the scene of a stratagem

Yawning into his fist

2007-02-12T20:30:00.000-08:00

This afternoon I took off work early and walked down the street to see my therapist. I'm not sure what pseudonym I'll make for him.

Things have been going well, I think. Better. A couple weeks ago I upped my dosage and added in a low dosage of neurontin for the evenings.

Immediate affect: decreased libido, which is all for the better.

I never thought it would be this hard.

I thought that the medication would kick and suddenly I'd want to go to the gym. I'd want to be social. I'd want to make love to you like old times.

Instead, everyone just hovers on by past me.

It's so incredibly easy to spend a whole week or a whole weekend indoors. I'm not cruising for sex but I'm not really doing anything much. Playing Star Wars Battlefront. Reading blogs. Watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Downloading obscure films like Tarnation and ripping copies out of my Netflix queue. Thank god for Netflix in this low cold doldrum of a winter, depressed, nothing really going right.

We talked about it today...how much work it is. To force myself to get off my ass and go to the gym, to not fall asleep. To stay healthy. To pick up the goddamn phone and call a friend and say hello. I know this might sound hard to believe, but I can't begin to tell you how incredibly painful and exhausting it is to even begin to think about calling you and catching up.

I can get up in the morning, go to the bus, put in a good eight hours at work, correspond and call authors, make presentations to colleagues, plan, juggle projects, line edit next season's trade titles.

But when I get home at the end of the day and I think about the fact that we haven't spoken in several weeks...I get a headache, my eyeballs hurt, my shoulders clench up. I'd rather slink away under a blanket on the couch then admit, outloud, again, what I am dealing with.

Today was the day I came the closest to crying in my therapist's office, though that has never happened and even today I was massively incontrol. But I began to get so tired of this shit months ago, and here are still spinning our wheels.

I have begun to forget how I was, how I used to be...you know, the happy Darling Daintyfoot. I did some incredibly happy things, oh let me tell you, and loved...and moved in so many circles and had a bright future.

I am resting on a siding now. Rusting.

Do you actually feel?

2007-02-06T07:38:00.000-08:00

Last night I sat around in my apartment and contemplated going to the orgy.

There's this regularly-occuring orgy in some far-flung suburb , hidden on some nondescript frontage road behind the facade of a banal, camouflaged condominium development.

The temperature was -10 below zero.

I also thought about going to the gym and instead I did neither. I ate dinner. Twirled in front of a mirror, naked, to find the angel at which I look the thinnest.

Stared out the window at traffic.

Before going on antidepressants, I'd spent a night like this in front of the computer, cruising the online hook up sites for sex, looking at porn, hitting poppers now and then, jerking off for hours and hours until my nose was raw and it was three in the morning and I had nothing left; then finally my dick would leach something out of my body, somethine week and zygotic.

Nowadays, on medication, I spend those sorts of evenings eating chocolate-covered raisins, drinking lemonade, and playing Star Wars Battlefront.

This morning while showering I asked myself whether this was an improvement or not. I think it is.

Having poured a stiff one...

2007-01-30T18:43:00.000-08:00

I feel like I'm talking to myself here. The handful of readers I had have likely dissipated. It's been months after all. And rather then send out a search party of lanterns and hound dogs, this is the internet, where people simply drift away.

It's been four days now since we switched up my meds and I'm feeling a little bit better. That was a tough month. What my therapist called "a major depressive episode." I just thought it was boring...a few weeks in the dead of winter when I'd rather put on my pajamas at six pm and watch Aqua Teen Hunger Force (thank you, BitTorrent!) than do anything resembling human interaction.

Tomorrow the dosage gets upped 50mg more. We'll see what does. Hopefully I make it through this one without being hit by a car (the pavement sometimes looks so pretty, is so mesmerizing, when you are speeding on antidepressants).

This is really starting to get old. I can feel it in my bones, the diagnosis, putting its roots down. I don't want this thing to define me. I don't want that at all. But yet I feel it slowly happening. Beyond and before me it seems to stretch, like a new tint to the sun or a fleck in your eye, a death in the family, a hall that's collapsed on your shoulders.

Sorta thinking

2007-01-27T10:48:00.000-08:00

I forgot all about you.

I kinda moved on.

This summer I spent at the river, doing poppers, barebacking latinos who barely spoke English born on this or that side of the border who would then follow me back to my upscale tony neighborhood and cry outside my window while I would be crying inside the window, wishing for them to leave...

Finally, I dragged my aching body and its night sweats to a psychiatrist and to a doctor...while I didn't have acute HIV infection, I did have severe clinical depression.

Medications were prescribed which knifed my libido in the back.

Several months later now, I have no idea what is happening. I can't give a shit about you and your boyfriend, or about my dad in the hospital, probably dying.

I want nothing more than to smoke some pot and lay on the couch watching Drawn Together or Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which I have pirated off the internet via BitTorrent sites and burned onto DVDs using Popcorn.

It's occurred to me that perhaps I should aim a bit higher. Go back to the therapist and see the psychiatrist about changing medications.

So here we go again.

It's also occured to me that I can't talk about this on my main blog where all my friends and colleagues follow my every word. I gotta come back to this here, my little secret.

This secret blog has become part of my stratagem again. We'll see how long it lasts.

Anyone who ever thought they could love me or my words, please come back and send me an html kiss.

I'll be back later to fill you in on things...

Vodka sour, please...

2007-01-27T10:27:00.000-08:00

Pour me a stiff one, I may need to bring this one back...

convalescing

2006-05-19T07:34:00.000-07:00

I am going away for a while. I am visiting some other cities, on the coast. Just going to hang out and write a bit, maybe buy you some presents.

Please be tender when you cut me down

2006-05-16T20:33:00.000-07:00

The most beautiful line ever.

From Viewpoints on Asphyxiophilia...

PLEASE BE TENDER WHEN YOU CUT ME DOWN
by Knud Romer Joergensen, Copyright 1995

An elderly, naked man, hands and genitals tied up, hanged. Autoerotic fatalities entered medical literature, when the german doctor Bernt took a special interest in this case in his paper on suicides (1821). But he reached the wrong conclusion and mistook it for a suicide with an insane twist. It took another century before attention was paid to the sexual aspects of such death scenarios. Again, it was a german forensic, Ziemke, who in 1926 finally identified and consistently described these cases as accidental deaths caused by strangulation as a means to sexual arousal.

1. The upright hangman

In the times of public executions it was common knowledge that hangings occasionally provoked erection and ejaculation. This reflex is probably caused by the snapping of the spine, but it could easily be misinterpreted as a sign of sexual pleasure. An engraving by Duumlrer shows a torture chamber filled with skeletons in chains, a hanged man ejaculating, and another being whipped. There are a number of references in 18th century literature. The most prominent is found in Marquis de Sade's "Justine" (1791), where Thirhse helps Roland achieve an orgasm by hanging him briefly. Afterwards, he exclaims: "Oh, Thirhse! Oh, these feelings are undescribable! They exceed everything!"

Orgasm in French is called le petit mort or the little death.

From WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE LIFE KILLS YOUR ASS:

My goal is to get off and escape without passing out and dying, all the while cutting the edge closer, chasing the fear and aiding the "suspension of disbelief". Sometimes my imagination beats my body there, and it's a quick, intense orgasm, but sometimes it's more laborious, requiring great effort, to achieve the drenched, exhausted, depleted, soul satisfying satiation I'm after.

Doing yourself is about selfishness. It's about control over timing, sensation, fantasy, intensity, all without apology or guilt. It's about needs and fears. The need to take our physical body where we found pleasure as youths (with or without the unhealthy psychological baggage). The fear of inability to articulate our desires to a partner. The fear of their physical (in)ability to comply (God, if tops could only read minds!). The fear of being judged and then rejected. It's about chasing emotions, sensations, fantasies, intensities, taboo's, and creating a context that allows suspension of disbelief long enough to orgasm.

Getting close to panic and death excites me. At ages 5, 7, & 12, I experienced near drownings and became fascinated with pre-panic breath deprivation. My mother was a religious zealot, and when she caught me masturbating at an early age, told me "God kills masturbators". Self gratification equals death. Well, during my early teens I negotiated with God nightly, "I promise this will be the last time I beat off if you'll just will let me live...no, really". It's easy to see why death stole my imagination. If you fear something enough, and tease it often without penalty, you may become an expert at chasing it. I'm talented with mechanical devices and possess self-control, which allows me to cut the edge close while lowering my actual risk factor. As Dirty Harry said "a man's got to know his limitations". Do I want to die? No. I want to live so I can keep pursuing the pleasures I get from stalking death's intensity. I'm as insane as any other danger seeker, from an Evil Kinevil wanna-be, to a cop, fireman, or soldier, but my motives are easier to understand, self-gratification.

When death seems inevitable, quickly approaching, when we know escape has been taken away, no stopping the inevitable machinations of our demise, we reject resignation. We fight with commitment and unsuspected strength, for in that fight we find our reward. We are never more awake, more alert, more alive than in the battle with death. Panic awakens us to all that is life. In panic, we bloom, there is no monotony or routine. "Embrace fear" is our mantra. Each time we win the combat, emptiness invades our soul, we wait, anxiously anticipating the next battle. If we're defeated, and die, we have no regrets, we've reaped the rewards of our bravery, and we've savored the extreme passions and intensities of our being. Recriminations, justifications and speculations will be left to those who have chosen a safer, more sedate existence. They are not "wrong" for their choice, nor are we for ours.

Life is not safe! Life is not benevolent! life is not consensual! There is only living what stretches out before us, honoring our chosen moral integrity, for in the end, when all is said and done, "life kills your ass".

"cutting the edge close." Love that.

"death stole my imagination."

"in panic, we bloom"

Autoerotic Asphyxiation

2006-05-16T10:27:00.000-07:00

I have been researching autoerotic asphyxiation for this movie I want to make which will be a lot better than that Ken Park bullshit. Since it conflicts with community standards here I had to download it and it was the most worthless piece of bittorrent bullshit.

As this website explains, autoerotic asphyxiation is one of the most bizzare of the paraphilias. The practice involves a precise collusion of suffocation and erotic stimulation, the point being that the brain freaks out in a spectacular fireworks of pleasure when confronted with both a lack of oxygen and an orgasm. Unfortunately, with the practice of self-hanging, much can go wrong and then your parents our your wife walks in and finds you dead with your pants around your ankles, a half-eaten lemon at your side, and maybe a ball-gag lolling on the floor.

What the fuck is up with this website? It catalogs the random online memorial websites of adolescents who have died and includes a lot of boys who have died of autoerotic asphyxiation.

The website links to the personal memorial sites for these boys. Like Jason below...I grabbed that photo of him with that Confederate flag off of the site his mother made for him. Jason was like, fourteen years old.

His mom gives us all some advice on what to watch out for:

Jason had gotten so he didnt want me to go in his room to put his clothes away the last few months he was alive, maybe a year. But I did anyway, but he would say "This is my room mom" and I thought that was just a teenage thing. I never went through his things, I had no reason to, I thought I knew everything he did, there weren't secrets I thought. But after he died, in a drawer in a dresser where he kept toys and baseball gloves, things like that, I found some things in his bottom drawer. T shirts with the bottom cut off, the bottom made into loops and some nylon ropes knotted into nooses. He was collecting military things and had bought a gas mask, I thought nothing of that, but now know he could have used it to shut off his oxygen, i dont know if he did, but he could have. So parents can look for ropes and soft things tied into knots and nooses. Jason didnt use plastic bags but that's another thing some kids use, or towels to pad the rope so marks wont show in their necks. Also the bloodshot eyes, maybe coming out of their room after a "nap" and being groggy acting, or marks on their necks, or wearing high collars. I didnt notice these last things, in fact there weren't obvious clues with Jason, just the things in his room in that drawer. Oh we had an extension rod on our shower, one evening when he was in the shower that fell, it never did before, now looking back he may have been pulling down on it. And he was wanting to stay home alot more lately, again, I thought because of his age, he had always wanted to go with me everywhere, he still did mostly but there were those times he wanted to stay home alone.

I like Stephen T. Connelly's the best. He was like 17 when he died and his parents put up this great website for him that includes a Dave Matthews Band song playing over and over again.

Stephen was a cute kid. I think there is a weird sort of fucked up collusion that occurs in the mind (that has to deal with both death and orgasm) in thinking of this normal, banal kid choking himself to death in his own closet.

These two dudes are just a couple of other randoms who hung themselves.

Bad Habit

2006-05-14T20:15:00.000-07:00

I have this bad habit wherein I am fascinated by my own blood. When I have a bloody nose or a cut I stand over a sink or something and watch it drip until it clots on its own.

Tell them anyway / and you can make it up / as yooooouuu GOOOOOO!!!!! / I'm already gone now / You were outside just waiting

2006-05-12T07:33:00.000-07:00

I just woke up. I'm sober again.

9 pm

We're in the middle of a spring chill. The heat just came on, setting the row of radiators in my apartment to clank and thump. Pouring rain all day, horizontal when it got windy.

After a happy hour for work at which I consumed two beers quickly, I came home, had another, and fell asleep while watching Midnight Cowboy.

I've been suffering from an annoying spring cold this week. As a result, I've been taking Lemsip before going to bed, which is this amazing powder you mix up in hot water to create a lovely and relaxing hot drink that makes you feel better when you are sick and immediately knocks you out. I smuggle these back from Britain whenever I go. The drink contains paracetemol which is a wonderful drug. Tastes so much better when you know it's come across the Atlantic.

The curious affect of the drink on me is like that of a fairy tale as I sleep...allegorical dreams flood my brainpan.

One dream stayed with me strongly all week long. I had this dream on Wednesday morning, just before waking.

First, some background. About two years ago I dated a boy, we'll call him The Coop Critic because that's the name Marcus Aurelius and I know him by. The Coop Critic was beautiful and smart and dashing but young. I fell in love with him and we dated for about a year and a half, and it was filled with mostly disappointments but in many ways was the most successful relationship of my life. I was finally with someone who I considered my equal. But he was kind of a jerk...no real surprises there...he was only 21, 22 when we dated. You can't ask much of people at that age. He had this hipster swagger and was fun at parties but lousy at emotions.

Anyway, I'm still a bit bitter. Usually you cut this person out of your life or they move to NYC to play dress-up and you never see them again and so do not notice that you are actually bitter. But with the Coop Critic (that's coop as in cooperative, by the way, because he is a green grocer at a local coop grocery store) I see him around and we try to be nice to each other but really I'm a bit bitter. I dream of cutting him down in public, of humiliating him, of hurting him.

