Here We Are

I was able to get July’s rent payment taken care of, although it took some gentle negotiations and teeth-pulling with my roommate. So basically he’s got this new job, a job he’s waited essentially four years for. God bless him, he’s going to be a lot richer and will have more opportunities to travel to the distant places he’s always wanted to visit: Miami Beach later this month, then Indianapolis in the fall (or do I have those two dates confused?). Either way a great change for him.

As for myself, the last two months have been rough, emotionally. This past Saturday I shut down all of my online accounts, deleted my Gmail, and ended my Skype account for good. Why am I doing this? I really don’t know. Compared to the last few years my overall online presence has diminished greatly. Which I am totally glad about, it really gives me an opportunity to focus on moving out of Texas and getting my real life together, rather than placing a lot of hype and emotional investment on the online one, the image I have so carefully crafted for the last ten years. But it makes life harder. I don’t get phone calls or emails from a lot of people, and mainly spend a lot of time talking to my friends and my family, and to my boyfriend. I really never valued those previous relationships much in the first place, since they were crafted to solely benefit the other person involved. I am beginning to see that things with my friends have not worked out as they intended them to. Shawn desperately wanted to witness to me as a bible-believing Christian, but his efforts at proselytizing failed when he realized that I cannot change what I am, i.e., a homosexual man. My relationship with my friend Luís fell apart when he dumped my friend Julie for another girl who essentially emasculated him and forced him to move away from Tech for good (and also, I think, partly because of Texas Tech’s positions on race and diversity). And then, my own relationship with Julie ended when I could no longer put any faith into hanging out with her, because she prefers to do things that hags do, such as go out with twinks to bars to pick up boys. I don’t hate her, I don’t at all, but I felt a little disrespected when she said that instead of having dinner at my house one night she’d prefer to go to the local gay bar with one of her friends. I can’t really listen to Dr. Mariani or Dr. Smith’s endlessly banal banter about professor-ish things or about their cat or about Celtic music. I respect them and their authority and scholarship, but I have learned why you don’t add your professors to Facebook. I have said to them: I wish you well. Please don’t hate me, because I know you don’t. But I also know that you hate my politics and you hate it when I rant on Facebook. So goodbye to Facebook, as well.

Dr. Jocoy is not responding to my emails anymore. I assume she has moved onto other things. I will see and learn the truth when she returns from holiday break later on this month. And as for Dr. Cimarusti, I will continue to see him, because he and Dr. Jocoy are the only two teachers I can really respect, because they understand me. Amelia has moved away, Austin is dead, Frank is living with a rich man in Chicago, Marissa and Melissa got married and became lawyers, Kelli is heading up a class in Memphis and is beset by the rain, Art is moving back to California, Herschel is living in Seattle and waiting for me to move up to Portland, Doug graduated, Amanda stopped talking to me because of my leftist political beliefs (which I was oh-so-fucking happy about), Steven and Katerina might be living together next year, Jacob Rose is living in California in a rented house by the sea, and Ben hung himself in a garage in 2010, a victim of legal prosecution and despair (Jacob Rose told me this as I was arriving late for my Anthropology class on a frigid day in February). Soen (or Martin? or Kogen?) is working in LA for a major television company and has a new beau. And Pete and Jon are still together, still together after four years, and Pete has mellowed out significantly and I like it. I am somewhat terrified of Jon, not for Jon’s sake for the specter of Jon I guess –– a big hulking football playerish kid who quotes from Grey Gardens. I am terrified because he is me, a physically different me, a doppelgänger of me in an all-gay city. I rarely talk to Pete (I talked to him this weekend), because he is so busy, much less to Soen (who I’m OK about, just OK), much less to Kelli (who is just plain busy). And Bruno’s mother passed away and he needed to start over anew. I feel like I’m beginning to lose Frank now, because we both have boyfriends we love very much and we don’t want to hurt them. But yet, we still love each other like old lovers and good friends. I can’t get my mind around that. I am so troubled by these constant abandonments. But something deep inside tells me this is all for the best, that after Lubbock will come Portland and things will be better. My story does not end in the dust and decay of this one-time hub marred by tornadoes and endless despair. It will go on, onward and outward, it will set down roots in a place blessed by the rain and the fog, in a city of pines and roses.

I keep on revisiting the past. I go over the mistakes I’ve made and the things I should have said, the truths I should have told, the things I should have held back. I should have gone to class more, I should have taken better care of myself, I should have not clenched my teeth when I was masturbating so much, or I wouldn’t have had to deal with having my wisdom teeth taken out. That, and of course candy and soda (my two weaknesses). I should have lived more. I should have taken more walks. I should have cried when I had the chance. I should have asked for a raise. I should have pulled my own weight. I should have not given up hope so much. Really, was it that hard? I mean, really?

And of course these are all very pathological things. They stem from very pathological leanings, very distinct problems inside me that haven’t been resolved. Why do I hate myself so much? Why do I feel so terribly inadequate? Why do I have these turbulent relationships with my friends and the people I love? It would be so easy to say, “Joe, you are fucking crazy.” Because I do crazy things. And yet, I don’t want to take medication because medication is a cop-out and the pills would make me fat. Therapy can only help so much. We are here, and we have no choice being here. But we can move. We can do things. We can choose to make the right decisions. We always get what we deserve.

