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Adam Phillips

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  1. Adam Phillips
    I may very well be the most procrastinatin' slowpoke story-nonfinisher of a Hosted Author at this whole place. And I know I've driven a bunch of you crazy with my slow pace. Heck, I've probably driven some of you away with my slow pace.
     
    But I'm here to say that the conclusion to Crosscurrents will be posted some time tomorrow. You have no idea what a relief this is to me. Talk about your albatross. On the one hand, anyway. (See below.)
     
    Many if not most of you know that I've had the final chapter and epilogue of Crosscurrents written for months.
     
    But I didn't like what I had. I couldn't put my finger on what I didn't like; I just didn't like what I had.
     
    So I started all over on those last two segments, not even consulting the previous versions. Trying not to even think about them.
     
    And whaddya know? I got it told the way I want to tell it.
     
    Not saying it's a masterpiece. I'm just saying I'm good with letting the final chapter and epilogue stand as I've written them. They do what I want them to do. What I couldn't get the previous attempts to do.
     
    The epilogue in particular pleases me, because even in its conceptual stages--and all the way through the writing of the first version of it--I didn't like it. And that's bad. An epilogue has to be the capstone of the whole damn novel, right? And it just wasn't. It was going to piss off readers. It was going to leave them going, "Huh?" And going, "WTF?" And going, "Well, that sucks. Ten years I waited for that?"
     
    I may still get some of that. But at least when people say it, I won't agree.
     
    The story's going to end as it needs to. And I think as I've written it, it'll please many people who were not going to be pleased with the original epilogue.
     
    I've said that the conclusion to CC will be "inconclusive." It's still going to be inconclusive. It's still going to want a sequel, and it's still going to get a sequel. But it's the kind "inconclusive" that will allow the Faithful Reader to close the book--so to speak--satisfied.
     
    I've also told readers for years who were demanding surcease from Matt's drama and pain and a happy ending for him (they don't give a rip about Andy, and that's as it should be) that the ending wouldn't make them want to slit their wrists. That was the best I could do for them. I couldn't promise a happily-ever-after ending, because that's not how Crosscurrents ever imagined itself closing out. And anybody who took the Prologue seriously should never have even bothered to ask for a giddy-happy ending. The Prologue simply won't allow it. The Prologue, and the reality behind it, made that impossible.
     
    But. But, but, but.
     
    Everything lies in the freakin' delivery of the inconclusiveness. Not comparing myself to Margaret Mitchell or David O. Selznick, but that final scene in Gone With The Wind hasn't left decades of viewers grumbling about the ending. And it feels like the end of a movie. And It's damn inconclusive. And that's just fine.
     
    Day before yesterday it fell from the sky into my head how I needed to write the epilogue. After ten years of telling myself "I'll think about that tomorrow," and then refusing to think about it because I didn't know how to freakin' close the thing out in any way that was going to be remotely satisfying...it just came to me. And the weird thing is, it's not all that different from my previous thoughts and plans and attempts, all of which disgusted me. That tiny bit of difference, it turns out, makes all the difference in the world.
     
    Now that I've oversold and overhyped, you're going to read the Epilogue and go, "What's so great about that?" And the answer is, "Nothing." In the same way, when I first tasted my first cup of coffee made from the Geisha varietal--specifically the Hacienda la Esmeralda from Panama--It had been so overhyped, I went..."Well, yeah, it's very good, but...but...it's not the Second Coming. It's not God in a Cup."
     
    So in the same way, when you actually get to read the epilogue, you're likely to be underwhelmed because of my blather. I'm just warning you. What I'm saying is not that in writing the second version of the epilogue I became Steinbeck redivivus. I'm just saying that for years and years I couldn't get it like I wanted. For ten years, I couldn't even envision it like I wanted. And now it's come to me. Now it feels like the end of a book. Now it won't send readers screaming at me for an immediate sequel because Volume One was so unsatisfying. And that's good, because I'm not going to get to that sequel for a few books. Andy and Matt need a rest.
     
    Couple of other things.
     
    1) I'm gonna have to bypass my three proofreaders this time. I want it posted as quickly as I can get it posted. That means I don't have time to run it by my three proofreaders. Sorry, proofreaders. Wish you were here, lol. But I'm not sending you stuff and then pressuring you to get the damn thing turned around in five hours.
     
    2) The chances are good that I'm not going to make my self-imposed Sunday-right-before-midnight deadline. These last two segments need the vernix scraped off in the worst kind of way--they're not bathed and pretty-smelling and swaddled in a receiving blanket yet; they're straight from the matrix--and Sunday evening is family time. And that's sacrosanct.
     
    It's not impossible that I'll meet my deadline. But I'm more likely to get them posted Monday. Maybe Monday at 2 AM. Maybe Monday at 10 PM. But not later than Monday.
     
    I feel kinda weird. Talk about your long, strange trip. I'm not sure I'm ready to say goodbye to Crosscurrents. As I've more and more lately been willing to admit, CC is essentially autobiographical. In spite of the bi-jockboys-fall-in-love cliche. In spite of the people who say "No way bi guys ever get with all those straight guys like that." Look, how the hell was I to know I was a walking stereotype? I prefer to think of myself as exemplifying an archetype. But, you know, I don't care if you think my story is autobiographical, or if you think in real life I'm an obese woman living in a double-wide with two ducks. The story's the thing, and anyway, I've been pretty reticent about passing this thing off as anything but fiction until the last couple of years.
     
    But I digress. What I was gonna say is that Crosscurrents has been a part of my life since 2003. And now I'm bidding it farewell. I'm ambivalent about that. I'm not sure I like it. Still, 2013 is apparently my Year To Say Goodbye on a number of fronts. It sucks...but this goodbye, at least, doesn't suck so bad. I accomplished the goal I'd set of telling the story of my best friend and of my adolescent confusion. And that is immensely satisfying.
     
    I've made so many e-friends and acquaintances along the way. And, maybe more importantly, I've heard from so many people for whom Crosscurrents resonated deeply with their own experience. Over and over again, readers told me how deeply they've been touched by what I've written. What could possibly be more gratifying for a writer? Some of you know that I write for a living these days. One of several income streams. And I want to say that there's nothing in my career-writing that can remotely compare. That's just food on the table, a roof over my head. With Crosscurrents, I'm not even thinking about profit. It's one guy's heart touching other hearts. And apparently I've done that. Over and over and over again.
     
    Thanks for walking with me on the road, Faithful Readers. And if you're willing to keep walking, I think I have some new places for us to explore. I'm far from done.
  2. Adam Phillips
    I don't know what it is about politics that makes us all foam at the mouth. Sometimes--like the people who rubberneck at terrible auto accidents on the highway they're traveling--I can't keep myself from looking at the comments to political essays posted to the Internet, but most of the time it just depresses me. People are mean, hateful, and ignorant on matters of politics, and they seem to be enjoying being those things and beating up other people with those things!
     
