The Test

When I was a fifth-grader, I sat in Ms Jill’s science class laughing hysterically one day. She had just brought up a topic I’d never even heard of before. HIV. What a silly disease it sounded like when I was 10. I laughed at the idea of people sharing dirty syringes at hospitals, or being stupid enough to put two open wounds in contact. HIV was for idiots, I thought. And it wasn’t just me, all of us little know-it-all fifth-graders walked out of our science class joking about how so and so was HIV+ for scraping their knee playing basketball and using the someone else’s shower.

Of course, at the time, Ms Jill wasn’t at liberty to say that people could get it by loving one another.

That information came later on, from multiple sources. I remember, when I lived in Egypt, how I thought it was a foreign disease, affecting those poor African people south of the Sahara, and those reckless homosexuals in Europe and North America.

Boy was I wrong. By the age of 18 I’d already had two near misses. One Egyptian guy, and one Lebanese. With the former, I’d taken him and his friend home with me one night after a long party, and the three of us fucked like rabbits till 9am. I’d run out rubber, but that wasn’t going to stop the mad teenager within. With the latter, I’d dated him for 3 months, and we’d only fucked without a condom once. In both cases I was extremely lucky (if you can call yourself that for sleeping with someone who’s HIV+ without a condom) – they contacted me roughly 3 months after we’d done the deed and told me they were positive. I was lucky in the sense that they told me after any incubation period for the virus (6 weeks) had lapsed, which meant I could go get an HIV test right away and the results would cover the period when we’d slept together. Had they told me any sooner I would have been in the horrible situation of having to wait for my sentencing until the 6 weeks were over. I was lucky in another sense – in both cases I came out negative.

Since then I’ve been getting regular check ups, roughly every 6 months. It is probably one of the most terrifying things on my bi-annual calendar. Your mind races through the faces, the bodies, the nights you’ve spent, the mistakes you’ve made. You wonder why God punishes man’s most basic and primal instinct. In your mind you see all the faces of all those children in sub-Saharan Africa who were born with it, and you wonder if you will have something in common with them after all. But worst of all you think about those people you know who have it, and what their lives have become. Drug addiction, recklessness, super-infection. A fist-full of pills every morning, a face both tired and pulled from the medication. Wandering eyes looking around at all the forbidden fruit. Self-loathing.

Of course, not everyone reacts to it that way. There have been people who have refused to let it dominate their life, their identity and have been leading extraordinary and fulfilling lives. But that takes strength of character, and you don’t get that very often in gay men.

So when my sexual health clinic texted me my blood report this morning with an all-clear, I said a silent prayer for all those that haven’t been so lucky, may the Creator be with them in every step and comfort their broken hearts.

How to get the partner of your dreams (but only if you care to look)

What makes irony so amusing is the symmetry it produces. We see something as ironic when we realize that, in its subtleties, the truth has somehow reflected itself to produce 2 sides of the same coin.

 

Take, for instance, modern individualism. Today it’s all about me. And you. And him, and her. Separate islands with few bridges. We have literally fought wars and sprung revolutions for the sake of individuality and personal liberty. Yet, when you look at the entirety of our civilizations as they stand today, no fact is more apparent than our helpless Dependency. On finding the right person, on the ideology that without such person life is meaningless or unfulfilled.

 

Consider the countless books, poems, blogs (like this one), movies, songs ad infinitum all geared to play on your Dependency. Billboards and banners surround us in every direction designed to speak only to your genitalia, and you can’t even buy a coffee maker without George Clooney’s face beaming at you from behind it. Despite our delusions of self-grandeur and our millennia of philosophy and civilization, we are predictable and dull creatures.

 

As much as I struggle with the thought, and despite many an attempt by a bed-mate to convince me otherwise, I am human. I am, therefore, by default, predictable and dull. I want to find the right partner, but lately I feel like this is more what I am expected to want than the reality. Nevertheless, with this apathy I’ve gained perspective, and my experience and beliefs have provided me with a lesson that I might as well try and share:

 

How to find Mr/Ms Right

1. Know what you want

 

Nothing is more tragic then seeing people running around like headless chickens latching on to the first half-decent thing that gets thrown their way. I’ve had my fair share of  relationship “hunter-gatherer” days, scavenging bars, dating websites, and even the occasional cooking class for Prince Charming. Not my most glorious moments.

