Rent.

It comes up from time to time, it came up just last weekend when we were at Baldwin-Wallace College where the musical theater students were singing several songs from Lizzie Borden in a concert of songs from new shows and they had us on stage for a Q&A after the concert, this question about Rent and why I don’t like it -- the students are rehearsing now for productions of Rent and La Boheme (the opera on which Rent is loosely based) to be performed in repertory -- and my pat answer is that it claims to depict a time and place and milieu, one which I have a strong attachment to, it having been my time and place and milieu, yet the characters, the songs, the story, don’t look or sound or feel anything like the time and place and milieu that I remember. In fact, it seems to me that it trivializes and sentimentalizes, reduces to clichés, the things that made the East Village in the 80s so wild and urgent, so heady, so riveting: performance art, drag, AIDS.

But I accept the possibility that I’m guilty of extrapolating my own experience too widely, assuming that my own experience of that time was the experience. I’m sure there are many people for whom Rent feels authentic. I may be too harshly critical. Lots of people love Rent. They can have it. In the end, I guess I just don’t care much for the songs.

T suggested wisely that Rent may be a younger generation's Fame, a movie which -- though I have known many people in the meantime who attended the High School of Music and Art, on which Fame was based, who say that it is a terribly unrealistic depiction of their experience -- inspired both T and I and many of our friends, showed us a New York where we might go to find aspiring artists like ourselves, a place where the streets were crawling with music and love and sadness and inspiration. I'll buy that. (The comparison breaks down when you compare the movies, though. Fame is a good movie. It holds up. The movie version of Rent is a piece of crap.)

I always think, afterwards when it’s too late, that I wish I would have added to my answer about how I feel about Rent that, though it doesn’t feel at all to me like the New York in the 80s that I remember, Angels in America does, and I don’t think I’ve ever been more grateful for an artist and a work of art.

Here We Go.

Look at how weird my life is getting now. Meetings with lawyers, agents, producers. It’s crazy. I have to keep reminding myself to keep breathing and enjoy the ride because, frankly, it’s about fucking time.

I went for a 3-mile run on Monday and that made me feel sane and stable. I run on the hike and bike trail between the West Side Highway and the Hudson River down to the George Washington Bridge and back. I want to increase the distance so that I can get past the bridge to where the trail goes down closer to the river, but I don’t run regularly enough yet. I’m pretty lenient with myself about that stuff; it’s hard to do those things – run, work out, meditate – every day when every day is different from the one before and every week is different from the one before and every year is … Anyway, the run is beautiful and invigorating, lots of traffic and the gorgeous Hudson and that bridge is awesome when you’re right next to it. It’s so high up.

The temperature dropped yesterday from the 70s to the 50s and 40s overnight. I made a big pot of white bean soup with pork and chipotle. The apartment got all steamy and smoky and the soup was over-the-top delicious. Add cooking to my list above. One of the things that kept me happy and sane (and not fat) the last few years was cooking and eating regularly at home. But it’s a different life here. In the end, I’d rather be a successful theatre artist than a successful homebody.

Where I Am Now.

Now, several months after the end of my relationship with M, it’s easy to see all the things that may not have been perfect about us being together, to see how maybe we weren’t as absolutely compatible as I was convinced we were, as perfect for each other as I begged him to acknowledge, and to say, “Look at all these wonderful things that are happening in my life now that I’ve moved on,” to adopt an it’s all for the best attitude, because of course now I’m doing this, whatever it is I’m doing without him, and if we were still together I wouldn’t be doing this and what a shame so obviously it’s meant to be, or not to be. Whatever. I still go to bed at night and sometimes just ache because I want so badly to throw my arm over him, my palm against his chest. To kiss his neck. To fall asleep and wake up not alone.

Saturday night I made out in a bar with a young man for what seemed like hours and maybe was. Long enough for my lips to be chapped the next morning. He was shorter than me, and several times he stopped kissing me to rest his head against my shoulder, and with one hand I cradled his skull. Near closing time, he took my hand to lead me to an area of the bar where it was dark, where guys go if they want to do more than kiss. As we passed the stairway to the exit, I let go of his hand. He was swallowed by the crowd. I ducked down the stairs and out the door quickly and went home alone. We never said a word to each other.

