Friday, May 29, 2009

Thursday Night Out

In the Club

I don't even know what his name was.

We'd been at the club several hours at that point, and after four drinks my entire world was spinning, the dance floor a dizzy, throbbing, colorful arena around me.

He walked up, and at first I thought he wanted to get past me.

People had been jostling back and forth all night, wading precariously through the mass of sweating bodies, through the human humidity that pulled at our consciousness. It was like moving in a dream or fantasy, the stomach-rumbling beat of the bass always threatening to lift us off our feet.

I stepped aside to let him go, and, being drunk, gestured with a small hand motion that he should head through.

He looked at me with an expression that asked, "What is this nonsense?"

I'll never quite forget the moment when I realized what he was thinking.

His eyes locked on my face like wolves' eyes on a prey about to be devoured. How could he have been certain I was gay? Maybe the look of total shock I'm sure I immediately produced, shock tempered only by eagerness.

My heart thundered, anxious and excited. I was a little afraid.

Without saying a word to me, he put his hands around my small waist, fastened his fingers on my thighs.

He was a Latino, shorter than me but broader as well, and his grip was firm.

I fell willingly into him, putting my hands around his neck. I'd been waiting for this all night, all year. I'd fantasized endlessly about yielding to abandon with a perfect stranger, one who may or may not have been a young Hispanic man in a night club.

The people around us were packed so densely together that almost no one, my own friends several feet away included, saw what we were doing. We attracted some looks from those in our immediate vicinity, but I was too drunk and too ecstatic to care.

"You're really hot!" I yelled into his ear.

I looked at his face, his hungry face, and I wanted to kiss him so much.

Then, once again without saying anything to me, his palms moved across the arch of my back and descended to my hips, where they slid past the waist of my jeans.

His fingers curled into the bare flesh of my back side, and I started in surprise. My eyes showed mild alarm, while his seemed to say, "Alright then" before he withdrew his hands.

I didn't want him to go, though.

When he did it again, his fingers tickled, and I probably responded the worst way I could have: I laughed and jumped back.

He pulled away once more, and I rubbed myself, both ends, against him. I squeezed the rear of his own jeans, brushed my fingers against the side of his stomach, and let my hand drift briefly over his crotch.

Then he was gone.

When I looked over, he was dancing suggestively with a young woman.

"Wow," I thought. "He must be into everything."

And then, because I knew no one could hear me over the din of the music, I yelled as loudly as I could, "I can't believe that just happened!" and jumped into the air.

I'm sure they thought it was the Reggaeton.

In the car on the way home, I reveled in my quick encounter, but lamented to Peruvian Girl that it had passed without a kiss.

"I made two summer resoultions this year," I said. "One, that I would record that song; and two, that I would have my first kiss. So far, I've managed to record the song and get felt up, but I still haven't been kissed!"

"'Summer resolutions?'" asked Curly Hair Guy incredulously. "Only white people would think up something like that."

Walking Through the Streets of Marble City

Sunday, May 24, 2009

A Strange and Wonderful Thought

Sky

I had a strange and wonderful thought the other day.

I was taking a walk in the bright sunlight, strolling in bare feet to better feel the warmth of the sun-soaked grass, when my eyes went to the blue of the azure sky. What I saw above me was a vast dome, spotted here and there along the edges with white clouds, a dome whose dimensions I realized I could not fathom.

"It's so big," I thought staring into the immense expanse, floating there like an endless ocean, an ocean more vast than any ocean could ever be.

Sky

I looked down at the sidewalk, the age of its white pavement measured in a handful of years, then tilted my head back into the blue.

I was struck then with the thought that, though it looked down upon new houses and manicured lawns and bright cars, the dome into which I gazed was a primeval thing, unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years.

And though I wore khaki shorts from an expensive retailer, though in those khaki shorts was strapped a 21st Century iPod, the activity in which I participated was an ancient one.

When all the minor details were stripped away, when I was reduced to my barest physical form, I was nothing more than a boy staring at the sky, lost in it, like a billion other boys long before I was a blink in creation.

In that one moment, I was no different from the young man who walked along a shore or through a field three thousand years ago and looked up to ponder the great blue disc of the heavens.

