wings

Lifetimes ago, I called to you, called, and finally

you looked, noticed how my wings glistened with light

and reached to take hold of my hand.

You were blind to how these wings were scarred, wounded, broken,

or you just didn’t care. You saw something that you thought you could fix.

You reached down, down far – and almost fell

almost fell – for me. Some things I just won’t let happen. See where the scars come from, see why I use what I do for paste now, and don’t judge.

Out of bourbon and fire, fire and ashes, ashes and dust, dust like thousands of words and the tears of joy and sorrow that created them, out of these things I make my paste. I make my paste out of the same wind that carries them away. I make my paste out of the strength of the blood of my heart, of mine, not yours. You want me to be my best, my best for you. I want to be my best for me and only that because that is what stays. I know me better, I know what I want I know who I am and who I will be and that is not your creation. Even in your love, it can only be made by mine of myself. Only I can make me, again, and again, and again – and I do. You haven’t known me long enough to realize this. Let me be and love me and let me always become. Try to mold me and I crumble in your hands. Love me and let me be if you’re strong enough.

If you’re strong enough, I will be stronger for both of us.

Advertisement

I’ve not been very inspiring these days. I know that. Still, I write.

I have been thinking about those that I cut out of my life, with blood and anger and what I needed to grow.

I think about the people who raised me, on the anniversary of my first meeting with my biological – BIRTH mother.

They tried. I can’t imagine how much they spent trying to make me like them, hoping O would be – someone who followed what thay thought god is, someone who literally cheered the insane diatribes of Rush Limbaugh – and someone they could control.

Hells – I can hardly control myself. They didn’t have a chance – and the figured it out far too late.

18 months in hospice and hospital visiting my sister who lived a few miles away.
THey never visited.

It may be my fault though – early in the hospice I got a call from my sister (adopted as well – the golden child) – and she put my mom on the phone. I’m dying, and the first question she asks is “Do you haave a job?”

I still can’t figure it out. Was that her safe place? Was that REALLY what she wanted to ask?

Still, I miss them. They tried. They failed beautifully. I am me, and they will never know how much that means.

there are SO many fucking reasons I  need to write this book – but this is the first time I’ve told you of this one.

I want tthem to know what they have lost in their ignorance, their bigotry, thit attempt to shut me down.

I have only grown stronger.

But damn, I do moss them – sometimes.

For those who I love.

I don’t know where to go vrom here, but I continue. Searching, judging each entry, every little part of my soul to determine if it’s valid. If it holds. If it lets you know not just how I shine but how far I have fallen.

Some days in this work are harder than others, and the tears fall. Every single day brings a remembered pain. Rivers flow and wrap themselves around anything in their path, and that is what I must do. They continue. I must.

I was so dreadfully wrong when I thought that this would be easy – after all, they’re just stories, right? Words written from a different life, just trying to heal, help someone. Let them know they aren’t alone.

But I work. I write, I continue.

This is for the dreamers. the believers, for those who thrive on the hope  of fulfilling the potential we’ve all been blessed with. I cry at every word written… or I smile. This is what I have to give.

Life is hard sometimes, but please – NEVER give up. REFUSE to give up.

I believe in the life I’ve been given, over and over. I do this for you, I do this for me – to become who we are; to LIVE and tell the world around us to fuck off. WE is something special, and I know how much it means.

We means – I love you. I always will.

I think this is a good one. Please share this post, like it, or comment.
I’ll never stop writing, but I will be more inspired if more people hear.

Old Bones (aka why I won’t let myself die.)

I spend much of my days lately going through my past, reading each post, filtering out those that say little and creating what will be a book out of the others. Remembering who I was, and trying to figure if there is still some of him inside of me, or if he’s still there, buried under all that’s happened since and trying to dig his way out.

