This anniversary of the federal levee failure is hitting me harder than either of the previous two. Last year I was hunkering down for Gustav, and I guess kind of in shock that it was coming. In '07 I was lying sick in bed from the pills I was addicted to. And of course the first anniversary, '06, was beautiful, then horrible: we went out to the dedication of the St. Bernard Parish memorial in Shell Beach that morning, and that afternoon one of our most beloved cats, Nathan, suddenly collapsed from undiagnosed/asymptomatic diabetes and died early the next morning.

The truth is that I will never like this time of year. There was never much to like about it, especially for someone who has always lived in the hot, humid south and hated school since the seventh grade. A confession: Chris and I had to change our anniversary, because neither of us was sure, but we thought it might be August 29. (Like many queer couples I've known, lacking a formal marriage date, we date our anniversary to the first time we had sex.) On the one hand, it was the best thing that ever happened to me; on the other, I was being unfaithful to another man, confused about what to do, and on the brink of the scary decision to move out on my own and fully support myself for the first time. (I say "fully," but during some of those lean times, it sure helped having a boyfriend who was a chef and would feed me.) So it wasn't an entirely happy time then, either. We moved our anniversary to November 5 because it would be a good time to travel and I've always been fond of Guy Fawkes' Day.

Anyway, I have no idea what I'm doing to observe today. I thought we might go to the N.O. Museum of Art events -- there will be a reading of the names of New Orleans' flood dead, and a showing of When The Levees Broke -- or some memorial Mass, but Chris doesn't want to get up early and I can't blame him, as he had to deal with restaurant drama (a cook/waiter quitting) until 4am last night. Maybe I will find some fucking sack and read my signed copy of Josh Neufield's A.D.

Last night I had occasion to send "Enough Rope" to a gay couple from my OLGC rosary group. Rereading the essay, thinking about it and my other, somewhat less serious gender essay "Cocksucker Suit" (published in Greg Herren & Paul Willis' anthology Love, Bourbon Street), I came to a realization that I hadn't ever really admitted to myself before:

I like wearing dresses.

Mentally and emotionally I identify as male and always will, but the older I get, the more fluid my feelings on gender seem to become. It makes me happy that terms like "genderqueer" are used in casual online conversation. It makes me realize that when I put on a nice dress and shoes, fix my sacrum-length hair, and generally get all done up, it doesn't make me feel female; it just makes me feel sharp, the same way I feel when I wear my cockseersucker suit and Stacy Adams boys' alligator loafers. I don't wear much makeup, but I do like me some jewelry. Most of the time my style of dress resembles supergee's timeless description of his own fashion sense -- "garish and slovenly" -- but when I want to look nice, I don't care what gender my clothes are. I did for a while in 2004 and 2005, going through a phase where I wasn't at all comfortable wearing women's clothes or jewelry, but then in '05 there was this certain little event, and after that I found that I had bigger things to worry about than whether wearing a dress made me less manly. And everybody knows that most men in New Orleans, gay or straight, have at least one dress in their closet anyway.

... at least so far. It's only 1:00 PM, the crack of dawn to me these days, so I suppose it has the potential to get better.

A) I made myself so sore working in the garden yesterday that I'm not sure I will be able to make it to the Druids parade tonight. The work -- digging out a new bed for elephant ear and stargazer lily bulbs, eating the weeds, putting up a new hanging basket so the neighborhood cats won't destroy my catnip plant -- needed doing and I enjoyed it, but I will purely hate missing that parade.

B) We awoke this morning to a newspaper story about Chris in which he is misquoted as calling me his "wife," even though he took the time to explain to the reporter that we don't use that word in our relationship and why (the short version). The story is well worth reading anyway for Chris' interesting food book selections, but for the reporter to put that word in Chris' mouth was careless and unprofessional, and I expected better from that particular writer, who has done some wonderful stories for the Times-Picayune. I can deal with it being used to describe me in text by writers who don't know any better, but to see the word supposedly coming right from Chris' mouth was hard and painful.

