Sunday night thoughts

 I'm thinking tonight about how we change over time.  A friend gave me a letter I'd written to her 42 years ago, and I was amazed at how full of energy and optimism and sheer joie de vivre it was.  What happened since then?  

Partly, life.  Things have gone wrong; the high hopes I had then have been dashed.  Partly, a growing cynicism about life and mankind.  I was an optimist, then.  Partly just being worn out.  Confectus aetate, the Romans called it--worn out by age.  Loneliness.   I've lost touch with dear friends, and some of them have died.  I miss them.  Making new close friends at my age is hard.   

To me, now, the vibrant enthusiasm for life of me forty years ago seems both tiresome and absurd.  How to regain that youthful liveliness?  Is it possible?  Can I go back to the mental state I enjoyed then?  My body has aged, and I know that can't be reversed.  But my mind and my character remain.  Somehow I must regain the full-on optimism and hope that I had then.  But how?

Saturday Night Thoughts

In a few months I'll be sixty-five, which is all sorts of .... interesting.  I was talking to my best friend from when I was sixteen just now, and we were wondering what happened to our lives.  Fifty years, nearly, have gone by from those days when we were filled with hope and our whole lives lay ahead of us.  We believed passionately that we would make the world a better place, that we would make our mark somehow, that we would have happy lives.  Yet here we are, both of us, just a few months away from being able to go on the old age pension.  Him a widower, me arthritic and in pain.  Both of us much poorer than we'd hoped.   And with so little done.  The world has gone on, indifferently.

I can't say I haven't had a good life.  By comparison with some I've in fact had a wonderful life.  The grief which pressed so heavily on me a few years ago has lifted.  I shan't forget my friend Henrik, or my parents or my father-in-law, but the agonising grief of their deaths has hardened into a scar.  You can call that "healing" if you want.

I still miss my little dogs horribly, though.  Their love was so generous and forgiving, so un-judgemental.  Sometimes I think of them and I find myself weeping.  I wonder that God -- or whoever orders these things -- should acquiesce in such suffering.

Really, I shouldn't  complain.  I have enough to eat, shelter, books and music, a loving family.  I live in a safe country, with a decent welfare system, my health is tolerable.

All the same I still can't get my head around the terrible grief and loss we humans must endure, of how you will suddenly be ambushed by a random memory which leaves you weak with sorrow, of how happiness is always tinged with remembrance.  The other night I dreamt of the little dogs, all asleep on the bed, and was overcome with grief to wake and find it wasn't true.

Bizarrely, despite my grief and memories, I am also sometimes intensely happy. Without reason or logic.  Happy, just because.  I know that if I examine the cause it will flutter off, so I don't.  It's a sort of blind happiness, owing nothing, so far as I can see, to circumstance.  A divine pat, perhaps?

Did my parents suffer this angst too?  And theirs before them?  It seems to be something that the  young don't feel, perhaps because they haven't suffered grief like we oldies have.  Or maybe they do too.  I can't remember it, in myself, when I was young and brash.  But then, the young are so self-centred. Or at least, I was.  Perhaps it is precisely this grief that makes you fully human.  I don't know.  The happy certainties of sixteen have vanished.

Even the old aged pension is an oddly mixed blessing.  It means I'm entering that last stretch of life, the slow curve downwards, the decay.  I find myself forgetting things and wonder, is this it?  Only I can't forget the things I would like to.  God has a sense of humour.  A very black one.

It's bedtime, now.

A la prochaine, mes amis.

Weight and psychology

When I was a lightie, I had a hellish time at school.  I was (am) Asperger-ish/mildly autistic and I was also effeminate.  In the brutal hell of a boy's school that was enough to make me an outsider and enough to provoke continuous bullying.  In one incident, I was partially blinded in one eye.  To this day, fifty years on, I have to dig deep into my reserves of courage to go into a room of male strangers.

I coped by retreating into my own world, and by eating.  Once a week, on Thursday, we drove into town to do the shopping, and we went to the library.  How magical that was!  I was allowed to take out two books.  I would read and re-read them over the next week, and my favourite way to do this was to lie on my bed sipping a cup of cocoa or eating a sandwich or a bowl of peanuts.  It didn't help that I was part of  family that loved food, and my mother would always push us to "clean our plates", so I would dutifully eat more, even though I was full.

