The Death of Imagination

So if it's easy to date when my one-sided romance with BB began, it's harder to say exactly when it ended. You could say it was last night, when clintswan got me to acknowledge that I need--for myself, if not for him--to tell him that going forward I'm not aiming for being anything more than friends. You could say it's tonight, when I actually deliver that speech. Or maybe it's Thursday, when I spent the whole day resenting him for, basically, not being something he never asked to be. Or even just after midnight on Tuesday, when he told me baldly "I don't really ascribe a lot of thought or feeling" to making out with anyone, me included.

At any rate, sometime this week. Let's say today, which gives us a total of 76 days or just under 11 weeks. Some of it was fun, a lot of it was awful, none of it was really easy. That's a clue, isn't it? If romance is this much work, then it probably means you're trying to force something into existence that isn't meant to be.

Realistically I know that declaring something over doesn't make it over. I'm still going to have lingering feelings for who knows how long. Part of the reason I'm telling him, after all, is so that if I need to not talk to him for some weeks or even months he'll know the reason. I promised him friendship and I intend to keep that promise if I can.

What else is there to say really? Overall, I'm content with how I've handled things. I wish it had all been less painful but, as Steve Buscemi's character says in one of his earliest film roles, "Wishing is for whining self-pitying assholes." Actually, scratch that. Because if there's anything I'm particularly proud of from this latest tangle with Eros it's how I've been making a point of being kind to myself. I have a tendency to call myself "stupid" for loving too early and too well. But that has nothing to do with smarts, it's just how I'm wired. I can't brain myself out of that tendency, I can only become more aware of it and try to check my behaviour as I go along--not by berating myself but by being realistic and doing calming exercises to dissipate some of my anxiety and help me redirect. Hopefully, the next wild ride will be less pain and more ecstasy.

So I'm not off this roller coaster yet, but at least the drops have become a bit less vertiginous.

Last Friday we chatted about mangoes and persimmons and I told him I'd text the next day about getting together. To avoid spoiling my nap, I waited until after 2 pm. It took him nearly four hours to get back to me (he took a nap, too), at which point I'd resigned myself to a night in. He proposed a nightcap but as we continued to chat, it became apparent that this would be late, if it happened at all, and when he finally concluded that this was probably not the night for it, I was frankly relieved. I'd been out the night before (though not too late) and the next day I had a holiday party and a birthday dinner.

We did chat a while about plans and he sounded eager to get together. Of the possibilities I threw out, he predictably chose the Christmas Eve get-together with some close friends. However, he also left the door open to rescheduling the nightcap for Wednesday evening at the bar near his apartment. Not only was the timing unusual (as a rule, he doesn't go out on school nights), but so was the location. "I would take that as a sex invite," clintswan said to me when I told him and I agreed. So of course I immediately started discounting the possibility of it taking place.

Thus it was no surprise at all that, when I reached out to him last night, he asked for another "raincheck". I'm disappointed, of course, and I woke up today grumpy because of it (and because the damn water was shut off to fix a plumbing issue). There's another world out there where Monday was a sex date with El Pasillero and tonight was a dinner with a newly-widowed friend from work and I didn't waste a minute of my time getting worked up over BB, but that's not the world I live in.

So the sex date with Pasillero didn't happen because the dinner--which could have been on Monday or Wednesday--had to end up conflicting with it. But the dinner went especially well. It was a restaurant both of us wanted to try and it was excellent and the conversation seemed to flow more easily than ever before. My widowed friend sounds like he's in a good place and I can claim a little bit of credit for that, which puts me in a better place.

Last weekend, when I was bitching to him about BB, I told clintswan I wasn't going to let some dumb boy spoil my holiday and I'm still committed to that. This whole affair is suffused with echoes--part of the reason I had that griefstorm, I think, is that some of the feels I've endured pining for BB recall how I felt back when my romance with Monshu seemed equally hopeless. But BB is definitely no Monshu. He's not even a Ragoton. Pining over the latter nearly ruined my Christmas in 2009 and it's those echoes that are helping me keep everything in proper perspective this time around. So maybe I can actually learn from my mistakes?

So now for last weekend.

Friday night was the 5th anniversary of Monshu's death. I'd thought about getting together with my friend Mozhu or at least going to visit the scattering spot, but in the end I didn't feel the need for anything elaborate and simply burned some incense while I recited the Heart Sutra. The next morning, I reenacted what I did the morning after his death (also a Saturday, due to some calendrical quirk) and laid down for a bit in the room where he died. I felt reflective, but not particularly moved, and started to get ready to meet BB.