To inspect the sky often provokes deep philosophical questions, but the act itself is the act of a child, mesmerized by the beauty of something it can't understand. The greatest of men are reduced to spectres of awe by that incomprehensible plain.

While buildings have risen and fallen, clothes come into and passed out of fashion, empires attained great power and declined into ruin, the sky has watched, unchanging, inalterable, oblivious to the toils of man below it.

And in all that time, there has always been a boy to take a moment from his summer's walk, shield his eyes from the glare of the sun, and wonder to himself in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Spanish, or even English, at what that thing really is.

Sky

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

The Beauty of These Summers

The Face of the New Pool

Fully three years into my university career, I only now fully appreciate the greatness of college summers.

The reason I’ve just come to it, as I realized this morning, is because this is the first summer I’ve had since graduating high school three years ago that I am not miserable and dangerously depressed.

The summer of 2007 was the summer after my Freshman Year, and in my recovery from that shattering experience I wasn’t even sure yet if I’d be going back to Major University.

This time last year, during the summer of 2008, I was struggling to find a job and already beginning the deep slide into desolation that would take me to the verge of suicide in June and July.

Molten Sunset

Perhaps because of my natural love for history, I have from the time I was thirteen years old divided my life into sections, usually clearly defined by major life events. My childhood was a long plain of silliness and innocence, a time before I really sensed the world around me.

It was only when my teen years began that the first stirrings of real consciousness whispered their way into my young brain, and I began to awake to the universe.

Counting my childhood and the cycle I'm currently in, there have been six personal eras of my life, the last of which was the worst.

When I look back upon the Black Times, as I christened the age, I see that it really was an enormous gulf of time; from August of 2006 and proceeding on for at least two full years, I had nothing but desolation. I’ve never known when to officially end the Black Times.

Other eras, taking place in happier times, were easier to delineate. Deliverance, for example, the blessed years of my own adolescent resurrection, began on December 27, 2001, the day we moved to Beautiful Town; and ended on May 27, 2004, the day I left. The Time of Tumult, an age of enormous upheaval, started the day Deliverance ended and concluded on March 10, 2005, when my family left Deep South State.

Within the Time of Tumult’s whirlwind ten months were contained my corrosive summer with Anne and my hurricane-ridden, death-plagued, glamorous days in Central City, days that still call to me.

The Interregnum, a pointless period between the Time of Tumult and the ashy death of the Black Times, commenced the day we left Central City and came to an abrupt halt on August 24, 2006, when I moved into my dorm at Major University.

The Black Times definitively began in late August of 2006, but when did it end? I declared its conclusion several times, only to keep moving the date further and further into the future. I attempted in November of 2007 and February of 2008 to bury it, but like a horrible reanimated corpse it rose to stalk me. I began a decided rebound last August, but depression lingered well into the school year.

A good demarcation point might be when I first came out on my blog, or perhaps the night last Fall I broke down and confessed everything to my mother. It was definitely over by Christmas Break. When I figure it out I’ll write it down.

And so the vast stretching arc that was the Black Times, that pitch sheath of indeterminate end, prevented me from enjoying the summers of 2007 and 2008. This time, though, its grip has ended, and I can truly see what a blessing we university students enjoy.

I was on summer vacation on the twelfth day of May, a full month before local schools were to let out, beginning a holiday that extends nearly to September. I still work at the theater, now approximately thirty hours a week, but my shifts there are stacked between Friday and Saturday. During the rest of the week, I’ve divided my time between hanging out with Sacagawea, driving around with Peruvian Girl, composing a song with my father’s friend Guitarist Man, reading, writing, singing, blogging, and doing whatever else I want. Along with several leisure trips interspersed, I get to live like this for four months, and I love it.

Monday morning at around eleven-thirty I went to Guitarist’s house with an original song I’d written called “So Long.” This is a pop number that I’ve thought has great radio potential since when I wrote it last June. Guitarist, a talented musician, brought my cathartic lyrics and anthemic melody to life with scorching guitar chords that make the song only more addictive.

Powell once called the notion that I could make a record label money one of the most ridiculous things he’d ever heard, but anyone else who’s listened to this piece is amazed by it.

