Pain is Your Imbalance

      There's a lot of pressure around the holidays to feel the necessary warmth of pure human goodness that comes with the spirit of things.  But what if your stark city spirit is as numb as a limb that is still sleeping and unavailable when you go to move?  It's surprising even to me how far from human camaraderie I am as a jaded New Yorker.  I know one fabulous neighbor (perfectly named Angelica) in a building full of people.  The only reason I'm forced to see anyone at all is because I'm walking the dog and waiting for Harley to endlessly sniff the dying Christmas trees piled up outside our building.  I know honey, I love the smell too. These fallen soldiers of the environment get cut down every year in their prime all in the name of temporary home decor and the baby Jesus.  Then there's the worldwide tradition that comes with the big question "What am I gonna get?" Harls is obsessed with trees as I'm sure no other dogs are and I love when she gets little pine needles stuck in her fluffy white paws come early January.  Sometimes I recognize a familiar face but never catch any names.  It's an occasional hello but never anything deeper.  It's New York.
       This year I had the misfortune of being uninvited to Thanksgiving dinner the day before the actual event! Of course there was the legitimate excuse of illness as to why it might not be a good idea for me to come.  But nonetheless it reminded me of how isolated one can feel among all these millions and millions of strangers here on turkey day eve. Manhattan can be brutal. Every year the New York City police precincts are flooded with suicides as soon as the holidays roll around. A woman just recently jumped in front of an oncoming train a month ago just after her fiftieth birthday. She just couldn't take it anymore. Its the ugly urban Hallmark moments like this that make me miss my family and the simpler things in life. I very much miss the smell of my dad's roaring fireplace and the honeysuckle trees scenting the fresh country air around my house. You couldn't buy that smokey sweetness in a bottle if you tried! Firesuckle by Jo Malone? Maybe you could call the magical mixture Honeypit? I dream of fluffy, flaky biscuits and white sausage gravy; the two plastic tea containers I grew up with that are stained so dark from over twenty-five years of Lipton tea bags that they could serve no other purpose; buttery home made sour dough bread and pink lemonade...........mmmmmm; BBQ shrimp; cajun cheesy garlic bread; shrimp enchiladas; shrimp everything actually; the gallons and gallons of plain vanilla ice cream hidden in my dad's freezer accompanied with the pecan pies nobody's supposed to know about.  Boy are those two deserts destined to be married in my wildest fat girl's weakest moments! My secret compulsion is mashing the warm pie up into the ice cream and proceeding to eat all my feelings. I'm about as legitimately homesick as a boy can be and it doesn't matter your age or maturity when it comes to that inner country ache.  Sometimes I just miss the quiet that comes with a Tennessee walk through the woods with my dog off leash or a quiet smoke alone with just me and the fat lazy cows in my back yard.  They certainly aren't calling the cops on me for a little j. because they are way too busy pretending they don't have flies on their eyeballs and chomping down on cheeks fulls of grass and semi-dry hay.  Southern comfort lingers on the outskirts of my sleepy dreams and the sound of a country violin underscores it all.  I'm a Southern boy with a modern twisssssst. I've somehow subdued my city Phoenix and unsuppressed my desperate need for simplicity and the silence of a sensible day hiking in the Smokies with the fam. When the big rocks in Central Park are hollow and too perfectly placed and you can hear the echo when you jump on them........I can completely identify.

