Good night.

Good night.

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Eventually we get around to

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 pli?s 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. 

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7,205

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.  

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push

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. 

<pushed the push-button publishing button>
everything becomes so damn complicated when it gets late.

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.  

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poztificating

From “pozlife:” 

You want it, you sick fucks?  Come and get it. I?ll pound your ass till you bleed and then you can go on your way to infect the world. I?ll see you in hell.

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.  

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Kev, Nah.   “Looking


Kev,

Nah.  "Looking through rather than looking at..."  It's all a matter of perspective.  You know how cruel 'kids' can be, but young men need us more than we need them.  And of that need we are acutely aware, while our juniors remain grossly unaware.  Do you lately remember -- with amazement, as do I -- the immensity of our dumbness (not dumb as in stupid, but dumb as in benumbed and shell-shocked) in our late teens and earliest adulthood.  Maybe it's just me, but I was unconscious in lots of ways.  I knew how desperately I wanted guys, but -- maybe it was the hormones -- I was utterly paralyzed from doing anything about it. 

Ninety percent of a youth's energy is spent pretending to a condition he can achieve only when he is no longer young.  Then, in some cases, he reverses and spends himself pretending to b.  young after he is not.  In a few cases the grown man recognizes the wisdom of youth's innocence; then he prepares himself to be a kind host to Wisdom-Innocence should it happen to pass nearby and need a moment's rest and comfort.   It is a holy opportunity. 

So, Kev, don't let their aloofness borne of fear dissuade you from giving the gifts that your less mature counterparts need from you.  Also do not misinterpret their cool disinterest as the result of a considered deliberation -- it is in fact hastily chosen, an artful and magnificent disguise worn in an effort to stay safe amidst terrible newness and monsters.  Some young men keep hiding even into their thirties, or beyond -- like me.  Most young men will not drop the uncaring guise, but all of them want to.  I try to stay ready for that moment, whoever he may turn out to be and whatever the circumstance; it is holy.  But more often than not I am tangled in my own need and lonliness, helpless. 

I'm sorry for your brief sickness, but I'm glad it was not a week-wrecker.  And the dancing... hmm, nice...  It has been a long time.  As for my smiling face "real-time," well, there is no camera here, and soon enough there will be no me.  Gotta move.  The landlord raised the rent, but that's just the excuse.  Over time, stationary has turned to stagnation and it simply is time to move on.  Even though I have an absolutely fabulous DSL connection here, which (in the great confusion of a Capitalism operated by incompetents) I have been getting for free, for over a year, without even one single bill.  Despite my e-mails alerting them.  Nada. 

But there is more to life than bandwidth (isn't there?), even if the bandwidth is one megabit per second.  It is a testimony to my faith in life that I am willing to forfeit such a connection, and the isolation I have cultivated around it -- I even neglected my phone unto disconnection -- in search of a fuller embrace of life. 

However, for better or worse, I will keep you posted. 

And there is no way I could've met you in P-town.  I knew the days you'd be there, but with me sucking-up all the overtime I can get, looking for a new apartment, and with the velocity of my cash flow critically close to cavitation, there just was no way I could do anything more than maintain an awareness from across Massachusetts Bay.  I love P-town, perhaps I love it even more from a distance.   There's no chance it will disappoint me.  Wanna go there off-season. 

Truly, Madly, Deeply. 

joe

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It’s a common theme here

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? 

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The 20-year-old grandson-of/property-manager-for my landlord

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. 

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Will I make it to

Will I make it to work on time? 

Went to bed sick.  Woke-up sick.  Decided, in some sort of fear-of-death Puritanism, that calling in sick would be… well, lazy.  And that would make me bad.  (As if showing up late is somehow redeeming?).  So here I am – in my underwear, with foreign things moving furniture in my abdomen, and with twenty minutes to be at work – and I am typing. 

(You needed to know that.) 

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I just love this (new?)

I just love this (new?) blog, with lines like, “so he invited our priest and her boyfriend the policeman over for dinner tomorrow night,” and throughout using the endearingly utilitarian title ‘the husband’ whenever referring to the companion/lover/significant-other/canasta-partner/whatever. 

And this.  Delightful.  I hate that he is younger than me.  ; )

How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons

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I’m sick.  But I’m not

I’m sick.  But I’m not complaining.  You can’t know that, though, because it sounds exactly like complaining.  How do I say it the way it is meant? 