(Please note: I do not think there is anything wrong with being someone's wife ... if you identify as a woman. I am no one's wife and never will be. Chris usually refers to me as his "better half" -- a kind fib, but one that works for us -- and told the reporter so, but she apparently didn't listen or care.)

C) The coffee maker suddenly decided to be broken this morning. This is the same coffeemaker we bought about six months ago and actually spent decent money on because we were tired of buying cheap ones that kept breaking. Can I lay hands on the warranty? No, of course I cannot.

D) Deuce is loose.

I'm sure there are people out there who are having far, far worse mornings than this, but as a wise man once said to me: if you say you have a headache and someone tells you, "You think your head hurts? That guy over there just got hit in the head with a hammer!", it doesn't make your headache go away -- it just makes you start looking around for a hammer.

I need to go to the shooting range again RIGHT NOW. Either that or mainline several milligrams of Xanax.

First of all, Frankie has developed an obsession with silverware. He gets it out of the sink and carries it all over the house. Now, this in itself is pretty funny, and I can even see the humor in being awakened at 7:30 AM by having a dirty fork dropped on your head, but overall I could have used another three or four hours' sleep.

Next: over the past couple of years, due to being married to a fat man and having many fat friends, I've become interested in fat acceptance, fat-positiveness, or whatever you prefer to call it. This afternoon, while browsing such a community, I learned about Mississippi House Bill 282 by Rep. W.T. Mayhall of Southaven, MS:

AN ACT TO PROHIBIT CERTAIN FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS FROM SERVING FOOD TO ANY PERSON WHO IS OBESE, BASED ON CRITERIA PRESCRIBED BY THE STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH; TO DIRECT THE DEPARTMENT TO PREPARE WRITTEN MATERIALS THAT DESCRIBE AND EXPLAIN THE CRITERIA FOR DETERMINING WHETHER A PERSON IS OBESE AND TO PROVIDE THOSE MATERIALS TO THE FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS; TO DIRECT THE DEPARTMENT TO MONITOR THE FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS FOR COMPLIANCE WITH THE PROVISIONS OF THIS ACT; AND FOR RELATED PURPOSES.

Of course any stupid shitsplat who manages to get elected can propose a bill about any moron thing s/he likes, and of course this idiocy died in committee, but it twists my gut and boggles my mind that ANYONE ANYWHERE EVER TOOK THIS DISCRIMINATORY GARBAGE SERIOUSLY. Even in Mississippi. (Apologies to the smart Mississippians out there. C'mon, I'm from Louisiana; we've got to have somebody to make fun of.)

Next, while innocently reading fuckyoulist, I came upon this prize. (DO NOT click if drooling ignorance about transsexuality/transgendered people makes your head explode.)

So I decided I needed to get away from the computer, and I went out in the yard to see if the fence guys had come and put up the rest of my razor wire as promised. Of course they hadn't, and while examining my plants, I found several boards that hadn't even been screwed down at the bottom. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for a fairly skinny person (e.g. most of the crackheads in my neighborhood) to kick in one of these boards and slip through the resulting gap. If they haven't come and finished the job by tomorrow morning as promised, I swear to God I will do it myself and bill them for my labor.

At that point, Chris came home from running errands and told me I needed to calm down. He had to go back out again for some groceries, so I amused myself by continuing to read Amazon reader "reviews" of my older books, and I found a doozy. I may have to make this a regular feature. This one's about Exquisite Corpse, but you probably could have figured that out on your own.

T. Jackson (Portland, OR United States)
Though I am a big fan of many dark films and movies, I usually like for them to have some sort of moral, lesson or hope to impart. Most of them do. This book is darkness for darkness sake, extremely gross and sadistic, and beyond disturbing. Though well written, I thought it was a waste of time and offered nothing but horrific visions and bleakness. I was so upset by this book, I wanted to write the author, but naturally, she has no public email or way of contacting. I really think she should be hanging her head in shame for contributing garbage like this to the world. I am no prude, extremely liberal and my favorite movie is The Crow, which is quite dark itself. But while that film is about love and redemption, this book is about terrible things. The world doesn't need this kind of darkness.