Subway Rat

         Once upon a time...a young man found himself in desperate need of a number One train to take him to a far away land called midtown. Call me the Rapunzel of Harlem. My metal carpet ride is nowhere to be found and there isn't a subway light in sight. My hope of taking a new dance class and making the most out of this day is dwindling. Today my counter productivity truly astounds me. I'm trapped underground in a station covered in graffiti and garbage.....home sweet home. I'm running in a hamster wheel and expecting a different result for some reason. It's the very definition of crazy. The energy is getting restless down here in the tunnels and the people are getting collectively more and more nervous. Wait......a train cometh!!! I feel the hope flooding my chest and I almost burst with relief. Hot jazz here I come! Then it blares it's nasty horn and charges past not even stopping at all. Damn you New York! I've been left in the dust yet again. Then another one comes along finally and picks up the massive, agitated crowd. It takes us one stop and then kicks all of us off and goes out of service due to "breaking problems". I flat line...........................................................................................................................
Sometimes I really hate this f*n town! The angry energy of a pissed off New Yorker is just as unsettling as a flight that encounters extreme turbulence, so much so that even the flight attendants look worried. Fasten your seat belt folks because you're gonna need a rape shower after this commute. It's like being slapped across the face by mayor Bloomberg every single day. When I lean as far as I can over the tracks to look for the ghost train that just isn't coming I realize my efforts to strain are in vein. Where's the hope in all this I think aloud? I've now become the crazy person talking to himself that I'm usually judging from a safe distance. People are filing in in twos and threes, pushing and clicking through the turnstiles in a constant stream, yet still there's no train. Only tumbleweed. The MTA has abused me today along with thousands of other late New Yorkers that desperately needed to get somewhere.......and Yesterday!

         I blew off an audition today and decided to take a new dance class as to not totally waste the day. And now it seems that choice has dominoed into only more delayed city chaos. Then, to my horror, everyone suddenly started moving towards the exit en mass to evacuate the station for some police investigation. There was no game to be won at this point because my IPhone ear buds prevented me from hearing the scratchy announcement that we were basically about to be fucked with no lube and no warning.  Acknowledging a silver lining is out of the question when you're talking about this level of disappointment. Living here is a lose lose sometimes and the prices continue to rise even though the quality of life doesn't. I'd rather be sitting in bumper to bumper rush hour traffic in LA in my own car, in my own clean space where no one can touch me, ask me for money, or rob me. Rusty old trains thread the needle of this ridiculous town deep underneath the city streets and my career feels like it's becoming a virtual skip stop due to an eternity of track construction. Ladies and gentlemen....pardon the inconvenience but we will be rerouting this train straight to Hell where the urban circus freaks never rest. This city self-proclaims its own ultimate greatness yet leaves people wanting, frustrated, and closed off. This is my fallen Rome. My home.                                      
        This town might as well be Mars as far as the Big Apple tourists are concerned. They peer through cameras out the windows of those domed double stacked red tour buses, protected behind the glass like curious suburban fish in a tank....eyes bugged out in disbelief at how anyone can live here. I wonder the same thing sometimes. You can always tell a tourist from a hard New Yorker if they're wearing mom jeans and some kind of Times Square paraphernalia. An M&M sweatshirt, white tennis shoes, a Disney bag, and a scrunchy gives a girl away every time. But for all my bitching there are of coarse the small details of this town that have me spoiled....like having the option to eat anything I want at almost any time of day. I love to take cabs at a moments notice when I'm geographically challenged like I am now. And I enjoy the option to go to restaurants and bars as late as I can stand. It beats the deafening quiet that comes with serenity. That's a silence I'm afraid to fill. Immediate access to live music and theatre is something I take for granted as the weeks come and go. This city has bewitched me so completely that I no longer believe that there is life beyond the boroughs. You mean the edge of the world doesn't completely drop off the second you leave Manhattan?! You could've fooled me and millions of other city snobs. Even going to the Jersey shore feels as long as a Tokyo flight sometimes. I forget that people lead fulfilling lives without all the stress of the hyper-urban struggle. I've met fabulous people that have their shit together and live in bumfuck nowhere that I still look at like gerbils in a science experiment.....waiting and watching......wondering when and if they will crack under the pressure of making babies(because that is what you do) and the idea of picturesque, ideal happiness. Stress is stress no matter where you are or what pretty bow you slap on it. We all operate under different levels of it, be it in the country, or right in the middle of some crazy metropolis . I scurry and scuffle around town like a dirty little subway rat jacked up on Red Bull but without the wings, hoping for show biz scraps and a fucking break whatever that means. TAXI!!!!!

