Thanksgiving sucks when you don't have a date (or I just hate turkey).

I suspect that I’ve never really “dated” anyone before. My ex-wife and I worked together and became friends long before we were married. Prior to that I always just had girlfriends, except for that brief, polyamorous period where I actively sought out both sexes and had boyfriends. I’m told that dating these days entails months of getting to know each other just to find out whether or not you want to get to know each other. When I think about it, it makes sense; particularly at my age (forty-eight), I mean there’s not much time left so the getting to know you period seems important. God forbid you should date someone you’re not really all that into.

The first woman I met from eHarmony lived down the peninsula from San Francisco, a considerable distance from Berkeley where I live which is just across the bay from the City. Mountain View is not an easy commute for me to make, especially since I don’t have a car. “S,” as I’ll call her, is a very attractive woman with an eight year-old son. She is very active in her son’s life which I found instantly attractive. S and I participated in the dance that eHarmony calls “guided communication,” trading answers to each others questions and sending our “must have” and “can’t stand” criteria. I swear, a lot of eHarmony is a waste of time, but there seems to be at least a fragment of science behind the concept. When we got to the “open communication” stage S should just how ballsy she could be and sent me her phone number.

We talked on the phone a few times and decided to meet. Our first meeting was a lot of fun; she had tickets to the Giants’ game and was going with her son and friend from work. A misunderstanding led me to the wrong ball park, I went to the Oakland A’s stadium instead of Pac Bell Park… that’s a long story in and of itself, but I did make it to the game right around the fifth inning. We seemed to hit it off, and now that I think about it a baseball game is a really good first date. It’s not so loud as to impede conversation and by the same token, there’s no need for awkward small talk and you can just watch the game. Afterwards we went to a nearby restaurant and got a bite to eat and continued the small talk. S and I decided to go forward and continue to see each other. About a week later she came up to Berkeley and we hung out, I impressed her by taking her to dinner at my restaurant and sealed the deal. A week or so after that I took the train down to Mountain View and we went to a movie with her son and afterwards I met her mom. Now, I think normally meeting someone’s mom can be scary, but I helped install a pump for her fountain and looked at the pictures from their recent trip to Hawaii.

S was great, I really liked her and the possibility of getting to know her son as well intrigued me. Could I be a dad? I think so, a good one too, much better than mine, that’s for sure. But a few weeks after that Mountain View trip S decided that I was not right for her. She said she “need[ed] to be careful.” I’m not sure what she meant by this, was it a fear of HIV, which is very reasonable, or was it my habit of drinking a few beers and playing dominoes into the wee hours after work? I suppose I’ll never know. I took the news well, and wondered who would be next. About two months afterwe went our separate ways I got an email from S saying that she had stage II breast cancer with lymph node involvement. I haven’t heard from her since, despite two emails I sent her offering my assistance and support. S I hope all is well…

The Universe is truly amazing to me. I feel that if you open yourself to it it will guide and show you exactly what it is you need. Of course this doesn’t help if, like me currently, you have open eyes but you seem to have misplaced your glasses. The dating process has actually taught me more about myself in a shorter period of time than my psycho therapy sessions, although I’ve spent just about as much money it seems. I put my faith in the dating websites because it seems a good way to meet people whom you would otherwise probably never meet. The other thing is that I put “HIV Positive” right there on my profile for God and everybody to see. This, ideally, was or so I thought, a great way to save time. No muss, no fuss, immediately you can tell if a person is the kind of person I find attractive because if they contact me, then quite obviously they have an open mind. And hell, once you get to know me my charm and grace will most definitely win you over and you forget about the woes of safe sex and latex. That is if the woman actually READS the profile…

Not long after S decided to bail my subscription to eHarmony ended and I decided not to renew it. I was checking email one day and I remembered my Yahoo account. Lo and behold there was a message from “J,” that had been sitting in my personals in box for about a week. I read her profile and since you can’t send messages on Yahoo without being a member I signed up for three months with Yahoo personals. J was attractive, intelligent and much more geographically desirable than S. Frankly, she’s hot. Again, J was up front with her phone number, we talked and then met. Apparently we had been matched on both eHarmony & Yahoo… which to me seemed like a good thing. So after a few conversations over the phone we decided to meet. Wow, sparks! Our first date was a walking tour of the UC Berkeley campus; she has a fondness for architecture as I do. The second was pool at a local pool hall, the third the Berkeley Botanical Gardens. Everything was going great I was beginning to think that this dating was a piece of cake. And then she got scared.