The last week or more it’s been generally in the 50s at night and the 60s and 70s during the day. The heat has been turned on in T’s building and apparently, like the heat in all these old New York apartment buildings, can’t be regulated much. There’s no thermostat; it’s either on or off. Even with the radiators turned off, the steam pipes that run through the apartment to the upper floors are still blazing hot. So, we have the windows open, because of course you don’t need heat when it’s 65 degrees outside.

Computer Love.

I’m sure everybody knows by now because I haven’t stopped complaining about it that UPS lost my computer monitor on its way to New York from Columbus, Ohio. I visited my brother there on my way here, and I left my car with him because he has room for it in his airplane hangar. Since that was the end of the road for my car, I shipped my boxes from Columbus.

I insured my computer but forgot to insure the monitor, so of course that’s the box that went missing. It was a big, fancy monitor, 27” screen, I edited my film Life in a Box on it. It and my computer were paid for by the film’s budget; I never could have afforded such nice stuff. I was sad to lose it. Since I got here, I’ve been using a 10-year-old Mac G4 notebook computer, which is functional but pretty jenky. It doesn’t play video, for instance.

But, UPS automatically insures every package for $100, and I found a similar monitor on ebay for $60. (Nobody wants a 7-year-old computer monitor except someone with a 7-year-old computer whose monitor was lost.) And the shipping was $40, so I just broke even. It arrived today, by Fedex, which is a New York miracle because this is the only day I could have been home to receive a package since I’m in rehearsals every day now.

I love happy endings.

Speaking of happy, we’ve had a couple rehearsals now with the cast. Three of the women are back from last fall’s production and one is new, the woman who plays Emma, Lizzie’s sister. The new girl is great. The old girls are still great. Our director is wonderful, very smart. She loves and understands the show. And our music director is some kind of perfect.

There was a moment in yesterday’s rehearsal, during the scene in which Lizzie begs Alice Russell to lie for her to the police, and Alice, though she loves Lizzie, cannot do it, when I started crying, and I looked to my left and Tim was crying and then to my right and Alan was crying. All three writers were crying. Hate to brag, but this show is heartbreaking. I’m awed by what this cast brings to our words and music, to these characters and this story. It’s a wonder. And it’s a privilege to work with such talented artists.

There's A Place For Us.

The song "Somewhere" from West Side Story is constantly in my head because the A train, which I take every day to wherever it is I might be going, as it approaches the station sings the first three notes. At first I thought it was an effect of the wheels on the tracks, but it is too regular and it happens at every station.

"There's a place..." That song always fills me with nostalgia. West Side Story was the first musical I worked on in a community theater production in Greencastle, Indiana. I was 13, on the stage crew, and Mike Van Rensselaer, who was lanky and handsome in a mid-70s way, played Tony. Every night as I stood backstage waiting for my cue to roll out one of the brick walls for the rumble scene, it was like Mike was singing to me. "There's a place for us...."

Anyway.

The other thing that's new about the subway since I lived here last is a woman's recorded voice on nearly every platform announcing the arrival of each train. She's super-cheerful and sounds like she's from Kentucky by way of Minnesota. It cracks me up every time, those hard nasal "a" sounds, an accent and tone so out of place here where daily one hears dozens of different accents but seldom that one. And she is announcing the arrival of trains, which is useless information. It's obvious when the train is arriving. It's big and loud. Information that might be helpful -- schedule changes, tracks changes, etc. -- is still bleated over a p.a., almost always garbled and incomprehensible. Just like the New York I remember.

I've been working part-time in a prop rental shop in Greenpoint. An old friend got me the job very soon after I arrived, and I'm grateful to have some income and to be working in a congenial place with varied enough tasks that I'm not dying of boredom.

The commute from Inwood to Greenpoint is almost an hour and a half door to door. So far, it's not bothering me a bit, though. After living in places where I had to drive everywhere -- if you know me, you know I hate driving -- I'm falling in love all over again with public transportation. I'm getting lots of reading done. I'm reading In Search of Lost Time again, the new Lydia Davis translation. (Which is great, by the way. If you've always wanted to read it but you're intimidated by its "great modernist masterpiece" reputation, don't be. It's a huge pleasure to read. I read the whole thing a few years ago when I was living and working in a very quiet, remote village in southern Utah for 8 months, but it's so long and rich and dense and entertaining that the first thing I thought when I finished it was that I wanted to go back to the beginning and read it again. Lots of time for reading may be the only thing the New York subway has in common with southern Utah.)

