Recently I found myself having to end an on again off again long distance connection.  Two years was a long time to remain uncertain, but we did try and it really was a more off than on situation.  Still such a time can leave feelings raw and emotions high.  I was sorry for my own indecisiveness and even more so to inflict that on another on an ongoing basis. 

Over the past seven years I have been an importer, if you will, of boyfriends and paramours from the GTA (Greater Toronto Area)  and beyond.  I don’t want to imply that the fair city of London does not offer up their own share of eligible bachelors … I’m sure they do, but for me importing importants and impromptus insured a certain distance that I felt necessary for both my own comfort as well as my denial. 

There is also the whole serosorting aspect of my thought process with regard to dating that quite honestly has me shopping in the big city in part because I see the stigma less then I do in my own backyard.  When you add that mind set, and for me it is the mind set that makes me most comfortable when dating, the fields narrow … but I digress.  I am talking in the more general sense with regard to long distance relationships. 

With the recent change in my personal life I spent the better part of Easter weekend spring cleaning and rearranging my home, my thoughts, and in some ways my life.  Part way through the extra long weekend I spent the Saturday evening with friends for a fabulously festive feast.  Two of the gents attending that evening had also recently embarked on a long distance connection and the coming together of friends and food were in part to celebrate the recent union of men and minds. 

Sadly, all good things must come to pass … distance being a factor. 

Are relationships that start from afar doomed to fail?  I pondered this thought throughout a sleepless night of late and I decided that yes; they are doomed! 

I can’t speak of course for my friends but I do mourn what I would have thought a good match of these two unique and wondrous worlds.  I can only bring my own thoughts to bear on the subject of love from afar.   

Relationships for me, when they start, are so often this explosion of feelings and dreams,and I statements … “I want to see you, I want to be with you, I want to hold you”.  When we are mere blocks away we can savour and soak up this blooming love fest; but when there is travel and waits and schedules we so often have to quell those initial thoughts with the mundane act of planning spontaneity. I can still recall asking a florist if roses and cheesecake will last for 2 hours in the back seat of a black car on a summer day as I navigated my way to the big city and my latest beau; she suggested keeping the air on.

Add to the initial distance aspect the weather, mode of transportation, and last minute changes and we then need to rethink the simple act of planning dinner and a movie.  Successful long distance relationships, I have come to believe, begin with two who live with or near one another. Then distance doesn’t become a factor.  Most I would think are more relaxed about a loved one who is far, but not far, for long.  To start off a relationship with needing to “understand” when all one wants to do is enjoy and share and simply snuggle is the beginning of a downward trajectory…this is at least what I have found to be true for me. 

That is not to say that if some handsome, passionate, compassionate, semi sane suitor from who-knows-where calls and asks me out that I would say no … but that’s a whole other story. 

As so often happens, it is the day before my next article is due and I am struggling for a topic to write about … I turn to my friends and colleagues for their input as to what this month’s rant should be and with a resounding chorus of voices I was asked to re-visit my smoking demons and what has transpired for me since my quit date of November 6, 2011.

Well, if you haven’t already figured it out, I momentarily fell off the wagon ….right around the same time that I fell off my balcony in a drunken stupor in Cuba. I woke up the next morning with a hangover and a couple of cigarettes in my pocket. The hangover left after about a half hour but the smoking persisted until just a week or two ago when a couple of friends cornered me about it and I was busted.

I thought I was doing well which is to say that I thought I was hiding it well…a sad statement really when one considers I thought I was doing well when I wasn’t smoking at all…then I thought I was doing well when it was just Cuba, then it was just a couple a day…and so on.  A slippery slope and a slope I am all too familiar with.  As I write this at 5.45pm Monday March 12, 2012 I am smoke free and have every intention of staying that way. I make no promises, except to my children and when my son confronted me around the same time as my friends, I knew I was not only trapped, but I found myself answering to my son who was certainly not impressed with me and made that very clear.

