An interesting, if not maddening, decision resulted in the importing of my previous posts over the last 20 years of blogs being migrated this new one, but the images did not follow it. A shit ton of images that I for some reason did not manage to migrate over before deleting the old site. I will see if I can fix that, but not very hope-filled with that result.
The new editing format is also a huge challenge, although WordPress is telling me I have more control over the content. I am not seeing that to be 100% true. I do like the layout of this site a little more. It does feel constraining and is not really as friendly as it suggests.
None the less I find myself getting mired down while I have a hundred other things I want to be doing today. Not the least of them is getting out of the apartment and enjoying this day. I promised myself more. And the other new web site I made www.teabagcult.com is also in need of a lot of love.
So, I took the blogging entries from my other site UrielsJournal.Com and imported them into this one. It will make letting those old sites go a lot easier and trying to decide what the future is for this one. My old art site exploded years ago and it is going away, too.
I am writing my first post in my new blog. Having an online blog is something I have had for very many years. My previous version was at www.UrielsJournel.com. That web site is going to go away this year and I am going to start a new journey moving forward. The thing is… I am not exactly sure how that is going to become.
The place I am in now, at this moment, is new. It is the same for many of us who went through the last 2 years. I would say that in 2018 I broke… like full on broke and for about 2 years I was living in a weird hell full of privilege and anxiety. When my mom and step dad started having serious medical issues was in that year. I had no one but my partner to talk to about what it was that I was going through. It was lonely, frustrating and sad at the same time.
Then in 2019 we found a new home in Oakland and it is really lovely. It is also really far from things that can get me in trouble, far from places I would hang out at (also trouble), and yet near to some newer people I have started to really care for.
So, lets see where this goes. UrielsJournal started to turn into a place to complain and I do not want this to go in the same direction.
Today is Tuesday, which is my Monday at my job. It’s really no different than most days, other than I know I will likely be busy-ish for the first part of the day and then the second half I have to sit at the door. I have to greet people, tell them thank you for shopping at Cliffs, and make sure they are wearing the right kinds of masks. Also, make sure nothing is leaving unpaid. Pretty basic. I am being paid a wage that fits the job… I think. All good, right?
The weight of depression and anxiety is really debilitating and feels like a huge weight on my chest. Looking out from within I keep looking for a ledge to grasp on to to keep myself moving forward. Some constants like showing up to work is the firmest foundation I have. Making sure I meet my partners needs at home (food, general house care, etc) is another.
BUT, looking out there is a monster inside that looks at that second paragraph and keeps pointing out the flaws and what it thinks I need to do. That broken Id, is a crotchety, angry old fart who keeps saying they know better. It wants me to quit this job full stop. It wants me to just take a break. Like a big break. It tells me I can survive without the illusion that I HAVE TO KEEP this job.
But that voice has been right and wrong. That voice is not a healthy thing right now. There is a lot of weight on my neck with mourning, remorse, regrets and a growing fear of social situations that is literally killing me.
Most recently I found out someone I really care about has cancer.
The fallout with my mom is still really upsetting and I cannot feel safe backing up into that lane again.
I still keep wondering if there was a way to be in a better place with my biological family, even though that is and was – unlikely.
Is my partner and I really good for each other? This January will be 10 years long.
I feel like a glob of solid lard. I have been unable to get out and get exercise. I have been unable to go to the gym, and I am paying a gym membership, but I am just stuck in a mode like my feet are sinking in mud. I do think about what it would be like to not have those worries any more.
There was a turn of events that began somewhere around 2016 or 2017 that started changing how and the ways I was interacting and engaging the Burning Man community. I slowly was becoming more and more of an outsider. I have questioned myself if it was my own doing or was I reacting to something else. I got involved in community leadership too fast and took on more responsibility and ownership than I ever needed or should have. That’s on me.
My last posts were around 2015. At least here and not so much on my personal blog.
What I would like to do is fall in love with Burning Man as an event again. Because, right now, the idea of wading into the community at something I did not create gives me such a sense of anxiety it is paralyzing. Covid may have added to that manifest, but it was there before.
What I need to do is feel trust within the Burning Man Organization. So much has happened over the last 14 years. As much as I have tried to be a force for good, some people have put me in a different bucket or just do not see me at all. I have tried to do the good fight with standing up for people who were not being heard, and have not lived up to my own standards; which might have been skewed anyway. I have seen and heard terrible things from them. And I need to learn to let it go and move forward.
I have missed the last 2 years at Black Rock City. I needed a break in 2020 which was planned. But that turned into 2021. And if you saw the things that happened in 2021, then you have to know it looked amazing. Now I am waiting for the aftermath.
Covid infections?
LEO blowback
MOOP recovery… who is cleaning up after this?
