Category: Life

Hopefully for the last time.

We saw the new (old) place yesterday, and after seeing what had been done to the house, it was an absolute no brainer to tell Amanda and James we wanted to move back in. (For those of you who have been following less than 2 years, there was a fire.)

I mean, the moment we walked in—even though the place is still not ready for immediate occupancy—it was like coming home. That's home with the capital "H."

The house has been completely rewired and brought to up to code. The entirety of the A/C system has been replaced. A new heat pump has been placed on the roof (the previous one was on a slab at the back of the house) and new ducting has been installed throughout the house, bringing ducts into rooms that previously had none. The work was done professionally, and is being inspected by the City to make sure everything is up to snuff.

The kitchen as well is being completely refurbished, including new appliances. This weekend James is hip-deep in refinishing all the existing cabinets (which had been pulled out completely to allow for the installation of new drywall and electrical). It makes sense to refinish and reuse these cabinets; they're in great shape, original to the house and made of solid wood.  (Something you're not going to get from IKEA.) They're being finished in a medium forest green color, and they're planning on putting in white quartz countertops…and a dishwasher/disposal! (Neither of which were present in the house previously.) And speaking of IKEA, James and Amanda obviously liked the IKEA under-cabinet lights we'd installed when we lived there, because they're putting in permanent ones now and have replaced the single overhead light fixture with a series of recessed can lights.

We're losing the gas range (with the exception of the water heater that caused this whole fiasco, the house is now all-electric), but Ben, surprisingly, is fine with that.

The color scheme of the house has also been changed. No longer landlord beige throughout, it's a bright white with accent walls in several of the rooms painted a rich blue-gray. It looks good.

They're letting us pick out the new ceiling fans that will be in each room, as well as making a few other recommendations.

The only disappointment is that except for a new floor and a coat of paint—and I assume the refinishing of the vanity cabinet, the bathroom is remaining as it was. One of our requests was a full width, full height mirror over the vanity instead of the 1940s-era medicine cabinet, so that will be done as well.

So when are we moving? James estimated that he will have the place ready by the end of January. I think that's optimistic, but maybe the fact that we're moving back in will be the impetus he needs to get it finished. Since our current lease ends at the end of December, we've notified our current landlord that we'll be exercising the month-to-month option he offered, and we'll be out of here by the end of February.

Moving is going to be a bitch, but I'm more confident now that 2023 might actually be a good year.

…Jesus Christ, when did I get so fucking old? And why does this seem to be my default facial expression for pretty much everything these days?

Never mind. I know the answer to that second one: the last six years.

We all have embarrassing photos.

Twenty years ago, February 2002. Taken at my dad's place where I was staying, shortly after I moved back to Phoenix from San Francisco (for the last time). Pre-cancer, pre-Ben (he had just graduated high school a few months earlier!), pre-blog, pre-cell phones, pre-pretty much everything I am now. I was quite the little porker.

And oh yeah, I had hair.

Time to reboot the Matrix! Who's with me?

For Posterity, Warts and All

Inspired by seeing Joe Orton's obsessive diary keeping as depicted in the film Prick Up Your Ears, I began to record my own life events—both mundane and salacious—from late 1987 until mid 2002.

Lately I've been going through those old journals, attempting to convert them from  their original ancient Word and WordPerfect formats into something readable on today's equipment. Word 2016 won't open any native document prior to the 97-04 format, but Apple's Preview application has no trouble (go figure), allowing a rather painless cut-and-paste into the new format. But nothing I own will open the old WordPerfect documents save for Apple's own TextEdit—which unfortunately also displays all the garbage that WordPerfect threw into those documents in addition to the actual text. It's a very time consuming process to weed that crap out and get it in a usable format. And the very few files that I for some reason password protected—even if was able to recall passwords from 20 years ago—are lost completely.

As I've written about before, the Mark who existed prior to the 2003 cancer diagnosis is very different from the one who came out of that ordeal, and nothing has brought that into sharper focus than going over those old entries.

