Month: September 2011

Categories
Malibu Rant

Mighty Mule 500

I spent the day with beautiful Robby… out and about.   Firstly in the garden spreadingcompost around the fruit trees and the grape vines.

After lunch we headed into Venice for expensive Intelligentsia coffee.

We had tried returning a Mighty Mule 500 automatic gate opener at Home Depot but they refused our request claiming that I needed the ‘box it was sold in’.  Who keeps every box for everything they ever bought?  When I asked the manager this questions he said, “I keep all my shoe boxes.”  It was a lame reply.

I called the Mighty Mule people, the Southern man at the other end of the fractured cell phone line told me that my Mighty Mule 500 was still under warranty but I would have to pay the expensive postage to return it.

Frustrated with his reply I said, “Oh God!”

The man at the other end of the phone said, “Don’t swear at me.”

“I didn’t swear.”

“You used the G-O-D word.”  He spelled out the word God.

“Since when has the word God been a swear word?”

“If you don’t stop swearing at me I’ll terminate this call.”  His southern drawl smearing the words into a verbal paste.

“I’m not fucking swearing.”

“Sir!”

“You fucking cunt.”

Click.

The Home Depot security guard who had been listening to me speaking on the phone stepped tentatively toward me.  We left.  The defective, un-boxed Might Mule 500 gate opener in the back of the car.

Apparently today is blasphemy day.

Later that afternoon as the sun began to set we were in the car driving over the Santa Monica Mountains and I said, “Do you think it’s odd that I enjoy spending my time with a twenty-one year old than with almost anyone my own age.”  He said, “Do you think it’s weird that I enjoy spending time with a fifty year old more than people my own age?”

We laughed at how our perfection would always be denied.

He is perfection.

I spent another night at the house of the troubled child who had, earlier in the day, run away from home.  When he returned home late that night he was ashen, fried, wasted…what could his parents do?

Art Platform, Pacific Standard Time and most other LA art events start today.  I am attempting to get to most of them.  Will keep you in the loop.

The decorators started work repairing the huge mess left by the renters yesterday.  I will tell you more about that tomorrow.  It’s a story I have been keeping under my hat.  Now is maybe the time to reveal all.

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Categories
Auto Biography Malibu Rant

Troubled Child

My friend’s 13-year-old troubled child is here at the house.

To tell you the truth…I don’t find him very troubling.  Why?  Because I was just like him when I was his age.

Difficult, intransigent, argumentative, addict manque.

Though our home situations are very different I began feeling a deep regret for how I had treated my mother and brothers.  Without doubt the genesis of my anger toward them had some basis.

Seeing him treat his parents so appallingly, confound them, fight them…distresses me and everyone who witnesses it.  He demands money with menace, internet privileges and rides to see other equally troubled, weed smoking teens.

It has been a particularly hard week for my friends.  Interrupting a drug deal he was making with a pair of 16 year olds in a car, a deal funded by money he had stolen from his mother, he attacked his Cambridge educated father and literally ripped the shirt off his back.

Until that moment his father had been his great ally and protector.  Until he saw what the rest of us had seen for some time…that there was nothing his own child wouldn’t do to get what he wanted.

The violence toward his parents is shocking to witness but he tends to behave properly when I am around because, rightly, he is scared of me.  I refuse to co-sign his bullshit.  I am bigger and potentially twice as violent and, of course, he knows that I will not acquiesce.

He steals anything he can lay his hands on and lies about it.

The last time I was at the house he stole $20 from me.  I just demanded it back and he handed it over.  When caught he tends to walk into a weird cloud of denial.  Glazed, fearful.

After he attacked his father the police came and cuffed him.  They wanted to take him to juvenile hall but his parents balked at the last moment.

It is only a matter of time before he ends up in very serious trouble.

I was sent to boarding school so my parents could live a normal life.  It suited me to be away from the house.  It suited them to get on with their normal, family life.

The problem seems to be that this kid has no passion for anything other than money.  He isn’t, as I was, sketching imaginary couture collections, writing plays or poring over houses I would one day build.

His stated aim: the acquisition of money.  He will do anything he can to get hold of it.  He doesn’t have anything particular he wants to spend it on.  He just craves hard cash.

Ultimately he will leave home and make his own mistakes…in his own time, on his own dime…but for now he tortures his parents and sisters with tantrums, violence and vile words.

