Not to brag, but I think I may be the most awesomely amazing idiot in the world.  Okay, because I'm a modest guy, I'll narrow that down to Oakland or even just the Fruitvale.  But still.  I do recognize that getting laid can over-inflate one's ego, but I still think I have a strong claim to the title.

Why do I think this?  Because this week I got involved with a super young guy and got a number of pointers in my idiocy.  Not just about him, me, and "appropriate" relationships, but about where I am in life and who I am.  And the deepest part of my idiocy is how very pleased I am about it all.

I am never going to be able to articulate what I mean by this, but let me try.  There will be no humble tone, there will be no apologies or attempts to justify.  I'm just going to relate a few things that have happened (some of them only in my head) and how I feel about that.  If embracing one's inner idiot isn't a vital component of sanity, then...oh.  Well, judge for yourself.

So I showed Andrew my last blog post.  His response was to ask if he could move in.  Okay, it probably wasn't cause and effect, I'm sure it was already on his mind (we had known each other for four days by that point, after all), but I'm sure it opened the door a little wider.  I did not say "oh hell no" but instead gave a rambling response that could have been an appropriate model for a non-response by a White House press aide.  We were lying in bed together during that talk and I wasn't going to get real at that moment.  I will break it out for him in terms he can understand this weekend.  Anyway, it ain't happening and that's the main thing.

And can't the young dude smoke pot!  Dude smoked more of my pot in a couple of days than I have in weeks.  He gave me a great lesson in what I want my relationship to smoking pot to be--moderate!  Mild, infrequent, and certainly not debilitating.  I don't mean to be all righteous but it's just a fact that humans can abuse and fixate on anything, even abstract notions with no basis in reality (hello, religion).

Okay, six paragraphs into this and where's the tearful, tender, compassionate mood of my last post?  Good question.  It's not been kicked to the curb, it's just a little seasoned now.  I have still have a responsibility to Andrew to be kind and loving.  But not to be a roll-over.  I suspect that once the message is received, Andrew will find other places and people.  I don't say that to be mean or cast him in a negative light, but just to indicate where I think he is in his life.  We may stay friends on some level--I don't mean friends with benefits, as that expectation would be exploitive on my part--but I doubt it.

But enough about all that.  What further proof of idiocy can I offer?  How about how much I like my time alone?  Each time I came up for air this week, the blessing of quiet, the comfort of solitude just melted me.  I cannot be in the mix every moment, even when the mixer is just one other person.  It leads to exhaustion and collapse.  Also I'm old.  Kidding but not.  The physical intimacy was amazing but guess what?  At age almost 52, there is such a thing as too much sex.  Sad but true.

In my little life, my model for being with someone is my too short time with Bo.  To this day, the memory of being in the same room with him, both of us doing something solo, usually reading, and then looking up to see him looking at me, or the other way around, that memory and the memory of the feelings that brought me may be my prime reason to want to be with someone again.  I know all that was leavened with how much I was in awe of Bo--awe isn't quite the word, but it will have to do--and may not be something that can be replicated, but that's what I want.

Okay, I'm veering away from my topic.  Further proof of idiocy: the very public way I conducted this affair.  Hilarious.  Okay, announcing a first date on Facebook is not that dramatic, but I am going to have to explain in some detail to several people.  Nothing freaks people out like inappropriate relationships.  It's part titillation on their part and sometimes a deeply rooted, almost visceral reaction, usually based on a moral system that Xs out the non-customary.

Hey, let me expand on that: most straight people deal with gay stuff best when the gay behavior is modeled on straight sexual and relationship behavior.  So you don't talk about what you do in bed, except in a glancing way--but more often it's total don't ask, don't tell.  And gay marriage--every gay man must want to get married and be monogamous, right?  Wrong, very wrong, and liberal America?  You're going to have to face that eventually.

I never liked the professional gays, it's true.  To this day, I like the freaks, even if their freakiness goes far past where I can travel.  I like the direction they are going, even if I'm not into the destination.  So this week of coupling with a 19 year old guy--frightening transgressive to some.  For me, an exercise in learning about myself and how to respect power/experience differences.

This post is so messy and it's not going to get better, so I better wind it up.  This week I awoke something in myself that had been quiescent for a long, long time.  I opened Pandora's box and the whirlwind did not consume me.  Honestly, this week has given me the first moments of belief that I can be something more than I am in daily life in a long time.  A long, long time.  I have a feeling that my 50s are going to be rich.  Not lottery rich, but if I can retain this mindset, experience rich.

There's a question that we all ask ourselves: What do I want?  And the answers range from the super trivial to the outright sad (to mention just two compass points).  For some years, maybe ever since Bo died and I lost my anchor, my answer was to be safe and stable.  And I got there, finally.