I work Monday next week and then I have two weeks off. I'll be working, but not for the man. As I’ve said, the two main reasons I moved back to New York were, one, because my heart was broken and I needed a change of scenery and, two, because big things are happening in my career. (I guess the real main reason I moved back is that I couldn’t make a living in Austin, but the heartbreak and Lizzie Borden are what spurred me to move now.)

The National Alliance for Musical Theatre festival of new musicals presentation is happening in a couple weeks. (If you're in New York, you can come to this event free. The performances are on Oct. 21 and 22, during the day.) I know I’ve said this before, but this is a huge fucking deal for the show and for me as an artist. Theater producers from all over the U.S. come to this conference to check out the most promising new musicals, and only eight are chosen each year to be presented. Eight. We start rehearsals on Tuesday!

Bags!

So far the hardest thing about being back here, after having been away and cultivated a different way of living, and I knew this would challenge me, is shopping and eating the way I want to. I just stopped at the neighborhood supermarket on the way home from running some errands. I didn’t have bags with me. I was buying some fruit, lettuce, a quart of half and half. As the cashier was ringing up my items, I said to the guy bagging groceries, “You can put it all in one bag,” and he nodded as he pushed one plastic bag into another. While I was paying, he put the lettuce in the double bag and then grabbed another bag and started putting lemons into it. I said, “One bag is enough.” I don’t think he understood me – stressful moments like this are exactly when I need to use my Spanish, but they are the moments when I am least able to -- because by the time I had paid the cashier, he had my 8 or 10 items waiting for me in 4 double bags.

Feeling like a total asshole, I started pulling everything out and putting it in one bag. He said, “It’s too much!” I said, “It’s not too much. I live less than a block away. I don’t need 8 bags to carry home my groceries.”

Eight bags! It’s so absurd. I can’t even get my mind around what motivates that kind of behavior. On the other hand, I was able to buy local apples.

But it’s not just the bag issue. It’s the fact that natural food stores are in neighborhoods I can’t afford to live in, and it’s not easy to find local produce, especially not in the cold months. And because life is very busy and hectic here, I won’t be doing as much processing and preserving and cooking all my meals from scratch at home.

I’m not going to fret too much about it, not so soon. I’ll allow myself time to discover ways to get as close as I can manage to the kind of conscientious life I want to live given the circumstances of living in New York. One thing that will help a lot is having a bigger kitchen.

*

One thing I’ve noticed, living in so many very different places in the last 10 or 15 years, is that the dust in different places has very different qualities. Different texture and color, different rates of accumulation. I think it was Jersey City where the dust was blue. Like blue blue. Here it’s more black, but it has a bluish cast and it’s very fibrous, almost wooly. In Austin our yard was mostly dirt and there was often some kind of construction going on, so the dust was more like dry earth, powdery and brown, and it built up fast. I’d wipe things off on my desk and within a couple hours there was a visible layer of dust again.


I Love Where I Live.

I just remembered that I got hit in the head with a chair last night! The first thing I thought after it happened was, “Now that’s why I moved back to New York!”

I had a date last night. A man I met and chatted and exchanged numbers with at the Eagle, a handsome man, a painter, asked me over for “dinner and drinks.” I left my job at the prop shop in Greenpoint at 5, came back to T's to shower and change. It would have been easier not to come all the way up to Inwood and then back downtown but I needed a few moments to relax and get my second wind. The new job, getting up at 6 a.m., walking everywhere again ... I was dog-tired.

He lives in a little apartment in Chelsea filled with his paintings. He made cocktails with ginger vodka and lemon juice. They were potent and I had two of them before dinner, which was beautiful and delicious: a chicken breast broiled with New Mexico chili, a baked sweet potato, spinach with lemon and capers, Israeli cous-cous. We smoked some pot.

