July - December 2001

July 3, 2001

We greeted my big 5-0 birthday quietly (with the exception of my arrest for soliciting, (see below)) on June 22, the Day of Mourning in Russia, 60 years since the start of the great patriotic war, with O and Dima computershchik. Encouraged by O, I managed to build a primitive web site on yahoo, which Dima is working on. Will like-minded people be able to find each other, delve into each others' minds and create a virtual community/ family via websites? 'Real' diaries, mimicking the fad of real TV? I stumbled on the site of Clifton Snider, a gay middle-aged Jungian write, with a fascinating article analyzing Oscar Wilde's fairy tales and references to Queer Theory, a site for like-minded gay intellectuals looking for related sites to list. I have also discovered online anonymous gay diary rings, mostly trashy middle America, but with a few exceptions. The terrible internet queues here and my general isolation are holding me back, but I will try to set up two sites - one public and the other anonymous (this one).

I went a month without even an erection (until after my trip with Mahsud to the mtns on my birthday weekend). I haven't cum with M since I returned from Canada in January. Poor M. He's accepting my impotence with him, resigned to my masturbating. "My spies tell me you visit the Blue Cupolas regularly on your trips to the British Council and USIS," he taunted me in front of Anafi recently. "Can I help it if it's smack between the two?" I said with an embarrassed smile.

However, I'm afraid my BC adventures are finally kaput. I was hauled into a police van on the afternoon of my birthday, just for looking a bit too long at someone in the loo at Blue Cupolas, who unfortunately turned out to be a plainclothes cop. He kept grilling me: "Why did you nod at me?" I tried to pretend I have a sore neck from typing, but he didn't buy that. Finally I said "It's lonely here, there's no place to meet people, and I just wanted to get acquainted." That seemed to make them happy. When I told them I work for you-know-who, they seemed to lose interest, and finally let me go, saying "We thought you were a Russian. Seeing as you're a foreigner, we should respect foreigners, so no hard feelings?" Most bizarre. My heart goes out to the dozens of guys who have been terrorized recently - there is no one even walking around there these days. This was my third time being grilled by cops there, once caught in flagrante. Even my kryptonite cannot ward off supercop forever.

I went with Mahsud to Hunsan in the mountains the next day to get away from all the shit, climbing where M&I climbed 5 years ago, when Mahsud took Amy M&I to the mtns. Then I was crazy - loving and hating M (the latter for his in-my-face fooling around at that time). This time, I felt none of that, just enjoying the mtns, meeting a local shepherd there looking after his sheep. Too bad Mahsud wasn't interested in you-know-what. It's probably better to keep these friends just that. Then there is no fallout over a bad conscience in the future.

Lying under the stars, stoned and slightly tipsy with sexy Mahsud was almost too much. On Monday, I headed straight to Chorsu and gave an unconscionable number of blow jobs (4?) before heading to Pakhtakor, where I noticed a not bad looking Uzbek lounging outside. He followed me in, went to the last cubicle - no question about his interest, only our compatibility. I invited him over and he came but after much jacking off. We went for a beer and a swim afterwards. Ravshan is thin, with tattoos on his hands (and as I discovered later, on his arms), a severe, tho' not cruel face. Neatly dressed, clean, a brush cut with bangs - the Uzbek fashion, and attractive, his hair wiry and jet black. A pained smile. He did not hide his 3 spells behind bars, amnestied three times by the president. "I like adventures too," he said, when I gave that as my excuse for not marrying. I was smitten - what seemed like a nice enough guy, with the added prestige of having roughed it out in prison. In fact, it was hard to believe that R had survived all this without developing TB, AIDS or becoming a nut case. Uzbek jails are no picnic.

I invited him over, and a call at 10pm a few days later made me put my money where my mouth is. Suddenly my heart began to race. An ex-con - maybe he was psychotic or a robber. That finger he thrust in my mouth was erotic, but a bit strange. But he was living with his mother and brother, he'd given me his home phone number, he seemed contrite about his crimes, which sounded like drunken brawls (I didn't think it polite to ask for details). He was a bit drunk as we sat, celebrating our little late-night adventure. He rather abruptly started necking, which I wasn't expecting, and we eventually ran the gamut, culminating in my fingers up his ass and him jacking me off. He couldn't cum and lay there like a zombie afterwards. I started to get worried. I remembered the cop 6 years back that turned violent when he couldn't cum. "You call that love?" he asked. That did not sound encouraging and I didn't respond. "Why are we sinners?" he asked. "We're all sinners," I said. "God made us the way we are. The main thing is we don't hurt anyone by doing this," I counseled. We eventually slept, but the usual distaste hung over me, not to mention my restlessness at his poor performance. Thankfully, he left the next morning, though his pained smile made my heart go out to him. Thankfully, he hasn't phoned again. Another fantasy tarnished.

I read Taking liberties: gay men's essays on politics, culture and sex, edited by Michael Bronski. It seems Malcolm X was a hustler before he became a born-again Muslim. How's this for cheery (but accurate): "We go through life waiting for people to start feeling okay about themselves and they continue not to, and die nasty deaths disillusioned or deluded." That's a comment by Ron Caldwell made about his friend Allen Barnett dying of AIDS, refusing to see his family to the end. It really is mind-blowing what millions of guys like us have gone through. I never really paid attention to the agony of AIDS till M&I had our scare. I feel like I've been given a gift of life, tho' I don't know what to do with it.

