He is not 911, a celestial supreme court, a faggot-hater, or a genie.

I am not the Court Jester, or a Christian boy with androgyny to spare, or a guest lecturer, or an art-as-found-object puppet in a Brothers Quay film.

He’s a lover in the dark. I don’t have to see His eyes to know He’s looking at me.

I am His. Just His.

The toaster gives off the kind of glow a harvest moon should.  Especially when the lights are off (or what’s far more common in my case, the lightbulb’s burnt out).  As many times as I tell myself not to look away because the toast will be done soon and if I look away it’ll just pop up and startle me like it always does, I still look away, and it still startles me, and I always think of that scene in The Graduate.

Sunday is for introspection, but then every day that ends in y is for introspection.  It has not always been.  There was a pre-wallflower period where I snuck around factories after dark, climbed into dumpsters of mattresses and jumped until I couldn’t jump anymore.  I walked up to man in a coffee joint taking notes and asked him what he was taking notes about.  I wore a black robe into a gas station and mumbled an imaginary prayer in an imaginary language to get a reaction.  I squeezed the juice out of every moment; I mean my life was concentrate.  I drank and talked and drunk-talked.  Now I spend so much time trying to reconcile myself with my former self that I don’t see people, I don’t see opportunity, I don’t see privilege.  I just see an adjusting Tetris game of prior goals, current discontent, future failure.

All the while the truly disadvantaged dance around me, daring me to do something more than make fun of Brian de Palma and add to landfills.

Dear God I just want to do right by you.  I’m so tired of being a screwed-up son who shows up drunk at your parties.  You’re so good you never send me away, you send the guests away and make coffee and lean over the kitchen table as you tell me I’m special.

Help me to be what you see.  I can’t see it.

“You sound depressed. It’s that self-loathing mood you get in.”  She said in one of those moments of compassion that just ambushes you.  I heard the toilet, still running.  It had been for hours.  It just couldn’t stop.  I told her that I loved her and hung up.

The irrelevancy of this “suffering,” it makes me shudder like epsom salts on an empty stomach.  I’m one part parent, criticizing the immaturity of it, one part child, sobbing at the unfairness of it.  And God’s staying for the duration.  After all the self-pity has been proclaimed, the names called, the loyalty questioned, He’ll be standing in the middle of the room, arms just perceptibly open, asking if I’ll come home now.

I hope I’ll do just a bit better this time, just a bit, just a little bit – maybe I can believe He started something, He started it and He’ll finish it.

You can’t make something happen with seven dollars.  You can buy four rolls of toilet paper from the corner store, the one that sells them individually, for people like you who look at the empty toilet roll holder mid-poop and think, there’s a missing piece to this puzzle and I’d better get that piece.  So you pull it (the half-exposed turd) back in, which feels like gravel in a pork casing, and you go get four rolls, a dollar each.  Three dollars left.  Still no options, unless you involve an ATM but they’re so smug about it, and they always look at your balance without asking.

You wouldn’t be thinking about this if you had friends.  She’d be telling you her sister’s pregnant again with that “how indecent doesn’t she understand how this affects me as a single woman” look, he’d be telling you he was so gone last night that every step felt like chocolate pudding.  And you’d nod your head in a “can I get a witness” kind of way, even though you’d be wondering if it’s a boy or girl and what difference does the flavor make, but these are banal wonderings, the kind too exhausting to express, so you’d only wonder.

You don’t want friends, though.  You want a lover.  A lover you can share an XXXL suitcoat with (like the one you saw in that thriftstore).  A lover who looks at you like you’re the Eiffel tower and a dog with a broken leg rolled into one.  A lover who’ll take a sharpie and write “you are everything” on you while you’re sleeping, somewhere discreet, under clothing, that you’ll find when you’re showering, that won’t come off for weeks.

You can’t have a lover. You’ve lost your fantasy privileges, based on the above paragraph.  You’re too selfish for a lover.  You have to focus on them otherwise it all collapses like so many cheap bookcases from Wal-Mart.

You can’t make something happen with three dollars.

Yesterday I saw who I wanted to be.  It was an art-as-found-object puppet in a Brothers Quay film – it doesn’t matter which one, because they all seep into the pores of your soul and just sit there, smoking and staring at you.  It had butterfly wings, a Georgia O’Keefe-like ram’s skull, feathered legs.

On the train I kept thinking about it – the puppet – the way it staggered about in stop-motion sternness, doing the same task repeatedly, reassuring everyone that it had purpose.  I listened to something by someone on the iPod, hands in pockets, eyes on floor, anonymity in place.  I have this embarrassment lately – a white noise that builds to a deafening level and then I have to look at the floor.  Michelle Pfeiffer said once she was terrified that everyone would find out she was a fake.  Me too.  Or maybe that they just won’t find out anything.  That I’ll die in the last row of the Film Forum at a retrospective and no one will know that I wanted to learn sign language and make out with someone while listening to a Bobby Goldsboro record and ride/operate one of those seesaw things on railroad tracks and lead worship with nothing but Nichole Nordeman songs (from her first two albums only) and play a part in a TV show written by Amy Sherman-Palladino or Aaron Sorkin and…

But even if there was some pre-death countdown of every incomplete pipe dream, unfulfilled ambition – it wouldn’t say anything.  We are not our wants.  We are not even our thoughts.  We are our actions.

This week can walk with its head held high. This week shall mount up with wings like eagles. This week is a mover and a shaker and a candlestick maker.

It’s been a, you know, good week.

Here’s why: I got response from an e-mail I sent to a highschool teacher. “Every now and then astudent like you comes along and makes it totally worthwhile.” Through the visual handicaps of acne, scrawny physique, fashion senselessness – she saw the something else. Everyone has the something else, but not everyone sees it, or says that they see it. She did both. I wonder if she’s trying to trace the new me over the old me on her light board mind. Think of it: all that separates me then from me now is her memory. I’m cement, but I’m not dry yet.

