The moon sure has taken a pounding said the pesimest.

          I have spent a good portion of my life telling self loathers that they are wonderful people.  I thought my words would help them. I didn't understand that some people hate themselves because they are not wonderful people; that at their core they know they are ugly.  Then there are self loathers who know they are beautiful at their core but lack the inner voice to fight off other people's cruelty.  I was, for a long time the second type.
           What I now understand it that loving yourself is hard, taking the time to see your faults or the ugliness that is buried beneath a kind and submissive demeanor is excruciating, and forgiving them is blinding.  People have asked me why California has been hard, how I can be so heavy in the lightest city in the world.  What I do not tell these people, my family, friends or old loves; is that it has been hard because it was in California that I began to take the time to love myself, and for some reason it has been the most painful process I have ever endured.  Now that the pain of it is clearing, I cannot bare to tell someone who hates themselves to not. Or to tell them it will get better, if they themselves believe that it will not.
           I cannot take it upon myself to heal anyone's heart or to believe I even posses that power; for it is the very notion of that power that has destroyed me time and time again and is another thing I spent a large portion of my life doing.  Believing I had the power to heal another person's suffering by giving them my heart, giving them every molecule of love I had in hopes that it would make them right.  Right for me, right for themselves, or just right enough to wake up.  I have no power. Even if I did, I can't.  I can't because self love is strong, it is the invisible atmosphere of our body, keeping our oxygen circulating, our gravity centered, and the UV rays of sadness out.  I can't because while I am astounded at it's ability and of it's strength, I know that negative people can pass through my atmosphere if I do not protect it.  That if I let certain people in they will gain enough momentum and obliterate the new and fragile foundation of my self love.

          The difference between the frailty of self love and the momentum of self loathing is the unseen layer of which they both pass through, the atmosphere that pulls in neggitivity and burns it up before it reaches the earth of your soul vs. the astroid of hate that is to big to disentigrate; leaving in its wake a crater and a shock wave of fire. 

        

Disclaimer: Don't read if you are related to me.

