OLD FLAMES
J. came over today for a day of Unemployment Fun; his temporary job had recently ended and he wanted to sit on his ass on a couch and play video games and watch DVDs. So we did that. It's worth noting that he showed up an hour and a half late; we didn't have a fixed-in-stone time to meet ("You said you'd be here to start wasting time at exactly 1PM!"), but still, it's a little amusing, especially because I used to catch unholy shit from him if I made him wait for five minutes for me somewhere. And he'd also cancelled this Day O' Fun on me twice; we were originally going to do it Tuesday, but he got a day's work thrown to him, and then we were going to do it Wednesday, but he hadn't finished the things he'd meant to finish earlier in the week.

Anyway, we had fun. And of course I'd hoped he'd end the evening by either engaging me in serious talk about where we went wrong, or just by jumping into my lap and saying "Fuck me," but in fact he ended it by realizing, at 7:15, that he was supposed to meet a friend at 8 in Manhattan. Woop. And so the curtain rises on another lonely night of reading Dostoevsky, obsessing over my list of the best CDs of 2004, and patronizing certain disreputable websites. Rock 'n' roll, baby.

I have the apartment to myself for the next few days; my roommate's gone for over a week but I'll have a houseguest starting Sunday. So that means you can probably expect to hear about some kind of internet-hookup-cruising misfire depressingly similar to last week's...
11:31 PM

ONE MORE TIME
Oh, and just for completeness' sake, I should mention that I also drifted off to sleep last night to the soothing sounds of my neighbor getting porked again. God is mocking me.
10:25 AM

NEW REASONS
Haven't written here for a while. Since the last time I did, I broke up with my ex, blew my chance to get anywhere with the other guy I had a crush on, almost immediately got back together with my ex, and then broke up with him again a little over a year later. Wheeeee!!! And now I kind of want to delete all of the previous posts, because looking back it's really hilarious that I was worried about the progress of my month-old relationship in the light of everything that's happened since. So please consider all the posts before this one to be the product of an emotionally stunted and hyper-immature dwarf who lives inside my body and seizes control of it when certain cosmic phenomena take place on the surface of the sun.

So. Now it's been seven months since I broke up with J. (the names I used to use are really bothering me, so I'm switching to initials). Frankly, I still miss him. We broke up on strangely good terms, and have remained friends ever since, and I see him fairly often. The problem with this is that we didn't break up because of any fundamental personality clash; of course we had our fights and issues but all couples do. No, we broke up because our sex life sucked. Out loud. He's an exclusive top and I am definitely not, or so I learned over the course of the relationship, an exclusive bottom. Basically, I wanted -- and it got to the point where I needed -- a chance to be the top, and it just wasn't going to work out; he tried a few times, bless him, but it always seemed to be ever so unpleasant for him, which made me feel guilty, but then that guilt stopped me from asking again, which made me resent him even more every time we went to have sex (which became less and less frequent over time; if you ever come across his profile on gay.com, and you see that it says "I like to have sex 3-5 times a week," feel free to take that with a grain of salt) and it was just assumed that I would bottom. Which I largely enjoy doing, but come on, no matter how much you like vanilla ice cream, you're gonna get sick of it eventually (and speaking of vanilla, he was a total clean-freak, which made even the most mildly adventurous things I wanted to try -- barebacking, rimming, etc. -- out of the question).

So at the end of our respective college careers, we broke up. He stayed in NYC, I went home for a summer and worked a stupid fun job, and now I'm back in town. And I'm unemployed. And I cannot seem to get a decent goddamn job to save my life. So I spend all of my time at home alone (my roommate's in school) in my apartment in the middle of nowhere in Brooklyn and I masturbate a lot. And now I really, really, REALLY want to get laid.