J had decided that it would never work between us because she searched herself and realized that I was just like every other guy she’s ever dated: only interested in satisfying my needs and my needs alone. She came to this conclusion about three weeks into the affair and informed me, over the phone, that she was calling it quits. Well I was not going to have any of this. I reached down deep for my best bag of rhetorical skills and argued, essentially, why this decision of hers was biased and concerned with satisfying only her needs and not addressing mine at all. While understandable given the degree of crap she must have had to suffer through with men who didn’t care one whit about her, what is not understandable is how she saw these things in me. I am very attentive and caring and quite frankly I was falling for this woman that I describe as the one that I would “build” for myself if Legos had a domestic partner kit. That fact alone should have been an indication that she came first in what we would soon be calling “us-ness.”

J realized that I was sincere. J realized that I honestly did care very much and believe it or not did put her needs ahead of my own. J agreed to another date and on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend we spent the entire day and into the evening together. It was really a wonderful date. It was here that I learned about her upcoming birthday and how family drama usually ruined it for her. Being attentive and caring I took note and began planning what I hoped would be her best birthday to date and, ideally, the first of many with me. So yeah I guess I was thinking about my needs.

J wanted to take things slow, no sex, but lots and lots of making out, which if you’re good at it, is almost as good as sex. We had two conversations in the same night, in between make out sessions on my new couch, about two subjects which most would consider the “deal breakers:” HIV and bisexuality. J took it all in stride while I opened up the parts of me that I rarely tell anyone, especially someone I fear will go running for the hills when they find out my secrets. I suppose there is some truth to vulnerability being attractive because J and I continued to make out on my new couch afterwards.

I planned a five course meal for her birthday and got her a Teflon pan for her eggs (she had mentioned that her eggs kept sticking) and a series of photographs that I had taken in one of those frames that holds five images. And the images were ones that she had commented on before indicating her favorites (and I have a lot of images). So yeah I pay attention. The Saturday before her meal with me was her actual birthday which she spent with her family complete with all the drama which makes her regret spending her birthday with her family. It was my goal to make her forget all about the ugly stuff and focus on us; on our us-ness. So yeah I was concerned only with getting my needs met.

To make a long story short everything was perfect. It was a beautiful September day and she wanted to go down by the water and just chill. Without missing a beat I suggested that we take the fruit and cheese course with us and enjoy it al fresco…great idea. We talked, we held hands, we romanticized ugly family drama. We went back to my apartment and got through three of the five courses, all the while drinking wine and conversing. We ended the night by making out and I tried, in vain to convince her to stay the night. She reluctantly went home late that Sunday night and I fell asleep thinking that we were destined to be together for a very long time.

Oh well I was wrong and must have been thinking only of my needs, insert sarcasm here, and J decided that “when [she] searched her self [she] knew it would not be a good fit.” I was dumbfounded. We had great dates, we had great conversations, I’m a great cook, she loves to eat, everything was perfect. Apparently not. This time I was hurt. Unlike S’s departure J had managed to get under my skin and when she decided to break it off, again on the phone, I was sad. For a couple of days afterward I found myself asking what did I do wrong? What is wrong with me? Is the HIV thing really too big for intelligent adults to handle? Do I smell? What is it? Of course no answers were immediately forthcoming. But I soon realized what it was. It was her and not me. I was exactly the person she was looking for and when she realized that she got scared. Unlike all the other men she dated I was there for her when she needed someone to be, I put her first instead of myself, I showed a genuine interest in who she is and what she wanted out of life, I actually did the things that I said I would do. Oh well. I emailed her and asked if she’d reconsider, like I said she had gotten under my skin and I was hooked, but to no avail. She was dead set about not dating me, oh well.

J left and I went back to Yahoo Personals to see who was out there. My subscription was coming to an end and I was fairly certain that I wasn’t going to renew it. I perused a couple of profiles and one woman sent me an “icebreaker.” I responded with an email and this time I left both my email and phone number explaining that my subscription was about to expire and I doubted that I would renew.