Today I have another answer, the secret answer that I've held in me since I was a teenager, maybe even since before I could express it.  I want to write.  I want to live an intellectual life, poking at meaning through language, examining the human experience through the filter of my own life and persceptions. My great, devouring fear was that I had nothing to say, a reflection of the fear that there was nothing at my core either.  I don't believe that anymore--most of the time.

Today I declare that I am going to do just that for the rest of my life.  That I'm going to make writing my focus.  I remember when Bo told me I was an intellectual, with no reference to my education or profession, but because of what and how I read, because of what interested me and how I reacted to ideas and words.  I was so in awe of Bo that I actually could take that in and believe it.

What I couldn't do then was act on it.  Today, today I can.  Today I did, writing here.  Now I have to expand on that.  I have to let it absorb my life and energy.  No more whining about how tired work makes me.  I watched a lot of not-successful (neither materially nor, if success is fame and notice, in their writing) writers work and talk and learn.  I can do that.  And if no one listens, who the fuck cares?  I'm listening.

One last word: Egypt.

For Andrew.

So I'm home and the house is mine alone again, smelling of cigarette smoke.  I walked around the house for the fist half hour, setting things to rights.  Tossing clothes in the hamper, putting stuff away, feeding the dogs.  With the cig smoke, the house is faintly infused with a sad tone.  Or that's me.  Or that's the detached tone of a phone call today.  I worry, not about me.  Not about relationship stuff.  But about a guy who is in the middle of a lot of change.  About someone I've formed the ability to care about, without really knowing him.  About how hard life is when you're young and adrift.  About how permeable life can be, filtering experience and emotion almost at random.

I can worry and wonder, but I can't act.  I can't be a savior here.  I'm playing two roles now, because I'm involved for myself, but I have to, have to, have to be able to step away and think about what's right for someone I barely know and then put that first.  Selfishness in relationships is the privilege of the young.  I have an obligation to care.

Christopher Isherwood (a hero of mine) met Don Barcardy when Isherwood was 48 and Barcardy was 16 or 17.  They were together for 33 years, until Isherwood's death.   My Bo started having sex with much older men when he was about 13.  He said it was good for him,  that it helped him and that he never regretted it.  I never liked hearing that--not out of jealousy, but from a retrospective fear for him.

These last years--well over a decade--it's been strange living as a gay man with practically no outer signifiers of my sexual identity (my friends are free to correct me about that).  If you don't know it, gay guys act "gay" or play out an exaggerated sexual persona because we need some sort of signifier of who we are, or so I think.  Homosexuality is not the default state, so we have to signify.  Many of us, anyway.  Me for sure.  And then I piled it on over the years, building up a front from whatever materials at hand.  Bad sense of humor?  Ham it up.  Notice you are aging and how odd that is?  Start pretending to be an old man.  But how often could I be Dan?  Not often, not like I once was with Bo.  Oh Bo!  You gave me so much and I was prepared to understand so little of it.  But I was me with you, even when it was all new discoveries, all the tender, scabbed landscapes of someone who had hated himself so much for so long.

And now?  What do I have to give?  Not much on the outside, not much from this humble little life I've salvaged.  But that I can see myself in this young man and care about him, that's something.  That I'd rather he was okay than in my bed is something too.  I thought I had accepted being alone.  I thought I damn well better, because what was the alternative?  I fucking would never accept less than what I'd known.  Better to be found a week death in this house than ever cling to someone out of need without love.  (I would rather skip the part where Moto nibbles on my corpse, though.  Anyway, the whole image is courtesy Six Feet Under.)  Amazing a damaged person can have that much determination.   But I did and I do.

So, Andrew, I don't know where you are going.  I don't know what I can do for you.  But I can give an image of how to be caring even when you're wounded.  If I can let you feel safe--not kept, not controlled, not protected from the world--but safe because someone loves you completely, then maybe I can save myself too.  And if I can't share that with you, maybe even the effort will open us both up to wherever we are going.

I've had a nice crying jag now, which I really needed.  I've been super emotional these last two days.  It's not fear or happiness.  I think it's about transition.  I'm thinking about the myths and deep, deep traditions of destruction and renewal.  It's in our bones to fly into the flames and hope we will rise again with the ashes.  What I want, I don't know.  But let me rise again--and I will accept the consequences.

I dislike one of my near neighbors.  She lives in the basement apartment on my kitchen side.  The upstairs neighbor, KHia, tells me bad stories about her.  Her kick sized dogs yip and yipe at my dogs.  She's fat.  Her boyfriend is cute, in a scroungy way (yes, that's another reason to dislike her!).  Her son is fat too and she yells at him--he calls her a whore.  Her TV is almost always on.

