The Bottled-Up City of Candor

It was a big decision for me to be candid here on the site about what’s been happening to me lately. But considering that a lot of my struggles are about being afraid to admit to weakness or vulnerability, I thought it would be a healthy step to let it all hang loose for once and see how things go. Also, my thoughts have been so addled lately that it’s been good for me to record them here during moments of clarity, or at least during the moments when I had the energy to try sorting them out. For friends and family and such, it’s proven to be a useful way to take a barometer reading of how I’m doing. For other people who read but don’t actually know me, I guess it just makes for a curious roller-coaster ride of depression and angst. Whee! Come watch Sparky get his crazy on!

I haven’t really found it detrimental to just own up to my problems here, however. I feel a little exposed, true, but all the venting and the navel-gazing has been pretty cathartic. That counts for something, right?

Rescheduled

This weekend’s special treat was supposed to be a long-awaited visit from Big Daddy Jessie, but it looks like he’s all sick now, so we’ll have to reschedule our big plans for the Doughnut Tour of New York and late night gab sessions back at the Swanktuary (formerly known as the Rumpus Room until its rechristening this past weekend). Damnation!

If anyone in San Francisco catches him out and about enjoying himself this weekend, smack him soundly upside the head and tell him to get back in bed and drink some cranberry juice.

102 Minutes

Almost nine months later, and a detailed story about September 11 will still make me teary and sick to my stomach. “102 Minutes” is an excellent Times feature that tells stories of what went on inside the towers the morning of the attack, pulled together from e-mails and phone calls from people trapped inside, and video footage and eyewitness reports of what went on. It’s brutal to read.

The smarmy memorial pieces and the constant references to the day don’t trouble me one bit. Any time I read any detailed reports of what happened that day, however — any time I’m reminded of the enormity of the disaster and the shock of the whole experience — my stomach does the same flip-flops all over again.

Imploding Plastic Inevitable

The antidepressant must be kicking in. I should be in the throes of a full-on anxiety attack (if the last few weeks have been any indication of a pattern), but instead I’m just curled up trying to block out the dull, maddening pain of accepting the inevitable. that’s the trouble right now: I’m not lost in some groundless depression that will just drift away with the ingestion of a few happy pills. No, I find myself deeply, deeply unhappy again, perhaps moreso than ever before, considering how much hurt I’ve been dredging up once and for all. In a way, I’m fighting the medication: I desperately crave numbness, a release from the acute emotional tortures I keep feeling, and wallowing in a depressive fog is the closest I ever feel to numb. I can sort out why some things upset me and how those things tie to other things, but it doesn’t change the fact that there are things staring me right in the face and shouting in my ears that make me feel miserable in a very real way.

This, of course, has all been very counterproductive to my master plan of nobly facing my demons and seeking occasional guidance without being a burden to anyone. As far as I can tell, I’m worrying the crap out of some people and becoming an unwelcome burden to others. Or another, at least. I can see that I’m less cheerful in public that I can usually muster the energy for. I can see that the effort to catalogue and battle the demons is taking a toll on me personally, and on my life in general.

And the demon leading the pack lately? Yup, that ol’ devil called low self-esteem. You know the one: it’s everybody’s favorite. The funny thing is, I don’t really think I’m all that bad. I don’t think I’m so bad looking, and I’m clever and often quite witty. I’m open to new ideas and I’m considerate and I have a lot of interesting stories to tell. I’m a good kisser and, when the chemistry is right, I’m a lot of fun in the sack. The thing that gets me is why none of these nor any other virtues and charms ever seem to do the trick when I really want them to. People swear up and down that I’m a great catch, but the positive reinforcement doesn’t come. Quite the contrary, in fact. I’m just the passing fancy, the second best, the good personality, and just the friend, if even that.

Maybe it’s shame more than low self-esteem. Though I can admit that I’ve got plenty of good stuff to offer, I also have to face up to being damaged goods. It’s easy enough to whine, “Wah, nobody loves me,” and blame it on fickle tastes and too much competition, but I’ve been on the other end of the equation enough to know it’s not that simple and sometimes feelings just don’t last. No, it’s the real stuff that upsets me the most: being positive, being prone to depression, getting so needy when it takes a hold of me, feeling the need to aggressively make things right when they go wrong, being too fast for the clean-cut guys yet too clean-cut for the fast guys. This is the stuff that makes me admit to myself now and then, in my smallest, neediest voice, “Why should anyone pick me when it would be so much easier not to bother?” And it’s so easy to listen to that little voice when I appear to screw things up the few times they really count.

It’s a Mark’s Life

So while I was sleeping off the evening’s thrill ride, my old pal Mark had another outbreak of Scaroliosis (his unique condition that makes him so prone to occasionally comic but often catastrophic back luck).

You see, Mark had a long day and strolled outside his front door a little after midnight to give Buster, his sweet and playful Yellow Lab, a quick walk before bedtime. He and Buster were walking a few doors down on his quiet little street in Fort Greene when the cops pulled up and asked where Buster’s leash might be. Mark explained that Buster was just out to find a nearby tree before heading back inside, but the cops informed him that this infraction was a “quality of life crime” and not the sort of thing they could overlook. Since he had no I.D. on him, they asked him to run inside and get something to show. He brought Buster and came back down with his license, and was greeted with handcuffs and a ride down to the station.