    We had a politics-place in the Forums here once. And, predictably, it got mean and ugly too. And that's why we don't have it anymore and why we're not allowed to talk about politics here.
     
    I'm a team player and don't wanna tick anybody off. The good people here host me and they make decisions they feel are best for the health of the site. And I'm not gonna argue (much) with them...athough from time to time I poke a little bit of fun at the enforced "niceness."
     
    But a thread devoted to exploring people's visions of the future got locked here because people couldn't keep politics out of it...and something in me offered up a silent "hey, now, waitaminnit."
     
    How you gonna do a vision of the future without reference to politics? The state of income inequality? The environment? Etc., etc. At the heart of all our hopes and fears for the future are realties which are inescapably political. So I guess we just can't talk about the future at the Forums.
     
    Or the state of health care in this country and the rest of the world? This is no inconsequential topic, and it actually has some specific relevance to gay men as gay men, though not only to them. Seems like it would be something we should be able to discuss here.
     
    Or how about how society looks at and treats people of Our Community. Marriage is only one of the issues in this category. These have inescapably political ramifications, too, and seems like we could have some great discussion. But I'm not sure how to discuss these without venturing into politics.
     
    Is your state board of education trying to put non-science in science books, rewrite history for their history books, and legislate about the moral worth of gay people? Doesn't seem like we can talk about it here, because it inevitably involves politics.
     
    The more I think about this topic, the more subjects it appears we can't talk about here in the forums. Because politics touches us all over the place.
     
    Which leads me to wonder...instead of banning a topic from the site, can't we just warn people that the political threads will be aggressively moderated, and that we have a two-strike, or even a one-strike-and-you're-out policy regarding rudeness or incivility or flaming or whatever it is that has made political discussion taboo here? Maybe that would take up too much time from moderators, but would it take any more than they're having to give over to it now, locking down threads and warning people? That way the people who play nice would retain their ability to discuss, and the "problem children" would be escorted out and sent to the nursery to play with the Duplo blocks.
     
    And we could have a fun thread like "What's your vision of the future?".
     
    Just my wandering brain, wandering and wondering.
  3. Adam Phillips
    The people who've e-known me for a while, from looking at this entry's title, are already either grinning or rolling their eyes: Here we go again.
     
    I'm sorry, I cain't hep it.
     
    Tell you a little bit about how I got onta the Internet as a dirty-story-writer.
     
    Long time ago, I ran into a story at Nifty that was pretty weak technically, but absolutely compelling--at least to me--from a "story" standpoint. That story was called Fraternity Memoirs, and it was based on the college experiences of its author, who went by the screen name of John Walsh.
     
    The story tells of how a college freshman decides to pledge a "renegade" frat, and tells the story of his friendship with his frat Big Brother and of his...uhhh...relationship with another kid in his pledge class.
     
    One of the things that was masterful about his storytelling was his ability to convey the palpable sexual tension between him and his straight Big Brother. I was much moved by the portrayal of that friendship.
     
    I emailed John thanking him for his story. It was the first time I'd ever written to a "Nifty" author. I told him a little bit about myself: Bisexual, if I had to put a label on it, but in a serious relationship with a woman. We got to corresponding via e-mail, and he became a very good e-friend.
     
    He asked me to tell him the story of my first time with a guy. I wrote him a reply that took 3 emails from me.
     
    Somewhere along that time I had joined his Yahoo! group, a little reluctantly. He'd created it mainly because the lag time between his chapters was pretty significant, and he wanted to let his readers know when new chapters were coming out. But, as these things often go, his group became a hangout for his groupies, who lavished praise upon him (aka "licked his ass"). You wanna talk serious hyperbole, though--he had people comparing him to Norman Friggin Mailer.
     
    That was just over the top for me. I told him, jokingly, that hell would freeze over before I'd ever participate in the asslickfest which was his group. He laughed and replied that it was pretty over the top.
     
    After I'd been hanging out at his place for a while, though, it struck me that I had a story of my own to tell. I was a senior in college, and it was the spring of my senior year, and I was about to graduate and move south to go to graduate school. My gf--no, by this time she was my fiancee--whom I'd known since we were elementary school kids, attended college in a different city, but she was going to be entering medical school in the same city where I'd be going to grad school. Life was about to change for me, and I too had some things from my past that haunted me a little. I was feeling the need to put some closure--or some something--on my past, as I moved into my future, and I was feeling a little pensive. But there weren't many people I could talk to about it because it wasn't easy for many people to understand me. See, the thing was, I was a mostly-straight-guy who nevertheless noticed guys, and who had fallen in love back in high school with his best friend. That friendship was intact in college, after a 2.5-year period of alienation, but it was a little strange, and I had a sense that he and I were about to walk the proverbial diverging roads, and that before too long we'd hear from each other twice a year at best--then once a year--then once every two years, etc., and think of each other once in a while as "someone I used to know."
     
    God, it was killing me. But what was to be done about it? We were walking different paths. He'd gotten married that year--I was best man--and we weren't living in the same city anyway; and I was about to move even farther south.
     
    I needed to talk to someone about how it felt for me. How I'd loved him so much, and how it seemed as though there would be this dark and empty place in me from then on, even in the midst of the joy I was feeling as I began to make a life with the woman who'd agreed to marry me. But who can a guy talk to about loving a man and a woman?
     
    I got to thinking about how much I'd been touched by Fraternity Memoirs. I decided I'd like to write the story of myself and my best friend, talk about what happened, and put it up there at Nifty. In a way I just needed to talk it out, to Say It, as I put it sometimes. I guess, too, it was a love song to my high school buddy. I also had hopes that I might touch some reader as Fraternity Memoirs had touched me. I thought that maybe--just maybe--there might be a reader or two out there who knew what it felt like to be torn between the love of a woman and the love of a man; and maybe those readers might contact me and we could talk, compare notes, stuff like that. You don't feel like such a freak when you can talk to other people who can relate. So I took the three-email writing I'd sent John telling him about my first time with a guy, and I began expanding it. I entitled the story Crosscurrents and I submitted it to Nifty.
     
    I thought the name was perfect, because it described how I felt. Out there in the surf, pulled in two different directions, by two strong currents that came together at the same place--the place of me.
     
    I started getting emails almost immediately. From gay men who loved the story; and from bisexual men who got it on another level entirely, because they'd lived versions of it. That was tremendously gratifying.
     
    By the fifth chapter, Nick Archer from the Archerland gay-fiction site had contacted me and asked if he could host Crosscurrents at his site. I knew nothing about all this, but I liked Nick from his email contacts, and after some further inquiry with him, I agreed. Archerland is no more, but I'm now hosted here at Gay Authors.
     
