s.e.x.

I'm not sure where it came from, but lately I feel sexy and desirable. I've been putting myself out there more lately, kind of as an experiment, and it seems to be "working." I went to a gay bar that I've never been to before on Friday night and met a handsome black man (not "boy," as my friend P pointed out, and it's true, he was easily my age or older). We talked a lot, flirted a little; he bought me a beer. I guess there was the potential to go home with him, but I didn't feel it. I mean, I felt the vibe, but I didn't feel like it, so I said I was going home; it was 1:15 a.m. He became a little whiny - not too annoyingly so - and walked me to my car, where we kissed lightly (I realized we were in the street and there were straight people around, but for some reason didn't feel in danger). He said, "I wish I could see you again." I asked if he wanted my number. He said yes, and we exchanged numbers. By the time I got home, I had a text from him, saying he enjoyed meeting me and hoped to see me again. I wrote back: Ditto. Have a good night. I wasn't truly sure I wanted to see him again, but didn't want to rule it out. I figured it would have to do somewhat with how he "acted" toward me. I assumed he would be calling me the next day, or soon. It's Monday, and he hasn't called yet, which I'm fine with. If and when he calls, I'll see how I feel then.

Saturday, I did some manscaping, with the planned intent of going to the gay bathhouse that night. I don't know why; it was another part of my attempt to get myself out there some more, just to see what vibes I'm giving and receiving. I've been reading a book on improvisation and theater (Impro, by Keith Johnstone), which I'm finding very helpful in my improv, but also in my life. I recently finished reading a section on "status," and decided to utilize it in my visit to the bathhouse. For instance, Mr. Johnstone writes about how looking at someone that you pass in the street determines status right away. If you and the other person stare each other down, you are having a struggle over high status/low status. The person who looks away first is low status. If the person looks at you, looks away, then looks back very briefly, that is also low status. If you are high status, you don't look at the person at all, or hold the stare until they look away, or look briefly then away, but don't look back. There is also a section about how one passes another in the street (on which side of the sidewalk, etc.) and other instances of status. I decided to do some "homework" at the baths, and it was quite effective! I won't go into exactly what I did, or whom I did (or who did me!)...

I've been dealing a lot with my desire to kiss-and-tell, my impulse to write graphic sex scenes. I'm speaking here specifically of august chagrin. A friend of a friend read the manuscript and I got an email from him last night with some of his thoughts. He likes my writing, likes my ability to draw the reader in and keep the interest; he made a few comments about specific things that made him laugh out loud, commented that the balance between sadness and humor works well. What he had the most criticism about was the graphic nature of the sex described in the book. He said it felt like it went into the realm of "pornography," and he felt it was a distraction and was happy when it "got back to the novel." He's straight, but he said he thinks his feelings would be the same if the sex were heterosexual.

I've had a lot of thoughts about this. Just before I finished the current draft, I wondered if my work could be taken as serious literature with all of the graphic sex, and specifically gay sex in it. S says there are lots of instances of graphic sex in literature, however this other person who recently commented on it said that he wouldn't, for instance, have wanted to read about the characteristics of Anna Karenina's privates, or Vronksy's, or the positions they may have enjoyed, even though their affair was what led to her downfall. Very interesting fodder, indeed.

22 little boxes

Last Saturday, S and I had a meeting over august chagrin. He had read through the manuscript before he went to NYC to open his Lizzie Borden rock musical, and he marked it up quite a bit - but not so much as to be overwhelming. He told me then that he feels like the novel is "almost there." He also said it is "eccentric" and "sometimes disorienting," all things which I loved to hear. A couple of other people I know have also read the manuscript. I don't know them as well as I know S, but I have heard from other people I know that the sex in the novel made them uncomfortable. I'm okay with that. For a while just before I finished, I worried about that a little bit; being that I'm not an avid reader, I was worried if I was writing literature or pornography, but S calmed my fears.

I really wish I was a better reader, a more avid reader. I thought of something interesting the other day: It's okay for people to love to read but hate to write, but it's not okay for people to love to write but hate to read. Writers are expected to be avid writers, and I'm not. I don't hate to read - not really - but I don't love it either. I'm a slow reader so it's such an investment of time, and it sometimes takes me a while to really get into a book. Oftentimes, in those cases, I'll put the book down and never get back to it.

