It gives me great pleasure to imagine all the gay love songs written in history that straight people have assumed or have been encouraged to believe were for them.
Music is proof that it doesn’t matter what skin is involved in love, it’s all pretty much the most compelling thing any of us experience. Love is epic and as genderless in quality as death is.
I enjoy how death and love are always such equals whether we’re talking about the highest concepts or the lowest of either.
I’m sitting here at my keyboard even though my back hurts like a motherfucker. Advil has failed to alleviate the pain. Took it twice today and neither time has resulted in a reduction of pain. I’ve been icing and heating it for hours and it still hurts. So I decided to sit here and listen to the music of my youth and get maudlin-ish.
Remembering skating rinks, piss-filled public pools, Harry and David fruit baskets, the smell of my brand new plastic Bionic Woman doll I bought from the dustiest shadiest shop in Talent Oregon with my saved allowance, and the smell of lime essential oil in the coolest shop in town that sold David Bowie T-shirts and albums.
I might need, at some point, to admit that my brain is so full of voices I’m not always sure which ones are mine. This potential admission must necessarily always be followed by the assurance that no voice in my head is compelling me to commit crimes. They aren’t even compelling me to vacuum, so you know it’s for-fucking real.
More and more I see the walls of my invulnerability and simultaneously see how I’m always letting the rot in through an involuntary empathetic bent that’s as basic as the thickness of my blood and how it clots around my desire for peace and love. Self perpetuating cycle of disappointment and confirmation of distrust of humans.
Now I’m remembering my boring Boyfriend who peremptorily told me he expected his girlfriends to kiss him whether they had lipstick on or not when I demurred at our meeting at the Bart station because I had red lipstick on and didn’t want to mess it up. I stayed at his house that night in Pleasanton but I knew it was the end because no bastard tells me when I have to kiss him. Fucker had no experience with people with OCD or other afflictions of preciseness. I remember listening to “Wild Horses” that night and knowing that we were pretty much over at that point. We hadn’t gone out more than a few weeks. Par for the course in my experience.
I remembered his name for 20 years but suddenly I can’t remember if it was Jeff or Jason.
What I’ll never forget is that he was a Capricorn like me and we drank Amaretto from his parents liquor cabinet.
Youth is fucked. Old age is also fucked.
Life is pretty much a marathon of pain and suffering with some effusive moments of incredible illumination.
Enjoy what you can of it.