I'd decided to treat our rendezvous at a breakfast spot before heading over to JB's as a first date and approach it without any preconceptions about where it was going. I wasn't going to bring up anything we'd shared in our moments of intimacy or try to steer the conversation toward weighty subjects. From that point of view, it was a complete success. We had an easy rapport, I learned a bit more about his mysterious past, and I was buoyant taking him to meet my friends.

At JB's I got my most burning question--whether he was still interested in fooling around with me--answered as well. We played footsie under the table and stole a few furtive deep kisses when left alone. He hadn't been exaggerating when he told me he was lousy at boardgames, but he greatly enjoyed playing them. At about 5 pm, he rushed home to take care of his dog and I stayed to keep playing and catch up with a friend I hadn't seen since before lockdown. JB eventually ended up ordering pizza so we could keep playing into the evening.

It was probably about 8:30 when I left to walk home. I felt blissful; although I considered popping my head into Touché to see some friends, I soon decided it would be an anticlimax to a wonderful day and instead just sat in the frontroom savouring all that had happened.

Sometime after this, things took a turn.

I was in bed listening to music. Talking about 80s bands with the young-uns had put me onto a nostalgia kick and I found myself playing the first side of Upstairs at Eric's in its entirety and wishing I had BB there to share the experience with. I began to get moodier and moodier, found it hard to sleep, and soon it seemed every song I played was making me want to tear up. It seemed inexplicable given that everything that day had gone as well as I dared hope.

The next morning, it was worse. I woke up feeling completely bereft and didn't want to stir from the bed. I managed to complete the very basics of my routine but soon I was under the covers again. I moped around the house all day and got nothing done. Well, I did call my mother, but I was only half listening to anything she said. I tried texting BB but we couldn't get beyond mere banter. I went to bed feeling miserable and began deliberately playing grief songs until I was sobbing almost uncontrollably.

So what happened? I have a couple of hypotheses:

One is that this was a simple case of delayed grief. I wasn't really neutral about Monshu's yortsait, it's just that looking forward to a good day with friends allowed me to delay dealing with it. Once I was alone again, it all came flooding back all the stronger for having been damned up.

A more complicated explanation is that something about my experiences on that day triggered the grief. After BB left, the party was down to me, JB, Hildy (the friend I hadn't seen in ages), and his husband. We talked about their wedding (which due to lockdown we hadn't been able to attend) and Hildy and I had a good conversation about sex with friends v strangers in the kitchen.

In retrospect, I wonder if being alone around couples (JB's husband wasn't there but of course he came a lot in conversation) combined with the anniversary to tap into my fears of being alone indefinitely. I liked the feeling I had of being in a couple with BB, even though we aren't, and thinking that we might never be (which is honestly the way to bet) depressed me. There's no set time limit to find someone, but I guess I felt I'd be further along that track five years on. Instead, this year has brought me only a brief crush which ended disastrously (back in June and I'm still resentful), a mostly unsatisfying summer fling which ended that day with the guy's return to the Southwest, and my crush on BB.

Then there's the possibility that it's specifically my crush on BB which is making me miserable. The weekend after I returned from St Louis, he told me he just wanted to be alone and though I told him I understood I was pretty bummed. I ended up going to a house party and pumping our one mutual friend for info on him. "Don't lose your heart to this guy," he warned me. His take is that BB is looking for to have fun and not much more. And he's probably right.

But I've been through this whole journey in my head over the past six weeks as my mind keeps spinning possibilities and then trying desperately to rein myself back in. Frankly, having a week or two where I wasn't constantly checking my phone for a word from BB felt like a relief (hence my reluctance to get back in touch). I feel resentful of him for "doing this to me" when really I'm doing it all to myself, and that realisation turns the resentment back onto me and this flawed emotional makeup which repeatedly leads me to take crushes too far and then have to keep constantly consciously checking myself. It's tiring and it's no surprise that the strain should lead to bouts of depression.

Sorry if anyone was concerned but it seems that due to some password changes my Dreamwidth posts haven't been crossposting to LiveJournal. Not that I've made many posts, mind you, but it hasn't been an entire year! (Not including occasional me-only posts which are mostly related to linguistic projects of mine that aren't ready for primetime.)

