EPIC FRIENDSHIP : Upward, Against Gravity!

Earlier this evening, I sent a random Google® Talk instant message to my dear, dear friend and former Shanti Project Social Support Volunteer, Wallace "Wes" Smith: my WALL•E!! His status icon displayed as idle, so I assumed that, perhaps by an off chance, he'd be free to join me for a spontaneous chat: a followup to the random instant messaged salutation he sent to me over the weekend. Little did I know that my spirited loquacity would suddenly seem to turn into a prosaically soliloquized epic ode to our friendship, of legendary mythic proportion.  

I felt so inspired to lavish my friend with lips-puckered, ass-kissed licentious lauding that what he struggled to read of my tenaciously frenetic fervor in typing seemed so awfully awkward in the contrived sophistication of its aggressively astute and alliterative prosaism and sophistry; so much so that I feel obliged to commemorate this haphazardly sententious and Homeric confession of best-begotten brotherly love as a disastrously dimwitted, maniacally meandering monologue, rewritten and posted in its entirety, herein below.

Heya WALL•E!! You totally left me hanging the other day, after you IMed me and then ditched in 10 mins, never to return to chat that day... Are you gonna have any time today to chat it up with me a little? I "yearn" to talk with you!

VOLUNTEERISM : SOCIAL CO-DEPENDENCY & WITHDRAWAL

Adrienne asked about you today, when we were walking to collect my weekly income check from my payee at Lutheran Social Services... She started the conversation by asking me my thoughts on finding another Shanti Volunteer.

I told her in a straightforward, matter of fact tone, "Well, thing is, I'm not sure how I feel about investing so much of myself into what's presumably meant to be a very important relationship in my life, if its just gonna end all of a sudden, and I am forced to lose a friend... again. I just don't think I could do that, at this point in my life."

She responded by asking, "Is that what happened with Wes? I thought you two were supposed to have stayed connected. Wasn't that your intention?"

So, I answered, again in a stoic, almost careless voice, "Yes, it was. But, Wes kinda just stopped responding and pulled away."

Her reply: "Oh, I can see how that could have been frustrating... [pause] ...and disappointing."

What I failed to mention to her was that I too hadn't made such a concerted effort in pursuing a sustained friendship with you, so it may have come across as me shifting blame all on you, Wes, which I regret. So, I commit to clearing things up the next time I talk to her, this week.

I just want to apologize, and say that Adrienne reminded me today how much of a giant gaping hole was left in my life after we ended our "professional" relationship. I MISS YOU!

Now, go take care of that "not so minor" issue that you're dealing with at work.

PETTY CONTRIVANCES OF A PSYCHO-UNSTABLE MIND

IF YOU'RE SCROLLING, YOU CAN STOP HERE NOW AND START READING AGAIN...

While you're off addressing that "not so minor" work issue for the next few minutes; a moment or two well spent by you, but better left unspent by me, I'm sure... I'll just continue my garrulously loquacious, leave-nothing-left-unsaid, babbling banter 'bout all the bizarre and contrite contrivances of my psycho-unstable mind, which have me anxious and worried of late, so that you can or may have an intimate and long-over-due peek into my perilously perverse and pessimistic personality! Hmmmm... Where did I leave off RE: Adrienne? Oh yeah... somewhere along the lines of:

So, I will be clearing you of the blunt force of blame for our reprehensibly reciprocal responsibility and our mutual misgivings vis-à-vis our dually shared and accepted failure to sustain our friendship past the point of its "professional" end.

I just don't want Adrienne to think that you were a bad choice as a volunteer. Heck, Adrienne already knows (I presume – and, if she doesn't, then she damn well should!) what an integral role you have played in SAVING MY LIFE! I owe so much to Adrienne for having stuck to her gut at the get go by pairing us together as client and volunteer... as would-be, could-be, forever-and-always "friends!"

RESPLENDENCE : AS "TACKLE-ANY-THREAT" TRIUMPH

But, more so, I owe much of my present success – my "Thank God! I'm thriving," tackle-any-threat, thwart-all-trials-&-traumas, tremendously triumphant and resplendent resilience, reborn amidst the tumultuously twisted travails of my recovery, rehabilitation, reconstruction and restitution of self – to you, my dear friend!

At the get-go, my joyous journey toward good health and happiness was gladly guided by the gentle and giving hand of a stranger turned beloved confidant, who courageously ventured well past reason, into a realm beyond responsibility where the rightfully righteous regalia and splendor of spirit dwell, to share his wisdom with a wounded, woebegone, godforsaken gay boy wanting of nothing more than exactly that which was delivered: LOVE!

My WALL•E!! Wallace "Wes" Smith
Facebook Photo, posted: June 16, 2010
© COPYRIGHT 2011 | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

SISYPHEAN STRUGGLE : AS PANTHEON TO FRIENDSHIP

I OWE ALL THIS FOR WHICH I HAVE TO BE THANKFUL TO YOU, MY DEAR FRIEND!

That is why I feel obliged now to persevere through the challenges of time and temerity, of entangled temperaments, of trials and tribulations brought 'bout by the blatantly bold, always bogus and unbecoming bastions of best-not-a-brick-wall-between-us "business."

To conquer – in a Sisyphean struggle steep & unsound enough to shake all shame, pride and courage from me – the cold, heartless and selfish demands of "convenience," in order finally to build the perfect pantheon to our still living, still thriving and resilient friendship, up atop the mythic mountains set between us

Let us together carefully carve, with courage & compassion, this megalithic monument to ME & MY WALL•E!! right from the Acherontic behemoth brimestone boulder that we together were once forced to push persistently past a presumed point of no return...

In a moment of inspiration, I lay claim to the rolling rock of our friendship as the necessary foundation of a forever extant and extraordinarily exultant temple, built to honor our two chance-selfless, yet yearning, souls. Thus, ad infinitum, we witness our two souls, serendipitously united by the unbreakable, ne'er tarnished bonds of brotherhood, made beautiful by perfectly platonic LOVE AND DEVOTION...

THE LACHRYMOSE, MOST LEFT SIDE OF MY MIND

LOVE AND DEVOTION duly deemed determined to destroy the could-be, would-be reckless and caustically corrosive contrivances of that aforementioned obstacle we've confirmed unspoken to speak of as "convenience." Agreed? And, don't worry, Wallace... I myself do not know what to make of all of this bombastic banter, either. It's all just "spewage" straight through the levies of the "last-ditch, last-chance, leftover" and lachrymose, most left side of my mind.

There, where my creative compass spins sporadically lost in all directions, a lasting light continues to shine. Despite the trifling trepidation and turpitude that has threatened to thwart the forever flamboyantly flagrant and fervid flame of our friendship, such incessant fear and intimidation still shall not stomp out our fire, nor even wash it away with waves of wearily woeful worry and doubt.

CONCEDING TO THE "CONTRIVANCES OF CONVENIENCE"

At very best, be it not 'bout time that we together concede to the "contrivances of convenience," admitting altogether that this could-be, would-be, whenever, wherever compelling of raucously chaotic commotion – preposterous pandemonium that continues to create a chasm of disordered discord straight through the center of our still quite celebrated and cherished friendship! – must be quenched, harnessed, muffled, exhausted, breached, and bridged before our bonds be beyond all possibility or chance of reconstruction, rehabilitation, recovery, and as well as – of course! – of redemptive restitution, in their own right?

My response to such discordance, as I hope would be yours as well in return, is this: THE TIME IS RIPE FOR US AT LEAST TO EXHAUST ALL OPTIONS!! The time is ripe for us to explore all earthly passages toward a point of position, where such a presumably implausible possibility of peace together might take its proper place ahead of all our pettily plebeian, yet boulder-like and burdensome, "CONTRIVANCES OF CONVENIENCE!!" Yes! The same phrase is refrained, as if for effect again, with emphatic force; of course!

I myself chose to remain courageously committed to the notion that naught near nothing aught keep us – Matt(e)o and his wholeheartedly happy-ever-after, astounding and amazing friend, WALL•E!! – from catapulting together the ungodly gargantuan boulder up atop the snow-capped cresting summit of a good-godly majestic mountain, there, where we have been meaning for a mighty long time to leave our lasting mark. Only this time, the behemoth rolling rock of our Sisyphean struggle should no longer conveniently contrive to create could-be, would-be impenetrable barriers and obstacles between us; instead, however, our mark shall be sculpted from that stone into the shape of a pantheonic monument, as previously described.

A SPLENDID TORCH : OUR STILL LIVING, THRIVING STORY

Tell me, dear, close friend and confidant – you, who once bravely buttressed the stumbling, fumbling, crumbling facade of my "fagged-out, ferocious, Fog City Freak Show," with naught near nothing more than mighty words of wisdom and a regular barrage of hugs...

Are you ready, willing and able now – dear friend! – to join in my cause courageously, compassionately, and without any cute and quaint "contrivances of convenience," to excavate, dust off, cleanse, polish and restore to its resilient shine the splendid torch of our still-to-be-told, living, thriving and triumphant story?

For, this story of ours, and ours alone, is the only chance we have together to inculcate our worse-off and ignorant brethren, by inspiring in them, as exemplars, an understanding and appreciation of the importance of our stolidly shared, striving, and thriving efforts to extend the life of brotherly bonds between friends well far past a few expectantly forgotten farewells, and all the way infinitely onward and upward, toward Everest or Olympia; there, where every man atop each his own majestic mountain may finally rest together, basking in the company of other likely heroes.

