note: Sarcasm is used here. Forgive my tackiness in giving it a plain label, but my words have been misinterpreted by some, who concluded from the first paragraph, that I liked being raped. The error is not their fault. In a sexually-obsessed culture which tunnel-visions on the victim, yet blindly suffers the little children unto the perpetrator's embrace, I can see how they might misunderstand.

I will leave it the way it is.

the best thing that ever happened to me was that bastard who held me down, and plowed my ass when I was small. The worst thing has been everything since.

It really wasn't too bad, you know? I learned to fly! I woke abruptly, hard-pressed onto my bed (I used to always sleep on my stomach, long ago), and I couldn't move. So I flew. I abandoned my little body to a death-grip of pain, and I watched—from a very expensive perspective—the suffering of my new, other self.

NOW - Determined to prove his (mis-)perceptions of the world, the author has posted yet another sickening account of his fetid stagnation. He states, "Of course, I do really know what the world is like, because I have been outside of it."

He goes on to assert that his bizarre version of the world, one in which he claims to simultaneously fly and walk, is no further from reality than the popularly accepted version.

However, representatives from academe, medicine, politics, and religion have overwhelmingly disagreed with the author's statements, which have been termed '[the] whinings of an unstable mind'.

In an astonishing move, Pope Paul VI issued a joint statement with Sinead O'Connor, the virus that causes AIDS, condemning all above-ground acrobatics and specifically railing against the author's flights of dissociation.

getting some sort of comfort from it, I now say rude and embarrassing things here. I can't lose. Either I am seen as repugnant, and thus validate my self-hatred. Or I am judged pathetic, proving my worthlessness. Either way, I don't have to come back to earth.

what should I do? Drop this shit, just forget it, and belabor it no more? Maybe it does me some good. It has come back now, more than ever before—maybe I'm ready for the next stage. Maybe it does somebody else some good; hell, those terrified of peeking into their own coin-purse of emotion, must be glued to the garish explorations I post here, with my heart and its contents spread like cheap pate over all the Web.

it's just that I ran out of time. I wanted to say more; I wanted to tell you more about his gentleness, and his silent fear; about his promiscuity and his hidden heart-rending need, and the boundary between them which I know he secretly wanted me to cross—which I really did want to cross (didn't I?). And about the really beautiful one who was always waiting just outside our embraces, always near—but apart from—our manic passion. It was the lonely, terrified, needful person in Bobby that compelled him to seek me out, and the needful one who waited for acknowledgment and love, standing silent and invisible, by our side, 'til we were done. Every time, I wanted to say more, and I meant to. But I ran out of time.

Last night, I wanted to say that I feel guilty. Not for what we did. No, not at all. But for what I did not do. For the distance I kept from the screaming tragedy below, both his and mine, as I floated by. As we both floated by; I believe Bobby had been raped as a small boy, just like me.

I wanted, I wanted, I wanted; wah, wah, wah. I have never wanted to kiss the axle of a tractor-trailer moving 60 miles an hour, or place my cheek against its wailing, spinning tread. I have never wanted to brutalize this God damn body so specifically as that; to crush bones like my pelvis or my skull, and to press to bursting hollow organs, like my heart.

And I have never wanted to confront fanatic angry intolerance; not in myself or in anyone else; not thirteen years ago, and especially not in those people—the vague relatives, neither father nor mother—who raised Bobby. I felt guilty, then, for failing to confront the hatred (and God knows what else) in his home, as if it would have helped. As if barging into the triple-decker where Bobby lived to tell them that Bobby was sweet, and tender, and scared to death, would have mattered; as if it might have helped to announce to them that Bobby made me feel wonderful, just because I mattered a tiny bit in the life of a beautiful young man who wanted me to care. As if they would have listened, had I said, "You shouldn't hate the boy, he needs your love and approval, desperately, not sex with me in the bushes. Can't you see, he's terrified and hiding, and hates himself because you taught him to?" As if I could have known any of these things based only on the sight of his house, and the glimpses I had of the angry people who lived there, and the rare fear-filled references Bobby made to them, and the desperately demeaning behavior we shared.

And when, inevitably, they would ask with suspicion, why it should matter to me—an ex-fire fighter ten years older than Bobby, working at the homeless shelter next door—I'd announce, "Well, um, ..because it's right, and caring and human and nurturing and I have NOT sucked his dick!"

for the record, Bobby killed himself by diving under a tractor-trailer on an Interstate Highway in 1989. I had not seen him in over a year. I can only speculate, but I know Bobby's behavior—a more intense version of my own; a promiscuity designed to culminate in death—almost certainly made him HIV positive before his death, and I believe he discovered his status before he chose to die. Despite his almost daily unsafe encounters, Bobby did not want to die, and that is a contradiction common among raped boys. But the AIDS hysteria in 1989 and the stigmatization it created, combined with Bobby's brutally negative self-conception, led him to see his future as overwhelmingly hopeless, loveless, and filled with even more pain than his youth.

I just wish he wasn't gone, and I wonder what kind of person he would have become... Which makes me look at everyone today a little differently, with a little less lust and a lot more compassion; with a little less interest in what I want and a little more concern for what you might need—say, at the end of a decades-long flight over your tragedy. Also, it makes me think a little more seriously about touching down, and finally coming back to earth.

This year, Bobby would be 31. I could be helping him get back on the ground (or he could be helping me), or we might have no contact at all. But his life would be getting a little better every day. Don't give up.

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