----------------20.November 2005 Sunday Berlin.
Its mind afternoon and J. was sick most of the night with an unknown ailment that I now diagnose as food poisoning after his 4am vomiting. It was amazingly without excessive mess due to our combined clarity at that hour’s crisis. He’s off now with his mother today to the jewish Museum here in Berlin Kreuzberg. Perhaps if I were not procrastinating from my own work or if the weather were more Idyllic I would have seriously considered joining them. Yesterdays extended time at the flea-market was at some point extremely physically painful due to the cold weather. A physical pain that they seem to be impervious to and that debilitates me to the point of only being able to wobble as I feel that my fingers will break off as they have become brittle and that every step like walking on sharp butcher’s knives- a pain that makes it difficult for me to smile in politeness.
His mother is pleasant and like the rest of his immediate family ahs a fear of the city- rendering her and them somewhat helpless within their fear. This is the second time in many years that she has visited him. Indeed that fact is stark and sad. J. for his part is all too often absorbically critical or patronizing, helping matters all the less. My part in this drama is perhaps to be supportive to all parties concerned and hopefully not allowing myself to be lost within the personal dramas most families have among each other. This Christmas, unlike last years, will not be spent with them at their home among the Hartz Mountains. A Charming historical village with much much Fachwerk (GermanTudorStyle) structures- the highest original surviving concentration in Germany I have been told by J. on two or so occasions. I will be at a somewhat generic housing complex called Gropiusstadt named after the well known Bauhaus modernist Walter Gropius who relocated to the USA to flee the National Socialism insanity that gripped this country and its neighbors. I have no idea what to expect , other than a certain assured loneliness that I fully accept. J. was not happy of my choice to do this- but it will in many ways be , for me, less stressful than my good behavior and polite composure kept up for a near week or so last year among nice people, his family, who hosted me during their Christmas celebrations. Indeed they have developed, through his mother’s wishes a certain holiday ritual that goes relatively unchanged since his childhood. It made me all the more aware how my brother and I had grown up without this, perhaps because my mother and father had not as well- the details are unclear to me. It occurred to me that I would have preferred ‘inventing’ a coordinated holiday ritual with my own partner or partners and building towards establishing history rather than adopting someone elses. So perhaps a solo Christmas will be very welcomed. My only self constructed ritual since 1999 had been to attend a post Christmas faerie gathering for the New Years. This will not happen this year as nothing has been coordinated given the focus on the purchase of Folleterre in Eastern France. In previous years when I was in my twenties I use to hunt for a flight to places such as London, Barcelona, Paris etc where I would spend the New Year. That was followed by a ritual some years later of giving a large and early 31. December dinner and releasing my guests prior to the midnight hour.

I find myself doing something that I have done for the past 15-20 years, making sketches endlessly planning my current apartment, the apartment I will have, the house I will build, the bungalo I will create and so on. Having reached my mid forties (something that makes me shudder as I type only because none of these desires has ever come to fruition. None. Unlike my close friends S&S I have not reached the point with a partner or partners where we can sit down together and invent our lives together and create the rituals and spaces accordingly. The closest was perhaps with dF. Where we spent some 7 years together in a loft in the chic area now known as SoHo. But dF’s abilities for credit responsibility gave me constant concern for him first and then myself. We were both extremely poor and never certain precisely what to do. I learned a great deal about myself from the experiences of that formative relationship. I could not begin the state them all here.
I have had 1-2-3-4 relations that have in some way affected me. The first was with dF (7years/ Soho NYC) then P.(1.5years/ Lower EastSide NYC) then with SM(3mo./Berlin, Schoeneberg-Moabit. I should have taken note of his intitials earlier) and now with J.(1.3years/Berlin Kreuzberg-Neukoelln). There have been others through the years who, finally, loom with lesser impact in my life.
DF was depressed much of the time due to a horrible childhood in Pennsylvania and the difficulties of jump starting his art career. A very talented artist, it disturbed me that he was not more aggressive with his fledgling career given some of his stellar contacts within the art world. We stopped having sex after the first 1.5 years because his sexual interests ultimately were incompatible with my own. We should have become best friends but stayed together regardless till the stress some 7 years later broke us apart upon the disclosure of a brief affaire initiated by me while traveling abroad in Berlin in 1995/96. That relation was followed a year later with another artist P. who it came to light was an alcoholic and extremely angry from a manipulative and complex alcoholic family from both sides of his Swedish and Polish family. I only realized halfway through the deep effect that this history had on our abiloities to communicate and to interact. It is the only relation I have ever had where I have felt fear on going until I bravely severed it on a summer evening sitting on a Chrystie street park off Houston Street in New York. My liberty from that compromised event led me to make myself unavailable, for relations, for the following year. My several years living in Paris saw no relationships and near abstinence except for a memorable night of sex at the cruise bar on Rue de L’Hôtel de Ville with an Australian and his Italian boyfriend. Not till I had relocated to Berlin had I felt a certain optimism towards the possibility for relations- and I trust and hope with much learned up to that point. Berlin was wonderfully flirtatious and sleazy in a manner that one could control ones depth into that world. Here I met an other American SM. With who I had a brief 3-4month affair which I found myself extremely relaxed with, so much so that it was betrayed in the most unceremonious of ways. I had , initially no great difficulties with us having other partners (though I remained fidelious) but his lack of candor and lying shocked and appalled me. I lost because of the sexual aggressiveness of another suitor. It is a loss I know cherish given that in time I would have discovered how weak he was. Some 3 months later J. and I met at a cruise bar, I had not expected anything more than a light relaxed relation that would have its ebs and flows but it has now been several months past our first years anniversary and we will need to assess our relationship and its own issues. Individual and diverging degrees of personal career motivation, diverging sexual interests and views, social outlook and esoteric view points are but few of the critical issues that have emerged. I find myself both cherishing many of J.s idiosyncarcies as well as being profoundly upset by them when they affect me very directly. We speak on for hours on many topics. I have stopped listening to music, with the frequency I had been use to (I do find music sometimes inspirationally helpful), I have unwittingly agreed by my actions to be a young man’s ‘bottom’ for the duration of our relation rather tan at minimum the 50-50 I would find plausible and agreeable. I a remain silent to voicing and sharing the many highly aesthetic pleasures that range from the beauty of clothing, people, bodies, buildings and so on. I don’t share the passion for the natural sciences nor of fiction literature that he does. I have tried , with very little success, to inquire about the details of his previous relationships which might shed some light on the complex reality we all know as our individual personailites.