255. vicissitude

One man he disappoint me
He give me the gouge and he take my glee
Now every other man I see
Remind me of the one man who disappointed me
— Apple, F. (2005). Get him back. On Extraordinary machine [CD]. New York City: Epic Records.

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Happy a month and a half into 2016, everyone!

So far this year has been incredibly busy with school and a new (temp) job that still isn’t in my career field but isn’t entirely horrible in its own right. That seems to be the theme of things at present: not ideal, but also doesn’t make me long for the inevitable and final release of death.

As far as a school update goes, after about a month and a half break I feel as if I’m finally getting back into the swing of things. I’ve stopped eating regularly and my sleep schedule is wacked out, but that’s the essence of grad school, right?

The things I’m working on are things that seem to finally matter, mainly because they feel connected to innate passions and talents of mine—not things that any gibbon could pick up and do for $11/hour. I get energized and excited about cataloging and archives, and concepts like metadata standards and schema. Information access is important in our world right now, especially as we’re trying to sift through more data than ever in our history, and we need clever people who can make sense of it all.

At least, enough for most people to find the information they need.

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Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. This fact did not escape me, nor did I forget. I simply chose not to acknowledge it. I did see an increasing number of memes on Facebook and Twitter that were trying to recontextualize it as a day to celebrate love of all kinds, including love for your friends and for yourself. That was nice.

Earlier this month I also turned 33, something I only reluctantly called attention to about five minutes after midnight on the day after my birthday, much to the consternation of friends who did remember and would like to observe it.

My decision for now is to stop calling it a birthday because my birth was something that merely happened, brought into a world that is no longer a part of who I am.

So this year I’ve decided to start calling it my Independence Day, because, as some of you may remember, it was five years ago that Seth dumped me on my 28th birthday… or whatever you call it when someone ends a one-sided friends-with-benefits relationship because they just met someone on a blind date and aren’t really sure where that’ll go, but they don’t see a future with you or a reason to continue giving you false hope anymore.

Happy birthday, indeed.

That was also the night I officially became an atheist. I won’t rehash the whole story, so if you’re new or need a refresher, go here. It’s a fun read, if you enjoy that sort of thing.

So the short of it is that I’d rather not observe that anymore. I need a different context, and reimagining that day as the anniversary of independence from my upbringing seems much more uplifting.

As Björk cries on Volta (2007): “Declare independence! Don’t let them do that to you!”

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Since we’re on the subject of dates, it’s exactly one month and nine days to the three year anniversary of the end to my last (probably final) relationship with the narcissistic fibromyalgic. On March 24th, I’ll have been single three years, without crossing paths with any realistic romantic partners in that span.

And from today, it’ll be four months and ten days to the two-year anniversary of the last time I was actually on a date.

Probably the biggest fear right now is of being alone for the rest of my life, ending up one of those people who die alone in their apartments, their absence unmarked for months until their mummified remains are finally discovered one day.

Is that likely to happen to me? Probably not. But still.

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What probably bothers me is that though I want a relationship, I still don’t what I’d do with one. The only concrete associations I can picture are having a (relatively) dependable plus-one for events, and a (relatively) reliable sexual partner. But I know there has to be more to it than that, because why else (besides social convention) would couples stay together for decades if it’s merely a glorified fuck buddy arrangement?

Frankly, I haven’t met anyone who I could conceive of spending virtually every day with for the next twenty years (well, at least anyone who could also feel that way about me) , and beyond. And I’m skeptical about the chances of meeting anyone in the Midwest.

Part of the difficulty is that, after almost seven-and-a-half years “out,” I’ve come to the realization that I’m a demisexual, as described here:

Demisexuals aren’t suppressing sexual desire; it’s simply not there until a bond is formed. They can’t look at a stranger and think, “Wow, I want to f*ck him”—while they might admire a person for his or her body, the urge to have sex isn’t there until an emotional attachment is formed. The deeper the bond, the hornier they are. It’s a simple matter of the heart leading the pelvis.

