why i remain single these days

My dad's funeral, 2006. I needed some air after the service, and my niece, studying photojournalism at the time, snapped this picture.

Alas, my life these days affords me no room for ultimate romance. I chose a path that I knew would lead to it. I chose my mom. So here I am, for now a laid off unemployed deadbeat who stays home and looks after his old mother. LOL! Who would want to date me for that?

Furthermore, I do not look after my elderly mom out of obligation. I do so because I love her deeply. I do it because I WANT TO. That's the difference. It means I'm genuine, true to myself, and I'm proud of that. Who wouldn't be? After all, she and Dad did a universe of selfless good for all of us kids, they raised us and gave us everything they could. How could I not want to repay them in kind?

The reason she calls me constantly when I'm out - which of course drives me crazy - is simple: she is scared to be alone. That is entirely understandable. I know that if I were in the same position (and we all will be sooner or later) I would probably feel the same. To die without seeing a loved one's face looking down at you for the very last time, without that final beautiful gaze of love and acknowledgment and closure, is a profoundly frightening thing. To me it's far worse than death itself.

So, I'm single and not available. The last thing I'd want is to drag a man into my situation. I wouldn't want him to suffer because I put my mom first. I do get lonely from time to time and wish I could fall asleep at night in someone's arms. But it would be just selfish of me to have that while not being entirely there for him because I put my mom first.

There's also the jobless factor. Until the economy picks up and I have a better chance I remain unemployed. I wouldn't want to not contribute to certain experiences like going on trips, buying dinners out, and birthday gifts for my man. I don't feel it would be a balanced relationship. I would want to spoil my boyfriend, lavish him with all the wisdom I learned from my past relationships and experiences. And that's just not possible yet.

But I do love to have affairs. I love such moments. It's a very healthy thing to do when it's consensual and safe and you both say "Yes, let's have fun and enjoy each other for a while!". You give yourselves permission. LOL, I call it 'being European'. It's great adventure and it can only enrich your life, add colour, texture and spice to it.

Some people define the worth of their life by whom they share it with. Some people define that worth by the fact that they are sharing their life with someone at all. Some define it by eschewing such relationships and preferring to go solo. And some define it by refusing to let someone else suffer for their own selfish desires and lack of priorities.

I am an amalgam of all four of those, not because I can't make my mind up. It's because I know how complex life can be and it's far better to embrace that complexity and know where I stand at certain given points in my life.

...as we are

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

- Anais Nin

If you knew me more intimately would you intimate yourself to me more? Are you better able to transmit your thoughts and dreams and desires and experiences to me when I'm an abstraction, as physical proximity might disturb such transmissions? Am I more valuable to you from a distance?

This is the contradiction of the internet. It's a Janus face. One side allows communication from different points in the world, bringing us closer and affording opportunities to connect that would otherwise be impossible. The other side is cruel. It exaggerates the geographical interstices, the chasm of hundreds or thousands of miles separating us, which only brings disparity. We can transmit to each other our secrets but it only reminds us how far apart we are that only electronic words can reach us - no facial expressions, no hugs, no touch, no breath, no sensation of warm skin, no aromas from our bodies, no voice, no sound of hearts thumping.

When we deny ourselves outings, experiences, people, various sensations - the heat from the sun, the coolness of the moon, the prickle of spicy peppers on our tongue, the vivacity of spoken gossip from a friend, the bracing sting of the first sip of an icy cold martini, the wind on our face as we drive along the coast - the only things we have to fall back on are thoughts, mind games, inventions - surrogates that further deny us truth, the truth of experiencing.