Some of the things I’ve written are still saturated now with the same pain I felt then – but some things I read make it worth it.
This is one of those things that make it all worth it…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
’06 – – – Because this makes me feel that everything in my life that got me to today was for some sort of reason…
I’ve been reading this almost every day since I received it in the mail about a week ago.
Every time, I get choked up.
Frequently, tears fall.
and I don’t think I will ever understand what I do to deserve things and people like this in my life
simply by living it the only way I can believe in…
***
(Sometime in ’05)
Dear kSea,
I find myself hesitant to write this as I don’t wield words nearly as deftly as you do. There is very little art in my language – pragmatic ramblings at best. And yet here I am putting paper to pen anyway. Because I miss exchanges with you. Because the internet feels cold and incidental. Because I’m hopeful that intention can affect distances, mental if not geographic. Because it’s so nice to get real mail!
There’s a part of me that’s worried about you nearly since the day I met you. Me being the mother that I am and you with your constant chaos and complete lack of social safety nets that I rely on in my own life. Yet some how you have managed to amaze me with your resilience and your will to survive time and time again. You’ve given me pause to question some of the things I give power and importance to. Boiled life down to it’s essentials.
When you were leaving S.F. for Boston my worry spiked. You seem like a mythical creature on the endangered species list – magnificent and otherworldly, but fragile and only possible in certain realities. Your disregard for those social construct nets is something that seemed possible only in a defiant city like S.F.
7.4
Wow, I wish I’d put a date on the first half of this letter. I wrote it possibly over eight months ago. It got lost in my papers and I suddenly found it just recently. But I read those words and realize it still holds true – all of it. So, I continue…
Nonetheless, out you ventured into the cruel world that never seems to appreciate it’s mythical creatures until they’re gone. But in a world stingy with it’s magic you’ve milked it, found the leaks and siphoned it, nurtured it’s growth in sidewalk cracks, passed it on like notes in class. You NEVER cease to amaze and inspire me.
This praise and awe does not come blind to the darker side. I know that you carry anger, bitterness, resentment, malice and cold along with all the glitter. It doesn’t make the wonder any less real – more so, in fact. The fervor with which you hold on to the beauty of the world comes in part from your knowledge of how ugly it can be. In times I’ve heard you resent your will to live. The thing is it’s not just a will to not be dead, but a will to live. To really live and take life for all it’s worth.
I guess this is really just a long winded way for me to tell you that I love you and I’m immensely grateful to have you in my life.

And I’ll never forget getting mailed a PB&J sandwich.
And I found this picture and thought you’d like it.
Much Love,
Whit

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

There was a time when I loved myself.Thought I was indestructible.
I’ve learned more since, but I still believe the latter. Not many people live through what I have been through – they give up.

I never will… but one day I just might want to go. IF I ever feel like I have given all I can.
I don’t see that day being anytime soon.

I love you. All of you. If you read this – thank you. I will do whatever I can for you. For us.
Just in something of a low spot for the past years.

I will fly again.

Know this.

I stare at this blank page and wonder what will come out of my heart tonight. I don’t write for want, don’t write because I like to. I write because I need to – and sometimes I like it.

Gathering all the deep-seeded memories from who I used to be I find that man a good one. Looking at myself right now I don’t know if I am anymore.
People come back from war changed. Distant. Different. I had my own battle, and it changed me as much as I try to deny it didn’t. It’s  obvious. I accept it. I detest it and the life it has taken out of me.

Strange, how hard I fought to live to have this- but I never imagined it would be this – like I  would be this. This person I don’t recognize, this personwho wears a false smile… this person. Disassociated & dissatisfied.

We all fight our wars. Some get through them. I just barely made it.

The society I love is teaching me how to hate myself. White male, straight (mostly) and as a result, detested. I would rather not have to add this on to all I am going through, all I have. Still, I feel like I am wrong for being who I am. Not female, not a different color. As much as I will do everything in my power to protect them… THEM?
As much as I will do everything in my power to stand up for those that I love, those that I love have made me feel like my gender and the color of my skin are hated.

I am hated because of what I appear as. And it feels like the people I love are just like “them”.

I’ve lived most of my life feeling alone, but I have never felt so alone as this…

but even if I feel alone, I will make certain that those that I love – the men or women holding hands walking down the street, the “not white” person who feels threatened – know this.

KNOW THIS. I will give my life for you, if that what it comes to. I promise you that.

I will give my life for you.

I think that is what I needed to say… just – if that happens, please get my book out. It will help others.

All I have to give.

The minutes tick away and I lay here tossing, turning, finding comfort in body yet far from it in mind. This is no easy task I’ve taken on, and each moment I relive hammers that into my heart, my being.

I don’t do anything half-assed. I now wish that I could but that isn’t me. Honesty is a crippling and exquisite trait, but sometimes, MOST times it;s all I feel I have left. I can’t let you down in the maelstrom of what this beautiful life was, but now I know – it will be more than just one book. This life is more than anything I could ever have dreamed of.This life  of dreams, nightmares, and this life I have created out of nothing.

There is one person that doesn’t get mentioned much, but follows in my heart from a time when I needed her more than anything else from the Forest until a time, THE time when I can escape all of this in the future. Her name is Tea. She has a child with my name. I don’t know why I write this – I just need to, just in case. I need you to take care of her and her family as I always have wanted to but haven’t been able to – yet. Promise me this. Please.

