Doorbell woke me.  Hours ago.  It was Bobby the cab driver, not Bobby the one I love.  Funny, it interrupted a dream of Bobby the one I love: 

Before answering the door, while stumbling around still half-asleep, I thought maybe the dream was a premonition; I thought that maybe it would be Bobby at the door, the one I love. 

It was the cab driver.  He'd shaved his head since the last time I saw him.  "Today's not a good day," I croaked, my eyes still squinty with sleep.  Bobby the cab driver comes when he wants to fuck.  We suck and lick -- never kiss -- and he bends me over and pumps it in.  Then he leaves.  Quick simple sex.  He's the same age as Bobby the one I love (31), but he's not half as cute, and not near as sexy.  Later on, when I'm horny, I'll think, "Why the hell did I let him go?  Why didn't I just let him do me?  Jeesh." 

I dreamt of Bobby the one I love the night before last as well.  In that dream his naked, lanky, sleeping body was suspended just slightly above my head and to my left in the branches of a tree; his limbs were splayed out in a random though comfortable pose, his face and pelvis were both turned away from me, concealing their details.  I thought, "He is peaceful there, I should not disturb him."  The tree was in the city. 

When I woke I had to wonder why I saw him in a tree; one never wonders these things while dreaming them.  It seemed as if he had fallen from a great height and, caught by the branches of a tree, was uninjured and peacefully asleep.  But for some reason that made me very sad, I was not allowed to touch him. 

Lots of bizarre news stories.  It can be a few minutes relief from the story; the obscurestore.com.  I've been lost there for an hour. 

File this under 'fate':  Couple altered itinerary.

My DSL is back up.  Yay. 

I have no TV, recently lost my phone, and when I got home from work, no DSL.  Cut off.  No contact at all. 

Here's a couple golden-hearted young men whose sites I found in my referrer log.  i'm running and 14th brother.  God, i love the web. 

Good night.

If you are sitting alone in your apartment, not watching (or don't have) a TV, and you feel an akward incongruity between the sunny clear blue-sky Saturday going on outside and the wailing grief of a nation, then spend some time with these photos.  Your tears will likely flow like rain, and your heart will be right back in alignment with all the rest of humanity. 

Tears do not darken our view of the world.  The white trim on the brick building next door is gleaming in today's bright sunlight.  Through tears, it absolutely sparkles. 

Something tells me this is sick, but I wish I was there.  Of course, if I was there, I would have wished I wasn't -- like the 5k who were there. 

5k.  A gross impersonalization but, as counterpoint, it emphasizes how utterly personal that attack was for every single one of those who died.  Out of all of those who suffered and died (estimates are that there will be more than 5,000, much more), at the end someone was just taking the first sip of their last coffee; someone was yawning; someone sighed for the tedium of their life at the instant it ended.  Out of 5,000 plus people who are now dead, someone saw it coming.  I wonder what they did.  Scream?  Furrow their brow quizzically at the 'impossible' spectre? 

I wonder what I -- what any of us -- will do now.

An account from a 1998 interview with Osama bin Laden. 

Where has all the time gone?  Just getting into bed now. 

I just don't want to be awake in the daylight today -- or yesterday.  And maybe not tomorrow.  I think I will call in sick tonight, If I don't sleep past noon...

This will become the 'Zapruder film' of the World Trade Center catastrophe. 

I know none of us ever thought a whole ton of things that we are thinking today, but I really never thought I'd hear the term 'forces of darkness' used outside of a fantasy novel, much less by a head of state. 

Words have not yet been invented to describe the way this agony has touched me, this nation, and the world. 

Hitler taught humankind a great deal about inhumanity, atrocity, and lust for power.  These were things we did not then want to learn -- lessons which we would gladly have forfeited had they not grabbed us and shaken us into an unpleasant reality.  Humanity paid dearly for that education.  But it was worth it. 

On Tuesday -- my birthday -- we began a new lesson, similar in its unpleasantness and difficulty to the one Hitler taught decades ago.  However, the topic of that lesson was over-grasping political philosophies while this lesson's theme is hateful religious fanaticism.  And like it or not, now is humanity's time to learn this particular lesson. 

