Tag: Health

Categories
Gay Health Hollywood Love

You Don’t Know What I Fear

You know what I’m doing?  I’m going out!  Started the evening feeling sorry myself.  Fuck that.

I sent an SOS to Amanda that I may or may not need.  But most of all, I am not going to be beaten by 5mm of something black on my balls.  It’s not a death sentence.  It’s black on the scan.  I wonder what color it is in real life?

I’m listening to very loud music.

Old fashioned shit.  I know.  But I’m allowed to.  I don’t have to answer to anybody.

I bought Jasper Conran‘s beautiful book Country.   Packed with so many beautiful images.  Try looking at THAT on a fucking kindle.

I cleaned the apartment.  I sorted my papers.  I totally forgot that I had to call the police station in London to deal with the iPod incident.  Never mind.  I would rather be in a cell than have this maggot growing inside me.  It’s all relative.  I read Michael’s brilliant script.  After I finish writing this I will take the little dog to see the cats on Cherokee so he can squeal like a pig with excitement.   Cat!  Cat!

I have to submit my HLN idea.  I received a lovely text message from an old lover in NYC who is eager to get together..balls or no balls.

Meeting Seb at SHLA at 11pm.  Fuck this sitting around shit.  I need solution!  have I LEARNED nothing from all those years sitting in church halls and masonic lodges reading the recipe of the 12 steps?

Take action my friends!  Get out of that shit relationship.  Don’t be bowed by illness!  Eat!  If you feel lonely get out onto the streets!   Don’t give in to the furies.  TAKE ACTION.

December 21st, 2009-August 12th, 2010

Jake has been in my life..for months…for most of it was an acting out dream come true.

Oh I WILLINGLY gave up my sexual sober time.

We talked almost every day.  Why trash those precious few months?  For the time being I will celebrate the time we spent together.  Although, sooner or later it will just feel…embarrassing.

In the long run it will mean far more to him than it will to me,  Try as he might he will never be able to unstitch me from his story.  I am, after all, the one who tore him out of the closet and in so doing rescued that poor girl from just one more day of deceit and lies.

I said to him on February 9th:

All I know is as the years pass this will weigh heavier on your mind and every time you look at J your girlfriend/wife/mother of your child you will know that there is a fundamental deceit.

If it is not me or the Hungarian it will be another man..and another and the outcome will always be the same.

One day you will meet a perfect man and then you will resent her, begin to hate her because it is not him…

I am the FUCKING HERO.  Beautifully written…don’t you think?

And for all you guys and gals who have been shat on..here is a shitty, campy song for you to remind yourself that we can all laugh at how stupid we have been:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxxwNuTpdd8]

Categories
Health

Going Home

There’s no easy way to say this but the cancer stuff is not turning out very well.   Irene will be pleased and so will Jake.  They can join the legions of others who wouldn’t mind watching me suffer..

I am going home.  There’s stuff here to sort out here.  Practical stuff.  It may take a few days.

Financially it couldn’t have happened at a worse time.

I heard the news this morning.

It’s odd how the news made my balls feel tender.  They began to talk to me.  Whine and complain.

You know who I wanted to tell first?  Well of course I did even though he wouldn’t have given a damn.

This is not great.

Categories
Auto Biography

Kuros Khazaei

My friend Sebastian’s father was my father’s very best friend.  When Sebastian first met me he knew exactly who I was.

My father was his hero.  His description of Kuros almost perfectly matches how I have heard myself described.  He cut quite a dash, he was impeccably dressed and when he entered a room people took notice, he could also be very, very bad-tempered.

Not many people have very nice things to say about my father.  My mother, his business colleagues, some of my brothers and sisters and their mothers all of them seem a little too ready to condemn him yet, strangely, I am not.   Even though he wanted nothing to do with me and treated my Mother very badly I am still willing to forgive him.  It is touching that he had such a profoundly positive effect on Sebastian.

We are without doubt very similar in temperament but unlike when I die…when he died he died very, very rich.

He was without doubt a colourful/controversial figure.

Sebastian’s father owned a restaurant in London where my father met all of his wives.  I still don’t know a great deal about him but I know for sure that his second wife disappeared one night with her children never to see him again.  I know that his third wife had a terrible time with his temper and cavorting.  I know that he loved backgammon and opium.  I have been told, although these might be myths, that he was thrown out of a second floor window by the notorious gangster Kray twins causing him to have a life long limp?  That he wrapped a sports car around a lamp-post severely damaging his eye?  That he was implicated in a massive robbery but never formally charged?

He certainly owned a restaurant and an antique shop and his big break came when he met a profligate Saudi Prince who bought everything my father could lay his hands on and sold to the Prince at exorbitant prices.

