Categories
Death Rehab

Wake Up!

Kristian’s death has affected me more than I might admit.   Rather foolishly I had a picture of him on my phone that lit up every time somebody called.  I deleted it today-I was making myself sadder than I needed to be.

Found myself looking at pornography last night-late-trying to soothe myself-trying to throw a warm blanket over my feelings.   It didn’t work.  I still woke up this morning overwhelmed with fear.  I wrote to John:

5am.  Waking up in huge amounts of fear.  Crushing, overwhelming fear. Think I may have come to the end of the line. Cannot go on.  Making bad decisions.  Can’t face anything.  Financial ruin facing me.  Nowhere to run to.   Don’t trust anyone. Obsessed.  Looked at porn this morning to try to sooth me-did not work.  Nothing works.  Do not see any more life ahead of me.

As dawn broke over the mountain I expected those particular ghouls to vanish, yet, those pesky demons lingered all day-like they were waiting patiently to claim me.

My father died when he was 53.

Found myself looking at pornography..

Now, that sounds like it happened to me rather than me searching around for that perfect porn moment.  Porn is like research, it’s scholarly, frustrating, intense.

Feeling desperately sad.  Not sobbing like when the Darling Big Dog was killed.

Cannot listen to Kate Bush or Soft Cell (remember listening with him) but rather strangely listening to the Spice Girls, which softens the edges-like having a wank.

Throwing the towel in.  “Goodbye my friend.”  Remember when we were best friends with Matt Rowe who wrote all those huge number one hits?    “Goodbye my friend.”   Remember New Years Eve at The Mercer Hotel in NYC with Melanie Sporty Spice and Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman?  Odd mixture that night?  What a night.

So I’m chatting with a friend about his childhood and he tells me that his father was sent to prison when he was 11 years old.  The only way he knew how to deal with the shame was to lie to his classmates.  He knew where his father was but told his friends that his father was on a business trip-he told lies because the truth was far too complicated.  Gosh, I related to that.  Lying to make life easier:  My father is on a business trip.  Telling palatable childish lies leading to a life of fantasy, pornography, disconnection.

It took me so long to let the truth set me free.  Now I try so hard to tell the truth.  Lyle brought word from England that I had a terrible temper.  Oh yes, I remember that.  My temper was a daily occurrence for so long.  Before I went to Sex Rehab I really had no idea why I was so angry-after sex rehab I fully understood why I was angry and the mechanism that controlled it.  So, to all that I shouted at and screamed at and made cry-I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong.

Sorry to repeat myself but..

When Kristian died suddenly a door opened into a world I considered closed to me.   I had considered suicide for as long as I can remember but never seriously.  Death, after all, is a very long time.  Suddenly there are enough fun people in the after life that I might have a good time.  Giggle with.   I am not scared of death-I was just scared of being bored when I got there-now with Kristian dead-death seems like a realistic option.  Holding the door open for me.

I am looking for clues for what might keep me alive?  What can I believe in?

This morning I heard John talking about being asleep and how much of the time I have been asleep.  I fall asleep when I first meet some one-a deep sleep.  I always thought that it was because I felt comfortable but now I see that it was to escape intimacy or worse that something might happen to me.

Moths in my clothes, little dog pawing at me…home sick for Whitstable, for Battersea Park..can we walk there together you and I?

Selling art-legitimate source of misery?  My friends didn’t want to buy my art.  They want to buy art from a legitimate source.  Funny.

Lying.  It’s a choice.  To tell the truth or lie?  It seems obvious doesn’t it?   Well, these muddled days, as Michael Moore reminded us when he picked up his Oscar, are ‘Lying times’.  Within a relationship there are all kinds of lies but I don’t want to tell HIM lies.  I just want him to know the truth.

The silence in the Malibu Mountains, the thudding base from the music playing in the apartment above my Hollywood apartment.   Both the silence and the interminable base making my head ache.   My head aches.

The questions that haunt me:  How could he have taken such a risk?   How can he be calling me to join him there and why am I listening?

One day I will write about FULL DISCLOSURE-a most unsavory practice.

I love you MR DARLING NYC-you are keeping me alive,  your love and your perfect smile are keeping the worst of these terrible demons from driving me to the gates of hell.