Somehow, I have no trouble believing that T. Jackson is "extremely liberal." I share many political opinions with liberals, but I find that those who just have to brag about how liberal they are seem to enjoy being offended almost as much as white people (of course, there's a lot of overlap there). Ah, how I wish she had found my P.O. box address (which has been on my website since 2000; this "review" was posted in 2006, so I guess T. Jackson didn't look terribly hard for that contact information she accuses me of hiding) and written me that letter telling me how I should hang my head in shame. I've never sent anyone a dead animal before, but there's always a first time.

I have now tagged all my 2008 entries. Yay for me. This tagging business is compulsive, and I'd eventually like to have the whole journal tagged, but I wonder if someone on my friends list would be willing to do the entries from September/October '05. I find those almost impossible to look back at.

Speaking of looking back, when I visit my Amazon page, I usually only check out the new reviews of my more recent books, but today -- perhaps because of Kody Boye's nice comment about Drawing Blood on my most recent Amazon blog entry -- I wondered what people had been saying about my older stuff lately, so I checked out the most recent of the 228 Lost Souls reviews. Most of them were good, but I found this gem (excerpted) from "Otto" of San Antonio, Texas:

I support gay rights, gay marriage, etc, but I can do without details that paint a picture in my mind, or actually seeing it happen. If someone told me Poppy Z Brite wrote a book and the gay stuff isn't in it, I'd be interested in reading it. Otherwise, I doubt I'll pick up another book of hers.

In other words, "I'll say what I have to say to be PC, but I don't want to know what those icky fags actually do with each other." I can only hope someone told him Exquisite Corpse wasn't a bit gay.

I managed to sneak in a couple of hours online while Chris was having lunch with a friend today (his computer died a few months ago, and since he left the Delachaise, he's constantly doing business on mine). I'm still not completely caught up with my friends list, but I'm on page "skip 675." I have enjoyed getting reacquainted with all of you.

Exchange from horror_novels (yes, I belong to this community; I didn't just go trolling for mentions of my name):

COMMENTER: I was a Poppy fan but her works seems to get way too predictably homosexual. It's almost like she's compelled to put in a gay male in every story.

ME: I know just what you mean. I love Stephen King, but it's almost like he feels compelled to put straight people in everything he writes.

Seriously, do people think about the shit they say? 99% of fiction and all other entertainment celebrates heterosexuality (not to say "shoves heterosexuality in your face," though that's how I often feel), but when an author writes mainly or exclusively about gay characters, he's repetitive. Or "predictable," if you like. I suppose I'm predictable in pointing this out too, but substitute "black" for "gay" in that comment and see how it sounds. For that matter, a vast percentage of fiction is about white people, and when a black writer tries to move outside the "African-American fiction" niche, he's frequently told that his book won't sell because "black people don't read horror [or whatever genre he's working in], and white readers won't read about black characters."

Whether my work is any good or not is ultimately up to the reader, but I do not give a shit for the reader's default expectations.

For my own part, I've been reading a lot of William Goldman. Though I fell in love with The Princess Bride when I was 13 (Inigo Montoya was my secret boyfriend), in general I have tended to write Goldman off as too slick. While I still find some of his verbal tics annoying, he's witty and good at dialogue and has a gift for creating compelling characters; whether you like them or not, it's hard to close the book without learning what happens to them. I will, however, say unabashedly that his early novels are pretty terrible. They also tackle Weighty Modern Issues (well, they were modern in the mid-sixties, anyway) such as Genuinely Good-Hearted Girls Sleeping With Married Men and Whether The Homosexual Can Lead A Truly Happy Life. Some (Boys and Girls Together) are compulsively readable in spite of themselves. Some (Your Turn to Curtsy, My Turn to Bow) are not. He's a fine example of a hard-working writer who may never be great, but who improved his work tremendously by writing a lot. (I even enjoyed Tinsel, a novel of Hollywood intrigue and scandal, and I hate everything about the movie business.)

