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Monday Night AA Meeting

My friend Bryan asks  me to lead the huge Monday night meeting held at the cream colored, concrete church or Rodeo Drive.

I agreed to address the cult.  You know how I feel about LA AA.

I spent the larger part of the day at home, packing.   I bought a coat from RRL.   A beautiful navy pea coat with brass buttons and a dramatic pleat in the back.

At lunch time I have a conversation with a financier and discuss tax credits.

Before the AA event I nip into Venice where I meet an actress.  We drink hot chocolate and discuss the script.   She has good ideas.

She has good casting ideas.

She is generous and interesting and interested.  She doesn’t get recognized.

I drive with the Little Dog to Beverly Hills.  Outside the church I notice people I know from the past… smoking.  People with small amounts of recovery.  Limited time in AA.  People who can’t stay sober for longer than a few months.

Leading the meeting means that I have to direct the format of the meeting as written then tell my story.  The story divided into three parts: Experience, Strength and Hope.   How it was and how it is now.

Well, you are meant to have a great story.  I don’t have a great story.  Not this year.

Inside the hall my mouth dries, I can see the bloated face of a gay film producer who just cannot stay sober and will die drunk.  His equally incompetent sober friends will mourn his death.  They will say things like, ‘Peter struggled so hard to stay sober’.

They will cry for the duration of the memorial then they will scamper like hairy children to another miserable dying addict who can’t stay clean or sober.

The same people are found laughing at the back of meetings.  Unable to take anyone seriously other than themselves.

Peter has four pitiful months.  He mocks my struggle or the struggles of people like me because he has never had more than a few months clean.  He will never know what it is like not to drink for a decade or more or what tribulations that incurs.

I didn’t tow the party line. I told them what was going on.  A public flaying.

I flayed myself.

What am I doing here? I thought.  What am I doing here telling these people my secrets?  What the hell do I do this for?  I sipped at my bottle of water.  I wore my new spectacles.

On the way back to Malibu I listened to NPR.  They were playing Bridge when I got home.  Eating marzipan mice.

The speaker of the Ugandan parliament has promised she will pass the so-called “Kill the Gays” bill in the next two weeks — she called it a “Christmas gift” for the Ugandan people. 

How will she achieve that?   There’s one born every minute.

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Some People…

…think that artists are nice people who gratefully sit around making work in a peaceable way.  That we do not confront life and all of its various struggles.  That we spend hours picking the wings off of dead butterflies in bucolic settings.

Bullshit.

Art is all about struggle.  The struggle to understand.  The struggle to be seen.  To be heard.

You know, don’t you, that I’ve been banging on about this film I want to make (if I do or not is another matter) but those who read it are unimpressed by the ending.  They call it a suicide note.

The ending isn’t very good.  It’s melodramatic and unconvincing.  It needs rewriting.

Life and art.  Art and life.  The two mingling, revealing…the truth.

The story evolves.

People are not what you think.  They make choices that reveal so much more than they ever intended.

Some people cast characters in their life like they are directing their own reality TV show.

You know, I’m not a very nice person and that is obvious to many…but, as they said after the John Edwards trial, nasty people are not sent to prison for being nasty…it is not enough that you don’t like me.

Whilst they could blame me for his problems they conveniently forgot him and his glaring defects.

Who are you?

I have always been fascinated by the grotesque.

The little dog stayed over night at the vet.  Rattle snake bite.  His paw and front leg swollen to twice, three times the size.   It’s touch and go if he’ll survive.

Since they let me out of the jail we have been distant.   It’s just the way it is.  Yesterday I pressed my forehead against his and told him not to die…we have other adventures ahead of us.

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Unspeakably Cruel

Still preoccupied with Tumblr.

It’s such a marvelous tool.  An archeological dig through ones own history of ideas.

Everything is there on the internet.  Nothing is hidden from me.  Then, they come…liking and reblogging and commenting.

They like the most unusual things.  Like the picture of Marilyn Manson.

Yesterday, I hired an assistant.  Had a long chat with Robby.  Dealt with my tax bill.  Spoke to my wonderful lawyers at the ACLU.  Cooked dinner.  Watched Jennifer cut up a wheel of cheese.  Spent hours looking for a certain picture.

Then, I lay in my bed wondering when I will see that boy up North who wants me to take what ever I want from him.

I’m waiting for you, he says.

I look at pictures of him.  I imagine what it would be like to find another to fuck him.  To watch him suck someone else.

He wants me to be unspeakably hard on him.  And, I shall.

Tell me, I like it when you tell me what to do…he murmurs.  Control me.  Take me.  Love me.

He is waiting.

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Sick Puppy

Lily stayed at home today.

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Marriage Equality Redux

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Little Dude

Here he is….

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Family Court

So, I went to court today.

If you want to know what happened email me and I will let you know.

I am not going to stop telling you how it feels to be me.

Arrived in NYC two nights ago.

Fashion week!  Fashion’s Night Out tonight.

Yesterday, I had dinner with Dan at Prune.   We had been to the Patagonia party at the Bowery Hotel and then ended up with new friends at Rogan.  Met Greg Long.

