New javascript pop-ups installed (for the most part, lots of links still need tweaking).  I just can't keep it simple. 

In addition to the quote posted on Blogger's main page:

...from this article, the writer goes on to say, "Not that they are about to displace the main organs of journalism. I don't think any serious blogger would make that claim."

Spoken like a true self-preservationist, suckling on the teat of journalism's main organ. 

Journalism is a joke in most of its present propagandized incarnations.  It is so bad in fact that I don't think any serious journalist would actually claim that as a title.  He'd probably have a weblog and call himself a blogger. 

Good journalism is out there to be sure, but too many so-called journalists are nothing but ad copy writers, which is in itself an honorable profession -- writers must make a living too.  But when ad copy is passed off as journalism, and when the stuff being hawked is political manipulation -- the basest of snake-oils -- that my dears is called propaganda.  They can call themselves whatever they want if it helps them swallow their own saliva without retching.  But if you won't tell me the real stories, which I find almost exclusively by reading weblogs, then you might as well be lying. 

I have to post weel qwick like a bunny -- my dsl is dropping like pellets this morning.

I thought it might be nice to have a dependable connection again, so I asked Speakeasy to help.  They responded fast but, alas, they probably won't be able to help me.  Actually they responded so fast that I was forced to restate (and rethink) what it is I want from them.  In the interest of getting this posted in the tiny window of connectivity which I am now enjoying, I paste from my e-mail to Speakeasy:

Oh my, but when it is fast, it is FAST.  See that little delicious detail in this morning's FTP session log?  2.25Mbps.  Oh yeah, I'm hard.  But I fear it won't last long, and that is why I am typing like a fiend to get this posted, like the last wave of a swimmer in distress. 

This is certainly not a complaint about Speakeasy.  Indeed I have heard nothing but good things about them.  But the logistics (and other details of which I am not aware) of DSL procurement in the cutthroat DSL market is prohibitively complex.  I am expecting too much if I want them to reuse a perfectly good, tested, and working connection loop, and my router, and perhaps even the DSLAM at the CO.  That would require too much of a departure from the polished routine which they have perfected, of getting people hooked-up and online fast.  I guess I just want it my way. 

I have been amazingly lucky -- DSL for free for over a year.  This is not unappreciated here, especially now.  DSL is my ONLY connection with the outside world; no phone, no cable, no TV.  But I am addicted now, and I will do just about anything they want to stay connected via DSL -- even if it doesn't occasionally reach 2.25 megabits per second.

God save me from Paint Shop Pro.  If there ever was a method for me to hyperfocus on the insignificant, that program is it.  I make all those -- well, most of -- little icons on the top left.  And if it's a copied graphic, then I just have to tweak it to death. 

Enough!  ...enough, already.  That's not my life -- at least I hope it isn't. 

Time is running out.  I want to tell you how the air felt when I shut off the a/c today and opened the window for the first time in weeks.  I want to explain that my landlord reminds me of my father, just because he's the man who owns the house.  I would like to capture in words this fleeting terror that comes and goes unbidden, without warning -- even without words, I would like to capture it and send it on its way, like an unwanted bug in my bed.  I want to say so much. 

Today, the air was like the air two weeks ago, the sky precious blue and clear, the sun warm; a joy just to breathe. 

Went to bed at 7:30 AM.  Can you say depression?  Anyway, I wasted a big chunk of my life at Spaced Penguin, a fiendishly addictive game which I discovered at blogdex.  The idea behind blogdex is simple (though quite complicated to implement, I imagine); keep track of what URLs everybody is linking to.  Consider this detail from blogdex:  The link http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/damage.map.html scored 16.9 points.  I have no idea what that means except that out of more than four hundred and fifty thousand links, only two other links scored higher.  And one of them was that miserable penguin game. 

Now, if someone is keeping track of how many other websites have posted a given URL, well, I can't help but wonder how my humble offering ranks.  It doesn't.  In fact, this is all they know 'bout me.  So far. 

Whilst I make another cup o' joe, I encourage you to add your site to their 'bot 'base.  You will be assimilated eventually anyway. 

Ok.  Enough of this.  My astrologer tells me I take myself much too seriously.  (Yeah, an astrologer.  What else would I call her, an angel?)  I was going to get all tangled up in some new javascript that I found, and then maybe change all my icons from 32x32 size to 32x88 cuz I found a bunch I want to use that are the larger size, and then I might create more pages for this site within a sensible structure like other sites I see...

And then I remembered; there is something in me that needs to come out -- that's why I get into this kind of unfocussed frenzy.  So, what might it be?

