Another post? How about you do my taxes while I make you a mean bread pudding. Got it from Oprah. Then we can take my dog for a walk – living with a writer is boring him to tears.

Last week I had dinner with the God of Biscuits at the Delfina Pizzeria on 18th Street. I’d never been there, never been to a lot of the new places that had sprung up since the time I used to walk that block every day. Back in 2001 I broke up with my boyfriend and moved from the Upper Haight into a flat on South Van Ness, a stone’s throw from Whiz Burger, a place that looked like it should have been on the side of some lonesome desert highway, not that piss-stained block of the Mission neighborhood.

I’d moved in there out of desperation, the first place to take both me and my dog. A co-worker whom I had disliked on sight was the master tenant, and he took me in with an equal lack of enthusiasm. He moved through work, and the new flat, like a black hole, sucking up all the surrounding energy. He practiced for his role in an amateur opera company (emphasis on “amateur”) in his little bedroom across the hall, then would sit down in the living room, on the other side of the pocket doors from my room, and catch up on reruns of the Golden Girls. He rarely spoke to me, but every day he would cackle in front of that television.

He’d adopted two cats and two dogs from the animal shelter where we worked. His dogs were skittish and annoying, so the cats spent all their time in my room. My roommate rented out the third bedroom to a couple who also adopted a dog, this one with severe separation anxiety, who would howl and chew through their bedroom door every time they left it alone. The cats were old, and one night while the dog chewed on the door down the hall, one of the cats up and died while lying in my lap.

Sober all of six months, I was one raw boy. My mom was dying and in a couple of months I’d test positive. In the past three years I’d burned a lot of bridges and had little to show for my thirty years besides my dog and a case of undertreated depression. I didn’t have a car back then, and after work I’d walk the stretch of 18th Street, from the Mission to the Castro, South Van Ness Avenue to Diamond Street, eleven blocks, to the 12 step meetings I attended every single night. I went there as much to escape the apartment as I did for the solace of sobriety. To clear for a minute or two my cluttered head. Eleven blocks, from Spanish language billboards to billboards for Stop Meth campaigns. From check cashing stores to lube-and-porn joints, from Mexicans to white boys.

After the meetings I’d walk home, slower this time. Around Guerrero Street my mood would darken again. I’d pass Linda, a tiny side-street where my meth dealer had once lived, always with my breath held, my dread building until I hit South Van Ness again, slid my key home, and opened the door into my little corner of hell. (I was a tad melodramatic back then.)

A few months after I moved in I started this blog. Two months later my mom died. I lived there for a year and three months, when a room opened in a friend’s place in Corona Heights, on the hill above the Castro, a room I still rent. My 12 step sponsor said that I started beaming the day I moved in, and didn’t stop beaming for another six weeks. When my opera star roommate found out that I was moving, he left a note for me demanding that I vacate his place within 30 days. Kind of a you-can’t-quit-I-fire-you situation.

This month marks nine years that I first moved into that little nightmare on South Van Ness, a fact I only just realized, writing this. Since then I got the depression treated, worked a few different jobs, went to grad school, got a degree, wrote a book, fell in love with two very different men.

In those nine years 18th Street changed too, as most city blocks do. In 2002 the Tartine bakery opened on Guerrero. Delfina opened their pizzeria in 2005, a couple of doors down from their main restaurant. In 2007 the Farina restaurant opened after gutting the old danish bakery. Bi-Rite opened their ice cream shop and the weekend crowds at Dolores Park increased tenfold. Bread shops and tea shops and nail salons opened around Sanchez.

Sometimes the Manly Fireplug and I would ruin a good work-out by hitting Whiz Burger after the gym for their damn good hot dogs. We’d sit at one of the picnic tables out front, and I’d look down the street, to the auto shop across from my old apartment, with hub caps hanging from its chain link fence. As we ate I’d tell him the story of when, nine years ago, I’d been sitting on the back steps when a young Latino boy poked his head over the neighboring fence and scanned our yard. When he spotted me he said, “Hey mister, have you seen a chicken?”

I told the Fireplug that story every time because it made us both laugh, and I guess I wanted to dispel the ghosts. I didn’t like sitting there for very long. Some streets, no mater how much they change, stick in your blood. The ghosts linger but weaken. They help me measure the distance I put down between me and that time.  I moved in there a scared kid but after a while I’d grown up, walking those eleven blocks.

I know what you’re thinking. Once you join the Gay Softball League your life must be cake. You get a sports cup and a baseball cap and suddenly everyone wants to know you. They shower you with gifts and sexual favors, and strangers snap your picture as you run errands, aching for a fleeting glimpse of D league glamor. Well I’m here to tell you that fame comes with a price tag.

I’ve been sore since the middle of February.

