am i dreaming?

Yesterday morning, S asked me if I'd had bad dreams the night before. I said, "No; why, was I making noises?" He laughed and said that several of his Facebook friends reported having bad dreams. I guess he was trying to see how far reaching this plague was. He had taken Nyquil, so he slept drugged and dreamless for nine hours.

Last night, I was startled by a bad dream. It was a bad dream, but I couldn't say that's what it was while it was happening. Usually, a bad dream is all about the label "bad dream." One could be being chased by an ice cream truck or a goat in a tuxedo, and that could be considered a bad dream, and somewhere in the middle of it, you know it. (I've had both of those dreams, and they were bad!)

In my dream that is just now coming back to me, I was climbing to the widow's peak of an old wooden house. There was a beautiful woman in a long white night gown standing next to me at the top. She stood up on the edge of the roof line and took a nose dive into the misty green silence before us. A moment later, I looked over the edge, and she had surely splatted on the concrete far below. It was startling. I thought, "Oh my god, she's dead." And then I woke up and thought it was a bad omen to have someone die in a dream (though I'm not superstitious that way, I myself have died in my dreams numerous times).

Then I thought back on the dreams S reported (and that I saw) on Facebook; one person had dreamt a close acquaintance died.

But I also remember passing by two empty public pools in the previous day or so and having a weird non-fantasy visualization of climbing up on the diving board and doing a dive into the emptiness. The part that stuck with me was that it might not kill a person to dive into an empty pool; it could just paralyze them, and as P1 says, that would be worse than death.

Just past the pool around which I had that thought, my eyes caught the eyes of an elderly black woman at a bus stop. I smiled, but it was too late to see if she smiled back. I like to think she did. A few days before that, I was riding my bike through that same neighborhood and caught a long glance at a black woman dressed in church-going finery. I nodded my head and said hello, and she smiled and said hello back. She was the opposite of the woman in white who dove to her death in my dream.

Maybe I'm making connections where they don't belong, but I fell in love with that black woman a little bit, even though I'm pretty sure that was the best our relationship could ever have been.

(photo credit)

ghostest with the mostest

I should be working, transcribing, paying the bills. But I'm too excited. I couldn't sleep last night, and I think I was visited by a ghost. That's not the reason for the excitement - just another of the "side effects" of it, I guess, so I'll write about it first.

Just as I was falling asleep, I was dreaming of two necklaces, beads - like prayer beads - hanging from under a staircase. I was reaching and at the same time a woman was coming up from the other side of the stairs reaching for the necklaces. Our hands reached them at the same time; they fell to the ground. I was awakened by the distinct sound of something falling in the far corner of my room, maybe my earbuds, I thought. I had been trying to go to sleep for awhile, but had lots of thoughts in my head, thoughts about my performance earlier that evening, thoughts about chapter 29, which I'm slowly but surely piecing together; I turned on the bedside lamp several times to write things down; I thought perhaps the earbuds plugged into my laptop might have been bumped.

I'm not often spooked (although that picture gave me a chill when I first found it!). I didn't turn on the light to check or anything. I just continued my journey toward sleep. It wasn't coming easy, but the time before when I had fallen asleep (before the falling beads woke me), I was going through the six sections of chapter 29 in my head:

1. The Black Man rises from the ashes.
2. August & Lorax on a plane to Houston.
3. Paul meets the Black Man.
4. August & Lorax decide to drive directly to his boyhood home.
5. Dar arrives home late from work; dinner is burned; Paul says the Black Man is upstairs with the children; she ignores him because he is drunk as always.
6. August & Lorax arrive at the smoldering remains of the house.

And then there was the tapping of the cat door in the window on the other side of my bed. I'm gonna fix that right now... (Done.) The cat door is unused now, since Timmy's passing. I have a curtain pulled in front of it, but it has a little tab to keep unwanted guests from entering. When the wind blows, it taps. I didn't think it was a ghost, actually, but it woke me up. But now it's fixed, I think - I stuck an eraser between the door and the tab - if it taps when I go to bed tonight, I will think it's a ghost!

I started working on going back to sleep again, then there was a distinct, single knock on my bedroom door. That's when I decided a ghost was in the house. I didn't feel afraid. I was just a tad annoyed that I was being kept awake, as much by the ghost as by the pot I'd smoked when I got home from the performance, and by chapter 29, which seemed to be unfolding because of the pot.

But anyway, I was excited and unable to sleep mostly because of the improv performance I did. C+T are out of town on tour, as are several of the students who were invited to perform, and it ended up being just me, L and K. It was at the Hideout, the scene of the crime, as it were, the place where I did my first, dismal improv show, that 2 a.m. embarrassment a month or so ago.

Well, I don't have words to describe the show without a boring play-by-play (as best as I can recall) description of it. But we were well connected. It was impressive. S and P1 were there, and they loved it. It was really great fun. And I keep thinking back on the few moments when P1, S and I were leaving, walking down the sidewalk toward her car behind a foursome, one of whom (a cute young man who was obviously in the audience) kept looking back at me and grinning real big. I guess that's what it's really all about!

The other bit of excitement is that, except for chapter 29 and a little bit of tidying up, I am done with august chagrin! I have begun posting the chapters on the august chagrin blog in order. I had previously been posting them in chronological order, but took everything off and put chapter one up. Chapter two will appear on Friday, and chapter three the following Monday. That's the plan. I've already got several of them scheduled to appear on the upcoming Mondays and Fridays. There's a link to the novel blog on the upper righthand corner of this blog.

Okay, I really should do some work now.

thursday, november 11th (2004)

8:12 a.m.

I wish cock didn't taste bad in my dreams. I met a cutie last night, followed him around and finally got in his pants, and yep, it had that odd metallic unpleasant flavor. Quite a turnoff.

I also had a dream that I heard or read about an old lady and a man (don't know if he was old) who drove off a cliff next to a road, and then suddenly I was there, could see the red car dangling right-side up next to a tall rocky wall. I was on foot and traveling with someone - perhaps R because it seemed like we were maybe in Angel Canyon, Utah. We came upon a cluster of houses that belonged to an odd family of portly men and scrawny women. They had built the houses themselves and they all had ventilation just under the metal rooves {sic} and spiders had webs all over the ceilings like canopies over the beds and what not. I talked to the people there and they saw the accident happen. One of them had caught the car or something and attached it to a vine or cable there and there it waited for the emergency vehicles.

I thought this might just be a tall tale. Then I noticed that all of the men had their shirts off and they all had big scars in the middle of their chests. Heart surgery, I imagined. My uncle just had heart surgery, so maybe that's where that came from.

Last night I was feeling puny. I was exhausted but had had a cup of tea when I got home so I could stay up and transcribe, but I realized I was too worn out to transcribe and too hopped up to sleep. I tried to watch TV. No good. Then I lay down on the bed downstairs for a while. I think I slept a little while. R was making something that smelled very good but I knew I couldn't eat. I'd only had white rice, bananas, applesauce and toast (or crackers) for two days and my diarrhea was gone.

I went to the doctor yesterday, told him my diarrhea was gone, he said, "Oh, well, then what do you want from me?" He was 70-something, old and puffy, charming but hard of hearing. He told me to take off my shirt so he could get paid, and thumped on me a bit, then sent me away with a bill of clean health - or a "clean bill of health." No charge (to me or TennCare).

I met E at an Indian buffet restaurant for lunch, pigged out, then regretted it the rest of the day. On my way home, I almost shit my pants, and had diarrhea for the rest of the evening. R asked me how I felt and when I said, "Exhausted and anxious," he said, "Exhausted and anxious?" And that was that.

I got up from my nap and decided to go to the store for some Gatorade but couldn't find my wallet. I still haven't. So I paced around awhile then went to bed at 9:00. I said goodnight to R and he said, "You're going to bed?"

