(9AM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)
This is my heart, this is my soul. This is my reason.
Anyone can see the road that they walk on is painted in gold,
It’s always summer they’ll never get cold,
They’ll never get hungry they’ll never get old and grey,
Anyone can see their shadows wandering off somewhere
They won’t make it home but they really don’t care,
They wander the highway they’re happy they left today…
If I could have you look at me, a 46 year old slightly aging man, it would be the sunglass wearing drummer boy in the video above.
Watch the video. See relaxed little drummer boy with the mirrored glasses and the shit eating grin. Look at 1:25 in the video, exactly.
That’s me. That’s me, my personality, everything about me, in a nutshell. It may not be how I look, but that is me. Although, I do look younger than my age, in most ways. With the right clothes and the right haircut and the right smile and the right glasses, I could be him. I could show you him, in me.
I was doing good. With my haircut and black jean jacket, I looked a little like him, today.
Shit eating grin. Smile of steel. This is what a lifetime of hurt and pain has left me. Stop. I don’t want your sympathy.
The shit eating grin.
My brother and I, we were latchkey kids. My mother, she was a roaring mother bear, detested my homosexuality, asked me once whether I ever tried a woman (I did, and had), and died of cervical cancer at the age of 54. I watched her die in 1997, from a curable disease that had caused her pain her whole life, at the age of 54.
I kissed her on the forehead with her last breath. She was never even aware I had come to see her.
The children woke up
And they couldn’t find ’em
Left before the sun came up that day
They just drove off and left it all behind ’em
Where were they going without ever knowing the way?
When I was 13, I discovered I was clever.
When I was 25, I discovered I was even more clever.
I have had a charmed life. I know how to do things that boggle the mind. I have never had to really work a day in my life, and to the degree I have had to, I regret it. I have not had, in one sense, a hard life.
I am an atheist. I fantasize that my mother looks over me, from the afterlife.
I smile partly because unless you’re a fucking GENIUS, you’re not cleverer than me — I’m not a genius, but I am, if you know me, and in some narrow context you can designate at your pleasure, your worst nightmare. And, if you’re not cleverer than me, I’ll find a way to beat you. Somehow. To “kill” you. There is no practice that is beyond me, there is nothing I cannot do, to eventually surpass you.
With anything, anything at all, I really care about, I do it.
I had a dream. One day I could not swim. The next day I could. And that was because of a dream I had. And one day, I had a 98 bowling average. The next day, I had 155.
Because of FOCUS, and dreaming.
This is who I am. I have a conceit: Underestimating me and what I can do with sufficient focus and time is a fatal mistake, at least in the context of whatever you’re doing. If you’re an expert card dealer, I’ll learn what you do and eventually beat you. If you’re a professional bowler, I’ll eventually learn how to do it and eventually crush you. All I need is TIME. But this diary is not about that. This diary is not about EGO. I don’t know what it’s about, really.
And I smile partly out of rage.
To be honest, I can’t tell the difference anymore.
I was born June 15th.
To me, I like this song, because of this:
Anyone can see the road that they walk on is painted in gold,
It’s *always summer they’ll never get cold(,
They’ll never get hungry they’ll never get old and grey,
Anyone can see their shadows wandering off somewhere
They won’t make it home but they really don’t care,
They wander the highway they’re happy they left today…
Why am I even writing this diary?
Robyn talks a lot to you about what it is like being a transgendered person, and a woman.
What I don’t know how to do, really, but am trying, in my limited way, is to talk about what it is like to be a gay MAN, to have lived an entire life being a gay man, with the twinned lacadaisiality and rage.
If you ever met me, I wouldn’t come across to you, as I often do on the diaries I write here, as angry. What disturbs me a little about the popular culture is, yes, I am gay, but I am also a MAN. Make no mistake about that. I am comfortable in my own skin, and I feel, people in the pop culture world see gay MEN a certain way. They don’t really see us as MEN. They see us as limp wristed lispers.
What I’d really come across is “aging party boy”. In my world, it’s eternal summer, but summer is twinned.
The sun means party on the beach. But it also means, angry death ray.
My mother died of cervical cancer. She died of a disease that is readily preventable today with a simple vaccine. She died in agony.
When people talk about how vaccines are a plot by the government to hurt people, this enrages me. I watched my mother at three different episodes in my life writhe in agony, and the last one took her life.
When people talk about gay men dying of AIDS, as if this is how gay men die, this enrages me.
We die of PAIN.
My lover died of a lifetime of PAIN. And it wasn’t AIDS. It was a lover who died of AIDS and a lifetime of being DIMINISHED.
And, yeah, I hurt. I guess. If I chose to feel it, I could spend a lifetime wailing in agony. My lover and my mother died within 8 months of each other.
So, I smile.
And I guess I write angry diaries. But, really, I write these things and am chagrined.
I am really that young man with the reflective sunglasses, banging on drums, grinning with simple young pleasure, in eternal summer.
And one day, I’ll leave you all, as you all left me, as the song says, I’ll wander off while you starve in abandonment, smiling and lacadaisical all the way. As you left me.
And I’ll never make it “home”. I have no home.
But I won’t care.
1 comments
i’m sure i’m not the only one here that feels this way about you….
♥~