Our oldest cat Boo, aged 14, hasn't been looking or acting well and is going to the vet tomorrow. This will probably mean some expensive bloodwork at the very least, so I finally got off my ass and put up some new eBay auctions: a first edition of Lost Souls with a pencil sketch of Ghost (my first-ever portrait of him, as best I can recall); a first edition of Drawing Blood; a copy of The Seed of Lost Souls; and a copy of the ever-rarer Wrong Things.

I just want to crawl into bed naked with Stephen King (pardon me, Miz Tabitha, on the very slim chance that you're reading; I mean with Wolves of the Calla), but I have to get this down while I can. Today was the Archbishop's Mass at Our Lady of Good Counsel, the day where Archbishop Alfred Hughes came to "address our concerns" about our parish being suppressed. What that added up to, of course, was a lot of platitudes about how "we must all work together in this difficult time" and a statement in which he actually used the Eucharist as a kind of tactical weapon to suggest that we were desecrating the Body of Christ by protesting. Horrible, horrible man. Horrible, horrible hierarchy. How I hate them.

We had a protest with signs before and after, and shouted slogans (I think I ruptured my poor sore throat) and talked to the press and all that. I'll probably be on the late news if any locals care. I don't. I have never felt so empty after a Mass in my life. I know a lot of people reading this don't believe in transubstantiation, and I'm not sure I believe in it literally, but I know it makes something inside me feel good. Not today. I've only taken Communion, what, maybe a dozen times since I was accepted into the Church? Every other time, even at Chop's funeral, I felt something good. Today -- even though I took it from Father Pat, not that stinking Hughes -- it was a cracker. "I like little dry things," I thought. "I could snack on these." Nothing else went through my mind at all. I felt the Church had been desecrated by his presence. During the protests, he flapped a hand at us that pretended to be blessing but felt nothing but contemptuous.

We will not close. But it hurts to see the evidence, right up close, that the man who is supposed to shepherd every flock in New Orleans doesn't give a good goddamn about us. No, it doesn't surprise me a bit, but it's a little like the difference between thinking your lover is cheating on you and actually catching them in the act. (Or like that difference must be; I've been lucky to escape that particular life experience.)

I wasn't going to mention this because it felt like a brag, but at Mass weekend before last, they took up a second collection for "Peter's Pence," which allegedly helps the Pope continue his charitable works around the world. As I believe I have said here, I am not a big fan of the Pope and imagine that his "charitable works" might well include a new pair of Prada loafers, so I took a dollar, wrote "THIS IS A GAY DOLLAR. GOD LOVES US TOO" on it, and put it in the collection basket. No, I don't kid myself that Benny will ever see it, but like so many little ultimately meaningless acts, it made me feel better.

Apropos of some slightly confused/confusing conversations on prime_liquor: In addition to my plethora of names, I pretty much answer to any pronoun, too.

I do have a question, though. If I have fallen in love with a .38 revolver named "Betsy," does that make me a lesbian?

From a Washington Post article on the papal visit:

"It's well-known that U.S. Catholics disagree with the Vatican on issues of sexuality, including abortion and same-sex marriage. According to recent Washington Post-ABC News surveys, 63 percent of [American] Catholics, compared with 55 percent of all [American] adults, believe same-sex couples should have access to the same legal protections as heterosexual couples."

So quit giving me shit for joining "that evil, homophobic institution," ya mokes.

I'm a lot better at saying I am going to leave a subject alone for a while than at actually doing so. I just Googled the phrase "Judge not lest ye be judged" to make sure I had the attribution right (Matthew 7:1) and, in the first five hits, found it being used to justify the following actions:

- Excluding gay people from a church "fellowship"

- Tiresomely pointing out the perceived "sins" of everyone around you: "So when I as a Christian point out sin that is going on around me, it’s not because I’m better than anyone, it’s because I love God and I desire to see his will done in the lives of others as his will is done in heaven." (I'm sure God just couldn't manage without you, dude. I bet there's a lot less sin going on around you lately. Hint: It's because nobody can fucking stand you anymore.)