One article is about outing musicians - so many are gay (composers like Tchaikovsky, Copland, even Gershwin according to him) and everyone has politely ignored their private lives. It's interesting how rapidly attitudes have changes once it became public about so many people. Slowly more and more role models are popping up, which should make growing up gay a bit less traumatic now. I guess that's the one good development in the last while.

Rondo Mieczkowski and his partner, after their initial sexual infatuation, worked out a long term platonic lifestyle which strikes me as a role model for M&I. I've never met anyone gay I want to live with other than M, and I see now that fantasies of living with PB or earlier, Larry Lyons, say, are just not feasible. Wrt to M, I can see my jealousy a la Sara-PB AND my own desire to sleep around a la PB-Sara. Can M&I ease into that kind of uneasy truce? Is that the best I can hope for in a relationship? I realize now very few people really care about me, and one of those (guess who?) I have more or less rejected as the cause of my neurosis. Looking back over my life and loves, there are clear patterns: chronic lack of self-confidence and oral vixation (somewhat abated with the likes of Muktor and even Ravshan), rejection of society, low-level depression alleviated by intellectual games and dope… I remember my clandestine visits to the attic at 113e when 8-10, leafing through the exotic Soviet Union Today that the Soviet Embassy, back in the heady 60s, plied my poor older sister with when she wrote them for information for a school project. A few times, prompted by Bill Mullholland, we donned some 'gay apparel' from the said older sister (which the nasty other older sister Carole taunted me with for years afterwards). Here I am, 40 years on, wistfully watching Khrushchev-era Soviet movies and living in the farthest reaches of that empire, giving head whenever I can beat down reality-depression. Sounds like a crock of sh**, as Fred once said about me (no doubt jokingly) at a 'family dinner'. But when it comes down to it, I don't know who I envy or who I'd rather be.

From Wilde's fairy tales, Snider develops the fascinating idea that gays are fated to carry the weight/burden of eros in a patriarchal society as a kind of promesse du bonheur. Women's eros is repressed, as is that of str8 men. That's why gays are such a threat to patriarchy - they are men who like to be erotic. Developing this further, the sexual revolution leads to a breakdown of both the physical and, eventually, archetypal (logo=m, eros=f) identities. Jung's categories of anima as man's soul and animus as woman's soul point to this and Hopcke takes the next step. But look at the result: a culture steeped in sexual imagery to the point of nausea. I can honestly say I would prefer more modest, traditional clothing on the street and more segregation m/f.

We watched a very interesting g film recently on Russian TV (2:30am) - A man is a woman like all the others. It is Israeli-French - Zilberman is the director - about a g musician who is forced to marry for money. He even begins to like his wife (and her younger brother). He kind of gives in to her courting, she eventually gets pregnant, realizes he's not good father material when his cousin (childhood sweatheart) leaves his own wife and looks to him for comfort, and has an abortion. Old habits die hard.

A review of The Other Side of Eden by Hugh Brody about the Inuit as Canada's sole remaining hunters and gathers: He turns the old idea equating h&g with nomadism and farmers with settlement and civilization on its head. Farmers, with their growing populations and the need for land, were the true 'nomads' of history. Hunter-gatherers, with their reliance on a single area, are profoundly settled. They can't conceive of expulsion, but rather have a sense of permanent occupancy on land that has always been connected with a particular people.
He also noted that Christianity treated indigenous beliefs as ridiculous and evil. "We never told the Christians that they would go to hell if they didn't accept our religious beliefs," a Mowachaht elder told Brody. "That's the difference between our spiritality and the white man's."

Throwim Wayleg by Tim Flannery, about tribes in Papua New Guinea, which RF left behind: the Miyanmin think everything out of the normal is caused by magic or curses, requiring immediate revenge. Tim gave a mosquito net to someone, whose brother's chicken promptly shat on it, requiring him to destroy his brother's harvest and slaughter all his chickens. When a tree fell and killed X's brother, he assumed it was the spirit of the village that they had slaughtered 15 years back, so he axed and ATE his own daughter, who he had taken hostage from those tribesmen during the raid, even tho he apparently loved her. They may be dressed in filthy western castoffs and have no notion of western hygiene, but they kept their environment pristine until invaded by us. Now in Irian Jaya, in Jayapura, the once spring-fed river is a cesspool, but the Indonesian immigrants wear crisp, white underwear, and worship at their alien mosques, while Americans extract gold and copper from the largest mine in the world, leaving mountains of slag, and smugglers clearcut the rainforest.

An hour after I started reading about the discovery of these tribes in 1938 by gold prospectors I switched on the TV, and lo and behold, Cousteau was visiting the tribe and showed the 1938 footage of the meeting of two worlds. The young Aussie was really handsome - the tribe thought he was a god or devil. Watching it I try to skip over the bits about this or that animal/ glacier soon to be extinct. How these scientist types can blithely proceed with their preserving skeletons and measuring wgts, etc., marvelling at the market invading these remote cultures and ecosystems, and remain clinically removed from it all - is hard to fathom.