And last night, she was singing along to the radio or a CD.  Not marachi or ranchero music, something softer and more instrumental--not knowing Spanish but hearing the tone, I'd say some type of traditional love songs.  And she had a pretty good voice, not that I'm any judge.  And she put a lot of heart into those songs.  I had to stop to listen.  And just listening to her, not knowing a word she was seeing, but hearing the bravura she put into those songs, it soothed my soul somehow.  The last few days I've been agitated, ill at ease, a bit uncomfortable with myself.  And all of that was gone in a few minutes, listening to her.

So now it's harder to dislike this person, whose name I can't remember.  Damn it.

Today would have been Bo's 51st birthday. He died in the month or so between my birthday, when I turned 33 and his, when he would have turned 33. I remember that I asked him incredulously if he wasn't at least going to wait for his birthday. I just didn't get it. What I had been calling my "healthy" denial had caught up to me and it was hard for me to understand that birthdays and such things had become irrelevant to him.

It's been many years since thinking of Bo has been like a sharp stab, something to wince from and then return to tenderly. These days, it's more like a dull throb followed by sweet memories. I've got roses from the garden by his photo at my bedside and I talked to his photo this morning. I wonder what he would make of me today, of all the trials and mishaps that have lead me to this day and place.

It's a bore for everyone else and probably looks a little pathetic, but I feel just as I feel. I don't regret not having someone else in my life, but I do regret losing Bo. I miss you, Bo! Dan

Memos. I woke up this morning thinking about memos. For the first 10-15 of my working life, my "office life" I spent a lot of time writing memos for myself or my managers, reading memos, even filing memos. When I needed to communicate something and a phone call wouldn't do, I would type (on a computer, I'm not that old!) a memo, using whatever format was customary at that organization. Type it up, proof it, print it (originally on daisy wheel or dot matrix printers, then on huge, slow laser printers--I am that old).

The next step was to put it in an inter-office envelope. Ever seen one of these? We still have a few of these floating around my current organization. Manila envelopes with holes punched in it so you could see at a glance whether they were empty or not. They had a thread at the flap that you wound around a little paper disk to seal them. And they had a zillion places to address it, in two or three columns on each side. Once all the spots were filled, you tossed the envelope--and by that time, it was pretty dog-eared. I remember that when I sent a memo to someone of sufficient importance, I used a fresh or at least fresher envelope, even though they likely never saw it--their secretary or "admin assistant" as they came to be know during my slow progress through a thousand offices, opened and sorted their memos.

I remember a point in the late 1980s and early 1990s when I would move from one organization to another--I was temping while I was finishing my B.A. at SFSU--and one place would have a network, another would not. Some advanced firms had primitive versions of email, most did not. During most of the 1990s, I was at a public agency that did not have a network, did not offer internet access to more than about 20 employees out of hundreds of desk-bound workers (I was one of the lucky few, thanks to my friendship with the IT manager) and relied heavily on the memo system across about a half dozen work sites scattered across the East Bay.

Two mail runs a day between sites, a staff of about 4 to distribute both internal and external mail, and memos to read, the generics to all staff or a department based slice of staff, the "carbon copy" copies and, between me and the legal department, occasionally the rare and exciting "blind carbon copies." The signed original memo, the photocopied distribution memo. The formal phrasing, the awkward and truncated sentences of the staff who were not exactly language mavens. These weren't ephemeral, like an email, or easy to sent on, like an email. They were physical, lasting, consequential--and often meaningless.

And those comments scribbled in the margins on an memo redirected to an underling by a manager too "busy" to handle it? Better give that priority, by god!

I don't know where I'm going with all this. It's just a flood of memories, very tactile, of a work culture that has passed to some degree from the modern office. I have no problem with emails, no longing to go back to paper trails of memos. I just remember how it was. I guess to some degree, I'm like the crusty old secretary, with her skirt and fluffy white hair I worked with at one of my first office jobs. I asked her what they did before correctible typewriters and computers and she said "we didn't make mistakes." I sure don't long for that world; I couldn't survive in it!

Dated and uninteresting.  Deleted forever.  

I first noticed something was different a few weekends ago, when I found myself acutely bored. I don’t often get bored--I’m pretty content with my own company (supplemented b two dogs and a sleepy kitten) and am easily amused. Then I found that my usual 3-4 cups of morning coffee were actually amping me up a bit. Putting these factors together, I was also watching myself doing more of life’s tedium more quickly. The conclusion was clear: my depression was lifting.