The instructor, probably Osama bin Laden, has aroused in us an epic rage and fury.  Thus he offers us a test, with an opportunity to pass or fail: can we feel within our broken hearts the full breadth of our rage, and attend our agony wherever it takes us, even down to our most terrifying depths and back out again, without choosing to kill our souls with hatred? 

Whoever did this is a hate-filled person who has a chilling skill for turning others toward hate.  His substance is fear, his purpose is evil, and he hates every manifestation of the openness, optimism, dauntless hope, and kind generosity which are, in large part, constitutents of the American personality.  He seeks to kill that goodness in us -- not by murder, atrocity, or acts of war -- but by simply making us hate. 

I can't stop crying, and that is a good thing.  Because once I refuse to cry, I have no choice but to hate, and that bastard is not going to win.  Not in America. 

And definitely not on my birthday. 

Updated: 12:19 PM EDT 16:19 GMT -- 11 Sep 2001

stunned.

Why can't I just write about the cat, or the boyfriend, or how I am getting my head waxed and going to the beach, or anything just bland and safe and mundane...  Why does it have to be these topics?

"Well, you write because you care," responds my father, "and you care because it matters." 

There you go.  Because it matters.  Hmm.  So simple; I should've known that.  I guess sometimes wisdom does come with age.  Sometimes.  There are, however, grown men who have less wisdom than most boys I've known.  But underage gay boys share a scary love that terrifies some men, especially when that love is celebrated and not hidden like a dirty English school boy secret.  Some men are positively beside themselves with rage that such a love might dare to speak its name in a widely published glossy mag that claims -- quite correctly -- to tell the truth. 

Boys are attractive in their own right, regardless of the beholder's orientation or age.  That notion alone is difficult for the sex-phobic American culture to accept.  Much less acceptable are any efforts made by anyone to validate and normalize the sexual attraction felt between some teenage boys. 

To the boys:  Whatever you are feeling is right and good.  I don't care what it is.  There are a lot of bad men out there who are terrified of boys who love other boys.  If you dare to love another boy, those men will hate you for no reason other than that.  Many are very respected, and powerful.  One of the bad men, unfortunately, might be your father.  Or he might be your minister, your rabbi, your teacher, your bus driver, or your scoutmaster.  He might be all of the above.  But if you hear it nowhere else, then hear it now; your so-called 'bad feelings' are not bad, in fact they are good.  Supress nothing.  Deny nothing.  Accept everything about yourself as precious (yeah, that's right -- precious) and good, and wholesome, and true.  These things will lead you to integrity, deep happiness, and freedom. 

I had a lover when I was in the fourth grade.  His name was David.  We had terrific, fabulous, wonderful, intense, red-hot sex, even though neither of us was yet able to ejaculate.  But sex is not all we did.  Mostly we were just boys who did boy-stuff together; camping, Boy Scouts, drawing (he had talent), watching TV or just hanging-out.  In fact, David was so flamboyantly femme -- and I, so homophobic -- that I would have avoided being seen with him, except that we were lovers, and we each had few other friends.  And because he was nice to me. 

I wanted to be like David -- or, more accurately, I wanted to be like me without all the pretenses and self-consciousness.  David was certainly not ignorant of the straight boys' contempt, but he never once let them dictate his behavior or cramp his femme ways; he met every intimidator toe to toe and he never once backed down.  David, the queen, was more man than me.  From the perspective of the closet I was in then I could not have recognized how much I looked up to David.  But despite the swish, the lisp, the limp wrist and all, David was what I wanted to be -- free. 

In the mid-sixties there was no way for me -- or for David and me -- to be gay and okay.  There was a lesbian (I think) teacher who was our champion and our patron, who did make it okay to be gay, at least in our immediate vicinity.  For a school trip to a museum, she had, perhaps on her own initiative, made arrangements to support the friendship of these two lonely boys, neither of whom had ever been able to make friends with others before.  So with half the elementary school assembled to receive the rules for the class trip, Miss Williams announced that she had gotten special permission -- from the Principal and the other teachers -- to have me come over to David's bus to ride with him. 

