I know this is only a trick ...

but, damn! is it ever a good one:



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Loverly evening

I just had the most lovely evening with SweetBoy, husband of the most amazing witch I know in this part of the world! He brought me cookies that had been baked on their hearth (and I'm eating them now), and a jug of wine and we had a lovely evening together talking and laughing and thinking deep thoughts together.

AND I just got an e-mail from two longtime friends in San Francisco who are getting married in July now that the marriage decision was handed down. Paul I knew as an undergrad, friendship deepening when he came back to Durham, NC to get his MBA after being away for two years. I think during that time we were hardly apart for more than a day or two, always cooking together of a night, walking, talking, and drinking wine together and planning our futures. His current (truly: one and only) husband, the Doctor, is a gem, a true find, and I wish them the utmost in well-wishes. Dr. G. methodically stalked our Paul until he landed him by hook and by crook when they both lived in Minneapolis, and they've been in connubial bliss ever since, weathering a move to San Francisco, a move to New York city and then an awakening and one last move back to San Francisco where they seem to have taken glorious root in a lovely house complete with stupendous friends.

On another note, my mother called during the dinner to tell me that while she and my father were driving to Gainesville, FL to be with his brother and my aunt for her heart procedure to fix her tachycardia, my dad (at the wheel, driving through the Ocala National Forest) had a TIA and subsequent CAT scan has confirmed a 4cm brain aneurysm that needs to be attended to. True to form, my mother, who has just injured her left meniscus, said to me, "we're both OK; there's no need to come home". Um, my dad is going to have brain surgery and there's no need for me to have to go home?

*sigh*

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More TV fluff

FreeCycle Free-for-all!

So there's this really great organization called FreeCycle.org that puts together people who have useful stuff to give away and people who want the useful stuff that others are giving away.

I just posted the following:

• A Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop that works but came from a repossession in Nashville
• An old, working Gateway CPU minus the hard drive
• An old, working iMac CPU minus the hard drive
• An old, non-working Compaq Presario CPU minus the hard drive but with other working components
• A Motorola cable modem
• A Sirius Sportster "Replay" satellite radio with docking station (still in the box!)
• An HP psc 750 printer/scanner/copier thang

All this at about 10:40pm on a Sunday night.

Lord.

I've had over 250 e-mails already asking if this stuff is still available! Yikes. The piranhas have circled and are feeding; the water is churning and there's blood!

I subsequently posted "Taken" messages for all this stuff with the addendum that it's all on the curb and there for first-come-first-served customers. Since I started writing this post three minutes ago, I've had nine thirty-nine more e-mails PLUS multiple hand-slaps from the moderator from posting a first-come/first-served offer and not formatting my entries correctly.

Eek. Such excitement.

I withdrew from the group. I mean, if you get fussed at for giving away perfectly good stuff, or for mis-formatting your entry for trying to do a good deed, what's the friggin' point?

Fooie on FreeCycle.

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Dutch Interred

Zootsie and Shovels-without-shoes came over today and helped inter Dutch. He's been in his kitty coffin in the back of my car for a day or so, and I was a little afraid that there might be stinkiness, but there wasn't.

After the hole had been dug by the talented Mr. Shovels, I opened the kitty coffin and just had to laugh out loud! They'd put his little body in this bag: (which they hadn't done for Phoebe in January)

Too funny. I liberated him from this tacky plastic shroud - I mean, please. So now he and she are side by side in front of the Fragrant Osmanthus in my back yard where they'll give me and everyone pleasure at blossom time.

So, piddle pads are off the couch, cushions and covers are soaked in enzyme solution, then off to the cleaners for cleaning. Food bowls are up and ready to give to the Humane Society. Little House is once again back to single occupancy mode.



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Non-Zero-Sum attraction

In light of my recent face-to-face with green-eyes, I began thinking to myself about my core beliefs and the types of men I've been manifesting.

I had an "aha" moment when I realized that I've been operating under the tacit assumption that for every good thing, quality or person I received, I had to somehow make a payment to the universe by also accepting something bad or undesirable. I had to do something in order to balance the scales myself so that I could accept the gift coming my way, that for every good I must also be dealt a bad.

That's a zero-sum game; there is no net gain. All wins and losses must balance out.

That's been lurking un-said, un-voiced in my subconscious all these years, yet always a potent driving principle.

Life is, rather, non-zero-sum. Everything benefits from everything else. People grow, sun shines freely on the earth with no thought of "repayment" or "reimbursement of insolation". Everything is constantly unfolding, always growing, ever becoming increasingly complex and rich, new and more.

