Its the little things

I find as I grow older (over forty) I am fascinated, not by the things that used to drive my attention when I was in my twenty’s and thirty’s but by the stupid little things that I never noticed before. Like what happened to my ass. Was it always this shape? Did it always dimple in that way when I squeezed it together?

I think that I am concentrating on these stupid little things because my own sense of mortality is getting to the point where I have to actually acknowledge it. Forty. Four Oh . Now to someone eighty, that may seem young and “wait until your my age” but that is the point. I look back and see just as much time back there as I probably have before me and it scares the shit out of me. Was my ass always this shape? Did my toes always curve that way? Little things to grasp onto just so I don’t go insane from the vast amount of time behind me and the inevitable declining years in front of me.  

As an aging single Gay man there are no books to tell you what the landscape is to look like.

I was at a play the other day “August: Osage county.” Excellent play by the way and the reason for the name of this blog, but I digress. There was an obviously gay man working the crowd and by working I mean skulking from group to group listening to snitches of conversations and then moving on. The only reason I noticed him was because he was very flamboyant and wearing the most amusing full-length black beaver pelt coat and carrying a matching purse or “man bag”. I started to wonder what motivated such behaviour. Why so obviously flamboyant but skulking around like Gollum looking for the ring of power? Then it hit me. He was a lonely old queer that wanted to feel involved but not sure how to quite break into the conversations of the people around him and frankly I think he made most of the people sipping their champagne a bit nervous. This is what old and gay has always been to me. Eccentric, odd old men hanging around closed groups trying to find a way to feel loved and accepted.

I find it odd that after all the years of fighting to be accepted in a world that either hates us or is so ambivalent to our existence that they stop seeing us after we turn forty that we still feel the need to ingratiate ourselves to this mass of norm. Yet I can feel myself drifting in that direction.

I would hope that it’s different when you’re in a relationship. Having one other person that loves you might stop the madness of over tanning and plastic surgery and all the little things that older gay men do to grasp desperately at their youth so that they can find that other person that loves them.

Someone once said to me “well you have to love yourself before you can expect any one else to love you” well I have been loving myself for about 20 years now and I think I would like to try it with someone else in the room for a change. I think that would make all the difference.

It’s not that I haven’t had great loves, I have, just none that loved me back.

Now looking back I see a laundry list of shit that really doesn’t matter to the now.  My divorce, The cancer, the broken bones, the vascular bleed, the restaurants that I opened and then closed or sold, the men I slept with, the pets that are gone, the family I no longer talk to, houses I owned, the cars I’ve had. All of it a mess of human garbage that at this point in my life formed who I am but doesn’t help me wake up any brighter in the morning.  I am terrified that one day I am going to wake up from this dream that I am walking in and realize that (as the Matriarch in August: Osage County did) all my life has changed, all the people that I have loved are gone and I have an Indian living in my attic and I have no Idea how she got there.