one of those good news/bad news situations

I didn't go to yoga because I was tired from being up at 5:30 (and couldn't go back to sleep), so I went to Dance instead, which was only so-so. After, B and I went to Bouldin Creek for a bite to eat and while we were eating, it started sprinkling and I decided I'd better get home and deal with the hole in the roof. But once I got home, it wasn't raining at all, and there were buckets in the appropriate places in the middle room, so I went to bed at about midnight.

At 12:45, the storm hit. There was rain blowing in all the windows -- hard! -- and I ran through the house closing all the windows as the window awnings flapped around and hail tinkled off of them. The nightlight in the kitchen kept going off and on and I thought the power was out, but apparently it was just that light.

I went to the porch to relax for a minute, and noticed that the huge pecan tree next to the garden had fallen across the garden onto my truck! It took a moment for it to sink in, then I decided to move the truck out from under the tree. I had to climb through wet limbs and leaves to get into the truck, and the window was all fogged up inside, but I managed to pull out without a lot of noise. Big surprise that there didn't seem to be any real damage, except that the gnome from the camper top was missing.

Just about as fast as the storm came it went, and eventually I got to sleep. The sun wasn't shining this morning, but it was lighter out the front window. I looked closer at the truck and there were two smallish dents over the passenger side door, but no real damage. The gnome was in the middle of the top of the tree, which was out over half of the road. His hat was broken off midway and I thanked him for giving his life to save the truck.

Then I noticed that I had two messages on my phone, and figured one of them was from the roofer, but no. One was a message from P from two days earlier that had just shown up on my phone. Weird. The other was from M; she came over to look at the old database of venues for possible places to play in her upcoming four month road tour. She was particularly looking for something in NC, and I told her about our old friend T and his wife L.

Later I sent him a message via myspace and he wrote back to say he would be happy to help M out in any way he can, and he also told me that he and L have separated. Sad.

I went to yoga and the road going there (15th Street) was bumper to bumper all the way. Come to find out, the storm with its tornado-force winds came right across 15th Street from the west, then split off at the interstate and over 15th and 12th. I drove through the cemetery later and it's easy to see the path, with all the beautiful old cedar trees split or knocked over, roots and all (like the pecan tree in our yard, roots and all).

When I got back from yoga, neighbor B was out front cutting the smaller limbs off of the tree to get the obstruction out of the road. I helped him drag the limbs to a pile on the curb then talked to my mom on the phone a while; she's planning to come for a visit in June.

She told me her new twin great-granddaughters have some problems. One has a (minor) club foot, the other one has a problem with her eyes, the arteries have not attached to the retina; they're watching her, and if things don't correct themselves, she might be blind. Tragic.

The gayboy neighbor J came by while I was on the phone with mom, and so I went over to his apartment when I got off and he offered me a Lone Star, then we went to El Chilito for fish tacos/burrito. He's nice. G was saying I need to have more gay friends and I think I've found me one. She meant ones I'm not interested in, and he fits the bill. There isn't any chemistry that I can feel.

Tonight there was a benefit at which L was singing, and I went to that. M was there and they were trading off songs for a half hour. It was nice. M has such a powerful voice.

Speaking of M, my main Lesbianaut (I've come to like that better than Les-B-Not, thank you very much), I came up with an idea that I'm gonna try to pursue: An intergalactic musical based on Jason and the Argonauts. I need to rent the movie for inspiration.

It's almost 12:30 now, and I'm tired. So I guess that's all for now.

rain pain drain stain

Was M supposed to have been visiting right about now? It's a good thing she's not here, or any other visitors, for that matter. At 5:30 a.m. I was awakened by loud cracks of thunder. I didn't know it was 5:30 until I got up to pee and walked through the middle room and my feet got wet. That's right, the ceiling is leaking, in a big way. The guest sofa bed had a stream coming down on it, right where M's face would've been at about that time! It's a good thing Timmy peed on that sofa bed once back when and I covered the mattress with vinyl. (Whew!) The curtains in one of the windows are all wet, but not from that same hole, from a hole in the top of the window frame. They'll dry right where they are. Of course, there was water coming from the light fixture; water loves to come through our fixtures! It seemed that everywhere I stepped I was stepping in water. I put the dish bucket under the light fixture and tossed rag rugs all around. I counted eight specific leaks, but it was 5:30 in the morning, I might have missed a few. Fortunately, the keyboard, ukulele and rolling armchairs were spared. I guess the biggest loss was the Junebug poster. The paint on the wall behind it was bubbled up and half of the poster was drenched. I pulled out the bottom thumbtack and water squirted out of the hole! It's really kind of comical in an American-boy-lands-in-a-third-world type situation. The poster is gone; I peeled it off the wall and recycled it. I think it was too early in the day to get all sentimental about a movie poster, particularly with water dripping on my shoulders! The good news is that the previous leaks in my room and the kitchen are holding steady, and that your room and the bathroom are still good.

