Good interview, you can uncross your toes now.
“If indeed, everything happens for a reason,
it is equally true then that nothing also happens for a reason.”
I’m not a “closed door, open window” mantra type of person
but I do think that if I practice what I preach these days, that
if the job is for me, I’ll get it. If not, then there is a reason
well beyond my comprehension and another opportunity will
soon present itself.

Thanks for the well wishes and prayers!

LMSM,

Don

If, indeed, everything happens for a reason,

then it is equally true that nothing happens for a reason.

This truth came to me a short time ago here at 2am on a Monday morning while I’ve been writing my next story for you, the working title of which is:

“One in a million,  nineteen thousand seven hundred twenty nine”

You might want to chew on the thought and ponder with it your own personal self assessment.  Are you the reason?

Stay tuned:

LMSM,

Don

If I was a younger man,

I would use more commas than exclamation points,

make pregnant pauses mean something more in conversations,

and think a lot more during the silent moments I was dealt.

If I was a younger man,

I would take up causes that mattered most,

my view of the future would be shorter,

and I would risk so much more for what I believed in.

If I was a younger man,

contemplations would be richer,

reflections clearer,

and conversations more indelible.

As a younger man,

I would spend more time creating poems,

writing longer notes in greeting cards,

and I would call those I love for no reason at all.

My friends would be closer,

my enemies further,

and my heart would be softer,

as a younger man.

I would have listened to the older men more,

memorized more quotations,

created more memories,

and remembered what was most important.

Everything I’d do

would be taken down a notch or two,

time would be much more precious,

and Life would be boiled down

to a purpose,

because I was a younger man.

I would do it today instead of tomorrow,

look at the big picture,

and take more snapshots on the way there.

The clock would pale insignificant,

and my “I” would be much less important

than you.

And because I was a younger man,

my gains would be more intangible,

my virtues more apparent,

and my focus more intense.

I’d play more,

give more,

and say thank you to complete strangers

for their unknown acts of valor.

I would pet more puppies,

take longer walks,

and pause a few more times

to see the smaller things around me.

And I wouldn’t be afraid to cry.

I would be an older soul in a younger body,

chasing more inventions,

reading more genres,

and blazing more trails for the young men to follow.

I would scour the dictionary for just the right word,

enter more contests,

and I would share more of my winnings with strangers.

Edit less,

listen more,

and use smaller words to say the same things to more people,.

so they could understand

the musings

of men much older than them.

And maybe then, the younger men

would see the value of using commas more,

And exclamation points, a whole,

lot,

less.

I buried an old woman in my backyard.

My two young daughters and I dug a hole, put her in, said some farewell prayers and cried. It was more than 35 years ago and I still miss her terribly.

Her name was Josie Brown. She was originally from Sapulpa, Oklahoma, a little town in the northeast part of the state smack dab in Tornado Alley. I remember that because all my life I’ve been fascinated by tornadoes and she would tell me tales of those “wicked winds” nearly every visit if I’d ask. I’d like to say I remember exactly how she made her way to live and die here in Las Vegas of all places, but I don’t. But I do know that for the last several years of her brittle life, I was her closest friend. I was her only friend.

I got the call from the mortuary one afternoon at work.

My family-owned advertising agency business was in its peak years. Clients were demanding. I rarely left for lunch unless it was to treat a client. None of us did. The agency was an incredible firm staffed with 21 employees, five of which were my family members. Miller & Associates was a great place to work. We took care of each other and our employees. We had each others’ backs before it became a cliché.

I was writing some quick ad copy for a banking client so dad could get the ad typeset and out for production to make the newspaper deadline that evening. We were never late, even with the most last minute of rush jobs. And because of our impeccable reputation for timely payment, honesty and fairness, we very well could have been late and the paper would have made exception for late insertion without question. They didn’t do that for anyone else to my knowledge.

Judi paged my office, “Donnie, there’s a call on line 4 but I can’t tell what it’s about. Some mortuary. Are we pitching a mortuary for God’s sake?” She was a riot, my mom’s assistant, and her best friend. She might as well have shared our surname.

We were always pitching business and the company was so well run by the Miller & Associates staff, it wasn’t unheard of for companies to pitch us to handle their advertising, marketing and public relations needs.