But, I just stared at the live cams that were there and was in awe. I nearly backed up the car last week and just left.
My future in this community is still some very soft clay. I am sitting at the wheel waiting to see what life I can make with it. Thank you for reading this if you did…
I have been thinking about an entry like this for a long time. Truth be told, I have been stuck in a place that has recently been making it harder to move forward with. They say, if you are looking back at your regrets you can’t be looking ahead to your future. And at my age my future is not the longest road left to travel.
But there are some points in the road that are places that I wish with all my heart I could go back and make a different decision. The truth is also, I might not be the same person I am now had I gone a different way. The person I am today is basically good and loving of other people.
My Military Service
The best single decision I made in my life was joining the Air Force when I was 17 years old on Nov 17th, 1982. I woke up one day, having never considered it before, and enlisted. By the following summer I was off to basic training. I loved my life there, even if it was hard, because I was a gay guy. But the regret comes when I decided to leave and took an early out in 1989 after 6 years. I should have stayed. I should have buckled down and been focused on my future, but I was too stupid to know what an amazing and good thing I had.
Bad choices were an ongoing theme of following my feelings and not what was really best for me. From a kid who grew up not really dealing with his feelings well at all. I had a lot of unhealthy life choices throughout my life and that was a big one.
That time for me was monumental. It was also my first time dealing with mental health issues. I was in a place where I was alone and felt so untethered as a young queer guy in Germany. It was the era of Ronald Reagan and the slow burn toward the end of the cold war. AIDS was in full bloom but I was miles away from it.
I knew the rules. They had to prove it. I lived my life. No harm. No foul. I left thinking the world was my oyster.
(Note: I wrote the above portion a month ago and it made me so wound up I had to step away. Anytime I take a dive into my own brain I really end up feeling very shaken in the end. It has also left me questioning a lot of personal choices and doubting my own feelings.)
My Relationship with my Sister (Lynn)
In spite of the very many things I wrote about in the past. In spite of the few short-sighted attempts to make some kind of reconciliation with my biological sister, I wish I had done a lot of things better with her growing up. We started off really really bad when I accidentally hurt her when we were super young.
Quick Story: I was around the age of 5 and she had to be around 2(?) when we were in the front yard of our house in the San Fernando Valley. Me, my sister, my mom and dad, were in the front yard. Someone tossed a ball and I had a bat to swing. When I did swing… I can still hear the words in my head… “I got it.” I swung the bat and Lynn ran for the ball behind me and the bat hit her right in the mouth.
I can still feel that story today. BUT, that is one of many things that happened between her and I over the years. One of my asshole friends whipped out his dick in front of her because he thought it was funny. I told him I did not want him too, but he goaded me into it. Major peer pressure from him and one of my other friends. I felt like a real asshole about that.
So, there were a lot of bad decision moments. She has every right to hate me forever. I have, about once every 5 years I bet, thought maybe we could reconcile and talk over coffee. I think when hell freezes over that could happen.
I was further deluded when my bio-dad and his sister somehow started a relationship again that was a good sign for us as well. The reasons to NOT reconcile have mounted over the years even if we have not talked. She seems to think a falling out with my dad had to do with money. And a falling out with my mom was on the same platform. When the truth was money was only the impetus that there was a problem and I had to step out of the way. Ugh.
(I have no images of me and my family at all. Is that weird? I have the pieces. And not one with the four of us.)
My Parents
If you spent any time I this blog you know there is already a lot there on this subject. I will say that with my mother’s decline of her health starting in 2019 that a lot of things have changed for me. I thought my dad was the blame for a lot of this fucked up dialog in my head. I learned that my mom had a lot to do with it too. Now I regret the place I was at with both of them. But, I do not regret that I had to get away from that toxicity. Check out: Jack, Category: Family Drama, Catergory: NFM (Not For Mom).
Not BEACUSE of my parents. Maybe because I had no structure growing up and any healthy role models. Maybe because I was a Queer kid in a world that did not understand or embrace queer kids? I was a tough ass kid to have as your kid. I was a pain in the ass.
I grew up around an environment always charged with sexuality and phonography. My dad made porn movies as a hobby, had a porn collection that was always accessible. My own life as a kid, I was surrounded by kids AS A KID willing to experiment. It was the 70’s baby. It can make for a fucked up adult.
My parents never had the time to be parents. Whether it was putting food on the table, like for my mom. Or, it was hiding in a safe space with his creative work on top of a full time job, like my dad. He took great care of himself and was able to retire at age 55.
I will be lucky to ever retire. So, in some ways this nut (me) fell off the tree and down the hill into a pile of dung. Wah-wah. That one, is on me. The relationship we are left with today is up to me as well.