Kitty disappeared for a few days and returned with a broken front left paw. She must have fallen off the roof. No more climbing the vine. I'll have to take her downstairs in the evenings to let her run around. She has no problem coming back. It's just going down the 5 flights that both she and our real Kitty couldn't handle. I rushed her to a medical clinic with the vet (there is no vet clinic with an x-ray anymore) and smuggled her in. It was not cheap - 4400 sums. Anya then put a cast on her and she limped around, gnawed off half the cast within a few days. She is a comfort as I struggle with this depression.

July 18, 2001

I have finally got some of my diary online. It was actually fun reading it again. To re-edit, though, would require distancing myself from it, which I'm not ready to do.

The #12 tram is very crowded these days, as the trolleys downtown are cancelled for some presidential route reason. As some old man cursed the discomfort, I was feeling up a sexy young guy, who enjoyed the attention and soon sported a large throbbing erection. What a feeling of excitement we shared. 'You find friends in tight circumstances' goes a Russian saying, though I don't know if it was intended to be taken literally. On the other 'hand', maybe that's how it was coined in the first place. I got off after him and watched him saunter/ strut off, remembering the final surge of his cock against my hand.

My artist hunk, Yura, phoned at 6pm on Monday, inviting me to a birthday party. I showed up at his office - he had already left to prepare the restaurant - and felt very conspicuous among these 20-somethings, all quite str8, 2 sveldt-looking Russian girls in skin tight pants and Yura's two workmates, not particularly sexy-looking. We waited a half hour for another dumpy looking Russian and took taxis across town to an otherwise empty Chinese restaurant. I was sorely tempted to disappear, fearing something akin to that horrible NY's party in Vilnius with my then-str8 heart-throb policeman Sasha ("Why did you bring your uncle?" a bitchy type asked Sasha when I tried to ignore them and sleep.) However, I had a great time - the honorary general of Gogol's Wedding, fawned upon by Dalilah (Dilfuza), an attractive Uzbek who graduated from the Foreign Languages Institute (shades of Martin's bitchy Uzbek wife) who was still hunting for an appropriate guy (like me!). Yura sat with me and opened up a bit: "Remember our skiing weekend? That is the most fun I've had all year," he said, melting me like putty. I even went to the Royal (pronounced roiAL, which means grand piano in Russian) disco and danced with everyone till 2:30am. Hardly a hangover at all, despite drinking many shots of vodka. There won't be many more such heel-kicking episodes for me. Good to know I can still create the mood and pretend I'm 20 again.

I'm constantly reminded of Barb Teskey's sharp observation: "Simon, you remind me of someone looking through a window at life, not really part of it. On the outside, looking in." Interesting that she inferred that 'reality' is like a store window, artificial, commodity-oriented, closed to nature. I think I prefer being outside, though it's lonely. She also feared that my intellectual pretenses would make me look down on simpler, working class people like my sister Carole and her husband Paul. How wrong she was there! I remember at that time, as I was struggling with coming partially out, I ridiculed an engineering student at Knox who was discovering classical music, who was actually quite sexy and secretly gay, alienating him. Bryan Tisdale rightly dragged me over the carpet for that. Since then, I've steadily gravitated to the natural, easy-going muzhik, looking for fulfillment, though my sexual attraction seems to exclude more mundane intimacy, even with Marlen. It's lonely outside.

I just finished Pinker's The Language Instinct. The recurrence of trinities at all levels of nature means our perception is riddled with dialectic: 3 color-relational cones in the eyes, three dimensional space), language grammar (SVO, SOV, VSO), learning, seeing, listening as the perceptual trinity. Then there's music - 3 parts are really the most we can know and keep track of (bass, counterpoint, melody). And of course, religion, at least Christianity.

August 11, 2001

My diary is slowly being 'published' on my website. I am creating myself, in the postmodern way - building my story on the myriad contingencies of my life in time and place, looking for new vocabularies, new metaphors, to try to achieve insights into what makes me. I just finished Richard Rorty's Contingency, irony, and solidarity (1989), which provides a dense but eloquent confirmation for me that there is some merit in this: though God may be dead and we can never really 'know' anything, we can build cultural monuments out of our lives, reflecting ironically on them, explore other lives and cultures, and thereby add a grain of sand to the actualizing sense of solidarity that alone can provide a rock upon which to try to stand to save the world.

A bit pompous, that. Anyway, a bit of fan mail has inspired me to use my empty time now to go through my old diaries, edit and upload them as background to my present struggle. Synchronicity struck that day: along with the email, admiring my intellect, I cruised Chorsu banya for the first time since 'remont' and was pursued by a fellow who wildly jacked off watching me, despite my lack of interest (he was a tub). How close, the sublime and the ridiculous! I was quite taken by a handsome guy with a long, beautiful cock, who alternately sat across from me looking like a Rodin-come-to-life and stood in the shaft of sunlight filtering down through the steam from the central cupola onto the traditional round platform of the main room, as if Dionysius had deigned to visit. He seemed uninterested in any hard core action (maybe he was awaiting Hercules), so I left with my fantasy intact.