About a year and a half ago he began dating this other guy, we'll call him Rush. We'll call him Rush because like Rush Limbaugh, our Rush is addicted to prescription medication. Rush is like me...same age, same body type. We look alike. But Rush is socially inept, pathological, insane, addicted to pills, often employed, and generally detested by polite society. Rightly so. The joke within our circles is that the Coop Critic definetely traded down. Their words, not mine.

So that's the background. And here's the dream...I am alone in a two-story farmhouse. It is a summer night, hot, breezy. You would say the atmosphere is pregnant. Charged with sexuality. Heat lightning. I am looking at myself in mirrors scattered around the rooms and just kind of wandering around. An erection presses against the front of my pants. There is nothing to do but wait for the storm to arrive.

There is a knock on the door.

I open the door and Rush is standing there.

Rush is wearing a white hoodie that is baggy. I can barely see his face, but the attractive features of his face emerge from the shadows of the hoodie.

At first I was shocked and annoyed and a little scared...for Rush can be a scary guy. I know he hates me. No one ever quite knows what he's going to do next. He has a habit of starting at you morbidly from across the room at a party. But here he is at my door.

He looks at me and tells me he's horny. I am looking down at him and he's wearing trackie pants like he's a fucking chav or something. He says he's been horny for me and he really wants to do it with me. He'll do anything I want as long as I don't tell the Coop Critic.

It flashes in my mind.

I don't really want to have sex with this monster.

But I want to hurt Brian.

The collusion of the two causes my erection to pulse.

Revenge is such a turn-on.

I bring him into my house and we make out. I feel his hardbody against mine. I kiss the hard line of his jaw and the stubble.

He pushes his erection against mind through our clothes and moans.

I am not going to be fucking him, but I am going to be fucking over the Coop Critic.

I woke up on the verge of coming, light streaming in the windows, time to hobble to work. I would love to fuck you Rush to hurt him...

Is my sociopathology so unique? Oh you guys are reading this and thinking what a horrible man I am but I know deep down such dreams are universal.

D and The Secret: rough draft of a section

2006-05-10T20:32:00.000-07:00

A few weeks later The Secret told D he wanted someone old enough to have forgotten being seventeen.

-----------

D had not quite forgotten everything. He remembered the sunsets the sulphur stacks produced in rings. Singles for Southport. The other boys emerged from their mews. Southport sunsets lasted as long as a North Pole. Sun and cider deranged them on the funfair's promenade. Glass lightbulbs burned sodiums in D's eyes, halved. Out to his left was the black hypothermia of the sea, silvering like a wet mirror.

He savved one- and two-pence coins all week to escape his family on the weekends. He sold little bird nests. Dipped his fingers into payphones. Dredged the bottom of his mother's purse.

Dad watched him from his green chair. His eyes looked like they could shoot poison darts if you stepped wrongly on the patterend lino. Could barely lift a hand. His flannels grew into his flesh like a tree will grow around obstructions.

He was shown once a fence post that had grown around a barbed wire fence. The action both proved the triumphalism of the tree as well as incorporated the barbed wire. The wire became a part of the tree, its interior. If you got to know it, fell in love with it, eventually you would have to reckon with the barbed wire.

Dad had few hobbies. He trainspotted. Erected fences for fun. Shot wild horses out of the trees. Mom trimmed his eyebrows in his sleep...

psychosociopath

2006-05-04T14:19:00.000-07:00

I realized this morning that I am a big fat sociopathic insane person or even a functioning schizophrenic and that my pathetic attempts to write were merely 'cover' so that I could say that my campaigns to fuck people over were merely in the name of ART. BUT really I just like sinking my teeeth into the flesh of innocent men and then shaking my head around violently until a hunk of jambon or shoulder muscle comes tearing off and then I run to the doghouse and rub my bloody muzzle in it.

Now that I have stopped writing and probably will never write again I'm just a bald-faced liar and a freak. You better watch out because I will make you fall in love with me and then we'll bareback and I'll put my cigarette out on your heart you worthless mortal.

Still though, I think I am an ubermensch.

Coda

2006-05-01T19:51:00.000-07:00

Coda coda coda.

Things are draining out of me. So humid and wet out today the whole world was a poultice. My brain is squeezing itself dry which is painful. I am licking the secretions from my knuckles, which are white from clenching. I vomitted up another pellet. This time tinted red-brown, robin red-breast, baby fox color, pipestone. Twigs that upon closer inspection were splintered bones, sucked clean of marrow. I peeled apart the pellet when it had dried and placed it on a clean white papertowel. Inside was a receipt from Chipotle, and written on the back of the receipt were these lines from Autobiography of Red:

Then he met Herakles and the kingdom of his life all shifted down a few notches.

They were two superior eels

at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.

...

Geryon was amazed at himself. He saw Herakles just about every day now.

The instant of nature

forming between them drained every drop from the walls of his life

leaving behind just ghosts

rustling like an old map...

...

Herakles lies like a piece of torn silk in the heat of the blue saying,

Geryon please...

I turned off the light and jerked off very quickly and then tried to sleep but I was grinding my teeth and thinking of cigarettes.

I woke up and turned on the light and just now I rolled my right thigh into the puddle of cum and had no idea what it was. I wiped the wetness from my thigh and brought it to my lips. As soon as it touched my lips I immediately thought of B. I would lick the cum off of his belly after sex, or he would deposit little pearls on my thigh as I roughly fucked him and he whispered out his peals like morse code against my shoulder in little bite marks.

I can't remember a good time, specifically, just a smear of something across the windshield that could have been at one point a lightning bug but you are driving to fast to have cupped it in your hands. We are fighting north of Sault Saint Marie. We are running out of gas. A meteor shower is happening in front of us, where the straight road ends at the edge of Canadian darkness.

Care of the Self / Killing him

2006-04-28T05:48:00.000-07:00

I think I may have excised the riverbottoms from me, at least for a while.

I had to kill a boy first, metaphorically of course, erase him, conquer him, place his mouth inside my pocket.

Last night I promised myself I wouldn't go there. Stop. Just stop. I went for a long run after work and then visited my friend Tom to have dinner and drink wine.

We sat on his porch and smoked and sipped wine and talked at Walter Benjamin and Goytisolo.

I excused myself at ten pm.

By 10:15 I was at the bottom of the city's deepest vein, stepping over trunks of fallen elms sinking into the sand, flotsam, no barges this time, the farther bank of smooth granular lime, lit up by the cloud cover, orange, that reflected the downtown city lights from four miles away back at us like a lens, the wind smelled like reeds, the water smelled like warm bathwater. I stood on the bank and let the river ignore me for a while.

At first the place seemed empty. Though the reason I go there: purgatory, suspension in a colloidal, brain-death. I walk around and smoke cigarettes, walk slowly, sit on limestone bluffs and watch the old men inch their ways along the inside edge of the scabbard of the river like decrepit mountain goats, kicking stones down at times to ting of the rocks; I imagine them deep up in the bank, licking drops of spring water. Once I came across a Native American, long black hair, naked from head to toe except for a pair of hiking boots, flogging his shaved cock and drawing deeply from a small bowl of amyl; he was being eaten alive by mosquitoes. Here was the Gay Savage, attacking from the tops of the rocks, his cock like a cougar.

Escape myself. Stop being me, and therefore forgot about the writing projects I'm not working on, the fact that I am alone, the fact that work is not going so well. I guess others drink alcohol, or do meth. I just walk around the river and occasionally have sex. Sex plays its various roles in this ritual: object to be searched for, method of erasing the self, and finally the switch, the petit mort that shuts off the ritual and allows me to become my banal self again. Here then is the progression....

Searching, wandering, smoking, patterns, for hours and hours. Reject and be rejected, watch but don't touch, suspend the feeling for as long as possible, do not look yourself in the eye.
Fill yourself with stimuli until you no longer exist. Cock in your face, inhale deeply, open your eyes wide, burn his imprint on your brain, mouth on your dick, suck down poppers until your brainpan blossoms into a throbbing bloodbath, the forehead breaks down, you are flowing into him and the river.
When it is all over you must go home to your boring life and look at the empty white pages again and shower. Sleep alone.

For the past week or so this process has become a pathological compulsion. I've dropped off the face of the earth. Every day exists for the river. I nap after work, wake as the sun begins to go down, have a bite to eat, and head to the river where I will stay until I am exhausted.

Edmund White sometimes told me similar stories about his youth, during the pillow talk we would have that always bored me to death. He worked for Time Magazine or some such publication in Manhattan, and his days were boring. He often only had to write one caption a day. He would go home, sleep for several hours. Wake near midnight, eat a tomato and some cottage cheese, and then go cruising all night long down at the piers.

I think of Hampstead Heath and Derek Jarman, the many hundreds of men that crowded the woods near Jack Straw's Castle on the warm summer nights and the entrepreneurs who would arrive and sell coffee, drugs, sandwiches.

For my own part, I have seen strange things these past few days. A small speedboat moored in the middle of the river playing loud rap music. A wild turkey. A crazy old man cackling loudly through the bushes and muttering over and over, "all the high class gays are in Florida..." and the potential queer bashers and the man, passed out on the beach, who I thought was dead but was really just very drunk and sleeping it off in the balmy sand of the beach, like a Robinson Crusoe, washed up from the wreckage of sex. Then, just the colors on the river, the sights of men fucking among driftwood, chipmunks, mallards fighting. The quotidian beauty--I can't ignore that part of it.

As well, there is the subtext of the game of power, of rejecting and being rejected, of manouvering yourself among these circulating men to end up with the configuration that best suits you, which for me always involves power...I need to reject a few guys, push their hands roughly off of me, ignore them flat out. Deadpan across their ugly, old fattie faces, snigger to myself as they stumble along the steep paths, or walk away from them across some treacherous crevasse, and the laugh to myself when they can't follow me.

Of course the same happens to me, I am rejected too, and when I am the slight burns on me like a brand, like a razor slash, eyes like talons, liver devoured. Branded, ashamed, the curtains fall away from the play and innerworkings are revealed, the ropes and pulleys of insecurity and fear and compulsion whose machinations drive me. Then, I must seek revenge.

Last Sunday I noticed a cute boy wandering around the cruising area. He was wearing a baggy hoodie that had emblazoned on it the name of the local Catholic private college and he was wearing workout pants that swished as he walked. He was impossibly cute, about 21 or 22 years old, thick head of hair. He looked...privileged. The private Catholic school attire, the nice haircut, the youth...he seemed out of the league of the men here, white, rich, straight. Of course I had to have him. I had to inflict some kind of imaginary violence on him. I followed him, cruised him, moved in for the kill, and his forearms crossed in front his crotch and barred me. I retreated, wandered around, the queer bashers followed me and I took to carrying a large stone in my pocket; eventually I hid from them and they left muttering about 'freaks.'

At the bottom of the stairs, this young boy and his short, older, black male companion, passed me and headed up the long flight of stairs that takes you up from the river bank to a wide plateau between the river and the street. I followed them, gathering that they were about to leave.

Instead, the young man went straight up to these two old fucks, pulled down his track bottoms, and shoved his dick into the coupling, adding a third node to the circuit of two, juiced by lube.

I joined them eventually, and we were joined by others, and still more, until this young man was the center of attention, mouths of his dick (including mine, after a rush of poppers) and he just stood there, shirt lifted up to armpits, expressionless face, pants around his ankles.

Eventually someone got me off--the death I had been avoiding/seeking. I couldn't stay or do anything more. I had to leave and go home, shower and sleep, rejoin the banal and unfulfilling routines of my life.

Woke up and biked to work, pushed some papers around.

Oh, made some dinner for myself, bought some crackers.

Listening to some new bands...

All in the back of my mind, the boy haunting me...how he rejected me only to hook up with those ugly, nasty old men, how his lube-covered cock tasted in my mouth, how he never reached out to touch me and get me off.

I obsessed over him...was this his first time at the river? Who was he? What was he studying at the private Catholic college? Was he out? Did he have a boyfriend? What was he doing right now with that beautiful body of his?

I kept going back to the river all this week seeking out my revenge for the slight, someone to fuck in the face.

Last night I was back at the river and there he was with his short black friend. They passed me, walking quickly along the path, and he quickly made a detour and doubled back to me. My body flushed with power. He was waiting for me now. I approached them both and they took out their cocks and I took out mine. He remained soft for the entire exchange, as though he was high on meth, even as the crowd grew around us his dick remained flaccid but elongated, slightly cold to the touch, as though it were rubber through which he pumped saline.

But he was mine--last night I killed him, controlled him, got what I wanted from him to make up for Sunday night and all the nights that have come before or since and all the failed daily routines as well that have nothing to do with sex or getting sucked off but they all come back to power, lack of control. He wanted me, he moved in to me, grabbed my dick and felt up my chest and I felt him up and touched his ass and it was wet with lube, I slipped fingers up his ass and he moaned and then I did it again and he moaned more and I looked deeply into his eyes and noticed the lines of his face, the flaws, I DEVOURED the flaws and they are burned on my memory, as are his eyes when he met mine, and the loosness of his ass, in which I swirled my fingers like you widen the hole of a soft fruit, COREING it like yoou would an apple. And my face kissing his neck and biting his ears and then us making out, his jaws unhinged like a toothless cobra, giving me access to everything in his mouth, my tongue swabbing his teeth and lips and gums, rubbing the roof of his mouth and pushing his tongue out of the way to crawl deep into the back of his throat, down his esophagus, depositing the poison pill.

Others took up positions behind his ass; I let them. I was interested in his face and I needed him to do something to really set the balance back to zero, to really make up for everything going wrong in my life, and that is I needed him to suck my cock. He pushed off guys trying to bareback him but let them rub their cocks in the crack of his ass and he grabbed an elm and bent over double and bit my nipple and I pushed his head down farther until it made contact with my cock and he began sucking it. I felt such TRIUMPH. Then again, he sucked it some more and some more and then I came...his black friend, who was now completely naked except for his shoes and getting fucked roughly by an old white dude, reached out his hand and grabbed the cum shooting out of my dick like he was collecting it. What did he do with it? put it in his mouth or on his dick or in his pocket? I left them, I left that boy with dude's faces in his ass, falling over against tree, I didn't need him anymore, he was dead to me. I stepped away, lit a cigarette. Ben called my cell phone and I answered, told him about a fun house party this Saturday night...