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Categories
Dogs

Oscar Day 2010-Academy Awards

 

For those of us who live in this part of Hollywood the Security around the highly anticipated Oscar Award Ceremony can be a big pain in the ass, at least for the one day of the ceremony.

 

I live exactly two minutes walk from the Kodak Theatre in the very heart of Hollywood.   Franklin Avenue, where I live,  has been completely closed and all the cars that were inadvertently left after the 6am deadline have been towed. More money for the city of Los Angeles.

 

Swarms of security guards patrol the streets, armed police with vicious dogs hang out in ominous gaggles, guards check under cars with mirrors on sticks, concrete road blocks hamper normal journeys in and out of our neighborhood and for one day only we get to feel what they must feel in Baghdad every day.

 

 

 

 

I had a huge dream last night.  Kay S, Amanda E, three other unknown women and I were descending a steep mountainside. Lil dog had transformed into a waist high dog/goat, his soft ears all leathery like a goat, his soft coat transformed into wiry fur.   I knew that we were facing something treacherous at the bottom of the mountain and as with all of my bad dreams the light was eerie like during an eclipse.  I woke up exhausted.

 

 

 

 

 

My Scar

When I last saw my therapist she asked if I thought I might be depressed.   I could tell immediately that I might get all sorts of expensive medical attention if I said yes.  I gleefully imagined a warm hospital bed somewhere.  My favorite.

 

 

 

I remembered the terrible car accident that my family were involved in when I was a small boy, remembering the moment that I was thrown off of my mother’s lap, out of the warm car and through the front passenger window and into the cold rain and the wet grass.  I remember my aunts bleeding legs, I remember the ambulance, the hospital where I would stay for a very long time as my head repaired.  I still have a huge scar that when I have very short hair everyone comments on.

 

 

 

 

When I write the word family I wonder whom I could possibly mean?  Does that word apply to me?


 

I am sitting outside the supermarket Fresh and Easy waiting for the store to open.  It is 8am, an endless stream of determined Academy Award production crew pass by me, their scripts in their back pockets. They are all dressed in black so they can vanish amongst the stars.   They are the night.

 

 

 

 

I feel like I have been fast asleep.  I wonder if it is worth waking up?

Categories
Gay Hollywood Love Rant

Pornography: A Spectacle

It was an early morning yesterday.  I was up before the dawn.  And I really have enjoyed my stay. But I must be moving on.

Sexual anorexia is a term used to describe a loss of “appetite” for romantic-sexual interaction but can be better defined as a fear of intimacy to the point that the person has severe anxiety surrounding sex with emotional content.

4am, Saturday morning.  It is almost impossible to sleep.  My lover is in town.  My sleep schedule rearranged as I learn all over again to share my bed.

We have been in and out of bed all weekend and whilst it is reassuring to have this oversexed lil monkey crawling all over me I end up thinking far too much-both good and bad.  The bad thoughts: wanting to escape, trying to remember old conquests, those perfect pornographic moments that always get me off.  The good thoughts: fully engaging with newly learned sexual behaviors/insights.   It is delightful to be mainly present during the sex.  Now, when I say sex what are you thinking?   The sex I have is, I am sure, nothing like most people.

When Bill Maher condemns sex addicts I doubt that he understands that most men who consider themselves sex addicts are not having the sort of sex that he is having.  They are not meeting, fucking, cumming and leaving.  Many men identify as sex addicts but the men I identify most with are actually porn addicts who seldom leave their apartments or Internet addicts on hook up sites with multiple on-line personalities.  These men exist apart from the Tiger Woods variety of sex addicts: men who hook up with women or other men whilst wives and children sleep oblivious at home.

Bill Maher’s limited understanding of sex addiction and general scoffing negates those of us who work daily in order not to retraumatize ourselves.  Bill Maher is certainly not recreating moments of childhood fear; he is not replicating perfect porno moments nor dealing with erectile dysfunction.

Tiger Woods may be a serial cheater but his story is the exception rather than the rule.  Those of us who compulsively masturbate seldom get to meet anyone at all regardless of our engaging personalities.  Addicted to the soothing effect of ejaculation, the calming thoughtless moments just after we shoot our dwindling load.