I slimmed down in late adolescence and my early twenties, because I was so busy: surfing, mountaineering, walking, riding.  In those days, young people didn't have cars.  We walked everywhere.  For example, I used to take the train to uni, then walk a couple of miles uphill (U.C.T. is on the slopes of Table Mountain).  I used to ride my sister's horse up our street, which was a dirt road, into the nature reserve on the slopes of the mountain.  I would walk to my friend's house, which was a good five miles each way.  In summer, I would swim a mile 3 or 4 times a week.  My waist was a remarkable 28, my chest 38.

But then I got a desk job, and depression, which, to quote Georges Moustaki:

Ell' ne me quitte pas d'un pas Fidèle comme une ombre Elle m'a suivi ça et là Aux quatre coins du monde


                "ne me quittait pas d'un pas".  When I get depressed I eat.  And drink.

So my weight started to rise,  Every so often, I would go on a strict diet, and my weight would fall, but, my psychological need for comfort would eventually have me going back to what I was doing before.  I tried Weight Watchers, and I lost weight, but I was always hungry.  I tried this diet and that, and they all worked.  Temporarily.  I even tried hypnotherapy.

For a while, running and cycling kept my weight under control,  But then all the running I did damaged my knees and ankles,  Today I can't run at all, and can only walk short distances.  On the other hand, I'm not depressed any more.  Often, actually, I am piercingly happy. Despite my joints!

But now I have an incentive to lose weight.  In a year or so, we will be retiring, to a small coastal town in country Victoria.  I'll tell you more about that in another post.  And if I want to walk along the beach every day, then I will have to lose some weight.  The orthopaedic surgeon said that often in cases like mine, losing a lot of weight helps.  And I really do want to be able to walk on the beach every day.  To wear a speedo without looking like a blimp.   So that's what I'm going to try and do.  I have a real goal now.  Retirement, and my happiness when I am retired.

Road sign at Cabbage Tree Creek
Distances in kilometres

Depressed ....

.... about my writing.  Or, actually, about my not writing.  I once really believed that I would always write, that I had to write, that I would be in some sense a writer.  I had no illusions: I knew I wasn't a great writer.  Just competent. But my characters spoke to me.  They were real.

Now they are silent.  I don't know whether it was the whole Henrik thing.  Or whether, being the aspie I am, that I've lost interest because I was always going to.  That it was just another of my obsessions, which as they all do, would pass.

I've just finished reading Richard K Morgan's "The Dark Defiles", and it is a quite remarkably good fantasy.  Very dark, very violent, very accomplished.  My writing is so tame compared with his.  I don't put my characters through the hell he puts his through.  And he's so fecking inventive.  Original.   His world sizzles with originality.   I'm in awe.   I hate him.  How dare he be a success when I am a failure!  :-)

 I've been trying to write Majorca Flats--it's just 20 or 30 episodes from the end--but I despair because they're not at my shoulder as they were, encouraging me to go on, or spread out across my sofas being slutty, or suffering and being happy and living as they used to.   It fascinates me how real my creations are--were--to me.  They were truly in some cases more alive than my real, living friends.  And now they are gone away.

Well, I think I must keep on trying, because once there was this pleasure and satisfaction, almost a lust for writing, for inhabiting the world my characters lived in, a world they created, not I, and perhaps it will come again.  Or maybe not.  What I really want to do is get back to ElvenSword and eviscerate it, to make it a fantasy which grabs you by the balls and the heart and keeps you up till 3 a.m. reading it.  I must make it happen, right?  But how?

Monday morning

My little dog, 14 years ago

It's very cold (2 C) and dark and the beginning of the week.  Today I go to get the referral for the colonoscopy and gastroscopy.  That's where they stick a fibre-optic cable up and down you to look at your colon and your stomach, respectively.  It's horrid, the whole process horrible.  Bleagh.  But at least it's me and I know what's happening.  A much worse thing this week is that I'll be taking my dog down for his last visit to the vet.  He's quite senile now, and he's becoming distressed all the time.  He's been my loyal and loving friend for 16 years, more loyal than so many of my human friends.  He's loved me without judging, he's forgiven me when I've been grumpy.  And now it's time.

I can't bear it.

Off-line

I've been off-line for a month or so, now.  I've been unwell (going for some more tests in 2 weeks' time); depressed; tired.  All that stuff.