We recorded the first preliminary version today. I’m doing something I’ve always wanted to.

I promise that as soon as I figure out how, I will share this track with you.

Monday afternoon was uncharacteristically cold, and I spent it and the entire evening in Sacagawea’s warm home. She made hot dogs with macaroni and cheese for her nineteen-year-old boyfriend Marine and sixteen-year-old sister Pocahontas, then stayed up late with me watching movies and listening to my complaints about boys, who seem averse to even looking at me.

An unexpected visit by Bisexual Boy, who came to excitedly announce his newest crush to Pocahontas, didn’t help with my mood on the subject.

Next Thursday, Peruvian Girl and I are meeting up with two new friends and going to a club in Marble City. Finnish Girl, a friend of mine from Major University, has promised to accompany us along with her boyfriend Lawyer Man. Having never been clubbing before I am nervous about this, but I am going anyway.

This time, I live.

Farmhouse

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Hair Update

For those of you who are new to this site, the Hair Update is something I've been doing for a while.

I've been growing my hair out since October of 2006, and since then it has been trimmed in November of 2007, August of 2008, and February of 2009, a total of three haircuts in nearly three years.

In August of 2008, after I'd cut off about three or four inches, it occurred to me to start keeping track of my progress, so I began taking photos every month and posting them here.

This is what my hair looked like last month, just days after my twenty-first birthday:

My Hair

Ponytail


That was when I first noticed it starting to get really long.

This is what my hair looks like now:

My Hair

My Ponytail


It's so thick and wavy that it doesn't show its full length, especially when in a ponytail, but eventually it will grow long enough that all the curls in the world won't be able to hide it.

That's it for this month. Hopefully by June it will be much longer.

Friday, May 15, 2009

The Beginning of Summer

At long last, after weeks of finals and papers and registering, both for housing and for Fall classes, the school year is over. With months of one deadline after another behind me, the only thing I have to worry about is showing up to work on time several days a week and figuring out how to best divide my many leisure hours.

In the future, of course, many important issues are coming up. Three years through a five-year college career, I'm still not sure what I want to do when I graduate, and a decision must be made before very long.

"Realistically speaking, you need to decide by Christmas Break at the latest," British Professor, my academic adviser, told me during a meeting last month.

The day when I must choose a path to follow looms seven months away, but that moment falls well outside this four-month summer.

On May 12th, I drove out to Major University and took my last exam.

As I left campus, walking through bright green lawns and between brick buildings laced with flowers, I felt a marvelous sense of freedom come over me.

Leaving Campus

In addition to being my last day of school, May 12th was also Thomas's fourteenth birthday. This is an important milestone, as now he is a full teenager, no longer a new adolescent. Fourteen is also the age at which most people start high school, as Thomas will this August.

My own first days of high school from the Fall of 2002 still seem so vivid and fresh that I can't quite believe my little brother is about to embark on the journey.

The summer of 2002 was special in many ways, but one of the things that made it much more enjoyable was the erection that year of a pool in our backyard. To a fourteen-year-old, nothing could have been more exciting than the promise of sparkling water to dive into each hot summer's day and the opportunity to host friends at what suddenly became the most popular house in the neighborhood.

This summer, seven years later, the gift of a family pool is being bequeathed onto another fourteen-year-old.

For the last several days, my backyard has been a construction site.

The team came earlier this week, and in a single day of hard labor they'd brought a pool up out of the dirt.

Dirt Foundation

The Pool Begins

Pool Erected

It was late afternoon when the head of the working crew handed my mother a thick green hose, and she steadied herself as the first spouts of water shot from its plastic depths into our new pool.

Filling the Pool

Having this amenity is a huge relief; the public pool in Mountain Town is crowded, hectic, and probably dirty given all the greasy pre-teen bodies that regularly plunk into it. Now, as with every other house we've ever lived in excepting the one in Wealthy Town, we have our own place.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Looking to the Future

2012

I was reflecting today on the future political outlook for this country, and on the way that the ongoing flood of Northern immigration into the South will affect that outlook. In some conservative circles, the ascent of the South has been presented as being beneficial to the Republican Party, but I believe that the opposite is true.