1983.   I answered an ad in Time Out for gay performers who wanted to make a play with Neil Bartlett for the Institute of Contemporary Art about pornography.  Drawing on historical texts, Diaries of a Marianne  (attributed to Oscar Wilde) for instance, we all at once celebrated and condemned the production, consumption and effects of pornography.  In one scene we compared the fantasy of pornography with the reality of our own sex lives.

After our 10 city tour in the UK and Canada I went home and never gave the polemic we were positing another thought, yet had I… my life would have turned out very differently.

How has gay pornography influenced my thinking, my relationships, my life?

Pornography has ruined my sexual expectations.   Pornography: where men together do not tenderly hold each other, look into each other’s eyes, do not cry gently, do not laugh out loud, and do not ‘fail’ with half hard cocks.    The perfect bodies, sexual performance and youth of most gay porn stars are impossible acts to follow.

Yet, the moment I get into bed with a man I try to emulate what I see in pornography.   My stance is both dominant and aggressive, my voice lowers, I am uncharacteristically clumsy, and my kisses are full lipped.  I have no idea what the end point of any sexual encounter is because I have so rarely ejaculated with another human being.  I am rarely even in the same room because I am off in fantasy.  I am rarely hard.

My lover is sexually submissive so what good am I to him if I am so full of fear that my cock does not get hard?  That at the back of my mind I know my darling pornography waits to own me the moment he is gone?  How many men cheat on their wives/boyfriends with pornography?

The past few days of sexual activity have been perhaps the best of my life because I am at least in the same room as the man I have elected to sleep with.  I am authentic, present, calm and honest.  I tell him the truth.  Perhaps too much talking but frankly I would rather talk than be absent.    There has been a great deal of consolation since he arrived.  There has been a remarkable kindness.  I no longer objectify him nor resent him simply because he sees who and what I am.

With the truth comes vulnerability, certainly never evident in pornography unless it’s a ‘mans first time’ with another man.  Then the gay for pay virgin simply looks confused or humbled by desire.   I have wasted so many years to pornography, so many wasted opportunities, so much lost love.

Men have humiliated me.  I have, in turn, humiliated men.   I have defined myself by my inability rather than my gifts.  I have invested in my defects rather than my talent.

I am trying to have a few wonderful moments before my lover leaves LA and God knows if I will ever see him again.   Of this I am sure: we got to know each other before we lay together.  This meant that I had no shame when he finally held me in his arms.  That I felt comfortable enough to let him know what was going on with me when I could not perform as perhaps he wanted me to perform.   That we continue to laugh and cry and feel comfortable doing so.

I only have until Friday and I am going to make the most of it-before he returns to his own war zone and I to mine.

Categories
Dogs Gay Hollywood Queer

Say Hello, Wave Goodbye

I needed to stay in home alone tonight.  I feel sad.  Sad about Kristian, sad about my friends who died this year and sad that once again I am on my own:  the vacuum left behind after a wonderful weekend with a great friend.

I have always had and certainly will continue to have a serious problem with goodbye.  Saying goodbye permanently or even temporarily brings up huge feelings of loss, vulnerability and then the anger-the anger overwhelms me.

The genesis of these feelings: I was ripped from my mother’s breast and put up for adoption.  These are primal fears of life and death.   The most profoundly affecting goodbye after my mother’s abandonment was the death of my Darling Big Dog.

When my dog was violently killed the resulting anguish unleashed a torrent of sadness, a great wave of misery that may have resulted from not ever having said goodbye-ever to anyone I loved.  I did not go to my grandfather’s funeral nor my grandmother’s.   I have rigorously avoided any ritual goodbye and for that I am a lesser man.

Whenever I leave a party I just slip away as if saying goodbye will somehow humiliate me.

The same feelings overcome me now after the deaths of three friends in as many months.  Yet the very act of writing about them lends me immediate solace.

The end of relationships causes me unrelenting heartache.

Stoically accepting the end of a relationship?  No, not for me.  Nearly all of the relationships I have had have ended badly.  I never, it seems, get to write that scene in the movie of my life where two people say a dignified goodbye.