I've been going to a book club on and off for the past several months. I've read two books I love (one, Wise Blood, by Flannery O'Connor, I'd already read several times previously, it was the reason I joined the group; the other was a new discovery, J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, a delightful find), and I've read two books in the group that I didn't like too much, one of them I couldn't read more than 100 pages of and therefore didn't go to the book club that month. I found out at the more recent book club that only one person in the group (the woman who picked the book) loved it. Anyway, it's good for me to be in this book club because it kind of forces me to continue to the end of a book that I otherwise might have put down - well, one out of two. The one I did get to the end of, Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, I didn't like the first 175 pages of, but liked the last 125 a lot, so there you go...

So, anyway, after my meeting with S, I corrected the little things in the manuscript that I could do so easily - things like deleting sentences or sections of text or moving parts of the text to other parts of the page or chapter, correcting typos, etc. - but the other, bigger edits, I flagged with purple post-it notes and made notes in a separate notebook with the chapter number, page number and so forth, and a little box to be checked off when the task is completed. My goal a while back was to finish the novel by my birthday (at the end of October). I thought I had finished early (on August 7th I finished writing the last chapter of the novel), but then S read through the manuscript and made his marks.

From our meeting I have 22 things in the novel that need to be worked on, 22 little boxes to check off in the next 29 days. As I get through with them, I am adding them to the august chagrin blog as "revised." But I'm still having to work and going to two improv classes a week and trying to keep up with my new and old blogging. It's a lot. I may drop out of sight for a while to finish the novel, in case you're wondering.

chapter thirty-one: christian wall

I finished chapter 24 and read it and chapter 17 to P a couple of nights ago. The novel starts in chapter 3, then skips seven chapters to pick up the next part.

Chapter 31 is the last part of this section before the chronological storyline goes back to chapter 4 and picks up there in seven chapter intervals. The section to follow that is chapter 2, then chapter 1, chapter 6, chapter 5, and finally chapter 7, each storyline moving through the novel seven chapters apart.

It may sound confusing, but it all makes sense in my head.

P made dinner for us and before I started to read, I asked if she wanted to hear chapter 17 or only chapter 24, the one I had just completed. She hadn't heard chapter 17 before, but I wasn't sure how much time we could spend together, since it was getting late in the evening. I looked to see how long each chapter was and discovered that chapter 17 is seventeen pages long and chapter 24 is twenty-four pages long. P said, "Is that another clever little thing you're doing in your novel?!" I have all kinds of things going on in the way this novel is constructed (like the non-chronological order) but I don't think this is one of them; I couldn't possibly condense chapter 1 to one page! (Though that sounds like a fun way to write a future novel...)

I decided after I finished the first draft that august chagrin felt a bit rougher than I wanted, so I'm going back through the whole thing and "rewriting" it chronologically, to make sure the story flows. It seems like it was a good idea. Chapter 24 was already written, as are most chapters, but had to be changed somewhat - as had the chapters in this storyline before it because I inadvertently changed the date of chapter 10 from 1973 to 1977, changing the ages of the main and secondary characters. That turned out to be a good change (since a sexual awakening is better at age 14 than 10), so I altered the chapters that followed to go along with this change.

Chapter 31 hadn't been written when I finished the first draft - there are a couple of chapters that need to be created so that each of the seven storylines has exactly five parts - and looking at the thing overall, at first I felt a bit overwhelmed by the idea of having to write more story. Not that I don't know what is supposed to happen in chapter 31 or the other chapters that have to be added. But then, after reading chapters 17 and 24 to P, it seemed simple how I would get into the next part.

I'm often surprised how the story comes to me. I find myself walking around in silence, making breakfast, washing dishes, doing laundry, or sometimes working, typing transcriptions (my job), my mind busily toying with the story, slowly coming into focus. That's how it was this morning. Chapter 24 ends the summer before Randy Reardon goes to college. There's a brief connection wrapping up chapter 24 at the beginning of chapter 31 (as there was a a connection from chapter 17 to 24, from 10 to 17, and from 3 to 10), and then it just flows from there.

