Scatterbrained Ramblings

Well, I couldn’t take it anymore. I thought I was being so clever as I messaged the guy on FB and said, “Hey, I’ve got something to say to someone at the bar, but I don’t know how the person’ll take it. I know the person on FB, too. I feel like I oughtta talk to the person in person so I can read body language, but I dunno, maybe it’s better to talk online, away from people. What do you think?”

Suffice to say, he’s got good intuition and asked if I’d found somebody I liked. I told him yes and asked if I was that transparent. He said that’s what it sounded like. Okay, fair enough.

Then he asked me who it was, and I gave him my usual disclaimer about, “if you ask me a direct question, I answer honestly” and asked him if he really wanted to know. He said yes, so I told him.

Well, nuts. He reaffirmed that he’s straight, and last weekend, he was “just talking shit.” That’s the bad news.

The good news is that he’s neither mad nor offended and good to stay friends, so that’s the second-best outcome it could have been.

All in all, it’s disappointing, but I’m glad it went as well as it did. Now I can get back to writing and stop being so damn distracted!

No time for poetry this morning, so prose it is. This has been on my mind off and on the last few days but particularly since I woke up.

I want to kiss your lips and feel your hands on my arms.
I want to unbutton your shirt and see what lies beneath.
I want to kiss my way down your neck, your chest, your abs.
I want to pull down your pants and everything else.
I want to nuzzle your cock, take it in my mouth—mmm, tasty wood!
I want to lick and suck and make it feel good.
I want to get you off and lie together in the afterglow, dozing off—how long? I dunno.
I want to wake up with you beside me, wrap my arm around you, pull you close.
I want to skip getting out of bed and just lie here with you.
I want to kiss your lips and feel your hands on my arms…

So I decided to get myself a Bluetooth keyboard for those days that I’m sitting bored at the laundromat and want to work on a blog entry or one of my stories. It just came today, and I decided to give it a shot. So far, I’m pretty satisfied; it responds well, paired really easily, and has a physical on/off switch so that I can leave it in the truck (let’s face it, I’m not likely to use it anywhere else…). So, all in all, I’m pretty happy.

Let’s see, as long as I’m here, I might as well update everybody. I’m not dead, for one thing; I’ve just been working feverishly on my next story. I don’t know what I’m going to call it, yet. The working title is, Title TBD. How incredibly original. Anyway, it’s at just shy of 62,000 words, so it’s definitely getting up there. I’ve got a few chapters left, so we’ll see how far it goes. Plus, I’ve decided to make this one a series, and I’m already having ideas for what is gonna be in the second book.

In other news, regarding my entry the other day, I feel better. I talked to some friends and got some good feedback. I’m gonna talk to him about it when we can talk in private, and I’m gonna keep it light-hearted so that there’s plausible deniability, if need be. If he reacts well (which I really hope he does), then we can figure out what the fuck to do about a bi guy being with a straight guy. I’ve never done it before, so it’s completely uncharted waters for me. I’d sure like to explore it with him, though.

Anyway, keyboard test is done, TV dinner is waiting on me to take it out, stir it, and put it back in, and I’m starving, so I’m gonna sign off. Just wanted to see how the keyboard worked, and so far, it looks like it does pretty well. I do wish it had an escape key, though… First-world problems…

I gotta go to work, but this has been weighing so heavily on my mind the last few days that I gotta get it off my chest.

I mentioned in On Helping When You Can that it was an interesting night on Saturday.  What I didn’t mention I started to write and then stopped, but it’s just eating at me.  There was a guy at the bar I like.  I’ve seen him there quite a few times.  He’s straight, and so I haven’t really made any advances or anything.  I’m pretty hell-bent on not making people uncomfortable.  Well, Saturday night while we were talking, he mentioned to me that if he ever were to “go gay,” it’d be for someone like me.  In my slightly intoxicated state, I smiled, said, “aww, thank you!” and left it at that.  I remember thinking that night, “I’m not touching this with a 50-foot pole.”  He’s a cute guy and a guy that I might actually go for (my relationship history has been…not great), but if he was just mouthing off while drunk, if I were to bring it up again, I’m sure things would get real awkward real fast.  He’s at the bar a fair bit, and I wouldn’t want to make it uncomfortable for us to be there at the same time.