When things get really bad at the house his desperate mother calls me and I sleep over.

Calm is restored.  Last night we made tea and dipped strawberries in chocolate.

I know, of course, how things will end up for him: jails, institutions and death.

It is the way of the addict.  We are all similarly destined until we take those imperative steps toward sanity and abstinence.

Categories
Gay Rant

Fuck You Dan Savage

OK, quick update. Returned California Monday night. Michael picked me up from the airport.

Ate dinner at Sauce on Hampton. Home by 9.30.

Couldn’t stop myself from compulsively watering pots, checking the apparently broken (wasn’t) irrigation system. Nipping downstairs to the newly vacated rental apartment…the mess was dealable with.

Nothing a few hours on my knees scrubbing couldn’t handle.

Much to Michael’s amusement I found a pair of shears and, at midnight, hacked at the month’s worth of hedge growth I just couldn’t go to bed thinking about.

On the plane home I had a terrible revelation about my novel. It was written from the wrong point of view.

To my tremendous relief, this morning, everyone agrees with me.

So, I immediately began work rewriting the entire thing.

The gardeners came and restored order. Swept the paths and stowed the trash. Robby came by and we had lunch at the Malibu Country market. Robby is soooo adorable.

Took dog to vet..he has a hot spot. No idea what that is. Anyway, the gorgeous Dr Victor tended to him. Gorgeous and recently married. He gave me a powder I have to squirt on his wound. Don’t you just love the word squirt?

After my reference yesterday to ‘activist’ Dan Savage…who did I chanced upon being interviewed by Keith Obelman?

Our great friend and apologist: ‘Activist’ Dan Savage.

He was raving about critically acclaimed musical The Book of Mormon. That was OK. It’s good. Then he started in on Christian America and how everyone who critiques/damns the gays is either in the closet or jealous of our freedom.

As you know by now…I believe that our so-called freedom seems to enslave most of us.

I am not convinced that Dan Savage is radical or dangerous. He seems mediocre and conformist. He is married and has a kid. He wears boring clothes. He has a predictable hair cut. He probably lives in a gay ghetto.

Benoit introduced me to Dan Savage after I was on Sex Rehab. ‘Activist’ Dan Savage refuses to believe that sex addiction (any addiction?) exists. Why? Because it doesn’t suit his view that we should be able to do anything, whenever we want…without censure.

He can’t believe that something he enjoys so much should ever be labeled as addictive.

Yesterday, there he was on Obleman’s Coutdown tearing into bi-sexual folk who had ‘chosen’ to be straight rather than gay.

Pompous Dan apparently…damning their choices. The arbiter of your sex conduct.

Dan calls those who believe in choice, the ‘choicers’. Dan continues, revealing his limited (Judeo-Christian) understanding of contemporary sex and sexuality…you are either one thing or the other.

People like Activist Dan keep bi-people/people who experiment sexually away from being honest and open about the sexual choices they make. A straight man will rarely, if ever, admit to having sex with another man…because people like Dan Savage will claim him for the cause.

He suggested that bi-sexual people have made a ‘choice to stay in the closet’. Bi-sexual people fuck with Activist Dan’s head.

Is Dan pro-choice? Well…if it suits him. Choose to be gay or straight, choose to fuck out of your gay marriage, choose to live by Dan’s rules. Choose sexual liberation! As long as you choose the gay way.

I mean…I’m just asking. Don’t take it the wrong way…If you have a choice…why not chose a straight lifestyle? If Dan is so damned opened minded and sexually liberated…why shouldn’t that same hetero choosing bi-man also choose to see men on the side? I mean…what’s so different from that and the gay men I know who see other people outside of their relationships?

It’s their choice!

Bisexuality, sexual fluidity, acknowledging our right to choose an evolving sexual continuum.

Why not?

Dan may very well find those sort of bi-choices personally threatening.

Yet, in my experience, those bi-men who fuck other men outside of their straight marriage..are perfectly happy, not conflicted, secular…and of course…EUROPEAN.

If, ultimately, these men choose to ‘come out’…so be it. People leave each other all the time!

Many bi-men have a community of like-minded men and women around them. These men and women are often more closeted than the gays…not because they live in Christian shame but because those who live at either end of the sexual spectrum make it impossible for them to speak freely and honestly about who they are, what they want and the experiences they have had.

