Packing musings.

Three brown shirts and a burgundy. John Adams's Fearful Symmetries to pep me up -- and I should be able to finish packing in 28 minutes. Though there's always some dallying. Matching socks for the journey. (They like to swim single in the drawer.) Three jeans and a brown pants for the flight. Six underwears (I'll do some washing) and some sleeping shorts. Time for new sleeping pants. Too many holes, and not exactly becoming.

Grooming supples? Tom's deodorant stick (drunk with hops). In a plastic baggy.

Damn. Took too long. Now I'm going to have to pick some more music. These are difficult decisions. I still haven't decided if I'm going to take Flutey. Let's see. Can't put on the Bowie DVD. Would get too involved. Liza with a Z it is!

Oops. Forgot about you over there. I've been packing, you know. Just packed my month-at-a-glance. Reminded me of another Christmastime vacation home, where I wrote a few notes of things to do back in SF to keep myself busy in the new year: join a writing group, take up a martial art, take an adult education class, relearn German. That was before S. and before I found myself here. After this vacation, I'll return to some firm planting.

You know, I still have some negativity toward that older man who befriended me at the Movie Groove and wanted to "help" me. He was the opposite of me; he could not see the humanity in Fellini, despised anything "unreal," and thought I could be happy as a clerk working for the state of California. As usual, part of my negativity is my anger at myself for having been silly enough to feel romantic toward him. Ah well -- that was when I was still working on the ol' youth-in-Georgia model where you have to love whatever gay person comes along because you're the only gay in the village. (Please Google "the only gay in the village" if you do not know Daffyd.)

What I must say is that he was right and magical in one respect -- just like Dr. R was in one (as mentioned here). One of his silly exercises was for me to write down a list of three-year goals. Forcing myself, I wrote a few things. Involved in something creative. Steady job using some of my skills. Financial stability, represented by my ability to buy a new car if something happened. (I'm always expecting the ol' Ford to die -- and in those days I lived in the suburbs of SF and actually needed a car.) And love (it's on vacation, but I had love to write home about at least twice).

Did writing the goals make things happen? Surely I hadn't the slightest hopes back then. Nor could I imagine the mostly happy and healthy life waiting for me three years off.

I'm packed. The random gifts and random clothes fit with the Patricia Highsmith book, sheet music, and flute. Take the trash out, have a pizza, watch a little Red Dwarf, and hit the sack. Leave this great state at ten after eight.

Happy birthday.

I'm not looking forward to this evening. The original plan was a concert of Beethoven in honor of his probable birthday today. A clarinet friend was arranging it, and I would play piano in the E-flat wind quintet. I looked forward to it because it would a concrete musical goal with a definite outcome. I would be challenged to play in a more public forum, and I would not be afraid to invite coworkers and friends -- as I am for our casual house recitals in Berkeley, since they are farther away and too personal and intimate to broadly invite the people I work with.

But the recital plan fizzled, and somewhat outside of my control (though I should have suspected) the evening has become one of sightreading a wider range of music for piano and wind quintet. Before I fully realized that the Beethoven quintet was only one of a number of pieces we'd run through, I had spent a good deal of time on it. The piano part is quite difficult and beautiful. It warrants real learning, total absorption.

There's a general frustration. General frustration because I'm not as good as I could be (though I try to remind myself that I'm plenty good for a nonprofessional who gets under ten hours of practice a week), and general frustration at the pianist's role. How I hung on my coworker's words -- a pianist who has a doctorate in music -- who, like me, is pursuing a new instrument! Not even knowing I played regularly with other instrumentalists, she mentioned how much more difficult the pianist's music was, how difficult it was to play with others. She trailed off imagining the joy the other instrumentalists were capable of in casual collaborations . . .

Sightreading is difficult. Torture. Humiliating. I've come a long, long way. I made incredible gains when I accompanied students at the University of Georgia, and I've made even more incredible gains over the last couple years reading things with G. -- and she and D. and I are on the exact same page reading sightreading. We are always a little in awe at the process -- the spontaneous reading of those arbitrary dots and squiggles, the coordination of the motor skills, the miraculous result painted out in time.

Ah, well. I'll quit whining. I'm sure tonight will be fun . . . All turned out well the last time I played with a stranger, an SF Conservatory graduate in cello -- and that was damn Brahms in a damn house he shares with a damn professor of piano at the Conservatory (who was no-doubt cringing upstairs).

But let me bring something upon myself by saying it aloud: in the next year I want more formal public recital opportunities. Give me a reason to buy a suit.

I'll also continue recording solo music -- I surpassed a CD's worth some time ago and am now approaching two hours. Thanks to all who have been my audience and helped me find new joy in solo piano music.

Ah, yes. Something else to bring upon myself. Somewhere out there is someone who cries at the Nutcracker's transformation and thinks Mrs. Wealey-Heginbotham-Stahlbaum is the pinnacle of humanity. Please find me soon -- we're running out of time!

Johnny Mathis . . .

Further reason to live . . .

Long ago I was involved in a local play. Mrs. S. appeared in Peachtree City, forced south from New York. She brought her son -- you know him, of course. He could not bear to see a blade of grass torn from the ground. (And he thought chicken noodle soup should boil twenty minutes.) Mrs. S. wrote a play, and I was the slide show operator -- it was possibly unbearable, or possibly the most real thing the city had ever seen. The slide show: useless, useless, except for those few minutes emotionalized by Johnny Mathis.

And I was seventeen going on fifteen, in love with another technical hand, his name lost in the fifteen years. It was the year R. died . . . R.'s boyfriend was in a cast, walking on crutches. They picked me up from the MARTA station. The boyfriend was rough trade. I was jailbait.

Oh, how I loved R.! But didn't we all? That little fire, that mustache. "We are blood brothers," I wrote, though I little understood the death in blood. He is the only friend I've known to die of AIDS, thank god.

Other things: Michael singing to Macaulay: "Remember the Time." These phenomena: proof that is is not useless. Macaulay in The Face, a wounded, desperate adult.



It was five years ago December that I came across that magazine. What does it represent to me? I tried to tell A. I had not seen the stupid holiday movies. I am generally not attracted to my blond brethren (with one powerful exception). Was it the obviousness of the Britten-style corruption? Was it simply the celebrity disappearance and reappearance in platform shoes and a boa?

Sure, sure, I may be watching a video of Michael Jackson wearing a see-through skirt and tights in "Remember the Time," and sure, I may believe the rage in "Black or White" is on par with Rothko, but we're talking about Johnny Mathis, who is trying to seduce me to support PBS. (He even tried working the Johnny Carson angle.)

Or maybe this is as good as it gets:



(And don't you go gettin' no ideas. You know I'm a bastard.)

It's hard to say what is most responsible for keeping us all here.

It could be this:



Or this:



But it is probably the beauty of this



Combined with the reality of this



and of course this:



And naturally the other things: Bowie, Tolkien, Nina, Fellini, Judy, Demy, Kris, Kristen, Catherine, Joan, and eyelashes.

It's hard to believe it's all real -- the returnings, the lunch dates, the coming weekends, the blond exes, the photographer bums, bless them -- but it is!