He was my North Pole.

I trekked across his fields of ice, hoping one day to find a sign of life. The sun rose never more than a couple of degrees above the horizon, but when it did I basked in it's heat, casting long thin blue shadows over the frozen terrain.

At night, the frost would sparkle under a full moon, and the northern lights would shimmer, delicate like a ballerina's gown. I would hear the growls and calls of polar bears, ghostly and ethereal, distant but reassuring and I would imagine Narnian forests and Satyrs and Snow Queens.

Sometimes I became tired, and I would curse him and threaten to give up my search, but the next morning the sun would sneak over the horizon once more and I would catch a glimpse of the dazzling beauty of that forever winter.

Then, one day, without warning, the pole moved. Switched inexplicably from North to South. I froze, spinning around, one moment feeling repulsion, the next attraction. The landscape reeled around me, it's familiar white dunes becoming looming and unforgiving. I ran, lost and dizzy, still spinning, still feeling my heart love - hate - lovehatelovehate.

North, south.

The sun rose and set, days, months, a year - wandering constantly through the ice, occasionally calling to him, but never once hearing a reply. He would no longer answer me.

Then one day I stumbled to the edge of the world. Water lapped at the edge of the ice-sheets, small icebergs floating off and melting in the warmer waters. A small tugboat was moored in a low natural bay. I climbed on board.

And I stopped being a magnet.

posted at 3:30 PM •

Rhinoplasty for the soul

I sat, catching glimpses of him. Had he changed? He looked a little less of the bumbling dishevelled oaf he loves to cast himself as. A little smarter perhaps, but then he was attending a conference and maybe he has finally learned a little of the value of appearances.

Poetic then, that my lessons have been about looking past external appearances.

"You're looking well."

I neither wanted nor needed to hear this from him. Not resentfully so, just statement of fact. I saw his smartened appearance and looked past to what was inside. Funnily enough, the image of him I now have is of the one or two times he shaved off his beard.

I remember the first time he did so, only a few months after we moved in together. He's one of those men who changes vastly in appearance depending on whether he has facial hair or not. He tends to wear his moustache quite long, which obscures most of the nuances of his mouthshapes. This muting of his expressions made him sometimes hard to read, but suddenly seeing him without his moustache made everything glaringly clear.

Suddenly, without a beard, he looked younger than his age - rather than the ten or fifteen years older he usually appeared. Most of the time when he spoke, he looked like a little boy.

I looked past his appearance and saw the little boy inside him. I saw how impossible it will be for him to change, and how I now no longer want him to change, no longer want to shoulder the weight of 'emotional cooking for two'.

Change is not easy - physical change is a trifle in comparison. There is no way to have your soul made-over - you have to want emotional and spiritual change to happen, work hard at it, and take advantage of the lucky breaks when they come. Change comes slowly - geologically, evolutionarily - little adjustments, counter-adjustments - the process requires self-awareness, humility, an ability to laugh at ones-self - all things that I'm getting better at noticing in people. It's still easy to be fooled, and someone on a path of personal growth is very vulnerable, even when they've become skilled at spotting fakes.

Growth and change happen though - and like the week I just had, sometimes everything falls into place and it's like you take a sudden great leap forward, a phase transition from one emotional state to the next.

John, you were right - I have done better without you. It would have been nice if you could have taken that fact and made something positive of it, rather than leave me to have to bear the changes that you couldn't and wouldn't face up to.

But that's not your way is it?

posted at 2:52 PM •

I never thought I'd make it to today...

No, no, no that's not right - too dramatic. How about...

If you'd told me a year ago...

Nah, too winsome. Oh sod it, I'll just cut to the chase - last week went better than I could have hoped - I managed to get everything done I had planned, perhaps even more. I've been having one of those periods where everything just seemed to fall into place.

I'd been aware of the fact that I'd booked a week off work to get things done, but was going to have to fanny about around the lodger - and that's not a problem now I've got the flat back to myself.