The end of my relationship with Joe ended thus:  I knew that I was going to leave but it took me 2 years to end it and when I finally did I tried to do it with tenderness and compassion but he was so angry that he made my life miserable for a full year after I left him-ending up in court fighting over property.

In my mad head I forget that I have choices, the choice to remember that the past no longer runs the show, choices to say goodbye without the reenactment of traumatic and ruinous scenarios.

Today I waved goodbye to a new friend who has come to mean a great deal to me.  Whether there is any romantic future between us is really not up to me-unless I behave in such a way that he would never want to see me again.   This morning I began to get angry, angry that he was leaving but knew that it was for the best.

Even though I was only momentarily angry-until I could identify what was going on in my mad head and break the cycle of abandonment and despair by telling him that I would miss him, that I was feeling sad, that I had no mechanism for making those feelings go away…and by telling him the truth I was freed from behaviors that would alienate him from me forever.

I will say goodbye to Kristian this week, say my heartfelt adieu.   His death has brought up all sorts of STUFF.   I sorted out pictures of us today and will post them as soon as I can.

IMG_1988 IMG_1964 IMG_1963

Categories
Gay

Kristian Digby

My friend (briefly my lover) Kristian Digby died yesterday; apparently of auto asphyxiation.

Kristian was a sweet, thoughtful intelligent man.  Not intelligent enough, he would have scoffed, to think twice about pulling a bag over his head, a belt around his neck and deprive his wonderful brain of oxygen.

By inducing a lucid, semi-hallucinogenic state called hypoxia-combined with orgasm, the rush is said to be no less powerful than cocaine, and highly addictive.

Kristian and I met in 2001 at the International Cannes film festival waiting in line for the Soho House annual Cannes party-bonding over the sight of Andi McDowell being pushed and shouted at by her surly, over weight publicist.  After becoming immediate friends-later that night, very drunk and having gate crashed a very grand yacht party, Kristian told actor Ray Winstone that he had always fancied him and tried, much to my horror, to kiss him.  Like most of his antics it was very, very funny but realizing how inappropriate trying to kiss Ray was we ran like mad children into the night and had a very romantic time walking bare foot back to his hotel room along the deserted beach at dawn.

I introduced Kristian to one of his many and varied heroes, the glorious Marianne Faithful. We were at Will Self’s house.   He sat at her feet.  She spilt red wine on his white linen trousers.  Whilst she fussed over the stain he was delighted that Marianne Faithful had spilled red wine on him.  Delighted.

He did not have one bad bone in his gorgeous body.

Creative, funny, erudite.  He had so much further to travel.

Kristian loved the films and books of Dereck Jarman-his true hero.  We had great fun exploring the dead filmmakers garden at Dungerness.  We ate a very high tea (english expression not drug induced) at a local hotel over looking the bleak gray sea.

I was always in awe of Kristian and those of us who knew him very well knew that there was much to be in awe of.

During the time that we knew each other best (when I moved to LA permanently we saw each other less often) we explored ideas, cites and over coffee in Old Compton Street the state of our gay lives.

He was a regular visitor to my house in Whitstable.  Everyone that met him there loved Kristian-I have been overwhelmed by sad emails from friends he met from my old home town.

He was not without his dark side-a troubled childhood and un-accepting parents blighted his early years as a gay man.

Lastly, let us not forget how much enjoyment he gave to those who never knew him personally: his loyal TV audience.

Oh Kristian, you silly billy, what did you do that for?  I will really miss you.

Categories
Money Rant

Healthcare? You gotta be kidding!

me in hospital

From Steve Dunkley, first published on the BBC news website…with a few edits by me.

I should have credited him previously but failed to do so.  Sorry about that Steve!

If I do quote other writers I usually highlight in italics.

