“It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s own taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire- meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface, was all that anyone found meaning in… this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…” ~ Bret Easton Ellis, ‘American Psycho’
Did I mention that things would get dark here this fall? Yes, I did, and I meant it, more than you will ever know. The room darkens as I sit here – the tail end of a day all sadness and sorrow and growing ever dimmer by the minute. Yet I welcome the dark, leaning into it, nudging it gently, like an old familiar friend. Here, by my side, where the dark is the only thing that has never let me down, I find solace, and, as I’ve only been able to glimpse in solitude, a sense of the sublime. How strange and sad that my brushes with the sublime have always been by myself – it would seem to go against the assumed purpose of the world, if we can be so bold as to presume that such purpose is to love and be loved. Therein lies the profound conundrum of my mad existence.
Don’t treat me special, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.
“There wasn’t a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being – flesh, blood, skin, hair – but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn’t figure out why – I couldn’t put my finger on it.” – Bret Easton Ellis, ‘American Psycho’
While there is some trauma surrounding Madonna’s release of ‘Secret’ thirty years ago today, there is also celebration, as in this whirling remix by legendary DJ Junior Vasquez – then Madonna’s premiere remix collaborator (a title he would hold until reportedly pissing her off with that ill-advised ‘If Madonna Calls’ track, wherein he used a recording of her answering machine message to him without her knowledge or approval). Remixes like this primed the club kids in the years leading up to the ‘Ray of Light’ album, and would bridge the dips and troughs of her career; Madonna has always found safety and salvation on the dance floor – see her epic legacy of club hits. As for whether I danced to this in the club when it came out, I must sadly admit that no, it never happened.
I remember obsessing over everything about the ‘Secret’ single – the photograph by Patrick Demarchelier, the artily-crowded font and its soft colors, the little dog that suddenly was part of the Madonna proceedings – and all in eager anticipation of the ‘Bedtime Stories’ album which would follow. That fateful and ill-fated September would go up in flames, and as fall ripened into October and November, Madonna sang of learning to love yourself. What strikes me more and more as the years pass is how absolutely and utterly alone I was during such a pivotal and tender turn of time. Just coming to terms with kissing a man was tumultuous enough – compounded with a reckoning of one’s own assumed sexuality, and being entirely without someone with which to share it or ask questions (that guy wanted nothing to do with educating or helping an 18-year-old gay guy find his way, and no family had a hand in helping either). Being gay was different then, especially if you weren’t out to anyone because you weren’t sure how they would accept it.
Having grown up without any mention of the notion that some men fell in love with other men or some women fell in love with other women, or that it was ok, my own acknowledgement of my sexuality was not something that came easily or with any sort of blueprint. And so I had to forge the way alone, which seems lonelier now that it felt at the time. My ignorance on that point may have proven to be my inadvertent path of survival; not having any sensory memory of how unnecessarily lonely I could have felt may have been my saving grace.
Happiness lies in your own hands
It took me much too long to understand how it could be…
My one constant companion during those days was a journal in which I wrote out my thoughts and ruminations and worries, attempting to figure things out on my own, because no one had ever thought to tell me that it was ok, that it was all right, that nothing was wrong with me. In silence there was doubt. In quiet there was concern. In all the ways I was brought up to be, there was an unsaid condemnation if I strayed but a little off the prescribed path. I didn’t see that then – I simply did as I thought I was supposed to do. That first kiss with a man broke the spell.
It almost broke my heart too, but I survived, living to tell the tale, living to understand how wrong it had all been, living to find the compassion and empathy to forgive myself everything I simply didn’t know yet.
And living to see that it never should have been that way.
After thirty years, I finally see: it never should have been that way.
Don’t we all know some guy in our lives that has done something like this? I know several – one or two right in my own family – and it never ceases to amaze me how small and stupid men can be. Oh I’m sure there are a few women who suffer the same anger management and temper issues, but in my experience it’s only been the men. They are the ones who have to feel superior to something to make up for all the very real inferiority the vast majority of their lives bestows upon them – in this case the perpetrator wanted to punch a bathroom stall wall. Like, whoa, tough guy. Scared of you.
