It is in the nature of certain people (ahem) never to be satisfied, which — depending on the context — can be a curse or a blessing.

For example, I just finished a very delicious chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting (but not too sweet!) and am already aching for another. This is also why it’s sometimes better to leave the contours of life blurry, so that we can be distracted by questions of interpretation instead of fixating on crossing boundaries that all too often we realize in retrospect might have been better left uncrossed. But at the same time, relentless dissatisfaction can sometimes yield work of improbable beauty, and this too can provide a measure of unexpected relief.

It seems like the unhappiest people — by which I mean ‘the happiest’ — are those who never give in to either extreme, and exude satisfaction and contentment. I was like this once, until I broke my glasses and everything was a blur for several weeks. I grew to appreciate this, so that when the time came to pick up my new glasses, I told the optician to grind the lenses back into sand; this made me happy for a little while, until I grew fatigued with everything this new world offered, and more than anything else, I wished to possess what I had once had. Now that I am older and a ‘productive member of society’ I sometimes attempt to nostalgically recapture these extremes through photography, and intentionally blur images; I am vaguely aware that this is actually an exercise in memory, which is equally susceptible to distortions in the attempt to make them more beautiful than real life.

Today I finally read the New Yorker article about David Foster Wallace, which was by turns inspiring and depressing; inspiring because (and this is hardly a surprise) he seemed to genuinely believe in fiction as a means to reflect/analyze/transform currents of our society, and depressing because of his unending doubt about everything from his ability to write a compelling novel to his own mental health, which was apparently precarious for many many years before he finally committed suicide.

His unfinished novel, which will be published next year, supposedly examines boredom as a potentially transcendent force in modern society; it’s set in an IRS office in Illinois, and describes a group of tax auditors, some of whom are better able to deal with the mind-numbing tedium of their work than others. Ultimately, it sounds like DFW was unable to resolve — or at least to his own satisfaction — the fundamental dilemma of how to make a novel about boredom not boring.

Whatever the merits of the novel, it seems that he was touching on an important theme in our culture; seriously, are there not days when the meaningless implications of everything you do at work becomes such a towering wave of ennui that you wonder how you can possibly live another minute, even if by most measures you have a job that is ‘interesting’ and ‘valuable’ and possibly even ‘lucrative’? (In this post, ‘work’ may/may not be a metaphor for ‘life.’) And do you — as DFW postulates — resign yourself to these waves? Do you quit fighting and simply allow them to pass through you so that you emerge on the other side more ‘mindful’ and able to ‘live in the moment,’ so that perhaps you can find gratification in composing say, an elegant e-mail to a senior VP or finally figuring out a mathematical function on a spreadsheet or even participating in a ‘team project’? Ultimately, it seems to me that the issue DFW confronted was (in two parts): 1) ‘how do we stop thinking, when thinking is so painful?’ (or, via Huysmans via Pascal: ‘The soul is pained by all things it thinks upon’) and 2) if we do stop thinking, can we still feel ‘meaningful’ or ‘human’ in modern society, and not like ‘just another corporate drone’?

In this post, there are four photographs: three of them contain an airplane, which may/may not be a metaphor for our desire to ‘leave our lives behind,’ whereas the one picture without may/may not represent the desire to contemplate that which we have seen so many times before with the (irrational/sustaining/instinctual) hope that we will find something there that we have never seen before.

Today the sky was windswept, which reminds of when I first moved to New York City and me and my friend Mike were walking around the Lower East Side one night — it was definitely winter — and we saw what could only be described as a tumbleweed that blew across the intersection, not far from where we stood with our mouths agape. We were both big fans of the Meat Puppets, of course, and as we continued on our way, we discussed the song “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds,” from the first Meat Puppets LP, a song I just learned — via Google — is a cover of a traditional folk song. Not that we would have cared about this at the time: we were only interested in the past so far as it extended back no more than ten-fifteen years (which seemed like a long time then), i.e., to the glory days of SST Records.