“Hello, this is Don. How can I help you?,” I answered, still frantically “keyboarding” the rush copy for dad on my brand new, state of the art Kaypro 256 computer. The entire hard drive was 256MB and the $2,000 investment made the now obsolete IBM Selectric 3 my sister still used for typing her press releases in the next office a noisy nuisance. I closed the window between our offices.

“Good afternoon. Is this Donald Miller?,” the woman on the other end asked.

“Yes ma’am, this is.”

“This is Bunker Brothers Mortuary on Las Vegas Boulevard South. We have Josie Brown here for you to pick up.”

It had been a long time since I’d last seen Josie or heard her name but not as long since I’d thought about her. I knew the call wasn’t that Josie was waiting for me in their lobby for a ride to the store.

Josie had passed the week prior. The cause of death was unknown, but I knew better. She died of loneliness. A lifetime of it. She was 84, and had earned every year of it.

“We called her nephew, a Pastor in Sapulpa, Oklahoma. He’s the only kin she has left. They didn’t want her,” she said rather hastily, as if families routinely rejected the cremated remains of their deceased kin.

Having worked phone sales at a cemetery once before many years earlier, I would eat lunch out by the crematorium and on some days when the door was open, I’d go inside and look around. Little plastic twist-tied grey bags of so many unknown souls lined shelf upon shelf around the big burning ovens. No one had come for them. No one had claimed them. Their final resting place was a wooden shelf among strangers with a daily view of the ovens which had incinerated their existence like so many others.

“He what?!,” I replied in disbelief. “He refused her cremains?”

“Yes, Mr. Miller, that is the case. Your name is the only other contact we found in her belongings when she passed. If you don’t want her, we’ll just put her out for disposal.”

I made arrangements to get her after work and called my wife to say I’d be late, but I didn’t say I was bringing company home. For good.

I first met Josie Brown when I was a 17 year old Bonanza High School student. I’d been elected Student Body President at the new high school that year and our student council had planned a Christmas visit to the old folks home on the corner adjacent to the school stadium. It was just another service project like so many service projects we’d done before.

We were armed with decorations, holiday cookies, snacks, a council secretary who played an impressive single finger piano, me with my guitar and all those we could recruit for the early evening event. We were given a certain window of time to get in and get out as the staff didn’t want med and sleep schedules interrupted, likely for fear they might miss the start of their favorite prime time programming.

It was a dismal place. The only holiday décor in sight was what we’d brought, and this was a week before Christmas. The caretaking staff tolerated the visit of our dozen or so teens. I think we were all genuinely happy to be there, though. It was that rare feeling in youth when you do something good for someone else when all you’ve ever been concerned about at that age has been yourself. I’m not sure if that was the source of our smiles or if it was seeing the room of lonely pajama’d octogenarians leaning in chairs and wheelchairs, none standing, fewer smiling.

It wasn’t organized this way but it seemed like each of us picked one resident for the evening. But in my case, I’d quickly realized it was I who was chosen.

She sat in a modest blue calf length house dress with brittle weathered hands folded in her lap atop one another. It was her smile that had caught my attention. She was, to the best of my memory, the only one whose face carried any expression at all. Her rich blue eyes had long since clouded over with cataracts, especially the left one. It was probably not the only untreated illness she’d endured for as many years as she had lived there.

I say “lived,” but there was no life at that place. At least not as we experience life, especially then as self-indulgent teens who’d volunteered our time that evening without any real inconvenience. It was a two hour Friday night stint and we could party afterward. I know, privately, through the smiles, each wondered when the project would be over. It was a gloomy sadness we experienced that evening, a stark contrast to the colorful, loud, joyous fun times we had been enjoying in preparation for the holiday outside those walls.

Josie’s seat was closest to the piano and her cloudy blues summoned me to the empty chair at her side.

“Hi! Are you having fun?,” I asked in adolescent naivete.

“Well hello young man. And yes, this is wonderful, thank you,” she replied with the distinct southern drawl of a proper lady.

“My name is Don Miller and we are so glad to be here with you this evening. What is your name?”

“Josie. My name is Josie Brown Don Miller.”

“Well that’s funny, we share the same last name “Josie Brown Don Miller!,” I said in a lame attempt at humor an 80 something old woman wasn’t likely to get. I was 17, quite sad at the time and I think my attempt was really to boost my own mood, not hers. I’d confused her a bit with my humor and it was embarrassingly obvious.