My friends, my children, my family all love me and I feel it, I know it.  The very fact that my addiction is sometimes stronger is maddening to me … and embarrassing to me. Friends aside, it kills me that my son is disappointed in me, and when my daughter reads this I will have another to answer to.  I am proud to share that both of my children are successful in their own quests to quit smoking and it is I that look to them and wish I could be more like them…something got turned around in my world because they are supposed to look to me to set the example, but so far I have been unable to show them what they have so clearly been able to show me.

I am familiar with the “one-day-at-a-time” thought process and understand that truth … practice that truth … and interpret it for my own use and misuse and therefore I have become all too aware that I can be a manipulative little fuck sometimes. 

When I see that attribute in others I can sometimes judge them either to myself, or in jest with others who share my thoughts at that moment.  The very realization that I not only resemble that … I am that … can be like that, is truly sobering for me.

When you talk with a friend or loved one regarding a medical concern that you have for them, the obvious warnings are of the physical nature and in all the years that I have smoked I believe I have heard every single argument under the sun but no one ever said to me ‘don’t smoke or you’ll turn into an unimaginable bitch!” 

For me, my addiction journey … and it is a journey … is showing me so much more then pictures of blackened lungs and yellow teeth.  I really am doing this one day at a time and in true ‘harm reduction’ terms I have many more good days then bad, and I do truly believe it will be a successful journey. 

I love to learn, even when it sucks!

Pain is the word of the day for me today.  I am experiencing probably the worst physical pain I have ever endured in my life … back pain; I’ve somehow thrown my back out.  Pain is as I imagine measured on the individuals’ tolerance to pain, and not necessarily the type of pain.  I have seen the pain of childbirth up close, so please do not assume I am comparing apples and oranges ….I’m just talking about this fruit as it is for me today. Although pain maybe what’s on my mind and coursing through my lower back, the fact that I have never felt this extremity before leads me to wonder if it’s something more than the emergency room physician says it is. 

Is this it? Is this the beginning of the end?

I had this conversation with a friend of mine the other day; we were discussing the year in review and my concerns therein.  In the past year I have experienced the worst case of pneumonia which had me hospitalized; the worst case of Montezuma’s revenge while vacationing in Cuba; and also my very real fear that my memory is going down the toilet as well.

Add now my twisted spine and I start to worry.

Friends and colleagues cajole that I am merely 50 now and this is to be expected … I am getting old(er).  The fact that through the miracles of modern science I am indeed getting to experience the wonders of aging that I otherwise would not have had; my mind gets stuck on the AIDS factor.  Am I getting older or am I slipping away slowly.

We all die, and the majority of us get to grow old somewhat gracefully before we bid our final adieu, so really they are in a way one and the same now. In either case I am on a downward trajectory.  I am of course ok with that … it’s the AIDS death I guess that scares me, and the very real fact that today we no longer know what that looks like.

Back in the day, you not only got to see it coming but you could plan for it as well.  Everything would be in order and you were the one putting it in order with friends, partners, care teams and grass roots AIDS Service Organizations. I am by no means calling this time in our history the good old days … I saw these days and they were anything but good.

I am left with the feeble excuse that I do not have my affairs in order, the only will I have is 21 years old and was made as a direct result of my HIV diagnosis; not smart considering my schooling. The will leaves my children and my money (if any) with a person I no longer have a relationship with … the point is rather moot now but the experience as a whole does explain what happened.  I turned from a newly diagnosed person scared for his life into a person who fought for his life, then finally a person at peace with his life.  I went through 50 years of living in 20 years.  No wonder I’m tired and my back hurts.

Modern science as I had mentioned has successfully put many of us in line to live “normal” lives which in turn has left some of us long term survivors very confused and in my case; paranoid.  I understand that death comes when it comes and I have the luxury if you will to know the impact of a sudden death as well as a slow one and if truth be told I know which one I prefer to experience as a person on the side lines, but once again, I digress as I so often do.  This experience, in whatever context you put it, sucks. 

But now, today I am left asking where is that guy that looked at every day as an opportunity, and laughed in the face of death; did he suddenly put on a hat, buy a Cadillac and move into the slow lane in life?  In truth, I have started a collection of hats, but I drive a G6 … in the fast lane, which makes me an enigma, I guess and I do enjoy that. 

