![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It's been a strange month.
A year ago June 18, after a week of being intensely sick, I turned bright yellow with what I found out a few days later was Hepatitis C. June 25, the weekend before Pride, I had my first shot of interferon which started 6 months of chemotherapy with intense mental and physical side-effects.
This year, the week before Pride, the day after Folsom Street East, I flipped out. I became intensely stressed and paranoid, I couldn't sleep, intense nightmares, I was having mild visual and aural hallucinations, and all I wanted to do was hide. This is extremely unusual for me, actually it's never happened before except as a side-effect from drugs. It took me about two days to figure out that it was probably a form of PTSD triggered by the one-year anniversary of the beginning of that horrible time and associated with the changes in the weather.
Things have gotten a lot better since that week, I'm no longer maintaining a constant level of xanax in my bloodstream and the nightmares have diminished but I still find myself feeling like a character in a bad time-travel SF film - my reality flickers between the reality now and the attenuated-but-still-intense reality from a year ago and I have to maintain an awareness and consciousness that this is happening and make a clear choice to remain here, to cement my being here, to look around and see that everything is OK, good even, and then breathe deep and take the next step.
I can say that it's just something I have to deal with that I can't control more than I am, yadda yadda yadda, but it disappoints me because I had thought that my daily life would be enriched and amplified by comparison with my memories of the same time last year, not dragged down by it. Whatever. My life is good. Very good. I have much to be thankful for.
The new bathroom is almost done, I've taken showers in it the last two days and I have to say that the decision to put in a 12" rain shower head was a good one. To stand under it and go "oh, this is SO fabulous!" without even thinking about it is a good way to start the day. The marble tiles look great, the granite looks even better (it looks like petrified wood) and the room is full of soft natural light in the mornings - which I love.
We've had a friend's dog staying with us this week. It's been good because it's totally removed any idea of us getting a second dog. Cooper's a great, sweet, expressive dog but each day that goes by he seems to be getting more and more stressed out. The visitor is a Shiba Inu - a small, pretty, smart, friendly (but expressionless compared to Cooper) dog who doesn't bark and isn't intimidated by Cooper (he loves to play with Cooper - there's "Chase Me!", and "I BITE YOUR NECK") but now in the evening Cooper won't eat until Nico is done and Cooper can go sniff his bowl, and anytime I pet Nico, Cooper throws himself inbetween us.
In this season of Pride there have been a lot of postings in my friend's journals about things they've seen in other people's journals about the usual self-hating "It's the faggy fags in Pride parades that makes things bad for everyone else" and a recent posting by michaelnolan about the awfulness of the term "straight acting" (the creepiness of which I am completely in agreement with.) I guess I've done well in arranging my life because I'm reading about a "gay world" that I just don't see, where people are berated and excluded for being too masculine, where there's an epidemic of normal, masculine guys acting nelly just to fit in, and where people even think about the relative masculinity of their friends and acquaintances on a day-to-day basis. Wow. Who knew?
A while back I went to Bear Trek in Danbury Ct and one of the things I brought home was a copy of _The Fabulous Sylvester : The Legend, the Music, the 70s in San Francisco_. Reading the book I thought about how traditional my life has been compared to his and actually made me want to be more queeny - not to fit in, not to be accepted, but instead to be more *fabulous* because of my reaction to reading about people where my response is "how *fabulous*!". One of the accounts that I loved in the book was how Sylvester's mostly straight band picked up his way of talking ("Oh Honey, Miss Tommy peed ALL OVER her solo tonight!") - just to fit in, I suppose.
It's an extremely well-written and well-researched book and makes me ache for a time that I missed out on, the same way I felt the first time I read through the _Tales of the City_ books. I feel so under assault these days, there is so much hatred directed at us, I have to remember that things were even worse back then. And that living in the NYC metro area I'm safe and protected and can live my life openly and without fear.
This weekend is all about finishing the construction - putting up hangar bars in the new closet, putting up light fixtures, attaching knobs to the new vanity, staining and finishing the new doors, and then hosting a party on Sunday for Ernie's BMI friends. Clean the house just so it can become trashed again. How little has changed since college.
Week after next is Bear Week in P-town. I haven't met any of my gym goals and I'm desperately downing carbs to fatten myself up but it's not working. But I love P-town and I love the beach and I am staying with great friends and I'm so excited I'm going to pee myself.
