Gravity hits one hard upon one's return from a place like the moon. Like a pillow fight with Jesus.
I put on Chopin's Waltz No. 7 in C# Minor, and struggle to embrace the restlessness. My hours of wrestling with the Beast of Restlessness has come down to an awkward hug. Hugward. Like Jacob and the Angel of the Lord, I suppose I have no choice but to refuse to let go until I am blessed. Recognizing of course that I am already blessed. A blessed restlessness, if you will.
Let restlessness be my muse. And sleep deprivation my elixir.
I sit awake. Rereading and remembering old blessings, reforgetting old curses.
Earlier tonight I sat on a hill overlooking this great City and discussed the merits of leaving it all behind. Trading in the sights and sound of Dolores Park for crickets and crows and country living. No, I'm not thinking of leaving San Francisco. Not in any real way, that is. But a friend is plotting his escape from this paradise. This fantastic purgatory. And I can't convince him otherwise.
I breathed the City deep into my lungs this weekend. Chaperoning the queer youth prom and being a part of doing some good and decent thing for queer young people who need all the help they can get to be themselves ("in a world that is doing its best, night and day, to make [them] everybody else"). I attended a house party in a San Francisco Victorian flat, where a veritable throng of gay men crowded into a front parlor around an upright Steinway bellowing their own renditions of songs from the Lion King and Cats and other musicals about singing animals. And I spent an afternoon looking at my friend's brain on the screen of some digital radiology apparatus. I attended the Haight-Ashbury Street Fair. (Although, it was not the hippie lovefest I might have expected it to be. It was more like an arts and crafts marketplace, with stages of punk rockers serving as bookends at opposite ends of Haight St.).
Yes, I breathed the City deep into my lungs. And I loved it. But when Sunday came, I settled back into my restlessness, hence this very late night rant. But it's my restlessness, and I'm doing my best to embrace it. After having exhausted my resources - squandering "my resistance on a pocket full of mumbles, such are promises - all lies and jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." - still, I trudge. Trudging, rather than the carefree, rolling gait of someone with something more or less to lose. I'm trying this new way of thinking because it feels like the next best thing. (That's not true, it feels like a last resort). But I suppose one man's "last resort" is another man's "next best thing". Poetic nonsense.
The story of my life, written in a sleepy script, in invisible ink, in language no one knows. Sleepwalk, sleepwalk, sleepwrite.
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