Personal

I got the phone call I’ve been dreading for weeks today, confirming that one of my oldest friends died on 22 March in his San Diego apartment. I’d been afraid this had happened ever since I couldn’t reach him prior to my trip last month.

Stan and I met in 1982 when we both worked together at the college radio station. He fancied himself as sort of a queer “mother figure” for me, trying to teach me things I already knew, like how to pick up boys and find the “hidden” gay content in every pop cultural phenomenon of the day.

Stan moved to San Diego in 1986 and never looked back. I made my first visit in 1991, as part of the trip where I decided to move to San Francisco, and I’m sad to say, I made only two or three more visits after moving west. But he came here once a year or so, using my apartment as a home base for his various solitary adventures throughout the city. And we usually talked on the phone once a month or so.

Stan and I had very little in common other than our common background in the south and the sheer longevity of our friendship. But we stayed friends no matter how much our lives (and geography) changed. We always managed to find something to talk about.

He was an odd sort, with very few close friends and confidantes, and he loved his privacy, which might explain why it was so difficult for his supervisor at work to contact anyone close to him. It was this supervisor who eventually called me, after I started making inquiries at the Department of Parks and Recreation.

It’s very unnerving to have a stranger (albeit a nice one) inform you of the death of someone you’ve known for almost twenty years.

For the record, diabetes was the culprit, along (I believe) with the strain of a very stressful year, on which I will not elaborate. He was found in his apartment when he didn’t return to work after a week’s leave to “recover”. There was a memorial service, his ashes were scattered over the Pacific, and there will be a tree and a plaque installed in his memory at the recreation center where he worked.

I’ll miss him.

Highlights from the weekend just past:

• Sucking face in a Japanese restuarant in Fresno while watching a bitchin’ band I like more every time.

• Having lesbians we’d never met buy us drinks at said restaurant/bar because we were such a “cute couple”.
• Realizing that the Wind-up Action Bender really worked and looked pretty damned cool (and being just a little peeved that it’s evidently on sale for half what I paid for it two months ago, so no link dammit).
• The “firestarter” technique. Don’t ask.
• Making it home from Fresno in a new personal record of two hours, twenty-six minutes AND being able to park, despite the rainbow-clad masses.
• Cold Comfort Farm.
• Mushy drunk talk.
• German sausage scramble on a hangover-free Sunday morning.
• Watching the most wonderful boy in the world hit the quarter century mark.

With Mark’s birthday out of the way, I guess it’s time to start pushing mine now. I’ll try to update the wish list shortly. And I think this year’s annual semi-public birthday gathering at Tad’s is on for Saturday 10 August at 8PM. But follow this space for further details…

Another navel-gazing bit of self-analysis that may or may not ever be published.

I need help.

I can’t really think of any way my life has benefited from the events of the past year. It’s been, without question, the most miserable, soul-sucking, spirit-crushing time I’ve ever been through. I’m pissed off and resentful and sad and sometimes just plain shell-shocked. It’s affecting the way I interact (or don’t interact) with other people. It’s starting to affect my everyday life and keep me from doing what I want and need to do. Since I don’t seem to be able to fix it myself, I’m arriving at the decision that I may need some help.

Depression and resentment have been the big themes of my life for a year now. I’m depressed because pretty much no part of my life looks the way I expected it to back in 2010 when (for the first time in my life, in many ways) I dared to envision a future for myself–one that involved a new job that I loved (another first) and being together with a partner that I loved even more. If maybe not a sense of adventure, I definitely had a sense of contentment, as if the life I’d been hoping for and working for and planning for was about to start happening.

Then it all went to hell. I still had the job, but the life together was over. And to this day, I still don’t quite understand why. That’s how dense I am. All I have left is a lot of memories of how things were and reminders of how things no longer are. The memories make me avoid things I used to love–little things like the fair, Baskin Robbins, Star Trek, etc. The reminders are more sinister: a mortgage I can’t afford to pay on a house I can’t sell and don’t want to own anymore, the loneliness and anxiety I feel when I wake up at 4AM and can’t get back to sleep…

Just when I thought I was seeing some daylight (and maybe I was fooling myself) came all the stuff with my mom, which not only made me more depressed, but also emphasized how empty my life was and how little chance it seemed I was going to have to do anything about it now that I’d accepted a second full-time job managing every aspect of my parents’ lives–which was a bit ironic considering how poorly I’d managed my own. This pretty much sucked out whatever remaining joy I was finding in life at this point, replacing it with dread, panic, and almost constant stress.

And this was when the depression and general “wounded” tone began to add that dimension of resentment. This resentment was basically built around my feeling that almost every aspect of my life had been adversely affected (turned upside down, really) due to other people’s issues–based on things I essentially had no control over and no say in. Of course Mark didn’t start out with the goal of making my life miserable and he in fact has done all he could to make things easier, both financially and emotionally. My parents obviously didn’t lose the ability to handle their own affairs just to spite me. That the timing was so bad was just an unfortunate coincidence. But I resented it all just the same. And even though I know that when you have relationships, you share problems, I felt that most of my problems were not of my own making.

Frankly, I think I have some justification for both emotions given the constant assault of the past year or so. But that doesn’t mean it’s a healthy way to live. In fact, it probably borders on lethal. It’s caused a tremendous strain on my relationship with my parents and has made it very challenging for Mark and me to keep a fragile friendship alive. I want my parents to take care of their own stuff and leave me the hell alone. And every time Mark starts talking about his plans for the future, I want to scream and say, “I could have some exciting plans for the future too, but I don’t have the luxury of just walking away and sating ‘I don’t like my life anymore.’ You get to go have fun and do what you want while I get to pick up the pieces of what we were supposedly building together.”

The problem is that I’m having a hard time seeing any happiness in my future. That’s a dangerous place to be, and one that I’m not sure I can (or should) get out of alone.