COMING OUT PARTY...SORT OF...

Here I am, miles from "home" and close to a number of other things, including my old high school. It occurred to me that I should try to reconnect with some of the people I remembered well, and some of the people I didn't remember so well -- chances are, at least 50 of the people at my high school turned out to be gay. [One guy from my class died of AIDS early on.] So I held a little house-warming. Sort of at the last possible moment: I mean, after you've been somewhere more than three months, you can't really ask people to come warm your house... and I wasn't really in the mood for a Christmas party, which was my other option. Christmas seems as far away now as Easter did six months ago. And Christmas will mean another holiday with an empty house or some other people's over-crowded house...

So I sent out a bunch of invitations, mostly by e-mail, and mostly, it turns out, to people too far away to come. Or too late to get people to come. I got some well-intentioned family members who made quite a trek, a lesbian couple who had invited me to visit them, and who came just as far from the other direction, and a sprinkling of local people. It made me think. Most of the people I know here I have met through the gay social network, and I didn't really see blending them with the high school crowd and the far-flung relations. Just yet. So I didn't try. It was a coming-out party for the people who had known me in a former lifetime. There were a couple of new faces, and I was very grateful to them for coming and leavening what suddenly seemed like a rather sad retrospective party...

Silly me.

Well, there were as many people as the little house would comfortably hold, and, as usual, WAY too much food. This last mostly my own fault, as my theory is that you have to make enough food to feed everyone when you invite them to a potluck -- and then everyone else shows up with food and we all sit there feeling dumb. I had made enough coq au vin for a small army, and salad, and had laid in clementines and potato chips... and only a small regiment actually showed up. This is what comes of the fear of having a dozen people sit around a box of crackers and make forced cheerful small talk while they figure out their exit strategies...

It was a nice lunch, and it was wonderful to see people. Of course, the one person from my high school class who did show up was the Mad Artist, who remembers all kinds of things about me that weren't true then and certainly aren't now, and who proved every bit as argumentative as I am. Well, at least there were other people there to blunt the confrontation. She's allergic to family [starting with her own], and there were just enough of my family there to put her on edge. Yes, it would have been better on the whole if I had not invited her, but how could I not, if I was inviting other classmates -- there aren't that many who still live here. People move on to bigger and better things, or at least to bigger and better cities... And those who did stay have other fish to fry... so many of the people I really wanted to see couldn't make it. It wasn't that I wasn't glad to see the people who came, but the mix I had hoped for didn't really come off. Waited too long, and didn't plan far enough ahead -- two very old problems...

And washing up after everyone had left, I got really depressed. Post-event let-down, I know, but this seemed more enveloping. It was partly that, suspended between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I was suddenly aware of what was headed my way: another holiday, and the great holiday of "the five of us" -- now to be spent with other people's children, whom I will snipe at, basically because they are children, but not mine. And so I was suddenly burningly aware of what I had given up and left behind. I suddenly thought: what if she is right? what if this whole decision was just my depression talking? Well, none of that mattered now. All that mattered were her words: "You blew it." They followed that ghastly moment when my hand-wringing and indecision had gone on long enough to convince her that my desire for some yet-to-be-found man trumped our twenty-seven years together. Which is of course only partly true. But it was true enough to tip the balance.

And here I sit, having traded a love that spoke its name and mine for a chance to try to find someone unattached in something like 3% of the population. [And this is me, who had enough trouble finding his way when he had 50% to consider...] In this burg, that becomes a depressingly small number. Quite aside from the fact that most people my age are either partnered or have good reasons not to be. And quite aside from my apparent broadcasting of a need so great that it drives perfectly well-intentioned people in the other direction, and attracts people with entirely the wrong idea of what that need consists of.

The comedy of errors continues. I was really hopeful when the Bald Mountain suggested that we get together for dinner. I had survived the coffee test; I had now apparently passed the breakfast and dog-run test, so I was feeling pretty good about myself, and our chances for a friendship, at least. Maybe I had not f#$%ed up for a change... but then came his e-mail begging off dinner, without any deadline or end of the postponement in sight. What had I done wrong? Was it the e-mail I sent apologizing for running off at the mouth? Was it really a postponement, or a polite brush-off? A puzzler, and not the kind I'm fond of, either.

