February 23, 2017

Woke to Handel’s Dixit Dominus in honor of his birthday. Woke from dreams of being a writer struggling for the perfect opening sentence. Did errands, wrote a scene of my play at the High Five, where the beautiful barista’s skin was radiant. Found myself at Bent Creek, with a most unusual day unfolding around me. It was where I walked in the 80's, when it was not the Arboretum at all, but a wild place crossed by a few dirt roads and riddled on the weekends with rednecks camping and carousing. You went there to have sex with other men. You went there sometimes to hike or look at nature, but it was mostly to have sex, sometimes actually to make love, and the distinction between having sex and making love is never more poignant than in such a place. I remembered whom I met and where I met them. I remembered the signs and signals that nobody saw except those who were looking. I summoned back the dread and the thrill. I padded down a side path that leads along the creek, almost invisible now, and remembered in special one hour of making love in the most sensual and memorable way, and the man I met there, the shape and feel and smell of his person, the halo on him with the sun behind him in the trees. He might have been the one, had he followed me out of the grove that afternoon. I think he is dead and his spirit met me there. Otherwise, the sensation could not have been so keen. I stood for a while in one place, and then in another, listening to the water. I thought the water wanted me to hear something, some particular message. I listened very hard. Perhaps it just wanted me to hear itself. It was a sad time, a terminus for a lovely and futile complexity. I really don’t know what any of it was for, it having come to nothing.