    In any case, for the most part, I've enjoyed the reader email in response to Crosscurrents over the years. But from time to time I get letters either lecturing me, or confused as hell, because they don't know why "Andy" doesn't come out as gay, or why he's trying for a straight boy. I've also gotten letters telling me that straight men cannot be with gay men, can't love gay men, can't make love to them, would be repulsed by it, so the "Matt" character must be a gayboy in denial. And I've gotten letters ripping me a new one for telling a story about a "bi" man falling in love with a "straight" man. Somehow by telling a story like that, apparently I'm betraying the entire gay community (funny; I didn't think that as an author trying to talk about real-and-true things from my life I was accountable to any "community.").
     
    My point is, the only negative email I've ever gotten is from indignant readers who don't want to accept that a man's sexuality could be multivalent. Many of these indignant readers insist that bisexual men are just confused and/or scared gay men. And they neither concede the possibility of, nor approve of, a "straight" man loving--intimately--a "bi" man. And then there are the readers who want to know why I don't make it more clear that "Andy" is gay and that "Matt" is at least bi.
     
    What is this about? Why are people so determined to tell me what makes my body respond sexually, as if they know better than I do? I mean, I'm the owner of said body, right? I guess I know what gets my engine going, and I guess I know better than people who aren't me.
     
    I've also gotten this in response to a story I helped complete that's not even mine: Dan Kincaid's It Started With Brian. The story has been an intriguing one. It takes 26 chapters for Brian to admit to Sam he's in love with him. But in that very same conversation Brian makes clear that he's straight. Or, rather, he doesn't deny it when Sam says "but you're straight." Rather, he counters with, "But I love you." And this in fact is part of the dilemma, part of what keeps Brian at arm's length for years until he finally decides, to hell with the labels, I want Sam. But I have readers who have emailed me and they seem utterly unable to just let the story tell itself. They want to know why it took so long for Brian to accept his gayness, or they tell me they knew all along Brian was gay, or they figure he must be at least bi, or yada yada yada. I've received more email asking questions about the sexuality of these guys than I've had commenting on how cool it is that Brian is finally making an attempt to get the two of them where they should have been years ago.
     
    It mystifies me. Why does a label have to be attached to these guys? What's wrong with accepting the description that they give of themselves? Granted that some gay men have tried not to face their "gayness" and have hidden under descriptions that aren't accurate, why does this need to label have to attend the reading of the story? Can't the story just be the story? It's a love story, and it's a love story that happened. Why the urge to dissect and label?
     
    I ask this with some urgency, first of all, because everything I've experienced in my own life, and in hearing from some of my readers, and from research and reading I've done, suggests that sexuality is much too complex and nuanced to be adequately captured by the labels "gay," "straight," and "bi." Secondly, and maybe more importantly, in the story under consideration, it's precisely the oppressiveness of these labels that keeps Sam and Brian from opening up to each other, thus wasting years, and causing both of them years of pain. Both of them were attracted to women, Brian almost exclusively so; but both of them were in love with each other. It was an awful thing that the labels shamed them into wasting years apart that they could have had together.
     
    I should clarify that I'm not pissed at any of the people who've responded in this way to It Started With Brian. It does mystify me, though. I don't understand why so many people feel compelled to rush in and proclaim that a person is gay. Or straight. Or bi. It doesn't alter the fact that the story is a love story, and it only insults the characters involved by telling them they don't even know their own sexual responses.
     
    Okay, I'll shut up now. Some of my readers characterize my occasional rants as Adamic Blasts. I think that's unfair. I am warm and fuzzy everywhere.
     
    I do trim, though.
  4. Adam Phillips
    Well, I'm ready to finish up Crosscurrents. The final chapter and the epilogue will be posted no later than Sunday, July 28, at 11:59 pm CDT. I hope I still have a few readers who started reading when I started writing it, a decade ago.
     
    Wait. A decade?
     
    How did this happen?
     
    Let's see: In the course of a decade, I got finished with college, got finished with grad school, got a job, got married, started a business, had a kid, quit a job, went full-time at my business, took another part-time job, added another side gig...and had another kid.
     
    Whew!
     
    Along the way I met hundreds of wonderful people online and made some online friends that continue to brighten my life on a daily basis; I dealt (for the most part) online and offline with some internalized homophobia; I grew in my love for the two most important people in my life: I had my heart broken a couple of times twice through deaths and once through the loss of a relationship that meant the world to me; and I got a much better handle on my tendency to rip people new orifices when they piss me off. I'm not completely healed of that last tendency, but the signs are encouraging.
     
    Thanks, everybody who came along for the ride.
     
    I'm going to keep writing. And that brings me to the musings upon which I based this entry's title.
     
    The next works I post to Gay Authors (after I've finished Crosscurrents next week) will come much more quickly than CC did. I have two short stories already in progress at different places on the web. I'll get those finished first and bring the completed stories to Gay Authors. Then I'm going to turn my attention to the other story ideas I have.
     
    The two in-progress stories are called Brushfire and Tumbleweed Connections.
     
    Brushfire is about a twentysomething "straight"--and married-with-child--young college prof who is drawn to an airman at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. It's currently only at Tickie's place, though I've done a considerable revise which I haven't gotten him yet.
     
    Tumbleweed Connections is a scandalous little short about a twentysomething-young high school football assistant coach who can't get a certain 18-year-old senior football player out of his mind. There are four "chapters" posted to Nifty. There are one or two left to go.
     
    Those will be easy to finish quickly. I have several other short stories cooking in my head that I'm itching to get started on:
     
    One I'm going to call Piel Canela. It's about a staredown with a young stud behind a cash register at a local restaurant. This one will be primarily prurient in nature, so be careful who's reading over your shoulder at work.
     
    Lawnboy is an overdue literary keeping-of-a-promise to a longtime online friend. The title should give you the general ideal. As with "Piel Canela," there will be nothing morally redeeming about this piece. But hopefully it'll have a little art to it, if you're not too...busy to appreciate that kinda thing while you're reading.
     
    Remix will follow a young thirtysomething guy as he wakes up on some parallel Earth somewhere in the multiverse (think Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics) and discovers that the elements of his life--including some people--have been...well, remixed.
     
    Solve is a dark, disturbing story of love, obsession, loss, and pain, and of being driven toward a solution. A literal one.
     
    Small-Town Boys is a coming-of-age slice-of-life short that looks at four high school guys dealing with themselves, their peers, and small-town living. I think this a short story. I'll only know for sure once I start writing.
     
    Spunk is a triptych whose individual pieces are united thematically by that white gloppy stuff that gives this short story its name. This one may be the most abstract of all the pieces waiting to get written. Even so, it'll take the reader places. As you might infer.
     