Barges

2006-04-27T09:19:00.000-07:00

Got home from work last night at six, immediately took a long nap. Woke up at 7:30, ate a banana, went out cruising at the river bottoms. No one around really, just fended off a few stragglers, sat on this log and smoked Camels and watched the barges ply the river. As they turned the corner their giant floodlights would alight the woods like the edge of a crime scene, like ground zero, and all the man sucking each other off were thrown into relief.

Got home at 11 pm, sexually frustrated, dick untouched, and jerked off. After I came I tried to sleep but couldn't. Got up and jerked off again.

Felt like Edmund White, or Huckleberry Finn, or this guy.

Recent phone sex acquisitions

2006-04-26T08:54:00.000-07:00

This is Bjorn. He said he was originally from Scandinavia but for some reason is living in a Midwest red state. He did write in broken English to me, but that can be easily faked, as can this photo, which is so obviously not a Scandinavian boy and just look at that hair, so 1994. The grainy webcam quality of the image and the cheap pressboard in the background speaks of trailer-park faggotry and Fantastic Sam's two-dollah hair cut and the bitch said he was a top. He asked for my number so I gave him the phone number for the Tampa Police Department and told him to call in five minutes because I had to go get my dildo out of my older brother's bedroom and I also needed to do another bump. After about five minutes he started messaging me again and he was fire pissed. Said he was going to track me down and kill my muthfuckin faggot ass. I just LOLed at him a lot and then hit 'ignore.' I fucking hate Scandinavians.

Speaking of meth, while I was online someone from my hometown messaged me. Said he was high on meth and that his boyfriend was gone for a few days and even with his boyfriend there the dude doesn't get fucked enough and right now he just wanted a big fat dick in his hole. He sent me his photo and said he was the guy on the right. So we chatted a little bit. I said, 'you look like you like meth' and he took that as a compliment. He said he worked at the SuperAmerica near my apartment. So, let's meet up boy and I'll fuck your tight little boypussy I said and he was like, I'll bike down. We agreed to meet at this intersection at a bus stop beside a laundromat. I arrived early and sat across the street on this picnic tables outside a coffeeshop and I read a new age publication they distribute for free around town. I was reading about crystals when the dude shows up at the bus stop on his bike. He had brunette hair and was really scruffy. Maybe the photo was him from about four years ago but he looked like hell now. The meth had really carved holes in his face or maybe just the tears had eroded out his cheeks and the skin just hung on them like scruffy animal pelts. I got up and nonchalantly walked away. Now my friends and I go into SuperAmerica to buy cigarettes and they're all like, "which one is the methhead bottom boy" and I'll point to him behind the counter and say, "there's the bottom faggot." I was using a fake pic anyway so he never recognizes me.

On location

2006-04-25T12:47:00.000-07:00

This post over at Land of the Bat reminds me of last Sunday*. I was on a giagantic bike ride and after about twenty miles or so I was parched. The city had not yet turned on the municipal drinking fountains. I bought some Gatorade and chugged it while walking around the cruising area in that one spot of the river bottoms. No leaves on the trees yet and with the bright hot sun it was like this arid desert, an elephant graveyard, and all the guys were just kind of wandering around in the bare sun and totally exposed.

I met this cute boy named Angel. He was latino, born in Texas but grew up in Mexico. Said he was bi and invited me to his friend's pool this summer.

We found a secluded spot and he was feeling me up. He said he had just come from work at a bindery and his crotch was smelly so he wouldn't let me take his dick out.

He was sucking me and we heard a crashing in the brush and he jumped up quickly but it was only a wild turkey lumbering around.

He was going down on me again when we heard more noises, only this time it was a big fat man wearing a tiny black bikini brief walking barefoot along the wet sand at the edge of the water, wildly scanning the opposite shore.

Angel gave me his phone number and made me promise to call him.

*except mine really happened

Bar close

2006-04-25T00:17:00.000-07:00

It's after two am, and I really should be in bed.

The bars are closing, and through the open windows I hear people shouting in each other's ears as they walk down the sidewalks.

Not that anyone is listening.

I'm just typing to myself.

Sometimes I go through these periods where I feel like my life is completely out of control.

Like there is this dynamo inside me, a strange machine. And when it gets switched on (the location of the switch is mysterious, and constantly changing) then I'm powerless to switch it off and I just have to go along for the ride until the turbines wind down the ironworks grind to a halt.

Then I might have a few days' respite.

It's fueled by porn and poppers.

Often it's like revving a car and spinning the wheels with the clutch out--gears grind away and produce a smell of distressed metal.

This weekend I let the machine carry me to the riverbottoms, where the men go to cruise. I was there on Saturday night for about four hours, on Sunday afternoon for about two hours, and on Sunday night for about two hours.

It just felt so good.

So anonymous.

It was the good old times.

Like when I used to spend hours in that park in London, cruising...all night long sometimes.

Just wandering in circles, smoking cigarettes.

Hours and hours.

Not that I would actually orgasm--that's saved for the end. The bottle of poppers, until the last cigarette has been smoked.

Nah, it's just in the wandering, circulating, exhausting my body, running it down the drain until I am forced to cum and then fall into bed, freshly showered, my lower back aching, my lungs ashed, my nose flaming from the amyl, my dick a bit raw.

Someone please castrate me.

Je suis geryon

2006-04-24T08:34:00.000-07:00

I just discovered that I write exactly like Anne Carson. Not her practice per se which includes a house stripped of furniture in Michigan and a summer off from teaching.

But read Autobiography of Red and you'll see what I mean.

Learned about the nesting rooms of the world at an early stage.

His mother left him at the doors of the school bus, that opened like those of silently-still observed clams at low tide.

From then on, the ride to school and the walk to the front doors, he was alone.

He wasn't stupid; he knew to stay silent.

It was early fall and as he walked toward the school the summer before turned red in his mind, and then brown like a leaf that is melting under frost.

The optics of the school--the windows--through them he saw the struggles of children fighting over paste.

He kept his hands in his pockets and took one last look at the world around him before entering school. Miles of blackboards stretched down the road where they had been planted in their wooden legs in cement and the wind caused some of them on looser spigots to twirl like windmills, revealing logical fallacies on the opposite sides as they blew in circles. Then, further off, the fields of desks, as far as he could see, ending where a barn broke up into the horizo like a black scab, and some of the desks were glistening in the sun from the water that the automatic irrigation system had just passed over them in a wand that looked to him like fairy dust.

The giant legs of first graders came down among the rows and rows of desks, and their books fell like avalanches. The air grew ashy with dust and the smell of burning book-ink.

He entered the school, which had the affect of swinging back on a swingset so that the ground and sky switch places and one experiences the vertigo of the little birds who fly to high toward the sun--the rooms were carpeted in moss and empty of people. He walked toward a stream flowing down the hall, his crawfish bucket in his hand...

Speech

2006-04-22T08:22:00.000-07:00

Jacques Nolot in Porn Theatre. He is a gay man chatting with the woman who takes tickets for the porno theater in Paris:

no one wants to hear what you dreamt about unless you dreamt about them

2006-04-19T05:55:00.000-07:00

I slept incredibly well last night because the suburban boy came over and we fucked a couple times on my bed. Kid's so fucking precocious I can't believe it. He works at a tanning salon and is going to get me a free unlimited month-long pass, natch.

Probably because I was thinking about highschool as I fell asleep (and what I pussy I was in highschool) I had this fucked-up dream.

The dream took place in this giant hotel/convention center kind of a place, perhaps a rearticulation of the choir trips I'd go on as a highschool kid, you know, to other cities in the spring, staying at large hotels and riding elevators around, smoking pot out of pop cans, kids mostly unsupervised, fucking each other but never me.

Three bullies bullied me in an elevator. And weirdest of all in the dream, one of the bullies, the hottest one (though he didn't look like anyone I knew, just a kind of skinny hick with a mean, sharp face and short blond hair) took a shit in the elevator. In the dream I got scared, you know, its intimidating when someone takes a shit in the elevator you are riding in. All the boys laughed at him and at me, the smell filled the small carriage and made me want to puke. The boy took a piece of paper towel from his pocket and wiped his ass and the doors opened and we all exited, me quickly, ahead of the boys. The boy who shit ran up in front of me with the shitty paper towel and tried to hold it in front of my face and this is when the fantasy set in, because I grabbed his arm and twisted it and took the paper towel and shoved it in his fucking mouth. I shoved his own shitty ass-towel in his mouth.

I gained their respect after that. And rather than retaliate, the boy became this little submissive bitch around me. Like, later on we had a conversation where he called me a name and I said, "how did your own shit taste, you fucker?" and then I was like, "maybe I should kick your ass again," and he quickly replied, "maybe you should fuck it?" and in my dream-mind I was like, ooooh ya.

I woke up this morning with a big erection but I never got to fuck this elevator-shitter's shitty ass. At first I was disappointed as I frottaged with the bed after I hit the snooze alarm but then I remember...I fucked ass twice last night--for real! And I felt better.

2006-04-14T05:48:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I spent the last hour of work yesterday fine-tuning my email to Shy. Here's what I finally came up with:

> Hi Shy, > > > I hope this note finds you well and enjoying a nice spring. > > I know it's a ways away, but I'll be in town the week of May 22-28 > and I'd like to see you. Will you be around? > >... me
And guess what? He quickly replied saying he wants to hang out with me! Today, I'll spend several hours booking flights. It's a good day! Hot out, I'm waring capris, booking flights, half-day at work, and today is the day Jesus is killed! Hoorah.

flights of fancy

2006-04-13T11:06:00.000-07:00

I am totally crushing on a guy.

First, consider the unique alignment of events that have made this possible. A few weeks ago I moved into a new apartment; the move was precipitated by months and months of hellishly living in hellish living conditions. Construction all around me, deadbeat landlords fucking around, breaking the lease, and then the compounded stress of looking for a new apartment and then moving. I'm happy to say I'm in a great new apartment, thank you very much. But it came with a cost. Though distance-wise its the shortest I've ever had to move (four blocks) it's taken the longest amount of time...moving all my shit into a truck on one evening, leaving the truck parked out on the street containing my entire life for two nights, and then moving into my new place.

Also, consider that work has finally slackened off a little bit and I have some more mind-space available, now that work and moving aren't taking up too much room, to think about things.

Also consider that it is spring, and a boy tends to get randy at this time of year.

I dunno, it's about driving with the windows down, long hot afternoons napping and frottaging with the pillow, bare calves, skateboarders, body odors...I'm in lust with the world.

And I don't just want to do you, I want to hold you in my arms and make you pancakes and do you again and then take you out shopping and buy you furs and diamonds.

Back in March, I was out of town for work, attending panels and having meetings with prospective "clients." I had been email corresponding with this one guy, we'll call him Shy, because, well, he is. Shy and I had corresponded, shared some stories about living in the same town, studying in the same department, a few years apart, etc.

I met him in the hotel lobby--he looked cute, and was dressed down unlike everyone else, in a Belle & Sebastian t-shirt. We had serious business to discuss over our drink, and I asked him to recommend a place--any place other than the hotel bar. He had no ideas, so I casually asked, "do you want to go to the leather bar?"

He broke out in a smile and said that yes we would really like that, so we had our meeting at the leather bar, which was a riot, and actually we spent most of the time just getting to know each other. Soon after I started crushing on this boy, dimply, a little shorter than me, sharp as a tack and witty as well.

But he lives in NYC and I live here.

I keep thinking about him, and I know its flights of fancy that prompted me to massage my grapevine and get some dish on him...a friend of a friend casually asked him what he thought of me, and the answer I got back raised the hope that indeed, he may be crushing on me a little bit.

So what am I doing about it?

I'm booking a flight to New York City.

Not entirely a flight of fancy. I have a good friend in D.C. so I am going there first, and my best buddy, Marcus Aurelieus, lives in New York City, so I'll see him and stay with him and that's really why I'm going. But yeah, I'm totally going to email Shy and ask him to hang out with me while I'm there.

Why not? I have a lot of available credit on my credit card. I have the vacation days. And I have friends that I can fall back on. But living in this town, doing what I do, I rarely meet someone that right of the bat gives makes me lust for his body and his mind at the same time. I have to see where this might go.

God is in the kitties

2006-04-13T10:27:00.000-07:00

Ides of April

2006-04-13T05:36:00.000-07:00

* Spring in my city. One of the many reasons why I love living in the city of ________; yesterday, riding my bus through the center of town on the way home, a cute, normal boy in the back was whistling out the window at other cute boys on the sidwalks.

* Smoking. I feel like shit this morning from smoking several cigarettes last night...my goal is to quit smoking (again) on May 1st.

* What my therapist has to say. I need to draw up two big signs and hang them above my computer. The first sign should say, "DO YOU REALLY FEEL SEXUAL DESIRE?" and the second sign should say, "IT WON'T BE PERFECT THE FIRST TIME."

Mattering that matters

2006-04-10T12:31:00.000-07:00

A good friend of mine found out this weekend that his ex (a man he had lived with for over fifteen years and who he was close to despite the fact that they were no longer 'together') had committed himself to a Maryland mental institution.

My friend went to visit him this weekend and it was sad of course...he sent back a long report that ended with,

I went out the door and along the narrow sidewalk to the distant parking lot. The building entrance faces west, and the sun had just gone below the horizon and the light after the rain was soft. The institution with its patients and attendants was behind me, and not a single person was visible. Walking alone, I had a feeling of
the greatest bleakness I have ever experienced. I felt like there was
nothing anywhere that mattered or had any significance to me. My outlook is
generally bleak, but this was different, and I wonder if it will be like
this from now on.

Driving out of the hospital grounds, there's an small upscale shopping
center. It has a Chipotle, and I thought about going in for a burrito but
didn't. There was a Starbucks, naturally, so I went in and got coffee and
drank it as I drove home. By the time I got home it was dark, with stars
unusually clear after the rain, and far away.

At the same time that I felt for my friend's aloneness, I could nonetheless recognize the universality of the feeling...I've felt it myself, often at the moment of the petit mort, when the boy beneath you, who had up until that very second seemed impossible close, flesh of your flesh, suddenly feels, as the serotonin drains away, impossibly far removed from you, or on certain buses heading south in London at five in the morning after being out all night in parks cruising, or perhaps alone in my apartment, you know, just pacing about, waiting for the noodles to boil so I can make some mac and cheese.

For me though, it is an awareness that while things matter to me, that connection doesn't matter. In other words, it doesn't matter that things matter. Usually I'm okay with that, although being the atheist that I am, I'm aware (and here the chasm yawns) that upon my death, the mattering won't even matter to me. It's less than a pauper could eat on, the mattering that doesn't matter to anyone else but me.