I think I figured out how to make my story readable. I can’t make The Brigade smaller, can not make my time in The Enchanted Forest anything less than it was – but as I write and cross out the things that have made this life so exquisite, I realize that the most important things are the beginning and the end – and I think this end os the finding of my Mother, then Father.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I can physically measure the dissatisfaction around me. The need to be someone, somewhere else. the need to be no one with nothing but a shitty van and a road and life in front of me or a motorhome that held in it promise to one day be able to go anywhere – all I needed was money for fuel. I thinkg everything changed when I found myself dying and had to sell it to afford to survive.
I look around me, see a cheap electric guitar, a keyboard,  things that I pray to no god I believe in that I may create something on, someday. I’ve always wanted to lose myself in music, to create something I can feel and share, but even through it all I still don’t know better – my escape is in words and the road.

I should sell everything I have and buy a car, onee of those things like a RAV-4 that will allow me plenty of room to just fucking GO with Ruby, me, her food and a couple of bags of mine. And my laptop. Find a place in a forest by a lake where we can be alone, where I can be alone, and… and then I may be happy.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I set up another appointment with the surgeon who denied cutting away my umbilical hernia yesterday. Before, four months ago, I told him that it was taking the life I loved away, taking me away. To his credit, he didn’t say no – what I heard was that he was terrified, that I have less than a 1 in 4 chance of living due to possible infection, and at the time I realized that as much as I was willing to try that, if I did die it was more than only me that would be affected. He’s a good person – this I felt from the moment I met him… but he also hasn’t any idea who *I* am.

He doesn’t know that I shold have been dead long ago but fought with all I had to survive, far beyond what Western Medicine could do for me. He doesn’t know that when I die, it will be y choice. He doesn’t know that each day I live with this – the pain, the way it takes me furthier and further away from who I was and who I AM that I lose my heart, my passion, my reason.
In mid-December, I will go to him yet again, and tell him that the only way I can die through this challenge is if *I* want to – and I don’t yet. My book will not be done then. I need to somehow make someone who doesn’t know me understand that he is released from all responsibility – that my life is in MY hands, not his.
But will that make me happy? If he agrees to the surgery, if I let him cut me open in the single place taht I loathed anyone touching and he fixes it to the best of his ability will taht solve anything?
I think it may be a start – a beginning of somethingthat will let me come back to me again. I will never forget what I went through – but at the very least I won;t have to live with the memory of it every single fucking day anymore. At the very least, I can move forward instead of being stuck here. I need to convince him. Maybe I should make a video of the highlights shere John & Val said I wasn’t a typical person, Maybe I should invite him to tald to any and all of the nurses that called me a miracle when I didn’t die.

I am not a miracle. I just didn’t want to die yet. I had things to do. I still do.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

As I create my book, I go through every post I have written over the years, trying to figure out what stays in and what goes. It’s the most difficult thing I have EVER done… but it must be done. I’m closer now than I ever have been but it still will take time. Time and money for a content editor, a professional, hardcore someone who has only the need to let this book be good. For some reason I can’t explain, I feel that it will be only a woman who I trust to do that.  Just waht I’ve always imagined.

As I create my book, I find passages that I will soon begin sharing with others = small gifts for The Brigade and all that have been with me through the years. Small gifts for those who have only just met me.
Though they will be gifts of nostalgia for some, new undertsanding for others, there is an ulterior motive – in order for this pook to help anyone, it needs to be read – and I’m hoping to create a bit of interest in what is coming. THis monstrosity that I will give the world. I want to create hype.
And I’m hoping that anyone who enjoys my words will telll their friends, tell people to follow, tell others that there jsut may be something here.
All I can do is write the words… It’s the only thing that has ever brought me peace.

Within two days, I’ll give my first small gift of what’s to come.

Closer

Take me under the sea, give me one last breath to me and I will see. I neeed you to continue. I need you to know that my death has been wanted f0r years. Continue. You only needed me for a short time/ I am done, done now.

The words are so veery close to being done.

For whatever it’s worth…

The words I’ve written swim around in my mind the worlds I’ve lived in swim around in my heart and gods if there was a chance to going back to the me that I was I would because

I don’t like the me I’ve become.

Not long ago there was a woman I met – Michelle, at a dear friends birthday party. I gave her a bit of my book. I gave her nothing what it will be. “Coming so close to death changes a person.”
I agreed, but… but I didn’t tell her that it changed me into someone who hoped for it, who spent every single fucking day wondering where I went – the passion, the dreams, the drive, determination. The me who wanted to envelop myself in the flesh of everyone, to taste them, to hear them, to show them what I had learned. What I had been taught.

