Category: Life

I realized today that if my first lover—who died in 1991—had immediately reincarnated, he'd now be older than we were when we first met.

I feel old.

I came to the realization this morning that I am a digital hoarder—and I suspect so are a great many other people.

The only reason there aren't intervention shows about it is because the hoarding is virtual and hidden. There are no horrific physical piles of stuff for camera crews to step over; you won't ever be found dead in your home, buried under a pile of roach-infested garbage, but I suspect the problem is just as real.

Why else would companies now regularly be shipping terabyte drives with their new systems?

I came to this realization this morning while trying to clear out my downloads folder. This is where I throw everything from software installers to cat memes and nekkid menz. When I started there were over a thousand items. I'm down to about two hundred and at the point where I just want to do the equivalent of shoving it all in a closet; moving it all into my equally unruly "to be sorted" folder just to get "downloads" cleared out. The irony is that nothing in the "to be sorted" folder ever gets sorted and currently stands at over a thousand items itself.

And don't even get me started on my meticulously curated "Menz" folder. I remember back in 2002 a friend dubbed me "The Porn King of Phoenix" when I had something like 10,000 pictures. Now I've got six times as many and frankly I don't even know why any more. Years ago when I was living in San Francisco I stopped going to the pride parades because I thought, "How many pictures of pretty men do I really need to take?"

I know some of this hoarding comes from blogging. I run across a handsome face or other interesting picture and think, "I'll repost that." Most of the time it happens, but there's a higher probability that it will simply get filed away and forgotten. I fear that if you compare what I've actually posted to what I'll culled off the internet with the intention of reposting we'd both be shocked.

Dare I say it's the same thing as my late father's habit of keeping stuff—and by stuff I mean junk—because as he used to say, "I'll need it someday."

I know without even looking that hundreds of images in my collection that are 800 x 600 pixels in size or smaller could easily be classified as junk now, simply because the resolution is so poor and need to be discarded—regardless of their content.

Time to start weeding.

Yeah, like that's gonna happen.

I'm not going to just throw all the stuff in a closet; I'm going to do the equivalent of buying a storage shed and transfer everything onto an external hard drive. Out of sight, out of mind, but still accessible if I "need it someday."

Denial ain't just a river in Egypt, y'know.

You are not here just to fill space or be a background character in someone else's life.

Consider this: Nothing would be the same if you did not exist. Every place you have ever been and everyone you have ever spoken to would be different without you.

We are all connected, and we are all affected by the decisions and even the existence of those around us.

Yesterday I tweeted:

But today I ran across this:

One of the strangest—and most unexpected—effects of being back in Phoenix is feeling the profound absence of my father. While my mom had passed before we moved to Denver and I still feel her loss, my dad died while we were there, and my involvement with his passing was minimal and long-distance (something that has caused a continued rift between myself and my sister). Being back here now it's smacking me up the side of the head and I have to keep reminding myself that he's no longer just a few minute's drive away as he'd been before we left.

Ironically however, when I look into the mirror I'm seeing more and more of him staring back at me, and perhaps more disturbingly I'm finding more and more of his well-known stubbornness and general temperament rearing itself in my personality; something I'd just as soon do without if truth be told.

When I was younger I didn't look like either of my parents, but as I've aged, his genes are starting to assert themselves. While I don't resemble him completely at this age, there's much more of him showing through than my mom, so hopefully his genes will maintain their supremacy and guard against the onset of Alzheimers that plagued Mom and so many others on her side of the family.

Who wants to come help us unpack?

I am so not good at being sick.

I've never been one to make resolutions for the New Year, but his year I will make an exception as there are concrete steps I can take to bring these resolutions to fruition.

TAKE MORE PHOTOS.

2014 was the first year since I started doing it that I couldn't rustle up enough shots I felt worthy enough to be included in a yearly photo book that I've been sending to a good friend in Phoenix as a holiday gift. Even if you add in my iPhone and Instagram photos I couldn't find enough that I truly liked to make the endeavor worthwhile.

