Categories
Malibu

God Children

My darling God Children give me so much pleasure.  Here is a glimpse of them.   They have moved to Lake Malibu which is  just PERFECT.

Loads going on in SoCal…but just H’wood shit.   On HLN again tonight with my valued opinions about Charlie Sheen.   SAG awards…blah blah.  Aleksa won with her Boardwalk Empire colleagues.  She texted me after…so excited.  I am so proud of her.

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Categories
Malibu

Fallen Tree

As per your requests on facebook….

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Categories
Malibu

70 degrees Fahrenheit 10am

I woke at 4.30 am once again.  Nothing unusual about that.  Pottered around making tea and reading the news.  Unusually I went back to bed and for four hours I dreamt:  dreams of reconciliation.

I found myself at Victoria Station (London) waiting at a platform.  Then, I am on a road trip in France with a man I seemed to know but at day break no longer recognise.   Then, I am in a strange bedroom with a girl and a boy who are fighting.  She is crying.  She lets me hold her, console her.

Back at the station there is a large white dog who is lost, I can hear her owner calling out her name and they are reunited.   The dog plays in a sand box, performing tricks as if she were not a dog at all.   Burying herself comically in the sand.

Now the boy and the girl are there at the station.  There is still tension between them but the girl thanks me for holding her.  I ask if I can talk to her friend.  When we are alone I look into his eyes and ask him if he had ever, in fact, loved me.  He smiled wryly and I knew that he never had.  I was disappointed but not surprised.  He let me kiss him on the lips.  He was being very brave.  I said my goodbye and they left, the girl and the boy.

Some man wrote to me last week, an anonymous man (might have been a woman) telling me that I had ‘borderline personality disorder‘ well, I looked at the symptoms on-line and well, yes I could very well be that man.  But, so could almost every body else that I knew.  I thought, ok..so take away these symptoms..cure me.  What am I left with?  Not much.

What is it to be normal?  To have ‘normal’ aspirations?  To have ‘normal’ relationships?

I am willing, as I have all the way through my recovery..to remain teachable.  To consider the options.  To seek, to find, to mine my happiness without compulsion.  I have failed again and again but I try and I try.

Perhaps the fight in general, the war..is over?  I don’t know.  I am not suicidal.  I am not unhappy.  Today I find myself in my own body, seeing out of my own eyes.  Feeling with my own fingers.

If indeed it is true that I am as mad as a hatter then I must learn to live with my madness.  I am not, any time soon, taking psychotropic drugs or committing to therapy that declares some sort of vegetable normality.  Regardless of what or who I am I shall continue to make the best of a bad lot.

If one really could change out all of ones shortcomings what is one left with?

Yesterday we chopped down the tree that fell on the house.  Jody arrived from the electricity company to oversee our work.  We stood on the roof and fearlessly chain sawed the branches out of the live wires.

Roger, my assistant, emailed, called, swept paths and generally made my life a great deal easier.  Started making a list of things to be packed up and sent back East.

Categories
Love

The War is Over

I sat in therapy this morning overcome with regret.

Don’t want to fight any more.  The war is over.  The bloody war is over.

Take your life and live it.   You won’t find you on these pages any more.

You couldn’t say a kind goodbye so I must accept what you threw at me.

I had such a lovely breakfast with the boys.  Everyone of them so thrilled for me.  I don’t want to ruin it with petty acrimony.

Listen, owning up to the genesis of my anger has been a chore.

I wanted, from the very beginning, to set you free from your bondage but ended up chaining you to me like a Siamese twin.

I have been looking and longing for so many years.

Take it…take it all.

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Categories
Malibu

malibu views

Spent all day sweeping paths…I will show you the garden tomorrow when it is swept and hosed down.  Just a few more weeks before I am gone from here.

I wont miss it.

I hired an assistant more for the company than anything else.  He has been on his laptop selling the truck, fetching the Dorian Gray Archive out of storage, fetching and carrying…fetching and carrying.

We made good headway today.  Great.

Had lunch with John in Beverly Hills.

Can you see how much STUFF I have to contend with?   I am just going to sell everything and start anew.  Auction house here I come.

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Categories
Malibu

Los Angeles

Ashley picked me up from lax.   70 degrees..the little dog started molting immediately.

The flight was uneventful. Attending the final days of Sundance…I hope.

It was sad leaving NYC.  I loved the bitter cold on my face.

Expecting friends to visit…odd being thrown back in the middle of nowhere…yet something rather miraculous happened…I started writing my film with some long-lost compulsion to create.

