hey you, you whiny liberal. are you an american? sure you are. are you registered to vote? you better be. stop your whining, and register to vote now. hell, even non-residents like me can register at tellanamericantovote.com. and, yes, i will be voting in the next presidential election. i’m an american, and i’d love to able to move back to the us of a. someday. :crazy:
oh, and i love to get my political news filtered through the three major networks: moby, margaret and michael.
one by one the names started percolating up from my long-term [repressed] memory.
at first it was amusing anecdotal tangential people, like alex who i had helped pick into lloyd house at university, some 8 years ago and who, over lunch today, i found out is back as a student, somehow. this person has moved to santa barbara, this person is working at overture… fred kept dropping names into the conversation, names that were familiar but long forgotten. names of people that were always there during my four years at caltech, but always in the foggy background.
but then fred, this cute young acquaintence-cum-lunch date starts dropping the bombshells. not on purpose, but just because he assumed i’d want to know. it’s been 5 years since i graduated university, and i’d done a damn fine job leaving my skeltons back in the [computer science laboratory] closets.
kevin. kevin was a best friend for a few years at university. then we had one date. then we were awkward friends. then we spent 13 days together in france. then he hated me. then he drove a wedge between me and several friends. the last time i saw kevin was when i bumped into him at .heaven on cousin michael’s birthday. i was hoping to make piece, but, somehow my drunken friends ended up telling him off. he’s now a resident associate at some all-male dorm.
clayton. clayton was the adorable straight lad who led me down a dangerous path of friendship and lust and confusion during my final few months of university. he wasn’t guilty for breaking my heart, but he was far from innocent. he’s still straight, i’m told.
looking across the table of this spanish restaurant at fred, my brain started making a loud clicking noise… that same sorta static-y hard drive access noise. back at caltech, i’d always thought that fred was cute, but he always had girlfriends so i let him be. sitting there now, though, discussing the cast of characters in all of my gay dramas from university, i started to suspect…
we talked about xy and qr, we talked about all of the insanity that is [was] caltech: how asexual everyone was, how difficult it was to date properly, how i [sorta] converted lloyd house from ~`the christian house’~ to ~`the gay house’~.
hours had flown by, and we’d finished our overpriced spanish dishes in this trying-too-hard-to-be-authentic spanish restaurant in belgravia. i was hoping he’d avoid digging too deep into some of my more painful memories of caltech… but he did.
you heard about steve craver, right? my heart sank. the memories came flooding back. that summer when we first met, him sneaking onto campus and the long emails at night and long walks in the misty pasadena night. then the breakup. then the awkward friendship/avoidance for a few years. then the makeup. then a few years of not keeping in touch. then my visit to pasadena from london, just to hang out, when we realized that we still had chemistry. then coming back to london. then finding out the news.
fred realized that he’d hit a nerve, and tears started to well up in my eyes. he very delicately helped to fill in some of the gaps that i wasn’t quite aware of… a manipulative boyfriend, job insecurities, a bad acid trip. reassuring, actually. reassuring to me, why? because these factors helped to remove any lingering guilt that somehow i was to blame? reassuring that there wasn’t necessarily well-constructed rhyme or reason to his suicide?
over two hours we sat at that table. i went back to work, a bit red faced. my colleagues probably assumed i had had a nice long piss-up lunch. in actuality, i was just reeling from the emotional shock to my system, due to recalling all of these emotion-packed segments of my university life.
i learned many lessons when i was young about saving. grandma, who had lived through the great depression, was always frugal. she insisted on wrapping birthday presents with the comics from last sunday’s newspaper. if we went to mcdonald’s after school for a milkshake, she’d insist on stocking up her purse with napkins, wetnaps, ketchup, jam, spoons, salt, pepper, etc.
when i was no older than 5, she took me to the bank to open up my first bank account. i think i cried when they smashed my piggybank open, but i thought it was really cool to have my own deposit slips and balance book. i listened attentively as the bank manager explained to me the virtues of saving. he banged away on his 9v red LED calculator, saying that my $5.62 deposit could some day be worth $19.32! floppy-haired 5yo eric licked his lips and thought, wow!
i started my adult life towards the end of high school. i had returned overwhelmed and triumphant from living in germany, and had decided to go to university in los angeles. caltech was probably one of the most expensive universities i could’ve chosen, and this meant that i, and my family would have to scrape together everything we could to make ends meet.
this is when i started my ~`borrowing’~ mentality.
it all snowballed after that. the student loans got bigger. my credit card debt grew from 3 to 4 to 5 digits. but, at no point did i freak out. instead, i just stayed smart about it… always rationalizing my debt based on my future expected income.