 

If you remember from your history books, hunter-gatherers ended their volatile, nomadic lifestyle with the agricultural revolution. Instead of scavenging like a pack of hyenas, man (having discovered the purpose of a seed) began to settle down and decide on what it was they wished to grow. Their land brought many returns and the fruit was always bountiful. Subsistence farming cradles all human civilization. So what can we learn from that?

 

Like the first farmers, the first step is always knowing what it is you want. No, don’t pull out that pencil and paper and make a checklist for your perfect man. (“Dear Diary, My Prince Charming will be blonde, 6ft 3, with a French accent and a flower tattooed on his right butt-cheek”) You are limiting your world that way and setting yourself up for failure. Instead, as you fall asleep one night, close your eyes and imagine what it is that you may look for in someone that will make you feel secure, loved, and wanting to be the best version of your own self for them. Make a mental note of that feeling, of that desire, and of the kind of person that is going to share with you all that.

 

Dating without knowing what it is you want is like trying to buy a bottle of “red wine” in Napa. Sure, you will derive random and inconsistent benefits from winging it and just picking the first winery on the hill, but if you know before hand that nothing enlivens your taste-buds like a Cabernet-Merlot from Clos Pegase then that’s where true satisfaction lies.

 

Once you know what it is you are looking for, and believe  you me it is harder than you think , you will be ready for (the final) stage:

 

2. Know that you will get what you want

This is the most difficult, yet in some ways the most obvious. Man’s biggest error is in thinking that his circumstances are beyond his control. “Oh if only I was thinner/smarter/richer/hotter, I would get what I want sooo easily,” wistfully sighs the single being.  What’s wrong with this sentence? One thing – doubt. For example:

 

A) If you aspire to be thinner/smarter/richer/hotter, then you have to realize that what separates you from achieving your goal is the doubt that you ever will get there. On some level you doubt your ability to succeed, to make the right sacrifices, to push forward and have what you want. For if you know and, and I mean you really are certain, that you will be thinner/smarter/richer/hotter, almost as if it is your god-given right, then your energy will align itself and your ambition will match what it is that your subconscious mind has planted into the world.

 

B) No amount of fat, stupidity, nor poverty at this point in time can stop you from meeting the “right person” that you have imagined. If you doubt this for a second think of all the times you’ve run into the most bizarre creatures, only to discover they are dating someone that can slow down the pace of time with one bat from their irresistible eye-lashes. What has this bizarre creature done to deserve this fountain of beauty? I’m sure there are multiple layers to any such relationship, but fundamentally, he or she has inner confidence and strength, certainty in their ability to succeed and thinking of “happily ever after” as a question of “when” not “if”.

 

***

I am aware that all the above takes quite a bit of philosophical fortitude. The lesson above needs to be internalized, not just read. If you believe in the lesson, then you will believe in the outcomes it promises. Did I ever mention that “M” stands for Moses?

 

Well, Moses can’t get past level 1 at the moment. His experience with relationships and lovers has confused him– what is he looking for in someone? But just because Moses is lagging behind doesn’t mean you have to, too. Run ahead, my younglings, and carpe diem.

 

Happy farming.

 

M

Poem from the Underground

Earth in beauty dressed
Awaits returning spring.
All true love must die,
Alter the best
Into some lesser thing.
Prove that I lie.

Such body lovers have,
Such exacting breath,
That they touch or sigh.
Every touch they give,
Love is nearer death.
Prove that I lie.

W.B. Yeats

Porcelain

“Thank you for coming to meet me, baby.” JS looked at me and his eyes were dancing with tears.

 

I had just gotten into the car, the rush hour bustle of Sloane Square and the icy wind still evident in my demeanor. I put my phone and umbrella to one side and looked at him, calming down, “You’re welcome honey, you know I’d do anything for you,” I hinted. It didn’t work. After a few second of him avoiding eye contact, I finally asked, “What’s wrong? I left work an hour early just to see you before you have to go to your dinner.”