I have actually been thinking about posting here again since this weekend reminded me that there's still a fair bit of junk from the last six or seven years that I haven't fully processed and this might not be a bad place to do it as I prepare to start therapy in the New Year. It's very targeted, designed to help decrease my œsophageal sensitivity, but because all this shit is connected my therapist wants to start off with a couple of CBT sessions to clear out any old trauma before we start working on that (since hypnotherapy apparently doesn't work well on trauma).

Nothing really bad happened--I had a very good day Saturday, in fact--but suddenly my emotions did a 180 and I became a depressed wreck. I'm still not sure what the actual trigger was or how much that matters; sometimes there's just a lot of grief under the surface and it doesn't take much to bring it to the surface. But it behooves me to make an effort to find out. Stay tuned!

I don't know if I'm really dreaming more or more vividly than I was before or if my pandemic schedule just allows me more times to lie abed and revisit the dreams I do have. Last night's was a recombination of mostly familiar elements (travelling abroad, getting lost inside a confusing building, inappropriate nudity, etc.) but with some unusual details and twists (notably hurtling myself at the ground with the intention of seeing if I'd die and missing), enough for me to remember it long enough to set it down here.

I was outside my bedroom door and noticed that the near end of the downstairs hallway was completely blocked with dirty laundry and cardboard boxes. The laundry was mine; it looked like Clint had emptied out the laundry room and dumped everything in it here. I don't know where the cardboard boxes came from. I was annoyed and wanted to charge right into his bedroom and speak to him but I couldn't figure out how to get through the blocked hallway. I looked for an alternative route and when I came back, there was enough space for me to squeeze past the clothes and boxes.

In the real world, the laundry room is located just past the door to the second bedroom; in my dream, it was located just before it, as a kind of anteroom. I stepped inside and became disoriented. I even looked around for the wheeled laundry hamper I knew was now in the hallway. I either stepped into another nearly identical small square room or the room I was in had altered because there were now cryptic signs on the walls. I had a choice of two closed doors. One opened into a short hallway that could have been in an SRO, the other into an identical small room with no other door.

I stepped out into the hallway and soon became aware of a few things: After a few meters, the hallway opened into a large room with a desk in the middle, there were people at the desk, and I was wearing nothing but socks and a pair of white cotton briefs. I deliberated briefly before deciding just to plunge in. Not only did I stride into the larger room, but I leapt up onto the desk itself.

The desk itself was at least three meters on each side; it appeared to be made mostly of steel and glass, as did the surrounding room. The overall impression was of an elite financial firm or a television studio. Three or four people, all men in suit and tie, were working there. Not one of them looked up as I half-slid across it in my stocking feet. On the far side, I could see a glass box with a desk and five or six occupied chairs set slightly below the level of the floor. I went up to it and tried to see if I could find a way in but I couldn't, so I circled back.

A bit to the right of where I remembered the desk being, a handsome mustachioed man in a brown suit and tie with a dark gold dress shirt was talking to what appeared to be a pandhandler. From the way the man was dressed, I knew he was German and I was in Germany. After cheerfully saying something to the panhandler, who I believe was in a long wool coat, he turned and headed up a lane to his right.

With nothing better to do, I decided to follow the man in the suit. I brushed off the panhandler and turned into the lane, which was hemmed in by woods on both sides. It seemed to be a sort of wide path covered in white gravel. At first, I had to pace myself in order not to follow the man too closely, but as we proceeded the trail became steeper and soon I found myself struggling to keep up. The sides grew into steep banks. At one point, I heard people behind me and turned to spy a small party at least twenty meters behind.

When I turned back around, the man in the suit was gone. Even though I could see at least 100 m ahead, I assumed he'd left me behind and began to hurry forward, but I heard a commotion from the party behind me and stopped. When I turned around, I saw them clamouring and scratching away at the gravel with their hands. Apparently someone had fallen into the road. Thinking it might be the man I'd been following, I went back to help them dig.

We uncovered a life-sized mannequin and tossed it aside. Even deeper into the gravel, we found the man in the suit, whose name was evidently "Erla". He wasn't moving and the white dust made him look completely ashen. I grabbed him under the arms and pulled him up facing me. After I gave him a good squeeze, he came to and began thanking me for saving him (which I thought was a bit unfair because the people who couldn't see had done more). I sat on the ground still holding him wondering what was going to happen next.

