All change. The days fill up rapidly. Meetings with lawyers and press advisors.
Life is more different now than it has ever been. The fast receding recent past. The life I no longer inhabit. The new life that beckons.
Journalists try making sense of what happened to me. I spend each and every moment simplifying, honing, editing both people and possessions out of what remains of the life I now live.
Men I know from jail are released and we meet in coffee shops all over the city. I drive to the ghetto. I drive to South Central. I drive to Watts and Compton. I am a long, long way away from The Chateau Marmont.
I have committed myself to the most onerous of tasks, bringing attention to the vast numbers of men and women currently held in Californian jails who have no reason to be incarcerated.
When we meet, my allies at the ACLU and NILC, talk about the criminalization of immigrants, we use a lexicon that I am slowly getting used to. No longer an abstract concept…I am at the very heart of one of the USA‘s most vexing problems: immigration.
Immigrants have little or no sympathy from the general public. Just like the gays. Little or no sympathy…as much as we kid ourselves.
Now I find myself at the edge of two marginalized communities. My immigrant gay friends in NYC do not consider themselves immigrants until they go back home and have their visas renewed. There, outside the Embassy, they find themselves in long lines of migrant workers, stripped of their status.
That’s why this state by state gay marriage fight means nothing to me. It will not help those men and women who had the audacity to fall in love beyond the border.
A marriage that is recognised in Europe, where a family can walk to the checkpoint together…is suddenly separated at the Immigration desk. We do not recognise your ‘family’ here. If we complain we risk being arrested or worse. Ask my gay friends what that feels like, those of them who marry Europeans, Australians…
Life has become very serious. My opinions about film and art and literature are worthless. I try, but the words splutter out of my mouth incoherently.
I want to be interested in what previously enchanted me…but I can’t.
I am so subsumed by my new task that what mattered…means nothing.
The Daily Beast article was well written, a little TMZ. The last time I had a piece in The Daily Beast Jake contacted me. It was the beginning of that painful fiasco. Ironically, the picture they used of me for the piece…you can just catch a glimpse of Jake’s arm. It is ironic how he remains in my life.
Yesterday they sent a photographer from the LA Weekly. He snapped me with both his very expensive camera and his iphone. We met at Intelligentsia on Abbott Kinny. Afterwards I met a young philosopher. We walked the length of Venice with the dogs. Talking.
I have stopped telling people I make films…because I don’t.
I spend time on Twitter, amusing myself with Deepak Chopra and Arianna Huffington. Asking them absurd questions about HGTV.
There is an infestation of ground squirrels and gophers. I kill them with acrid smoke bombs.
A few weeks ago a friend explained to me how he and his girlfriend fell out because, when they argue, he wants at any cost to be right.
If I’m not right, I’m nothing.
It’s the scourge of the addict.
I was wrong. I’ll have to get used to saying that. It’s not very American. Nobody ever wants to admit the mistakes they make…unless there is something in it for them.
There was a time, not so long ago, when all I wanted was to be moving. Now I am quite happy to sit still. I do not yearn for anything.
I am happy not to write this every day.