It's worth noting that while my own obsessive journaling started sputtering out a few months prior, it came to an abrupt end at the time of my diagnosis for two reasons. Firstly, I really didn't want any written record of the thoughts and feelings I was experiencing at the time because I couldn't come up with words to describe any of it without sounding full of self-pity, and I was just not that kind of person—knowing full well even then that I was going to come out of it okay. Secondly, only a few months after completing treatment and on my way to a full recovery, I discovered blogging, and while I couldn't be quite as open and unfettered with my words being published for anyone to see as I could when writing only for myself, blogging did scratch the itch that journaling had ignited.

While I'm not proud of a lot of the things that are recorded in my journals (much of it is embarrassingly cringe-worthy at this point), they do accurately represent one gay man's journey through his thirties while looking for love and living in San Francisco in the late 80s and 90s. In spite of the AIDS specter constantly looming, there was sex; lots of it. There are many names in those journals of men with whom I was obsessed but am now unable to conjure a face for. There were broken hearts and hearts broken.

San Francisco was even then an extremely expensive place to live, and while I generally made enough to get by (if only barely), angst about money was a recurrent theme. (Some things never change, even now.) But there were also reflections on the magic that existed in that city, whether it was catching sight of the fog spilling over Twin Peaks on an August afternoon, or the way the sun glinted off the bay, or the first evening after daylight savings kicked in and you found yourself walking home from work in the crisp dark air, or something as simple as a smile exchanged with a handsome stranger on the train.

My growing love for technology—and the horrific amount of time and money spent acquiring it—is spelled out in excruciating detail. Trips to computer fairs and installing hardware or software are so obsessively documented that I want to reach back in time and slap the shit out of that Mark, telling him to get the fuck away from that glowing screen and go to the beach!

There were also many a rumination about spirituality and attempting to find meaning and my place in the universe; pondering alien life and reincarnation—oftentimes punctuated in the same entry with a description of an unexpected orgasmic encounter with a total stranger in some public venue.

I knew even as I was recording those encounters for posterity that some day, with older and wiser eyes, I'd recoil in horror, and ask, "What were you thinking?! You were such a fucking asshole!" And sure enough, I now find myself doing exactly that. Really, Mark…you're damn lucky you didn't get yourself killed or arrested. ANY NUMBER OF TIMES.

Ah, the innocence of youth.

And yet I am reminded of two quotes from a onetime favorite book, Illusions, the Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, that I always kept in mind when recording my adventures:

"You are lead through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self. Don't turn away from possible futures before you're certain you don't have anything to learn from them."

and

"Live never to be ashamed of anything you do or say is published around the world—even if what is published is not true."

It's been a year since our former landlord—through his own incompetence—burned us out of the home we had lived in since returning from Denver in 2015.

And while today isn't the actual date of the fire, its anniversary will forever be tied to the Sunday after Thanksgiving, regardless of the number on the calendar.

A few weeks ago, acknowledging that the pall of that tragedy was still hanging over my head and robbing me of what little joy this year has afforded, I decided it was time to just let it go.

Let. It. Go. Move on. I was tired of allowing it such power over me.

"Fuck James," still rolls off my lips when confronted with a reminder of what happened (we're still discovering little things missing or that need to be replaced), but not nearly as frequently as it had been.

As I may have mentioned, Ben and I had been talking about moving prior to the fire. There were several things about the house that annoyed both both of us no end, but in the end it was home and perhaps even more than that, the one thing that kept us there was the very reasonable rent ($1300 for a three bedroom house), and the fact that neither one of us could stomach the thought of packing everything up and moving.

As is often the case, the Universe picked up on that and literally lit a fire under our asses.

Our new place has its share of annoyances, and our landlord is a far cry from our previous on the sociability index, but we've finally settled in and think of it as home.