At its peak in the early part of the 20th Century, the North collectively held 262 electoral votes, a large share of these controlled by such titans as Pennsylvania, which had 38; New York, which had 47; and Illinois, which had 29.

The liberal tradition in the North has always run deep, regardless of party; New England was the stronghold of the failed Federalists (early believers in a powerful central government) in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, and when the anti-slavery Republican Party first emerged on the national stage in 1856 it swept the North.

Up until the 1960’s, the GOP was the more progressive of America’s two parties, and in the period from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement the Northeast and Midwest, with several exceptions, stayed lock-step in the Republican fold.

Nixon’s Southern Strategy, in which white racism was manipulated to yield Southern dissatisfaction with the Johnson Administration, was when GOP energies were first directed toward a growing South.

The first indicator of a future Northern descent had come in 1930, when Pennsylvania fell from 38 to 36 electoral votes. It was not until 1950, however, when New York was downgraded from 47 to 45 votes, that the North began to slowly ebb from its stratospheric peak.

In that year, Illinois went from 29 to 28 votes, and Ohio went from 26 to 25, while Pennsylvania dropped for the third census in a row, moving from 35 to 32.

Nixon, peering into the future that 1960’s demographic changes presaged, tied his party firmly to the region of the country sure to experience the fastest population growth. The South’s incredible electoral rise has proceeded as Nixon likely hoped, but in other ways the 37th President’s foresight was fatally limited.

It was a fundamental error of judgement for the Republican Party to believe that the bastions of conservatism, chief among them the Deep South, could absorb wave after wave of Northern immigration and remain geopolitically unaltered. The GOP of four decades ago assumed perhaps that Northern arrivals would become enculturated to the South, but instead the opposite happened.

In Miami, Atlanta, Charlotte, Northern Virginia, and other places, liberal communities established themselves and bolstered, year by year, the electoral power of the South.

For half a century, migrants swelled the overall Southern population while constituting a smaller share of the citizenry than the native Southerners whose ideology remained the bedrock of conversatism.

In the 1980’s, however, the rate of Northern immigration increased dramatically and continued for the next two decades at an unprecedented pace. As the North depopulated and the South soared, Republicans were temporarily left in the 1990’s and early 2000’s at a demographic advantage, able to exploit a situation wherein liberals had moved across the Mason-Dixon Line in sufficient numbers to empower the South without transforming it.

The appearance of Republican hegemony was impressive.

In both 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush won every Southern state save the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Delaware, also prising a handful of industrial states from a Democratic North that could never have less afforded to lose a single vote.

In the late 2000’s, however, the balance shifted.

As Northerners continued to pour south, the immigrant population, which included not only transplants but also those transplants’ Southern-born children, reached a tipping point. In many jurisdictions, genuine Southerners were narrowly outnumbered for the first time by Northern immigrants and their descendants, who in 2008 could at last taste the fruit of fifty years’ change by accessing the towering electoral vote totals they’d built up.

In 2008, Barack Obama took Florida’s 27 electoral votes. Virginia, revolutionized by the glittering center of wealth, liberalism, and urban power that its northeastern counties comprised, fell into the Democratic ring. In North Carolina, five decades of slow-moving demographic trends just barely delivered 15 electoral votes to the blue column.

Meanwhile, the North flew the liberal flag as it always had, with the only difference being that it was even more staunchly Democratic in 2008 than in previous years.

Simply put, the Republicans’ problem is this: while liberals have been moving south since the 1950’s, conservatives aren’t moving north.

As the Southern population continues to rise, the Democrats’ advantage will only grow with it.

Florida, which will have 29 electoral votes following the 2010 Census, is highly unlikely to vote Republican in 2012.

The Democrats will almost certainly build off of their narrow edge in North Carolina (which will gain one more Northern-fueled electoral vote in 2010, bringing its total to 16), while in Virginia the Democrats have likely found for themselves a new stronghold. The Old Dominion holds off-year gubernatorial elections, and the biggest question in 2009 seems not to be who will win the general contest, but who will win the Democratic primary. The current front-runner, appropriate enough in a state whose prosperity has been brought by outsiders moving in, is former DNC chairman and Upstate New York native Terry McAuliffe.