On Thursday I started the ball rolling on remortgaging - more on that later - but I've got one or two little hurdles left to go on that front. I've got to see John for some signatures - in two hours' time.

I'm nervous as shit - I haven't seen him for months, and the last time I saw him, I was sinking my teeth into his hand as he tried to get me out of his house. It hurts to see him, to have any contact with this guy who did his level best to try to finish with me with the minimum of fuss, but failed miserably.

It hurts to admit that he was right all along - I'm much better off without him.

I don't say that with any sense of self-congratulation - it's much more complex than that, but I do feel that I can face him now and not wish we were still together.

Well, we'll see.

posted at 1:03 PM •

That dating base system in full (gay male version):

Sex-chat on gaydar = First Base

Bareback sex, fisting, rimming = Second Base

Saying 'hi' in local bar then turning and bitching about him to your friends = Third Base

posted at 1:58 PM •

First BW twists her ankle, then she passes on the negative energy and I've gone and knckered me big toe.

Sympathetic (or unsympathetic) magic is not big or clever.

What's worse is it's my gear-change toe (note to non-bikers: you change gears with your left foot) - and I've got a 7pm dental tomorrow in Catford. Public transport is barely an option, and I'm not sure I can ride all the way along the A12 in first gear.

I just hope the potion I've been given doesn't make it fall off altogther!

posted at 1:11 AM •

Blog-meets - they're a funny old thing aren't they?

The arse-end of last week was spent in anticipation of getting together with faces both familiar and unfamilar. The funny thing about it was that this was perhaps the first time in over a year that I've been able to look forward to something without the promise of any illegal substances.

And it meant a lot to me.

Hopefully you weren't all questioning whether I had actually taken something that night - other than the three bottles of Shiraz myself & BW managed to put away - considering my bouncyness. I'm just overflowing with energy since deciding nearly three weeks ago to give up drugs. I remember what I was like before I started habitually taking coke - I'm quite a lively sorta chappy generally, especially so around a large group of people, and I never used to feel the need to get higher than I already usually am.

I'm not explaining myself very well - it's mostly just a feeling of listlessness at having an entire week of sorting things out yawning in front of me. I find blogging from home quite difficult as my brain is usually juggling about fifty other things that I should be doing - so, I'm going to go and make a start at tidying up.

Maybe once I've sorted a few things I'll be able to write a few more thoughts down.

posted at 1:41 PM •

I want to live in a city that never sleeps, and is always dreaming.

posted at 4:22 PM •

All dentists are sadistic bastards.

OK, they're better than what was there before, but my new crowns aren't exactly comfortable, and at the moment I feel like a fucking cross between Janet Street-Porter and Jim Carey in The Mask. They're slightly convex at the back, but with a slight overbite - so they feel absolutely awful when I'm eating, and my 's's are coming out like a fucking whistling kettle. I've got to go back to have the crowns adjusted, but it's going to take a while to get used to this.

Thank god I'm on holiday next week - I need some time to relax and recouperate from all the strain over this last couple of weeks.

posted at 3:23 PM •

Day 13.

Spare a thought for poor Alan, who's stuck behind a draconian firewall. Perhaps we should record a BlogAid single for him - it can't be as bad as the latest version (oh - and ps - what's the deal with Joss Stone? Is she supposed to look like that?).

Had a chilled evening last night coming down from the crises-du-jour. Bottle of pinotage, nice meal, trashy dvd.

Imagine To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmarr meets Thelma and Louise meets Victor Victoria meets Nurse Betty meets Muriel's Big Fat Greek Wedding. There you have the pitch for Connie and Carla. A totally riotous turn on the old "girls on the run from mobsters and hiding out as drag queens" story that we all know and love so well. And the best thing about it is that it didn't seem to get a great theatrical release in the UK, and the dvd hasn't been heavily marketed. If you like any of the above films, see it today, it's going to be a total cult classic one day.