So, therefore, must I be as well.

I had this vision of myself as a light bulb. A light bulb freely accepts power as its input, its gift, so that it can do what it was made to do: illuminate and give off heat. When power is applied, the light lights up. It doesn't think, "oh, I have to give back some of this power". No. It just does what it was made to do without any fuss, and gratefully accepting the gift of power as its due.

OK, so I'm anthropomorphizing a little, but you get the idea.

I don't have to balance the scales! I don't have to "do a good turn" or "accept the good with the bad" when something good comes my way; merely doing what I do and being who I am is the only payback that the universe is wanting :-) Me trying to balance the scales myself gets in the way of the positive flow of good, you know?

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Street art taken to a new level

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

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RIP Dutch

Is no longer. He's in his little kitty coffin in the back of my car; I had him put to sleep today. I think he's either 18 or 19 now, not sure, since I got him from a former co-worker.

He had gradually declined over the past several weeks, gradually stopped using the litter box, stopped eating solid food, stopped even peeing at the far end of the couch. About a week ago he began just peeing where he was and then sleeping in it during the day, or just peeing in his sleep, I don't know which. And he's wanted constant companionship these last several days so I know that he was uncomfortable.

So.

Today was his first and only trip to the vet since I've had him in the fall. Services tomorrow a.m. at Little House Shady Acre Pet Cemetery.

P.S.
Had my first face-to-face with green-eyes before I drove to the vet's. Just called him and asked to see him. Seems our combination of my neediness and his avoidance-of-neediness is at the heart of it. He still loves me, I still love him, and I was warmly received. But. I'm going to let him call the shots for a while, give him all the space and time he needs and begin to look for those things I'm needy about within my own self. And if that's the end, then I'm OK. At least I got to say what I needed to say and to know that he saw my lips move and heard it with his ears. This feels a little scary and sad to my little self, but also very right. To avoid temptation, I've removed his entry from my phone, though I still have it written down in my address book for later retrieval.

We shall see what we shall see.

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Cut loose

Green-eyed lad has been very quiet for almost a month. I spent the night about three and a half weeks ago and it was very, very good. That next morning I asked him whether he would like, ahem, some more. His response? "No; I've had my fill."

Seems that statement was laden with more meaning than the obvious one at the time. Occasional texts and phone calls have gone un-answered, and for no discernable reason. If its a brush off, I'd like to do it face to face and have it end up that way. I don't like the casualness of text-message-breakup (marginally safe video. NSFW though. Longer version DEFINITELY NSFW).

This must be a new thing, 'cause JoeMyGod has a post about one of his friends being text-message-sort-of-broken-up-with today, too. Signs of the times, I'm guessing. The comments are especially good on this post; at least I'm not the only stupid man on the planet who takes inferior charms for far too long as his due.

So the boy was fun. He was cute and very sexy and smart and funny. And he's royally fucked up, on antidepressants which screw up his sex drive, and smokes pot at least twice a day. It's his "experiment". His choice of friends is scary at best: though he himself is no drama queen, all of his friends are. And sketchy, at best.

So. Love clearly blinded me a bit, or at least had me dazzled for a while. In more ordinary light perhaps all that glitters is not so golden.

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Crazy World

My business partner and I just hosted a three-day massage continuing education workshop centered around safely and heart-centeredly massaging people with cancer. Cancer patients don't get much touch, and when they do, it's generally of the variety of "oh, my god! I don't want to catch that!", or "I have to keep my distance and be very careful or I might break them!"

Neither of these things is true.

In massage school I was taught never to professionally touch a patient with cancer. We could "spread the cancer" or somehow contribute to the metastasis process.

Bullshit.

If cancer patients are walking around, breathing, playing golf, swimming, walking, they're doing far more potential "spreading" of cancer than I ever could in a simple massage.

Metastasis and invasion are their own biochemical processes, unaffected by physical manipulations. For metaststic cells to detach, travel and re-adhere, there must be very specific biochemical events in action. And this happens all the time in most people. But for most of us, our immune systems take care of it. For a few cases out of millions, mutated cells develop the ability to detach, reattach, and also to create a blood supply, also known as angiogenesis. Angiogenesis is the key from turning a clump of cancerous cells into a malignant tumor. If the cancerous cells can't create their own blood supply, they simply die off from starvation.

None of this has anything to do with massage.