- Branding people who drink alcohol or read/look at/take part in porn as Hellbound sinners

- Declaring women who have had abortions murderers*

- Declaring that all non-Christians will go to Hell (including, presumably, Catholics -- isn't that what "idolaters" is code for these days?)

I don't consider these people Christians (and there I am, judging them -- this stuff is harder than it looks), but they really, really, really make me understand why a lot of people reflexively dislike Christians.



*I don't agree with the official Catholic position on abortion, but I at least find it comprehensible; abortion is an undeniably sad and ugly thing. However, I find abused children, abandoned children, and even those children whose mothers you hear telling them to "Shut up!" as they drag them through Wal-Mart even sadder and uglier. Abortions are going to happen no matter how many Catholic hearts they break, no matter how many little cardboard crosses Catholic churches plant in their front lawns, and it seems to me preferable to keep it legal and as medically safe as possible. If I said anything else I'd be a major hypocrite, since I know that if I had ever been careless or unlucky enough to get pregnant, I would have had that thing out of there so fast its head wouldn't have had time to spin.

EEK St. Joseph pray for me the things I go through for you. I rose at SEVEN DAMN THIRTY to represent Our Lady of Good Counsel on a radio talk show, only to be put on hold and hear Paul Harvey and ads for Sean Hannity. The host was nice enough, but the only caller I had the pleasure of speaking to criticized me for "bragging" about how my church was diverse (what I said was "young and old, gay and straight, black and white and Asian and Latino, cradle Catholics and new converts like me"), and that that was probably why the archdiocese was closing us. Of course I knew which word he'd battened onto, but fortunately I had Harold Baquet's editorial on my desk, so I mentioned it and said Harold had pointed out that fifty years ago, his and other African-American families would not have been welcome at OLGC, and it was a shame that the caller wished to return to such times. He hung up.

I also heard one caller pronounce "Obama" like "O'Balmer," so from now on I fear I will always think of him as an Irish mortician.

I HAZ BIN ON HATE RADIO FOR JESUS.

[ETA: You can hear the interview here. And yes, I've e-mailed to let them know my name is not spelled "Poppie."]

Thanks so much for the supportive responses to my earlier post from members of prime_liquor, nextroundsonme, and via e-mail.

One person did make a comment I wanted to address in a wider forum:

Whatever your choices, I hope they bring you happiness and peace. I can't help but also hope they don't mean you'll eventually think less of the rest of us, or abandon writing about the characters I've grown to love so ... but you come first ... you can't be anything good to anyone else if you aren't happy with yourself.

My journey to Catholicism has made me think more of other people, not less. I spent much of my twenties and thirties feeling contempt for the human race -- there were individuals I loved, of course, but overall I thought people were pretty shitty. Some of them are, but whatever has happened to me -- I hesitate to call it anything as definitive as "faith" -- has made it much easier for me to see the beauty and value in people. And if anything, I hope this step in my life will bring me back to writing about the characters I love, not push me further away from them. After all, it was G-man who got me interested in this stuff in the first place (although his situation differs from mine in that he is a lapsed Catholic who feels drawn back to the Church despite doctrinal problems, while I was not raised Catholic and initially became attracted to the faith at least in part because it was so exotic to me).

My decision to join the Church is purely about what I believe I need to do. It has nothing to do with telling other people what they should believe or how they should live. I loathe fundamentalists of all stripes. As far as I'm concerned, people who use the Church as a tool to judge and bludgeon others don't deserve to be called Christians; they're Paulists to me. However, Catholicism in New Orleans tends to be extremely live-and-let-live -- after all, how judgmental can you be in a city where almost every man has a dress hanging in his closet?

After the ceremony on Saturday evening, I expect to remain pretty much the same person I've always been, but with a little extra reassurance about my own soul -- not revised opinions about anyone else's. And for the record, let me reiterate here that I am still a big old non-operative transsexual fag, which is how I was made, and nothing will ever convince me that this is a sin.

