Days are ticking down to the point where I have to move out of my current situation and need to find a new one. The main reason for the shift was to get away from my current housemate, Mark. In that effort I led myself right off a cliff so far.
One of my biggest fears is to end up homeless. Technically I am ending up that way as of next week. I made an offer on one place… she wanted much for rent and the room was 1/3 of the room I am in now. A twin bed barely fits in it. So she has not accepted or declined. It’s in a pretty decent area but certainly nothing I would scream over.
Alas nothing else has prevailed. I am looking for work at the same time and doing both has me freaking exhausted. The last two days I have been running around checking out places and doing interviews. I came home both days exhausted.
I am supposed to be, right? If I don’t work for it what will it all mean? Well, this is a huge test.
I do not want to leave San Francisco. I have people here I really like. I am dating a guy who is pretty awesome, still. I have a life I like and I do not want to lose it. If I have to go I will do so sadly. I crashed and burned again…
Category Archives: verbal diahrea
What just happen????
This is actually part 2 of a story… or shall I say the non-readers digest version. I posted a very clean version of this tale on www.gayburners.com choosing to leave off many of the details because it was just too bizarre.
Castro Street Fair
It all started at the Castro Street Fair when I was approached by two nice guys because I was a single guy. The told me about matchmaker wonder Susan Adams of www.distinguishedgaymen.com and how I absolutely had to meet her. Indeed, she was as charming and engaging as they described. So, after taking my name and number they said they would be in touch.
It took a while, but Susan arrived in San Francisco again and was meeting with potential clients. We arranged a meeting at Cafe Flore right on the corner of Noe and Market here in the city. Something about Cafe Flore: It is in the gayest of areas in the city and is owned apparently by Burning Man people! If that is not cool enough, there is a MAN effigy on the roof of the place!
First and Only Meeting
We met and talked about a lot of things, because she was looking to be a match maker and find someone for me, or maybe me for someone?
I tried laying it all out on the table and explain why dating has been such a bitch since Adolfo and I broke up and went in separate directions. I was honest that I felt he was my last soul-mate. I described how dissatisfied I was with meeting guys because they never mentioned they were in relationships already until I thought we were starting to make a connection.
When the subject got into my Burning Man activities things started getting very slipery.
“She told me she was planning on going to Burning Man next year in our discussion over coffee. We were meeting in a local cafe called “Cafe Flore” that has a Burning Man Man on the roof and is owned by Burners. We were meeting because she was going to provide me a service and was interviewing me for this service… but she kept going back to ‘why‘ is Burning Man in your life beyond some festival that happens 7 days a year?
“When I tried explaining that the 10 Principles include things like radical self reliance, radical self expression, community involvement, etc… I explained these were things that were are not the 10 Commandments. But she countered:
‘Why wouldn’t a normal person just do the right thing? Why is Burning Man in your life beyond some festival that happens 7 days a year?’
“Not everyone just does the right things and we are looking this as guidelines for a community. It’s a culture. It’s an ideal.
Part of Burning Man for me is the nearly unquestionable inclusion and acceptance in the local and major events. Those 10 Principles referred to here and there in the original story are guidelines people opting into the culture generally adapt and apply in daily life.
I also talked about the Radical Faeries and how I am enjoying my engagement with them?
“What is it about these people you find attractive?” she asked [paraphrased]
“From what I have seen the Radical Faeries are about gay people being as expressive and as real as they want without being burdened by the condemning eye of people who cannot understand… I love the ability to just put it out there.”
Keep in mind she started off telling me how much she wanted to go to Burning Man. If you know me I am the cheerleader on crack kool-aide drinkin’ cartwheelin’ Burning Man believer… all hale Larry!
“In the course of our conversation and how she kept referring to it being just a 7 day event that begins and ends and then, as she said, ‘people return to their normal lives’ I gave her a suggestion. I said, in the nicest way possible, cushioning it and told her: Maybe Burning Man is really not for you.”
Conclusion
There is no way I could afford paying her for this service. Maybe at this point she caught up with the calculation and she decided she could not invest in what I was bringing to the table. Or… perhaps my suggestion that she pass on Burning Man was insulting?
It was this bi-polar moment when we were having an engaging conversation, she was showing me pictures of her in the 80’s as a match-maker, and asking all kinds of personal questions. I answered them all but we stalled cold.
Susan shut down faster then a vampire at sunrise and closed the folder, shook my hand wishing me good luck, and stomped away. I saw literally sitting there for at least 5 minutes trying to figure out what just happen.
WHAT JUST HAPPEN????
I sat there dazed and Susan walked through the restaurant and came out the other side then walked right past me in a daze? I have to wonder if she had a stroke or something happen to cause such a bizarre shift in mood. Needless to say I will not be a part of www.distinguishedgaymen.com and my application is: DENIED!