If this — to see a tumbleweed in Manhattan — happened now (assuming the entire LES hadn’t been transformed into an upscale shopping mall), we would no doubt have taken a photograph or video of it and posted it for everyone to see, but for us it became a memory that we shared and was one of those goofy jokes/events that I suppose — once you share enough of them — forms the foundation of any friendship. For years after we would say to each other, “do you remember that time we saw a tumbleweed?” (This was no doubt annoying to those who missed out or refused to believe such an improbable truth.)

Perhaps one casualty of ‘the Facebook age’ is a sort of passive destruction of any part of the present not documented with some kind of photographic (or via e-mail) textual reference; it’s almost like we don’t have to worry as much about filtering things out in our daily existence, because we can always do it later. I’m no less guilty of this, of course; I didn’t keep a journal on my recent trip to Europe, because I literally took a thousand photographs and will rely on those in the event I want to remember something.

Once I saw a tumbleweed blowing across the windswept streets of downtown Manhattan.

Because I didn’t take a photograph of this, it may or may not have happened.

Like fewer and fewer events in the modern age, you’ll just have to take my word for it.

There is a pastel hue to the sky today that I haven’t seen since ____, which makes me think that summer is approaching. It reminds me of the sky I saw not too long ago in Vienna, although there the tones were more subtle and exquisite in a way that New York cannot ever quite seem to match — probably because we are too far south — but it also reminds of the sky that I saw from this exact location last year, when I first starting paying closer attention.

It makes me look forward to the coming months, when the sun will move north — inching closer to the bridge — and each day fall dramatically behind the Palisades. Only the bridge is constant and unchanging, as if tying the past to the future, as much as one piece of land to another.

This is a blog called ‘The Gay Recluse.’ Here you will find words designed to provoke or stimulate or anger or entertain or bore you to death. Moreover, ‘The Gay Recluse’ is a fictional character written by another fictional character named ‘Matthew Gallaway,’ who in turn is played by ‘an actor’ named Matthew Gallaway.

Just as this is a photograph of a bridge and not the real bridge, Matthew Gallaway — again, via The Gay Recluse — should not be confused with ‘the real person’ — i.e., the actor — much less his past or future, which is sometimes depicted here in ways that to the uncritical observer might appear to ‘resemble the truth.’

Rather, we ask readers to consider these words as you would lines in a movie, which while at times may appear very close to a ‘biopic’ should not be confused with ‘real life.’  Most of all, we beg you to resist the temptation to use these words to bludgeon or provoke those who — like children or the mentally infirm — are suspectible to confusing words with reality, or for whatever reason lack the acuity (or desire) to appreciate this construct.

Or to put it more plainly: whatever you do, please don’t feel compelled to tell our fifth-grade teacher Mr. W___ (if you happen to bump into him) that we made fun of the polyester pants he wore (not to mention his ‘macho perm’) so that all of sudden we have him yelling at us on FB! (Note: this is a metaphor, and in no way should be understood to be something that ‘actually happened.’)

This is a blog called ‘The Gay Recluse.’ It is filled with words and images. It is a story about life (i.e., it is not a Tumblr). It is a fabrication. It is meaningful/meaningless only as a work of art. Any insight you gain from it is into your own soul, not ours.

We grow up and are given a set of words that we use to communicate: ideas, places, things, ppl.

But as all of these things change — as they always do, thanks to the passage of time — words that once seemed perfect become inadequate to describe the new world in which we live.

Thus we have a choice: we can suffer with old words or invent new ones. (In this sentence, words are a metaphor for words.)

It should further be noted that the words we use or invent may or may not be applicable to anyone else.

If I can describe the infinite pieces of my life in the most beautiful and accurate way possible, why should I care if you describe yours — which is infinitely different (or not)– in the same way? Moreover, why should I care if you take bits and pieces of my language to build yours? (Note to the litigious: we are not talking about copyright law here.)

In this way, we may not agree, but we may not be in conflict, either.

As long as guns are not involved, we should be able to live in peace: you will write your book, and I will write mine.

It’s often said that as you get older, time moves faster.

This is undoubtedly true, except for when it moves more slowly than it once did.

I’m reading a book by Richard Rorty,* who — unlike Plato/Kant/Schopenhauer/Freud/Jung — argues that there is no greater truth to be discovered, either inside of us or beyond us, i.e., there is no “will” or “unconscious.”