that’s the beauty of borrowing. i mean, who wants to die with a million dollars in the bank? i’d much rather die with a million dollars of debt, right? in the meantime, why can’t i just juggle the interest rates, transfer the balances, refinance and repurpose my cash flow?
i think that my generation has been brought up to treat all income as disposable income, and, particularly with regards to big city living, it’s always about now now now—with the exception of that big holiday at the end of the summer.
it carries over into other realms as well. we drink to get drunk, we drink to get smashed, knowing full well that the hangover tomorrow may be incapacitating.
we do the drugs on the weekend, borrowing seratonin from monday and tuesday. in my mind, it’s no different than slurping a few coffees in the morning to make up for a bad night’s sleep, only to have a caffeine crash in the afternoon.
and with relationships, romantic or otherwise… you invest effort in maintaining and improving relationships, only to be able to borrow back in the future. so sorry i haven’t rung you in a few weeks, let’s meet for dinner—i have a favor to ask.
borrowing is a form of reverse investment, a form of gambling on your own self-worth. it may not be responsible, but sometimes taking risks is the most logical way to live one’s life.
it’s been a full week, and i have to say i absolutely adore my new home. the flat is modern, beautiful and brand-spankin’ new—all three of which are rarities in london. i’ve never moved in with friends before, and .gregiño and wesley keep me entertained from sun up till sun down. so far, no arguments about the rubbish bin being full or the leaving the loo roll empty.
the location couldn’t be better… vauxhall is a treat! so central, yet at the same time so many local amenities. restaurants! bars! clubs! supermarkets! it’s the simple things that can really make life more enjoyable—having a proper supermarket, for example, means i can have a more exciting diet, rather than my set biweekly ocado grocery delivery.
the past few weeks have been probably the busiest of my life. three huge projects [the move, the day job, the magazine] overlapped precisely, forcing me to very effectively manage every waking minute. i’ve always known that i operate well under stress—it’s just nice to know that after a good solid year of unemployment/sabbatical/freelancing, i’ve still got ~`it’~.
if i had my way, i would’ve stayed in last night unpacking and setting up my computer and cleaning, but the boys intervened. my former flatmate mitch stopped by, with gossip about my old flat. atif, who [along with .darian] helped us move last weekend, came by with his usual convincing party mentality. and of course there’s marcos, who’s been serving as our live-in houseboy [cooking meals, cleaning, doing the shopping, wandering around mostly nekkid].
i didn’t realize how desparately i needed a release after a few solid weeks of stress. we started at a sleazy local gay pub called the little apple which was filled with wrinkly old lesbians and pink-faced gay granddads [kiss ma teeth!] i’m exaggerating a bit, but even the nice outdoors patio and cheap drinks didn’t cancel out the hungry stares from the entire pub. thank god we’re spoilt for choice in vauxhall—i hope to never end up with that bad apple again.
our lounge is suited quite well for entertaining, and we’ve done a good job ensuring we have the right supplies to have a party… nice cocktail glasses and smart coasters for the drinks. a set of pitchers to mix and serve lovely cocktails. plenty of ashtrays for the smokers. nice shiny metal trays for party favors. a few hours of side-splitting laughter at home with the boys and then off to .heaven.
i’ve been going regularly [and i do mean regularly] to .heaven for 3 years now. through paul and manny i’m friends with some of the staff and know the rest reasonably well. and, i’m quite fortunate to be able to swim in and out of the club and vip room at my leisure. but, i haven’t been there in three whole weeks and it seems like the usual door whores and cloakroom lads were somewhere between icey and ambivolent. oh well, all i wanted was to dance, and dance i did.
was pounding the dirty sticky floors [good evening pasadena!] till the wee [sun's coming up] hours of the morning, letting all of the stress and tension and drama of the past few weeks unfold onto the dancefloors. the stress was replaced by satisfaction, then the satisfaction was replaced by confidence, and by the end of the evening i think i had befriended just about every cutie in the 2000-person club. not that i’m looking, really, but it’s important to perform regular inspections on one’s mojo.
coming back to my new home, crusing along the river just as the sun was starting to think about coming up, warm summer breeze keeping me just awake enough to stumble in the door… the perfect end to a perfect few weeks, and the perfect start to the next chapter.
computer’s whirring away loudly, dust swims around with every shuffled footstep, i bang my foot/knee/elbow with every attempted navigation around boxes and boxes and boxes crammed into every corner.
but, for the most part—i’m unpacked. i am incredibly happy with my new flat, in vauxhall. after three years in finsbury park, i finally stopped my moaning and made the move, from north to souf, from zone two to within-spitting-distance-to-big-ben zone one. some of the differences between the two neighbourhoods:
finsbury park
high street is geared to serve turkish/algerian mafia types. no proper supermarkets, restaurants or cafés—only tiny convenience shops, al-halal butchers and gritty internet cafés, all very obviously mob fronts.
