joe.

The neighbor’s computer has a screen saver of male models, mostly naked. The various displays on his monitor are visible from my back door–he leaves it on all the time–but I have never noticed the boys before, just colorful morphing designs. This is the guy who said hello to John when he and I were leaving my house the other day. The same neighbor who has never noticed me.

Maybe I should go back to John as a lover. It would not be impossible to make that happen. Then at least my neighbor, who–by tonights revelations seems to appreciate naked men–would be envious. And that is the kernel of success in catty gay circles; to make them (who ignored you) jealous because of your boyfriend, whom you wear like an ornament on your ego.

The beautiful Summer is coming. The giant elder outside my kitchen window has been in bloom for a week now, dropping delicate white petals like spring snow all over the back yard. Soon the best of the boys will strut their glories in the warmth of their admirers and the sun. But I am older, closer to the end, and not so comfortable on youthful expeditions conducted on the European plan–plenty of bed but no meals. I hunger for the self I lost, exchanged in brief arousals with smooth, tanned young men; and I fear the man who will follow the troubled stirrings of my night and bring me back to bed.

The date on disk says 21 October 1999. The neighbors moved years ago. John visits nevermore. I have gained a hundred pounds. And the fear I speak of at the end, a breathless fear; it has been replaced by a tired sigh.

Hm.

I once asked somebody I trust at work, “What is wrong with me?” I was wondering if the general dislike of me (that I sensed from all the people I don’t like) was real or if I was just paranoid. It was real. He said, and I am paraphrasing, “You can’t keep your mouth shut.” He had often–without me knowing–done damage control among the people I don’t like after my comments had incensed them. He had gotten fed up doing it. He no longer did damage control for me.

Huh.

I have a friend who is angry. He vents his anger by way of any situation which is handy. He makes racist remarks which often works for him this way. He’s really pretty generalized in how he spews anger. But the racism stuff is usually what gets him in trouble.

In his anger, I recognize my own. It has long since ceased having any connection to its origins. And yet it remains, like a hard blind boil, spawning multiple separate eruptions, but never itself opening up, emptying out, and healing.

Hmmm.

So, what do I do with this? Keep my mouth shut? Well, yes, according to both the Tao Te Ching and the advice of my trusted friend. I could explore the canals of each of the remote eruptions as they happen, probing back to the one originating abscess. That would be painful. Or I could bind the eruptions, when they begin, and force the rage back in on itself. That would also be painful, and probably impossible. Or possibly fatal. How exactly it would be fatal I do not know. I just think it might be.

Does this mean that if the wise men’s words had forked lightning, that they would go gentle into that good night? Not necessarily. But Dylan Thomas does seem to be encouraging rage–at least at The End. And I don’t think he agreed with the Tao Te Ching that far better is it to keep what is in the heart.

So. What is the point? I know there is a point, I just am not clear about what it is exactly. I have asked the higher-ups for help with this. I am waiting.

Maybe their answer will be that there is no point. Maybe the lesson of all the rage and the rude remarks, of all the anger and the injustice that caused it, of all the words and all the literature in all the languages of all the world, maybe the lesson of everything is that there is no justification, no reason, no purpose–and no point.

Could it be that simple?

OK, another web publishing platform. Only this one seems to offer a more comprehensive tool set over that offered by WordPress. This is bad, and good. WordPress does one thing–blog publishing–and does it well. Joomla promises to be a complete content management system. Like a dustpan into which I can collect all the flotsam and jetsam from around my site and …throw it away? Preferably not, but to erect it all into a charming and inviting structure. This presents several of those broad questions which are so massive in their scope that they are easily (and often) ignored.

* What am I trying to do?
* Why am I trying to do it?
* How will I do it?

What am I trying to do? Well, I guess I want to present my writing, most of it old journal writing in the form of archives. And to create an attractive (to me) method to encourage me to produce new writing more often. And in both cases–the journal archives first, then the new writing later–to have it all presented in a cogent, consistent, easily navigable site.

