The Death of Imagination

So what am I being a baby about now? Something that happened at the monthly cocktail party last weekend--or rather didn't happen.

To explain, I'll have to go back a month. At the previous cocktail party I was stressed. I ended up inviting too many and the first hour was just me running around trying to take care of everything--making sure there was enough ice, the newbies knew where the glassware was, nobody was trying to open a bottle with a hammer, etc. Eventually, things calmed down and I was able to enjoy myself, but in the meantime I bitched to a lot of people about how annoying it was.

One of them was my new friend Hot David. He suggested I hire someone for next time and I told him that if that's where this was headed then I wasn't interested. I said I would be willing, however, to ask some of the regulars for help. Like maybe assign one of them to keep an eye on the ice bucket, another to make sure recycling wasn't going into the trash, etc. He encouraged me to do this and offered to come early to help out himself.

Flash forward to Saturday afternoon. I sent a message to a chat group with a dozen of these friends (all couples) and Clint in it, prefacing it by explaining how poor Clint was sick and couldn't fulfill his usual duties. At first, I got no response. Then someone asked what Clint had--not because they were concerned about him but worried they might catch something. He replied saying he had a "stomach bug" and one-by-one I watched half of them cancel.

It was deflating to say the least. Oh, and how do I know they weren't concerned about Clint? Because not a one asked what they could do for him, nor has a single one of them inquired about him since. What makes it all the more baffling is that most of them spend these evenings on the back porch anyway and they all know the layout well enough to know that Clint's bedroom and bathroom are downstairs, so their contact would be minimal with him even inside.

I reached out to a friend for support and he basically took their side. I told him I understand that they might have legitimate health concerns, but the fact that none of them asked what they could do without attending (e.g. doing an ice run or something) made their decisions feel awful selfish. (But, you ask, haven't they checked in with me to see if everything turned out okay? Also no.)

We were supposed to meet for brunch this coming Sunday, but you know what? I just don't feel like it. I'd have to deal with them all telling me, "Sorry I didn't come on Saturday BUT..." while I sat there with a sympathetic expression on my face not saying what I actually thought. To hell with them.

Oh the party? A smashing success. I made a point of not mentioning it unless the other person brought it up or had explicitly asked me to remind them and that kept numbers down to a reasonable three dozen or so. I actually got to talk to everyone and even make some fun cocktails and one of the guests took over the kitchen to make some warm appetizers without me wanting to kill him. Hot David made sure someone was answering the door and El Huevón showed up with an extra big bag of ice, despite having spent the entire day getting sunburned at the state fair. You don't need a lot of friends, just the right ones.

So today's good-new bad-news is a really doozy. The good news is that, after literally years of trying to hook up with Chef Bear Italia, we finally managed to find time last Wednesday. He came over around 4:30 and we spent a wonderful evening together.

The bad news is that I got a text this morning informing me that he'd passed away in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.

The most upsetting thing for me is probably that it's only a fluke that I even found out. A friend of a friend looked at his mutuals on FB, saw my name, and forwarded me a text from another mutual about his sudden unexpected death. If that hadn't happened, I'd probably have texted him tomorrow or Thursday about getting together again and then just assumed he was blowing me off again when I failed to get a reply.

It's all such an unlikely chain of coincidences that we met at all and managed to stay in touch over 15 years. Our friendship, such as it was, outlasted both of our relationships. And now--just when it was possibly blossoming into something else (he asked me that night if I wanted to date him), it's been cut abruptly short forever.

Just one more reason to hate this stupid month.

Benty's advice to me yesterday, when I texted him from the depths of a morning funk, was "Focus on work. Formulate a plan of attack for you home goals." Which is excellent advice, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, the anxiety at being left hanging is taking a real physical toll. The last decent night's sleep I had was Friday night. Despite this, I was able to rally yesterday and remain pretty alert at work, only really fading during the last hour.