There is a language I have not learned, a rapid fire rata-tat-tat of syllables that would dance and tumble from my mind with effortless precision like Nadia Comaneci, a way to tell you in perfect tens, or in spades, or in quadruplicate forms, or in two hundred ninety five million divided four ways; a way to say in one life, with one heart, just one word that cannot be misunderstood.  There IS such a language, but I am possessed of it not.  Not yet. 

In the meantime I do night school, here with my blog, alone – like an autistic trying to get through.  To you. 

Someone advised once long ago, in the pre-history of high school perhaps, to just write.  Don’t think the words to death, but get them out and put them on the paper.  Make room for more; despite my fears, more will surely come – it always has.  And when more words do come, put them on the paper too.  With a flow of enough words over enough time, I might get through.  Hell, just a trickle made the Grand Canyon, after enough time. 

Enough time.  I’m sick. 

It matters less than not at all what particularly is wrong with me, or rather, my body.  It matters less than not at all the hour and the day when these words will end.  What matters is how many went before.  I could have done better, from the beginning until now.  And who knows what I’ll do between now and the end. 

But I won’t be a Navy pilot, and I won’t be a movie star.  I’m not going to have a beach house, or probably any house at all..  I might not ever ski again.  I’m never going be able to play all the games I’ve learned in this life – I’ve spent all my time learning new games (or re-starting old ones, maybe) just so I could avoid getting too deep into any games; like life, or love, or family, or friends.  Me. 

I think it all gets stuck inside me, like an infection festering, or a poison that my liver tries to contain within itself in a futile effort to save my life.  It makes my stomach hurt – everything from my ribcage to my waist, swollen and heavy like a garbage bag full of water – and it wants to get out.  Maybe it is just sick of waiting, and since I am never going to start the flow on my own, maybe whatever is stuck is going to just come out, like in ‘Alien‘, and there is no way to be ready for that.  There was never a way to be ready. 

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Return of the Lockbox, a

Return of the Lockbox, a column by Mark Weisbrot at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. 

I am not an economist; to me, economics seems a study in conundrums.  But all this ‘either raid the trust fund, or pay down the debt’ rhetoric is not informative or even helpful.  It is, rather, the two major political parties jockeying for advantage. 

I am usually a politician-basher but, you know, they must be as fed-up with us as we are of them.  As an electorate, we are lethargic, disinterested, and a nearly unrousable occupant of our own careening destiny.  The tedious decisions, the tough decisions, the consequential decisions; we choose to discard them to the custody of our elected representatives who, without guidance from their constituents, have no choice but to find other lights to guide them.  This is the inevitible result of popular non-participation in government, and we should not expect it to be different.  Unless we participate. 

We cannot expect them to do what we want unless we tell them what we think.  And, yes, that makes the letters and the calls and the e-mails and blah, blah, blah all very important.  But the tedious work of telling them what we think is not the hardest part; thinking is. 

Thinking leads to feeling, and feeling leads to a meaningful response.  If we have conviction, then the e-mailing, the letter writing, the phone calling – even the sign making – is a cinch, and not tedious at all. 

Personally grappling with the intractable conflicts that confront our lawmakers is the very chore which we elected them to relieve us of.  That is a self-deception.  We are responsible; all they do is represent us.  And to overcome our disinterest, the politicians present us exaggerated details with histrionic drama, and that is OK with us – even when we know that what they are doing is not strictly truthful.  That’s OK, as long as they just keep making our decisions for us, relieving us of our responsibilities which, really, are impossible for us to surrender – whether we like it or not. 

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Found in the Boston Globe

Found in the Boston Globe this morning, with coffee: US to tap pension funds, report says.

Shifting Social Security funds to other government expenses has no impact on benefit payments, but has been considered taboo since 1998, the last time the government used part of the surplus for anything other than paying down debt. Office of Management and Budget director Mitch Daniels yesterday called that policy a ”symbolic commitment,” arguing that while it was a noble cause, it should be considered a luxury in boom times, not a necessity during an economic downturn, and that the budget estimates should not hamper investments in defense.

Please tell me what we need defense from, if not from these worry-mongering Queeg’s who live in fear and seek to codify it. 

Sorry.  Pomposity is not a good way for me to start the day. 

Me and Irene are looking at another apartment this morning and, in the cyclical nature of things, it is across the street from the apartment which I moved out of 6 years ago to come to my current place.&nbs.  It is on the third floor of a gorgeous old brick Victorian that is showing its age.  All hinges on the quality of the renovations now ongoing. 

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Hmmm?

Hmmm?

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This brings back memories from

This brings back memories from when I worked at a garage, especially the complex hydraulic control-channel casting.  Ahh, the pre-silicon seventies…  Howstuffworks: “How Automatic Transmissions Work.” 

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