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.

Gobble, Gobble

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. More than sixty relatives, all dressed in matching t-shirts specially designed for the occasion, brown with an orange cornucopia & brown lettering, will gather in my youngest aunt’s white Colonial Revival house. I thought the t-shirt idea stupid but knew enough not to say so. I expressed my opposition by ordering a large child-sized shirt rather than the small adult-sized shirt my aunts were pushing.

You’d likely not guess it, but I’m a real sucker for Thanksgiving. I can be quite the glutton when the occasion dictates. And I’m not above wanting to feel like I belong – especially if the group is raucous & rollicking. And my family is. I’m even working on a Thanksgiving poem. It includes ruminations on the ending of Blood Meridian, about which I’ve been thinking a lot since receiving an email from my friend BD on the subject, so I doubt that when (or if) it’s finished it will become part of anyone’s holiday vernacular.

Marathon

I volunteered on behalf of, & voted for, Barack Obama. However, I’ve spent the majority of his presidency miffed due to his so far abysmal record on Gay Rights. What of the rapid repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell & the Defense of Marriage Act? Would the anti-hate crimes legislation named for Matthew Shepard continue to flounder & sputter? How long, in this era of ‘Yes We Can,’ would justice for GLBT community continue to be delayed & denied?

Last night, purely by chance, I came across Obama’s keynote address at the Human Rights Campaign’s annual dinner. And in the course of that speech, fifteen minutes tops, all of my anger was assuaged. Though imperfect, President Obama is the best advocate the GLBT community has ever had in the White House – & that isn’t the same as saying he sweats less than any fat girl with whom we’ve ever danced. His sincere commitment to equality hasn’t waiver as evidenced by his announcement that, after ten years, the Matthew Shepard Act had garnered enough support in the Senate to pass, & that he would soon sign it into law. Still our progress in correcting searing injustices has been incremental & more piecemeal than it seemed to him it would be, during halcyon days on the campaign trail.

But the world economy fell off a cliff. And health care reform has come to resemble trench warfare. Add Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq & worldwide terror cells to the mix & I ‘d bet my testicles (of which I’m inordinately fond) Obama gets to bed much later than his predecessor’s 9:30. Being gay doesn’t inoculate me from these concerns. And they aren’t excuses for inactivity, but the reality of life in the 21st Century.

The GLBT community has had great success in its fight for recognition, equality & acceptance, but hundreds of thousands of good people remain unconvinced. If granted the power, my entire family (save a handful) wouldn’t think twice about de-gaying me. Not out of a lack of love but due to excessive judgment & a dearth of understanding. These same people would also cut anyone who wanted to do me harm. There’s no rhyme or reason.

So, in recognizing that he has a lot on his plate & that nothing of merit can be achieved without the efforts of a large group of like minded elected officials, I’m extending the olive branch to President Obama.

ii

Still, color me gob smacked that, in a year of a record number of nominees (205), President Obama won the 2009 Noble Peace Prize. The Peace Prize, unlike T-ball trophies, isn’t an aspirational award. It ought be awarded following a sustained period of actual achievement. The nomination process closed just two weeks after Obama’s inauguration – barely enough time for him to become fully familiar with all of the toilets & exits in the White House, much less do anything to warrant this honor. Had Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination & the general election, it’s likely she would have won the 2009 Noble Peace Prize, the peculiar bestowal of which rebukes George Bush’s presidency rather than lauds Obama’s.

But as only the third African-American & third sitting president to be named a Noble Peace Laureate, I guess pulling a Marlon Brandon, who declined his 1973 Best-Actor Academy Award, wasn’t feasible.

One Need in the Night

During U2’s concert at Carter-Finley Stadium, in Raleigh, on 3 October 2009, I’m scheduled to man a booth for the ONE campaign. ONE aims to end global poverty; I added my name to one of their online petitions two (?) years ago. On Thursday, I answered their call for volunteers, never anticipating I’d be one of the 100 selected. On further reflection, they likely received but 100 volunteers (if 100). And now, I’m fucked – forced to concoct an emergency to get myself out of a snare I could have ( so easily) avoided.

I’ve not given U2 much consideration since I was a senior in high school. They released Achtung Baby on 19 November 1991, I bought the cassette during Thanksgiving vacation & listened to it with the same concentration & commitment an OCD germaphobe devotes to hand washing. “Love Is Blindness,” "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World,” "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses," "Until the End of the World," & especially “One” were my favorite tracks.