With this, our legendary tale of triumph through travail so quite unlike and contrary to others' staid or saturnine stories of dissolute dysphoria, we may finally and forthwith fill our heavenly hubristic hearts with the ne'er forsaken but full-force fuel of the forever-lasting flames of friendship: a fire from whose embers the diamond-crystalline core essence of our energetic enthusiasm, our exultant exuberance, and of our dutifully indestructible do-good-only devotion to and love for one another erupts as a miraculously mythical, flame-tailed fowl aflight.

A PHOENIX a'FIRE ... OF FRIENDSHIP!!

From the smouldering ashes of what could have been our failed, forgotten folly, "A PHOENIX a'FIRE ... OF FRIENDSHIP" shall burst forth in explosions of celestial brilliance and be reborn into so-white-hot-she's-red, resplendent glory.

This fiery immortal and all-knowing animal-prophet will take flight with unmet and outstanding wisdom, through the telling of our tale as an oracle of obligation and duty for those few who, wanting such to sustain the boundless and unbroken bonds of brotherhood, shall serve so many could-be, would-be countless, courageous others, as god-sent, spellbinding, and brilliantly living beacons of fire's light: the immaculately inextinguishable exemplars of faith in friendship and devotion to hope!

We must share with the as-of-yet ill-fated throngs of death-defyingly isolated, outright tormented and lonely others of the world our own unique unhampered hope in happiness, exponentially multiplied by the mutually endless and perfect power of our platonic love!

For, it is now, in writing and reading this quasi-Homeric epic enunciation of our shared story, that we bear witness to the very real possibility, the probability or perhaps even persistent truth which, pondered in properly mythic proportion, tells a time-willed and wistfully whimsical tale of the forever-lasting and eternal life of our fraternal love; such that is rightfully redeemed through the rapturous resilience of friendship's bond. 

NEAR TO UTOPIA : DANCING UPWIND OF DOOMSDAY

Through reincarnate duet dancing, such brotherly bonds that we share do tenderly touch our flat-footed heels and toes to the dew-dropped golden petals and emerald green glowing grasses of heavenly Elysium.

In our loving embrace of a fraternal order, our spirits sprint a fervent and inflamed, mighty marathon heat: a mad, mad mercurial dash upwind of Doomsday! Together, we freely frolic forward – as desultorily dithyrambic dancers do! – to unfold the footprints of those propitious gods who unknowingly lead us ever more near to Utopia. 

OUR WILDLY WOVEN & TENDERLY UNTANGLED STORY

It is this, our untold story – composed of a tightly wound, full-colored dreamcoat of woolen, silk and linen threads – which we must commit to continue telling, not only through its own wildly wondrous weaving, but also eventually through its tenderly touching but tough-knuckled untangling, as time doth pass.

We must commit to continuing our story, born of our passionately platonic and brotherly bonds of fraternal love and friendship. As long as there still remain even the most random and unreasonable threads of debauched, clashing hues to be woven into the coat of arms that sheaths and enshrines the time-worn epic corpus of our friendship against all brief abeyance and absconding of pages, we must never thread sparingly the spindle but only weave on with gusto, grace and gratitude.

Even now must our story continue, as – or, at last, until! – we stumble together surefooted, in our first few eager steps, high o'er the chaotically libidinous currents of the rivers Acheron and Styx. May we courageously coax ourselves onward, in our tumultuously trying trek, to conquer the Sisyphean mountains and the 'bout-to-be-bested boulders before us.

Let us gladly, gracefully, and with genuinely gregarious gratitude, thank gods for the heavenly happenstance and dear twist of luck that brought us together...

MS. ADRIENNE ELIAS : OUR SOLE HEROIC INTERMEDIARY

Or was it more, perhaps? Yes, indeed, I posit proudly and am pleased to say that we owe all for which we are thankful – which has made us far more fortunate than all but a few of our brave brethren esteemed and emboldened by love! – to the arguably naive and innocent, albeit wonderfully wise and bright-witted, instinct of our sole heroic intermediary: she, who carefully and cajolingly navigated us both each in the direction of the other... God bless Ms. Adrienne Elias! She, who brought us together!

Dear friend, I challenge we two to courageously commit as well to gratitude. Let us duly express our thanks to that "hip and happenin' queer grrl" from whose innate social instinct and stellar performance on the job was born serendipitously our most saliently stoic, solemn, and sometimes flat-out fervidly phlegmatic bond of brotherhood!

NOTE: Please, leave room for some "limp-wristed, fagolicious, and freaked-out," irreverently licentious PIZAZZ! Lest we forget to exaggerate such sibilant fricatives with our good, godawful "gay lisp!!" Hehehe! Even if I've added in an ounce of my own outrageously unrelenting and vulgarly splenetic sense of salacity... 

In honor and respect of the immensely lasting impact of Ms. Elias's offhand, off-the-cuff, but consequently on-target decision to pair the two of us as Shanti client and volunteer, may we permit ourselves to be empowered, me and you: Matt(e)o and WALL•E!! (a.k.a., Wallace "Wes" Smith), to continue our journey together!! 

PARADISE : LOST, FOUND & RIGHTLY RECLAIMED AGAIN

May we only pause to ponder past pitfalls and triumphs, as we resolutely commit still to climbing up skyward, toward the heavens, where at last we may leap together and dive dancing into the blissful beauty of the full-blooming and fruitful fields of our own emancipated Eden: Paradise Lost, Found, and Rightly Reclaimed Again!! by you, able-bodied and by me, with my "miscontoured" mouth and cane!! 

THE INDOMITABLY STURDY STANCE OF OUR FRIENDSHIP

Dear friend, Mr. Wallace "Wes" Smith, won't you please take your place once again right next to me? Would you so kindly permit me please to pass my arm under yours, so as to lock us into an indomitably sturdy stance, poised shoulder to shoulder, heal to heal, ready and raring to risk all our "contrivances of convenience" and to step simultaneously a few feet forward, toward our best-begotten yet unfurled future of good fortune in friendship, as confidants and family, as brothers and ... best friends? 

IN CLOSING : FRANTICALLY FUMBLING FOR WORDS

Eager to know all the thoughts which my epic prolix prosaism has left you to ponder, I now frantically fumble over a proper closing salutation, so that you may have the chance even to consider a reply!

Despite the tremendous chasm that has been carved between us by time, distance, and yes, even "convenience," I continue to cherish the profound loyalty and trust, which still – I hope! – defines our personal relationship, together.

Furthermore, with utmost confidence in the potential of genuine friendships, like ours, to remain resilient in their compassionate and caring capacity to reap reason from duly deserved recompense, restitutory requital, and redemption. Despite things gone a wry, I do very much happily hold you in the highest esteem. 

SISYPHEAN MYTH : A REFRAINED MOTIF OF RESILIENCE

While I wish we could be closer and have more time to spend together in each other's company, I still am very much devoted to seeing this expansively epic, Sisyphean myth through to the end of our long and illustrious, sometimes challenging, but always courageously and compassionately careful, caring and, of course, carefree journey together through life.

Wherever the rock of our friendship may roll, I hope, plan, and pray to be by your side, as we toil over the physical, intellectual and emotional mechanics of putting that damned boulder back into motion against gravity, by pushing and prodding it to the zenith of life's myriad mountains. With honest and unhampered hubris enough to mimic Homeric myth, may we own for ourselves together the ferociously thunderous and omnipotent force of faith, courage and pride in humanity; in other words, let us proclaim our pride in the human kind: a kind in which the God of all gods so often dares to boast believing! 

May we, like the God of all gods, one day boast, as unabashed and deep-bounded brothers do, of that piously peculiar Promethean fire, which has lit our flaming-feathered wings – where wax once was! – and which has lifted us into flight, skyward toward the heavens. There, settled contentedly into the soft, sumptuous comforts of Elysium, shall we have the untried and true contours of our still boyish busts carved out of alabaster marble stone, and beset – as if by birthright! – with perfectly pantheonic and divinely illustrious laurels dipped and gilded in gold.

Together, after a long life of shared stories – good or bad, iniquitously ignominious or spectacularly resplendent and successful – may we conquer all mythic challenges that good-natured guardians chose to cast o'er we two as shadows of sullen gloom, by holding tight to our godlike friendship with a powerful grip of fervent loyalty and trust, by climbing and cresting mountains with boulders before us, and by flying sky high toward the heavens as reborn birds of glory, with inflamed wings. 

TRIUMPH : AS CROWNED LEGENDARY EXEMPLARS

Ultimately, together, we will triumph and be crowned legendary exemplars of bravely bold and beautiful brotherly bonds, as we gawk and goggle mockingly in the face of those fastidiously funereal and dolefully despondent, godawful, good-for-nothing naysayers who near as never relent in their efforts to foul our flight and drag us down from the skies into petulantly vile, outright opprobrium. 

So, join me! Or not! Dare I fly, trek or climb this heroic journey alone? I pray to the all-present, all-knowing and all-powerful divine forces which guide us through life, with or without compliance, from birth to rebirth a thousand times fold, until finally we transcend all earthly contrivances and courageously trek through a frenetically fantastic phantasmagoria of all things transmundane.

Only then, once triumphed and transformed, may we yet be transeuntly transfigured into incomprehensibly perfect and indubitably divine demigod creatures meant to compliment the cosmically stellar, celestially surreal Olympian menagerie, where all other blessed, immortal chimeras eternally rest and reside. Join me? Lest I falter and fall, alone!

