2

I watched an episode of Oprah. It showcased this family where the uncle kills his wife and sister and brother in law in front of their kids.
The kids are almost grown and are on Oprah’s stage. The killer is with them via satellite. He is executed a few weeks after the show airs.
I liked watching the show, because I like to watch families interacting. I have some sort of addiction to it. It’s the reason why I’m stuck on this new show Parenthood on NBC, and how I used to be stuck on that show Brothers and Sisters on ABC before the show just got too bad to watch.
It was why when I was a teenager I would watch the show Home Improvement. The three boys on the show were near my age and I would wonder what it would be like to be adopted by the two parents, to live in that house, to go to school.
Somewhere during the show there was a promo of another episode where Oprah was explaining that kids were getting what was called a ‘choking high’ and parents needed to beware. It’s become more and more clear to me that the closer you are to death the more clearly you see the world.
I wasn’t surprised that you could get high by being choked. I figured that’s what a high was, at its core -- sheer relaxation to the point of death. I thought about how my heartbeat will inexplicably race sometimes, how far away from seeing the world clearly I have had to been.
I haven’t been high in a long time. I’ve been relaxed and happy often enough lately without it. It’s like the more often I’m happy, the better I can remember how to be happy -- a dangerous tightrope I know.
I notice how I like all foods now, same as when I would be high. I even like vegetables. It’s because they’re all Real. I notice that my furniture is made of wood, and my shirt out of cotton and it all comes from the earth and I enjoy it all more, now that I’m not taking its existence for granted.
I would perceive the world that way when I was high. I’m still perceiving it that way even when I haven’t been high for a long time.

__________

　
I thought about that line from the book Middlesex, where the transsexual was stunned to accept a shocking truth about masculinity: how every individual man was The Man, or else.
I remember how when I was high I kept thinking about how the first few human beings were known simply by one quality and were worshipped by the Greeks that way. I wrote it down even though it didn’t really sit right with me.

You are The Man.
You are the god of Brave.
That’s just how it works.
You’re the Alpha,
And you chose to be the Omega,
(to die before dying)
In order to ensure its truth.

I thought about how I’ll know these things when I shift to the next life, the next re-birth, the next great Change. How I’ll know that life’s just one shifting after another so there’s no such thing as death. How I’ll know to be brave and nothing else is required.
If I wrote some sort of fictional book that alluded to all these truths, then in my next life I might read it. Then I realized that the book had already been written: by Vonnecut, by Morrison, by Ellison and a slew of others. Not only that but I already knew enough to read them. So there’s nothing left that needs to be done.