With her help, it would have been okay to be gay, except I was just too afraid to acknowledge my own affection for my loverboy.  I learned that cowardice from men.  I stayed on my own bus. 

If you ever see a tall forty-something blonde named David Ackley, originally from Northboro Massachusetts, please say hello to him for me. 

I'm glad summer is not over.  I'm glad my air conditioner still works.  For all my tantrums and bitterness, I am still grateful that all the world's people continue their precious journies despite my occasional desire that everyone except me be vaporized.  I am grateful for the work I am allowed to do -- even with all of its frustrations, catch-22's, and angry-scared-hurt people who call and try to be mean. 

I am thankful for consciousness; for sight; for the ability to read; for the opportunity to write; and for the paperback set, now venerable and disintegrating, given to me by my sister 30 years ago, 29 years before she died. 

I like woodsmoke carried on crisp air, or the scent of suntan lotion mingling with sweat and sea air on a brilliantly sunny beach-day.  I apreciate the performance art of day and night, of sunset and sunrise, of cloud and sky, and of star and spirit.  I love all my ex's and their vast capacities to forgive; few of them hate me, but most of them have had reason to.  I am grateful for all the trauma's I have suffered, for my abortive evasions of trauma's effect, for the decades I have lost to self-pity, self-contempt, and breathtaking rage.  And I am grateful to have lived long enough to grow up and to retract the blame that really belongs to no one. 

I have hated living only because I loved life more than I thought I could bear.  I am grateful now to know that my love for life is vast -- and exactly the equivalent of my capacity to bear it. 

Boston Globe Online / Nation | World / Pay phones to cost 50 cents as use falls

More insignifica.  But you just know I've gotta complain.  Only my complaint is not that they are raising the price of payphones -- please, they've always cost at least twice what we spend in phone change.  That's the lot in life of a 'public utility', but the notion of promoting the commonweal by regulating such services as are considered necessary for the common good is fast becoming antique.  And yet, even that is not my complaint.  I may wax nostalgic for the monopoly days of Ma Bell and 10¢ phone calls, but nostalgia is not cause for complaint except when I am miserable or when I think I am about to die.  Happily, neither is the case at the moment. 

My complaint is that their excuse for doing it is a lie. 

I have to smile.  Poor folk, who have already endured the loss of "widespread availabality" of payphones, now have to stop being poor in order to use the few payphones which are left.  The public payphone has long been acknowledged to be an albatross around the neck of the telecommunication industry and -- except for for those public utility regulations -- would only have existed in the form of that bane to social progress, the privately owned payphone.  Verizon wants to transform that albatross into a 'pearl-necklace', and the public, not just their customers, are the ones getting jerked-off.  "It's as simple as that." 

Now, in order to continue enduring this corporate impediment, and to (tongue in cheek) continue to provide the general public with reasonable access to the phone system, they are going transform the payphone -- a symbol of once egalitarian elements within the former Bell System -- into just another overpriced vending machine.  (If they think there's a lot of vandalism to phones now, just wait.  Poor boys pick their targets with unerring acuity.) 

Complaint over.  Hi ho, hi ho, off to work we go... 

I like chiphi2x -- the name, the new design, and the person behind it all.  From his journal:

9/3/2001, 2:18pm I guess you may have figured out 2 things so far... 1) this is the new redesign i've been babbling about... and 2) i'm going to keep chiphi2x.com as my personal site (roofpig.com will launch as a "creative" site down the road and i'll announce it on here when it does)... let me know what you think

Yay! 

Good night.

Eventually we get around to talking about the point.   Eventually.  

...after the diversions, after the sex, after the booze and the binges, after the boys of summer.  After the fall.

joe. (a true story)   It's all a lie, a clever Mambo danced amid the lethal laser beams, between and under them; and a ballet of leaps and pliès over and around them -- but never through.  To go right through one of those slivers of light would cut a person in half.  Tell the TRUTH!?  What, do I tell the story of what really happened to me?  That would be the most boring thing on earth -- or the most terrifying, depending on one's perspective.  Do I tell instead of the consequences of that story, the sequelae of my life?  (As if my life is already over and this is what's left.)  

