TO the FAR-FLUNG VOICE... and OTHERS...

There is nothing like missing a connection that you have been looking forward to, to dash your spirits, or your hopes. Like a visit you have been looking forward to that has to be called off at the last minute. The broken engagement. The phone call you weren't home for.

The Far-Flung Voice is many time zones and many miles away. I have to say that I am nearly as dependent on hearing from him as I am on the Goat. It's different, but similar for all of that. One thing and another has kept me from home or the computer when he was likely to call, and now I am left hanging, wondering what is going on in the soap opera that is his life. We go back a year or so already, so he has been with me since I was posting about Greasetank and Tagame and is still hanging on in the Year of the Goat.

A loyal friend.

And, I guess, my first [and only?] electronic lover. (Not the first guy I fell for in coming out again -- that would be the Pig Demon, whom I bless with every moment of prayer, few and far between as they are these days, and who can use all the prayer he can get, poor man, PA and all...) The FFV is the unnamed correspondent in my divorce. Someone I have never met, may never meet.

Most of all, however, a loyal friend.

So it drives me a little crazy to be so out of touch, so out of synch. His life is in some ways a lot like mine, but runs in the opposite direction. You know the way they say that water goes down the drain in the other direction in the southern hemisphere? (I can't say I noticed it when I was in Oz -- maybe I just couldn't remember how water went down the drain at home -- in any case, with the FFV and me, lots of things are the same, but everything plays out differently.) I divorced because I came out. He is divorced, and now has to come out, and it may happen against his will, and before his time, if he's not careful.

I worry about him.

Well, you all know what a worry-wart I am. People who post things that give me pause, people who don't post anything that gives me pause, people who don't post: they all make me worry. Some day I will grow up and just move beyond this hopeless fussing over things I can't change or help... but I would not advise holding your breath.

Here is the problem: get to know people, get to care about them, and you can forget about sleeping well. And that doesn't even get into the mad regions of my heart and soul that include my feelings for the Goat. He is, one night of fumbling without a clue put out of the running, the 3rd man I have slept with in my life, and I think I am something like the 103rd in his. Our differences of experience and perspective are a constant source of surprise and confusion: he left his marriage right around the time that I was entering mine, so our views of life, gay and straight, are rather...cc different.

Well, here's what I mean to say to all four of you out there in Blogville:

What happens to you is not just your business.
Once you make people care about you, it is their business as well.
And that's where it gets messy.

So, stay in touch.
No need to go overboard about it, just leave a note and move on...
You are all in my thoughts, and in what now passes for my prayers. I would give anything to be a church person again, but I think the time is past, for now. Another @#$%-ing forty years in the wilderness...

Just what I need.

Hang in there.
I do my best, lame as it sometimes seems to me.
But at least I have my Goat, who now complains of not seeing me for a week.
This is the guy who, not so long ago, charitably agreed to see me once a month.
I guess this is progress...
.