"Am I Alive?"
Today is perhaps the first time I’ve ever walked through Bed-Stuy without feeling subsumed — in nauseating hyper-empathy, feeling the pain and desperation of everyone I encounter…All this is to say: it’s a pretty day and I had a nice walk in the park. The question is: now what? Or, what now?
The clarity I feel in this moment comes after a night out to the Exley of all places a gay ditchwater slophut I swore I’d never return to. And yet, there I was, making out with a stacked silver daddy, racing off in his Fiat, sneaking to a friend’s condo, where we got some privacy in the closed fitness room. It was life enough to wake me up, and enter me into this brief halcyon transmission. It feels like those 24 hours after you’ve done molly, when you’re floating on the rings of Neptune in hi-def crystalline awareness, grateful and lucid and satisfied from the dancefloor. Then comes the crash. So let’s get this going.
It’s been agony. New York, Israel, some third option I’m blind to. Trusting what’s in my heart, knowing that some of said heart’s desires were informed by a diseased upbringing and an urge to run. The feeling of wandering New York like Odysseus in the Land of the Dead, surrounded by the sheddings of old selves. Today, my friend Danny and I started talking about Benjamin Maisani’s failed nightclub LoveGun, from back in 2014. Jesus. How am I still alive?
No apartment, no money, no real plan. And the fear that if I go back to Tel Aviv, I’ll be like Wendy returning to Neverland, or Kagame playing hookey to keep visiting her demon lover in the Feudal Japan of Inuyasha. The sense that I’ve branched off from the path, that I’m now on a fringe timeline, steering my starship towards oblivion, a lost cause like my fiftysomething divorcee cousin [NAME REDACTED].
I’ve been staying with different friends over the last few months, collecting momentary closure on all my definitive relationships. It feels like an inevitable goodbye tour, but onto what? Ryan keeps assuring me that these last few months — a Mars in Gemini saga which I have deemed to be an absolute waste, a meandering in the desert on par with the Israelites going in circles after the Exodus — that this chapter has great value. There is wisdom, and peace, and power in it. He’s right. That doesn’t mean I have to like it. Which of course brings us to Jenny Slate on Girls, which you all saw coming:
“Look at you. You’ve had all of these, like, boyfriends and jobs and moments. And you’ve lived all this truth.”
“Well, it didn’t feel like very much while it was happening…”
“But it is much.”
Emily texted me the other day:
Not incidentally, it is Pisces season, and one of the essential truths I learned from Liz Greene’s masterpiece The Astrology of Fate is this: the sign of the messiah is not only embodied by Jesus, but by Judas. Which is to say: the fish that swims upstream is as important to the salvation of humankind as the one that surrenders to the current. Remarkably, shockingly, there is validity (and even valiance) in that part of me which will not give up the fight, the struggle, the conflict; the part which bolts me awake at four AM, vibrating and perseverating with suicidal anxiety; the part which, consciously or unconsciously, presses the CRASH button over and over again on any progress gained.
My response to Emily wasn’t my own, but Laura Dern’s from Little Women, for it’s all I have to hold onto:
THERE ARE SOME NATURES TOO NOBLE TO CURB
AND TOO LOFTY TO BEND
I can’t believe I’m admitting this, but while recovering from butt surgery I watched the baseball romance Bull Durham, starring supreme Libra Susan Sarandon…and…Kevin Costner. This is a huge coup for my friend Lulu, who has marched the streets defending Dances with Wolves and Yellowstone for ages, securing herself a peaceful retirement on Taylor Sheridan’s ranch while the rest of us walk willingly into RuPaul’s dungeon gulag. I get that Kevin Costner is very handsome in that movie, but his entire sex appeal is so straight as to render him nearly invisible to gay eyes. He’s like Russell Crowe, or even Clooney. I can’t see him!
But regardless, the movie is hot, and there’s actually a point to this rant. He plays a washed-up baseball player who falls in love with Susan Sarandon, the local league’s seductress/sorceress/high priestess. The story ends with him giving up his swinging career and accepting a managing position. The two sit on her spectacular porch, where she starts speculating on baseball and the future.
“I got a lot of time to hear your theories. And I wanna hear every damn one of them, but now I’m tired, and I don’t want to think about baseball. I don’t want to think about quantum physics and I don’t wanna think about nothin’. I just want to be.”
I don’t know what that means for me, or where that means. I just know what my guides have shown me: that my health is all that matters, that they don’t really give a shit what I do with my career, that they just want me to be happy, and whole, and that I have the option to exit the nightmare, at my leisure, like Jessica Jones breaking away from the Purple Man in Alias.
In one of my favorite Superman stories, the Man of Steel’s enemies break him down and force him to chisel his own tombstone. But even when shit’s going down, and the world’s about to end, when Lois Lane sees what he’s inscribed, she knows it ain’t over ‘til it’s over. And it’s not. I release my ultimate destiny, my higher karmic directive. If it means I get to stick around, then it doesn’t matter where I end up. I just want to be.
