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?