fighting for your life, for fun

so, i joined a gym recently. it's not like i have all of this excess cash just sitting around, but because the gym has a deal with my place of employment, i get it at a pretty good rate. the reason that i havent really gotten to the gym around here before was partly because i was always under the delusion that i wouldnt be here long enough to make any kind of committment, but i seemed to have hurdled past that particular subconscious quirk.

the reason that i joined this particular gym was that it has a pool. in college, i was lucky enough to be able to go swimming everyday for a good year or two. i always thought that swimming was the most perculiar exercise. it's not really like lifting weights. lifting weights pretty much a past-time, a hobby.

swimming is fighting for your life, for fun.

when i was a little kid, i drowned. i'm not talking about "oh my god, i got water up my nose", i mean, like lost consciousness and woke up on the beach coughing up water onto a hot lifeguard (or maybe a paramedic- i can't remember; i was 6, i had no idea what hot was anyway.....). i have always said that if i couldn't die in my sleep, i would rather drown.

the last thing i remember was the sensation of falling forward and the expectation of my nose hitting the sand beneath me. maybe i was too young to fully grasp what was going on, but once i got past the panic stage, it was very peaceful.

don't get me wrong...whenever i go swimming in lake coeur d'alene and i get a good bit of lake water in my sinuses, i tend to freak out just a little. like, for a split second, i am 6 again. the next week my mother took me to swimming lessons and i have learned to love the smell of chlorine. later that smell would remind me of bath-houses, but more on that some other time.

the pool at my gym is something like 5 feet at the deep end. i find this disappointing. at first, i couldn't say why, but as i've had more time to think on it while i follow the blue tile strip back and forth, i find that swimming takes on more of a hobby role than anything when you can touch the bottom the whole way through.

when i was swimming in LA, i would occasionally run out of energy in the middle of the deep end and i could literally feel that adrenaline kick in as i fought hard to get to the edge so that i could hold on for dear life and recover. like everything else in my life, it's just another bland exercise in going through the paces.

at the gym, i have discovered that running in place can be interesting if you have an IPOD and that pretending that you're actually rowing a boat makes that machine seem kinda less dumb than it looks.

i realized something while i was at the gym today, though.

i have always avoided gyms, for several reasons. the least of which, is that working out always kind of bored me. the invention of the ipod seems to have smoothed over that transition, which leads me to the big one.

as kind of a thought exercise, i went into the locker room and pretended that i was heterosexual. when i put myself in that mindset (if i can ever truly be in that mindset) and i found that a huge weight had been lifted off of my shoulders.

when i am at the gym, i am still that 15yo gay kid terrified that someone will catch him sneaking a glance or something like that. i'm not at the gym shopping, believe me, but the subconscious pressure is still there. it wasn't until i tried to get out from under it for a moment that i realized it was there.

of course, there is the obvious self consciousness of someone who is unfortunately out of shape.

i comment on these things because they are old and familiar, yet i have not had to deal with them, so they become new and interesting as they pass through my dreary days.

you had to know this was coming.....

i couldn't tell you how i got there, but i found the most insane thing i have ever read in my entire life. here is the link

i used to get all up in arms about the political process. i was livid for weeks after bush "won" the 2000 election and horrified that anyone in their right minds would re-elect the moron based on his "well, you wouldn't want to change horses in the middle of the race" campaign.

i have always been amazed by hate. the fact that some people would sell their most basic freedoms in order to elect a man who hates ags as much as they do.

i want to be shocked. i want to be indignant, but i think that it is indicative of the past 8 years that this is just another day in america

deal or no deal? gimme the f&@king case

okay, so lately I’ve kind of swung around back to an old obsession of mine; Alexander the great. I’ve been enamored w/ him for years, but to be honest, I have to say that in the shadow of my 31^st birthday, I feel a special kind of relevance. I think that 30 is an especially important age in our society, especially in a judeo-christian sense. What I mean is that if you believe in that kind of thing, Christ began his mission at 30. by the time he was my age, he already had his disciples. He had 12 people following him around.