I'd be lying if I said there weren't any scars remaining from a year ago. I still haven't put the aquarium back up, and frankly I may just write off that entire hobby at this point. Last night, thinking back over the number of fish that I—through my incompetence—sent to an early grave over the years still sickens me when I think about it. After 35 years of having an aquarium of one size or another in the bedroom, I miss the quiet gurgling of the air pump at night but I do not miss cleaning the damn things.

Hell, this explains so much of the last five years!

A nurse, who goes by hospice nurse Julie on TikTok, shared two unexplained phenomena that medical professionals see during the death and dying process. Thousands of comments confirmed others have seen this too.

Unsurprisingly, in a culture that often avoids talking about death and dying, people were curious about what Julie had to say. Her two viral videos both received 5.8 million views.

Julie's first video was about something professionals call "The Rally."

"This is when someone is really sick and almost towards actively dying – meaning dying within a few days – and then suddenly they look like they are 'better.'"

She said patients will begin to act like their old selves, talking, eating and maybe even walking again.

"They have a little more of a personality."

"Kind of laughing, talking, joking."

"But then usually they die within a few days after this."

"Sometimes even that night."

This happens to patients so frequently, they will educate families of the phenomenon so they don't feel such a total devastation when their loved one dies suddenly.

For a few people, this reminded them of the character Mark Sloan from Grey's Anatomy.

Others shared their own personal experiences with The Rally and their loved ones.

Apparently, this doesn't just happen to humans.

The second phenomenon didn't have a snappy name, but it happens incredibly frequently.

It's been seven—almost eight—months since the fire.

Things are still not fully back to "normal," and I'm accepting the fact they may never be. Like a celestial body that ventures too close to something possessing a larger gravity well, many aspects of who I was and what interested me got spun off in a totally different direction last November. I like to call this "the new normal."

I am reminded of this whenever I get emails from The Ocean Floor or Funko.

Trauma changes a person. There's no denying that. Some of that unexpected fallout was the want or need for an aquarium; something I've had in my home continuously for the last thirty-five years.

I still have the tank I downsized to a little over a year ago, but it sits empty and unused in a cabinet in the garage and I'm fighting the urge to just chuck it into a dumpster and revel in hearing it smash to bits. Admittedly, it was a mistake for me to downsize to this tank when I did, as even before the fire it had been a pain in the ass that I fussed over more than any other in memory. I also managed to kill off—accidentally—more fish in that tank than I'd done since the late 80s (when I failed to properly rinse a very porous piece of rock I'd bleached to remove the algae that had been growing on it).

The night of the fire, I handed off my fish to my sister (herself an aquarist). I only realized weeks later that I'd missed one fish in the tank, and to this day it haunts me that he was overlooked and died a most ignoble death.

Yeah, I know, it was just a fish. I mean, I eat fish. But it still hurts that I failed him and his brothers who had died a couple weeks prior so utterly.

Since that time, I've had absolutely no desire to get back into the hobby. As I've gotten older, the tanks seem to have gotten heavier (one of the reasons I downsized) and with my newfound apathy toward anything aquarium-related, I can't justify spending a couple hundred dollars on a lightweight plexiglass tank that would be easier to move when I just don't care about it any more.

But never say never.

The same goes for our Funko collection. It's still in a box. Again, no desire to haul it out, buy and mount new IKEA shelves, and put it all on display again, only to have to laboriously dust the little motherfuckers every couple weeks. It's just not important like it was prior to last November. Also, we have no space for the shelves and the figures are now missing most of their stands.

It's a good thing we weren't planning on moving back into the old house, because it still hasn't been fully repaired. Our previous landlord, "Mr. Fix-It" is insisting on doing all the work himself—the hubris that burned us out in the first place.

While we remain good friends with his wife and family, and they would love to have us move back in, that's not happening. I have no desire to have any contact with "Mr. Fix-It" ever again. If he'd hired a licensed contractor from the beginning to do the work I might have been open to it, but as it stands now, that's not only no, but hell to the no!