Update: Seems like it was just the first 100 comments. After that every comment is by a dude named “Colon Cleanse.”  (You don’t know me, Colon!)

If you’ve hung around here for any length of time, you know I’m writing about my family, who’ve been awfully charitable about the whole thing considering that everybody (including me) comes out of the story looking like, well, singular pieces of work.

Quick review of the basics:

• Parents separate when I’m ten and my brother five
• Parents both come out of the closet when I’m eleven
• Parents divorce and begin adventures in same-sex dating
• Parents both end up with long-term partners who were also previously married, with kids
• I come out at college, as far from my family as possible
• My brother, poor dude, turns out straight

So I did a lot of packing and unpacking, of boxes, suitcases, and duffel bags, in the midst of a complicated joint custody schedule. My brother and I lugged a lot of bags onto a lot of buses, and were forever leaving things at the wrong house.

So there were a few houses for the Fireplug and I to cruise past in our rented Sebring. Ten or twelve or more, I’ve lost track. But during the tour the Fireplug turned quiet. Silence is an unnatural state for him, so of course I asked if he was okay.

“My stomach hurts,” he said. It took us a while to figure out that he was stressed. He’d spent his entire childhood in one house, the house where his mother still lives, and our day-long tour was getting to him.

Ever since college I’ve had a deep, primal longing for a home. It doesn’t need to be big. I just want one. And only one. I like having all my stuff in one place. I don’t rent storage lockers. Whenever I have to move I unpack everything (and I mean everything) within 24 hours. I hate clutter, and my idea of hell is a bad roommate.

Seems like no matter how much we grow up, it’s the childhood stuff that sticks. So the five years that I’ve spent going back and forth between the Fireplug’s house and my apartment, bags in hand, have been challenging to my nesting OCD. Part of being an adult, however, is accepting life on its own terms, and San Francisco real estate is its own reality.

Following our wedding in New York (and our domestic partnership in California), we’d barely dipped a toe in the tepid waters of possible home ownership when a realtor friend called and said a family was interested in looking at the house the Fireplug shares with his roommate, a house which wasn’t even listed. A pocket listing, he called it. (A lifelong renter, I am mystified by the entire home ownership process, including terminology.)

The same realtor friend had just emailed us a photo of a cute little bungalow near Stern Grove with the subject line, “Your Next House.” Looking at the photo, we had to hand it to him, he was good. We weren’t so delusional as to assume that we’d end up in the cute little bungalow, but it seemed unwise in today’s market to turn down the family’s request.

My head that week filled with fantasies of a cute bungalow, with my husband and our dogs, and my duffel bags tucked away on a back shelf of a back closet. The Fireplug, who’s been through the process more than once,  kept cautioning me, telling me to expect an emotional roller coaster ride, with no certain outcome, and that I’d have plenty of opportunities to work on one of my, um, less noticeable traits: patience.

“We haven’t even applied for a mortgage yet,” he said. I tried not to pout in response.

When the realtor arrived with the family, the Fireplug’s roommate and I ducked out through the garage with the dogs. We drifted up and down the block three times waiting for the family to leave, the dogs giving us curious looks, and it was weird to look through the picture window at the strangers wandering through the living room, assessing the place that I couldn’t quite call home, but where I’d spent so many hours. I felt territorial.

The roommate had done his best to de-gay the house of its most egregious belongings, especially since the family of strangers included a grandmother, but you can’t catch everything. After the family left, the realtor told us that the grandmother had carefully examined the shirts hanging over the dryer and asked, “Who’s the sheriff?”

“Depends on which night,” I replied.

The realtor smiled. “I love my job.”

I was recently asked to speak to a writing class about my book, which gave me the chance to reflect on what’s worked for me, and since I sometimes get emails asking for general advice, I thought it might be useful to share a little of my experience. I’m entirely aware that by posting this, having finished only 97% of the book, I am seriously tempting fate and derision. But this will fuel me through the last 3%. Pride’s a useful motivator.

Fill the Well
I spend a lot of time on the Internet, for work and for not-work, clicking from one shiny object to the next, and I invariably walk away from the computer feeling dazed and stupid. I can think of maybe a handful of movies that fuel me creatively. Often, the theater. The last season of Breaking Bad. But nothing fuels me like reading, and by reading I mean books. Sometimes all it takes is a page or two to fill me with the courage to return to my own imperfect, unfinished story. Do more of whatever fills your well and less of everything else. Guard the well from celebrity gossip sites, shiny objects, and Facebook barbarians.

No, Really
Another plug for books but from a crankier angle. Expecting people to read your writing when you can’t be bothered to read other people’s books is just plain rude. Read a lot, of everything. Otherwise you’ll go years operating under the delusion that everything you write is brilliant and original and destined to be turned into a four-film franchise starring Daniel Radcliffe and Meryl Streep.