I am not willing to go quietly whether it be at the age of 99, or tomorrow as a result of a discarded banana peel.  I need to remind myself where as before I thought I knew myself.  That means I am still growing and at 50 to be able to say that I am still growing and still learning about myself is truly one of the many gifts of life.

Now if I could only remember where I put my car keys . . . .

. . . . . . . and for what?

I have a form of writer’s block, not the traditional kind where one cannot turn out their next best seller; far from it.  I have so many words tripping over one another in an attempt to come out that I fear that what I am about to put to paper may very well make sense to a remote few.  For that I apologize.

A friend of mine took his own life over the holidays and his death has affected me more than I thought it would …. more than I thought it should. I cannot make sense of it, so will try in this rant to quell the noise of the injustice of it all.

My friend grew up culturally different than I and that is most likely where my confusion is born of.  I therefore believe that in essence it is the reason he took his own life.  His family would have never understood, accepted, or allowed his sexual orientation.  They would have insisted he change, would disown him until he did, then would have danced at his wedding to the woman he would never really completely love.  There will be no wedding, no dancing.  They never had to insist he change, they never did inflict the pain of disowning him, and now as they grieve his death they also don’t know why he died …why he felt so alone that he believed that the only option for him was to end his life.

They never did know that he was HIV+.

I admit openly and often that I grew up a very lucky man.  My family not only embraced every single aspect of my being, they went so far as to defend it staunchly; which is no simple feat for an Italian Catholic father and mom raised in Europe during the second world war.  Their lives had not ever really seen what I was all about yet they knew to love me and they did, going so far as to lovingly call me twinkle toes.  I adored my parents, and they surely loved their youngest son.  I love my children; they are my air.  There is nothing that they could ever do that will change that.  I may not agree with them, understand them, side with them; but if they ever need me, I am here I will not falter.  My love is forever.

As I write about my parents, and parenting I am reminded of an episode of Larry King where Mr. King interviewed the parents of Jeffrey Dahmer.  This quiet shy reserved older couple sat behind their son in the courtroom throughout his trial and wept when his sentence was read … they did this because that was their son and they loved him and would always love him.  They understood the horrors of what he had done and most certainly did not defend him in any way, but in the end they stood by him because as parents that was their job.  I admire them.  I learned about unconditional love of your children from them, and from my own parents.  Perhaps an odd set of teachers but life lessons are such because they come quite often from where we least expect.

My friend who took his own life at the tender age of 30 did this because not only did he believe that his parents would hate and disown him but he also believed that his god his church would also hate and disown him.  He was terrified that he would lose everything in life and then end up in some unimaginable purgatory upon his death.  When all is said and done, I think he took his own life because he never wanted his parents or his church to know his truth….which therefore means that he protected those who in turn would have never protected him.

The last time I saw him we danced the night away.  He seemed happy and content with life and was moving forward as one does when dealing with HIV …at his own pace and in his own time.  What changed for him I do not know.  As I wrote this article I shared my grief and my writers block with a colleague and it was suggested to me that I end my rant with what I would have liked my friend to know.

Dear sweet man …

Know that you are loved … your words are precious, your thoughts and feelings are important to you, to me, to everyone.  You have great value and you are not mistaken nor are you a mistake. The time that all of us get to spend on this earth is a valuable split second in the grand scheme of it all and do not waste a second of that time believing that anyone or anything  has all the answers.   Rest and know that you made a difference in my life and the lives of others.  You will be missed.

The transformation is of course a life process but I am particularly paying attention at this current juncture, which I assure you is no easy task for me as I move forward in this journey of mine. Throughout this latest leg I have been made aware of things that when I look back on I can’t help but wonder about. Like how long a person may have felt such a way with regard to a rather unconscious almost constant characteristic of mine. Without identifying the person or the characteristic let me assure you that this AH HA moment came with curiosity and at no time was I hurt to learn that actions, my actions, made another pause.

We need to learn these things.  Information like this is important for our inner navigation system. These blips that involve another or others are the blips that we know can cause discomfort or concern. These things are more of a human – geographical issue rather than actually something I am doing wrong. This same characteristic that one may find less then appealing another could actually seek out in me …. But I digress as I so often do. This self awareness is in actuality a constant cautious consciousness’s that we do all the time in such a way that they become part of how we “operate”.