Heavy immigration continues into Sunbelt states that have yet to reach the tipping point, and with every new resident those areas are brought one step closer to crossing the migrant/native threshold.

One example of this in Georgia, which barely held for John McCain last Fall. The Empire State of the South has either reached or is about to reach its transition from native to migrant primacy, and in 2012 its 16 electoral votes will be more ripe for Barack Obama than they were in 2008.

Arizona, which will have 12 electoral votes following the 2010 Census, was already a swing state in 2008 despite being the home of Senator John McCain. In 2012, it is wide open.

Texas, meanwhile, could possibly supplant Florida as the ultimate swing state. The conservative tradition in the Lone Star State is strongly ingrained, but the liberal surge south is being felt there. Houston, with its world-class medical facilities; Dallas, with its business elite; countless other major cities now home to educated professionals; and an enormous minority population are shaping a new political order.

By 2016 at the latest, Texas and its 38 electoral votes will be a viable target for Democrats.

The North, while stripped of power and precipitously nose-diving in terms of national importance, remains a loyal Democratic fortress. Indiana, Ohio, and Iowa may be coaxed out of the liberal coalition from time to time, but when taken with the overwhelming support the Democrats enjoy in the rest of the North and their burgeoning power in the South, it won’t be enough to matter.

In 2010, New York will fall to 29 electoral votes (tying with Florida), while Pennsylvania will reach 20, Ohio 18, Massachusetts 11, Illinois 20, and Michigan 16. This is incontestably a region the midst of a steep decline, one whose bottom remains out of sight, but its political ethos, through its children who have diffused across the South and West, is on the cusp of holding national sway as never before.

The outlook for the Republican Party, at least for the near future, is very bleak. The South is rising, but it’s rising as a different entity than its conservative champions once imagined.

Before long, the new symbol of the Democratic Party will be the palm tree.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

My Brilliant Sister

The other night, I was up in Powell's bedroom, having just told Thomas and Pie their nightly bedtime story (these tales center on a chocolate-eating monster whom my sister is convinced resides in our pantry).

I was laying there next to them, as I sometimes do, indluging in drowziness, when Pie put a question to me.

"BB?" she asked. "How did God make us?"

"I don't know, sweetie," I answered. "I don't think anyone knows that."

She held her own arm out before her face and stared at the limb in amazement.

"What is this?" she whispered, her high little girl's voice full of awe.

"What is what, honey?" I asked, unsure whether to believe she was asking the question she was asking.

"This," she said, pinching the baby-soft flesh of around her wrist. "It's like He made us out of plastic."

I assured her that her hand was not plastic, and soon she drifted off to sleep.

I couldn't help but be struck by her wonder, by the ancient inquisitiveness of a mind so young. It made me love her even more.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

On the Summer, Being Gay, and the Coming School Year

This is to be one of my all-purpose updates, which I enjoy so much.

In between academic responsibilities and the drama of making this blog undetectable to my birth-mother's family, I haven't had time to discuss events in my life for a while.

Tuesday was my last day of regular classes, and, true to form, I skipped. I was up at three o'clock on Tuesday morning when I decided to double check my exam schedule. As I was doing this, I remembered that I had a Philosophy 151 paper to turn in and wasn't sure of the due date.

To my shock and horror, I discovered upon opening an old e-mail from my professor that the paper was to be turned in by noon that day, eight hours later.

"Alright," I thought. "I'll get up, do it tomorrow, and e-mail it to him at the start of class."

A clause in the paper requirements, however, mentioned that only early submissions could be sent via e-mail, so instead of waiting I just stayed up until four and punched the whole thing out in an hour. I knew after that that I wasn't getting up for a ten-thirty class, so I stayed home and spent the day studying for today's Government 305 final exam, which I'm fairly confident I aced.

I have two journalism finals tomorrow, neither of which I am bothering to study for. A friend (Finnish Girl) sent me the study guide, but because it came from school in Vista format and both of us have XP at home neither could open the file. It's all going to be AP material and current events anyway.

The only thing I really have to watch is getting there on time.

