Tag: Dancer from the Dance

The Art of Letting Go

Saturday morning, and a top o’ the morning to you, me pretties. Yesterday wasn’t too terrible, actually; I always make such a big deal out of things that aren’t big deals and I really need to break that really bad habit at some point before I die. I got up before the alarm, but hit snooze a couple of times before Sparky realized the alarm was mysteriously going off a fifth day in a row, which meant I’d be getting up soon which means breakfast for the kitty! And wasn’t it sweet of him to try to let me sleep in? I feel good and rested this morning; I was tired and sleepy last night when bed time rolled around, and I slept like a stone (how things that aren’t sentient are supposed to sleep has always mystified me) last night, and woke up relatively early this morning. Once again there’s supposed to be some serious thunderstorms in the late afternoon, which would be lovely and a nice time to curl up and read some more of the book I am currently reading and need to finish.

I was tired, though, when I left the office to run my errands before heading home to finish the chores. They didn’t have Creole tomatoes, which was enormously disappointing; I really wanted one of my grilled cheese sandwiches, which I need to rename because it’s not just a grilled cheese sandwich. I usually will put bacon, guacamole and Creole tomatoes on them, too; they are so amazingly good, and when you use Maldon salt and fresh ground pepper? My word. I’m going to have to go to the store again over this weekend to look for Creole tomatoes, which is the only thing I actually need to get. I was a bit brain dead when I got back home, and then worked on the laundry and other chores. I do feel like this is going to be a productive weekend, and I feel good about that. I really straightened up the books in the living room as a first step to making it look less like a FEMA zone, and also couldn’t find a copy of a book I was looking for, which means I’ll have to buy another copy. Oh well. I did also locate my copies of Dancer from the Dance and Faggots while going through the books, which was a bit of a relief. I can revisit them now, at some point. It’ll be interesting to see them again through a modern lens, remembering the first time I read both and what I thought of them then and how they hold up now. I really need to get back to my reading.

We watched an episode of Sugar and I had the end of an episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (not enough monsters) on while I was straightening and picking things up last night. I also baked potatoe sbecause I didn’t feel like making ravioli or…anything, really. I also kept thinking it was Thursday all afternoon, and being confused by how early it was before remembering oh yes, you put in six hours at the office. Next Friday is Staff Development Day, also mandatory, and also all day. Hurray. Not loving this, honestly. I’ll survive though–at least, I hope so and if I don’t, well, I could use the rest and not aging anymore isn’t a bad thing.

Amazing what anti-anxiety medication can do for a person, isn’t it?

Paul is going to something tonight–he told me, but I forgot; some kind of art show he’s attending with his board president–so they’re having an early dinner first, which will leave me here alone with Sparky for a few hours later on–probably around the time the thunderstorms are predicted to hit the hood. I also want to do some more deep cleaning on the place; I need to move some furniture around, but getting all the shit various cats over the years have knocked behind or underneath them out. (I told you, I have not been as thorough with the housecleaning chores this decade as I used to be, and I wasn’t joking at all!) I also would like to work on a newsletter some more this weekend, maybe even get it sent out later today or tomorrow (I kind of went overboard with them over the holiday weekend and need to space the next ones out some more), and I do want to work on the book and some short stories today, too–we’ll see how it all goes, though, won’t we?

Okay, on that note I am heading into the spice mines. I am going to take my coffee into the living room and watch some news before I get cleaned up and going on this fine day. It looks beautiful outside my windows, and it’s not that humid because the windows aren’t covered in condensation. So, out with the trash and the recycling, too!

See you tomorrow morning!

Il Duomo in Florence from the air. I love Florence.

Goody Two Shoes

And here we are on the third day of the new year, and I am starting to feel more like me again, which is great. I did get tired yesterday afternoon at work (getting up at five for physical therapy truly sucks), but not as bad as I was last week–last week was horrifying, how tired I felt; literally like I needed a jump start or something. It’s also pay-the-bills day, and it has rained all night, which has made it a little warmer outside than it has been. The rain is supposed to let up by noonish, but the colder snap seems to be over for a little while, at least.