Our minds begin to fill in the blanks left by such denials of direct experiences. We start to create feelings and thoughts to replace what we hadn't acquired in the first place....in person. I wonder if this is because we were made to be experiential beings and without experiences we scramble to at least have something, anything, to grasp onto, even if they are false and invented and projected. Is it really better than nothing?

photo: Boden Sea, Uttwil, 1993. ©Hiroshi Sugimoto

So, such is my life at the moment. If I wanted to I could turn off this laptop and go out for a walk. I hadn't done much anything this year. I'm broke. I can't work because there are no jobs. I can't travel anywhere. All I can do is wait for things to get better so I can make my move. I'm like a monk in a tower; I have views but they're of things far away, people I can't meet in person, places unreachable to me.

I'm out of the market for romance. My life isn't set up for it, there's no accommodation, especially in this town. Even friendships are tricky to maintain. I have a couple of local friends but it's expensive to go to out with them. Online friendships are even harder. The more we reveal ourselves to each other the harder it gets because we'd rather reveal ourselves to each other in person.

I can never understand people who swear by love affairs online, that they love having a boyfriend/girlfriend who lives in Sydney or Tokyo or Prague and they instant message each other everyday. What the hell kind of love is that? It feels so.....detached. That's not love, that's torture. LOL! It's a relationship you can switch off and walk away from whenever you have disagreements. Like an appliance. How convenient. But you can't take it to bed and make love to it, dine out with it at the bistro, enjoy a lovely conversation with it over cocktails, or lay your head on it and listen to its heartbeat.

I have no one in my life. I accept that. It seems like it would hurt knowing that it's a byproduct of other technicalities I suffer through presently. But strangely enough it doesn't hurt. Maybe it's because I've grown numb, I don't know. What I do know is that my acceptance of it helps; it lessens the pain of loneliness. What would really hurt is if I didn't accept it but at the same time knew that there's nothing I could do about it, either, for as long as it lasts.

Another thing that lessens the pain is knowing that it probably won't be this way forever. Things have ebbed and flowed in my life before. Why should this be any different?

I am the dynamism of my experiences.

fuck Kafka

^ Epicurus most likely had a lot of things to teach Kafka. Navel gazing isn't one of those things.

In a gaming community I frequent, a fellow member posted this:

Where do they come from and where do they go?

Why do people create knowing that it will eventually be destroyed? Why do people cling to life knowing that they must someday die? None of that will have meant anything once you do.

Kefka may have been completely batshit insane, but he raises a good point. Why do we do the things we do? What does it mean to live? Why do you insist on living and finding happiness knowing that it is temporary and death is probably eternal? What is your response when you are faced with these questions?

I replied with this:

First of all, I wouldn't trust Kafka to be my guru even if I were considering razor blades on my wrist instead of on my unshaved face. The guy most likely didn't know shit about enjoying himself, he was emo before emo was emo. Amazing writer, though.

Secondly, I have no idea if there is an afterlife (I'm atheist) but damn shit if I try not to have as much fun as I possibly could in this life I have now and to be as good as I can to other people.

I don't "cling" to life. I make hot passionate love to it. I lust for it and in it. Not because I'm desperate, but because it's there to take advantage of. It's not death I'm scared of, it's the absence of living.

Years ago I nearly died myself, from a medical condition, so I have some idea how it would feel to be on that "event horizon" of existence. It taught me a lesson: be good, have fun, lust is your friend, and build and create and enjoy while you're around and not give a shit if it all ceases to exist when you do. Because you have nothing else better to do, and what good would it do to just mope in a dark corner?

The idea of the worthlessness of this life hints at a lack of imagination and self-esteem, and certainly to a kind of laziness in imbuing value and a sense of time well spent, no matter how brief that time may be and no matter how mysterious dying may be perceived in terms of what may or may not come afterward.

Oh, I've done my share of navel gazing. The difference is that I got the fuck over it. My navel only looks interesting for so long, you know.

I could use another Mexicola (coke, lime juice, and tequila). Cheers!

stars and stripes and douchebaggery

^ One of the critical tenets of President Obama's fix for our nation is less
emphasis on reckless consumerism and more focus on education.