This year will be different.

As I was catching up on all the people I follow in Instagram this morning, I realized I need to get my ass off the couch and get out there and do what I truly love doing.

GET THE FUCK OUT OF DISH.

To that end, I've finally scheduled the test to get my Mac OS X Support Credentials. I'm sensing that—unlike what my boss is undoubtedly counting on; that once I have that cert I'm one more warm body to drop to my knees and service executives and their enormous egos—it will be my Golden Ticket out of that hell hole.

…combined into one image that are forever burned in my memory that sent my 19 year-old imagination to overdrive and launched me on a spiritual journey that lasted for the next 30 years.

Ben and I have suffered through entirely too much death during the past twelve months.

2014 was supposed to be better.

No, seriously.

With the exception of only one or two actual bright spots, the past twelve months have been crap; a festering, pus-filled boil that is finally being lanced and drained with the arrival of the New Year.

It started out with my dad's passing, followed immediately by the arrival of Ben's mother into our home. Her domicile was intended to be only a temporary situation, lasting four to six months.

But yet she's still here.

While the apartment hasn't been completely trashed (I'd seen what she'd done to every previous place she's lived and this is the reason for my reluctance to agree to this in the first place), she has still very much left her mark upon it. (How exactly does one break a toilet seat, or stain black granite countertops?) The woman has far outstayed her welcome and both Ben and I are ready for her to get the fuck out. We delivered her eviction notice just prior to Thanksgiving and endured several days of sub-zero temperatures as a result, confirming my suspicion that she had gotten far too comfortable with the situation and had completely forgotten that this was intended to be only temporary.

No matter. She's on notice and knows in no uncertain terms that her time is up; that she will be out of this apartment by the end of January.

In late summer, after returning from an awesome vacation to Arkansas where we met up with Erik, his husband, and my longtime friend John (who I'd known for years but had never actually met in person), I quit the job I'd held at Stupid Central^© for the previous two years. It was very spur-of-the-moment and done without having anything else lined up beforehand. Yes, my own fault that this contributed to the suck-fest of 2013 and looking back, this may not have been the wisest course of action at the time (at least in such a dramatic and spontaneous fashion), but I've long maintained that if you're miserable at your job, quit and find another one.

By the time mid September rolled around with still no work in sight, Ben and I both wanted—nay, needed—something good from 2013. As our five year anniversary was coming up and coinciding somewhat with a family wedding occurring in Santa Fe, he suggested we pile into his brand new Kia Soul and drive down to the wedding and while there take advantage of New Mexico's recent rulings on same sex marriage to get hitched ourselves.

That was the best part of this entire fucking year.

At the end of October, after having completely drained my savings, maxed out my credit cards, and suffered through nearly three months of depression, anxiety, and horrible, horrible job interviews—I finally started working again, landing a contracting gig for a large Windows 7 rollout project. It was with a company who had the dubious honor of being named the second worst place in America to work, but my experience there thus far hasn't been that bad.

The manager told me that the other techs really like me and they were all kind of surprised when I did not express any interest in applying for the permanent opening in the department. I've been reevaluating that position over the past couple weeks and after much contemplation, I went ahead and submitted my application last week. No, it's not perfect, but as Ben pointed out, is any job ever? I didn't want to go perm at my last job in Phoenix when my contract ended there either, but the manager talked me into it and I ended up staying seven years and made some lifelong friends (including that manager) in the process. So who knows? I figure that at this point it's at least worth putting it out there to see what happens. Que sera, sera, right?

2014 will be better. It has to be.

…you hear a certain song and find yourself thinking, "Gawd, life was so much simpler then."

I have iTunes on shuffle today, and Meco's Empire Strikes Back came on a little while ago. Yeah, you know Meco did the infamous disco Star Wars, but did you know he followed up three years later with Empire as well? No, of course you didn't. It never got the kind of club or air play that Star Wars did. I'm fortunate in that Steve gave me copy for my birthday the year it came out.