   

Homo for the Holidays

     Being home for the holidays is always so humbling and familiar to me, a mixed bag of emotions really. Walking into my mom's blue country kitchen feels so right yet so wrong from my interior design stand point. In the living room a melange of crazy printed upholstery cushions kind of match the less than desirable floral couch of nightmares. Print on print on more print....  White doilies rest beneath every single picture, lampshade, and stack of decorative religious books.  Stuffed teddy bears wear little crosses around their necks and a single giant patchwork quilt hangs featured on the living room wall and completes the Little House on the Prairie countrified log cabin feel.  My claustrophobia sets in after about three days. When there are too many crosses and chachkis sitting in the window sills collecting dust I slowly start to mildly panic.  Over my holiday I woke up every morning in my old childhood bed (where I had my very first orgasm) yet there was not a single trace of me having lived there...none whatsoever.  It was strange that none of my pictures were hung, not even a photo of me to represent the life that had begun there and evolved between those four walls. They had been painted over and the holes from the push tacks filled in. There were no more maps of Paris haphazardly pieced together or dried flowers hanging upside down stinking up the room with that dead smell I now have come to hate. It was nothing but documentaries on Moses and the burning bush and more doilies. My old bed spread was made from all the flags from every country around the world. It was now gone and covered with super sized quilt surprisingly enough. I was a dreamer who's goal was to visit every country represented on my Walmart deuve. And for the most part, because of the business I'm in, I've had the opportunity to travel more than most people have by thirty-one years old. And for that I am truly and utterly grateful.
         The decor is actually very well done for the style my mom is going for but it's just not my style. The best part of my childhood home in Sevier county (no joke on the name!) is the huge dominating fire place anchoring the cathedral ceiling. It's the center and best part of my parent's space and me and Harley love to sit in the rocking chair....feet up.....and listen to old scratchy Ella Fitzgerald records on vinyl. The intense heat is perfect and my toes and heart are warm again.
                
           I coasted into town this time on fumes...an empty gas tank completely low on inspiration from a very unforgiving city. East Tennessee was my greatest escape and now it's so weird to love it as much as I do. How unfamiliar it is to crave the very thing I tried so hard to escape all those years ago. Hillbilly irony. I need to simplify my life and reduce some of the noise if I can. Moving home is not the answer nor is staying an swirling around in the same fucking negative depression I've been nurturing forever. That constant "glass is half empty" approach eventually turns into Cancer one day I'm convinced! My friend Joan says not to make any rash decisions that I might regret (like moving) considering how much I've built for myself in twelve years, but to simply change my frequency and vibration as to how I think about what is or is not going on in my life. Negativity manifests itself in ugly ways. Do people really find a calm space within the chaos of the urban storm? Isn't even the calmest yoga instructor occasionally stressed out beyond all composure? Don't they curse the same scarce trans and fare hikes that I do? I seem to have all the standing power of a fallen leaf in a tornado. I live in limbo and feel like New York could, at any moment, sweep in and knock my knees out from under me with one swift blow.
          The icy greeting from some of my uptown neighbors makes me want to run for the country hills and rent the first little secluded house I can find....just me and Harley and my blog. Sometimes room mates feel like strangers when you are living community style. I can write this confidently because I can't imagine any of them ever being interested enough or bothering to read any of my writing anyway. It surprises me how many of my closest friends haven't even read a single word of this blog. I love the "I haven't quite gotten around to it yet" excuse!  Chorus Boy Interrupted is like my little secret. It's my sanity. And even worse than not reading it at all is when someone tells me they "skimmed" it! Nothing makes me crazier than the word SKIM!
           There are many different definitions of what a home can be. My mother's is a country bed and breakfast-like home she and my dad own and built from the ground up. It sits on three acres of land that they also own. That land backs right up to a huge beautiful horse farm that would take your breath away if you looked out beyond our back porch. I rent. That's what I do. I might as well stuff nine hundred dollar bills into a pipe and smoke it! High rents and low inspiration make for an ugly pair in 2011 but I'm fully available for a spiritual and financial boost should the universe see fit. She has deemed me her humble servant.....ready and whipped into total submission. But I've got reserves New York. Don't fuck with TDos....people get results when they've got everything and nothing to loose!