No More Hummer Nation | Maureen Dowd, New York Times Opinion

I heard a French scientist on a radio show once explain that Americans would always insist on supersizing things because our “reptilian brain” likes things big. We’re still big, as Norma Desmond said. It’s everything around us that’s collapsing and shrinking.

The Wall Street Journal had an article last week reporting that, now that gas prices have gone back down, almost half a million fuel-frugal small cars are piling up unsold at dealers around the country.

“I don’t think Americans really like small cars,” Beau Boeckmann, a Ford dealer in California, told The Journal. “They drive them when they think they have to, when gas prices are high. But we’re big people, and we like big cars.”

That’s the big nettle we’re grasping. How big do we need to be to still feel American? How big can our national debt grow? How big can our cars be? And how big is our clout abroad these days? Will Michelle’s style in Europe make as big a splash as Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s?

The cowboy push by W. and Dick Cheney to be a hyperpower and an empire left America a weakened and tapped-out power, straining to defend its runaway capitalism even as it uneasily adapts to its desperation socialism.

How do we come to terms with the gluttony that exploded our economy and still retain our reptilian American desire for living large? How do we make the pursuit of the American dream a satisfying quest rather than a selfish one?

What Maureen Dowd hints at here is the serious need to re-define what it means to be American. But first thing's first - where the hell did we get the idea that to be American means to own big things? I mean, physically big, literally big, expensively big? Unnecessarily big?

And I also have to ask, how much emphasis do we put on individualism before it spills over into selfish bragging rights and materialistic whoring devoid of larger social considerations and responsibilities? Sure, we as Americans can easily max out our credit cards on the latest gadgetry, fashion, and huge cars, and yet we can't even take care of our unemployed homeless fellow citizens, much less pay our mortgages on time. We even have the gall to brag about keeping our priorities.

I used to think that to be American is to be the best you can be - hardworking, educated, self made, socially responsible, generous, strong, and fierce. But evidently that wasn't enough. Or worse, we hide our shortcomings in those departments by relying on such things as Hummers, large screen HDTVs, and houses whose mortgages far exceed our annual salaries.

It's a classic situation: dazzle them - and ourselves - with the goods as a way to distract from our decided lack of accomplishments in the areas that truly matter. After all, isn't it easier to impress someone with an expensive SUV than having to go to graduate school and earning a masters or a PhD? Wouldn't it be more convenient to wow our friends with the latest iPod or Louis Vuitton bag instead of making them inspired and proud of us for having volunteered at a homeless shelter for the past year?

The pendulum has swung the other way, and swung hard. And yet many of us are still too stupid to come around - being smart, responsible, and thrifty is NOT the latest fashion trend. Instead it is now a necessary way of life, one that was birthed by our recklessness and lack of values in the right places.

Do you know why many items at 7-Eleven cost so much? Convenience. You pay extra for the convenience of being able to do a jaunt to that store at 3 in the morning for a carton of milk, a handful of Slim Jim's, or a Slurpee to satisfy a desire. And that is how we have been behaving. Patience has never been a part of American values, at least in the past century. And because of that we've created the pathetic mess we're now in. Yeah, we're that stupid.

Given our choice to create the current dismal economic situation, we have also now created an opportunity, one that offers possibilities to choose wisely this time - and for all time. A new choice has now emerged, though which one we pick depends on whether we have finally learned our lesson:

Do we choose to be big, or do we choose to be better?

e-chain of fools

"Don't even."

LOL! I just got "gently scolded" by people I don't know who work with my oldest sister. She sent me yet another one of those chain emails with really corny sentimental messages in them. You know what I'm talking about, right? They got, say, cute puppy dog pics, animated smileys with "have a nice day" wishes, or heartwarming human interest stories done in PowerPoint with very, VERY, VERY loud elevator music, and of course about a hundred cc's to other recipients. I'm sure you get these 'feel good' chain emails all the time. I delete most of them without even reading, but some I do read (against my better judgment).