I wonder sometimes why in this weblog I don't write most of the things that are going on.  Other bloggers give a nicely proportioned serving of their day with some detail, sometimes with great detail.  Why don't I do this?  (Rhetorical question -- no e-mails, please.)  So.  This is what is going on:

1. I am supposed to be looking for a new apartment; actually I'm supposed to be in a new apartment already, but since I am not, then I guess I am supposed to be still looking.  I find this difficult because
   1. I can't get out of bed -- not in the morning, not in the afternoon, nor at any other time of day even after I have been in bed long enough to have lost a pillow (the fact that I am able to recognize that a pillow is missing constitutes evidence of adequate rest -- but I still cannot get out of bed.  It is just so much nicer than the alternatives.) 
   2. Once out of bed (it's inevitable) I can make coffee, but I am unable to do anything else before supper-time -- not even shower -- much less locate and call prospective landlords, visit their properties, and ramp-up my enthusiasm to present myself as a generally desireable potential tenant.  And because,
   3. I don't want to.
2. I'm supposed to be living.  I am 43 years old and less than 200 miles from where I live, the lives of over 6,000 people -- most of them younger than me -- were snuffed out in less than 30 minutes.  You could say that I feel a little guilty about that, especially since I have done shit with my life, but let's not dwell on the negative.  Whatever else may be the case, there is some living to be done here, by me, in whatever time I have left.  However, I find that this too is difficult.  See item number 1, sub-items a, b, and c. 
3. I have blown-off (or am trying to blow-off) about $10,000 in credit card debt.  This item is related inversely to items number 1 and 2 in that 'success' here equates with failure in the other areas.  Of course defaulting on my debts was not my goal in spending so much money over the past four years.  But my logic was faulty.  I thought if I incurred so much debt that I needed to make more money, this would motivate me to advance professionally and increase my income.  Ha!  I don't think I really really believed that, but it provided a functional rationalization while I was spending six grand on computer hardware, and the other four grand on vodka martinis and tips for cute waiters. 

So that is what's going on -- or not going on, as the case may be.  And I don't feel even the slightest bit better for having not indulged my fetish for javascript merely for the sake of trying to be more like all the other bloggers in the world.  Harumph.  I'm going now to play with some javascript -- or maybe getting into bed would be nice.  Hmm... 

...and anything could happen

Ahh, Mary.  Is it you who make the tears?  Or is it me?  Or are they made in that horrible holy space between us all, where we fail -- fail to meet; to love; to touch and give; to touch and receive; to let go; to hold on... 

(I want -- just one more time in my life -- for the center of my world to be my nana's chocolate chip cookies.) 

But here the tears gather, in the wet of my own eyes; blame me for them.  Guilt by association.  But I don't want them.  But here they are, more and more. 

And more.  Thank you.

I used to live at this site.  I watched his webcam day in and day out.  I was in love with him in the same way that I love the sexy boi's I know I cannot have, the fresh beauties who do not have a pathologic attraction for older paunchy men.  Rex was the perfect sweet soul, kind to all, sensitive in a crystalline-honest way, and gentle.  He was one of those delicious boys who made me achingly aware of that place in my heart where I wanted someone to be.  But I tried to be the good observer from a distance, not contemptuous of him, for he deserved no contempt, and not hating him for his vital youth and love of life, for that is the basest kind of jealousy.  I tried to be just me, whatever that would be if I were like his other admirers -- open and honest and not trying to keep contained a raging white-hot lonliness in a pressure vessle of calm appearance. 

He was so many things that I was not; young, attractive, productive, social.  Genuine.  While watching his webcam I listened to his nightly web-broadcast on gaybc.com almost religiously.  I watched him have coffee most mornings when he got up around 8 or 9 AM his time, which was around 11 or noon my time -- we usually got up together.  It was as much interpersonal reality as I could handle at the time, the silent movie of reX updated every 40 seconds.  I wondered what he was saying when I saw him on the phone, and who he was saying it to.  I wondered what he was watching when the downloaded image showed him alone on his couch illuminated only by the light from his TV.  I wondered how I would behave if I were there, within earshot of his TV -- within the sound of his voice.  How would I respond?  Who would I be? 

I tried to read the language of the bodies when he was not alone on that couch; he was modest, never an exhibitionist, though he was extremely hot.  And his partners (the few I saw) were never interested enough in him; either they persued their own sexual urges despite his reluctance, or they dumbly ignored what appeared to be his obvious affections, withholding their warmth and resisting intimacy with him.  Baffling to me. 

One of the things I respected most about reX was the loving way he handled people -- callers to his show, people who wrote in, guests -- who were HIV positive.  He treated us the same way he treated everybody, with whole hearted kindness and goodwill.  He even had a positive boyfriend for a significant period of time.  I loved reX. 

I speak of reX in the past tense not because he died or anything like that, but because he left.  He disappeared from gaybc without much explanation that I could find.  But I didn't look too hard because he was still on-camera; I had figured out how to watch his webcam without going to his site -- stealing bandwidth it's called.  I am a sinner.  But even his pictures spoke of something different.  My reading of his images told a story of some disruption, a hard wind of change.  His images switched web-hosts, he started showing more skin -- not immodestly, but like a modest boy pretending to be immodest.  I wondered where he was going. 

