proteanme

Last night here in the homeland. I feel strangely cut loose and solid all at the same time. I have thought of home so much this year.  Seen certain landscapes in my mind and felt such longing for the place that I thought I might be romanticizing it all.  Thought I might be wanting this sense of home to live in me more than it does.  But here I am and the home in me is beating and breathing even as I type. And that is a beautiful feeling, man.

I am not any closer to knowing what next or where next or how next or anything about nextness.  But I wasn’t coming home to answer that question.  How Indiana fits into whatever’s next has been to some degree resolved in undestanding the Indiana in me. 

It has been impossible to be here and not think about this girl in western Mass. Knowing her has helped me know myself, and at times that kinda knowing has blown me away. 

This year is turning out to be a year where I really take a look at what gives shape and meaning to my days, and in turn to my life. I wouldn’t exactly call it an existential crisis, but that’s mostly because I’m not in a panic. If anything I’m more in a state of underwhelmed surprise, like “really, this is it?” The question I’m asking myself right now is: am I really down with the shape of my days, given that I have the luxury to shape them. I work and when I’m not working sometimes I do things that have some meaning to me and sometimes I just do things to take the edge off my loneliness and anxiety. I spend a fair amount of time by myself, which in part is intentional, to carve out the time and space to reflect, and to write and make music. But there’s also a hard swallow to all that alone time and that is, with very few exceptions, I don’t have meaningful connections out here. While I am part of a network of people here and that’s nice, the truth is I am not part of a community; I’m not in a deeper relationship; and I am far away from most of the people with whom I feel there is genuine understanding and the chance for giving and getting some sustenance.

It’s taken months of turning off the T.V. , not going to movies, not reading much, not eating a lot of crap and not just hanging out with whoever to see all this. But at this point I’ve got a pretty clear picture of what I’m doing with myself, literally and figuratively. And getting that picture flushed out has been accompanied by a fair amount of sadness, curiosity, and gratitude, some of which has been excellent fodder for this blog.

The other day I realized I might be coming to a place where I can start to let myself consider what now or what next.  I got a feeling that the what is mostly gonna be about me being solid enough in myself to take some bigger chances than I’ve taken before.  But we’ll see.  I know I gotta stay true to letting things unfold right now, even though I wanna rush ahead.  I need to seep letting things get stripped away so I can really see.

And it’s been a little bit of a surprise to discover how moved I am by art.

Reasons to call it a good day:

• Made fresh fava beans, Roman style.
• Tackled some web work that had been giving me a headache.
• Beach Boy’s Good Vibrations was playing when I was standing in line at the grocery store.
• This girl I like said the sweetest things to me about wanting to be close.
• The sun was shining.
• My friends, had a nice wedding and I was thinking how glad I was to get to be a witness to it.  That and to get down a little later on the dance floor.  These Hoosier guys can get their boogey on.

I think I slept maybe two hours last night. It’s been a hard year for me for getting to and staying asleep, which is weird because all my life I’ve been a sound sleeper. I think turning down the volume on so much external stimulation and really experiencing my mind and heart is taking some adjusting to. Last night my mind was like a broken record replaying this bit of information that I discovered accidentally about this girl I like. It was a battle of trying to chant down the spinning out in my head by counting backwards and just spinning out. Spinning out won; it almost always does. I likely should have gotten up and put on my headphones and just drawn some, but I kept thinking I would tire myself out. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say I was just not wanting to take care of myself around spinning out.

When I finally fell asleep for about an hour at 2am I had these sad dreams. In one dream I was getting it on with a girl that I know for sure I don’t want to get it on with and it was so detailed and so uncomfortable and so not what I wanna do that I remember thinking what the fuck am I doing, man and then feeling relieved when it ended and that dream faded into an art gallery scene, all quiet and stark. The gallery was having a photography show. For some reason I remember that the walls appeared almost yellow in color, yellow like an old newspaper fading. I was looking at some photos taken by this girl I do like. The same girl I talk about here every now and then. I came up on a photo that I somehow knew was recent. It was of the girl and this butch laying on a bed facing each other; the butch’es back was to camera, but and this girl, the one I like, she was resting her head over her butch’es shoulder and looking into the camera. The photo had a caption I can’t remember, but it was something like “me and the bare arm of my butch.” As I stood looking at the the photo it started to enlarge itself; I woke up before it got big enough that I could make out the details of this girl’s face.

I dunno if what woke me up was not wanting to see how this girl looks, feeling so safe and open with someone else, or all the ruckus from the thunder and lightening at play outside my windows. Maybe some of both. But I got up and sat on my couch and bared witness to nature’s show – a real midwestern thunderstorm complete with rolling booms, lighting flashes and a big loud downpour. It was comforting but at the same time it nearly broke me, as thunderstorms remind me how far away I am from things I love, like home, and things I long for.