...is happy to be alive.

That's how I updated my Facebook status this morning, and I got several thumbs-ups and a "Nice" comment from friends. But I was serious. In the sense that it quite possibly could have been the other way around. Not just "unhappy" to be alive, but rather... not alive.

Last night, I went to see Kat Edmonson at the Elephant Room. I heard her on the radio a week ago or so, and her voice reminded me so much of a singer friend of mine that I couldn't get her out of my head, kept Googling her, listening to songs, watching videos, etc, and noticed that she was playing the Elephant Room last night. I've always wanted to go to the Elephant Room.

I was supposed to go see my friend G do a dance performance in a park somewhere yesterday evening at 6:30, but I got out of improv class a little late, had to ride my bike home, needed a shower by the time I got here, and it was after 7:00 by the time I got done with that, so I blew it off. I was planning on meeting up at G's performance with D, a friend of G's with whom I've become pretty good friends, so we texted back and forth a couple of times through the day and decided to go see Kat together.

I got to his house at 9:30, picking up a bottle of red wine he requested on the way. He was sitting at the dining room table with two women friends from his college days in San Marcos, M and the other woman's name escapes me. We hung out for about an hour, D and M drinking the bottle of wine - their second of the night. I had a few sips from the glass he poured me, because I don't really drink red wine, because I figured I would have a beer at the club, and because I had taken a hit of weed before I left the house.

D and M dated about six years ago when they were in school. She recently contacted him and they've been "hanging out." She had planned to head back to San Antonio (where she lives) last night but both of her friends suggested that maybe she shouldn't drive back (in her condition, I assumed).

The woman I didn't know headed home, D went to change, M and I talked briefly, then she disappeared and decided to go with us. While she changed clothes, D came back out and asked if I minded; of course, I didn't. Unrelated to that exchange, he left the room then came back and put his arms around me from behind and said, "I know we don't know each other very well, but I know I love you." Maybe he was loosened up from the wine he'd been drinking, but it felt sincere. I told him it was nice to hear it, and that was about it of the exchange.

I had thought about asking D to drive because he drives his dad's comfy car, but since there were three of us, it didn't even come up, because my truck doesn't seat three very comfortably. D also has cool electronic music, so we were able to enjoy his jams on his dad's fancy sound system. It was nice; I was buzzed, feeling good, and looking forward to some good jazz singing and playing.

We had to wait a little while because Kat is from Austin and the Elephant Room was packed. When we got in, we had to stand in an aisle. D went to the bathroom and M moved to a spot next to the bar; I stayed where I was. Besides sounding vaguely like my friend when singing a pop song, Kat has a voice like Billie Holliday or somebody like that when she sings standards (or turned-standards, like The Police's "Tea in the Sahara" for example). She was singing in front of a tight quintet led by a piano player, anchored by drums and upright bass, and acceoompanied by trombone and trumpet, with a special guest saxophonist.

M and D were talking some, and talking to a couple sitting on barstools behind them a bit, but I ignored them. I was far enough away from them to do so, rocking in my shoes, eyes half shut, grooving. We were there till the end, we stayed through two breaks. During the first break, several audience members left. I saw some seats next to the stage and told D; he said, "Let's go!" but by the time I got there, there were only two seats left, and they didn't follow me all the way, turned and went back to their place at the bar. I couldn't stand forever, my knees were already starting to hurt, so I sat and enjoyed the second set from there.

During the next break, we were able to get in a better position, a table with three seats close to the front. We sat and talked, and that's when I pissed M off. She and D had been talking when we first got there and the couple on the barstools said, "We can hear you over the music, can you please be quiet?" (Or maybe they said "shut up," as I heard the story.) M got pissy; D got cocky. M's point (to me) was that she has to do what other people tell her to do all week long, the weekend is hers, she doesn't want to be told what to do during her weekend. The guy asked them to move if they wanted to talk, and D said, "If you have a problem with us talking, you should move." I was glad I wasn't present. (D doesn't strike me as being this kind of a guy, so I am led to believe it had something to do with being with a woman he was having sex with...)

M made her point for a while, and obviously wanted me to concur, but I just couldn't. I said that I probably would have asked them to be quiet, too. She said it would be different if she were at the symphony and there were signs around that said "No Talking." I told her that there aren't signs at the symphony, that it is just kind of understood that there is no talking in a performance of any kind. She pressed her point some more but I just couldn't bring myself to agree with her - at one point I offered, "The best way to keep people from telling you what to do is to be quiet!" I was trying to be light, but it was the breaking point for her. She went back to her place at the bar. And of course D went too. I spent most of the next set happily alone with my beer.

D spent some of his time trying to get M to come and sit with "us" at the table but she refused; I wasn't being supportive of her and was just as bad as the people who were trying to tell her what to do. I don't know how much D and M drank, but I saw her with a martini glass in front of her a couple of times, and he had pints of his beer in front of him. At the end of the night, I sampled her beer because she insisted (it was a different kind than what D and I were drinking), and because I was trying to make nice with her.

After the show ended, D went to the bathroom and sort of asked us to "talk." I made an attempt. M started in on her same story so I just dutifully shook my head and didn't respond too much otherwise.

It was suddenly 2:00 a.m. I know I had listened to a lot of great music, but didn't realize we'd been there three hours. We headed home. M sat in the front seat (I had sat up there on the way to the show, but took the back seat before she got to the car to show some sort of "respect"). It was misting out, D was driving a bit aggressively, or "cool" is probably a better description; it didn't strike me that he was driving drunk, just kind of like he normally does. We got on MoPac - which has a 70 mph speed limit. A car in the fast lane wasn't going quite that; D got close to the bumper, the car changed lanes, and D hit the gas and we flew down the wet road.

I thought of that billboard that insists on passengers speaking up against aggressive drivers. But that billboard annoys me. If you're in a car with an aggressive driver, particularly a drunk one, making a stink about the way they're driving seems to be a good way to cause a problem. I remained quiet. I knew D had had more to drink than me, but I don't drink very much; people have different saturation levels.

We exited MoPac at a higher speed than I thought was necessary. I braced myself and sunk my mind into the loud techno music playing. At the end of the exit ramp, D hung a right, fishtailed over-corrected - just like they say you do - and we spun around 270° so that we were facing the wrong direction on the two lanes we were in, at the same time continuing a sideways slide across the lanes into the oncoming traffic, had there been any, hitting the curbed median first with the back tire. In my mind, the sound brought the image of the tire and wheel being forced sideways under the car.

There was no oncoming traffic. There was no traffic at all, fortunately. It would have been a horrible mess had there been. I also thought later that there could easily have been a bicyclist on the road, or a pedestrian, even a dog or raccoon would have been a horrible addition to the scene. All of these thoughts keep flashing in my mind, and I am only left with gratitude for life.

After a brief moment of silence (D turned off the music), he apologized then drove back over the median, turned us in the proper direction and continued on at the speed limit, a raucous sound coming from the back tire. M leaned farther out her window than I thought was wise, to see where the racket was coming from. I tried to unclench my fists and jaw.

When D slowed, the noise got worse. We had a number of turns to get into the subdivision where his house is; he seemed determined to not slow down at any of them, then he said, "God! It's like the car doesn't even want to stop!" I was very, very sober, all the while trying to figure out if I would remember how to get back to my truck on foot, because if we stalled out or for any reason didn't make it all the way there in D's dad's comfy car, that was what I planned on doing.

As we pulled along the curb across the street from his address, there was the sound of glass shattering, like I imagine a champagne bottle hitting the bow of a ship might sound. But it wasn't glass. It was metal, two rounded pieces about a half-inch thick, one piece about six inches long, the other about three. It was the shattered rear brake rotor falling to the pavement when we stopped. I picked a piece up but could only hold it for a few seconds because it was very hot.

