Do like the wind does the rain cloud
Carry me places afar
Or settle me down in your hometown
I’ve got to be where you are
Don’t you ever leave me (don’t you go away)
Unless you wanna grieve me (forever and a day)
Take me where you go
It’s been a series of vignettes.
I’ve surprised myself that I fulfilled the joke that I would turn this stage of my life into a work of art. I kinda have, even if it just lives as a journal for the masses to ignore online. Perhaps this all turns into, if I remember the dialogue well enough, a script or a play. If the payoff isn’t gonna be personal, maybe there’s still an opportunity to profit? It’s the biggest satisfaction that I have right now. I’m living out what seems not to be the climax yet. I’m happy that we’re gonna be wrapping this episode up soon enough tho.
I can’t say that this interim in-between the seeming death rattle of my life in California and this still yearning to be born life in Philadelphia is complete. It isn’t. I still in all formality hold an Oakland address and California bills. I can’t fully luxuriate in the possibilities or joy just yet. I’m at times surprised how much it physically hurts to be torn between the California dream turned Updikian nightmare while trying to settle into the most tender of embraces in the city of brotherly love.
I can’t fully say that what I’m feeling or experiencing in Philadelphia is healing quite yet. I’ve joked about my feelings being up for commentary and clowning as my ‘Philadelphia Daily Roast.’ I feel a bit of pressure to ‘toughen up’ and roll with some very accurate, stunningly painful punches. There’s a lot more at the surface because I’ve made it too much of a habit to wear my heart on my sleeve like a misplaced brooch. Sometimes the tears were glittery enough to catch the eyes of others. Costume jewelry works wonders when you’re a broke bitch.
I cracked open my heart a little bit last night only to be slapped with the obvious. As I walked into a piano bar, I noticed lyrics and chords familiar. I had to assume life was truly bullshitting me. It was also nearly 9pm and the earlier roast of the day wasn’t the reason I looked delightfully tender and tasty after some warm day toasting. I didn’t bother to even look to get a good grasp of what aged theater queen was belting me in the face without my hearts consent to be pulled out for observation with:
The morning fog may chill the air, I don’t care
My love waits there in San Francisco
Above the blue and windy sea
When I come home to you, San Francisco
Your golden sun will shine for me
Sometimes you hate how accurate emojis are.
I still am running my tongue over all of my teeth to make sure they’re still there in my mouth. There’s other voids deep within I have learned to live with. There are the ones this big change will force me to live with permanently. I could name them, but I prefer not to besides knowing myself.
I’m pretending I’m making peace with it. I just can’t leave any other gaping voids that don’t have the muscle memory to retract back to form once the tool has done the proper excavation of potential secrets and thrills. I swore I lost a tooth or 3 to that hook out of left field. My mouth is sore but its been held shut most of the time.
I pour a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar into my mouth and somewhat caustically retort that Philadelphia is a ‘Scorpio’ after all. I’m not sure I’m allowed to bite back as I’m turned into some comic cosmic feast for an audience. The stars and the ancestors have this planned for me or some shit. This is a ride that I half heartedly endorsed buckling up for. It’s titillating for sure. It’s been two weeks of moments which make me slightly nervous.
I’m choosing to settle in another city chartered during the season that stings open the partition. There’s sparkles in the soil. The photos developed show the erotic blooms of purple and pink and the never ending joke about the ‘cum trees.’ For whatever reason (okay, I love cum) I don’t mind the perfume of those trees. If I have a little bit of cannabis in my system, I outright envy them and the primal fragrance they’re giving off. Everything is a slightly dirty joke not exactly whispered in my ear. It isn’t crassly shouted over the noise either. Photos not developed yet will show those ‘Rites of Spring’ settling into luxuriant blankets of green trees as this all rolls along.
I don’t know if you can hear in these photos the birdsong and the relative peace despite literal millions of people swarming around me. I’m far more aroused by this landscape but haven’t found just the appropriate times, rhythms and places to put that good energy to use. I guess that’s why I’m so set on staying. I guess I’m still trying to write a love story through images in hopes someone, anyone, out west will understand my why if they’d just look.
I worry about holding on too those that welcomed me, encouraged me to give this a city in a state a shot too strongly. I want to take the upspoken unsprung weight off of them. Surely, I’m melting from being the ice queen I’ve cast myself to be. I hope that makes me less heavy that I’ve been in the past. There’s perhaps too much hope that I turn into steam vapor that blends in their nostrils so I don’t have to worry about being my own water as life source. I’ve welcomed the heat to give me at least a glow of moisture; a mere semblance of delightful, pleasured sultriness.