Laying on of hands

2006-04-07T21:47:00.000-07:00

I walked outside and it was suddenly April.

Millions of snow fleas flitted in the last snowbanks, almost invisible among the crusts of dirt.

Dog shit washed away.

It is raining now and from that we'll be thinking of tulips and wondering how much earlier tomorrow the sun will creep across the windowsill.

I returned home, feeling not quite right, as though something that had been diffuse through my whole body, an armada of toxins and viruses, had coalesced somewhere deep inside of me.

Oprah was on t.v.; I tried to concentrate; force down some potato salad.

Suddenly it was all up over the front of my shirt, pooling in the bib, I unlocked the cuffs so I could try to stumble to the toilet but the puke came out of me like a gun firing, pooling on the wood floors, creeping into the cracks.

Sweat beaded and fell, beaded and fell.

A lump rose in my throat, the gorge pushed up like a geyser, a giant blockage.

I laid on the ground giving birth to something horrible.

My esophagus milked it up out of me and it landed in my throat--hot and textured, a small fist in my mouth, the texture of it was like shit or a living thing, a mouse squiggling between my teeth, the very feeling made me dizzy.

I spit it out onto the floor and it laid there.

A pellet about four inches long and two inches wide, deep brownish-red, like coffeegrounds or bloody stool.

Poking at it with a fork I noticed patches of fur, bits of broken beak, liverish material that shined like an eye.

Porn Theatre

2006-03-21T19:52:00.000-08:00

Porn Theatre is a French film written and directed by Jacques Nolot.

Making the rounds.

Jockeying for seats.

Malfunction and the lights come up and the faces hide.

Attracting a crowd.

At the end of the night.

Moby and the Minoans

2006-03-20T14:06:00.000-08:00

Does anyone remember Moby? I saw him in concert once in London at Scala; he wasn't very good or interesting. Moby was popular for a time and I owned some of his cd's but he's not timeless; it's only been a few years but already upon hearing him again randomly the sound conjures up the same feelings I have when I hear Ace of Base.

Still though, I owned his CD, that popular one. Called "Play" I think.

I can't remember where I was this weekend when I heard that CD in the background. I think I was at this sleazy gay bar near my apartment and someone had put it on the juke box.

In any case, it brought back a memory.

D and I traveled to Crete and spent a week on the island. We stayed in a small little village on the north coast between Hania and Rethimno.

I was 21 and he was 39.

As in most of our travels, it was a mixture of eight parts effortless magic and two parts of fruitless binding, as he tried to knit me into him or fuck me into him or grind us both into sand or something; he was going gray and I wasn't going to be sticking around and I think we both knew that.

That's why we drove around Crete with the windows wide open--the rush of the wind drowned all that out.

I remember it was dusk and we were traveling north from the interior toward the coastal highway that would bring us back to Kalives.

Down out of the mountains and the scrubby heather to gentler hills of cultivated olive groves.

On the map we discovered that a Minoan cemetery was only a short jaunt off the beaten path.

The sun was setting quickly, everything was golden and hot, Moby was playing on the radio and it was quite fitting.

We got to the Minoan cemetery too late, however...it had shut for the night. We sat in the car in the dusty, empty parking lot before a big chain link fence listening to the hot car click itself cool.

Just some goats walking around.

Then D did that crazy thing I loved him most for, executing his spontaneity like he was trying to prove something to me, like he could be young just like me, or younger even...

Before I knew it, he had jumped the fence by climbing up on top of a garbage can. He cajoled me into joining him, and we spent a lurking dusk in an ancient cemetery.

The Minoans were a strange and sophisticated civilization that inhabited Crete around 1700 B.C. Highly evolved in art and culture, neither European nor African nor Asian, there is no evidence that they were militarized but rather devoted their energies to commerce and art.

And they buried their dead in long, deep wombs.

The cemeteries were scattered among olive trees, deep slashes in the ground lined with stone; it was unmistakable to me that they were vaginas, a symbolic circle from life to death. They were wide at the opening, and then sloped gradually down and down, narrowing until you were about ten feet below the surface of the earth and at an small and narrow entrance which led into the burial chamber, a small stone room.

We spent hours wandering around these empty Minoan tombs. The people had been scraped from them long ago, had barely mattered then and mattered even less now.

People are just little temporary fingers, tendrils of the earth, emerging to push the dirt around a little bit before subsuming back into the ground. Perhaps four thousand years ago we did the earth's bidding more or less to its liking.

Clearing the docket

2006-03-19T10:01:00.000-08:00

This has never happened to me: there are three boys after me for sex.

Which is not to say I haven't had my share of play before; I have. Even in my chubby frosh days when, straight off the farm, I had neither the gumption nor wherewithall to update my wardrobe, get a real haircut, and make my mark in the club, I still had boys after my affections.

But I have three right now, three boys messaging me online, calling me, emailing me. Do me. No, do me first. Do ME!

It's quite exciting and a nice boost to my ego.

I guess I've filled a particular niche. I have some things going for me. Devastating scruff. Nice eyes. One of the few men out there over 24 with a normal BMI, a nice patch of curly chest hair, some definition.

I have to say I am quite enjoying myself...and to be honest, my schedule this weekend has been demanding and almost exhausting.

I had Friday off from work, and so I slept in a bit, thinking I'd wake up, do some writing, clean a bit, catch up on some netflix discs.

Instead I get an email from Rey saying that he, too, has the day off.

I met Rey, a 23 year old, at a sex party a few weeks ago.

(I must diverge here slightly to exposit a minute on a topic near and dear to my heart--sex parties. It warms my heart that they happen in this city, even if I am not there to partake. I live in a place where gay sex is compartamentalized from gay social circles...it's sublimated, hidden, lied about even, and the result are men who are two-faced, hypocritical. Men here are sluts--and in a good way--but they aren't honest about it. They don't celebrate it. They squirrel it away and rely on gay.com hookups. The sex parties I've been to have been fun, laid back, open affairs, with men actually socializing more than they are sucking dick. This particular one had some nice touches--a security man at the door checking invites, another man taking clothes and putting them in white plastic bags with names written on them, a giant plywood gloryhole scaffolding, and best of all, Dr. Pepper and german chocolate cupcakes in the kitchen.)

Rey and I had had a good time at the sex party and then lingered together, showering, sharing a smoke in the kitchen, promising to get back together sometime one on one. So we made plans to meet up at his place, about twenty minutes out there, deep into suburbia, over the river and through the woods of interstates and developments.

He lived with two roommates in a large condo set anonymously among streets of identical buildings off the interestate a few stoplights. He came to the door in sandals and A&F shorts, no underwear, I quickly clocked. He was a little different then I remembered him--not chubby at all but wider, perhaps...still cute, brown skin, dark black hair that is making an early exodus from the top of his head. It was one pm.

Inside he was having some sips of wine.

The house he lived in confounded me. Three young people lived here--and from what I gathered they all had typical jobs (Rey is a waiter) yet it was a giant condo filled with nice stuff (albeit deocrated atrociously). A flat screen t.v. mounted on the wall of the living room and another GIANT t.v. in the basement den, sectional sofas, a glass-topped dining table, a computer room. I saw not a book in the house but the roommates had about five televisions between them. Candles burned everywhere. And white tigers were a constant motif, which always creeps me out. As well, there were giant, and I mean HUGE fishtanks all over the place. We're talking five feet long fishtanks. Three of them at least. Who pays for all this stuff??

We said that we had both missed each other and were glad that we could do this again, without loads of other naked dudes around. We kissed, and I remembered what a good kisser he was. Full lips, taking his time, nibbling around the edges and not diving in quickly, like dipping your feet in the pond first.

We went up to his room. Sarah MacLaughlin was playing on the stereo(???). We kissed a lot and undressed and rolled around, cocks rubbing. I slipped off his shorts, which I find so incredibly erotic--slipping off someone's clothes I mean. He sat his butt down on my dick and rubbed it a lot, which feels great.

We had sex, good sex, a nice alchemy between us. You know, when you are hard as a rock but yet in no hurry to cum. That's a rare combination for me...either I'm rock hard and quick to shoot off the gun or it's a bit of an effort to keep the corpus cavernosa filled to the brim.

In any case, we did it a lot, in many different positions, and he made the most beautiful noises.

After we were done we took a shower and then just laid around in his room kinda napping. He had hung sheets over his window so even though it was a brilliantly sunny out and nice we were in the dark, which I liked. He took out some cocoa butter and we rubbed it all over ourselves; he said it was a nice lotion and I said it made me want to eat his butt again. We had more languished sex, just sucking each other and kissing, and then took another shower.

We headed out into the suburban strip malls to look for some place to have a meal, and ended up at a chain sports bar...it was either that or Red Lobster. Alas, we forgot it was St. Patrick's day, and at five pm the place was full of plastic green hats. We sat in the bar, smoking and talking, his scent still on my fingers.

He's a sweet boy and we connect sexually but there wasn't much in common between us. He's originally from Texas, would like to work eventually in community health, working with the Latino population, but right now he works in the restaurant in a department store. He doesn't have a car so is stuck in the suburbs a lot.

He owns a lot of ani di franco cds.

His friends think he's a slut and that makes him sad.

He's been crying a lot for no reason, sometimes on the bus on his way to work.

We had a few drinks and I dropped him back off at home and went back to the inner city and took a long nap. When I woke up he had sent me an email saying he has a highchool crush on me but he's going to leave it at that.

Yesterday I am happy to say that I've been able to eliminate one of the three boys from my life, which will certainly mean more free time for me. This guy has been after me for awhile but I've always hedged a bit...I'm not sure why. He's twenty-four and lives in my neighborhood. He's messaged me all over the place online and I've seen his webcam and blah blah blah. Finally I decided I had to just do it with him and get it over with.

I didn't really enjoy it. He's got a strange looking face, I have to say. I'm not sure what it is...it's not his teeth, which I admit could use some filing, or his scruff, which gave my lips rug burn...it's his eyes. I'm pretty sure he was sober but yet his eyes seem wide-eyed, puppy-dog, dialted fully...that kind of a gaze makes me uncomfortable, like I'm being x-rayed.

We didn't do much. While he was going down on me I laid back in bed and thought about how much I wanted some eggs benedict. That is always a bad sign.

After we were done I think he wanted to hang around a bit, cuddle or talk, get to know each other. But I kicked him out and drove to this diner I love and sat at the counter and had some delicious eggs benedict. It was the highlight of my day.

Then there is the suburban boy. I like the suburban boy. He calls me a lot from a gay coffeeshop that's nearby, only a few blocks. He'll be bored, surfing on manhunt using the cafe's wifi, working on his myspace page, and horny. I've been learning things about him.

At first, he appeared to be a wonderfully fascinating dichotomy...plain old suburban highschool boy, obsessed with hair and a&f clothes, thinking about college, with a good group of friends, while at the same time a sexually precocious boy who knew what he wanted--men to fuck him.

It's more complicated than that now, as I've found out that he has dated a string of men MUCH older than him since the age of 15...and these men have not treated him all that well.

He appears to attract men in their mid to late thirties who are alcoholics, violent meth users, fucked up in some way...funny enough, those would tend to be the same kind of men who are attracted to sixteen year old boys.

He's eighteen now and has some stories to tell. I'm worried that his worldview has already been formed: that most gay men of a certain age are fucked up alcoholics struggling with sobriety and normal human relations.

Suburban boy told me how the last guy he was 'into' got them a room together at a sleazy gay hotel that rents by the hour only to binge on meth.

Suburban boy tells me how he regularly gives himself enemas.

Suburban boy recently had gonnorrhea.

It's all very intriguing. We're playing it safe and I'm being honest about what his expectations should be with me. He's just been accepted to go to school in San Diego, so, whew! The gay community there is so respectable...I'm sure he'll be fine. Yikes. I'll see him in a Cobra video within the year I'm sure.

That's a slice of my life.

Phone sex

2006-03-17T09:39:00.000-08:00

Photos sent to me last week from guys who wanted to do phone sex that I met in the gay.com channel, Phone:

Which are real and which are fake?

I may as well be on meth

2006-03-14T07:48:00.000-08:00

The last few nights have been late ones, spent in front of the computer on gay.com in the Phone and College rooms, chatting and setting up phone sex chats, hitting poppers and watching porn. I feel so fucking pathetic as the febrile, pathetic tensing of muscles finally subsides at two, three in the morning, I shower off the sheen and fall into bed on stinky sheets only to wake up a few hours early, still black out, and head to work, headachy, exhausted.

The tender cellular structure of the outer rim of the nose and divet between nostril and upper lip has begun to break down, the flesh red from its acid wash, the friable tissue of the brain is awash in amyl, the heart palpitates, the fume is inhaled, reminding me of sexy childhoods at the public pools and Spanish backrooms where I would fuck backpackers and die in the blackout spaces.

Is it edging or coping? I suppose it could be both. Suspension in the colloidal made by mixing lube and Blue Boy and watching some bareback porn. I feel like Rufus Wainwright during his meth days, no different than an addict pushing the boundaries of his own erotic world to the very event horizon, that petit mort that will allow me to sleep.

Sad thing is, I'm never more alive these days than when I'm slicked up and having nasty phone sex. Reading books puts me to sleep, friends make me yawn, writing is impossible in my brain-dead state, I slack off at work. Maybe I should just become a meth head.

Had to share.

Every morning I see your picture from the train

2006-03-13T11:43:00.000-08:00

I am back from some days away for work, in various cities, certain heights of fancy hotel rooms afronting gay districts and elevated trains, thunderstorms and the dry air of hotel rooms, the starchy fabrics I made sure were changed daily to remove last night's white stains from lonely jerkoffs to reality shows about young cage fighters.

I generally find work trips pretty sexy...it's the transitory, anonymous nature to the habitats of the businessman away from his wife and kids or husband and charging to the company's card...the airport terminal and toilet, the subways, the hotel bar where we're all desperate and unfiltered, then the hotel rooms themselves, which we do not have to clean and which are empty of signifiers. I have the uncanny ability to sniff out the perfect places for trouble in new cities (parks, streets, bathouses). My sex skills on the road should be consumate.

But it never happens for me...I have horrible luck hooking up while traveling for work. Part of it is that I'm chickenshit. Part of it is that I'm just so fucking exhausted from the emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983) of my day job. Eight o'clock rolls around and I just want to smoke a cigarette and drink a beer at a boring bar and then buy some chocolate, shower, and lay on clean sheets on a giant king sized bed and watch bad cable television. That's mostly what I've been doing...no reading, no poetry, no writing, no phone calls home. It's all very depersonalized.