After a bit, I turned to the two women standing closest to us and asked them if they'd called an ambulance (in German, though the word I used for "ambulance"--Krakenlastfahrwagen--doesn't actually exist). They said no and didn't seem too concerned by this. Even amongst themselves, they were talking in a mixture of German and English.

Finally, Erla and I stood up and began to walk back the way we'd all come as if nothing had happened. The path soon led into a kind of shopping mall food court. There were no food kiosks but there seemed to be quite a range of vending machines. I saw one of the women go up to a soda machine and buy a Coke. I realised I was hungry and began to look over the other machines for one with hot entrees. Instead, I found one that seemed dedicated to a particular brand of chocolate candies and I started looking at the choices in detail.

When I looked up, I realised that I'd lost track of the others. I tried to head back to the centre of the food court but suddenly I was in an auction house and all I could find were large galleries of antique furniture for sale. Pretty soon I realised that any attempt to find my companions would be futile and just started looking for a way out. I went upstairs to find another storey much like the one I was on. Then I found an enclosed staircase. Two young white men were mounting the stairs and I caught enough of their conversation to realise it was some kind of right-wing trollery. I made some kind of crack to let them know what I thought of them and expected it to lead to a confrontation, but it didn't. When I reached the room at the top of the stairs, they were no where in sight. I went up another short flight and found myself on the roof.

It was hard to say how high I was above the ground--probably at least nine storeys up. Below me there seemed to be mostly pavements. I decided I was tired of all this pointless pursuit and was going to hurl myself off the building to see what happened. At this point, I was fully aware I was dreaming because I recalled how--despite what people said--I'd died in a dream before and simply continued dreaming afterwards. Would that happen again? One way to find out.

I felt my clothes flapping as I fell; apparently I was wearing some sort of jacket or coat though my chest was still bare. Instead of plummeting, I began to soar. I was losing altitude the entire time, but the building seemed to be at the head of a long slope so it was a while before I got close to the ground. I flew over a huge empty parking lot and then over a twisting rural road. The signs on either side seemed to be in a mix of Spanish and English. Finally I saw an anti-Trump sign entirely in Spanish and decided I must be in the southwestern US.

I finally swooped into a kind of large ornate cage which seemed to be used for animal fights, bullfights maybe. I tried to climb to the top of it in order to take off flying again but I discovered that the upper side, which I thought was open, was actually covered in a fine wire mesh and I had to climb down again and slip out near the bottom. There were a couple of Latinx around but they seemed not to notice me. Then I noticed a heavily-laden truck and decided to climb on top of that to use it as a launching point instead.

Almost as soon as I'd gotten a handhold, the truck started moving. Undeterred, I kept climbing. It was piled so loosely that it was like climbing a pile of laundry or the inside of an impossibly tall clothes closet. I kept worrying that one of the stacks would collapse and send me plunging to the ground. Before that could happen, though, the truck stopped to take on more good, apparently some kind of cheap plastic containers. I jumped off and found myself inside a sort of small warehouse and, looking for another way out, stumbled into a closet-sized room and decided to wake up.

It's interesting how much my recent experiences have changed my attitude toward certain situations. It used to be when someone went into the hospital I would be anxiously but guardedly hopeful. "I know this looks bad, but it will probably be alright, won't it?" I'd lived through two miraculous recoveries in my 20s: first my mother flipping her car on the interstate and walking away with more more than some broken bones and then my ex having botched surgery, falling into a coma and spending almost a full year in the hospital, and then making a complete recovery. So it was natural to view the best outcome as a distinct possibility.

Now it's, they're going into the hospital? With those symptoms? Better have POMA, a DNR, and a will all ready and I'll start preparing myself. Once I'd finally pressured Urso into giving me a decent account of his situation I knew how bleak the picture was. I expected we'd have him around for another couple years at best and already started planning my next trip out to see him. In the end, we didn't have two weeks and that trip may still happen but he won't be at the end of it to hug me.

It was a long night. Once it became clear where things were headed (you're not called to a hospital in the middle of a statewide lockdown to visit your friend if the medical team expects you'll soon be taking him home in anything but a box) I swore off sleep because I knew it was going to be a long night. One of Urso's best friends I stayed on a video call with until he told me he was ready to try to sleep. That was 1:30 a.m. I woke up at the regular time and tried to go back to sleep but the messages kept coming in from the group he set up for video chats and then the announcement went public and the posts started to come in and I kept reading them, crying, pausing, and then finding new ones to read.

