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March 2011

Unhappy house

Thing that doesn’t make me happy: spending hours cleaning and scrubbing the house for a Sunday open house that’s attended by exactly one person (and my real estate agent suspects he was a curious neighbor rather than a buyer).

I need this house to be sold. Soon. It’s such a great house and I used to love it so. Part of me still loves it. But the the thirty-mile commute is only going to become more and more of a problem. Worse still, the place is just too big, too expensive, and too maintenance-intensive for me to handle all by myself. Factor in the fact that I’m a little depressed every time I walk in the door these days and you’ll maybe understand how the house I loved has become something of a giant albatross.

As many of you may have deduced, yer humble host is single again after nine and a half years. Mark and I decided a little over two weeks ago that it was time to call it quits. There’s no animosity between us. We love and care about each other and we’ll always consider each other “family.” It’s just that we’ve grown in very different directions over the past few years, and we’ve developed very different views of what we want out of life. Eventually we hit a point where we realized that the incompatibility–and the lack of communication about it–had more or less strangled our relationship. That’s the short version. There’s a longer version, but it has the same basic plot and the same exact ending and I’m not going to share it here.

It would be an understatement to say that this is the single most painful thing that’s ever happened to me in my life. I’ve shed more tears than I knew I was capable of producing. It doesn’t get much sadder than realizing that you’re not going to spend the rest of your life with the person you’d planned on spending it with. The way I’d envisioned the next phase of my life has been drastically altered just when I was expecting to be happy and excited about how successfully I’d “reinvented” myself in the past few years. This has magnified every little insecurity I’ve ever had about myself–I have a lot of them, thanks–and it makes the standard midlife crisis look like a fucking walk in the park.

However, I’ve finally arrived at a point where I’m managing (with some exceptions) not to wallow in it. That’s significant for me. I have a history of being fairly self-indulgent in my depressions and I’m not going to let it happen this time. I can’t let it happen this time, because a depression of this magnitude might break me if I let it take hold. Fortunately, I have my work to focus on now; I love it and frankly it’s really sort of all I have right now.  And I think that may be what ends up saving me. Anyway, I’m going to live. I’ve not yet managed anything resembling optimism about the future, but I think I may arrive at “neutral” one of these days.

So anyway, if you know someone who needs a really nice house in Winston-Salem, I’m willing to make a deal. You get a free home warranty and I get to maintain my sanity. No pressure, though.

A little addendum: I apologize for this mass announcement. I haven’t talked with many people about this, because frankly it’s not a terribly pleasant thing to repeat over and over again. I appreciate your support but this is personal and not really subject to public comment. Thanks to all of you for being here for me, even though I may not really want to talk about it that much for now. And thanks to Mark for nine of the happiest years of my life. I never thought I wanted a relationship like this, but I’m damned glad I had it, even if it didn’t end up lasting forever as we’d hoped.

Baffled

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For the life of me, I can’t imagine why I “may know” this person. I’ve spent most of my life trying to avoid people with names like “Joedog”.

Facebook baffles…

Videolog: China

Red Rockers
China (1983)

So before life interrupted everything last week, the Translator post was going to be the beginning of a set of videologs saluting 415 Records, a label started by Howie Klein in San Francisco over thirty years ago. I used to talk to Howie from time to time in my role as music director of WUAG and didn’t realize at the time that he also was one of the original rock and roll homos. He later became head of Sire Records and now blogs–but doesn’t everyone over age 35?

Ominous warning

I’ll be doing a WordPress upgrade today, after avoiding it for quite some time. Thus the site may disappear catastrophically and without warning. It probably won’t, but in case it does, you were warned.

Relationships

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One of the most disturbing things I’ve realized about myself over the past few months is how very few close personal relationships I have anymore. In the past few years, I’ve let a lot of very important friendships just sort of slip away and I’ve become more and more isolated. And that’s a little scary, especially when I recently realized that I very much needed some  friends.

I’ve never been a social butterfly. It takes a lot for me to consider someone a friend. I don’t like having a big entourage and I’m not comfortable at parties and in large groups. But I’ve always had a few very close friends I stayed in touch with on a pretty regular basis. I have a lot less of that now, particularly locally. I don’t think it has much to do with geography because it was happening even before the great move of 2005, although I did leave some very close friends in SF. And the big issue is not that I’m not making new friends, which is frankly a fairly common thing among people in my demographic, but that I’ve let so much of my existing social network slip away over the past few years. That’s the part that really concerns me. I’m not sure exactly how it happened.

OK, I do sort of know how it happened. A little of it has to do with being in a relationship. A lot of it has to do with pure selfishness and laziness.

I’m a person who needs a lot of time to myself. Upon entering a relationship, I found myself with much less of that. And I began preserving as much as I could at the expense of other friendships and relationships. It started innocently enough, an unreturned email message here, an avoided phone call there, and before I knew it, there were incredibly important people in my life that I was never really talking to. Eventually, I found that I wasn’t getting in touch when they had important things going on, wasn’t keeping up with their lives, and generally wasn’t “being there” for them. These friends would still keep up with my life, and they’d reach out to me. And I’d respond by making apologies and vague unfulfilled promises to stay in touch. And at some point, I realized I’d lost touch with a lot of people who had really cared about me (and the feeling was mutual, despite my behavior) and that I was suddenly without much of a social support network.

But I did have all the precious solitude I needed. I probably still had the friends, too, but I was reluctant to reach out in my time of need when I’d been so unavailable to them in the past.

And here I am. The way my life has evolved over the past few months has forced me to examine almost every aspect of the way I deal with other people and relationships, and I’ve found some things that are seriously lacking. As I try to reassemble my life, fixing these things, being more available to the people I love, and doing the work necessary to keep these friendships alive are big priorities for me now.

I am never going to be a terribly social person. Misanthropy is still very appealing to me as a lifestyle choice, and “community” remains a term I’m very wary of. But I don’t want to be completely alone, either. And I want to try to be a little more giving toward the few people I really love. I have given up on or otherwise frittered away too many important relationships in my life. Fortunately, a few of my closest friends have stuck with me no matter how little I may have deserved it, and I’m determined not to lose any of these few I have left. And I’m going to work on rebuilding some (if maybe not all) of the ones I abandoned.

Yes, I understand that it looks like I’m broadcasting things I should be saying to people face to face. I do that sometimes, but this time it’s because I thought this one was worth publishing. And because I’d like to be called on it if I don’t deliver.