Duncan

Forgive the pun, but I’m sick of listening to the ideological bigotry being used by both sides in the current debate over healthcare reform. Even the fallacy that the debate could possibly be encapsulated by “two sides” makes me so angry. The very idea that being able to shout louder than someone else or that a few words written on a placard contributes anything to a debate on such an important issue is simply asinine. Such behavior, including mindless chanting of simplistic slogans, effectively halts all objective discussion and obscures the real issues.
So, stop mouthing off, stop quoting anecdotal examples and stop using prefabricated, emotive labels designed to perpetuate already polarized thinking.
This maybe a revolutionary idea, but why don’t we start looking at factual evidence backed up by legitimate research. Yes I know this a new concept, but just bear with me for a while, you never know, we might then draw some reasoned and sensible conclusions.
Here are some facts:
• The United States of America does not have the best health system in the world
• The United States of America does not have the worst health system in the world
• The United States of America has some of most advanced healthcare expertise in the world
• The United States of America’s delivery of overall healthcare and its health outcomes do not compare well to most other industrialized countries
• The United States of America has the capability to offer expert treatment to patients of all ages
• The United States of America has an illogically high incidence of infant mortality and avoidable death rates

Here are some factual statements and observations:
• The United States of America spends more (per capita) on administering the bureaucracy of its healthcare than any other country in the world. Sometimes by a factor of three or four over countries with effective universal systems.
• There is no particular reason why employers should continue to be responsible for providing healthcare. It is an invidious practice that can be extremely detrimental to both employee and employer interests. The practice has its origins in the pay freezes of World War II, yet now seems entrenched in the American working life. Why should your employer decide what health cover you get? Your family physician doesn’t tell you where you should work!
• There is no reason why a national, universal health plan should increase individual or government healthcare costs. Individual tax costs will increase but, if a scheme is implemented effectively, there will be no health insurance premiums to pay. Employers should no longer have to pay their portion to the insurers and there should be no co-pay. In case you missed that – NO CO-PAY! Your employer may even pass his or her savings on to you as a wage increase.
• Effective preventative healthcare makes an enormous contribution to the quality of life and the longevity of that life. In the current situation prevailing in the United States of America, there is little incentive for health insurers to finance preventative care. The premise is that, as people change jobs and healthcare insurers, the financial benefits of preventative medicine might be enjoyed by organizations other than those that originally funded it.
• Viewed from afar, the citizens of the United States of America are hypochondriacs obsessed by illness. This hypochondria is fueled by a constant barrage of television commercials for prescription drugs containing information that should only really be evaluated by competent medical professionals. Trendy acronyms only exacerbate the obsession – why not become obsessed by health and wellness instead?
• Market forces and human nature are generally inappropriate in healthcare. Physicians are encouraged to treat where treatment is perhaps unnecessary. Pharmaceutical companies need a steady stream of new illnesses, gullible or mercenary physicians and new drugs to keep them in business. Health insurers need to be able to promise nurturing care from cradle to grave and yet be able to deny treatment on all possible occasions.
Now that you’re thinking about shouting or painting a placard, here are some comparisons that will restore your faith in man’s inhumanity to man
• Universal schemes can only provide the greatest good for the greatest number and will spend any and all amounts of money provided
• Private schemes will drop you if it looks as though you might get a long-term illness
• Universal schemes will always treat acute cases first and will generally do these well. less urgent cases may well wait some time for treatment
• Private schemes will treat your acute or less urgent conditions entirely in respect of financial considerations, but will have you back in your car about the same time the anesthesia wears off, often causing you to come back again (with another co-pay) in a couple of days
• Universal schemes often provide unintentional long-term accommodation for the homeless
• Private schemes always use the latest and most expensive treatments irrespective of whether they are superior to proven treatments.
• Universal schemes are often unwilling to adopt new procedures until cost and/or patient benefits have been established