I also ploughed my way through James Hillman's The Soul's Code: in search of character and calling (1996), which is tendentious at time, but argues with merit that we need to add the word/ metaphor/ archetype daimon to our vocabulary, however anti-postmodern such a Platonic ideal may seem. Though far from Rorty in form and content (metaphysical to an extreme), he points in the same cultural direction, focusing on biography and autobiography. Funny, the author Rorty lauds as the perfect example of what he admires most in 20th c culture, who wrote the ultimate autobiography, Proust, gets only a passing mention in Hillman ("Proust's teacher considered his compositions disorganized"). I suspect that Hillman may be a bit of a put-on. Quantity (more than 2 dozen nonfiction books) instead of quality.

He also trashes my beloved Alice Miller and most of psychoanalytic theory, denouncing its "parental fallacy", going as far as to say that our daimons choose our parents, if only as a challenge to overcome as we struggle through life. "Our lives are less determined by our childhood than by the way we have learned to imagine our childhoods." Still, his exhortation that we must be sensitive to our daimons and take responsibility for our lives does strike a chord. And when he allows his despair with the present age to show through, he is eloquent: "Hope enters history and our psychology as trust in continuity fades. Our main myth is apocalyptic and our children live among and act out images of catastrophe." So at least give your kids an atmosphere of hope. Give them time to develop some defenses against the despair they will face as intelligent, sensitive adults.

In his analysis of Hitler he makes the provocative claim that the elevation of the profane through ritual breaking of taboos raises the profane to the level of the sacred. In this vein, Dominique Fernandez actually bemoans the legalization of homosexuality, as this saps it of its sacred/ profane nature, making it mundane. My and, through the ages, countless others' anonymous ritual breaking of this taboo is profoundly religious after all. However, for us the daimon can become demonic through its single-track obsession, its monotheistic literalism, perverting the larger imagination of the seed into a serial reenactment of the same act, its own kind of sacred/ profane ritual [cruising]. We must recognize this and attempt to follow the daimon's deepest intentions [writing, analysis?], as opposed to being stuck in the rut of, say, cruising. How to do this? In the past, through a ritual of exorcism/ repression; now, through a ritual of recognition, just as Athena found an honored place for the Furies in Athens, and Dionysus inspired orgiastic rituals.

Hillman's focus on Hitler, and the incessant barrage of news about Israel these days, justifying its own atrocities by reference to the holocaust prompts the question: Why don't gays have the same loud, self-centered anguish wrt our very real holocaust under the Nazis as do Jews? Jews were more easily identified than gays, who could hide behind a public hetero persona, though they were psychologically scarred just as much. Living in Uz re-enacts this trauma for me: public and personal denial (with hetero friends), resulting to some extent in inner annihilation. Is this masochism, Fernandez's search for the sacred through the profane, or, in Rorty's framework, solidarity?

In an article in Achilles Heel, an online men's magazine, the str8 author made the telling claim that nowadays, without a traditional initiation ritual, a male can only become a man when his father dies. Until then, he is frozen in life as a boy. That was definitely the case for me: dad's death set off a long, anguished struggle to find myself. I was struck in AH articles how important the father's death is for so many men. I discussed this with Marlen, who said: "Here in the SU, army service was the initiation. When you came back, everyone would say: 'Now you're a man.'" As this last vestige of male initiation crumbles, increasingly ours is a world of immature, irresponsible boys.

Rorty's talk of creating new metaphors/ languages struck home wrt my family. I realized long ago I could no longer communicate meaningfully with them or share my experiences ironically. True, I can thank my parents, a la Hillman, for providing me with a stable atmosphere of hope and encouraging my daimon, but like Lukas, my mother was clearly fated to be what I would react against in shaping my life. This explains my alienation from Jim, whose language is closer to mother's than mine, despite the fact we are both gay. He is happy to continue the farce and hypocrisy, glossing over the lies and hate characterizing the relations between the siblings and parents in our family. Funny how Anne and Fred were happy to share their hatred of Carole with me, how Jim quite openly told me he thought Fred was an asshole, how mother could curse Carole to me: "I wish she'd had abortions rather than giving birth to her children." Their own daimons (demons?) were speaking to mine, casting me as the Cassandra of the family. Only Bob and Sharon seemed not to have shared any poisonous thoughts with me.

August 24, 2001

I'm finally editing my diary entries from 1989+ and posting them to my web site. So many feelings, the constant anxiety, the groping towards a meaningful sexual life... Some nuggets, but much repeated self-flagellation and mother-hating, which becomes tedious. They need a stronger editorial hand. My unsettled period after GP and before meeting M is the weakest. Good writing requires peace and routine. Is it worth the effort? Do I have anything else worth doing? An article in the IHT tweaks the babyboom generation for producing a stream of self- critical angst these days, so I'm not the only one. Ironically, my most eager reader would probably be the LAST person I would want to reveal it to. But no, I'm still struggling to stand on my own two feet, to empower myself. My mother can read my works once I have made MY mark as an independent man. My timid, anonymous efforts don't yet qualify. In an act of synergy, just as I came to the diary entry introducing him, M came over last night uninvited (a rare event), stayed the night, and we fucked in the morning. It was quite comforting, almost a turn-on! Maybe God is watching over us (or our daimons).