So, why do this? Apart from my fascination with the ‘how’ of it all (that comes later), I can only come up with reasons why NOT to do this at all. Let’s face it, we all have secrets, or things we maintain as secrets even though they may in fact be known to many others. Maybe they are not published facts, but certainly they are not secret as in ‘known only to me.’ Suffice it to say that truth-telling can get to be very messy and very unpleasant. And that (truth-telling) rings some bells from long ago, from when I first felt the urge to write, publicly.

Back then I chose to use essentially my real name as my ID in all things Internet. My motivation was linked rather obscurely with my reasons for having always avoided television. Something feels similar between them. Checking out of reality, and inviting others to brainwash me (which is TV), seems related to checking out of my identity, and inviting you to think I am someone else. Intuitively, both felt like traps.

The diversion of television and the subversion of identity are both ways of hiding. I think that is where originated my desire to do truth-telling, to write candidly about my feelings, about my relationship to the world, and to combat my very powerful urge to hide. This truth-telling ended up as writing on the internet because the Internet for me is the primary alternative to television, and because the Internet is massively lingua-scopic–it sucks up content in the form of words like the dry desert absorbs water. While the Internet absorbs much more non-text content now, I believe the Internet began as primarily test-based, and in 1999 text (along with a few pictures) is what I provided, and it is still what I am most comfortable producing. So that skims the ‘why’ of my website.

Trying to answer the question of how threatens to take me into an unending labyrinth of possibilities from which I might never extricate myself. Indeed, I have spent most of my time since the beginning of my website lost in these possibilities, trying one set of tools, then switching to another, and another, tweaking and customizing inconsistently all along the way. And that process is precisely what led me to try Joomla. Which in turn, led me back to ask the original questions which have lain unanswered at the entrance to the labyrinth. What? Why? and, How?

One of the answers to ‘how?’ must provide a pleasing way of integrating WordPress into Joomla. I rather like WordPress, and while I am not averse to junking it entirely for something better (or something just more fun and interesting), I have just recently succeeded–after many months of trying–in upgrading to its latest version. While that experience alone might compel some to abandon WordPress, I should confess here that that torturous process was not all WP’s fault. I frankly gave up after a while. Yes, their upgrade process was not as polished a year ago as it is today, and my skills then were slightly less than they are now. But, in its current incarnation, WordPress 2.6 has lots of cool stuff I have not yet fully explored.

More labyrinthine diversion, you say? Maybe. But unfortunate or not, labyrinthine diversion seems to be the upgrade path along which my creativity has chosen to lead me.

Besides that, WordPress has custody of almost everything I have written since 2001, and if the only reason for keeping WordPress was just to avoid transposing all that old content, that would be enough.

Lunch. Now or never.

I discovered that my code rendered disastrously in Internet Explorer. So much for standards compliance. IE requires some obscure workarounds in page code, and probably some secret incantations known only by the chosen initiates of the master serpent corporation MS, Inc.

Having gotten things back to workable in Firefox–after royally screwing things up trying to get MSIE to work–I have now also gotten MSIE to render at least readably for the moment. The sidebars are not where they belong, but they are not in the way anymore either.

Now it is time for bed, cuz I got to get up early to meet Shay for lunch (early means before 2PM).

This is what the page should look like. Since upgrading, a lot of weird things have been happening, like CSS formats failing, text disappearing, images not showing up. All of it is, I am sure, my fault. But if I always did it wrong before and it worked, then I am slightly resentful when I continue to do it wrong, and it suddenly stops working.

For those (if anyone at all reads this) who are familiar with WordPress, the theme I am using is old, tweaked up the ying yang, and should be commended for having endured so well all the machete-like plastic surgery I’ve done on it. As soon as I get it to work flawlessly with WP 2.6, I will replace it with a new ‘up-to-date’ theme which will introduce a whole new set of vanishing elements and queer formatting.

There is no such thing as ‘well enough’, and if there was, it should never be left alone.

Well, I upgraded to WordPress 2.6. No disasters or nothing. In fact it took longer to read about upgrading than it took to actually do it. And i have backups galore! But it’s nice not to need them.