    American Honey is about an unlikely love affair between a married thirtysomething artist and a small-town, newly-graduated high school guy who's headed toward the armed services. Although I have it in my head as a short story, this one may turn out to be a novel, and of all the stuff I'm previewing here, I need it to be the last one I get to. Some of it's already been written, though.
     
    I have another novel just barely begun. It's called Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters, and it's about that odd interstice between graduation from college and Starting Real Life. It chronicles one summer's misadventures between a Texas boy and an online friend from New York. Said Texas boy goes to meet said online friend at the top of the Empire State Building (oh, shut up; they're gay, okay?), and Mona Lisas lets the reader watch them live out and love out that summer (cue ABBA singing "Our Last Summer") (oh, shut up; I'm gay, okay? Or, at least I'm allowed to carry that card!). This is the story that's going to be the most difficult to write of all those I have in the lineup. But it too is a way of keeping a promise I made some years ago. I have one chapter of Mona Lisas--a prologue--up at Nifty. But I abandoned it years ago. I'll pick it up again and finish it off eventually.
     
    A novel that has some considerable life in my head already is Not to Touch the Earth, a book that explores the question, "what if you could go back and take roads not taken?" Better yet, what if you went back and the world actually accommodated some of those choices you were too scared to make back then? This story is something of a period piece and something of a science-fictiony piece. But the SF element is only a vehicle for the story, which isn't SF at all. Anyway, It's set in the early Seventies for the most part, with occasional intrusions from the 21st century. I have a great opening sequence in my imagination. Unfortunately, the way I have it in my imagination is as a movie. I'm not at all sure how to write that sequence. That aside, I have much of this story plotted out mentally.
     
    I'm anxious to get CC finished and to get on with all these other projects. The thought of it kinda jazzes me.
     
    Stay tuned and I'll let you know how it's all going.
  5. Adam Phillips
    As some of you are aware, I started writing and posting Crosscurrents in the spring of 2003. It's been a long, strange trip, and that trip has almost reached its end.
     
    Over the years, my work on the story has been glacially slow. I imagine there may be a hundred or more readers who started reading and ultimately bailed because I have been so terribly slow at getting it written.
     
    As you'd expect of a person over a decade's time, I've been through some changes. Above all else, my life situation has resolved in ways I couldn't have predicted at the time I began the story. One of the major facets of my life reached a sort of final resolution in 2007, and that left me with something of a dilemma regarding how to conclude the story. I don't make a secret out of the fact that CC is essentially autobiography, and the future I was looking at in 2003 was hazy and indistinct. By 2007 it had resolved, and resolved in ways that presented me with a dilemma for the story that I couldn't have foreseen in 2003.
     
    CC opens in 2003, really, with the narrator reflecting back on his experiences from childhood up to the present. That means that I have to conclude the piece in a way that doesn't go beyond where it started. And it's been a challenge to figure out how to do that in a narratively satisfactory way while remaining faithful to my own authorial intentions. I'm mindful of the requirements of good storytelling...and I'm also aware that life doesn't really imitate art, and that good art doesn't simply lift a slice of life out of the whole and lay it out for inspection. But from the standpoint of story, the place where I began the story doesn't give me a very solid place to end. There's so much simmering in the relationship between Matt and Andy still, and Andy's situation in the spring of 2003 is not the situation of a guy at the end of a story. But I painted myself into a corner from the very beginning with the Prologue. The writing itself demands that Andy end the reflections on his life at the place--and mindset--from which he began them. So, from a literary standpoint, there needs to be an epilogue that brings us back to Andy's final spring break of his college days, as he sums up his thoughts and feelings on everything he's just remembered.
     
    The epilogue won't be hard to write. The chapter that comes before it--which will, naturally, be the last one to advance the narrative--has been bugging the s**t out of me. Because I didn't know how to make it read like the conclusion of a novel.
     
    Novels don't have to end with "happily ever after" or "the heroes die and everyone mourns." They don't have to avoid ambiguity and haziness. But they do have to be emotionally satisfying, and they have to present a conclusion that makes narrative sense, one that has compelling internal rationale.
     
    I've had the last full chapter written for a long time, but I haven't been happy with it. I just haven't been able to satisfy that last demand. The demand that requires a story to end like an ending. One that doesn't feel as though the author merely pressed the Stop button before the final cadence sounds. And it's been bugging me. So I've stayed away.
     
    I took a beach trip with my family the weekend nearest to July 4. If you've followed the story, you'll know why, lol. I had some fun time with the family, some fun time with old friends, and some alone time to walk the beach and reflect. And while I was there, the way through all of that mess with the story just sort of came to me.
     
    So...if I can squeeze out an hour or two, I'm going to rewrite that final chapter and get it finished so I can post the dang thing. The Epilogue will be a piece of cake. It'll be short, and I'd essentially pre-written it the day I wrote the Prologue. But it's that dang Chapter 35 that's been beating up on me...and I finally have it figured out.
     
    You won't see any special brilliance in the conclusion. Nothing that suggests that there was an ongoing problem that I've solved in a stunningly creative way. All you'll see is a shutdown that makes some sense. Makes some sense in the story, and makes some sense in terms of what we need stories to do.
     
    I have a short sequel to Crosscurrents that needs writing. But that won't be my next project. Over the decade that I've been working on CC, I've had some other ideas spring up, ideas that wanted to work their way into stories. I'll be turning to those next. I need a break from Andy and Matt, and I have a feeling they need a break from me. And the next things I write should go considerably faster, because they won't be so heavily autobiographical. They won't weigh on me quite as heavily. One thing I do know is that Matt needs to narrate the sequel. And so he will. But that's a story for another day.
     
    Thanks for staying with me over all these years, Intrepid Reader. Your loyalty is about to pay off.
  6. Adam Phillips
    I don't really want to open up a can of worms, but I'm going to. It seems as though the topic of bisexuality always does. For gay people and straight people alike. There's a popular sentiment that's so widespread it's made its way into the world of entertainment TV. A specfic example is found in the lyrics of one of the songs of Friends' adorably dippy Phoebe. Check out this clip:
     

     
    Or, for those of you who can't/won't go there:
     

    "Sometimes men love women,


    Sometimes men love men;

    And then there are bisexuals,

    But some just say they're kidding themselves."

     





    Yeah. Funny. Haha. As a root canal for some of us.

     

    Here's what irritates some of us about that sentiment: (And, no, it's not "hits a little too close to home; right, buddy?")

     

    It's insulting. The owner of that sentiment, when he directs it at me, presumes to know better than I do how my body responds, how my brain and emotions are configured.

     

    Granted...for some men, declaring yourself "bisexual" is a safe first stepping-stone on the way to coming out as a gay man. It's as if they can't fully admit even to themselves the full truth. I think that probably the most vehement "bisexual-deniers" out there come from this group of men, who assume that, because it was true for them, it's true for every man who labels himself "bisexual."