     Life is so chaotic right now.  Every time I sit down to write about it, my mind overloads and freezes.  It's like when you try and remember a movie title you have not thought about for years, you can feel your brain searching for the information it knows exists within the confines of it's cells; yet in the midst of digging for it, you feel your brain go blank.  There is so much to dig through these days.  So many revelations, experiences and uncovered truths about my character that the idea of writing about a single one of them stuns my mind, my heart.  
     I could start with the accomplished Bosnian writer who in less than 72 hours provided me with a level of intimacy I have been searching for my whole life.  I could start with him, start with how he worshiped my body for hours, cupped water in his hands and tenderly poured it into the small of my back so that he could have a drink or the kindness of his words that caused me to barrel out the door, crying because I could not face such beauty.  Within those 72 hours, I felt a shift in my soul so profound I ran away.  I cannot write about it.  Not yet. .
     I could write about the nude beach I visited just two days ago, about how I indulged in the delicacy of flesh for several hours with several beautifully sculpted men.  I could write about the shame I fight off when I lay my head down at night for enjoying the type of sex that I do.  For exploring the cold wet floors of orgies or the degrading warm sand of a nude beach.  I could write about these things, but how do I even begin to explain how I have devalued sex, something I used to hold sacred, and how I cannot handle real intimacy without trembling.  Finding the words to express the roots and fallacies that burn within me feels like I have been told that somewhere in the ocean is a grain of salt, and that I must find it before it deludes.  Sometimes I see the grain of salt in the ocean of my heart that possesses the words but before I can pick it up and dry it off, it deludes into the canyons of my wet finger tips and it is gone.
     I could write about how every important person in my life, within the past year has ruthlessly expressed how I have become a miserable son of a bitch who has alienated himself apart from any and all things healthy.  I could attempt to write about how the love of my life left me because I am insecure, selfish, alcohol dependent, pessimistic in addition to having no real concept of the intimacy I demand but cannot reciprocate.  I have faced these truths in my head but cannot write them.  When I write them it becomes real; and if the bottles I have devoured in the past few months speak volumes on anything it is this; I can't handle reality. 
     My reality for some reason doesn't match up with others.  My reality is lonely and misunderstood.  I exist in a frame of mind I have decided to be in that demands everyone be subjected to my vulgarity my lack of consideration and my general disregard for the comfort levels of others.  It is not that I don't care about the comfort level of others but for instance; just yesterday a co-worker of mine asked me, "what did you do on your day off?"  Not thinking about it, I answered the question truthfully, "I got my ass pounded on a beach by some body builder named Rodney."  I said it as lackadaisically as I would have if I told her that I had a plain bagel with unsalted butter on it for breakfast.  To my surprise, it did not go over well, and she looked at me with horror.
     I don't mean to offend people, but I don't think people realize the weight of the questions they ask; and while I know asking, "how are you today?" is more of a formality of human interaction rather than a genuinely posed question, I still find it to be invasive and inappropriate, because everytime I've answered the question honestly people are somehow offended that I actually told them the truth.   "I'm terribly hungover from the gay bar I went to last night" I might say or, "I'm really good, I'm going on a date later with a Bosnian God!" is somehow an inappropriate answer.  I have been told that I have no social tact, that I am rude, disgusting and offensive because I don't at all respect social norms or comforts.  The idea of blending in, of not laughing at a loud fart or not telling someone during dinner about an article I read about forced abortions in China, or even something as simple as not smoking in a non smoking sidewalk area, make me want to kill myself at the total loss of self I would have to consciously cut out. 
     My mother always says, "if everyone in a room is saying you're an asshole, then you're probably an ass hole."  Taking into consideration that everyone I know, including my mother is telling me what an asshole I am, I am beginning to wonder if they may not be joking, that I might maybe be a putrid asshole; and that I might want to consider shutting the fuck up every once in a while, if not entirely.   I think I'm funny, and there was a time when other people thought I was funny.  It's just not funny anymore.  My humor has become so dark that it is not humor anymore, it is cynicism and comes from a place in my heart that is screaming at the world to go fuck itself.   It's really very Charles Bukowski of me, but then again, Bukowski was a miserable drunk who's only redeeming quality was the beauty of his writing.
     The sad part of all of this is that only the people who truly know me see the side of me that is repulsive.  For it is the people who love me the most that I unleash the most onto.  I have fun, I go out for drinks and laugh often with co-workers or friends or aquatances, the Ryan they see is funny, put together, sure of himself and kind; and at my core I am all of those things.  But I have not showed that to the people close to my heart in so long they have left begun to turn away.  I always thought that I don't have to say things like "I appreciate you, or I love you" because they should already know I think them, plus for some reason my lips don't like forming those words.  Almost as much as they don't like forming the movements necessary to say I'm sorry.
     But I am.  I am so very sorry.  I am sorry to my mother for not seeing her efforts and her pride in me that at times, has been almost impossible to defend.  I am sorry to my best friend Jen for not telling her how proud I am of her, and how grateful I am to have such a beautiful soul in my life.  A soul that has on more than one occasion saved my life.  I am sorry to all of the people I cut out of my life for fear that they might say, "I told you so."  I am sorry to my family for running so far away from their love that they do not call anymore.  I am sorry to Kevin for not treating his love as tenderly as he, for a short time, cradled my heart.  I am sorry to myself for allowing the damage I have endured to shape me into a concentrated ball of fear and distrust in the world. 
It is time to change, to change in all the ways I have fought off for years.  It's time to grow up.  It is time to allow happiness to fill my lungs again.

Through pierced quivering lips, and lungs full of release, I am sorry.
   

Bosnia.

My heart goes off tempo to the though of smelling his neck, to the thought of the moment when you are making love with someone so hard you forget to breath; and you inhale so deeply into their neck you can smell the small particle of soap behind their ear, forgotten by yesterdays shower water and the mixture of spit from one another.  His neck looks like it would smell like dark leather, after shave and sea salt.  His neck is the kind of neck that's pours are spread out enough to make goose bumps look like warm and white braille. I once read braille like that; but I didn't understand it. 

Comfort Foods.