I hadn’t noticed the night I met him the deep creases at the sides of his mouth which could have been age but more likely were the result of HIV drugs because he also, and I hadn’t noticed this before either, had the tell-tale distended stomach and lack of ass. I won’t say I didn’t have a slight reaction of, if not fear, apprehension, which of course is completely irrational because, even if you were going to have risky sex (and you always have the choice not to) you’re much less likely to contract HIV from someone who is on long-term anti-viral drugs than from someone who is not. But who ever said we were rational creatures?

At any rate, he was charming and eccentric, gracious, sweet, and the vodka and marijuana… After dinner, we had amazing sex -- if the quality of sex is measured by the intensity of physical sensation and I question more and more whether that is the best metric; my experience with M showed me that the whole sex and love thing may not be just propaganda -- the sex of experts, a kind of sex completely without mystery that only people who’ve been around the block so many times there’s nothing to discover can have. It was hot because we knew exactly how to make it hot.

But then it was over.

He said, “I hope you can stay,” and I said I wanted to wake up at home which meant I didn’t want to sleep with him.

It was only 11 when I left, and I was in the neighborhood, still a little drunk and high and craving a beer, so I stopped at the Eagle. Usually the Eagle is sort of all about horniness but I was a little spent so I went up to the roof and sat looking I imagined aloof and handsome. Maybe not too aloof because within a few minutes a very cute bearded man, young I thought, sat next to me saying, “There wasn’t anyone sitting here, was there?” I said, “Not that I know of.”

I tried to steal glances at him, sitting there right beside me, but I wasn’t at all sure if he’d sat there because he wanted to sit next to me or sat there just because it was a place to sit. Is he shy? Should I say something? Or should I pretend I don’t even notice him and thereby avoid humiliation? (Despite my feeling that I might look attractive, I always believe that anyone who I think is handsome is almost by definition handsomer than me. I’m not even sure what that means, but it’s true.) He lit a cigarette. He said something about the porn playing on a TV over the bar. I think he said it was mesmerizing. I said, “They usually play really good porn here, but tonight it’s kind of bad.” Which it was. But it was a TV screen and impossible not to look at. Then I said, “But I guess everyone has their own particular taste when it comes to porn.” And he said, “You just said a true thing,” or something like that. He had a strong Australian accent and used a lot of idiomatic expressions I couldn’t make out. I think he called the bathroom the dunney.

We sat and talked and got drunker and drunker till almost closing time (which in New York I’d like to mention is way too late). He’s a solicitor taking some time off to grow a beard and travel. He’s more or less backpacking with a buddy. They’re staying somewhere on the Upper West Side sharing a single bed to save money. We talked about traveling, the places we’d been. He was small with a bright disarming smile, black hair and eyes, and I told him I thought he was very handsome and he said, “Likewise,” which could have meant that he too thought he was handsome, but I don’t think that’s what he meant.

Several times he said things that, because I was drunk I can't recall today, made me think he was very insightful and sensitive and emotionally self-aware.

I was glad that I’d just had sex because, though I wanted to touch him and I did put my hand on his leg a couple times, I didn’t feel that intense urgency to go somewhere and fuck that usually backgrounds these types of encounters. I told him I’d like to see him again and he took my number. He texted me so I would have his, but it’s an Australian number and it came through as a regular phone call, not text. When I heard last call I said I had to go. I asked him if I could kiss him. I don’t remember if he said yes or nodded or if I just kissed him without waiting for an answer.

On the street outside, I texted him saying I’d enjoyed hanging out and looked forward to seeing him again. I’m doubtful I’ll hear from him, but who knows.

Around the corner on 10th Avenue, I stopped for a slice. There was something happening on the sidewalk in front of the pizza place, a big group of people shouting and looking agitated but I didn’t think much of it since at 4 in the morning on 10th Avenue there’s nothing unusual about that sort of behavior. I made my way through the crowd and was headed for the counter as a couple guys and a woman came running from the back of the restaurant toward the front door. On the way, one of them picked up a chair, one of those sturdy but light aluminum chairs, and lifted it over his head. As he ran past me, it banged the side of my head hard enough to hurt but I was drunk enough to be more amused and intrigued than scared or angry. I sat down at a table and watched the chaotic running around and shouting, someone saying over and over, “Chill! There are cops outside!” until finally they did chill, and I got up and ordered my slice and walked to the train at 34th Street. Miraculously, the A train came within minutes -- sometimes late at night you have to wait forfuckingever -- and I was home in bed by 5.