“So, Josie, how have you been?,” I asked as if it had been awhile since our last visit, with a woman I’d never seen her before in my life.

“Well fine, Don.” She spoke softly as the single finger pianist next to us pounded out the notes of some indistinguishable Christmas hymn. It was hard for her to hear me and while she loved music, this was not music. She was getting uncomfortable and anxious at all the sound and action around. Surely, it was more noise and action her group had heard and seen in perhaps years.

Relocating to two vacant chairs across the room took some time, of course. Once seated in the still warm chairs which had been vacated minutes before by two other residents who had already returned to their rooms for any number of reasons, Josie and I began to talk.

“Well, Don, I’m from Oklahoma. Do you know where that is?”

“Of course I do. That’s where Tornado Alley is, right?” I was attempting to find a topic for a conversation starting point and it was easier to begin with something of interest to me than to her.

Josie and I talked tornadoes, family, Christmas memories and all the topics of holiday chats. It was apparent she’d had a rich life history of stories which had rarely, if ever, been told. Nobody was interested. Drinking our punch from styrofoam cups and an occasional bite of a store bought sugar cookie, I listened.

Our two hour gig was up 20 minutes ago and most of my classmates had long since said their goodbyes and lies to come back and visit again soon. Me, I couldn’t get out of my chair.

That frail old woman had captivated me that night. Her stories of Midwest living, life on the farm, the hard times and hard work of being a prairie woman in the grain fields and the vivid imagery of a kind of country life this city boy had only read in books had brought us into the third hour of the evening. The nurses had cleaned up, patients and residents were long since in their rooms asleep and we had been cued at least twice by one of the nurses that it was time to go.

That night changed my life forever.

Many years later during my graduate program and a class named “Society and the Psychology of Aging,” I had written a shortened version of this story for my final class project. I have looked all over for that essay, especially the photo of Josie that I’d paired with it. I have yet to find it. It is important because it is the only photograph of her that I have. I don’t need it, really. Her face is as clear in my now own rapidly aging mind as that night in the Torrey Pines Convalescent Center. My short essay for the class, the last one presented before the Christmas break, brought the entire class to tears. I got an A and a million questions about this magical pioneer woman who’d stolen my heart. I have since found two photos.

A little more than a week after having met Josie, I returned. It was either Christmas Day or Christmas Eve, I don’t recall. What I do remember, however, made me more sad than I’d initially been on my first visit. Except for the skeleton crew of workers and the residents, the place was void of visitors. It was the biggest holiday of the year, and nobody was celebrating. Nobody had reason to.

Checking in at the nurse’s station, I managed approval to visit Josie. Walking down the dingy linoleum hall, gift in hand for Josie, I paused just a little at each door to see how other residents might be spending their holiday. It was cruel. Seeing some stranger at their doors this holiday, even for an instant, brought small words of welcome, believing they were the one selected to be remembered that cold winter day. As I walked on, door to door, the expressions were the same. I had brought one gift for Josie and in that short walk down the hallway, had broken the dreams of so many bedridden others.

Josie was startled by my visit and said all the quiet humilities to me of how she didn’t deserve such a treat, especially since I had family to be with. Her room was darkened and not so good for her already impaired vision. She was wrapped in a thin blanket, half reclined in her bed. The night stand was empty except for a table lamp with a low watt bulb, the only illumination for her holiday. No cards. No gifts. No trinkets or holiday snacks. The room was cold, austere and obviously designed to make the outgoing of one resident and the incoming of the next as seamless as possible. They were not in the business of keeping beds empty.

Her room was shared by another elderly woman who had died during the week and Josie expressed anxiety wondering who her next roommate might be. “I hope she’s not mean,” she said. “The lady who was here was not a very kind person. She was loud and kept me up all night, Don,” she continued. I was pleased she’d remembered my name.

I presented her my gift, a digital alarm clock radio, which she opened slowly marveling as if it were the crown jewels. Hastily, though, she pulled open her nightstand drawer and placed it inside, closing the door and looking over her shoulder as if she were a bandit hiding her loot.