The choice to express themselves has been stunted by people like Activist Dan.

Dan’Bi Now, Gay Later‘ Savage.

Dan’s limited and sophomoric opinions about sex are frankly…dangerous. He does as much damage as Tony Perkins the Family Research Council president who denounces the idea that kids suffering from “abnormal” homosexuality kill themselves because they are bullied.

Dan is the equal and opposite of Tony Perkins. His passive aggressive, liberal, sexual free-for-all is as damaging to us as the hate spewing from the Christian right.

Whether we like it or not…Christians have the right to disagree with our lifestyle…why? Because they can. Because sometimes they are right.

Sometime they say things that I agree with.

Am I a self loathing homo? Am I jealous that you are young and getting some? Am I just bitter?

Is this how I can agree with SOME of the things our enemies say about us? Because I am jealous?

As for Dan’s notion that the moment we step out of the closet and embrace gay life we suddenly ‘live with integrity’.

Bull shit Dan.

Obelman asks a reasonable question about men and women trapped in the closet for 50 years. Savage, yet again, blames Jesus.

I have met men who didn’t come out of the closet because of what the gay community had on offer, couldn’t imagining themselves fitting in. The lifestyle simply wasn’t for them.

Can some of us believe that what we have isn’t everyone’s cup of tea? Jesus wasn’t keeping those guys in the closet..we were.

I have no experience of the closet…but I do have experiences as a gay man which include choosing to sleep with and have emotional bonds with women. I presented myself as a gay man to those women and choices were made. Get used to it.

There is something mithering about Dan’s tone. He believes as surely as Tony Perkins that he is right about everything. He is as sure as the preacher who damns us all. The gays here in the USA love Activist Dan. He is their saviour, their dog in the manger, he is their apologist, their very own MMA fighter prepared to get down and dirty defending the gays.

Sometimes I agree with him. Mostly I don’t.

Compared with a true activist like Peter Tatchell this buff hack is just another money spinner, whipping up the gays to buy his stuff so he can live the dream. He is as bad those in the GOP who hate us in public so they can run for office.

Have any of you read Right Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin? It’s worth the read. She doesn’t go after the clan leaders, she goes after their wives. It reveals the experience and motivation of women like Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, Anne Coulter.

Right wing women who attack feminism even while they are the beneficiaries of its work.

I am not interested if Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum has, as he claims, gay friends or a gay head of staff. I am interested, however, in those gay friends and head of staff who have subordinated themselves to Rick’s cause…are willing to overlook his hateful rhetoric, set aside their integrity (magically bestowed upon anyone who steps out of the closet in Activist Dan’s world) and make a pact with the devil.

Dan has made a great deal of money out of being our gay saviour. Many in the gay community are devoted to his unquestioning beliefs, his naive rhetoric, his easy answers (blame the Christians) and his dashing good looks.

Straight liberals like Obelman love him because he’s just the kind of gay friend they would like to have.

He makes me puke.

See the interview with activist Dan here.

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Categories
Gay Health

It Gets Better? Better Than Death?

Yesterday a pair of young film makers turned up at the apartment to work with me on their well written but unfocused script.

The man was leaving as they arrived.

They said, “Wow, he’s gorgeous.  Where do you meet men like that?”

Not in clubs or bars, not grindr or Manhunt.  I meet men like that as we pass in the street.  He said, “You looked mean.”  I am…I suppose.  I do.  Keep the fuck away from me.

Anyway, the film makers sat down and we talked about their script.  It was revealed, during our conversation, that one of these young men had recently found out that he was HIV+.

This is the third time I have heard this story, or one like it this past month.  His sex partner had not told him the truth about his HIV status before he agreed to have unsafe sex.

He had been lied to.

I was shaking with rage.

Like J risked J’s life when he was fucking HIV+ artist Pal S behind her back, like X had been lied to…these innocent folk had made bad decisions based on the lies they were told.

On each occasion the liar had tried to make it the victim’s fault.

” You shouldn’t have believed me.”

“You must have realized.”

“I can’t talk about this right now, you are complicating my life.”

“What kind of straight man doesn’t play sports?”

He is 25 years old.  A young man dealing with a huge problem.  He told me that he feels like he has ‘gone back into the closet’, that ‘no one could possibly love him’, that he is ‘damaged goods’.