Now I must decide what to do about my theme. Of course I’ll have to upgrade that too…

But not now. I’m eating and trying to break out of the cocoon of depression in which I have encapsulated myself these last two days. Midnight is not too late to go grocery shopping, is it?

It seems I tried to update Wordpress about a year ago. June 2007 was my last post. Since WordPress version 2.2 was released on Tuesday, May 15, 2007, that was probably the version I tried to upgrade to.

It failed.

It failed with the notorious Post-upgrade-you-haven’t-installed-WP trap. It goes like this, though it has been so long, I can’t remember precise details: I upgraded Wordpress, according to a careful reading of the upgrade instructions. This involves obliterating the former installation (which I must have backed up since 1.5.2 is what I am using now). After everything is overwritten, except a couple specific things that have to be held aside and then copied back, I browse to upgrade.php, which implies a process, but then cutely reveals that the process is all done, telling you happily that it is really only one step. With what I now know is morose irony, the upgrade program provides the link to login.php behind the hypertext ‘Have fun!’ Clicking there, I was led to the dreaded “It doesn’t look like you’ve installed WP yet. Try running install.php.”

Have fun.

With no other alternative even remotely accessible, I do as told and click on install.php. What feeble hope I have left is then completely drowned with the output, “You appear to have already installed WordPress. To reinstall please clear your old database tables first.”

Having lots of fun.

That was a year and a month ago. I searched high and low for a solution, many days in a row at first and then as discouragement set in, less often. And I attempted every conceivable variation of the recieved wisdom, that all the database tables needed to be ‘dropped’ in order to recover from my failed upgrade. That would have eliminated eight years of accumulated blog posts. They would of course continue to exist in the db.sql file which I had saved, but there they were as inaccessible to me as if they had all been deleted because I could now no longer get into that database with WP 1.5.2, since the attempted upgrade had altered some crucial part of the database. And every fresh installation of WP 2.2 required an empty database.

Could I have imported the wp_posts table from 1.5.2 into whatever the equivalent would be in 2.2? If so what is the equivalent? But then what about comments? And if any of these were possible, why was there no suggestion of such a remedy anywhere?

I gave up for a year. Even though my blog writing had only been in fits and starts, I kinda continued it using flat html files. And as tedious as that method was, it was still less infuriating than wasting time trying to fix the WordPress 2.2 upfailure.

Today, after several months to forget the trauma of abruptly losing my WordPress blog, I took another look. I searched the same pages on WordPress.org and googled others eslewhere. Somewhere I read something that led me to try something different. I ‘emptied’, not ‘dropped’, the wp_users table. Then I retraced the upgrade.php, to ‘Have fun!’, to ‘try install.php’ sequence again, and lo!, at install.php I was prompted for user settings. And finally I was directed to the long sought after login.php.

I don’t know how to make a long story short, as you may have guessed. But if I ever attempt to upgrade from WordPress 1.5.2 again, I will not do it by the recommended upgrade path. I will probably get a completely seperate WordPress installation up and running without touching this current installation. Then I will export all my posts from 1.5.2 and import them all into 2.whatever.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

“We are so glad you are here.”

And I never believed it.

How far from the holy place have we fallen? Through what tortures did we descend on the way to becoming human? And why on earth—or anywhere else—would I disbelieve the compassion of a friend?

Recently, old friends have contacted me, and there is no question I am glad. But there is also no question that I had to stay away from them as I did for years. And there is no question that even when I was within their circle, I had to keep an artificial distance—especially then. And even as I longed to be the friend they wanted me to be, and even as I desperately wanted to let them befriend me, even then I insisted on a distance, a cold space. And it was a torture to maintain while I was with them. The torture sank and became a muted pain as the natural passage of time and distances eventually developed betweem me and my friends. But the ongoing loss and saddness was no less then, only more deeply buried. And so, from the first day of my first friendship, I ask now, what required that necessary grief?

At this point I can imagine a therapist saying, “Let’s take a break.”

And I say, “Fuck you! Maybe you’re tired, but I am sick of waiting and I am running out of time. Or have you forgotten? I am prone to wasting twenty years on a whim. Or a ‘break’.”