IN ANTICIPATION OF YOUR LOSS OF WORDS

As I anticipate your loss for words apropos of your likely quite surprised, yet delightfully honored and impressed reaction to my, as stated, ranting and railing "Homeric prosaism," I leave you with a poignantly simple and straightforward request: Please, respond if you would like, but only at your leisure!

The rest is better left unwritten, and shall stay that way, safely kept in the caressing arms of angels, at least until a time when the echoing voice of prophecy doth guide me (or you!) to give into garrulity once again and to wrench open our hearts with words of epic grandeur.

As one would say in French, my surrogate mother-tongue: À Très Bientôt, mon cher ami!! – Until So Very Soon, my dear friend!!

Ever most fondly,
Matthew

Respectfully submitted,
Matt(e)o | QHereKidSF
Matthew D. Blanchard
matthew@qherekidsf.com

San Francisco, CA USA
[20110601T234738PST]

RE: LONG LOST FRIEND!

Indeed, “long lost,” but never in a moment forgotten! Throughout the span of a decade, with a mind tempered (or tormented) by “what-once-was” well-wishing nostalgia, remembrances and a deep longing desire to redeem the unearthly, unending exuberance of youth, I have often found my thoughts drifting towards you, my baby blue-eyed, porcelain-paled, lusciously lipped lil’ lady friend of times far past & gone. Indeed, “friend,” but oh so much and so many things more!

April Manteris, you were my Perestroika as Millennium Approaches; you were one above many of my arch-guardian Angels In America! How fitting that in my later, more recent life, I would battle with disease-induced malediction & delusions of messianic manic psychosis, much like the enlightened torment of Prior Walter told by Tony Kushner in his “Not-Yet-Conscious, Forward Dawning,” damned devilish drama staged as “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.”

My own, personal, proprietary and unprecedented “Gay Fantasia,” told as follies of the mind and frailty of the body, was rife buttressed by more universal themes. In a demented state of holier-than-thou HIV/AIDS-instigated happenstance and insanity, I foresaw a full faith reconciliation of all conflicting religious around the world; the real-time cultivation of a post-apocalyptic, new-growth Garden of Eden; and my transsexual impregnation as an irrationally self-proclaiming, prophetic “Gift of God” with Christ Child incarnate.

Delusions of near godly grandeur galloped as chariots of fire along the strangely strung-out or awkwardly wrought and wired synapses of my parasitically enslaved psyche toward a new and evermore illustrious Elysian Fields. I was a hopeful, kindhearted and jubilant psychotic; not a criminally paranoid sociopath.

In my lonely, lachrymose, lunatic madness, I believed that all humankind would fall down under the watchful rule & gaze of intergalactic warring Angel/Alien brigades, led by Michael, Gabriel, Beelzebub, and Lucifer, only finally to be throttled full flight into a world far more beautiful, blissful and serene that anyone could have ever imagined before.

Funny thing for me though, during my drug-delayed, disease-induced delusional psychosis, I actually possessed the superhuman scope of mind and intellect to imagine the unimaginable as actual and real! What a harrowingly exhilarating experience! Moreover, you were there with me in spirit, all along the way.

For, I was convinced that you, April: my dream dancing “tell-it-to-snow” Eskimo named Harper Pitt, were suffering from a simultaneously paralleled, prophetic psychosis there, on your side of the world.

In my dreams, I imagined our union as beleaguered, but still sun-beaming and boisterous, biblical brethren, once each of us (and countless other young-spirited saints, psychics and soothsayers) had rightfully sown the heavenly seeds of a new beginning for our separate communities, cultures and societies on this dying-to-life, righteously reincarnate Earth of ours.

So much coincidental quizzicality has shaped the “nefand, sullen languid stories of my last-ditch, last-chance life,” including the serendipity of that first meeting of our two minds.

Our two submedially mature yet still quite sycophantic student souls were somehow, at some point, so mutually confounded, mesmerized and inspired by the truly enlightened intimacy we would go on to share, that we often (if I remember correctly!) smothered each other in self-obsessed, other-opposed & ostracized narcissism.

I fondly reminisce, remember and recall just exactly how we together, as the closest of friends, dealt only in the immaculate intimacy of trusted truth (or truthful trust). Tantamount to our unfettered ferocity of faith in one another, such truth tightly intertwined our hearts & souls together in both telltale-tangled threads of deliberately disgruntled dysfunction or malcontent malaise and sumptuously bittersweet stories of irrational, unreasoned, and misguided boy/girl romance gone awry.

Truth is, all throughout our first two years of undergraduate, I tormented myself terribly in confused and conflicted recognition of the dichotomically opposed binary between mainstream, most fortunate and “full-worth-the-effort” male-female love and its exact opposite: gay love, or “queer” love, since there was nothing “gay” about such love for me, during those years, or even ever after!

Truths is, that one occasion of my coming out that you so fondly remember in email, could have panned out in two very different ways; and trust me, when I say that you would not at all have been pleased by the alternate “outcome” of such proceedings!  WINK! WINK!

Oh! I should scream it from my rooftop! I’M IN LOVE WITH YOU, APRIL MANTERIS! I always have been and always will be! Never once have I not regretted the decision I made to proclaim my homosexuality to the world, because all that led to was me being pigeonholed in to a nasty, putrid, pestilent and perverse segment of society, where I subsequently succumbed to a lifestyle of depression, then deviance, then drugs, then disease, then delusions, then death, then disfigurement.

And, all that’s been done to me without my ever having witnessed once again the trusted truth (or truthful trust) of such mutually equitable & reciprocal platonic intimacy as we once shared, let alone anything remotely resembling the romantic!

So, that said, I’ll conclude in recognition of how immensely blessed I am to have found you meandering back into my life with such a generously opened mind and heart, with such forgiveness of the trifles of the past, and with such dignified poise, to reclaim our friendship from the exact point where we once left it off.

I welcome you into my life with widely opened arms, April! Moreover, I do ever so hope that we can rekindle that platonic intimacy that once existed between the two of us and that defined our very profound and beautiful friendship!  I look forward to a future with you in it, and I hope you do of me, as well…

With fond memories…
And, In fond regards,

Most sincerely…
Your dear friend,

Matt(e)o | QHereKidSF
Matthew D. Blanchard

matthew@qherekidsf.com

http://www.qherekidsf.com

http://bit.ly/qherekidsf

San Francisco, CA USA

[20110401T223247PT]

A LOOK BACK @ 18MTHS. OF HOPE!!

A LOOK BACK! At 60DAYS SOBER, ... I once concluded that "I JUST have an UGLY face." However, despite the devastation of disfigurement, I was/am still conscience & cognizant of the fact that my Seventh Chakra shines – Sahasrara : "The Thousand-Petaled Lotus" – "signifying & assuring QHereKidSF of his supreme consciousness & sublime connection to the cerebral, spiritual & physical worlds" (cf. http://youtu.be/gg8mjhUqSpw – below).

At 1YR. CLEAN, I affirmed "BEAUTY!" ... "But, only at God's speed. God willing" : the choice words Director Daniel Cardone & I used to frame the closing of CONSTRUCT, our "epic" (not in length, but rather in magnitude of reverberation & depth) experimental docu-short, filmed as part of The HIV Story Project's STILL AROUND 2010 compilation (Exec. Producer: Jörg Fockele; Producer: Marc Smolowitz), which together feature a day-in-the-life of 15 individual PWA (i.e., People With AIDS) protagonists.

Now, today... At 18.5MTHS. OF HOPE (not dope!), I take the stage in a short time to proclaim how indeed I am finally & once again ablaze with "DESIRE" : red hot & risen, redeemed & reborn; as a "PHOENIX a'FIRE" (cf. "Resident Alien" - the Sins Invalid Artists In Residence Show), who prances, dances and sings poemsongs of Paphian pleasantries, indulgences & delights...

As my Sins Invalid artist bio reads, I am: "grateful for God's boundless love of & faith in [my] own purely imperfect and human desire 'for elaborate beautification & solemn self-betterment" (cf. CONSTRUCT, 2011). "But, then again, I'll be quick to say: We live to die and die to live... Forever! Come what may." (cf. JEER NOT! FEAR NOT!!; "Resident Alien," 2011).

STAY TUNED!! for my "flagrantly unfettered" foretelling of a future full of fortitude, good fortune, and truly "fag-o-licious fabulosity" of face... SUBSCRIBE TO MY YouTube® CHANNEL – mindflux | matt(e)o | mayhem : http://youtube.com/qherekidsf.

Cheers! Ciao & Namaste...
Matt(e)o | QHereKidSF
Matthew D. Blanchard
matthew@qherekidsf.com
http://bit.ly/qherekidsf

San Francisco, CA USA
[20110125T071435PST]

Alien Annuciation: Unearthing My Sacred Self

The following is a dramatic monologue I prepared for my SINS INVALID Artists In Residence "Resident Alien" Performance Showcase; however, this exact text will NOT be performed the evening's of the show. I therefore am now at liberty to share some of the copious work I have been preparing for performance during the last nine months for review by my peers. Please indulge me with your insights into this work; provide your own critical response and feedback, and I will be happy to take whatever you have to say to heart when considering revisions of the piece for future performance.

ALIEN ANNUCIATION:
Unearthing My Sacred Self

Fuck! Face it!! I’m a fagged-out, ferocious, Fog City funambule Freak Show — or Peep Show, depending on the scene [chuckles] — fabulously fucked in the head — HOLE! — for far too long [laughs outright]. FUN? For sure!! If by chance, you get some crazed, cracked-out, masochistic satisfaction from — OH! SO SAD! — strangely spiritual & surreal stories of catastrophic crystal-lined “Quarter-Life” crises, then maybe I’m your man!!