I stopped snatching his images off his server because it began to appear like reX was using them commercially, on badpuppy.com.  Private galleries of reX-images became available to subscribers.  And nowhere on the web could I find his voice, which, now that I think about it, had always been wHay more sexy than any cock- or butt-shot could ever be. 

Fast-forward to tonight, while I was wrestling with my lately spotty DSL connection and out of sheer annoyance at my disconnectivity I clicked on a streaming-audio link in an e-mail sent by Eric at planetconcrete.com. There was reX, at radio.gaycams.com.  I listened to reX again.  I watched.  And I read. 

And I cried.  Because I've been at this place before.  And I never finished crying from when I was in that same place, eight years ago, discovering that I was HIV positive, too. 

Maybe you never finish, maybe you never complete the task of working through a tragedy.  Maybe instead of crying as much as you could -- which would take forever and certainly be enough tears to wash away all the dust from ground-zero -- instead, you simply mark the dust with a thousand tears, and then you walk away.  They say that even a work of art is never truly finished, just abandoned. 

I love you reX, and I don't care what anybody thinks of that.  I don't even care if you don't love me back the same way -- which of course you don't.  (If you do, I'll be there within 24 hours.  <grin> )  No, I love you because my love is -- it has to be -- unrequited.  It cannot safely exist otherwise.  It blooms in the space of your absence; it would wilt from shyness under the sheer intensity of your attention. 

The truest work of our hearts is never finished, just abandoned... 

A nice diversion.

Everything ends.  Violinist Isaac Stern dies. 

Goodbye, Isaac.

This is the beginning of underground journalism.  If the objective story is going to get out, somebody is going to have to go in and get it.  But beware, this is post-911 America; leave your press pass behind. 

Please visit the Nostradamus Index at faqs.org.  I know, I know...  I read most of this site days ago and refrained from mentioning it because of its kookiness quotient.  But this site is somewhat scholarly and objective in its treatment of the topic.  The introduction gives a good sense of where this stuff is coming from. 

Even if such prophecies are viewed as nothing but the curious obsession of a few, they still allow us to look at various interpretations of the present and the future.  They gave me pause to reflect, and as a result I gained a perspective on life which I did not have before.  And interestingly, for all of Nostradamus' bleak and desperate predictions, I came away with a very sturdy conviction that goodness and enlightenment will prevail among humankind -- eventually.

We are exactly where we are supposed to be right now. 

How vain.  But I just cannot waste a good e-mail -- especially if the recipient liked it. 

Out of context right there, that quote sounds facetious -- but it is not.  After just a few minutes at Sovaj's site you know. 

Maybe my isolative behavior makes me more acutely aware of human warmth and sincerity.  Maybe I'm just seeing what I hope is there -- but I don't think so.  I don't think so because there comes with these recognitions of young men who are generous and sensitive a kind of jealousy on my part -- no, it's more like a soft lament for the boy in me who always wanted to be generous and sensitive, but never let it out.  That unpretensious sentiment makes me believe that my perception is accurate; that impossibly beautiful young gay men do exist.  And I don't mean beautiful that way -- I've never seen his picture. 

It's nice, even if it's not me. 

It finally dawned on me what hurts so much about that picture; it's a warning light, intended to help aircraft avoid collision with these tall structures. 

I hope we do not let this horrific tragedy make us cynical in all our human activities.  I hope we can maintain the optimism which makes America one of the most desirable places on earth to live.  We cannot predict every monstrous plan, nor forsee every potential for evil.  We cannot create lives of utter invulnerability in America without losing a great deal of what makes those lives so very much worth living. 

I was reading National Geographic last night, an article about light.  Physics, photons, waves, spectrums -- it was all there.  And as a curious aside, they included a picture taken at dawn of a workman replacing the red blinking light that is perched atop the antenna tower on the Empire State Building.  It was a nice picture, maybe I will scan it after work and post it here.  And it is fascinating to see close-up such things which are familiar to us at a distance.  There was the East River in the thin light of early dawn, the Brooklyn Bridge, the surrounding huge buildings looking tiny from the tip of that height 1400 feet off the ground. 

And there was in the grey distance near the tip of Manhattan, two towers -- so fond.  So painful. 

They are gone. 

This e-mail message was forwarded to me, but unlike most of the garbage forwarded to me by my dear friends (who really do mean well), this possesses some intrinsic value. 

This story piqued my apocalyptic fears earlier today, though I could not find the details of it until I got home from work. 

Osama bin Laden is the perfect solution for fanatical Arab states.  Through him they are able to prosecute a war which officially and diplomatically they decry.  The hobnailed boot of Arab agression in the Middle East has been left empty as the result of an international (mostly American) prohibition on its use.  They have been gnawing that angry leather idly for many years, one might even say for decades.  Finally, as if in answer to their prayers, that boot is now filled with the force of a potent phantom, a non-state entity responsible to none, who has the resources and the will to carry out the most brutal schemes of the most fanatic elements within the several bona-fide Arab states. 

