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welcome to the hole
Once upon a time, I kept a LiveJournal account, gryphons_hole, a deep, dark, comfy little hole in my brain where I kept notes on my life and queerness.
This is the archive to that account, mostly password protected, adult, queer content, stripped of photo content after the site restructured its photo hosting feature. I hope to restore that content as well.
If I know you, ask for the password. If I don’t, hope for a generous mood.
08.18.24 I have realized a need to continue in this space. A kink reawaking if you will, with content that may range into inappropriate for my other blog spaces.
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Protected: so much time passing
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a day late…
I should count it as good that the date is becoming fuzzy…
Seven years; happy anniversary to me!
July 27th, 2004 I was officially released from treatment and declared cancer-free.Today was not such a good day, and the packing for the move seems to get nowhere. These are the days that I think, “chemotherapy was so much easier to get through than this…”
How messed up is that…?
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wait! what…?
So, I do a good amount of my grocery essentials shopping at Save-a-Lot, mostly since it is on the direct path home from work…
I started buying my yogurt there some time ago: it was very tasty, at the time only the strawberry had HFCS, and it was an eight ounce container priced at two for one dollar.
A short time ago, the container shrank down to six ounces, still two for a buck. It didn’t bother me much except the initial noticing of it; I mean, I still get two snacks for a buck, so no big loss…
And it still doesn’t bother me, but now I am noticeably more confused…
I looked into the labels again and noticed that the strawberry no longer has HFCS. And then a week ago, the price lowered to thirty-nine cents a cup. Let me break that down…
Originally, the yogurt was two eight ounce cups for one dollar, which breaks down to 6.25 cents an ounce.
Now, it is one six ounce cup for thirty-nine cents, or 6.5 cents an ounce.
And they removed HFCS from one flavor and replaced it with the more expensive ingredient of sugar. And they changed the cup size, and therefore had to recast molds and change packaging design and the foil stamping for the lids… All of this for the increased price of 0.25 cents a cup. That is one extra cent for every four cups… One extra dollar for every four hundred cups sold.
I do hope they sell an awful lot of yogurt…
Does this speak of how impossible it is to raise a price above such a rounded amount as two for a dollar…? How silly we are as consumers.
On a tangentially related note: I have started noticing a lot of moments when it is cheaper to buy two smaller packages of a product instead of buying one package holding exactly twice as much. This never used to be so when I was growing up…
It all makes my head hurt a little bit…
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welcome to my world; enjoy the stadium seating…
I saw the Movie Avatar late in the game; I believe it was months after it has been released on DVD. It was, of course, visually stunning, and I loved that finally, the bullish white American privilege finally didn’t win at story’s end. (I think I had been waiting for that at least since Disney’s Pocahontas..)
Then, some time afterward, I hear a radio report about Post-Avatar Depression Syndrome…
My response: Only just now…? Only this movie…?
*pshaw*
Get in line.
I do not just slip into a movie when I watch it on the big screen; it slips into me. Even the most responsive audiences cease to exist to me.
I remember the first time I was rejected from the movie experience inside of my head: The Crow. All those years ago, I can still feel the rejection. I was sitting in the apartment with the actors. And then the needles, omgosh, those needles. They came out of nowhere and flew through the air into that asshole’s flesh; I was so stunned that I jerked back into my seat and back into the reality of the theater. My friend next to me understood exactly what had happen to me, even though he couldn’t not explain it to his girlfriend, who had also witnessed my response…
So, I had no need to mock PADS, not any more than anything else in the world… Honestly, only just now…? Only that movie…?
After Thor, I was upset that the Asgardians still remain silent in our world, when it is so in need of help.
After X-men, First Class, I was disappointed that the virus in my blood still hadn’t merged with my DNA to wake up some latent mutation and shoot power forth from my eye-sockets.
After any of the Harry Potter movies, I have sulked that no owl has yet to deliver my invitation to attend Hogwart’s, even this late in my life, and cursed my parents for creating me muggle-born…
After the Green Lantern, I wanted to scream to the sky in frustration that the purple alien’s ring has yet to find me. Well, I was also a bit disappointed that Hal Jordan was not waiting for me in my bed when I returned home, also, but that is mostly a different topic.