Your Muse is a Flake
Waiting around for inspiration will never get you to the end of your book. Some of my best writing came only after I forced myself to sit at the computer and endure for an hour the thick, fuzzy-headed despair of having nothing in the world to say.

Don’t Wait for the Shack
I once read an interview with a well-known writer who leaves his house every morning, walks a hundred yards to a little redwood shack on the far corner of his wooded property, and spends the next eight hours undisturbed, writing and sipping tea from his lucky mug while the occasional acorn falls on the roof overhead. Oh, how I want that shack. I have no shack. I’ve been working on this book for seven years. For one year, when I had more money, I rented a private office. But I also wrote at home, in bed, at my desk, and on the couch. I wrote on my husband’s couch, on a chair passed down from his grandfather, and in the basement of his shop. I wrote in a tiny Manhattan apartment with a view of an airshaft. I wrote in three different rooms at the Columbia University library and a public library at the Jersey Shore. I wrote at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, Jumpin’ Java, Cafe Flore, and a dozen other coffee shops. I wrote on airplanes and in two different borrowed houses in Palm Springs. I wrote at every job I’ve ever had. You may have a fantasy shack, too, somewhere in your future, but what are you going to do in the meantime?

Your Portable Pal
Carry a little notebook, or your iPhone, a place to scrawl the words, ideas, and sentences that you’ll otherwise forget. No, you won’t remember.

Swallow Your Pride
I was a coward in college, afraid to commit myself to literature, and I chose instead the wildly practical major of sociology. I spent the next ten years feeling insecure about my education, and still it wasn’t until I got into Columbia’s MFA program that I began to see just how little I knew. Workshops and peer feedback can be valuable, but having someone take me through 100 books, page by page, sometimes sentence by sentence, and show me how each writer put together a story, was the single best thing I’ve done for myself as a writer. You don’t need to commit yourself to a Master’s degree. Take an extension class. Download a lecture from Yale. There’s no shame in being taught, and those who tell you otherwise are idiots.

Join a Cabal
The greatest unexpected benefit to grad school was the little group of writers from my program who landed here in the Bay Area after graduation, a group I still meet with every month, over five years later. We started out as a book club (first selection: Madame Bovary), but then one day my husband referred to the group as “your little cabal,” and it stuck. We exchange work, gossip, job leads, literary agent horror stories, and the occasional awesome news of a book deal. We also talk about Downton Abbey, Battlestar Galactica, and eat a lot of Salt and Pepper Kettle chips with french onion dip. They danced at my wedding, and I’d be lost without them. Again, you don’t need an MFA program for this. Find writers through workshops, local lit organizations, or Craigslist.

Be Accountable
Writing is a pain in the ass. The beautiful story you imagine in your head, by the time you get it on the page, is a pale monstrosity. You will want to do anything in the world but the thing you most need to do. You will wash the dishes. You will vacuum every room in your house. You will cut your toenails and then vacuum some more. Unless you are in school or are an incredibly important author with a publishing house editor waiting for your next chapter with bated breath, you’ll need to create your own deadlines. Form a cabal. Find one friend. Exchange work.

Be an Ass
Despite what the world thinks, talent only takes you so far. Only the mule-headed endure.

Everybody Hurts
I did research in the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books division of the New York Public Library, where I went through old correspondence files from The New Yorker, and learned that the magazine rejected every single famous writer you could think of many, many times. It doesn’t matter who you are. You will be rejected. Be a mule.

Let It Brew
I have a friend, a well-respected author with three novels under his belt, who hates revision. He works by slowly moving forward, perfecting each sentence as he goes along. I can’t work that way. My first drafts are hideous. I don’t know what I think or how I feel about something until I start writing about it, and even then it takes time, sometimes a few weeks, or months, or years, till I get at the truest insight possible. I have to let each chapter sit, like a tea bag in a cup of hot water, letting it steep, stirring it around seventeen or eighteen times, doctoring it with milk and low-calorie sweetener, or, fine, yes, actual real sugar if it’s the only thing in the house, till it’s right.

It Matters
I routinely forget to follow my own suggestions, but eventually I remember. If you’re plugged into contemporary culture (and what 21st Century writer isn’t?), you will frequently fall into black despair over the future of books. Our fragmenting attention spans. The publishing industry death spiral. The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

But listen. Writing still matters. To a lot of people. There will always be readers who want to get lost in a story, learn about other places, or step inside the skin of a total stranger. Readers willing to have their minds changed and their hearts broken. Readers quietly thrilled by beautiful language. Readers who find, within the pages of a book, a voice that articulates the things they’ve always felt but could never express. Readers who feel, at the end of a book, less alone in their fears and mistakes. I can’t list all the reasons why people read books, or why literature is important, because there’s too many of them, and most of the fun is figuring out, book by book, your own reasons. Why you need to read, and why you need to write.