VLOG: Sunset in San Francisco
Was just a beautiful night and I got all video happy again!
VLOG: Friends
Playing with video stuff… what do you think?
VLOG: Thoughts
There is a point just after 7 mins where it gets a little long… the transition before the out take should be FF…
back from where…
I have not written anything here since coming back from Burning Man probably because I really have not completely landed. When I try putting the puzzle pieces together I am finding they did not really fit.
When I sit here looking at the screen determined to write something there are too many things trying to get out at the same time. I will, for your information, be writing more on my burner blog talking about my actual experience out there but these pages are for me. My burner blog is on this site too here.
Anyway, this may sound cliche, but I am back and changed down to my soul. There is this vein of anger I am missing and left somewhere and the way the universe works I pity the soul that may have taken that energy into him, her or other. Not trippin’ either. When you read the burner blog maybe you will understand… if you do.
I did come back determined to put a foundation under my feet. There was an unexpected upheaval in that plan when my wallet was left in Reno. It basically forced me to put life on pause a moment longer and make some evaluations. In that I updated my portfolio site called StudioSK. I don’t want that any more… I am sick of technology and am burnt out on it.
The burning desire to be creative and put my art out there kinda got a kick in the groin too. My art piece Final Passage was a ship wreck. All the work and all the energy I put into the piece itself was a total failure. I did take away the journey as the win in this case, because the people I was able to work around and I hope I learned something. In fact an idea for my next art piece can be very exciting.
One big issue is the problems I have had with my birth father. This is a demon that haunted me a long time and 2 years of therapy only took me so far. The anger that was inside of me and the pain of struggling with the life of being with him in my formative years was more damaging than I ever imagined.
Without sounding crazy, which some people think I am anyway, a woman named Gigi and a man named Coop helped me strip something out of me that left me softer. It left me more fluid. It took away a lot of anger.
No. My sails are unfurled and I feel like I am in the sea. I root out the people who cause pain and I refuse to acknowledge their attempt to pull me down. I look into your projection of pain and your false empathy and let it roll right past me. I am like the wind and you are the trees and I will become water and you will be the rocks.
I am rediscovering my spirit and I will not let you take that away from me. Let me tell you your spirit is important too. When you try to steal mine you are losing a bit of yours.
Another Day
There are a lot of days that come and go when it feels like I am literally falling into a whole. Today was like that, seems like it is happening once a week, but something always makes the landing just soft enough to to keep from getting a bloody nose.
I know I have a lot of things going on and I get a lot of good things happening, don’t get me wrong. I am grateful for every day and really have been taking a lot in the face just to get from getting up in the morning and going to bed at night.
I hope a change in energy will allow me to have a change in focus over the next couple months as I get ready for what may well be my last Burning Man. I can keep making art and I can keep involving myself with some local burner crap but I think it’s time to let go. Everything that was fulfilling got light shined onto it in the last year and the dreamkillers won.
Digressing
Well, there are these days when a lot of things are going on and somehow at the end of the day I still feel like I got beat up. Today I was home until noonish and then went to go see Harry Potter by myself. Then I had a date with a guy I met on the train yesterday who is 22 years old. He was cute, sweet, nice and very interested in me. We met today and I was not feeling ‘it’. I hung out and suggested we get some dinner and he kept tooling around, playing on his blackberry and for some reason keeping me from getting food. I ended up just walking away…
Dating? Ugh… at least not that way. I had no idea what the hell I was doing with that kid and I am just over this stupid idea of trying to date again. I am 4 freaking years out of practice… is it supposed to be hard?
1964
I have shared a lot on this thing. This is my personal journal. I have also sorta faded from posting as often as I have because it feels like writing here results in more negative drama than I would like. I am trying to focus more on positive things.
Right now my stress levels (as mentioned multiple times already) are through the roof! I need to find a job. I need to find grounding. I need to find myself again because I have tried wearing so many hats that none of them fit anymore. Going to school for 2 careers only led to confusion. Trying to please other people has led to disaster. Looking for greener grass has led to anxiety. Past regrets and mistakes have become this creature always at my back scratching me and cutting me.
I’ve known I had a problem with anxiety that went back to 1996. I can almost give you the date when something inside of me cracked and the fissure kept growing for a long time. I had a lot of things to help me hold it together, mostly my optimistic youth and a lot of friends I loved and counted on. But something happen when those things broke too.
My interpersonal relationships are hard to maintain and I feel like my connections to people are lost in something related to this feeling of Chaos I bring with me all the time. It is this perception that I somehow instinctively see the cracks in people and examine them to death and sometimes bring it to the attention of that person thus bringing that chaos into their world.