Yesterday when I got home I wasn’t super-exhausted, and I did some chores. I finished the laundry I’d started on New Year’s, and also did a load of dishes. I finished reading Glory Be by Danielle Arsenault (more on that later), but Paul was working upstairs once he got home, so I just sat in my chair and watched some documentaries on Youtube. Nothing interesting or new, just some more folklore and legends of the South on the “Dixie After Dark” channel–and all the stories are of murder and ghosts and vengeance and brutality…the South the Lost Cause folks don’t like to mention because it isn’t genteel enough to fit their narrative of a “lost civilization now gone with the wind”, and these stories kind of show up the lies that false narrative creates–like Aunt Jenny, whose husband was strung up in front of her and her children by the Home Guard, and made her sons swear on his corpse that they wouldn’t rest until the men who hanged their father (who opposed the war–Southerners opposed the war?) were all dead. And she got her revenge too, and used the skull of the captain to drink water from for the rest of her life. Learning the history of northwest Alabama in greater detail over the last few years has opened my eyes to a lot of things–and given tons more ideas for things to write.

Which is exactly what I need, right? More things to write?

But overall, it was a nice, relaxing evening and I can’t get over how awake and alive and like a Gregalicious I feel this morning. It’s been a hot minute, you know, and I’m glad to see my decision to not be a slug as much as I would like in the new year is already working out for me. I see my surgeon on Saturday and hopefully can say goodbye to this goddamned brace once and for all. I did also work on the book a bit last night, which also felt good to be getting back into that groove again. I can head straight home from work after my time in the office today, and hopefully will be able to do some writing in addition to cleaning and organizing. I cleared out a shelf in the cabinets last night, and am going to use it for some things I store in the bottom cabinet (espresso machine, milk frother, coffee grinder) which will open up some more room on that side of the kitchen.

I’m not sure what I am going to read next, but the TBR pile is chock full of great books by terrific writers, so I won’t be disappointed by anything I choose. I was thinking about revisiting Larry Kramer’s Faggots, thinking that it might be interesting to revisit it now with the perspective of being in my sixties and looking back at those wild and crazy 1970’s in Manhattan and on Fire Island…but if I am going to do that, I also need to revisit its flip side, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, which I’ve also not read in decades. Or I could just read another mystery. So many choices, so many options.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back later, most likely.

Left to My Own Devices

Thursday morning and here we are, with a mere two more days before we can call it the weekend again. I’m not really sure why I am looking so forward to it; I just have to write and clean and do shit all weekend. Yay? But I guess it’s lovely because I am on my own schedule, I suppose?

I didn’t sleep for shit last night, which was highly annoying. Also, convenient because I forgot to set my alarm. Fortunately, my eyes opened at promptly six this morning. Huzzah?

So, overnight my HBO app on my Apple TV magically converted to an HBO MAX app, and I got lost in there for hours last night, just exploring all the options. I doubt I’ll ever watch the eight or nine Harry Potter movies ever again, but they are there, along with all kinds of over things. Scooby Doo Where Are You in its original two series is there–I watched one last night, delighted, before making dinner–and of course TCM is there, and there are so many classic films I’ve either not seen, or haven’t seen in a very long time. One of my all time favorites, Body Heat, is also there; I can’t wait to rewatch, as I’ve been wanting to rewatch it for quite some time. Also a lot of classic Hitchcock films, many of which I’ve never seen, including North by Northwest and several others. Essentially, with HBO MAX, combined with Hulu and Netflix and Prime and Disney Plus, I really don’t think I ever will have an excuse to be bored ever again, as there’s always something I can watch on one of those streaming services. There’s also some very good classic Hollywood, thank to TCM (Mildred Pierce, Laura, Bringing Up Baby, etc.). In other words, I am quite pleased.

Alas, that will undoubtedly cut into my reading and writing time–but better that than Youtube black holes, right?

Larry Kramer died yesterday, and I thought, “you know, I’ve been meaning to reread Faggots for a really long time and perhaps this is the time to do so, as a tribute to Larry and everything he did for us all.” As I took the book from the stack, I also realized this meant pushing Night Has a Thousand Eyes back into the pile, and this was probably the kind of thing that has happened with far too great a frequency and why I’ve never gotten back to reading the Woolrich, so I decided to go ahead and read the Woolrich and then I’ll get back to the Kramer. Faggots was one of the first “gay” books I read after coming out officially (I had read Gordon Merrick and The Front Runner and The Swimming-Pool Library while in the closet. Faggots was recommended to me when I walked into my first gay bookstore, Tomes and Treasures, in Tampa in the early nineties; the incredibly sexy bookseller–on whom I had a major crush–told me I should read it and Dancer from the Dance, so I bought both and read them) and I sometimes joke that “it almost pushed me back into the closet.” The gay sexuality was so in in-your-face, and all the kinks and other variations depicted within the covers of that book–plus the clear misery and unhappiness of the main character, Fred Lemish–kind of was shocking to someone as naïve as I was when I first came out.