The mindflux & mayhem of this “MATTO” Matteo manifest as anxiety, manic depression, numerous non-specified personality disorders, coupled with devastatingly detrimental drug dependency and HIV/AIDS disease — BAM! Axes one through five, in no specific order!! My psychiatrists would all be proud. During the long-stretched syndrome of illness, disease & disorder that is my dismal, abysmal life, I was only ever once lost to languid torpor; torpor which turned out tantamount to torturous (i.e., id est… the ten to twelve days I laid unconscious, inactive & still; the skin & bone of my once boyhood beautiful face pressed flat, flush, firm & dying against a putrid, pestilent pillow).

Yet, for a time, prior to my tragically traumatic end, back before my whole “Fuck! Face it!!” mantra came into play, I once touted myself better than plainly pretty & princely. Back before my very real ruination ripped apart my smile; before antipsychotic psychotropics pretty much fucked up, tore down and all but annihilated my lachrymose libido, I spent my days super-speedy, sexed-up & salivating for raucously wild & raunchy “fag-fornication” – E, K, G… Crystal Methamphetamine sure’nough spewing from my sweaty, slimy skin!!

For lack of food, lack of sleep, but with no shortage of insanely over-indulgent fucking, I was led libidinally through a caustic, quixotic, voraciously vivacious and virulent six month schizoid-delusional messianic mania (i.e., id est… “crazed and cracked-out,” I told you!!). Here’s how the story goes…

After twenty-four-plus hours of positively preposterous unguided, temper-tantrumed and tweaked-out tantric yoga, I found myself falling flat on the floor from a backbend. In a glorious instance, I could both hear, feel and fear my mightily tight military neck flicker from firm to flaccid to flat with a couple of cracks and a crunch. 

Then, out of nowhere, but to my tearfully giggled and enraptured delight, the “cycloptic” serpentine energy force of my kundalini uncoiled itself three & 1/2 fold from deep within the pit of my scrotum, as if a cataclysmically massive monster cock was fucking me from bottom-end to top-end entirely. My phallic kundalini snaked its way like speed-lightening straight up my squarely smacked flat spine, erupting explosively through each of my leveled & loosely lain chakras. Past my shoulders. Into my head. All with a sparklingly celestial shudder of glee!!

My voraciously virulent kundalini energy force broke the blood/brain barrier with the cracking and collapsing of my never near too straight again neck, and was free!! At that moment, deep from within a blinding, brilliant light, I saw the rebirth and renewal of all life, the reunification and redemption of retaliatory religions of the World, embodied as a dying leafless triple-branched tree: a familiar scenic device of Beckett’s brain, symbolizing the existential nihilism inherent in “waiting for God…”

But, the tree at the center of my powerfully immaculate vision was quite unlike the grey, lifeless, hollow-trunked, death-determined tree that so thwarted the mindless meanderings of Vladimir and Estragon. The tree at the center of my celestial light budded a new growth, new birth branch with a single, glowing emerald green leaf which dripped dew of heavenly angelic gold from its tip.

Two Men Contemplating the Moon, ca. 1830
Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774-1840)
Oil on Canas, 13 3/4 x 17 1/4in. (34.9 x 43.8cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
Wrightsman Fund, 2000 (2000.51)

My kundalini force thrust me thankfully toward my heavenly father – at least, I’d hoped it would – through ungodly, goliath insanity and bliss. Thus began the potent perversion of my intellect, my psyche, as I set off on a profoundly esoteric and spiritually pious six month search for the “One,” Almighty God.

Six days to six weeks, I spent alone, shut up in my sparse, stark and sullen studio apartment, spiraling my insanity into a chaotic hoarded mess, savagely searching for God. No, I didn’t find him…or her…or them. Well, maybe them!! If you’re one to consider the sublime god force a pluralist spiritual entity, then I’m almost certain that my schizoid-delusional miscomprehension of individual life forces, as being all parts of a prophetically benevolent community of angel/aliens who had come calling for me as a veritable “MATTO” Matteo, would have intrigued and enticed both your own spiritual and intellectual curiosity.

So, I didn’t find Him (or “Her”) in my search for the Divine, but I did find my own angelic alien annunciation as a “Gift of God” : Matthew, for I believe with all my kundalini life force that during this six month psychosis, I was being suited by a community of angel/aliens for my god-given, divinely apostolic duty to proclaim to the World the imminent arrival of a purely peaceful, nonviolent, anti-diabolic Armageddon.

I was called upon, or so much I wholeheartedly believed, to return from the “deathspace” transexualized and impregnated with an angel/alien Christ-child to usher in the climactic rebirth, re-growth and cultivation of a global unifying force: a “Garden of Eden,” Elysian Fields, Les Champs Élysées leading into more than just a city, but rather into a World of lights, illumination, rapture!!

I speak of chakras and kundalini sparingly here; even though, these words as psychic phenomena seem to predominate my prose. But, don’t get me wrong! I’m a good faith, good Catholic, Christian boy of Franco-Polish Hebraic descent; therefore, the word “RAPTURE” should make more sense!

You’d sooner find me carving a Cherokee totem disparaging my colonial heritage as self-proclaimed proudly pompous, well-educated elite alum of Jefferson’s own “Alma Mater of Our Nation.” Hell! You’d sooner find me rigging a home-made I.E.D. car-bomb in my Fresno-based meth-lab storage garage while bowing toward Muslim Mecca – No, not GAY MECCA!! – as I pray in istikhara, and offer supplication for divine guidance on how best to cripple and destroy Judeo-American neocolonial forces.

You’d sooner find this white-bred, white trash, euro-mutt, slut, goy-boy American speciously boasting either indigenous or Islamic roots, rather than spiting my own just and good Judeo-Catholic heritage by following blindly the wisdom & stricture of Sanskrit/Hindi yogic faith teachings, if not just as a Eurocentric fad of the intellectual and spiritual post-colonial diasporas…

Yet, sadly still, contrary to my Judeo-Christian biblical heritage and learning – if even as a namesake, merely!! – I did neither see nor encounter my single almighty God, the Father: The Maker of Man, of me, of my mindflux, mayhem and misery. But, I swear on the last remnants of sanity and semblance of beauty that this mad, mad monstrosity of a man may have, I swear…

I saw something! Something real. Unimagined. Something immaculate. Holy. Sublime. In fact, I saw many things, which I remember vividly and in distinct detail, despite near half a decade of dutifully downing each dawn & dusk the fists full of psychotropics my doctors order me to take to keep pace of peace and order in my boyish, good goyish brain.

I could go on and on and on without a single smile – I could, and I should, but I wont! Anyway. – I could catalog… In fact, I HAVE cataloged pages and pages describing the many multitudinous manifestations of my immaculate enlightenment. I could retell my rapture. I could narrate my nirvana; translate my transcendence for you all – I could, and I should, but I won’t! Anyway…

And, why not? Because, trust!! You’d only spurn and scoff at my seemingly spurious, counterfeit, tall, tall torturous tale; even though, it be not torturous, but tender, touching truth!! Unless, of course, you are curious, and have come across us angel/aliens in our own right with open minds and open hearts, then there’d be no point in proclaiming the snippets of specifics of my all too perturbing albeit prophetic schizoid-delusional messianic psychosis.

Respectfully submitted,
Matt(e)o | QHereKidSF
Matthew D. Blanchard
Artist In Residence
SINS INVALID
San Francisco, CA USA
http://bit.ly/qherekidsf
[20110111T235237PST]

ACCESS POINT – Point d'Accès

Depuis des jours, je me suis échappé à une vide créative, qui durait à peu près 4 ou 5 mois. Alors, je tente à faire travailler le côté gauche de mon cerveau, puisque j'y ai découvert un point d'accès à un trésor d'idées fortement originales. DIEU MERCI!

Some days ago, I escaped a creative void, which had lasted as much as four or five months. So, I am attempting to make the left side of my brain work, since I discovered there an access point to a treasure of highly original ideas. THANK GOD!

STATUS UPDATE – ORIGINAL

Depuis quelques jours, je me suis échappé à une vide (mieux dite: "une absence," un soif ou une faim) de créativité, qui durait certes à peu près plus de quatre ou cinq mois... Maintenant, je tente à bien travailler le côté gauche de mon cerveau, -- Là, d'où fonctionnent, non pas l'intellect mais, plutôt mon esprit critique et mes impulsions créatives! -- puisque j'y ai découvert un point d'accès à un trésor d'idées fortement originales.

La "découverte" et la "recherche" de ces idées et impulsions, ces expériences sont celles-là qui m'amusent, m'assouvissent et me satisfont par-dessus tout. Donc, c'est en reconnaissance de tous ceux-là que je proclame sans doute, ni honte, ni crainte:

DIEU, MERCI!! Vous m'avez certes béatifié et béni! Vous, DIEU, qui êtes le plus bienfaisant de tous autres saint-esprits! Dieu, je Vous dois ma vie!! Ne Vous inquiétez pas, car il n'y a rien à craindre. Je vous revaudrai toute celle-là. Je vous la promets!

Retournons alors au travail!

Sauf d'abord, il vaut dire à vous tous qui lisez mes mots et les comprenez bien, "SVP, Souhaitez-moi la bonne chance!!" J'en aurai certes besoin! Car, même si j'aie trouvé la capacité et des facultés avec lesquelles je puisse accéder à ma créativité, ceux ne sont riens sans une forte dose de chance...