Reinterpreting dreams has sharpened my interpretive skills. Some recent ones:
-enter poodle in competition. Note it has mother's freckles. Artificial hair cut. Unnatural compared to other dogs. [Hardly needs interpretation.]
-search for Dr. Schreiber on 8 S floor for passport stamp. Eat cake with women there but no Schreiber. Leave and descend to 8th floor. [My u clearly identifies with Dr. S, his hysteria and search for religion and the inner woman. The extra Ѕ must be going up into the intellect. I descend to the balanced 8th floor: dare I hope this means some resolution? I feel calmer now, after reliving my meditation notes from Sri Lanka.]
-open frig. See M has put mulberry jam in 2 jars. Angry. Put back in one? Fear his anger. Probably did it so won't spoil. He's on phone. [Our increasing separation, which certainly frustrates and worries me?]
-build fire in wide-open new hearth with Mills. We're sick. No wood left. "Don't wait to burn marble steps." He goes for wood. I follow but lose him on crowded st. Find some rotten wood and bring back. Hearth cover falls into coals. A mess. Too hot. How to fix? Where's Mills? [Our sickness: the political reaction and worrying world scenario. We have grown apart in our development, the way we stoke our creativity, or rather I have drifted away from the political struggle. I've made a mess of what's left of my emotional energy and am feeding it with what is insubstantial and rotten. The fire could go out.]

Is Nietzsche's "thus I will it" the same as Hillman's "realize your daimon"? Are both just metaphors, new bits of language that we adapt to come closer to realizing our potential?

It's 10 years since the putsch. I read over the articles I wrote on the 2nd anniversary 8 years ago. My feelings are the same: sympathy for mumbling Gorby and a feeling of betrayal by the ego-maniac Yeltsin, who did all he could to sabotage Gorby, going as far as to call him a dictator on an uncensored TV broadcast calling for G's resignation, months before the coup. Putting the rev in perspective requires recognizing the cyclical nature of history. Already there are storm signals on the world horizon. And tho' Putin's war in Chechnia is a tragic mistake, I'm convinced he was a believing party man back in the '70s and '80s (you don't devote your life to the KGB lightly). So maybe he will slowly undo some of the damage of the Yeltsin years. Meanwhile, the historical struggle for socialism renews itself - the old upward spiral. That made me think of how I get energy from young guys, a kind of sexual renewal (Brahma, Deva, Shiva). I look at the pathetic struggle of so many young people here, and marvel at their innate optimism and energy. It is like a divine gift, and inspires me. I am glad to help them.

BBC's The People's Century series showed the post-WWII European economic miracle, and made it clear that it was only due to the US fear that Europe would go commie that it hurriedly inaugurated the Marshall Plan. The standard of living tripled in Italy in two decades. An earlier part showed how Sweden introduced social democracy in the '30s to shape its capitalism into a socially acceptable form, and of course how FDR forced radical changes on US capitalism. Capitalism, when controlled by a strong progressive political will, can be benign.

For all the pomp and circumstance, the lies and terror of Communism, we must thank it for inspiring this political will from 1917 to 1991. More than once I have been told by Russians the following: Thank your lucky stars the revolution succeeded here. Not because we Russians live well (which we don't), but to frighten your politicians into passing social reforms to keep our system at bay. Unfortunately, the rigid Soviet system proved incapable of reform, and as the ideology died, so did the economy. Now, without a credible threat, capitalism has gone wild and appears hell-bent on destroying the world, with an spiritually empty and physically dangerous ideology of overconsumption.

Rereading my Buddhist experiences, I can see what has survived the years: the Vipassana insight meditation, which requires total awareness at all times. My efforts to live a reflected-upon life is in line with this. But there is my desire to experience the unaware other (young guy), to make him 'aware' even if only for a moment, to get relief from this constant awareness, even if only for a moment!

September 13, 2001

Nothing much new on the sex front. Both Pakhtakor and BC are tighter security-wise, and I'm put off by the hostility I felt the last time from the Chorsu banya attendant and one creepy client who glared at me and continually spat in my direction, clutching his cock in a feeble attempt to hide his ugly, flabby nudity. The one exception to this tale of woe was last Sunday. I did my 'rounds', arriving at P about 1pm and saw a good-looking Uzbek about 50 meters away, watching the boys play soccer. He didn't seem to notice me enter the can, and when I came out I walked past him and caught an enigmatic but at least non-threatening glance. He immediately headed for the can, and I took his cue and followed at a discrete distance, making as sure as possible that no one noticed our mating ritual. He was ensconced in the last stall. A good sign. I entered the next to last and lit a cigarette nervously. Thank God tobacco isn't outlawed yet. After I flicked the stub away, beginning to lose hope, he finally emerged and hesitated until I had given him several signs of interest. He pulled out his cock and I began to coax it to life. He indicated I should hold his ass and things picked up. He came quickly, just as a guy walked past us, ostensibly looking for a plastic bottle to fill with water. My hunk left in a hurry and I was in a quandary. This second guy was also good-looking and I sensed interested, though he took a stall closer to the entrance. After a minute I decided to try to catch up with my hunk. It's so rare to find someone these days, I wanted to at least pass on my card. He was still close by and I followed him for a 100 meters and then suggested we go for a beer. He refused even my card - post-coital nausea, I know it well. I returned, but hunk number two was already sauntering away, though he looked back several times.