Now my profile on Yahoo was a little bit vague about the HIV thing. In fact, it doesn’t even address the issue of HIV, just an obtuse comment about “not being able to have kids,” assume at your own risk, right. Besides I figured any intelligent woman, any woman that I could possibly be attracted to would ask the meaning behind the cryptic one liner. Enter “K.” Now I have baggage. I have abandonment issues, I was an abused child so trusting people is difficult for me, I also have HIV which puts the self esteem issues to the test. K, as it turns out has genital herpes. Now I’m open-minded and can handle this, or so I think. But there’s another problem, she’s not exactly my “type;” a little heavier than I like, a little less buxom than I like, a little taller than I like and she has genital herpes. In the grand scheme of things does HIV outweigh herpes on the list of things not to pick up on your travels? Most likely. Does having HIV make it easier to commiserate with someone about the tenacity of certain STDs and the woes of safe sex and latex? Surely. But studies have shown that the herpes virus allows the HIV virus to replicate at a much faster rate. This time I got scared. K mentioned to me that she thought that I wanted what I couldn’t have. Here she was offering me everything I was looking for and I turned it down. I just couldn’t take the risk. Do I feel bad? a little but we “dated” for only a couple of weeks so the emotional commitment was minimal.

I re-joined Yahoo yet again. I updated my profile with a picture that was taken on that wonderful Labor Day weekend with J, I just cropped her out. I added a paragraph indicating the nature of my virus, and once again, the women that I contact don’t return the email. So it’s back to waiting. There’s a twenty-three year old math major that I’m interested in but the age difference scares me. There’s a forty something friend / co-worker that I’m interested in but I lack the balls to ask her out. There’s a thirty something friend of mine that I have asked out but I honestly suspect it will go nowhere; which is cool.

Dating is difficult. I think I’d rather have my wisdom teeth put back in just so they could be taken out once again.

Next Time: never trust a skinny chef

The First Interlude

I wake just after dawn. The birds in my new neighborhood are many and the singing brings an unconscious smile to my face. The cat is curled in a tight ball, tucked between my arm and my side and gently, softly purring. She always seems to be aware of the moment that I open my eyes for she stretches one paw out and gently touches me. The smell of the jasmine and mint outside my bedroom window fills my mind with exotic images of some peaceful, magical garden far away where all fears and worries are rinsed away and the body, mind and soul are purified and one with the world. I laugh out loud at this thought. My sudden outburst frightens the cat who, as she bolts from the bed manages to impale me with a couple of her claws as she runs out of my bedroom. Life is no peaceful, magical garden, I thought; and Harry Potter doesn’t live here anymore as I roll over and try to catch some more z’s before the alarm goes off.

The alarm erupts and I throw one arm in its general direction blindly searching for the switch that turns it off. The cat is back, this time a little more prepared to deal with me in my morning ritual of getting out of bed. The smell of jasmine and mint is still strong and I smile as I think of that earlier garden while lightly petting the cat. Maybe there is a magical, peaceful garden. It must take a lot of work to find. I had found my way this far, I thought, because I was tired of the old way of life. The old garden was full of weeds and thorny hedges that offered only a minute degree of safety from a colder world outside; an illusion of safety, really, because the fact was that these weeds were slowly choking the life from my very soul.

Diligence, patience and determination would be the tools with which I would work my garden. Compassion, awareness and joy would be the seeds sown in the newly tilled soil of my life.

* * *

I had been suffering from horrible headaches, nasty, non-stop headaches that pounded the inside of my skull. It felt is if my brain had suddenly outgrown the space it occupied and pressure was building up daily. No matter how much aspirin I swallowed the headaches never completely went away. They reminded me of the headaches I suffered when I first became HIV positive. And the headaches weren’t the only symptom; add to the mix an inability to sleep or focus on my work and a weird feeling of disassociation from reality that was almost euphoric. I kept trying to remind myself that there was light at the end of the tunnel. I was almost finished with my A.A. degree. But I just felt so bad; it was difficult to keep the bigger picture in mind, it just seemed as my own body was conspiring against my potential for success.

Being stoic in nature and foolish in action I tried my best to live with these symptoms; and I did, more or less successfully for four months. Outwardly I carried on as if nothing was inwardly wrong. The spring semester was coming to a close and I finally gave in to a voice in my head that urged me to have my symptoms addressed. A rational voice from within kept reminding me that due to my weakened immune system I might indeed have a serious medical issue developing. The very notion of that possibility caused a shiver to run up my spine. It was a notion that I did not want to recognize or deal with. There had been a recent upturn in my life and I viewed acknowledging an illness as an admission or recognition of physical and mental weakness. My prospects were looking up as the acceptance letters from transfer schools trickled into my email inbox. Anything that might cause a delay in my education, I felt, would doom me forever. I took the bus down to the hospital and told the attending docs in my clinic what was going on. They did the usual cursory exam and then conferred in the hallway. They came back in the exam room with a “specialist” in HIV and she examined me in much the same manner as the other two. The three of them went back into the hall and conferred again. Twenty minutes later I was on my way to have an M.R.I. and C.T. scan to be followed by a spinal tap, all the while imagining my future had suddenly been truncated.

