Woke up.  Again. 

Started coffee.  Checked bank balance; it's the end of another month, you know.  Rent check will probably bounce.  Got $604.01 in there, and I charged $4 and some change last night for milk and some bath soap.  I have a fifty dollar savings bond that I have yet to deposit.  I'm just lazy, and I don't like dealing with people.  Despite popular myth, bank tellers are people. 

I love shopping at night.  The place was empty—especially for a Friday night.  A nearly deserted all-night supermarket at 2:00 AM—to be precise, it was Saturday morning—is as close to a waking dream as I can get.  I don't have to practice meditation.  I just go down the street and take a right.  There's lots of stuff to look at, lots of space without people, and an occasional annoyed glance from a dismissive young stockboy.  It is a strange and lonely place, comforting for its similarity to my interior. 

Just put laundry in next door.  Had to use dish soap.  I remember looking at laundry soap while I was at the supermarket, but decided I would wait until next week when I have money, maybe order it online from Walgreen's (along with other household stuff—orders over $50.00 they deliver free).  That way I won't even have to leave the house.  The laundry for my landlord's three houses are in the basement of one of the other houses, and just as I was leaving the laundry room, hoping nobody would see me there with my bottle of dish soap, some cute twentyish stud sticks his head in the door, and smiles.  "Oh, OK," he says.  I hide the soap.  I figure he came to do his laundry, but I beat him.  There's only two machines.  I giggle nervously and, by way of apologizing for being in the way, say, "I just put the stuff in."  He says, "Just checking it out."  Then I see my landlord is behind him.  He is a new tenant being shown where everything is.  I follow them along the path that leads from the basement door.  New tenant is wearing nylon sweats, and he has, like, a super fine ass.  I hope the soap doesn't over suds the machines. 

I just rented, "My Life as a House."  And I just found, "The World as a Blog."  Isn't life fun?

I want Happy. 

So many ironies.  An eighteen year old—boy, really—who is lost, perhaps distraught, certainly vulnerable, and abused; he has been a victim, though that may now be over for him.  And this is the first irony.  Maybe I do not so much want the handsome young blonde as I want to be eighteen again, able to begin my own escape.  As late as eighteen may be, it is undeniably a better age at which to reclaim the life that was stolen from me than is forty-five. 

Maybe I just want to have and to hold someone who won't demand responsibility from me.  You know, like a helpless child in a man's body.  He's had his language stolen.  How much more intimate a theft can there be?  Surely, this one would cling to me without questioning my intentions.  And without making me question my intentions, either.  With him I could stop being alone. 

Smooth skin.  Soft hair.  And the name, Happy.  Another irony.  We knew nothing of the agony of Happy until he ended it.  We don't even need to be bothered with the effort of rescuing him.  He comes to us completely prepackaged, a childhood tragedy of which we had no knowledge, now seemingly resolved.  We have none of the bad taste of having failed the boy, none of the guilt of having offered only tokens of help while knowing that he needed more than tokens.  Of course, our excuses would have been perfectly reasonable; I mean who is to say that his so-called kidnappers were not in fact his rescuers?  Even if he did need to be saved—which I believe he did—how were we to know?  We do this as a balm for our own consciences rather than take any risks.  In the case of Happy Sidane we are not troubled with questions of, "could we have done more?"

But, what if you discovered his plight four years ago, after he had been away from his birth family for eight years?  And what if you were reminded of his ongoing distress two years later?  What if the thing Happy needed was to be kidnapped back from where he spent most of his life?  Would he have let you?  And what would you have done with him?  He would not have been able to help you find his parents, and so would you keep him?  Or what if you did give him back to his parents, and they turned out to be more abusive than his kidnappers?  We are relieved of all of these questions and more, because we were not aware of him when he needed help, and now that we are aware of him, his problems are being handled by the police.  We are immune to responsibility.  How very neat. 

I still want Happy.  I want to be the one who sees what is wrong and can fix it.  I want to be the rescuer of the beautiful innocent.  I want to restore order to the riot of wrongs, the tragedies that occur everyday, everywhere, to everybody.  I want to fix everything but me.  The damage to me is the only damage that hurts me.  It puts me in an unending writhe of anxiety and dis-ease.  This is my lifelong angst, the problem of my own internal pain which I can neither approach nor flee that drives my obsession with similar pain elsewhere. 

And the pain of Happy, if indeed he is in pain, is not even important.  His pain is useful to me only as a diversion from my own pain.  Wanting Happy is merely a substitute for the one thing that I have never dared to hope for my whole life long; that the orphan, me, might someday find his home—and be happy. 

Where love?  Where truth?  Are such things even real?  Why pain and fear?  Why life. 

I think about death all the time lately.  Maybe I just need a new job, or maybe I just need to go.  I haven't wanted to do this since as far back as I can remember.  Fuck you world, I'm not playing your fucking game.  Or so I pretend.  It's like standing in the rain, angrily refusing to get wet. 

I am soaked.  