On the other hand, if he was sober enough to know what he was saying, what if it was a quiet invitation?  Worse than losing the opportunity would be making him think that I’m not interested, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

And so I’m torn and have been ever since: do I say something?  Do I let it go?  Part of me is tempted to talk to a mutual friend of ours, but at the same time, if he hasn’t said anything to anybody else, I don’t want to out him.  Argh, this sucks!

I’ve been through it in my head.  He and some of the others occasionally go back to smoke.  I’m a heavy smoker: I smoke maybe two cigarettes a year, and maybe a hookah if some friends are going and invite me along.  Consequently, I don’t go out back to smoke very often.  But I considered getting a pack and inviting him out for one so we could talk about it.  He’d say, “I didn’t think you smoked,” and I’d say, “I don’t normally, but what I’ve got to say deserves one.”  He’d look at me suspiciously, my gut would hurt, and I’d take a drag.  I don’t know the exact words I’d use, but at some point, I’d end up going in for a kiss—in some versions, a peck on the cheek and a shy smile before I disappeared inside, and in others, lip-to-lip contact.  In most versions, though, it ends with him saying something to the effect of, “whoa, dude,” putting up his hands, and things being awkward from there on out.  There is one version where it turns into a pretty awesome kiss, though.

Fuck, I need a cigarette just from thinking about it.  My nerves are so on edge right now, and I’m not even going to the bar.  This sucks.  I gotta find somebody to talk to about it.  Trouble is, my friends who are good advice-givers aren’t gay, and my gay friends are not generally very good advice-givers.  Why does gay matter?  It’s more complicated for gay-on-straight than gay-on-gay or straight-on-straight because the degree of rejection can be significantly worse, and sometimes even violent.  Not that I really expect that from this guy—I’ve already mentioned to him that I’m bi, and he was fine with that (said his best friend was bi)—but still…just…complicated.

Ugh, I gotta go to work.  As much as I hate traffic, I think that might be preferable to chewing on this…

I had an interesting experience last night. Two, actually. For one thing, I noticed that the knife they’re using at the bar to cut up limes is the worst kind of dull. I think you might have had equally bad luck with a butter knife, yet the bartender dutifully cut up something like 20 limes in preparation for last night’s karaoke. I had mentioned to her the other day that I needed to remember to pick up my sharpening steels when I went back to my roommate’s and asked if she wanted me to sharpen it for her. She agreed, and so I sharpened it last night. Not gonna lie, it was a little strange even from my perspective to be sitting at the bar, drinking a beer and sharpening a knife. But what can I say, I like sharpening knives more than I like using them, and as I said tin he guy next to me, if you have the power to make something better, do it.

Now, the guy I was talking to used to work at the bar as a bartender (and was my favorite before he quit unexpectedly). I found out he’s coming back, which suits me just fine. He makes some really good drinks and is generally a really nice guy. Between you and me, he’s mighty easy on the eyes, too.

Anyway, before I get carried away on a tangent, I’d better move on. There was another guy at the bar, also a nice guy, and apparently he didn’t hold his alcohol very well. Big guy, so kinda surprising; he didn’t have that many drinks that I saw. In any case, he got so drunk he was lying on the bar. That obviously wouldn’t do, so the guy I’d been talking to had to take him home. I didn’t think much of it, but then he waved me over and said he needed help. Turns out he needed me to drive the guy home and then ride back with the other guy. This I did. Got him home safely, but he was saying he was gonna go visit his girlfriend. I tried to talk him out of it before I left, but I’m not sure if I was successful or not. I hope so. He was a nice guy, and I hope he didn’t do something really stupid.