No. This is the end of these past illusions that a little less warmth, a little distance, a little pushing away might be prudent. BULLSHIT! There is more than enough inhumanity everywhere I look. Why on earth—or anyplace else—would I cultivate any inhumanity anywhere?

But I did. And it seems I cultivated a little coldness, a little inhumanity and a little distance between me and every other person I ever met. I imagine there may have been some reason; some fundamental betrayal in the formative moments of my existence. But it doesn’t matter. I know something which I have glimpsed before, a truth that transcends explanation. The truth is that I am exactly where I am supposed to be. And that means everything that brought me to this moment was, as ludicrous as it sounds, also ’supposed to be’.

And this is where I will allow a break of sorts. Not a break to take a rest. But a break from the way in which we conceptualize life, and time, and the passage of ourselves through all of this. A break from what we think is right and wrong. A break even from what we percieve as joy, and from what we percieve as saddness.

I know that all that has gone before has prepared me for this moment. I think it is more than a pro sequiter, it is more than the simple equation that if what had gone before were different, then I would be at a different moment now, with a different perspective, differing circumstances, and so forth. I believe it is more than just that simple.

I called it a ‘necessary grief’ back there a bit, and that may hold a clue. I don’t subscribe to the myriad of various religious traditions supporting and promoting mystery. That they exist at all is reinforcement enough for my arguments. I do believe there was a ‘coming’ and there will eventually be a ‘going’. The questions of ‘where from?’, and ‘where to?’ are the mysteries. I do believe that we come consciously, that there is some awareness of what this tempest is we are coming into, that there is a cognizance of what existence might be like within this cuisinart of life. In short, everything since that primary ‘plop’ into this existence has been a continuous, somewhat modifiable accident. And all the grief we have suffered, whether we think so or not from within our spinning, looping, swirling perspective, was necessary, inevitable, and unavoidable.

I am not saying it is right to suffer. I am just saying that it is not wrong to.

And if my friends choose to say again, “We are glad you are here,” then I will take that unreservedly and thoroughly into my heart, to stay.

Is this it? Here? Is this OK? Right here on this spot? Can you hear me? (Probably anywhere is fine, no matter where it is. I mean, the guy dying in a mining cave-in can’t really worry much about venue, or placement, can he? Likewise, the traffic accident victim, trapped under his car in a muddy gully with a broken back–he can’t adjust his location, or for that matter his posture.) No, right here will be fine.

Ahem. Cough. Erhm.

Where to begin… Well, let me say I am glad you are there. More than glad. In fact, in this isolated existence, I am literally ecstatic you are there.

You see, I don’t tolerate companions well, much to my disappointment. I wish I carried their company …well, carried it at all. And if I did, then I further wish I could carry it lightly, like a bird carries a feather, like a breeze carries a falling leaf to the ground. Like I once carried the breath of a lover within my own lungs.

Enough of that. Companionship is not my forte—neither giving nor receiving it. Every attempt—and believe me, there were some very promising ones—failed. And every time, tender parts of my soul—of both our souls—were torn out.

So, except for a few who, at a distance, stay in touch with this hermitage, I am alone. Except for them, and you, of course.

I am glad you are here.

I have nothing in particular to say; my soul has had too many chunks ripped out, too many lovers have reclaimed their breaths from me too soon, before I was done breathing them. And too many of my most sweet and innocent hopes lay trampled like tulips in the war.

There is more to this life. Almost more than can be imagined. Almost.

The sun, it’s in early summer, or even in spring when I notice how it just barely slips behind the Northwestern horizon, reluctant to go, and eagerly returns after a short trip just below the not completely dark Northern sky, rising again only a few hours later just north of east. Its light and warmth is like a poltice, pulling toward the surface of me the darkness-deepened infections of my fear and isolation, they rise in hot inflammations, and threaten to erupt with unthinkable agony. Poke me in the eye with a stick. Drive a nail into my ear. But do not let these poisons burst out of me. I cannot bear to see the hidden damage they have wrought, all the dead flesh and rotted dreams spewed out upon the carpet, and the rot-feeding parasitic creatures squirming in the middle of it all.