“You know, it would probably look better if you put it on your night stand and plugged it in, Josie,” I joked. Looking at me, she was puzzled a bit, but cautiously retrieved the gift from the drawer and I installed it on her table. The volume of the radio was factory set to max and as I tried to demonstrate the many functions, she was frightened as I clamored to find the volume control. It hadn’t been programmed so the loud shriek of radio static coming from room 24 had disturbed countless residents down the hall. No nurses though. They were at their station having a holiday potluck of their own. The radio sound could have been shrieks of agony from a resident and they would have known no difference.

Josie told me that she was reluctant to leave such an expensive gift out in the open for long as “they take things, you know.” Whether it was her now deceased roommate, other residents or the nurses, she was definitely afraid of losing the $20 gift I’d brought her.

We talked for awhile, occasionally pausing as a patient on a walker meandered past the open door destined for a hard seat in the TV room down the hall. Josie was big on privacy and not just a little paranoid, I’d thought. She mentioned the family in Oklahoma she hadn’t seen nor heard from in many years but was obviously proud of her nephew Richard, who was a pastor back in Sapulpa. He had a large congregation in the very small town, last she knew. I asked if she’d heard from him for the holidays and though it was quite obvious she’d heard from no one, she made excuses on his behalf about the many miles between them, the possibility that the nurses had intercepted his greeting cards or that the holiday season was his busiest time.

I never heard if she had any other living relatives. On my visits, I tried to keep the topics current and relatively upbeat.

I came back almost weekly from there on out. I usually brought some sort of gift or trinket for her drawer and we’d chat for an hour until I had to be back to work. As years passed, I followed her to three other convalescent centers after her Torrey Pines eviction. Each one was progressively worse, dingier, dirtier, even less involved and more disinterested than the one before. Nursing home prices went up and her small government check could buy her fewer and fewer conveniences.

And as those years passed, I was ashamed to have scheduled less and less time for her. Weekly visits became biweekly, then monthly and eventually only on the major holidays. Each time I would track her down in those later years and show up unannounced. She was always as cheerful to see me as on that first Christmastime visit.

I learned more about myself during those times than I knew what to do with. And writing this, even now I’m still very much at a loss with the emotions.

I’d become busier with work, marriage, family and home that I didn’t seem to make time for even a quick visit now and then. I was secretly ashamed of myself but shared the sentiment with no one but my conscience.

My feelings of guilt over having gradually abandoned her like everyone else in her life had done were laid to rest the day my kids and I buried that small, sealed brown box which contained the remains of the old prairie woman from Sapulpa who had more than once captured my heart.

“Was there anything else?,” I asked at the mortuary that afternoon picking up Josie’s cremains. “She had many possessions I’d given her over the years.”

“No, nothing was turned in but this Valentine card with her picture. That’s how we knew to contact you because your name and phone number were on the back.”

The red construction paper with deckled edges and a wallet sized photo of Josie inset in a lacy red heart in the center read, underneath in pencil:

To my friend, Don Miller.

Love your friend, Josie Brown.

When my family moved from that home to a bigger one, we’d packed and cleaned it out and were already moved into the new place when I’d remembered one box I’d forgotten to pack in the move.

I raced back to the old house and shoveled and dug on my hands and knees for hours into the night in the mound of dirt in the corner of the yard where I’d laid Josie’s brown box to rest so many years before.

I never found her.

The angels had beat me to it, and Josie was no longer alone.

I know I will meet up with her again someday, and like old times, we will talk of tornadoes and Christmases once again.

We played our own brand of team games that St. Patrick’s Day evening.

Young parents, all friends from church, our many kids were long since tucked in at our homes by an undoubtedly exhausted team of babysitters in our employ so we could cut loose for just one night.

A large group of close couple friends, and at the time, the most irreverent collective our conservative church could tolerate, we usually pushed the limits of propriety,  narrowly escaping chastisement the following Sunday morning, a public lynching or otherwise excommunication.

Tonight, the pastor and his wife had been invited to our coven.

Terry, the unofficial ringleader, had opened game night with her native Irish menu. I don’t recall if we drank beer that evening under the excuse of it being the holiday it was, but if we hadn’t, the atmosphere we had created without it was nonetheless pub-like.