That we don’t call it out because it’s so common is a telling and sad statement on the smallness that some men continue to betray. And that they get away with it because they have moments of tenderness and reason in-between the lashing out is a sad commentary on who the rest of us are. Myself included. There’s more than enough blame to go around.
Worth an almost-campy revisit at this time of the year, ‘The Witches of Eastwick’ was both ahead of and behind its time. Based on John Updike’s novel, it’s never quite clear to me what the author was trying to say, and so I take the witches as characters ready to speak for themselves, and in their words I feel their power and might and something perhaps more than the author ever intended. Personally, I find the movie best viewed with an eye of superficial entertainment – watching Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon and Jack Nicholson volley for their respective spotlights – sometimes quite literally, as in the tennis match – is a sort of cinematic masturbation – and we celebrate all masturbatory elements in these parts.
“The witches had learned from an early age that anger and bitterness were two of the most powerful emotions they had at their disposal.”~ John Updike, ‘The Witches of Eastwick’
Most of the time, I merely watch the early card game/snack/cocktail sequence, which finds the witches gathering on a rainy, lightning-laden night, where they inadvertently summon a fiendish man among talk of town gossip and men. Nabisco and Cheese-whiz surely sponsored the making of this movie, because I almost went out and bought a bottle of Cheese-whiz to recreate Pfeiffer’s mountainous cracker creations. (Relax, I stuck with the Boursin.) Leaning into our worst and most basic preferences, from junk food to pregnancy cravings, hunger of all kinds makes us each a little diabolical.
“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.” ~ Joseph Conrad
Cloaked in shadow or black wool, I place a black Stetson on my head and step into the night. At such times, I realize I have to become my own avenger, to save my own self from the torment of the past. A clove cigarette dangles from the corner of the avenger’s crooked half-smile – it’s my way of reconnecting to the past, to those nights when the remnants of a clove whisper secrets from lips spicy and sweet and just the slightest bit sinister. In the smoke conjured here, there are trails leading to where I need to travel. We fly on those wisps, returning to another time in the same place, and when the smoke dissipates we have arrived.
I will avenge you, little Wonder-Woman-wanna-be, with your gold-sticker stars and your yellow construction paper cuffs and that lasso of truth made of whatever sort of rope was lying around – the one that never worked because nobody ever told you the damn truth, and when they did, it only served to hurt you, never the teller.
I will avenge you, little flower boy, lover of plants and gardens and nature, when your own family is crying out ‘faggot’ so casually and carelessly and not even thinking what it might mean to you, how it was forming the very lack of self-love that would forever haunt and inform your wayward steps.
I will avenge you, magnificent and misunderstood fairy creature, when the world makes fun of what you are wearing, what you are reading, what you are saying and what you are doing. To be so bold as to be only yourself, and to be nothing but punished for it – I will avenge you.
I will speak for you now, for all that you couldn’t and then wouldn’t say, because you deserve to let it all go. You’ve carried it a long way, and it’s time to put it down. Rest, little boy – you’ve been tormented enough. My mantle is warm, my province is night, my work begins as yours comes to an end.
This song almost made it into the summer rotation, but it just wasn’t anywhere near coquette enough for the occasion. It exists, instead, here, in the early fall, when the breeze can still feel like summer, the sun still warms like August, and hope still kindles as if it has some sort of business being here. This is ‘Daytona Sand’ by Orville Peck – and it’s less about the message and lyrics than it is about the atmosphere and music; it makes me want to hastily pack a bag, hop in the car, drive somewhere – anywhere – and fuck all the way off. That’s the current frame of my mind – and it’s not good.
Buddy, we got major blues
Another suitcase in your hand
I hope you brought your walking shoes
‘Cause it’s quite a ways, from what I understand
Something’s not right. I feel it in the agitated way the slightest bothers set me off, how they bring tears to my eyes out of sheer frustration and exasperation. I’m usually good, at this point in my life, about not reaching exasperation; lately that’s been my baseline. If you start out there, it will only and always end badly. That’s where the sirens come in, that’s where blood is spilt, that’s where you cross the lines you can’t uncross.