* * *

To sit on the shore of the Pacific on the afternoon of the winter solstice is a thing of beauty. The pale yellow light streaming through the layers of clouds at such a relaxed angle warms my native soul. It’s beautiful right now. It’s so bright on this first day of winter. The sun in its southwest arc casts a golden road onto the Pacific, tempting me to climb that road towards heaven. The temperate climate of northern California in winter sent my mind into deep thought. I wondered about the possibility that humans, too, might have a seasonal cycle. Looking back over the decades of life and the various emotional and physical changes I’d experienced it certainly seemed possible. It is the first day of winter in San Francisco and I’ve been plagued with headaches. My life felt like it was locked in some dark, frigid arctic winter. The spring semester is about to start, my last and most important semester at junior college. A milestone that will probably only lead to a dead end. I gazed west, out to sea and tried to remember something pleasing.

I grew up with this view. The ancestral family home was just a few blocks from where I now sit at the foot of Golden Gate Park here at the western edge of western civilization. It’s an interesting mesh of landscapes here as the green park meets the dirty khaki sand dunes; a place where restored windmills are now just tourist attractions and have long since ceased performing their intended purpose of pumping water for the greenery of the park that was built on those sand dunes. San Francisco has become the land of the tourist, where even I am a tourist in my native city. I’m envious of the people who can afford to live here. Even crossing the bridge is expensive. Five bucks to cross the bridge and soon that’s how much it will cost to ride a cable car. A price only a tourist would pay while flippantly calling them “trolleys.”

I take a deep breath and put my writing down, exhale, and gaze westward to the Farallons. “Beautiful,” I think to myself on this hazy winter’s day, it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s absolutely beautiful that the sun continues to embrace me after all this time. I watch the surfers beyond the break and envy their willpower to pull on a wet suit and dive into the chilly and restless surf. The breakers doggedly pound the shore with their cold, wet, thunderous precision. When I was a child, just a few blocks from here, I could hear them beating away as I lie in bed waiting for sleep and dreams of sunny days. I miss that salty, fishy smell that hangs out in the air here. A smell so thick that you can taste it. The cold bluish grey of the Pacific, warm pale gold of the sun, throw in a mild off shore breeze for good measure and you have three of the prime ingredients of my childhood memories. The good memories. I had found the “something pleasing” I was seeking but then winter crept into my soul and I remembered the cold rain and snow that seems to lurk in my psyche. This is the danger that remembering childhood held for me. Ever present and aware the black clouds of memory manage to cover the sun and steal away from me any warmth that I might find. Any new shoots of hope and promise quickly whither in the icy environment.

* * *

The doctors were great, they listened to my symptoms and then proceeded to scare the shit out of me with tales of bacterial meningitis and the treatment thereof. They explained the tests needed to confirm or deny their diagnosis. They explained the treatment was relatively benign, however it required at least a week stay in hospital. I paled. I don’t have time for this shit. Finals are approaching; I couldn’t spend a week in the hospital. Every class I’m taking this semester is a class necessary to finish my transfer program to U.C. There is no way a bunch of baby faced doctors and some microscopic bacterium were going to keep me out of school. No way, no how.

* * *

A favorite line from a favorite movie of mine is “Fear is the mind killer.” I’m not sure if my mind was effectively killed, but I do know that the experience in the hospital caused me a great deal of fear: fear of needles, fear of extended stays in hospital, fear of not being able to finish out the semester in time for graduation, fear of stupid doctors and fear of stupid hospital gowns that have an amazing ability to make one feel stupid and leave one exposed to attack from behind. I had been inundated with a great deal of fear, but from what seed had this fear germinated?

What was I afraid of exactly? I didn’t know. How is not knowing possible? How could I just be afraid and not know of what? Fear is powerful. I can’t let fear control my actions any longer.

I wondered who would feed my cat should I be in the hospital for a week. I wondered if my professors would understand my predicament and make allowances for me, after all, it’s not like I made a conscious decision to get some bizarre bacterial infection just to get out of a final project in statistics; or did I? Would they give me a second chance? Would they have protection for me from this cold winter?