It isn’t that I don’t have sexual desire. It’s just not that important without an emotional connection present… which does not appear to be how most gay men around me are wired. They’re: A) sluts and proud of it; B) already coupled (with a 75% chance of being monogamish); or C) emotionally compatible but physically not my type.

The irony is that now I almost get reverse slut-shamed for not being promiscuous, as if that’s the default “gay” mode. And I did try it for a while, but it wasn’t me.

So I’m not sure where to go from here.

Ah well. Back to library homework, I guess.

203. pluvial

In a way, Valentine’s Day didn’t feel that much different from last year, when I was dating Jason. He wasn’t feeling well, as usual, so I felt pretty much alone. The same as this year.

I know it’s a corporate holiday, its origins are entirely apocryphal, and that it’s mostly about guys buying romantic shit for their significant others so that the latter will be more receptive to sex later in the evening. Just like Christmas is about making people feel coerced into buying shit for friends and relations because that’s what we’re somehow supposed to do. And so on. Holidays are mostly nonsense, with a dash of social bonding thrown in to add a feeling of legitimacy to the crass proceedings.

This year, I was in a less cynical mood, partly because I didn’t go out much over that weekend, and consequently wasn’t buffeted by the aggressive advertising campaigns. I did get emails from Starbucks, Caribou, and Dunn Bros, inviting my to bring my “sweetheart” for a buy-one, get-one. Thanks, big chain coffee companies, for reminding me of how freaking lonely I am.

Of course, there are a lot of people who are alone on Valentine’s Day, who have no one to buy into the bullshit with and for. Many of these people feel anger and resentment at those who callowly revel and who don’t seem to understand how anyone could possibly feel anything but the artificial joy and rush of oxytocin that marketing materials are designed to make them feel.

But many are also content in their own company, content in themselves and who they are as individuals, just happy to be alive, and feel no need to be “completed” by another person. These are people who seem comfortable in their own skin, and comfortable in just about any setting, anywhere, with anyone. These people also baffle me.

Most years, especially since Valentine’s Day of 2010, when the Seth fiasco began and the flame was lit to the edges of what I thought was my comfortable existence and would eventually become a violent conflagration that would burn away the very foundations of that existence into dying embers, I watch Moulin Rouge, because nothing takes away the lingering sting of heartbreak like schadenfreude.

This year, however, I decided to watch a couple of documentaries. One was the incredible Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the discovery of the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in France and the collection of incredible paleolithic images that were sealed off there over 30,000 years ago. Far from crude, the paintings and etchings are sophisticated, evidence that individuals responsible for them were probably not that different from us today. We drive cars, live in advanced dwellings, have access to medical care and to technologies that would have made us gods to our ancient ancestors, and weren’t threatened by cave bears.

The other was a four-part (two-part on Netflix) BBC documentary called Walking with Cavemen. It was probably more speculation than science, although the writers did attempt to put a “human” face to the fossil bone evidence, which is all the traces we have of our early ancestors.

Each half-hour episode is presented in the form of a drama that attempts to explore the way that each species of human possibly lived, from Australopithecus afarensis to Homo neanderthalensis, particularly in response to climate change.

As the documentary notes, at one point there were numerous species of “ape men” on the African plains, each adapted according to a different successful method of survival. Some, like Paranthropus boisei, adapted larger and more powerful jaws to chew tough vegetation. Others, like Homo habilis, developed larger brains that allowed them to create tools and scheme more effectively.

Last year, I watched another BBC documentary called Christina: a Mediaeval Life, about a 14th-century peasant woman named Christina Cox whose life has been reconstructed through financial and legal records from the time. In mediaeval England, everything was recorded, in meticulous detail. The show notes that it was one of the most well-documented periods in history (aside from our own, which future historians might consider overly documented—one can imagine them musing over our obsession with cats).

I thought about her while doing my taxes a few weeks ago, wondering if anyone in the future would be going over my tax returns six hundred years from now, and parse together from those records (and possibly from this blog and other writings) what sort of person I was.