The wound between the material reality we live with and the great unknown somehow has greater control over existence than we like to believe. I’m struggling to let go of my concepts of control. I’m not as loose as I’d hoped I be. I thought it would be a little easier for those seeking entry inside of me. I remain uptight because I thought I was going to make this the most meticulous masterpiece of my life.
I’ve mostly fumbled and stumbled as the tactics of sustaining yourself in a beastly existence disappear as soon as you enter a bigger arena. I’m overconfident because I’ve spent my life slaying smaller beasts. When it comes to media influence however, I’ve done a good job of not paying attention to what’s beyond my control.
I thank the roasting, the humor and processing the surprise hurt feelings for that. I don’t have much of anywhere to hide here. There’s nowhere near the veneer I’m able to cast out west. Granted, I’m working with maybe 30% of my tools. Gracie sits in the long term parking garage in SFO. I tried burning off most of the gas in her tank. I’m neurotically concerned with what happens with clearly more ethanol ‘enriched’ gas sitting in a vintage tank. I have nightmares of the deteriorating old rubber and metal. Remembrance is too keen about the last time I let a Corvair sit for nearly a month. I’m not trying to leave the Bay behind in a cloud of oil drippings and blue smoke.
I’m behind on promised love letters.
I use the excuse of business and the time difference to be slow to respond to text messages. I wonder if I’m slowly weaning people off of having me be a part of their daily existence. There’s more I could say, but every conversation from the west seems to be about work. How did I become nursemaid to everyone’s anxieties around participation in capitalism?
I wonder if they notice that I’m sincerely pretending to care.
I could be more honest. All people do, or know me for, is work in the Bay Area. There’s a core reason why as I grasped my own flesh I felt my hands pass through me as if I were a ghost. There isn’t really a me unless I’m flanked there. Beyond that there’s nothing much more to me to these people other than some trinkets of ephemera and hope that I’d dutifully suffer alongside them. I sincerely wish I never had to ‘work’ again in my life. I don’t understand why the rest of the world does. I’ve cried the least amount of tears per hour in the last 3 weeks than I have the 18 months that proceeded it.
I don’t have the wealth to persevere over the natural rhythms of existence in this world. I’m warned time and time again to garage Gracie when I get here because she’ll rust. She’s got rust already. Time will tell if I’ll have the time and resources to continue to bring her back to as close to her first day of life in Philadelphia. I’d rather just be driving her here. I’d rather be figuring out if this very old car still is viable in this very old city. I drive a series of bland decade old midsized sedans over these surprisingly hilly North Philly streets now. I have a hard time placing them in lanes because of the numbness of their power steering.
My mind drifts off mid traffic thinking of what it will be like to be in something lighter, nimbler, older and frankly more dangerous. The hills are steep where I want to be. What happens when I do have to grocery shop downhill in the snow? Her tires are fresh I could get new drum shoes. I’m not sure I’m looking at being reunited with what I love from before this moment as an opportunity for preservation. Mild continual repair to keep on trucking has been the game so far. There’s too much death in this world right now, quite fucking literally. I can’t image trying to hold status quo, even if that means forgoing fully restoring my beloved car. It is a car after all, they’re subject to life spans themselves.
There’s what I need to go back for in 10 days. There’s nothing quite yet built in Philadelphia. I perhaps foolishly ignored that this almost-month was a gift I could give myself to feel things out instead of explicitly set up house. The days have given me opportunity to understand, feel far deeper why I’m doing this. Just when I thought I was finished, there’s a lot more than an extra suitcase of winter clothes from previous seasons that I want to put to the test under harsher environmental conditions season after season.
Day 14 provided a double down back to back roast via Tik Tok reels uploaded by elder millennials to instagram. The match singed the edges of my intimacy life as I hone in on parts of Northwest Philly. Mt. Airy, Germantown and East Falls prompted a comedic routine filmed from perhaps another bland mid sized sedan but more likely crossover parked somewhere on a street I’ve strolled or driven down in the last week. Just like the abundance of those derided cum trees, the video chuckled while clocking the proliferation of interracial couples in all three neighborhoods.
There’s a burning underneath knowing that such relationships often are signs of gentrification in quaint but neglected neighborhoods all over the imperial west. I purposely hid all of my previous white boyfriends in the white neighborhoods they ‘belonged’ to. I realize that there’s a host of aged hipster troupes I’m crash(out) landing in Philadelphia with. I am showing up with a head of steam of finances, an assurance I’ll find a job during a Civil War and a vintage Chevrolet packed to the gills with LPs. There’s something painfully ironic in the embrace of white adjacency that I truly, honestly am that I’m about to do in a city that still can claim at least 40% of its citizens are “Black or of African Descent.”