I have a slight headache today and a bit of a knot on the side of my head and I can’t stop smiling.

Almost Two Weeks.

I've been here less than two weeks and already I have 4 jobs! I haven't started any of them yet. I interviewed last week for a job at a prop furniture rental shop in Greenpoint. They called yesterday and said they'd like me to do some work for them on an "as-needed basis, and we have a need now." I think they just want to check me out before they say anything too committal. In the interview, she (I think you'd call her a manager, though it was a small operation and it seemed like everyone did everything) said it would probably be 2 or 3 days a week.

I'm also going to babysit a friend's son (he's 9) about once a week in the East Village. And I'm going to help a friend of a friend organize her files, and then some time later in the fall I'm going to do some house painting for a friend.

***

It's been chilly at night and in the mornings, but I find myself superstitiously avoiding putting on a sweater or even a long-sleeve shirt. I don't trust the cool weather, I've been so traumatized by the Texas heat. It's been gorgeous out, the kind of bright, cool fall that New Yorkers live for. It's still hot in the subway. I've forgotten how long it takes for that hot air to be displaced in the fall.

***

I cleaned and rearranged T's kitchen yesterday, spent most of the day on it. T and I have been friends for 20 years. I love him with all my soul. He has many talents but keeping the house clean is not among them. The kitchen was a mess, dirty and cluttered with no place to work and no place to sit. I moved stuff around and created some counter space for cooking and a little eating nook by the window. It's very tenement civilized. Huge difference. And it made T happy to come home from work and see the kitchen transformed. That in itself made the effort worthwhile.

When people ask me for advice about cohabitation, whether it's as friends or lovers (and oddly enough, people ask me), I always tell them my one rule is, "If you think something needs to be clean, clean it." Seriously, stop trying to figure out how to get the other person to do it and just do it yourself. Then it'll be clean and you'll be happy. It doesn't matter who left the dishes in the sink. If you wash them, they'll be gone. Problem solved. What's so horrible about doing something nice for someone like washing their dishes?

People have different styles of housekeeping, different priorities, different levels of dirtiness that they notice or tolerate, and it's probably impossible to change them much. All the trying and the resentment it creates on both sides just corrodes the relationship. My threshold of cleanliness is somewhere halfway between clean freak and slob -- I've been on both sides of the dispute in my various households over the years.

***

It's hard to believe I've been here for almost two weeks now. I'm happy.

Fat People.

The subject has been well pondered before -- it’s just so obvious -- but I’m still intrigued by the complicated connection between the rise of “bear culture” and the recent so-called obesity epidemic. I’m skeptical about the “epidemic” thing. Though anyone who’s been around for a while can see that the average American body size is increasing, I think most of the hysteria about food and fat people is just moral panic and scapegoating. Fat people are lazy and greedy.

And hot. Is there a subculture of heterosexual people fetishizing excess body fat, or is it just gay men? As soon as I ask that question, I realize it’s not hard to find times and places where fat women have been and are seen as more desirable (look at an art history book, or a shelf of porn), but men? The Judd Apatow movies, Seth Rogan, etc., must be somehow analogous, but how so? Those films seem to be less about the attitude of heterosexual women toward fat men than they are about fat men’s fantasies of their own desirability.

Stinky.

The same friend who gave me movie deal advice also turned me on to Weleda sage deodorant about a year ago which -- I am not exaggerating -- changed my life. For the last 10 years or so I haven't been able to use deodorant without breaking out in a painful rash that takes months to heal. I tried dozens of them; the "natural" ones were the worst. And don't even mention that evil rock.

Luckily during my time in Austin, I was usually either at home or hanging around men who liked the smell of b.o. (I like it too, but I get extremely self-conscious when I'm in a close public space and I know I smell strong and I'm sure my nervousness only makes it worse. People can be so judgmental about body smells.) The one big exception in Austin was when I was in school, but the UT buildings were almost always freezing so I didn't have to worry too much about sweating.

So, finding a deodorant that actually worked and I wasn't allergic to was huge. But in the last few weeks it has stopped working! In fact, it seems to make me smell even worse than if I weren't using anything. I smell ripe! It could be the fact that I've been in a much more humid climate recently. But that's not good news because New York is just as humid as the Midwest, which is much more humid than central Texas. And I'll be in all sorts of situations where I don't want to stink: meetings regarding the show, job-hunting, various workplaces, etc.