Other things
When I was a kid, in the 6th grade, I was hanging out with some wild kids who lived in a creepy house ON Quartz Hill in Quartz Hill, California where I would one day go to High School. We killed a rabbit with a rock. I was about 10/11 at the time. The kid I was with was actually named: Leroy Brown – yes for real. He had some crazy brothers and they were a wild bunch of kids
When I broke up with Adolfo, I thought it was the right time and reasons. I loved him so much. I would have gladly spent the rest of my life with him. We started making some bad decisions and those started mounting with sex and finances and I thought it was the right thing to do. I wished he would have fought to keep us together, because I thought at that moment he was also done with me. We were both wrong.
When I left Las Vegas for California I was trusted by a friend in Vegas with money and I fell on some real tough times and I never paid him back. He said it was just money and forgave me, but I still have not forgiven myself. It was someone whom I really looked up to and was a real amazing paternal figure for me. I can’t redeem myself in my eyes and therefore I cannot redeem myself in his eyes.
4. I was a bad friend to a woman I knew really well in Las Vegas. I let three women from the community get into my head and took on their drama that was not mine. It made me look at people I cared about in a way I did not want to see them. Melissa was a woman of tremendous presence and while she could be a tough-cookie she did not deserve what ultimately ended up happening. Our friendship was lost. I missed her terribly and I said some super shitty things. She is, rightfully so, done with me.
5. I pulled back the curtain on Burning Man. I got involved too quickly and my sense of self-importance grew out of proportion to the facts. It has poisoned my belief in the culture handed down from the governing body of leadership, but it has also not dampened my core belief that there is a vital message at its heart that is very important. You can learn more about my Burning Man Life on the back section of this blog. (As of today: very out of date.)
I tried to short note some of the baggage in my head above. The things that I am hoping I can pull out of my head and let go of. Or I can find a way to restore and repair if at all possible.
Money has been a factor that has popped up in my life a lot as a catalyst for change or growth. I only started actually managing my money in the last ten or fifteen years with care. I still make barely enough to survive. And, in spite of my household income being what it is, I have to live off of what I bring in. I am paid okay but I am still having a hard time making ends meet. And this is nuts!
The title of my biography will be: “Never Good Enough”
I have been accused of being self centered and making some things about me. There have been suggestions that my ego was the controlling force in my decisions. There were times it was true. Honestly, if there were things I wanted to explore and experience there were a lot of times I just created it. Instead of waiting for someone else I just did it. And if someone wanted to go on the same ride, then I was hopefully doing it right.
I great up with my dad telling me I was worthless and had not value in life. He said those exact words more times that I can count. I was never good enough and never doing the right thing. I was crashing through life with a man who wanted me to smile even if I was dying inside.
I was a fat kid once I got into my later teen years and heard about that a lot. I had a 38″ waist when I was sixteen. The summer between my junior and senior year of high school I lost weight and got into a much better look just like all those high school hottie films.
His words followed me into my adulthood. His words haunted everything I tried to do. When I did fail I was proving him right every time. Each time there was a tiny hint at failure, he was right.
In recent years I discovered that my mom’s voice was part of that too. While helping to manage her and my step-dad for the last 2 years, I discovered she was using a lot of the same language too. Her words, even though they were fueled by fear and loneliness, were tearing apart something inside of me. Nothing I did for her was good enough, and then I began seeing her differently.
I had me mom on a pedestal, one she never deserved to be on. She was a working mom. She survived 3 shitty… I mean shitty… husbands. Like really shitty. She was a survivor and in the end all the wear and tear from the men in her life turned her into someone I realized I did not like very much.
She and I, if we were ever really close, I cannot tell you when. She kicked me out of her house when I was like 13 or something like that. I had to go live with my dad. And from the previous paragraphs you can see how well that went.
I am such a damaged human being. But. I am more aware of who I am, who I want to be, more than ever. I feel helpless in my life for the first time ever at my age, with few job prospects, but with a lot of demons.
I have a shopping list of life regrets I need to deal with. I will. I will. But, I have been on a very special road for being a better me over the last 2 years. I need to keep going.
I am trying to figure out if writing here is something that will be helpful. To raise this thing from the dead and put my thoughts on the internet as if anyone gives a shit seems a little narcissistic. I do not think that is who I am, speaking in present tense, though I cannot say that was the case at other points in my life.
I did figure out he name of my life’s story recently while I was reflecting on my relationship with my family. My immediate family (those by blood: mother, father, sister) is a tragic shit show. It is amazing how much I got wrong and how much of a disaster it evolved to in the long run. Under the category #familydrama I detailed some recent misadventures specifically with my sister and mother.
Family Shot: Me, Dad, and Uncle on my moms side
The thing is, that I have for a long time put much of my family issues on my dad, and it is only within the last year where I started to see how wrong I was. He has with absolute certainty earned a place in the shitty-dad hall of fame, but it turns out there were more players in the game than I thought.