        I've never been one for emotional eating.  I much prefer to pacify my loneliness with vodka or a tightly rolled dubber and maybe a muscle relaxer now and then.  I once pacified myself with all three and convinced Jen I was going to puke to death while I draped myself over our bear claw bath tub.  Lately, a strong drink or five, simply is not doing the trick..  So now I've had no choice but to take up emotional eating, which as it turns out, is also not very healthy. 
        The coffee shop I work at, has the most indisputably delicious array of pastries ranging from an almond tea cake to a fucking cookie with candied almonds poured over a layer of thick dark chocolate.  Sometimes if there are no customers in the shop and my boss is doing inventory in the back, I stand in front of the pastry display and stare at the glistening sugar crystals in the icing of the carrot cake or the swirls of cream cheese in our spicy pumpkin bread.  At the end of the night someone throws them into a black trash can for the morning crew to throw away.  It's devastating to witness.
        Customers, if they see you dumping the pastries in the trash, will stop their conversations, look up from their lap tops and stop mid sip, and glare at you.  I think it's interesting to watch the people's faces though, they all look confused, shocked and sad.  I think it's been so ingrained into our minds and our DNA that discarding edible food is wrong, that people's minds short circuit when they see it happen.  I once worked with a man named Perry at an organic grocery store and every time he would return from the baler, after dumping hundreds of pounds of food, he would look mortified.  He would mope around for a short time after doing it, thinking, "what a waist." 
         The food industry is a disgusting place to work when you are hungry, because every food establishment I have ever worked for, throws away more food in a day than I could possibly eat in a year; and yet I'm pulling quarters out of my ass to buy a piece of shit cheeseburger off of a dollar menu.   In small spurts of retaliation, I have eaten out of my employers garbage more times than I can possibly even imagine counting.  If I have to throw away 26 rotisserie chickens because they've been sitting for two hours and legally they are no longer considered food, then I am going to do so while furiously eating 26 chicken skins by a trash compactor. 
        Usually, when no one is looking I will bury my face in the trash and dig out something delicious.  Last night I went on a baked goods bender.  I was shutting down the coffee urns and burned myself on the hot metal.  Suddenly I was fighting tears so hard my face became flushed from holding my breath.  My mom told me when I was a little boy that the only way to get rid of hick ups was to either eat a spoonful of peanut butter or hold your breath.  I found out quickly that they only way I could stop crying was to hold my breath. 
        So there I was, leaning against a coffee maker holding my breath for as long as I could bare.  I knew it wasn't the mild burn that I was holding back tears for, it was the fire raging in my head.  It was like the burn jolted out of the mussel memory, mundane tasks of closing a coffee shop and brought me back to me.  All of the uncertainty of California and of my decisions that have lead me here crept up and all it seemed I could to to keep from collapsing was to fill my lungs to their max capacity and freeze. 
         Luckily the trash can was over flowing with baked goods and I soon found myself violently shoving a fearful amount of carbs into my body.  I was breaking cookies in half and biting the center of them, the center being all I'm really after when I eat a cookie.  I was ripping open almond pastries, scraping out their marzipan centers into my mouth and discarding the buttery leftovers to the side like clam shells.  I heard the door open and customers footsteps walk to the counter.  I brushed the crumbs off of me, swallowed, dried my eyes and walked out to great them with an enthusiastic smile, a smile I have trained to look sincere in the face of customer service. 
        Holding my breath, I asked, "what can I get started for you today guys?"

Pure Garbage.

        I think it's fitting that Jen and I are spending Easter morning on top of a mountain overlooking the San Francisco bay.  Instead of going to church, we packed a back pack full of cigarettes, lighters, weed and our journals.  As I sit here looking at the water, I feel like I'm looking into a sandbox after a heavy rain and that I could scoop up the city with a cupped hand or snap the Golden Gate Bridge with a flick of a finger. I think this is closer to God than the pews of a crowded church that smells of a mixture of strongly applied perfumes and hair spray and the bombardment of pastel colored ties with Easter eggs on them. 
        I am almost more amazed at the amount of litter on this mountain than I am the view of tiny boats voyaging under the Bay Bridge or the lizards running and hiding from the hawk's watchful eye.  There are McDonald's bags, beer bottles, packs of cigarettes and for some reason dirty diapers wedged between these ancient rocks and between warm trees.  I am baffled by how little people respect beauty.  How some people will rush home to catch the last few minutes of Two and a Half Men or yell at their children for forgetting to use a coaster on the coffee table and then turn around and throw a diaper, a plastic diaper full of human shit into the mouth of mother nature; and still think of themselves with high esteem.  How some people can sit on a mountain top and be so underwhelmed by the majesty of nature and human capacity that exists within San Francisco, and throw off of it a bottle of Jim Beam.  
         Sitting on this trash covered mountain peak, I can't help but feel a connection between these stones and myself.  I too know the anguish of possessing paramount beauty, of being inspired and radiant; and then having someone dump a cauldron of garbage on top of you.  I know what it is like to have beer bottles dumped on me and left on to floor to roll a few feet and stop, forgotten.  I too have felt cigarettes tossed into my face by people who did not see my heart but instead saw an escape from their own swooning ball of darkness.  I have felt men discard their trash onto my chest and I have felt their foot steps as they walked away, shake my earth.  What I did not know until this moment, was what it was like to feel beautiful in spite of those bottles and cigarettes and trash that exists within the scars of my heart.
        Because in spite of it's debris, this mountain top is the most astounding thing I have ever seen.
        Thank you universe.