John Adams: "The people in all nations are naturally divided into two sorts, the gentleman and the simpleman."
Thomas Jefferson: It takes three years of common schooling to sift the natural aristocrat from "the rubbish". There are two classes - the laboring and the learned.
Hegel: The gentleman can know himself only through an 'other' (in the section on lordship and bondage in the Phenomenology).
No comment.

The tragic attacks on NY and Washington on Tuesday have only driven home the insanity of US and Israeli policies. There will be no end to this reign of terror until Israel acknowledges its folly, abandons its settlements, and makes peace with the Palestinians. At the time it happened, I was watching a National Geographic documentary on the Huaorani tribe of Ecuador, the indigenous people who have looked after (been part of / lived in harmony with) the rainforest for millennia. They were only 'discovered' a few decades ago. Of course, most of their territory was immediately seized by the government; US oil companies invaded, building roads, dumping toxic waste, bringing disease and the other accoutrements of civilization. The companies flew in missionaries to destroy the Huaoranis' minds, make them ashamed of their bodies, give them cast-off clothes, guns and plastic bottles. The H, a fierce tribe who just wanted to be left alone, filled the first missionaries with hundreds of spears, but then there's no easier way to make it into paradise for these emissaries of capitalism. An oil tycoons had the gall to say: "I'm a conservationist myself, and the road is a wonderful thing for Ecuador." The road in reality brought in impoverished, landless peasants, who immediately began cutting down the priceless forest to graze cattle. The heavy tropical rains then wash away the soil and now leave a growing wasteland behind.

Anyway, O phoned and I switched to CNN to hear the horrible news. I can't think of any buildings more appropriate to blow up than the Trade Towers or the Pentagon, except the White House, but the key word in this statement is THINK. To do it is beyond the pale, and I actually felt pity for the feeble-minded Bush sputtering away on the TV. Sadly, as the documentary on the Huaorani made painfully clear, the terrorists' logic is spot-on: American IS the evil empire, destroying the world with its cancerous materialism, not that I find a return to the savagery of Amir Temur an attractive alternative. Far better would be a return to the primitive communism of the H, though I fear I'm stuck with trying to wrestle with the ghosts of late late capitalism. The fruit of knowledge and all that.

This latest disaster marks the end of the 'hepi end' of the post-Cold War Pax Americana. Fukiyama's end of history with a vengeance. I recalled Nostradamus's 'prediction' that at the end of the millennium, a great airship would fall from the sky bringing havoc to the world. In 1999, we were expecting Mir to spin out of control over Paris. Then we all forgot about it - another wacky soothsayer. Time to eat our words.

Speaking of missionaries, the 'world community' has been upset with the Afghan government for arresting a clutch of these pests after catching them red-handed with hundreds of cassettes about Christianity in local languages and manuals on converting Muslims, though these so-called foreign aid workers knew very well that trying to convert Afghanis is punishable by death. More martyrs on their way to heaven? The same logic, if more benign, as the kamikaze Islamic terrorists whom we love to hate. Come to think of it, how many children die of starvation and disease every day?

October 14, 2001

I fear the apocalypse is approaching. I hope it's just middle age angst but the future of this planet looks terminal. The US and its 'American dream' are the underlying enemy, and there is no sign of the beast mending its ways. On the contrary, it is crashing ahead with its high-tech war against its latest virtual enemy.

Meanwhile the answer screams out: the unhealthy hunger for the US-style consumer society, with the mad rush of half the world's population to migrate to find the good life in the developed world is the flip side of the hatred fueling the growing terrorism by the rest.

The era of mass migration must come to an end. But it can only do so if there is a mass redistribution of wealth to the direct benefit of those in need (not governments) and an end to the flood of materialist propaganda. The US will only be safe when disparities are reduced. The world will be safe only when the mad rush to consumerism ends and an era of ecological consciousness begins, based on consumption minimization (given basic needs) vs the present consumption maximization (democracy of desires).

Mass migration just fuels the rape of the planet, continued overpopulation and the extinction of cultures. Let the Amazonian tribes set an example, if a rather extreme one: no foreigners allowed in, all desires met from their land and social organization. (OK, let there be antibiotics.)

Of course the other component for US security is ending its addiction to oil, especially imported from Arab states. But just try explaining that to W/Cheney. For that matter, try explaining any of the above to them. Hence, apocalypse.

More meditations on language. Language is primarily a means to achieve greater intimacy. That's probably why I learned Russian. To discard my English-language-programmed intimacy problems (who do we learn language from after all?!). that's why I probably can't push myself to learn Uzbek (I can get all the intimacy I need through Russian). To learn a language, the most important element is NEED. However, I do like intimacy with Uzbeks. Take Mahsud and the issue of dropping over, which Uzbeks will do without warning. This is a carry-over from the village mentality. In a village, entertainment is primarily visiting one's neighbors, who don't have telephones anyway, and live nearby. But Mansur/ Jamshid's dropping over is not such a thrill. I crave Mahsud's intimacy, sensuality, the feeling of connecting with his soul. To finally learn Uzbek, I must find a non-Russian-speaking Uzbek soulmate. QED.