Isn’t it odd that whilst he owned an antique shop in London (only feet away from where I would one day live with JBC)  I was trawling through the antique/junk shops in Whitstable and Canterbury.   That his restaurant was only a block away from where I would settle with Phil.  That we may very well have passed each other in the street and never known who one another was.

I met a man on the train to Shrewsbury I was convinced was my father.

He was not my father.

I felt as if I were not allowed to ask Sebastian questions about my father, as if the topic were still off-limits, disallowed, forbidden.  There is still a huge amount of shame surrounding his name.  As if even the barest mention of him a terrible catastrophe would somehow happen.

Yet, there is nothing more I need to know about him.  I know that I am his son, that we are cut from the same cloth and that it scares me to hear about him because in some way I am forced to accept my own flaws/defects/shortcomings.

That, my friends, is incredibly uncomfortable.

My father died in 1998 of pancreatic cancer.  I never met him although I feel as I have.  A protracted and messy financial battle ensued after his death.   There are all sorts of stories about who stole what from whom but my four younger siblings seemed to do OK.   He left at least 8 children behind, two ex-wives (did he ever bother getting a divorce from any of them?) and a widow.

It was a pleasure discussing him with Sebastian because Sebastian has fond memories and…I believe him.

Categories
Gay Hollywood Malibu Rant

Renters From Hell

The day started out badly and after getting a great deal better ended with a bang…quite literally.

A friend called me a ‘drama queen’ after reading this morning’s blog.  Thanks friend.  The fact is:  I was sick with a migraine, the first real one I had ever had.  Nausea, blinding headache and dizziness.  Silly me, I decided the best way to solve that particular problem (after writing my blog) was to drive 30 miles to Gold’s Gym and work out with my friend David.  Bad idea.  Hillary met me after the gym to eat lunch at the French Market in Venice.  Bad idea.  My reasoning was that if I could just behave as normal everything would get better.

I am sure that my migraine was actually a combination of stress, high blood pressure and depression.  It followed soon after some particularly loaded conversations.  After I posted my blog the comments came thick and fast.  You guys were all so sweet to support and love me.  The reason I write this blog?   Because you are all there to read it.  To understand, to reach out, to condone and condemn in equal measures.

After lunch I went back to bed and slept deeply.   The phone woke me three hours later… my friends from England  arrived in LA but decided to stay elsewhere.  I can’t say I wasn’t happy.  I wasn’t in any mood for 10 days sharing my life with English people.  Laying in bed feeling so sick, the bathroom floor unwashed.

Woke up to an email from a disgruntled Malibu renter and his blousey girlfriend/fuck buddy.   I knew that we would have some sort of disagreement about the return of the damage deposit.  When he left the house he left it in a terrible state: broken coffee pot and coffee cups, 5 huge red wine stains on the carpet.   Thankfully Jerome was with me when I checked over the house and the moron was forced to admit what he had done.

They were the sorts of tenants who couldn’t do anything for themselves and were constantly summoning me to look at things they could have fixed… like the stove top they locked by accident.   As usual it is the cheap skate tenants who nickel and dime that seem to cause the most problems.   On the first occasion I was asked to go to the house the tenant was so drunk he couldn’t stand up.  I should have chucked him and his lady friend out there and then.   I was embarrassed for him.

When they, rather amazingly, asked to come back to the house I made it so prohibitively expensive… I knew they wouldn’t be able to afford it.   The letter I received from them was littered with quotes from this blog.  Well, blog on this bitch!  I was in no mood to deal with bullshit, no mood to be lied to or manipulated and certainly no mood to deal with a woman (not on the contract) the renter had confided in me he couldn’t wait to see the back of.

My anger toward these nasty, cheap people had the affect of shaking my headache and forcing me out of the house.

I walked briskly down Sunset.  I had my hair buzzed and beard trimmed at a barbers on Ivar and began looking for appropriate BEAR WEAR as I now intend, whilst I am in NYC, to attend the Urban Bear Weekend which will be fun-exploiting my tiny celebrity for a bunch of hairy bears and their bear cub boy toys.   A friend of mine suggested the Urban Bear idea as a kind of joke but it looks like a great deal of fun.  This may be my future!

Now all I need is a cub to drag around by the belt loop.

Anyway, by the time I got home it was time to get dressed and head to WeHo for dinner with Spencer my very intelligent British friend.  Over beef burgers and fries trying to understand the cultural DNA of the average citizen of the USA.   My new theory?  That the ‘puritan chromosome’ is not nearly as dominant or as influential in the American genome than the ‘wild-frontier chromosome’.  That the majority of people who live in the USA came from simple European ancestors who, for their freedom, had to combat rattle snakes, bears, hostile climate, native Americans as well as their brutal own.  The threat, real or imagined was always there.