I haven't been drinking coffee regularly since the beginning of February. I've been drinking black or green tea, mostly. But a couple of times I've had coffee, just because I need the extra kick. Last weekend, I went to a coffeehouse to work on chapter 24 and had coffee and a cinnamon roll and my work poured out of me easily. This morning, I woke up at 5:30, finished a transcription that was left over from last night, and then there was no work to be done - thankfully - so I poured myself a cup of coffee after breakfast and started in on chapter 31:

The first plane that tried to take Diamond and me home from Las Vegas faltered soon after it got into the air. The pilot told us in a steady voice that there was nothing to worry about - "a little engine mishap!" - but turned around and took us back to the airport to get a different plane. Diamond pretended to be asleep, even as we deboarded the broken plane and boarded a new one, wouldn't speak to me, so I made a silent promise to myself that if we got home alive, I would never get on a plane again.

Randy doesn't see Diamond again that summer until she's heading off to Denton, Texas, to go to music school, and shortly thereafter, he's on his way to Gainesville, Florida - only twenty-five miles but far enough to be a world away - to study theater at the University of Florida. He arrives at his dorm a week before his roommate and spends his third and fourth days alone at his desk writing his very first story, "Diana's Tallywacker," based on his first adult sexual experience which took place in Sin City, which is the name (and subject) of chapter 24.

I'm enjoying this.

movies, movies

Amitodana is a large black dyslexic woman ex-Southern Baptist turned Buddhist pothead who comes off older (in her letters) than she is in reality. I got stoned and figured this out while editing a version of chapter twenty, the third of five letters by Ami's hand.

Tomorrow is my regularly scheduled writing night but tomorrow night is the second presidential debate and S reserved us seats at a viewing of it at the Long Center, and I wanted to get my hour of writing in for the week. Next Tuesday evening, I'll have just arrived back from Nashville (where, coincidentally, the debate is taking place), so I'm not sure I'll be writing that night either, but I'll have lots of time to write on the plane, or potentially will, if I take advantage of it.

Wow, my mind just wondered. I was thinking about C, whose name I can't remember, only that it begins with a C but doesn't resemble a name that would start with a C. The young model/actor friend of M's (from the dance) who told his father to say hi to me when he was visiting from California. There's nothing more to that.

S and I watched The Graduate a few nights ago. At the beginning, when he's on the plane, I got very claustrophobic feeling. Then I remembered I was high. Later, when he's in the pool in the scuba suit, I felt claustrophobic again. Why am I so claustrophobic as I get older. Of course it has to do with the pot, but it didn't always used to be that way. Is that the way I picture death coming? Feeling closed in and then slipping away? If that's what I think, it's a good opportunity to get comfortable with the feeling. When he was on the plane I was thinking about Paris, about my trip to Paris in March, my loooong plane ride to France.

Randy Reardon is supposedly afraid of flying but I don't feel like I've captured it yet. I've decided I will journal all the way to France, write about my claustrophobia if it strikes, describe the panic attack if I have one. It could be very useful for the book.

If my fear is based on death, I think I've approached my fear of death already and I don't really fear it in a fundamental way anymore. If the plane crashes and I die, that's the absolute worst thing that could happen, so there's nothing to worry about, right? I just hope it happens on the way home and not on the way there, if it's gonna happen!

I guess a bigger fear would be being paralyzed. So I'll state right here and now that, yes, you should pull the plug on me. Whomever, however, I don't want to be kept alive on a machine. (I'm glad I go that out of the way.)

I went to see Man on Wire a couple of nights ago. I had wanted to see it for some time, and I was afraid it was going to disappear from the movie theater by the time I got around to it, particularly since I'm spending next weekend out of town. S has become drastically conservative financially, will only go out if someone else is paying (except when he goes out for his Saturday night beer or two at the Chaindrive, but maybe somebody buys for him there -- he does have that charm or whatever it is that makes people want to treat him). I don't mind sometimes, but I like to go when I like to go and don't want to have to coordinate.

That's the best thing about our relationship, I think. We aren't boyfriends or partners or whatever; we don't have to get permission from each other. We don't have to answer for ourselves unless we want to, but we don't have to. I think it makes for a more comfortable and realistic relationship.

Man on Wire is a film about the man who tight wire walked between the World Trade Center towers in 1974. It's an amazing film. I'm not usually afraid of heights, but for at least a third of the movie my knees were jelly and my stomach was in my throat. It was exciting. It's a very well-made film, very stylized. I loved it.