There’s nothing like a good dump to clear your mind.  A good curse your pants because they’re too tight and you need butt clearance pronto press down on the seat hold your breath an entire supermarket is passing through the hole of a donut kind of dump.

I was going to open with a quote from Manhattan (saw a gorgeous 35mm print tonight at the Film Forum); the one in which Diane Keaton’s character summarizes the mental illness of the collegiate: “Real adolescent.  You know, fashionable pessimism.  I mean…I loved it while I was at Radcliffe, but I mean all right you outgrow it.  You absolutely outgrow it…don’t you see? Don’t you guys see?  That it is the dignifying of one’s own psychological and sexual hangups by attaching them to these grandiose philosophical issues?  That’s what it is.” 

Instead I took a dump and told you about it.  It’s a little easier than a look in the mirror on the morning of a hangover, which is essentially what that quote is for me.  It makes me realize that every one of my magniloquently constructed moments – the Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons-styled seductions, the Sylvia Plath metaphors, the Dostoyevsky-“identifying” – is adding frosting to a piece of bread.  It doesn’t make it cake, it doesn’t make it sweet, it doesn’t even make it desirable – it just makes it bread with frosting on it.  It’s a fucking farce and I don’t think I’ll be starring in it anymore if it’s all the same to you.  My life is not important, it’s not impressive.  It can, however, be a way to serve others.  A reason for someone’s smile.

It seems like more things are finishing than starting.  It means God’s at work.

We greet one another with warehouses of love, the doors bursting open and spilling everything everywhere until we’re too mixed up to be individuals anymore.  We laugh as we try to tell the stories that every one of us has heard already.  We compare diets and recipes and supplements.  I gush over my mother’s new Christmas decor; a “design rebirth,” and she smiles warmly enough to melt a whole bag of marshmallows.  I tell my father about the book on Islam I’m reading, and he’s electrified with intellectual energy.

I’m not crying alone listening to Tracy Chapman or buying lentil bean pasta or selling another vintage dress for a New Year’s party I’m not invited to.  I’m here, moving back to the middle, listening to a church lady say I’ve never looked so much like my mother.  I’m separated from myself, the kind of separation that makes you more like yourself than you’ve ever been.

We’re playing Red Rover where everyone’s sent and everyone’s received and we’re laughing too hard to play the game anyway and what were we going to do and we’re late and let’s call and cancel and let’s just stay in and let’s light a fire and let’s talk about when we’ll see each other again and let’s make sure it’s sooner than last time –

I always get water on the counter.  Then I rest against it as I shave and I get water lines on my boxer shorts.  This also happens when I wash dishes.  I dab the “sensitive skin” shaving cream on my face like frosting on the cake: carefully, even though it couldn’t possibly do any harm, except clog a few pores, or a few arteries.  I get to a point, I can’t tell you exactly when, but I get to a point when I don’t want to stop spreading it.  I want to keep going until I see eyes without a face, like that dreadfully gorgeous film about the car crash victim who wears a white mask.

When I’m ugly on the outside I feel ugly on the inside.  When I’m beautiful on the outside I feel ugly on the inside.  So much of the time I want to bleach my soul, or at least give it a good spanking.  But I can’t, I need someone else to do it.

I thought I’d gotten closer the other day when my boss walked up to me holding a shirt that could be described as purple (if purple was a sad old woman who smoked menthols and didn’t bother with hair dye) with the Cheap Jack’s Vintage Clothing logo on it.  “Would you wear this?”  He asked insecurely.  “Of course,” I smiled.  “Now?”  “Oh.  Why not?”  It worked for a few days.  For once I wasn’t wearing self-conscious ensembles, wasn’t nervously checking for positive reactions from the intended audience, wasn’t asking every store window and mirror, “yes?  Is this me?  I mean, not me, but ‘me’?”  But then it got dirty,  I didn’t want to do laundry.  I lapsed.

I’ve got it all figured out, as usual.  Satan’s doing it.  He attacks me with trivialities until I’m a blind man, on his hands and knees, searching for his contacts.  It’s nothing personal for him, it’s all in a day’s work.  I’m going to make it a hard day’s night for him, though.  He’s going to slave and sweat and suffer, and fail.

“How are you doing?”  The men’s group leader asked last night.  “I feel like playdough pushed through that plastic spaghetti-making contraption.”  “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “who’s doing the pushing?”  I paused, impressed.  “Satan.  And me.  We’re both involved.  It’s a team effort.”

It’s just Henry Mancini’s christmas record and I this holiday.  It seems that I relate best to dead famous people and fictional characters.

The second night in a row of four hours or less of sleep, which means my judgment is right on.

I am alone, by default and by choice.  I can’t get anyone to come into my Pick N Save, let alone try a sample.  At some point I determined that this was a personal deficiency, or superiority, which separated me from humanity; made me unapproachable.  I don’t know whose fault it is anymore.

It could be case of cosmic timing – everything must be aligned – or it could be I’m not intended to have a conference room full of yes-men affirming me.

Of course there’s the fact that almost every “conversation” I have makes me feel like a guest lecturer.  It’s just that one-sided.  I can’t imagine how impersonal it must be for the victim.

I am capable of friendships.  I am capable of a relationship.  The latter is an ethical and/or physical impossibility, but I am still capable.  I must remember.

“You’re the most gorgeous creature in this bar,” I told the forty year old woman with the parted waves of platinum hair, checkered sweater and humongous earrings.

“I was just thinking that about you,” she smiled.

Maybe that’s all I’m capable of.  Maybe that’s enough.