I was so disoriented by the afternoon I had to ask my flatmate if it was time to feed the cat who was obviously begging to be fed. By four p.m. I was back in bed in a completely dark room. <lj user=clintswan> came in to sit with me. I talked out my grief until it was possible for me to look at photos and feel more consolation than grief. Then he brought me a gift of cookies and edibles from the neighbours which I took upstairs to eat and found them outside under their heater. We spent the rest of the evening hanging out and chatting and it did me a world of good.

I still need to distill my feelings down to fit the more concise demands of FB before I consider posting there. It's hard to explain just why I feel as privileged to know him as I did. It's not just because he was a legend on SF Bear scene (and beyond), it's the reason why he was a legend. Clint and I both joked about being mourned in spite of our abrasive personalities. But I tried to remember ever hearing Urso run anyone down to me and I simply couldn't. I literally could not recall him having a single bad word to say about anyone. In this scene, that is like walking into the bar and finding someone who's never had a drink or smoked a cigarette.

People were drawn to him and he had a knack for drawing those people together. Months ago now, he set up a Messenger group for video chats and invited me to it. Even with him out of the picture for a while ("like the host of the party falling asleep in the back bedroom" as I rather saltily put it) the group kept going. When we got the news early this morning it immediately made the transition from shitpost central to a support group for everyone who needed it. It'll be interesting to see how long this persists; certainly, whatever happens, some of the blossoming friendship there will.

There's a lot more to say but, as my friend Charlie reminds me, no rush to say it. You don't find out what a loss like this means right away. I'm only just beginning to really learn what we lost with the death of Urso.

Well, it was bound to happen eventually: We have a COVID case in the building. I thought it would be the flight attendant, but surprise! no, it's the young woman who just gave birth.

I shouldn't say we have a "COVID case". What we have is someone who tested positive for COVID. She's still not showing any symptoms, so there's still the possibility of a false positive. My chances of having been exposed are slight, but they exist: Saturday, in the course of coming and going, I passed within a few feet of her and we chatted briefly. And there are other vectors as well: Her daughter plays with my porch neighbours, who I occasionally share food and tools with.

In a sense, I'm, if not glad, a little...reassured? I was concerned that we'd all gotten lax in our habits over the summer--completely understandably, of course. It's hard to maintain vigilance when nothing much happens. It's unnatural to be around others and not interact with them--especially a child, who can't really comprehend illness, let alone something as abstract as a pandemic. This is a wake-up call, and hopefully it came before anyone else got infected.

Like everyone else, I'm just so weary of this regimen. This afternoon, before I got the news, I try to think forward to how I would spend my evening, realised it would be the same way I spend almost every evening, and I had to think of something else before the ennui started pressing down on me. I wish I could just skip ahead to January. The nerve-wracking election season (with prolonged postelection uncertainty and chaos, possibly featuring armed insurrection) would be over, the transition would be underway, and a vaccine would most likely be in sight--three or four months away, perhaps, rather than half a year. As a bonus, I'd skip a number of death anniversaries in the bargain and the disaffection of holidays without family and friends.

But short of a coma, that's not an option allowed anyone. The price of being alive is having to live every day. I know I'll get through it--and that there will be little rewards and joys along the way---but I just don't care to, that's all.

I've been meaning to do a writeup on how I spent the past weekend since--if my attempts to recall how I spent my birthday last year are any guide--I won't remember otherwise. Everything happened more-or-less as I outlined in my previous post: I lazed around on Saturday and managed to miss every single attempt to call and wish me a happy day but one. I think my family were holding off in order not to interrupt a nap and then from about 4 p.m. until midnight, I was basically continually socialising.

It was a lovely lovely day to be out in JB's back four. We spent a languid couple hours on the deck listening to the wind in the trees and the sounds of our own voices while sipping sparkling wine and eating zesty orange-banana cupcakes. The weather predicted thunderstorms, but apparently the line broke and they went to the south and the north. As the first drops fell, Big Red and I hustled into a car driven by JB's husband, who brought us back to my place, but they never amounted to anything more. To my surprise, I found the whole porch decked out in blue and yellow streamers and suddenly Clint's impatience as I delayed my departure made sense.