This was good news, but not a simple thing. I’ve long ago lost any hope that someday, somehow, my depression will take wing and lift forever. (Funny how one speaks of depression “lifting”--it’s a heavy weight and when it does diminish, it is as if a great weight has been removed, but it is such a nasty, oozing thing that truly it must fall to the ground and keep falling.) And I have even come to distrust the periods when I seem free of it and can live rather normally, because I am always looking over my shoulder, expecting to find it once again looming over me, ready to descend on me like a black, choking cloak. What hope for a full life can I have when at any time, I may descend into a steep depression that makes working and maintaining friendships a struggle that I have lost all too often? I’ve been knocked down by this monster too often to believe I can ever knock it out.

It’s sad. I detect a detached tone in the preceding paragraphs that comes from the intense discomfort I have in writing about this topic. It’s a discomfort I won’t be able to edit out; an uneasiness that makes for my stilted, impersonal tone. I will push through this piece, even knowing it will remain an awkward creation, because I have some important questions to ask myself by the end.

What concerns me is the cause of my improved mood, my moderate lift in spirits that is so important to me that I almost can’t bear to acknowledge it. The cause concerns me because the nature of the stimulus appears to suggest the outcome. For instance, if this is a lifting of my depression as the natural swing of my biochemical cycle, then I feel doomed, because I have yet to find any way to modify the cycle. So if that is the cause, it’s a scary situation, because it suggests that inevitably the cycle will swing back to a greater degree of depression, likely just at the moment when things are going well (and what does that timing say about causes, hmm? Depression as self-sabotage is as likely an answer is as likely a cause as any other and another cause I don’t have a cure for.)

I often think about physical causes and I have honestly wondered if the exercise I have gotten in past weeks from shoveling snow has stirred my brain juices into a more friendly configuration. The medical world is fairly well agreed that exercise can help alleviate depression. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to get out and work up that healthy sweat when your head tells you that it’s useless. Add the physical exhaustion that seems a vital component of depression and voila, the classic vicious cycle. I have never had the iron discipline that may be the most successful (and most common) response to depression.

Now, as my bank account shrinks, I have changed my eating habits quite a lot to stretch my remaining funds. One thing I have largely cut out is sugar. Generally, I have a batch of cookies, ice cream before the earth froze a few months ago, or some other sweet thing at least once during the afternoon or evening. This is an age-old habit. And my body’s response, a “little death” that involves a sudden dive in energy after the sugar and the urge to take a little nap, has been with me for many years as well.

Perhaps it’s because I lived for two years while a woman who lost over 100 pounds on a very carefully tailored “food plan” (don’t say diet, if you value your skin and want to avoid the lecture). A large part of this food plan involves eliminating the “white poisons” from one’s diet. The white poisons? Sugar and refined wheat are the principle culprits.

So could it be that reducing sugar to the minimum (I have marmalade on my morning toast and pop 1-2 hard candies after dinner, but the candy will end after it gone, so I haven’t gone cold turkey), I have modified some food related biochemical process that has haunted me since late adolescence? I doubt it; it seems too easy an answer. But it could be a factor, couldn’t it?

But when I think about my earliest depressions, I am fairly sure that there is a psychological element to my mood swings. My first depressions were in reaction to my parents’ progressively more insane relationship as Leona’s alcoholism blossomed so hideously. Rather than run away from home or turn my interests outward, I collapsed. And, in some primitive protest at the world’s misery, I have continued collapsing into middle age. Ugh, what a self-defeating response.

And that brings me to the ugliest of potential causes: the idea that success is what stimulates my depression. That I fall apart under moderate stress, even when things are going rather well is established fact. That this is due to fear of continued success, a secret feeling that I do not deserve a decent, happy life and so sabotage myself, is speculation with an 80’s Est-ian influence.

Oh! I’ve just realized that I’ve somehow segued into a discussion of the causes of my depression. What I meant to write about was the flip side of this potential cause: the idea that my depression may be lifting right now because I am facing financial doom. It’s the scariest idea of all, to my mind: the idea that my convenient depression may lift when the crisis hits. Why scariest? Because it suggests that my depression is a vehicle that I drive, in some sense, rather than driving me (the poor victim).

Dan as driver is a awful thought only if I am doomed to maintain my helplessness. If this cycle of achievement and failure, dependent on my mood and ability to to function in the world, must continue in the years to come, then the picture is pretty grim, if only because I am aging and becoming less resilient and because the world becomes less and less tolerant of chaos as one ages--and as the world becomes more and more able to create a data portrait of hapless folk like me.

If however, I am the driver, and this cycle of fear and failure and dark dread can be broken, then perhaps I can find a way to live in this world. And find comfort in the same small things I have learned to love over the years: dogs, books, tea and the great missing element that depression has robbed me of: friends, real friends.

I would say that it will be interesting to find out the answer to these questions, but I fear that it could be very dull. Failure is ultimately a dour, sullen thing which is best not examined too closely.