Attacking the Great Satan half a world away was a stroke of self-promotional genius by bin Laden.  He proved to the Arab states, especially to their fanatic elements in their Intelligence and Military communities, that he was capable and competent.  He capably pulled-off the boldest incursion ever into the sovereign land of the world's biggest superpower.  And he proved his competency by executing this grand horror without losing any of his cover.  I submit that what connections we have discovered between bin Laden and the dead mass-murders, he has intended to reveal to us.  He wants us to attack. 

While he is baiting us to attack, he is dangling before the noses of those fevered hate-filled Arab fanatics an irrestible dainty: Isreal.  When the Great Satan superpower attacks the impoverished Afghanistan, bin Laden will have accomplished what he set into motion on my birthday, September 11, 2001 -- justification for the Arab world to retaliate against the United States.  And since the Arab states with nuclear capability have no launch vehicles capable of reaching the United States, they will retaliate by striking Isreal who they hate even more than the United States.  This is why I oppose a military retaliation against bin Laden, the Taliban, or Afghanistan. 

He is revolting, an ugly and disgusting soul who seeks nothing good for anyone, yet claims holiness.  He very effectively is gaining power for the sole purpose of feeding his insatiable pride in the same way Popes and nations have been doing it for centuries; by claiming to serve God.  I would like nothing more than for a cruise missle to flick him like a snot from the face of the earth, but I don't think we would get him, and besides, that's exactly the attempt he wants us to make.  Everything he wants we must oppose.  Osama bin Laden is the closest that humankind has ever come to the Anti-Christ; he may yet prove to be. 

Why is it that only Isreali politicians tell it like it is?  Here in America we swim in our political leaders' soothing rhetoric -- we elect them for their ability to tell us what we want to hear.  There is a nobel purpose in attempts to minimize fear and terror.  But let us not be deluded, as any rational person is wont to do in this situation; we are indeed facing an "unbelievable danger." 

And from the same article:

This scares me.  Enemies ally themselves -- without first resolving their enmity -- only under mortal threat.  Isreal and Palestine are indistinguishable to a re-entry vehicle, and Jerusalem lies within minutes of an Afghani ballistic missile.  I can't believe I am even saying these things, it is all so unthinkable.  But it is also visciously real. 

"God bless us, every one." --Tiny Tim, from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

Doorbell woke me.  Hours ago.  It was Bobby the cab driver, not Bobby the one I love.  Funny, it interrupted a dream of Bobby the one I love: 

Before answering the door, while stumbling around still half-asleep, I thought maybe the dream was a premonition; I thought that maybe it would be Bobby at the door, the one I love. 

It was the cab driver.  He'd shaved his head since the last time I saw him.  "Today's not a good day," I croaked, my eyes still squinty with sleep.  Bobby the cab driver comes when he wants to fuck.  We suck and lick -- never kiss -- and he bends me over and pumps it in.  Then he leaves.  Quick simple sex.  He's the same age as Bobby the one I love (31), but he's not half as cute, and not near as sexy.  Later on, when I'm horny, I'll think, "Why the hell did I let him go?  Why didn't I just let him do me?  Jeesh." 

I dreamt of Bobby the one I love the night before last as well.  In that dream his naked, lanky, sleeping body was suspended just slightly above my head and to my left in the branches of a tree; his limbs were splayed out in a random though comfortable pose, his face and pelvis were both turned away from me, concealing their details.  I thought, "He is peaceful there, I should not disturb him."  The tree was in the city. 

When I woke I had to wonder why I saw him in a tree; one never wonders these things while dreaming them.  It seemed as if he had fallen from a great height and, caught by the branches of a tree, was uninjured and peacefully asleep.  But for some reason that made me very sad, I was not allowed to touch him. 

Lots of bizarre news stories.  It can be a few minutes relief from the story; the obscurestore.com.  I've been lost there for an hour. 

File this under 'fate':  Couple altered itinerary.

My DSL is back up.  Yay. 

I have no TV, recently lost my phone, and when I got home from work, no DSL.  Cut off.  No contact at all. 

Here's a couple golden-hearted young men whose sites I found in my referrer log.  i'm running and 14th brother.  God, i love the web. 

Good night.

If you are sitting alone in your apartment, not watching (or don't have) a TV, and you feel an akward incongruity between the sunny clear blue-sky Saturday going on outside and the wailing grief of a nation, then spend some time with these photos.  Your tears will likely flow like rain, and your heart will be right back in alignment with all the rest of humanity. 

Tears do not darken our view of the world.  The white trim on the brick building next door is gleaming in today's bright sunlight.  Through tears, it absolutely sparkles. 

Something tells me this is sick, but I wish I was there.  Of course, if I was there, I would have wished I wasn't -- like the 5k who were there. 

5k.  A gross impersonalization but, as counterpoint, it emphasizes how utterly personal that attack was for every single one of those who died.  Out of all of those who suffered and died (estimates are that there will be more than 5,000, much more), at the end someone was just taking the first sip of their last coffee; someone was yawning; someone sighed for the tedium of their life at the instant it ended.  Out of 5,000 plus people who are now dead, someone saw it coming.  I wonder what they did.  Scream?  Furrow their brow quizzically at the 'impossible' spectre? 