I cry a lot in Spring. It’s the winter that brings the peace, and in the darkness and the cold, some kind of comfort.

But the endless ache is here, and the unfixable brokenness that causes it. Drain the deathly rot, wash out the putrid abscesses, flush the inside out. But then what will be left? Can you say I will not be a hollow shell? Can you say for sure that there will, in the bleachy emptiness left inside, still remain a soul?

The Pleiadians are not helping me. No, that’s not fair. They just aren’t doing everything for me. That must be the impasse, that they cannot help me with certain things. A comparison might be one person trying to feel another person’s emotions. Yeah, emotions, nasty things sometimes. But trying to pay a therapist to cry my tears for me, instead of doing it for myself, well, that has never worked.

My point is that there are a lot of ways in which the Pleiadians probably are helping me. It’s just that I am not doing my part. I want them to do my part for me.

My friend told me that reading Bringers of the Dawn, a book of teachings from the Pleiadians, caused her to have a schizophrenic break. When I first read the book, I only let it skim my surface, then I set it away in a safe place for a long time. It does not merely shift some paradigms, it sets them all afloat, like so many castiron stoves on roller skates, on the dance floor of a pitching and heaving ship. Their teachings are presented in a subtle enough way that one can read them superficially without being forced into any calamity. Though my friend, it seems, went in too deep too fast. My first reading of the book was like being told about the Grand Canyon; that it existed, that it was big, and that it was in the Southwest. My current reading is like being there, on the rim of the canyon, with the imperative that I must hike across it. Immediately.

Time is, for the purposes of these tasks, very ‘real’, very limited, and frankly, running out. Time is, finally, an illusion, but we have chosen to enter into this existence within time, and I suspect our intention was to confront certain tasks—and either do them, or not do them—while within this temporal realm.

And so, that’s it really. What do I want to do? The thing that really disturbs me is that it is entirely my choice. I can do nothing, make no decision. I have some experience with that. I can tell myself that I am just postponing the carnival ride, that I will overcome my anxiety and buy a ticket… later. But one day the carnival, and all its opportunities, will be gone, packed up and moved on to another empty lot in some other state. Never deciding is a kind of purgatory that keeps you stuck in the past. And it ensures that your no-good friend, regret, will always be close at hand.

I can just keep postponing, and this task will never be done by me. That’s a little scary, that what I decide (or avoid deciding) will have a definite outcome.

The challenge to me is not so much what follows the decision as it is the decision itself. The events after I choose to move ahead—after I say ‘yes’—will certainly be of monumental significance. But this must come first; I must drill down, deeply, and find out what I really want to do. Sounds simple, but it is almost the hardest thing I have ever done, because I have always avoided it. I never rode the roller-coaster. Regret has been my constant companion. And that regret was because I had never dug down deep enough to find out what I really wanted. It’s probably, at root, a self-respect issue, as in ‘what I want really doesn’t matter’. So, the bottom line which the Pleiadian teachings have brought me to is this: Does it really matter what I want?

Is what I want important to me?

That is an easily misunderstood question in a consumer-oriented society. But, when handled existentially, it reveals for me the underpinnings of my bondage. If what I want is not important to me, then that removes a huge amount of potential for conflict from all that I do. Unfortunately, it also effectively removes all of my free will because, if there is nowhere I want to go, then the freedom to go there is superfluous.

I can answer that question, ‘no’. At least that is true of the past; what I want has not been important to me. So, how does one change? By wanting to change? But if what I want is unimportant, then it follows that making the change is unimportant. So how does it happen?

It happens with help. It doesn’t matter where that help comes from, whether from the Pleiadians, or from some inner spark long dormant, or from somewhere else entirely. It comes. More accurately, I believe such help is always present, like a stream always flowing which we encounter only occasionally, and sometimes fall into accidentally. The help comes as a call from outside our sleep, giving us the chance to wake up if we choose. And, to carry the metaphor too far, once awake, whether we choose to get out of bed and to stay awake is our problem.