Yesterday morning in the former fundamentalists group I attend (that is, when I feel like getting up early on a Sunday morning and being with other human beings), we were discussing how we approach death and legacy as Christians-turned-atheists. There was some discussion in Walking With Cavemen over whether Homo heidelbergensis buried their dead and whether they had any concept of an afterlife.

In a way, I’m thankful for the knowledge that I’ll die someday. That day still seems a long way off, but it will happen, eventually. Just as it happened to Lucy; to every Homo habilis who was eaten by lions or died of starvation; and to the man with the crooked finger who did the palm prints in the Chauvet cave 30,000-some years ago.

We are impermanent beings. That is the nature of life on this planet. Flowers bloom, flourish, wither, and die. Animals are born, grow up, grow old, and die. Even mountains crumble. The universe itself will even slow down and freeze to death, so to speak.

What all this has to do with Valentine’s Day is that it doesn’t really matter. This moment doesn’t really matter. And yet it matters immensely.

A few nights ago I had a dream about preparations for a wedding in which several good friends appeared in various representational aspects. My friend Jenny, who is studying counseling psychology, was the bride. She arrived late, but wasn’t worried. “It’ll be okay,” she said.

I hope against hope that she’s right.

And all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

123. cordate

cordate, adj; 1. Heart-shaped; 2. (Botany) heart-shaped, with the attachment at the notched end.

it may not always be so; and i say
that if your lips, which i have loved, should touch
another’s, and your dear strong fingers clutch
his heart, as mine in time not far away;
if on another’s face your sweet hair lay
in such silence as i know, or such
great writhing words as, uttering overmuch,
stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

if this should be, i say if this should be–
you of my heart, send me a little word;
that i may go unto him, and take his hands,
saying, Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands
— e.e. cummings, Sonnets-Unrealities XI

On the subject of love lost, regrets and things that I should let go of, this is probably the one thing that the people in my life would most like to see me get over, as they are likely tired of both hearing and reading about it. I’m tired of dredging it up so often, and of it seemingly dominating everything.

Two years ago to the day, I was waking up with Seth, something I never would’ve thought happened. It was shortly after we first met for coffee, and I was rather taken with him and wanted to spend more time with him. So I went over to his apartment on February 13th with the intention of watching Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, which he hadn’t seen. For some reason I couldn’t find it in my bag (I later found it buried behind something), but I’d brought the DVD of John Doyle’s 2007 revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company. I ended up spending the night, we ended up making out until about 5am.

That was the first and only time I ever woke up with someone on Valentine’s Day. It’ll probably be the only time that I ever do that.

Yes, Valentine’s Day is a corporate marketing ploy. It’s empty ritual and shamelessly overt commercialism couched in gaudy romantic sheep’s clothing.

As a homeschooled kid growing up, we didn’t do Valentine’s Day. Sure, my mom baked cookies (but then my mom always baked cookies), and I still have a fondness for that pink icing that was slightly crispy on top and still moist the rest of the way, like a good crème brûlée. But unlike the rest of the kids who went to public school, my sisters and I never partook in the ritual of exchanging cards.

I think I’m afraid to let go of what’s left of my feelings for Seth, even though nothing will ever come of them and it’s a waste of energy. He’s a great guy, and he has a lot of great qualities (which is why I fell in love with him in the first place), but emotionally speaking it’s a dead end.

I’m afraid that I’ll never feel anything like that ever again, and thus far I haven’t. There have been people who have fallen in love with me, but it wasn’t reciprocal. Aaron, my first boyfriend, was crushed when I ended our relationship. In a way, the fiasco with Seth was somewhat karmic, although it’s probably just an inevitability of dating that you’re going to hurt people and be hurt in return.

I’m afraid that if I let go of Seth altogether that there will be no one to fall back on; that there is truly no one out there for me. The thought of that is unbearable, because my dating prospects have been disappointing thus far. The thought of waking up alone every morning, let alone on Valentine’s Day, with the memory of that one day, that one chance I ever had at something like that, is too awful to think about.