D was mumbling to himself saying "normalized" things like, "I guess I'll be making a trip to the brake store soon." I hugged him goodnight; we searched M out to say goodnight. She was hiding on the front porch behind a shrub. I told her to take care. She hugged me tentatively and said something like, "It's been real..."

I drove home, my head reeling with thoughts that I could have died. In that vein, I didn't hesitate even a moment to talk myself out of driving through Mrs. Johnson's, the Indian-owned late night donut shop, where they always give you one while you wait . I ate the freebie and another on the way home, then wrote "HELP YOUR SELF" on top of the box and left it on the kitchen counter.

S wasn't home yet. It was 3:00 a.m. He had gone to the bar. At 6:00 a.m. I awoke from a weird dream about D to the sound of the windchimes out of the bathroom window clanging like they had been run into. I could see under my door that S's bedroom light was still on and decided it was him, having forgotten his house key, trying to find an unlatched screen on an open window to climb through, even though I doubt he would never do such a thing. It didn't even occur to me that someone might be trying to break in; I had already had one near-death experience, I guess I figured I wasn't up for another so soon.

I looked out the bathroom window but saw nothing, closed the bathroom door and went back to sleep. At 11:00 I woke up, happy to be alive, happy to see S's light off. Later in the day, I noticed that the bush under the windchime had grown long enough that the wind sail had become caught, the striker was pulled outside of the metal pipes, and when the wind was strong (as it was all day) the pipes hit the striker the same way they had early that morning. I took wire cutters out and trimmed the bush.

D texted me this morning:

Wow! A little dramatic last night. Sorry about the intensity!!

I didn't know how to respond. S seemed to think I should tell him it was okay or that it was "no problem." But I wasn't sure I felt that it was okay or that I didn't have a problem. Not that I blamed him totally; I had just as much responsibility, if not more, for my well-being. I value his friendship, but I've been having a lot of consternation about friends lately.

Finally, I came up with this:

Let me know if you need a ride anywhere. Peace.

I haven't heard back from him yet.

sunday, september 12th, 5:52 p.m. (2004)

They say you aren't supposed to relight a cigar once it goes out. What they should say is it's damn near impossible to relight a cigar.

There's a beagle in the neighborhood. I can also distinguish the raspy bark of the black Doberman at the end of our alley.

I quit smoking cigarettes while we were in Nova Scotia. I got a cold a day or two before we left Nashville and had smoked the last of the pack of American Spirits I had so I didn't buy anymore to take on the trip. I smoked one of R's early on when we were at J's, there by the 20-foot high cliff overlooking St. Mary's Bay, and it did nothing for me. Well, it made my throat sore (more). So I didn't smoking another and didn't really have a second thought about it until I was reading an article by a columnist in the Montreal newspaper who smoked 25 Camels a day and had cancer. A side bar in the article mentioned the addiction people have to the smell of the match, putting the cigarette to the lips, the first drag, the curl of smoke rising, and I thought, Oh, yeah, that's what I like about it. The nicotine addiction is an unfortunate side effect. So that's why I just smoked the last Sweet Daddy cigar from the tin that I bought in Las Vegas.

I cross my legs, left ankle on the right knee, and I see a bundle of wrinkles at the top of my calf and I think, Oh, yeah, I'm 40. That's a sign of my aging. There are several gray hairs in my moustache and my goatee is almost solid white, except for a stripe down the middle. My jazz tooth isn't aging as fast as my other facial hairs. I plucked a few gray eyebrow hairs yesterday, and I've been pulling out shocking white coarse nose hairs for a while. Crazy.

I'm having a Spiritual Dilemma. Did I mention that? Let's see... I guess not.

Mosquitoes are starting to hover, even here on the front porch; I'll either have to go in or slather on some Burt's Bees Insect Repellant. One mosquito in particular is testing the ground that is me. My shirt, my arm. He hasn't dipped in yet.

Should I have a third Southern Comfort & Diet Coke? Should I smoke another bowl? Should I go inside and turn on the TV? It feels like I've been watching TV for two days. I've only been watching IFC and Sundance, and once in a while Comedy Central, but still, my eyes hurt from staring at the tube. I saw some good documentaries though.

Should I turn on the computer? And do what? Play Internet games? I feel like that's all I've done besides watch TV the past two days.

T's in town. (J's new boyfriend; we met him in Nova Scotia). We were supposed to go have a couple of drinks with him tonight, but we haven't heard from him. And here I've already had a couple of drinks.

It's one of those times when nobody's answering their phone. I called S. I called T. I called Sa, I called Ci, I called my mom. I called the S's, whose house I clean.

It rained all day today. Till now. It's cooler now; it's nice.

A's in town and we've been having sex. We're very connected in that way. And now that I've "figured out" my relationship with R - my "place" in our relationship (or something like that) - there's no need to hold back.

R and I had a shower together yesterday or the day before, and he said he had to jerk off; he hadn't had an orgasm in two weeks, which was the longest he'd gone in 20 years! I enjoyed watching him jerk off. He yanked my dick while he jerked his. I got hard but I didn't come. He made some comment that I can't remember, but which made me say, "Our relationship is not about orgasms." He said, "That's true," or something to that effect.

I am so out of money right now. My checking account says I have $10! I hope I have some money in savings to put in there. I was gonna go to the bank Friday morning and R discouraged me because it was 8 a.m. And so I ended up not going. And I've been spending some of the leftover cash I have from the trip to Nova Scotia. Actually, I didn't use any cash there because we heard you get a better exchange rate to Canadian if you use credit cards or even debit cards. And since I didn't have any money in my checking account (I thought I had $40; I only had $10), I told R to just tell me how much I owed him at the end of the trip.

S got to California in three days and starting working on the doc with C yesterday. They watched the 3-hour 45-minute edit that S created, and he told me that every idea C had, every suggestion, went right along with his thinking, and he's very excited to be working with him. They have a week to create the next edit, which they'll send to enter the Sundance Festival. (Sundance will accept unfinished entries.) And then they'll work another two weeks (? three weeks?) to finish the final edit. And at that point the budget for C's part will be spent. It's very exciting, really.

I've been having weird dreams lately. The most recent, most memorable weird dream included a family of deer running about, doing tricks and even dancing on busy streets, as well as a church service with a lot of inappropriate behavior (a weird play-acting thing in which a young guy is wearing only long john bottoms as his costume - though he has underwear or shorts on under them - and a mouthful of cassette tape that wouldn't stop coming out). I woke up with severe cottonmouth after that!

I had a falling out with R today. I don't know if he even knows it. He had gotten all his pictures out and was inspired (by A) to do a collage in an old window frame, and I thought I'd give him a hand by organizing the photos into Nature, R, R and Friends, Friends only, Animals, Things, etc. He came into the dining room, said, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm organizing your photos, and looking at them." He said, "Well, they already are... I'll take care of it. It doesn't matter. I just have them in groups so I know where they were taken..." I left the photos and watched TV and played computer games. What am I saying? Of course he knows I had a falling out with him. It often happens as a reaction to him seemingly overreacting to something I've done in which I think I'm doing him a favor.

A and I joked about the fact that I could live in Denver.

I don't know if any or all of this has to do with my Spiritual Dilemma. I was reading UU World the other day, and there were article after article on the recent General Assembly, and I found myself getting bored and thinking, This is all a bunch of religiosity. Now that MK is gone, I don't seem to have a Spiritual base here. It seems that it's all about choir and lay ministry. And choir is a lot of input (Thursday night rehearsals and early Sunday morning calls). And lay ministry seems to be suffering from a lack of leadership.

message in a dream

I had a dream this morning. I was walking through an area with warm, low Frank Lloyd Wright type buildings, live oak trees were abundant and old, their limbs like hundreds of big strong arms hovering near the hilly ground and high into the sky. It was a sunny day but it was cool and shady where I was.