I brought out the Missouri cheeses my brother had sent me and the cocktails paid for by a pal and distributed them among the five of us. Dr Balzac's Other Gay Friend came by and we got an appetiser of thin slices of grilled zucchini and salty ham rolled into roulades accompanied by leipäjuusto. For the main course, our chef had pureed the avocados he'd asked me for the day before and frozen them into squares, which he plated and covered with succotash before laying perfectly cooked fillets of crispy-fried sockeye salmon (which I'd also given him) on top. The succotash was what really impressed me: I was like, "You peeled favas for me?" "Don't expect us to do it again!" shot back Dr Balzac.

I bummed bourbon off of them to make cocktails with the Amaro Sfumato Rabarbaro for me and Big Red. He was one of the last to leave, well after Clint had gone to bed, leaving just me, Dr B, and the OGF. I'd preempted a contentious political discussion by beginning a game of Categories shortly before my sister called and I picked up just as she and her kids were leaving a raucous rendition of Happy Birthday on my answering machine. Then came the OGF's stunning fresh fruit tart, which I insisted on Instagramming.

The odd thing to me in retrospect is how a few small tweaks--inviting a new person, going somewhere else for a bit--made the whole experience feel fresh. I've been hanging out with these folks on that porch on the regular for weeks now, and yet it all felt special. I really couldn't have asked for anything more than that.

When I first met Chest Rockwell (I believe the year was 1995 or 1996), we had both just recently joined the Great Lakes Bears. I'd only recently learned they existe and he'd only recently relocated here from the Northeast. The organisation had been growing explosively and their annual event, Bear Pride, was starting to become the tail that wagged the dog. The officers realised that the bylaws--written for a smaller and looser organisation--had become outdated and asked for volunteers to form a committee to revise them.

I joined because I thought it would be a good way to meet folks. I imagine he thought the same thing. I don't recall who else was on it except that ubiquitous Bob Singer, who I recall functioning as committee chair (whether officially or otherwise). We met maybe a half-dozen times at Reza's in the evenings to hash out the document, which was approved with minimal discussion.

I liked Chest from the start. He was only a year or two younger than me and already seemed more confident. We had a lot of interests in common, not least among them daddy bears. Chasers were a small contingent in those days and it felt like most of the members were bears-seeking-bears, so it felt good to have an ally. I suppose we could've seen each other as competition instead, but that was so contrary to the Bear ethos that it never occurred to us. Those were the heydays of GLB and Bear Pride and we soon became "Bauchbrüder". He became someone I would seek out at every gathering. We developed a greeting ritual consisting of running at each other dramatically and falling into furious feigned snogging. We traded intelligence about the Bears we had had or wanted to have or who we wished wanted to have us.

And this was how I came to glimpse the first hints of the bitterness that would later consume him. I remember the disastrous Bear Pride of '99, the first of three at the Mistake on the Lake. Monshu had just broken up with his boyfriend--three short months after dumping me to reconcile with him--and I was furious. I went to the Welcome Party, only to find his ex there, so I sought out Chest. But he was equally upset, ranting about being ignored by the older daddies whose attentions we were unsuccessfully angling for, who he venomously called "paedophiles". (Like me, he was rapidly closing in on 30.)

Shortly after that, our paths began to diverge. Monshu and I got back together and decided to close our relationship. His ex requested that I keep my distance from the Great Lakes Bears--never mind that I'd joined it years earlier, I had Monshu now, so what did I need it for? I didn't need the aggro (and I did have Monshu), so I stayed away. (There were also rumours that Chest's boyfriend had spread gossip about me, hoping to break them up so he could sleep with Monshu's ex, but I never knew whether or not to give those any credence.) The death of a popular president of the organisation robbed it off some of its soul and Bear Pride crested, its attendance dropping annually until it ceasing to exist entirely a few years back. Chest had a partner and they moved out of Rogers Park to a cheaper apartment that no one wanted to go visit.

A few years later, LiveJournal became a new haven for Bears. I'd joined it in ordered to see locked posts from a RPG pal but soon stumbled across acquaintances from the GLB and began reconstructing something of my social circle online. Chest was soon part of it and began sharing his work woes with us. He'd graduated from law school with crushing debt and the need to pay it down in order to keep from losing his licence led him to work for some dodgy firms. I began to see much less of his carefree side and more of unease and resentment.

This reached an apotheosis on a disastrous trip to the southwest. Their car broke down in the desert and he went to LJ to beg for help, but none was forthcoming. In response, he soured not just on his acquaintances in the vicinity but all of beardom. It became an event that he regularly referred back to during his frequent rants about the lack of community in our community.