Some days ago, I escaped a void (better said: “an absence,” a thirst or a hunger) of creativity, which had lasted certainly almost more than four or five months… Now, I am attempting to work well the left side of my brain, – There, from where functions, not the intellect but, rather my critical self and my creative impulses! – since I found there a point of access to a treasure of strongly original ideas.

The “discovery” and the “research” of these ideas and impulses, these experiences are those which amuse, satiate and satisfy me above all else. Thus, it is in recognition of all of this that I proclaim without doubt, nor shame, nor fear:

THANK YOU, LORD!! You have certainly beatified and blessed me! You, GOD, who is the most beneficent of all other holy spirits! Lord, I owe you my life!! Do not you worry, for there is nothing to fear! I will return the favor. I promise you that!

Let’s return to work!

Except first off, it is worth saying to all of you who read my words and understand them well, “PLEASE, Wish me good luck!!” I certainly will need it! For, even if I might have found the capacity and the faculties with which I may gain access to my creativity, these are nothing without a heavy dose of luck…

Cordialement,

Respectfully submitted,

Matt(e)o | QHereKidSF 

Matthew D. Blanchard

San Francisco, CA USA

http://bit.ly/qherekidsf

http://pulse.yahoo.com

[20101110T222547PST]

ON MOTHERHOOD: "Nature vs. Nurture"

While researching the meaning and popularity of my given name: Matthew, in preparation & as subtext for a monologue that I'm preparing for my Sins Invalid Artists In Residence (A.I.R.) Showcase performance, I "stumbled upon" the website, CafeMom.com, which conveniently catalogs baby names by category, popularity, date and by other distinguishing factors; the website also provides a social networking platform for expectant and/or experienced mothers.

The following is the complete text, which was intended to serve as my profile discussion introducing my puppy dog, TANNER'baby, as my first and only child. I discovered only after a few good hours of creative writing, when I tried to confirm my profile on CafeMom.com, that the website prohibited any discernibly male-gendered persons from accessing their social network as a member.

Nonetheless, I feel it worthwhile for me to post what I had written for their website, for the simple fact this, my essay: ON MOTHERHOOD, indeed reveals some very pertinent & potent aspects of my psyche, as they be related to relations with my own mother. In fact, what was supposed to be a passage limited to 500 words, turned into a torturously contemptuous tirade against my own mother.

I'll be straight forward with my introduction here, for I admit frankly & freely that this essay against my mother can easily be interpreted as damned vehemently vicious, venomous and cruel, if read out of context and incompletely; however, MIND YOU! This is a happy story!

Truth be told! This is a story founded on a sincere desire to love and be loved, to restore a stable, healthy, worthwhile and meaningful relationship between mother and son. All the pejoratives and derogatory vocabulary I use to describe my mother come from a place of immense sympathy, empathy, and love.

True, it is inappropriate to call such deprecation empirical, however constative my utterances may seem; being that these words are mere manifestations of my own severely biased, negative judgments and opinions of my mother. Despite the harsh tone and timbre of my words, I freely, confidently & gratefully admit that my mother's love for me (and her other children) is truly immense! 

In fact, I would even go as far as to argue that my mother's love of her children is so intensely, unfathomably immense that, just as the scope of Man's intellect is far too limited to contain and comprehend a truly complete understanding of the Sublime, the sublime love my mother has for her children fully exceeds the capacity of her imagination, emotions and intellect.

For this sad fact, my mother truly suffers, and I'd be damned if I didn't wish things different for her, for me, for us. Likewise, this sad fact defines and buttresses my own sympathy and love for my dear, dear mother, MOM!! God bless her, endlessly!! I pray.   

Before I begin serving up pleasantly sycophantic praises of my oh so adorable, high-energy & affectionate amber-haired Terrier-mixed mutt, permit me please to describe the context within which a 30-something, single, San Francisco Fog City gay man, like myself, presumes to find new friends amongst CafeMom.com members.

As a young queer, but closeted, college-bound over-achiever of teenage years, I sadly suffered the wrath of dysfunction born of my own mother's unmonitored, unmitigated manic depressive alcoholic binging & blackouts. Thus, I forcibly distanced myself mentally, emotionally, and yes, even physically (i.e., geographically) from my seriously sick and psychologically frail single mom.

Coincidence smiled slack-jawed some thirteen or fourteen years ago, when I first mandated distance from & distrust of maternal wrath & reign in my life. Concurrent to the disappearance of my mother, my benevolently better-intentioned & bigger brained educators innocently indulged and thus cemented my caustically cautious contempt for the schizoaffective, severely alcoholic & codependent maternal forces of my absentee and/or aggressively antagonistic family.

My teachers, to whom I gratefully granted custody of my capriciously prodigal intellect, introduced to me through scholastic study the convincing conclusions (i.e., covertly complementary bio-psychosocial arguments) of Francis Galton's Darwinian-based theories & theses on "Nature vs. Nurture."

By analyzing the extensive empirical evidence acquired through the lifelong, cutting-edge biological studies of his cousin, Charles Darwin, Galton determined the unequivocally evolutionist role of the relationship, first interpreted as dichotomic binary, between "an individual's innate qualities ('nature,' i.e., nativism or innatism) versus personal experiences ('nurture,' i.e., empiricism or behaviorism) [...] in determining or causing individual differences in physical & behavioral traits."[1]

Modern psychologists have come to criticize Galton's distinction between nativism & behaviorism "for its binary simplification of two tightly interwoven parameters."[2]

Today, the empirically extant binary between "nature" & "nurture" is more commonly interpreted as involving a relatively DYADIC (i.e., linked, interactive, symbiotic) co-dependence, rather than a DICHOTOMIC (i.e., contrary, mutually exclusive, independent) opposition, between the influence & impact of:

A.) "NATURE" : the uniquely concretive genetic profile of individual progeny inherited directly from their biological progenitors, and...

B.) "NURTURE" : the subtly nuanced psychosocial behaviors, traits and/or characteristics learned [i.e., "gain[ed] (a habit, mannerism, etc.) by experience, exposure to example, or the like; acquire[d]") from those individuals serving or interpreted as role-models, guides, or teachers within one's sociocultural environment.[3]

Today, in my "eyes wide shut," there no longer seems to exist a valid argument, but rather an agreement, between the concepts of "nature" & "nurture." In this vein, I see myself the son of a manic depressive, schizoaffective, actively alcoholic mother, who in his own time has perpetuated the traits, traditions and inheritances of his maternal line through severely catastrophic "quarter-life" crises.

Such crises began cruelly crippling my confidences, as far back as the Second Grade -- How well I recall that ineffable moment, when I was first called, "FAGGOT!" I often bitterly & begrudgingly recall the ostensibly laughable fact that, at the innocent, naive age of only seven, I was belligerently lambasted with brutal, brutish teasing for having erroneously defined "blow job," as being: You know! Like, when you go to SuperCuts®, and after the lady cuts your hair, she "blow" dries it!

More recently, these crises have tangibly & tragically crippled my mind, my body & my health. Fast forward to (or remembering in retrospect) the most ineffable, ill-fated & unfortunate day of my sad, sorry life: October 7, 2007.

Sure! We are now many chapters further along from my early adolescence, but this single day in my turned 'round story of survival & redemption is equally (if not astoundingly more) unforgettable than the years upon years of persecutions I succumbed to as a very lousy, lonely, lachrymal school-aged lad.

In early October, just over three years ago, I was found alone & on the brink of death, after what doctors now believe must have been 10 to 12 days of comatose confinement, brought on by overdose-induced, HIV/AIDS-related PCP pneumonia and a poly-microbial bacterial infection of the face.

The San Francisco Fire Department busted down my door to find me lying face-down & belly-up in my stark, unsterile studio apartment; painfully contorted and coiled up in the soiled, sickening sheets of my sullied, stained single bed. Blood streamed sanguine from my back-end, from my blackened necrotic nostrils and mouth, from the empty ethereality of my ears and eyes.

I was covered in my own vomit, urine and defecation, and all but nine of my teeth had fallen out "under the weight of my aching, dying brain." I had been forgotten, left alone, depraved & denigrated, deteriorating toward death; yet, by some ridiculously rare reversal of fate, I was rescued, redeemed & restored to life.

A rescue brigade – purportedly, a near dozen of emergency vehicles; all with lights emblazoned & flashing; sirens blaring in cacophonous mayhem and mercy – rushed me speedily & without delay, directly to the nearest hospital emergency care unit. After some quick and effective lifesaving maneuvers (i.e., blood transfusions, dialysis, wound care, heavy doses of generic antibiotics), my fading heart rate was stabilized; brain activity restarted.

Then, "a team of San Francisco’s leading diagnosticians, doctors & surgeons fought valiantly, yet failed so sorely to" curb, control and defeat the necrotizing bacteria which infected my face. Their only option, in order to ensure my survival, was the immediate debridement of all the necrotic, infected skin, flesh and bone of my once quite beautifully handsome visage.

For eight weeks, I remained in a drug-induced comatose state, with my entire head wrapped in white gauze bandages. After having amputated my entire upper jaw & palette, as well as deeply denigrate parts of my mouth, the left side of my nose, and my septum, a godsend group of most heavenly, heroic healers waited for the great gaping hole in the center of my face to heal.