I was a gay dude with a gay father, and in our relationship at least, “father” weighed more heavily than “gay.” What I mean is that, like a lot of fathers and sons, we weren’t so skilled at talking to each other.

That began to change ten years ago after my mother’s death, and that change is a part of my book, and since I’m wary of giving away much of the book’s story on the blog, since I want the book to be fresh and full of new stuff for you to read, I won’t go into great detail.

But the years I’ve spent writing the book came with all kinds of obstacles and awkward moments, including the times I’d visit my father, as he struggled to understand why I was going so long without a real job and benefits and a 401k, working on something that might never make one single cent, and as I struggled to reframe the project in terms he might better understand:

“Hey Dad, it’s like, it’s like an investment! In my future. You know, with, like deferred benefits…”

But the benefits weren’t guaranteed. I could spend seven years working on a book that might still go unpublished, and my reframing explanation to my father worked about as well as you’d expect.

Don’t get me wrong. Most of the time we got along just fine, and when the Manly Fireplug came with me, he amped up the fun factor (as he tends to do) and I even one time, after years of second place, BEAT MY FATHER THE EDITOR AND ALL-TIME REIGNING FAMILY CHAMPION IN SCRABBLE. I tried not to gloat. Wait, I’m still totally gloating. Sorry, Dad.

But at some point during every visit we’d find ourselves alone, and he’d ask me about the book, and work, and money, and down the rabbit hole we’d go. I walked away from these talks frustrated and angry, convinced that he wanted me to be someone I didn’t want to be, with a different set of priorities and dreams, and though I won’t pretend to know how he felt after our talks, I doubt they were any easier on him.

Eventually, as I’ve told you here before, the money ran out, and I was forced to get a couple of jobs, and struggle, and feel broke since I was paying $500 a month in health insurance, and after a year the two jobs turned into three, one of which finally offered me benefits, and for the first time in a very long time I had money in my interest-bearing savings account, and dreams of a house with my husband.

And a new energy swept through me.

I found myself finally using my Mint iPhone app, categorizing my spending and planning monthly budgets. Every day while waiting for MUNI I’d check the balances of my linked accounts before opening my Kindle. Checking my balances turned out to be more fun when the sums went above the double-digits.

This led to me creating all sorts of spreadsheets and lists that I uploaded to Google Docs, where I sorted everything into collections. I don’t know if any of this will actually lead to greater productivity, but man do I feel organized.

This led to me taking ownership finally of my desk at the firm, no longer assuming I had one foot out the door, but instead committing myself to making the three jobs work, and I cleaned out the desk drawers of the last guy’s junk and set up a couple of framed pics of the Fireplug and our wedding, and blew half a can of compressed air into my keyboard (OMG GROSS!).

This led to me taking greater ownership of my second job, where I grabbed hold of the weekly conference call reins and created a brand new categorized agenda template, and got more done in two weeks than I had in the previous three months.

This led to me taking on more freelance clients for my third job, and having a lot of fun with invoices.

This led to me writing down all sorts of tax deduction questions to ask the tax preparer when the Fireplug and I meet (for the first time as a couple) next week to figure out how a domestic partnership (not to mention three jobs) will affect our returns.

This led to me cleaning out my desk at home. Which led to me cleaning out my closet and finally getting rid of clothes I hadn’t worn in two years and all the underwear I’ve been wearing that have been falling apart, since I now had money in an interest-bearing savings account and could spend some of it on underwear that the Fireplug agreed were worth the price, since they made me look, well, like that.

I can be a stubborn ass sometimes. I don’t always acknowledge other people’s influences on me. Dead writers, sure, but real live people? Don’t hold your breath.  But I’ll say this much: the Fireplug is also a practical man, more practical than me, and it has served him well, and it fills me with pride to walk into his shop on a Saturday afternoon and see every chair filled with waiting clients.

He’s a practical man who allowed me the space and time to work on my impractical dream of writing a book, and he allowed me to work on it without complaint until my circumstances changed and I could see for myself that I also had to change, to meet those circumstances. He let me get there at my own speed.

And though this burst of energized productivity, all aimed towards the larger goal of affording us a home together in a beautiful but prohibitive city, feels new, it also feels too thorough to lay entirely at his feet, as much as I love the guy.

Every parent echoes within his child. There was a practical man lurking within me, all this time.

I took this photo in Palm Springs, from the passenger seat of a borrowed car, on the Fireplug’s birthday, as he drove us downtown to meet my gay dads for a birthday lunch at Tyler’s. I like this shot because I remember how I felt, full of this new energy and hope, a feeling that had spilled out and colored other feelings, like my love for the man beside me, which felt like it had expanded in recent days.

