I left home when I was 18, eager to find my own place in the world. I did brief stints on California’s central coast and in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, eventually settling in the Los Angeles suburb of Silverlake, known locally as the “Swish Alps” for its large gay population and hilly terrain.
I have a tendency to gravitate toward gayborhoods; society as a whole is hostile enough toward members of the LGBTQ+ community, we shouldn’t feel unsafe or under siege at home. I like living amongst my people. Around the lake (that is actually one of several reservoirs designed by William Mulholland which store water for metropolitan Los Angeles) I spent my 20s and my 30s writing computer code by day and getting into as much trouble as I could by night. They were halcyon years, and soon to end.
Bars and the Burrito King on Hyperion Avenue were my hangouts. I was committed to a life of drunken debauchery, and I exceled at both. One apartment building I lived in was a residential bacchanal, but neurological complications from HIV would bring the curtain down on Act I.
When you’re diagnosed with an incurable fatal disease, it can sometimes be harder to survive than to die – especially when your neurologist tells you, “we’ve stopped the spread of the lesions on your brain, but the damage done is done, you will not recover from hemiparesis [one-sided paralysis/weakness].” Physical deficits and disabilities – due to illness, injury, or just age – are different when they are encountered later in life than if they are congenital; I do not mean to suggest that someone born with a disability has an easy go of it, but they do not experience loss like those of us who become disabled as adults do. Seventeen years on when my neurologist told me (in 2023), “we’ve got the PML under control, I think we can now say, after all this time, it’s not going to kill you – you’ll probably live another 30 years,” you’d think my reaction would be something like – great! – right? No… far from it!! Tell me, what am I supposed to do with myself for the next 30 years?
“I don’t know how you do it,” one of my friends said to me. Really, how do any of us do it? Live with chronic illness, or disability, or just the knowledge of our own mortality. It’s easier to sign-up for the certainty offered by the Cosmic Comfort Package of religion with its promise of better things to come than to embrace the unique and wonderful life we have got, not in spite of its challenges, but because of them.
Seneca, a Stoic philosopher of Ancient Rome, said, “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.” The circumstances I find myself in are like a script, and I’ve always believed you have to act your part in the play – as written – giving life to your character. And this means facing daily challenges with clarity and integrity. I have a leading role, the leading role, in this play. Its second act contains an unexpected major plot twist.
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” said Albert Camus, suggesting that Sisyphus in the Greek myth finds happiness in the act of rolling the boulder, rather than in the meaning of the task itself.
I left my Silverlake life behind. Moving to the desert, in a wheelchair, life had changed but I couldn’t see that at first. Like Schopenhauer with his Poodles, I turned to my dogs.
First there was Dennis, and now there is Gordon, 8 pounds of pure love wrapped in the body of a blond, short-haired, deer head Chihuahua. But my dog is more than just a cold nose and a warm heart. He is a philosopher and a teacher that offers me genuine insights into life and how to live. Much has been written about the idea of mindfulness and “living in the moment” of late, with roots dating back centuries. But,
one doesn’t have to follow Thomas Merton into the silence of a Trappist monastery or go to the trouble of reading a book by Eckhart Tolle to learn how to live hic et nunc – here and now. Dogs show us the way to do this everyday while they wag their tails with joyful abandon and smile as only they know how. They have a wisdom that far surpasses our own.
I need to create, to produce; I created my first personal website in 1997 on GeoCities, a web hosting service that rose to prominence in the latter half of the 90s, and since that time my “site” has evolved and gone through many thematic and stylistic iterations. As a writer by avocation, though, my site has always been a repository for my writing, a way for me to explore what I do and do not know, to recall, record, and recount my experiences, and to reflect myself back to me to gain greater self-awareness. It is not unlike the 16th century collection of writings by Michel de Montaigne known as Essays.
As a genre (which he invented with this book), the essay gave Montaigne ample freedom to explore ideas. His essays tended to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations, which was seen as a departure from “proper” style rather than a new and exciting innovation. But it was his declaration that “I am myself the matter of my book” that was viewed by his contemporaries as being a bit too self-indulgent. Well, to that I say I am myself the matter of my website!
One thing that stands out about Montaigne was his practice of revising the essays over the course of 22 years from 1570 until his death in 1592 to better reflect his changing views. Armed with more knowledge as well as experience, what collectively we might call wisdom, he would add clarifying annotations that sometimes were several paragraphs long, or that might only be a word, rather than remove what he had previously written, even if it conflicted with his newer thoughts, and this gives us an opportunity to see how his thinking evolved on a given subject.
It is this constant rewriting, something I am prone to myself, that demonstrates one of his most profound philosophical insights: our ideas and opinions on subjects, and our memories, change over the course of our lifetimes as we grow older, read more books, and get on with the business of living. We are, quite literally, never “done” until we die.
As an example of this observation, in an essay entitled “On Repentance,” Montaigne discusses how difficult he finds it to describe himself, writing, “I can’t pin down my object. It is tumultuous, it flutters around.” He then shares with us what is one of his most famous aphorisms – “I don’t paint the being. I paint the passage.” – by which he illustrates with his writer’s quill what he believes is one of the fundamental characteristics of human existence: that we are on a journey.
This is what I find myself doing these days: a little writing, a little reading, with some web design and gardening thrown in to get me out of my head and outside into the blue skies, fresh air, and endless sunshine of the California low desert. I am busier than I’ve ever been, but as I have always said it’s only work if you’d rather be doing something else, and I am very fortunate because there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing.
As I strut and fret my hour upon the stage, I face the final curtain expecting no encore, I have no interest in the critics’ reviews, and there is no sequel planned or in the offing.