Down for the Count

My home computer is acting up ... and won't let me get online. I feel like a junkie without his drugs. I can check email at work, but can't go into a lot of the sites I chat on. So bye bye Gaydar. Bye bye Big Muscle. Bye bye Tribe.

Maybe this is good. I know I spend way too much time online. I'll have to meet guys the old fashioned way. In person.

[represses a shudder]

I'm at a computer cafe right now, clearing my gaydar inbox. I'm trying to keep the open windows small so that the innocent boys around me don't freak.

Been fighting the blues all day. Not sure why. There's nothing specific. Well, except for the complete lack of romance or sex since I left New York, the fact that I'm smoking and drinking and eating lots of sweets [damn holidays] , the mess that my studio is, the energy I'm spending trying to help a friend who's going through a very rough period, and that I'm turning 40 tomorrow.

40. Shit. Most of the time I forget that I've had a birthday until days afterwards. Not tomorrow. 40 doesn't bother me per se - it's that the next milestone is 50. And that freaks the shit out of me. Sure, it's ten years away. But I just took a state job that will take ten years to get vested, and it pretty much ties me to the islands until then. I can't really walk away from state retirement benefits. I've entered the gilded cage of my own free will, but I've lost some of the freedom that I've always guarded so jealously.

And there's my buddy. I've had friends go through worse and stood by them. And I've been through my own rough patches, and can empathize. So this is a road I know. What's new is the reaction of my other friends. I'm getting mini lectures from random sources on enabling and codependency. I might pop next time someone says either of those words in my presence.

Because what pop culture calls enabling, I call unrequited love. What they call co-dependency, I call brotherhood. And what they call self-empowerment I call being cold hearted.

The benefit of having a Catholic background - and of having lived in other cultures - is that I know there are alternatives to this puritanical self-help 12-step bullshit. I refuse to buy into it.

Don't know if I'll be online until Tuesday. I'll try and have lots of good adventures so that I'll have things to write about. Cheers, and Happy New Year.