I heard someone say my name. I recognized it as being C's voice, a friend with whom I've recently had the third and what seems like final falling out (in the course of our short and very intense relationship). I turned to look and saw someone who looked like him but wasn't him.

"Did you call me?"
"No," the stranger said, "That was just C pointing you out. He went inside."

That sounds about right, I thought to myself, considering what we've been through recently. I turned to leave the area and saw litter on the ground. I picked up a clear plastic bag and put the litter in it as I walked toward the exit. I dropped the bag in a big trash barrel. There were bottles and cans in it, but I didn't see a recycling bin, so I didn't bother separating them. At the end of the sidewalk, there were several recycling bins, organized for the different items. I went back to the trash barrel to retrieve the recyclables. There were ants coming up from deep within the barrel. And then there were bees and wasps hovering around. Every time I looked away and back, the ants, bees and wasps had multiplied exponentially.

I tried to pick out the bottles and cans, but the flying insects were thwarting me. I saw a shovel on the ground, it was covered with the bugs as well. They were flying in my face, scaring me a little. Finally I put down whatever was in my hands, said to myself, "Better to just leave it alone," and walked away.

Better to just leave it alone.

It was one of those message dreams, pertaining no doubt to the stuff I've been going through with C. I was the one who instigated the separation, but it wasn't really what I wanted; it was what I felt like he wanted. I expected my email to sting a little - I was in Paris, feeling very alone, feeling like he was responding to everything I said from a very selfish place, not seeing what I was going through, not being the friend he had been the previous two months. I expected to get a response from him the likes of when I canceled out on a meditation retreat after our second falling out. That time he had written, "It makes me me very sad to hear that."

Apparently, this was exactly what he wanted to hear. His response to my "Letting Go" email was, "I think this is for the best." He went on to tell me that our relationship now "brings up confusion and an agitated heart" for him.

Maybe it was foolish of me to write that email saying "I feel like I need to let go of this relationship." (Be careful what you ask for, comes to mind.) But I was in a really sorry place in Paris, and I felt like the focus had been on him in our recent interactions - and come to think of it during the whole relationship, I decided in the moment before I wrote the email. I kept it on my phone a whole day, rereading it, editing it a very little, making sure it said what it needed to say, before I sent it.

He had never had a close gay friend before me. (Whenever I repeated that back to him, he was always quick to correct me, saying that he had never had a close gay male friend before; he had lots of gay women friends. Whatever.) Suffice it to say there are things in his past that make him a bit leery of male companionship at all, and particularly with a gay man.

But that was what this relationship seemed to be about in the beginning, about him working on getting over some of his issues. It was about that for me, too. It has long been my desire to be friends with a man in which sex is not a consideration. We discussed very openly (at first) all of the things that were coming up for us; it wasn't hard, but we were determined to press on, to figure things out. We even had a therapy session together!

And now I'm left with my own confusion, agitated heart, and a softball-sized pain in my belly. The only difference is I'm still willing to try to work it out.

I've outlived my father by six years so far. He seemed so old when he died at 39, so grown up. I know he had his problems, but he didn't deal with them in the big way that I feel like I am dealing with this loss. I cried all day long yesterday and the day before. Not constantly, but when I went outside to deal with the laundry or turned the corner into my bedroom, or somehow the wind changed, a great sadness would suddenly descend upon me and I was unable to move for a few moments, except for the movement of my insides, my pounding chest, my pounding head, my tears, my gasps, my anxiety. I don't feel like a 45-year-old man; I feel like that same boy in the eighth grade who cried in private and had no one to understand him or help him figure things out.

All of this is not C's fault. --Okay, is any of this his fault? We got a little too close to his edge; he got very scared; he ran. I understand that need sometimes.

But he said he wouldn't. Over and over again, I expressed my fears of being abandoned; again and again he said he would not do that. He said he was there for me. He said "I love you," he called me his "dear, dear beautiful friend"...

What do I do with all of this? Where do I put my sadness? C came strong into my life shortly after Timmy my cat died. And now for some reason, the sadness of Timmy is back. Day before yesterday I was drawn to his grave and just sobbed uncontrollably for 10 minutes. C was a nice substitute for the uncomplicated love I had for and from my cat. The love C and I shared was always complicated, but it was as deep as any love I have felt for a man, and special because it was not sex-based.

There were trust issues on C's part because of my sexuality. He seemed more sure and confident of my sexuality than even I am. He seems to have some stuckness around what that means, what it means to him, what it should mean to me. I've tried to work through these things, have tried to process all of my fears and anxiety through him. He said he was open to that, said "bring it on" in so many words. And so I did.

And then he pulled away. And now I feel abandoned. I've printed out our email and text correspondence - 43 pages of 10-point Arial typeface. I'm trying to figure it out. I wonder if one last therapy session with him would be possible or even a good idea?

it's all good

That statement annoys me when I hear it, I don't know why. But I'm feeling much better today. Actually, I was feeling better last night. I don't know if it was the weather change, masturbation, or the presidential debate, perhaps all of it. It's all good!

I realized after yesterday afternoon's rain that the weather was so disagreeably hot and muggy prior that I was on the verge of tears. S often complains about weather like that, sometimes I think he's overreacting. But now I get it, finally.

When we got home from the airport I said something about it being "moist," he said, "It's been like this for three days." We have different thresholds with regards to weather -- I don't like it cold, he doesn't like it hot -- but he's more apt to comment on his discomfort. Not that there's anything wrong with that. (It's all good...)

Maybe it was because I'd just gotten back from Tennessee where the weather was quite agreeable, and where people had their thermostats set to 70 (which seems a bit frigid for indoors to me) and I had become accustomed to it (somewhat, with a down comforter on at night), but something was putting me on edge yesterday. I couldn't work, I couldn't do much of anything; I almost felt depressed, except that it was just inability to do anything, not inability to do anything combined with the wish for death!

The presidential debate gave me a renewed hope for this country. Barack Obama is the sweetest, most genuine and generous president (to-be) I have ever witnessed. Maybe it's an act, but if so, he's deserves the Award.

I had a dream a few nights ago that I hugged him. Or I should say we hugged each other. It wasn't one-sided. The thing I remember as I drew in close was that there was a dimple in his earlobe where an earring had once been. I don't know that he ever wore an earring, but for some reason that made him all the more real to me. (This was a nice follow-up dream to one I'd had a week or so earlier in which Michelle Obama had died -- been killed? -- and S and I were sent to Barack's hotel room to notify him. That was a really upsetting dream; I was rolling around on his hotel bed sobbing while he hugged S, and when I woke up I was still crying.) The day I woke up from the hugging dream, I saw on the web that he was walking door to door in Ohio shaking peoples' hands and giving them hugs. Therefore my dream seemed fortuitous.

I was actually quite jazzed when I got home last night; so much so that I thought I would do some more work (since I hadn't yet clocked in six hours and the end of the work week was today at 1:00), but instead I read through some blog comments on the debate and felt uplifted by all of it; it really is all good.

This morning I got up and worked, and I turned in a time sheet with twelve hours on it. Not what I'd hoped for, but I was about ready to call the whole week a bust this time yesterday afternoon.

short - sexy - straight

Who are you?

I saw you across the way, at the table along the wall, your back against the wall, looking my way, glancing over at me, smiling at me. Nice smile, by the way. And those Nana Mouskouri glasses look good with your floppy blond hair, don't you know.

