Thursday, April 28, 2011

April 2011

You all know who I am, and make my sexuality into a sports game.  Am I gay or am I straight?  What do YOU think?  Truly, I’d like to know.  Am I not good enough to be heterosexual?  Or am I just an inveterate liar, a lesbian who just can’t face up to herself?  Periodically, you get to relieve the boredom of your lives with parlor games of double entendre conversational exchanges.  It’s like the old blues lyrics, everything has a sexual connotation, undertone.  Well I haven’t eaten yet.  Maybe that’s why I’m angry.
The truth is, I’m gifted with a philosopher’s mind, tend to tilt at windmills.  After my three year sojourn in the lesbian feminist community, I got bored, decided I was bisexual.  Moved from West to East Villages and actually got to act on that principle.  But that was the hothouse period of notoriety in lower Manhattan, the years of Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Talking Heads and Television.  As with others like me, I took the risk of living on the edge, the only location where life exists.  And with the experimental, nonjudgmental community around me, it seemed only natural to go where desire led.
And now, in utter isolation, in the no man’s land of Newburgh, I ponder the locus of any social life I’ve yet to construct for myself, outside of cyberspace that is.  Can I move into Facebook, in some weird sci fi Hollywood phantasm be sucked into my computer screen and be happy at last?  In my philosopher’s mind and masculine adventures, I know I am seeking a feminine counterpart.  Are there any feminine men who have not already been absorbed into homosexuality?  I can assure you they are not readily available in straight social circles.  So even though most of my recent amours have been male, I’m wondering whether as a masculine woman I can find a greater receptivity in the women’s community.
But I can assure you I wouldn’t be going through this enormous soul searching if you had not imposed it on me.
So with insect eyes hidden in every corner, and my most intimate moments made into highway billboards, I must clear everything with you, and life slows down almost to a standstill.  I cannot risk anything social, even a phone call, without being exposed to the way in which you would choose to process it.  I had been watching the acerbic Chris Matthews, but then decided that Wolf Blitzer was more benign.  I can assure you I’ve enjoyed some hysterical moments thinking of myself as Muammar Khadafy or even more recently Osama Bin Laden, with a close friend being alluded to as the deserting Moussa Koussa.  (Just the name itself is funny.)
The truth is, there’ve been only two moments in my life when I was genuinely happy.  Most of my life has been an accommodation to ostracism and mental illness.  St Jude should welcome me into a partnership for all I’ve invested in lost causes.  In my quarter century sojourn in Mensa I’ve consistently tried to inject vitality into its social calendar, with no enduring success.  Too, I’ve been active in church communities for even longer, and as a return on my investment, was greeted with glares and avoidance the last time I attended Sunday worship.
So this is a little longer than my vowed 500 word entry and I could go on even longer still.  I had wanted to make an intellectual argument for bisexuality, but it turned into a rant instead.  Good.  In the absence of friends and psychotherapy, it’s probably exactly what I needed.