Today, I officially reached a breaking point. I woke up to the sound coming through the wall of the girl next door to me being robustly fucked. Then I started messing around with my gay.com profile, which I'd initially created months ago and never actually set up. And then I hit on the bright idea of looking for J., who I found immediately. Before we went out, I was a complete never-been-kissed virgin; I was his first significant relationship but he'd gotten around sexually before, largely through internet hook-ups. (I'd always wanted to know more about that side of him, but he would never share about it; I wasn't jealous, I was just really curious.) Now I've always assumed that, since we broke up, he'd gone back to that, but it was a little distressing to see that the last update on his profile came the day that I left NYC for home. We'd only been broken up a couple of weeks before that. AND that his primary picture is one where he's standing arm-and-arm with me, and I'm cropped out of the photo. That's just weak. All that said, he hadn't logged in to the site since mid-May, so I don't know if he's just been celibate (he has been working hard), or if he's found a new venue for hook-ups. I really want to talk to him about his sex life, and mine, but I strongly doubt we're at that level of post-breakup comfort yet. Like I started to say above before my incoherent ramblings cut off any opportunity to make the point, it kind of really sucks that I still like him, a lot, and that the only reason we can't be together is sex. I don't know how much he still likes me; the friendship's been awkward but tenable so far, so who knows.

Anyway. So I put together my little gay.com profile, and then I finally snapped and went over to Craigslist, which I'd been cruising for over a month, and ended up posting an ad for any bottom willing to help break in a top-in-training, tonight, I can host, etc. I specifically requested both face pics and somebody between the ages of 19-25. I got two responses, one from a vaguely creepy daddy figure who wanted to "spoil" me, which I promptly ignored. The other was from a black guy at Columbia, who sounded hot, but when he finally sent me his pic and stats he was older than 25 and still not showing his face. Plus he had dreadlocks, which, sorry to be superficial, kind of turned me off -- I'm really, really into short hair and really, really anti-long hair. But being a total newbie at this, I decided I didn't want to get involved with a guy who was both deliberately ignoring the age range I'd asked for and not showing me his face even when I'd sent him a pic of mine. He had an obnoxiously hot body, too, which made the decision slightly more wrenching than it should've been, but in the end I didn't reply to him any further. Instead, I ordered a pizza, played some Mario Kart, and ended up hating myself because god damn it, I finally could've gotten laid tonight, and I blew my chance for a bunch of stupid reasons.

And I'm writing it all in this blog because I've got no gay friends that I can babble about this sort of stuff with -- of my three gay friends, one is J., one is S., the guy I had a crush on and blew my chance with, who recently gave me a long rant about how awful it was that his ex tried to get back together with him (so he probably wouldn't be very supportive of my predicament with J.), and the other is M., a perfectly nice guy who doesn't have a clue about the sexual realm and who I've never talked about these sorts of things with before, so to suddenly unload all of it on him now could be disastrous to the terms and quality of our friendship.

I'd have done all of this in a LiveJournal, but I'm too old for that place now. And I'm still in my early 20s, so that's saying something.
10:38 PM

THE THRILL IS GONE
Well, I can't lie: the anxieties which drove me to post to this weblog have vanished for the moment. Updates will undoubtedly be sparse until I get something new and offensive to other people in my head.

I had an extremely good time with Atom in NY, and I'm very much interested in keeping things going with him again. The next time I'll see him will, in all likelihood, be in late July, when he comes to visit me here at my parents'. THAT is going to be an interesting adventure. I've only been out to my parents for a little more than a month, and they're going to be meeting my boyfriend. Woooooo-ha.

Aiding me in my commitment to Atom at the moment is that fact that Nick hasn't answered the nice conversational e-mail I sent him a week ago. Asshole.

I just read The Subterranean Journal Of Tom Coates. It's given me an overwhelming desire to put all of this stuff in somewhat more dangerous "full" view somewhere on my actual blog. I dunno. It frustrates me immensely that my weblog was supposed to be an experiment with full personal disclosure in a way that one can never acheive in your normal relationships -- things left unsaid, etc. -- and here I am submerging so many important and vital things about the way I feel towards myself and others. Self-expression? My crunchy arse...
11:48 AM

BAD THINGS
After waking up this morning, I indulged an extended fantasy involving Nick's presence in my bed with me. Thoughts of Atom provoked absolutely no guilt. This is baaaad.

Nick will also, apparently, be incommunicado for the next two weeks or so. Please, God, let that have a beneficial effect on me; when I couldn't "see" Atom for a while my interest waned. Maybe the same thing will happen here...? I know full well that Nick is just a mental scab for my issues with Atom but holy shit is he an appealling scab.

