IN THE MORE MERCIFUL MOMENTS

In the more merciful moments, God speaks. I hear him speaking so clearly..

You can go home again. In fact, you must. The road simply won't be as easy as many think, and when you get there, it may not look like it used to.

In these more merciful moments I followed me senses and went to visit a friend who had been distant and strange for a time who finally told me about all that had been going on. The more merciful moments are when I sit on the steps of the Freemason Temple smoking a cigarette at ten at night, watching the cars roll by. In the more merciful moments I sit in prayer and remember the beauty of life.

Reassembling these abandoned blog pages is like reassembling the scattered parts of myself, a work of prayer almost. I realize the strong place of eroticism in my life. It isn't just titillation but exploration and a refusal of shame, a refusal of the ways of the world which always encourage shame and make us deny our first feelings.

BEAUTY AGAIN

Now that I m writing Witch's Blood again, I am going back through the old post, ging to the very first post to see how I have grown, how have I changed? Is there a consistency to me or am I am I a wholly different person? I think back then I wrote intentionally conversationally, but also like a teacher a preacher, here to deliver a lesson of good news, end on a good point, declare that there was a good point and of course this made lots of sense. I was a Christian then, and the Faith is all about the good news. One is sort of bound to make good news of life.

That isn't a bad thing. Just as often I have been, almost fashionably, about despair, about the bleakness, about sarcasm, French ennui and existentialism, and this makes sense too, for I was taking apart the sections of my life and now assuming, but rather examining what existed, what was true and what was not.

Now, I need to talk to you. I really need to learn how to talk to you again and not merely write to myself. There was a time I did that, posting things I never expected to be read in places it would be strange to read them.Now is the time for us to all have something to truly say and ears that really listen. Now is the time to remember how to speak.

What does strike me when I read this old me, this younger more Christian me, is the beauty I saw in a life that, looking back, was difficult and often painful. And I think I saw this beauty truly. Maybe i made some of it up, but in making it up, it was so. This was in the days before I left the Church, and it all became too much, so much became too much, things I can never go back to. But when I was there I saw a beauty and maybe I can learn not from churches, but from that younger self, to see beauty again.

DON'T STOP

Can it be seven whole years since the last time I wrote in this, my first blog, the blog that showed me the way, that united me with friends all over the world when I didn't have a damned thing to say. I was almost fresh out of college then, never having had a lover or finished a novel or gone to graduate school, having tasted pain, but not like the pain I would taste.  And now, here I am a bit away from forty hoping someone will read me, and I will have something to say again, hoping to develop the links I lost.

I come back looking for so many people. Some of you I've found but the post stop years ago. In this life it is one thing after another, and there are people who have walked beside me marching on. I hope they didn't stop. I hope that just because your blog stopped, you didn't stop writing. I hope that because things weren't easy or downright difficult that you kept on. Please, please don't stop.

Tonight I am calling to you. I am hoping, praying, weaving a spell really, that somehow you dear ones I have lost will know i am back again and we will keep up in this work of writing.

I guess after I came out or came into my queer life, I was so quick to have it and so in need to turn inward and find myself, that my blog post went from being queerer and queerer to flat out weird, and then I looked, and the links to all those I had been linked to were gone, my blog little more than a private and slightly mad journal. There is a whole other blog, perhaps appealing to some, where I had a tribute page with pictures, to all the men I had slept with, or as many as had their pictures up. What in the world?

Ah, but what in the world is this, as a queer person I was developing a queer ethic and that ethic will be for a queer and select audience. I imagine that page will stay up. i imagine some things will find their way onto both pages.

Writers, all artists, are looking for friends, and we are looking for them in unusual places. We are banking on finding them in books and in graves, in letters long ago written and ghosts who gather at our altars, all over the world. I hope that if you are reading you will come with me and be my friend on this adventure.

I'm not going to write about my first thought because... well, I thought it out already, and this is a journal, not a diseration.I have decided to keep the journal for the time of Elul.

Lord, I just swa the bob Dylan bio and it had all of those wonderful people, gathered together at one time, for one cause. The cause is still there, and so are the people, but things are so scattered, so slow moving, so often unseen. The revolution is slow, slow, slow. How do we find each other? How do we move to each other? How do we find our public? How do I find those who are waiting for my stories?

Now it is Elul. Time to keep a journal. Time to reflect a little. I am not afraid of time. That is the one thing about Sabbaths, the fear that I am not doing when I should be doing, that I will run out of time. And then the fear that there is entirely too much time, that I will go numb with boredom with all the time stretching.

When I speak of repenting this Elul, one thing I really mean is that I want to thoroughly change. I want to change the way I perceive things. I want to deepen. I also want something awful to happen to those sons of bitchs who live across Howard Street, and who's noise I am always hearing. At that note I'll leave off this journal and slouch slowly to bed.