My friend across from me kept thinking I was looking at her; I had to tell her I was using her to get glances at you (fortunately, she's a lesbo so she wasn't offended). Our friend was on the stage with two other singer/songwriters -- I assumed one of them was your friend, too. I noticed the ring on your "wedding" finger, and the guy in the middle on the stage, with the sweet high tenor voice also had a ring on his finger, and it looked a lot like your ring (though of course there isn't a lot of variety in men's wedding rings). But I was convinced. When the singer sang a pronoun-free song of love, your dimples showed, you glowed. I was sure I was right.

To be honest, I didn't like his songs that much. They were okay. The other woman in the trio singing seemed to be trying to write a Nashville hit to save her soul, so I didn't like hers much at all. I was really only there for my friend, whose songs seem to come out of the depths of her heart and soul. She looked like a caged animal up on stage in that straight-backed chair. She could hardly contain her feet as she sang her songs of disappointment and despair, love and loss. There is power in her emotions.

You were the icing on the night for me.

Some other people came to sit at the table I shared with my friend, some said hello; one (straight) man whom I was a little too amorous towards once upon a time wouldn't even look my way, which isn't a new development.

I didn't care; I was enjoying my little game of catch-my-eye with you.

When I lived in New York, I used to play a game on the subway or wherever groups of strangers were caught suspended for a moment or several -- a museum exhibit or drum circle in Washington Square Park; I would commit myself to looking into a stranger's eyes, holding a gaze the longest, not looking away until after he did. It was harder than it sounds.

But there was that ring. And there was that man onstage, your man, I assumed, and it's really not my thing (anymore) to break up happy couples, or even unhappy couples. You break up, and then I'll come calling...perhaps. I pondered my "Shot in the Dark" ad for the Chronicle, but knew I wouldn't go through with it. Who reads those things anyway? What if somebody saw it was me? A friend. Would they pity me? That's the last thing I want: anybody's pity (yours among them).

So I put "our future" out of my head, just enjoyed the caught glances over the mouths of our drinking glasses.

Then there was a break in the music. You rose and came over to our table, said you liked my Obama ("Compassion for a Change") t-shirt. I told you where I got it after an initial huminah-huminah-huminah!
And that was it. Nice little exchange. Damn, you're short! Like a foot shorter than me. (I like that. I've always found short somewhat fey men quite sexy. Must be a dominance thing.)

A couple of minutes later, the singer/songwriters were off the stage, the man in the middle was at your table, and I heard your chit-chat, which didn't sound much like two men who were intimately involved (unless, I pondered, you had some sort of big closet-in-public thing going on between the two of you while your husband worked his way up to super-stardom at which point he could more easily make his Clay Aiken appeal). And then you introduced him to the woman sitting next to him as your wife. What the--

Last night I had a dream that I was at the Central Texas Democratic National Committee Campaign Headquarters (which is just a few blocks from our apartment, and which is where I got my t-shirt). I was wearing cut-offs and cowboy boots. I don't know why this detail seemed important, except that I saw a short blond man in the parking lot (you) walking with a large red-headed woman (like the "fag hag" I imagined the woman sitting next to you last night to be) and I was trying to walk more butch in my boots instead of like a drag queen in heels, in case you looked my way.

The two of you went into a store next to the campaign headquarters, a fabric store that was going out of business. The front window was smashed in and spray-painted letters all around the door announced the deep discounts going on inside. I followed after you, thinking to myself, "Well, I do need lots of fabric for curtains for my new house, and I can also look for some stretchy vinyl." That last part was a reference to a conversation I had with the neighbor on the front porch just before bed (she's been hired to make a vinyl jumpsuit for a friend and said stretchy vinyl fabric is hard to find in Austin).

When I got inside, you and The Woman were looking at furniture and talking about how well this chair would go with your couch and how this fabric matched your lamps. I was heartbroken. In my dream.

Oh, one other nugget -- so to speak -- to hold onto... I showered right before I went to the show last night. I neti potted my nasal passages as per usual and blew my nose in the shower stream. While I was at the show, I went to the bathroom and thought I felt a scab on my dick, but it was a dried up booger. I thought that would be a funny detail for my book, for when Randy the narrator is standing at a row of public urinals somewhere, masturbating next to another "pervert" who notices a big brown booger on his dick, which of course makes the fellow next to him lose his erection, and then sends Randy running embarrassed from his spot.

Of course, this isn't something I would tell you -- I don't even know you -- it just kinda fits neatly into this little entry about you. So there.

artist emerging

I'm not going back to the gay men's chorus. It's not for me. I was doing the math -- amused that I even had to be doing math for such a thing -- and the numbers just don't make any sense. First, dues are $120 a year. I've been told that this money goes to pay the two co-directors' and the piano player's salaries and rental of the rehearsal space.

The first concert opportunity coming up is in the middle of the day, so I would miss a minimum of two hours of work(...$170); plus I would have to buy an outfit for the concert (casual dress attire, long sleeve shirt, slacks, tie; another $20 at best). (...$190) I don't have any of those items in my wardrobe and I don't really want any of items in my wardrobe. And on top of that, there's only one more rehearsal before that concert, and I don't feel confident with any of the songs (one of which I haven't even received the sheet music for, even though I paid my $10 music fee). (...$200)

The next concert opportunity is something I likely won't be chosen for, and I'm not sure I want to be anyway. It's the "Midnight Cabaret," an event for which the audition is this coming Thursday evening, and the director gets final say over the pieces, whether they're too risky or not bawdy enough. Those who don't perform in the cabaret are encouraged to volunteer but must be in full costume regardless of the position you volunteer for. I don't think I would get selected because I've seen a song or two that some of the men intend to audition with, and they seem boring to me, classic piano bar songs. Oy!

And then there's the Christmas concert. I'm somewhat opposed to singing songs about the Christchild any ol' way, but the costume for this concert is a tuxedo! Someone said you can get one at JC Penney's for around $100... ($300)

And I really have no interesting in inviting friends to come see the concerts (tickets for which I hear cost $140!) But mostly it's about the fact that I'm an Artist.

S and I went to see the Patti Smith documentary last night (Patti Smith: Dream of Life), an excellent, inspiring film. I had been thinking about quitting the chorus before we saw it, but was completely sold on the fact that I need to quit afterward because the movie is all about being an artist, being true to the artist that you are. I wasn't a big fan of Patti's back in the day because I really wasn't exposed to her. I don't know if I would have been transformed had I experienced her in the 80s when I was confused and stupid and living in Houston, but I was certainly transformed last night.

Although I am often lonely, I realized I don't need to search for community to fulfill me -- because I haven't found a community yet that fills that need. What I need to do is create art; I need to be proud of what I am creating. My art might bring me closer to a community of like-minded people; or maybe that won't happen until sometime in the distant future. Patti read a Walt Whitman poem in which he imagines all the poets to come after him; he was describing what he saw in the trees and the water and nature for the poets to come after him. She said it has always been important for her to do that. I like the way that sounded.

I keep making excuses not to write, not to get in there and cover my hands with papercuts in order to organize and work on this fucking big-ass novel. But last night, glowing from having just seen the Patti Smith movie, burning from the excitement that is New York City as I haven't since I left there ten years ago, I decided that I just gotta do it. So, I made a promise to myself. At the very least, I will spend the two hours of rehearsal time expected of the men in the chorus working on my novel. Every Monday evening, 7-9. There may be other hours as well, after I get into the groove of it and things start flowing, but right now I'm promising myself that much. Even if I just sit with the manuscript on my lap smoking cigarettes and staring at the space in front of me, I will be totally involved with my novel for two hours every week night. No special outfit required.

