Parcel

Of these things there’s little dispute: she was enraged; she threatened a woman (a friend? a confidant? a passerby?); she brandished two knives; she was shot & killed by Harlem police officers, one of whom emptied his gun; she walked with a cane; she was a lesbian; she was homeless; she was mentally ill; she was my father’s first cousin. And because her mother said I don’t want that shit in my apartment, I’ll carry her ashes back to NC in my suitcase, when I visit my family come Thanksgiving.

JUST NOW

I suffer from non-site-specific restlessness & after sitting for two hours in front of my computer, unable to concentrate on anything other than gay sex sites, I decided to go for a walk. I walked west on East 5^th to Avenue C, north on C to East 12^th, and west on 12^th to Broadway & The Strand. There I bought Patti Smith's Just Kids, now out in paperback. I then waked north on Broadway to 14^th and east on 14^th to Trader Joe’s, where I sampled the chile spiced pineapples, before settling on my stand-bys: chile spiced mangoes & sesame honey cashews. Continuing east along 14^th, I missed the light at 2^nd Avenue & while I waited on the curb for the (north-bound?) traffic to stop, a man stepped close to my left side. However, he didn’t step as close to me as I’d anticipated & in stepping to my right to give him space, I overcompensated. So it seemed as if I’d jumped to my right to avoid standing next to him in particular – when I’d never really looked at him at all, I’d simply sensed someone walking up & stepped aside. Awkward. Very cold & very awkward. Waiting through a very long (north-bound?) green light. Having, on more than one occasion, watched in disbelief as people abruptly crossed the street, seemingly to avoid me, I was giving myself the business for having given this total stranger the impression that I wanted to be as far away from him as possible. And while I’m castigating myself, the man to my left, at whom I’ve, still, not really looked (but at whom I’d looked enough to know that he's white, bearded & likely younger than 30), takes two steps over until he is centimeters away from my left side & lays his head on my shoulder (close up, he smelled of alcohol &, if not homelessness, then certainly the street). And he kept it there until the light changed. At which point he stepped into the street & walked away.

I love New York.

THIS & THAT

Anomie or You Don't Win The Kentucky Derby With Mules

Yesterday, SB, a photographer friend who took the single best post-pubescent photograph of me, sent me an email part of which read: Making art is hard, eh? Yes. And lately, it has (also) felt like dialing my land-line from a cell phone, in the hope that someone will answer & tell me exactly what it is I need to hear, most. When, in fact, I live alone & the house is empty. No matter how I arrange them, the words are mine; I am their product. And I am the only revelation my writing can (or will ever) reveal. I am not a valid appraiser of my merits as a writer or a man.

For the past eight years, I have really loved my beard – its wisps of grey lend a dash of unkempt & butch gravitas to my narrow, contrary frame – but, suddenly, somehow I have developed beard fatigue. No matter my beard’s length, it is the wrong length & unsatisfactory. It is only because my clean-shaven face is even more unsatisfactory that I persist with the beard. Though I hope it will begin to grown on me, again, soon.

Survivalist Porn

I am (mildly) perturbed by the popularity of the castaway-themed reality programs: Survivorman, Man vs. Wild with Bear Grylls, Man, Woman, Wild & Survivorman. These shows, to which I collectively refer as Survivalist Porn, differ from the long-running Survivor in that they are not competition-based & do not offer a prize. Education is their purported purpose. Stranded in the Georgian (the former Soviet satellite not the Peach State) wilderness or on Motukitiu or a Scottish peat bog with only your pluck, a paper clip, a length of rope, a tin cup, a pocket knife & a camera crew? Here is your prescription for survival – assuming, of course, that the serious calamity that has left you stranded, also, has caused you no physical injury.

(I lack whatever muscle is necessary to find these programs anything but annoying. But then, I don’t enjoy, or do, a number of things that other perfectly reasonable people do & enjoy – like touching, tomatoes & driving. And I quite enjoy oddities like beets & flossing.)

Perhaps the lingering economic downturn & our stuttering, anemic recovery lend these shows their appeal. Perhaps the view of your neighbors’ foreclosed properties, from inside a home threatened by foreclosure, is best balanced by a manicured presentation of an even greater catastrophe.

Archival

Imagine that you’re sitting in a slightly shabby examination room, explaining to your best friend’s aunt, a nurse who has a daughter exactly your age, whom you’ve known since junior high, that for several weeks you’ve ignored your left testicle’s awful ache; that you’ve felt a periodic & stabbing pain in your taint; that it pains you to piss & (even more) to ejaculate; that your frangible, hard-won sleep is interrupted by multiple trips to the head.