     

    But this isn't the experience of all of us who call ourselves "bisexual."

     

    And you know, you can posture all you want about labels...but dicks don't lie. If, when you look at beautiful women, you get hard...if you jerk off thinking about them...if you have erotic dreams about them...if you have had sex with them and enjoyed it intensely...it seems to me that by definition it's not accurate to call yourself "gay."

     

    Likewise, if, when you look at beautiful men, you get hard...if you jerk off thinking about them...if you have erotic dreams about them...if you have had sex with them and enjoyed it intensely...it seems to me that by definition it's not accurate to call yourself "straight."

     

    I have had both of these sets of experiences. So tell me that, as Phoebe says, I'm just "kidding myself." About what am I just kidding myself?

     

    Another misconception--one that comes from people who are willing to concede that there are, in fact, bisexuals--is that for bi people, male and female are interchangeable, and that in the search for a life-partner, it makes it so much easier to be bisexual, because you can be fulfilled by making a life with either one. I can't speak for all bisexuals, but that hasn't been the case for me. And here's why.

     

    There's a difference in the...I don't know, the nature of my sexual responsiveness to each gender.

     

    In women, what I desire is the soft, sensuous curves, the wickedly seductive softness of the female form, inviting you in. It's the difference, the mystery, the yin-yang of the whole thing that makes it so compelling. To be explicit, and, I suppose, somewhat crass, when my penis is sunk deep into a woman, there's this incredible merger of hard and soft that is absolutely sui generis. Equally compelling is the slight mismatch in the tempo and the contours of male and female desire. Learning to make love to a woman is an art that opens up the most intuitive aspects of me. You have to come to know the enticing differences in a woman's body and in her desires to fully and successfully make love to her. That's amazing to me, and utterly compelling. There is no experience of sex with a man that is in any way comparable, in my opinion.

     

    In men, what compels me is the toughness, the strength, wrapped up in a beautiful package. The rhythm of desire is no mystery; it is as familiar as my own libidinous interior. In my experience there's a no-bullshit quality to men coming together. And lovemaking is, in one way, actually more violent--although that's not quite the right word--because there's muscle involved, contending with muscle. And the tender element of making love to a man...it blows me away. The concatenation of tough and tender is an incredible turn-on to me. And with men, to run your hands over the hard contours, to feel the power thrumming under your fingers...juxtaposed with the incredible softness of the skin covering backs, faces, lips, asses...to look into the eyes of this strong, wild being and to realize that he's given himself over to you...that is nothing like what I experience when making love to a woman.

     

    How could this possibly be an either/or? How could it be a matter of indifference which gender I partner up with for life? For me, the difficult part of being bisexual has been that in choosing one, I am denying myself the other. And the choice, regardless of which way it falls, is for me unbearable. And in this paint-by-the-numbers culture, resolving that in a way that meets society's approval is difficult; very difficult indeed.


  7. Adam Phillips
    If you've read any of this blog, you'll maybe remember my sarcastic whine that I wasn't good enough to be a Hosted Author at Gay Authors.
     
    Well, whether that's the case or not, I now officially Are One.
     
    So head on over to http://www.gayauthor...g/adamphillips/ and check out my new place!
     
    Thanks a jillion, Steph, for designing my site for me and putting up with my pickiness.
     
    Thanks, CJ, for getting the gang to consider my stuff.
     
    Thanks, Myr, for fielding some questions and for letting me submit a book review!
     
    Thanks, Sharon, for all your Sharon-ness, your behind-the-scenes support, and even for the dark-musical welcome. You were supposed to let everybody figure out on their own that I'm a bad guy, but maybe forewarned is forearmed...
     
    And thanks to everybody who's read and supported the writing of Crosscurrents over the years. Including that story, I have a total of seven stories I'll be working on this year, and a number of them--the shorter ones--will find their way to my site fairly quickly while I post Crosscurrents.
     
    Speaking of which, you'll get a new chapter every Friday until the story is finished. It'll be either 33 or 34 chapters long.
     
    Anyway, just thought I'd blog about it.
     
     
    Also...Mark Arbour: I'm in love with you. We should meet in the parking lot and make out.
  8. Adam Phillips
    I'm not sure why I'm doing this, but I guess I'm starting a blog here. Maybe it's because I've heard from a few of you in response to my work on the late Dan Kincaid's eFiction story It Started With Brian, and I figured it might be fun to get to know some of you a little better.
     
    I should tell you a little about myself. I'm 29; I'll be 30 in August (yikes!). I'm married. To a woman. I have a two-year-old son. I have no idea what to call myself, orientation-wise; nothing seems to fit. I guess I'm bisexual. I'm more strongly attracted to women, but I do like the guys. A LOT. I was an athlete all through school, played all the sports, but really concentrated on football, baseball, and soccer. I went to college on a soccer scholarship, so that really paid off. I love to read; I usually have about three books at a time going. I play a little piano; and I listen to every kind of music under the sun. I'm a teacher at the college level, in a math-and-or-science field. I also have a little freelance work on the side involving commercial writing. By commercial I don't mean "advertisements." I mean, you know, commercial. LOL.
     
    In addition to working on Dan's story now that he's gone, I've also been writing one of my own. It's called Crosscurrents. Like Dan's, it's autobiographical. I used to admit that right upfront, then I had a disturbing incident with a fan who used some of the information from the story to figure out exactly who I was and where I lived. After that I changed around some of the details of the story and took out all the "author's comments" that admitted it was a true story, and began treating it as a fictional piece. Finally, this winter, I said "screw it" to all that (I would have said "f**k it"--am I allowed to say that on this blog?). I don't really advertise CC as autobiographical, but I'm not going out of my way to hide that fact anymore.
     
    I started Crosscurrents in May of 2003 (!!!!), the spring of my senior year in college. I was moving on with my life, going on to grad school. I had gotten engaged to the woman to whom I'm now married. And I was facing the fact that in all likelihood, my relationship with my best friend, a relationship I'd had since I was eight--a relationship that had survived a real rocky patch--was probably going to be dwindling to nothing, as we each began to settle into our "real" lives. My friend had graduated the year before (I took five years because I changed majors), and had gotten married; I was moving even farther away (we lived about four hours apart during most of college); and I know what happens to old hometown friendships. They go away and never come back. People get involved in the direction their lives are going; and the common paths they used to walk, well, those paths diverge.
     
    All that was on my mind when I started writing Crosscurrents. In that year I felt the need to sort of...well, sort of Say It. I needed a way to put some closure on the things I was feeling about my best friend. Crosscurrents started as a way of Saying It, and as a cri de coeur, and as a love song, I guess, to my best friend. A way to acknowledge what he had meant to me, to Say It, and to move on.
     