Today, not so much. I didn't even finish my morning tea. My eyes kept shutting as I drank it and I thought to myself that if I thought there were any chance that I'd actually be able to go back to sleep, it would be worth calling off the morning and staying home. But if I couldn't sleep from about 3 a.m. on, what reason was there to believe I'd be able to sleep at 10 a.m.? I forgot that I'd washed my hair the day before and washed it again. I forgot to take my pills with me. I took a stupidly long time to decide what shirt to wear. And we're not even going to talk about the effects on my bowels.

What's most annoying is how disproportionate this physical reaction feels to the actual level of disappointment. Nu, so you met a guy and it didn't work out. That literally happens every day. But I have to remind myself that every defeat summons echoes of the ones before. That's how my brain moves so seamlessly from "This seemed promising but didn't pan out" to "You will be alone forever". Every new opportunity is freighted with way more baggage than it can be expected to bear.

So if you'd told me two years ago that my response to eventually testing positive for COVID-19 would have been a shrug of resignation, I'm not sure how I would have responded. At the time, I was confident that we'd ultimately get the upper hand over the disease but I was still prey to a lot of anxiety over it. Even earlier this year, fully vaxxed and boosted, I had plenty of worry. (I chose not to attend my sister's 50th birthday in no small part due to fear of transmission on airplanes and in airports.)

Thanks to the vaccine, my experience was (like many other's) little worse than a cold. I had one particularly bad day at the onset with a fever close to 103℉ followed by two days of feeling just regular bad and since then it's been pretty much just coasting. I still don't feel 100% but I'm not sure at this point how much of that is a combination of things like allergies, the heat wave we're in, and struggling a bit to get my sleep schedule back after over a week of remote work.

I'm still ambivalent about the CDC's guidelines which basically amount to "if it's been ten days and you're asymptomatic we're just gonna assume you're over it". After months and months of admonitions to do all we could not to spread the virus, this feels a bit like giving in. I'd feel better if I'd tested negative, but now the information I'm getting is that the chance of a false positive is too great to make further testing worthwhile--again, quite the reversal from earlier messaging.

When I told folks I'd been with over Memorial Day weekend, the most common response was "Furball, right?" Of course it's impossible to say with any certainty. From the Welcome Party that Thursday to Sidetrack on Mem Day itself, I was at a lot of large gatherings with minimal masking this weekend so there was no shortage of opportunities. Moreover, it's moot at this point; I knew from the onset that going out during a time of high community transmission was risky and I don't know that I would have stayed in even if I'd known with certainty that I'd catch the virus. So no regrets.

Was I bummed to have to cancel so many events (including a concert I'd been given free tickets for, my cocktail night, and a friend's birthday)? Of course. It felt especially frustrating that just as the social season was really picking up and I was getting the nourishment my extrovert spirit needs we had to suddenly slam on the brakes. But--as BB pointed out--it's still early summer, there's lots more to come that I will be able to participate in.

Speaking of BB, I was at first very disappointed by the prospect of not seeing him before he left town. Then I began to think that maybe this wasn't such a bad thing, as it would give us a longer break. Now it looks like I'll be able to see him after all (he and our mutual buddy invited me to dinner with them tomorrow) and I feel fairly neutral about it. The important thing to me was that after initially being kind of shitty about me getting sick he eventually came around.

Crucially, though, I wasn't focussed on that because I had enough other friends get in touch, many of whom with very generous with their offers. At least a half dozen offered to do errands for me (I let one pair bring me back dinner from H Mart and another friend get my prescriptions for me) and others kept in touch to check on my progress. And all that's without making any sort of public announcement, just mentioning my status in passing.

Who I feel worse for is poor clintswan, who most definitely got the virus from me and is now stuck in isolation through the end of the week. He started isolating right after I tested positive so in total that'll make at least two weeks for him. And though he never felt as punk as I did at the beginning, he's suffering loss of taste, and I'd take a day or two of fever over that any day of the week. He's not resentful toward me (I asked if he wanted me to go into strict isolation and he said no), which is good, but I think that may get tested if I start going out and having fun tomorrow without him.