Life truly is good.
A year ago June 18, after a week of being intensely sick, I turned bright yellow with what I found out a few days later was Hepatitis C. June 25, the weekend before Pride, I had my first shot of interferon which started 6 months of chemotherapy with intense mental and physical side-effects.
This year, the week before Pride, the day after Folsom Street East, I flipped out. I became intensely stressed and paranoid, I couldn't sleep, intense nightmares, I was having mild visual and aural hallucinations, and all I wanted to do was hide. This is extremely unusual for me, actually it's never happened before except as a side-effect from drugs. It took me about two days to figure out that it was probably a form of PTSD triggered by the one-year anniversary of the beginning of that horrible time and associated with the changes in the weather.
Things have gotten a lot better since that week, I'm no longer maintaining a constant level of xanax in my bloodstream and the nightmares have diminished but I still find myself feeling like a character in a bad time-travel SF film - my reality flickers between the reality now and the attenuated-but-still-intense reality from a year ago and I have to maintain an awareness and consciousness that this is happening and make a clear choice to remain here, to cement my being here, to look around and see that everything is OK, good even, and then breathe deep and take the next step.
I can say that it's just something I have to deal with that I can't control more than I am, yadda yadda yadda, but it disappoints me because I had thought that my daily life would be enriched and amplified by comparison with my memories of the same time last year, not dragged down by it. Whatever. My life is good. Very good. I have much to be thankful for.
The new bathroom is almost done, I've taken showers in it the last two days and I have to say that the decision to put in a 12" rain shower head was a good one. To stand under it and go "oh, this is SO fabulous!" without even thinking about it is a good way to start the day. The marble tiles look great, the granite looks even better (it looks like petrified wood) and the room is full of soft natural light in the mornings - which I love.
We've had a friend's dog staying with us this week. It's been good because it's totally removed any idea of us getting a second dog. Cooper's a great, sweet, expressive dog but each day that goes by he seems to be getting more and more stressed out. The visitor is a Shiba Inu - a small, pretty, smart, friendly (but expressionless compared to Cooper) dog who doesn't bark and isn't intimidated by Cooper (he loves to play with Cooper - there's "Chase Me!", and "I BITE YOUR NECK") but now in the evening Cooper won't eat until Nico is done and Cooper can go sniff his bowl, and anytime I pet Nico, Cooper throws himself inbetween us.
In this season of Pride there have been a lot of postings in my friend's journals about things they've seen in other people's journals about the usual self-hating "It's the faggy fags in Pride parades that makes things bad for everyone else" and a recent posting by michaelnolan about the awfulness of the term "straight acting" (the creepiness of which I am completely in agreement with.) I guess I've done well in arranging my life because I'm reading about a "gay world" that I just don't see, where people are berated and excluded for being too masculine, where there's an epidemic of normal, masculine guys acting nelly just to fit in, and where people even think about the relative masculinity of their friends and acquaintances on a day-to-day basis. Wow. Who knew?
A while back I went to Bear Trek in Danbury Ct and one of the things I brought home was a copy of _The Fabulous Sylvester : The Legend, the Music, the 70s in San Francisco_. Reading the book I thought about how traditional my life has been compared to his and actually made me want to be more queeny - not to fit in, not to be accepted, but instead to be more *fabulous* because of my reaction to reading about people where my response is "how *fabulous*!". One of the accounts that I loved in the book was how Sylvester's mostly straight band picked up his way of talking ("Oh Honey, Miss Tommy peed ALL OVER her solo tonight!") - just to fit in, I suppose.
It's an extremely well-written and well-researched book and makes me ache for a time that I missed out on, the same way I felt the first time I read through the _Tales of the City_ books. I feel so under assault these days, there is so much hatred directed at us, I have to remember that things were even worse back then. And that living in the NYC metro area I'm safe and protected and can live my life openly and without fear.
This weekend is all about finishing the construction - putting up hangar bars in the new closet, putting up light fixtures, attaching knobs to the new vanity, staining and finishing the new doors, and then hosting a party on Sunday for Ernie's BMI friends. Clean the house just so it can become trashed again. How little has changed since college.
Week after next is Bear Week in P-town. I haven't met any of my gym goals and I'm desperately downing carbs to fatten myself up but it's not working. But I love P-town and I love the beach and I am staying with great friends and I'm so excited I'm going to pee myself.
Life truly is good.