    I wrote three chapters and submitted them to Nifty. I'd never written any narrative before; I'm a math-and-science guy. Jayne Finn wrote me a very complimentary email, and told me that she'd pointed Nick Archer to my story. I posted two more chapters to Nifty, and it wasn't too long before Nick also sent me a complimentary email, and a few days later, sent me another one inviting me to let him host Crosscurrents at his website, Archerland. I took him up on it, and to this day, whenever a new chapter of Crosscurrents comes out, it shows up at Nick's site first.
     
    Why did I want to put this very personal story up on the Internet? I don't know. I think I had a sense that there must be other people out there who had experienced something similar. Not long before starting Crosscurrents I'd read a true-life-based Nifty story that had really touched me, and I struck up an e-friendship with the author. It began to occur to me that I could maybe touch other people through my own story as this guy's story had touched me.
     
    The response from my readers has been overwhelming. You wouldn't believe how many people have written me to say, "Man; your story could be mine, this happened to me too," or "I had a best friend like that, too, and I never told him how I felt, and I've regretted it ever since," and on and on like that. I've met so many great people, and made so many great e-friendships. It's how I met "Dan Kincaid." He was a reader who came to be a good e-friend as we shared and compared life stories.
     
    Crosscurrents is now hosted at far too many places. Not to denigrate any of the great hosts who have asked and received permission to post the story, but I now wish maybe I'd have limited it to Archerland, and maybe crvboy. A few years back I tried to get gayauthors to host it, but I guess I'm not good enough for them, and in any case with my sorry-ass posting schedule I'd have just that many more readers angry at me for leaving them hanging.
     
    I'll be finishing up my work on Dan's It Started With Brian within a month or so, and after that I'll return to Crosscurrents. It's been over a year now since I last posted a new chapter. The last year has been incredibly busy for me, and when Sam got sick I knew I had to help him complete It Started With Brian, because he so badly wanted it finished. There will be one sequel to Crosscurrents, because my life and story moved on from where it was when I started Crosscurrents. I also have four pieces of outright fiction posted here and there and at various stages of completion. I'm itching to get back to those.
     
    Anyway, I'll post here from time to time. I have a Yahoo group, but maybe this is a better place for me to ramble on. I hope some of you stop by to say hi, and I'd love to get to know some of you a little better.
  9. Adam Phillips

    Fans

    By Adam Phillips,

    Those of us who have any kind of authorial presence on the Web clearly have the expectation that our stuff is going to be read. We want you to read our stuff, and we love it when you e-mail us about our stuff...usually...and we even enjoy getting to know you. Well, some of you.
     
    Sometimes, though, I get taken by surprise. I've had two readers whose presence in my e-mailbox has caused me some discomfort.
     
    Several years ago, back when the "author's notes" at the beginning of Crosscurrents admitted that the story was autobiographical, I started receiving these very short and cryptic e-mails from a reader. The first one said, simply, "I know who you are." Gradually, over the course of a couple of weeks, I'd receive an e-mail every few days in which he'd tell me--correctly--some additional factual detail; my real last name, where I went to high school, my parents' home address and phone number, and the correct full name, address, and phone number of the other main character in the story.
     
    Needless to say, this freaked me out. I had a wife and a new kid on the way, and my best friend from back in high school had a wife and a kid. Had my story exposed my family and friends to some psychopathic freak who might stalk us and do us some real harm?
     
    Eventually the guy revealed to me that he was a college kid who had gone to the same high school I had. We were never in high school together because of the age difference, but from certain details in the story, he'd gotten a strong impression I was writing about the high school he had gone to. A trip home one weekend was all it took for him to go to the gym and see the pictures of previous football teams hanging on the wall, complete with full names of the members of those teams.
     
    He hadn't been trying to scare me; he was just a lonely, nerdy college freshman trying to impress me.
     
    So...no harm done. But it was enough to cause me concern. If it was that easy to discover my identity from clues in my story, some not-so-benign psycho could easily do the same thing. And it wasn't just about me; I had a friend with a wife and a kid, and I had my own wife and child on the way. Was it fair to subject them to danger because of my narrative exhibitionism? Was that something I remotely wanted?
     
    I tried to get the archivist at Nifty to take down my story, but he was reluctant. He offered to remove my email address from the story, and in the back-and-forth between me and him, I decided that I was overreacting. But I asked him to let me edit it and resubmit, changing the first names of the main characters (only those two names were real, and only their first names; the rest of the characters were pseudonymous. Plus, I'd changed the gender of one character, split one real-life person into two "narrative" characters, and combined two real-life people into one "narrative" character), and removing the author's note at the front of each chapter which admitted that the story was true.
     
    For a long time, even at my Yahoo group, I treated the story as if it were fiction. Once in a while, I'd admit the truth in a private e-mail to a reader who'd taken the time to e-mail me, and of course all my long-term readers knew it was a true story, but if my new readers just figured I was writing a fictional tale, that was fine with me.
     
    Last fall I accidentally outed myself to my group, and I finally decided, to heck with it. I'm not playing this game any more. I don't spend a lot of time dwelling on the factual nature of the story, but if something comes up, I'm not dancing around it any more. You can walk through life always afraid of freaks and taking extreme caution to keep yourself out of situations where people won't go berserk on your ass, but that's no kind of living. So I've settled down and gotten over it. I changed the names, and I went back and changed my parents' vocations, and introduced a few other distortions-of-fact. Beyond that...screw it.
     
    I had one other weird encounter with a fan. A pretty nice guy. Very intelligent. Significantly older than me. About my dad's age, I guess, but a really unhappy, troubled guy. Gay with children and married and working in an occupation where he couldn't come out.
     
    For some reason he started pretending to other people online that he was me, or that I was him. Telling them that he'd written Crosscurrents. I didn't understand it. I confronted him when I found out, and he came clean and 'fessed up. He explained that he was so desperately unhappy he was trying to live vicariously through me or something, even though....well, it's a convoluted mess, and on the outside chance that he reads this I don't want to be harsh. We don't have a relationship anymore, understandably, and I haven't heard from him in ages. He never did me any real harm, and he was a nice guy who was hurting a lot. It's terrible what homophobia has done to people over the years, forcing them into closets and creating pain and misery for themselves and their loved ones. Still, he definitely crossed a line with me. I'm not excusing him; I just felt bad for him.
     
    Those were the only two really odd encounters I've had with readers. There are two other kinds of reader e-mail, though, that annoy me:
     
    First are those readers who tell me how I should write my story; you know, how to plot the damn thing. This happens mainly with readers who assume it's fiction, and I figure most readers assume that these days. But even if it were fiction, how effin' presumptious to tell an author how to write his tale! One guy wrote me a really rude letter because the Nifty archivist had put Croscurrents in the "gay male" section, when it's a story of a bisexual guy. He read my prologue, decided that the protagonist would have a love-relationship with another guy, then leave him to get married. He had huge political objections. In his opinion, nobody should write a story like that, because gay guys get the shaft often enough from life, and he wasn't going to read another chapter. Obviously he didn't get to see that my story was nothing like that, and anyway, even if it were, what the hell? Doesn't that kind of stuff happen? And if it does, why forbid chronicling it in narrative? We exchanged a series of e-mails, each one more heated, and finally I told him to go screw himself.
     
