...it seems I've spent my whole week receiving amazing emails from amazing people - I'm behind in getting back with everyone and I apologize. Hopping a flight in a couple hours to San Diego. Hope to do some thinking and deep talking with two of the most important people in my life, V. - my best friend since college and C. - my gay proxi-dad.

I may see this lovable rogue. Thank god I'll be on my best behavior - well kinda.

It's been a week. Thanks for caring about this rough little irish/norwegian misfit - your luving feels good.

With trepidition I feel myself coming clean with it.

I've been hiding. Not for days, not for weeks, for months. Many, many months.

I thought it all had started the day I broke up with Lucky - but I had been traveling that winding road for months before that. Did I start on that path last summer - the second time Lucky and I had broken up, or was it earlier - maybe when I was laid off from my job as as advertising exec, maybe when I broke up with Lucky the first time (fucking have to have the first strike to get to the third - "play ball!"), maybe it was the DUI sixth months into what I used to think was the best relationship of my life (a story I still haven't told)- maybe it was when I decided to start doing drugs again and go to my first circuit party at 30, and then my second and then my third (and so on) ??

I've been hiding behind any thing that would medicate me, soothe away my fears of not being lovable, being wrong in some deep, irrevokable way. I drank alot when I was a kid, drugs, booze, sex - I started young. It became an integral make-up of who I was - the load-bearing beam of my dysfunctionality. I learned that sex with strangers would make them like me, feel closer to me - give me control over others, that drugs made life more interesting, and booze - oh booze made me fucking sexy and funny as all get out - even if I couldn't remember your name or the punch line 20 minutes after you had come in my mouth and the joke had come out of it.

Don't let me paint the wrong 'Movie of the Week' picture here (could John Stahmos play me though - he needs a job - Rebecca's carry his dead weight) - I have had many periods of control, or abstinence. My Senior year of college - I didn't drink or do drugs for a year. But I fucked around, man did I fuck around. I would bore of a guy after a month - usually because it meant if I kept seeing him I couldn't (in good conscience) go to the bookstore. See if it wasn't booze, or drugs, or sex, or shopping, or a person, or working out - it would be something. I just kept shifting the blame. I blew out both tires on my truck hitting that median - because of the booze, I wasn't to blame. I let that guy and his roomate bareback me - I was higher then a kite on drugs, I wasn't to blame. I would spend $500 bucks on shirts in the days when I was only making $21,000 - I really needed those clothes, I wasn't to blame.

I fall back into these behaviors - not because I have a problem with booze, or drugs, or shopping, or sex, or working out - but because I have a problem with - me.

I just use everything else to mask it. I am an amazingly funtional - self-hater. I can bump up before work, drink at lunch and get through the day impressing them all. I am the typical Leo - playing "life of the party", never really remembering how many drinks I had - but able to count the phone numbers, the conquests, the laughs. I can mix my K with my E with my T (but not G, at least that one I know is a one way trip to an early grave - the only thing I seem to have a wake-up call on) and seem pretty normal.

I need to take a good long look and figure out how I want to proceed with this life. I've done a great job faking it - but I think the cracks are starting to show through.

Leo:
Robust individuals are feeling slightly fragile. There's no harm in taking refuge for a while until you feel up to speed. And when you decide to step outside, be advised that people are playing rough out there. Maybe your old sense of adventure will return once you get a taste of it. The surging and colliding of different types of energies could be exciting if you feel like taking the risk. You already have a good feeling about this.

Thanks

...dropped off the heart monitor at the hospital last night and have an appointment with a cardiologist on Tuesday. In the meanwhile - I've taken a few days off from the gym, no caffine, no supplements, no booze. Hope to get back to the gym tonight or tomorrow - depending on if this lil rag-a-muffin comes up from Tucson tonight. I feel good, like whatever has happened has passed. Occassional tightness in my chest and my heart seems to run much faster in the morning. Suppose the next work-out will be the test. I'll be in San Diego Friday thru Sunday so it's gonna be so hard not to party. I've been mulling the words over in my head again and again: "Maybe someone is trying to tell you something". I didn't get too heavily into it with the Emergency Room doctor what my current drug usuage was. Primarily he was concerned about my use of "X". I told him I had used it in Palm Springs a few weeks back, but didnt mention the others - and tough I wasn't excessive in quantity, I was in variety and combinations. Maybe it's all just to much, bad-boy/gym-boy supplements, the heavy drinking, the drug use, the stress, the break-up - maybe when I said my heart was ripping - it wasn't as emotional as it was factual. I push myself harder and harder through these work-outs to become invincible - someone who can't be hurt. I medicate my daily existence with booze and drugs - so I can't feel Lucky and Baby's absence. I think how many times over the past few months I've thought - I feel like my heart could just burst right now. Am I killing myself without knowing it? No, I don't buy into that. Am I pushing myself too far, too hard, too fast? Yeah, probably, probably so.