And when we met them for lunch I told my father about my three jobs, and the benefits, and the money in the bank, affecting a nonchalance, since I didn’t want to appear, at the age of forty, like a man in need of his father’s approval.

And I could see the change in his eyes as I told him the news, and he smiled broadly and reached out and patted me on the shoulder. We had never been a physically affectionate family, and I’m telling you this so you can feel the full weight of his gesture.

At the end of the meal I slyly handed my new debit card to the waiter.

“Cash only,” he whispered. I blushed, for I had none.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” my father said. “It’s his birthday. Our treat.” He reached for the check, and I let him take it.

We don’t quite sit right with life, filled with what Martha Graham called the “queer divine dissatisfaction,” which compels us to spend an inordinate number of hours each week either creating things for little or no pay, or feeling like crap because we haven’t done so. And since it makes my skin crawl to speak for other people, I’m going to stop. For now.

My little run-in last week with the porn industry, after a few more days of reflection, seems to fit a familiar pattern, one it took me well into my 30’s to discern. Although I’m hardwired to lurk on the edges of life, taking it all in, I’ve always had the conflicting desire to stop observing and just experience life. An internal battle between wallflower and prom queen, if you will.

Underneath, or within these two desires was another one, which seems obviously related to growing up as a scrawny little gay dude. I wanted to prove myself as a man. What this has to do with prom queens, I don’t know. I’m sort of making this up as I go along, people.

These motives pulled me in a few directions over the years:

1. Theater actor. Someone who walks around on a stage pretending to be someone else while other people watch. And applaud. In this job I pretended to be, depending on the role, more naive, more salacious, and more heterosexual than I really am. You get to be other people, without serious consequence, which explains why a lot of introverts take on this job. I have a feeling Meryl Streep is the type who needs a little alone time every day. And she still gets to be Margaret Thatcher. Let’s be clear: by pretending to be other people I felt more like a participant in life, but the urge to prove my manhood wasn’t assuaged by joining the drama club.

2. UPS Unloader, one summer in college. I heard somewhere that in the world of manual labor, this job was considered the toughest. From 10 pm until 2 am at breakneck speed I unloaded boxes from semitrailers onto a very fast conveyor belt. I came home each morning ravenous, covered in dust and dried sweat and bruises, like a guy in a Chevy truck commercial. Apparently I still did not prove what I wanted to prove (see #3)

3. Bicycle messenger. In Minnesota. In the winter.

4. Bartender. Shortly after moving to San Francisco at the age of 27, I stumbled into a South of Market leather-ish bar and watched with hunger and envy the shirtless bartenders sling drinks. Just standing there I could feel some of my Midwestern good-boy aura, which I was desperate to shed, rub off. I figured that getting hired at this particular bar would prove that I was hot in the way I wanted to be hot. I got hired, and though the external validation never sucked, I discovered that flirting for a few seconds with a long line of customers on a packed Saturday night depended upon an entirely different skill set than listening to two or three alcoholics complain for six hours on a Tuesday afternoon.

5. The boyfriend (now husband) of an International Mr. Leather. I will let your imagination fill in the details here, but let me state the obvious: this is a relationship, not a job. Still, attaching myself to a man with that kind of title, who has no qualms being the center of attention, seemed partly motivated by the same desires as above. Fortunately for me, after those desires faded a little, I found myself falling for the actual man.

6. D League Gay Softball Player. Hitting a ball with a stick in front of a bunch of people.

7. Blogger. The perfect job for the guy who wants to narrate his observations from the sidelines while courting attention. And I suppose over ten years I’ve proven something here, but it probably wasn’t my manhood.

8. Potential Porn Actor. You can see the pattern by now. And frankly I’m tired of talking about it, which means you probably got tired of it two weeks ago.

It took me a long time to understand that proving my manhood through external indicators like jobs doesn’t address the internal desire, which lingers long after you’ve punched the clock. I often forget this.

As for wanting to experience, and not just observe, the thing we call life…

I never believe people who say they have no regrets. (And if you leave a comment saying you’ve never once wanted to be a prom queen, even for a minute, no one else will believe you, either) I’m full of regrets. I’m a greedy man. I want to live, if only for a few minutes, and without consequence, every possible story. I want every road not taken.

But having regrets isn’t the same as being unhappy. I like my life, and the dude I’ve turned out to be. After seven years of writing a memoir, though, I keep thinking about the possibilities of fiction, where you can make shit up, and live more lives than the one you’ve been given.

“By the way, I occasionally read JoeMyGod, and grinned when I saw your image smiling back at me yesterday.  You haven’t written about your career as a model!”