I did make a couple stabs at amorous daliances. At my first travel stop, the exhibits organizer was this semi-cute young man with a chiseled face who had taken an interest in me and my work the past few days. As I was packing up, he came over to sign off on some paperwork. "I'm really glad this event is over...I can get into trouble now," I said, looking him square in the eye and smiling. He merely glanced at me before saying, "good luck with that" or something and walking away.

In the next city I ventured out in to the driving rain that was bone-chilling and headed to a local bathhouse. I'm a fan of certain sleazy bathhouses in Northern European working-class cities but this one, which I had been to before, was gigantic and clean as a whistle and lacking a certain kind of grimy character. It has many, many rooms and people spend whole weekends there. I've often had the idea to do something like that...you know, bring my laptop, buy some bags of chips, and lay around all weekend in my tiny room, porn on the tv, writing and leaving to work out and fuck and then going back inside my little cabin to sleep on the plastic sheets...I wonder if this bathhouse has wifi?

In any case, the halls were mostly empty but I did manage to find a cute Chinese man who was really turned on by me...We found a quiet little space and shut the door on ourselves. But mostly I just wandered around in the halls over and over again, constantly retying my towel, in order to escape myself.

I doubt anyone missed me or even reads this blog but I just wanted to say that I am glad to be back.

Suburbia in the inner city

2006-02-24T11:30:00.000-08:00

Was visited by the suburban boy last night, out of the blue in a&f's...

He called me randomly near midnight, complaining bitterly about an older man he liked who had just relapsed into meth binge after three years of sobriety, like, in his lap basically, and he had dropped him off and needed to 'vent.'

Venting for him was tender makeouts on the bed in my room.

It had been a long time since I had touched and been touched and we just slowly laid there, kissing and stroking for the longest time.

There was something insouciant about it all, our defenses gone, no pretense or borders under lock-and-key.

Eventually I entered him from behind and we rocked back and forth like that for the longest time, and when we finished he fished his hands through my chest hair again, looking for something...

Been thinking

2006-02-20T12:37:00.000-08:00

Walking around and staring out the bus windows at the shops and everyone flapping in the wind like crows and I'm not scared for him, or really sad, or that jittery and upset...what comes to pass will pass whether I like it or not.

If anything, I'm sad, slightly pissed, beating my metaphorical fists against the figurative drum of the sky, wishing I had a different dad. It was kind of a waste--I mean, it's rare in life that fate squishes you into close proximity with another human being for a period of many, many years...and, well, I guess you should just expect that the two people sharing said patch of ground would have done more for each other, found out more, shared more and influenced more than my dad and I ever did, a pale drop of dadness as far as essences go.

found out

2006-02-19T13:14:00.000-08:00

I found out today that my dad has prostate cancer. We don't know yet how advanced it is, how treatable it is. We'll know more soon.

I don't know how I feel. But that's a lie. I don't feel much--I'm not worried or scared or sad for him. I just take in the news and move on. Often when we say, "I don't know how I feel," it's often because we really do know how we feel, but the feeling is not the one we wish we had.

Pessoa's trunk

2006-02-19T08:53:00.000-08:00

"Autopsicografia"

O poeta é um fingidor.
Finge tão completamente
Que chega a fingir que é dor
A dor que deveras sente.

E os que lêem o que escreve,
Na dor lida sentem bem,
Não as duas que ele teve,
Mas só que éles não têm.

E assim nas calhas de roda
Gira, a entreter a razão
Ésse comboio de corda
Que se chama o coração

—Fernando Pessoa

-----------------------**------

"Self-Analysis"

The poet is a forger who
Forges so completely that
He forges even the feeling
He feels truly as pain

And those who read his poems
Feel absolutely, not his two
Separate pains, but only the
Pain that they do not feel

And thus, diverting the
Understanding, the wind-up
Train we call the heart
Runs along its track.

—George Monteiro

--------*---*-----------

"Autopsychograph"

Poets are liars.
They lie so completely
That they make up pain
Even when they're hurting.

Readers of poetry
Can know this pain,
Not the real ones of course,
But the imagined ones.

And on the train rails
Huffing, fooling the head
This little toy engine
We call the heart.

—James Parr

-------------****-----*---

"Autopsychography"

Sneakin' a Peek

2006-02-16T19:06:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I'll be watching an amateur porn and the background, the 'sets' that double as a random hotel room or someone's living room for god's sake will stop me in mid stroke. Can you believe that tapestry? I'll say to no one in particular. Or I'll call up my friend Colleen and say, 'Colleen, have you seen this tapestry? It's hideous!' but she won't know what I'm talking about of course. Or I'll catch out of the corner of my eye a Braun espresso machine, black, with built-in milk steamer, and I'll just have to have one.

The other night I was watching a Sneek Peek video. Of course I didn't buy it, I downloaded a torrent of it. Anyway, while watching "Blowin Da Boyz 3" I couldn't help but notice the feline theme going on in this guy's apartment...check it out:

In one of the first scenes the pornographer drags his prey into the master bedroom where the bed is covered in leopard print sheets and a giant leopard tapestry is pinned to the wall. I had a dumb friend in highschool I used to fuck and he had the same thing...It was some kind of blanket that he thought looked so fucking cool that he had to pin it up on the wall and it just looked retarded but it gave me something to look at while I fucked him. Same thing is going on here.

As this one carb-face enters the apartment he walks past this giagantic cat scratching-palace. This is one of those giant toys lonely people buy for their cats because they imagine there's this great bond between them and the pet, and they think that the pet will just love them to death for buying them such a carpet-mansion, but of course the cat doesn't give a shit which just makes the owner, in this case the single pornographer who likes to blow carbfaces on film, feel even more like a sad loser, which means, that to make himself feel better, he has to buy even more tiger trinkets...

See that lion in the background there? And on the chair we can count not one, not two, but three different kinds of feline prints.

Behind this dude, a white tiger stuffed animal and another tiger, camouflaged behind the houseplant.

Hard to see, but at the bottom of the screengrab, to the right of the desk's keyboard, you can see the man's real cat, probably running away to hide, which the cat does everytime the dude brings home some stranger to blow. You know, cats have a pretty good sense of smell and they hate to smell their owner's spit on another dude's stinky dick and his cum. Yuck! At least if I was a cat I would hate the stench of that.

God damn another white tiger.

Doesn't that look majestic?

Shit that was better than sex.

Because this is a secret blog

2006-02-14T21:16:00.000-08:00

"Sadly, or perhaps not, I recognize that I have an arid heart" [Fernando Pessoa]

Outwardly, I despise Valentine's Day...hate it, denounce it.

My bitterness drips.

My jadedness glistens.

People are impressed--I'm so over it.

Love is like, a cultural construction. Man. Get with it.

Inwardly though, I have felt lonely for sometime, and today, I can't help it, but I wish I had a boyfriend. I can't really picture him but I have written, in secret, page after page of attributes...the equivalent of a schoolgirl (or boy) writing in the margins of their bluebook the name of their secret crush again and again and again.

Dynamism, compassion, humor, well-read, kind eyes, open face, tender and thoughtful, demonstrative, quiet, spontaneous.

Tonight, I clear my calendar of all obligations.

I spend a lot of money on a nice dinner for us. We're the youngest, sexiest couple in the restaurant. He's brought me a rose. The restaurant attracts an upper middle class, white, straight, suburban millieu. They are incredibly deferential to us, feeding each other ice creams and kissing across the table.

We walk hand in hand. It starts to snow.

It's not even about sex anymore. Sex is boring. The Monday night orgy? Like a Monday night workout. Let's do this for an hour and get it over with so I can take a shower and get a burrito for dinner. I miss when B and I were dating and we would wake up on a Sunday morning, fuck, lay around in the bed and get high and read the New York Times and then fuck again on top of the Arts & Leisure section. Or we'd go downstairs and get breakfast at one or two pm.

Sex is so passé, don't you think?

Tonight I have half a mind to break into the local gym where I work out (the gym closed many hours ago; it's quite late).

I'd turn on one lamp above one treadmill and run for hours and hours and look out at the snow.

Right now it feels like I could run twelve, fourteen miles maybe, do it for hours and listen to music on my headphones.

I wish I had a boy whom I loved and who loved me. I feel so Whitman right now, so Calamus. When I was a boy, fifteen or so, I bought Whitman's Leaves of Grass...why? A sympathetic English teacher, probably, older and married and yet kin to me somehow, put me on to the trail, knowing that I would find what I was looking for, and in that huge volume I somehow came to the Calamus poems as if through divination and read this one which has always been my favorite:

} A Glimpse

A glimpse through an interstice caught,
Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove
late of a winter night, and I unremark'd seated in a corner,
Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and
seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand,
A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and
oath and smutty jest,
There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little,
perhaps not a word.

Tonight I think about it again and wish it was true. I was alone a lot then as I am now. When you see me at work I make fun of you and your boyfriend or girlfriend in a casual way, making it clear that the single life is the life for me right now. But really I am wishing for it too--someone worth buying a big fucking box of chocolates for. Happy Valentine's Day.

Bathhouse, Liverpool Street, September, 2005

2006-02-14T20:56:00.000-08:00

I loathed the men in the bathhouse. I kept seeing these old guys--around late 50s, early 60s who were hobbling around, stooped and hairy-backed, lunging for me as I walked past and how sad that looked and these men deceitful in the shadows and coming across as early 20s when really they're 40 and only showing age around the edges of the eyes, calderas, brimstone on their cheeks, old volcanoes, faces like cracked continental drifts. One was very agressive and wherever there was a cock to suck he was in there to suck it. I had to push them off of me. A few times I put my heel in a puddle of jizz and that really disgusted me and made me afraid of what I might be soaking up by way of osmosis...

Pachyderms, lifting the bones of the dead
with their fat, white trunks.
Their time draws night-light in the chinks
of the boarded up windows,
Brazilian letting his feet hang over the rim
into the taxis and cobalt between clients
and splooge mops resting,
breathing heavily in the corners like baleen.

They hear time thundering,
and the older ears, the wide ears that wrap
my lips in the crowns of their hair,
spell a bit,
rain over there,
thudding like a giant foot,
like your hand on a rail
and they come along,
clearing the hall of bones like how a man shaves.

gay.com

2006-02-11T20:19:00.000-08:00

random gay.com chat:

[him_him] hot
[xxxxxxxxxx] wanna phone?
[him_him] can u sound fem, impersonate my g/f only more kinky/sexual, etc. ?
[xxxxxxxxxx] yeah
[xxxxxxxxxx] ??
[him_him] talk on here real quick as fem, as g/f just so i see how good u can be with it
[him_him] then we can talk on phone
[xxxxxxxxxx] cool
[xxxxxxxxxx] so, stud, u horny?
[him_him] god baby, i def am.... missed bein with u babe
[xxxxxxxxxx] ive spent all day in these tight panties..
[xxxxxxxxxx] thinking about you in class, geting all wet under my skirt...
[him_him] mmm thats fuckin hot katie--- very nice
[him_him] good girl
[xxxxxxxxxx] thought about fingering myself in class but then thought...no, better wait for my man
[xxxxxxxxxx] how about yu stud?
[him_him] mmm god katie thats awesome--- would be real naughty if u did that while u were student teaching or since u are up visiting ur family, being naughty up there
[xxxxxxxxxx] mmm i wonder if the students noticed how wet i was?
[xxxxxxxxxx] u horny for me stud?
[xxxxxxxxxx] wanna talk to me stud about my wet pussy?
[him_him] fuck yeah... now thats hot...
[xxxxxxxxxx] can i call u stud? i miss you so much...my pussy is so wet...
[him_him] fuck yeah baby--- let me get rid of everyone else so i can focus all on u on the phone
[xxxxxxxxxx] k stud
[xxxxxxxxxx] god my pussy is so wet thinking about you
[xxxxxxxxxx] are you hard stud?
[him_him] mmm u talkin like this is getting me very excited to talk to u katie
[xxxxxxxxxx] whats your name stud?
[xxxxxxxxxx] really? are you getting hard thinking about THIS pussy?
[him_him] chris--- yeah the more u know about my real g/f and can act like her, the crazier u will drive me
[xxxxxxxxxx] oh chris i miss that big dick of yours
[xxxxxxxxxx] home alone here i tried to fuck myself with a cucumber but it wasn't big enough
[him_him] wow baby thats so naughty-- and u never finger urself katie
[xxxxxxxxxx] mmm i do when u aren't around
[xxxxxxxxxx] theres a lot you dont know about me
[xxxxxxxxxx] like, im always horny
[xxxxxxxxxx] oh lets talk on the phone chris
[him_him] wow baby thats so naughty--- u do any naughty things when u are teaching at school or what would u do if i was up there at ur parents house
[him_him] one more min baby and then im all urs
[xxxxxxxxxx] if u were up here at my parents house we'd wait till they were asleep
[xxxxxxxxxx] my panties would be wet all night
[xxxxxxxxxx] id take them off and give them to you
[xxxxxxxxxx] and lead you outside
[xxxxxxxxxx] someplace quiet
[xxxxxxxxxx] and just kneel before your big dick
[xxxxxxxxxx] beg you to take it out
[him_him] mmm fuck yeah--- blow me before going in to see ur parents, my cum on ur lips when u go into see them-- they not knowing what ist is though
[xxxxxxxxxx] mmm kiss my daddy hello with your cum on my lips?
[him_him] fuck yeah baby--- naughty shit like that
[xxxxxxxxxx] oh chris lets phone
[xxxxxxxxxx] im all yours
[him_him] and can u sound fem
[xxxxxxxxxx] yeah
[xxxxxxxxxx] oh honey hell yes
[xxxxxxxxxx] u make me feel like a little slutty bitch
[him_him] fuck yeah... let me get my phone-- what are we gonna talk about-- a scene or just talking in general?
[xxxxxxxxxx] what ever you want chris
[xxxxxxxxxx] what do you want your slutty katie to do?
[him_him] mmmmm maybe talk about all the naughty things we can do at ur parents house when we visit them
[xxxxxxxxxx] ok chris
[him_him] like the blowjob, u feeding me ur pussy juices, ur hot ass juices--- u sleep upstairs with ur sister and i have to sleep downstairs
[him_him] as many fucked up situations like with the cum and kissing ur daddy, etc
[xxxxxxxxxx] ok
[xxxxxxxxxx] how old is my sister?
[him_him] 11
[xxxxxxxxxx] lets do it chris
[him_him] k katie
[xxxxxxxxxx] me call ?
[him_him] sure--- XXX-XXX-XXXX
[xxxxxxxxxx] ok chris
[xxxxxxxxxx] im calling
[him_him] k
**** Connection Closed ****
[xxxxxxxxxx] thanks chris
[xxxxxxxxxx] maybe we can do that again sometime
[him_him] anytime--- u were very hot
[him_him] very impressed
[him_him] ive never really phoned before so hope it was good for u
[xxxxxxxxxx] did ii do good?
[xxxxxxxxxx] oh chris you were THE BEST
[him_him] yeah-- very good--- all about detail and u did get for a first time-- more u know/learn about her, the crazier it is
[xxxxxxxxxx] u can tell me
[him_him] sweet--- will def. do what i can to get u off for going to all the effort for being katie
[xxxxxxxxxx] it was an effort... i loved it
[him_him] sweet...very hot
[xxxxxxxxxx] did u really cum chris?
[xxxxxxxxxx] my pussy is still wet for u
[him_him] yeah i did--- def. made me shoot my load babe
[xxxxxxxxxx] so u get into dudes at all?
[him_him] thats fuckin hot
[him_him] a little-- mostly into girls with their smooth body/hot outfits, etc....
[him_him] although having a bro being str8/masc around g/f or friends, fuckin around is hot
[him_him] being str8/masc around g/f, being her friend then impersonating her for me in private, etc
[xxxxxxxxxx] thats hot
[xxxxxxxxxx] having a bud whos your bitch
[xxxxxxxxxx] is your katie not very kinky?
[him_him] yeah--- gettin real close to my g/f just so they can learn to act like her more, give us an excuse to hang out as str8 bros when really u are being her
[him_him] she is FUCKIN HOT-- crazy hot-- just not real sexual
[him_him] grew up real strict and catholic-- getting better but nowhere near where all my fantasies are
[xxxxxxxxxx] cool
[him_him] yeah
[him_him] so u think these scenes/things are hot?
[xxxxxxxxxx] HELL yeah
[him_him] awesome--- can take it as far as u want--- have a fem s/n just like hers, to drive me wild before phone, tellin u ALL about her, maybe show u pics of her, u sendin pics as her, in panties, etc.... the more the hotter
[him_him] and whatever gets u off too, def.
[him_him] well im out bro-- gettin some sleep --- hit me up sometime if u wanna do this again--- xxxxxx@yahoo.com xxxxxxx on yahoo messenger