Should you be MALE or FEMALE?* created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Male Being mostly male / masculine, within your structures of thinking simply means that your reasoning powers are (the way they are perceived in Western Culture`) higher than the one of the opposite sex. Psychoanalsis claims this to come at the price of creative expression - a rational thinker can not think out of the box, it is claimed. Male 61% Either 61% Neither 50% Female 21%

More later, maybe. I'm very tired and disgracefully behind on my editing.

Today is Chris' and my eighteenth anniversary. It hasn't always been. We've never actually gotten legally married, so, like many gay couples I've known, we use the date upon which we first had sex as our anniversary. We're both kind of senile and we forgot years ago what that exact date was, but we know it was toward the end of August in 1989, and we had a sneaking suspicion that it may have been August 29 ... so obviously we needed a new anniversary. We chose November 5 because it falls after hurricane season (so we'll be able to take a fabulous trip for our twentieth in two years) and because I've always been fond of Guy Fawkes' Day.

Remember, remember, the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason, and plot!
Poppy and Chris
In their homo bliss
Shall never be forgot!

Chris is working tonight, so we'll be celebrating tomorrow with a sushi dinner; the chef at our favorite place reports that he has sanma.

We kind of take for granted that we've been a part of each other's lives practically forever, but when we really stop and think about it, eighteen years is an overwhelming number. Nearly half my life. We've lived in two apartments and two houses together, and allowed ourselves to be victimized by dozens of cats, a few dogs, and three snakes; Chris has worked in more than a dozen restaurants since I've known him; I've written seven novels since he's known me (he wasn't around for Lost Souls, except some of the revisions); we've traveled to seven countries together; we've almost broken up twice; we've called each other "dude" hundreds of thousands of times, and "sir" tens of thousands, anyway; we've weathered one disaster that left us scarred but ultimately closer than ever.

Another eighteen years doesn't sound like nearly enough.

William's situation is iffy. Our vet feels it's time for him to go, and this is a doctor I trust. However, William woke up seeming a little livelier this morning, ate some more ham, and isn't in pain, so Chris -- who's been working for the past five days and hasn't gotten to spend much time with William -- asked if we could try one more steroid shot/infusion of subcutaneous fluids and, if things aren't looking better by Thursday, do it then. I can't deny him those last two days with William, and of course I'm happy to have them myself. William has perked up before when the vet thought he was at death's door, so there's a chance it won't happen Thursday, but we've already had more time with him than we expected to when this began -- for which we are grateful.

Thanks for all the well-wishes. We appreciate them.

I was amused to read the following in officialgaiman:

A couple of odd FAQ mails came in accusing me of either lying or "jumping on the bandwagon"when I mentioned the other gay Neverwhere character. So I thought I'd point them to http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2003/06/questions-answered-neverwhere.asp. (Odd, because they didn't actually seem to be from readers of my stuff, but seemed to be from people who'd been led here from some sites where people were arguing about other things.) (Shrugs.)

I want to "jump on the bandwagon" too, so I'm announcing that Trevor and Zach in Drawing Blood, Andrew, Jay, Tran, Luke, Soren, and several more characters whose names I can't remember right now in Exquisite Corpse, Jared, Benny, and Frank in The Lazarus Heart, and Rickey and G-man in The Value of X and the Liquor books are gay. (I didn't include any characters from Lost Souls since most of the characters in that one seem to be of the Frank Booth orientation: "I'll fuck anything that MOOOOOOOOOOOOOVES!!!") I'll be happy to organize a press conference if anyone wishes to discuss these shocking revelations.

This just in from another friend whose intelligence and knowledge I trust implicitly (I'm not using his name because I am reprinting his e-mail verbatim rather than paraphrasing it, and I did not get his permission to do so, but this has Not Been A Good Day and I am too tranked up to reliably paraphrase anything):

I think your friend is mistaken, or perhaps attributing positions on gay rights to Al Gore Jr. that really belong to Al Gore Sr. Gore Jr.s positions have evolved, for sure, but he was never a troglodyte. I'm not the biggest Gore fan, but the amount of bullshit and nitpicking that gets thrown at him is amazing-- and almost all of it is part of a willful refusal to debate the issues he talks about now: we don't have to listen to Al Gore about the environment -- he endangered the snail darter! etc.

