It was almost 90 degrees on Sunday and this morning I am windshield-wiping frost off the glass and it’s 47 degrees and also it is February so everything is fine and totally normal.
Am I going to quit my job? I might. A late night sync-call, I join without others — new people, my new boss — necessarily clocking that I have done so, I hear the tail end of a very candid convo. Lay-offs. “The board has ZERO confidence in this org to deliver, it’s time for a change.” A totally bonkers, bat-shit plan to pivot to crypto? “We’ll be on the rocket.” I spend the rest of the night in mounting dread. All executives are assholes, but am I working for douches?
Next day I pull a spread mid zoom call: “WTF is going on at this company” Hierophant, 7 Coins, 2 Rods, all reversed. I message a friend about the reading. “Jesus, is like… weird illegal, grifty shit going down? Shady leadership?” In the mouth of two witnesses, el oh el. I am spiraling and just so so tired.
I apply for a job at my old job, send out some feelers. A friend from another old job reaches out from the ether: any chance you’re looking for a new opportunity? Two calls with his bosses tomorrow.
Something must be done about the phrase “nice to e-meet you.” It sends me into the void, staring into the space between electrons. “E…meet… you?” We haven’t met. You just… sent me a calendar invite, this is literally our first and only interaction.
A text from Danny: a humpday drink? A night out in a bar just chatting for a couple hours. So prosaic on paper, but the revelation of the activity after almost two years of abstinence? Euphoria. I realized 30 minutes in that I hadn’t once even thought of or worried about a contagion. Unreal.
This is a new neighborhood spot, easy drinks: classic drinks with an herbal twist; easy bites: focaccia, stuffed olives. Moody without being a scene, feeling special without being precious. A minor event in the best possible way.
Halfway through the night an enormous cat named Lenny walked confidently into the bar, onto a banquette and sat down immediately next to a patron and the whole bar was all amazement. Instant celebrity. An omen?
Apparently, also a regular, and swiftly escorted out.
Will it ever not be a horror to see the back of your own head?
As much as I’d like to be “above” resolutions, especially fitness resolutions, there is a large part of my lizard brain that finds the new year extremely satisfying for goal setting. Officially, my only resolutions were to be able to do 10 pullups in a row (I began January being able to do… one), and to move up a class in bouldering, from v3 to v4. Unofficially… ugh where to start.
John has been on a wild diet at his gym, an anti- diet, his wildest dreams diet. He went in to his nutritionist with goals to build muscle and lose weight, and to his shock she prescribed almost 2000 more calories than he was currently eating, a lot of it carbs (which he’d previously been avoiding religiously.) In the last 4 weeks he’s lost 11 lbs, while eating non-stop, and is so visibly jacked it’s giving me a complex.
The monstrosity of the gay male feedback loop. To want to look like what you want to fuck so that what you want to fuck wants to fuck you. That death spiral, that hall of mirrors. So what started as just 10 pullups has turned into keeping up with John. It’s so shallow and fueled entirely by insecurity. My concerns are not only to be attractive to him, but also, to me? and to others, not to be desired by them, but to not be perplexing. To not be observed, John and I together, and to have other muscle fags wonder what I’m bringing to the table. “Huh, what’s going on there?” Are they observing? Who knows? Probably. I already feel the eyes when our friends who also go to John’s incredibly posh, and very Hollywood gym come over, with their 27 abs, skate ramp trapezii, and pneumatic arm veins.
Also, death death death. To look down at my arms and see the gray hairs waltzing in. The crepey skin at my neck. To observe the age and decay of this body, while not yet being able to totally feel it, and to try to fool myself into pretending the inevitable can be avoided. Does this happen to you, too? Mid-traffic, on the way to the grocery store, you slip for a second and there before you is the white-hot yawning abyss of the fact that you will die, you will die, you will die, you are dying, right now, and everything will stop and everything will be lost and you won’t even know because you won’t even be and suddenly you are LITERALLY gasping for breath while you also try to make a left turn?
What fun. It’s stupid! But human. Oh well.
It’s also something to do. I love climbing and climbing is difficult with the weight I’m bringing to the wall, and the decorative arms I’ve brought along to lift it. So I’m back on the rower between climbing days, back on some cross-training in between those. Observing some restraint at meals. Trying (and failing!) not to be neurotic.
Anyway, I thought my arms looked good here.
Books in January. A lot of history, fodder for drawings, food for thought.