Potato bowling: pantyhose tied around the waist, the feet of which held bowling ball sized spuds swinging hands-free, between the legs on linoleum alley of her kitchen. Gyrating, pelvic-thrusting potato-bowling parents, all of us, that early evening, full of corned beef and cabbage and probably beer.  It was clear the pastor and his wife were going to be part of our secret society from now on, or we’d have to kill them.

The ten-pin potato tournament awarded prizes and game night progressed to Team Dictionary. Scouring the Merriam-Webster for the most obscure of words for the one the opposition would certainly have no clue to its meaning, all had to submit guesses. “YONI” was redefined that night as a “japanese home perm.” “SHAGANAPPI” was a show-stopper, though. One response was so off-color, politically incorrect and so damn funny, the entire crowd had a matrix moment where time seemed to stand still for a full 20 minutes or more of deafening teary-eyed laughter and probably more beer. The women peed themselves. The guys were wet with tears. We were all glad our babysitters couldn’t see us because they would have taken our children to safety or CPS.

It was clear we all needed this night.

The Irish hostess and her husband were not finished though.

Team Pictionary, if you remember the game, is one in which a word is given to one person, (in this team event, two,) each the round leader of his own team huddled in the furthest most corners of the host’s large living room.  The object was to  race back to their team’s giant easel of oversized paper with the same word and a bold sharpie. Our kids’ Valentines Day cards still proudly posted on our home refrigerators,  were Monet’s in comparison to the drawings we silently but hastily produced to summon the correct answer from each of our two teams.

For this particular round, I was my team’s leader.

So far, it had become a close and fierce competition. I think the winning team got the leftovers from dinner, making it all out war.  I and my counterpart from the other team stood in the middle of the room with the word-giver and judge who very quietly turned over the card to the two of us , revealing the tie-breaking word each of us was to illustrate. We raced over furniture and around tables back to our teams in opposite corners of the room and began drawing.

Furiously, I drew pictures to describe the word I’d seen on the card. Across the room, the other leader was doing the same for his team. We could hear the guesses of the opposing teams across the room as the leaders drew pictures designed to elicit the winning response and guarantee tomorrow night’s dinner to the victory team.

But something was obviously and terribly wrong.

Both teams screamed single word guesses into the charged air like popcorn without a lid. Though not able to see their drawings, we could easily hear their guesses from way over there. And they could hear ours.

“Worship,” “Reverence,” “Holy” and other words of divinity rose from their group as their still-drawing leader sought to create the picture for his team that would end game night for all of us.

My group, however, spewed forth utterances like “Butt,” “Ass,” “Penis,” “Vagina” and much worse, like a George Carlin monologue.

Across the room, they shouted: “Angel!”

Our group:“Dick and balls!”

Their group: “Godly!”

Ours:“Butthole!”

This exchange went on for much too long, but long enough for some increasingly curious glances across the room and jaw-dropping looks across the room from our pastor at his foul-mouthed wife on our team.

At points, there was a mutual silence as teams could only stare across the room, away from the pictures their leaders had drawn, in disbelief that both teams were, indeed, pursuing the same given word.

We compared easel drawings.

The artist-leader on the opposing team had created elaborate pictorials of heavenly beings with heads and halos bowed in reverence, hoping his team would be the first to guess our given word “PROSTRATE.”

I had somehow misread the given word on that slowly revealed card at the very start.

Having missed that second “R” in PROSTRATE, I had eagerly drawn porn.

I had pictures of every imaginable genital in every position with little black arrows pointing to them as if these church people hadn’t seen porn once or twice already. I had been drawing a stick figure’s  PROSTATE.

As if “Shaganappi” wasn’t enough, all of us lost it.

Again.

Most hadn’t even recovered from the physical effects of the earlier laughingstock and had the crowd been 20 years older at the time, ambulances would have been called that very moment.

I don’t know who walked away with the leftovers.

At the end of that evening, it really didn’t matter. We’d had our fill.

Still chuckling at the door, we said our goodbyes and insincere apologies to our friends and each couple and our newly inducted pastor and his wife, and drove home to get our babysitters back to theirs by midnight.

Even now while writing, I’m reminded that gatherings like this one from a St. Patrick’s day long ago are times of my life which can instantly transform even my gloomiest of days.

I imagine someday, on my death bed, whomever remains from the fun group that night, may come to my side and lieu of a soft goodbye, will simply say “shaganappi” as their farewell.