One other reflection: can we see a hint of the sensual architectural/ cultural elements of Uzbek life (the rounded cupolas, soaring minarets) in the language itself, with its rounded, solid phrases and strict formal syntax?

November 9, 2001

For better or worse, I'm one of the 'elect' - those socially evolved/ enlightened humans, along with a mixed bag of religious nuts, crazy lefties, gays, environmentalists, feminists, poor blacks and others 'objectively' and 'subjectively' forced to be aware. Critical reasoning and the mindset it creates are the way humans have evolved since the Neolithic period, when the brain reached its present complexity and the voice box descended (except for resistance to certain epidemics in dens, settled populations). What is our bottom line? It's got to be based on a world of nonviolence, given our technology capable of destroying everything, and of asceticism, given our trajectory towards actually destroying everything of value through uncontrolled production/ consumption.

I identify with this motley crew, but still am drawn to the mindless, joyous macho male for my connection with reality, the beautiful, sexy stud, who himself is the universe, perfect in his arousal and timeless in his fleeting orgasm. But ironically, this 'reality' is best experienced in fantasy. Such a stud will perhaps grace me with a fleeting moment of ecstasy, but no more. If he's after a long term relationship with me, he must be flawed (the ex-con drunk Ravshan) or gay, which means his is not this fabulous 'other', but someone much like me. So by continuing with my illusion, I remain arrested, projecting my own 'other' onto an idealized, unattainable 'other'. No hepi end, there. I've tried to project in a fulfilling way with M, but that passion has petered out. I feel the way forward now is to stop projecting all together. Retreat into celibacy. Enjoy my young male friends, like Yura and Mahsud without pushing for sexual fulfillment. Does that leave M&I as a deep bond, or a clinging to fill the void?

Jared Diamond's The Fates of Human Societies, which he flippantly titled Guns, Germs and Steel as the main title, puts the 'miracle' of the rise of capitalism in northern Europe in perspective. The rise of agriculture is the most profound transformation in human history, and arose specifically in the Fertile Crescent based on the Karenina principle due to a very clear confluence of ultimate and proximate causes.
Capitalism is just the icing on the cake, or rather the poisonous effluent from millennia of human social evolution. It struck me that the deadly ability of some microbes to mutate from animal->animal to animal->man infections, and most spectacularly of all to make the leap to man->man infections is an apt metaphor for money in its evolution from an occasional means of regulating trade to a total means of self-generating value through commoditization of production. It becomes a deus ex machina, and like the terrible epidemics which have accompanied man the farmer, it has raged through societies, transforming them and leaving them under the control of the strong, the ruthless survivors.
Democracy, especially in its monetized form, is the political system most suitable to capitalism, as it allows for the rise and fall of various competitors through the vagaries of nature and society. Maybe Iran, China, and Cuba, with their one-party systems founded at least on paper in a socialist morality, can still resist the worst of the capitalist tidal wave. Crucial to all the radical transformations in human history is autocatalysis. Success breeds success. Domestic animals provide transport and fertilizer, allowing a denser population… On a personal note, self-esteem prompts the respect of others, encouraging success and greater self-esteem. We can change our surroundings (me fleeing to Russia, Uzbekistan…) - that's what's gret about the city (Sennett). But we carry with us mental baggage, shame of our past mistakes and silliness (former professions of love…). Buddhism encourages us to 'let them go', to see all earthly events as maya, and find inner peace.

November 27, 2001

Stalinism is alive and well. I've been translating an eyewitness account for Rebecca of the fall of Bukhara in 1918-9 by the leaderer, Kolesov, ghost written and published in 1935 for her book about the last emir. I found a rare copy in the National library with parts hacked and blacked out, no doubt in the purges of 1937, when coincidentally my Uzbek friend Mahsud's grandfather disappeared. In case I needed reminding of how ingrained this vicious 'shadow' side of reality here is, M had a knock on the door at 8 pm last week, peered through the peek hole to see one plainclothes fellow, who convinced him to open the door. Another person was hidden and it turned out they were cops there to kidnap him.

He was not allowed to phone, and they searched the apt. Thank God it was there and not here (though I would never have let them in). They found nothing incriminating - porno would have meant a $1000 bribe. He was beaten and threatened with 'the goom', meaning the basement torture room of the main militia headquarters, if he didn't comply with their requests to name names. They forced him to agree to bring them a photograph of one of our NGO meetings to identify someone they were looking for. They showed him many pictures that they had confiscated from others whom they had arrested, including one which included me.

Dream at the time: I'm in small car back seat. X driving. Center lane. Police van swerves in front. Crash. Rain. I fear being maimed more than death. Driver starts fixing. Drill new spot in starter engine. Hope will drive away. Police at fault.