Here is a dirty word:
“Single-Payer”
Actually it’s two words, but you get the drift. Most universal or national health schemes operate this policy. Supporters of the status quo in United States health policies consider it blasphemy. It is a prime example of the emotive labeling so apparent in current healthcare discussions.
Single-payer simply means that payment for medicines and treatment comes from a single source. That single source is the organization that operates the health service – almost invariably the government. Pharmaceutical companies and medical practitioners abhor this policy because they are unable to play numerous payers (with differing priorities) off against each other. Instead they have to deal with a single body that has the single objective of balancing cost and patient benefit – more simply known as value for money. The VA health system bureaucracy “sorta-kinda” operates in a similar way to single-payer.
This does mean that many medical practitioners will get less for the work that they do. Pharmaceutical companies will undoubtedly claim that they will be unable to research new treatments. Personally, I can live with this because the physicians that earn substantially less will only be those who have been financially focused in their practices. Pharmaceutical companies will continue to research and develop because that is what they have to do to exist. Maybe these new pressures will force them to be more focused on effective remedies? Am I the only person who wonders whether drug companies develop new products and then look for an illness to treat with it? The objective of a healthcare system is to look after the receivers of that healthcare – not to make a few professionals obscenely wealthy.
The bottom line is that the current healthcare systems (in terms of delivery and outcomes) in the United States of America are ineffectual and probably irreparable in their current form. Federal and state politicians are scared to death of the pharmaceutical lobby and failure to be re-elected (but then I repeat myself). The AMA represents the interests solely of the medical profession and has stood four-square in the way of any proposed initiatives that benefit patients at the expense of their members. I don’t think insurance companies care one way or the other because they think they will still get a large slice of the cake whatever happens. When it dawns on them that single-payer may become a reality, they will get the rest of the politicians that the pharmaceutical companies missed.
It should not (and cannot) be beyond the wit of the US Government to take the time to investigate the healthcare schemes that are the most successfully operated in other industrialized countries. Surely, somewhere in this nation, we have officials with the ability to judge and evaluate the best of those and surely we have the expertise to implement such a scheme here.
According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OEDC), in 2003/2004, per capita health expenditure in the United States of America was $6,120 (15.3% of GDP), life expectancy was 77.5 years and infant deaths, per thousand, were 6.9. During the same period in Japan, per capita health expenditure was $2,249 (8% of GDP), life expectancy was 81.8 years and infant deaths, per thousand, were 2.8.
Here are some final kickers. How can the country that considers itself the most advanced economy in the world, allow its citizens to be denied preventative healthcare because of corporate avarice? How can it allow around 700,000 families each year to bankrupt themselves seeking healthcare? How can it let people die for lack of healthcare?
For those that say government cannot afford universal healthcare, consider this: in 2003 (according to the World Health Organization) the United States government spent more, per capita, on healthcare than each of the governments of the United Kingdom and Sweden. Two countries that each have universal healthcare, the citizens of these countries did not have co-pays and both countries achieve generally better health results than the United States of America can boast.
Personal net expenditure on healthcare would drop significantly under a properly implemented universal scheme and a single payer scheme would have the potential to cut billions of wasted dollars out of administrative costs.
Finally, President Obama’s scheme will not work because it does not address the fundamental underlying problems. The supporters of the status quo will gladly watch the percentage of GDP spent on healthcare rise to 20% in the unreasoned belief that the marketplace will deliver effective healthcare and that we already have (of course) the best healthcare in the world. Basically we’re screwed!

Categories
Malibu

silence

can i sit with myself for more than 30 mins without doing anything at all?   can I sit without making a call?  checking facebook, text messages or emails?     can I sit in my own body listening to the twittering humming birds fighting, the waves crashing below me, little dog breathing deeply on my lap.

can i just stop imagining for just one god damned minute?  can I stop being so bloody infuriated by injustice?  can I just concentrate on the blood pumping around my body?

I sat alone in malibu all day and I did not nap, I did not look at pornography, i lit a huge fire, i fed the dog tinned salmon, i picked up my godson from  his drama class and ate chocolate with him in the truck as we drove down the PCH in the rain.

I like being on my own.  i have no idea what being with anyone would be like anymore.  I don’t know if I can share what I have.  being a curmudgeonly bachelor may be on the horizon.  was it meant to be like that?   probably.

strangely peaceful tonight staying over in deep malibu where my phone does not work.

i am a very lucky man.  i am surrounded by people who love me, who include me, who will catch me if I fall.

Categories
Poem

LOVE POEM

London.  I crave the capital of my Island jewel.  I am too far now from cream teas, steak and oyster pie.  Oh London and the Home Counties I miss you with all my aching heart.

I am tired of selfish boys.  Tired of his jet-black hair.   Tired of waiting.  Tired of mistress censorship.

I want to see Amanda, Tim and banter; with Simon Finch and hold my nose in the air.