Maybe the problem is simple: old age.  I'll be 64 in a few weeks.  And when I say "old age", I mean the way in which life wears us out.  The death of family and friends, of the little dogs we love.  The realisation that no matter how hard you try, ppl are still going to be bigoted and nasty.  The wear and tear of constantly struggling against debts and poverty.  My lady was saying how once we would have bounced back from adversity.  Ah, the resilience of youth!  Now, when things go wrong it's so hard to find the energy to get going again.

Maybe it's that I am unfit.  A desk job; too much wining and dining with clients, not enough exercise (because of sore knees).  On which principle, since I am now swimming 40 lengths (1 km) 3 or 4 times a week, things should improve!  We'll see.  At least I'm losing weight again.

So ... a picture of Venice, a city which fascinates me, which I've never visited, but which I hope to see, one day.

Happy new year to everybody

Here in eastern Oz, only New Zealand in the world  beats us into the new year.

It's been a better year for me than for many years.  The gradual recovery from the Henrik/Jack/Arn disaster proceeded; my job got better; we paid off more debt.  All I need to do now is lose some weight!

To all of you: happy new year.

Aan almal van julle: 'n gelukkige en voorspoedige nuwe jaar

A vous tous: bonne annee

A Ustedes todos: feliz ano nuevo.

Just as I have climbed out of my slough of despond, so I hope you all will be well, will be very well in 2015.  Thanks for following this blog.  Onwards and upwards.

Boxes

For so long I've thought of myself as a gay man who happens to love a woman.  I thought, when I fell in love with my guy all those years ago, that, ergo, I was gay.  That's how it was: there were gays and there were straights and since I'd fallen in love with a man, and had sex with men, I had to go in the gay box.  But over the last few years I've realised that I am attracted to women as well as to men.  I'm not even sure any more whether I'm primarily attracted to men or to women.  I'm attracted to individuals.  To people.  And their gender isn't really relevant any more.

Of course society is still stuck with boxes: the gay box; the straight box; and even, dare we say it; the bisexual box.  But it's stupid.  These labels don't matter.

I haven't been swimming for a week

:-(

Somehow I just haven't had the energy.  Or the inclination.  Sigh.  The the only exercise I'm getting is my walk to and from the station and the office.  That's only about a K each way, but it takes me 20 minutes, because I have to walk so slowly, my knees are so sore.

Ah well.  I'm still alive!

Saturday night thoughts

In The Curse of Chalion (which I will review here one of these days), Bujold says at one point, 'a young woman looking forwards and up not backwards and down'.   It is a characteristic of youth, or at least more fortunate youth, to look forward in the expectation of up.  But surely most ppl my age look back.  And down.

Friends who are gone, for whatever reason.  Failing health.  Things you always thought you would do, but didn't: take the number 1 tram in Budapest, for example; or visit the forests of Washington;  or see Venice; or climb Sneeukop one last time with someone you love.  Things you will now never do.  Failure.  Loss.  The realisation that love is transitory and ... not enough.  The awareness of your own arrogance and folly when you were young and the certainty (given your own experience of life) that you will surely be foolish and  make more mistakes before you die.

The greed and short-sightedness which ignore the inexorable logic of global warming, to postpone as long as possible the necessary and inevitable steps needed to fight it.

Yet such are the ironies of life that your horizons contract as you age, and what you need to make you happy is less.  That is not to say that I don't sometimes find myself staring into the distance filled with melancholy.  Of course I do; life is filled with grief and loss.  Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus.  Yet as you look back and down there are simple, ineffable, pleasures: a bowl of home-made mushroom soup.  Music.  The deep love which grows between partners in a marriage.  Family.  The first hope-filled creamy green spikes of the daffodils, knowing before we do that spring is on the way.  I am very conscious after recent health scares that I may not have much more time here.  Yet I am happy.  How odd.

Saturday night thoughts

By Amy Gutman, from Annex Galleries

Alcohol affects different people differently.  Some have said that it allows the real you to show, so if you become violent, it's because you are violent, really, and alcohol has just removed your inhibitions.  If you are a morose drunk, that is the real you, they say.  If depressed and lachrymose, well, you're just letting your hair down.

For the last many months I haven't been drinking.  My body just kept sending too many signals to me that it was bad for me.  But it was good for my spirit.  It made me happy, usually, and (but only occasionally) melancholy sometimes.