Sadly, I cannot recall or recognize my selfless saviors, these "heavenly, heroic healers," as my mind's eyes were closed off to consciousness & seeing, while they worked their wonders on me.

However, you cannot conscientiously consider this lifelong continuum of crises after crises as mere counterfeit confabulations of my residual angst & anger, psychically preserved in the seemingly spurious spewing of my gad-awfully disgraceful, ungrateful gay boy guts.

For, however unrealistically severe sound my stories of sad, sad sufferance – both inherited & learned – the gad-damned destitution, destruction, deprivation, drug dependency, depression, disease and disfigurement, which have tortuously tormented me 'til present day, are terribly, entirely telling and TRUE!!

Still, such conspicuously catastrophic crises have, each in their own turn, torn me from the bliss of my not entirely outlandish optimism, inspiration, aspiration, hope and faith in Self, only to catapult me cruelly and contemptuously toward all but indomitable death; as if, as retribution for the heartless, angry animosity I've held toward my mother for my entire young life!

In spite, despite, or perhaps even because of my madly miserable mother, I have learned to survive great sufferance & struggle. Finally, at the age of thirty, I have come to transcend the pain, the shame, the disgust and disgrace, the disappointments, dissatisfaction & contempt.

I have languished and labored in battle over the brutal bereavements & bombardments of the neuro-psychobiological symptoms and side-effects of my bipolar disorder, schizoid-delusional psychosis and substance abuse; indubitably, inherited from my mother. 

I have also always often fought against my psychosocial behavioral impairments learned, gained or acquired by example, as the middle child of a hyper-dysfunctional threefold broken family, which manifest in my lonely life as parallels to my mother's last-ditch, last-chance, leftover life, as well.   

Yet, instead of still so stupidly sustaining such suffering in my life, I have in turn tended to cultivate a feverishly Faith-focused and thankful fortitude of smile, spine, spirit and psyche. 

This, I've learned or acquired, not from my weak and woebegone, miserably melancholic, mentally depraved & miscreant, degenerate mother, but rather from the countless coaches, counselors, providers, preachers, fans, friends and family who sit loudly lauding me court-side, during this furiously & ferociously fun game we call, "LIFE!"

My many loving laudators, whose encouragements, praise, counsel and commendations have rightfully and willfully replaced the disappointments of deprecation manifest by the damned near always drunken, depressed and indiscriminately desultory, dissatisfied, dreary but deadpan, stone-faced, icy, empty smiles of the mad, sad, sullen source of my genetic degeneracy (i.e., good ol' mother, MOM!!).

My many myriad advocates, supporters, defenders, patrons and providers stand tall, strong and sturdy as proud pillars of the wholly turned 'round reversal of my Fate.

Through a renewal of my Faith, a return to my roots (as opposed to my running away!), and my rightfully deserved Redemption, I've earned (as my mother would have, could have, and perhaps, still can!!) divine, sublime recompense for the determined, dutiful and devout good-doing and grasping toward greatness that I aim and am poised to achieve, through a careful, caring and conscientiously heralded sharing of my tall, tall telling tales of tempestuous turmoil and tragedy turned to triumph, after all.

These pillars of my survival and success have proven empirically, time and time again, through thoughts, words, sentiments, support, and – above all else – through past & present affection, admiration & ACTION, to be my guardians, my protectors, my heroes, my role models, my mentors, my teachers.

As I stand today so surefooted & secure in recognition of my Salvation through survival, I swear so surely to return to the origin, to the roots, of my Redemption, so that I may – God willing!! – give back to my guardian angels in gorgeous, gleaming, goliath grins of goodwill & gratitude.

I’ve joined CafeMom.com, as a thirty-something diseased, depressed, disfigured codependent; because, in spite, despite, or perhaps even because of the madly, miserable mindflux & mayhem which define the dysfunctional distance separating me from my mother, I aspire to find new friends here. 

I am looking neither for a new mother, a substitute, nor a replacement. However, I am looking for guidance from compassionate confidantes and role models, from whom I may learn how best to repair, restore, cultivate and nurture a stable, healthy, mutually beneficial, respectful and responsible, adult relationship with my own MOM – a wounded, weary woman who is oh so wanting of love; especially, from her estranged children.

For any future dialogues ON MOTHERHOOD, I will dutifully & discriminately describe the cripplingly corrupt manifestations of my own psychological frailty, social ineptitude & awkwardness, and substance abuse. A cataloging of my own many myriad imperfections, I presume, will prove them inherited and/or learned. But, from whom?

Does this question really remain altogether unanswered? If I have not at length provided a fully convincing & complete argument in favor of a DYADIC/CAUSAL/EMPIRICAL interpretation of the "Nature vs. Nurture" debate, as it relates to my life and to motherhood, then I briefly reiterate:

I argue adamantly that the utterly execrable, nefand, ne'er-do-well iniquities of my colossally corrupt character are ultimately my most reprehensible & reprobate inheritances: glaringly ungodly & grotesque gifts from my emotionally maladroit, compulsively codependent, maniacally defensive, nefariously perverse & irrationally self-repudiating mother.

While the "plentiful beatitude" of my blessedly blissful, infectiously intrepid, jovially just, fortunately fortitudinous, faithfully frank & fair, sacrosanct sense of survival, I've learned (i.e., gained or acquired) from the many "heavenly, heroic healers" who, hearts aligned in prayer, have held such a superhuman hand and played such a specially sublime role in sustaining my survival for so long, against such awful odds. THANK GOD!!

PERHAPS, some other mothers might find plausible, in my long, languorous tirade, the possibility for friendship & the turning of a page: a new leaf! For, while my tirade may have been told in a heated, contemptuous tone, I believe that therein lies loving, tender, telling TRUTH!!

PERHAPS, the love of mother & child might be restored here, starting with this still young, but no longer naive…; this still ridiculed & persecuted, but now more proud, tough-knuckled & thick-skinned…; this still mentally distorted, diseased & disfigured, but no longer depraved, dissolute, debased, degenerate, deteriorating invalid, now no longer deprived of love.

PERHAPS, this happily home-bodied, healthfully integrated & involved, ultimately indomitable and inspiring, safe, sane, sober thirty-something, solemn & blissful believer...; this no longer languishing, but still lauded lifelong learned laureate and lover of life...

PERHAPS, this “fagged-out ferocious Fog City freak show,” who is as delighted as he is grateful to have had so many successive second, third, and fourth choice chances to live again and again, may find it in himself here to restore trust and faith in family connections, in maternal instinct and love.

PERHAPS, this next chapter of my life might begin with innocently simple & patient, carefully & caringly cultivated conversations over my own compassionately p/maternal role as proud, proud papa of a vivaciously sweet, loving and affectionate two year old, gorgeous Terrier-mixed mutt, named Scruffy “TANNER” Thompson: my “PRIDE & JOY!!”  We’ll see!!

OR ELSE, my words are wasted… And, what a shame that would be for me: the marauder of one mightily mammoth & megalomaniac monologue! WINK! Like I said, “We’ll see!!” Thanks for reading… Cheers! Ciao! NAMASTE…

__________________
[1]     Wikipedia contributors, "Nature versus nurture," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nature_versus_nurture&oldid=395464833 (accessed: November 8, 2010).
[2]     Ibid. (accessed: November 8, 2010).
[3]     learned. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/learned (accessed: November 8, 2010).

Respectfully submitted,

Matt(e)o | QHereKidSF

Matthew D. Blanchard

San Francisco, CA USA

http://bit.ly/qherekidsf

[20101109T052758PST] 

FERGUSON : A Loquacious Look Inside...

Daniel Cardone, an Australian film/television producer & director living & working in San Francisco, was recently matched to me as a subject for the three to five minute HIV/AIDS survivor's story film documentary he has been commissioned to direct as part of a compilation of 15 to 20 short films of various genres that is now being called The HIV Story Project.

Jörg Fockele, a German film/television producer & director who is Executive Producer of the project, was introduced to my story when I met him as a youth liaison member of the Board of Directors of Bay Area Young Positives, Inc. He was searching for youth to profile for the film project, but was coming up short with the membership of BAY Positives and the clients of Larkin Street Youth Services, Inc. Assisted Care/After Care.
I did what I could during the conversation between Jörg and myself to advocate as well as I could for a focus on youth-aged subjects for short film exposes, but we were running into an obvious brick wall. That's when Jörg asked me how it came to pass that I had been associated with the project.

I gladly explained that Derrick Mapp, an HIV Health Counselor and L.I.F.E. Institute Facilitator from The Shanti Project, had told me of the Project and was immediately moved to get me involved either in a development capacity or as a short film subject. Derrick incubated the original idea of a short film compilation commemorating the 30th Anniversary of the emergence on the scientific scene of the "Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)" as a nominal spoken word diagnosis for the then popularly known "Gay Cancer."

Then, sitting there at an empty desk in the back of the BAY Positives' office(s) with Executive Director Curtis Moore, MPH (a dear, dear friend of mine, as well as one of my most distinguished professional colleagues) at my side and Jörg Fockele sitting across from me, I downed my mask and recounted my story of disease, drug dependency, delusional psychosis, and just short of death, disfigurement, etc. Jörg was stoic in his reserved response to my story, and in a very unexpected matter-of-fact sort of way, he confirmed Derrick's assumption, "Yes, you'd surely make a decent subject for a short film. I'll have to see if I can find a director who is up to the challenge." I, in turn, smiled in delight and then just waited to discover who he c/would find to direct me in my own short film documentary!!