A relationship with another human being seems like the one thing that actually matters in life, aside from leaving an enduring legacy. We’re here for the blink of an eye geologically speaking, and then that’s it. No second chances. No great hereafter. No life everlasting. This is one of the major reasons why I finally chose to come out as gay, because I suddenly realized that life was too damned short to surrender my happiness to others.

Yet here I am doing just that with Seth—surrendering what could have potentially been a happy year to basically emotionally freeze myself in carbonite. However, I’m not sure that the alternative would be much better.

To be perfectly honest, I hate myself. Not some kind of stereotypical gay self-loathing or residual homophobic. It’s hard to explain, but it has to do with never feeling good enough to please myself, which means that I’m not good enough for other people, which has largely to do with the complete lack of acceptance that I felt as a child growing up. I’ve always felt like a contractor, trying to impress clients in order to keep their accounts—in this instance, people’s friendship, and that at any time they could find a better deal from the next guy. In the case of a boyfriend, the stakes are even higher.

And we all know that I don’t deal well with rejection. As a kid with extremely judgmental parents, I tend to take it personally.

So I’m a bit lost. I need to learn to love and accept myself, flaws and all—but how to do that when I can’t see my own face and don’t trust the mirrors that others hold up to me? And I need a guy who won’t give up until he’s convinced me that he truly loves me and isn’t going anywhere. Most of the guys I’ve dated over the last few years have left me feeling like that will never happen. And though I never dated Seth, of all of the guys he was the one who left me feeling the most undesirable and unlovable.

But I haven’t found anyone yet to take his place.

57. invidiousness part i

… and why I hate Valentine’s Day so much.

Truth be told, it’s because I’ve never been able to take part in it. Or rather, had a positive experience that would refute the notion that it’s anything more than a tawdry, vulgar pseudo-holiday dreamed up by the Marquis de Sade to torment those who are miserably single [he said with a permanent scowl etched into his craggy, careworn face].

It’s a day when happy, coupled people blissfully buy into the spurious notion that there’s one day in the year when we should all be extra attracted to each other, and men go out and make grand, sweeping gestures to their girlfriends (or boyfriends) to make up for the fact of how neglectful they are towards their significant other the rest of the year.

Or maybe that’s just me and that damned speck of mirror-glass in my eye.

Yes, I’m one of those peevish, vituperative, curmudgeonly people who begrudge the fact that others are happy and having a wonderful time today, and wish they would all just collectively go fuck themselves and remember that there are those who aren’t blissfully happy; who (full disclosure) desperately wish that there were someone to brainlessly buy into this farce of a “holiday” with, and maybe for a few, fleeting hours forget how cheap, bloody and cruel life is the other three-hundred and sixty-four days of the year—or, on a more positive note, spend an evening with that “special someone,” maybe have a nice dinner and feel part of the universal experience of romantic love.

And, naturally, fuck each other silly at the end of the night.

Another reason that I begrudge Valentine’s Day so deeply and with such contempt is that a year ago today I woke up with the guy I spent the majority of this past year pining, crying and agonizing over. Let’s call him Seth. (No, really, that’s his name.) He was the first man I have ever been in love with, exacerbated by the fact that I knew he didn’t feel the same way about me. Shortly after our first sexual encounter, he basically told me that flat out, breaking my heart the first time. Before that, I found the idea of unrequited love silly and self-abasing. “Get over it!” you’d hear me say, doling out advice to inconsolable, anguished friends whose predicament I now find myself in. “He/She is not worth the pain you’re putting yourself through!” The funny thing about it though is that you can’t stop caring, or wishing, or hoping. It’s wholly irrational, but you hold out for the slim chance that maybe, just maybe, the veil will be drawn from their eyes and they will suddenly see you for the loving, caring, perfectly compatible person that you are.

And so Seth and I became what is affectionately referred to as fuck buddies. He was more or less using me for sex, apparently under the misguided notion that we were just having fun. Or some shit like that. And every time I hoped that maybe, just maybe, I’d get through to him; that he’d see that we could be more than friends; that, even beyond the whole sexual compatibility element, we got each others jokes, wanted the same things, had a similar approach to life and faith and intellect.