Our friendship didn't survive the transition to Facebook. He posted screeds, I attempted to engage, he got annoyed and eventually unfriended and then blocked me. I didn't take it personally because he wasn't the only one and he was still cordial on the very rare occasions when we still saw each other. At HiBearNation, we even greeted each other in our old flamboyant style. But when I ran into him this spring at C2E2, just before the pandemic nuked all social intercourse in Chicago, he was distant, chatting briefly for form's sake but not intending to rekindle anything. I, buddied with an exciting new friend, shrugged it off and moved on.

So he was just about the last person I expected to hear about this past Saturday when I went over to friends' apartment for a socially-distant chat. He'd come to their attention in just about the worse way possible: by retweeting white supremacists. I wish I could say I felt more shocked, but it seemed like a logical endpoint for his trajectory. He'd always felt entitled to more professional success than he achieved, so there must be some explanation for his failure to achieve it that put the blame on others.

I feel sorry for his remaining friends. Reportedly, some were sticking with him and trying to talk him back off the ledge. (My friends didn't stick around to see how this turned out and don't hold out much hope; one didn't seem to think he was long for this world.) I wonder if what pushed him there was more bad news at home, since his husband's health problems were another frequent theme in his litany of complaints. It's a sad ending to a relationship I once really treasured, but some things just can't be helped.

Today I'm dealing with some shit. Out of the blue, the president of my high school (who's held the position since I was a student there) sent out an email with a link to a list of confirmed molesters among the the members of the order who ran it. At least three of the names were familiar from my years there and two of them--not coincidentally, the two I had the most interaction with--were no surprise. (One was reassigned to a different establishment where he no longer had contact with minors and then left the order shortly after; you don't have to be Sherlock to understand what that trajectory means.)

The cover letter said this was being shared "in a spirit of sorrow and accountability". So I fired off a reply to the effect of, "Where's the accountability for the enablers. You know, like yourself?" I was about to hit send when I had second thoughts.. I'm not sure why; I guess some residual goodwill from when I still looked up to him? Not to mention that it felt somewhat like kicking a man when he's down.

But some men deserve kicking. After all, he's still occupying the exact same position of authority despite what's finally come to light. He only sent the letter because it was required of him. (The list was for the entire order; every president or principal probably had to send out a similar letter.) Most of all, he took no measure of personal responsibility for things that happened when he was in charge.

For all I know, he put a stop to the abuse as soon as he heard about it. But--crucially--the perpetrators were never held publicly to account. Every listed member who served at my school is deceased or no longer a cleric; I don't know that any were ever formally charged (and I googled the living one every couple of years, which is how I know what became of him). No one contacted me or my classmates to find out what we might have been subjected to.

In my case, it wasn't much. One incident, basically, where a brother came up to me while I was studying in my dorm room and gave me an unexpected backrub. Inappropriate, a little confusing, but not deeply upsetting. Certainly not compared to knowing that the Assistant Principal and latter Principal of the school was fondling students while the President played dumb.

And that got me thinking about the wider effects of these incidents. The focus is always on the direct survivors--as it should be, because what they go through is devastating. But what happens to those around them is not nothing. To be put in this impossible position, where you know that crimes are taking place but you don't feel like you can stand up to the authorities that are allowing them to happen, if not outright perpetrating them. How do you make your peace with that?

One friend my age, who saw similar bullshit go down at a different school, said that it destroyed his sense of "mentorship" (since the "mentoring" relationships he observed were just covers for sex with minors). A classmate from the same school said the revelations had him questioning one of his own mentors who spent a lot of time tutoring him one-on-one. What were his motives? How lucky was he that ultimately nothing happened to him?

It's all complicated by the fact that, at the time, I was just coming to grips with my own sexuality. I even tried flirting with the principal once. Either it was so clumsy that he never noticed or he wasn't interested so he never let on, I wasn't sure. Let me tell you, it did wonders for my self-esteem. How fucked up is that? To feel rejected by a molester? But I knew he had no ethical objections to sex with students, so what did it mean that he didn't want to have sex with me?

I didn't mention any of this in my letter. I kept it short and bitter: Hey, remember that time my best friend tried to talk to you about the principal's shenanigans? 'Cause I do. You knew and you pretended not to, so fuck your false piety and your "spirit of sorrow". And--by the way--thanks for your contribution to making me an atheist who thinks your entire organisation should be burnt to the ground and the ashes dumped in the sea.