Well, I'm back again which can pretty much only mean one thing. I'll try to follow this post up with one about all the truly positive things from IML Weekend, but I just need to process the stinky parts and this seems to be where I do that these days.

So the big dance party was Furball at the Metro. I was last there three years ago and I remember it being pretty amazing. It also struck me as something BB would enjoy, so before I ordered my ticket I suggested he get one too. He took a little bit of convincing, but I promised that we would "drink, dance, and have a good time" and so he agreed to come.

A couple hours before doors opened, I began to realise just what he had to overcome to do that. His therapist has been urging him to accept all the invitations he can in an effort to have him confront his social anxiety and this was kicking into high gear as he contemplated being surrounded with buff bodies at a monster event someplace he'd never been. So I did my best to reassure him while preparing myself, traveling to Metro, and then waiting in the hour-long queue outside. Fortunately I had company for that, as a guy I know and his best friend hopped into line right behind me.

BB showed up maybe five minutes before they starting letting people in. At my urging, he'd worn his harness under his t-shirt but he was worried he hadn't put it on properly. We eventually ended up going to the vestibule by the upper balcony exit doors so I could adjust it for him. For the first hour, he never left my side while I showed him around and introduced him to what friends I knew were there.

I was pleasantly surprised when he finally relaxed enough to remove his shirt. There was a moment in particular when we were standing at the base of the stairs with my pals from the queue. He was in front of me looking away and I contemplated for a moment draping my arms around him but I didn't want to make him uncomfortable so I held back. A short while later, I was standing on the other side of my pals from him, chatting, and I glanced over and realised he wasn't there. I just figured he'd gone to get another drink. Finally, after maybe 20-30 minutes I texted him and he replied "I'm getting laid! Hahah"

I want to say I was happy for him. I want to actually be happy for him. This was, after all, an expected outcome of this kind of event, a vindication of my efforts to get him to come. But in the moment I felt wretched. I know we weren't going as a couple but, I confess, on some level I was enjoying the fantasy that we were. I also realised that I'd somewhat unconsciously made the focus of my evening making sure that BB had a good time, so without him there, I was suddenly at something of a loss.

I wasn't really getting any play, so I reminded myself that what I'd enjoyed most about this events in the past was dancing with my friends so I started looking for friends to dance with. But the old crowd wasn't there and the new crowds were small and scattered. I bounced from one side of the main floor to the other trying to find them and when I did it was underwhelming. When I managed to locate someone in particular I knew--someone who I'd danced with there before, who had told me just two nights before he was looking forward to dancing with me at Furball--he ignored me. I just couldn't figure out what was going on and realised I didn't want to. I made one last desperate circuit (my pals who had been stationed at the bottom of the stairs for at least an hour were suddenly nowhere to be found) and decided to go.

As a saving grace, on my way out, I ran into an opera singer from New York who I know and like and caught up a bit. He was similarly unenamoured of the music and preparing to leave as well. I ran into him on the street maybe ten minutes later with his best buddy; they were heading to Touché and graciously offered me a ride. I won't say it turned my night around, because my night was effectively over at that point, but it at least arrested my downward emotional slide. At least someone was showing some concern for my well-being.

I literally cried myself to sleep. I lay in bed, played some sad music (drawing the line at "How Soon Is Now" though!), and felt myself tear up before I drifted off. It was fitful sleep. At quarter to 7, I glanced at my phone and saw that BB had finally responded to my request that he text me when he was safely home about half an hour before. (I confess that the first place my stupid mind went to was that when he hooked up with me, it was also around 2 a.m. and he left after three hours, not four.)