Here's Gore (Jr.) on gay rights in 2006: http://www.inlamag.com/904/opeds/904_oped1.html#up

Here's an Advocate interview from 1999: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1589/is_1999_Sept_14/ai_55927481/pg_1

His record on the environment and abortion is a little more problematic. Here's a somewhat biased and very angry article from Counterpunch that lays out the arguments: http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair03032007.html

This is probably the best summary of his environmental problems:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1525/is_n4_v82/ai_19550538/pg_1

I don't know about Helms and Mapplethorpe. Gore started out as a conservative democrat from a southern state and did bring with him some of the worst traits of that breed. But most of the issues your friend brings up took place 20-30 years ago. Gore has advanced quite a bit from his early days. It's not really fair to judge him on his earliest political decisions, which he's repudiated.

x.x.
(also a Buddhist, but of the ass-kicking variety)

OK, this is veering dangerously close to actual "blog" territory (as I understand it, there's a seldom-observed technical difference between "blogs" and "journals" -- blogs, or weblogs, tend to concentrate on a certain subject -- frequently politics -- and collect links from around the Internet relating to that subject, while journals tend to be rambling personal jackoffery on any subject that enters the writer's head), and I have always considered myself a journaler rather than a blogger, so we will leave Mr. Gore to his own devices now. If anyone else wishes to comment on him, they are free to do so in prime_liquor or nextroundsonme.

I don't usually pay attention to these "national whatever day" things, but this one is important to me for obvious reasons. I realize that Chris and I take a lot less shit for our relationship than any biologically-same-sex gay couple. No one wants to beat us up just for walking down the street together. When one of us is in the hospital, the other is allowed in to visit without questions or explanations. I could go on, but you know the drill. My point is that I'd trade all that to live in the body I know I was supposed to be born with, to not have to explain a bunch of cockamamie-sounding gender crap to people every time I identify myself as gay (which I don't go around doing constantly, but I do sometimes), to be able to tell all the gay and transsexual people who don't consider me "truly" gay or a "real" transsexual to go to hell (which I do anyway, but even though I know perfectly well who I am, I can still see their point).

Many people who've been reading this journal for any length of time are probably familiar with my essay "Enough Rope". Even so, this seems a good day to link to it. It's about ten years old, but it still explains my whole gender deal fairly well, I think.

Everyone has been complimentary about the photo I posted, but a couple of people have expressed puzzlement that I would post a nude picture of myself when I so frequently state that I identify as male.

I don't see the dichotomy here. My face and some of my clothes are obviously those of a female, yet nobody is puzzled when I post pictures of my face or of myself wearing a dress. Why do one breast and the curve of a hip make such a big difference? Yes, I identify as a gay man, but I don't actually believe that I possess a male body and don't ever plan to transition or attempt to "pass" as male. (I have the highest regard for people who do take this brave and difficult step, but it simply isn't something that has ever become necessary in my life, and I can't imagine undergoing it unless it is an absolute necessity to you. However, those who'd claim that I am not a "real" transsexual because I've not chosen to transition are cordially invited to bite my crank.) Over the years, I've grown comfortable with the body I have. Having a longtime partner who believes in my gender identity but nonetheless seems to love my body a lot has improved my comfort level with my own physical being tremendously. Posting what I thought was an attractive, tasteful image is one way of demonstrating that comfort. That's all, and I think it is enough.

A nice, calm day, Chris' day off: we ate Vietnamese food, had dessert at Angelo Brocato's, and shopped for Halloween decorations. I am sorer than I thought it possible to be from one workout, but at least it's soreness from having done something, as opposed to soreness from lying around being defective.