So, contrary to what most massage students are taught, every person who is undergoing treatment, who has cancer, and/or who has survived may be safely touched and massaged by someone who knows what the cautions apply.

The big cautions turn out to be risk of lymphedema from removed or compromised (i.e. irradiated) lymphatic nodes in neck, armpits (axilla) and groin. Massage therapists who know how to work around these damaged interstitial cellular drains can do a hell of a lot of good, and can avoid harming their patients.

I posted these clips from one of my favorite movies because this weekend has been an utter rollercoaster of emotions. To simply touch these people who have only had clinical touch for so long, and to know that you're being safe with them, is pure joy. To confront my fears around doing so has been incredibly healing. I took this class last January when we hosted it here for the first time, and I had the luxury of just sitting in on it this weekend to review and be the gopher for the teacher, and that was absolutely a wonderful thing. To re-hear and re-experience this information firsthand from the source, the pioneering massage therapist who literally wrote the book on massaging people with cancer, has been a true joy. This woman has been a pioneer in the field of oncology massage for about 15 years now, and does many, many seminars all over the US and the world. She also has a hospital oncology course where four massage therapists spend a week massaging patients in a hospital undergoing cancer treatment, be it chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, or a combination of any of those.

A former massage student of mine took this course last year and said it transformed her life. I believe her, for this simple three-day course has transformed mine in ways I've only begun to understand. It completely cracked me open, once again. I've spent the weekend leaking tears about things I haven't thought about in years. And marveling at the wonder and beauty of everything. And joyous at the persistence and hardiness of us mortals.

Today's clinic, where all 19 massage therapists worked on actual cancer patients and survivors was just magical. These professionals rose to the challenge and did their work with care, patience, and total applomb. I was completely awed. And thankful, and connected to them all.

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I'm-a burn in Hayull

This and other gems found here.

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I'm leading a double life

Well. For a few weeks, anyway.

As mentioned a few days ago, I'm helping a friend turn a run-down garage into a fabulous new shamanic workspace and classroom. By day I'm Raybob, Supermassager (I only use my powers for good), and by night (between 7:00pm and 11:00pm and occasional weekends) I'm Constructo-Bob, bringing new life to old spaces.

It's been a total blast.

So far, we've:

• ripped out two under-roofs (rooves?) that were on older additions to this garage
  
• cut a hole in the concrete block wall for a new door from the former utility room that will eventually become a bathroom
  
• separated the joists of half the roof from the sill plate (with a cool monster tool called a sawzall. So butch.)
  
• jacked up that half of the roof to match the pitch of the other half
  
• built rafter supports for the new pitched roof segment, also making way for a row of custom windows on that side under the new eave space
  
• framed in the existing garage door opening and installed a custom door (complete with five-pointed star!) It is a donated, slightly damaged, expensive door bearing the Texas star in leaded glass in both door and side lights, and it's just fucking perfect as the entrance to a pagan workroom :-)
  
• constructed three custom (and pretty) modified scissor trusses
  
• hand-hefted, manhandled and set the trusses and got them supporting the roof by attaching hanging purlins between them
  
• installed 2x4 furring strips that we're going to use to screw drywall to

I'm in hog heaven. I love building things and tearing things down! And thanks to my friend Don, I'm learning how to do it all neatly and correctly.

Tomorrow night: wiring, that task which I love the most.

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Happy Monday!

Hilarious drag by Anita Mann



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Telling myself ...

"What did I just tell myself?" has been working like a charm. Based on emotions coming up, I'm more able to monitor my own thought processes, and quicker with this simple self-query.

I knew that I had a lot of negative stuff rolling around in there, but I'm frankly shocked and surprised at how often my mom's and her mother's thoughts creep into my own head; grandmother was obsessed with death, homelessness, injury, poverty and starvation as normal consequences of just about everything. My mom is a little better, but is getting worse over time. Growing up with that echoing down the family tree has clearly had repercussions in my own thoughts: I find my own thoughts turning toward the self-denigrating variety, such as "oh, well that cute man wouldn't like a guy like me, anyway", or "I could never do that (whatever so-and-so is doing that's fabulous)".

Bullshit, I know. But when it's just below the level of consciousness, it's not always easy to catch those nattering nabobs of negativity. Unless I catch how it makes me feel, then ask the magic question.

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Synchronize

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Fabulous and Strange

(YouTube really is a goldmine!)
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The Inner Daddy

This is a portion of an e-mail I wrote to someone who reads this blog. As I wrote it my thoughts began forming up and I thought I'd also post it here.