Without trying to be too nosy, I asked some questions and found out some basic details. He had only a first name and no picture, so I don't know if this is someone I know or not. I also don't know if that would matter. In any case, we left it that we would chat more later. (I thought we'd have that opportunity Monday, when we had tentative plans to go to the vendor mart together, but he ended up bagging.)

The whole rest of the morning I spent lying in bed trying to sleep and being foiled by my anxiety. It took me a while to sort out what the source of that was. Jealousy, yes (I always thought I'd be the one to fuck BB in that harness, ever since he first sent me a picture of him wearing it the day after we met), but also fear. Fear that he was being taken away from me, that this new guy would become a regular thing and instead of jumping at my invites BB would soon be begging off to spend time with him instead.

I'm well aware that none of this is a healthy reaction to a good thing happening to a friend. It's humiliating to realise I'm not as over him as I thought or want to be and I don't really have a good solution. I talked at length with a couple friends that day and the next and--though they had good advice--they didn't have any remedy for the way I feel now. Not only will BB never love me romantically, this is further evidence that he'll never give me all that I expect from a good friend. (He did at least ask "did you get lucky?" but that was all and there's been no follow-up since.) And at some point, I need to accept that and reduce my investment or I'm just going to grow resentful.

Honestly, sometimes I wonder if that isn't the solution. I think about how I overcame some of my bad crushes in the past and often it was the eventual realisation that I was making someone a priority who had no intention of prioritising me and I deserved better. But this is a worse crush than those were and I'm kind of afraid of the level of anger it might take to reach that point. I honestly don't know where things go from here, but I know I need to step back and see what he's willing to do while I work on shifting my focus to all the better friends I've been neglecting for too long.

This was intended to be a somewhat lighthearted post about my misadventures with men, inspired by a week that features two strikingly similar online encountres with radically different outcomes. Unfortunately, I'm anything but lighthearted today. This isn't a full-on griefstorm like I had several weeks ago, but it's an unwelcome return to the former landscape of my life when most every Saturday was a lost day.

As I've explained it countless times at this point, Saturday is the day when it's least possible to escape the cold fact of the absence of Monshu. I did spend some time preoccupied with BB, who I might see tonight purely as a "friend" (though I'm increasingly being forced to acknowledge that what he considers "being a friend" has little to do with what I need from one), but I realised that's just my emotional defences trying to fill up the gaping emotional void with whatever's handy.

With any luck, the worst of it will pass before evening, I'll go out for a bit after more than a month of isolation and start adding to my dangerously depleted store of Humanity Points, and tomorrow I'll be able to make another attempt. And if I don't, you'll know the blue meanies got me.

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.

I suppose I was overdue for a COVID-19 scare. A couple months ago, I felt a bit overheated and broke out the thermometer, but my temperature was actually below average. Since then the weather has warmed up and my allergies have blossomed but without becoming acute enough to require medication.

I've also been exposing myself a bit more than I was before. It started the weekend before Father's Day with the barbecue. I was a little antsy for the next two weeks but showed no symptoms and relaxed a bit. Then <lj user=clintswan> arrived last Thursday to live with me, which was fine, except he brought along a friend I didn't know, which made me a bit nervous. Sure, he'd been isolating himself in rural Washington, but then he did just complete a cross-country trip through several hotspots. I was particularly dismayed after I learned from his Facebook that he'd made a sidetrip on the way to visit his relatives and the pictures he posted didn't seem to indicate much social distancing.

I'd hope to have the upstairs bathroom fully function so we wouldn't have to share facilities but didn't manage it. Despite being a sizable apartment, it's a pretty cozy arrangement. I did my best to maintain some separation without being too obvious about it, but it's so hard to navigate being a good host in the age of Coronavirus. Am I supposed to use tongs to hand someone a glass of water or Chlorox every doorknob every time? No, I just washed my hands a lot and tried not to fret.