Last night, M and I went to see a friend of hers do a reading at BookPeople, and afterward we talked about relationships, hers and my lack of one. In many ways I want a relationship, a "significant other," but it just doesn't seem to be happening for me, and I'm trying to come to terms with that. Then again, I'm going to Nashville for a boy, so we'll see what comes of that. I know I'm not moving to Nashville, so it has limitations.

Last week, S and I watched Carnal Knowledge. I had never seen it (nor had I seen The Graduate). S's writing a paper for his history class on Mike Nichols, or on his films, rather, or at least on those two plus Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It's for his history class, so he's writing the paper from some sort of historical perspective, the late 60s/early 70s, something like that.

Great film, Carnal Knowledge. The Graduate, too. But I liked Carnal Knowledge a little better. I love Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I hope that's in the queue. I've seen it at least once before, but would love to see it again.

the letters of amitodana

I worked on the letters of Amitodana last night. Letter number three. One and two are already written but I went back to them thinking I would rewrite them then caught myself and moved forward. They're short chapters; the first one is two pages, the second one is four pages. Chapter three looks like it'll be six or seven pages. They each get longer because Amitodana is writing to a stranger, and opening up as she goes, telling the stranger about the main character's condition. He is in a hospice far from home and she is the only person who knows him, but she doesn't know him very well -- she only knows him because of his illness, or because he's her neighbor who is ill -- and she is trying to let the stranger know where his sick friend is in case he wants to visit.

There are five letters in all from Amitodana to August. The third one (the one I wrote last night) implores him to visit or at least make contact, for the good of the patient. The fourth letter is a letter of resignation and disappointment that August hasn't yet made contact. And the fifth is a compassionate description of the patient's last hours. Or will be.

***

Sunday night, P, A, and R came over for dinner. It was P's birthday. S made a delicious meal and I made a delicious cake. A brought wine; R brought an appetizer. P brought flowers from her yard (we think they're pink oleanders) and I made two arrangements from flowers in our yard, bougainvilleas and flame something-or-others and another bright red flower that the hummingbirds love along with live and dead weeds and rosemary stalks.

P was going to bring a guy she's dating so we could get to know him better, but she changed her mind that day because they've been getting to know each other a lot since I made the invitation a few weeks ago and they needed to take a break. That was why I invited R. I saw him driving up to his house while I was cutting flowers and invited him. He's a good neighbor that way. He's hung out with P before, too, and likes her -- she reminds him of someone special -- and so it was fun to have him there.

P had requested S and I sing to her ("serenade" was the word she used), but we didn't have time to rehearse and didn't want to rehearse (we don't like to rehearse together), so I offered to read to her since I used to do a lot of that and haven't in months. I read to all of them chapter thirty-one, "Journey Home," which I'd written a few nights earlier, stayed up until 3 a.m. writing. I hadn't even typed it up yet; S hadn't even read or heard it yet. It was fresh.

S liked it a lot. They all liked it. I was quite proud of it. Am quite proud of it. It's the fifth installment in the five-installment Houston section of the book, so I felt a certain amount of explanation was in order, particularly for R and A, since neither of them have read or heard any part of the book. I stumbled through explanations of the preceding four sections but decided the next night to write out as brief as possible explanations of each chapter so I'll have them for later similar occasions.

It took two hours and ten pages to write out all thirty-four chapter descriptions, but it charged me up. I really didn't have to write the fifth segment descriptions -- since these were intended to be "preceding chapter descriptions," but I was on a roll.

***

Last week I went to the movies with MV; we saw a great movie about the last days of Bertolt Brecht's life. I dropped her off at MN's where she was staying afterwards and went up to say hello. MV sang us a new song she had written and I read a dream from my journal that I happened to have with me (because it has drawings of my cobbing plans that I wanted to show MN). Then MV sang another song and I read another something.

