By Christian Alexander
Photo: Jamie Lee Curtis in “Halloween”
Inspiration is a flash of lightening. If you don’t catch it at just the right time, you don’t get the energy from it. As a writer, that charge sometimes comes in all encompassing waves of joy, hope, love, pride, fulfillment, and all sorts of physical and mental delights at once. It is, in fact, a feeling that rivals really good sex with someone you toy with planning a future. OK, so maybe sex is better, but feeling waves of inspiration certainly beats living alone in a big empty house full of memories of better times.
I am supposed to be sharing a completely different story with you right now, but I caught a bolt of that aforementioned lightening from someone I hope will become a new friend, whom I shall simply identify as “A,” However unwittingly, “A” caused inspiration to strike me like an 18-wheeler rear-ending a VW “Bug.” So here I sit in my home-office typing whatever letters my fingers lead to the keyboard thanks to a person who “rolled the dice” on a nut like me.
Maybe you will enjoy it, and catch some of that lightening as well. Maybe you’ll think I’m some sort of “whack job” (which I freely admit to). You want to know something? I can honestly say for the first time in my life that I could not possibly care less what negative feelings anyone may have towards me.
My “former” life, if you will, seemed as though it was all about me. Now, I’m not that emotionally needy adolescent anymore. Not the 20 year with
the 29 inch waist and big blue eyes, being pampered while standing before cameras all day either. I don’t have to have Giorgio Armani’s name on my ass (although his jeans tend to make it look better) to advertise to the world that I am somebody. I am somebody right now, sitting here, typing in my pajamas.
I’ve placed all the outer trappings aside – along with the bar drama and the cliques that flock from bar to bar to bar like migrating flamingoes. Simply knowing the “right” bartender or being acquainted with the DJ du jour doesn’t amount to anything in the real world. What happens when the club closes and there isn’t another party to go to?
A series of torrid circumstances mixed with bad investments had led me down a dark road no one should ever traverse alone. I, personally, was completely taken by shock. It was the kind of terror I imagine Jamie Lee Curtis felt with Michael Myers just outside the closet door in the 1st “Halloween” movie.
Who was I really? I had lived my life by day getting my nails done, sitting behind a desk, counting other people’s money, schmoozing with the ladies- who-lunch set for so long, I thought I belonged. But, I was the token gay man that all the wealthy housewives loved because I fawned over them and gave them the attention that their consistently absent husbands didn’t. We could discuss things from the latest celebrity sex scandal to the “must do’s” in the Hampton’s with ease, for we had all been there and done that, more than once.
Then I found myself in a most uncomfortable situation. I could no longer keep up the lifestyle I had lived in my self-created, safe little bubble for so long. All I really got out of it were fading photographs, some dusty old catalogues with out-of-date fashions, and a person whom I once resembled but have had little to do with since.
It was time to figure out what would get me back into the security of my own, personal little “bubble” once again. The difference this time was I found myself older, supposedly wiser, and didn’t want to cry to my parents. I desperately needed a new start, but kept coming up with excuses not to try, because I felt I was destined to fail anyway. Great logic, don’t you think?
At this phase of my life, I truly can’t say where I see myself as of yet. Hell, I never expected to live this long after 17 plus years as an HIV+ man. I never expected to find pleasure in the little, sometimes silly, and occasionally even frightening things. Yet, being real has enabled me to feel!
What’s next? I am making plans again. I’ve traded in my remote control in order to make something happen. I have hope that the future will unfold as it should, good or bad. I intend to just try and enjoy the ride.
May your dreams be beautiful.
May your realities outshine your dreams.