proteanme

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

I am amazed, when I really pay attention, at how many moments there are in any given day to have some empathy and compassion for another person’s experience. I swear they are happening all the time.

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.

Silvia you were so spot on with the Rilke recommendation. Thank you. I’ve never felt an author speak to me so directly and its not typically what I expect or look for from what I read. I had to put the book down a couple times because some sentences hit so close to home. Very powerful. I’m now reading the Duino Elegies. If anyone wants to join me, lemme know.

A number of you made a donations to support my ride.  Thank you so much.  Your good eggs.

A few of you might have already received an email from me, via the American Lung Association, asking for you support, but I just realized I have a blog, duh, so why not post something. Here’s the deal, in a couple weekends I’m participating in a 60 mile bike ride to reach the beach, in large part to honor a colleague who died this year of lung cancer and who completed a number of these rides (with one lung). I’d love your support; $5 or $10 would rock!

I’ve been thinking of starting another blog to talk about all things butch, especially the everydayness of being butch, and I still might, but for now I’ll post some butch thoughts here. It’s kinda funny that I’d even want to start a butch blog, because in lots of ways I relate so much more to just being a nice midwestern guy than I do to being butch, although I’m not interested in making any transitions, in case anyone out there is wondering. I’ve just never been very good at performing butch, which for all you straight folks may be hard to explain. But basically it means I’m not showing up to queer events with my chain wallet and big black boots on the back of my Harley. I spent my time at the softball fields playing chess on the tailgate of a friend’s truck. I’m not a deft pool or dart player. Yes, I’ve kicked many of your asses in racquetball and yes I can get out the rock, but believe me when I show up at queer event, I feel like I stick out like a sore thumb, with my cords and Munsingwear sweater and clipless bike shoes. This is not at all thought through commentary. Maybe I should have said that first.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if I can be a nice guy and butch at the same time. For those of you who’s identities are not so narrowly defined this may not be very interesting, but it seems like I can either get my guyness affirmed as I have been for the last 15 or so years, mostly through the company of straight guys and gals, or I can get my butchness affirmed through the queer community. But the two don’t have lots of overlap. Again, not well thought through and I may pick up this thread later.

Hedwig inspired sexiness from a band called The Knife.

I was listening to John Wayne Gacy by Sufjan Stevens with a friend and she was saying something to the effect of how the lyrics were just too depressing, especially in juxtaposition to that really beautiful and haunting melody. I was thinking about how that was the whole point, how that melody brought some humanity to the darkness, and how we’ll never figure out the dark in us as long as its confined to the realm of what’s inhuman.

I mentioned in my hilight list that I went to the MOMA. I envy New Yorker’s access to such a treasure. I was down right blown away by De Kooning and Pollack. The De Kooning drawings seemed so deliberate and careless all at the same time, nothing finished and still everything was there. I’m not sure I even have words for Pollack, but I kept thinking about how great performers leave it all on the stage, and with Pollack it felt like he left it all on the canvas. Powerful, powerful stuff. It also had this wonderful balance of head and heart that was so, so moving. And while not a huge Picasso fan, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, was amazing. Really, I’ve never seen something so perfect in planning and execution.

Plus we kept running into these class tours led by these super cute women, who, from what I overheard, were saying all sorts of smart and engaging things. And I kept thinking how I would just fall in love with art if they were teaching my 7th grade art class. By comparison my 7th grade art teacher seemed to be doing time behind the desk. Wasn’t til I got in highschool that I got a real art teacher.

Compared to the MOMA most of the New Museum collection seemed like a joke. And I’m not just talking about throwing down some of these young guys (and by the way where are the women in art) with Pollack, I’m talking about judging them against the MOMA’s collection of self taught and outsider art. By and large the New Museum’s collection reminded me of a New York review of Books critique of Jonathan Lethem, which said something like Lethem needed to remember that the number of times he’d seen Star wars was not profound and that Lethem and a number of his contemporaries are caught up in the minutiae of their coming of age stories but unable to make it meaningful beyond nostalgia. I left the New Museum thinking good lord we’ve raised a generation of narcissists.