if he finds me i'm dead

2006-02-08T13:51:00.000-08:00

H...ere's a confession for my secret bl...og...

I lived in northern england for a while, in a tiny town surrounded by damp hills.

I ate a lot of Colt's Foot Rock and sat around in cum-stained underwear, watching Cadinot porn and writing a novel.

No work permit and the boyfriend away all the time.

He was in his late 30s and I had just turned 21. He worked at a home for retarded people and I jerked off a lot and drank beer and lounged around on this uncomfortable futon and wrote down numbers of other lonely guys thinking I'd cheat on him but I never did.

Once he found a number I had written down in the opening pages of Giovanni's Room and we had a big fight about that and later he forced sex upon me but usually things were chill and we drove around a lot, fucked, ate pizzas, watched movies, blah blah blah.

My novel was about a young American who fucks around on his English boyfriend with a young polish dude in London.

It was all true, which was the major fault of the novel.

We broke up, it ended badly, and he's never gotten over me.

Recently I found his myspace profile. He's, what, in his early 40s now?

Shhh.

I read his myspace blog which is pathetic and sad and boring.

The other day he wrote about me.

And that's when things suddenly became very difficult for me. Within seconds, my heart was hammering and my stomach leaping up to wobble thumpingly at the back of my throat. (So much for a mellowed evening with malt whisky and a brief blog / chat).
I asked XXXX to stop and explained that I could not hear about Darling Daintyfoot - it is unhelpful for me. Or, rather, I 'd be more than happy to hear from him and try to sort out some of the spoil from our past relationship, which troubles me (not sure about Darling Daintyfoot) so very deeply.

To know that after all these years...

It filled me with a dirty swill of prideful power, to know I still had this kind of control.

linked

2006-02-08T11:55:00.000-08:00

I just linked to

Blair Mastbaum: Bat Society

I just linked to his blog. I'd like him to send me a photo of him playing the guitar naked. He could use the guitar to cover up the naughty bits.

Someone asked, "are your posts modern poetry er sumthin?" No, but thank you for writing. They are not. But if these posts were typed on an Underwood, my typewriter ribbon would be inked by Matthew Rohrer, Christopher Nealon, Matthea Harvey, Tao Lin, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

longtemps

2006-02-06T20:12:00.000-08:00

il ya longtemps since I felt a calmness come about.

Icy and metallic, like the smell of snow when there's nothing else to smell.

On Saturday night my old, sedentary parents went to their separate bedrooms at around eight pm as though they were still farmers.

My car turned over slowly in the cold but eventually I made it into town, across the bridge, to another town.

Where railroad tracks cut through downtown and many of the streetlamps have been broken by drunken kids or simple neglect.

On one of the main drags is a gay bar.

This gay bar burned down a few years ago. Cause is still unknown, but two men sitting in a pickup truck outside the bar were burnt up in the conflagration, their bodies so badly charred that it was impossible to tell whether they were dead before the fire was started. The bar was rebuilt immediately a few blocks away.

Even though I visit only once every few months, there's always someone there who recognizes me.

The Professor.

The two bears I almost slept with.

I got to talking to a fine woman named Rhonda who works in a papermill a few towns south. She was looking for a woman with a kind heart and we commisserated.

A cute boy weighing as much as a snow drift kept eyeing me but he left for the cold before we had a chance to speak.

Really not interested.

Borders are secure; tests came back negative.

No HIV in my body. No, no, nothing.

I want to be chemically castrated.

I'll turn down invitations to the Monday night orgy.

I want to get my back waxed, get a haircut and a massage, tone my skin with expensive lotions, buy a new pair of expensive jeans, run six miles on a treadmill and take a giant shit, give myself a facial, smoke some pot and eat a giant piece of cake.

I don't want anyone to touch me. Stay away, speak from a distance, don't breathe on me, don't touch me, don't sully me or try to get inside of me.

I am impervious.

Just let me relish it for a few months.

i love it that somewhere

2006-02-06T19:39:00.000-08:00

Oh please let it be true.

That somewhere, on some night these two boys cuddled and then fought. The world would redeem itself if it were so...

flesh

2006-02-02T11:20:00.000-08:00

Take a deep breath.

Breathe in.

And out.

And in again.

Steel yourself.

This is why you set up a secret blog...

Since adolescence I have been a hypochondriac. It's etiology could be traced back to third grade, when I came down with acute appendicitis. For over a week my condition remained undiagnosed. I laid in bed in immense pain, vomitting every few hours and when finally brought to the emergency room X-rays showed that my appendix had burst. On the X-ray, shades of gray flooded my trunk from lung to bladder, representing the swill of bacteria and pus my guts were swimming in. I was rushed into emergency surgery, only a few hours before my body went into shock.

Two surgeries and four weeks of convalescence later, I was physically fine, though I had developed an acute distrust of both my body and the world. It's machinery could fuck up at any moment, and I could not trust the outside world and its authority figures--parents, doctors, modern medecine, to fix it quickly and promptly.

At the age of twelve I became convinced I had breast cancer. No doubt influenced by an episode of 20/20 on breast cancer during which Barbara Walters interviewed a man who was suffering from breast cancer--yes, men could get it too, though it was much rarer. My tits were big with baby fat but behind it, my fingers, kneading them during my nightly self-examination, could feel harder lumps, near the rib cage.

My mother took me to the doctor, who confirmed that I was merely going through puberty and that hardenings in my male mammaries were a common, but often unnoticed part of the process.

At thirteen I became convinced I had diabetes. My frequent trips to the bathroom to urinate were the primary source of my self-diagnosis, combined with the family medical dictionary, whose crude drawings of triage and cross-sections of the human body did not cease to enthrall me. In the hospital after my appendix operation, I had become fascinated by what was happening inside my body and indulgent relatives had bought me copies of Gray's Anatomy and pop-up books of the human body and tomes on organs and chemical processes. My mother, who was rather indulgent of my hypochondria, perhaps feeling that it was better to take me to the doctor and have my worries dispelled then ignore them as if they didn't matter, indeed brought me to the doctor, who, after I explained to him my diabetic symptoms, confirmed that I had only a small bladder.

I was probably slightly disappointed. Diabetes was a manageable disease that would get me attention, special treatment. I wouldn't have to take gym class! In addition, my own powers over my body had let me down.

The only other serious case of hypochondria as a youth was the thought that I had become schizophrenic, like my father. I was seventeen or eighteen.

Freud deals little with hypochondria, subsuming it under the larger heading of Narcisism. For Freud, hypochondria derived from a profound wonder of the body and its many systems and marked a withdrawal of the libido from the outside world, repositioned on the organs and systems of the body. In its own twisted way it represents an eroticization of one's own body--internal and external.

I think I can remember the first time the fear of catching death through sex with other men caught me by the throat. I had been dating a cute, dynamic, uberintelligent boy named Montreal Jason. A week after meeting (and fucking profusely), we drove to Montreal together for a week, just for kicks, twenty-four hours, all through the night, to spend a week in a glorious city neither of us knew, fucking like rabbits and spending days and nights out in the city. Soon after our return, the mirage faded and truths emerged--he had another boyfriend, he had lied to me, etc. Soon after my glands swelled to rock-hard peas. Non-Hodkins Lymphona, surely. It was brought on through acute exposure to unrequited love. Like going outside without your jacket on.

And then it was HIV.

Since then its always been HIV.

Cum and cocks. Love them. But to get their full flavor, for them to touch you in the way you want to be touched, they've got to pass through a membrane, both literally and figuratively. At this point I'm more interested in the physical lips, the anus, the mucous membrane, the semi-permeable chains of molecules that let in some cells, keep other cells out. At a micro level, swarming at the gates--love and something dumb and blind yet personified by our culture into an insidious agent that hates gays, hates love and freedom.

There is another theory of hypochondria. Taking Freud's theory of Delusions of Persecution, in which the subject feels as though the world is out to get him, kill him. Its irrational--sinister spies on every corner, a global conspiracy to target and kill him. The delusion of persecution is the twisted doubling-back of a blunted libido--the unrequited desire becomes poisonous, turns back on the desirer. Transmitted along the lines of physical contact that pierce the body at various points (ass, mouth), the delusion of persecution becomes internalized. For someone like me, I wanted to be loved, to be held by men. And when that didn't happen, that want, a tender-nerve, turned back against me, became internalized. The men I wanted to love me didn't love me, so instead were trying to make me sick. All so that I could hate them.

Powerless as well. When the cock is in your mouth you are powerless. It has pushed its way past the membrane, it has shattered the defences. Some love the feeling. I hate it. I want to patrol my own borders, ruthless monitor the comings and goings. So a few months ago when the guy I knew to be HIV positive pushed his cock into my mouth, and I tasted the precum, and my thought was, (there is HIV in this precum), I freaked. Said I couldn't do it anymore. Walked outside into the backyard and sat naked in the cold grass. It was August first, 2005. I walked with him into the woods, deeper and deeper, the branches picking at our bare soles, barely any mosquitoes, and we walked until we couldn't see the lights of the house anymore and we stood their in the hush and heard only a distant freeway and didn't say anything and then walked back to the house.

I was fine for a while and then the panic attacks started. I would search the web for the symptoms of seroconversion. Every cough, every puffy gland in my neck was a sign, a symptom. I broke out in sweats, couldnt' concentrate at work. Three months passed and I was negative.

The rash came suddenly across my arms and torso last week. Itching in bed. Red spots up my forearms and across my sides, my thights, covering my ass, extending down to the webbing between my toes. I surfed the web and began thinking back...to the eighteen year old suburban boy and to the Monday night orgy. The eighteen year old boy had talked, post-coital, about the older men who fucked him, one of whom was HIV positive. I thought back to the orgy, and how, poppers under my nose, I had sucked that one big dick as deep into my mouth as it would go. Dude was probably a meth head. The web confirmed my timelines, gave weight to my imagined symptoms. I visited my doctor and he said he wanted to do a blood test to determine a viral loud count. The sweat broke out immediately. He was old and had a gray ponytail and he was in and out in fifteen minutes. He didn't know me. He didn't know my risk. Viral load count. Should I worry? I asked. I'll worry, he said, for you. He smiled and scooted out.

Is he worrying for me--really? Is he up late at night?

I left the doctor's office on Monday and drove to a gas station.

Bought a pack of Camel Lights.

I quit smoking about ten months ago.

I drove along the interstate, smoking and listening to Aimee Mann.

The interstate ended and I took a random off-ramp, traveled down some dark suburban streets, turned left into a cul-de-sac of McMansions. The lights were blazing in all the windows.

They were not yet occupied.

I looked through the vast expanses of living rooms, populated with golden furniture, at the black backyards.

A sign read, "No driving practice allowed."

At the end of the road I turned around and headed back onto the interstate.

Test results tomorrow afternoon.

*67

2006-02-01T20:16:00.000-08:00

I have various fake profiles on gay.com that I assume from time to time.

Depending on my mood.

I hang out in the rooms 'College' and 'Phone.'

One of my profiles I play around with is a 21 year old black male.

These are photos emailed to me by a guy, also 21, who wanted to talk on the phone with me and call me 'nigger' and dominate me verbally and 'phone-fuck' me.

So I called his phone number on my cellphone, hitting *67 first, and talked in a very quiet voice and he called me rude things like 'nigger' and told me how hard he was going to fuck my black ass.

I was fake and he could have been too, those photos I mean. They could have been fake photos. The guy on the other end of the line could have been this guy or he could have been someone else...another twenty-one year old or another kind of man altogether--does it matter?

He spoke his particular truth for the night. He described something that was deep down inside of him.

Manhunt obituary

2006-02-01T12:29:00.000-08:00

Via monotonous dot net, this strange obituary that limns the faults and contradictions of the internet communities many gays feel an ambivalent connection to. Cuteboingeorgia gets into JO, sucking, fucking, 1 on 1, exhibition, LTR, friends, dating but he's currently 'not looking' because he's dead, something having to do with a fall from four stories or so.

His myspace.com profile survives as well, the comments section giving one-dimensional friends a one-dimensional space in which to write a one-dimensional goodbye.