Aaaarrrgh.

$.

A friend in Austin who I assume knows a lot about money because he has a lot of it told me that if we’re looking for a movie deal for Lizzie Borden we should hold out for $10 million because 40% will come off the top for various agents and lawyers and accountants leaving $6 million to split among 3 writers or about $2 million each which safely invested would produce about $65,000 a year in dividends which would be enough to live on for the rest of my life. None of these numbers really mean anything to me except the $65,000, which would be a modest and completely reasonable income for an artist in New York. So ... $10 million, folks.

Less One Car and Halfway to New York.

This big decision to move to New York, and all the packing and traveling and plans, the anticipation, all of it has pushed thoughts of M into the background. Mostly. From time to time the sensation of being near him will wash over me and, as soon as my brain identifies the feeling, sadness comes just as quickly as the initial feeling of warmth and comfort. With a clearer head and some perspective now, it’s not hard for me to see how imperfect we were for each other, how it was not as good for either of us as I thought it was, but I still ache when I think about him touching me.

I’m in Columbus now with my brother and his partner. I love visiting them. They’re sane and kind and they have a very sweet, simple life. They’ve been together for like 15 years and they still sit on the couch holding hands while they read the paper. How does that even happen?

This afternoon we took my car to my brother’s airplane hangar to store it for now. I don’t want a car, of course, in New York, but I don’t want to get rid of it just yet since I seem never to know where I’ll end up from one year to the next and it’s a great car. If things go well in New York and I get on my feet, I’ll probably sell the car in a year or two. It’s a 94 Honda and everyone tells me I could get a lot of money for it. On the way back from the airport (which is way out in the country, very pretty drive in rural Ohio), we stopped at a roadside vegetable stand and bought some sweet corn and tomatoes for dinner. I think they’re going to grill the corn along with some chicken and we’ll eat the tomatoes sliced and salted. August in the Midwest.

I have acres of free time, but I’m finding it very hard to blog much. Except my tumblr blog, which I’m enjoying hugely but it’s not writing. It’s turned into mostly porn because that seems to be about all I’m interested in looking at lately. But all the pictures I post I have chosen because there’s some interesting story behind the image. Some of them are hot, some are funny, some are mysterious. The best ones are all those things. I choose pictures that make me wonder, that send my imagination. Check it out, unless there’s some reason you don’t want to look at pictures of naked men.

Dad's Briefs.

My mother calls male genitalia "outdoor plumbing." I had to stop running for a few days because it's been so humid I got a case of jock itch, the news of which I had little choice but to share with my mother. I can't make a move here without being questioned as to what I'm doing -- she notices everything and comments on it -- and I had to drive to the store to get something to treat it. And I have had to stop running until the rash clears up because sweating exacerbates it, but I wanted Mom to know there was a good reason I wasn't using the expensive shoes she bought me. Later, she brought in a pair of my dad's underwear, made of some high-tech fabric that keeps you from sweating or something and asked me if I wanted some. She would order me a couple pair if I wanted. They were sort of silky and metallic gray and not completely unsexy. My dad apparently has also gone from boxers back to briefs, just like I did a couple years ago. I do want to try the space-age briefs, but something, many things, about the idea of wearing the same underwear as my dad makes me very uncomfortable.

Weight.

I haven't gone out running the last few nights because it's so ungodly humid out. I'll get back to it. I have continued my daily workout with weights, and I feel stronger already. I'm eating about half the quantity of food I'd been eating the last year or so, and I'm not drinking beer every night anymore.

I gained 20 pounds while I was with M. The last time I was this heavy was a few months after J and I started seeing each other. Our nightly ritual was to walk to Ray's on Ave A after sex for chocolate milkshakes.

Apparently, being in love is fattening. Or I just tend to fall in love with sugar addicts.

Running Again.

I went with Mom to a big sports stores in Muncie to get some new running shoes yesterday, and while I was at the store I decided to get 2 15-pound dumbbell weights so I can work on my upper body while I'm here, too. With a very familiar mix of gratitude, relief, and shame, I let her pay for everything. Not that it was a surprise, her insisting.