“How do you feel about the guy who infected you?”  I asked.

“He’s evil.” he replied.

“Misguided?”  I suggested.

No, I told myself, not misguided.  I knew he was right.  Deliberately infecting or risking the lives of others…is simply evil.

My phone rang, I made a plan to see a friend the following morning.  

The boys looked at me askance. What?  I said.  “I’ve never seen anyone make an arrangement like that on the phone.  We text each other.”  I felt suddenly dislocated from life.  How come I didn’t know?

The kid with HIV is now at the mercy of the pharmaceutical companies who stand to take millions of dollars from him as he tries to stay healthy.

The same companies who promote their products in our gay publications… paying top dollar to do so.

Look at the pictures.  Strapping, healthy boys living with HIV.

Big Pharma shaping this generations attitude toward HIV as a manageable/livable with disease… just like diabetes!

Turn your back on health education, embrace ignorance and a life shackled to Big Pharma.  Enslaved at 25.  My heart bled.

“I never knew anyone who died of AIDS.” he said.

When this young man was being bullied at school for being gay he may very well have been reassured by the biggest deception of all:  It Gets Better.  Dan Savage‘s message of false hope.

It is another gay lie.

We don’t treat each other very well.  We don’t talk about not treating each other very well.

They stop bullying us…we start where they left off.

If they don’t damage you…we will…with my lies and infected sperm.

It’s not getting better for the young man I met yesterday.  It’s getting a whole heap worse.  Straight bullies didn’t lie and infect him with HIV.  Gay men did.

Gay men lied to three of my friends…confirming that it is not just an HIV epidemic, it is an epidemic of lies, betrayal and life threatening denial.

Uneducated, shamed, arrogant, drug fucked gay men with no principles.

Just like Jake.

The only reason I have to come back to NYC so frequently is to meet Jake in court.  Prolonging the inevitable.

Forced, yet again, to indulge his tantrums, his ego, his selfishness.

Without me in his life to define him as the victim…what is he left with?  Without me and his appearances in court…he returns to the mundane fixtures and fittings of the life that was…if one can call it a life?

Yet, when I am here in NYC, I make the most of it.  Happily wiling away the days, finishing my novel, seeing movies, hanging with my buddies, walking the dog, enjoying the humid nights tangled in your arms.

When he left this morning we both said, almost in unison, ‘I don’t do goodbyes’.   I don’t.  He had his bicycle over one shoulder, he didn’t look back.  I can still smell him on my fingers.

I will have a shower when I get back to LA.

Categories
Travel

Soft Boiled Eggs

The past few weeks in his arms.

This morning we woke up next to each other one last time before I leave.  The dog needed walking so I headed over to Grumpy on 20th St and ordered the Guatemalan special.  I drank mine there then limped back to the apartment. I forgot to wear my ankle brace.

He was waiting in bed, tangled in the sheets.  His monochrome tattoos: insects and art nouveau chrysanthemums.  He is agile and muscular like a wild beast.  His wiry beard and jet black, beady eyes.  Yesterday he did standing push ups against the wall.

It never occurs to me that he would want the same of me.  Super fit, super defined.  I am neither.

We watched Harold and Maud in bed last night.  The old woman and the young boy.

He is a man, 32 years old, not a boy.  Half Italian…half black…he has lived all over the world, indulging his wander lust.  Taking refuge in the roads.  He speaks Italian, spends time at an Indian ashram, collects art, makes art, cooks me dinner and today we are kayaking on the Hudson.  He has already seen Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers.

In bed, we take turns with who plays the aggressor.   He kisses me, feeding me his spit, his cum, his ass.  I stand over him, telling him what to do. He holds me down and pounds me.  He holds up his ass and I push my cock in him…holding it there, relishing the connection.  The first time he came he shot his load under my arm pit.

I don’t make the same mistakes.  When I feel that loving feeling rush over me.  No travel fantasies, no ownership, no LA visits or career help. No promises, no name dropping.  Nothing I can do to make him love me.

We lay together or walk together.  He bikes over the Manhattan bridge, he hates the Brooklyn bridge, he says that there are too many tourists walking in the bike lane.