I wonder what I -- what any of us -- will do now.

An account from a 1998 interview with Osama bin Laden. 

Where has all the time gone?  Just getting into bed now. 

I just don't want to be awake in the daylight today -- or yesterday.  And maybe not tomorrow.  I think I will call in sick tonight, If I don't sleep past noon...

This will become the 'Zapruder film' of the World Trade Center catastrophe. 

I know none of us ever thought a whole ton of things that we are thinking today, but I really never thought I'd hear the term 'forces of darkness' used outside of a fantasy novel, much less by a head of state. 

Words have not yet been invented to describe the way this agony has touched me, this nation, and the world. 

Hitler taught humankind a great deal about inhumanity, atrocity, and lust for power.  These were things we did not then want to learn -- lessons which we would gladly have forfeited had they not grabbed us and shaken us into an unpleasant reality.  Humanity paid dearly for that education.  But it was worth it. 

On Tuesday -- my birthday -- we began a new lesson, similar in its unpleasantness and difficulty to the one Hitler taught decades ago.  However, the topic of that lesson was over-grasping political philosophies while this lesson's theme is hateful religious fanaticism.  And like it or not, now is humanity's time to learn this particular lesson. 

The instructor, probably Osama bin Laden, has aroused in us an epic rage and fury.  Thus he offers us a test, with an opportunity to pass or fail: can we feel within our broken hearts the full breadth of our rage, and attend our agony wherever it takes us, even down to our most terrifying depths and back out again, without choosing to kill our souls with hatred? 

Whoever did this is a hate-filled person who has a chilling skill for turning others toward hate.  His substance is fear, his purpose is evil, and he hates every manifestation of the openness, optimism, dauntless hope, and kind generosity which are, in large part, constitutents of the American personality.  He seeks to kill that goodness in us -- not by murder, atrocity, or acts of war -- but by simply making us hate. 

I can't stop crying, and that is a good thing.  Because once I refuse to cry, I have no choice but to hate, and that bastard is not going to win.  Not in America. 

And definitely not on my birthday. 

Updated: 12:19 PM EDT 16:19 GMT -- 11 Sep 2001

stunned.

Why can't I just write about the cat, or the boyfriend, or how I am getting my head waxed and going to the beach, or anything just bland and safe and mundane...  Why does it have to be these topics?

"Well, you write because you care," responds my father, "and you care because it matters." 

There you go.  Because it matters.  Hmm.  So simple; I should've known that.  I guess sometimes wisdom does come with age.  Sometimes.  There are, however, grown men who have less wisdom than most boys I've known.  But underage gay boys share a scary love that terrifies some men, especially when that love is celebrated and not hidden like a dirty English school boy secret.  Some men are positively beside themselves with rage that such a love might dare to speak its name in a widely published glossy mag that claims -- quite correctly -- to tell the truth. 

Boys are attractive in their own right, regardless of the beholder's orientation or age.  That notion alone is difficult for the sex-phobic American culture to accept.  Much less acceptable are any efforts made by anyone to validate and normalize the sexual attraction felt between some teenage boys. 

To the boys:  Whatever you are feeling is right and good.  I don't care what it is.  There are a lot of bad men out there who are terrified of boys who love other boys.  If you dare to love another boy, those men will hate you for no reason other than that.  Many are very respected, and powerful.  One of the bad men, unfortunately, might be your father.  Or he might be your minister, your rabbi, your teacher, your bus driver, or your scoutmaster.  He might be all of the above.  But if you hear it nowhere else, then hear it now; your so-called 'bad feelings' are not bad, in fact they are good.  Supress nothing.  Deny nothing.  Accept everything about yourself as precious (yeah, that's right -- precious) and good, and wholesome, and true.  These things will lead you to integrity, deep happiness, and freedom. 

I had a lover when I was in the fourth grade.  His name was David.  We had terrific, fabulous, wonderful, intense, red-hot sex, even though neither of us was yet able to ejaculate.  But sex is not all we did.  Mostly we were just boys who did boy-stuff together; camping, Boy Scouts, drawing (he had talent), watching TV or just hanging-out.  In fact, David was so flamboyantly femme -- and I, so homophobic -- that I would have avoided being seen with him, except that we were lovers, and we each had few other friends.  And because he was nice to me. 

I wanted to be like David -- or, more accurately, I wanted to be like me without all the pretenses and self-consciousness.  David was certainly not ignorant of the straight boys' contempt, but he never once let them dictate his behavior or cramp his femme ways; he met every intimidator toe to toe and he never once backed down.  David, the queen, was more man than me.  From the perspective of the closet I was in then I could not have recognized how much I looked up to David.  But despite the swish, the lisp, the limp wrist and all, David was what I wanted to be -- free. 

