revision

It shouldn’t be counterintuitive that to get a job writing you need to write. Write copiously = writer better = get job writing. But perhaps the equating of these clauses is misleading; they’re more causally related than perfectly equivalent, after all. I’m supposed to be reading Milton’s Paradise Lost at the moment, sitting here in the still-new, still-new-smelling Hargrove Music Library, staring at the curiously dull passersby below in the one-foot-tall-but-twenty-feet-long window tucked into one wall of this strange little cube of a place.
This Saturday is Record Store Day! Celebrating the independent record store, that despite the endlessly proliferating Borders stores with giant music sections, Virgin Megastores with their obnoxious I’m-hip-and-you-know-it flair, and other monstrously enormous music stores that are threatening to drown the world in noxious waves of homogeneity, survive on in pockets of resistant culture! That the interest in them remains is proof enough that not everyone out there should be held in the utmost contempt, that not everyone out there is a mindless drone who believes in the mind-warping messages of new media and popular culture. I don’t know why I’m ranting so obtusely. Rants really ought to be more original, engaging, and comprehensible than this one’s turning out to be. It wasn’t even supposed to be a rant. Record Store Day is a beautiful cause for celebration! A beautiful excuse to hop over to the city in search of that next beautiful 12″ to add to an incipient collection.

Hm, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Well, I’m back, hopefully for good this time. We’ll see.

There’s what we choose to think, what we choose to desire, and what we choose to do. Only the last of the three is important because only action produces change, that cornerstone of development and advancement that remains, not a bit ironically, the only constant in life.

Daily writing and drawing. Routine. 8 AM alarms. Newspaper and microforms room. Newspaper reading. French listening. An hour. Pure fascination. A quick graduation. A quicker tomorrow. Movement and ambition. Let’s wait and see.

This is the first lonely late night, in a while, and I realize how fiercely I value my independence and how much I need it to live. Even as the rain poured down and I felt the wind coursing through my legs, through the holes in my pants, the wood of the balcony railing alive beneath my hands with water soaking in, everything felt the way it should have, everything felt the way it could have, as if I were reading a text-heavy novel when suddenly a picture gleams from the page.

–

Peppermint-flavored Pop Rocks popped in our mouths as we walked down the rainbow-lined, men-filled streets of Castro. I’m actually a lesbian, I wanted to tell the world. Look at me: I’m out of the closet now. I want to find a small, vulnerable, beautiful woman and whisper love words to her late at night with my arms around her, telling her how radiant and beautiful she looks, and how I can only ever really be myself when I’m with her. Will I ever find this woman? I like being a man, but I love men. A man, at the moment, but perhaps I could love men. And perhaps I could love women. I cannot say.

–

The rumbling started from a long distance away but grew. It started to shake the ground, then the people, who could feel it in their bones and then their hearts. It continued. Their hearts shook so violently now, resonating with the rumbling, that they no longer fit in their useless chest cavities, and one by one, the people fell. Hearts and bright blood splashed across the black cement, wet with fresh rain. The rumbling ceased. No one was left alive.

–

It must have been dementia. It had to have been. The dementia of emotionality and asphyxiation, of poor decisions and even poorer execution. The dementia of savage hunger and painful blindness, of wealthless late nights and forgotten glasses. It was above all the dementia of hate. Beautiful, poetic, bitter hate.

Today is the beginning. Day one. Clean slate. A personal New Year’s Day on this, the lucky thirteenth of November, and an insignificant Tuesday. Knowing I’ll be sleeping in my own bed tonight lends this life, at last, a dimension of reality. The past two months seem too much like a vivid dream, and a nightmare at times, for me to comprehend where I am or how I got here, but just the idea of home creates perspective, as if home were a restorative power, and a map to boot.

A snapshot.

The din was surprising in the corner-hugging cafe, pushing up against unparallel streets as it was, and oddly-shaped. There’d been a few stares as they walked in, black coats coated with midnight rain and long hair dripping. They’d been outside for a while, they’d said. That was all. The hostess led them to a table by the tall glass windows, open to an abnormally nocturnal neighborhood, with a bright neon clock on the shopping plaza across the way reading the wrong time, reaffirming the timelessness of those strange morning/night hours.

So you did it again, after all these weeks. You thought you were through. You told yourself you were, in so many words, in so many ways, so many times. As if repetition created truth and illusion bred reality. Yet the world felt perfect again the moment you inhaled, you could breathe a little easier, could live a bit longer with yourself and who you’d become, could imagine a different time and could almost feel the wind of a different place raising the hair on the back of your neck and the goosebumps on your arms. You exhaled.

You turned your head so the smell wouldn’t soak completely into your hair, you’d forgotten how the smoke smell stayed and stayed and stayed, especially on your hair, on your hands, in your mouth, on your yellowing teeth and rotting gums, in your blackened lungs, on your blackening heart. You inhaled. The trees looked friendlier for a second. You exhaled.