On gay.com or manhunt.net some of the same images circulating in the mix come to form architecture and populate those particular virtual rooms. Should we tie a portion of our psyche to the page, to the 'online communities' of hook-ups and barebackers and online ranters and friends and tweakers only some of whom extend into the fleshy realms beyond the computer screen, we tie a bit to those images as well, and they to us--part of the familiar scene, faces in the crowd that we may not see or care about until we notice out of the corners of our eyes that they are gone, or until we are hit over the head by a reminder that they exist or existed in the flesh as well through an announcement of their death.

He's not looking.

He's offline.

unrevised poem I never sent to him

2006-01-30T14:01:00.000-08:00

Hemophilia

for Tim

He was the first Hasidic Jew I had ever laid eyes on.
His fly was open as we walked together toward the park.

I think we are all walking around with our pitiful
flies open. And we are all hemophiliacs

bleeding from it. I can’t stop it. The basement is flooded
with my phone calls to you to say that the peppers were crying here,
the peppers were crying at the co-op today and the world is a mirror.

But no one is on the phone right now; they’ve come down
to the Madison Square Park of a hot summer; they would all like
a little sip of us. You are somewhere among these cottony powerlunches.

You are in sandals, snake in the grass,
belly becoming pillow.

I can’t stop shopping in New York City.
There never was a sale I wouldn’t have bought you at.

The city without you makes me feel Hasidic
and I abstemiously abstain from carving my hand
into a hand for you to hold

but fold it like a block of wood in pocket shroud
until that one day on which we can speak to gentiles.

I’ll clasp your hand on our Bedford Ave.
and ask you to pray—but only if you are you.

And we’ll never be closer.

poem for ("Okay, bye bye now. Good luck with everything in your life!") Cute Tim

2006-01-29T19:54:00.000-08:00

VINCENT, (2)

this morning a blimp was blocking 53rd Street
as inexplicable and final as a sigh
when you are about to say why you did sigh
but it is already done and we will never
be happy together again never sure and
I felt if I walked all the way to the Hudson
through the electrical (artificial spring) air
I would not be able to pass I
would not be able to meet you on the other shore
but here you are in a gust of wind with
your bronze turn-out smiling shyly on the velvet
light my depression drifts off into the blue theatre
why did you sigh anyway why did I notice
a sheet flaps in the wind a pillow hits the floor
we are laughing as time collapses around us
on the Palisades-Columbus-Avenue-Love-Bed-Awards

-- Frank O'Hara

melancholycutyououtofmylife

2006-01-29T19:40:00.000-08:00

Rain changes to snow.

No cars have come down the street for a few hours.

Listening to "Fuck This...I'm Leaving" by American Analog Set.

Sorry Cute Time. Sorry you had such narrow vision. I don't blame you. But it is why we would never have worked out had you stuck around. We met a few weeks before you moved to NYC. After you left we carried on as lovers. You had such a beautiful body and I loved being inside of you and then holding you in my arms and almost crushing you in kisses. Wrapping you up made me feel wrapped up.

Rain changes to snow.

You would call from a few hours out. Hey, I'm on the train, I'm a couple hours away...can I stay with you tonight? My flight leaves in the morning...it was incredibly passionate.

I can imagine what would have happened had we stuck around in the same town and become boyfriends...banality, middle class existence, bourgeoise, boring, recriminations, acrimony. It worked so well for me. But after a series of emails, a ruthless excision on your part, followed by a 'have a nice life' junior high line and please send me back my hat and delete those naughty photos you took...I'm sorry, but I have no patience for boys with no imagination. Its why we never would have worked out, Cute Tim.

Sorry too: I'm not going to delete those photos.

in this house on ice

2006-01-27T17:48:00.000-08:00

oh dear friends i am a little drunk...8 pm in that lull between friday happy hours with coworkers and then the later bar excursions with other friends, sitting in my apartment, inhaling the stench of varnish, windows wide open to the still air and just now on the number four bus my ipod which switches through songs came to 'house on ice' by clap your hands say yeah and i was reminded of the early summer, when i listened to this album and this song in particular a whole hell of a lot as i had just gotten a car and returned from buenos aires a new man several pounds lighter and addicted to camel lights and katie and i would often drive to twin lake and drink maté and lay on the beach among the hippies and in the heat of the summer this song was my anthem and now in the gray dark winter it came to me again half drunk on the number four bus among the neon and overcoats and made me overjoyed or was it the beer.

Hamas in the park

2006-01-26T18:02:00.000-08:00

Hamas has scored a stinging political victory that has thrown an already unstable Middle East into complete disarray.

Er something.

I know little about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, as I am afraid to pick up any book on the subject lest I am inculcated by some sinister ideology.

In that subject, alone among all others, I wish to be ideologieless.

In London, when the writing wasn't going so well, or if I was lonely, or drunk, I would end up in Bloomsbury Square.

From about ten pm until six am it was a bacchanalia.

Summer nights were orgiastic--the men, dozens of them--would undulate in groups among the weak leaves of the battered limes.

One time I stepped into a muddy glen, two sides brush, one side wrought iron that looked out upon a cobbled street of row houses, and a skinny young man, perhaps nineteen or twenty, pale in the light, was being attended to, like a prince with a coterie, by men who knelt and kneaded at his penis and neck and lips with gloved hands.

He detached himself from them and found me.

We kissed for a while before he took me away from there.

I can't remember where his flat was--off the Edgware Road I think, somewhere east of there, an area some called Noho, he owned the flat himself.

We fucked in this room that was blindingly bright from arc-sodiums that lit up the square of the council block.

After, I kicked around the books he had stacked on floor in the living room.

He said he went to college in Southwark and was studying Yiddish theatre and performance cultures at the turn of the century.

We began to speak of Jewish culture--he was a Jew.

Members of his family had immigrated to Israel but he was in actor and wanted to make it in London.

"And who are you?" He asked me.

Despite everything that had come before, it was the first point at which he had asked anything about me.

"What's your background?"

"I'm American," I said.

"I know that--but your ethnicity."

"French," I said.

His face fell. "French? You mean--you aren't Arab?"

My left eye winced as it is wont to do. His face fell some more.

I shared the bed with him but we didn't speak much. In the morning, he quickly left me, saying he had important appointments.

That's how I remember it.

Visuals

2006-01-26T17:27:00.000-08:00

For those of you who may have downloaded a copy of Treasure Island Media's Plantin' Seed 2 (eponymously named if you indeed call it 'seed,' for it is indeed planted, many times, though I must admit I have never met nor will I ever entertain for dinner any man who calls it 'seed' and blemishes the act of making love by deigning to call it "plantin' seed" nor will I ever allow anyone to "plant" anything on or in me) but were distracted to other corners of the frame during a particular scene you may have missed one character who appears to be enjoying the act of bareback sex whilst adorned with an ankle bracelet. How incongruous, since my understanding was that the bracelet's purpose was to detain criminals under house arrest but apparently there are degrees of limitations that can be opposed, ever-widening spheres in which particular low-level offenders can move, and good for him for negotiating with his corrections officer the luxury of attending filmed bareback sex parties in hotels. Or perhaps he lied and said he was just popping out for some milk and smokes.

To me the image of the bracelet crowds out all others from this film.

It perked me up

2006-01-24T12:08:00.000-08:00

Depressed, I found myself driving out to the suburban Monday night orgy.

Wetnesses on the highway gilded behind semis.

Early, I idled in my car in a grocery store parking lot and watched a woman struggle with her groceries.

In my dream I dreamt that I smoked cigarettes again.

I use my car so infrequently and it takes me to such beautiful places--suburbs, grocery stores, an eighteen year old who calls me now too frequently.

I associate cars with sex and cigarettes.

Idling in them gives my cravings and erections.

The orgy took place in a darkened room.

One young man, in baggy cargo pants and shirt, buzzcut, stunk of smokes, gothic lettering on his back, always found me. I found it so comforting, to be stuffed full of him.

On my way home I sang to Dolly Parton songs, loudly, and the billows of snow confused me and blinded the road ahead.

I arrived home, and once showered, felt much better.

Veux-tu?

2006-01-22T19:09:00.000-08:00

We went to high school together--I'll call him Saul. I only went to his house once. He lived out in the woods in a small white house set in a nicely manicured lawn with white pebble gardens. Outside his bedroom window was a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Saul was Catholic and wore a cross of St. Christopher around his neck. I found this out in Quebec City in June after my junior year. We were in the French club together and had taken a trip to Quebec City for a week to practice our French. We were staying at Lavalle University dorms. The real students had departed.

During the days we were free to come and go as wel pleased, taking the city buses into the old part of town (or, if we were brave, out to suburban shopping malls, where no one spoke English). Most of us chose to spend the days out of the dorms, because they were sweltering.

Saul and I were friends, good friends. I think we had spent the day together in town but had returned to the dorms before everyone else. We were alone in his dorm room and he took of his shirt. He told me what the medallion meant.

Saul and I had a game we used to play. It was a variation of the 'Do You Trust Me' game that some of his played in junior high. You put your hand on a girl's knee and said, "do you trust me?" If she said yes, you moved your hand a fraction of a inch higher. Same question. Another affirmative, and you inched up and up until she giggled and bucked your hand off. Saul and would play the same game, only after two or three rounds one of his would suddenly lunge for the other's crotch and give it a good shake, like a dog's jaw tugging on a rope.

That's the game we played, only it went farther. I kept my hand on his crotch and he let it sit there for seconds upon seconds.

Each second another drop of sweat.

Eventually we bucked against each other, his bare chest against me. I can close my eyes and see the brown freckles, the pendulum of St. Christopher beating between us.

Nothing else happened. The moment was dilluted and then trickled away. We returned home.

It was the end of our senior year when the next development occured. Again, it happened rather quickly during a heated performance of our Do You Trust Me game. This time we were in my parents' minivan and I was driving us to a friend's house. There was a lot of crotch-grabbing along the highway. Finally, I pulled over. I was going to ask the question.

"Saul, can I ask you something? Are you gay?"

"Yes," he said, very, very quietly.

"YOU ARE?" I said loudly and quickly, so shocked and surprised and so pleasaed.

"Nah," he said, retreating. "Far from it."

I told him I was bisexual, that it was okay if he was, etc. Nothing happened. He wouldn't budge. He wouldnt' go there again. I asked if he wanted to go to the elementary school and hang out on the dark playground equipment. We wouldn't need to join our friends. We could just be alone. No, he didn't want that.

A lot pivots on that moment for me, and also very little. I was enamoured of Saul. I admired him, his sweetness, his sensitive masculinity. He needed glasses. In a way he was a Jack Twist. I was in love with him. I moved away to go to college and Saul struggled at the local community college, eventually dropping out to work full time in the meat department of a grocery store. I have never gone back to see him although I know exactly where he would be. When I kissed the suburban boy the other night, the lips immediately made me think of Saul's, as though every kiss I seek out is a search for his.

Suburbia

2006-01-21T14:13:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was dreaming of whales in the Thames. Today I learned it has died.

Yesterday I drove out to the suburbs to have sex. I rarely drive out of the center of the city--when I do I am entranced by the long lines of red tail lights, the endless sound walls, the outposts of fast food boxes blazing at the onramps.

I had been talking to this 18 year old on Manhunt and he thought I was sexy--this is the high school kid from an earlier post. He lives in a shitty townhome with his dad; they have a giant big screen t.v. and little else of value, rummage sale purchases, mis-matched furniture. One of dad's friends, a recently divorced dude, lives in the basement. The guy is a senior and his dad teaches high school hockey and he was out at a game so we had a few hours.

When I met him I realized he only had a few more years of cuteness in him. He had reddish hair and blond eyebrows that became invisible in certain light and at particular angles. He had a cute round face, taut, but as soon as the slack starts showing he'll be done for. We started fooling around. He was a bit chubby but underneath it was hard muscle and a lot of it.

After we fucked we laid around and he put his hand in my chest hair and told me more about himself. Since the age of fifteen he's been dating older men--much older men. At fifteen he had a 'boyfriend' who was in his late 30s. I think he's been treated badly and it sounds like he's been put at risk of HIV infection by some unsavory characters who took advantage of an impressionable teenager.

We drove to a Burger King and I had dinner while he talked--editor of the school newspaper, has an after school job at Abercrombie & Fitch, likes shopping and coffee shops. He was utterly banal, in other words, you might dismiss him as another homogenized suburban white male in America.

These two spheres--I was captivated by their convergence in this one boy. He wore a jean jacket and A&F jeans and styled his hair and his dad was a hockey coach who probably would have kicked my ass to find me in bed with his son and his secret life is the meaningful search for an older man, a mass of chest hair to dive his hands into.

I found the whole thing quite radical. A much more laudable quest he's on then, say, an out gay man like myself in the safety of the liberal center city.

Gay boys

2006-01-19T13:22:00.000-08:00

I was thinking of the earl of scooby the other day. Omnisexual gayboy sex offender. His myspace page is gone, but before they took it down I surfed around his friends. I read the profiles of out 16 year old gay boy drag queens and underage queers and out-and-proud junior high kids.

Last night I was on manhunt and got to talking to this eighteen year old kid. He thought I looked 'so fricken' cute' and he wanted to talk on the phone so I thought what the hell.

He is a senior in highschool and bubbled on and on about working at abercrombie and fitch, about this guy who he was seeing who ended up cutting his wrists, about doing his hair and shopping and how he loves his hair, he was bubbly and gay.

I said, listen, can I tell you something? I said, I've been thinking about this the past couple days. I graduated from highschool not so long ago and it strikes me that so much has changed in the past few years. Across suburbia its okay to be young and gay and out in highschool.

He said yeah, that was kind of the case. Not at all highschools, of course.

Of course.

My highschool was a redneck hellhole.

Weekends were spent drinking in pick-up trucks, having keggers at gravel pits, fuckin' gettin' herpes and shit.

A small city nearby was our only metropolis.

Of course I wasn't out--barely out to myself--and tried to hide, small as possible, corner of the lunchroom, dick shrunk up into my gym clothes, showering after everyone else, surrounding myself with sympathetic teachers.

I was sucking lots of cock though and gettin' ass and had a boyfriend in another town when I was a senior.

But two instances of unrequited lust stand out in my mind that I would like to share.

The therapist

2006-01-10T13:20:00.000-08:00

My therapist ain't no pontalis

but he helps me / he's nice

scribbles things down

usually long loopy circles

while talk about myself

last night he said I lack connection / I should put myself out there / find a boyfriend

I told him that I felt really self conscious talking about all this stuff

I felt banal / middle class

"My life is so middle class!" I said, loudly, when my time was almost up.