I went, for the first time, to Bawdy Storytelling tonight, and felt like a very old man – a man who has experienced everything and still yearned for desire, but couldn’t find it. There are reasons I feel ugly, estranged, unwanted. None of them are rational, but still – they are there and they pollute me.

I just want to me me again. I haven’t changed that much – not THAT much.
This is what I want to believe. This is what I will, eventually, come back to.

The traveler, not the disdainful hermit with nothing left but memories.

This is what I hope for – for whatever hope is worth.

simple.

Why, how hard is is for us to remember the most simple things. The things that give us pleasure.

Tonight, I was fortuate enough to get a ride home from Mike & Shannon Gaines – and if I ever idolized ANYTHING, I was wrong – because these are my firneds, and the love I feel fort hem…

But tonight, it was nice just to get a ride home from Mike & Shan, and Counting this…

Just another exquisite even with incomparable friends.

Simple.

Digging up the bones

Only a couple short but full months into my memoir I find that it’s far from as simple as I thought it would be. I knew it wouldn’t be easy by any means, but as I go through my past writing, my past life, I can’t help but be taken back to that time. The words again become my near-reality, and each carries a blade that slices a small part of my heart.

As if I don’t already have enough scar tissue there.

I have been outed, hated and vilified for keeping my HIV & Hep-C status from public knowledge in the highly sex positive community  I was in, my dog & I are a few days away from being homeless, I’m barely surviving, simple things such as eating are a luxury, and I’m terrified – but I still refuse to give up on my dreams, even though I have little idea what they are.

I just went to my first Dresden Dolls show at Cafe du Nord, a tiny basement bar that kept the air of its past, with deep red walls and thick velvet curtains draped opulently around the room. ANd ten foot ceilings, foot high stage. In the prohibition era, they did what they could, where they could – and du Nord kept that…
That was the first time I performed with the Dolls, getting a corset piercing in front of the small stage before they went on.

Whitney is just about to email me, treating me to lunch and telling me about a “proposal”. She also just told me that Amanda has a crush on me, in the shortened time of the memoir.

My life is simultaneously falling apart and coming together, but all I can see is the former. I had little idea what the next few months would hold – a life that had meanst nothing to me or anyone else becoming something I finally wanted to keep living in, a life that made a difference, a life… of value.

I didn’t know that then. I was just trying to find something I loved to do. Something I was good at somehow, something that gave me a reason.
And I did.

The places I decay into while writing this book are no one else’s business, but I’ll try to keep up here, try to write about it. Writing is what I know, deep inside of me, that can bring me peace. The only thing. I’ve been doing it for 33 years – and I’m still, somehow, alive.

It was writing that took my pistol out of my mouth, it was writing that washed away all the other times I decided it was time to end. This is what I do. I just need to remember how – how to keep my mind out of it, listen to the words that blow on the wind through my heart.

I think I do have something to offer… but the challenge is trying to write without worrying about how I’m going to afford to feed my dog and me. Everything was going so well, things were coming together, people were buying ad space on CultureFlux.com – and then my life stopped, was almost gone.

Coming so close to death changes a person. I still feel it, still wear the spiritual and physical scars – but gods, I learned more than I could eve have imagined.

= = = = =

I’m still a couple months from my attempted move to Boston, still a couple months from volunteering at the private refugee camp in Austin, still a few months…
Still a few months from Bean being killed by a train.

I wonder who I am now. I have my past. I have what I’ve been through… but what do I have now?

I frequently think that we live through things just to say “That happened to me.” to me, not someone else. I live in the same world as all of you – I’ve just seen more of it. As I’m certain some of you have, as well.

Sometimes, life can only begin with the understanding of death. Of dying. Sometimes it ends – not physically, but in spirit.
I was told that I was dead when I was 19 years old. A call from a doctor telling me I had the AIDS virus. Back then, over 95% of people who contracted it died miserably, painfully within 18 months.

Think about that.

I lived a good part of my life afraid to try anything that took more than a month to learn, afraid to go back to school and feel like I, again, didn’t finish what I set out to do – and terrified of loving anyone. More terrified of them loving me.

but here I am and how? WHY me?

Here’s a little secret: I felt that the Universe kept me alive so I could finally find my birth-mother. When I was writing my first letter to her, asking if she was – I felt, i KNEW that the moment I met her the one purpose I had been allowed to live for would be achieved, and I would come as close to dying on the spot as possible.
Rational? There is no logic in this, no logic why I am STILL alive. But I am.

And maybe that’s why it so difficult to get this book done.

Somewhere in my life there is that last thing I need to do, and that last thing will take it away.

Now that I think about it – I have had a good life. I am not afraid of death in the least – I’m incredibly intimate with it. We’re buddies.

TIme to get writing this fucking book again.