vauxhall
high street geared to serve cosmopolitan homo/metrosexual urbanite. a huge cruisy tescos, some great restaurants and countless gay bars within stumbling distance [royal vauxhall tavern, south central, fire, .beyond, crash...]
finsbury park
over the three years i lived there, my building went through several scummy life cycles. first it was just nastydirty… stairwells reeking of excrement, new graffiti popping up weekly. then came the influx of crack whores… people shooting/cooking up in the lift, in the abondoned flat down the hall, the stairwell, even on the curb [kerb] outside between parked cars. stumbling home at 4am, you never were quite sure who you’d encounter—at least they were always cracked out of their tree, so that they weren’t a particular threat.
vauxhall
all of the neighbors i’ve encountered so far are friendly, chatty, and the extended neighborhood is filled with the fittest, cutest, cruisiest gay boys i’ve encountered in london. fer real, though. we live next to a jamaican family, and .greg’s convinced he’s going to befriend the mother, since, you know, they’re both strong black women.
finsbury park
riding the bus home with brian last week around 10pm, a group of 6 teenagers stood next to us and started rapping back-and-forth, as black urban teenagers are prone to do. the one boy was singing some song, getting plenty of laughs from his mates. my ears perked up as he started dropping lyrics about “dem batty boys” and “kill the chi chi man”. i looked up and asked, “you think i’m a chi chi man?”
his friends all guffawed, “awwww sheeet!” and he was plenty embarassed. “erm, you know what a chi chi man is?” i say, “yeah, and i ain’t no batty boy, either!” i turn to brian and snog him [properly], and the whole group of 6 starts roaring with laughter. i look back up to the ringleader, and he apolgoizes, “awww, man, i’m sorry. this is 2004, innit?”
vauxhall
just strolling down kennington lane in the morning or the afternoon or the evening, all i see are the gays. but, this ain’t no gay ghetto—there just happens to be a slight enough, visible enough concentration here. gay couples going to work. gay singles coming out of the tube station. gay friends in tescos. it’s brilliant.
<—— another item crossed off the list. B)
you know when you’ve been in a relationship for a while, and you meet your boyfriend for a date, and dinner seems kinda rushed and then you just sorta assume that you’re gonna go clubbing or maybe [haw haw] just go straight home for some sexual healing? but, as you leave the restaurant and stroll down the street, you can see that he’s hemming and hawing, and you look into his eyes and you can just tell that there’s about 173 different thoughts and emotions happening juuuuust behind the scenes?
well, yeah, that’s been my life over the past month. i’m alive, and doing quite well, and i apologize for not keeping you entertained. i’m still in my ~`quiet period’~ and i promise, dear reader, that it’s only a temporary measure until i get a few things sorted out.
in the past few weeks some exciting things have happened:
big gay out, this year’s gay pride celebration in london took place just down the road from my ghetto fabulous flat, in finsbury park. maybe 15 people stopped by beforehand for the pre-party, and apparently 40.3 people stopped by for the after-party [the 0.3 was the remnants of yours truly]. the boys and i dressed up as american police officers, replete with hats, uniforms, badges, mirroed glasses and citation books.
being the red-blooded american that i am, i rang in the fourth of july by holding naked peace negotiations with a very cute iraqi lad. he signed my treaty but i sent in my troops anyway. i think i found the weapons of mass destruction. [note, there were about 10 even worse, even more vulgar puns i have on the tip of my tongue].
my day job has been fab. i love it, i get paid, i use my skills, i have a laugh. i can’t say any more otherwise they’ll come and get me.
my night job new project is taking off faster than i can handle, and is the reason you’ve seen no updates here recently. i need to keep hush hush about what’s happening, but, also all of my creative juices [read: spare time] are being poured into my new magazine like a toothless 6yo girl pours lemonade on a hot summer’s day. for a nickel. unless you just take it and run.
been seeing a lovely irish lad [he's from northern ireland which makes him british but he's got that sexy accent so back off] for the past few weeks. our relationship is casual, light, fun, sweet. he’s dead cute, seems innocent but really isn’t, and seems keen. and, he likes my music.
fish don’t fry in the kitchen… beans don’t burn on the grill… i’m moving in a few days, finally finally leaving my ghettofabulous finsbury park flat, my home of the past three years, to a very lovely, brand spankin’ new flat down in seedy vauxhall. i’ll be within stumbling distance of .beyond, crash, .orange.
stay with me, reader. in the near future we’ll resume our regularly excessive rants, rent boys, musings and abusings. in the meantime, please check out some of my esteemed colleagues…