Rorty is not exactly “tween-lit” — I will probs have to read it twice to really digest — and I’m only about halfway done, so I could be getting it entirely wrong!

There is only the changing/evolving language we use to describe our circumstances. As such, two observations — seemingly contradictory — could both be entirely valid.

In effect, there is only the arrangement of books and art — the exposure of the different threads that tie things together — which he calls literary criticizzzzzzzm.

What’s clear is that he’s not an artist, but a thinker.

There is a line in the photograph that clearly divides it; one half is bathed in brilliant sunlight and the other is frozen in the shadow.

Recently — in part because of reading Rorty — I have begun to have doubts about which side I would prefer to be found.

According to Wikipedia, the rooftop of the Stephansdom in Vienna contains over 230,000 tiles. It was originally built in the Middle Ages and then — after it was destroyed by fire at the end of WWII — rebuilt in 1952 with the help of Google Images and Soviet robots.

One fear of the modern age is that we serve no purpose in life but to increase the profit margins on the spreadsheets of our superiors.

Of course in our modern jobs — for which we have attended college and sometimes even more than that — we are insulated from the occupational ravages of disease and prosecution and slavery.

But there is still a part of us that no matter what the risk longs to be one of ten thousand others toiling away for a five or six decades, despite the numbing cold and the slippery slope and the certainty that our name will never be attached to this work.

Only when observing the obsessive madness of such art do we feel anything close to hopeful about humanity.

But then we remember standing on the plaza, hating the hordes of tourists who (just like us) had come to gawk at this spectacle before returning home, where the image becomes — as much as a memory or hope — a bludgeon with which we beat ourselves, knowing what we can never be.

A new and improved version of this post can be found here.

When we are born, our souls are encased in ice.

At some point, some of this ice might thaw, leaving us exposed in ways both good and bad.

It would be naive to think that anyone could emerge from this without some damage, although this too might be considered beautiful when viewed in a certain light.

I first met Leanne in the fall of tenth grade in the Kingswood dining hall.  This was my first year of boarding school and — residual fear from public school — I was still petrified at the thought of eating alone; I don’t remember if I circled the cavernous room looking for someone I knew (preferably from the boys’ dorm or the hockey team) or whether I went directly to the emptiest table on the edge, where she and her best friend Mary already sat, clearly not interested in the throngs who populated the middle of the space.

Leanne — who I think had skipped a grade or two by this point — was dressed waifishly in khaki pants and a man’s flannel shirt, and still possessed the androgynous charm of a precocious child; only her shoulder-length hair, wavy with bangs and indifferently styled, pushed her more toward the girl’s side of the equation. Mary, dressed similarly — and with short, shiny swimmer’s hair and broad shoulders — seemed even more ambivalent about adorning herself with the trappings of the more traditional — and popular — segments of the school, who chattered away en masse only a few feet from our table.  As it turned out, they were extremely conscious their separation from the “mainstream” of the student body, but — revelation to me — framed this in terms of class, not gender; though they were both “day students,” Leanne and Mary were not from the posh suburbs surrounding the school — Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham — but from further afield, although the exact names of these towns now escapes me. In this respect, they were more like the boarding students — who tended to come from more middle-class environs — but because the girls who boarded were a smaller and more insular group, it made sense that — at least at this juncture — Leanne and Mary were outsiders from almost every vantage point.

Although I — as a hockey player, book-smart, and with conventionally masculine good looks (which I say with no pride, and perhaps some shade of embarrassment) — was the opposite of an outsider, a fact that may have begged the question of exactly what I was doing each day eating lunch with self-professed “losers” like Leanne and Mary, they obviously appealed to the nascent dissatisfaction I felt for so many facets of my own life at fifteen. I think my presence egged them on, as if I had entered a private theater, a sort of performance of two in which I was the only audience member. Leanne was the ringleader and the wit; her down-turned eyes, along with a small bump on her nose and a strong chin, seemed to possess an inherent melancholy that made her observations — usually either an extreme form of self-mockery or just mockery, particularly when it came to money and what it bought for those around us — all the more outrageous; Mary would quietly gasp in agreement and laughter as Leanne threw her head back in hilarity and sometimes waved her thin arms around — almost daring the world to notice — as I watched paralyzed with awe at the urbane quality of what I had implausibly found in the suburbs of Detroit.