I was so charged when I went to bed last night that I had a full night of dreams, most of which I can't remember, except for one: A crowd of tall people talking at a party separates and a boy with breathtaking light blue eyes, pushes through, points at me and smiles, saying, "You! You!"

evil eye ball

I went to the Evil Eye Ball with A last night; it was a fundraiser for Rude Mechs Theater Company. There was free Real Ale and good food (though we'd eaten at Blue Dahlia right before and I could only stuff down a few tiny tarts). People were encouraged to dress up in their luckiest outfits, or to wear some sort of evil eye; all of this because this is Rude Mechs' 13th year. S painted eyes on the back of my head -- which turned out pretty cool. I had matching dark underlines on the front side because I'd read that young Nepali girls are never allowed to leave the house without darkened eyes (evil eyes) to ward off bad spirits.

I bought a beer glass with the Evil Eye logo on it and had a couple of beers, then wandered around the space perusing the silent auction items, and ended up with "Pckg #24," which contained a $25 gift certificate to Farm to Market grocery store; a Farm to Market T-shirt; a subscription to Edible Austin magazine (plus the two old issues and one current one that were on display); a pound of coffee from Progress Coffee as well as a $10 gift certificate to Progress Coffee. Value: $93. Cost: $45.

I ran into lesbian artist M (on whom I have a crush) and she told me about her recent trip to Cuba; I chatted with all of A's many acquaintances in the Austin art and performance world, the UT community and the Dance Group she's heavily involved in (me not so much anymore, but that's where I met her), including J, whom I like, and her Welsh husband C, whom I've never really talked to before, but he was drunk, as was I, and the two of us were cracking each other up while the hired hypnotist went on and on and on and on...zzz... We were cracking other people up too (and probably annoying the hypnotist) because we were talking a little too loud.

Hypnotist: When I snap my fingers, you'll go twice as deep. (Snap.) Twice as deep. (Snap) Twice as deep.
C: So they're, what, four times as deep now?
Me: Twice as deep? Call me when you're twice as long, then we'll talk!

Oh, well, you're bound to get at least a couple of ne'er-do-wells when you're giving out free liquor.

I bought another beer glass on the way out (thankful that I hadn't won the silent auction item of "Pies for a Year in the form of one Pie a Month," which I bid $120 on -- undeniably a good deal, and I'm sure S would have been happy had I won, but still!) and was home by 11:00. S wasn't home -- most likely out at the Chain Drive with his buddies -- so I smoked a cigarette on the porch, then hit the one-hitter and went to bed, too drunk to do anything productive, including, as it turned out, brushing my teeth or doing any of my ritualistic nighttime duties, which I attributed as the cause of my bad dream karma.

After my 7:30 a.m. pee, I had two disturbing dreams, which probably won't sound as disturbing in writing, but you know how it is. They were terrifying.

1. I found an armadillo. He became my pet. We loved each other. He rode around on my shoulders and on the top of my little pickup truck. He was like a little fat plushy toy, soft-shelled.

Then something went wrong. He climbed out of back window while I was driving around and couldn't hold onto the roof like he had before. He fell onto a busy street. I pulled over and chased him on foot. When I caught him, he was smaller, no armor, more ratlike, with fangs that he kept trying to bite me with.

2. I was at a house with a big yard. I don't know if it was my house, but an old man who reminded me of my mother's father lived there. My middle sister was there, as were my two nephews -- one of whom belonged to her, the other to my older sister. I was going away and we were trying to figure out what to do with the pet rabbit and the stray dog puppy. We had cages for them, but they were small and I was worried that the animals, particularly the stray dog puppy, would go crazy in the time that I was gone, no free time to run around. I guess the old man was going to feed them, but I didn't trust him to do it right.

I was attaching plastic to the inside flap of the mailbox to keep the mail from blowing away or getting wet while I was gone. It was a very tedious process I was employing, using little lengths of wire to attach the plastic to the metal box. My sister said she had already taken care of that, but I pointed out that she had only done a side-to-side flap with duct tape and I was fortifying that with the top-to-bottom flap of plastic and wire.

The nephews saw something at the fence line, a dead animal or a dirty diaper or something. They were going on about it, but I couldn't be bothered; I was busily making preparations for my departure and for the animals. I decided that maybe I could afford to board the dog at least, and got in the old man's truck to drive across town for something; I didn't ask his permission. My sister was going too but in a different vehicle with the boys, I guess.

There was a dog dragging its butt along the side of the road, and then the stray dog puppy was suddenly running to catch up with me, running in the busy street. The dog dragging its butt got up under a car, but the driver avoided running over it; I was afraid I was going to hit and kill the stray dog puppy, and I was having a hard time driving the old man's truck, which was standard transmission with a hand clutch instead of a foot pedal. Suddenly I was in unknown territory, on a street I didn't recognize in an unfamiliar town.

There were sirens and flashing lights. I saw two police motorcycles on a parallel street. I pulled over with the other cars and people. The motorcycles were escorting scary-looking prisoners to jail. A black man standing in the street next to me made an unfortunate move and a prison guard stepped out of the line of prisoners and shot him in the gut. I fell to the ground like everyone else did until the prisoner procession had passed.

When I stood again I had a sporty motorcycle (which I didn't know how to work) and had a pistol in two parts (which I had a hard time putting together and keeping it that way). I pushed the motorcycle forward but I was suddenly in a hallway, in a doorway. I turned around and was headed off by a security guard who hadn't been there seconds before. He was demanding to see my prison ID. I told him I didn't have one but he didn't believe me. He pointed to a sign on the wide open door (which I had missed) that said not to go through that door without the proper ID. I was scared, frantic, pulled out my Texas driver's license and in all of my confused explaining mentioned that I had lived in Tennessee before. He asked me suspiciously, "Oh, yeah? In what district?" I told him I didn't know, that I'd never heard of such a term. He told me not to go anywhere and left with my driver's license. I considered running, but there were too many things stacked against me (and I thought of the black man who got shot for less).

Then I woke up.

the gods don't give a damn

(This entry could also be called "About A Boy, Part Three")

A while back, some women friends suggested I put a notice in the "Shot in the Dark" section of the Chronicle, the listings just after the personals where people say "I saw you at such-and-such a place; did you see me?" I was talking about D, the boy I met nearly two years ago at El Chile, where he worked waiting tables. I had a big crush on him, and he seemed to be at least somewhat interested, but I didn't handle myself in the best way. I wrote a note to him and walked it to the restaurant, but was too shy to walk in and give it to him, so I gave it to a waitress outside the restaurant who was opening up the patio windows. I had practiced writing the note a couple of times before I put it down on the card I'd made for him. But I didn't practice my phone number, and when I got back home, I couldn't for the life of me recall if I'd actually put my number in the note. What an idiot!

So I couldn't go back to that restaurant. (That's the way it works for me...)

So about a year later, I saw him at CampCamp, the monthly lesbian-run talent show that takes place at Bouldin Creek Coffeehouse. He seemed very interested in me, but I was too flabbergasted by having run into him, him seeming so interested, to do anything about it. Somewhere in the conversation I found out that he was no longer working at El Chile ("That was the worst job ever," he told me), but that he was at The Clay Pit.

I went there with a friend shortly after that but he wasn't working. And then the following week, another friend invited me to her birthday dinner which was going to be held at the Clay Pit. I responded to her email, "Ooh! Ask for D to be our waiter!" Which she did, and perhaps we got a D, but not the right D. I don't know the name of our waiter that night, but I found out later that there were two D's who worked at the Clay Pit.

