Cleaned the apartment Sunday night.  Spent yesterday bitching, moaning, napping, and downloading cute games for the iPAQ, which pretty much is a useless device—I carry it around hoping I might need it for something, and I worry about losing it.  But back to Sunday night... 

Stayed up until 6:00 AM Monday morning cleaning.  Used every rag, sock, and towel in the place.  I now have a 300 pound pile of laundry on my bathroom floor that smells like Murphy's Oil Soap.  I had to get the place at least tenable looking because the landlord's cute blonde grandson was coming with a locksmith at 9:00 AM to re-key all the locks in my building.  His note said it would take about an hour. 

They came and woke me at 9:30 AM and stayed for four hours.  I started out tired, cranky and irritable.  My usual, I know.  But then I got worse.  The fat, ugly locksmith comes in with globs of slush, takes the locks apart, leaves the pieces on the floor and goes away for twenty minutes.  He did this six times.  The pretty young blonde hovered about being useless, but polite, during each visitation.  This made me anxious in addition to annoyed; attractive young men make me anxious, especially if I am not having (or not able to have) sex with them.  By 11:00 AM, when I had expected to be back in bed snoozing recuperatively from my all-nighter, it had become clear that this would take a couple hours more.  My overwhelming desire to be alone was in diametric opposition to my equally overwhelming desire to fully engage the fever of having this adonis within speaking distance.  Alone won. 

I was all but snarling audibly by early afternoon.  I think I even caught their attention briefly with a little petulant cabinet-slamming, or a loud expellatory sigh.  Or two.  I guess I blew my chances for a blow-job; there won't be any illicit encounters with landlord-grandson, at least not in the apartment which I occupy.  Oh well.  Maybe I really do prefer the view of him through imperceptibly parted venetian blinds as he scurries about outside my windows.  Despite my pining for contact, maybe I do prefer to be alone.  Maybe. 

But maybe I just do not know how to do it; me and the cute boy, or me and you, or me and anyone at all.  The game is tedious for me for some reason, at least it is the way I play it.  Probably I am not 'following through,' as in a perfect golf swing.  Probably I am not surrendering to the flow, swimming with it, cooperating with life, and even redirecting it a little as the course of things might allow.  Probably somewhere long ago I chose to fight, and to make that my sole companion, to dig my toes, my whole legs even, deep into the muck and fight the flow while also trying to keep my head above it. 

Could it really be the complete opposite?  That this stream of experiences—this dream of existence—is really the bouyant of my life instead of its inundation? 

Time is about up.  Only minutes to go, never enough time.  Phone calls and responsibilities interrupt.  Even phone calls I want, from people I love.  Don't they know time is all there is?  I'm not so rich with time that I can afford to lavish it all about on whomever happens by.  I'm not that generous.  I have to force something through this tiny window of time, something huge and important, like the swelling of a symphony up from rumbling depths to a cresendo understood by all.  I sit here beside the hopeless task, it's like trying to get a piano through a bathroom window, and I am on the toilet.  Another interrupting task. 

We are buried in snow, everything is whiteness, snow like frosting plastered on the sides of trees and walls and porch railings, and raised in great whimsical drifts.  It is as if workmen came in the night and tried to decorate the world like a wedding cake.  The streets are already filthy, time is going, the moon is half gone, my coffee cup needs a refill and I don't have time. 

I have such big things to say.  So little are the words that maybe it won't matter much if I never get them said. 

I fantasized all day about a movie I would make, if...  If something.  If I were connected to life, to myself, to this moment.  If I had done the time in the little jobs that the people who make movies did.  If I had done the work that a writer does to earn the right to write.  If I was consumed with doing what I want—following my bliss.  Instead, I am obsessed with identifying and avoiding all the things I do not want—and that list is never done. 

Lucas is home for the holidays, apparently.  I am just glad he has not been consumed by the background, like a discreet signal lost in the hiss.  I want a beacon, or I want to be a beacon, maybe.  No, I would chafe at the burden of being used by others for guidance, though I'd be flattered.  Maybe I would be so flattered that it wouldn't matter to me that my guidance was wavering and unreliable.  Maybe I wouldn't mind deliberately misleading them—and maybe it doesn't really matter in the end. 

The movie is a gay porn with no rubbers about a primal breach of trust in the middle of an unintended love affair, with an angel who falls from her position as a winged luminous creature to become a homeless, legless street beggar, achieving enlightenment in the process.  Troy is black, age 25, he's HIV positive and angry, he's living in Boston and he hates the white privileged world.  Jonathon is white, age 16, and uncomfortable in his rich, entitled world; he lives in Wellesley Hills, an affluent suburb of Boston.  Troy is Jonathon's first love and first lover.  Jonathon is Troy's first victim. 