In the mid-sixties there was no way for me -- or for David and me -- to be gay and okay.  There was a lesbian (I think) teacher who was our champion and our patron, who did make it okay to be gay, at least in our immediate vicinity.  For a school trip to a museum, she had, perhaps on her own initiative, made arrangements to support the friendship of these two lonely boys, neither of whom had ever been able to make friends with others before.  So with half the elementary school assembled to receive the rules for the class trip, Miss Williams announced that she had gotten special permission -- from the Principal and the other teachers -- to have me come over to David's bus to ride with him. 

With her help, it would have been okay to be gay, except I was just too afraid to acknowledge my own affection for my loverboy.  I learned that cowardice from men.  I stayed on my own bus. 

If you ever see a tall forty-something blonde named David Ackley, originally from Northboro Massachusetts, please say hello to him for me. 

I'm glad summer is not over.  I'm glad my air conditioner still works.  For all my tantrums and bitterness, I am still grateful that all the world's people continue their precious journies despite my occasional desire that everyone except me be vaporized.  I am grateful for the work I am allowed to do -- even with all of its frustrations, catch-22's, and angry-scared-hurt people who call and try to be mean. 

I am thankful for consciousness; for sight; for the ability to read; for the opportunity to write; and for the paperback set, now venerable and disintegrating, given to me by my sister 30 years ago, 29 years before she died. 

I like woodsmoke carried on crisp air, or the scent of suntan lotion mingling with sweat and sea air on a brilliantly sunny beach-day.  I apreciate the performance art of day and night, of sunset and sunrise, of cloud and sky, and of star and spirit.  I love all my ex's and their vast capacities to forgive; few of them hate me, but most of them have had reason to.  I am grateful for all the trauma's I have suffered, for my abortive evasions of trauma's effect, for the decades I have lost to self-pity, self-contempt, and breathtaking rage.  And I am grateful to have lived long enough to grow up and to retract the blame that really belongs to no one. 

I have hated living only because I loved life more than I thought I could bear.  I am grateful now to know that my love for life is vast -- and exactly the equivalent of my capacity to bear it. 

Boston Globe Online / Nation | World / Pay phones to cost 50 cents as use falls

More insignifica.  But you just know I've gotta complain.  Only my complaint is not that they are raising the price of payphones -- please, they've always cost at least twice what we spend in phone change.  That's the lot in life of a 'public utility', but the notion of promoting the commonweal by regulating such services as are considered necessary for the common good is fast becoming antique.  And yet, even that is not my complaint.  I may wax nostalgic for the monopoly days of Ma Bell and 10¢ phone calls, but nostalgia is not cause for complaint except when I am miserable or when I think I am about to die.  Happily, neither is the case at the moment. 

My complaint is that their excuse for doing it is a lie. 

I have to smile.  Poor folk, who have already endured the loss of "widespread availabality" of payphones, now have to stop being poor in order to use the few payphones which are left.  The public payphone has long been acknowledged to be an albatross around the neck of the telecommunication industry and -- except for for those public utility regulations -- would only have existed in the form of that bane to social progress, the privately owned payphone.  Verizon wants to transform that albatross into a 'pearl-necklace', and the public, not just their customers, are the ones getting jerked-off.  "It's as simple as that." 

Now, in order to continue enduring this corporate impediment, and to (tongue in cheek) continue to provide the general public with reasonable access to the phone system, they are going transform the payphone -- a symbol of once egalitarian elements within the former Bell System -- into just another overpriced vending machine.  (If they think there's a lot of vandalism to phones now, just wait.  Poor boys pick their targets with unerring acuity.) 

Complaint over.  Hi ho, hi ho, off to work we go... 

I like chiphi2x -- the name, the new design, and the person behind it all.  From his journal:

9/3/2001, 2:18pm I guess you may have figured out 2 things so far... 1) this is the new redesign i've been babbling about... and 2) i'm going to keep chiphi2x.com as my personal site (roofpig.com will launch as a "creative" site down the road and i'll announce it on here when it does)... let me know what you think

Yay! 

Good night.

Eventually we get around to talking about the point.   Eventually.  

...after the diversions, after the sex, after the booze and the binges, after the boys of summer.  After the fall.

joe. (a true story)   It's all a lie, a clever Mambo danced amid the lethal laser beams, between and under them; and a ballet of leaps and pliès over and around them -- but never through.  To go right through one of those slivers of light would cut a person in half.  Tell the TRUTH!?  What, do I tell the story of what really happened to me?  That would be the most boring thing on earth -- or the most terrifying, depending on one's perspective.  Do I tell instead of the consequences of that story, the sequelae of my life?  (As if my life is already over and this is what's left.)  

And so the dance -- the lie -- defines the trap even as the dissociate soul ranges broad across the universe (and the bedroom ceiling).  

The story is this:   I don't lie, I just don't say.  Cryptic, hidden.  Safe.  Let's play pretend, it's comforting.  It is like being God.  Children are God, or not far from it; they are at the beginning of that little loop that is human life, that comes out from God at its start, swings out away and finally, near its end goes back in again.  At the beginning there's a need for a little readjustment, as the soul departs from infinite omnipotence to enter a journey through limited humaness.  Some people make the transition well. 

