Friday, October 27, 2006

CLOCKED...
and CLOCKED AGAIN...

My friend "Joe" [everyone's favorite alias] must have been a matchmaker in a former lifetime. Not only has he [very sweetly] told me about other men in the area in my situation, he has passed on their contact information, and I am beginning to meet some of them: a teacher at my long-ago high school among them. [He of the Nights on Bald Mountain.] Anyway, the other night Joe made a point of asking me to come back to the Coming Out support group which I had been neglecting of late.

He had a friend from his home town, not too far away but closer to the now-defunct military base that fueled a lot of the area's prosperity in the cold war; "Jay" had been wading through his separation and coming out and the chicanery imposed on him by those who might have been thought to have loved him best completely alone. So, Joe finally insisted he come over and meet some other gay men who were not cruising (Jay had accompanied Joe to the last gay bar standing in the area on a Saturday night, and had been pretty much completely creeped out). We were a tiny little group without much in common
, and we were meant to be considerably less threatening. And I think we were, all things considered, even though one of us was a six-foot southerner in full leather gear... A visiting fireman from Raleigh, NC...

I had to leave early to get to another meeting [two gay men and a lesbian mud-wrestling with a computer in her tiny walk-way-up apartment], and I had carefully laid that out so that no one would think I was reacting to any particular piece of the conversation. I had no sooner closed the door and started to put on my jacket than Jay came barreling out after me and asked if we could trade contact numbers. I have no problem with that, though I do hope this is not another tar-baby situation for me; I have already had my fill of fending off people who would make great friends but who clearly have other things on their minds. But I guess to some extent that is the price of coming out, and I had better get used to it and its corollary [that there will be people who would rather not know about MY feelings] -- or develop a thicker skin, or just get older quicker. [That one, I suppose, is going to take care of itself... I have spent a fair amount of time over the last fifty years mugging in the mirror, and when I practiced my fear grin the other day I saw some things that made me think twice about [a] aging in general and [b] mirrors in particular.]

Not to mention silly habits left over from childhood...

Last month, I was driving in to work after spending the night at one of my far-flung houses of hospitality, and the teeniest bit worried about getting there late, when I drove by a couple of signs without paying the least attention to them and straight into the arms of a state trooper. Well, not as I might wish -- a month or three from now -- but into his sights and blue lights. I looked down at the speedometer, and while it was true that I was in the left-hand lane [nearly always a bad idea] and traveling five miles an hour over the limit, I wasn't driving any faster than anyone else, so I couldn't quite believe that it was me he was after when he pulled out of his little perch between the lanes and barreled up behind us all, lights flashing. But I decided to err on the side of caution [and how I wish I had done that earlier!] and pulled over with enough space behind me for his cruiser. Always looking to get points for consideration, if not for good behavior, your correspondent.

Well, it turned out that in spite of addressing him as "sir," and generally being the Good Citizen from my point of view, I had really pissed him off by not pulling over immediately. As if I was meant to know that driving five miles an hour in the left lane was a cite-able offense. Well, guess what. It turns out it was: the signs I had ignored, because I had been driving by them off and on for a good part of my life, and almost daily since September, announced a ten-mile-per-hour drop in the speed limit. So I was going fifteen miles an hour over the speed limit, and he was in no mood to settle for giving me a warning. That cost me almost $150 and a series of marks on my license that will not go away for seven years -- and who knows how they will affect my transfer of licensure [should I have looked that one up?] to the Flatlands? I chalked it up to experience; actually, I seriously considered fighting it in court, as the cops rarely if ever show for a contested ticket, but then I realized that I had in fact been speeding, so what was the point? Then I chalked it up to experience, although it cost me most of what I had earned that week. Ouch.

On my normal way into town to work the other day, which is a surface road, but a major one with lots of morning traffic, I noticed a strapping guy with a buzz cut by the side of the road. Imagine my surprise when the next thing that registered was that he was one of a group of strapping guys with buzz cuts by the side of the road. And all dressed in a rather becoming shade of dark blue, and all standing in a rather provocative spread-leg stance, arms lifted at muscle-making angles. The hands at the ends of those arms held videocameras and other devices, pointed straight at the oncoming traffic, including me.

Straight at me. Maybe I'm paranoid, but it seemed that they were paying more attention to me than I needed, and it seemed that they panned on me past their station to... catch my license plate? And which lane was I in? you guessed it. Not because I was in a hurry, or because I was driving any faster than anyone else -- as far as I could tell -- but because I had a left turn coming up, up ahead. But then I glanced down at my speedometer, which I
never do when driving; I almost always tune myself to the flow on the road, and pass to keep my field of vision clear -- yes, I have really speeded to get by trucks, for example. But it took me several hours to shake the feeling that I would be getting a love-note from that guy in blue, and that it would be a tar-baby of its own peculiar and unpleasant sort. How many points before they take your license away? How many points before the Commonwealth lifts its skirts and refuses me the honor of its photo-bearing plastic? This is obviously my next thing to research at work when I should be...

Mud-wrestling with the computer. In case I haven't said so before: I loathe and despise Microsoft. I would renounce it and all its works if it hadn't wormed its tentacles into every workplace in America; as it is, my fear and loathing of it has driven me into the arms of the feckless [WordPerfect], the equally evil but not quite as pervasive [Adobe], and the possibly soon to be as evil [Google]. Now, if I were smart, I would convert to Appledom and leave it all behind. I could have saved a ton of money if I had done so years ago, but at that point I had something like a thousand dollars tied up in PC software, and it seemed an unnecessary expense to start over. Well, now I am in much deeper and am even more "sot" in my ways than I was then, so I may just be stuck.
Talk about tar-babies.