I decided that night that I want to have a salon for my birthday. A Soup Salon, I decided. A dinner party in which all of the attendees offer something they're working on, or something they've created previously, or somebody else's work that inspires them in their work. It could be a song, a story, a poem, a journal reading, whatever. S's offering will be the soup (though he might sing or read something; I hope he will but won't pressure him). He wants to keep the event fairly small because of his busy school schedule, and I want it to be a diverse group, so I'm gonna have to do some thinking and planning.

a queer spectacle

My friend G turned 45 yesterday. She had an all-day party, which started at 4:00 and went on until after I left at 10:30. G had this great idea that everyone (or those who wanted) would perform for her. I was inspired by her email invite to write a song. Of course I recorded it on GarageBand, and if I can ever figure out how to incorporate songs onto the JDJB page will include it with the nine others I've recorded over the last few months. G said my song was her favorite -- not that the others who performed weren't good (they were), but mine was the only one written specifically for her, so it had that going for it. A few moments before I headed to the party, I decided I couldn't just stand there in her living room and sing without moving, so I came up with some hand motions and dance steps to go along with the lyrics; I was surprised by the number of comments I got specifically on the dancing portion of my performance!

My latest song (after the one for G) was inspired by J calling a few days ago to tell me that they had put the down payment on the shipping containers which will soon make up a good portion of our new home. The song is called "Train Car" and it's kind of bluegrass (or at least that's how I envisioned it).

Well, we're moving into a train car
On the far side of this town;
She's tall and thin and sexy
And the purtiest shade of rusty brown.
Gonna sleep like old hound dogs,
Sleep like ain't nobody else around,
When we move into our train car
Out here on the far side of this town.

Well, we're moving into a train car
On the far side of this town;
Livin' higher on the hog
Than any poor soul for miles around.
Folks are bound to be jealous,
But we'll just keep on smilin' while they frown,
'Cause we're livin' in a train car
Out here on the far side of this town.

Train car, sweet train car,
Tell me, can you hear that whistle blow?
Train car, sweet train car,
Suits me mighty fine from head to toe.

Well, our train car is a mansion,
Nearly forty feet in length;
We got chickens, a goat and a garden,
We even got us a kitchen sink.
We don't lack for nothin',
'Cause everything we needed we have found
In our happy handsome train car
Out here on the far side of this town.

Our train car is so fancy,
Makes us proud to call it home,
With a door as wide as Texas,
In case we get the urge to roam;
Just slide that big door open
And take a little trip right down the track
In our fancy little train car,
Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, clickety-clack.

Train car, sweet train car,
Tell me, can you hear that whistle blow?
Train car, sweet train car,
Suits me mighty fine from head to toe.

I videotaped the arrival of the first couple of containers, then went out to Bastrop, Texas, with J to film the driver picking up the next load. There are eight in all, but we're only using three for our house. "Only." Two of them will serve as S's and my rooms, the third will go on top, straddling the back of those two; it'll be like a screened in porch for watching sunrises and having cocktail parties, and for sleeping when the weather is nice. The space between our rooms will be enclosed with a pitched roof (V-shape to catch the rain) and front and back walls. The plans are still kind of solidifying, but there will be a kitchen, a shower/laundry room (which will hopefully/eventually use 100% captured rainwater) and a composting toilet on the other side.

I spent several days last week with M1's saws-all clearing brush and getting the area ready as much as I could before there was anything to do with regards to construction. Now that the containers are all on site, the first thing to do is to have the concrete piers poured; these are the support columns which will lift the two main containers up off of the ground. After that, the containers will be placed on them, and then the real fun begins. Or the real torture. J is a pro at building things; I'm eager to learn; S is terrified. I think we'll all learn a thing or two in the months to come.

But back to G's party. After the performances (which had intermissions between each of them), G set up her sound system in the back yard for her improv disco band, which includes her and her friend S1. I have been one of the dancers for all three performances. I wore a pair of pajama bottoms and a matching red t-shirt and old Crocs because it was too hot for any of my polyester dance clothes. But G's girlfriend A mentioned that she might have something I could wear (she's tall and has a "pretty wide rib cage, too"). So I ended up in a beautiful vintage polyester black bikini with bright red tulips and a wrap-around skirt and short "jacket" (perhaps it would be called a jackette in fashion lingo, or should be). I put the very skimpy bikini top on my head, wore the jackette as a kind of tied-in-the-front Carmen Miranda look, slid on the skimpy bottoms and wrapped the skirt around my bottom half. The music was pumping and I was doing my best moves, doing a slow strip tease and eventual reveal of the crazy-sexy bottom. But with all that gyrating, I suddenly felt my junk on the outside of the bikini bottom. I reached in to fix them and danced a little more, revealed a little more. And then suddenly realized that the bottom had come untied on one side and had fallen down around one thigh. I did my best to wrangle the wrap-around skirt back around my pride and kicked off the bottoms with a little reveal of ass cheeks -- not on purpose, it just happened that way.