12.

I have trouble getting more than two or more people together to go to a movie.

Take Alexander.

By the time he was my age, he was leading a vast army across India. He was the ruler of an empire that stretched from Greece to almost the Indian sea.

I’m technically a “supervisor” at a call centre.

It’s kinda hard not to take that personal. granted, I know that I’m holding myself up to impossible standards, but there you are. I guess not being born in either the 1^st century AD or in 4^th century BC royalty probably doesn’t help. maybe this just isnt the time for extraordinary people.....

I guess what I’m going on about is this intensly strange feeling that I have been having of drifting.

For those of you who haven’t heard my latest exploits, let me regale you with the tale.

At the end of April, I left for los angeles to get my fresh start. Justin elected to stay in Idaho and for some bizarre reason I decided to go without him. I drove down in a rented SUV. While I was passing through San Fran, I ran into a spot of trouble. It seems that I have some old tickets from back in the day and in CA, they become warrants for your arrest if they are not taken care of in a sufficient amount of time. So, I spent some time in jail and my rfental car was impounded. Lucky me.

My friend Bryen happen to know someone up in the bay area that helped me retrieve my things from the rental and get them down to LA. Now, by this time, a deep depression had already started setting in. I had been in LA for maybe a week when another friend, my old ex, actually, suggested I go to an AA meeting. It really wasn’t for me. Some day, I’ll have to go into it.

I tried to go to a NA meeting, but I ended up at some NA-like meeting being held at the same church in west Hollywood. The upshot is that by the time I left there, I wanted to get high so bad that I actually made the arrangements while I was walking away from the meeting.

Then I felt bad for falling off the wagon after a year of sobriety and the depression got worse. It got to the point that I was ready to walk in front of a bus. But I remembered that meth is technically an antidepressant and went on a bender.

In a moment of clarity, I called Justin and he offered to come get me.

Most of me wanted to stay and fight it out, but I knew that I would just end up drowning myself. So, one evening, Justin left ID and drove down in a 24hr period and came and got me. We left for Idaho the next day and drove another 24hrs.

Needless to say, by the time I got back to Idaho, I was emotionally and physically exhausted. Then it hit me.

For all of my bravado and all of my talk and all of my ideas about what was going to happen, I had been brought to my knees in a matter of a week or so. A year of sobriety gone. A year of not dealing with it at all bit me in the arse.

The feeling of listlessness and loss still haven’t really left me. The depression got so bad, that I ended up on mild antidepressants. I have found that they have evened me out a lot. It seems that I was very unbalanced before.

Don’t get me wrong, good things have happened since. Justin and I are together and happy. The harry potter series came to an exciting conclusion, etc. however, I still can’t seem to get anything together.

My whole life, I have lived in the future. In this future, I was a successful cinematographer with a huge, cozy house in the Hollywood hills or somewhere just as glamorous. I have always envisioned a pool in my house. CA taught me that it should be heated as well, lol.

Now I stand a month away from my 31^st birthday and no closer to my dreams. In my worst thoughts, I imagine that I had my shot the first time I was in LA and I blew it.

I talked to my brother a few days after I got back to ID, and we had a great conversation. I realized that somewhere along the way, my brother has become a very wise individual. I’m immensely proud of him. He was the one who coined what has become one of my favourite phrases.

“it’s not about living your life in years”

when my brother and I talked, said that I had spent so much time living in the future, that I had never worked on me. If my last LA experience taught me anything, it is that I have spent so much time hiding from myself that my soul has scurvy.

I guess scurvy is better than leprosy, lol.

In the Illiad, Achilles is given the choice between “glory and length of days”

Maybe it’s time that I worry more about fortifying myself and my soul instead of worrying about glory.

archive

i've been writing a blog off and on for a year or two. i have been writing on myspace. com, but decided to archive cpoies in a seperate blog. http://archiveblog.blogspot.com/