It is 2008, and soon to be summer, with all the enticing airs, and clandestine possibilities that summer brings. I did not expect to be here, still. And I don’t know if I will be ready before it is time to go, but I know it is up to me to get ready. Once, when I was on a plane in 1980, above the clouds, I decided to ask for help becasue I didn’t think I was getting any, I wanted a sign that …I don’t know, a sign that someone was there helping me. They must find these constant requests for reassurance rather tedious, but they are patient with me nonetheless. They were with me then, and they told me so. And they are here now. All the rest is up to me.

Hello, …hello. Hello?

Oh, there you are. Been a while. What does one say after so long? I suppose we could reminisce, (or I could), but that is regressive in a way. Listening to oldies, remembering passed sentiments, finding lost feelings that were left unfinished, it’s all just an effort to avoid this moment—or finish the other moment from a safe distance. And that of course is impossible. It’s like, “You can never go home.” Except you can never go back. You can only pretend to. And that’s a photograph, not the present. Tear it up. Throw it away.

On the other hand, is there really a value to the sentiments gone-by? Do we gain a sense of realism from the moments remembered? Are sentiments the substance of time?

I think that is just the problem. Time. It is an illusion, like motion is an illusion. It’s relative to something else which may or may not also be in motion. And if you are in motion, and I am in similar motion, then relative to each other we are together, still.

There is a moment that is not passing. There is a ‘time’, if you will, which is not within time. We have a place which is not perishable—an eternity which can never be left behind. The challenge for me is to find it, amid all the empty coffee cups and unpaid bills; to tear up all the photos, to abandon sentiment-dwelling, to come back from all the reminiscences of youthful beaches and summer nights gone by, to resist the fond lament of past familiarity. My calling is to find what I am looking for where I have never looked before.

And it will be new. The place of no place, in the time of no-time, is. Simply is.

Well. I went shopping, bought a laptop.

I have a talent for achieving the least with the maximim amount of effort. For example, I am presently being persued by a spiritual imperative, like an alarm clock going off which I am trying to sleep through. The purpose of my sleep is no longer for sleep’s sake,it’s purpose has become the avoidance of the spiritual awakening. So to help me stay asleep, I went shopping—the illusion here of travel outside of my home is purely figurative, since by ‘went shopping’ I merely mean that I surfed to a website and made a purchase—and I bought the most absurdly unnecessary (for me) thing which I could find. A laptop.

I live in a studio. I go nowhere. Since returning from work Sunday night, I have not ventured further than a few feet from the two computers which I already have at home. Besides, if I ever do go somewhere, the last thing I will take is a brand new laptop for fear it will break or get stolen.

So, ’shopping’, which I disparaged in my last entry, is now employed by me as diversion. And no wonder, there is much from which I seek diversion.

Ungh, the elephant in the living room; the aforementioned ’spiritual awakening’. What can I say about it while still asleep? It calls me to a broader awareness of this nightmare that this second millennium has become. And that awareness is, unexpectedly, comforting. Once you can see the monsters as they are, then they become a little less monstrous. It might be like knowing where the spider is—once you know where it is, you feel a little better about everywhere else. Likewise, as the monsters become more well defined, they shrink from infinite size and power down to something real, with less potential, something which might not win in the end.

And the impending awareness promises to clarify much of the confusion that has clouded my vision in all directions since …well, always. Of course it also promises to introduce new inconsistencies, I think. But, asleep as I am, it is far too early for me to say much about these revelations. Except that they come through great resistance, and bring a substantial challenge to my sanity.

Maybe parts of the ancient legends are true. Certainly some of history is a lie. And perhaps there are whole universes of things we have not known, and a million possibilities unimagined to replace each and every fact which we think we know. All things are neither good nor bad. But pain is real. And fear. And hence, so too is courage real, to endure pain and confront fear, and real, too, is the nobility of helping others do the same.

So, is it really time to wake? Has the silence startled me, the silence which signals that even the alarm clock has given up on me? Does anybody really know what time it is…

Depending on the degree of my awakening, I may need to sell a laptop, or a couple computers. Stay tuned.