Suspicious and mistrusting by nature these people believe that government is good for only two things PRISONS and THE MILITARY.  White settlers distrust Obama, discrediting his empathy.

After dinner Spencer and I wandered around WeHo and met a couple of handsome cops.  Handsome but dull.  We wandered aimlessly back to the car and outside the Abbey some young man threw a can of vile smelling alcohol at me from a yellow school bus yelling homophobic rhetoric.   The full can hit me squarely in the chest.   I can still feel where it hit me on the sternum.  At first in shock, I grew increasingly angry, then I buried the  anger under a seething fury, quietly determined that ‘they’ can’t hurt me, that they can’t hurt me any more.

‘Drama Queen’ that I am I sank into a pit of man hating quick sand.  I hated the entire crew of my Wednesday morning therapy meeting with their frat house homophobia, their cheating ways co-signed by a dodgy ‘therapist’.   These men miserably attempt to patch up their sham marriages to avoid alimony and see their kids whilst yearning after mistresses, transexuals and sophomoric freedoms.

Categories
Dogs Gay Money Rant

Drug Companies Profit From Gay Self-Hate

Eating cheese and pastrami with lashings of piccalilli smeared over the top.  The inside of my mouth is burning.  My lips are burning with desire.  Not really.  My lips are just bored.  I am waiting for the mail to arrive so I can walk to bank and get on with the day.

I just scaled Mount Runyon with Sherpa Lil Dog, we saw two gorgeous yeti and had to: Alert! Avert! Affirm!    It’s simply no good for me to gaze longingly at the perfectly honed abs of my fellow Runyon climbers.

Yesterday I realized, after chatting with a friend of mine with HIV that the average drug company will make over $2, 000, 000 out of a single person with HIV during their life time.  Where is the incentive for those drug companies to educate gay men about staying negative?   Anyway, I am fast realizing that the sexual health education that gay men need is nothing to do with safe sex and everything to do with self-love.

The drug companies have no compassion for gay men, no desire to educate an underclass with no real rights, who are despised by most Christian bigots and have so little respect for themselves that they routinely get infected with HIV and become another $2, 000, 000 meal ticket for big pharma.

Pharmaceutical executives must be rubbing their hands in glee when another gay man converts from positive to negative.

This has to stop.  We must start educating the next generation of gay men to love themselves enough to make good sexual health choices.

I got to thinking about my friend Amanda and how we recently hit a bit of a rock.  I think deep down, even though she has gay men around her to dress her, she really has no respect for gay men. For many people we are clowns who have no right to complain or behave as anything other than grotesque queens.   We are, to her, useless absurdities.   Her notion that it is somehow ridiculous for us to have children, for us to have politics, opinions, etc.  She’s not alone; I think many people are outraged by all of that and more.

Whatever I may have written about gaybies in the past I now see gay men having children as a delicious act of rebellion.  It confronts homophobia head on.

Categories
Death Dogs Love Malibu

Crying

The Sex Rehab show effect has been cumulative.   When it first aired I expected to be immediately recognized.  As the weeks and months pass more and more people come up to me in the street and introduce themselves.

Shown daily on VH1, making it easier for old ‘friends’ and acquaintances to reach out to me.  Long forgotten, now reminded by Sex Rehab re-acquainted on Facebook, twitter etc.

Reality TV is truly life changing.   Opportunities include film projects,  book deals,  lovers-I am anywhere but where I thought I might be at my age.

Outside, this rainy afternoon, the gardeners are pulling out tons of weeds.  It is good to hear them chattering away in Spanish.  So, that’s what life will be, a life of chattering Mexican gardeners until Dorset Mary pitches up in her airstream and tends the goats and the chickens.

I have to call the bee man today about getting the bees up here.  I know where I want them to go.

I wrote yesterday about crying, a commission for a new magazine.  There’s been a great deal of crying during the past few months as my focus shifted from the big picture to just one man.   Ones view narrows exponentially when one falls in love and at the same time balloons into something huge.  My tears were not often for him but for past traumas and relationships and deaths.  My focus became very shallow and as I retreat from love I seem to be more aware of the horizon.

I cried when my Darling Big Dog was killed. I sat in my bed for a week and sobbed like a child.  I am still prone to sink into that deep, black well of sadness, tears  flooding my eyes and my heart.

If I had not witnessed that terrible moment I would be a lesser man today.  In many ways to have suffered like that unleashed all I had been denying myself throughout the years.  So many times I should have, could have, would have cried but remained stoic and dry-eyed.

The architects have just been to the house to check out the layout.  She was a rather wonderful, practical woman with a great attitude.

My film is taking shape, the garden continues to give pleasure and I am getting into my creative groove.  Although I am still mourning the death of love I am looking forward to a brighter, leaner future.