He wants to show me a picture of an old lady torn to pieces on the subway, the picture he sold to the newspapers for $300.  Her hand stretched out, trying to stop the train ripping her head in two.  I don’t want to see it.  Imagining it is enough.  Do you want to see?

Last night he took me to Washington Square Park.  Hundreds of young, nerdy kids fighting each other with light sabres.  A forest of drawn weapons. Some had arrived just with their sabre, others with friends, a routine and rehearsed lines from Star Wars.

(He is doing a hundred push ups.)

As we were leaving the park a young girl indignantly told her friends, “I don’t need to see Star Wars to play with a silly stick.”

He cooked dinner.  It’s Midday on Sunday and we are getting up again.  I am boiling some eggs.  He likes them soft.

Categories
Rant

Taking Care of Business

Yesterday was unquestionably productive.

The morning spent in airless, 19th floor, mid-town offices.  Obama in town, the city still snagged with traffic.  The sidewalks choked with Ahmadinejad protestors and Palestinian hating zionists.

My foot feels much better.  Walking normally until Midday then it swells a little and I have to rest.

Fleas on the dog, Petco remedy.

Read script by new, young writer.  Charming boys.  Flawed script.

Met Zach for dinner on 10th Street then art event on Lower East Side.  Seemed to have a William Burroughs theme.  The curator was super cute.  I mean…fucking gorgeous.

You know that Burroughs came to my 21st birthday party?  Did I ever mention that?  He arrived with Princess Selima Guirey a descendant of Genghis Khan.  I think both Scott Crolla and I were kind of amazed.

After a very spirited performance by a well endowed, naked man covered in glitter I stood on the street in the humid night chatting with an incredibly knowledgeable boy wearing an out sized base-ball cap who invited me to a Courtney Love party.  I didn’t go.

We quite randomly discussed Herbert Huncke who I had seen read poetry on St Mark’s Place in that church there with Richard Gere who, for a short time, was an acquaintance of mine.  I don’t think many people know this but Gere supported Huncke in his latter years.   He died in 1996.

If you don’t know Huncke…google him.  It’s worth your time to get acquainted with the man known as the ‘Mayor of 42nd Street’.

I first met the very young and very beautiful Richard Gere with Christina Monet-Palaci in Paris when I was Lord Rendlesham.  Lady Jane Wellesley reintroduced me to him several years later in the late 80’s whilst making the ill-fated Baron in The Trees with Marc Warren.

Gere is a huge Italo Calvino fan so we had lots to talk about.   Ah, those were the days.

I wonder if Tim remembers us having dinner at his house with Jane and Jean Paul Gautier?

Have you read City of Quartz by Mike Davis?   We discussed that too, on the hot New York street, late last night.

I left the dog with Z and T and their huge black pit bulls.  The Little Dog loves their bitch Lucy.

Home by midnight.  Asleep by one, up at 6.30am.

Next week I am in LA for The Pacific Standard Time art event and Art Platform inaugural fair.

As for my novel?  My novel has shape shifted from a dark, murderous, self-conscious meander into a funny, adroit tale of kidnap and mayhem.  It’s not high art but it is very readable.

Finally, DADT was repealed.  For the small number of people this affects directly…I congratulate you.

This morning the web is alive with video images of Republican Presidential candidates berating Commader in Chief Obama for liberating gay service men and women from keeping secrets.

The right-wing audience revealing their gay hate by booing a gay soldier, screaming with joy when the repugnant candidates promised reinstatement of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

Obama has finally left New York.  This morning the traffic is once again traveling freely up 8th Avenue.

Categories
Gay

Province Town

Oh how beautiful it was….

Categories
Gay

The Weekend by Andrew Haigh

The small screening room on Greenwich Street in Tribeca was packed with worthy NYC based gays.  Sweaty, moustached Gawker hacks.  Vanity Fair worthies.  Fledgling, GQ wet mouthed boys.

A fairly obvious NYC taste making, career determining gay crowd skillfully imported for the screening by Adam Kersh, the eager beaver publicist.

I arrived with Benoit Denizet-Lewis and the Little Dog stuffed into his traveling bag.

I had heard ahead of time that The Weekend by Andrew Haigh was ‘severely flawed’, so not to expect much.

Immediately it started I was drawn (homesick) into the spare, urban, British landscape.  Set in the east Midland town of Nottingham.  The neo-brutalist, ex-council estate provides a gritty working class back drop for this very British film.