 

He looked at me again and the twinkling tears now formed steady streams. My heart stung. JS was emotional but this was a lot even for him. I put one hand on his cheek and wiped off some of the moisture. “What’s wrong honey?”

 

His big, brown eyes looked at me with anguish. “I’m moving to Chicago in a month.” The words came out of his mouth slowly, as if each letter coming out of his mouth were carrying an unfathomable burden.

 

I felt my eyes blur for a millisecond as my thoughts registered. “You found a job? Honey, that's GREAT!”

 

Yes, this was the emotion I was supposed to feel, joy. His long and treacherous 14 months of unemployment have taken their toll on him, on me, on everyone in our vicinity. But now here we are, a month away from the day he puts his days in London behind him. Puts me behind him.

 

The strangeness of the situation must be commented on. JS and I are not together. We haven’t been for almost 2 years. Yet we know that in the 3 years we spent with one another the bond we formed was unusual. He knows me like no one else, and I like to think the opposite is true. In the time we’ve spent apart we’ve both dated, with varying degrees of success, and given other people a real opportunity to make their own marks on our lives. But on those nights when we sit in front of the TV with a bottle of wine, our tongues would betray our pride and admit to one another that nobody has even come close to what we had.

 

“I’m so happy for you,” I said, honestly, but my voice was overcome with confusion. I couldn’t imagine him not living down the street from me. I couldn’t imagine church on Saturday, or my favorite restaurant, the River Café, without him. He is part of the very fabric of my life here.

 

Luckily, I’m not blessed with the gift of tears, or emotional manifestations in general, so I looked him right in the eye as he softly whimpered. “You should be happy.”

 

“I am. I just can’t imagine leaving you behind,” he stammered. That makes two of us. Maybe it was the healthiest thing. I sat in the passenger seat, immobile and waited him out, wiping his tears with my thumb every few seconds. “Come on, I’ll take you home,” he said.

 

The car moved smoothly through Holbein Place, down to Pimlico Square and up Buckingham Palace Road. He held on to my hand the whole way. I looked out the window but saw nothing but my faint reflection in the glass.

 

Outside my building door, his grip tightened around my hand. I looked at him and he’d stopped crying. There was a new determination in his face. He leaned over and put his head against my shoulder. I rested my head against the chair and closed my eyes.

 

Seconds later he lifted his head and, in slow motion, moved his lips to my ears. He whispered something softly. A smile slowly formed on my face as the words kept flowing. Nothing ever made more sense. I looked at him and held his beautiful face between my palms. “Of course.”

Six Acre Meadow

Ophelia – John Millais

When the Pre-Raphaelites, including Millais, brought their revolution to the world of 19 century art, their message appeared desperate:

Enough with the broad brushes; rid us of the bold strokes, the clean lines and the sanitized art that Raphael forced upon the European Renaissance. The masterpiece is evidenced in its flaws… inconsistency breeds realism… and the world is nothing but the assembly of countless minute brush strokes.

Sometimes it's difficult to contain such grand philosophy to painting technique and not let it run free in our minds.

Seratonin

Beyond all wrong-doing
and all right-doing
is a field.
I will meet you there.

- Jalaludin Al-Rumi



What is “sin” for a mystic like Rumi? For anyone who takes it upon themselves to pursue spiritual enlightenment in ways that disregard and often offend religious dogma?

Sin is whatever distracts one from the path of edification. Accordingly, it is impossible to pinpoint what sin is prior to identifying where this path lies. I have many times gone through life like a zombie, satisfying my body without really trying to take that satisfaction and turn it into an energy that can transform my life.

But, what if sin leads to an awakening or an epiphany of sorts? Does that not make it part of the path? Who unleashed the snake Satan into the garden of Eden? Was it not God? Adam and Eve were destined to fail, and so are we. But, one hopes, failure is part of the process.

I am a sinner, and my sins are many. I have hurt, but mostly myself, and as a result the need for change has not been immense. I say, the only sins that remain so are the ones you have not learned anything from.

