Categories
Health

AA Birthday

As I embark on my 15th year of sobriety are things as I imagined they would be?

Well…they are as they are.

In God‘s perfect world there is nothing I can’t handle.

I have enough.

Enough is all I have.

What was it like before I got sober?  It was a daily, living hell.

This is the day I that I yearly recommit to sobriety and this is the day that forces me to take stock and move forward unburdened.

The day where I take a thorough inventory, both good and bad.

Some things need left behind.  You know what I am talking about.

Some things need embracing.

Life needs to be lived.

For all the love/health/death/aggravation of the past year…today I am strong and secure.  Today.

It seems that although forgiveness is key…it is a hard thing to swallow.

Categories
art

None of My Business

It’s none of my business what you think about me. Remember that. Duncan Roy…asshole.

Busy past few days. Mostly interested by the end of my novel. Eluded me until last night. Then, just as we are serving dinner (Michael B), it hit me like a rock in the head. The dignified end that had been requested of me.

I have had to really listen these past few days. Listen to somebody I have never met yet whose opinions I trust. Somebody who although several thousand miles away, is as engaged as I am with my book. It is all at once disconcerting and exhilarating.

He asked if I was wedded to the idea that this be a ‘gay’ novel. Don’t! That’s what I thought. Please don’t do this to me. Then, without a moments thought I said that I wasn’t wedded to the idea but didn’t know if I could write it any other way. He suggested that I re read a certain novel with similar themes. That I might be inspired. Well, I did and I was. He was right.

As a result of his suggestion..everything has to be re-jigged but it is smoother, less…his words…’self conscious’. That seems to be what he levels at me most often…that my writing is ‘self conscious’. Then I think to myself, you are out there helping me write a better novel. Do you want to write? No, he says. That’s not my job. I don’t have those aspirations. Like a therapist he is loathed to talk about anything else other than my work and me. He is a closed book.

He helped me with the POV (Point of View) which I had thought about a million times when making a film but never when writing prose.

So, there’s a beginning, middle and an end. That’s that.

What else? Well, I have been in the garden for hours. It looks amazing. I am either at my desk editing or I am in the garden planting and pruning. My nails are constantly black with mud. There is a trail of dirt through the house where I can’t be bothered to take off my shoes but get very grumpy if anyone else forgets to.

I went to a dinner with Tom and wished he didn’t want to sleep with 19 year old boys but wanted to sleep with me. I had sex with the deaf boy whose deafness kinda turns me on. We fucked. I wish I knew him better.

The Dane arrives this evening and we set off on our adventure. What is it with me and adventures?

Have been to therapy every day. I feel great. I feel complete. I know, God damn it, that this will pass but being active in the body and the mind seems to placate my yearning heart. However, I am acutely aware that when I feel good like this I start hankering for more. Where’s 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