This was meant to be an era of changes for me and so it was though
not exactly the ones that I had in mind.
For one thing, I’m starting the second era of this blog on a new page due
to an unexplained loss of administrative privileges on the
original blog,
thus preventing me from updating the design that is no longer relevant. It
can be still be viewed for comparative purposes in terms of design and
content, some at which I cringe in retrospect but choose to keep in place
because some is still relevant. Two of my greatest personal faults are my
hesitant honesty and contempt for spin in the form of historical
revisionism. Ego is a two-way street.
Skimming the last few entries of the original blog, my last long-form
attempt to be the sober equivalent of Hunter S. Thompson cum Howard Stern,
prior to my jump off the wagon, was in January 2008.
A lot has changed since then. A lot of loss. I lost my job at the State Lab
in Boston. I lost my parents. I lost seventy pounds.
Also a lot of gains. I regained sobriety for myself at the end of 2013 as
well as for my father a bit over a year later. His final years were the
first time that we got to know each other sober at the same time. I gained
minor artistic credibility (minus the implied financial reward) in certain
indie circles when I resumed composing music.
At the beginning of 2013, I added a short entry with the line: “Egos are
amazing creatures, especially when they lie as required.” I look at some of
the entries in the old blog with amusement and aforementioned cringe,
portraying myself with an intentionally farcical heterosexual creepiness
enacted against fictitious females of various ages.
A major change in my life, neither a loss or gain, occured when I finally
came out c. 2009 or so, slightly forced when I filed a formal complaint with
GLAD against a Boston cop who liked harassing men in the vicinity of the
Fenway Gardens for as little as walking down the street. My reason for being
in the neighborhood at all was that I got a gym membership at the Gold’s Gym
at Fenway Park on the recommendation of a female coworker. I would later
learn that two other State Lab coworkers with a history of antagonism were
daughters of police officers. I’ve pondered the coincidence ever
since.
Thus began my entrance into the world of gay bars, another story for
another post. I marched in Boston Pride in 2011 and lost my job at the State
Lab a few days later (I had been on a paid suspension based on anonymous and
vague complaints from heterosexual coworkers).
In the midst of MCAD proceedings that ultimately ruled against me for
reasons of limitations, my mother died. It didn’t help matters that I was in
a toxic roommate situation so I began a nightly ritual at the local Beer
Works, where I began wasting my savings on my one meal of the day (I stopped
buying groceries after my roommates stole nearly an entire pound of cheese
from the frig before I even had a slice).
I eventually moved back in with my father on his offer, intended as a
temporary move but I wound up playing caretaker after a number of issues
with my eldest brother, another story for another post.
After my father’s death a
few years ago, I gained a refreshed perspective on my relationship with my
parents, much of will be the subject of future posts, my mother in
particular. As a preview, I offer a glimpse in the form of this old school
photo, fourth grade, Horace Mann North.
My final Christmas with my mother, when we pretended to be a family after
she expressed mixed emotions about my coming out, had a prescient sense of
doom, probably enhanced from the meds.
Oh, did I forget to mention my suicide attempt and subsequent stints in a
couple psych wards (the second stint set up by a small-time dealer who works
with teens at his day job and implied that I was a “rat”)? Another story for
another post.
Anyway, my sense of impending doom inspired me to pull out the family
photos “one more time” (stored in piles in ZipLoc bags because my parents
never got around to buying albums for some reason). The photo as you see it
here is how I found it as well as one of my other brother who was the only
other family member to move out from under my mother’s evil eye. My mother
didn’t know how the faces on the pictures came to be scratched all over, or
so she claimed in a defensive tone. After her death, I found one of her own
childhood portraits vandalized in a similar manner. She projected self-image
issues and did not like her picture to be taken for years, often wearing
sunglasses in public. I have a couple photos and videos that I snuck
of her, working in the kitchen five months before her death, the only ones
from the last twenty or thirty years of her life other than her driver’s
license.
I can’t remember what I got her that final Christmas though I remember
giving my father R. Crumb’s illustrated version of The Book of Genesis,
still sitting on the bottom shelf of the TV table as I’m typing this. I
wonder if he bothered to read it. There are a lot of things I’ll be
wondering about from hereon.