Getting honest is the hardest part; it is coming out of hiding, and giving up all the clever hopes and schemes that say going back is possible, promising that life can be undone and re-lived.  Truth is the laser which seared clean through you; it cannot be un-burned.  The options are simple; do you want to be real, or do you want to pretend to be God? 

The true story is real, not pretend. 

Eventually. 

I have 7,205 'dirty' pictures.   They take up 442,912,423 bytes of disk space.   If it weren't for blogger, I'd have nowhere to say that.  

So what!!   Yup, I agree.   insignifica inundiata. That means, "I got blogs up to here!"

So, back to the business of blogging.   It was the viewing of the pictures that occupied all my time yesterday... well, not just viewing them, but... (Eieewwww, icky!)   Anyway, that big manual I brought home from work never left its place in my bike bag, where I had placed it -- with the very best of intentions -- around midnight on Tuesday before leaving work.   And my iPAQ, once it finally made it's way out of the bike bag and into its synch-cradle, never moved again nor made a peep.   I have all the acoutrements of an active life, without actually living.   I am an Egyptian mummy.  

Now, mummy's got to go to work.  

Another great thing about blogger is that when midnight comes and I have wasted an entire goddamn day stuck to this web like a dying insect, I can still post something dated yesterday, thus redeeming the lost day.  

Well, now I see that that is not true.   I must have gotten the time warp notion from Blogger's main page where, for exactly one minute at 9:34 PM PDT, it appeared that I had stopped wasting my life three hours ago.   (As if posting this drivel stops my descent toward absolute zero.   No offense, Blogger, but keeping this blog probably accelerates my descent -- I only do it because I really want to look like I have a life, too.)

I'm starving.   That's the substance of my existence right now.   Actually, it is a dilemma; I have in the freezer a pint of ice cream, which I should not have purchased two days ago, but that is a story I have already failed to tell.   Gotta move on.   Someone -- a writer probably -- said once, "If you wake-up feeling the inspiration to write, just eat something sweet and the feeling will go away."  

I'm starving, and I'm gonna eat the ice cream, even though sugar depresses me, and I certainly don't need to be any more depressed than my usual.   But the alternatives are...  well, dull.   I mean, what would the world be without an occasional plunge from a bridge to spice-up the drive-time?   Or an airline disaster to make us wake and wonder if there's not more to this destination than we thought?   I grew-up wanting to put my cock where it was not supposed to be, simply because everything I was taught about life -- and how to live it -- was so goddamn dull.   As it turns out, cock-placement has never provided anything more than merely fleeting relief; it's not where you put it that matters, but what you do when you get there.  

I'm starving, but I'm going to tease the gnawing hunger a little bit, like gastronomic foreplay, because there's a three month old leak in my bike tire that I didn't fix today -- again.   And because there's a classified section from Sunday's paper right beside me listing apartments for rent with phone numbers I should have called Sunday night that I still haven't called, in search of the apartment that I am going to need in three weeks, which I still haven't found.   And because in twelve hours I'll be firmly under my employer's thumb again, at a subsistance job I hate, where all my skills and talent and inspiration will be discounted out-of-hand -- much like when I am home all day, alone.  

But it is all OK, because once I fill my gut, everything will matter a little less, and that is bad because there is little that matters now.   Writing this blog isn't much, but at this moment it is something.   In twenty minutes whatever tiny inspiration may have briefly flickered here will be thoroughly buried under a pint of Ben & Jerry's Apple Crumble.  

I'm not despondant, I'm just sick of all the nothing.  

From "pozlife:"  

Such a marvelous economy of words.  

-   ·   -

Let me introduce you to my longtime friend John, from Boston.   He has a big dick.   Very big.   He cruises; parks, bars, bushes near bars, even hotel men's rooms on occasion.   He gets lucky a lot, and tells me about it later:  

"He was   g o r g e o u s   -- a Spanish or Brazilian boy, said he went to Northeastern.   And he had an   e  n  o  r  m  o  u  s    dick.   But, OH! could he suck!"  

"How old was he?" I ask voyeuristically.

"20.   He wanted me to come in his mouth.   I almost did."  

"You didn't?"   I already know where this is headed, but I go there anyway.   It amuses me.  

"No."

"Why not?" I press.  

"Cuz he might have anything.   How the hell do I know what he's got?"   The tone of John's response strives to be sincere, but I know John.   He realizes that his logic kinda skips a track there, but he won't look at why.   He lets them suck him, rim him, deep throat him, and he reciprocates (except for rimming), and he pretends there is no danger of "getting what they've got" -- until they want his come.   I can never quite get him to tell me what the real reason is that he withholds.   At this point our discussion of the tryst always ends.  