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Categories
Dogs

Monday Morning

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Categories
art

cristobal balenciaga

Woke up on Saturday morning curled up with the sweet NYU boy and the little dog tangled in our feet.  It felt good to feel him there.  We walked west to meet my lawyer.  It was a great meeting.  We connected.  Looking forward to this project.

Lunch with Federico then we all headed to the Cristobal Balenciaga show at the Spanish Institute curated by Hamish Bowles.  Dan joined us there.   Very well attended show.  Many, many old ladies in mink coats and equal numbers of gay men including that really camp boy Austin Scarlet from Project Runway.

BALENCIAGA: Spanish Master is the first exhibition to consider the impact of Spain’s culture, history and art on one of its greatest twentieth-century sons, the legendary designer Cristóbal Balenciaga (1895-1972). Hailed as “Fashion’s Picasso” by Cecil Beaton, Balenciaga’s innovations transformed the way women dressed, from the opening of his Paris fashion house in 1937 until his retirement in 1968. His visionary designs and impeccable standards seduced generations of the best-dressed women in the world.

Separated over two floors in three rooms this exhibition could have been delightful but sadly…wasn’t.  There were simply too many beautiful costumes crammed into two badly lit rooms.  The descriptive captions were almost unreadable and the ‘influences’ we were promised were hard to divine.

There were some very beautiful dresses.  Some really pretty hats.  Wonderful beading and embroidery.   The black and white film of the fashion show on the top floor was interesting because most of the pieces looked so frumpy and the women in the audience were smoking.

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Cab home.  After the show Aaron and I lay on the sofa and napped.

All the while I am having a huge kerfuffle with some man making comments on my blog.  I took down all of the comments and my replies.

He was trying to persuade me that I was clinically insane but all of the ‘symptoms’ he used to convince me of my insanity seemed perfectly reasonable coping mechanisms for the unusual, the addict and the high achievers.

I am not striving any time soon to be NORMAL.  I am not striving to hang with NORMAL people…what or who ever they are?

I certainly don’t want to end up in crippling mediocrity…in some clap board home in River Ville filled with furniture a bed bug wouldn’t bother infesting.

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Dinner with Ian Drew.  A young lady asked if I was famous.  I told her that I thought maybe she was confusing me with some other guy.  She wasn’t convinced.

Categories
Rant

Choose Life

SH and DR

Suddenly enthusiastic.  Suddenly full of LIFE.  When I got sober I chose life over death…so I better get on with the living.

Yesterday ended up in steam room with the MOST GORGEOUS MAN.

I shudder at the recollection.

This morning he is sitting beside me writing.

Had long conversation with Jennie K.  It was so great to connect with her again.  I love that woman.

Mostly talked about what happens to a testicle when it is removed.

It is cremated.

My friends Joey and Chase have written an album that I love so check it out ..they are called:  THE BLACK SOFT

SH

Had long chat with CP about film.  I am going to have a stab at it before we hire a writer.  Cheaper that way.

Had dinner with SH uptown in some ghastly Korean restaurant.  I love that boy.  So lively and intelligent and good-looking.

Taxi to East Village.

Dan and I sat around giggling when I got home.  Loving living on 10th St.

Having chat with lawyer today…about STUFF.  Let’s see.

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Categories
art Health Rehab

Therapy

I spent the past few days in therapy.  I have a cold.  Therapy and a cold.   A brutal combination.

I didn’t really feel like doing anything yesterday.  I just hung around at home.  Then, rather dumbly, decided to go to Wholefoods on Union Square.  It was packed.  I bought spicy meatballs.  I bought white chocolate.

I sent the more completed treatment (with notes) off to London.  The more I think about it the more I want to shoot it there and not in NYC.

I am going on a road trip this weekend.  Driving to Buffalo.

Dan and I had dinner out last night.  As we were leaving the restaurant he pointed to an MLK quote written in chalk on a blackboard.

I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

I have been dragging a big bag of hate around with me since I received that childish email this summer.  A bag of hate bound up with cancer, shame, resentment..fear.

My hate and my cancer were inextricably linked.  My hate for him.

I am trying to love.  Trying to forgive.  Not Jake, he’s just a silly symptom.  I am trying to forgive my dad for all the terrible things he did to me.  Once again.  That old chestnut.  How am I going to survive this legacy?

One more day.

The effects of childhood abuse can have more severe consequences for a gay man.  A sizeable number of all people who are abused in childhood have extreme difficulty regulating their emotions as adults.

The effects of sexual activity, regardless of the child’s desire or participation are significant and damaging.  A child is quite capable of strong sexual feelings but incapable of handling the emotional aftermath of such feelings.

Survivors of violent childhood abuse are complicated to say the least.

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