I thought I was moving here to gain some greater access to some credibility based on my skin tone. The closer and closer I get, the more reconciliation happens between who I was trained to be and who I’ve actually become. I’ve had to be honest about where I fit in the world. I’ll always fit in the in-between of polarities. I see it in the desires I spike. I find comfort in neighborhoods that literally hold the role of being crossroads.
That meme was shared in some knowing. I’m afraid that I’m about to be the biggest stereotype I’ve been in my life. I’m being told to laugh at myself. I’m being told to yield to what makes you smile. So what if it is weird and often white? You say you’re a queer. There’s like a huge inventory of white queers and white queers-to-be. I shouldn’t be afraid to take care of some basic needs in this society. The first Saturday night out was a complete confession. Who I paid attention to and the fact that there’s documented evidence of such made such an assessment of my being too true.
This will happen whether there’s a former attachment or a doubtful newly one developed once I’ve somewhat nested. I’ll be honest that I’d rather pack up my preferred Bay Area Babe and attempt to start fresh somewhere new. Trust me, no one in their right mind would rather be in their mid 40’s and actively dating.
The dating pool of queers have brains fried with a mixture of multiple COVID infections, non productive Sniffies hookups after weathering nearly 20 years of location based apps and too many seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race. I cringe while accepting the fact that no one expects, or even hopes, that I’ll be partnering with someone Black at this point. Most want to see me ‘happy’ and I have to be honest that I’m not even sure what that feels like consistently yet.
“We’re like a stamp and a letter
Addressed to a love life for two
If the stamp didn’t take it then the letter couldn’t make it
So I’m gonna stick with you…”
I’ve been told that I’m more or less being too picky, not organic and not fast enough in making decisions, whether that’s a honk of a horn at a stoplight or what job am I gonna take to, well, how soon am I actually giving up on everything in Oakland and getting on with the show. I keep saying, beyond Gracie, there’s records, books, film negatives, a few more clothes, a special lamp that I want to bring with me. It’s not gonna take me long to complete the physical process. I haven’t been fully honest that I want someone to actually hold my hand in the emotional process.
This is a big choice.
“I think you’re probably one of the best survivors I know when it comes to approaching different life and work situations.”
I’ve only said to one person that I’m just trying to escape the sadness I already know. I’m making peace with the fact that I might still be sad, depressed, wherever I’ll be because the conditions towards my ideals are not clear. I’ve always made it work even when I was precariously close to almost death. I hope I’m allowed to confess that I’m tired. I want to wail. Do I get to confess that I enviously watch others throw massive tantrums while I sort everything neatly and keep it pushing? I know few understand that they’re witnessing a walking, talking, breathing paradox embodied as flesh and blood.
I find myself torn. There’s two men that made me feel I ‘mattered’ the most are at the core of this crossroads. They were the most prominent in my life in these years that I have been in-between the most significant realms of life and death. I’m honestly addressing it now because man, there’s only so much elephant shit in the corner you can ignore.
I honestly can’t believe y’all are complaining about ‘cum trees’ in comparison.
Both have done great jobs in taking me where they go in life. They both seem happy when I find the way to be a travel companion of theirs. Sometimes its only a couple of blocks. More often it’s a walk through a beautiful park and the best hugs of all time. I still want one of those adventures to be Butt Mountain up by Shasta someday.
I guess I’m loyal to a fault. There’s the core of why its so painful. I understand why some pets just run away rather than facing the separation that death presents to those they love and who loves them. One told me that it was, and it is, possible to roll on cobblestone streets on coil springs cast over 60 years ago regardless of the season. There was loving evidence shown time and time again of the possibility.
A Pontiac Grand Prix resplendent in white shown to a larger audience was followed by a sky blue ‘66 Special dying to be a Skylark directly, personally to me. A first generation Javelin escaped the quickest draw of a shutter I could produce this past Sunday. I wonder what vision surrounded in white vinyl I was imagined to be to hope I’d always be nearby in this life. I wonder if I’ll finally get the chance to plan the route to something delightfully ordinary or prosaic, or something indeed worth a trip to REI or a reason to gas up.
(the car… for a long drive?)
(the grille? for some chicken?)
I shatter at the fact that this might mean the other one that cooked one of my top 5 favorite meals will be a thing of the past. He made his own browning. He knew to use allspice. He slapped my hand away to put it in the oven to keep it crispy, just as I would when he would threaten the crumble of my crust on a fruit pie. We were indeed fussy and I loved every minute of it. I belatedly noticed he saved the biggest, closest-to-perfect Beef Patty he made for me while looking at the photos I took, that rich earthy sweetness still dancing on my tongue.