It’s in the unreasonable annoyance I feel for every small petty setback, every mistake the world makes, and my reactions, blown entirely out of proportion for what is remotely appropriate, are telling me that something is wrong.
I’m not mad, for what it’s worth…
This is something that has been building over the years – all of the years – and it goes back decades. Decades of holding my tongue and holding it all in – and as much as I may have seemed to reveal in these pages, there is simply more that has happened than can ever be put forth here or anywhere. The great burdens of our histories are what we carry with us every day, mostly in silence and quiet, and it’s very difficult to genuinely drop it and let it go. The more evolved and well-adjusted may get it all out as it comes up, wisely letting out steam in little puffs along the way. Those of us who try to be strong or stoic or simply fucking stupid try to keep it bottled up until it passes – knowing full well it will never pass until addressed, acknowledged, and, dream of dreams, reconciled.
So I look back, all the way back, even further back than this photo I found in a trove of photo albums that recently came back into my possession; my mother can’t store them anymore, her home being too filled with my brother’s stuff. They’re mostly pictures of me in my vain years, when I was channeling Norma Desmond and Madonna and playing around with friends who embraced me unconditionally – the friends you turn to when your family refuses to understand. In binders meticulously labeled by month and year, I open the pages and travel back in time, and most of it pales in comparison to how I so vividly remember it. I should probably just burn them – a bonfire of the vanity – or toss a few in the garbage bin every week until they’ve all disappeared: an attempt at eradicating the past, because I’m tired of remembering.
I’m getting tired of this earth
But they say some stones are better left unturned…
‘Dolores Claiborne’ is one of the most under-rated and unappreciated movies, and while it is bleak and dark as fuck, it’s still one of my favorites. Maybe that speaks to something bleak and dark about myself, but whatever. The character of Vera Donovan, portrayed majestically by Judy Parfitt, is the highlight, and when the two leads are Kathy Bates and Jennifer Jason Leigh, that is saying a lot. This mood continues…
“Sometimes, Dolores… sometimes you have to be a high-riding bitch, to survive… Sometimes, being a bitch is all a woman has to hang onto.”
Urushi. Japanese lacquer. An art that has been around for three millennia.
Pause and think of that time – all of that time. Most of us cannot wrap our heads around how long that actually is, while at the same time how short it may be in the entire history of the universe. Minuscule and magnificent all at once. Like a person’s life. When viewed on a macro level, it feels immense. When put into the long history of the world, it doesn’t even register. Even the most mighty among us won’t be here in another thousand years, nor will any memory of who we were. The eternal black.
And so we narrow our focus, refine our view, condense that immensity into something hopefully manageable. We label and organize, whatever it takes to make some semblance of sense, to get some ind of grip on all that we simply cannot understand. The mind can lose itself when not harnessed to the mundane tasks of a day.
That brings us back to the Japanese lacquer, which is also the inspiration for a Tom Ford Private Blend, ‘Black Lacquer’. Both contain multitudes, much like the average human being. The former can put an entire earth on the varnished exterior of a box or bowl; the latter is said to be evocative of vinyl, ink, black pepper, rum, ebony wood, peony, and olibanum ~ the prick of eternity in a drop of perfume.
A gorgeously haunting score by Danny Elfman, a mesmerizing performance by Michelle Pfeiffer, and the transfixing narrative of dramatic transformation, this scene of Catwoman coming into creation was one of the most inspiring turns of cinema in my formative years. I would watch it over and over, aching for my own similar scene of origin amid all the adolescent angst. Somehow I knew part of what was in store for me, sensing then that I’d need this sort of empowerment during a string of bad men.
From her meek secretarial start to the disturbing trauma of unexpected violence, and the ensuing journey that brings her from ‘Hello there’ to ‘Hell here’ – I am most definitely here – here for all of it.
“You poor guys, always confusing your pistols with your privates.”
A treatise on turning to the dark side, finding out what might happen when there are no more fucks to give, and embracing then releasing a feminine energy and female rage that centuries of patriarchy so richly and disastrously deserve. It’s also going to be a reckoning for my own family history, and the revelations it’s taken me 49 years to realize – all that was wrought and how it all came to be, suddenly coming into crystalline and terrifying focus.