    Then, of course, there are the readers who harangue and harrass because I've been so slow in my production schedule. These range from the "beggers" to the downright abusers, people who accuse you of high crimes for not making their next drug fix available to them. I feel like saying, "I'm sorry I have a life, but I can't factor your need to have a new chapter into my life decisions, at least not at the level of priority you seem to want me to give it." Still...I can't help feeling guilty. I've followed stories that the author walked away from <cough> <cough> Mark Arbour <cough> <cough>, and man, there's nothing quite as depressing--well, except for the idea that Republicans exist --as investing yourself in a story and its characters and having the author bail on the story. Still, I know from personal experience that guys who write stuff for no compensation and post it to the Internet have things that come up in their lives that make it impossible to continue. I don't hold that against them even though it disappoints me.
     
    Okay, that's off my chest, so I feel better (I just got one of those e-mails about Crosscurrents). Republican readers, of course, are welcome to flame me for the smartass remark above. After all, some of my best friends...
     
     
     
    --Adam
  10. Adam Phillips
    I turned thirty on the 20th. I told members of my Yahoo group that I was going to write in my blog about what I've learned about love in 30 years.
     
    That sounds waay too effing pretentious. And boring too. And that's not exactly what I meant to say anyway.
     
    What got me to thinking I'd like to post something on love is that there's a lot of cynicism about the whole romance-thing-over-the-long-haul. It seems as though a person's belief in the whole "in-love" or "romance" thing is inversely proportional to the number of years he or she has been in a relationship. The longer you've been in a relationship, it seems, the less likely you are to believe that that "in-love," "romantic" feeling is anything more than an initial insanity that quickly fades and leaves you with...well, with "comfortable." Which disappoints us. Disenchants us. Discourages us. And more than occasionally destroys the relationship.
     
    The thing is, a lot of people--maybe even the people who don't believe in the staying power of "in-love" and "romance"--don't want comfortable. They want want freakin ecstasy. Right along with the "long-termness." But they don't believe it's possible.
     
    What I have to say doesn't amount to proof. It's strictly anecdotal evidence. But what I have to say is that it is possible. I have it in my life. I think anyone can.
     
    I've been married for four years and have a son who'll turn three next week. But I have been in love with my son's mother (aka "my wife") since I was 17, and have been in an intimate relationship with her from that time, excluding part of 1998, 1999, and part of 2000, where we were both off making sure there wasn't something else out there for us that didn't include each other.
     
    And I swear: She takes my breath away as much as she did when I was 17. She can still make my head spin. Just looking at her can make me feel like that kid who first nervously asked her out. And she'd say the same thing about me.
     
    Of course, it's become much more than that. I'm not that nervous kid anymore. And over the years we've built something much deeper and closer.
     
    But it's still exciting. Sexually and romantically.
     
    And it seems that doesn't happen with a lot of couples.
     
    How does it happen with us?
     
    I honestly don't know for sure, but I have some suspicions about why it hasn't gone away for us. So I thought I'd make a list of things that seem to me to contribute to it.
     
    1) We don't need each other. Oh, hell, I've used that kind of language before--you know, the "you complete me" thing. And there's some truth to it. But we're each complete individuals on our own. What excites me about her is that she's this amazing, vibrant, sexy woman who doesn't need me, and has yet chosen to make a life with me. Being needed can be very flattering at first and might give the relationship some initial mileage...but a person who needs you--daily--to make them whole isn't, over the long haul compelling, sexually attractive, or even particularly interesting. It gets to be a burden, in fact.
     
    2) We know we can trust each other. This is particularly important in our relationship, because it...well, there are some aspects of our relationship that are not at all traditional. I mean, c'mon. Here I am, married to her with a son, and I'm posting to a blog at a gay stories site. But my point is not our unconventionality. My point is, to delineate it further, that she knows I post to a gay stories site, and that I write erotic narrative with gay themes. Hell, she's read them. We don't hide things from each other that we know would be relevant to the relationship.
     
    People get too reactive over the whole "lying" thing. There's lying and there's lying. Everybody does some of it every day. Our social fabric seems to depend on certain small lies. When your wife asks you if she's starting to look overweight, she doesn't really want you to tell her if you think she is. That kind of "lying" is benign. Everybody knows the kind of lie that can sow mistrust. The easiest way to evaluate it is to ask this question: "Does it seem scary to the relationship to bring this truth to her/him?" If the answer is "yes," that's a sure sign you have to tell her/him. That is, if your goal is intimacy.
     
    I add that last qualification because I'm not judging people who withhold aspects of their lives from their spouses or significant others. There are all kinds of ways to configure a relationship. I'm just saying that if one of your goals is that whole romance thing, significant withholding of important truths is incompatible with that kind of relationship because lack of trust and lack of full knowledge can eat away at romance. Where there is doubt or uncertainty or an awareness that there are areas of the signif other's life to which you're not invited, that's a buzz-kill for romance. Conversely, there is a kind of freedom in being able to trust your significant other that, in my opinion, is in and of itself romantic; erotic, even. There's nothing too out-there about me to share with my wife. And trust me, I got some out-there shit goin' on. I'm here, right?
     
    3) We keep an eye open for those traits that originally attracted us to each other. If you're not careful, you can take those for granted. But they don't go away, often; we just get ungrateful. We take those things for granted. We shouldn't. Sometimes I look at my wife and see the blond cheerleader/AP student who mesmerized me back in the day. She was fiery, determined, confident, soft, alluring...the mixture was intoxicating. And it's still there. Oh, it hides now and then under the time-demands of her residency requirements, our mutual schedules, the challenges of parenting...but it's there. And I make it a conscious practice to look for it.
     
    4) We know ourselves and keep examining ourselves. I think that for a couple to really stay giddy in love, each one has to know what it is about himself/herself that made the other person giddy originally, and has to know what there is about himself/herself that's a liability to the relationship, and each one has to work to bring the good stuff and has to work--hard--at not subjecting the partner to the bad stuff. We'll each fail at that last part. And we'll fight, and get angry, and get annoyed, etc., from time to time. But because we've been consciously trying to bring the good stuff--the stuff the other fell in love with--there's a bigger picture, and we get over fighting, being annoyed, being angry...and anyway, makeup sex is pretty damn good!
     