The other good news is that the repaired blender arrived yesterday. I can't wait to have a smoothie. Maybe I'll put some rum in it. That would probably help...

Last night, I went to see Young at Heart with P, A and L (P's friend; you met her that once when we went to see another movie -- I can't remember what -- at the Arbor). It's a wonderful movie; sweet, sad, funny. (I'm not crazy about the poster, though!) Before that, I picked up A at her house and we drove over to P's. That was at 5:45. We got to P's at 6 and she was casually making miso soup and had hummus, veggies, olives, cheese and crackers set out for us to munch on. We had white wine. At 6:50, we were being served soup; I tried to be calm, cool and collected about the fact that the movie started at 7:15, just mentioned that we might want to keep an eye on the time, because you know P doesn't like to get to a movie too early!

After that, on our way home, A suggested we go to Dolce Vita for a gelato and liqueur. She had a brandy, I had a port, we both had coffee, and I had a blackberry lemonicello gelato. It was a lovely night. I was in bed by 12:30 and up again at 5:30. (You can start reading again at the beginning if you want to live my nightmare!)

I just got a text message from R (at 6:45 a.m.) telling me that her brother died and services are today. I feel like I should go up and visit her. xo

big empty house

I don't need to talk to you, but now that you're gone (and not even 24 hours) I miss not being able to talk to you, being able to share the minutiae of my life that nobody else cares about. Maybe you don't care about it either, but I know you find it at least interesting enough as a trade-off for me listening to your little stuff.

I was gonna go that that documentary at the Ritz last night but talked myself out of it because I'm so broke right now. The movie was only $2, but you know how hard it is to go there and not order food, or at least a beer. Since I'm going out to see a movie with P and A tonight (after P feeds us -- yay!) I decided I could do without a movie last night. I felt so all-of-a-sudden alone and lonely when I dropped you off at the airport. Kinda crazy. It's that desire to fill up space instead of being with the quiet and emptiness, which I sometimes crave. I'd like to learn to appreciate it when it's given to me.

There has also been almost no work, so that financial strain puts me a little on edge, having to hover over the computer pushing the F9 key every other minute waiting for a transcription to show up. Yesterday, I missed four of them; this morning I got one and just finished it so now I'm making lunch. At least I can be released when four o'clock rolls around (five o'clock in NYC) if there is no work to be had; those people don't often stay past five. I decided last night that I could/should work on chapter sixteen, this monster, instead of avoiding it again by going out or making up songs on Garage Band.

When I dropped you at the airport, I had an hour before yoga. Not enough time, I told myself, to get involved with writing, so I did play on Garage Band awhile, but made myself turn it off when I got back, and I did get some good writing done, I think. I had a beer and a cigarette and then some pot because I figured that's what I would've done had I gone to the movie, and I didn't want to deny myself any of my vices!

When I got to my yoga teacher's apartment building, I came upon a barn swallow on the railing at the top of the stairs. It was so beautiful, with his rusty head, white belly and iridescent blue-black back, and those little scissor tail feathers (which aren't really all that "little," they were at least as long as his body). I got almost close enough to reach out and touch him before he flew off (not that I tried). We had a nice moment together.

Okay, what's with straight men and me? My yoga teacher reached between my legs from behind while I was in downward dog, to assist me in the stretch, pretty high up on my thighs. Of course, no one could accuse him of anything for that (least of all me), but later, when I was doing a standing pose with my legs spread, my hands clasped behind me, bent over, he came to help lengthen my stretch by gently pushing my arms further over my head. He stood in front of me, told me to lean into him -- which I do happily... Yesterday, while he was gently manipulating my bound hands, I swear he rubbed them across the scruff of his unshaved face. I couldn't see what was happening, so I don't know if it was an accident or what really happened, so I really don't know what his intent was -- and he could surely deny any accusation I could make (not that I ever would), but dang! It sure makes me curious... It does help me to keep up my yoga practice, if not other things (ha-ha).

Speaking of which, I've decided lately to start injaculating when I masturbate, in hopes of keeping my creative (and other) energies within me. I know it sounds kind of new agey, but I actually think it's working.

Back to my vices, though, and my number one (and perhaps yours, too?): sugar. I finished off the blackberry cobbler (ala mode, natch) when I got home from yoga and was still thinking I would go to the movie at the Ritz at 10 (and have "dinner" there). Shortly after I decided against going out, I heated up a little posole and had that (because I was feeling kind of funky from that sugar blast on an empty stomach after an intense yoga workout). I also had the beer, cig and weed I already mentioned and had to talk myself out of having another dessert later in the evening when the munchies struck!