* * *

I sit on the gurney waiting for test results and started to write. At least the lighting is good in the E.R. After all it’s moments like these, these moments of high emotion that lead to true personal insights right? All I could think about was my collegiate career being flushed down the drain like so much hazardous waste making its way to the bay from the Chevron plant. Even these thoughts were hazy and distant; yes, my mind had been effectively killed. The one continuous thread that weaves together my fear of not finishing the semester is the same thread that ties me to my childhood. Memories of a brutal childhood had synthesized in my psyche a feeling of lack of control over my own destiny, a lack of self-respect, a lack of self-control. This thread was taking the shape of a giant web stretching across the great hall of my psyche trapping any hapless thoughts of hope that might surface and flit towards the garden and the sunlight. The pitiless nature of my household taught me fear at a young age. I learned to fear humans and their power to inflict a deep enduring harm; a very real harm that wasn’t always obvious. As I grew into adult life these deeply planted seeds would grow into a thick and gnarled hedge around my psyche that, once tucked safely within, I could protect myself. Or so I thought.

Waiting for the test results is brutal. I wish they would just give me morphine for these goddamned headaches. At least that would help pass the time and who knows what imagery it will lend to my writing? Waiting…the waiting is the hard part. It’s like the waiting I endured to find out if I got into any U.C. Waiting…I never want to be in this position again. No more CT scans, no more spinal taps (just the movie), no more waiting, no more passivity. A call to action is necessary; it’s time to take ownership of my health both physical and psychological. It’s time to get back on the anti-retroviral medications that can quell that persistent and pernicious virus that makes my body its ancestral home. It’s time to make peace with this silly tourist of a virus of mine (the HIV thingie I mean and not the suspected meningitis thingie). I need to find a way to raise the property values so it can’t afford to stay. I have too much work to do to keep waiting. A change in seasons will help.

My mind wandered into the recent past and of a time long before I had decided to have my symptoms looked at; a time when I was in a deep funk that stemmed from the worry that I wasn’t good enough to go to school anywhere. This funk, this fear, this foul and ancient weed rooted deep in my psyche began to creep upward and ever more present in my mind as I lay on the gurney. I shivered suddenly as I thought about “not being good enough.” I’d heard that phrase so many times before but I couldn’t remember where. It’s not too late to apply to S.F. State, I thought with another shudder as I wished for an accidental overdose of morphine (which the pleasant nurses smilingly forbade me). Where is that damn doctor? At least U.C. Irvine had come to my rescue; while true that Irvine is my third choice at least I know I’m going to a U.C. The fear of being admitted to this hospital however, raised a very real question of whether or not I would finish my final semester at junior college, and subsequently graduate and transfer to U.C., any U.C. at this point would be fine with me. I have to finish this semester.

Fear had effectively killed my mind. I wasn’t worried about the real danger of having a serious, life threatening illness. I wasn’t afraid of death. It was something else. This fear wasn’t about illness so much as it was about repeating patterns established and programmed into my psyche a long time ago. Patterns that I was beginning to recognize as obsolete. Patterns of winter weather blowing in from the north at a moment’s notice, unannounced, unwelcome and always detrimental to living things without shelter. Somewhere, from some all too familiar back room of my psyche I could see the image of my father standing over me, inside my thorny hedge in my frozen garden holding his belt, shaking his head chiding and deriding me about not being able to graduate from a junior college. Where is that damn doctor?

The doctor appeared and flushed my fathers’ image from my consciousness. In a brisk, business-like tone and with the tiniest of smiles he said, “The results are negative, you can go home.” A wave of relief came towards me that I rode all the way to the beaches south of L.A. My life returned to me that day at that moment. I wouldn’t have to miss any classes, I would be able to finish my project and paper, and I will graduate and transfer. My life was now perceivable as an ever-advancing line towards the frontier that higher education would provide for me. This huge, warm, tropical wave on a south west swell would take me to Irvine. But as I rode my wave I realized I was approaching some rocks. “Umm, doctor?” I asked hesitantly, “I still have the symptoms that brought me in.” He looked at me rather blankly and said, in what seemed like an autonomic response, that I should take two Tylenol with codeine and if the symptoms persisted for a week I should come back. I swallowed the pills and left the emergency room feeling that my very real symptoms had been reduced to a mere trifle by a single sentence. It reminded me of the pop culture standard: “take two aspirin and call me in the morning.” The handsome young doctor had accurately portrayed his role in the seriocomic hospital drama, while I and my waiting had become comic relief to ease any stress felt by the audience due to the more dreadful cases in this particular episode of E.R. Grudgingly I left the hospital campus and, only slightly worried about my real symptoms, walked down to Ocean Beach to ponder things like bacteria, viruses, diplomas, plans and goals and how we can sometimes be our own worse enemies.