I want to stroll down Old Bond St in my red suede boots, visiting Patrick in Hanover Square.

I want to smoke cigarettes in West London with Katrina.  Let me ride horses in Hyde Park with Martha; explore electrical hardware stores with Toby and Arthur.  Clandestine giggles with Joe and Adam and Eve, cottage amusements with George.

The train to Bromley and Chatham through the Garden of Eden.  Where the Thames meets the Medway and the Swale beyond.

I am tired of you because I don’t trust you, but I know very well what it is to lie to some one you say that you love.  To meet in some dark, wet guinnel, to feel your warm body under your navy blue coat.   To feel your lips and always your lips.

Oh I miss you so much my darling hometown, and wish you invited me Whitstable style.   Up on the downs overlooking the sea.  Turbines, the horizon that chased me away.   I have arrangements with banks to consider and beg that homeland security take me away so decisions are easier where no choice is to stay.  Wholesale foreclosure, redistribution of wealth.

Take me.  Take me away.

I am tired of selfish boys with raven black hair and myself in every one of them.   Just you.  I met just you.

Let me forget these people, struggling with prosperity and stemming the tide.    Seeking solution and tanning the hide.  Let me go home. Let me go home.  The 12 step recovery clichés that keep me in purgatory with less time to go than one hundred years of perfect sobriety.  Oh please send me home to smoky church halls and WI and no multi-malls.  Remind me of jet beads stitched onto her bodice, of peplums and bagels and tottenham forest.

I am TIRED of you showing me men that are hot, hotter than me or you for that matter.  I am tired of boasting to keep us alive, to stimulate interest and punish my precious child.   I am naked before you my darling creator.  This and more like it is all I can offer.

So take me away with you darling Ophelia on the Thames and the Medway and the Swale far beyond.

Categories
Gay Malibu Rant

Public Option/Private Option

without beard in sydneyWhenever some catty reader tells me to go home to the UK because I write optimistically for positive governmental change, fair taxes or that there might be a public option in the healthcare bill-where am I meant to go?  I live here!  Some of you can be very cruel, writing vile and damning notes to me-do I care about your vile and damning notes?

Do I fuck!  It takes a great deal more than a few inarticulate insults to upset this old goat.

What could any of you possibly do to upset me?   Well, like my errant lover, you could keep me hanging around LA waiting for you when all I want is you beside me-that’s pretty unsettling.  I am unsettled. Bemused by adolescence.

Even though I know you are fragile, it’s hard not to be selfish.  I love you. I need you.

I want to fuck you.

However, I loved laughing with you last night Mr. Darling NYC.  Sitting together by the fire in Malibu with Chris. Laughing like we should be doing when two people meet and fall headlong into…whatever men like us fall into.  I wish there was a word for that exciting moment just before you fall in love.

I couldn’t sleep last night.   I remembered the giant from twin peaks.

This is all I am permitted to say.

So, I was thinking about just how lucky I am surrounded by like-minded friends who want the best for all of us-rather than just themselves.

I was thinking about God and how regardless of circumstance I am never alone because I have faith.

A great deal of faith.

There’s a man in a smiling bag.

I have faith that the good of the people will overcome the evil in men’s hearts.

I was thinking about being a liberal.   I was wondering what American’s mean when they say the word ‘liberal’?  When they think of a liberal what do they see?  I was thinking that in some countries even Glenn Beck would be perceived as a liberal and that it’s all a matter of context.

Actually, regardless of whichever country Glen Beck lived, he would still be a simpering, self-obsessed cretin – a suppurating sore on the backside of humanity.

Unable to sleep I was thinking a great deal last night-holding my lover in the night gently snoring and fragile in my arms.

Without chemicals he points.

Having been one, I was thinking about the British Aristocracy.   Drunk aristocrats, dressed in tartan, over glasses of port rueing the day the British media went bad, nostalgic for a truly right wing rag.

Some would raise a glass to Oswald Mosley.

I met Oswald Mosley,  leader of the British Union of Fascists and his beautiful wife Diana Mitford in Paris when I was 19.    By the time I met him he was a demented old man wracked with Parkinson’s disease.  Lunch was cancelled because he took a dump in the sitting-room-I remember the smell and thought to myself  ‘that was a stinky poo’.