After Transformers: Dark of the Moon, I kept an eye on the rearview mirror the entire return home, insistent that I could pick out the Decepticons from the pack of black SUVs on the road behind me before they transformed and blew me off the road…
And, finally, I left Super 8 with an empty feeling inside for not having shared an empathic link with such a creature…
Once more… Only just now…? Only that movie…?
Welcome to my brain. I assume that this response I have to the big screen experience speaks of the degree of thoughts in my head; the worlds that swirl into existence in my brain are a much closer match to the realities of the big screen than to the world I always have to return to after the credits roll. I know I will have to do this, but I am most always a little bit sad when I first step out into the parking lot. In that haze as I walk from one reality into the next, I feel the potential of them colliding together, and then the long silent pause when they don’t.
*sigh*
Only just now? Only that movie.
Amateurs…
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help me, obi-wan…
You are my only hope!
Honestly, I have not been abducted by the sadistic leather-clad strong-arm of an evil empire (although that does sounds more delicious than horrible…)
This has been a month! I decided to not renew the lease on the studio, Michael’s (my studiomate) health finally failed, and I have the entire contents of this space to either move, sell or dump by the end of July. I do look forward to the move; ever since I made the decision in earnest, I have been waking up a growing list of things of which I have been depriving myself since moving in here. Like an oven, and a private bathroom, and the ability to use more than one counter-top appliance at a time without popping a breaker…
So, that is all right and fine in the world.
Yesterday was Michael’s funeral service. Not a wake, not a memorial, but a funeral service. I had not been to one of those in quite a while. I was just find through this whole to-do until I got to the service and people starting telling their stories. I could not stop crying. Nor can I step up to such things and speak, I am too overwrought by the thoughts that flow through my head at those times…
Now? I am still fine, or mostly so. If I think too much about the things that will change in Michael’s absence, I am hit full-bore with how much I miss him. Or will, or whichever.
Mostly, the day-to-day is easy, since he was only sporadically here. It is when I am where he was always with me that the weight of his absence sits hard on my shoulders. For instance, this coming afternoon… AT the service, I was invited to a poolside gathering by Michael’s closest gang. I had joined them last year for both Memorial Day and the Fourth. I will enjoy myself there. And I look forward to spending the day with everyone in attendance being aware of Michael’s absence.
Yes, I think that will work just fine.
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touching the veil…
My studiomate, Michael, died some time this morning, after I left for work.
I went to see him in the hospital yesterday evening. For all the deaths in my life, this is the first time I have sat with someone so very close to death. Michael was an even six foot tall, and looking at his face last night, and what bit of his shoulders and arms came out from under the covers, I would say that he was at best eighty pounds…
I was hit with a wall of force when I saw him. I had almost nothing to say during my visit; I was that overwhelmed by his approaching death, but I held his hand the entire time I was there. I couldn’t not touch him; it was that important to do so.
Michael is my oldest friend in KCMO. I met him some time about 1998 or so while I was still living in Phoenix. He had been visiting family there. He was my confidant, my framer and preparator, my collaborator, my patron and among the dearest of my friends…
Speedy travels, Michael. You are loved and missed…
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the first step of the last phase…
My plans for the evening got cancelled. Well, postponed. An obligation ran long and I had to call the day and stay in the rest of my evening, which is fine considering.
I had missed a call from my studiomate while thrifting this morning. I hadn’t yet returned the call.
The phone rang later than he is usually up and his number showed up on the ID… but it wasn’t Michael, it was his partner, Little Michael. Michael is in the hospital. He is barely conscious. LM is certain that this is the start of the end. I would agree.
Michael has been in a steady decline for over half a year now. Things only ever got stable, never better.
After a two week delay, I got a message on Friday from the landlord’s office. They offered a two year lease, which I wasn’t expecting, and a seven percent increase, which I can’t really afford on my own. The situation of me living in the space makes it difficult to find another studiomate. This is the hard decision for me, but in my mind I have already made it.