I don't know what pissed me off so much, or maybe I do know; some cruelty early on, some off-the-scale injustice—doesn't matter.  My life began on a warm summer night, at the entrance to the carnival.  A spectacular carnival with acres of rides and attractions, thrills, risks, and excitement.  Scents of fried dough and cotton candy, hot dogs and warm summer air.  I wanted to see it all and do it all, to taste and feel everything.  At least I think I wanted to.  But right inside the gate something happened, and the tantrum still persists.  No!  I don't want to see the merry-go-round.  No!  I don't want to ride on the ferris wheel, or the roller-coaster, or the tilt-a-whirl.  No!  I don't want to play!  And with nothing better to do, I set about trying to leave the carnival, to depart prematurely, to eliminate all the tragedies in life which I can't control, by creating a tragedy which preempts them all—my own death—a tragedy that I can control. 

But I did want to play.  And I do. 

When it started they called it GRID—gay related immune deficiency.  When I realised its potential for me, they had just started calling the virus HTLV-III.  In 1980 I was 21.  It would be three years still before I would buy The Joy of Gay Sex, examine all of its drawings of sexual positions and promise, and another year more before I put that knowledge into practice.  It was in June, 1984, at about ten at night, on the grass outside a secluded municipal building in Northboro, Massachusetts.  Paul and I had gone parking, but soon enough my sleeping bag was open on the ground beside my car, and I was on it, and he was on me.  I guess you could say I was a virgin until that night, even though I had been giving lots of blow-jobs—and getting a few—for four years.  Promiscuity for me began in earnest when it was announced that sex was potentially fatal.  I was 25. 

Everybody wanted me to participate.  Family wanted me to be at family things, to stop sulking and take part in weddings and births, in Christmases and Thanksgivings.  Friends mostly just loved me, and wished that I would let go of whatever the rage was that I held so dear, which would inevitably drive us apart after a time.  Employers would try to cope with my anger, for the sake of, I imagine, my other significantly positive qualities.  They all hoped that I would change my heart and stop resisting the carnival, stop fighting the enticements of garish lights and cheap games, of the hurdy gurdy music and the tense happiness—they all hoped I would let go of my ancient anger, and stop fighting life.  They had no idea... 

Maybe it is that easy—maybe it would have been even then—to just get over it, to stop being mad, to stop pretending that I don't want to play, to stop pretending that I don't want to be here with you.  Maybe.  But maybe I need somebody to show me how to stop being mad, maybe this angry boy needs some grownup who can show me the way back to the whole world. 

I tempted fate more and more until about 1990.  I don't remember hearing the term then, but bareback was what it was.  There was some sort of ecstasy for me in the risk of receiving whatever you gave.  There was a sick satisfaction in knowing that your frivolous orgasm, forgotten by morning, might kill me before the end of the millennium.  It was the height of irresponsibility; I didn't have to deal with any consequences—except pleasant ones—for at least several years.  In all of those bedrooms and backseats I got what I wanted; control.  The equation is a little warped, but here it is: I could make you kill me (in a time-adjusted sense), and your only motivation for throwing my life away was that you got to blow your load.  That little exchange confirmed for me everything that I needed in order to survive: that whatever I lost when I first came to this carnival—at the beginning of this life—it wasn't worth much to begin with. 

But what I lost was worth everything.  I always did want to play; I still do.  It's just that I was always too goddamn scared. 

I still am. 

Listen to this song. 

While that downloads... 

There was an inspiration earlier, but it has subsided along with the relief of my fever.  'Well' does not always equate exactly with 'better'.  My inspiration was better when I felt sick. 

A gorgeous young man has regained a modicum of 'wellness' after a very heroic ordeal.  In the past when I used such a term like 'a gorgeous young man' I always pretended that I was referring to some base physical eroticism, that I was reducing the described person to a sexual object.  I even convinced myself that beauty was merely a degree of sexiness.  Many years have given the lie to my self-deceit.  Beauty can be a thing horrible and terrifying, and concealing it beneath the guise of lust makes it, at least for me, less heart-rending to behold.  Today I know that I was always painfully aware of a beauty far deeper than the tanned skin on rippled muscles, far deeper than the beauty that is only hinted at by the sparkle-eyed smile of a handsome face.  Such true beauty I have beheld here. 

I have a job I hate.  I have an illness that will probably kill me, and slowly.  Sometimes I can only see the things in this world that make it a bad place, a terrible place to live.  I have often felt that death at my own hand might well be a safe retreat from weariness to gentle sleep.  But I have been changed by this young man who will never know me, and never see me.  And it is not so much him who has changed me, but that 'something' that was with him there in that canyon, revealed to me in the way he handled his ordeal. 

I have always been at my best when it was my best that was demanded.  When I perceived a lethal threat, I could think very clearly, more clearly than at any other times, and I could do amazing things.  I could accept huge disappointment and move beyond it in the space of a single breath.  But in the gray half-living of my usual days, even tiny disappointments become insurmountable obstacles for me—and linger endlessly. 

So I am feeling well at the moment, and a little guilty for having ever whined about anything.  In his statement, Aron describes his decision to cut off his own forearm as an inspiration, and with it he says, "all the desires and joys and euphorias of a future life came rushing in."  It is the intensity of life at the edge of death.  Aron reached beyond the edge, and was stuck there for five days.  His choice to return to us, despite its cost to him, convinces me that this world might not be so bad, after all.