Of course, in light of all the anticipation of knowing that I would soon be collaborating on and starring in a documentary short film about my climactic curtailing and confounding of my desolate doom in a destitute room: a slovenly studio begrimed in blood, urine and other gross indecencies of death at the door, I eagerly awaited the opportunity to meet my director. 

More so however, I eagerly anticipated the opportunity to broad cast my nevermore nefandous net to work my story through communities of survivors: a story of a reluctant rebounding, a refusing at first of the miserable misfortune that was meant to map out my unfathomably forlorn future of disconsolate discomfort and disdain, to reclaim courageously, confidently, and above all conspicuously my right to life well-lived.

Thus, in waiting for eventual contact with the film director assigned to document my story, I went ahead and proclaimed to the world that I was going to be a star. Short of posting the news to my blog for all the world to see, as I'm doing now, I've told everyone I know that I am going to be featured in a short film as part of The HIV Story Project. And just in time for me to begin to substantiate my claims to stardom, Daniel Cardone has entered my life as a true Godsend!

The following text is taken directly from my most recent email to my documentarian, regarding our struggle to find a logical link between the performative spoken-word aspects of the excessively loquacious, prosaic pedantry and pomposity of my creatively written exposes or essays (or whatever you'd like to call my boisterously shit-for-brains, blabbering behemoth of a blog?) and a certain naturalism of the cinematic narrative.

Yesterday evening, after pondering further the myriad of possibilities for juxtaposing the performative spoken-word with stoic straightforward naturalism in film, I realized that the production dates that Daniel had proposed to me perfectly coincide with my one-year anniversary of sobriety.  I realized also that a speaker's visit to Ferguson Place, my Recovery & Rehabilitation House (spotlighted in previous blog entries) was long overdue and that one could easily coincide or conjoin with a community celebration in honor of my "WATCH" (i.e., my achievements and accomplishments since first establishing my sobriety a year ago).

Below, you will read a very intimate depiction of Ferguson Place, as well as a downright dutifully dramatic portrayal of my personal experiences disclosing my disfigurement and disease(s) to my community there. In writing this email and sharing it here as a blog post, I have no intention or desire of breaching confidentiality clauses or the confidences of my confidants there.  I can only say that I intend with this presentation of text to pay homage in a very real and honest fashion to my friends and family at Ferguson Place. Enjoy the read!! Thus, I quote:

Let's see.. What happens/ed at my Recovery House?

Well, Ferguson Place is a Triple Diagnoses Residential Substance Abuse & Mental Health Rehabilitation & Recovery House for people living with HIV/AIDS. To graduate from the program, one must transition successfully through four phases:

a.) ORIENTATION PHASE: a two-week in-house lock-down usually meant to empower the recovering addict to recover completely through the withdrawal of most illicit substances and to attend to medical and psychiatric appointments, putting their schedule into place for the subsequent three phases;

b.) PHASE ONE: the recovering addict can only attend medical and psychiatric appointments on their own; at all other times, s/he must be accompanied by a PHASE TWO or THREE buddy to all social activities and out-of-house recovery meetings (including 12-Step);

c.) PHASE TWO: INDEPENDENCE = recovering addict (usually after one month of in-house semi-lock-down recovery) can leave the house solo as s/he pleases but only to pre-approved recovery-related appointments and social activities.  The purpose of this phase is to prove your ability to maintain sobriety on your own through near independence, while demonstrating that you are able to be relied upon by other housemates in lower phases to accompany them to appointments and social activities;

d.) PHASE THREE: TRANSITION = During this final phase, the recovering addict is meant to focus all of their time on maintaining their recovery and health regimens, as well as to devote concerted effort toward the process of transitioning into short-term to long-term co-operative Baker Places, Inc. sober-living housing. During PHASE THREE, recovering addicts/residents/clients are expected less to accommodate to the needs of their housemates and more to focus on their own individual transitional needs.

During these four distinct periods of progressive recovery, the client/resident partners with their primary counselor to set their weekly schedule of mostly recovery-related activities. Primary Counselor's are all extensively trained in substance abuse recovery, mental health disorders and their psycho-social treatment, and HIV/AIDS health promotion and advocacy.

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With the primary counselor's guidance during ORIENTATION PHASE & PHASE ONE, the client/resident sets the following "PLANS" for their time in residence at Ferguson Place, as needed:

a.) RELAPSE PREVENTION PLAN: a step-by-step worksheet with numerous questions related to trigger identification & monitoring, and exploration of safety/sobriety response tactics that the client/resident would use ultimately to prevent relapse. In this plan, you also define the repercussions to any unexpected relapse, including demotion from your present phase, one-week lock-down, urine test, properties search, etc.

b.) HIV/AIDS HEALTH PROMOTION PLAN: a progressive plan meant to augment one's HIV/AIDS HEALTH PROMOTION practices through regularly scheduled appointments with specialists, any necessary additional appointments to follow-up on important HIV/AIDS health related issues, and prescription regimen adherence. In this plan, the client/resident defines the requirements s/he must meet to eventually hold their own meds; otherwise, meds are kept locked in the main office and are monitored and administered under staff supervision. The purpose of this plan is to optimize one's HIV/AIDS Health through weekly rehabilitative activities during the entire length of stay at Ferguson Place, with the hope/expectation that the client/resident would maintain the activities, therapy, psycho-social and prescription regimens well after they leave the program.

c.) MENTAL HEALTH REHABILITATION PLAN: much like the RELAPSE PREVENTION PLAN, this plan starts from a comprehensive fill-in-the-blanks worksheet which challenges the client/resident to define the triggers of symptoms of their mental health defects or disorders. The Primary Counselor offers general guidance and community health education about the client/residents' specific mental health disorder(s) and suggests to them avenues for ongoing treatment needed to maintain mental stability through difficult and challenging times (especially as their mental health is integrated with their substance abuse disorder).

d.) TRANSITION PLAN: This is the final "plan" that a client/resident completes, only after having defined their day-to-day psycho-social & medical treatment structure. This plan is meant to be introduced and initially adopted during PHASE THREE of the program, challenging the recovering addict to devise a three month schedule of recovery and rehabilitation-related health promotion activities that they would follow once they have graduated the program. This plan often has ulterior foci, including vocational education development, financial planning, residential/housing planning, and recovery maintenance.

The first plan listed: the RELAPSE PREVENTION PLAN, is the most important and often overrides the stipulations and expectations of all other plans, for the simple reason that RELAPSE DURING RESIDENCY is taken very seriously (albeit, less seriously than I would have liked!!). Client/Residents are only permitted TWO (2) relapses during their residency at Ferguson Place, and with each consecutive relapse comes more severe repercussions.

Client/Residents sign an universal substance abuse testing release, granting any member of the Counseling Staff to test all residents for the presence of illicit substances (including everything from alcohol to amphetamines, from barbiturates to opiates and other narcotic substances) in their urine at any time of any day for any reason or under any suspicion of use whatsoever.

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Ferguson Place houses a total of 12 recovering addicts with HIV/AIDS and mental disorders on a rollover basis, meaning individual addicts enter into residence at any time that there has been at least a two day vacancy. While I was a resident for three months at Ferguson Place, from July 14 (Bastille Day) to October 11, 2009, I saw only five residents graduate the program, not including myself. Evidently, the program was much more difficult to maintain for others than it was for myself.

In total, I saw 25 residents enter the program and 19 leave before they had graduated the program, either due to relapse, or psycho-social tensions in the house, or because they simply felt that they were ready to move on. Across the board, every resident of the house who was unable for whatever reason to graduate the program, left only to relapse within two to three weeks (usually in much less time).

As for the graduates, we are all invited back twice a month for alumni activities, where we can keep a pace of each others' achievements (or failures) at maintaining sobriety. I've counted four graduates that I know of since my residency at Ferguson Place ended who have relapsed. The sobriety and health maintenance success rate of graduates of Ferguson Place is somewhere around 7 to 1, success to failure (for lack of better phraseology), I would estimate.  Which, I believe, are outstanding figures.

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Ferguson Place is like a second home to me: home away from home. The veteran Counseling Staff there and the alumni I still have relationships with are like family. They play a significant role in helping me to sustain my sobriety, because I know that no matter what happens (sobriety or none, recovery maintenance or relapse at any time), I will be accepted there with love and admiration, compassion and care, sympathy and a strident strict hand of accountability.

My individual experience at Ferguson Place was quite very unique. I arrived there on July 14, 2009 at around 11AM in the morning with my mask tightly taped to my face to completely cover my forehead flap and nose. I remember, everyone made a point to introduce themselves and to start some semblance of a conversation with me, even though I was terribly nervous.

And each new person I met brought to my attention in their own time the fact that my mask was making my glasses fog up, as it usually does when I'm sweaty or the tape is loose. Most of the residents there were kind enough to give me permission to take it off, but I had previously planned with the staff there to set aside a dinner plate, skip the meal with everyone in the kitchen, and to wait to unveil myself until after dinner during mandatory evening group.

I was my normal gregarious, outgoing self (just an understandably tense tangle of nervosity, with a mask on!) interacting with everyone one-on-one as I could; however, I didn't discover true, absolute, total comfort and acceptance of my uniquely tragic, terrible but immensely beautiful blessings of circumstance and survival, until I sat down with the entire group of residents and staff to begin to tell my story. My voice was cracking; tears were welling up in my eyes, but I just took a deep breath and committed to being 100% honest.