Weekends I’d bum rides to a town several towns over & attend parties frequented by skate punks. Parties not without narcotics & (often-warm) purloined hooch. In his pool house, for several consecutive weekends, this kid featured a local band. Young, to-varying-degrees-affluent-&-disgruntled, they performed their own loud maudlin songs plus three covers: “Jane Says,” “Driver 8,” & “One.” During the covers, (seemingly) the entire party moved as one cohesive organism. First, forward – as close to the makeshift stage without breaching it & then left & right – surrounding it.

We raised our arms. We sang along. We danced – or what passes for dancing when it is very dark & one is very young & all true transgressions lie far ahead.

Jubilee

I’ve just watched Gay Sex in the 70s, a documentary of NYC gay life & culture between the Stonewall Riots of 1969 & the onset of the AIDS-era in the early 1980s. Beyond the sheer depth & breadth of sexual activity, the mentality of the time was most edifying. The shackles were loosed, the stone rolled away from cave’s mouth & in poured sunlight, freedom & hardcore man-on-man love. Even decades & a technological revolution removed from the period, wisps of joy circulated within & emanated from the men interviewed about their halcyon days of youth. They all seemed so liberated.

Watching the film, I became a little envious. Not of butt fucking a stranger on an abandoned dilapidating peer or a dank dark semi truck trailer – I’ve come plenty close to that – rather of the joy. It's residue & repercussions.

I love nothing more than writing poems, more so than ever before (including the fevered reckless period during which I wrote my first book). And, these days, I’m better at it. Still my poetry lacks some essential expression. I’ve given joy – the acknowledgement & expression of – short shrift. I’ve been less given to praise than I ought be. I don’t know how best to speak of joy without falling prey to sentimentality. The words required are less familiar & comfortable. So I avoid them altogether. I resolve to change.

I’ll always be more glass-half-empty than Pollyanna, but perhaps the glass will (sometimes) contain chocolate soy milk or Luna & Larry’s Coconut Bliss Chocolate Hazelnut Fudge. Joyful or not, I remain lactose intolerant.

A Promise of Tomorrows

I wanted to write something about The Diving Bell & the Butterfly, Grey Gardens – the original documentary & the Emmy-winning adaptation starring Jessica Lange & Drew Barrymore – & (unscientifically of course) the various & varying manifestations of locked-in syndrome.

But when I sat down at my desk, all I came to me was: I was never led to believe that when I grew up, I could be anything I wanted to be. I don’t recall references to any future save the immediate future – seven to ten days (then) hence. Our present was too uncertain.

I remain (somewhat) long-range averse & am most comfortable with negative (personal) projections & speculation.

I’m trying to resuscitate my life: a job & a clean well-lighted place in New York. But my belief in the possibility of such resuscitation waivers. I fear my talents are irrelevant. That there’s no word for people like me in today’s lexicon. KW – hot, bow-legged, wise (& oddly single) – assures me that mine is the fear of inexperience. And that it will pass.

I’ve crossed my fingers.

And The Winner Is?

So, I spent the past 183 minutes watching the 61st annual prime-time Emmy Awards telecast & its associated commercials. A total fool’s errand considering of the nominated shows & performances, I was familiar with perhaps four. Ten tops. While I was pleased to see Glenn Close, Toni Collette, Bryan Cranston & 30 Rock win, I watched because I’m a sucker for almost any awards show – I draw the line at the ESPYs – & I’ve had more than one erotic dream of late in which Simon Baker & Aaron Paul have featured very prominently.

What impressed me most about the long-winded-but-deftly-hosted shindig was the depth & breadth of its whiteness. And not just in terms of one-screen talent, that’s something with which I’m wholly familiar, but also behind the camera – the writers’ rooms in particular.

As a writer, I’m most concerned with the plight of (& employment opportunities for) writers. But for the collective crews of 30 Rock & The Daily Show with Jon Stewart nary a writer of any color would have basked in, what was at best, reflected glory. In fact, unless I missed someone while taking a piss around the 98-minute mark & again at the 160th, all of the nominated writers were white. And mostly male.

Are colored people un-funny? Are they not-serious? And therefore lack the necessaries needed to write scripted comedies, dramas & mini-series?

Are white folks really the very best at everything?

And what's a blue-black writer like me to do?

Watch less television?