--------

I danced my heart out on Saturday. My body swayed and thrusted to the heavy bass and crisp vocals of Lady Gaga as she opened her Monster Ball with the words “Silicone. Saline. Poison…Inject me”. It was all I could do not to collapse from exhaustion, from my severely low levels of seratonin, and it took a few Irish coffees for me to be even standing meters away from her gyrating body under the dome of the O2.

Rewind, it’s Thursday.


By 8pm I was feeling a little anxious. Going out in London on Fridays and Saturdays can be unpalatable. The city is crawling with out-of-town drunken revelers and mad locals alike. Understanding this, and since both Jared and Rodrigo were visiting from NY and Rio respectively, we decided we’d take them out whilst the city is still in good shape. I blamed my anxiousness on the fact that I had a lot of work the next day and didn’t want to stay out too late. But perhaps I should have rethought the guest list in light of this glaring fact.

Most of us 'pre-gamed’ at my place. This is where the madness begins, and as of late the magnitude has been steadily rising. The bottles of Belvedere and Goldwasser came out, but so did the neat packs of cocaine and mephodrome. Drugs have always been around. They always will be. The same can be said for the social stigma surrounding them, for which I care very little. What concerns me, above all else, is my safety. Knowing very well that I am a sinner, I draw a balance between enjoyment and cautiousness, one that I have maintained very well.

But, that night, I began to loose track of how many lines I’d had. Maybe it was my exhaustion, or the need for escape from some of the harsh realities that surrounded me at the time, but I did not stop. At 3am, on the dancefloor with some of my girlfriends from high-school who have been equally indulging, I was on a plane I’d never been before. My confidence was extreme, my awareness heightened. In a moment, I saw him from the corner of my eye, the person I would drag to my cave tonight and consume like a lion ravaging a zebra. I wasted no time in walking up to him and, as I approached him, I realized that I already knew him (Derek). I’d always been interested, but he’d been dating someone up until recently. He saw me coming and beamed a smile. I wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

Back at my place the pace was slow and intense. We both kept doing lines as our hearts raced and eyes took in the vibrant colors. We had sex for hours, sex of an intensity and sensuality I have very rarely experienced. The cocaine delayed our orgasms for at least an hour at a time, allowing us to make the most of every single touch. When we were finished, the sun had come up, for the first time in weeks, there were no clouds smothering it. That’s when I remembered work.

-----

“Silicone! Saline! Poison…Inject me baby!” Gaga hollered at the sea of people and flashing cameras. I had survived the Friday at work, productively even, but more than ever I felt like a monster. I had no intention of seeing Derek again, though he had consistently called me since that out-of-body experience in the first hours of Friday. I wasn’t going to call because I  felt like a cheap, coked-up stereotype, and all he would do is remind me of this. When did I become this person? Serial sex, extreme indulgence, leaving people hanging in tandem after I promised them the world?

I have sinned. But it remains to be seen whether this sin will be a lesson that justifies all harm or another evening under-rug-swept, eating away at my soul.

Return of a Roundhead

When I first started this blog, I wanted it to be a place where I can lay out events and thoughts in their most raw and exposed form – a sort of therapy, so that maybe one day when I read through posts of periods past I could detect a pattern, good or bad being irrelevant, but perhaps enlightening. Over the years I feel to an extent that I’ve lost that, and fell into the trap of turning this into a Perez Hilton meets Carrie Bradshaw. In other words, dull and pseudo-thoughtful.

 

Now there’s little guarantee that those words don’t actually describe me. But at the very least, going forward, I’m going to resist the pressures of conformity and write as openly as I can. Some of what’s to come may, therefore, be disturbing. As this is generally an anonymous blog, I care little about judgment, however for those of you who know me, consider yourself on a license to view, I plead.

Gaijin

Defiantly, I held my boarding pass and passport in one hand and my carry-on goodie bag (complete with iPod, books, sleeping pills, motion sickness sniffer, eye-mask, moisturiser and a forest of Reese's) in the other, all the while thinking about the 10 days of absolute isolation and estrangement that were to come and save me from two months of cosmic battery.