Our professor, who my friend and I have nicknamed "Eyebrows" because of his expressive brow movement, wrote on the syllabus that "students must be present at the start of the exam period," and there's no doubt in my mind that he'd prevent a commuter running ten minutes late from taking the test. Some people are just awesome like that.

Finnish Girl and I have another journalism class together on Tuesdays and Thursdays, this one taught by Professor W. This man has a peculiar accent that to me carries small traces of the western South, perhaps Kentucky-based, and he has the odd habit of prounouncing certain W words with an H.

"Hwhy?" he often asks. "Should a journalist cover or not cover a story like this, from an ethical perspective?"

This quirk has become a running joke between Finnish Girl and me, and we always shoot each other laughing glances whenever we hear it, which is several times each period.

I've come across this pronunciation before, usually from older people, with W words that have an H immediately after the W. Examples are white, where, when, etc.

The other day though, Professor W. came out of nowhere and hit us with, "That would be kind of hweird."

Finnish Girl and I both snorted, burying our giggling mouths into our hands.

He compounded this later on the same day by relaying to us the tale of a sensational trial that had once occurred.

"I remember years ago," he said. "There was a spectacular rape trial."

He'd hesistated before saying the word "trial," so that for one hilarious and confusing moment our entire class thought that the professor was recalling some "spectacular rape" from the past.

"Isn't that hweird?" I asked Finnish Girl as we left the class. "Did you hear hwhat he hwas talking about? About that spectacular rape?"

For days afterward, we'd greet each other with, "There was a spectacular rape..." every time we met.

Next Monday I must turn in an Anthropology 114 paper that will serve as my final, on Tuesday I'll drive to campus for my Philosophy 151 exam, and then I'm free.

What am I to do with that freedom? After the summer begins for me on May 12th (which is also Thomas's fourteenth birthday), there are plans to be made.

One of the first things on my list is searching for a new job. Western City Movie Theater has provided me with friends and with an income at a time when jobs are scarce, but I feel I've exhausted opportunities for personal development there. Most of my co-workers come from a different socio-economic class than I, and the bitter exhaustion they're already beginning to acquire is a downer and a bore.

Call me superficial, but hearing about how terrible other people's lives are all the time does get old. This summer, I'm looking to party and have fun. Next Fall, I'll be headed back to school. For them, though, nothing about the movie theater is part-time. When you have to work as many hours as possible, you don't have much time to go out, and in that there is a serious impediment to further bonding.

Beyond that, the culture that Manager creates, the values of violence and masculinity that he and several other (though not all) male employees have embraced, is completely unappealing to me. During the winter, they tried to bring me into their circle, and I refused.

In several conversations, Black Dress Girl, who no longer works at the theater but dates Assistant Manager, has advised me not to come out to anyone at work.

"It would just give them a reason to fuck with you," she said.

I don't really want to have to associate with people who are like that.

Quitting is not an option at this point, as I don't have another job, and, if we're being honest, am unlikely to find one. I'm going to try, but I know how the market is.

Don't get me wrong; it's not as if I want to leave Western City Movie Theater, and even if I found employment elsewhere I'd likely continue to work reduced hours at the cinema.

I just want to meet other people, different types of people, and make more friends.

There was a certain restaurant in Western City that wanted to hire me last summer, before I got the job at the theater, and I remember a very attractive gay boy who worked there. That will be the first place I apply.

Another thing I'm looking forward to is relationships. This, my twenty-second summer (I was born in April), will be my first as an acknowledged gay person. As the sweltering sun vaults into the blue sky and beautiful tempests wreak their havoc on black clouds, I would like to open myself to new experiences.

Summertime is often characterized by sudden thunderstorms, violent things that come out of nowhere and spew warm rain onto blossoming flowers.

I want to be overtaken by those rains. I want the downpour to drench me, to open my petals and leave their pink silk covered in glistening pearls of water.

I've gone twenty-one years without feeling a lover's touch, and that extended drought has given me an insatiable thirst. I want lips and thighs and eyes and caresses and so many kisses. I want it bad.


Gay Boy


The picture above is of Gay Boy. From what I can gather, Gay Boy is very fond of me. We've never met in person, but a mutual friend named Sacagawea showed him my pictures over Facebook and before long he added me.

