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Outside the Holiday Why do I feel totally out-of-place everywhere I go? I frequently feel as though everyone is looking at me and thinking, "You are so transparent, you poseur. You do not belong here, and we're not sure just how much longer we're going to tolerate your presence." I guess that's part of why I drink: It dulls the sensation of being an outcast. It's something I can share even with the most unattainable characters. You think you're such a bad-ass, but I will drink you under the table, mother-fucker! Not so this weekend, though. I left the office Friday night around 7, staying so late to try to compensate for having spent the majority of the day in a public health office, and headed home, arriving (small miracle) early enough to watch the original Boris Karloff version of Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas, followed by A Scooby-Doo Christmas to get me into the holiday spirit before watching a few old episodes of Sex and the City, all the while firing off e-mails and chatting with people online, lying on the living room floor with my old iMac in front of me, which will have to suffice until the insurance company decides what to do about replacing my beloved iBook, without which I've been floundering since it was stolen last Friday. Eventually, I fell asleep on the floor, after three shots of Wild Turkey (the 101-proof variety -- I do NOT fuck around) and two beers and a corned beef sandwich to go with my doxycycline. Saturday morning, I woke, showered, dressed, trundled downtown to my rehearsal, which was long and miserable, (though not as bad as it might have been had I not spent some time studying the score -- Handel's Messiah may be a nauseously familiar piece of music, but it is NOT particularly easy to sing, and even less easy to sing WELL, and I shudder, grimace and cringe every year when I'm told of the various pick-up sing-alongs of it which occur) particularly because of the ongoing nagging sensation that some indefinite small object had been inserted into my urethra. My attention was at least distracted by the astonishingly good performances of the soloists and the cuteness of our supernumerary tenor; I do always enjoy a bit of variety in the eye-candy department. After rehearsal, I headed uptown to hang out with a new friend for a few hours, in the midst of which I was reminded that I was supposed to go see NEWSical with another friend and some of his friends. Ironically, I managed to arrive at the theatre before they did, and consequently, ended up bantering with the cute box office boy for awhile. The show is quite funny, and the performers in it are all quite talented, so I recommend it if you're a fan of, say, The Daily Show and silly musical spoofs. Some of it might be a little too clever for the majority of its audience, though, as I noted the average age on Saturday night was probably a good 15 to 20 years older than mine (tourists, no doubt, go figure, but shouldn't they be off seeing something like Pacific Overtures, which was playing next door?!), yet they still weren't clever enough to...Hmm...Or maybe they just hadn't had as much to drink as we had. I downed a fairly large Tanqueray martini during the first half and another during the second, so I had a nice buzz on when we left the theatre and headed to some very red-orange gay bar in Hell's Kitchen whose name I do not remember. At the bar, I had another gin & tonic, and between the colour of the place (which was not particularly pleasant), the clientele (whom I found generally unattractive, and by most accounts, they must have thought the same of me, as I, as ever, felt like I was not even there, though I might have just been drunk), and -- ohyes! perhaps it was not my brightest idea to pour a pint of gin into my system on an empty stomach and under the influence of antibiotics, I quickly descended into a very dark mood. I have no clue why or how I retrograded to this place of bad juju, but it was probably a combination of all of the above factors with the fact that I'm generally uncomfortable in gay bars, and I hadn't yet really acknowledged and processed all the bad shit that's happened to me in the last few weeks, which despite its devastating effects on my finances, I've just laughed off, for the most part. (Long story short: sexual frustration due to lack of time coupled with the fact that it'd be very irresponsible for me to fool around with anyone in my current condition; abandoned by friends in a gay bar (surprise, surprise!) and robbed while asleep in the subway on the way home; apartment burglarised, laptop and $300, not to mention my smoky-treats, stolen. More detail later.) So I excused myself, left the bar, and caught a train back uptown from 50th Street. It's likely that'll be one of the few occasions on which I was glad that the 'A' train makes all local stops after 11 p.m. I got home around 12.30, did some reading of poetry by a young man I've recently met who I think is rather brilliant, if rather complicated, scribbled my thoughts about his poem, and fell asleep. Sunday morning, I woke feeling particularly wretched, ate a small breakfast-type snack, took my antibiotic, showered, dressed, and