You think I’m exaggerating. One week we field ground balls, the next fly balls. My trips to the batting cages have improved my swing, sure, but every other day muscles I didn’t even know I had complain. It’s hard to appreciate the glamor while limping around like Quasimodo. I live in an apartment with 732 stairs.

I’m long past the age of 21, a fact that becomes apparent with a glimpse at my medicine cabinet. When I was 21 I had only toothpaste and cologne (it was the early 90′s, people.) I’ve since ditched the fragrance, but the shelves of my cabinet are now overrun with Clearasil, Advil, Immodium, and Gas-X. There I find evidence of past phases: Kiehl’s, when I took moisturizing seriously. Jack Black, when that mean lady at Nordstrom’s said my neck looked razor-burned.

The fast, free-wheeling days of my youth have faded, and now my travel kit is stuffed to the gills with products picked up during past emergencies. Visine. Zantac. Gun Oil. I used to hit the clubs with nothing but youth fueling me. Now I need two Red Bulls and a fist full of Aleve.

Nobody likes a cranky celebrity. Complaining about fame is so petty. But I do this as public service announcement for all those starry-eyed boys who lie awake at night, dreaming of the D league. Yes, a delicious sense of power, as you slide your cup into place, awaits you. But so do the consequences. Your hamstrings will hurt. For three months.

Take your shirt off at a brand new location. See all you perverts at BLOWOFF, the stellar funky dance party hosted by Bob Mould and Rich Morel, here in San Francisco on Saturday night, April 10th, 10 pm, Slim’s, 333 11th Street

Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Oops! Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball.

My dog likes the morning. I do not, and I count myself lucky that he waits as patiently as he can for Daddy to wake the hell up. He watches me from the bed as I get ready for the day. If he sees me pack just my gym bag, then he knows he’s staying home. If he sees me pack my gym bag AND my laptop case, then his little tail wags and he hops down from the bed as he knows I’m taking him to the office. Even then he sometimes gets confused and starts down the stairs to the back yard. “No, this way,” I tell him, and he freezes in the middle of the staircase, which are not carpeted, looking over his shoulder at me with wide eyes. He doesn’t know how to turn around on non-carpeted stairs, so he runs down to the back door, turns around, then runs back up, past me, towards the front door. My dog makes very funny noises when he sees someone he especially loves, like the Manly Fireplug. The noises make bystanders stare. “Is he choking?” they ask. He likes to compulsively lick the inside of the Fireplug’s mouth. I wonder how long he’d do it if we just let him. My dog thinks he is much bigger than he is. Last week he chased a Saint Bernard around the park. He is afraid on nothing, except for the vacuum cleaner.

In Minneapolis I lived for a while on Lyndale Avenue, in a duplex above my landlord. I’d moved in with my then-boyfriend, our cat Henry and our dog Louie (I had a thing for old-man names). The place was beautiful — two bedrooms, hardwood floors, a skylight and a fireplace in the living room, all for 800 bucks a month. Dwayne, our landlord, was a Minnesota native who spoke with flattened vowels. He stood about 5’8″, with hunched shoulders, and weighed maybe 130 pounds soaking wet, with long hair that could have been permed, that he often pulled back in a ponytail. He wore big round glasses that magnified his green, frog-like eyes, which blinked at you slowly. He wore overalls and sandals in summer, thick appliqued sweaters in winter. For holidays he put up huge figures in the front yard – snowmen or jack-o-lanterns, depending on the season. He raised dozens of parakeets, which he kept in cages that filled the basement, and advertised them in the local paper. He built his own cages, enormous and elaborate, which he sold three or four times a year at yard sales. The birds made a cacophony whenever I came down to do the laundry. He was the first diabetic I’d ever known. He warned me that sometimes he’d forget to eat and go into shock, and that if I ever found him that way I was to make him drink a Coke, which he kept in his fridge. One night the cops came to his door, and I went down to check on him. He stood in the middle of his dark living room, three cops surrounding him, their flashlights trained on his pale face. He stared at them, groggy and confused, and I knocked on the door, startling the cops. I told them what he had told me, then excused myself. I never did ask him how the cops ended up there; I didn’t want to embarrass him. Dwayne dressed in drag on the weekends, and took part in pageants at the Gay 90′s. He’d entered several times but never won. He spoke of the pageants with great longing, and filled me in on all of the gossip and backstabbing. My boyfriend and I went one year to see him compete. He did not make a very pretty girl. He wore a long sequined number, his cheeks heavily rouged, firmly in the old school camp of drag. That year some skinny young blonde, who used half-naked back-up boys in her Madonna number, stole the spotlight and the crown. I looked at Dwayne back then with mostly pity, even though he had let us into his home. When we decided to move to San Francisco we asked if we could sell some of our furniture at one of his yard sales, and we were shocked when at the end of the day he handed us 1700 dollars. Early one morning, the last week of October, we packed up a Ryder truck, and Dwayne stood out on the porch and waved to us as we drove away.