It's been a beautiful spring day, today, but I've had a headache all day.  I seem to have a headache every Saturday.  Maybe it's a reaction to my workweek.  I don't know.  Even now, at 8.30 on Saturday evening, I'm still headachey.

Of course, we never have visitors any more, except on red letter days, our children.  And we seldom go out at night--too tired, too poor.

And my mild depression makes me unable to write.  So I will be watching Miss Marple, and drinking a mug of warm soy milk, and hobbling on my stick to and from the kitchen.  When did I become an old man?

Anyway, gentle readers, môre is nog 'n dag.  Tomorrow is another day.

Happiness

Last Friday, just before I went into the swimming baths to have my swim I was suddenly, intensely, inexplicably happy.  The years of regret for lost love, the betrayal and indifference of so-called friends:  all seemed irrelevant.  I was filled with joy.

When I came out from the baths, I was much less joyful.  I'd done something to my knee.  No idea what but I could barely walk.  Only, of course, I had to walk.  From the car to the station.  Along an endless platform at Southern Cross station.  From the station to the office.  And then, to crown it all, on Thursday and Friday, I had to go on business to Sydney.  And you know how much walking there is in airports.  Kilometre-long passageways, aerobridges, queues for taxis ....

So this morning, Saturday in Oz, I'm assembling all my threadbare philosophy to be joyful again.  And later on, I'm off to the chemist (pharmacist to Americans) to rent a walking stick.

Resentment

Someone I know has just admitted that he is a millionaire, after being a poor student only a few years ago  He's handsome, manly, nice, and loved by his family.  And I am filled with resentment.  For I have to count every dollar.  We need a wood heater in our house and I can't afford one.  I work in a job where I'm paid half of nothing, I'm very far from handsome.  I am not manly.  And I'm not nice.

Resentment is so ... shabby.  Unattractive.  Mean.  I should not feel it.  I should be happy for him.  After all, his prosperity doesn't harm me.  His luck doesn't mean that I'm unlucky.  It's just the way it is, right?  I'm unlucky, and he is not.  And, anyway,  he's worked hard to get where he is now.  But what I realised is that perhaps, underneath my resentment, fueling it, is a trace of dislike.  After all, I don't feel much personal resentment towards Rupert Murdoch.  I mean, I don't care for him or his politics.  But I don't resent his wealth or influence.  I don't know him.  He's a cartoonish figure somewhere far away.  And so, the reason I resent my friend is more personal.  I'm angry, somewhere in me, at him, and I have transferred this anger and dislike onto his achievements.   Rather pathetic, really.

As I said, I'm not a nice person.  And I think as I get older, I get less nice.  That's rather dispiriting, neh?

Wish

From all blindness of heart, from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness, Good Lord, deliver us.

Sick. Again.

A dreary cold and bronchitis.  I haven't felt well for months.  Meh.  That's old age, right?

Anyway, as a result, no Majorca Flats, no other posts, nada.  (I'm learning Spanish! No es facil hablar esta lengua!)

Anyway, maybe after a good night's sleep I'll feel better ....

Majorca Flats -- 151

“You probably wondered about how I could afford the clothes I wear,” began Luigi. “Well, maybe you didn't. But I can afford these clothes and I own my flat and I have investments. I don't have to work. I do though, for charity. I work at the gay helpline, and for an AIDS charity. And I can because I have the money.

I was a … let's be honest … a whore for a while. A high class whore. Like there's any difference, really. Between high class and low class.” He avoided their eyes.

“Yeah, big dayil,” said Keith, his accent strong again, “I was too, mate. So fuckin' what? I was on the strayits for a whoile. There's nothin' fuckin' immoral about it whatever those happy clappy religious drongoes say. Nuthin'. I gave payple pleasure. For twenty minutes. They gave me money. No harm done!”

“You've got to remember, Keith, I was brought up strictly Catholic. No sex before marriage, gay sex an abomination, even pulling your wire against God.” Luigi smiled grimly.

“Yeah! Bullshit! Maynwhoile the fuckin' priests are diddling the altar boys.”

“Not our priest! Cold as ice he was. Anyway, I was at a gay pub, The Lord Grey, as it happens, and an old bloke came up to talk to me. When I say old, I mean old. He offered me money if I would have sex with him. He wanted me to fuck him, 'cos he couldn't get it up. Being old and all.”