He is twenty years old and goes to school in Marble City.

We e-mailed back and forth for a bit, and while the conversations never became explicit I got the impression that he found me attractive.

"What kind of guys do you like?" I asked.

"Thin and youthful, with shaggy hair," he responded.

Anyway, I've decided that if the opportunity comes I will hook up with him. I don't necessarily intend to have sex with him, as intercourse is something I'm not comfortable rushing into, but there are many things short of making love that I'm eager to try.

Believe it or not, Gay Boy would not usually be my type. It goes without saying that his body is phenomenal, but he's not as pretty as the kind of guys I'm usually attracted to. Still, he's in great shape, definitely cute if not ideal, and for an inexperienced young man in a rural area with little knowledge of gay culture, waiting for the perfect guy is likely to be a long wait indeed.

My hope is that Gay Boy will be the first or one of the first of several partners, and that through him I can meet other people. Maybe he has some really cute friends.

I want a guy who's innocent and sweet, who's as new to this as me. That guy might not be the first guy, though, and he's definitely not Gay Boy, who's been known to date professional men and accept all the material perks therein.

In all of this I have yet to publicly come out. I know, however, that I will do so by the end of the summer.

Then this Fall it's off to school, where an openly-gay BB will confront the student body. How thrilling and frightening that is!

I applied for housing on May 4th, the day the list opened, and have been told that due to my early submission my likelihood of being granted a spot is very high. However, the tuition battle that I always wage with my parents around this time of year has begun to gear up. More on that in the next post.

Monday, May 4, 2009

The Good Side

Switching blogs was a difficult decision for me to make, as I knew in doing so I'd be leaving behind a large portion of my readership and sacrificing, in part, the history that I've built over the last year.

There are, however, positive aspects to what's happened.

When I first began blogging last April, my enthusiasm led me to share details of the project with people around me. It wasn't long before mostly everyone knew I had a blog, even if they didn't know exactly where to find it, and what was meant to be a private aspect of my life became public knowledge.

Had friends and family been ignorant of my activities, it may be that I would still be operating at my old address without problems. I'm not, though. Because of my own careless mistake, I've been driven away from BlackenedBoy, from the digital home that was mine for thirteen months.

I did not leave without taking several important lessons with me, though.

This time, my blog will be what it was always supposed to be: a personal place, an escape that no one else knows about.

After the incident with Anne's family I made a very public display of throwing my hands up, announcing I'd taken down my old site, and swearing off future blogging.

When friends and family suggested I make a different one, I answered in disgust that I'd worked on the old one for a year and didn't have the heart to start anew.

"It's not worth the drama," I told one co-worker.

So far as any of them know, this place does not exist. And for however long I am here, for however long BB continues, they'll never find out. What hurt the most was lying to my friends, people who care for me and urged me not to let Anne's relatives take away something I enjoyed so much.

It's the only way, though. The conclusion I've reached is that, if I'm to ever have the absolute freedom that is my only option here, I will have to sever BB from the real world. From now on, he will be my secret, and the observations he makes are incognito reporting. I'm going undercover.

It actually feels nice, cool, to have a part of myself that is kept away from everyone else. It's a bit like being a covert agent.

Most bloggers who run into personal trouble do so because they blab, as I did. That is a mistake I will never make again.

In keeping with this new policy, I want you all to know that I have decided to remain at my current profile. I wouldn't have asked your advice if I didn't intend on listening to it, and your consensus on the issue seemed pretty decisive.

As for my readership, it will return. I built a following before, and I will build one again. Plus, as several of you pointed out, the really important people tagged along with me.

As it is now, after three days on a new page I have hits from three different continents and over sixty profile views. That seems like a pretty good start.

Thank you for hanging on, and for making this easier.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Dilemma

Here is the issue as it stands.

After the developments with my birth-mother's family, I exported my blog, created a new Blogger profile, and then imported and published the blog under a new name. I gave the old blog a new URL and marked it private, then transferred the old URL to a new blog which I promptly deleted.

The effect of this is that my old blog still exists, but that if anyone types theblackenedboy.blogspot.com into their address bar, the account will come up as deleted.