headed to mass. I stood on the platform for a good 20 minutes waiting for a downtown train. When I arrived, I was one of only about 10 people waiting for the train. We waited. An out-of-service 'C' train lumbered heavily through the station, tooting its horn as it passed. We waited. As usual, two uptown trains passed before a single downtown train arrived. While we waited, our numbers increased at least ten-fold, so that there must have been at least 100 people waiting for the train (this at 9 a.m. on a Sunday morning, mind you) by the time it finally arrived. Somehow, I managed to be only two or three minutes late for our call. I fell asleep repeatedly during the sermon, but somehow, the music in the service managed to be pretty decent. Afterwards, I was faced with a dilemma: What to do for lunch? Some of the choir-folk were going to LemonGrass, apparently a Thai restaurant, and some were going to Caf� World (I like to call it �Caf� Hurl�) for food from their buffet. I wanted food, fairly cheap and in gross quantity. I went to Wendy�s, had a double-cheeseburger, biggie fries, and a large Diet Coke, then proceeded to eat my small Frosty whilst watching CNN. What a wretched experience that was! (The CNN, not the food. I�m having burgers & fries so much, I swear I think I�m going to turn into them. In other news, the �folks� who inhabit the Middle East are NEVER going to grow the fuck up and act like civilized adults. Once again, I call for the IMMEDIATE withdrawal of ALL western influences, military, governmental, corporate, social, from that area. If they do not want to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Western world�s twenty-first century, I see no reason why they should have to join us. If they want to continue their tribal feuding, which has become an apparently indelible tradition over the last few millennia, let them fight it out until they destroy themselves. I see no reason to waste the lives of uninvolved parties in attempting to dictate how other cultures should govern themselves. Historically, the greatest changes in world governments have come through revolutions from INSIDE, not the interference of outsiders who don�t even speak the language. Not all of these changes have been for the better, but England (Cromwell, and later, the return of the Monarchy), France (repeatedly, as the French can�t seem to decide, even to this day, precisely what form of government they desire � actually, that�s not true; the French want the same sort of government that I want: the sort that supports its citizens� health and well-being and otherwise leaves them the fuck alone), Russia, Germany, even America, have come to their current political structure through revolution. And they did it themselves. You say you want a revolution? Go make your own!) Sound check at 2 p.m. left me with scant time to telephone the parents on my dying cell phone battery, but I managed a brief chat with each of them, assuring them that I was fine and all is well in my world. (I�m SUCH a liar!) Messiah went well, and certainly, it was well-attended. Despite what I thought might have been prohibitive ticket prices, the church was nearly packed. And they were not disappointed. The arias were delivered with alternating fire and fluid grace; the choruses were tight and expressive; the orchestra was elegant (though the trumpet had been better in rehearsal than he was in performance). The only other time I�ve performed the piece was in 1993, with a group of people I didn�t like, with a wretched baritone soloist who was consistently a quarter-tone flat, and then, it wasn�t the whole thing, just the Christmas portion. (We did most of it, this time, cutting a few choruses, basically.) After that teenage performance, I�d sworn I hated the piece and vowed never to perform it again. I�ve broken that vow, now, and I�m happy to admit that I enjoyed it. The emotion involved in this performance was phenomenal, as was the audience�s extended standing ovation reaction. Watching the conductor during the final �Amen� section, I was drawn so close to the verge of tears that I was unable to sing portions of the sequence. My own singing, I must confess, was not impressive. I was distracted throughout the performance and had not spent as much time with the score as I�d needed, and I couldn�t help thinking that I should have been better prepared, or at least more brave, on the day I sang for the conductor, and that I should have been among the soloists. That said, I do not believe I could have bested the performance of any of them, as they were all phenomenal, and that sort of music is really not my milieu. I am a rock and roll whore who happens to have a fair amount of training and technique and can consequently do things other rock and roll whores might not be able to do. That is all. After the performance, many of us went for drinks at a local dive bar. I wasn�t really feeling too festive (that old familiar darkness settling in ever deeper), so after my potato skins and half a pitcher of beer, I excused myself, still among the latter half to leave, but not among the last as I usually am, and went home to ponder my solitude. r
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