And then: I sent a post-holiday greeting to the Silver Fox, and got a very nice note in return which, however, politely but pointedly mentioned how much he had enjoyed the chance to share time on the beach over the holiday with His Partner. Pointedly enough to make even me realize that I had misread this guy from the beginning, as I seem to be misreading everybody. [Where are the reading lessons given? and who gives them? and where do I sign up? Do I just have to keep on blundering until I have walked into enough brick walls to know a brick when I see it coming?]

Between the Professor and the Silver Fox, I am slowly coming to the conclusion that my inner confusion is creating a filter of some kind that distorts and reverses all the signals coming in over the wire. Although it may just be the wires themselves talking: I didn't see my response to the Professor as sexual, let alone a cock-tease act ["cock-tease persona"? me?] because I didn't find him sexually attractive, and it is absolutely true that I probably misread the SF just as completely as the Professor misread me because, as I have said before, my heart stopped when he entered the room. Everything he said was invested with what I wanted to hear, as I assume everything I said to the Professor was invested with what he wanted to hear. Now, of course, I know that the group leader is his partner, and that their time on the beach together is important. But I didn't know it then...

The worst of it all is... well, there are two worst things:

1) I had not realized the extent to which I had begun to count on the attentions, and eventual favors and affection, of the Silver Fox. I thought: surely I could get him to hang on for a while until the Simmering Down is done [and my kids go back to college, around the end of January] and then I would walk into whatever he had to offer because I have to start somewhere...

And that little fantasy, which is obviously what it was, had kept me going for quite a while. But perhaps more to the point,

2) I am beginning to drown in my own longing for affection and attention, which of course I had on tap until my melt-down convinced the "tap" that I no longer cared for her. I suppose that the longing is what people are reading and construing so clearly, if in their own separate ways. Having walked around for years wondering if I were that obvious, I guess I just have to admit that I am that obvious.

God help me.

Here's what I really need: close, supportive friends. Gay or not. And in retrospect, I had so many in the home I have left behind... and I am dying on the vine here for lack of that affectionate chiding and support that was the hallmark of the best of those "relationships."

Well, three months is a short time to despair of ever finding anyone to talk to, let alone to love, in a new place far [or at least far enough] from home. Standing at the sink, I realized that the reason all the facts seemed to be lining up against me was that...

the Black Dog is back with a vengeance, and his bark is nothing compared to his bite. The funny thing is that my medication doesn't remove the depression itself -- it just allows me to recognize it for what it is, usually a couple of hours after it really stops barking and starts biting, or if my luck runs out, a couple of days after it starts to bite. By which point I am ready to hang it all up and throw in the towel. Even while standing at the sink.

I think I have posted my mantra:
"Necessity is called grim for a reason."

The Troll's new coining is his evening prayer. For years I have gone to bed with the publican's prayer ["Lord, have mercy on me a sinner"] and now I add, as a personal aside to my Lord and master: "I lay the mess I have made of my life in your hands; make of it what you will." Because so many nights I have no idea where it can be going, and know only that it is out of my control, and can only live in the hope that it is in someone else's. And in the hope that when morning comes, I will somehow be given the strength to get out of my bed, put on my clothes, make my coffee and hit the road for work.

Because, to tell you the truth, if he's not supplying it, I have no idea where else that strength could come from.

Tomorrow is the first day of Advent. And I will be skipping church to attend a family event far away, or far enough away that I prefer to leave early and come back late and make a full day of it. But the message of Advent is that we join creation in waiting for Him Who Is To Come, who reveals himself day by day, as he was revealed in the manger so long ago. But how many people went to their deaths awaiting his coming and not seeing it -- and how many failed to see it when it happened. He is always coming, always unrecognized, and always suffering to bring us the new life promised for tomorrow. O, let it come soon, and give me eyes to see it and ears to hear it coming.

O come, o come, Emmanuel...

Well, that's enough for one evening.
Write if you get work.