When rain drops fall and you feel low Ah, do you ever think it’s useless Do you ever feel like letting go Do you ever sit and do you wonder Will the world ever change And just how long will it take To have it all rearranged
Tell me why these things are still the same Tell me why no one can seem to learn from mistakes
Fear not, brave and courageous readers who have come back for more! This fall won’t be all doom and gloom, for fall has its sultry enchantments and lighter moments of whimsy as well. A linky look back at previous fall entries should allay you of any one-note worries – and everyone knows I would bore myself silly if I were to cloak myself in shrouds of black and not even dip into the jewel tones. This is still the long and winding road that leads to the salvation sometimes found in the holidays. While that salvation feels like a lofty and unattainable goal at the moment, it can’t hurt to try. Well, it can, and it will, but that won’t stop me. Let’s have that look back at other fall entries that started off the season not so long ago…
Fall often begins in light and ends in shadow – a fertile playground for deeper rumination and analysis, but also for leaning into the shorter days, the bracingly-jarring mornings of the first few frosts, the seriousness that ensues now that summer is officially over. Such a difficult time – no one wants summer to end – and so we try to find places of solace and moments of peace to assuage what we might be feeling. A song then, for this moment of desperation.
Take my hand if you don’t know where you’re goin’ I’ll understand, I’ve lost the way myself Oh, don’t take that old road it leads to nowhere We must leave before the clock strikes twelve
So it shall be, and so we shall welcome fall with all her requisite wonder and magic, hoping she won’t treat us too harshly, hoping we can make it through her maelstroms, her obstacles, her storms and her shadows.
It’s so easy to do nothin’ When you’re busy night and day Take a step in one direction And take a step the other way So don’t stop tryin’ when you stumble Don’t give up should you fall Keep on searchin’ for the passway That will lead you through the wall Don’t look back or you’ll be left behind Don’t look back or you will never find peace of mind
“It was not as if I was not myself – oh no, I was myself, I was my other self, the self that wishes to carry on a secret dialogue with all that is evil in human nature. Some men do not struggle with this in themselves. They seem to have a certain grace. They are happy – or rather, they are content. They swing tennis rackets in the sunlight and get the oil checked regularly and laugh when the audience laughs. They accept limits. They are not interested in what might come up from the dark, cold hole of human possibility.” – Colin Harrison
There comes a time in every troubled or unloved boy’s life when he is faced with the choice to become the hero or the villain of his story. It actually happens quite a few times, and such junctures will haunt him throughout his journey into adulthood. They’re not always presented as binary and simple choices, and they rarely result in one final decision that veers him irrevocably into good or evil – instead, they are small and little choices along the path of growing up and then living in the world. If the boy has had a few people who were there at pivotal moments to support him when he needed it most, if he’s known unconditional love and been made to feel like he belonged, he stands a chance at endeavoring upon the hero route.
If there have been moments when he’s found himself alone or without support, if he has made himself different or other to a point where those who were supposed to love him hesitate or pause, or if he has been subject to moments where the bedrock of what should have been unwavering, unconditional love has shifted or cracked or otherwise revealed itself to be possibly transient, he may try out the role of villain. And if that role fits – if he might in fact be skilled at playing any role, perhaps – he may realize that the path of the villain is just the sort of misunderstood and maligned journey he was destined to make.
This fall, after our coquette summer, the theme is fade-to-black, as much a frame of my current state of mind as it is a chic and fashionable option for the cooler season. Tom Ford has just released ‘Black Lacquer’, the Rolling Stones are singing ‘Paint It Black’, and this blog is about to descend into the sort of darkness I’ve protected its readers from in an effort to make things prettier than they ever were. Play our opening theme song below and settle in for how I am setting the scene…
Sometimes, its takes almost half a century before some of us recognize and make sudden sense of the patterns and repeated offenses that have occurred – especially if they have happened within one’s own family. Part of it is because you don’t want to believe it, that your own family would ever do such things, and sometimes you are able to see the patterns, and the traps that everyone has fallen into, and it’s not too late to find ways of forgiveness. Sometimes, you’re just too tired to forgive, too exhausted to care, or you understand that it will be this way forever and there really is no point in fighting it anymore.