Three more days until I see Atom again. I'm starting to think that if he doesn't impress the hell out of me next week, then there's not much of a point in my continuing this... a while ago I was talking to one of my significantly older/wiser friends about this whole mess, and she said something that's stuck in my head: "Don't stay with a guy who doesn't make you feel special." A simple platitude but an effective one. Atom at this point just doesn't make me feel particularly special, or cared-for, or *gasp* loved. (That word has not yet entered our discourse, mind you, mainly for that reason). I'm not sure if it's in his nature to be at all demonstrative of his affection, and while I can understand that, I definitely can't live with it.

I wish that we'd been friends before we became involved, because it's gonna fuck shit up big-time if we can't be friends after this. We were introduced by our mutual best friend. I'd really like to not have to avoid seeing him in social situations... grrr.
1:03 PM

AIN'T IT ALWAYS THE WAY
Desperately bored, I put out a call on my other blog for my various friends in town to call me this week, knowing full well that there was one person who reads the blog who to be quite honest I wasn't terribly excited to hear from. Ah well, I figured, maybe he won't see the message...

Of course he was the first one to leave a comment on the post.

I'm gonna have to bite the bullet and go out with him some night, aren't I...?

I'm also gonna have to bite the bullet and post about him sometime, aren't I...?
8:09 PM

FOR FUCK'S SAKE
And of course I can't even start a stupid secret confessional blog for myself without Blogger giving me massive shit. It keeps "forgetting" that I typed in the code for titles on my blog template. FUCKING GRRRRRRRRR. I refuse to re-edit the template again... they'll probably just appear on the page three weeks from now.
8:38 PM

OH, WOE, WOE, WOE, BLAH BLAH
Ah, I knew I'd find it in my heart to bitch some more.

And make no mistake, this blog is probably gonna be nothing but wall-to-wall bitching. Whenever I find myself with a little moment of joy -- for example, I had one tonight -- I write it about it on my "main" blog, since there's generally nothing offensive to my friends and readers about my being happy. If something about that changes I'm sure there may be little spots of chronicled happiness here. But.

It's interesting that I write this as though I'm addressing an audience and not, oh, myself. Since this is a private blog and I've told no-one that it exists. Oh well.

So my principal complaints today...

I had not one but two conversations with Atom today, which is well above the norm. I'm not one of those people who insists that their significant other call them every day. Though of course, I kind of wish Atom wanted to do that. Which he obviously doesn't. Talking to him on the phone is kind of a chore (not only because he mumbles, and only chooses to talk right after I've started saying something, making it impossible to hear him) and it kind of removes the passion and romance from the whole long-distance thing. In fact the passion may've started drifting very far out of the relationship at this point, on my end anyway, and often I felt like it was never there on his end -- or if it was, he wasn't going to, or didn't know how to, show it. Make no mistake, I desperately want to see him (only a week and a day to go now) and the first thing I'm gonna do when I see him is jump his bones... but the separation, in addition to making me become all melodramatic and stupid and emotionally self-indulgent, has given me a chance to realize that so far this has not exactly been one of the great love stories of our time. But then, we only had a month together, for fuck's sake.

Grrr. This relationship business is really fucking irritating. I liked it when I could just complain about not having a relationship; I didn't have to work at that...

The other thing bugging me this fine summer's eve: Andrew. I went to the bookstore with him tonight (Bought Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, if you're curious; I can't believe I haven't read it yet), but we parted ways 'round 9:30 or 9:45 or so, at which point he announced he was going to try to rustle up two of our colleagues (I'm gonna call them Mephisto and Bruce, because it makes me laugh) for a game of poker, seeya. Now, Mephisto and Bruce are two of his oldest and dearest friends, and I'm sort of a johnny-come-lately to the whole group, though it's been five years now since I met them all. But it still hurts me a little, irrationally, that I'm not and probably never shall be "one of the guys" even though I'm friends with all of the guys in question. And I really don't have a persecution complex here whatsoever -- all of my friends have been astonishingly great about it -- but of course I chalk that up to my being gay, honestly. They play cards and shoot pool or whatever, and I don't. Humph.

I have never studied my navel for this long before. It's kind of unappealing.

One last note for the night, then I'm off to finish reading my damn book: you'll note that the specific details I've been mentioning now and again could very, very easily be used to link me back to my other blog. This page is covered in hints, in fact. I'm doing it on purpose, and I really shouldn't, since who knows, if the wrong people read this they could get quite angry... but my self-destructive streak sort of wants that, and God knows my hammy performative side wants the world to hear and see and Know My Woe, so I kind of can't help it. That's just how things are gonna be.
8:26 PM