And I will die laughing.

I recently ended a correspondence with a friend not with “Love” or “Yours truly” but

“LMSM, Don.”

To me, the salutation has become a near reflexive way of summarizing most of my notes and communications to family and friends with something eminently more meaningful, powerful and true.

Let’s face it, “Love” isn’t exactly how we feel toward all with whom we communicate. Not that its absence means “I don’t love you,” but just that used so frequently, the power of the single most important word in any language is overused and watered down from its true intent.  “Yours truly”…well, who says that anymore? We learned it way back in our typing class books as a nice but “truly” vague way of signing off during frantic tests of our typing speed. And what exactly does “truly” mean?

I digress.

I’m pretty much as far from being a trendsetter or follower as one can get.  I have always cherished originality and creativity way too much to get trapped in the insignificance of memes.  The latest trend, it seems is the “YOLO” abbreviation for You Only Live Once.  This one, in particular, strikes a sad chord for me in that it is inherently selfish, an unfortunate reflection of our life and times.  The digital internet age and the increasing pace of our society  has us searching for the easiest, most expedient ways of communicating our thoughts and sentiments.

“YOLO, Don.” or “You only live once, Don.”

For most of us, it’s trendy but meaningless.  But when something like YOLO catches on, it’s like a spark in a forest that soon becomes all the rage of a fire, but will soon and inevitably so, burn itself out, only to be replaced by yet another.

LMSM.  I suppose this is my proposal for replacing the burnt out YOLO with something that is more universally true, uplifting and hopeful.  It reflects a hope for all humanity and an intention of the user as a gesture of corporate goodwill.

Maybe it will catch on.

Will you make it yours…truly?

LMSM,

Don

Because Life Means So Much.

It truly does.

#LMSM

A lengthy talk with a friend, as they often do, finally arrived at the pivotal existential question we’d been searching for the past hour or two.  It was our version of an Elbert Hubbard quote that asks: Are we successful because of our vast and varied knowledge of things, our noble actions and efforts, or simply, because of who we genuinely are?

Both of us being type A personalities, we endeavored to evaluate each of the three independently but found it impossible to arrive at any one as the explanatory answer.

We concluded that success, being an ever-evolving and truly individual destination, is in fact no destination at all.  Success is not dependent on knowledge, for many are successfully uneducated.  It couldn’t be based alone on actions either as behaviors have to originate in motivations– things much more intrinsic to the soul.

The horseshoe that came closest to a ringer of an answer was the remaining variable…with a very important twist:

Success is a result of who we are…becoming.

Success is not stasis, a stagnant fragile balance.  If our destinations that define success are constantly evolving and changing, necessarily, who we are is caught up in the same truth.

We impact and are impacted by events of our lives just as raw elements from the periodic table mix with one another to create elaborate, new elements.  We have to have knowledge to be that scientist, motivation and desire to do and create something new or better for ourselves and others, and those, essentially, make us who we are now and better yet, who we are ever becoming.

Satisfied with our mental pursuits, we poured another cup of coffee, believing we’d been successful in our analysis.  That is, until we realized that if our successful outcome was indeed not a destination as we had originally posited, we would have to meet again to re-evaluate someday.

We enjoy each other’s company immensely.

I think our reason for trying to tackle such an existential question wasn’t simply to arrive at an answer.

I think we just wanted an excuse to have to hang out again!

“Men are pigs and fags are liars.”

The first time I tried crystal meth, this not-so-gentle truth was shared with me.

My new best friend had been out most of his life and despite his obvious contempt for the gay world, he proudly wore the nickname  “Mr. Gay 411.”  He’d earned it.

He threw all the best gay parties, knew, knew of or had otherwise slept with everyone who met his reasonably selective criteria of beauty and drug use on the many online “dating” websites (note: Gay men don’t “date” for the most part.)  His most valuable possession, earning him the handle,  was his state-of-the-art rolodex  listing detailed statistics of most gay men who did drugs, had an online profile and had somehow, at least so far, escaped the physical and hygienic destruction that meth eventually bestows on long term users.

Alphabetically. By screen name. Cross-referenced.