As Bobby Fisher might say, “No dice.”

This Valentine’s story concludes a few weeks ago, on my 28th birthday, with me drunk and sobbing in a friend’s apartment. Everyone had left Seth’s apartment (where the birthday party was being held), and I was too drunk to drive. Two other friends of mine live in the same building, but have a cat, and I am extremely allergic to cats, so normally this would end with us in his bed, having sex and me spending the night. It was not to end thus this time.

Seth had been on a blind date a week previous with another guy, and wasn’t sure how it was going to go, or even if it would go anywhere. My heart sank when he talked about this, but again I held out for the hope that it wouldn’t work, that it would just be another dalliance and that if I hung around long enough that he’d fall for me as I had for him. On that February 2nd though, he said that he was starting to like the guy more, and things were getting more serious between them. I was trying desperately to put a brave face on it and not let it bother me.

Flash back to earlier in the summer. I had just ended a relationship with my second serious boyfriend (let’s call him Nick) and was starting to date a new guy (we’ll call him Jack), and the night that I’d told everyone about Jack, as we were leaving, Seth asked if he could kiss me before things got too serious. And so, still being madly in love with him, we made out in the stairwell of the apartment.

Back to the night of my 28th birthday, eventually it got late and everyone decided it was time to call it an evening. It was obvious I wasn’t going anywhere, and he said I could crash there, but that I would need to sleep on the couch since he was starting a relationship with a new guy. And that’s when it began.

For weeks prior to this, I’d been agonizing over whether to confess my feelings to Seth or not. Some good friends who knew about the whole fuck buddy situation said that there was no way he couldn’t feel the same way, at least on some level, because nobody could do those things and be totally detached. Right? And I was determined not to let him be the biggest regret of my life.

So there in his apartment, drunk and enraged, I spewed everything at him that had been building over the weeks and months—how stupid I’d been to have let him play with my heart that way, how he’s not worthy of me, how I deserve better than some guy who can fuck me whenever it’s convenient for him to get his goddamn rocks off but then toss me to the curb once something “real” comes along, as if I were that cheap and disposable. On top of it all, he’s slated to be the pastor of a fucking GLBT-friendly church. I told him he’d do this again to someone else, that he’d play with some vulnerable guy’s affections who’s desperate to find a good Christian gay man, take advantage of him, and break his heart too. I called him a monster, a user, and a whole host of other awful things. No sense in being a writer if you can’t use them as a scalpel.

That night I also told him I no longer believe in God; that the church is a sham, and that he’s living, walking proof that none of it rings true. He listened quietly, tried to explain himself (which I’d have none of), and then left the room. Upon which I called my friend who lives upstairs, asked if I could crash there, and then spent the next hour sobbing on her couch. I’d hated myself for what I’d done, and hated him at the same time that I loved him.

But I also knew that the friendship, the relationship, was over.

Since the 2nd, I made it my resolution to do away with my old sexual morality, because chances are I’m never going to find a soulmate, and impersonal hookups are about as close as I’m probably going to get to the intimacy that I desperately crave. In the last few weeks I’ve had more sex than I have in my entire life, but it hasn’t filled the void, and I knew going in it wouldn’t satisfy. Maybe I’m just trying to get Seth out of my system.

So you’ll forgive me if I don’t jump on the Valentine’s Day bandwagon and celebrate the triumph of romantic love with the rest of the callow world. Last night, a guy that I’d been seeing and talking to for a few weeks decided to call things off. It was a mutual decision; I’d been sensing that we weren’t any more than just friends, but it still came as a bit of a crushing disappointment, especially considering that, even if it wasn’t going anywhere, that perhaps for once I could temporarily shut my eyes, not be alone on Valentine’s Day and believe that maybe, just maybe, love and romance really are possible. But, as usual, he turned out like all the others. This man too “disappoint me.”

I’m still waiting for someone to prove me wrong.