__________

　
I watch an episode of The View as I eat lunch because there’s nothing else on. One guest is a sixteen year old singer. Despite a small body he has the look of manhood I recognize. A nameless thing behind his eyes. He naturally refuses to buy into the show’s assumed UnRealness. He refuses to play his ‘role’ all the way. I like him for that.
Barbara Walters comments on this, mentions that he has such maturity. She says it in a way that lets the listener know she finds it confusing, she says it as if it were a question, but not quite. The singer responds to her without answering her question. He knows that if she has to ask, then she’ll never understand his answer. What he knows is wordless.
I went to sleep in the recliner and dreamed about woods. The Real men were always near the woods. The men were young, had serious looks on their faces. I was one of them. The men who lived farthest from the woods were attracted to the raw masculinity of the ones from the woods. The ones from the woods were the penetrators, the ones not from the woods wanted to be penetrated.
The dream shifted a little. Two came out of the woods. Though they were both penetrators they still loved each other. A mutual respect was felt between the two of them.
The dream was insisting something almost-wordless: the young singer on the The View would only go so far playing his role. The View women were falling all over themselves to play their role. That’s how he kept close to the woods. By keeping his poise.
It’s okay to experience all kinds of sex. Doesn’t mean you have to experience it outside of dreams. Somewhere in the dream I understood why young men get with older ones. Their age is what separates them, makes their bodies interesting to each other, attractive to each other.
The dream shifts a little and I am one of the two penetrators fornicating. It shifted again and turned into the sex scene from Broken Sky, then turned into the scene from Bad Education with the silent Adonis.
I wake for a little while, but feel sleepy. I know I get sexuality right when I fall into a deep, deep sleep. To the point where my limbs feel like lead and melt into the material of the mattress. Usually I then dream very very vividly, like that one Saturday night where I was shifting in and out and didn’t know which world was the Wake one of the Sleep one.
Had a long dream as I slept. Justin Bieber -- the kid from the View -- is with me but we’re little kids. We’re in the timeless place. We’re at the Johnston House, at night. But then we’re separated and I have to work my way back to him. I walk past my parents on a dark highway with no traffic because of a bar opening whose line of customers waiting for a table spills out so far it crosses the four lane highway.
So I get on the train. George Clooney and his family are sitting in the center section of seats. The seating area is large like a plane‘s.
He gives a kid near me a dollar, as if for some significant reason. Even though I’m sitting alone with an empty seat beside me, an attractive woman’s legs suddenly are beside me. The woman is sitting behind me.
The seat beside me somehow loses its back. She does that somehow, she wants me to notice her. I run my hands up them, beneath her skirt, hard even, she starts moaning, moving.
The scene shifts a little bit, so that I’m on the train in the middle of the film Masked and Anonymous. Then I ‘m back at the Johnston House, at night.
I’m a little kid playing around with two little-kid Biebers. As a little boy, I know rape goes on here in this house. I think in my little boy brain, as I go up a flight of carpeted stairs: so that was sex all along: wanting to touch and be touched, like how I felt as a boy. Getting attention. Always I’ve been having sex, mistook it for childhood.
Then I woke up.

__________

　
(Tuesday morning)
　
The news told a story about violent incidents at a Florida high school. One kid was set on fire over a video game. A few weeks later at the same school a girl was beaten almost to death over a text message by someone she didn’t know.
They said it was because this generation only communicates through media, and have no skills concerning human interaction, human connection. I wonder about the fact that I only express myself anonymously on an anonymous website.
Watched Parenthood that evening. It has teenagers on the show, and I feel triggered. Memories arise, and I’m forced to relive my teenager years, in a way, remember them the way they Truly were.
It lasts for hours, as I cook, and take a shower. It feels difficult, but isn’t in the end, it feels liberating. Like I get those years back, now that I can remember them the way they really were.
It’s like I can give myself credit and the credit physically soaks into me, instead of just being a concept in my head.
The fact that my life has already been lived is hard to take. It’s not easy to experience my life for the first time through memory only.
Meanwhile the memories are stronger than memory. I feel like I am still that boy, like I’m that boy right now. The memories are so strong I wonder about the danger of remembering like that. Strangely, the boy makes me smile.
I remember as a little kid noticing that it took me over two weeks to register an event like a tiger cubs meeting or the first day of school. I used to think it was just something weird about me.
The flood of memories is more than just my teenage years. I remember the tricycle, I remember teaching myself how to ride a bike, I remember the restaurant we stopped at on the way home from visiting my grandparents in Florida. It un-numbs, me but it’s a horrific price to pay. The memories are spaces of time between horrific instances, horrific events.
I’ve felt afraid of Tre for awhile now. I feel like I’ve embarrassed myself. I feel like he couldn’t possibly like me still. Maybe I was Him as a little boy, but I feel like I grew up to be sub par. After all this, how can I still claim to be Him and look Tre in the eye.
When I feel his touch, it’s like he reminds me. It starts at the base of the neck, and it straightens, like it should be. And with it my body resets into its natural posture, it’s natural ways. When the memories are this strong, and I allow myself to be this brave, it’s not long before I feel his touch, and tonight is no different. I allow it, though I still feel a disagreement with him about my being Him. The touch is so strong, impossible not to trust.

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