Tampon Applicators and Kleenex Balls

          I'm not good at being alone.  I'm good at many things, but being alone is not one of them.  I can walk into a bar, a party or wedge myself between two strangers smoking a cigarette the permitted 20 feet away from city doorways and I can become old friends with strangers.  I can book a train and cross the continent without fear and I can lye in a man's bed and kiss him like I have loved him countless nights before, never wondering why the scent of his skin does not smell new.  I can do these things because it exists within me to be unabashed and careless and belligerently honest.  I can't however, sit alone in a coffee shop or a bar or in the stillness of my living room and feel anything other than a staggering desire to be in the company of someone other than the cruel man that lingers in my mind. 
              I have been in California for almost two months now, a time in which I have slipped deep into my own thoughts and come face to face with my own voice in a way that I have been avoiding my entire life.  It started when I began, at the age of 9 to realize I would rather kiss boys than kiss girls, a fact I was almost instinctualy ashamed of.  For the better part of my adolescence I found it was easier to call myself a fagot and tell myself I was sick, that it was just a faze, and that I wouldn't be that way forever; than it was to confront myself.  I remember hating myself so much that I would stand in front of my mirror and become nauseated looking at the person behind it.  How could such an ugly person be in that mirror? 
          I think in the same way that it was easier to seek comfort in self loathing than it was to seek bravery in who I really was, I am telling myself recently that I am not an artist and I am not a writer because being both of those things is hard and requires a person to, without fear, reveal their mind even when it is ugly and even when it hurts and causes a reader to cry as I have cried.  Sometimes I will sit down to write on my lap top and watch my cursor blink and erase for the duration of time it takes for my battery to die, I have done this often and in those times I am lucky to write a sentence or two.  Instead of writing the truth, I think about how the truth is not worth sharing.  So what is the truth?
          The truth, is that I hate being alone.  The truth is that I've never felt not alone, I have just been fortunate enough to, for brief periods of time, surround myself with people and romance long enough to feel just a little less alone.   The truth is that I've been grappling for love in bar bathrooms, gang bangs and sex shops since I was 17.  The truth is, people can smell me from a mile away and the smell of desperation is pungent and discarding.  I have done things in my life that haunt me, that tug at my skull daily and beg to be forgiven, and the truth is, I'm finally brave enough to let them tug and to let them be forgiven and to quite the man in my mind who does not love me.
            I think one of the reasons I hate being alone is how overwhelming my brain is.  It thinks of so many things at once and it is exhausting.  Other people slow my brain down in the same way half a bottle of vodka or a medical grade joint slows it.   I remember sitting in a desk chair at work a few years ago, using my feet to push my body backwards and balancing the weight of myself on two legs of the chair.  I pushed a little to far and began to fall.  I remember the second my feet left the floor and my body lost control, it was as if time stopped.  During the second or two I was falling, I remember thinking paragraphs worth of articulated thoughts, "Is my head going to hit the desk behind me?  No, I'll be fine, there is room, I will just have to keep my neck tight so my head wont slam to hard against the floor.  Fuck this is going to hurt so bad, where is my cell phone?  In my pocket?  No, it's in my hand.  Don't drop your phone, you can't afford another one..."  My mind raced and once I had fallen and I had stood up, I was amazed at how many thoughts my my mind just had. 
          I feel like I am always falling, about to hit something, and my brain is always trying to keep up with and exceed the momentum of my body.   I think that is a curse most artistic minds are plagued with, and is why almost every famous artist or writers fall victim to drug abuse.  My drug is and has been love.  I say this again, not to beat a dead horse but because it is the truth; my mind is only calm in the arms of a lover.  It is calmed by the slow gusts of air from a lovers mouth as he sleeps behind me.  Letting go of that calm has been hard for me, and I have finally collapsed into myself in the absence of it.  I have finally confronted myself and the truths of my decisions. 

     But I figure if I can get on a 3 day train ride across the America's, I can gather the strength to look in the mirror and think, "how can something so beautiful be in that mirror."

Rugrats

     I woke up this morning with rug burns on my knees and elbows.  The skin around my lips smelled like sex and was rubbed raw by facial hair, and my neck was swollen in little circles of broken blood vessels.   The sun was not up yet, but I couldn't go back to sleep.  My head was throbbing and I needed water.  I searched for my pants and underwear for a few minutes, growing frustrated I thought to myself, "where in the hell could he have thrown them?"  My underwear was behind my pillows and my pants behind my door.

     I was chugging my fourth glass of water on my way back to my room when I noticed something in the entrance of the living room.  I stood still, clutching my water and looking at the evidence of my bad decision carved into the white carpet.  The street light's soft yellow glow leaked into the room, and in that light I could see where my fingers had dug into the carpet and pulled with them acrylic fibers, leaving in their wake shadows of our bodies rolling and clenching and clawing.  My brother and I used to make snow angels in our mother's carpet when we were young.  We used to write our names in it too.
       Last night I made sex angels.
     "To bad he's married," I said to the floor.
      With a defeated smile, I used my right foot to erase myself from the carpet and used another glass of   wine to erase myself.