Mainly I hadn’t written about it because I grew up in Minnesota and calling attention to one’s “modeling career’ felt immeasurably immodest, and for a Minnesotan there’s nothing worse than everyone thinking you’ve gotten too big for your britches.

Instead I told him I hadn’t written about it because I hadn’t “figured out how to write about it yet.” But then I remembered that I’m the kind of writer who figures out what he thinks about something after, not before, he writes about it.

Plus the “modeling career” (i.e. one photo for one ad) led to another offer which dragged me straight into a moral quagmire, so maybe there’s a story there.

Long story short. The photographer who takes all of the images for the Daddyhunt site lives in San Francisco and saw my photo online somewhere. He asked if I’d be willing to model for Daddyhunt for a bit of cash.

I talked to the Manly Fireplug and he expressed concern that they’d pair me up with some other dude and splash our pictures in bus stops and billboards all over the Castro (like they’d done with previous ads) and he’d be forced to look at multiple, larger-than-life images of me with another man every time he went to work or the gym or Walgreens.

An entirely understandable reaction. I’m not exactly proud to admit that I argued with him. I was broke at the time and could really use the money, I told him, but looking back I was motivated less by money than by pure vanity. Fortunately my conscience worked its way past my vanity and I could see that stroking my own ego at the expense of my partner’s feelings wasn’t the kind of thing that would help me sleep at night. So I said no to Daddyhunt.

A few months passed. The photographer contacted me again and asked if I’d be willing to model for his own freelance business portfolio. I checked with the Fireplug, who’d recently told me he’d had a change of heart about the whole matter (I think marriage and the fact that I now legally belonged to him made the whole thing easier). He said sure, and so the guy took a few shots, then showed them to Daddyhunt, who again asked if they could use them. This time the Fireplug gave his blessing, and I signed a waiver.

And literally the next morning I woke up to find a tweet from JoeMyGod with one word: “Daddyhunt?” I was still groggy and confused and I clicked to his site and saw an ad for Daddyhunt with a picture of another guy. I clicked “refresh” and there was the virtual me, smiling as the flesh-and-blood me turned beet red.

In the next few days a couple of friends mentioned seeing the ad, and one guy said it was rather strange to see a married friend modeling for a gay pick-up site, and yes I’ve wondered what I’m implying to people by selling my image in this context, particularly to people who know me and/or the Fireplug, and the Fireplug himself has said that he himself feels a little weird when he sees the ad, and has to recalibrate his initial feelings, and I myself have avoided this dilemma by avoiding JoeMyGod’s site for the time being.

I tell myself that the vast majority of people who see the ad don’t know who I am, much less the backstory I might bring to the ad, and will forget the whole thing in a few seconds, and frankly yes, it’s rather nice that at the age of 40 I got asked to model for something since nobody asked me to model for anything at the age of, say, 22.

Then last week as I was writing my post about a local porn star, I got an email. I didn’t see the email until after I’d posted the story, which was kind of funny and surreal because when I finally did see the email it said the following:

“I just saw a pic of you in an add for a porn site somewhere. Are you interested in doing a movie for_____?  I have a project coming up in April you would be perfect for!”

The email was from an acquaintance who directs movies for a well-known porn studio, and if I told you the name, some of you would immediately picture men of MASSIVE musculature and butch handsomeness, which is what I immediately pictured, and so of course my very next thought was:

“Is he smoking crack?!?”

And then I thought, “Hey, he confused my ad for Daddyhunt with an ad for gay porn!” And I wondered how many people reached the same conclusion, and that of course raises all kinds of questions about the difference between modeling shirtless for a gay pick-up site, and having gay sex on video, and what that says about our culture and oh, hey, my reputation – even though I’m 40 and supposedly too old to be worried about such a thing.

I don’t know if straight people do this, but I imagine a large percentage of gay dudes have pondered the question of whether they could ever do porn, which I quickly found out is not the same as actually being asked to do porn.

I texted the Fireplug with my OMG WTF news. “Wow!” he texted back. “That is cool. You thinking about it?”

I don’t know if he actually thought this was cool. Texting is…well, you know. Trying to interpret his real, unmasked, uncalibrated reaction, I’m leaning towards “complicated.” In any event we agreed that the issue was perhaps a little too unwieldy for our iPhones.

But I won’t lie. I was flattered. And in the hours before dinner I found myself giving  the matter serious thought for a number of reasons, which I’ll try to break down.

1. Vanity.
2. The urge to confront my own fears and inhibitions. (see “raised in Minnesota,” above).
3. The urge to flip the bird at America’s puritanical, hypocritical fear/hatred of sex, etc.
4. The usual writerly curiosity that leads me into entirely new and uncomfortable situations.
5. The idea that appearing in a gay porn movie might actually lead to more people buying my book, should I ever actually finish the damn thing. (Doubt me? Look at the number of Facebook followers a gay porn star attracts, versus, say, your average mid-list author.)