We’re both perfectionists that know perfection is not possible.
We foolishly have tried over and over again for our respective separate perfected states. I hope this move is the biggest crack in the facade I’ve held all my life. I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again that the only perfected state is death. I see way too many failed attempts at perfection on the individual level with one I love to hold out hope. I have a litany of attempts that match. I wish he understood how far he went to make something sensational, memorable, out of humility and ambition. I wish he’d remember how happy we both were and would try again.
But I can’t tell a grow ass anyone what to fucking do.
Granted, so many people seem to have permission to tell me what the fuck to do.
Do I want to be here?
Yes. Absolutely. Philadelphia is actually dreamy in a way I’m not gonna make you understand. If you get it, you’ll ‘see’ it. It is sincerely too late to turn back now. I’m also quite the radioactive byproduct where I hail from. I too often provide a nuclear truth to the illusions that’s the grand mirage of California. I’m glad that others here recognize, for all of its sun, it’s a very very cold place.
I wish it were already done.
I wish it weren’t a series of intricate decisions like, how am I navigating healthcare given my heart condition? That decidedly makes the matter of securing work pertinent because, well, there’s no true hope for Medicare-for-all at this point. I have no clue what any of the rest of you are hoping for at this point. I wonder what is sanity, what is neurotypical, if I have to still be just a transplanted version of who I already am in a technically strange land. I’ll have to rise at 6am to be in an office at 9am and then sardine crush on transit or sit in traffic with hopes that I’ll have a satisfying evening before life is consumed again for another day in this endless rat race.
I thought one solution for housing was fine until I got a loving reminder to pump the brakes. I’m not sure how my body will tolerate the humidity day in and day out if I’m in a top floor attic apartment with no air conditioning. I sit on couch in the temporary top floor suite of a similar converted West Mt. Airy Victorian as I swim in my emotions. I’m sweaty but in a delightfully carnal mood.
I want to give a go at afternoon delight when my body is this swampy. Maybe some deep fulfillment will need less artificial moisturizing to make the gliding gleeful. I think its obvious that I love damp moisture by the fact that I’ve used the A/C in those mundane sedans minimally. I like showing up to evenings with mildy tossled hair from driving on a humid day with the windows down.
The emotional ride that has been the last 7 months or 3 or all my life quieted down as soon as I decoupled from being too much of a front seat to the most still functioning as Bay Area bourgeoise queers I know in Philadelphia. I figured out pretty cleanly I find Roxbourough and Manayunk kinda creepy. I have questions about the people that actively choose that section of Philadelphia now. That’s not the Philadelphia existence I want, despite how picturesque the neighborhood looks as it rises on hills and cliffs over the river. It’s also too damn relentlessly white.
There’s been a hint at the house next door that now isn’t vacant. Weirdly, like whack-a-mole, the house across the street just went for sale. It’s so fresh that I can’t even find a listing for the house on the realtor’s website. I’m sure this isn’t Brigadoon. I’ve been here multiple times at different times on the calendar. This is a real place, with real possibility and real desire to keep my close, to hold me safe. I just want it to be already instead of lingering in the interim for 6 more weeks if not even more.
You could be a prince or a pauper
Or a shoemaker working with leather
We could live in a palace or a hut (so what?)
As long as we’re together
Don’t you ever leave me (don’t you go away)
Unless you wanna grieve me (forever and a day)
Take me where you go
Maybe my ambitions for what I desire are too big. Maybe they’re just right. One of the most beautiful songs you’ve never heard is Sheila Ferguson’s “Little Red Riding Hood.” She recorded it somewhere in Philadelphia as 1964 gave way to 1965. I’m not shopping between bears like Goldilocks but the bear hugs have me hooked.
I want to rush into not being rushed. There’s the desire to linger a little longer in the sensation that I’m a kid in a candy store. If you somehow feel, even incrementally the same way, I hope we’re encouraging each other to feel the same way. I still, despite reality, want the perfect fit. There’s certain things that taste right. There’s pairings that just work well together.
Pistachio and Cherry with Chocolate should be something, should your allergies permit, that you should try.
I’m going to try out, fail, and try again in rapid succession. I hope if I start really hurting others, that they’ll be brave enough to tell me to stop before I destroy everything. We’re perhaps all at the brink of disaster but we know better. We’ve felt better than the seepage of sadness that filters up to reality from the not exactly subconscious.
Take one bite.
Chew, savor, let the juices roll all over your tongue. Enjoy the first berries of spring that’ll give away to the melons and stone fruits of summer. There’s apples and pears beyond that before we seek the sweet warmth between us in winter again.
I’ll love you for all seasons.
Let’s pray that we’ll always have seasons.
