… and good fucking riddance

Goodbye 2006, and good fucking riddance. The worst fucking year of my whole fucking life is over, and I’m so ready to move on. Ready for oh seven. It would be pointless to catalog my various little miseries in 2006. Who wants to hear about other people’s drama anyway?

Looking back over the past year, what’s worth mentioning? I guess the honest answer is that I can’t tell you. As in I shouldn’t. What you’ll see here instead is the pretend list of important events. There’s a lot of reading between the lines required.

Connections

Some time early in the year, I found that I’d let my network of personal connections wither away. I didn’t have any friends. No one to talk to. No one to turn to. And I decided to start meeting people again.

In May, I volunteered at the Village Building Convergence and met a bunch of nice, fuzzy, flaky hippies. In June, I went on several Pedalpalooza rides and met some eager, earnest bike people. In July & August, I went through the Build Program at Free Geek and didn’t really meet anybody, since geeks don’t have a lot of social skills. At the same time, I was volunteering as a gallery assistant at the Portland Art Museum and sat behind a desk in a neatly ironed white Oxford every Friday from August through December. Despite being there regularly for months, I only met people I already knew, folks from the Northwest Film Center selling tickets next to me.

The Gay Stuff

And then there was the gay stuff. I placed a craigslist ad in, maybe, April for a gay male friend to ride bikes with. Just ride bikes. I was specific. That was an interesting experiment, I’ll tell you. I got plenty of replies, most of them not for bicycling.

About mid-summer, the popular gay dance night, Booty, moved to Acme in southeast Portland. From then on, I was at Booty on most Thursday nights. It was really just a place where you went to see your friends on a regular basis. Rode my bike there and chained it up with all the other bikes covering every pole in sight. Seeing that always made me feel like I was in exactly the right place.

In early fall I joined an all gay male drawing group. Had to ride my bike way down to Milwaukee every Wednesday, but I was so incredibly glad to draw, a feeling I wasn’t expecting to be quite so intense. The guys were all much older, for the most part, except the organizer who turned out to be a year younger than me. (We found out our birthdays are one day apart, and every time I said, “We’re one day apart,” he would add, “one day and a year.”)

Still, here I am after nine months of constant socializing, and the only people who bother to call are the guys who want to fuck me.

Straight Guys

Funny how things work out, though. My housemate Elle moved out at the end of August, and after a long and careful search, we got a new straight male roommate. As luck would have it, he and I actually get along great. So much so, in fact, that he’s managed to convince me to get a tattoo. Never saw that coming! (But then, he’s a tattoo artist and gave it to me himself. How could I say no?)

Speaking of straight male friends, I had an odd thing happen to me in November. A guy I used to hang out with long ago looked me up online and asked if I wanted to get together when he came through town. Not so strange, I guess, but we’d been friends when he lived in Portland; then one day he stopped returning my calls, and I never heard from him again. Now, four years later, without warning, he writes.

So we actually did hang out again, and we picked up right where we’d left off. Totally comfortable. Great conversation. He was exactly the same guy I was friends with way back then, and that was both encouraging and really confusing. Obviously, we had the connection I thought we did. Good to know. But does that mean I was right about everything, including the parts I don’t want to be true? And what about the parts I do want to be true? Are they just my imaginagion?

Damn if people don’t really confuse me. Never can tell what’s real.

The Big Three-Two

It was a big year for me. My “official” age is now 32. Some time in 2006, I decided to start using a complex algorithm to calculate my “official” age from the actual number of years I’ve lived. One of the really nice things about the formula is that on some birthdays I actually get to go backwards in time. So in December, I went from 33 to 32.

My method is to take 20% of the decade I’m in and subtract it from my age. So, lets say I’m 34. That’s 34 minus 20% of 30 (my decade, since Im in my thirties, in this example anyway) or 34-6, which equals 28. My official age, therefore, would be 28.

I’ll save you the backwards calculating. Everyone reading this (i.e., me) already knows that I turned forty on my last birthday. And it’s funny, but I’m actually kind of happy about it. Thirty-nine sucked, both as a year of my life and as an age to tell people. Forty, somehow, seems full of potential. It sounds strong. “Fort.” Forty. I like saying it. So far I like being it.