And "just like that" (i.e. 14 fucking hours later), I was sitting on the Narita Express heading to "downtown" Tokyo. In that smooth gliding train-car, I remembered why I had travelled this far alone. I watched this foreign world go by in high-definition and, looking around me at all the signs, words and even objects that I could not even begin to understand, the excitement started to rumble in my chest. I was, finally, alone and free. I had flipped the coin, and very well. I went from information overload, over-communication, over-exposure and disarray to silence, reclusiveness and Japanese efficiency. Nobody spoke English. My phone had run out of batteries and I refused to charge it for the duration of my stay. My computer was snuggled on my couch in London. What bliss, I was ready for my adventure.

And indeed, I spent 10 days roaming the claustrophobic island between bullet trains, Zen temples nestled in mountains, and one of the most energetic cities I have every visited.

Tokyo's intensity was a shock. There is no "downtown" Tokyo because all of it is super-urban and super-crowded. Every corner is a Times Square, a Piccadilly Circus. Lights blaze down on you from every inch of every building. People move like schools of fish in spectacular harmony. As I understood nothing of what was going on around me, I walked around with my Lonely Planet close to hand (whilst I would usually feel self-conscious about bearing such an atrocious token of the League of Straight Dull Back-Packers, I had no shame in doing so in Tokyo: this city is one place where I was going to stick out as a Gaijin (a foreigner) no matter what I did).

Alas it was spectacular fun. Though I understood nothing, everyone was kind in ways I could not begin to describe, and honesty is central to their culture, so nobody ever tried to take advantage of my glaring ignorance.

About 4 days into the trip, I levelled with myself and decided to cut through some of the BS – bullet trains with full view of Mount Fuji are fun, and I did go through a rebirth ritual or two in Kyoto – but when you get right down to it, nothing says spiritual cleanse like a brand new wardrobe and shiatsu massage.

So, after a killer massage by a highly experienced and disappointingly unattractive masseur, I attempted to go shopping.

As with everything in that city, what was on offer was astonishing. The clothes were unlike anything I had ever seen before. "Camp" took on a whole new meaning. There was real creativity in design, in fabric and in structure. No hang ups about fur, knee high red boots, or silk and studded shirts. But after the third fitting room it started to dawn on me – I'm a fat bitch! I'm an XL Gaijin. Most stores didn't even hold my size. Ok, I'm a European Medium, and an American Small, depending on whether we're talking haute couture or Zara, but my body has never been wrapped in anything marked with an "L" (unless you're talking leather Louboutin). So whilst accepting the fact that I am classified as a cow (a Gaijin cow) in Tokyo, I was not ready to accept that I was going to go home empty handed. Alas, I found a pair of silver metallic "come-fuck-me" half-boots and an equestrian blazer, but had I starved myself for a few months prior I would have come home with so much more. (Stay tuned.)

In any event, after my shopping escapades failed (though truthfully, just browsing the fabulous stores was enough to give me the kick), I turned to my other past-time: partying. I was debating whether I wanted to go to an 'institutional' club or just the local gay hole in the wall. I soon learned that the latter was not a very preferable option for Gaijin, and I spent about an hour in the former before realising that people in Japan still listen to techno at 170 beats per minute and that my ears may actually start bleeding (note to reader: since the advent of minimal techno in 2004, respectable European techno rarely passes 120 bpm threshold). Alas, I hit "Arty Farty", a London Soho-style bar with your average cheesy music collection and 15 year old prostitutes. I looked down at the crowd (I was the tallest one there) and realised, here's another relaxing thing about Japan: I felt zero sexual tension. So I met up with some friends that had been seconded in Tokyo for work and we drank and debauched to the extent possible.

On the Narita Express back to the airport the sun was just coming up. Its rays bounced off of the steel and glass of the buildings on either side of the tracks. My head rested against the large spotless window with my iPod whispering in my ears. The conductor would occasionally make an indecipherable announcement in his soft respectful voice. I did not want to go back to London – to the stress, the sleepless nights and the cold, damp streets. But I knew I did not belong in Tokyo. Though I am lucky I even got to experience this country, it is a parallel universe. I closed my eyes and fell asleep as the train slithered between high-rises.