When the Fireplug and I finally had dinner I made my argument. We talked for a while, and he made a few counter-points, three of which stuck with me:

1. “You’re a writer, which means you may want to teach someday, at like a university, and right or wrong, let’s be honest about how a hiring committee might look upon this.”
2. “I know you, and I don’t think you’d like the process of actually having sex in front of a lot of people, with lights and cameras and later the whole freaking internet.”
3. “I want to be generous and supportive, but really I’d have a hard time sharing you like that.”

None of which I really wanted to hear, and I got quietly petulant. But really he was right. On all of the above.

In the next couple of days, though, I kept giving it some thought, and I talked to a friend who’d done porn, who said he didn’t think he had performed all that great on camera and didn’t like not having control over his image, and that he’d recommend I take a pass, if I was at all on the fence. Another friend said he’d never even considered porn because he wanted to actually, you know, enjoy sex.

Then I read a few blogs covering the gay porn industry. I even forced myself to read the anonymous comments, and OH MY GOD PEOPLE, NEWSFLASH! THE INTERNET IS MEAN!

I also think about something one of my favorite writers, David Foster Wallace, once said (I keep quoting him this week). He was interviewed about what it felt like to get so much media attention for his bestseller, Infinite Jest, and he admitted it was nice but that ultimately a writer needs to observe, not be observed, and if he were to lose this skill his writing would suffer.

The email from the porn director arrived seven days ago, and I’ve spent that time thinking about the difference between shirtless modeling and porn, about vanity and morality and the value of not hurting one’s husband.

I’ve written nineteen drafts of my memoir and with each passing day I get a tiny bit more insight on my younger self. So seven days is nothing, and I don’t have much insight on my “modeling career,” as it were. I’m still vain, and flattered, and conflicted, and immensely grateful that I have one man who knows me as well as he does.

I don’t know what they do with the recaps. Probably use them in online marketing, to tell potential customers exactly who does what to whom in their flicks, though I’ve never asked and I’ve never checked their site for confirmation. Some of my writing I don’t feel a need to revisit.

It’s a challenging job due to the repetitive nature of porn scenes (“Insert Tab A into Actor B. Rinse and repeat.”) and because there are only so many words for parts of the male anatomy that are both:

1. Hot
2. Not silly

Think about it. You can come up with several dozen slang words for penis, yes, but how many of them don’t make you giggle? Porn depends upon, as the writer John Gardner once said about fiction, “a vivid and continuous dream.” Giggling breaks the dream, and deflates the mood.

While writing my first-ever recap, I turned to my copy of the Oxford Writer’s Thesaurus, which had cost me $30 and which (despite its contributions from writers I love like David Foster Wallace) I’d barely cracked. I paged through the “P’s” only to find no entry for “Penis.”

Cowards.

Over time I’ve settled on a small but trusted stable of terms that don’t make me break out in hives (tool, cock, shaft, piece, meat, etc.). I watch each film (movie? title? whatever) twice, taking notes then revising. Some actors appear in more than one film, and like every viewer I have my favorites. As you might imagine, I find it more challenging to write about the ones who don’t do it for me.

One of the guys that I don’t mind repeatedly watching in action goes to my gym, and we frequently end up in side-by-side squat racks on leg days. Like most local gays I am completely capable of affecting a jaded air of can’t-swing-a-dead-cat when it comes to porn stars. And yet.

I’ve written three recaps starring this guy, spending at least six hours in his virtual company, and though I’m well aware of how this will sound to you, more than once I’ve nodded at him as we paced back and forth between sets, expecting him to recognize me.

He regards me long enough to no doubt lump me in with other slack-jawed, secretly envious porn fans, until I finally break eye contact to salvage my pride. “But no,” I’ve actually thought to myself, “Dude, I’m different.  You and I – we’re in the same industry.”

Thankfully I’ve kept this line to myself.

I suppose it’s a regular event for all celebrities – some stranger tugging on their sleeve and whispering, “I feel like I know you.” But, well, I sort of do know him. Or rather a narrow version of the man in the next squat rack, well-lit and well-framed, engaged in very specific activities. I don’t know what he looks like when he wakes up in the morning, or when he visits his parents, or when he thinks nobody’s watching.

I recently came across a photo of him in the earliest days of his career, before he’d discovered facial hair and anabolic steroids, and it looked like the photo of an entirely different person, and now whenever I see him I am conscious of these bits of knowledge in my head and of the imbalance, since he knows nothing about me.