You left guilt for another time, a better time, perhaps when you could get him out of your mind, his smile, his laugh imprinted in your brain, although you didn’t want it there. Had never wanted it there. You had more important things for that space in your head that he now occupied. You had watched your carefully constructed card-house plans fall to pieces the second he smiled at you.

And of course it was too late now. You inhaled. Lowered your hand to hide the object of your shame, the faint glow of the embers pulsing with the wind like a heart. Like your heart as you thought about his kindness, his intensity, his laugh. You exhaled.

You could almost see him now, could imagine him besides you, a cigarette ever dangling from his mouth, the white of the paper pristine against the black of his full beard, so strange on a face so young. He looked much older, which was partly why you couldn’t resist the inevitable attraction. You inhaled.

I’ve slept two hours out of the past 41. There’s a ridiculousness, almost an obscenity, to the current situation. Why is it so easy here to lose sight of one’s dreams, as if the endless monotony were what stifled hopes and ambitions? It’s too easy to forget where we are, why we are. Too easy.

The warm smell of detergent and fabric softener and clean clothes floated around the room as people slowly filled the narrow spaces between the stacked chrome washing machines and the dark gray laundry-folding tables. A microphone stand sans microphone sans speaker stood alone at the back of the laundromat, surrounded by well-dressed, intelligent-looking middle-aged men and women. It was the third and last “phase” of the evening, the event having been split into three innocuously termed “phases,” where literati gathered to listen to writers and poets read their own works. It was the second to last day of Litquake ‘07.

I stood staring at the remnants of bohemia, bewildered and entranced, realizing suddenly what had simmered inside me now for a very long time was not loneliness but a savage hunger for language and literature as life. Words like blood coursed through my head; the knowledge was frightening, liberating, suffocating. I wanted this world. Needed it the way I needed two gallons of water a day, the way I needed to sing, to blink, to love. The way I needed intensity and conversations about nothing.

But choosing to write for a living means choosing a chance at failure. I knew that too. One by one, they climbed onto the folding table, read, spoke, and danced the dance of words and meaning and truth that was deeper and richer than the truth of the quotidian. I heard and I listened and I started choking with my heart in my throat, but nobody noticed. Nobody was supposed to notice.

At last, I’m feeling settled into this virtual home with a new theme (Derek Punsalan’s beautiful, award-winning Foliage mod), one photo in place (more to come), and all the time in the world on my hands (or so it seems). I’ll be on a plane in less than 48 hours!

A small silverfish just crawled across my knee and a rather large spider delicately picked its way across the overlapped spines of a pile of books beside me. This rug is not a very clean place to be.

Rainbows waved in the midmorning air, brushing away clouds in the blue sky. Too many butt cheeks, breasts, and genital parts swung in the perfect summer weather for comfort, but it was San Francisco; the words “indecent exposure” never formed on anyone’s lips. And it was pride, not insanity, that motivated them. No matter which face you turned to, it was there: pride etched into folds of skin, curving mouths and eyebrows rapturously upward, pride in the faces of those who knew they were different, asking for the right to love and not be ashamed of their love. Yet, why is so much of the collective LGBT identity defined by who one is sleeping with and how often?
That their sexual orientation contributes to their individuality and defines the community to which they belong does not make sexuality, that is, promiscuity, a requirement for choosing to live and love as they do. The long, happy marriages built upon commitment and fidelity, the families created through adoption but shaped by the same love found in a traditional home, all of it is discounted by both those within and outside the LGBT community who choose to focus exclusively on homosexual sex. Perhaps the image of the sexually promiscuous homosexual man is residue from an age when having AIDS and/or wearing only one earring meant you were gay. Yet, many still choose and flaunt the sexually irresponsible route and, in the process, destroy the best efforts of their brothers and sisters fighting for equality by upholding traditional values. Several groups in the 2007 SF Gay Pride parade promoted safe sex (one banner had a drop headline reading Fuck Safely, or some other similarly vulgarly sound adage); someone handed me a package containing “personal lubricant” and a black condom–did I look like I needed them?

-

Every religious and ethnic group was among the supporters–Jewish trailed Catholics trailing Episcopalians trailing other Protestants. An Indian dance party made heads bob amongst the audience–saris flapped to the dancers’ movements; a group of men each carrying an enormous flag of his native country marched by, countries where they would have had the rights they hoped for in this one. The Native Americans, who rode by in an imitation cable car, call homosexuals “two spirits,” because they have the body of one gender but the spirit of another. What a beautiful idea–that two spirits should be suspended together in one being.

I’ve been browsing through a few of the grad blogs linked on Lloyd’s blog, and all that passes through my head as I read them is “Why can’t I blog like that?” To transcend emotionalism, purple prose, the angst and confusion of adolescence, and to reach the heady heights of creativity, humor, wisdom, tech-savviness, intelligence. Ah, what a dream. What a delicious, impossible dream.