Anyway, the office wrestling match was with the inexplicable things that MS-Word does when formatting things that ought to be quick and easy. My suspicion is that they are all things triggered by some Microsoft tool to make things easy for people who don't have a clue about type or layout, but it makes things nearly impossible for folks who actually know what they want and what they want it to look like. There are days when I would pay cash money to be back in the land of DOS. I spent all morning trying to set up a mail merge to print three inserts for a fund-raising mailing on a single page. It should be so easy. HA! I guess if I had been schooled in the arcana of the Office Suite instead of just coming at it to do what I need done, I would know what I had done that made it suddenly jump and re-format and shed entire sections at the drop of key. But who would I have to hate? I suppose it does work out this way... on some level. Well, I got them done, and at least I [think I] can use the file as a template for the next set...

Last night I was scouring the same three spots on the web for new mail or comments -- it's amazing how often you can bring yourself to go back just to check whether anyone has checked in since you were there, especially if you are feeling a little mopy and abandoned. So I started browsing through my Stat Counter, pulled up the map and noticed a hit from Almaty, Kazakhstan. Well, as you can imagine, I was interested, but of course it turned out to be another one of those poor people I had been making jokes about, who Google "Francois Sagat" and wind up here, and who are, I am sure, then quite literally at Sea. I suppose I did know, in my heart of hearts, that leatherbound churchmen are probably few and far between in the former Soviet republics, so it didn't come as a COMPLETE surprise. But it is still a little sad, isn't it?

This morning, I had another laugh attack; does anyone remember my summertime praise of Augusten Burroughs for making me laugh out loud? Don't get me wrong, I still love him, and wish he would publish something new sooner rather than later, but it turns out you don't need compulsive drugged-out scribblers when you have your own blog and its tracking system [i.e., when you are one yourself]. I am going to have to pace myself carefully, though, to spread out the enjoyment: I have just had my first hits from Italy [looking for Greasetank, of course] and from Trinidad and Tobago [first, as far as I know; the great tragedy in my Bloglife is the loss or lack of information from March to October]. In other late-breaking news, Bear Stearns has been joined by Goldman Sachs, as the University of Utah has been joined by the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and UCLA's Institute for Advanced Studies [of what, Francois Sagat? you can just imagine the graduate seminars...]. Oh, and I have a new theory: Mr X. of Snohomish, WA, who has been checking in almost every day, showed up almost exactly when Mr. X of Bothell, WA disappeared. Hmmm.

My good friend Mr. Bigg chimed in the other day with the comment that I was sounding more cheerful. Well, all I can say is: it's just because it's that or going all weepy 24/7. Even when I'm not sure that there will never be anyone I'm even remotely interested in who will ever be remotely interested in me [and that on the off chance that there might be, that we will then turn out to be incompatible in either the bedroom or in conversation...] -- when I'm not sure that my life is doomed to be a complete mess -- I am struggling with a sense of inner and outer isolation that makes it impossible for me to reach out. [Anyone hear a circle coming on? The Sid Vicious Memorial Circle? or find the missing negative in that endless sentence?] And sometimes the empty half of the bed is more than I can bear. Or the empty seats at the dining room table. THREE MONTHS [and a week] and I'm a basket case. This does not bode well. BUT... it's cheerful or suicidal, and I'll try cheerful any day of the week.

Wouldn't you?

I'm off to the Frozen North again later today with a load of empty bookboxes to refill. Actually, this afternoon I am just clearing some of the existing pile of full boxes into the car and dropping the empties off so that come Sunday I can wade in and start packing again. God, I hope I finish this some day. It really wears me down. But it's good practice for clearing my books out of the house; my guess is that it's another fifty at least. And my spouse assures me that she has just chanced to be gone the last couple of times I was there; she claims not to consider me a plague case after all. I was beginning to wonder. I can be thankful that I am not in Jay's shoes: his wife is still on the warpath over two years after he left, still stopping by to leave things on his front porch with nasty notes attached and bad-mouthing him in public places, most recently at an event where he was even present. You just need to count your blessings. I do try to remember that, though there is no way I could count, really: they are too many. Now, doesn't that sound cheerful?

The good news: of the umpty-odd cheesy bookcases I bought from Staples, only one was demolished in shipping. The bad news: I will now have to go try to get them to replace it, a month after it arrived and I checked off on the shipment as "undamaged." Oops.

Hang in there.
And if you can pray, pray for me.
I seem to be rusted shut in that department.
Maybe I should say: "Oilcan."

2 comments:

  1. Well cheerful is good for whatever reason!
    Troll, I hope you won't hold this against me, but I think you might just need to go out and get laid. No commitments, no considerations about the future, just the very best lay you can get for the evening.
    After all, you are a free man now, and sex is good for you PROVIDED YOU'RE SAFE. I'm willing to bet that it could allow a ray of sunshine into your day...
    Please understand, I'm not saying that you should make a habit of it, or become a bar fixture, or any of that negative stuff. I'm just saying... you've suffered so much just for being who you are. Shouldn't you get a little joy out of it, too?

    ReplyDelete
  2. ToughGuy@Treetrunk.Com:

    Yes, cheerful is good. Beyond that, I feel a post coming on...

    ReplyDelete