I have seen it often in other ex-lovers and casual partners; the guy topping me, while perfectly willing to put me through all sorts of acrobatics on the end of his cock, is curiously passionate about preventing me from keeping his come.   It was always as if expelling their semen into me made them vulnerable to me; as if at the moment of their total release they were in complete surrender, and defenseless.   That's exactly what I wanted; indeed, I got it quite regularly from my second to last ex-, Kenny, but he is the ex- exception.  

Semen is powerful, even if only in our minds.   Some of the young men from my past who were stingy with their come, were very uncomfortable with power, especially their own -- they had each been raped by an elder when they were very young.   Very young.   Like six or eight years old.   Power for them was inextricably entangled within the concepts of harm, injury, and danger to themselves.  

A scene:

I'm 25, he is in his late teens.   He's black and hot as hell.   He's got my pelvis clamped between his hands and he's pumping his cock right into the center of my ass, into the center of me.   And something is gathering deep inside him, somewhere behind and below his belly button, and he feels it coming and he knows that in just a couple strokes more, that vulnerable center in him is going to make a big connection with that vulnerable center in me, and it's all just too powerful and too scary and he stops it.   He pulls out and shoots his load on the cement floor behind me, in a vacant corner of the Worcester Center parking garage.   It was 1983.  

-   ·   -

I can't say I disagree with Poz's sentiments, but I certainly cannot say that I agree.   Maybe it's just his tone; AIDS has made us arbiters over the intimacies of others, and that is clearly sick -- at least it is to me.   Under the badge of some imagined moral authority we presume to insinuate our Pop-culture attitudes into the private sexual activities of gay men.   Bah-humbug.   I'm not afraid of my come or yours, whether you call it poison or not; and I'm not afraid of your power, nor of mine.   I can understand the heat some people feel around the issue of barebacking, but I equally understand the heat felt by aroused guests at a bareback party.  

I might like your body, and I might like you to do some push-ups on me while you hold my ankles by my ears.   But if you are going to preach -- or worse yet, if you are going to keep your mouth shut and assent to the preaching of others -- then please do pull out.   Then go away, and stay away.   I'd do as well having sex alone.  

It's a common theme here in my blog, or anyplace my orphaned words find a home - in letters, e-mails, or any of a few former journals; the Movement of Light. 

"He's a guard at a federal prison, for chrissakes," I said to myself after reading the article about a guard at the Federal Detention Center in Central Falls, RI who is suspected of murder.  I thought, "I'd laugh if it weren't so sad."  And I caught myself gazing out the kitchen window at the moving light, at 2 PM, Sunday afternoon on a sunny Labor Day weekend. 

I never recount anything in the present; even the current moment must be deftly deflected into the place where all my apparatus for examining and experiencing it are directed, the past.  And to avoid having to actually wait for now to become then, I have invented a 'virtual past' into which I put now, safely seperating reality and me.  It is like the big sealed glass glove box that lab technicians reach into through long rubber gloves to manipulate stuff which is either hazardous or absolutely positively cannot be contaminated by their touch.  I like to say that I put this beautiful, gorgeous moment into that box.  But it is more accurate to say that I put me into that box, and from there I beg the moment to touch me, gloved.  It is never enough. 

I've often wondered if we can detect the movement of light when the Sun - relative to Earth - begins to recede near the end of summer.  Is the quality of that patch of sunshine on the lawn next door significantly different - except for the slightly repositioned shadows - than the quality of that same patch in the sunlight of May?  Is the sky a little less blue?  Do we have in our DNA some evolutionary memory that resonates with the movement of light? - a memory that tells us, near summer's end, to stock-up and seek shelter, even to prepare to hibernate? - an unbidden reminiscence of a delicious gentle warmth inexorably slipping away? 

The 20-year-old grandson-of/property-manager-for my landlord is leaning against the building next door, enjoying a late summer daydream, his boyish limbs a-languor, his meditation central and deep.  And secret.  He is tall and blonde though not stunningly handsome, and cordial but not particularly charming, yet nonetheless I find moments of him - such as this secretly stolen spectre - especially delightful. 

The determined reader will have found that much of my writing is (and I am not proud of this) a ponderous mass of whining and self-pity.  The casual reader never stays, I think.  The reason for my depressed style is perhaps the same reason that I am fascinated by this plain boy outside my window; regret. 

I read, in Bono's commencement address to Harvard, "...Is missing the moment unacceptable to you ? Is wasting inspiration a crime? It is for a musician."  I must therefore be a musician.  (!)  I am no more a musician than I am a writer, but I am so in love with the moment and the inspiration that I am stuck lamenting their loss.  It's like I am focussing on everything not just as I am receiving it as a free gift form the universe, but just as it has passed; as if choosing a vantage point in the lull of the wave's wake is preferrable to riding its curling lip on the event-horizon of disaster. 

I was a boy.  I am not now.  I was absent from my boyhood in lamentation for my lost childhood.  And still looking back, I am absent from my manhood in lamentation for my lost boyhood.  Missing the moment, wasting inspiration. 

Just twenty minutes passed, and the meditative boy ouside my window is long gone.