He left on Monday and my new roomie and I started to negotiate a routine. He's been having more trouble sleeping than me, so when I woke up suddenly from a weird erotic dream around 3:30 a.m. last night, I figured I could count on him being awake, too. My heart was pounding and refused to slow down. My stomach was upset, but I figured that was due to to snacking too much during trivia. However, when I got up to pee, I noticed dizziness, aches, and fatigue. As I crawled back into bed, I thought, "Well, here we are. You'd better get your affairs in order."

I did my best to remain calm and went upstairs for the thermometer. The reading was normal (still a bit below 98°F). I thought about how, the first time I became seriously dehydrated, I mistook the symptoms for a summer flu. So I drank some water before heading back downstairs. But I still texted <lj user=clintswan> and asked him to bring me his pulse oximeter.

He showed up almost immediately with his comforting voice and reassuring presence. My reading was completely healthy: 98%. I thanked him and went upstairs for more water. It took me more than an hour to fall back to sleep, but when I did, I stayed out until nearly 9:30. I wasn't feeling 100% but my symptoms were no longer out of line with what I'd expect from mild summer allergies, disturbed sleep, and too many chips before bedtime.

While it wasn't a pleasant experience at all, the overall effect was to calm my nerves somewhat. Whatever I have to deal with in the coming months, I won't be going through it alone. That is a huge, huge deal.

I've been thinking all week about posting an entry here, which is to say I've been spending all week avoiding posting an entry here. There's a lot I want to talk about but the days go by so quickly and leave me with so little energy. Plus the background anxiety is manifesting as insomnia

Usually it's not too bad: Wake up at 4 a.m., take an hour to fall back asleep. But last night was awful. I woke up thinking it was 4 a.m. only to discover it was 2:20. Then I made the fatal mistake of checking FB, which was flooded with images of Minneapolis. It took me another hour of doing chores, reading, and stroking the cat to fall asleep again after that. I had disturbing dreams, woke up every hour, and finally crawled out of bed just before 11 a.m. feeling like I hadn't really slept at all.

I'd been planning a morning shopping trip--which probably fueled my anxiety--but that wasn't happening. I stumbled through half a day of work, did a little bit of gardening with the neighbours, who cooked me a hot dog. They're really helping me hold it together.

When Sis called Sunday, it had been nearly a month since we'd last talked, so a chunk of our conversation was about the contrast between what we'd thought we might get done during our confinement and how we're actually spending our time. She's doing more watching and less reading than she thought, but that doesn't surprise me because I always remember what mollpeartree said about watching the most television when her job was more exhausting, and keeping five boys busy in a twelve-room house has got to be pretty tiring.

I'm glad she reached out because I was--perhaps predictably--feeling pretty down. I saw other friends posting about family video chats and realised that, not only had we failed to organise anything similar, but that none of my family had reached out to me weeks. Right when things blew up, I called both mothers to check on them, plus my sister, and texted my brother, and that was the last I heard from any of them. I know we're pretty atomised, but I've long treasured how we pull together in a crisis. But not this crisis I guess.

Sis told me Mom is getting pretty restless, which hardly surprises me, and that she can't go anywhere because she let the battery in her car die, which surprises me even less. Our stepmom, at least, has neighbours to visit with. I know she's as thankful as I am that Dad isn't around for this mess; having him in a home right now would send everyone's anxiety through the roof.

The next day, I finally got around to checking my mail again. I don't expect much these days, but I had ordered a book from friends' shuttered bookshop in the hopes of keeping it afloat. I wasn't there but I found an unexpected package that turned out to be a handsewn mask from my SIL. I wore it day after for a walk with friends. I say a walk; what actually happened is that we rendezvoused on one street corner, went a block, and then made a loose pentagram while we yelled a conversation. Once we started getting chilly, everyone went their separate ways.

So I guess we're just going to see how long we can survive on this strange mix of online socialisation, phone and video calls, and kinda getting together but not really. Illinois is expecting the peak in hospitalisations to crest soon but it's not clear what happens after that in the absence of a proven course of therapy and testing regime, much less a vaccine.