SO MUCH FOR FEATHERS...

The problem with hope is, that if you look the facts in the face, it's pretty @#$%-ing hard to hold on to it. Much of the time, it's @#$%-ing impossible. You pull through by holding out for grace, which is that undeserved gift of God that makes life worth living, and which is freely available all around us, if only we will stop straining for it and let it come to us. Me, I've just had my hope of grace whacked with a 2x4.

OK, the Silver Fox is back. Which is a good thing, but a hard thing as well. Because the first words out of his electronic mouth were: my work schedule, blah blah blah, my steady squeeze, blah blah blah, we'll have to work things [i.e., me] in around the edges, blah blah blah. "Thrill of hope," my ass. It's been plucked, gutted, and packaged frozen. What a rude awakening...

So the dream-time is over, and we are back to dealing with the reality that while this guy is incredibly hot and still blows me away just by doing the simplest of things [like eventually answering e-mail], he is committed to a multitude of other things besides me. Before me -- before I even show up on his radar. And while I would gladly give up just about anything should he care to throw me a bone, he is throwing no bones. Not to mention not jumping any bones.

I am so pathetic.

Here's the problem. I can't live on one night a month. At least not on one night a month and the prospect of nothing more in the foreseeable future. That is to say, I'll have to until something better [more... available?] comes along, but I am really in the market for someone who can spend at least some of his time focusing on me. Is that so much to ask?

So it's time to put the Phantom Fox out to pasture.

The Phantom Fox is my idea of the Fox, which has a completely separate life from the Genuine Article. He's actually been part of my life since the fall, when my heart [rotten, traitorous organ that it is] came to a dead stop when the Genuine Article first walked into the room. And he has been my constant companion for the last month, while the Genuine Article was off on the beach. He's the face that has started and ended my day (the face I've been caressing with my cursor every morning and midnight)...

I managed to elaborate the Phantom into a pretty convincing picture, convincing to me, anyway. He became an overpowering if not-quite-real reality in my life, sometimes overwhelming my ability to think straight. Sometimes? Horseshit. Constantly. And his hold managed to survive my subsequent meetings with the Genuine Article, survive my evening in his classroom, when I almost physically threw myself at him and got the world's most mixed signals in reply; it even managed to survive [survive? who am I trying to kid? The Phantom battened and super-changed himself on] my 22 hours of whatever it was... call it "bliss"... with the Genuine Article.

God, it sure felt like it at the time. And probably would again.
If we only didn't have to wait so long...

We're back to the "I'm fucked" mantra, I'm afraid.

A few nights back, I had a beer with a lone visiting bear from the Northwest, who is pulling up stakes and moving to this know-nothing burg with his lover. Neither of them have any family or friends here, neither of them has a job here. But we are close enough to some scenic beauty that got its teeth into them on a recent vacation that they decided to pull up stakes and just move here. Not to Boston, mind you, or Jamaica Plain, which would have made some sense [now why didn't I think of that?], but Nowheresville, MA.

By the end of the second beer, I was aware of several things:

I actually think I land more on the bear side of the bear/leather divide. This Bear was beautiful -- not in a text-book, art-work kind of way, just from the inside out. And I noticed.

OK, so he was mind-blowingly beautiful. It may have something to do with the fact that he's almost twenty years younger than I am -- even his partner (still on the West Coast) is twelve years younger than I am...

OK, so it had a lot to do with the fact that he's under forty. On top of everything else, there's all the added fantasy thrill of cradle-robbing...

I have filed this information away to add to my checklist. It either shows me what I really respond to, or just adds another @#$%-ing layer of possibility.

GREAT. Just what I need: another type of Mr. Right.

I now spend a large part of my time thinking, "If only this guy [or that guy] weren't partnered, I could really see..." If this guy had wanted a recreational roll in the hay, I would not have resisted much.

OK, I admit it, I would have rolled over and played alive. But he didn't. [And why should he?] Why does no one I like ever come on to me? What is the vibe I put out that only attracts people I don't find attractive?

Lessons from the above:

Is there some nasty self-defeating pattern at work here, that only lets me respond to partnered people? This summer, when I had lunch with the guy who left his wife fifteen years ago, he said something about how I would find out what wonderful friends gay men made. [That is certainly true.] I muttered something about the fact that most of the men I had been attracted to were relentlessly straight. And he shot right back with a question that has haunted me since then, at least, whenever my brain does in fact turn over: was I making sure that the guys were unavailable as a strategy to avoid a relationship that might force me to face facts? I don't think so, but it does keep rolling around my brain...

So this partnered thing is also a bummer, even if it isn't a nasty, self-defeating pattern. And even if 3/4 of all gay relationships are "open," who wants to be the "other woman"? Not this little red hen. Not for long, anyway.

We are decidedly in the Slut Phase.

And there's no putting it on anyone else. And here's the thing -- it's not even really about sex at all. Yes, it starts there, but it's what happens after that initial signal gets picked up on my antennae that's completely overpowering. It's that Titanic Girl throwing her weight around; she throws what's left of my mind permanently off-kilter. Some days I am just such a mess of emotional pulls this way and that, that I can't imagine why no one tells me to go away and come back when I can get my act together. I mean, surely at some point my inability to think about anything but finding another heart to hold will become so obvious that I will no longer be able to maintain the fiction that I am holding down two jobs and casting about for spare work...

When did my "skin" and my heart become so closely entwined? I mean, I find there is as good as no difference at all between my responding to someone's looks or stance or story or way of speaking and this emotional free-for-all zone that passes for a blood pump. I mean, I know that it was precisely this combination of attraction and affection that I had always feared, but who knew it had such claws?

About this time last year, when I was wrestling with the eruption of the desires that I had kept under wraps for so long, or rather, failing to wrestle them into anything resembling submission, [ah, submission!] what I said to my poor, long-suffering wife was that if I actually met in the flesh any of these people to whom I was over-reacting on-line, I might just burst into flame.

That is true in its way, but the thing that bursts into flame is this odd symbiotic creature that is partly "skin," the part that is picking up on the outside of people and their [perceived] beauty, and partly "heart," which is responding to what I perceive to be the inside of people. It's just emotional overload, pure and simple [rarely pure, never simple] a completely whacked-out response to even minimal physical attraction.

Talk about thirty years of "control" taking its revenge...

Now I would be the first to admit that love is blind. I have been blind in one way or another for the better part of a year. When it comes to the Silver Fox, for instance, I have been blind, deaf and dumb for some six months. But it's a strange blindness, that certainly sees the outward appearance for what it is, but invests it with all the inward qualities that most speak to me. Whether or not they are really there is another question...

Not that I mean to bash the poor Fox. He has been incredibly generous, gentle, and sweet -- there's just the teeny-weeny problem that he is also completely up-front about how little I can expect from him in the Big Picture. So he's also being honest, where lying would be so easy. Rack up another point for the Fox. Really, I grant him lots of points. Gold stars even... now, if I could just get him to trade some of them in for time together...

Some days I wonder if I shouldn't just stay in bed...
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