Everything to Loose

      Missing the necessary axles to make a sweet push through the park, rollerblading is absolutely out of the question.  Anyway my bike is totally fucked from flipping it on 158th street where Harley decided to take her own life by jumping out of the doggie-bike-basket she was secured into with a harness.  Needless to say it ended horribly but Harls was alright if not totally, completely freaked out.  I was the one sprawled out face down on the pavement bleeding and coughing and trying to catch my breath and check on the dog.  A puppy screaming bloody murder is the most awful sound known to mankind!  I can think of nothing worse in this world than an injured animal.  My girl was just shaken up but nothing serious.   I, on the other hand, bled profusely with a chewed up left elbow that had pieces of gravel and rocks stuck in it and a left palm that had a half-dollar sized perfect circle peeled back and hanging on by a disgusting oozing thread.  Dance classes have been canceled for me because my right toe nail was split and peeled back about two weeks from falling completely off. There will be no squeezing this mangled toe into a split-soled dance sneaker for some hot jazz anytime soon.  My bike chain  is completely tangled in a greasy, oily knot (only to be undone with heavy duty gloves.)  The dog basket is completely ajar and off kilter along with the handle bars and seat.  What freaked me out the most about this heinous incident (other than the blood and the puppy scare) were all the people that walked right by me and my screaming dog, never lending a hand or even so much as asking if we were alright.  It was the ultimate New York brush off.  I myself would have dropped anything that I  was doing and rushed to help a person that just flipped his bike n' child.
       I hit the jagged asphalt hard and fast and slid about five feet.  !!!BAM!!!  I didn't try to brace myself at all because my only goal was on catching the dog safely.  Mission not accomplished!  I caught neither her nor myself.  It was a hard cement slip n' slide of sorts that completely took my breath away.  The skin on my hands and elbows peeled back like the meat of a carrot being shaved. If I saw some pizza delivery guy flip his bike and completely wipe out right in front of me I wouldn't step over his twisted, mangled and bloody body and pretend I didn't see it go down.  Come on New York!   
       A fat white woman straight out of my nightmares walked around me with Oprah weights in her hands pumping them high and fast for maximum effect. She looked at me coughing and crying and stepped over my scraped up body and pumped her hand weights off into the sunset like Richard Simmons after a huge heartless line of cocaine. Help a brother out chubbs!  She didn't even consider lending a swollen puffy hand. This bitch was dead inside and I could see exactly how much she didn't care about me or Harley in her jaded, washed out, menopausal gaze.  She was really way too busy slapping her thighs together and having hot flashes to care about us.  And her special curved toner shoes were proving to be perfectly pointless. She was one of those big girls who's knees buckled inward like an X from all the weight she'd been schlepping around year after year.  In fact I detected a rolling of the eyes as if I seemed to be inconveniencing her somehow with my immediate tragedy.  It baffles me how extreme things have to be here in the city before someone is bothered enough to notice anything outside of their little urban bubble and lower their New York times to text in a mugging or taxi accident to the police.  Where is that human connection among all these millions of strangers? I find that New Yorkers all share one thing......unnecessary isolation.  
         After the eternity it took for me to quiet and calm Harley down I began to angrily assess my cuts and scrapes. It wasn't looking good.  I'm fine in other peoples emergencies but a huge gay disaster if I'm the one hurt. I swoon and faint easily when it's my blood that's gushing! Once I badly cut my finger while slicing oranges in the Crescent Moon lesbian cafe where I worked part time as an closeted awkward teen.   The morning prep required that I cut hundreds of orange slices for the lunch garnishes. My hand slipped and the blade cut right through a huge,  meaty chunk of my left thumb.  I looked at mama Teri and told her what happened. And as soon as I got the words out "I'm totally fi......" I slid down the kitchen wall onto the floor and totally passed out.  Later I was told that as I crumpled down the wall into a heap on the kitchen floor I mumbled to the rest of the staff that "I'm just going to take a little nap"  I don't remember saying that. I don't want to loose all sense of caring for people and become so numb and detached that I would probably hop into a cab that just dumped a dead body on the curb. I need to become the person that I want to save me one day.  I just want to know New York....................where have all the cowboys gone?