Summer here sure is sexy.  She lulls you into forgetting about the other 8 or 9 months of the year. I’d say she’s got a bit of a siren’s call.  I finished up Pedalpalooza by going to the Multnomah County Bike Fair on Saturday and the big bike party later that night hosted by Portland’s own Sprokettes.  The attendance at both events was skewed toward the hipsters and bike freaks, a bike cap appears to be di regueur for this crowd.  But it was fun all the same.  The party included a lot of live entertainment by these bike related dance groups and some non-bike related acrobats, who were very good.  It was kind of like a high school talent show for adults.  Or maybe a county fair talent show. And it was fun.  It reminded me that there must have been a time when folks relied much more on other folks in their community for entertainment and the connection there feels different than say paying to see a band.

I’m gearing up for another butch blog or darkness blog or maybe I’ll try and string the two together. Ha!

This girl I like, the one I’ve mentioned here before, the one who lives really far away, well yesterday she told me, “you’re so fucking sweet”, and I think that might have made my day today.  That comment in isolation is likely not the best representation of why she moves me, but she does and one of these days I think I’ll talk about her a little more here.

I know the title of this post makes no sense, but the lyric popped into my head and I liked how it sounded.

So my girl who lives across the country, who I’ve mentioned here every now and then, told me she read some of my blog the other day. And at first I was like shit what have I been blogging about and then I thought was it boring and then I thought was it manly enough. Nothing like a little neurosis. But all that passed and mostly I’ve thought about how after reading this blog she said something like it’d be fun to read a blog about your butchness. I once told her I was considering keeping a blog about being butch, which I think I also mentioned here a while back. And I realized that in many ways segmenting that conversation off from the larger conversation I try to have with myself here is just perpetuating this fragmentation. I’m tired of living my life in pieces. So heads up, I’m gonna talk about my butchness and guyness from time to time and if I say something and you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, just ask me.

One of my ideas for my butch blog was to post something everyday that validated my butchness, like admiring on the sly the idea of cleavage or the hint of a thigh while a feminine woman is talking about something smart or serious. It feels like all the lobes in my brain get engaged at once and sometimes that’s all I need to make my day better.  I can be standing in line at the grocery and I’ll notice painted toe nails pushed through the strap of a sandal and I’ll think man it’s my lucky day.

The shine is off Portland for me. Yep, almost ten years out here and I’m realizing this may not be my kinda town. Now I’m not sure what that means in practical terms, cause it’s not like I have plans for moving or anything. At least, nothing more than some fantasies. It’s just one more thing that I’m willing to put in play as I think about how to make being alive special.

It will sound funny to some folks, but I actually miss the subtle landscape of Indiana, even if I can’t imagine living there again. Nothing against my home state or all you wonderful folks living there that I hold so dear. Indiana has all the nice guyness I could ever want, but the queer factor could be better.

I was entertaining a fantasy last week about getting a job that would allow me to work from anywhere and being a bit of nomad for a while, spend some time here in Oreogn, some time in Indiana, some on the east coast, maybe some in Europe.

But really as much as I wanna grab hold of something to give my life meaning, I’m pretty my sure the focus has gotta be on the internal, at least for the next little bit. Not that there aren’t some things I wouldn’t mind wrapping my hands around, like the waist of this girl I know who lives in the wilds of western Mass. But things being what they are, I need to let them simmer, not just with this particular girl, but everything in general. Simmering is not particularly glamorous, as much as I may try and make it out to be what with playing music, working on art and writing. Mostly, there’s just this boat load of nothing and in thinking about looking inward, I relate a lot to Silvia’s nourishment post. I started a list in my head the other day of what makes being alive feel special to me and here’s what I got so far:

• Writing
• Riding my bike
• Intellectually challenging work
• Meaningful work
• Music
• Good food – eating it, making it, sharing it
• Good friends
• Freaks

It’s funny, for such a long stretch, nothing much was happening in my personal life and then all the sudden a bunch of stuff happened in a flurry and then it settled back into a new version of nothing much, where the revelations that were uncovered in the flurry changed things, some in a kinda big way. One change is that a girl I really like told me she really likes me too, which made my day. For all its complications, it is as straight forward as that.

I met this girl a while back who I like a lot, but it’s complicated and she lives on the other side of the country. I’m not saying anything more than that. There’s nothing to tell here, really, just wishing I wasn’t so dang far away.

One of my favorite writers on one of my favorite blogs.