This also made me think about my life in those years prior to my thirty-third, which was when I stopped passively floating through my life and tried to take control of it–to start actively living instead of passively letting my life happen to me. I rarely talk about, or even think much about, my life between moving to the suburbs when I was ten and my thirty-third birthday; primarily because my existence was so completely miserable and tragic and pitiful. There was the duality of living as both a closet case in my more regular day-to-day life (and fooling no one, as I was quick to find out later), plus my hidden, furtive life on the edges of gay world. It’s difficult for me to look back at that twenty-three years and not wince or recoil in embarrassment at what a miserable life I was leading, and how desperately unhappy I was all the time. But that time was necessary, because it was also that same period where I was starting to recognize, and learn, that almost everything I was raised to believe was not just a lie but a horrible one. Unlearning those decidedly terrible values and lessons is an ongoing process to this very day, but it’s also terribly important and necessary to shed all that conditioning in American exceptionalism, evangelical Christianity with its bizarre morality and cognitive dissonance, and the true American legacy of white supremacy. As I thought about this last night–we watched the first episode of CNN’s docuseries The Movies on HBO MAX last night, and I was remembering, not only the unhappy first more-than-half of my life, but started unpacking the rest as well.

And it will inevitably show up in my writing at some point.

ANd now back to the spice mines. Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader.

Head over Heels

So, apparently a lot of people lost their minds yesterday because the BBC announced that the next Dr. Who is going to be a woman. I’ve never watched the show, but I know that people who do are very devoted; some of my friends are very devoted fans of the show (none of those friends, incidentally, lost their minds over this) so I have a passing knowledge of it. Paul and I were also big fans of it’s spin-off series, Torchwood. (And seriously, the mini-series “Children of Earth” is so fucking amazing that you should watch it immediately if you haven’t seen it. You don’t need to watch Torchwood from the beginning, either, to enjoy it.)

Personally, I think it’s amazing that a show that’s been around fifty years–and as such has had plenty of time to do this–has done so. One of the best things about Spiderman Homecoming, for me, was the diversity of its cast and the whole nonchalant way Marvel Studios went about making the cast diverse; it was no big deal, and I didn’t even notice. It was until after the film was over that I realized that not everyone in the movie was white. (They also showed a preview of Black Panther before the movie, and it looks amazing. Two big thumbs-up to Marvel Studios for diversity! Now, if you could work on the ‘woman-as-lead-in-the-movie’ issue….)

Maybe it’s because I belong to a minority group, but I’ve never really understood the resistance to diversity and change.

Nothing ever stays the same, you know? Isn’t that the biggest lesson we learn in life? The only constant is change?

I finished reading The Great Gatsby again yesterday; and I will admit to enjoying it more this time than I did the first time. I still don’t know that I would call it a ‘masterpiece,’ or ‘The Great American Novel,’–both hyperbolic claims I have seen made over the  course of my life–but I did enjoy it more as an adult than I did as a teen. I will talk some more about The Great Gatsby here, but I am going to let the book, and my thoughts about it, marinate a little more. The reread did, however, confirm something I’ve said for years; that Andrew Holleran’s great gay classic, Dancer from the Dance, owes an enormous debt to Gatsby; I’ve been known to refer to Holleran’s book as The Gay Gatsby. I feel relatively certain some scholar somewhere has written a paper conflating the two; I may even give Dancer  a long overdue reread so that I can do something similar here.

Game of Thrones was quite fun last night, and a nice beginning for the end.

This week, I plan on getting a lot done. We shall see if that comes to fruition; but I hope to finish writing “A Holler Full of Kudzu” this week, and maybe rewriting another story before jumping back into the WIP this weekend.

And on that note, it’s back to the spice mines with me.

Here’s a hunk to kick off your week right, Constant Reader:

hot-firefighters-with-puppies-calendar-charity-australia-4

Mood: Cheerful

Music: You Belong to Me by Taylor Swift