"My life is made up of four things

working, working out, monday night orgies, and netflix."

he laughed and laughed

and then wrote down

"major depression."

he did

I saw him write it.

Manhatta toilets

2006-01-09T01:41:00.000-08:00

In London, when I was sad or frightened, I would go to this one toilet in a dark and abandoned street.

I would smoke cigarettes, listen to the water dripping on pipes. It was cold. Men would come and cruise, suck each other off.

Against all better judgement I would spend hours there and I felt so safe, so protected by myslf and my clothes, my eyes were my weapons, no one spoke to me and I was not compelled to speak.

I saw it all, and only occasionally partook.

Just wishing

2006-01-08T19:28:00.000-08:00

everyone was wrapped up in their game of trivial pursuit

i had arrived after the game had already started, so i was just sitting there drinking lite beer and being bored

i excused myself and said i was going to go have a cigarette

i wandered around the house and found myself in my ex boyfriend's bedroom

it was dangerous for me to be there but i couldn't help myself

i kicked at some clothes on the floor--did these belong to him or his boyfriend?

the old bed

i was sitting on a desk chair when he was suddenly in the doorway

hello there, what are you doing?

sorry...just wandering around

he looked at me nervously and said, what are you thinking about?

just wishing that things were different, i said

you mean that you are i were back together?

no i said, just wishing that you were someone worth fighting to get back

Seething

2006-01-07T22:58:00.000-08:00

today I was depressed

i went to a shopping mall

i overheard a woman say to her husband, "you know what I want? i would really like some burger king coffee right now"

i went to express for men because that cheers me up

even though i am so not that store

i bought two shirts that made me feel momentarily happy

wandered out into the parking lot

couldn't find my car

the damn mall doesn't have any mnemic devices in the parking lots

i wandered for what seemed like hours

fell into a slough

when i woke up i was a princess

***

later in the night that feeling went away

i found myself playing trivial pursuit with some people including my exboyfriend and his new boyfriend

i realized i am still bitter

his boyfriend is crazy

i mean literally

he's addicted to pills, often unemployed, has mental problems

in short, i am way better than him

so why is he still with him and why did our relationship turn into great big globs of dogshit that are still stinking up my room

i am bitter and that depresses me

and i saw white heat at times in my eyes and i dreamed of stabbing

but im home now listening to the doves

Harangue

2006-01-05T11:02:00.000-08:00

Exboyfriend of many, many years ago has a tendency to harangue me. It's a passive-agressive form of stalking, what he does. Letters, postcards to my mom, messages meant to get back to me. Myspace communications. Someday he'll show up on my doorstep and kill me, I'm sure of it. This time he pointed me toward an allegorical essay on Prometheus. I was the eagle.

Because this is secret I can talk about the orgy I went to last night

2006-01-03T14:03:00.000-08:00

The orgy was pretty lame. I had been there twice before and usually there are a mix of men, 19 years old to about mid-30s, maybe a total of 10-15 people. The orgy is in a suburb far from the center of the city. It's in this nondescript condo development. With the closing of sex clubs and porno theaters and gay bathhouses its nice to know that naughty sex has migrated to the suburbs. Condos are so boring and ugly its heartening to think of a bunch of strange men buggering each other. Think about that.

When I arrived at the orgy there were seven guys smoking outside of the condo. Some of them looked cute. When I got in the orgy organizer, Jeff, was acting kind of nervously. Jeff is in his late 30s or so and he's pretty fat. He has an orgy every Monday night except for the nights when the local hockey team plays at home. Jeff never joins in the orgy. He just stands in the doorway to his master bedroom and watches guys fuck each other and once in a while he'll rub someone's back or kiss a dude's neck while he's getting sucked off but he always keeps his clothes on. I swear he's videotaping it all and that he jerks off to the tapes when we've all left. My secret plan is to ingratiate myself to him and get him to share with me his secret video tapes. I am positive they exist.

For some reason, the seven guys outside disappeared. I sipped from my can of Miller Lite. I had another. I really wasn't feeling it. Soon I just said to Jeff, hey, bro, I'm not feeling it. The way to Jeff's heart is to call him 'bro.' Jeff understood why I wasn't feeling it. He walked me to the door and grabbed my butt through my jeans. I told him I'd call him next Monday. The thing about having an orgy every week is, there's always next Monday.

This is a secret

2006-01-03T09:20:00.000-08:00

This is a secret blog because I am really, really famous. I would get fired and you would be hunted down and shuttled to Uzbekistan via secret CIA flights routed through Gatwick if you revealed my true identity.

As for a nom de plume I chose Darling Daintyfoot because its really pretentious and sexy. You don't know who I am so I can be pretentious.

Other candidates were: Frank O'Hara's Fuckbuddy, Fernando Pessoa, Sal Mineo.

Getting my victim to pardon me

2005-12-31T11:13:00.000-08:00

The heat has been turned off in the building for some reason. There are only two of us. The rest of the apartments are empty and the doors swing wide open. Broken panes of glass everywhere. Sometimes I walk around in the empty apartments, the refrigerator doors swinging wide, the smell of gas from forgotten stoves breathing to themselves in bare kitchens, ugly lino.

A hot boy used to live downstairs. He had girls over all the time, pretty girls that I imagined he would fuck at night and in the morning I would watch them dash out in high heels and negligee as their cars got towed from out front. I would fantasize about this boy, thin as a rail and trash-faced, addicted to camel lights and ice beer, and wish he wanted me. Now he's gone and his apartment is empty. I wandered around in it just now, sniffing, trying to get a sense of him. He's been gone for months of course. The bathroom, the bedroom, swept clean of everything except a few dead skin cells, I imagine, on the windowsill.

The Christmas break has come and gone and Cute T hasn't called, which makes me sad and yet defiant. We met about a year ago--I threw a Christmas party and some boys brought him. He was cute and curly-haired, thin and indie. He was also moving to New York City in a few weeks, but we went out on a date anyway, to a trashy gay bar, and got drunk, and I, feeling giddy, told him I didn't care if he was moving--I liked him and I was going to keep liking him. Thus began about a month of intense passion...fucking all weekend, napping in bed to wake and fuck again, dinners, movies, more fucking, making out. He is so fucking cute I am getting aroused just imaginging being inside him again. He is also sweet and tender and one of those boys you want to spend all your money and time and cum making happy.

Part of the success of things for me was that he was moving. I know that doesn't make any sense, but we wouldn't have worked out had he stuck around. If we had had all the time in the world, we would have squandered it, grown bored, moved on. With only a few weeks, we crammed it all into a tight ball between us, like some critical mass of neutrons that burned our bellies.

He moved to NYC and I visited him and he would come back to town unannounced. His family lives in a small town about an hour away so Cute T would fly into the larger metropolis and call me. "Hey, it's me. I'm on the train heading into the city. Can I crash with you for a few days until my flight leaves?" I never knew when his calls were coming and he was always only an hour or two from my doorstop. It was sexy and exciting. We'd have a few more days to fuck and cuddle and whisper. And then he'd be gone.

Cute T always wanted more, and I was content with what we had. Finally he caught wind of my truth--that I didn't think we would have worked out had we stayed together. It was something I kept from him, calculatingly. Why spoil it with a kernel of truth he didn't need to know? Witholding your projection of a possible future that never came to pass isn't dishonest. He wrote me saying he just wanted to be loved the way he wanted to be loved. At first I was sad, and then I became angry--don't I want to be loved the way I want to be loved? And if Cute T could do that, wouldn't my thoughts have changed? I said as much to him, and that was the end.

So these past few days between Christmas and New Year's, wandering around my freezing apartment in slippers, wondering if Cute T would call (but knowing deep down that he won't ever call again), I can't help but think of another passage from Genet...

Here am I this morning, after a long night of caressing my beloved couple, torn from my sleep by the noise of the bolt being drawn by the guard who comes to collect the garbage. I get up and stagger to the latrine, still entangled in my strange dream, in which I succeeded in getting my victim to pardon me.

Of course that's how I felt this morning, waking with a slight hangover. Wishing Cute T was in bed with me and thinking for a brief moment that I might see him again. This time last year we were lying in bed together, watching the snow outside, making love over and over again.

The Scenes

2005-12-30T19:49:00.000-08:00

Art...

The banners I've constructed for the site encapsulate in certain small ways what I hope this blog is about...

I'm a big fan of zines, diy culture and the rough aesthetics of copiers and inaccurate reproductions. This image comes from the cover of the zine Autocratic/Autoerotic.

Computers have a way of fucking things up in beautiful ways. When I began this blog, I returned to some old essays I wrote on Jean Genet in an very archaic version of Microsoft Word. Opening them, my computer jumbled the text into strange and somewhat beautiful patterns.

On the left, Justin Berry. Webcam porno star? victim of pedophiles? Born-again Christian? Federal witness? Web entrepreneur? All of the above? This photo of him is my favorite--after leaving behind his sorded webcam lifestyle, he got baptized again. On the right, Freddie Mercury. Live Aid. Bohemian Rhapsody. AIDS. "My makeup may be flaking but my smile stays on."

Speaking of autoerotics, this is an image I fell in love with a long time ago. It's a crime scene photo of a married man who died while practicing autoerotic asphyxiation, which involves masturbating while cutting off one's own airflow, which is obviously very dangerous. He is wearing pantyhose and women's shoes and died with the television on.

This is the body of Piers Paolo Pasolini, the Italian writer and filmmaker, who was stabbed to death on November 30th, 1975. At first, a young street ruffian named 'Pino the Frog' told how he had been having sex with Pasolini in the park when they were set up on by three men with Sicilian accents who beat and stabbed Pasolini to death while shouting anti-gay slurs at him. However, Pino's account was since discredited, and the details of the death of one of cinema's geniuses remains a mystery.

Of course, this is taken from the movie poster for Fassbinder's Querelle, which starred Brad Davis in the role of the murderous, bisexual sailor.

Here is Little Edie near the end of the film Grey Gardens, lamenting the overbearing control her mother, Big Edie, has had on her life all these long years shut up in the ramshackle mansion on Long Island. The documentary, shot in 1975, provides a fascinating look into the mundane and eccentric lives of Jackie O's Aunt and her spinster daughter.

I'm quite proud of this one--It's a reworking of the cover of the Farber and Farber edition of Querelle.

I hope he won't mind...I recently heard from Sean, who sent me this updated photo of himself. Sean is 24 now, but he was seventeen and I was nineteen when we first met. I was a freshman living in the dorms and he would drive in from exurbia. We would go months without seeing each other sometimes, and then he'd show up and we'd spend a tender night together. He was the gentlest boy and I cared for him deeply. He chose others over me though, and that makes me sad, though deep down I know it couldn't have been different. He lives in Florida now, where he runs a successful windowblinds business with his boyfriend, who is my age. The last time I talked to Sean, his boyfriend was dying of cancer.

A random image, that's all, that I was struck by--a fine-art nude of a young man, decontextualized, taken from this link. No clue who what where when how.

Writing in white ink

2005-12-29T19:03:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, I was in college and living in my first apartment, which was in a shitty part of town. The apartment was two bedrooms, a third floor walkup, hardwood floors that pitched like the deck of a boat at sea, a galley kitchen and a giant claw foot bathtub that took hours to fill. It went for the anachronistic price of $445 a month--for both bedrooms. I had just become a Cultural Studies major, and wrote papers on the queering of marriage and gay pornography and took my sexuality extremely seriously. It was newly discovered in me and a potent force. Not something to take lightly but let it run wild while you could only dig your hands into its mane and hold on for dear life.

In one particular class I fell under the spell of Jean Genet. He was many things I aspired to be at a time when they all seemed impossible--thief, criminal, buds with the Black Panthers, shaker of Arafat's hand, and unabashed homosexual. Our Lady of the Flowers became in a few short weeks my Bible and handbook. How well I followed him, I don't know. Not to the letter, certainly. But single, alone in my shitty apartment, I did find a kind of religiosity in paying homage to my own bodily functions and the whims of my burgeoning erotic life.

One weekend I wrote this paper that I'm still kind of proud of. Shit, yeah, but not bad for a nineteen year old. The paper was called "Writing in White Ink" and compared Genet's masturbatory fantasies of Darline and Divine to an essay by Helene Cixous, "Laugh of the Medusa." What I had before me was a neat little paperback published by Grove and typeset in Times but as I began to absorb that what I was reading were the sexual fantasies, the jerk-off diaries of a homosexual in prison, alone and isolated and so turning inward, relishing his farts and examing the jewels he left behind in the toilet bowl and writing down on the paperbags he assembled during the day for a measly job the stories he would jerk off to at night, I found myself stopping every few paragraphs to fall breathlessly to my own bed. I must have jerked off about ten times during the course of that paper. And since then I've devoted my life to writing in white ink.

Our lady of the flowers

2005-12-28T18:16:00.000-08:00

I have given up the daydream. I was loved. I have quit, the way a contestant in a six-day bicycle race quits; yet the memory of his eyes and their fatigue, which I have to cull from the face of another youngster whom I saw coming out of a brothel, a boy with firm legs and ruthless cock, so solid that I might almost say it was knotted, and his face (it alone, seen without its veil), which asks for shelter like a knight-errant--this memory refuses to disappear as the memory of my dream-friends usually does. It floats about. It is less sharp than when the adventures were taking place, but it loves in me nevertheless. Certain details persist more obstinately in remaining: the little hollow key with which, if he wants to, he can whistle; his thumb; his sweater; his blue eyes...If I continue, he will rise up, become erect, and penetrate me so deeply that I shall be marked with stigmata. I can't bear it any longer. I am turning him into a character whom I shall be able to torment in my own way, namely, Darling Daintyfoot. He will still be twenty, although his destiny is to become the father and lover of Our Lady of the Flowers.

-- Jean Genet

The scene of a stratagem

2005-12-28T17:50:00.000-08:00

Fifteen months have since gone by, during which time I have written the opening sentences of this text (roughly speaking, the ones I've just written) perhaps fifty times and have each time without fail become thoroughly snared in rhetorical devices. I wanted to write, I had to write, had to rediscover in writing, through writing, the trace of what had been said (all those pages recommenced, those unfinished drafts, those lines left hanging, are like souvenirs of the amorphous sessions in which I had the hateful sensation of being a machine for grinding out words without weight), but the words hardened into carefully chosen phrases and what one might assume to be preliminary questions: why do I need to write this text? Who is it really intended for? Why choose to write, and to publish, to make public, what was perhaps named only in the secrecy of analysis? Why choose to attach this uncertain search to the ambiguous theme of the Stratagem?

-- Georges Perec