- Casey Wilson’s memoir was a surprising gem: essays with a surprise, gut wrenching arc about the loss of her mother, but truly laugh out loud throughout.
- The War of Art was a two-day dalliance, recommended by POOG. Brilliant if somewhat cringeworthy life and creative advice from your boomer coworker who maybe sometimes says the wrong thing, but who knows what they’re talking about. Containts the most crisp, sharply observed analysis of inherent animosity between fundamentalism and art.
- Edge of the World & Blood of the Isles were a refreshing look at northern European history and folk customs, antidotal to nationalism and supremacist views. Edge of the World changed the way I thought about the relationship between coastal communities and deeper mainland towns and cities, where the former had far more in common and to do with one another than with the latter, even within their own “borders.” The Light Ages was similar, changing my understanding of the roots of our modern sciences and the people who brought them to the fore.
Blood of the Isles took me back to my Ancestry DNA days, but also contained a tantalizing personal connection: an anecdote about a “journeyman geneticist” in the 1800s who catalogued physical characteristics of people in the British Isles. He noted a group of people in the West Riding of Yorkshire with almond shaped eyes and darker features — features he puts down to an exotic, foreign bloodline somewhere in the Colonial rule. That’s where my family is from and describes me precisely, but Blood of the Isles (and my own DNA analysis) shows no such admixture… just a weird, native trait, present in theIslands long before the Saxons made their way across the strait. - Queer City and the Edge of the World have really kindled a rage in me towards Rome, Christianity and piety of any stripe. How much we lost. How much was erased.
Here are some masonry heaters I drew.
I got covid at the beginning of the year. Omicron was relentless, but nowhere more unimpeded than Utah, and so a visit to celebrate my dad’s 63rd was the inevitable vector. We knew it would be, and 5 days after returning home, symptoms materialized.
It was very manageable. I had a low fever for a day, congested & coughing for a week. And for 5 days the most painful sneezes I’ve ever had — about 150 total. Each time my arms, lats, and traps would be in agony for about 2-3 seconds, tender the whole day. It was weird.
Today I’m fine.
Will blogs ever return to their glory days? Does anyone have the discipline? Web3 this and newsletter that, but nothing captures the glory days.
In a month I turn 39. 2022, in the 2nd month, on the 22nd day, a 2sday. What does it mean, to what portents does this omen slant?
Last week I received my first shot of the 2-part Moderna Covid-19 vaccine.
The number of times in the past year that I have thought — in the middle of the anxiety attacks, in the plodding logic of survival mode, etc — “If only I could like… kind of catch covid? get the most mild case possible? Just enough to get the antibodies?”
Last year we watched The Great and saw the the court of Catherine the Great tread that same path of if-thens, coming logically to the process of inoculation. It’s a comedy, but you see even in the farce the naked terror of disease. I’ve never missed a vaccination growing up, but my understanding of things like measles, mumps, rubella, small-pox, polio, et al are the stuff of history books.
It’s both with this well-worn, erudite understanding of the mechanics of vaccination, and this sharp, newly-minted, visceral puzzling my way “out of the trap” that I brings to me fresh appreciation of doctors, scientists, and generally smart people that have made this possible.
It’s with this workaday awe that I humor the pharmacy worker who insipidly coos “now you’ve got the Fauci-ouchie.”
Reflecting on a year of never being indoors out of the house for more than 5-10 minutes at a time. Years in San Francisco prepared me for endless queuing, but now as things seem like they’re slowly inching back to normal, I’m wondering if a line outside a shop will ever register as anything noteworthy ever again.
Routine starts to develop at the new place. LaColombe in the morning, B-Twentyfour if I’ve got a wild hair. Regular visits to the Heights for sandwiches. Realizing that no one who “knows” me as a regular knows what my face looks like.
Saw a guy I’ve cruised before at coffee the other morning, a guy who I regularly chat with on the apps. I was dressed like a slob, hadn’t shaved, bags like loaded paniers under my eyes. I fell into the old mental dance of “how do I avoid his gaze, how do I dodge this exchange?” but then realized… we’ve never seen each other’s faces in real life, this one chance encounter made possible by the fact he was unmasked while walking his dog on the river trail. I took a breath and passed geradeaus with nary a blip on the radar.
There are parts of Los Angeles that remind me so much of very specific areas in the Bay. It’s usually the parts where the city smashes up against the hard reality of terrain & geography, where the land says “no more.”