This month marks ten years of DOGPOET, a project I’ve sustained mostly through stubbornness. Once or twice a week some stranger will come up to me at the gym, or at a party, or at Café Flore, and mention this blog, and I find myself on the other side of that imbalance, and I usually blush because, for the moment at least, I feel naked. Sometimes I wonder about the people who don’t come up to me,  strangers wandering around out there who know little bits of my life. But then, why else did I start a blog?

That’s how it is for all of us. I glance across the gym at guys whose names I don’t know, but whose bed linens I’ve seen in their cruising site profile pics. I don’t know what that guy does for a living, but I know he’s circumcised. I know this other guy’s opinion on Sarah Palin from a comment he left on my friend’s Facebook post. I know that guy just got dumped by his boyfriend, and that other guy listens to an awful lot of Florence and the Machine.

We’re all walking around with small stray bits of knowledge of strangers with whom we’ve never even shared a meal. We’re all briefly naked, now and then, revealing carefully chosen parts of our lives. But no, that’s wrong. Nakedness implies a full reveal, and what we offer the world, online at least, are edited frames spliced from our lives, well-lit, and well-framed.

The online world’s been good to me, mostly, but I’d like to keep it in perspective. In the new year I hope to have a little less Facebook, and a little more flesh-and-blood. The hour-long face-to-face chats over dinner, or coffee, where the knowledge we accumulate is more evenly-balanced, and usually more revealing.

Finally a law firm offered me a temp job, each of my three interviewers pointing out helpfully that I was clearly overqualified, to which I replied, “I’m not above anything.” Words I sometimes regretted over the coming months (most often while elbow-deep in dirty dishes) but which I never took back.

The temp job led to a permanent, if low-paying, part-time position three months later. At the same time I found another low-paying part-time position managing content and social media for a small company. In between I wrote low-paying movie recaps for a porn company. Between the three jobs I had a little hope that I’d be ok.

But none of the jobs qualifed me for benefits. I was paying several hundred dollars a month for health insurance (which I was lucky to have), and any day I took off was a day without pay. The Manly Fireplug and I had a couple of weddings to pay for, and we wanted to live together. We’d managed to get through five years in separate places, but the back-and-forth was wearing on me. San Francisco, a beautiful city of cruel real estate, wasn’t making it easy. To live together, I’d need to make more money.

I felt increasingly fractured, working on so many projects that I was doing none of them well. Working as much, or more, than everyone else I knew, but seemingly making far less. An acquaintance on Facebook (I assume he had health insurance) posted a rant about the “socialism” of “Obamacare” (I really, really do not understand gay Republicans). My car broke down, and the mechanic said it would take $1300 to fix. I parked it outside the Fireplug’s house and tried to save up the money. Each week I’d meet with the three separate guys I was mentoring in their sobriety, but I’d show up distracted and grumpy and short of patience. The thirty pages of revision between me and the end of my book felt insurmountable. Then my laptop died.

I felt trapped. I argued with the Fireplug more often than I’d like to admit. I was angry and put-upon, and embarrassed by my struggle to accept my circumstances, which were, I had to admit, mostly of my own making. Because a long time ago I’d decided to be a writer.

What this meant, to me at least, was a matter of focus. I could go the career route, finding a comfortable salaried position with room to grow, but risk ending up one of the countless people I knew who wanted to be a writer, but who never wrote. Or I could write, and for the time being,  sacrifice the money and security of a career. There are people who manage to do both. So far I haven’t been one of them. About a month ago I almost switched sides, interviewing three times for a position with a start-up that would have paid me more than twice the amount I’d ever earned in one year.

A week after the third interview, I emailed my contact at the start-up and asked for an update. “Oops!” she said. “Oh my God, we’ve been so busy. I forgot to tell you. We decided to go in a different direction. Best of luck!”

My point here isn’t that I had it worse than a lot of Americans. Only that I wasn’t handling “it” well. My short fuse shortened some more, and all I wanted, from the Fireplug, from my friends, from my co-workers, was to be left alone. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, the Fireplug asked me to help him with some minor chore.  I responded with childish exasperation. We had words. My volume grew, and then it happened. I just lost it. A year’s worth of bitterness and anger and resentment came out of me, through my lungs. I’ll leave out the details, but trust me, for a good five minutes I was insane. I scared both of us. And the neighbors.

Cue regret and embarrassment. And a lot of silent reflection.

Then, last week, my supervisor calls me into her office and offers me a full-time job, with benefits. My little behind-the-scenes campaign of dropping hints to co-workers about interviewing for jobs with benefits seemed to have worked. The partners wanted me to stay.

I’m not sure if I can articulate the relief I felt. It was – it is – immense. I immediately went back to my desk and ran a few calculations. With paid health insurance, and another day a week in pay, suddenly everything seemed possible. The car repairs. A savings account with more than four dollars. Best of all, a home together with my husband.