My new blog, BrightBoy, is not searchable through Google, and neither is my new Blogger profile. My family all believe that I have ceased blogging, and I can write here with the guarantee of total anonymity and safety from detection.

The downside, however, is very large.

When blogging is what it's supposed to be, it has community at its center. Community is what makes this worthwhile, what distinguishes it from simple journaling. Blogger did not import any of the comments that had been left throughout my blog's history, meaning that the coversation we've had over the past year was effectively erased.

I can browse through archives to see what I wrote last spring, but what I can't do, and what no newcomer could do, is see what you wrote, what my readers said, how we interacted.

On BlackenedBoy, I had two thousand profile views, fourteen followers (some of whom I didn't even know), and regular visitors from over a dozen countries on six continents. When I switched to BrightBoy, all of that history was lost.

A first-time visitor to my new site will see a blog that's been active for over a year with thirty-four profile views and three comments total. On a practical note, that creates a very bad impression.

As I said, the profile for BlackenedBoy still exists. I could transfer my current URL to the old account, and all of my comments would be restored. There would still be some confusion among readers as to my sudden address change, but it would be far less extensive than it is now.

With a different URL, any potential snoops in my birth-mother's family would be unable to locate me by typing in the old link.

The problem is this: a Google search for BlackenedBoy still links to the old profile, even though the name has changed. If anyone were to look up my old username, they could potentially find my profile and with it my new blog.

So what should I do?

I'm soliciting advice here.

I can either stay where I am and build up a new readership with a huge chunk of my history ripped away, or I can go back and risk discovery. What do you think?

I want to make a decision one way or the other and stick to it, because going back and forth between profiles will only make this situation worse.

Friday, May 1, 2009

Cruelty

Anne's family is truly vicious.

For all their charms, and for the accomplishments of a select few, there should be no doubt that they are fundamentally a debased group of people.

This evening I received a telephone call from an infuriated Anne, complaining about something I'd written on my blog.

Many of you will remember a similar incident in November, when after the Thanksgiving holiday she was sent into a flurry of indignation because I'd posted that she ate dinner with the television on.

On that occasion, I'd been foolish enough to check my blog on her computer, thus leaving the address in her viewing history.

This time, though, she received an anonymous e-mail from someone who tempted, "If you want to read about yourself, click here."

The link took her to my post, "Discoveries," which obviously revealed some harsh facts about her past.

The reason for my anonymity has always been to ensure that I have freedom to total honesty, to unfettered venting of my feelings. Were I operating a blog under my real name, I wouldn't reveal half of what I do.

To her complaints I responded, "I'm sorry, but that's why I'm anonymous. No one on there knows who you are. That's my place to be open, and I'm going to continue to write about whatever I want."

She didn't like that at all.

I think the fatal error, which I'm kicking myself over now, was checking my blog while up at my grandmother's house last weekend. I thought I had deleted the viewing history, but evidently one of my unseemly relatives stumbled upon the site and overdosed with greed at the discovery of a serrated treasure that could cut to my birth-mother's core.

They saw something they thought would hurt her, and they sent it right away.

That's the kind of people she deals with, the snake pit into which she was born. Her intelligence, beauty, creativity, and talent made her an early target for abuse that spawned lifelong insecurities and that I only now realize is behind the temper tantrums she's thrown over the years.

Powell and I have never engaged in the absurd chess game played by that crowd, and I refuse to start now. As soon as I learned of what had happened, I changed my web address.

Sacrificing the URL I've used for over a year will likely leave many of my readers displaced, and furthermore is a personal loss; as I wrote in November, that address felt like home.

The transfer, however, will allow me to continue here free of unwelcome eyes, so it's been done.

In the meantime, as my grandmother nears her end the vipers show their fangs. Aunt Heroin has lost her head at the prospect of her mother's passing and proven no help at all, while Uncle Nosehair recently called from Mexico to scream curses at his dying eighty-one-year-old mother when she refused to give him more money.

The usual beggars, addicts and alcoholics who have bled my grandmother dry for decades, are surfacing now that her time is short.

If one good thing comes from Grand Ma leaving, it will be that we can finally sever our ties with that disgraceful horde.