Soon thereafter, I retreated to the "dressing room" and put on my boxer briefs and a blue mesh underskirt which would normally be used for some kind of a petticoat action. My fellow dancer -- whose name escapes me -- was at the party but was not dancing, so I was on my own. I was happy to see that A had donned a rather Elizabeth Taylor Egyptian number and blond wig and was out there to lend me support. Eventually some of the other party-goers joined in on the dancing. It was really a good time.

I must work my stomach muscles quite a bit in improv disco performance -- or maybe I hold my breath a lot -- because all three times I've done this gig, I've had a bit of a stomachache afterwards. That's why I left shortly after the disco ended at 10:00. G wanted to sit and chat with everybody, but I was already chatted out. She seemed disappointed that I left "early," but I'm sure she got over it because there were a lot of other people there to keep her company.

The original announcement had said it was a potluck, so I made an egg salad (because she said she would be having a "sandwich bar," and because I had the ingredients in the house), but when I arrived, M (a somewhat androgynous lesbian I have always had a crush on) had just delivered thirty burritos -- large ones, cut in half, so it was really like sixty meals -- and the sandwich bar idea had been ditched. I put my egg salad in the fridge, and left with it. M brought the burritos as part of her performance for G. She's a professor at Community College and had difficulty buying thirty tacos as a reward for good work by her students, and after a bit of back and forth email writing to Chipotle corporate headquarters was offered the thirty burritos for G's party (because school is out of session).

I had a veggie burrito, and it was very good. But I was really looking forward to an egg salad sandwich with some of the arugula I'd picked from the garden for G. So today, I had my sandwich with some fresh cut leaves of arugula and a slice of swiss cheese. Yum! The egg salad had mayo, mustard, red onion, calamata olives, fresh basil, salt and pepper.

This evening, I went with A1 and E -- some friends from the Dance Group -- to see the new movie Brick Lane, about an Pakistani woman in an arranged marriage living in London. It's a gorgeous movie, very touching, one of those movies I wanted to just have a good cry after, but I couldn't since I was with A1 and E. Well, not that I couldn't, but I didn't.

I came home and sat on the porch to a lot of distressing insect activity, which I'm hyper-aware of because I'm rereading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek right now. There were four wasps congregating around the porch light. I couldn't tell if they were building a nest or if there was one already built up in the cup around the light, or if they were just pretending to be moths. Then a brilliant green dragonfly appeared and was flying clumsily around the light and around the wasps. I was certain a murder was about to happen before my eyes, so I decided to come inside, turn off the porch light and hope for the best for all. But not before I was dive-bombed by a waterbug (what I grew up calling tree roaches). Whew! And then I started writing this blog only to discover that the queen wasp (it must've been the queen, she was bigger than the rest, and agitated) had gotten inside and was spinning around my desk lamp and around my head. I got the trusty small-necked bottle I've used before and once again did a catch and release somewhere around the second or third paragraph of this entry.

So now, of course, I'm totally exhausted!

Oh, and one more thing to report. I got an invitation to be M's friend on Facebook! She said she was enamored by my song and dance at G's party. Swoon!

left-right-left

As I was going to sleep last night -- my right shoulder aching as it always does, my right forearm sore as per usual, my right thumb numb and buzzing as it is on and off -- I started thinking about writing with my left hand. I've been reading Beautiful Shadow, a biography of Patricia Highsmith (Stranger on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, etc., none of which I've read...yet), and I feel a strange kinship with her; the events of her life, her relationships, her quirks seem to parallel some of the things about me and my life.

She was ambidextrous. I thought, as I lay trying to go to sleep, that I could probably write left-handed. I feel like I might lose the use of my right arm at some point in my life, and maybe by starting now, I'll be used to using my left hand by the time that happens, and it won't be as frustrating a process. In the dark I wrote "What would it be like to write with my left hand?" on the covers with my left hand several times. No problem. I believe I could even write backwards!