And so the dance -- the lie -- defines the trap even as the dissociate soul ranges broad across the universe (and the bedroom ceiling).  

The story is this:   I don't lie, I just don't say.  Cryptic, hidden.  Safe.  Let's play pretend, it's comforting.  It is like being God.  Children are God, or not far from it; they are at the beginning of that little loop that is human life, that comes out from God at its start, swings out away and finally, near its end goes back in again.  At the beginning there's a need for a little readjustment, as the soul departs from infinite omnipotence to enter a journey through limited humaness.  Some people make the transition well. 

Getting honest is the hardest part; it is coming out of hiding, and giving up all the clever hopes and schemes that say going back is possible, promising that life can be undone and re-lived.  Truth is the laser which seared clean through you; it cannot be un-burned.  The options are simple; do you want to be real, or do you want to pretend to be God? 

The true story is real, not pretend. 

Eventually. 

I have 7,205 'dirty' pictures.   They take up 442,912,423 bytes of disk space.   If it weren't for blogger, I'd have nowhere to say that.  

So what!!   Yup, I agree.   insignifica inundiata. That means, "I got blogs up to here!"

So, back to the business of blogging.   It was the viewing of the pictures that occupied all my time yesterday... well, not just viewing them, but... (Eieewwww, icky!)   Anyway, that big manual I brought home from work never left its place in my bike bag, where I had placed it -- with the very best of intentions -- around midnight on Tuesday before leaving work.   And my iPAQ, once it finally made it's way out of the bike bag and into its synch-cradle, never moved again nor made a peep.   I have all the acoutrements of an active life, without actually living.   I am an Egyptian mummy.  

Now, mummy's got to go to work.  

Another great thing about blogger is that when midnight comes and I have wasted an entire goddamn day stuck to this web like a dying insect, I can still post something dated yesterday, thus redeeming the lost day.  

Well, now I see that that is not true.   I must have gotten the time warp notion from Blogger's main page where, for exactly one minute at 9:34 PM PDT, it appeared that I had stopped wasting my life three hours ago.   (As if posting this drivel stops my descent toward absolute zero.   No offense, Blogger, but keeping this blog probably accelerates my descent -- I only do it because I really want to look like I have a life, too.)

I'm starving.   That's the substance of my existence right now.   Actually, it is a dilemma; I have in the freezer a pint of ice cream, which I should not have purchased two days ago, but that is a story I have already failed to tell.   Gotta move on.   Someone -- a writer probably -- said once, "If you wake-up feeling the inspiration to write, just eat something sweet and the feeling will go away."  

I'm starving, and I'm gonna eat the ice cream, even though sugar depresses me, and I certainly don't need to be any more depressed than my usual.   But the alternatives are...  well, dull.   I mean, what would the world be without an occasional plunge from a bridge to spice-up the drive-time?   Or an airline disaster to make us wake and wonder if there's not more to this destination than we thought?   I grew-up wanting to put my cock where it was not supposed to be, simply because everything I was taught about life -- and how to live it -- was so goddamn dull.   As it turns out, cock-placement has never provided anything more than merely fleeting relief; it's not where you put it that matters, but what you do when you get there.  

I'm starving, but I'm going to tease the gnawing hunger a little bit, like gastronomic foreplay, because there's a three month old leak in my bike tire that I didn't fix today -- again.   And because there's a classified section from Sunday's paper right beside me listing apartments for rent with phone numbers I should have called Sunday night that I still haven't called, in search of the apartment that I am going to need in three weeks, which I still haven't found.   And because in twelve hours I'll be firmly under my employer's thumb again, at a subsistance job I hate, where all my skills and talent and inspiration will be discounted out-of-hand -- much like when I am home all day, alone.  

But it is all OK, because once I fill my gut, everything will matter a little less, and that is bad because there is little that matters now.   Writing this blog isn't much, but at this moment it is something.   In twenty minutes whatever tiny inspiration may have briefly flickered here will be thoroughly buried under a pint of Ben & Jerry's Apple Crumble.  

I'm not despondant, I'm just sick of all the nothing.