The fact that my family life is so screwed up had a lot of factors that came from all directions. I was a queer kid and I was an out and proud queer kid growing up. I was more out than I remember, because apparently I was making proclamations when I was merely 13 as to being gay.
My parents were not prepared to deal with a queer kid. The world was not ready. I mean, we are light-years from those days now and I see parents bringing their queer-kids in the store I work at all the time and I am amazed at how much the world has changed. (Granted, I am talking about the Castro in San Francisco of all freaking places)
It is impacting me a lot. I had to step away from my mom because it was becoming too heavy for my shoulders. My sister has stepped in. It was to my invitation and went very wrong in the end, but I was more shoved out of the way then let drift out of their lane.
At some point there is a need to self preserve and get into a safe place, but it is also isolating. My Uncle Dave, Aunt Chris and Aunt Nancy and I have not talked since I was pushed out of the way. I worry heavily that they think I abandoned her, but I did not.
My mom and I may not ever have been very close. She kicked me out of her house for being an asshole kid (oh, I was!) and sent me to live with my dad who was never home. And when he was, I wanted nothing to do with him.
But, the thing is, my memory is really bad. The story that was written was skewed by time and the fact I can remember so little about my own freaking life. I remember a lot of trauma and exposure to things a kid should never have had to navigate.
The regrets and sadness I still carry are all monkeys on my back to this day. Not the hours of therapy that I went through, not one, has made it easier.
And today. When I think of those three family members (dad, mom and sister), I have so completely lost that connection that I miss it. I have learned a valuable lesson. That the hope it will all change is pure delusion.
When I think if family on the next level, I cannot help but think about how much some of my step-sibs have been there being supportive and positive through the hardest times with my mom and their dad. There was have been a lot of screwed us situations, but they have tried to do better even though there were times when mistakes were made.
People’s true colors were seen. I took care of their dad’s funeral arrangements, obit and his final tasks as best I could with my mom and because of her they got nothing of him. Not a single fiber of his legacy.
Bob, my step-dad, was a challenging soul. I mean, he was… a good fit for my mom. And you see it in the end.
And it stings to look back and wonder how things could have been different. If you are looking backward you are not looking to the path ahead. Staying in the present is the key, right?
I am deeply unsettled and deeply injured by the way this road has gone. One time I went to a workshop called “Faggots and Their Fathers” and all I remember is sobbing my head off through it. I mean, gross-face snot sobs. And I am still damaged from it all.
We came to Seattle to check it out. In reality we have been considering moving here and are still not 100% sure about it. However, I am feeling a little better about the idea. I think moving here will require some boxes ticked that eye a long term transition. For me anyway.
If we move, it is likely somewhere I will have to retire at. C has a longer life and is not going to be stuck anywhere, but building a nice home where ever we go will allow us to build roots and set up life for a long term.
Considering the last 9.5 years together and if the road offers at last that much time still that would be awesome.
Family
As for the drama with my sister that seems to have cooled, but who knows? The moment I take my eye off the ball it will likely swell up again. In the last month I decided I had to walk away from a toxic family dynamic which many many people seem to be in a similar spot.
A big common thread with unhealthy family seems to be the queer kid. Having a queer kid in a family means the kid is not necessarily going to follow you safe, heteronormative family dynamic. That is scary for parents and tips the expectations of family members thus driving anxiety and disillusion of ideas that make some people angry > which is a reaction to fear.
Fear of the rejection of their hetero normative values and fear for the kid who is afraid of being rejected by the family and the over all support system.
Basically, for me I am evaluating things much differently. I have literally been trying to justify my life to parents and siblings that I was at odd with. The reasons I walked away from my sister 30 years ago is different from the reasons I walked away from my dad 20 years ago and finally me mom a month ago.
However, there is a thread running through it all tying it together. My failure to be what other people thought I should be like, or who I should portray myself as. I grew up a queer kid and am still a queer adult.
Whatever…
I might read this again later and wonder what I was thinking. I am using this blog as a tool to put this drama out of my head and live at peace a little. I am sitting in my Seattle hotel room with an amazing view thinking about life.
I have not heard from the Sherriff’s office since Friday and the email I tried to send them bounced back. By all eyes so far, their claims have no legs. To be blunt, it is just harassments from my family proving that their toxic lives are not a good fit for me. I have chosen a different path and cannot see myself in my parents.
The video above has resonated with me so hard since it first came out. Chester Bennington was someone I felt a weird connection to, his voice, his vibe, his being. When he left our world that one hurt.
His voice, his song is the soundtrack of soul crushing pain in my head. It happens more than one would think, but I am hardly the lone ranger on that. The song feels like it pushes back on the angst and anguish as if to cast light on it.
This version is particularly fun because …well, it was fun to watch.