The concrete tower blocks and congested ring roads determining the drama as much as the delicious dialogue.

It’s Friday night and Glen and Russell have met for the first time.   They do what so many of us do…pack an entire relationship into one weekend.

Russell, late twenties, is a charming, meticulous man who likes ‘old things’.  He never came out to his parents because, as a foster kid, he never knew them.  Glen, a more experienced, angry man (also in his late twenties) has been severely hurt by a lying, cheating ex lover and is unwilling to let himself believe that he can love again.

They burn through the weekend with passion, drugs and frantic conversation.  They fuck and suck and talk and snort and smoke and gaze.  Like so many gay men they are just trying to work it all out, what it means, where they are going…who they are.  In less adept hands these long, rambling conversations might have seemed pretentious, stilted or boring but Andrew Haigh is a skilled film maker and there is a palpable tension throughout the film that made it compelling and at times…glorious.

Americans have exalted the performances which are indeed pitch perfect but as a Brit I really wouldn’t expect anything less.  These actors are trained at what they do.  It never amazes me when I see a good British actor do his thing.  I expect it.

Americans slaver over the ‘realism’.

When the film ended Benoit introduced me to the nay sayer.

“You thought the film was bad?’  I asked him.  He nodded.  “You’re an idiot.”  I snapped.

The Weekend is an elegant, charming portrait of something many of us do and few of us bother remembering let alone shaping into a work of art.  The film could be defined by the small amount of money that made it.  Static shots, minimal coverage etc. but it shouldn’t.

If you have the inclination, please see this film.

We headed to Spring Street where the after party took place at ex pat Nick Denton‘s (owns Gawker) large Soho loft.

The gays settled into their cocktails.  They talked about the film, were amused by the differences.  “Nobody ever made me a cup of coffee and brought it to me in bed.”  one sneered.

I thought to myself, how sad, I love a cup of tea or coffee in bed after a long night of passion.

The gays noticed the instant coffee.  I noticed the saucers.

They didn’t understand British drug nuance.  Bowl verses rolled joint.  They were a little taken aback by the real bodies of two ordinary men who obviously don’t spend hours in the gym.

Nobody really talked about the conversations these men were having.

I met the director Andrew Haigh who knew my films and was very sweet to me.

We talked about The Film Council, BAFTA etc.  It is a delight to see him doing so well.  Being so well received.  We talked about how they gush over you when you first arrive in America.  Their compliments seem disingenuous.

We laughed that at home in Britain both of us were told that our work wouldn’t ‘mean anything’ to anyone other than ourselves. That’s what they say at home…then suddenly you’re at Sundance and they change their minds.

We both won the Outfest audience award.

I was proud of him.  I know what it feels like to make that first film.  To have it well received.

There is a moment when the two men, in bed facing one another, role-play a ‘coming out’ for Russell who doesn’t have parents.  It is touching and beautiful.

After the after party I took the Little Dog home and then uncharacteristically decided to go out again.

I hung at The Standard with Benoit’s gorgeous friends and drank expensive diet coke.  It was total freak night at The Bain.  Like a Nina Hagen tribute party.   I flirted with the beautiful blond, met a photographer I thought I knew.  Two black boys came up to me and asked if I was ‘Duncan from the ‘A’ List New York’.

The view over Manhattan from that roof top is sublime.

I took a cab home at 2am.

I was glad that I had met Russell and Glen.

I had identified with both of them and had healed for doing so.

Categories
Love

Delete My Facebook

“Gagged by snobbery.” I like that. That’s what happens in England. I’d forgotten.

I deleted my Facebook to see how it felt. Well, it feels pretty damned weird. Just suddenly cutting out a whole world of communication. Can I do it?

Like stepping back in time. I am an Edwardian Gentleman. Another procrastination eliminated?

I began decoupling myself from social media. Facebook was kinda easy. Twitter less so. I can ‘protect my tweets’ what ever that means.

I wonder how long I can stay away from Facebook?

Give me some time. What else? This. I can set this to private. I’ve tried before but failed.

The dog is farting toxic farts this evening.

This weekend I met someone I had ‘friended’ on Facebook some time ago, we had sparred, ‘liked’ and written to each other. When I actually met him he was short, rude and surly…and orange…like a bald snookie.