Chikapow to Ramification - my camp cultural advisor and number one Lindsey Lohan fan - for the heads-up.

posted at 11:00 AM •

There's someone inside me. There's someone good, and wise, and noble, and courageous inside me, and increasingly he's coming out of the closet. Increasingly I'm finding that I don't want to dull him with cocaine or ecstacy or ketamine.

OK, a little red wine is allowed.

Death is not an easy thing to deal with. But we deal with it. Not only are we (arguably, very arguably) the only animals to really have to comprehend the finality of death, the finite and infinite, we also are able to deal with it. But the deal isn't easy.

Dealing with death is hard - I think our minds evolve as we try to cope with the reality of existence imposed upon our own. It's hard, and many, many people deal with it by escaping.

They find a hatch somewhere and escape from life - and usually it's frowned upon; "oh, *tut* they're not coping - it's so sad". Dealing with death is hard, and escape is often the only solution. So we escape - into work, drugs, drink, sex, pick a crutch, any crutch.

We dive into the deep blue oblivion, and escape from the world. And once in a while, if we're lucky, we surface. We try breathing air again, we try to walk on the sand, and feel the sun on our faces. Sometimes we remember, this is what is was like before I saw my shadow. We surface, and if we're lucky, we surface a few times, each time getting more bold, testing out whether we're ready to walk again.

Sometimes we dive under again.

And then one day we stand in the sun, and...

...we breathe.

posted at 11:44 PM •

One of those crisis days today - day 12 was going so well too. Oh well, it was nothing to break my resolve anyway, I have the cigs for when things get too stressful.

So - the lodger situation flared up in my face. As I said, he'd moved most of his stuff out quite suddenly on Thursday and left me the empty room to come home to without even telling me. This, despite the fact that he took my digital camera and left it at his workplace, giving me several excuses as to why he'd not returned it.

I started to get seriously edgy by this time, and texted him but he didn't tell me when or if he was coming back for the rest of his belongings, nor when he intended to return my property. On top of this, he lost a set of keys a month ago, and so I spent all of Friday on the edge of my seat, expecting to go home to find he'd nicked half my stuff.

As a result, on Saturday I changed the locks. I texted him again asking when I would expect to get my camera back, but didn't get a reply. By this time, alarm bells are buzzing like crazy, and I start to resign myself to the thought that I'm not getting it back.

Well, he texted me today - in his fairly surly manner telling me he was back on Tuesday as he'd already told me. We argued on the phone - he claims he texted me twice on Thursday, but of course, I never received the second text.

I'm feeling utterly battered now. On top of everything else, I had another financial crisis, and I've had to re-consolidate my debts.

Annoyingly, HSBC were more than happy to give me several thousand pouns in a personal loan - with no credit checks - but wouldn't extend my overdraft five hundred quid. It's a nice feeling having everything tidied now, but I have to be careful this time not to get in the same situation again. Of course - I've one less expense this time around.

posted at 6:31 PM •

Oh. My. God.

This blog is like so totally fetch.

posted at 1:19 PM •

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

Day 10 drug free. Last night was a tough one. I haven't really been out in as many days as I've been clean - I can't be near the temptation. Yes, it's that bad. My dealer messaged me on gaydar yesterday. I'd resolved to not even talk to him, but he's a friend and I don't want to appear like a total git.

I'm missing going out and socialising as much as not taking drugs, although the two are mixed up together so it's hard to work out what I'm missing. I'm actually dealing with the cravings for coke quite well, it's the staying in that's driving me crazy. I know I should get my act together and fill my time with something more productive, but I'm feeling quite apathetic.