This fall, I have no idea what’s going to come up here on this blog. I know I need to share some things that I’ve been holding back for fear it may hurt or upset some people, and if that turns me into a villain, so be it. I’ve felt alone my entire life, and at key moments when I’ve needed people to be there they haven’t been. That might all be in my head, and the only way to make that determination is to put it all out there. Well, here.
That may likely vilify me, and though that has happened countless times in the past, it’s never been something that I have welcomed or wanted, but in the way the universe sometimes works, that which we fight is that which we ultimately become.
“In my experience, men and women who have a kind of brutal fortitude have been made that by a sequence of events, until the person passes beyond a point of no return. They learn that life requires the ability to coldly stand pain of one kind or another… They will do what is necessary to survive; they will conceal and protect their vulnerabilities, except from those who cannot hurt them. Above all, they will press their advantage when it presents itself.” ~ Colin Harrison
Being the villain is actually quite a freeing role. It not only rids one of great, or just basically decent, expectations, it also removes any pesky sense of a morale compass, which far too often only seeks to slow or hinder the difficult decisions we must make on any given day. When you’re the villain, you have nothing left to lose, so the terror of losing nonsense such as being well-liked or loved is automatically removed. There is only one thing that usually scares a villain: loneliness. It’s the one secret they don’t want getting out. A villain does not exist if there isn’t someone more virtuous beside whom to stand. More importantly, a villain is nothing without a victim. And so, the biggest fear of most villains is the loneliness that might leave them without purpose or patrol.
That makes this current state of mind, and everything I’m about to write on this blog for the fall season, doubly diabolical, in that there’s only one thing that has never scared me: loneliness. A villain unafraid to be alone is a villain without redemption. Perhaps it’s been beaten out of him over the years, perhaps they’ve been slowly inflicted in complicated and complex patterns that it takes a lifetime to figure out, or perhaps the simple drudgery of living in a world where the only constant is pain – dull or sharp but always there, never fully eradicated – is finally enough to push him into such a villainous turn.
A warning before we begin: this fall it may appear that I’m throwing one big tantrum on this blog. I’m aware that most people think I throw tantrums all the time, but if you really think about it, that’s not at all true. When a tantrum is the result of years of debilitating family patterns finally coming to light in a way only afforded by time and distance and the repetition of said patterns, it’s not so much a tantrum as a reckoning – and most reckonings happen only when they are absolutely necessary. For my own mental state, for my own emotional well-being, and for the sake of simply telling the truth honestly and openly to free my own guilt and shame, this looks to be a difficult fall.
Yet in such an acknowledgment, and in such freedom as being the villain so wondrously affords, there may be a way out – the only way out – and if we walk through the woods together we may discover that escape.
I’m not promising that. As the world slips and tips ever deeper into madness, maybe being the villain is the safest way to make it through the wilderness. I’ll do what I need to do to protect my heart. If I’ve learned anything in the past few years, it’s that nothing is stable. Nothing is forever. And sometimes letting go is the only way not to lose yourself.
“I thought I recognized in him a certain kind of man, a man who is damaged and yet unflinching. I’ve met a few. Because he has taken pain, such a man knows he can take more. In fact, he expects it; suffering, so far as he sees, is in the order of things, the logic of the universe. Usually such men are hard, even self-punishing workers, capable of long periods of isolation or aloneness, and suffer bouts of crippling melancholy. They refuse to take antidepressants, they refuse to talk too much; instead they wait and wait, with the patience of a cat, for the mood to turn. They drink coffee alone in the morning, they smoke cigarettes on the porch… Such men believe in luck, they watch for signs, and they conduct private rituals that structure their despair and mark their waiting. They are relatively easy to recognize but hard to know, especially during the years when a man is most dangerous to himself, which begins at about age thirty-five, when he starts to tally his losses as well as his wins, and ends at about fifty, when, if he has not destroyed himself, he has learned that the force of time is better caught softly, and in small pieces. Between those points, however, he’d better watch out, better guard against the dangerous journey that beckons to him – the siege, the quest, the grandiosity, the dream. Yes, let me say it again. Quiet men with dreams can be dangerous.” ~ Colin Harrison