Categories
Love

Day 2 No BF

Day two of having no boy friend, even though he wasn’t actually a boy friend because he told me so.  Not feeling quite as good as I felt yesterday.  Wondering if I was just too eager to say goodbye.  I know, deep down, that it was the right decision but I just miss talking to him.  I see him out there in face book land and I want to say hi but daren’t.   I just don’t want to get sucked into our weird co-dependent, obsessive love affair that has no name.

I had dinner with a friend yesterday evening but I really could not summon the energy to engage.   Almost fell asleep at the table.  Everything he said irritated me.  That night I had more erotic dreams about you-know-who.  I can only imagine having sex with him.   The idea of just taking my clothes off in front of another man fills me with icy horror.

I know that he is probably having group sex with half of Vanity Fair by now.  Joke.    Even if he was I can’t care.  I can’t make it my business.  I am in Malibu so am prone to morbid thinking.

I wandered around Hollywood last night snapping the neon signs with my new iphone app, the project was extraordinarily successful.

Dane came by and massaged my back until I fell asleep.  I like that he blows out the candles, turns out the lights and locks the door when he leaves.

This morning went to Palisades’s men’s meeting-full of monstrous egos and bad hair plugs.  One particularly vile Hollywood agent sitting smugly on his fat ass.   He isn’t really fat; he’s just pudgy really, like a Rubens nude.  Solid fat, not the kind of fat that squidges.  Firm fat but FAT all the same.  Not ‘precious’ fat.  Not morbidly obese either.  Just enough fat, that one thinks ‘I might catch the fat’, like a disease.  Thankfully he kept his mouth shut.

I don’t know what I would do if he were brave enough to get onto an airplane and come to me.  I think I might just forgive him-which is stupid as he obviously has a drug and alcohol problem.   Oh FUCK!!  It’s so damned hard to fall out of love when you don’t have a big bottle of whiskey to wipe the slate clean.

Party tonight, parties all weekend.   Can I really be bothered?  I should be mourning the loss of my non existent boyfriend.

Categories
Love

The Lies We Tell Ourselves

After dinner a few nights ago I had a moment of crippling paranoia.

Perhaps I should not have eaten so much cheese at the Mercantile?   My grandmother Margie who died last year often warned me that too much cheese before bedtime causes nightmares.

My chest tightened.  My heart beat faster.  My mouth dried.  I tried to sleep.  I could not sleep.  I could no longer employ any one of the very many coping skills I had learned during the past 13 years when the panic comes.  I lay down in fear.  I woke at dawn with the dawn chorus.  Not birds in the palm trees outside my window but to a miserable conference of those self hating voices that used to wake me every day of my life.  These episodes are so rare nowadays that when they come upon me I get very scared..terrified.

These are the lies I tell myself:

“Being in love tends to make one feel vulnerable and foolish…and, as we all know, there’s no fool like an old fool.”

“I know that I am loved.  I believe it.  I know that I can love.  But, when more is required-what then?   You got to give the man hope.”

I suddenly felt, I suddenly knew, I was being lied to.   I was convinced.

I said, “I became aware.  More was revealed.  You can’t con a conman.”

I felt violently sick, I began to dry heave: I said out loud, “My desire for authenticity isn’t being honored.”

The voice I heard was a child’s voice.  He said,

“I understand that it takes a very long time to acquaint yourself with the truth; when a lie comes so easily to your lips.  When a lie is easier than the truth, when deception is in your nature then rigorous honesty is something to be feared.”

I said, “But I had had to train myself to be honest.”

When I tried to defend myself the child impersonated my very own voice.

“I am sick of making excuses.  I am sick of trying to see it from the other side when my side of things is simply ignored.  I am tired of supporting and encouraging and making excuses when it turns out-I am the object of deception and not affection.”

I said, “When the other changes before your very eyes?”

The child laughed out loud and wanted to know who exactly I was kidding.

“I don’t take drugs, I don’t drink, I try and tell the truth, I don’t act out sexually…therefore I never have a day off from myself.    I am always here, present, in my own body.  I never have an excuse for bad behavior.   Ever.”

I could hear other children, laughing..at me.

“When you drink and you take drugs and you look at pornography you are taking time off from yourself.  I would love to do that-take time off from myself.”

By being present 24 hours of every day for nearly 13 years I thought that I had evolved.

Remember that stuff I wrote about self-love?   That the choices I made had to reflect the respect I had for myself?

The first gay men I ever saw in film were Farnsworth and his boy friend being thrown out of their high rise apartment windows, begging for their lives, by the FBI in The Man who Fell to earth.  I must have been 13 years old.  I watched it with Linda my house mother from school,  Canterbury.  She vomited on me after seeing the film.

That’s what’s going on.

So, what’s it all about?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3_2bDqf32I&feature=related]

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.

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