My D was working at the Clay Pit, but he was downstairs. I had had a beer and had the encouragement of two (different from the above mentioned) female friends to get the balls to walk over to him and ask him if he wanted to go out, and he said, "Well, yeah," in a way that sounded to me like he'd been waiting for me to ask about as long as I'd been trying to work up the nerve. But I'm not good at these social situations; I know now that I should have gotten his number, but he asked for mine first, and that seemed sufficient. In fact, I was kind of happy that he had my number instead of the other way around, because then I would have to ponder the proper amount of time to wait before calling him.

He grabbed a pen, said, "Give it to me," and wrote my number on the back of his hand. I had caught him doing his cleaning-up duties, sweeping the restaurant floor; it's likely he did some other, dirtier chores, and he probably washed his hands, and with the dirt away went my phone number. That's the best-case scenario I can think of. A month went by; he didn't call. It didn't bode well. But what could I do?

Friends were full of advice about how to follow up, and eventually I went back to the Clay Pit -- three times: the first because I just happened to be in the neighborhood and had time before a movie I was going to see started (but he wasn't working); the second time, after I called to ask if he was working, was interrogated a bit by the phone-answerer, and then got there to not see him there (though the waiter who had worked my friend's birthday dinner was working, and that's what made me think that perhaps his name was D as well); and the third time, when I got the bad news (I asked the bartender if D was there, the bartender said, "No, I'm sorry, D lost his job two nights ago."

So, maybe the gods are telling me he's a bit flaky. Whatever. I don't care about his employment history. I have dreams about him now and again; in some ways I want to see how this story plays out, in other ways I just want to get the inevitable heartbreak over with!

I forgot that I'd put an ad in the "Shot in the Dark" section of the Chronicle. In fact, I just picked up the current paper today, which will be replaced by next week's in three days (so it's more than half a week old); if somebody were going to respond to my ad they would have by now, right? The thought of my well-intentioned girlfriends a week or so ago at La Dolce Vita over cognacs and cappuccinos was that at least one of his friends would see it and alert him to it. But like I said, I forgot I'd put it in there. I had just noticed that the cover story was about the Museum of Ephemerata, which I took my friend R from Wisconsin to when he was here a while back. So I was pulling the paper apart to send the article to him, when I noticed the "Shot in the Dark" section. And I remembered writing the ad, though I didn't remember writing it quite like this (read carefully and to the bitter end):

DANIEL, WHERE Y'AT?
First it was El Chile, then Clay Pit. You
wrote my number on your hand. Did
you wash it off? I still have a crush
on you. When: Thursday, April 10.
Where: Clay Pit. You: Man. Me:
Woman. #903108

i'm so azure

My mom gave S and me a stupid clock with an indoor/outdoor thermometer reading, which I moved to over my desk when S went out of town for the summer with the intention of keeping myself from overheating. I don't mind the heat so much, but sometimes it's a little hotter than it should be in here, and I think it's making me ill. I decided that when the indoor temperature hits 90, I would turn on the a/c. It usually stays about five to ten degrees "cooler" (relative term) in the house than outside. A couple of days ago it got up to 104 (outside), and I turned the a/c on, but it kept flipping the breaker switch, which meant I had to keep going outside to the back corner of the house to flip it back on again. It was 88 in the house when I gave up. 88 isn't so bad.

Yesterday, I was going to go to Dance, but got involved with work, and then with jumping into internet rabbit holes and before I knew it, it was nine o'clock (the Dance ends at 9:45). And it was 92 degrees inside. I was going stir crazy, and I was hungry, and because I didn't want to heat anything up, and because I didn't want to eat cold cereal, I decided to head over to the Dance space and see if anybody was going over to Bouldin Creek Cafe after. There was some drama at the Dance -- which is part of the reason I don't go as much anymore; it has to do with the current president of the board and his decisions and his way of communicating and the struggles he and the other board members and many of the Dancers are having, being that they're a bunch of hippies.

LR, for one, who is like the Mama of the Dance, and has been setting up and breaking down the space for thirteen years, was asked to provide a job description, which she took as being a little too corporate for her soul, and so she quit. So the president immediately hired a new person to do her job. LR showed up to Dance last night, early, in time to set up, and found out that she had been replaced. I arrived at the end of the closing circle, saw her lying on the floor, asked how she was, and got an earful.

A asked if I wanted to go get a bite to eat. I did. I suggested Bouldin; A counter-suggested Polvos, because LR likes it. I didn't see any reason to contradict. Seven of us ended up at Polvos, including three Bs (one of whom now goes by F, the other two I'll refer to as B1 and B2), LR, A, and a woman I met recently named P, a beautiful woman, gentle, hippie-like, with a generous smile.

The gossip continued around the issues with the Dance -- which was a bit tedious to me. I asked B1 who the woman was, he told me we'd been introduced a week ago. I didn't remember. When she went to the restroom, B2 went as well, and B1 said, "He just slapped her on the butt!" He seemed a little offended. When P returned, B1 said something about it. She said, "I know; I hope he got from the disgruntled sound I made that that wasn't acceptable behavior." (I always liked B2. Right before I met P1, she was dating him. She says now that she shudders -- I think that's the word she used -- every time she thinks about the episode of dating B2. I didn't understand. But later, when he was the first to leave, he pulled P over the table to him and kissed her on the cheek, which wasn't completely unacceptable behavior, but did seem a little odd, so maybe it really was, to P.)

Anyway, I asked B1 if he and P were dating. He said, "We're hanging out," which I took to mean that's the precursor to dating. Shortly after that, when she was back at the table, A said, "So when are you performing again, JDJB?" And P turned to me and said, "Did you do CampCamp?" She saw both of my performances there -- the Blood of the Lamb Beet Juice thing and the May Day Human Maypole thing. But what was most interesting was when she said: "I'm queer too!" I could see a drop in B1's face, could feel his energy change severely. He didn't admit it right away, but later, it came up when we were in the parking lot. I told him that's exactly the way I feel over and over when I find out that guys I'm attracted to are straight. His response: "Well, I think she's everything..." I wanted to say, "Yeah, and I sometimes think you're 'everything,'" but I didn't. I just smiled and let him have his little fantasy. It was useful to me to see how he struggled with that, struggled against that very obvious information: "I'm queer!" How he kind of told himself it wasn't exactly what it sounded like.

I had a coconut margarita, which was tasty and strong and loosened my tongue and wit -- though around some people (B1 being one of them) I'm known for being funny, there's some sort of incentive, or some sort of energy. The food was okay at Polvos; the service was horrible. A said she's had that experience there before (except she thinks the food is great).

After we said our goodbyes in the parking lot, I drove toward home but stopped at Chain Drive, because it was Wednesday night and that's the night they have bands play, and I remembered in the back of my mind that Chainbow (a band that played at CampCamp on May Day) was playing. Indeed they were.

A week earlier, I had performed as a dancer in G's improv disco unit, and there were maybe ten people there. Last night the place was packed. I rolled a cigarette in the truck so I could go stand on the Chain Drive patio and enjoy it (so I would have something to do), and I saw S1 and J and R and S2, queers that I've met through G. I walked up to S1 and said hey, had a brief conversation with him. He was polite, but there just wasn't any real connection there. J was standing close by; a real cute little homo studying to be a nurse. He was at R's pancake breakfast birthday party and I felt like there was some sort of connection there, but last night he didn't seem to even recognize me. S2 looked really fucked up, kind of squinty-eyed and swaying, and she was standing across from R, who I went up to, hugged, and we had a conversation, which was a little warmer than the one I'd had with S1, but I felt like I had nothing interesting to say. I feel like I have a totally uninteresting life. There's only so many times you can say to somebody that you're writing a novel before they start saying, "So, what are you up to, just writing?" Yeah, just writing. (And not even that for the last week or so, this goddamn chapter sixteen...)

