Meet the new blog...

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.