I told them about my accident, moment by moment; about my hospitalization and reconstructions, day by day, month by month; and I told them about the taut tight suspension cord I was delicately stumbling back and forth upon in pause, recollection and relapse, waiting either to fall again to my miserable demise (i.e., death by meth!!) or to continue onward to the other end of the tight rope, as a faithful master funambulist would do, to step square-footed in stable surety onto a platform miles high, where peace, serenity, self-acceptance and resounding love of others reside.

I expressed to them at that moment that I was standing at the center of a bowing, wickedly imbalanced tight rope, reaching in their direction for a helping hand.  I told them that I could not live in residence with all of them for three months with a mask on all the time.  It would have been unfeasible. How would I eat? How would I shower? How would I breathe when I slept? It was necessary for my safety and my success at recovery that I be accepted into this household without my mask on.

I admitted openly and without any shame whatsoever that what they would see behind the mask would surely frighten them.

"I'm grotesque.. a monster; however harsh or sad it may sound, but I ask you... I challenge you to look beyond the disfigurement and inside of my deep grey eyes or into my crooked half-smashed smile, where you'll inevitably find resounding, remarkable beauty," I told them with utmost confidence and courage.

I told them in true faith of my own pride and potential, valor and value, "Just try. Just look. Inside. Deep Inside, and you'll find a beautiful young man who's just starving for love."

That's when I deliberately dipped my fingers behind my ears to untangle the cords of my mask from my hair and began pulling it off my face.  I peeled the tape from my face that was securing the mask to my nasty mutant double-nub, single-nostril nose, and slowly dragged the mask along a horizontal directly in front of me, still blocking my face from view.

Then, "VOILA! A la Française! Quel dramaturge que je sois! Voici my quasi-moto mouth and flagrantly flagitious, nefariously nasty nose."  I had those lines memorized, as if to cap-off my performance with as much of a shock of language as of sight. "Happy Bastille Day!" I said, "I hope you'll have me."

One by one, each of the staff and residents there in my audience briefly stumbled through a silent pause of shock and trepidation, and then one by one each in his own time, curled their lips into broad outstretched smiles.  All I saw was a small throng of floating tooth-filled tender smiles.

Someone who would become a very close personal friend of mine: a heroine addict with a three year old daughter in foster care, raised her hand gently, bashfully from her lap and asked politely, "Matthew, do mind if I say something?"

I smiled back at all the smiles smiling at me, and nodded in her direction permission to go on.

She continued, "You might hear this a lot. I don't know. But, really, honestly, to be brutally truthful with you... and I don't mean to diminish your story or your pain, but you don't look half as bad as you make yourself out to be."

Of course, I had heard that before from kind, courteous paid professionals, but never from a real person. And never had I witnessed an entire room full of people adamantly affirm her observation with hugs, kisses, embraces...long, thoughtful, sincere embracing.

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That experience... my welcome to the world of Ferguson Place, to the world-at-large... was pivotal in my transition out of addiction and into good, sober health, because it was only then, in witnessing the immense impact that my story had had on this small group of strangers, that I realized that all the politicking my pious, plaintive, yet cheerfully cynical and lugubriously lonely priest had preached to me was true... Truer than true!!

Ever since first passing by my cordoned-off curtained corner of an obtrusively unobstructed and open HIV/AIDS hospice hospital ward where I wailed away the whys and wherefores of my worrisome woebegone and weary unwelcome melancholia, my priest has preached to me of our pathways toward purpose, piety, and perfection as ultimately imperfect invalids in the eyes of the Lord.

With the audience, the friends, the family I had found at Ferguson place, I realized that all the merry mentioning of mankind's mighty miracles by my propitious priest was in fact not forlorn unfortunate fallacy, but pure untethered truth! I caught a clear glimpse of veracity in that very real instance of courageous communing.

I began to believe wholehearted then that holy hubristic happenstance looms over we the lowly licentious laymen only to transmogrify us as demonic lookalike leftover lovers of life,... as admonitorial addicts who have through hyper-tragic trails and tribulation taught themselves to be teachers above all else, community leaders or heuristic heroes to the still hungover and high.

And that truth, revealed before me in this breech backward birth of brotherhood between a garishly gruesome ghoul of a boy and his blind-sided brethren, painted my pathway and purpose toward a transmundane telling of my tragedy-turned-triumph testimonials.

Just then, I realized that my definitive purpose in the world, the purpose for which I had all but almost given up an aimless search that defined every waking moment of my yuck of youth and muck of manhood, is to share my story with the world in whichever way I could.

I would for thence onward broad cast the calamity, capitulation and comeuppance of my story through tender telling in any media and any form, so that I might ultimately save others from such sufferance, such mistakes and misery, mindflux and mayhem!!  

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There! Enough garrulous gab from the so-grotesque-he-makes-you-giggle gay boy!! Consider these past paragraphs petty practice and preparation for my sumptuous sophist spoken words of wisdom we'll frame in film for the future.

Back tracking... Besides the telling of my especially serendipitous story of survival to a group of strangers turned family in an instance of wonderful welcome, for what other reason could I reason myself to be rightfully removed from the common clientele of this Recovery House?

Well, unlike most other client/residents, I came to Ferguson Place with much of my mental health and substance abuse treatment already lined up and scheduled. I would have advanced to PHASE TWO directly from ORIENTATION PHASE had I not suffered a severe withdrawal-related anxiety attack and fainting spell by throwing a riotous temper tantrum after only a week in the house.

I was convinced that I would not be accepted by the folks there because of my disfigurement and that none of the residents or staff would ever be able to grapple themselves into an intimate enough understanding of my addiction, my disease and my experience(s).

So, in light of my hospitalization due to mental instability and to my general unease and discomfort with my position in the house, my Primary Counselor decided to extend my ORIENTATION PHASE by four extra days.

This was challenging for me to accept, so I immediately submitted a Grievance Report to the Program Director asking for a new Primary Counselor. The two of them met with me. Speaking very openly, honestly, and with compassion, they told me how much they cared about my success in the program and how much they worried that the instability I exhibited could be endemic of an underlying doubt or insecurity about my sobriety, I was easily convinced that they had made the right decision.

I accommodated, obeyed, followed the rules to a tee the rest of the way and was in the end a model resident, building very strong, intimate relationships with many people there, most importantly with my Primary Counselor and the Program Director.

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As for your question related to the frequency of speakers' visits to Ferguson Place to tell their success stories in sobriety, I'll answer by saying that during my three months as a resident there, I was audience to two alumni speakers. Both individuals had incredible stories to tell. I got to know them well.

Also, exactly three months, one week and two days after having graduated the program, I myself went to Ferguson Place to present the story of how Crystal Meth and HIV/AIDS had literally destroyed my life. I went there to share the story of how I rose like a phoenix from the hot embers of the hearth that resides at the core of this amazing place of transition and have gone on to achieve full and complete reintegration into society, to achieve great success in my sobriety, in my personal and professional life, in my HIV/AIDS and mental health rehabilitation, etc.

To be honest with you (since we are at that point now already in our acquaintance), the ultimate reason I went back to Ferguson Place after I had achieved the minimum six months sobriety to speak there was to reintegrate into the community, to take off my mask(s) for a new audience of would-be could-be friends, and to reclaim my proper place at HOME.

And in fact, the speaking engagement definitely worked in my favor; for a month and a half afterward, I would regularly stop by Ferguson Place for visits without my mask on to interact with the new and old friends I had made there, and BOY!! WAS MY IMPACT ON THESE PEOPLE IMMENSE, OR WHAT!!??

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To sum things up in brief... Ferguson Place should be entirely accommodating to me celebrating my WATCH (i.e., one year anniversary of sobriety) at the house after speaking to the residents there and sharing my amazing story with them. We'd have to get special permission from each individual who might appear in the film as audience members.

If we do this, I would plan on inviting all of my closest friends and providers to bear witness to my achievements and to testify as well to my accomplishments, to join in the celebration as audience members. All I have to do is talk with the Program Director of Ferguson Place who is a very close friend of mine to schedule my speaking engagement for Wednesday July 14, 2010, and I'm sure she'll be excited to support the cause.

One potential snag in the plan could be that Wednesday night's from 6:15 to 7:30 at Ferguson Place, is usually reserved for a mandatory meeting between the Program Coordinators and the Residents.  What's called "Client Council" is a venue in which residents can contend with any psycho-social and interpersonal issues that might be negatively impacting the community.

Also, if there have been any relapses or phase advancements by client/residents during the previous week, time is allotted to process these milestones as a group. But I don't see why we couldn't organize to have guests arrive at around 7:30/45 to proceed well into the evening with my celebration and the filming. I'll definitely talk to the Program Director pronto!!

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WOW!! What a terribly loquacious long-winded rambling about nothing but trifling tedium. I hope you don't mind how I've gotten carried away in this prosaic escapade of unequivocally illusive eloquence and pedantry.

Like I said, consider it all practice and preparation for my spoken-word narrative for the film. Tell me if anything I've written strikes a cord with you, or if it strikes a nerve!! Either way... I need to bridle my "boisterously babbling behemoth of a" brain, and learn to trim up the curvaceous corners of my ultimately square head.

Read in peace and in pleasure... I hope all this typing to which I've so tentatively (or should I say, tenaciously??) tended tonight (and into Thursday morning) treats you tenderly and touches your heart. Be well, and write soon.

Regards,
Matt(e)o | QHereKidSF
Matthew D. Blanchard
San Francisco, CA USA
[MDB2010.06.24@09:59PST]