Dear _,

I've been surprised at my inner Daddy rearing its head lately. Not unhappy, just moving into something new, which is always fun :-)

For most of my life I've seen myself as helpless, incapable, "unable" and without the inner resources that other people seem to have. I'm definitely rethinking that now, and honestly really do want to try and develop some sort of exercises or something to access the Inner Daddy. Most everybody who has done any personal work is familiar with the Inner Child, but I think many gay men desperately need to find their Inner Daddy; some of us never had this modeled correctly, and we never saw ourselves as complete persons or as completing certain rites of passage that straight men seem to go through effortlessly. I think we need to define our rites of passage for one; just drifting forward without recognizing life-milestones is not enough.

Coming out is certainly one of those; owning a major part of who you are and declaring it openly is a big rite of passage. Navigating gay sex and finding out what it is that you like is another; learning to use all your parts for erotic fun (safely!) is something that only just recently have books begun to appear in high numbers. It's almost as if we keep coming out of closets. I'd like to put in place some maps to those closets and also install some gentle cheering sections at the doors for the guys who are still in the process of coming out of them.

I've got some ideas, but nothing really concrete that I can share here yet. It'll show up soon, I'm sure.

Cheers!

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What did I just tell myself?

A client and I are working together outside the massage room to turn a dumpy garage into a cool classroom and shamanic workspace. It's a lot of fun and I'm learning a whole bunch. Mainly about how to do things right, how wrong I've been doing things all along, and that good tools can make a hell of a difference in one's skills when one carpents. I covet his $600 Bosch chop saw. And the cool-o transforming portable Bosch table saw! It folds up like a transformer toy. Fun!

He's a totally cool guy and he's very patient with my ineptitude and with showing me every little thing. I'm grateful for his patience. And I'm a little thrilled that the new shamanic work space is going to have some of my spirit in it. It already has my blood and sweat. We've been working in the evenings and on weekends, and are trying to get it ready for its maiden class during the weekend of June 7 and 8. The openings you see at the right are where we jacked up that half of the roof to make it match the slope of the other half, and the new custom trusses that you see were just put in by us last night. I personally cut, measured and assembled one of them, which consists of a sandwich of two identical truss halves with tricky angles and with 3/4" plywood glued and screwed together to give shear strength at the joints. I'm so proud. The 2x4's strung between them are holding up the old rafters of the existing roof. I feel so butch. Jacking up part of a house. Yippee!

When we work and also when he's receiving bodywork from me, we talk a lot. He's completely into Taoism and somewhat into shamanic practice, so we have a bunch in common and lots of touch points to our conversations. Our talk frequently turns around Toltec ideas, mainly about how we as humans tend to relate to the story that's in our heads about people and events rather than merely reacting to the actual people and events, how we notice this in ourselves and how we practice trying to remain "awake" more. Today we were talking about emotions and about how he feels that emotions arise from the story that we tell ourselves about what's going on, and he said to me, "when I have a particularly strong emotion come up, I ask myself the question, 'What did I just tell myself?'" Which I thought was absolutely brilliant and cuts right to the chase: reminding yourself that you're reacting to the story instead of reality thus helping you stay awake and aware as the Observer and not as the Doer, deactivating what Eckhart Tolle calls the pain body.

I immediately started applying this to the situation with me and the green-eyed lad, and was astonished to actually dissect my feelings and really inspect what it is that I've been telling myself about me and about this situation. Asking myself that one question has given me a depth of clarity and a remove that I haven't been able to get before this. I don't think it will solve all of my problems, but it's certainly a good new tool for the spiritual toolkit. And, as I've learned, a good tool is worth a lot.

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Finding The Daddy Within

My relationship with the green-eyed lad is like no other I've had. Mostly because he doesn't want anything resembling a "relationship". So, we end up seeing each other infrequently, yet when we do it's sweeter than sweet. In so many ways, this boy was custom-made for me, and, I think, I also for him.

The thing that drives me mad is the catch-as-catch-can timetable. He's single and gay for the first time in his life at 34, hot on the heels of his first longish-term relationship he began when he came out at 30. Being a new thought devotee he knows that good things (and good people) are constantly flowing to him. He doesn't worry about interruptions in his flow of good; if a good guy goes away, there'll be another one coming along to take his place.