And in other news:

I have my next tattoo consultation tomorrow night. I'm very excited. Really just adding on to the existing one, but I get a great vibe from this guy that it's gonna be awesome.

Also, sometime between now and this time tomorrow I should have my 70,000 visitor. Kinda cool. Maybe it's you.

...well a little scare now and then is good for the blood flow I guess.

Spent most of yesterday in the Scottsdale Memorial Emergency Room - actually 6 hours to be exact. Sunday at the gym in the middle of a really bad ass work out I started to notice that my heart had made a decision to leap out of my chest. Lil fucker started racing like a speed demon, pounding faster and faster - being a pain-in-the-ass and hating the whole medical experience I ignored it and assumed this would pass. Went home and showered and went out for beer with the boys and felt reasonably better. After several beers and much flirting with the "hot muther fucker" - I felt extremely better. Anyway - fast forward to me waking up at 1AM to find that the lil fucker had started racing again. I huffed and puffed, walked around, listened to music and the fucker wouldn't slow down. Now fast forward to 7AM. I haven't been back to sleep and still a little nervous, my heart beat has moved down, but I'm having chest pains. I get ready, go to work, and when my boss shows up - explain that I want to run up to the doctor and have them take a look. After an EKG comes back with an abnormal status - due to an irregluar heart beat/rythm - they send me to ER (where I spend more than enough time - hooked to machines - staring in to space).

Well the good new is - despite the irregular heart beat which I may have always had and never had any reason to be concerned about, my blood work and ultrasound and second EKG look good. If nothing else the Doctor thinks I'm in amazing shape (I will admit I was attempting to wear my hospital gown in a provocative way to show skin - kidding). So they hook me up to a portable heart monitor that I have to wear thru this afternoon and then I have to do a followup with a cardiologist next week.

Now the bad news is the doctor says no more supplements. Seems he thinks those culprits sent my heart thru the roof - giving me a little cardi heart frustration. I admittedly don't like this answer - but suppose I'll behave for a while and see if it helps.

So I spent the night at my folks (who were worried sick) for the first time since I was 21 - kinda weird. But my Mom wanted to get to take care of me. And hey after a day like that - I was open to that.

Ahhhh - never a dull day.

...risky words. but I may have just met the hottest muther fucker I have ever met before. and he was all about me all night long.....
not the time, not the place. but damn - fucking-a-damn - i was hard all night just talking to him.

....Sundays have always been the hardest. Through the ups and downs of my time with Lucky, it was on Sundays that I would miss him most. Today no exception. I find ways to busy myself and stem off the creeping emotion looking to make itself known. I sit at a coffee house and read, I tease my monkey, I clean out the garage, I run to Target to buy things to organize the minimal disarray. Sometimes you come across something and no matter how good you're doing - at least for a tic, a sec, a moment -you feel him again - kissing your cheek, patting your ass, watching you stare off in to space. I found the 1 year warranty I bought for the "all-in-one" fax/copy/scanner I gave him at Christmas - forward it to his roomate I suppose. I find a folder with Baby's veternarian receipts, information on puppy pre-school, and a hand-drawn note to Lucky in yellows, pinks and greens saying 'Happy 1 Week Anniversary Daddy - Luv Baby'...it makes me pause, reflect and I feel a small ripping in my heart.

I start projects, water the plants and prepare to hit the gym. There will be beers later with H. and C. and D. - I'm building fences - using friends. I let the handsome, human fence surround me at bars and feel safer behind it - looking outwards. I smile, I laugh, I joke...yet behind my eyes there's been a bit of a vacancy for weeks now. In the cocky swagger there's a suggestion of 'maybe', but more often 'off-limits' or 'danger - construction site'. I went to dinner and for drinks (far, far to many drinks) with the charming, vunerable, J the EE (formerly known as 'BN1") last night, and as the smoothness of his vodka tonics took hold of him I could see despite my distance - he's slipped to far. He's fallen. He references a new found belief in love or finding that Mr Right - he knows his comments must appear indirect to not scare me. Saddened, I'm really gonna hurt this one aren't I? I pound through the libation medication and wonder what the other side of this really looks like. Handsome, gentle, Maestro (formerly known as 'BN3') will be leaving for Chicago soon for 8 weeks. He's made it clear he hopes for visits, he asks for nothing when he tells me he misses me when I'm not there. He seems used to my controlled silence, my smile, my body. In both their eyes I see them studying, seeking clues and I wonder how much I give up without knowing it. They know there are others, they know not to expect the daily call - and they feel his presence too, still lingering beyond my shoulder.