So went my Monday morning.

There’s a scene in Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, during which the fur-wrapped doyenne gazes out of the back driver’s-side window of a limousine & confesses that life is mean. And it is (often unnecessarily so). But it’s also sly, tart & oddly pleasing.

Reprise

An old, favored sweater spared a spot in the toss pile, by a few well-placed stitches.

The push past nigglingly voracious doubts, toward goals writ on more than water.

A courting (& cultivation) of perspective & voice & audience.

Yes, when no, is more than sufficient.

Our deepest desire aims at transformation.

Tone-deafness & (Reactionary) Imprecision, Do Not A Racist Make

Given the current brouhaha over his comments concerning, then candidate, Obama’s light-skinned appeal & lack of ‘Negro dialect’, Senator Reid likely can’t wait for the nation’s attention to turn, again, to the contentious business of reconciling the Senate’s health care legislation with the bill passed by the House.

While Reid’s use of ‘Negro’ (a term often deployed by my grandmother in response to my more fanciful requests: Grandma, may I have $20? Negro, please.) was no doubt tone-deaf & more than a little reactionary, it wasn’t racist. Racism is a mortal offense that requires more than insensitivity & imprecision. And how duplicitous is it of Republicans, the party of ‘Barack the Magic Negro’, to call for Reid’s resignation? Furthermore, I agree with the senator’s assertions, if not their articulation. I believe, as I believe myself to be 5’10.5”, & 131.7lbs when buck naked, that if Obama were as dark-skinned as I am or married to anyone other than a black woman, he never would have been elected to the Illinois senate. Much less, the presidency. Reid shared a hoary, ugly, poorly-kept secret.

Would that all my fellow citizens maintained deep, abiding multi-racial (gender, sexuality) friendships. For while such relationships aren’t without mysteries & their attendant misunderstandings, they afford an authentic & safe space for dialogue. Instead, & all too often, we have classmates & colleagues, about whom we know next to nothing, & we err in assuming that their experiences are identical, or wholly antithetical, to our own.

Recently, the, white, ex-boyfriend of a, black, friend asked me if ‘African-American’ & ‘black’ were inter-changeable & if not, why. It was one of the best questioned I’d been asked in some time.

Christmas Miscellanies

It's the Monday before Christmas & my disbelief in Santa & sugar-plumb fairies has been displaced by a waning faith in President Obama & the Democrats in Congress. An escalation of our war effort in Afghanistan all without evidence of any coherent strategy that doesn't smell of malarkey & double-speak; haphazard (& potentially worse than the devil we now know) health care legislation; toothless financial regulation legislation -we continue to genuflect before the Titans of Wall Street & Big Business. 'Round & 'round we go.

*************************

It's now the Monday after Christmas. I'm again alone in AB's apartment in Chapel Hill after spending Thursday through Sunday afternoon safe in the bosom of RM's family. Last Christmas, my only wish was to be elsewhere when the holiday rolled around again. That wish was granted. And not in the manner, or location, that I'd imagined but sometimes we are the beneficiaries of gifts which exceed our limited imaginings.

*************************

Vic Chesnutt , a singer-songwriter whose music I love & admire, died on Christmas after having taken an overdose of muscle relaxants earlier in the week. Such suicides open little fissures that were long ago filled in & smoothed over. The notion of death by my own hand seems (only) minutely less impossible. I too have lingering chronic lingering health issues - though of a nature & severity different than Chesnutt's - & am without the means to have them adequately addressed. I often feel burdensome, irresolute. If all of this proved after all to be both too little & too much for Vic Chesnutt perhaps I'm simply wasting my time.

************************

At 35.5, I've still no access to the normative meaning in (& for) my life. If such a thing even exists.

Chapel Hill

With walls so thin I can hear the upstairs neighbors snore & fuck, this apartment isn't conducive to sleep or secrets: (Once) I fancied myself a contender.

Odd that I should consider weeks of isolation in an absent friend's apartment, in a city with which I'm largely unfamiliar (a city best traversed by car, despite its bus system) a curative to my quotidian loneliness. Funny the comforts one can find in the margins of someone else's failing life.

I'm exhausted (& bored) by my rampant insecurities.

I can't return to my old life. Any of them.