In the end, something precious and familiar is destroyed, while something new, precious and unknown is created.  In the end it is not about fucking without rubbers, but about loving without defense or reservation.  By falling in love with the rich white boy he sought to infect, Troy is transformed from an aloof aggressor, and his hatred is revealed as empty and meaningless.  The naive Jonathon loses his innocence, and his illusions that Troy was the perfect first love are destroyed, and he is left with the question, "Can my love for Troy transcend his betrayal and forgive, no matter what?"  At the end Jonathon is having blood drawn at a free clinic for an anonymous HIV test.  We never find out the results of his test.  We have to decide for ourselves about the strength of his love. 

In the end it is a movie.  In the end, we—and not the porn stars fucking on film—are the only ones doing it for real. 

About time. 

There is just too much to cry about.  Seas upon seas filled with tides of tears, coming in overwhelming waves, unrelenting, unending.  Timeless.

Who would embark on such a quest?  To venture out upon a sea beyond the limits to which we have ventured in the past where it gets only deeper, darker, more desolate and more hopeless—who would go?  By any reckoning from the shore such excursions could only lead to death.  Or worse, to an unimaginably horrific end in a place beyond the reach of any humans, a region devoid of compassion and bereft of love, a tortured place where all things that we have never known hold sway and power, a wilderness where dwell the terrors and demons which we have driven off the common ground of our familiarity.  Who would go? 

The hero.  She will go.  She might gaze out across the hopeless tempest, away from her own people (who seem to be not her own), away from her home (which feels like it is not her home), and she might see a vision of something beyond.  Such is the gift of the misfit—to see two worlds with equivalent eyes.  For the misfit, both the native land where most prefer to stay and the dark sea of unpredictable possibilities lie upon the same horizon.  For the misfit, either journey will be difficult, whether inland or outbound.  But for the hero, only one way offers the true thrill of life... 

Seas upon seas filled with tides of tears, coming in overwhelming waves. 

Unrelenting. 

Unending. 

Timeless. 

Carry me home. 

I am she:

Instant messaging scares me.  Like the phone.  They are the tangible manifestations of our need for human relationship, a need I do my best to repudiate.  The fact that I use these devices, or rather, keep them handy—I don't actually make calls or IM anybody—is evidence of my conflict within; I want to isolate, yet I want relief from lonliness.  I fear contact, especially genuine intimacy, yet I despise isolation.  Rock and a hard place. 

The illusion of presence soothes.  The AOL instant messenger 'door creak' and 'door slam' sounds suggest that I am there, wherever 'there' is—present to the reality of now—even when I am not.  Like soft voices from the kitchen when I was a toddler waking from a nap, the illusion of presence, of a cognizant, caring presence quieted my fears that I might be cutoff and on my own.  Why did I ever fear abandonment?  How did I know such a condition existed? 

I have a hard time with people who never experienced nihilistic threats in infancy.  This makes it easy to exclude many.  It is not that I don't like them, it's just that I'm jealous.  It hurts more than I can bear when to be kisses not to be full on the lips. 

BTW, it looks like the rent check maybe didn't bounce...

It's snowing.  Just walked to the store and bought two pints of Ben and Jerry's.  Can't afford to buy food at work tomorrow, have to bring a bananna.  And the rent check is going to bounce. 

The quiet was so perfect that the hood of my parka made too much noise against my ears and I took it off to listen to the snow—the snow, sleeping everywhere, lying pure and undisturbed.  I had no idea it snowed until I left the house, because all evening I was studying Lucas.  Just a boy.  Actually, he's just a boy like everyday comes just the sun.  And I've not been studying the boy himself, directly—I've not even seen a pic.  But I have been through all 135, or so, of his diary entries, and it's nice there's been no pic.  It has allowed me a truer vision of his beauty than I could have had if I had seen his face. 

To call him a boy is not fair for indeed he is a man, and one who has achieved much greater progress in his nineteen years than I in forty-four.  Perhaps that's why I read him.  And wait.  For more.  Maybe I use him to feed my silly fantasies of what could have been, my obsession with the past.  I doggedly evaded the passions of my own youth like a prisoner of war tunneling out of a stalag.  I linger here, now long past the end of my escape, and I listen for antediluvian echoes from the experiences I abandoned, and I cling to them as if to delay their loss and I imagine what passion there might have been had I not fled... 

The echoes diminish, and soon not even a nostalgic link is left to tether the loss, and I hurtle into empty silence. 

When the quiet makes me panicky, one such as Lucas calms my angst.  I don't know why but it seems helpful to know that somewhere, one who is perhaps like I might have been, is riding out the full passion of his youth in all its sweet fury and rage.  I ran away when my turn came, so now, in the cold, dark dead of night, it is vicarious comfort to know that someone is accepting the full embrace of passion's precious and terrible gifts. 

Happy birthday. 

I hate my fucking life.