I had a great time even though my foot aches like hell!  Met Alex on the street.  He said, “Are you crying?”  I wasn’t crying…but I was distressed and there were huge rain drops on my cheeks that looked like tears.  I was thinking about the following day.  I just kept thinking how I had no desire to look at that man ever again and I knew that I had to.

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Alex and I walked back up The Bowery to the Bowery Hotel, ended up at B Bar for new French label Surface to Air party.  Super cool.

I love the rain.  I love the streets.  If my foot wasn’t so painful I would have walked home in the rain.

Breakfast today with Jenny A and Robby at the Mercer.   That woman is a dream…such a dream.

You know that I got sober because of Jenny.   15 years at the end of this month.  After breakfast we went to an AA meeting and I felt the love.  Thank God for AA!

Spent afternoon with the most beautiful Russian at the totally revamped, gorgeous private club.

I love being here.

Jenny sat at the back of the court and was dumbfounded at the ego in the room…mine included.

She said, “Did you see that man’s suit?  Even his wedding ring is cheap.”

Exactly.

I am here all month.

I want to tell you that it is hard work hating someone, anyone.   It was hard hating my step-father.  He was a bad man.  He deserved what he got.

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The Garden

It was perfect this evening in Malibu, I thought I would share it with you.

Alex and I hung the bronze lamp this morning.  I found it in a Beverly Hills dumpster..where they throw this sort of thing away.

 

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Sometimes…

I look at my blog site stats.  A bunch of fluctuating numbers posted throughout the day behind the scenes of this blog.   I used to be mesmerised by these stats.  Especially when thousands of people read the blog every day.  Now, those numbers have dwindled.

I could do more to boost my numbers but choose not to.

Each morning I get up and write everything that is on my mind.  It isn’t particularly interesting to most people what happens to a man living on both coasts of the USA.  Living on a small stipend delivered monthly from various investments made many years ago.  Living with a small dog and a pair of beautiful twins.  Living with bi-polarity.  Living in his dreams.

Yet, every morning I feel compelled to write my life for you to read.  I try not to boast, I try not to be too self piteous.  I try to tell it as it is.  Sometimes I am just talking to myself, sometimes I am talking to my Mother.  Mostly I am just talking.  Last year I seemed to be engaged in a one way conversation with him.

As the days pass between who I was and who I am, the years pass between what I thought I wanted and what I actually achieved, the decades between an impetuous youth and a contemplative old age.  I become less frightened, more at peace.

I know that my writing about him has chased many of my regular readers away.  I worked out that terrible obsession here on this blog.  Do I regret writing it?  What sort of diary would this be if I hadn’t written it?  What sort of man would I have been if I sat here suffering and just candy coated what was the most bitter of all pills?

Of course I am capable of telling you lies but for the most part I get up and tell you whatever truth is presently haunting me.  I have not written things and regretted it.  When I was with him I often excluded him from the narrative and as a consequence the most beautiful moments we shared have been lost.  Making love in the wood.  I didn’t write about that when it happened and now it is as if it never happened.  Writing retrospectively about those moments somehow devalues them.

I know that you hate me writing about him but he has been on my mind.   When I stop feeling angry, foolish, sad…I still find myself wanting the best for him.  Wishing him well.  Hoping that he resolved his stuff with her.  Praying that he now has the gay life he wanted so badly.

After all is said and done…I loved him.  For good or for bad.

I wish that I did not now have to see him in September.

At this moment I have climbed fully out of the straight jacket I designed for myself.  Life has become simple and manageable once again.  My head no longer in two time zones.  No more longing, fantasy, false hope.

I listened to the singer Adele talking about how her first album was crafted after a nasty break up.  How she punched her ex bf in the face then wrote her album.  This is what artists do.  Copper’s Bottom, the play I showed at Sadler’s Wells in my mid twenties was all about a love affair I had with a policeman.  The deep scars it left in me.  This is what artists do.  We craft something from our own experiences, we do not disguise our vulnerabilities, our history.  I cannot deliberately disfigure the past.

When I was nominated for the BAFTA I finally had proof of sorts that being true to oneself and the stories we tell can reach much further than those of us who hide away.   I have hidden away for most of this year.  Licking my wounds behind my site stats, my failed love affair.

If I am to remain credible I must do what I do best: create.   Wasting the rest of my life hankering after what could have been is just plain stupid.  Whilst many of the folk I grew up with are considering retirement I must do what thousands of artists before me have done and just get on with it.  Do the work.

Regardless of how many people are watching.

This morning I have watered the garden.  Listened to the birds.  Made strong coffee.

Miles is vomiting in the bathroom.  He drank too much last night at the Whale Wars premiere.  He is missing his girlfriend who has moved to the mid-west.   Watching him struggle somehow helps me.  I have no idea why.

“I’ve never been this hung over.” He moans.

I don’t have ANY sympathy for people who drink too much.

Now, what next?  Apparently the niche publisher is not so niche and the nice woman there has already read my book and wants to talk further.  I wonder what that means?

I put my film on ice but am ready to warm it up.  I am meeting producers this Sunday.   Whilst I was in New York I met another producer.

I seem to be getting back into that grove.

PS  I got a 4k reduction on my property tax..which is now only 13k a year.  Hurrah!

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Penguin Shit