The acupuncture seems silly. I've been browsing The Skeptics Dictionary and wondering how you would go about devising a double-blind study of ear-acupuncture.

posted at 2:07 PM •

What better way to say "hello" to another blogger whose words you like than to link to them, so they find your domain name sprinkled through their stats. Nothing says "hi, I like your site, but feel it's creepy to cold-email someone and besdies, I'm an egotistical lazy slob" than a link from stats.

posted at 3:05 PM •

What do we do to fill the yawning vacuum of our lives? What drug do we use to create the delusion that time is not our enemy and that actually there is meaning out there?

Everyone has a 'drug' - be it true-believer religion, children, extreme sports, the gym, their pets, spiritual enlightenment, stamp collecting, Sci-Fi conventions, historical re-enacting.

Sorry, beginning to sound like an Irvine Welsh novel today. I'd better say "ya fucken id-yot, did ye no get the fucken jellies ey?" or something to be truly authentic I suppose.

French and Saunders did it best - the 'Woman's Mag' sketch where one of the editors (Dawn in editor-y style glasses and shawl over one shoulder - this being the nineties) has a sudden faith crisis about the constant rotation of articles about flans and Timothy Dalton.

"It's all so banal."

Oh hell, I'm being all self-reflexive again, and you get confused when I go like this; narrating the narrative of my ace life. The lone cry of the blogger - who are you people that visit here every day? There's at least seventy of you and I haven't tidied.

Came home last night to find the lodger had cleared out 99% of his stuff. I'm hoping he doesn't return today and take the remaining 1% and help himself to a percentage share of my property. Because for the life of me, I don't know what just happened, and it would have been nice if he'd said at the start "Hi, I'm a morose flake of a man who will break things in your flat, have an endless stream of meaningless one-night stands and then leave in six months time."

Had another guy round to look at the room last night, but I have a feeling he's not going to take it. Looks like it's chateaux-Spelling in E10 again as I get my gift-wrapping room back. What home is complete without one?

But of course - if I knock the 'habit' on the head, I can afford the place by myself. And that nauseatingly cloying sentiment is driving me nuts.

posted at 10:12 AM •

Things have been a little slow around here lately I know, and there's a reason.

Time to come clean - in more ways than one - I've been drug-free for a whole week. Last Thursday I had a minor crash after being up all night on my favourite recreational substance. I couldn't take the day off work - I've had two days in as many months, although both for legitimate health reasons (once with tooth pain, once with a lousy cold). I found myself sitting in the square next to my office at 8.30 in the morning, no sleep, scared, isolated and fucked-up.

Without wanting to go too in-depth as to What Happened Next, I ended up in a drug counselling unit in Leytonstone. The experience was great in terms of giving practical and realistic advice - and (clue for those paying attention) I had an acupuncture session, which was - um - interesting.

I've been holding off mentioning things. It was all a bit too intense last week as I was busy at the weekend keeping myself busy, but not really doing very well - boredom was the biggest problem, and something I'll have to work at to combat.

Last night was a struggle, as Wednesday has been my habitual 'little reward' evening for getting through half the week. Instead of doing what I usually do, I got myself a nice meal, bottle of Argentinian Shiraz, Shrek 2 on dvd and stayed in.

I'll go into more detail as the mood takes me, but for now just wanted to give you this much.

posted at 10:46 AM •

Did I miss the bit where I signed up for constant difficulties?

I'm sitting here with five green teeth as temporary covers for five stumps of teeth after having them ground down for crowns yesterday. Yes, yes yes, In a week I will have lovely new crowns - but right now I have green teeth.

I have green teeth and what's more, my lodger just gave me notice. That's the second one I've broken now - six months, the same as the last one.

I can't afford to leave the spare room fallow for a couple of months as I did last time, but as luck would have it I might have a replacement ready to go.

It may be a case of third time lucky - the current lodger hasn't been particularly great. I almost never see him, and although on one hand that's quite good, it does mean I'm effectively living by myself. Once in a while I'll see him wandering from his bedroom wearing nothing but a towel, belly propped out in front of him looking like an extra from Jerry Springer The Opera: "My husband is an adult baby", and I'll wonder who this stranger living in my house is.

posted at 1:41 PM •

One thing I learned from John is to question whetever is fed to you by the media. Question everything - not just what the mainstream press is saying, but also the alternative press. There's always an agenda.