Just the other day my boyfriend’s friend says to my boyfriend when he mentions that I’m going to Tech, “I feel sorry for him.” He is sorry not for me specifically, but for the bullshit I have to put with, bullshit I should have known about, bullshit I should have learned how to deal with when I was younger, when I was a hot young gay. Bullshit, frankly, that is not my fault. I happen to live in the shittiest, ugliest, most god-forsaken state in the Union. Not my fault! I happen to go to school and work in a place that is not only hostile to homosexuals, but to Hispanics, to Catholics, to liberals and to creatives. Not my fault. I happen to suffer at the idiocy of some policymakers who feel I’m a liability to their political ideologies. Not my fault. It is not my fault, and I acknowledge this before You, O Lord God, that I am myself. It is not my fault I am a different. It is not my fault that I can’t “fit in”, because in most cases I do, but in other places, in other lives.

I also confess to You, Lord God, that I take full responsibility for my problems here, problems that I caused for myself. Problems, I might add, that I later whined about. I played with fire and I got burned. And I hurt people’s feelings in the process. And then I had to deal with the guilt, the remorse, the feeling suicidal for weeks and weeks, the actual remorse over the failed suicide attempts, especially after I got sick. The money I spent, practically pissed away for things that I shouldn’t have bought. The jarred spaghetti sauce instead of the canned. The golden mushroom soup for 78¢ instead of the white cream of mushroom for ¢68. Now I am having to deal with all the little remorse-filled moments of life, the not eating and the remorse arising from my mother having to send a package in the mail with pancake mix and syrup to assuage my constant hunger pangs. And it’s not the hunger that makes me suicidal, it’s the lack of socializing, its the watching the day go down, it’s the  banging my head on my desk and crying out to God for assistance, its the lack of living on a standard compared to other people I know other people my age are living on, because of my poor life choices. It’s the asking for care packages, and it’s the crying at night in the shower when nothing can be done. It’s the sense that nothing will change, despite the circumstances, it’s the sense that things and people seem so far away. It’s the sense of futility at attempting to commit suicide because I know better. And it’s the sense of remorse and shame that inevitably keeps me from taking a handful of Vicodin in the bathroom. It’s also the sense –– and this is the weird part –– that the songs which used to make me cry don’t make me cry anymore. That scares me and saddens me immensely.

What hurts the most is the part when someone says to you: we can’t be friends because things have changed for me. We can’t be friends because you are not the person I want. I want the other Joe, the Joe I liked so much before I got to know the real Joe. The real Joe can’t offer anything interesting or good aside from good intellectual conversation, because all I can relate to is what Joe talks about. That hurts the most. I am a good conversationalist because I am an intellectual. For the first two months people are fascinated with me, intrigued. But it all fades away when they realize I have these problems, problems which I can’t fix or can’t solve on my own, and then they say, “I can’t be around this person, because he doesn’t know who he is.”

That is completely different from being the sexual being Joe, the sexually selfish Joe. That Joe is solely concerned with getting sexual attention, in a crude effort to reproduce the mysterious things called love and affection.

A long, long time ago, someone said to me that I continued doing the things I’m doing, I would only end up perpetuating my isolation and self-imposed exile even longer. He was right. I am, after months of pushing everybody and everything away, finally alone. The despair is overwhelming. Like the film Groundhog Day, every day is the same. The hot sun rises in the east, in the parking lot, runs over the pines and through the blinds of my room, into my face, onto my skin. I take a bath and I go to work. I take lunch or no lunch, depending on whichever time of the month it is. And then I work some more, go to the gym, take a walk home in the hot sun, bathe, eat (or not eat), then jack off and sleep. On the weekends it’s the same, only except working (unless it’s one of those cases and I have to be there), the eating, the watching Golden Girls on the big screen until the sun lowers at an agreeable angle, the eating again, the bath, the jacking off and the sleeping. I don’t go to parties, rarely go to the bars. I am myself. These are the things I do. I mainly talk to my boyfriend on the warm evenings when the sun goes down and the sprinklers have started watering the landscaping.

Please let me tell you, Lord God, how much I hate myself. Please let me tell You how much I hate the world I live in, the endless dry yellowed wind-ravaged parts of it. Please let me tell You how emotionless and hollow my life is. Please let me tell You how much I want to be dead or at least in some place, some place that isn’t home, some place where no one knows me and no one cares about whatever the fuck it is I’m doing. A place where I don’t have to put on airs and condescend and spout bullshit about how dedicated I am to being a lawyer when the plain truth is I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I don’t know what I am doing, God. I know You are listening and I know You want to help. I don’t know how to communicate to You what I want.  You see, I have made these mistakes, God. You see, these mistakes are slowly killing me on the outside now. I feel like I’m already dead inside. And I want to have these good relationships with people, but I don’t know what I am going to do. I would like to be able to have a normal, good life. But I don’t know what normal is. I would have liked to have lived a life that had positive repercussions. I would also like to have nice clothes and good hair and good skin. I would like to have given my mother peace-of-mind instead of endless fears and worry over my wellbeing and a $400 trip to get me when I was sick and needed help. I would like her to know that I am finally doing the things necessary so that she doesn’t have to worry or cry when I am in trouble.

I would like to have those things which I have always wanted. But there is no perfection in the world. So I will place my hopes elsewhere in it, to get a close approximation to what I want.

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