It would be fair to say that I fell in love with Leanne in every way except the one that mattered, or at least required some definition; it would probably also be fair to say that my feelings were reciprocated, but only for a little while, until it became apparent that I would remain cruelly aloof, no matter how inwardly charmed I was by the long letters she sent me over Thanksgiving break describing the horrors of a car trip to visit her grandparents in Florida.

We remained friends — and possibly even good friends — throughout high school, and I think she generally regarded me with a sense of stupefied affection, as she — and no doubt others — wondered what my problem was, when the answer was so obvious as to appear completely unlikely. For my part, I watched from of a distance as she gained popularity among an alternative crowd of “faculty brats” and assorted “boho” types with whom I was also loosely associated; more than anyone I met at Cranbrook, I had the sense that she was simply biding her time before being released to the world at large, which she would undoubtedly conquer.

As luck (or bad luck) would have it, we both went to Cornell; she was the first person I saw when I arrived on West Campus in a cloud of hopeless dread, knowing that I had made a huge mistake, compounded by my agreeing to live with a childhood friend in the freshman-football dorm (an arrangement made to please both sets of parents, predictably enough). But Leanne was nearby, and for one night — this during orientation — it was like we were in tenth grade again, and we walked through the teeming crowds, wondering openly how everyone could be so stupid, and yet at the same time so oblivious to their stupidity.

After this, we quickly lost contact. My academic career was marked by a program of laziness, subversion and ambivalence — i.e., I majored in “Government” — and for friends I sought out those whose aura appeased my own vague need for self-differentiation, but without ever forcing me to elucidate the underlying reasons for this; in short, I gradually attached myself to some of the fine-arts majors. Leanne by contrast quickly established herself as a “star” in the creative-writing program, and became popular in a way that seemed a thousand miles away from the person she had been in high school; when we saw each other, our conversations were brief and superficial, as if neither wanted to remember where we had come from while distrusting the other for knowing the truth.

After I moved to New York, I occasionally saw Leanne at parties in Brooklyn. By this point we were “adults,” and reflected somewhat more candidly about who we had been, although as someone who remained closeted, there were severely enforced limits on how far I would allow myself to go in this regard. Nevertheless, because she retained her brilliance I felt a little sad when she married a writer and seemed to give up her own aspirations, as if they were my own. After this, our friendship — if it could even be called that — became increasingly attenuated (not out of any malice) and at some point I learned she had gone to architecture school.

The last time I saw her, I was finally “out”; I remember feeling nervous, as if I should apologize for how dishonest I had been, yet at the same time searching in her eyes for some sign of the person who still lived in my memories, which was no doubt an unfair burden to place on both of us; for who could possibly live up to the naive, unformed expectations of a fifteen-year old? Though I would have liked to dwell on the past and exactly how it had contrived to push us to this point in the present, we were at a crowded art opening, and so talked aggressively for a few minutes about her job as an architect and my obsession for old bricks. (Only later did I realize this obsession was both literal and metaphorical.) Though understandably distant, she still seemed impossibly erudite — and even good-natured — as she pointed me in the direction of obscure artists and design theorists whose work might reinforce my own tendencies. We traded e-mail addresses, but neither followed up.

Although I knew she remained in the city, and it would be quite feasible to track her down, I preferred to think of her as elusive; and here my inclinations seemed to be reinforced when, the last I heard — via a friend — she was quitting her architecture job and going to Africa.

She recently appeared to me in a dream, and it took only a few seconds to locate her on a professional networking site on the internet. I made no effort to contact her, though; it wasn’t that I lacked the desire to see her again — the tug of nostalgia almost reduced me to tears as I remembered her laugh — but a sense of stinging remorse that I felt certain would descend upon me in the minutes after such a prospective meeting; but even as this occurred to me I realized that this, too, was an exaggeration, and in fact, I was more than prepared for either scenario (i.e., to meet or not to meet her). Then I felt redeemed by a greater certainty that what had appeared to me was a symbol of my own youth, and one to which I was more than ready to say goodbye.