So then the band was starting. I went inside. They really aren't my cup of tea. They're loud and not real melodic, and I'm just an old fart because all the mostly-lesbian audience members were bopping and laughing, spewing their drunkenness right back at the drunk foursome onstage, banging away, keeping a relative beat, stopping occasionally to start over because somebody fucked up a song...

I looked around the crowd, the crowd looked through me. A fat girl looked past me and smiled as she did so; I took that as the one most real connection. The cute boys all seemed too young for me. There was a short-haired man in tight jean shorts and motorcycle boots playing pool; he was nice to watch, but he looked at me sideways and made me feel like I was being perhaps inappropriate.

Then I saw a tall man with long blond hair. He sized me up as he passed by. Then he followed some people out to the patio. I bought a beer (forgetting I'd had a margarita already, and I don't like to mix alcohols), and it was just a Corona, which isn't the kind of beer that I would normally drink, but, believe me, it was the best choice...and it cost $4.25 (which makes it really not the best choice)! I went outside to where the tall blond man had gone. He was standing in a cluster of five guys by the fence, all but him smoking. I'd already had my one cigarette and didn't really want to go roll another. Next to me were two guys involved in a cynical conversation. Close by, a group of six or so were sitting at the built-in pond; over there was a picnic table of four bears most likely making snide remarks about the other groups; at another spot, a group of three; and at the back corner, a couple tables of mixed gender queers.

The tall blond man was across from the pool player, but next to a rough looking guy. Then suddenly, they were kissing. I couldn't hear their conversation, so it looked completely out of the blue. One moment, they're standing around with three other guys, and the next they're sucking face. That doesn't happen to me. In one way I want it to, and in another, I'm completely opposed to that kind of non-genuine connection. Not to say these guys didn't have a genuine connection, but it seemed pretty random. Fifteen minutes later, they were at it again, and then after a brief pause, headed out of the bar together most assuredly to go have sex. The rough guy sized me up as he passed, and then stumbled off of the sidewalk. I thought to myself perhaps if I hung around this place long enough, got drunk enough, somebody would come along and suck on my face and let me take them home. It's a conundrum because I have this desire for an intimate connection, but I want it to be genuine, and a bar doesn't seem like the right place to find that.

Though the Dance isn't really the right place either since I'm the only homo there.

I came home feeling despondent. I have been thinking about celibacy a lot lately. If I could take that desire out of my life, I think I would be a lot better off. It's like getting out of debt to relieve a certain amount of mental stress; celibacy would possibly go a long way to relieve me, too. Other than masturbation, I am celibate. I haven't had sex in over a year. I haven't masturbated that much recently, either. But I got home last night and felt like it was the only thing that would make me feel better. It didn't. I shouldn't have mixed tequila and beer.

I had a dream last night that I was in a big city -- probably New York, but it felt like Paris (though I've never been there) -- I was with my immediate family; it was time to leave, to catch a plane back home. But there was news of a great tragedy outside. When I got outside, police and firemen were everywhere, searching for the perpetrator of this great tragedy. There was controlled mayhem in the streets, everybody walking briskly on the sidewalks, darting behind buildings, in and out of alleyways.

It turned out the perpetrator was a little boy wearing an over-sized policeman's jacket and hat and carrying a huge bag that looked like a two-dimensional jack-o-lantern. They caught him walking down a rickety staircase. They took him away. The staircase separated an upper sidewalk and a lower sidewalk. I was on the lower sidewalk; I started climbing the rickety staircase to get up to where the police with the boy had been, and the stairs started falling apart, coming loose in my hands, splintering and falling away under my feet.

I've had diarrhea since the week after S left town, and for the last five days or so, a cough when I take deep breaths . P1 said maybe I should go to a doctor. I don't want to go to adoctor. I don't want to take medicine; I don't want to fight for life; sometimes I'm okay with it coming to an end.

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...)

sxsw film pass day two

I woke up singing that Paul Simon song, "Diamonds in the Soles of His Shoes" -- well, no, not really, because I don't really know the song, just barely a tune that goes along with the title -- because I had a dream that I was wearing bowls of kumquats for shoes. I had on a regular shirt and khaki pants, and it seems the purpose of the dream was to go around asking people if I looked all right, if what I was wearing was okay. People in the dream would say, "Yes... yes... No!" That's kind of where I'm at in my life right now, I guess.

---

Yesterday I saw two movies. The first (Film #2) was called The Lost Coast, which I mostly liked. Here's how the website describes it:

High school friends reunite for Halloween in San Francisco: Mark, who is now gay, and Jasper, who is straight and soon to be married, are forced to confront their unspoken sexual history in this haunting, spare look at the subtleties of sexuality, friendship, and loneliness.

Now that I just reread that, I'm confused. The Mark character was more obviously gay (personality-wise), but I thought he and Lily were a couple in the film. It was a dreamy, murky film, beautifully shot, taking place a lot in the dusky and nighttime hours of San Francisco (Golden Gate Park, etc.) where the characters were wondering around in costumes that were possibly sort of symbolic.

Except for that confusion -- which didn't ruin the film at all; I thought it had some very good points -- the thing that bugged me most about the film was that one of the characters started out by writing an email to his girlfriend, which is okay, but we kept coming back to that again and again. It got kind of tedious and really pulled me out of the story; it seemed very much like something they went back and added to the film later to clear up confusions about the story. I think I would rather have been confused.

Film #3 was called Then She Found Me.

Adapted from Elinor Lipman's novel of the same name, Helen Hunt makes her feature directing debut with a touching story of schoolteacher April Epner and her very unlikely path towards personal fulfillment. Following the separation from her husband and the death of her adopted mother, April is contacted by her apparent birth month, who turns out to be local talk show host Bernice Graves. As Bernice tries to become the mother to April that she was never able to be, April seems to find solace in the arms of the parent of one of her students, only to find that the mystery to life's questions cannot be solved by a simple revelation.

Helen Hunt was there in person to introduce the film. She is still as sexy as ever, aging gracefully and gorgeously; I almost started crying when she walked out onstage, just because I had such a crush on her when she was on "Mad About You." (S and I used to watch that show religiously, back when it was on the air, back when we had a TV, back in NYC...) Unfortunately, she wasn't there afterward -- or didn't come out anyway -- for a Q&A, which seemed a little odd. My thought was that maybe she wasn't completely satisfied with the movie. She asked if there were any filmmakers in the audience (and of course there were quite a few) and she said, "All I can say is don't give up; this film represents the past ten years of my life, trying to get it made, making it..."

There were a lot of boom microphone shots in the first half of the film, which is very distracting to me. You don't see that in Hollywood films, and I kept wondering -- as the black mike (or silver one in outdoor scenes) kept popping into view and pulling me out of the story, screaming IT'S A MOVIE! IT'S A MOVIE! -- where were the technical people who were supposed to not let this happen? I still loved the movie, it had a great emotional pay-off, me and the chicks in the room were sobbing (I guess some of the men were too), so I would highly recommend it, but as S likes to say, "I'd watch her take a dump!"

Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick, Colin Firth were in the cast; it was a good cast (though I'm not sure I'd watch Bette take a dump!). I felt wiped out after it was over, just the big emotional release; I really could have stood Helen coming out after and letting me know she was okay.

Outside, waiting in line before the movie started, the people in front of me were talking about the movies they've seen so far in the festival, what they liked or didn't like about them, even telling the entire plot lines of the movies they'd seen. Fortunately I didn't hear any spoilers because they seemed only to be seeing movies I'm not interested in, but I did pull my hoodie over my head, plugged the ear on that side and buried myself in my book I'm reading so I wouldn't get a spoiler. But before I did this, before I realized what they were doing, I heard one woman say this about some film (I don't know which one):

"It was like a poem...if you like poetry. It was like film...poetry. It could've used something...in the editing or something, I don't know."