Nightswimming / remembering that night / September's coming soon...

I look younger than I am. I feel older than I am. I joke with my friend that I have “age dysphoria” – my bastardized version of “gender dysphoria,” a term used in transgender discussions denoting a disconnect with biological sex or birth-assigned gender.

I’ve nearly gotten into physical fights with people who say things like “You wouldn’t remember that, you’re so young” or “Just wait till you get older!” I cringe when waitresses call me “hon” or “sweetie.”  I spent most of my twenties in a state of discontent. All that energy and motion, college days amassing friends, drugs, sex, go go go and don’t forget to figure out who you are. It wasn’t for me. I was a lousy young person.

I’m still young, relatively speaking. But the older I get the more relieved I feel. There’s more time to reflect on what’s happened. Things slow down (even as time seems to pass more quickly).

The term “age dysphoria” is a bit of a bad joke – everyone starts young and gets older, while transgender people don’t have the luxury of naturally migrating from one gender to another. I realize now that when people assume I don’t know something because of my age, or call me naive, they aren’t putting me down. They just don’t understand that inside me is an 80-year-old man who wanted to learn to play bridge when he was in high school.

I’m writing this in early September. There’s a palpable chill to the air. I love summer, don’t get me wrong, and I had a good one this year with just enough dancing, swimming and hiking. But summer is youth. I remember lying in bed one summer Saturday morning when I was eleven and listening through my open window. Kids playing, dogs barking, cars whooshing past. It was all too much. I was immobilized by the bounty of it – too much life. I didn’t know where to start.

There’s a relief to fall, to the downturn. It’s rained so much in the past few days, all I’ve done is sit inside and watch movies and I’ve loved every second of it. Bad weather means I don’t have to go outside, I don’t have to take advantage of every single minute of my life and live as fully as possible. I’ve always been better at sitting back and contemplating. Nostalgia is my favorite emotion.

Sometime in July it occurred to me that I only have a limited amount of summers left. How many? Fifty? Forty? It’s sad to think of it in those terms. Still, I’m not afraid of getting older. I know my body will break down as I age (it’s already starting – just slightly), but as long as my mind is good, as long as I can think and reflect, I welcome it.

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My favorite fall album is Camper Van Beethoven’s “II & III.” Here is the first track from it, “Abundance”:

I’ve been trying to write memoir. I just put a new story up here.

I’m going to be interviewed LIVE for a local web show, Positive OUTlook, this Thursday, September 1, at 1pm. Just go to http://outonline.com to watch the live feed. Afterward it will be archived on their YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/OutTVPittsburgh.

The show is health oriented, so talk is going to be along those lines (fantasy as part of a healthy sex life, etc). There’s a number where you can call in and also a chat room, which could be fun.

A photo essay by Natty Soltesz

My life has changed completely in the last four months, and one of the more minor changes was that I got a new phone that takes pictures. Here are some that I’ve taken during this period (some are very NSFW so I’m posting them after the jump).

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First of all, have you noticed how poorly this site has been operating lately? I called my hosting service today and they were like, “Oh yeah, we’ve been having trouble with that server for the past month,” and I was like, “Okay, so move it to another server,” so that’s what they’re going to do. So hopefully it should work better.

I don’t even know what to say on this website lately. There’s too much going on. I had to euthanize my cat a little while back. The vet came to my house to do it, which helped. I took his body to my hometown and buried him in the woods.

I sold my first collage at an event in Pittsburgh called Art All Night, really a fantastic thing. It was the first time I’d sold a piece of visual art on its own merit, so that feels pretty great.

I started writing again, I submitted something to Best Gay Erotica 2012 just the other day, so that feels good too.

I guess that’s it.

I know this blog is shit lately, and I apologize.  I don’t have any fucking time in my life these days.  I’m working two jobs (one is at the porn store, which should provide for some good stories on down the line) and I just moved to a new apartment.  Bear with me.

Repost from old blog, 2/7/2009

Rising sea levels could swamp sections of the Eastern Shore, eat away islands in the Chesapeake Bay and submerge long stretches of Atlantic Ocean beaches by 2100…[more]

Ocean City, Maryland is but a sliver of sand – the place already feels like it’s hanging on by a thread. Being there recently, in the dead of winter, I couldn’t get it out of my head that it is doomed. I was imagining it as a lost, submerged world when I took these pictures.

A bit dramatic, I know…

Detail from Backwoods cover illustration by Michael Kirwan

Here I am!

My novel-in-stories of erotic fiction, Backwoods, is done done done and coming out this summer from Rebel Satori Press.  Michael has completed the illustrations, the cover is GLORIOUS, and in the next couple of days I’m going to be putting up a rudimentary promotional page on here, just to have something I can link to.  More info as I get it!

I haven’t written a word besides journal entries in the past three months.  It’s getting old!  I need to get back into writing, but haven’t been able to concentrate.  The big change in my life is that I’m single now, and though I don’t really care to talk about that on the internet, it feels way too significant to gloss over.  Know that I’m doing okay and working through things day to day.  I know that people out there care, and it means a lot to me, but please don’t offer me sympathy.  I’ll be fine.

I hope to start posting more on here in the coming weeks, including resuming your Friday Nifty experiences.  As always, thanks for reading!

Repost from old blog, 3/14/2009
Here are pictures from a recent trip a friend and I made to the old Torrance State Hospital in Torrance, PA. I grew up around this place and it is the source of much legend and speculation. It seems that this building is not the actual hospital, but rather the staff quarters. Yes, apparently the staff lived on the hospital grounds 24 hours a day, which makes you wonder if you could tell them apart from the patients after awhile. Still, staff building or not, the place is suitably creepy and just an all-around great abandoned building.

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Repost from old blog, 8/15/2009I was having a crappy day on Wednesday; an outcome of the extreme financial stress we’ve been having lately. I’d been so overcome by my problems, so paralyzed by the future, that I knew I needed to do something to escape.

I took a walk through a field near my house. I was picking wildflowers when I saw a family of deer: three does, three fawns. They spotted me almost instantly but kept walking toward me. They would stop, look around, look back at me, then continue toward me. They got about five yards away from me before one of them made a snirfing sound and they bounded off – all except for one adult, whose body was pointed toward where the rest was running but whose neck was craned back to look at me, as if too curious to run away. Finally I clapped to scare her and she ran.

But I was thinking about how the deer have to be constantly alert to danger. They kept looking up, looking around, then going back to what they were doing. All animals have to be like that, to varying extents. It’s important to be aware of danger, but equally important to go on with your life when no immediate threat is present.