I got back to the bar, and the guy I’d been talking to was really appreciative. It feels really good to be the hero, even if it’s something as simple as sharpening a knife or driving somebody home. I didn’t even get a thank-you for the knife, but I know what I did, and that’s what matters. I am curious to know how the knife does; I’ll have to ask next time I go. I hope it’s like sliding through butter; it was sharp enough to shave my arm…

What do you get when you mix a hopeless romantic with a hopeless idealist? Well, me, or course. It is my blog, after all…

Anyway, the thought occurred to me the other day as I was walking in the pasture.

After years of being by myself—completely by choice—I was beginning to think that perhaps I was incapable of loving another human being. My animals I love dearly and hug and kiss a lot (on the shoulder or neck…), but I just don’t feel that way about people, or at least I never have. It was getting me down. I’ve been a bit of a hopeless romantic my whole life (as I’m sure my writing shows). It’s bad enough believing there is nobody out there for you, but let me tell you: it is far worse to believe that there is someone out there for you, but you are incapable of loving and appreciating him.

That is a truly depressing thought, and it has weighed on my mind a lot this year. Perhaps it’s living in the camper and truly being completely alone, or perhaps it’s the whole nesting instinct that I’ve heard comes over people in their 30s, but although I’m still fiercely independent, the idea of being alone for the rest of my life is beginning to sound pretty awful.

Enter the hopeless idealist. I’m sure my writing reflects this, too: the bad guys get their comeuppance, the good guys end up together, and everybody lives happily ever after, just as Nature intended…well, okay, maybe not Nature or God, but at least as I intended. And since it’s my book, I have decreed that things shall end ideally, and thus it was written, and this it was. Hehe.

But I digress… Enter the hopeless idealist who believes that you shouldn’t settle for mediocrity and combine it with my pragmatic nature that says that while you can fit an initially square peg into a round hole through the great effort of carving it down and making it round, it’s a terribly inefficient and wasteful way of going about it when a little more searching might actually find the correct peg. And since these are people and their personalities we’re talking about, it’s probably not good to go whittling away at them. That’s got to be unethical.

When you mix these together, you get someone who has a pretty specific idea of what happily ever after looks like and won’t settle for less. And that person ends up alone because there I no such thing a perfection, and depending on how high you set the bar, it’s pretty easy to rule out everybody. Compounding the trouble are the issues of proximity, awareness, and mutual attraction. I consider myself a pretty good guy, but I’ve got flaws—lots of them—and it begs the question that if I were to overcome all the issues of distance, awareness, and impossibly high standards and actually find the perfect person, why would that person choose me? That’s not low self-esteem talking in case anybody’s worried—I’ve had my years of beating myself up and am over that—but it is practical. I mean, if you’re the perfect person, you can have literally anybody and can afford to be choosy.

Of course, everybody’s definition of perfect is different, and so maybe the guy I see as perfect is less than perfect to many, and his self-esteem has suffered for it or he’s started needing a nest and has settled.

One thing I am not is a hopeless optimist, but it is encouraging—I think—to be back to a point of believing that I can over and appreciate someone else once I find someone worthy of it.

Damn, I sound stuck-up. Maybe I am, or maybe it’s that practicality, idealism, and hopeless romanticism talking. If we’re supposed to live happily ever after like the romantic believes, then practically speaking, it’s not going to happen if I jump into a relationship with the first guy I see and we’re not compatible. We can work through the little things, but the idealist won’t suffer huge incompatibilities, and from experience, we’re going to be miserable.

Maybe another year in self-imposed time-out will have me more receptive…

Candles set alight:

A new life is beginning.

Burn brightly, my child.

Candles burning bright,

Filling the room with sweet scent,

And warming my soul.

Candles extinguished:

It’s such a very sad smell,

Like childhood lost.