I want real people in my life…not virtual ones.

Part of the problem I had with fuck-face was: he thought I was one thing when I am without doubt totally different from what he imagined me to be. Mind you, he did what many of you have done, he confused what he saw on TV with the real deal.

As for seeing him again last week? Same venue, usual shit, the same absurd grin…these people are like petulant children. He told his father (the shrink) that I was crazy. Uh? Crazier? More crazy than when he met me? Who is the crazy one?

There was a moment when I walked too close to him and he began flailing his short arms. Pointing at me…calling over the deputies. Well, Jenny and I just left the building and had lunch.

I wonder if he will ever realize how absurd this all is? That it means nothing.

What did he want me to be?

I am neither sophisticated nor particularly educated. I take what little I have and spin it into a life.

Other people tell me that their ex lovers try to blame everyone other than themselves for their wrongdoing. He tried blaming his ex too, it was her fault for not realizing that he was gay…because he had ‘no interest in sports’. He was so angry with her.

It is a common theme…not to accept ones part…amongst those who mistreat their lovers.

Forced to listen to absurd justifications. I used to think that everything he did was somehow original because I had never encountered it before.

Now, more than ever, I see that he is merely unevolved.

That’s ok.

I know that as he grows older, has other meaningful relationships…he will learn.

Waking up next to a beautiful boy this weekend.

Having beautiful boys to look at first thing in the morning…always charges the soul.

Here he is:

Spent time with Z and T. We had a lovely time. Read Vanity Fair whilst traveling. Conrad Black, unashamedly talking about his time in prison. I don’t know how I feel about that. There are real crimes…and he committed them.

By 4am I began to feel totally bereft and reinstated Facebook. An exercise in futility. That’s how pathetic I am. I have an English friend called Craig who deleted all but 500 of his 2000 ‘friends’. I envy him. I am naked out there. Too many people know too much. Obviously they only need know up until today. After today they need know nothing.

I am already blogging less. Revealing less.

I had not prepared before I deleted my Facebook account. If I ever do it for more than 12 hours I will prepare. There are some friends I see in the real world who I make plans with on Facebook.

This weekend was dramatic in other ways. Started out well enough then disintegrated.

Categories
Whitstable

What A Dream I Have

Whenever I return home I am relieved.

Leaving the distractions and the doubt behind.

Cruel thoughts, many miles away.

Whitstable, it takes me a day or so to crawl back into my own skin.  The scale of the town needs adjusting to.  I feel like a giant towering over the small, clapboard houses.  I cannot fit into the tiny shops.

The vitrine has not changed for many years.

The town has kept its original character.

Good and bad I know everyone on the street.  Now I see people who I knew formerly in London.  Gallery owners, actresses, commercial directors.  They strut around thinking they own the place, which of course, they do.

“What are you doing here?” They say.

Last week I was dwarfed by skyscrapers in New York, today I am shrinking rapidly into my Whitstable self.  No coyote to eat the dog, nobody to distract me from my task.

The children sit at their desks on tiny chairs in the same infant school where I learned about the autumn leaves, the saints and the sinners.

This morning we walked the grass paths on the freshly mown downs.  In the thin sunshine the skin on my arms and hands looks brown and weathered.  The fierce Californian sun, long forgotten.

Tomorrow we are driving to Dorset.  Past Stonehenge, to the sea.  Staying at The Bull Hotel in Bridport.  Traveling the well maintained motorways.

I may just keep driving.  I have everything I need.

Just head north through Bristol to Wales where I want to walk Offa’s Dyke.  Find me a B&B in Clun.  Eastward from the unspoiled Welsh counties to Shropshire.  The Stiperstones, this earth is my grave.

Fried eggs and thick bacon, marmalade.

Northward again through the black country.  Cheshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire,  Cumberland to the borders.   I love you England.  I love you.

I bought a pair of secondhand, brown velvet trousers and an ebony cane with an engraved, silver knob.  I found a dark green cashmere and silk scarf, channeling Fanny and Stella in Burlington Arcade.  It is cold enough to wear a beautiful hat, an autumn gown.

I am willing the winter moonlight.

I don’t want anyone else with me. This is mine.

I could not be further from the madness.  England!  Where my heart lies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIIK1jdMHUA&feature=colike