He was my new best friend not simply because he’d introduced me to meth, which I found an effective and cheap—albeit illegal—substitute for a prescription medication I could no longer afford.  I liked him a lot. He was also a father, had been married and his endearing southern accent told me more deep truths and secrets about living the gay highlife than I would ever hear again from one source.

He was also the first of what I have come to find as a relatively commonplace attitude in the new subculture that had fully embraced my own coming out.  Many openly admit that they don’t know their HIV status and don’t care to know.  Perplexed by his indifference to that question which I asked often of him, my now growing habit and frequency of visits to his nicely appointed, suburban home in a middle-class neighborhood soon clouded my mind to the nagging dissatisfaction of his answer. In a nutshell, there were more important things to worry about, like buying drugs and welcoming guests at all hours to party.  And by “party” I mean have sex.

For Christmas one year, I joked that I had bought him a numbered ticket dispenser like those used by Baskin & Robbins customers waiting their turn to be served their treats. I vowed to metaphorically install it at his front door to help manage the flow of guests to whom he had rolodexed invitations and meticulously scheduled in blocks of time like job interviews at a corporate HR department.

Men are pigs.

That one was easy to accept.

Men who remain unenlightened to a higher calling are generally selfish pigs, approximating or exceeding most sexual-needy stereotypes we have come to laugh at in prime time comedies.  When gay and drugs are added, that fact is augmented tenfold becoming an alluring trifecta.

Oink.

The point of my story is not to state or rehash stereotypes or even to find humor in them to help sedate the sad truth of the male libido.  But really, even as a man, I have come to believe it’s not at all funny.

Fags are liars.

It may as well have been a book title, a primer for the Coming Out 101 course at one time I vowed to teach the innocent marks at the bars who were unwittingly referred to as “fresh meat.”  Arriving nightly, freshly coiffed and undeniably petrified, they often mistook the festive, accepting environments  as something other than the slaughterhouses they actually were.

But I am one of the fortunate few.

With all odds against it, I emerged from my once eager, deep venture into the gay drug subculture nearly unscathed.  I walked away with no diseases, all my teeth and a reasonably good complexion for a now 52 year old man who’d spent the past several years there, the latter portion of it high every day.

In the years since, I have made an elective decision to be celibate.

Studies of meth use point to a marked decline in libido after stopping use.  They suggest that after continued and prolonged firing of those neural pleasure sites that meth produces, they are just flat burnt out. It can take months for libido to return to normal function.

But I have long since passed that marker and replaced that forced physiological celibacy with an intentional one.  The few male friends who know this have found my news shocking, beyond belief.  Most men view libido as a drive beyond their scope to corral, tame and control.  As a single man, for this season of my life, I choose to view it as a nuisance, a distraction of mind, not body, that impairs the attainment of things I have since come to classify as eminently more important. My present circumstances being 52, grey and overweight don’t make me the prized catch I once was, either if that even plays a role.

Dallas Willard has described spiritual disciplines in two realms: a)disciplines of engagement and b)denial.  Engaging disciplines are those active efforts of doing things that promote well-being and in doing so, a spiritual centering of sorts.  Denial disciplines are the practice of those decisions which thru the process of deprivation, create a vacuum for these same virtues.

So here’s the part where I act all virtuous, a chaste, holier-than-thou whore-turned-monk.

While I would like to say I was religiously motivated in my decision, I was not.  For me and my journey, celibacy was just the next step.  It was a no-brainer with deep spiritual underpinnings.

After having climbed out of the gutters and my head having cleared, for the very first time in my life, I had acquired a clear sense of all I had lost in the process.  When I speak to others, I use this description:

Imagine, if you will, your entire self immersed, surrounded by a very dark cloud in which everyone and everything is random, out of order, degraded and depraved.  A force from behind slowly pulls you out backwards by your stained and broken spirit, kicking and screaming until that moment you break the barrier between the cloud and the clarity.

At first, your view is the barrier immediately before you and from which you were extracted. You get your very first close-up glimpse of the horrible swirling maelstrom you had been calling home.  Continuing backwards, your view gains some periphery and you see the full outline of that dark cloud. Further, you lose vision of the internal maelstrom and now see that dark cloud in relation to everything else, other beautiful clouds, light, illumination.  This is the point of epiphanous attack, where you can now clearly see how black, indeed, is that cloud which once contained you and the starkest of contrasts between it and the rest of life.

