To make the story simpler, Big Green House Guy works for an eye doctor, so I'll just call him Eye Guy.  Eye Guy and I hit it off from the start.  We fit together like chocolate and cake.  It is not so much that we mesh perfectly; rather Eye Guy has the amazing capacity to be loving and open even when I behave moronically, which I'm given to do at regular intervals.  Even Havana Cat, a feline who tolerates only me as the human in her life, happily climbs into Eye Guy's lap and purrs as if he was the one who rescued her from the animal shelter. 

I dragged Eye Guy to Folsom Street Fair (he was unimpressed); he dragged me to New Orleans (I was unimpressed). 

Eye Guy makes me mixed CDs with affectionate notes scribbled in permanent marker; he brings me Teen Titan action figures; and when I can't make up my mind between Milk Duds and Hot Tamales in the movie theater he buys both. 

Eye Guy and I dated for six months.  Somewhere in those six months something changed.  We love each other intensely, but somehow that love doesn't quite reach our penises.  So we stopped being boyfriends and settled into what we both refer to as our "Inappropriate Gay Relationship" - inappropriate because we don't sleep together, we don't have sex, and neither of us seem to be able to live without the other.

Relationships and sex have long been a puzzle for me - like a Rubik's cube that everyone else knows how to solve but I just stare at and see unmatched squares.  While I still feature fantasies about waking up next to a person I love, there is security being in love without the baggage attached to sex. 

Both of us date other people now.  We rarely talk about it except to satirize bad dates.  I don't know what will happen if either of us finds a new relationship.  I prefer the healthy option of ignoring and refusing to acknowledge this possibility.

Someone remarked to Eye Guy:  "Don't worry, you'll find the right person some day."  I turned and said to Eye Guy:  "You already have."

Profound loss and tragedy often strip away cardboard barricades designed to block the vista of our shared mortality.  Eternal nonexistence weighs too heavily for some and the only medication is a flimsy promise of eternal memory.  Our collective unwillingness to release the past leaves us embalmed in guilt and pain for events long gone and for which no atonement is sufficient. 

We will forgot.  Time will wash away the memories of recent tragedy as it reduced the names of millions of dead in two world wars to melting marble markers and fading photographs.  Matters of great importance today evaporate in a generation. 

The desire to create a token tossed into the future beyond our lifetimes only further distracts us from our impending demise.  We stand graveside chanting "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" not comprehending the message is for us and not the corpse below.  Life sings when we stand in the full awareness of our death - not fleeting and vague comprehension - but the constant knowledge our existence is finite in every variable.

[Summer has arrived in Maine.  How do I know?  Crazy Helga is mowing her lawn while wearing ermine.  Click here to see her live.]

21 June 2005 - (Link to this entry) (Comment)

It is time to end Gay Pride celebrations.  Everywhere.

A close friend of mine describes Gay Pride celebrations as "Big Gay Flea Markets".  Other friends deride the events as showcasing drag and leather - just what the cameras love and just what marriage-minded, integrative homosexuals hate.

I don't like the commercial kitsch, but I understand someone has to foot the bill for the performers, parades and VIP tents.  I don't mind the drag queens or leathermen either.  All the marriage minded queers would be well reminded that drags and leathermen started our little revolution and manned the front lines until baby strollers replaced dildo shops in the Castro. 

I am all for a Big Gay Holiday.  Although Halloween technically qualifies, and Easter follows close behind, a day all our own is still a great idea.

What I dislike is the moniker "Gay Pride".  I may be thankful for lots of things, but my self-esteem doesn't come from the fact I sleep with men.  Queer folk seem to believe that "pride" means the opposite of "shame"; that a Pride Festival shows we no longer hate ourselves and want others to stop hating us, too.  Both are incorrect.

It is time to return to the origins of this holiday - the Freedom Day.  Freedom from oppression, freedom from hate, and freedom to live as we truly are.

While Gay Pride implies tribalism, freedom means integration.  Queers desperately tried to include other groups by constantly expanding our hip abreviation.  What was once GL (Gay and Lesbian) now is GLBTQQ and sometimes a few extra letters.  Freedom Day eliminates the need for adding groups to "Gay" opens the festivities to the anyone looking to make equal rights really equal.

Happy Freedom Day.

27 June 2005 - (Link to this entry) (Comment)

I am in Miami.  There are no swamps here, just runoff canals filled with air conditioner condensation.  Condensate runs from beneath cars, down gutters, drips from rusting boxes perched in windows.  The inside of buildings smell of mildewed refrigerant coils; the world outside smells of rot.

Miami is Havana.  Here as there, diesel exhaust flavors the air.  It is a slum made attractive by steroidal vegetation rampaging under the tropical heat and humidity.  Cheap shacks and derelict cars look romantic covered in vines and shaded by palms. 

My English is foreign; signs and people speak in rapid Spanish.  The women sport giant breasts in tight tops; the men feature building biceps and intentionally transparent cotton trousers.  I feel comparatively pale, white and, um, inadequate. 

The hotel feels and looks like the palace of a deposed tropical dictator - less the revolutionary bullet nicks in the stucco facade.  I am here as the guest of a business client.  Two blocks away cars sit on cement blocks and beg for repairs less expensive than my valet parking.  Fifteen hundred dollars purchases a single night in this rundown upscale hotel where my one bedroom suite includes three bathrooms.  I do not know why the room has three bathrooms or whether I am expected to use each of them before the maid calls. 

From my suite I can see the ocean and a t-shirt shop and a daiquiri stand.  On the street below someone blasts a car horn and screams first in Spanish then "fuck you!"

28 June 2005 - (Link to this entry) (Comment)

How do we end up where we are?  By choice?  Fate?  Random luck?

I lost my way searching for South Beach today.  I wandered down a narrow strip of beach jutting into the Atlantic Ocean and discovered a curious place you are unlikely to see featured in any Miami tourist guide.  Check back next week for a series of photographs which obtaiing required me to trespass, survive insect hordes, and return home with seventeen mosquito pocks.

More...