Actually, I didn't have very much posole, so when I moved my writing operation in from the front porch to the bed, I got myself a little bowl of chips and then another. I wrote until 12: 30 last night -- and, hey, it's 12:30 again right now! I've been working pretty steadily on chapter sixteen all day, except for the hour-and-a-half of transcription work I managed to snag. I'm at the kitchen table now, finished with lunch; I probably oughta go back to the computer to wait for more work and write more there.

Oh, and I meant to mention this bad/sad bit of news: While I was writing on the front porch last night, back house R came by to tell me that upstairs R's younger brother committed suicide on Saturday. That poor woman, what a fucked up family that must be.

Anyway, I hate to end on a downer note, but I'll write more later. Oh, here's something "cheery": My mom might come stay with me for a weekend while you're gone. That'll be fun.

Love you,

dreams of things

What do those dreams mean when you're crawling through spaces that get smaller and smaller? I woke up from a dream this morning at 7:00 too exhausted to keep on dreaming it!

I was at a big sauna day spa public space kind of thing and I was supposed to check out at 9 o'clock, but I decided I wanted to see more naked people, so I snuck into some big area where there was an even bigger steam room which turned out to be along the back wall of a big studio where they were giving away some kind of Black Awards (there were Black TV actors and musical groups all dressed up in matching outfits with the funny Afrocentric hats on) . The steam room so crowded, there was a constant line of people in towels and people at the awards show going in one door and out the other. I was one of those in a towel (most of the time, the other part of the time I was wearing clothes). I filed in with the others and saw a man sitting (dressed) looking intriguingly at the front of another man's pants who was standing in front of him. That man was kind of swinging about, so I positioned myself to see the front of his pants, and his zipper was undone! He seemed to catch it just because I was looking at it, then I looked at the sitting man's crotch and his zipper was undone, too. I didn't take it to mean there was anything going on, just that they had forgotten to zip their flies.

There were also parts of the dream where I was in the more intimate dressing area of the spa, looking at the clock, making up a story in my head for why I was going to try to check out an hour late, or if someone came around looking for me because I hadn't checked out on time. "Oh! I completely misread the clock!" or "Oh, is my checkout time 9? I thought for sure it was 10."

And then on top of all of this activity, I kept running off to climb through an old building to get tickets for a theatrical show -- sounds like it was Broadway but the tickets were really cheap if I climbed up all of these external building fire escape ladders and through wooden cutouts, which were roughly cut; I hit my head on a little snag of wood sticking out in a corner. But I was going through this one square hole again and again throughout the dream, thinking it was so real, telling myself, "This is the kind of thing I would have to do in a dream that would freak me out," and also, "I should keep this hole in mind for when I'm dreaming and think back on it to make myself know that it's really not so freaky."

But then of course I was at a different hole in the external wall of the brick building that was just a little small for me (which was the last hole I had to go through to get those wonderful theater tickets), and on top of it there were spiders and bugs everywhere, which I kept swiping out of the way because I didn't want to smash them, and because I was just a little bit freaked out by them.

Then I could have sworn I saw the silhouette of a boy inside the building just sitting there all ghost-like and freaky. And then there was a little hard-shell caterpillar, pinkish, who was standing at the entrance talking to me. I kept trying to flick him away from the hole but kept missing, and he kept on talking.

That's when I woke up, my left arm was completely dead asleep. I stumbled off to pee and saw what time it was and tried to go back to sleep, but I rarely am able to do that, so I just got dressed, made my bed and turned on my computer, looking for work, of which there is none, so I'm left to sit here pondering this most bizarre dream.

Here's some thoughts on it:

The next chapter I'm working on is a tricky one; Randy is driving along the interstate, "high" on Trucker Zoom, stopping at every rest stop, at first because he needs to pee, but then because he recalls the experiences of public sex in NYC, so he's looking for it. Hopefully the chapter will weave seamlessly from reality to fantasy without too many bumps for the reader. I need it to work in this chapter because it happens again in a later chapter (this is the setup for the experience, I guess).

I went to Spider House yesterday (that's not why I dreamed about the spiders, I don't think! but then again, maybe it is) to read over old notes on previous versions of this chapter, and also because there was no work to do, and because at 4:20 I agreed to go with A to have Dillon put to sleep because he had stopped walking over the past couple of days. That was difficult, but it was also nice to know that "Dillon is with J..."