I've received some suggestions about the bed I discussed in my 9/28 entry (the one titled "New Skin, New Bed," not the one with the picture of the snake). They were good and creative suggestions for redecorating it so that it would feel like a new bed, but it's a beautiful bed the way it is now, and somebody else could get some use out of it if we no longer can, and to be honest, I don't really want to sleep in a bed painted all sorts of wild colors or covered with little dangly things (many of which would soon be destroyed by the cats anyway); I think I would find these elements unrestful. More and more, I'm liking the idea of a sleigh bed that would cradle us like a giant cupping hand. I've been watching the furniture ads in the paper, and while I haven't seen anything I really liked yet, I've learned that bedframes are not as expensive as I thought they were. On Chris' next "weekend," maybe we'll go bed shopping -- although he doesn't mind if I go and pick one out on my own and surprise him. Not being much of a decorating queen, he's pretty neutral when it comes to furniture. Of course, I'm not much of a decorating queen either. As I think I've said before, we think of ourselves as a gay couple, but apart from having a great sex life, we really live more like a pair of crazy old bachelor brothers. (TMI re: sex? I don't care; I get laid a lot, and since I don't have much to brag about these days, I gotta brag when I can, dammit. We don't really use buttplugs, though; I just couldn't resist the alliteration in the title.)

Depression is getting its hooks in me again, sinking them fairly deep. I'm trying to fight it, but I don't seem to be making much headway. There's not a great deal of work left to be done on the house (at least not work that I'm capable of doing), and it's too hot to spend as much time in the yard as I was doing a month or so ago. While I still love the house, I'm beginning to wonder if the neighborhood was a good choice: I'm not especially worried about crime, but I sometimes wonder if our neighbors will simply bother me to death -- not the homeowners, who pretty much keep to themselves, but the crackhead renters who are always wanting to do some job for us or sell us something or just cadge some money for nothing at all, because, you know, we're rich. I'm not the kind of person who can live sanely with the knowledge that my doorbell may be rung at any time by somebody wanting something from me, yet these people have so little that it's very hard for me to turn them away. Chris will return to work soon, and for the first time in my life I seem to have lost my talent for being alone. Of course I could see friends, but Chris is really the only person I want to see for any length of time, and certainly the only person who deserves prolonged exposure to me in my present state. (Well, he doesn't deserve it per se, but he did sign on for the long haul.) I will have to watch William get sicker and eventually die. I am doing nothing for New Orleans except the most basic things such as paying taxes and owning property and not leaving. I don't want to write, but I feel as if there is absolutely nothing I do want to dedicate my life to.

I can remember a time when an oncoming bout of depression, as daunting as it was, felt a little like the return of an old friend: something familiar and weirdly comforting, something that absolved me of a lot of responsibility. Now I see that this, along with my belief that you couldn't really be a great artist unless you were a depressive substance abuser who died an early, sordid death, was just one of the many ways I had of being stupid when I was young. I still have many, many ways of being stupid, but they are different ones now, though probably just as self-deluding and useless.

Ben Jonson's "old bald cheater" was time, but it seems an apt characterization of depression as well. Anyone who has experienced it will understand why. Anyone who hasn't experienced it will probably just tell me to "get over it" and "stop wallowing in self-pity" and "pull myself up by the bootstraps" and that sort of shit -- all without ever understanding how very lucky they are not to live with this filthy condition* -- so I'm not going to waste time explaining anything to them.

I've not yet put up new eBay auctions, but I did list some new store inventory, books I've inadvertently ended up with duplicate copies of.

*While I certainly wouldn't call it a "filthy condition," I often think the same thing about transsexuality, operative or otherwise. Do the people who ridicule it and dismiss it as claptrap born of messed-up minds ever stop to think how incredibly fortunate they are to simply live in their bodies without a second thought? Oh, they may think they're too fat or dislike their hair or have an acne problem -- I think very few people really love their bodies -- but there's a huge difference between that and spending every moment of every day of your life knowing you were born in the entire wrong body. The idea that people think anyone would subject him- or herself to a transsexual life out of vanity, or a "need for attention," or a sexual fetish, or any of the other things they come up with ... it no longer surprises me, but it still boggles my mind.