I do hate the idea of needing to find a new place, but I need cheaper than this space, and I wouldn’t mind a clean break from all of the stuff here that isn’t mine…
I will go to see Michael tomorrow after work; this isn’t something I should put off very long…
Oddly, this is the first death of a friend to which I will be up close. All the rest have died while I was living elsewhere (either they moved, or I did.) or had never been in close proximity in the first place…
I have known Michael longer than anyone else in KCMO; I met him while he was visiting family in Phoenix, while I still lived there. He has been an unerring friend and a great support, both for my art and for myself. Our mutual needs offered me a living option when I needed it most desperately back when I realized I needed to leave my most recent ex-partner. He helped generously with the rent here, even though he only stored stuff here, at least at first, at least while he could. He supported my art regularly, not just with inspirational ideas and suggestions, but with his preparator skills for framing and matting, and by buying multiple prints and cards and drawings, as well as commissioning an original diptych shortly after I moved here to KCMO.
At the moment, I am quite well-grounded. Part of it is real, and part of it is numbness, I am certain, from the shock of all this upheaval in my life. Some point in the near future, I am sure it will hit, and that will be fine. I am not bothered by crying, or the sadness of such things as death… At least with Michael, I got to watch it coming, instead of all these instant deaths of late.
*sigh*
This rots. Big time.
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Protected: you better believe it…
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Protected: full. sated. complete.
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losing my masochist
A friend once mentioned to me that not-choosing was a valid option; he put it in the sense of waiting for clarity. The idea has always sat close to me through my life…
With that notion, I have been sitting silently with something since last September. I have mentioned it to various individuals as the conversation arose, but not posted anything about it, nor mentioned the deeper ramifications…
Last fall, at summer camp, I was flogged. Well, I was flogged by a certain individual, which more than one man has told me is a flogging with a capital ‘F’. It was quite possibly the single most intense experience I have had in my thirteen years involved with the leather community. I think of it often, fondly. I am fully happy to have share that with him and to have been there with him.
Since then, I have had a few opportunities to be flogged, and my answer has been ‘No, thanks.” Or a more resounding “No!”
See…? I think I am done with it. That session answered a lot of questions for me. Perhaps it has offered more insight into who I am than most other moments in my life. In a more abstracted sense, I am still processing it.
Once more, I say to the world: I am not a pain pig.
This time around, it is not a question or suspicion or anything of a guess.
I am right and accurate when I say that certain things do not hurt me as they do others, and certain things do. I do not enjoy the latter. Early in my life, I walked through the world with a lot of pain. Things such a flogging offered a break from all of that by giving so much intensity so that I could forget about what I carried through the day. That said, the years following chemo were intense for numerous reasons, but steadily over the past few years I have learned to move through the world with very little pain in my body.
I suspect that this change has influenced my shift from activities such as flogging.
In the process, my body has come alive in its response to such tiny little stimuli. Any of you that have witnessed my response to tactile stimuli understand what I mean in this. This is wonderful stuff to me, but also it makes more intense things quite difficult.
I can sit in an active play space and close my eyes and listen to the beatings and sounds of the space… in the right moment, my body will start to response to the experience. Sometimes, so intensely so that I feel like I am being hit…
There are reasons for the timing of all this: IML is this weekend, the event that I will no longer attend as long as I make yearbooks… but, also, I received my invitation to this year’s summer camp earlier in the week, so my urge to reflect is rather high…
The frustration I see in this new understanding of myself is this: once more, I am put outside of the normal range of experience. The most common BDSM practice is flogging. It seems to me that moving upward from there is single tails. I still choose to walk my own path, I am just frustrated to again find myself isolated from the norm even among those I consider to be a better fit to me than the general populace…
I am happy to note that of the men I have met that see the unique response of my body to light touch, many of them delight in knowing me and sharing that experience with me… but the mainstream of the leather community doesn’t get it; the subtlety of it all is lost on them…
Such is the way for me, I suppose…
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gryphon's hole 