* * *

Tuesday May 12, 2003, a week after my visit to the emergency room, was like any other Tuesday for me: Biology lab, lunch and then into San Rafael for a couple of beers and, finally, home. I had been home for an hour or two, watching the baseball game and just generally unwinding when I decided to check my email. And there it was. There was the email of all emails, the email whose subject line managed to simultaneously satisfy the completion of a goal I’ve had since high school and bring to the forefront of my consciousness the idea that all past notions of failure, whether real or imagined, that had long been present in the morass and mires of my psyche were false notions indeed. The subject line of the email simply read: “Congratulations, you have been accepted to U.C. Berkeley.” I blinked. The warm spring sun flooded my consciousness from all sides, within and without. I blinked again, man it was bright. Then I screamed such a joyous scream that the angels would descend from heaven to witness such a glorious and blissful voice. I couldn’t believe it. Hell, I still can’t believe it and I’m sitting in Moffitt library right now. Curiously, about forty-eight hours after I read that email my symptoms went away. Well, maybe not so curious. No more headaches, dizziness, inability to concentrate, inability to focus. No more sleepless nights, no more fear. No more waiting for spring.

* * *

I spent the rest of 2003 thinking about how my life and my way of thinking about myself needed to change. Would the change be immediate? Would there even be a change? I tried to map out a plan that would help me rise to glory while attaining, if not surpassing, the much talked of “Berkeley Standard.” What I didn’t know at that time was that the change had already started. The change started nearly a year before that day in the emergency room when I began the long and arduous task of shoveling the snow from between the rows of my garden. As I cut away my gnarled hedge I hit upon the idea that if I experienced winter, then surely spring and summer could be experienced also.

When January 2004 finally arrived (I was a spring admit), I was so excited I could hardly contain myself; I damn near pissed myself on the commute across the bay. I had quit my job, dispossessed myself of those things that I could no longer afford. I had made a concerted effort to quit the debilitating predilection for beer and the much more expensive habit that involved a certain weed that is much touted for its efficacy in treating certain symptoms common to those with HIV (I now regard this as pure bullshit, I just wanted to be numb). I was systematically removing impediments that would hinder my success at Cal; such was the nature of the importance of my success. For the first time in my life I took ownership for who I was and how I got here. Long, deeply rooted patterns of behavior were being exorcised and new, positive ideologies are being found and implemented. After all, someone, somewhere, an entity completely alien to me had decided that I had what it takes to succeed at Cal. This thought alone was instrumental in thawing the glacier my psyche had become. I was not going to let this entity down, and I will be damned if I let myself down.

This thought, this “nugget of pure truth,” would become the seed from which a great tree will sprout, ever reaching skyward and sunward and casting out the last remnants of those pronouncements and paradigms that still linger in the dark and muddy mires of my psyche. Forever a metaphor of re-birth and renewal, spring now looms bright and warm over the world. Over my world. Over my Psyche.

Winters will come again; of this there is no doubt. But in the last two years with careful attentiveness I have managed to bring the garden of my soul into the spring. There is no one event or action that is responsible for my awareness. A series of events and actions that were carefully played out, whether by chance, fortune or destiny I cannot say. What I can say is that this careful attention to the recurring weeds, the old and ugly paradigms and pronouncements laid upon me at a young age are now much easier to recognize for what they are: shadows on a cave wall that do not accurately reflect who I am. I am no longer de Leon in winter.

* * *

As I step out the door I give the cat one last pet. I shut the door behind me and inhale deeply the smell of the sweet air in the garden. Jasmine and mint caress my nose and work their therapeutic magic on my brain. I walk down the drive and squirrels play on the fence, hummingbirds are busy about their task. Do they understand their role in pollination, I wondered, probably not. I turn on to the street and start the short walk to my first class of the day. It’s another beautiful day in Paradise I thought as I subconsciously pulled another weed from my garden.

History (part one)

*** pre-history

In 2003 I was admitted to U.C. Berkeley as a junior transfer student majoring in English lit. Now, my personal history up to that point had been rather touch and go. I had been cooking professionally since 1986 and moved up through the ranks rather quickly. In 1999 when I had been diagnosed with HIV I was “chef de cuisine” of a large California style Italian restaurant in the Sonoma County wine country. I had been dating off and on, vacillating between boys and girls, though looking back, I spent more time with women than men. Sometime around the middle of August of 1999 my girlfriend and I broke up and unbeknownst to me I started down the long and winding road towards depression where suicide was becoming a very viable and welcome option.