It wasn't one of Meco's better works, although it stands up pretty well in more of a jazz-fusion sort of way than outright disco after all these years.

At the risk of running off the rail completely, did you know he also did The Wizard of Oz…released on yellow-brick-road colored vinyl?

Yeah, good times. Wizard  is probably his most straightforward interpretation of all the movie soundtrack stores he attempted to discofy. I actually count the entire album in my Top 100 dance tunes.

But I digress, again.

As I was listening to Empire today, I couldn't help think back to that summer of 1980 when Steve and I were working as messengers for Lewis & Roca in downtown Phoenix. Back then, the worst thing I had to worry about was whether or not the air conditioning in my truck would blow up, leaving me stranded somewhere—and what I was going to wear out dancing on any given Saturday night. We (and most of the rest of the world) were blissfully unaware of the shit storm that was to descend upon the world in the form of AIDS, Ronald Regan, George Bush (Senior and Junior), and Dick Cheney. (The impotent right wing was braying that Jimmy Carter was surely the anti-christ.) MTV wasn't even yet a glint in anyone's eye, and computers still occupied entire rooms. The most high-tech thing I owned was an analog turntable that had digital speed and pitch readouts and was controlled by integrated circuits! CD players were still a couple years out, and having an in-dash cassette player in your car was considered hot stuff.

It kind of makes you pause and consider how much life has changed during the last 30 years.

…among us gay folk that states you can have the perfect relationship, the perfect apartment, or the perfect job. But NEVER all three at once.

At least I have the relationship.

That is all.

It was a very toasty 108℉ in Phoenix on that late spring day when I popped into the world. The sun was in Gemini and the Moon was in rising on the eastern horizon in Libra. I could tell you the position of every other planet as well, but what's the point? I now believe in that stuff as much as I believe that a Jewish community activist rose from the dead 2000 years ago.

While I have no conscious recollection of it, there are plenty of family photos to prove that shortly after my first birthday, my folks and I flew back to Green Bay, where we met up with my mom's side of the family and then drove to my grandparents' home in western Massachusetts where we spent the remainder of the summer. This was to become an every-other-year family tradition (sometimes with my dad, sometimes without) until they relocated to Arizona in the early 1970s.

My earliest memory was noticing the way the light fell from below the drawn window shade on the painted concrete block wall next to my bed while I was supposed to be napping. From this, I can ascertain I was probably less than two years old, because the next oldest memories are of my second birthday. My folks threw a backyard wading-pool party and invited all the neighbor kids (it was a recently built neighborhood full of new families, all part of the baby boom).

The next year, we made the trek to Wisconsin and Massachusetts and moved from our home in Scottsdale to central Phoenix, where we took up residence in an adorable bungalow built in the late 30s located in what was to become 40 years later the very trendy—and very expensive—Willo neighborhood. During our time there however, it was neither. (I remember it being full of working families and retirees who'd probably moved into their homes when they were new.) It was a cute little place with two bedrooms, hardwood floors, a huge back yard with orange trees and a detached garage—and which now possessed a very curious three year old who recently learned how to use a screwdriver and wasted no time in sneaking off to remove the dials from the backyard gas meter. True story! (My mom and recently gone back to work, leaving me in the care of a part-time housekeeper.) Needless to say, it was a miracle I didn't blow the house—and myself—to smithereens that day.

After that little incident, Mom quit her job and I never saw the housekeeper again.

Two years later, just as I was starting kindergarten, I was told there was going to be an addition to the family. My sister was on the way, necessitating yet another move. I was thrilled at the prospect of having a sibling, but not so thrilled at the though of moving away from the friends I'd made in the neighborhood. I hated kindergarten, so that was also a plus, but it meant that I would forever be branded a kindergarten drop out.

Susan was born the following April, and I adored her unconditionally from the moment she appeared in my life.