On the way home, we measured a route for me to run. There's a path along a road near the house, and if I run out to the end of a path and back home it's a 3-mile run. Seemed like a reasonable length to start out. Well, just running out to the end of the path nearly killed me, and I walked back. In my defense, it's very warm and the humidity is heavy and thick, even at 10 p.m. But, there's no denying I'm in poor shape. My legs were fine, but I was flushed and soaked with sweat from head to toe. I haven't exercised a lick since I was hit by that car last summer. I stopped riding my bike, stopped lifting weights at the gym. I evens stopped walking much because I got a car. Apparently you just can't do that when you're almost 50 years old.

I got a little lost in the neighborhood. My parents live in an older sort of rural/suburban development. Big yards. Lots of huge trees. It's pretty. And very dark at night. In the car, the route seemed very straightforward, but it's not and I missed a couple turns. I thought I was more lost than I turned out to be. Or, I should say, I was lucky that I guessed right a couple of times and ended up finding my way back to familiar streets. So, I might actually have run more like 2 miles than 1 1/2.

This little spate of hot, humid days is supposed to end soon, so maybe the running will get easier. Maybe? My legs don't feel a bit sore today.

Equal Rights. Not.

From the New York Times today, in their story about the California federal court ruling that Prop 8 is unconstitutional:

“Being gay is about forming an adult family relationship with a person of a same sex, so denying us equality within the family system is to deny respect for the essence of who we are as gay people,” said Jennifer Pizer, the marriage project director for Lambda Legal in Los Angeles, who filed two briefs in favor of the plaintiffs. [emphasis mine]

I don't think I've ever heard this stated quite so simply, and it's exactly why I don't consider myself to be gay anymore: because that is what being gay is about now.

So now, if I were married, I'd have rights equal to other married people in California. But I'm not, so I don't.

It's Monday.



I dealt with most of the loose ends I’d been worrying about. My brother is going to keep my car in Columbus. He has plenty of room in his airplane hangar. M’s bicycle was stolen recently, so I gave him mine. I’m going to leave the boxes of unsold CDs here with J. I’ll store some stuff with my parents in Indiana.

This is it. It’s Monday -- in fact, it’s noon and I haven’t started, so I’m already behind. On my list today: 1) buy a big suitcase at Texas Thrift, to pack my clothes in, 2) go to the comic book store for more boxes, 3) buy packing tape. And I guess 4) would be … pack.

Hippie Clown Jesus, Etc.



I have 70s New York on my mind today. I'd forgotten that Godspell was set in the city, too. It's odd, and I'm not really sure I like it, how art that depicts the World Trade Center now has an immediate potency and poignancy.

This opening sequence from Hair is my favorite opening sequence from any movie, ever. What I love about film is that there is seemingly no limit to the quantity and variety of genius that can be contained in it. The horses are dancing, y'all!

Bravery.

People -- friends, fans, family -- tell me they think I’m brave, most recently referring to my move back to New York, but people said it about my first move to New York when I was 20, about my life of poverty and art in the 80s, about J’s and my decision to live on the road, etc.

Brave? I don’t know. I never felt particularly brave, just scared. I think sometimes I certainly did what excited me regardless of risk, did what I wanted to do while brushing aside any notion of danger, but many many times, those apparently courageous choices were actually just me doing what I thought was the least terrifying option available.

Absolutely the thing I am most scared of, because I am literally afraid I would commit suicide, is giving up art and getting a regular job. I’m not sure why that is so awful to contemplate because sometimes it sure seems like it would be a hell of a lot more pleasant than all this uncertainty, rejection, disappointment, poverty, frustration, but I can’t even contemplate it without starting to feel panicky.

Art-making has brought me countless moments of pure joy, thrills beyond anything I imagined, and deep satisfaction, but I also associate it with a constant background of anxiety. I don’t mean the economic anxiety that has resulted from choosing this life, but a more general “I have to do something but I’m not sure what it is” anxiety that I’ve felt ever since I can remember. It’s always there, and I regard it rightly or wrongly as the source of my creativity.

Am I brave? Most of the time, I feel like these big life choices are out of my hands, like someone or something else is pushing me along.

Giving up, it seems to me, would take real courage because that’s where the real demons live.