Don’t worry; I’ll get us back to 2003 in a moment.

When the docs at Kaiser Foundation hospital in Santa Rosa, Ca. told me that I had HIV they also mentioned that it looked like I had had it for a very long time, possibly five years or more which meant that there was a possibility that my ex-wife, the last woman with whom I had had unprotected sex could also be infected. “Lovely,” I thought to myself as my dreams of a future with wife and children seemed to veer off down a different fork than the long and winding road I now found myself on.

Frankly I was sick, very sick. The virus was running rampant and unchecked through my body and my immune system had almost completely been destroyed. It’s a miracle that some nasty little opportunistic infection didn’t take me out. My weight had slipped down to 112 lbs and I had no appetite. What concerns me most is that none of my friends ever said anything about my dramatic weight loss, not even my ex-girlfriend who I continued to see on a professional basis twice a week. But I digress; I started taking the HIV “cocktail” within a week of being diagnosed, the side effects were, in a word, horrible and my mind turned inward and began to examine every speck of self-awareness it could find. I held myself under the most powerful electron microscope I could find, which is my own psyche, and dissected the fibers that were woven together and formed this macramé shell that once, long ago defined me.

*** history

The years between 1999 and 2003 are not without event; but their dissection and dissemination seems strangely inappropriate here. Rest assured that I will return to them in depth in the near future. Suffice to say that with a few years of therapy under my belt I had decided to go back to school, starting with junior college, just to see where it would take me. In 2003 I was accepted to Cal and in January of 2004 I stepped on to the UC campus for the first time as a junior transfer student.

It is difficult for me to describe the feeling of happiness and value that permeated every cell in my body. For once in my life I had been validated by an organization that said I was “good enough” to be part of their elite club. A lifetime of experience was beginning to be proven erroneous while I witnessed people; professors, new friends and fellow students demonstrate their faith in my ability to do the work required to excel at Cal and ultimately in my life after Cal. The dark and scary places deep in my subconscious were beginning to be exposed to light. It was that first semester at Cal where I realized that I could, after all, live my old dream of having a future with a wife and children. I was in fact, living a very old dream of going to UC Berkeley, one that I held for nearly thirty years. Dreams can and do come true. So I joined eHarmony.

eHarmony, for those of you who don’t know is a relationship website that matches prospective partners based on “the 29 dimensions of compatibility” as defined by site founder Dr. Neil Smith Warren. “What are these dimensions,” you ask, I honestly don’t know. I do know that the psychological profile that I had taken took about thirty minutes to complete and seemed very thorough. What eHarmony doesn’t allow in their huge database of potential matches is the possibility of same sex matches. This minor oversight was fine with my as my musings seemed to be towards the hetero couplings instead of the homo variety; I was ok with that, but still looking back it should have been an indicator to me that not all was as it should be. The other thing I noticed is that there is nowhere, absolutely nowhere on the site that allows one to indicate that (s)he might be carrying one or two hitch-hikers in the form of viruses to our potential matches. Again, this should have been an indication as to the socio-political ideology that this site, in hindsight, seems to be fostering.

I’ll cover eHarmony in some depth soon.

Being relatively experienced in human relationships, both platonic and sexual I have found it best to be honest and upfront with people. Lies and bullshit, games and ploys are soon and quickly discovered, especially if, like me, you are attracted to individuals who posses a higher degree of intellect. It can become very ugly very fast and people get hurt. No esta bien. So, in answer to the lack of a space to list potentially deadly sexually transmitted diseases on my eHarmony profile I wrote it in under the category: “Is there anything else you would like your potential matches to know?” I can’t remember the exact phrasing but it went something like this:

“My potential matches should know that I carry with me the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Currently I am undetectable and on medication. My numbers are doing what all good doctors want our numbers to do; the good ones are getting higher and the bad ones are getting lower.”

I’m pretty sure there’s a subconscious reason for me spelling out HIV instead of using the abbreviation that we all are, by now, so familiar. Did I hope someone “hot” would gloss over it and contact me, possibly but that’s most likely a topic for another entry.