I got a little bit of reading done, and wrote a few notes, but P called and said she had something for me (what she should have said was she had something for A, because I embarrassed myself when she arrived with a bottle of liqueur and a card thinking it was for me, me, me! though I did have a toast with A and some other people at her house after we got back from the vet). P and I visited a while, and so I still have the big work ahead of me on this chapter.

I think the sauna and steam room references in the dream have to do with the rest areas and places for public sex in the upcoming chapter.

As for the Black awards show, I'm not sure. The funny hats were definitely inspired by a YouTube video I watched the other day of Earth, Wind & Fire singing "Fantasy" in a 1988 concert and the lead singer was wearing an outfit with one of those funny delivery boy kind of hats, but with a zebra print or some kind of animal (his whole outfit was black and white). In the dream, someone on the show (or in the outside world -- perhaps in the steam room?!) had made a racist comment and one of the women in the group wearing one of the matching outfits stepped forward when her group was receiving an award and said some rebuttal, which, in the dream, was all muddled like a Charlie Brown parental character.

This could have to do with the fact that I went to dance with the Dance Group I was really into for a year but haven't been to much in the past year. I went last night (to memorialize Dillon a little because he used to go there with J, and because A was there), and somebody put a new sealant on the floor and fucked it up; it feels like a fine sandpaper. I asked during Closing Circle what was up, and a friend who is a contractor (and a woman) said that she had tried to warn them against using this particular sealant, but they ignored her advice, possibly because she's a woman, which she went on about for a good ten or fifteen minutes, repeatedly saying she didn't want to go down that path (that she believed it's because she's a woman, "but still..."). She is also the first and maybe only person in the Dance Group who has expressed that she is "not totally straight," and I guess perhaps it's easier in a dream to represent the minority of which I am a part using Black people.

As for the clock-watching, after the Dance on Wednesdays, people often go to Austin Java for half-price appetizers. The dance gets out at 10:00 and Austin Java closes at 11:00, and oftentimes the wait staff there gets bummed when a bunch of low-tipping hippie dancers show up at 10:30 or later. A went ahead of a bunch of us who were hanging out, and when I asked LR if she was going, she said, "Ooh, we better hurry, huh?" Then she took my asking her to mean that I was on my way and asked me to order her a turkey burger and a spicy soup.

I don't know what Broadway show I was going to see. Perhaps this is my novel I'm thinking about, or maybe it's S's rock opera "Lizzie Borden" that he's currently working on, and for which he will be out of town (in NYC) in a couple of weeks to work on it. Yeah, that's probably it. I was sitting on the front porch last night too wired to go to sleep right away, thinking about the idea of having a party for the Dance people while he's gone. Just because. But I probably won't. Just because.

I'm not sure what the climbing through holes represents in my dream -- that's why I put that question out there; I think it has something generally to do with the subconscious. Or no, that's water. But I do know what the talking caterpillar probably represents. While we were sitting at Austin Java, a group of about ten of us, a baby opossum ran through the restaurant. A group of people cornered the poor little guy, which bummed me out, but then they chased it out one of the open doors, which made me feel better. One person at our table -- whom I've referred to as an "oaf" in previous blogs (and got reprimanded by S!) went on and on (and on) about what he would do if a possum showed up in his restaurant, naming this dish and that dish that he would fix with it. It wasn't completely horrible, but it didn't go well with my sensitivity for the animal, particularly after having to watch D get put to sleep, and because of the baby bird I saw a day or two ago who had fallen out of its nest and I tried to put in a safe place but really there wasn't a lot I could do, so I felt really bad, even cried a little bit (I was walking home from yoga). But anyway, the caterpillar in the dream looked a lot like a baby opossum, come to think about it, and man, oh, man, he was certainly speaking to me.

Oh, and last but not least, I think the open flies on the pants of the men in the very public steam room (as well as the ghost-like silhouette of the young man in the shadows of the building) had to do with this young man I met at the dance last night. A red-haired boy named D, who naturally made me think of my main character, Randy Reardon, mostly because he's a redhead. D was dancing around last night having a lot of fun and I started dancing with a woman who does a lot of contact improv (L) while she was dancing with him, so naturally the three of us were dancing together. And then later again. And the third time D, L and I were dancing (with other people involved), L and the other woman she was dancing with split off and suddenly D and I were dancing together, and the music got slow, and we weren't bumping and grinding or anything like that, but our dance became a little more intimate, and I got a slight erection, which I chastised myself about. That was a lot of what I was sitting on the porch pondering when I got home. In times like those, I know that I'm more of a homo than anything else, which unfortunately still causes me to chastise myself about... But I also chastised myself for not being completely in the dance with my partner, and then furthermore for being upset with myself about the intimacy of the moment. Oh, it's a tangled web. (Ha! maybe that's what the spiders were about...)