Misty. Watercolored.

September 5, 2008 in Ephemera | 3 comments

I’ve been siting home for the last 2 hours, reading the MLS and watching 90210. In my defense, I never watched the original, but I turned on the TV as I made myself a sandwich for dinner (a turkey reuben and some beets in balsamic vinegar) and I quickly flipped away from the football game on chanel 7. When I hit channel 9, the CW, I was halted by some iconic image of Los Angeles and I got stuck there.

I miss LA. Maybe I just miss the idea of LA and all the things that go with it; particularly in the department of romantic entanglement. It’s hard to tell, perched where I am at the precipice of middle age, that I was once young and cute. We all were, though, weren’t we? I’ve minimized the real impact of my addiction, but demographics has to play a role in the fact that I have only had one boyfriend in the last 14 years that I’ve lived in Boise. In LA I seldom didn’t have a boyfriend, and all of them, except for the last one, were pretty wonderful men.

All those images of Sunset Plaza and Melrose Avenue remind me of being in love. The last time I was really in love I worked on the 13th floor of the tower on the left in the picture above and my office overlooked the football (and oil) field  of Beverly Hills High. I think the treatment term, Augusten Burroughs would know beter than I, is defocusing.

The fact of the matter is that I have engineered a way to make sure that I don’t have to face having a relationship now. That way I can complain about it without having to do anything about it. It’s safe. If I really wanted a relationship I might start with making room for one. The fact that I haven’t would suggest that I don’t want one.  But I miss it.

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  1. Wayward Son on September 5, 2008 at 6:36 pm

    I have not felt carnal desire in a noticeable way since I quit using. I only mention this because somewhere in my mind I hold the notion that a romantic relationship would be the ultimate promise of a sober life. However, I think I would have to want to have sex for this “ultimate promise” to occur. For the most part, this lack of desire has allowed me, I think, to reclaim and rebuild the broader parts of my life that are not about sex. That’s a complete reversal of focus from my days of using. Perhaps it will all come to pass in time. It feels like an eternity since I quit but it really hasn’t been THAT long.

    You may wonder what on earth I am talking about as this doesn’t seem to have much to do with your post. But once again you have me thinking about my life in a different way by writing about your own experience.

  2. Chris on September 5, 2008 at 8:39 pm

    Oh, no, sweetie. You’re right on. What hasn’t returned for you came back to me with a vengeance. Only I haven’t acted on it. I tried, once, to the point of buying lube and condoms and the whole thing disintegrated in my apartment. That was the event that made me stop doing dishes. Why bother, right? I was so depressed over that.

    But “hooking up” has never been something that I do well or that I’m comfortable doing, especially in recovery. There is so much about it that goes against every principle I try to live by. Plus, being raised LDS (Mormon), I’m really kind of, what’s the word? Prudish. I really believe that, at least for me, the right place to express oneself sexually is inside a committed relationship. I’m not very hip. I’m not very popular. I don’t have much in common with much of the gay community around here, or anybody else for that matter. I don’t go to bars at all. I live in a small city.

    In my after-care group the other night someone decided that the topic needed to be about my “lust problem”. Personally I don’t see anything wrong with noticing every good looking man that passes my field of vision, but I guess other people do. So I have the sex drive worthy of a Mormon, and no place to express it. And I am right there with you with the idea that a relationship would be the “ultimate promise”.

    Someone told me that the 2 safe ways to change the way I feel are meditation and masturbation. And all that I’ll add is that one way or another I work to change the way I feel every day. ;-)

  3. Marc on September 6, 2008 at 6:14 pm

    I think we sober gay men spend far too much time thinking there is something wrong with us for wanting sex and not having it, not wanting sex and not having it or wanting sex and having too much of it and so on. Basically, there isn’t a one of us who doesn’t need and desire intimacy, and very few of us who thinks we’ve found the right mix in getting it. This was the topic at a meeting last week, a very Gay LA meeting with an very impressive array of beauties, and no one shared anything close to serenity or right-sizedness in this area.
    Funny enough, I have my first date in forever tonight, and I’d rather stay home. Sometimes you just know, right off the bat. But I so appreciate his willingness to explore that I can only give it a chance in return, even if I strongly suspect what the result will be anyway.