I’m warning you now: navel-gazing therapeutic bullshit ahead. Click elsewhere if you can’t stand trainwrecks. With that said, I want to openly declare my present love for music, people, and writing who aren’t afraid to show their hearts. Cynicism will be the death of all art, unless there continue to be people who fight the good fight. More creators and less critics. Who would we be without the expression of honest emotion? A cog in the corporate wheel, another film critic, a consumer. All I want to do lately is read, write, listen to music, hike in the woods, and fuck. Yes, really.

“Despite what your high school English teacher may have told you, literature does not make us or our society better. To be seduced by fiction is to live at cross-purposes with most of the really important things in life. I’ve never entirely succumbed to a story without blowing off housework, neglecting social obligations and flubbing career-critical deadlines.”

“You Read Your Book and I’ll Read Mine”
By JUDITH SHULEVITZ

I feel I am living at cross-purposes with most of the really important things in life. The irony being that they’re not important; the job, the bills, the social upkeep. I keep fantasizing about escape, which is really a fantasy about death, or a kind of death at least. Not the morbid kind; just the unrealistic.

My mind is in a strange little orbit lately. My first year of sobriety was basically about survival; getting clean, breaking up with the Ex, starting a new job, testing HIV-positive, watching my mother’s health deteriorate knowing there wouldn’t be a cure in time to save her. I kept holding on through it, held on through her death in February. I cried at her memorial, for the first time in months. Now it seems like grief is under a single layer of my skin; welling up after all my successful avoidance. I never felt my break-up; not really. It was a matter of details; finding a new apartment, packing, moving, AA meetings at night. I never shed a tear over him. I didn’t think about him. Sometimes I would marvel over the sheer absence of drama. He’d come over to get the dog and stand too close and smile that let’s-fuck smile and I couldn’t care less, couldn’t want him less. Now it feels more like a dead clump of cells in my heart. Me; the guy who tattooed a heart on his sleeve.

Attended a dinner party for the man whose dog I watched last week. His boyfriend made faralitos and placed them all around the backyard and we sat out on the patio in the cool night until long after dark, the lights glowing around us. A couple of otherwriters attended, and the conversation was easy and fun. Louie sat near the closest hand of food at all times.

My friend was plugging the Campfire, so if any of the dinner guests are reading this, welcome. I made a remark that night, which is true, that I am grateful to be writing again. So grateful I could cry. If you were to stand near me for long enough, you’d most likely end up drenched.

Oh, hell. Others say it better:

“Seriously, Tommy, yeah. I believe that love is immortal.”
“How is love immortal?”
“I don’t know, perhaps because life creates something that was not there before.”
“What, like procreation?”
“Yeah, but not only…”
“What? Like recreation!”
“Stop! You come in here crying and you want to recreate with me!” (pause) “Maybe just…creation.”