When I was five I was quiet and sweet. I liked hiking around in the woods behind our Missouri neighborhood. I wanted my little brother, born premature, to come home from the hospital, and I wanted to find my saber tooth tiger toy. When I was seven I had a bedroom rug printed with Indian teepees. At nine I was quiet and sweet. I liked books, my cat Grover, and I wanted my parents to get along. At twelve I liked America’s Top 40, Electra-Woman and Dyna Girl, and Stephen King. I was scrawny and wanted to look like normal boys. At fifteen I wanted to be straight. I also wanted to live on another planet. When I was eighteen I wanted to quit my family and cigarettes. I liked being gay. At 21 I wanted to escape Florida and live in New York City. I liked bad boys and postmodern art, or what little I understood of it. At 25 I wanted to win more poetry slams and build bigger muscles. At 29 I wanted to quit meth, quit bitching, and act in independent movies. At 30 I wanted my mother back. At 33 I wanted to write a book and move to New York City. At 37 I liked Joan Didion and Gray’s Papaya. I wanted to finish my book and move back to San Francisco. Today I turn 39. I am quiet and intermittently sweet. I like my dog, my family, my friends, and the Manly Fireplug. I like that I am a stubborn bastard who never ever gives up. I want to sell my book and get an iPhone, though AT&T sucks here. I want world peace, equal rights, and a cure for AIDS. I want to quit feeling so guarded all the time. I want to hit a double in softball.

I started out my Friday night watching the Giants versus A’s, analyzing their swings with the help of the freeze frame. Then I watched a documentary on the September issue of Vogue. Before bed I’ll read a little of John Cheever’s journals. This is my Friday night, and I’m okay with that.

Netflix recommended the documentary to me, and I did like the dynamic between ice queen Anna Vintour and creative director Grace Coddington, who comes across as the slightly anachronistic, romantic soul of VOGUE. My favorite moment was when she roped the documentary’s cameraman into a fashion shoot, a very nice boundary breaking.

It reminded me of David Shield’s REALITY HUNGER: A MANIFESTO, the only book I’ve read twice in the last few years, which chronicles our growing fascination with “reality” and “truth” versus “fiction.” I put all of these words in quotations because as soon as you start working on a narrative, as soon as your memory touches upon an event, you’re making fiction. A memoir by necessity leaves out more than it includes, and it’s formed by self-serving, selective, revisionist, fallible memory. Every blogger presents not himself, but a version of himself. I didn’t agree with every point in the book (story as a form is centuries old, it’s deep in our marrow, and I don’t think it will die an easy death), and fiction writers in particular might find it offensive, but the book lit my brain up, and it had a big part in me deciding to write here more often. So blame him.

That secene with the documentary cameraman and the fashion photo shoot felt like one of the book’s anecdotes.  Anna Wintour, filmed by the cameraman, takes note of his silhouette in the fashion spread and turns to him with a tight little smile. “You need to go to the gym,” she said.

Last year during a blackout I practically died from boredom.

My brain splinters. I lay in bed in front of the television, with the laptop in my lap, clicking from one irrelevant page to the next.

The thought of sitting in my room listening to nothing but my own head scares me, so I keep these portals propped open, kept company by made-up characters and blocks of text, news, sarcasm, celebrity gossip, commercials for movies I will never see or movies that I will one day rent, movies I will give five or ten minutes until I’m bored and open the laptop again.

In the last week a deep ache seeps into the tendons of my right arm. Some nights my arm throbs and I wake from sleep, rolling from one side to the other, clutching a pillow to my chest.

I wake in the morning with the internet, sitting at my desk slowly sipping enough caffeine to rouse me, rubbing my eyes, scratching my bed head, my dog warming my lap, clicking from the Times to the Gate to the Times to the Post to the Times, skimming headlines for something that I will read for ten seconds, abandon, open a new tab, shift back and forth between five open tabs, caught in a loop, stuck to this thing.

I drive to the office, listening to Massive Attack. I read books and write a book listening to ambient Moby, ambient Eno, ambient Aphex Twin. I read a Kindle on the stationary bike at the end of my work-out. I read three pages of a memoir, then click and read two pages on sports pyschology. Above me six flatscreens show videos, news, sports. At the bottom of each screen roll bits of text that do not relate to the images above. I sit so I can’t see them. I sit watching the boys work out instead. I read a page on my Kindle, look up, watch a boy, look down, read a page. A sentence. A boy. A sentence. A boy.