I'm not at that point, deep down. That particular thought cluster activates anxiety in me. I want him to want to be with me, and I want it to matter. But he doesnt' (or doesn't show it - he's perfectly capable of that), which drives me a little over the precipice and into batshit-crazy-land. My fears activate and I push. And he withdraws. And ... well, you get the picture. The little boy that's the dominant personality within me at these times goes into screaming meemee overdrive; he's soo not comfortable with this abandonment scheme.

And yet.

When we do happen to have some time and then end up spending the night together, frequently I make the decisions. I take the lead in sex. I'm the top. Most often. Go figure. And (I absolutely adore this): he sleeps with his head on my shoulder, nestled on my pecs. Since I'm short (still the short one in this relationship), guys don't normally do this to me. But he does and I love it. I get to relate to him in a way I've not related to others; I get to kiss the top of his head and whisper sweet nothings, caressing his back and his arms, and occasionally pull him up into my arms for a sweet kiss. It makes me feel protective, butch, manly.

I'm simultaneously a scared little boy and a comptetent, in-charge protector.

After analyzing all this, thinking about it and reliving some of the feelings of it, I've decided that I don't like feeling like the abandoned little boy anymore. A few years ago I bought a pretty good book titled "Finding The Boyfriend Within", which, despite it's somewhat crappy reviews was not a bad stab at the "as within, so without" philosophy as applied to gay men. It has loads of exercises designed to put the reader in touch with the qualities within himself which he thinks he doesn't possess, and which he then seeks in others.

For me it was a little soft, marginally helpful and missing the mark quite often. What I really wanted was a book that would help me find the Daddy Within. Boyfriends are fine, but I needed (and still need) the Strong Comforter, the Wise Sage, the Elder, the One Who Will Make It All OK that I never had growing up. My dad is great, but he's remote. And that's OK: he's endured more at the hands of a violently alcoholic father than I'll ever experience in this lifetime; he earned the right to be remote. After all, no one can model behaviour that wasn't taught them in the first place: he can't give me what he never received himself.

Back to the Daddy Within: from having him activated by green-eyes resting his flaming redhaired head on my greying chest, I know he's in there; he rouses mightily when he's protecting and comforting others. I know that I already possess all of the features and character traits that I find attractive in a mate; it's just how to cultivate and access them that I don't know how to do. I want to become the Daddy that I'd love to have and be married to. I want to be decisive and confident, sure and steadfast. I want to engender deep certainty. I want to make dicks hard with my sheer masculinity and silverback, testosterone-laden authority. All of these things I want to engender in myself, for myself. I honestly don't care if no one ever perceives me this way. But I want to perceive myself this way one day, to become my own object of respect and admiration.

Ideas, boys? Tell me what you think.

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YouTube is just a damned goldmine ...

Some people are like black holes ...

... in that they can affect time. I have a client who is a "time slower" or more accurately, a time dilator. Moments expand into years when I'm with her, and not in the good way. I can be working on her and to my subjective time sense it's been 30 minutes or more yet when I look at the clock I'm lucky if four minutes have passed. *sigh* An hour session with her lasts about 800 years, I would swear to it.

I've experienced this phenomenon before, most usually when I'm with someone who is avoiding the true nature of his or her core self with a vengeance. Happens at parties sometimes, especially with people who are really, really nervous.

Having done massage now for a decade, I usually have an excellent sense of the passing of time as I'm working. And yet, I've also observed the reverse of the above phenomenon: that is, there are clients who can speed up subjective time, too. Time is suspended when I'm having fun, in the flow, and working on something I love and am immersed in. It's always suspended when I'm singing or on stage. Being truly in the moment can completely erase the feeling that time passes.

Like tuning forks and strings tuned to very slightly different pitches which even so can sympathetically cause each other to vibrate, I believe that people can do the same thing and entrain each other to different emotional and mental states. I know that my calming presence can calm others if I'm dead sure of myself. And I know that others can make me jittery if I'm not aware of guarding my own present moments when I'm around them.

I think this is what happens with my clients who are the "time slowers"; they are entraining me out of my own now and into their no man's land of neverwhen. Usually the ones who have to talk to fill silence are the strongest at entraining others: they're so intent on not experiencing the present moment that they have to fill it with and endless stream of meaningless chatter so that the moment is seemingly under their own control. It's interesting to observe. I can usually change this pattern (and get time started back up again) by gently returning their awareness to their bodies, by asking them to pay attention to what it is that they're actually experiencing.

And I now have ample experience in all those states, so am better aware of it myself when I'm not here/now.

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