My mood lightened. My lungs no longer felt tight. “It’s good to see you smiling again,” the Fireplug told me. Last night I drove my car back from the garage, and when I greeted the Fireplug, just home from work, I could actually see him. His handsome face. All the worries and grudges I’d been carrying around, which I’d let hang in the air between us, had fallen away.

I wish I could say that I’d achieved this transformation through some kind of spiritual shift. But no. What had saved me was simply money.

My mother would have been sixty-four today. Her birthday, as you might expect, sometimes prompts a bit of soul-searching, usually about time and priorities and this short thing we call life. I’ll be holding on to all of my jobs, at least for now. The relief about money seems to have whipped off the blinders I’d been wearing, and a few days of reflection have made it clear that I had a bigger part in my year-long stress. I hadn’t exactly made the most of my fractured time. So a personal inventory, just in time for New Year’s resolutions, on how I spend my hours and days is in order. It’s time to get more done.

Butchie stoically presided over last night’s frenzied literary reading preparations, as I dusted off the folding chairs, iced the drinks, and searched for that damn corkscrew. An hour later, after the folding-chair-up-the-basement-steps bucket brigade (thank you volunteers and Fireplug!) I ducked outside to try and air out my damp shirt. I sweat a lot before every barbershop reading.

So I expect the sweat. But I didn’t expect the tears. Last night at the podium, in front of the capacity crowd, I got choked up reading a chapter about my father from the end of my book. Last year, at the Queer Arts Festival reading, I got choked up reading a chapter about my mom’s first girlfriend.

Both times took me by surprise, and embarrassed me. I find myself aspiring to a particular writerly image, the dude who reads, say, at the 92nd Street Y in New York, and sells just enough books to stay – with the help of the requisite side jobs – just above poverty.

That dude writes literature, which requires emotional distance from the subject matter. His work isn’t a barely-digested therapy session thrown on the page.

An emotional distance I thought I’d acquired. By now I’ve written nineteen drafts of my book, and have read through each draft at least ten, but more often twenty or thirty times, tweaking the stray word. I must have read the chapter on my mother’s first girlfriend, and the chapter on my father, at least fifty times each.

So the tears felt like the mark of an amateur, or worse, some kind of performance trick I was pulling on the audience. A schtick.

I used to be the kind of kid that others called sensitive. Code word for homo, maybe, but I’ll admit that I was ruled by my feelings.

In recent years I’ve tried to lean a little more often on my thoughts, if only to reach for a bit of balance, and to become a better writer. And in some cases my lack of emotion began to surprise me.

During those dreary few months when the Fireplug and I split up, for example, I seemed to only feel cold disappointment. I never cried.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZWZo-rnciE

But then one day I’m driving to work, listening to a Death Cab for Cutie album I’ve just downloaded, and the sad opening piano chords of their song, “Brothers on a Hotel Bed” throws a hook into the depths of me, and reels up tears. Tons of them. I spend the next few weeks driving around the city with that song on repeat, endangering countless San Franciscans with my blurred-vision driving.

Last week, as the Fireplug and I drove down to Palm Springs, listening to my iPod, up pops that song, and up come the tears. Again. Tons of them.

“Oh G-god,” I said. “I’m sorry, I f…forgot it was on this p…playlist!”

After we’d got back together I’d told him all about the song, so he knew what I meant.

“That’s okay,” he said, grabbing my hand.

“I don’t know why it still m-m-makes me cry. It’s st-st-stupid!”

“It’s not stupid,” he said. “We almost lost this.”

He was right, and really, the only stupid thing is to pretend like you’re someone you’re not. To jam yourself inside an image of a writer that doesn’t fit. We can’t all be Butchie.

So yeah, I cry, and maybe the only thing that’s changed since I was a kid is that I let my tears surprise me. I was embarrassed at first, last night, but then I got over it. Time’s wasting. I’ve got two last chapters to get right, and if I’m lucky, a slew of future readings at which I can freely bawl my eyes out.

And a very hard honeymoon to leave for the real world again. Since then I’ve been back to the three jobs, interviewing for others, and trying to get the last 3% of the book finished so that I can send it off to a few agents.

If you’re in San Francisco and free tomorrow night, I’ll be reading at the Fireplug’s shop as part of Litquake. Decided I’ll share the What-Happened-When-My-Dad-Found-My-Blog chapter (new material in case you’ve heard me read other sections). Hurt feelings, D.C. snipers, a Banana Republic sales boy with a lopsided mullet, and much more…

A Little Off the Top, and Over the Top
Tuesday, October 11th
Doors open at 8:30 pm; show starts at 9:00 pm
free; $5-$10 suggested donation
Joe’s Barbershop
2150 Market St (between Church and Sanchez)