    If you think all that sounds really artificial and forced, all you have to do is think back on when you were on your way to becoming "a serious item," and you'll have to concede that you did just that: You brought your best stuff and held back your worst. So you snagged the prize; and you show your gratitude for her/his choosing your lame ass by getting lazy and not doing that any more? Hell, no wonder romance has died!
     
    5) We work on keeping it fresh. I've been in love with my wife for 13 years, give or take a couple years' off a decade or so ago. That's a long time to know someone intimately...and yet she still surprises me sometimes, and in good ways, in amazing ways! I try to be the same sort of person for her too: Someone who brings some creativity, some spontaneity, some of my inner joy, to her in ways that catch her offguard from time to time. In that way we sort of inspire each other to bring that kind of thing to each other regularly. Surprises. I'm confident I won't have exhausted the mystery which is my wife even when I've drawn my last breath!
     
    All that being said, we've had some significant fights. We had one last spring. I spent a couple of nights on the couch! But those five things prevailed, and got me off the couch. And, as mentioned above, the makeup sex was fantastic.
     
    Anyway, your mileage may vary. But if I had to say why we still feel crazy in love with each other after 13 years, I think those five things have a lot to do with it.
     
     
    Adam
  11. Adam Phillips
    I guess everybody who writes narrative, from the Pulitzer Prize-winner to the hack, has a niche. Granted, some writers demonstrate a wide range of narrative interests and can treat a lot of themes, but there are also very very fine writers who spend most of their literary careers exploring a fairly clearly circumscribed plot of land, so to speak.
     
    I've been tremendously fortunate in my life. I grew up in a great family, I have a decent set of personal resources and abilities, I always had a lot of friends and I always fit in well with my peer group, in school and professionally. I made good grades; I have my own family now, a wife, a kid, people who love me, a good job, and my health. I can't think of a thing I want, or at least a thing that I need, that I don't already have, although there are many things I'd still like to do.
     
    But all they way back since I was a grade-school kid, right up to this last year, I've seen tragedy and loss pass right nearby. And it's always struck me, even when I was a little kid, that things don't always work out for many, many people. In fact, it seems to me that more often than not they don't. Little things, of course, don't always work out. But all too often even the big things, the really important things, don't. I've seen people who deserve love miss out on it; I've seen families break up and I've heard the heart of a kid howl with loss and the pain of abandonment over his daddy bailing on him. I've seen people die young and their loved ones driven to the edge with grief.
     
    And I've never had it happen to me. That makes me react in this oddly torn way: I'm grateful beyond measure; but I wonder from time to time when or if the hammer's gonna fall, and how I'd respond if it did.
     
    I've had a near-miss or two. The life I have now I nearly missed out on because of some fear, some stubbornness, and some stupidity. Fortunately for me, the difficulties that might have led to me missing out were resolved. But it could have gone another way. Easily. And I can't experience the blessings of my current life without shuddering over how close I came to f**king it all up.
     
    This haunts me for some reason, the radical, frightening contingency of good fortune during our threescore-and-ten. And I find myself pulled toward stories--as a reader and as a writer--where things don't always quite work out. Because what we invariably discover is that, yeah, things often don't work out, but we go on anyway. And somehow it has seemed important for me to hear and to say that again and again. I guess, then, to return to what I was talking about in my opening paragraph, that's my niche. Stories that deal with loss and with things not-working-out. At least until I can get that theme to leave me alone. That doesn't mean that in treating that theme I'll never write a happy ending. Sometimes explorations like that damn well need happy endings.
     
    I can only hope that as I treat that theme as a writer, I can manage it with some dignity and some sense of understatement. It's pretty easy to get mawkish with that kind of stuff, and I sure as hell don't want that.
     
    In my largest story in progress, Crosscurrents, you can see elements of the things-don't-always-work-out theme in there. Given that I done already admitted that it's about my life, a person could infer that it's those experiences that have cooked up in me this interest in things that don't work out. In fact, I guess I pretty much said as much above. Which is not to suggest--or deny--that things are not gonna "work out" for Andy in Crosscurrents, lol. And, coincidentally or not, my work on Sam's It Started With Brian deals with many of the same elements. These two stories narrate real lives, so I guess one thing that could be inferred from that is that themes of loss, longing, unfulfilled love, desires that never went fulfilled, tragedies sustained, those things aren't just the elements of weepy (and not-so-weepy) pieces of fiction. They probably make it into fiction because we experience them in our real lives. If we're lucky, we get at least elements of a happily-ever-after, or at least elements of a happily-until-some-undetermined-future-point. I don't think I could handle never reading about good stuff happening; but I never resent it when an author takes me to a sorrowful place, at least if it's not a gratuitous trip. Usually those visits seem more real than the ones that end us up in Happyland.
     
    On a related subject, I was looking for some photos on some old DVD-Rs today when I came across a video of an episode of Cold Case from December of 2006 called "Forever Blue." Many of you have seen it, I'm sure. The case being worked on was that of the murder of a young cop in 1968. The story was told through a series of black-and-white flashbacks focusing on two young police officers, Jimmy Bruno and Sean Cooper ("Coop"). Partners at work and best friends, they come, through a situation of conflict with each other, into confrontation with the fact that they love each other. You know, like that. After a period of, I don't know, days? weeks? where the guys allow themselves to experience this love, Jimmy ultimately can't handle it, and pushes Coop away, not realizing that that moment will be the last time he'll see his partner alive. Coop's death turns out to be a homophobia-fueled hate crime, and the story closes with the solving of the case and with the now-elderly Jimmy returning to the scene of his partner's murder, where he experiences...what? A ghost? A memory? The healing of a decades-long sense of guilt? The story doesn't make that clear, but I defy you to watch the closing scene without reaching for the box of Kleenex. Trust me, there won't be a dry eye in the house. Shane Johnson, the actor who plays Coop, is a young married straight guy with a child of his own; he said in an interview at AfterElton that seeing the episode made even him cry, and he knew how it was going to turn out!
     
    Anyway, as I said, I just stumbled onto that video again while looking for something else, and I've had trouble shaking it all day, both it and the final song from the soundtrack as an elderly Jimmy Bruno stares back into his own history: The Byrds' "My Back Pages." It's made me think again about how many people there are out there who have huge hurts and tremendous regrets. Especially those of us who have been wired to love in ways that society still doesn't completely condone. And it makes me come back again to the conviction that whatever our own struggles, we just gotta be kind to each other. I really suck at that sometimes. I have a good friend who's a total role model to me in this matter, and years ago he said to me that there was enough hurt in the world already, and we didn't need to add to it. He would have known, because he'd sure had a boatload of his own. But I've never seen him add an ounce more of it to the world. It's my goal to be like him in that regard when I grow up, lol.
     
    Just curious: Do any of you share a similar attraction to stories, songs, screenplays, etc., with bittersweet themes? Or is that my own unique psychopathological quirk?
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