If that description was too flowery for you, think of a pearl in an ever-swirling  toilet bowl of excrement.

Either way, I was somehow very thankfully but sadly one of the chosen ones.

Hope, once firmly grasped, will quickly yank you from where you are and fly you into its own erotica.  And when something so profound as this happens, satisfaction of the physical necessarily  loses its appeal, like a quick stop for gas en route to a weekend at Disneyland.

Chris Rice, my acknowledged favorite musical artist and lyricist, describes in a song that, for the life of me, I can’t seem to find as of yet,  so many random and meaningless sexual encounters as momentary pleasures, the crescendo of each is an inevitable sharp, momentarily painful blow of a spike by a hammer, chipping away a tiny, seemingly insignificant piece of the soul.

Since I have been out of the drug scene entirely and the gay scene mostly (seems you only belong if you’re sexual and uber vocal about equal rights these days,) I realize that I may have begun a new genre entirely.

In the film, Chasing Amy, I was moved by the mid-movie monologue of the female lead who, upon explaining her view of coupling, posed a profound question.  A practicing lesbian who in the story had connected with Ben Affleck, her straight friend, so deeply, that as the relationship progressed she became compelled to ask herself the question:

Why in the search for a life partner must I immediately halve my available options purely based on gender?  While my complementary mystical other half could very well be (and to her gay subculture, should be) another lesbian, I would be shortchanging myself of a full half of the possible options and in turn placing limits on whom I was available to love.

So if love is, indeed, friendship caught fire, then at the dismay and disbelief of my own gay friends, I have chosen also, to leave my gender options wide open in my pursuit of a life mate.  And until that time I hope to remain sexually celibate.

You see, my spirit has learned some things.

When I first explored myself in the gay milieu, I was morally appalled that every piece of literature, every event, every sort of entertainment and conversation wreaked of at minimum, sexual innuendo.  It was as if the only thing the gay community had to sell its converts was sex.  It was a shallow, self serving concept into which I confess I bought for a time, partly  because of the disenfranchisement of my former subculture.  Bereft of accepting friends, the attention I was promised by the gay community as a new convert was a hook I eagerly bit out of my own insecurity.

So, I’m happy.

Poor as a dog is hairy, but happy.

I think I may be the first to populate this new and unnamed genre.  And I have to admit, it’s pretty damn exciting to be blazing a new trail that I imagine only very few will ever fully understand.  Myself included.

Men are pigs,

Fags are liars.

I was both,

But now am neither.

Don’t you love a good poem?

A long, warm embrace and I said “Come back again, Jon, you’re always welcome here.”

Not an hour ago, Jon had mustered the courage to come to my door and knock.  There was a part of him, I know, that hoped nobody would answer.

Nobody ever knocks on my door. I rarely have a visitor anymore, so when I hear a knock or a doorbell, I know it must be either Publisher’s Clearinghouse or bad news.  Today it was different.

I could see it on his face, too, as I opened the door to find him standing there.  He later said he didn’t know if I still lived here but had been in the neighborhood many times before but didn’t know if he was in a safe-enough place yet to take the risk of seeing me again. After all, our last encounter was not very pleasant.

Jon was a friend from my days of dealing drugs and partying. We spent a lot of time together and I recall that despite our last encounter when he was still using and I was sober over a year, he was one of a handful of friends in the drug circles who had that je ne sais quoi.  I knew that under that always  high, drug injecting, self-centered man was a quality person who would, with any luck and before it was too late, emerge and be redeemed as I was.

Jon is three months clean. His distance from his last use, however, doesn’t match with the sobriety level he exhibits.  His level of insight far exceeds most at his stage of recovery.

He came in. We talked for an hour. He explained how the paranoia from his prolonged drug use had caught up with him finally.  Laying on his bedroom floor with .45 in hand, he was destined either to kill the invisible intruders of his paranoia or himself that night.

Finally, ready to escape the nightmare, he said he’d knocked on the door at his mother’s house and admitted he needed help. He moved in that night and has been off drugs since.

I’m honored that he took the risk of knocking on my door this morning, one he’d knocked on countless times before with a much different agenda.

I think we’ll be close friends once again, bound together now by an adhesive much stronger than drugs ever were.