The officers who later came by to bring him to a jail for the night were appalled at what had happened — getting arrested for walking a mushy blonde dog of the leash in the middle of the night — and apologized profusely as they brought him to his evening’s accomodations in a 10″ x 12″ cell shared by 10 other guys (at least one of whom had also been brought in for walking his dog without a leash).

So who thinks things are finally back to normal here in the city? Who thinks the terror warnings are no longer quite enough to keep the annoying police-state happenings at bay any more? And who thinks Bloomberg is going to have the same smarmy savvy that Giuliani did to keep things from really blowing up about it once and for all?

The Last Thursday Ever

Ah, another exhausting ride on the Kiki & Herb express train to madness. Brilliant as ever, last night’s one-night show at Knitting Factory (also featuring the hot and fun and sassy Scissor Sisters) was a little more off-the-cuff than their twice-yearly productions, but a performance of theirs never degenerates into a simple drag-based covers show. No, a night with Kiki & Herb will always leave you shaky and spent, twitching from laughter and horror and emotional shock.

Last night’s show loosely followed a theme of escaping from the endless grind and put-downs of life. (Very timely, to say the least, and I’m not just talking about this season of Buffy again.) Kiki made a lot of bleak jokes about this being our last weekend ever (“Thank you for spending your last Thursday night ever with Herb and I…What a Memorial Day this is gonna be!”) and they earnestly and ferociously launched into a set pulling together songs and medleys of songs that railed against the ongoing pain and misery of life, and pondering the various ways to escape it: “No More Drama,” “Heroin,” “Walk on the Wild Side,” “Creep,” “Boys Don’t Cry,” “Get and Stay Famous,” and an incredible reading of “Howl.” (And keep in mind, this is all incredibly funny at the same time it’s making you want to slit your own throat in a fit of existential anguish.)

Kiki & Herb are not just a drag act, or a cabaret covers act, or a novelty. They’re fun as all hell, campy and cutting and sloppy, but they’re also musical geniuses, and powerful performers. Every time I’ve seen them there’s something — some element of madness or pain or remorse — thay they suddenly suck you into, just when you’re laughing your hardest, and they manage to remind you that the world is a big, hard, messy place with no easy answers and a lot of confused attempts to find some. But at the same time, you can’t leave unhappy when they come on with an excore medley of Mary J. Blige, Wu Tang Clan, and Destiny’s Child, with some Kate Bush tossed on at the end for a note of weary hope.

Long Nights

I can feel myself stuck in the fog. I know part of this is my body, the chemical soup which will slowly be adjusted by the new ingredients I’ve been adding. Part of it is fatigue, my first chance to sit still and catch my breath without distraction since last weekend.

Part of it is real, though. Most of it, today, is real. All week long I’ve had lots to worry about and think about and do. I’ve had opportunities to be reminded about the things and the people I have that I’m grateful for. I’ve been reminded of some wonderful things that I won’t lose. Even when those reminders were tied with the knowledge of new roles and limitations, they were good, and they left me happy.

Last night and today, though, the loss is really hitting me. The loss of what I hoped for, the loss of what I had (or thought I had), the loss of contact and comfort, the loss of synthesis. Last night and today, I’m realizing how much I’m really being forced to accept. I realize how big the hole is and how sad and disappointed and disappointing I feel. Even if we continue on as such close friends, today I’m feeling the boundaries inherent in that word, and I yearn for what lies beyond them that once seemed in my reach, sometimes even in my grasp.

It really, really, really hurts. And there’s nowhere to hide from it right now.

Big City Dreams

I’ve moved back to a cubicle with a commanding view of midtown, facing northeast from my spot on the 20th floor at 34th and Park. After the dreariness of the last couple of days, it’s nice to take a second and shake the typesetting out of my head by staring off at the East River and the Chrysler Building.

Rooster reminded me of detail from Kurt Vonnegut‘s Jailbird, in which the uppermost room under the spire of the Chrysler Building is the showroom of the American Harp Company. A character sneaks up daily and sits listening to all the harps played in demonstration for customers. It’s kind of magical, capturing the way the spires of buildings like that hold the iconic power that the spires of cathedrals once did.

And then there’s also Vonnegut’s Slapstick, set in the near future, when the King of Michigan rules the area stretching east to the Atlantic and lives in the Empire State Building, in the middle of a largely uninhabited Manhattan transformed into a public park called “Skyscraper National Forest.”

In a more mundane way, Vonnegut’s Timequake reminds me of when I worked by the U.N., blocks away from where he was living at the time. In the book, he talks about how he had a crush on one of the women at the corner Post Office, inspiring him to go into a dusty little stationery store nearby just about every day so he could get envelopes and notepaper to mail off. The little routine seems like a quaint anachronism from an earlier time, except that I went to that store and that Post Office just about every day when I worked in Turtle Bay. I used to stare at the surly, tough women who worked at the P.O. and imagine which had inflamed the desires of that grumpy, frumpy old man.

So many books distill these little parts of the essence I love about New York: Up in the Old Hotel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Low Life, and others. New York has always captivated my imagination so much, and given me such a rush of pride about living here, that I get so excited when I encounter books — fictional or not — that really capture the sense of how I feel about its features and its people and its magic.