Until his dying day, Oswald Mosley was convinced that the British people would eventually come to their senses and call him home to lead the country he believed vehemently he was born to lead.

Oswald Mosley was not a rogue British fascist.  It is well known that had Hitler invaded the United Kingdom the aristocracy, of whom Hitler was in awe and had great sympathy, made a pact to hold onto what they owned.  Edward VIII‘s pro-German views made him a source of concern for the British government. “He’d always admired Hitler. He was, frankly, very pro-Nazi,” says John Julius Norwich.

Edward’s affair with Wallis Simpson – an American with a racy past, who was even more pro-fascist than Edward – was of great worry to the Royal Family. In 1936, Edward gave up the throne. The couple married as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in 1937, and went on a tour of Nazi Germany, finally settling in Portugal. While Adolf Hitler plotted to seize the duke and use him as a puppet king, Churchill banished him to the Bahamas – where he could do the least damage to the British war effort.

I want to write about the private option.

The man I met in New York, the scruffy handsome man is gone.  There’s no two ways about it.  Gone, gone, gone. I just didn’t call him back and now friends are calling pissed at me for my summary dismissal.   One night he lays there in my arms as gently as a baby the next he is on the streets diving into gay bars in The East Village.

Jake bauman Jake Bauman

That, my friends, is the way it is in the life of a sex addict.

What do these things mean?

LUNCH:  Cold poached chicken with watercress sauce.  Delicious.

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Dogs Hollywood Love Rant

World of Wonder

Anna and Melanie beneath a mermaid pinata.

It is a world of wonder.  The day opens thus:  the clouds have cleared over Los Angeles.  The sun is bright and the air is clean.  The birds are singing.  The squirrels are playing in the palm trees within feet of my window.

Everyday I wake up is a new day to think about what life has to offer and I am all at once terrified and enchanted.

I frantically tidied the house, put all the clothes that were stacked in my room in their correct places.  I remembered to fold my teeshirts and not put things in draws that were inside out.

I have to move the car at 9am so I don’t get a parking ticket.  The little dog is looking at me expectantly.  We need to walk, we need to take the trash to the building dumpster.  We need to go to yet another 12-step meeting and rip my heart open again and again.

I want to smoke cigarettes.  I want to lay in bed and not feel.  Please.

Right here, right now.  That’s what John A says.  Reminding me to stay right here right now.   Not yesterday or tomorrow.   Right here, right now.

Everything happens for a reason.  Collating the artwork made me take an essential inventory.  It seems that there is more value in what I own than I first suspected.  The choices I made for 20 years have been good ones.

Everything happens for a reason.  That’s what they say.  That’s what they tell me.  That’s what I have come to believe.  The plan is set, the dye is cast.

I felt sickly last night, too sickly to leave the house then spontaneously decided to visit my friends Anna and Melanie.  Driving through the heavy rain the little dog and I arrived in Silverlake and ate slow roasted pork, black beans, plantains and lemon sorbet.   Chatted to my arty filmmaker friends and loved every minute.  Drove home, lay in bed waiting for the anticipated thunder but none came.

Silverlake, Los Felis, Arcadia, La Canada, Flitridge, Brentwood, Malibu, Santa Monica, Pasadena, the map of LA unfolding like an old linen backed map in my head.  The freeways, the concrete LA river, the Pacific Ocean all wrote in Indian ink.

I once owned a 17th century map of Venice that I found in a library in Dorset when I was a boy.   It was folded into a marbled envelope and each painstakingly hand drawn section of that map remains engraved in my memory.

Venice stretches across 117 small islands in the marshy Venetian Lagoon along the Adriatic Sea in northeast Italy.

For a moment this morning I remembered that map and wished to be magically transported to the saltwater lagoons that stretch lazily along the shoreline between the mouths of the Po and the Piave Rivers.

When I die the various maps of many cities will be lost.  I think often of that.  The many and various maps of  all the cities I explored that will be lost along with the smell of fresh snow, the taste of my lovers mouth, the unmistakable sound of my own childish footsteps running down warm unusual, sunlit corridors.

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