I joined eHarmony for three months sometime around April of 2004. Prior to that I had “dated” a couple of co-eds (under 25) and while my ego benefited greatly from the attentions and affections of, for example, the twenty-one year old anthropology major, my brain was craving the attentions of someone with whom I had something much more in common; someone say, twenty years older with a much broader experience base and possibly the children I could no longer generate without the expense of “sperm washing” (sperm washing is a process which allows the sperm to be stripped of the HIV virus thereby allowing me to have children without the risk of passing the virus to either my partner or my child). http://aids.about.com/cs/womensresources/a/washing.htm So eHarmony seemed a logical choice.

I was matched with people all over the bloody country. I’ve done the long distance relationship in the past and it never, ever works. During that first three month period on eHarmony not one woman requested communication with me and everyone with whom I requested communication subsequently closed the match. Depressing. And the insane thing is that here I was in the best public university in the country surrounded, roughly, by thirty-two thousand co-eds and I had pinned my dating hopes to a website that was matching me with women in New Jersey who subsequently went screaming and running for the latex barriers and bleach when they saw my electronic virus peering happily at them from the computer screen...sheesh. So while my ego continued to be boosted and assuaged by the amorous affections of both the male and female undergraduate population at Cal and while I was being unceremoniously turned down by people across the country who had never actually met me; three months after I joined eHarmony my subscription ran out and I began dating “S” on a regular basis.

Next time: dating “S” and why “hot” twenty-one year olds is only a temporary “fix,” especially when their mother (who is younger than me) carries a .45 automatic pistol. Doubling my efforts by joining Yahoo personals and re-joining eHarmony. Dating women with children and breast cancer. Dating women with pets and no children. Dating women with no pets or children but with genital herpes.

First

I guess I got tired of writing a journal. I would write and write and write to such a degree that I now have volumes of journals stacked on the shelf in my closet. I would carefully balance the frequency of entries with the depth of self exploration that would ultimately peel away the leaves of my exterior and reveal the "nugget of pure truth" that lies within me; that lies within all of us, really. I stopped journaling. It was a combination of factors, really: I had been in therapy for several years and the Freudian interpretation of my memories became sufficient enough balm to assuage my psychic ills, and then there was school. I was writing hundreds of pages each semester and journaling got pushed aside.

So why a blog? A couple of reasons really. I have been feeling the itch lately to begin writing again. I'm done with school, finished my thesis and am suddenly faced with an empty hole (is there any other kind?) where my writing would get funneled. Also, a friend gave me a book Julie & Julia (Julie Powell, 2005, Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company, New York) that has helped to inspire me. In this prose non-fiction work Julie, at a moment of personal crisis, decides to cook every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Child, 1963, Knopf, New York) and in doing so, she starts a blog. The book is wonderful by the way...

You see, I'm a chef. I also recently graduated from U.C. Berkeley with a BA in English (Aug '07) with a marked propensity towards the genre of prose non-fiction. I had been cooking for the past twenty years and decided that going back to school might be fun, certainly much more fun than the long hours standing over a stove followed by the long nights of drunken debauchery with my restaurant fellows; all in hope of garnering a degree that would free me from my indenture to cheap, clueless and heartless restaurant owners who have no respect for the creative genius of the non-celebrity chef. But a BA in English is still just a BA, even from Cal. So while I contemplate the merits of various graduate programs, I've not only extended my indenture (to a corporation this time) and cook the shit out of some grub, I have decided to come back to my first love (I was writing long before I started cooking) and write.

The blog. My intention for this blog is for it to become a sort of online journal; not a day by day recounting of the inane bullshit that we all encounter, rather, an exploration of self and discovery. I realize that this sounds a bit mundane and why not? I'm sure there are hundreds of blogs, if not thousands out there that say pretty much the same thing no matter who is/was the author: absolutely nothing. Vacuous and malodorous malcontents who's only claim to fame is that they have no claim to fame. So I'm going to throw you, gentle reader, a bone. I've recently started dating again after a very long hiatus. "No big news," you say, "everybody has lapses in dating, whether due to work or other circumstances." True enough. Without getting into the Freudian interpretation of who I am (for the moment), I have HIV. Needless to say dating women over the past year has not been very successful for me. Now I should be clear here, I have had success meeting some very nice people who, at least initially, are willing to work around my virus. But nothing of a lasting nature has been attained much to my dismay.

So this blog is about a postmodern Stephen Dedalus as he wanders the city streets ruminating about the nature of literature and self and how the two shall meet in the lap of love. My great post-baccalaureate experiment; will anyone read this besides myself and my therapist? it will be interesting to see.