He also taught me that you should be most wary when politicians are trying to get something. Polticians almost never behave entirely in the interests of the constituency they represent. Domestic constituency matters represent small to medium scale pressures on a politics - and increasingly it's the large scale, macro pressures of nations existing in a global constituency/marketplace that are more important. At this scale, politics has to operate in a way which sometimes is incompatible and inconsistent with micro-scale politics.

That lot may all just be undergraduate level International Relations Theory, or it may be a load of old twaddle that I've misinterpreted. But it sounds good.

I was thinking about this last week after (surprise, surprise) Bush got four more years. The biggest gripe (out of the cacophony of whingeing) coming from l/Liberal USA was that the Deomcrats hadn't put forward a strong enough candidate.

As I was mulling it over, I had a sudden realisation that made a lot of sense - maybe they didn't want to win the election? Maybe they realise that taking the Whitehouse meant taking over a pig's ear of a war, a mess of an economy, a xenophobic foreign policy which is alienating the rest of the world - and maybe, just maybe, they were more than happy to let the Republicans finish the job.

posted at 10:46 AM •

Wouldn't it be nice if upon birth we were given a manual for ourselves?

This textbook would contain everything we needed to know about our physical needs, emtional well-being and spiritual drives. It would tell us what we need to do if things go wrong - troubleshooting advice and warning signs to look our for. It would tell us about our likes and dislikes, our talents and skills, and the things we're not really good at. The book would tell you why you feel a certain way sometimes, and what to do when you do. Everything would be indexed and cross-referenced.

The manual of you.

posted at 1:12 PM •

Here's Islington borough council's evidence against me. If you rollover the image, you'll see me highlighted in the foreground - gasp - clearly breaking the law, a good two feet inside the bus lane boundary. What you can also see is a taxi in the middle, stopped across the oncoming lane of traffic, and a security van parked on single yellow lines just after the bus lane. Now you tell me, which one of these is causing the biggest obstruction to the flow of traffic?

It's a fuckin' disgrace.

posted at 4:07 PM •

Foreword Any misogynistic views in the following post should not be taken to mean that my ace life is in any way 'women-hating'. My ace life hates everyone.

The key difference between gay men and straight men is deceptive in it's simplicity. Women. Straight men have them, gay men (to an appreciable extent) don't. It's easy to underestimate the effect women have on men's lives, but the key effect is one which is often mooted by the 'ex-gay' lunatic fringe: women are a civilising effect on men.

This of course is widely open to argument, depending on your definition of civility. Of course, what women understand by that term is 'emotional torture, blackmail, general backhanded coersion and manipulation to make men behave exactly as we want them to'. Look at the mojority of married men - they're sad pathetic shells, so messed up emotionally that they don't know which way is up. Years of psychological terrorisation have rendered them utterly incapable of deceit, and they gradually spend their existence in isolation, in garden sheds, fishing boats or in the company of other emasculated men.

Gay men on the other hand, have no such 'civilising' influence. Often, you hear gay men being compared to women is negative tones - we are told, and we tell each other: "You are not real men".

This is true. Gay men are much closer to the human male ideal - more deceptive and underhanded than their straight (read: hen-pecked into female subservience) counterparts. And we do the soft furnishings thing too. It's straight men who are the phonies - and the secret matriarchal cabals that rule the world know this too.

This is all just a preamble to my main point. All gay men should be tattoed on their foreheads: caution - contents may be different from advertised. Just as you (women) would never trust your best friend when she tells you that "no, no, your arse doesn't look like a Bernard Matthews turkey in that skirt" - you should never take a gay man at face value.

Well - not 99.9% of them anyway - my ace life is one of the rare ones that tells it like it is. Word.