The most obvious for me is, of course, my HIV status. In my travels I am certain that everyone that I in one way or another come in contact with is aware of my HIV status. But not only is that not true, but yes, today, after all of these years there is still that pocket of people that I have no intention of sharing my status with.  For that certain person(s) to know that about my life would make no difference whatsoever in the dealings I have with that person.

OR I don’t need to hear their shit ….. There I’ve said it.

I grow weary of the uninformed, the ill-informed and the plain ignorant who, for whatever reason, do not know nor have they ever bothered to learn anything about the pandemic that is going on in the world that they live in; and I resent that the lack of insight on their part has caused this constant cautious consciousness that it has therefore tossed me into. I must remember that I refrain from disclosure because of their ignorance and not my shame.  I have no shame, but their ignorance reminds me that according to them I should have shame.  That to therefore quench their thirst for details, I must explain myself, my actions, and my life.

I have had to explain a lot of things in my life; as a father, a son, a friend, a peer. For me to be careful in a conversation when I have in fact spent the better part of my adult life coming out of a variety of closets is a difficult chore …. And the irony of that effort on some stranger who in truth will not make or break my day week month year life is a pisser!!

I do it to keep the peace …. Not THE peace, just my peace.

Although the constant cautious conscious is an effort, the effort is mine to choose to make at that moment and trust me when I say it again …. I do it for my peace because at this stage of the game that’s what it is all about for me anyway …. Personal peace.

Season’s greetings everyone, peace on earth.

I got sick again … when I look back on my calendar (because I have no memory) I realize that it’s only been 5 months since I was last sent to bed with pneumonia… and here I am again, only worse….this time they kept me overnight in the hospital; a good friend and a nameless doctor gave me what I hope is the slap I needed.  I have been smoke free for three weeks as I write this latest rant.

I have been doing a lot of work in the past month since my latest diagnosis of pneumonia, yet have barely set foot in the office.  The work has been on me; on just what it is that makes me tick and sick.  I have been working with a therapist who specializes in multiple loss, my own therapist, HIV specialist, family doc, smoking cessation nurse practitioner and a gaggle of friends who took it upon themselves to stage a non invasive intervention of sorts. All of this combined with my ever present ever optimistic son we made November 6th our last smoking day.

I have quit before so I am completely aware of the slippery slope in front of me and I need to remember that only I can make or break the path that lies ahead.  There are no events, stresses or tragedies in my future that could in any way have to do with the end of my non smoking health.  I also need to remember that at all times I am dealing with an addiction and what I am dealing with is my life in that moment of the addiction.  This addiction is only a part of what it is that makes up me.  Like my HIV diagnosis, my dad’s dimples, and my mom’s crooked baby fingers - this will be something I will have until I depart from this planet.

This latest bout of pneumonia brought with it a multitude of other infections and I can only recall from the 80s and early 90s that this is how the end starts.  It starts with a nasty bug that lingers and invites friends to join in the feast of the depleted immune system.  Why is it that I cannot recognize in myself that which I can see so clearly in others? Could I see it as a fault, as something caused by the lack of health care one must have in order to then allow this to happen?  I need to look no further then my cupboard and freezer to see that health and well being was not on the grocery list.  Add to that the compliance that I have always struggled with. 

Still when I look at all the factors that make up me, I cannot then blame me.  I do not believe in blame unless you are talking about the person who cut me off on the highway.  Blame is too often used as the “reason, if you will, for a fault or a problem.  My poor eating habits and lack of total compliance are not to blame for my current health woes any more then my smoking.  There are instead all factors that contribute to my health as it stands today.  Whatever that may be; today is a good day.

We don’t get to do things over, as if to say if I never smoked, always followed a good diet and took all the meds my doc told me to would I then be complaining of my poor health.  No one can answer that because so many different factors make for a good and balanced life.  We are left with the power to make decisions in our life to in every way affect our life in what is apparently supposed to be in a positive fashion.

I may not have a lot to work with but I do have the power.