawg.

Since I won’t be able to link to my new site from my old blogspot page, I hope you’ll adjust your links and help me spread the word. I still have a few adjustments to make but take a look around and help me congratulate Jocko on a beautiful job well done.

The next time I start whining about something, will someone please send me a polite e-mail telling me to get on a treadmill and run for awhile? The endolphins are good for me. Thanks.

My only suggestion would be to change the words ‘letting go’. It’s just become this phrase, kind of new agey, you know?”

My writing instructor looks at the girl who’s read her poem aloud, then around at the rest of the group for affirmation. Everyone nods. I have to agree.

The girl’s not so sure. She wrinkles her brow. “Like what? Change it to what?”

I know how she feels. Everything you learn sounds cheesy, eventually. All those words you pick up in church basements; pithy little sayings on cards printed by AA’s Central Office. Cards with layers of masking tape on the back, cards that can’t stay up all week so they’re taken down at the end of each meeting and stored in cardboard boxes next to tins of Maxwell House, bags of sugar, non-dairy creamer, a mess of plastic spoons. Cardboard boxes stacked into a closet in the hallway outside the room. Each box belonging to a different group: “Monday Night Big Book Discussion”, “Tuesday Keep Coming Back”, “Thursday As Bill Sees It 7pm”. Words and phrases that have worked their way into mainstream consciousness far enough to generate parody in movies and on Saturday Night Live: “One Day at a Time”, “Keep it Simple”, “Easy Does It”. Familiarity breeds contempt.

I forget to let go. I hang on tight to trouble, to worry. I obsess, I sweat, I toss and turn. I want love and assurance. I want affection. I want success. I want comfort and money and sex. I want a life free of embarrassment and boredom. I want a better job. I want the world to be okay. What does Meryl Streep say in “Postcards from the Edge?” The problem with instant gratification is that it takes too long.

On Tuesday we filmed a scene where I used to bartend; early in the morning I parted the thick black curtains hanging inside the front door and slipped inside, the bright sun cutting off abruptly as the curtains fell back in place. The dark windowless rooms, the smell of old beer and urinals and ashtrays and sex. Walls covered with Tom of Finland-like art; beautiful paintings of men, butts, penises. Flyers for every night of the week; a xerox of a boy in a jockstrap, head tilted back, mouth wide open as a leatherman empties a bottle of tequila onto his waiting tongue. A beautiful blue painting of a man’s backside on the restroom door, done by one of the bartenders; does he still work here? Who still works here, how do they do it, year after year? I know where the sinks are, I can lean across the bar with three beer bottles half-full with tea (for the scene) and drain them without looking. I know where the light switches are. I know where to find the votives, where to toss the bottles. I know you have to push the trashcan in front of the restroom door when you take a piss, if you want any privacy. As they set up for the next angle, I leaf through the bar rags, more snapshots of half-naked men, groups of shirtless friends at all the clubs, all of this, it was my life for awhile.

My barber, a former Mr. International Leather, was wearing a “Manhunt.net” T-shirt the other day. I was looking at it thinking, “I don’t want to hunt for men anymore; I don’t want sex just for the sake of sex.” I never have; I’ve always wanted more. I may have acted otherwise for awhile, then again I was doing a lot of drugs, chemicals that would let me do things I didn’t want to be doing.

I don’t want to wait another month to meet the space monkey. Another month of the Imaginary Friend, when I’d rather get my hands on the real thing. I want a date I can circle on the calendar; an oasis in this desert; an eye in the storm. I want a chest to sleep on, a hand to run through my hair. I want the comfort of another man’s arms in uncertain times.

I can’t seem to control anything; my job, the war, my virus. Love. I want to know it’s going to happen, I want it all today. I don’t want to let go of anything; I want to hold on tight. If I can’t clutch him I’m gonna clutch something. What do you have if you let everything go? Who are you without anything to squeeze? I’m not that evolved. I’m changing, but not that fast.