Last night for example - I got home from work feeling all smug and proud of myself because I'd gotten a replacement wing-mirror - only to find a ticket for £50 for a bus lane violation. I flew off into an incandescent rage, and decided to vent my spleen - and perhaps see if anyone knew of any handy tips for getting off said ticket - in the gaydar 'bikers' chat room.

You'd think, wouldn't you, that such a room would be full of bikers, talking about biker-y things, slapping their tanks, revving their engines, but OOOH no...

This being a gay men's biker room, the discussion hinged mostly around whether anyne was going to The Hoist (London leather fetish club) - who wanted to take someone pillion, and various other sexual propositions. I ventured my question regarding getting off bus lane tickets, and you could almost hear the bone china hitting the axminster. "Girls - he's a real biker!"

The momentary pause as their poor brains struggled to cope with the concept of an actual honest-to-goodness biker being in the room gave me just enough time to beat a hasty retreat.

I really, really give up sometimes.

By the way (and if anyone is still reading at this point) if anyone does know of any good ways of getting off bus lane tickets I'd love to hear from you. As long as it's not "don't pay it and keep your fingers crossed that 'sexyrubberbiker' from gaydar is presiding in court the day your case comes up".

posted at 10:13 AM •

I believe in you. I carried your future on my back, walking past a man standing on a street-corner holding three pink roses, looking around, looking for someone, looking for his love, his hope, a vase for his bouquet. I circled the palace of Westminster to Vauxhall, carrying nothing but wide-open emptiness and secret glances. I looked at the past and saw my fallen comrade, his wig resting on the bankside, a raspberry octopus holding it's own wilting bouquet. My mind turned to the grief for those that we did not know, and will now never know. I felt him walk with me past Nelson's Column, past the homeless, girls in ponchos, a man who for a split second looked like John Kerry. On to Soho, through the never-ending tourists, getting cruised by a man unaware of my silent pilgrimage through the narrow streets I have known for these past five years. The pink rose man was still waiting on his corner as I finished my ghost of a journey, but his roses had blossomed and changed to a deep blood red. He's still standing there now, as the ghosts hurry past him.

posted at 2:41 PM •

Got back to my bike on Thursday last week to find some helpful rider had decided I didn't need two wing wirrors, so had snapped one of them off. I've been trying in vain to do a bodge repair on the thing, but the slightest little pot-hole and the thing falls off again.

I'm screwed without my bike - the commute into work isn't too bad on the tube, and it's nice not to have to worry about killing myself or some cyclist every morning, but my travel budget is half taken up with insurance costs for the bike, so the additional expense of a travel card is something I can do without.

Without my bike, there's a load of stuff I can't do - such as get to my dentist out in Catford. I managed to get into central London yesterday without the repair falling off, but by the time I got back to my bike in the evening, the mirror was on the road. I had a choice between cancelling my appointment, or attempting the journey with one mirror. Actually, it's not that difficult, though highly dangerous of course.

I got to the dentist to find that my treatment (all £370 of it) had been approved, so we moved from playing around with little fillings to the big boys - serious, fuck-off root treatments. Next week it's prepping my teeth for crowns. I'd ask whether anyone knows how painful that's going to be, but, no, really, I don't want to know.

Everything is going to have to be paid for on plastic, and I'm just getting so fucking ground down by it all.

On the bright side, the treatment itself wasn't too bad - the most uncomfortable I've had so far, but the anasthetic was rather nice. Didn't wear off till late in the evening, either.

I wonder whether my dealer has this stuff?

posted at 1:11 PM •

Killed for being gay.

David Morley was a barman at gay pub The Birdcage in Chiswick. On Saturday night he and a friend were attacked by youths, and David later died as a result of the injuries he received.

David - Cinders - was known and liked by many of the staff and regulars at the King's Arms. His death is truly shocking and appalling, and I hope his killers are found and brought to justice with expediency.

posted at 10:47 AM •