When I figured out he must be in detention, I was able to locate the phone number of the Iakarasaraiski militia office, where rumor had it the investigation is taking place, and brusquely announced I was phoning on behalf of the US Embassy, making it clear I was concerned about his well-being and to ask on what pretext he was being held. He was released a few hours later. How many times has this happened here in the last century? How many more times will it happen? Is there any place to hide? We met with Matilda from Human Rights Watch in Mir Burger. A quiet, plain Aussie, with a blotchy complexion and 6 months pregnant. She said parents of a gay fellow had related to her how he was humiliated by the cops. They've been here 5 years and produce damming reports about the gross violation of human rights, especially devout Muslims, and manage to get visas all the same. "I think they didn't realize what they were in for when they accredited us back then. It was a bit more open and upbeat. Now it would be an embarrassment to kick us out," she said.

November 29, 2001

I worried, falling asleep, about my heart. I feel constant emotional pain and worry that it will affect me physically. Recent medical research suggests the heart is intimately connected to the nervous system. You can literally die of a broken heart. It's not just a pretty metaphor. The former thrill I got from cottaging sex involved a rush of adrenaline and the feeling of my heart pumping. The cigarette high is from the heart pushing the nicotine to the head, giving a rush. I feel trapped here, oppressed by both the local homophobia and blind worship of the new market god, and by the growing vicious, reckless American system. But letting myself fall part would only be to its advantage, if my existence matters at all.

What is my life journey? A 'becoming the other':
-sex - primarily passive, taking in the other, leading towards celibacy
-religion - Buddhist renunciation, living in Muslim society
-politics - communist, rejecting the materialism I grew up with, embracing a green asceticism.

I used to wonder how the SU worked, what motivated people to get up in the morning and go to low-paid jobs. Now I wonder how the US or any capitalist society works, why people will work 18 hour days to build a business to produce, say, toilet paper, or some toxic chemical. 90% of the small businesses will fail, most products are useless or harmful, and life is just too short for this shit.

When M was arrested, he met a handsome Chechen hauled in as a suspect in a robbery who had spent time in jail already here. He related how American advisers had come in to reform the prison, where formerly the prisoners mostly ran the prison, with a system of payment for the guards to grant them privileges and lots of drugs circulating. The Americans helped eliminate the prisoner control, which effectively worsened conditions, since prisoners could no longer move about so freely to visit with friends. The new regime gave power back to the authorities, but they were unable to use it to, say, promote rehabilitation through programs, education, or work. The only rehab is the instilling of remorse for sins against society (assuming the prisoner is actually guilty, which is far from certain here). I suppose this works for a simple Uzbek, a la Ravshan, who seemed to regret whatever it was that landed him in jail (methinks it was fighting). I need reason.

January 2, 2002

I'm fortunate (lucky?) with my brushes with the 'law'. The most recent was at Pakhtakor, where I literally forced myself to drop in on the can one day last week. Ten meters from the entrance, just before I started to veer towards it, a cop car hurried past me, stopped right at the door, and a cop jumped out and hurried in, either with a bad case of the runs, or with a quota of queers to round up. I calmly continued on and watched as the cop car headed for the back gate to the sports complex 30 meters ahead. I decided to make a circle around the playing field in front of the can and when I reached the far side, I saw that the squad car had returned and was moving slowly in my direction, as if I was wearing some kind of homing device (that day will come, mark my word!). I turned around as casually as possible and made for the canal, praying that the car would not stop. Thank God it didn't.

I even thank my stars after crossing the street sometimes, as some 'new Uzbek' careens madly forward, honking aggressively or flashing his lights in the twilight, accelerating as if his life depended on reaching terminal velocity before screeching to a halt at the next light. Truly, this life seems to be degenerating into one ordeal after another, on the personal and social levels.
[The teenager next door, Katya, is in the habit of entertaining her boyfriends on the stairwell. They love to burn matches on the ceiling, leave garbage at my door, now my peephole has been scratched. M says if I complain, they will stick matches in the lock so I can't get in.]

A split-second slip in my reactions could lead to a chain of events which it is best not to think about. I could lose weeks, months, years, my health, my capital - extricating myself from some mad, baseless nightmare.

I have withdrawn now from my past flirtations with excitement, with only my daily toke to let me take flight. Time to reflect. I see my frustrating love of handsome, sexy, straight, sensitive Yura as a continuation with my 'love from afar' of Dave Harbord, my Seneca Posen student, PB, my Moscow Tartar cadet… My encounter with Lyonia and experiments here on buses suggest that it is possible to strike it rich with a young guy. I must keep a fire smoldering that I can blow into a flame if the opportunity should arise, but I don't think I'll ever hang out for hours, say at P, as over the past few years. I don't need huge quantities of experiences anymore. I have my memories and knowledge.

As for mature gay relations, I also have some experience now, tho' my passion for M died with my illusions. I know my own limits better (which are growing as I age!). I make do with less intense and less physical relations.

I just read a University of California interview with Howard Zinn. He argues that it is not interesting to live as a pessimist. We must be optimists and have faith in our small steps of protest. They can grow.
My withdrawal from the family and left wing protests is from a feeling of abandonment by family/ society. I've reduced my contacts to the elemental (Daniar-like wordless moments of ecstasy). Can these small sexual steps lead to a renewal? Can my articles count as small optimistic steps? I am living a sexual/political dialectic from being to nothing. Now, becoming?