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Majorca Flats Episodes 1 to 10           Majorca Flats Episodes 71 to 80
Majorca Flats Episodes 11 to 20         Majorca Flats Episodes 81 to 90
Majorca Flats Episodes 21 to 30         Majorca Flats Episodes 91 to 100
Majorca Flats Episodes 31 to 40         Majorca Flats Episodes 101 to 110
Majorca Flats Episodes 41 to 50         Majorca Flats Episodes 111 to 120   
Majorca Flats Episodes 51 to 60         Majorca Flats Episodes 121 to 130
Majorca Flats Episodes 61 to 70

Warm beach evening

This image makes me think of happy evenings spent at the beach, long ago.  Friends, conversation, laughter, companionship, and threaded through it all (for we were young) the tantalising hint of sexual attraction and desire. 

The model is Benjamin Godfre.  He has a lovely body, but that's not the only reason why I selected this image.  I love the look on his face and I love the fact that he's nude under his boardies. 

Sometimes I feel such regret for the loss of that time of innocence, where there were (for us) no mortgages, no careers (just jobs), no binding commitments to others.  We were friends together, and sometimes lovers, and we took care not to hurt each other.  We believed we were free. Of course, we weren't.   

Time to settle down.  Perhaps the saddest words an older person can say to someone young.  Yet true words, all the same.  I wouldn't change the one I love for anything.  But it would be wonderful to sometimes set aside my responsibilities and be as free as I was then.

The land of lost content.

Car Blues

My car has finally died.  Two years or so ago, the garage advised us that if something went seriously wrong with the car it was not worth fixing.  I thought it would last till June or July of that year.  Instead it has continued working till now. 

So I've been walking to the station (20 minutes for someone as confectus aetate as me, carrying a heavy laptop) and half an hour down to the village.  My knees ache and my ankles ache and my hips ache from all this walking.  I know, it helps me lose weight.  And yes, I know, exercise is good for you.  But when you can hear the bones grinding in your knees, it's not so good, neh?  Anyway, we've decided to get another car next week.  Not a new one (do I look as if I'm made of money?) but one that's only 8 years old instead of 16.

Sic vita est.   Not many months ago we made the last payment on the other car.  Oh well. 

Mustn't grumble.

Darl

Darl.  That's Ozzie for 'darling'. I've had a whole series of thoughts arising from this article, about perceptions and stereotypes and how we gay-shaded blokes like to think we're unjudgemental and unprejudiced. About how being constantly put down by others eventually breaks your spirit. But it's going to take me ages to write, so.... tomorrow, or the next day. Meantime, consider why firemen, tradies, policemen, cowboys and leather men are considered sexy by so many gay blokes. Why is the story of a straight man turning gay is so compelling (and such a Nifty trope?) Why is "slash" such a popular genre? Why do so many gays advertise for "straight-acting" men in the gay dating smalls?

I'll give you my answers soon. Meanwhile I'll share with you some pics of hot tradies, from a nationwide competition to choose the sexiest tradie. Frankly, these blokes'd be hot even if they weren't tradies. But something about khaki trousers and sweaty torsos. . . .

May-September Relationships

Love and friendship between older and younger guys is considered not quite the thing. If, say, a 50 year-old falls in love with a 30 year-old, the hidden assumptions of everybody including perhaps even the men concerned, are that it's an unnatural relationship. It can't last. The older guy is regarded as a bit pathetic, because after all he's unattractive, and shouldn't really be having sex anyway. The younger one is regarded as a loser -- what's wrong with him, that he doesn't find someone robust and of his own age to have sex with? I know this is so because I've experienced it. Faint contempt, mockery, raised eyebrows. Of course, we mock it with het relationships too. Rich old men marrying busty twenty year-olds. We smile dryly. We know what she wants, we think to ourselves. And it isn't him.

The implicit assumption is that sex is the only point of the relationship. That the younger partner is giving sex and the older paying for it. Sugar daddy. Says it all, doesn't it?

Sometimes there is much more to a relationship than the merely physical, the merely sexual. Sometimes love transcends barriers, and two people connect, even though they're not supposed to. Even if there's 20 years age gap between them. Today I mourn my friend who died roughly two years ago, and who, though he was much younger than me, came to be my best and closest friend. Our souls connected -- even though he was 20 years younger than me. I miss him. Vale frater et amice.