I decided to be evil (oh yes, I'm capable of it) and reply not just to my sister but to all the recipients (most likely some of them forwarded it to my sister in the first place) with great sarcasm:

"AWWWWW! This is so excruciatingly corny and trite and whoever put it together with those cheap sofa painting backgrounds and deafeningly loud elevator/shopping mall music should be flogged senseless.

But the message is well taken and I agree. Thanks to all my parachute packers, I love you! May you never have to deal with unbearably corny 1970s style Hallmark greeting card type emails again."

xoxoxooxoxoxoxo

A couple of them wrote me back with an obvious tone of dismay: "Did you get up on the wrong side of bed?" "Who are you?"

Chain emails as such are the equivalent of real world chain mail to me, akin to numbingly annoying ones that clutter up my mailbox and waste good paper. This is how computer viruses and worms are spread, through attachments or links in the emails. At least you can never do that with real world letters. But as it stands, my family and some of my friends keep sending these to me, expecting me to forward it to other people.

Look, I am a good soul, I've survived life threatening crises and other moments of agony in my life, I volunteer my time and money to worthy causes, I love my mother unconditionally, I'm loyal to my friends. But that does NOT mean I do this cruddy Hallmark "perfect world" crap, there's something sickeningly saccharine about it and I will not apologize for it.

I do have my mushy moments but I hate it when emails like this try to force mushiness on me. That's just...revolting.

“I shall stay the way I am because I do not give a damn.”

Ever read Dorothy Parker much? You should. It's very grounding stuff.

anagnorisis, peripateia, and lamb testicles

The Entertainment Gathering 2008
Monterey, CA
Dec 12th, 2008 (20 min. 35 sec.)

^ Drawing on his experiences picking up roadkill, feeding swine, and castrating a lamb with his teeth, Mike Rowe, host of Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs, discusses how modern American culture belittles necessary labor.

Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe is old school hot & hunky, with a hot & hunky voice. You know, that kind of man many women - and many of us gay guys - swoon over by default, the kind of man many straight men would consider a man's man, someone to buddy with and have a few brews with. The catch (well, he is a catch, but I digress...no, I don't, really) is he's also a damn good sport and has an amazing sense of humour belying his intelligence. If that doesn't make you look up to heaven and beam while your knees weaken, I dunno what will.

Furthermore he holds a profound admiration towards manual labour and the humble folk doing that labour. These are the invisible human beings who make it possible for us martini sipping cosmopolites, jetsetting tycoons, credit card whoring mall shoppers, gadget worshiping geeks, tax cut preaching Republicans, tree hugging liberals, and otherwise squeamish processed weaklings of humanity to live a reasonably comfortable life. We enjoy the sausages, we just don't wanna see how they're made.

Mike has not only seen how the sausages were made, he has helped out with the process, hands on. Like in the title of this post. It was painful for him (though the lamb never seemed to make a scene of it). But it was also epiphanous. Many, many of us Americans have lost touch with the salty, earthy, and ultimately grounding physicality of our lives. It shows in how we live, how we consume, how we socialize, how we view and formulate opinions, how we experience, and how we vote.

"We have been bred to consume, not to create." - Jennifer Connelly, actress

Maybe it really is time we put sweat into it or at least had a humbling glimpse into how this sausage of a country we call home is being made, everyday (no, I don't mean manually washing the dishes). Only then can we re-discover it and admire the hard work and craft put into it, humble us a bit, while maybe even putting a little hair on our chest and a little muscle on our arm.

And looking at Mike Rowe, with his "aw, shucks" earthy, sexy, funny, grounded, manual labouring charm on his show and, I trust, in person, I'd say that wouldn't be so bad, now would it?

grounding

On my nightstand, a photograph K took of me at my dad's wake
a few years ago.

~ Stay the course in good weather and bad ~

Regardless of what is going on around you, make the best of what is in your power, and take the rest as it occurs.

- Epictetus (interpreted by Sharon LeBell)