brokenwhole

This story marks the beginning of a violently colorful few weeks in the summer of 2006, in Hollywood. It's also the beginning of my memoir.

I have always been strongly compelled to organize, categorize and understand every piece of information in my life. Now the flood of ideas through my brain was becoming almost impossible to handle. I was, for the moment, still able to control it, but I was close to being overmastered. The hardest thing was to figure out simple priorities against the raging background of my thoughts. And now the pressure was vastly increased by the screamingly high priority of not worrying my boyfriend Ben. He’d

Written a while back ... This blog was prompted just a minute ago when a very hunky guy swaggered into Starbucks. His eyes may have been concealed behind his sunglasses, but there was no concealment of his self-regard. He knew he was sexy, and expected obeisance. I doubt I'm alone in finding this to be a complete turn-off. Yeah, I might sneak a look now and then at the swaggering guy's beautiful biceps, but I wouldn't be interested in seriously engaging him. But here we get into tricky ground. I meant to write about it after the White Party. There were guys there of such magnificence they'd belong in Michelangelo's pre-sculpture boudoir. I'm thinking of one guy in particular. He goes to our gym, Golds. And he carries himself with such portentous seriousness. He's built up a wall of muscle that shuts him out of all but the small little world populated by his equally buff buddies. You get the impression he'd sooner die rather than let his gaze rest on somebody outside his circle. I'm sure if you could ever get his attention long enough to ask him a question about why he behaves this way, he'd respond with a complaint about how difficult it is to be so god-like. Everybody finds him attractive so to protect himself he tunnels his Adonis gaze. But I'd argue back to him that he's made a choice to be that way. To make eye contact with somebody else doesn't necessarily have to mean anything other than, hey, we're both human. I'd go further and hazard that in his case (and he's only one extreme in a spectrum), he's built up both his body and his steely countenance out of insecurity. All of us - particularly gays - hide a secret heart of shame. How many times have you talked to guys with great bodies who say they used to be skinny when they were kids. And they're still skinny inside. They've never grown to love that skinny kid inside. I'm sure they don't mean to be lacking in humanity. Yet here they are in a party atmosphere where everybody is all smiles, and, out of shame, they're completely cut off from the experience of sharing our commonality. I should add that not all gorgeous circuit-boys act this way. There are a few here and there who have sufficient sense of self to know that bestowing a smile on a plain Jane is an act of kindness; joy even. A short detour here: I promise it will lead us back to the main subject. I just wrote a book

Thanks Friendly, for the good wishes Keith

I guess I'm too much type A to enjoy it as much as I should

As I sit here in our living room, you could hardly call for more peace. And yet ... a distant dog bark, a plane high overhead, the sound of my hard disk in my study as it runs a backup, our wind chimes moving softly, the sensation that I can hear through my neck bones as I rotate my head, the scraping of the hard edge of a low palm tree against the window and the flutter of that same leaf as a waft of wind hits it, the rustle of the wind in the big trees in our back yard, a passing car, wind chimes from neighbors' houses in the canyon, squeaks from my own stomach, bird song, the sound of my own swallowing, the occasional tearing noise as the bare skin on my back rubs against the leather sofa, the crack of the paper in the book on which I'm writing as it snaps into place when I move the pen the scratch of the ball of the pen on the paper, the swich of my hand against the paper as I move the pen, the occasional sigh from our big dog and the lighter sigh from the little one, the lightest sound of my own breath, once in a while a rumble from the freeway makes its way through the valley, a noise as of sudden and minute metal expansion from the kitchen, and behind it all the background high note of silence which is always in my hearing when I pay it attention. All of a sudden it feels as if I'm in a symphony of sounds. Then the moment passes and it's just the sound of peace again.

Thanks for the kind comment Corvus! Objectivist (great nickname!), the reason I didn't want to explain everything is that a) it was overwhelmingly complex - the full story of that day would take twenty pages to recount, and, it would have scared Ben. It would also have been difficult to believe! For instance, at one point that day I thought I would be one day perceived as a Messiah. As you can imagine, it's not the sort of thing suitable for a quick discussion in the car

That's so sweet of you Eddy! I'm glad you like my photos. Actually, I took all the photos on my site, even the ones of little old me. Well big old me Thanks for taking a look and saying such nice things! Keith

After a couple of weeks during which I'd experienced unaccountable intellectual, emotional and moral growth, I made a discovery which I thought could make me incredibly rich. As I rotated the idea in my mind, it slowly dawned on me that I'd be so rich that I could walk out the door and might never need to see my beloved house again, should I choose not to. Doing just that, in search of either intellectual excitement, or pampering, whichever I could find first, I left home leaving a trail of destruction, fear or bewilderment in my path. To recount the entirety of that day of crisis would take an essay ten times the length of this one. You need, however, to understand the worst of it if this essay is to make sense. (Please note this covers a period in 2006 when I went through a very serious manic episode on the way to being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I'm completely stable now, and have been for 18 months.) It's one of the principal symptoms of the first manic episode that the mania is obvious to everybody but the person experiencing it. My boyfriend Ben, a doctor, had had a bipolar boyfriend in the past, and had recently been increasingly concerned that I was heading in that direction. In the afternoon of my day of havoc in Hollywood, before I'd done any real damage, Ben, called me, sounding tearful. He was wondering where I was: I'd forgotten about our meeting with our counselor. After Ben's call, it became, all of a sudden, the most important thing in the world that I get to that meeting to assuage Ben's worries. The resulting anguished rush through Hollywood on foot, during which

(I call this "my official self-portrait"