In 2009 I lost a good job to this issue and I went to see a doctor eventually and was given a medication to help with it. It has been a great equalizer and over time the medication has evolved but the anxiety has too. It has become much worse and came with depression that occasionally put me in a hole from time to time.
I am dealing with this mental illness and I have never said anything about it before in the blogs posted here. It is anxiety and depression and I am dealing with it. It has made some of the irrational decisions I have made, bad choices, and kept me from finding comfort in my own skin. My weight issues have been holding me back and my age are all feeling like bricks on my shoulders.
No one is out there who can help me and I try to help myself. That whole Burning Man principle Radical Self Reliance has been my credo and I refuse to need anyone to exist. I rely on someone and I can bet that person will let me down anyway.
I am writing this posting to talk about this subject here for the first time. It was years ago someone told me they were impressed with how much I put out there and how honest I am. I have been lying to anyone except family who has been reading this because you don’t know what is going on.
- I suffer from severe anxiety; to the point where it is literally debilitating and cause me to freeze up, lock down and shut off more than panic attacks. I have been in treatment with a doctor for more than a year and a half.
- I suffer from severe depression where I sometimes drop into a hole and can’t see out.
- I take a mild medication to keep it under control; Wellbutrin and Clonapan.
When someone recently made a lot of angry posts publicly claiming I was mentally ill it hurt pretty deep. There was truth in it, but this is a world where using those words is a condemning as telling someone you are a felon or a child molester. There is this shroud that because you have issues that you have chosen to deal with that it is your fault.
I am a good guy. I have a good heart. I have courage and I have character. I am brave and I believe in justice. Your baggage cannot be my baggage and visa versa.
All around me are…
In my life there are certain energies that I think I have exuded. No matter where I move in the world and no matter what changes I make in life there are constants. I am certainly NOT saying there is anything special about me, but over the many years of my existence:
when I come into a person’s life or when I have become a part of an organization I feel like I bring chaos; let’s define chaos. My presence seems to force change and I think that is an energy I bring. Sometimes it is good, a few times it goes the other way.- there are a lot of people I meet and realize they are vampires. Time vampires… energy vampires… and none of them really stay around very long or I keep them a safe distance away. (I know someone is going to project this statement on themselves, but let me assure you these people are NOT reading this page. It would require them to invest and not just suck away.)
There is more and somewhere along the way I learned to cow to other people and become gum on the bottom of people’s shoes while any attempt to stand up for myself or for someone else has left me feeling like the asshole. I am so fucking over feeling like roadkill in life.
In the last couple years I have fallen down so often while trying to fix myself that I have lost who I am entirely.
I went to school to learn how to cook and I went to school to improve what I can do with design, web and art and I am not doing any of them with any great success. In fact choosing a couple of careers has left me with none in the end.
Take a job in a field you like doing as a hobby and you will see resentment for that hobby unless it is a passion that has a return. Unless you are successful then, like me, you end up feeling kicked – down – and that all that money for school was a waste. I left the Art Institute of Las Vegas without skills I needed to find work. I was shuffled through classes and passed without the basic knowledge needed just to move me and other on.
I know I have a responsibility myself as a student, but all along I thought I was leaving with what I needed and that magical B.S. degree would lead to great things…. absolute horse shit.
That’s another consistency in my life – delusion. If it is not the case of the ‘grass is greener’ then I also always fall for glitter being thrown in my eyes.
- glitter includes when I left the Air Force and was promised that people would want to hire a veteran … like it was some red carpet to success … meanwhile I hear that they don;t want vets because they are too rigid
- glitter includes going to college and getting a degree in a field and thinking there was work afterward…
All BULLSHIT. All of it BULLSHIT… BULL – FUCKING – SHIT ….
…so there ya go.
Hippieville
Well, I have arrived in San Francisco and settled in. It was a slightly bouncy landing and more expensive than I expected. I was not very happy about the expenses… $135. for a tank of gas and that bitch needed to be filled 3x. I had to borrow the money which I did not have.
So, I took some pictures of the trip in and some of the property where I am living. It is a decommissioned Nave Base and it still looks like a base. I love it… I miss those days. There is a lot of hood-rats running around here but the place is clean and nice.
Did I mention I live in the middle of the bay on an island. Yes, it is called Treasure Island and it sit between Oakland and San Francisco connected by the Bay Bridge.
View Larger Map
Personally Speaking
Coming here and seeing Mark again was nice. I have not seen him in more than a year. It’s been good seeing him again and getting aquainted, but he is a party animal and I cannot keep up with that boy. We met up Friday and Sunday and went out and decided I was done for a little while anyway.
The household itself is a strange mix and we all have some interesting things in common. Some things I just can’t put into writing on this site, but at the same time I hate editing myself. This just proves to certain assholes out there that I do have an edit button.