Thursday, July 29, 12:55 p.m.

My favorite moments now are when I feel like Marion's weird little boy. Those qualities of the first 10 years of my life - the nine yards of imagination, the seizures of empathy for misfortune - are probably my strongest and my best.

The rest is shit.

Thursday, July 22, 9:15 a.m.

Tears and melancholy are just prettier, store-front versions of fear. Fear of separation and loss, fear that our mature lives have lost the people and pleasures that gave them any meaning. Nous avons été abandonnés!

This sensation is my signature as an artist.

Tuesday, July 20, 5:06 p.m.

You'll never be missed as much as you are by a child. Or by an adult who tends to be childish. In both, the mind and heart are still linked.

Wednesday, July 14, 8:56 a.m.

The main business of life, after you've dressed and your teeth are brushed, is to hide your actual feelings.

Monday, July 12, 4:41 p.m.

Like blood, just beneath the surface of me lie hours of hard, intense crying . I haven't wept all that I need to. A few drinks pierce the skin that restrains this grief. I unfold alongside the sink, my shoulders shaking into a tea towel. Gary never sees this.

Life made me sad. The beautiful faces and sweet-smelling sheets. People threw me away, but I continue to worship them, remember them. Their scented oils and sunglasses. Not only my mother. Everyone.

I carry it all forward. It's worthless.

Friday, July 9, 5:35 p.m.

A technical glitch prevented me from editing this website for months (all through June at least). How I have missed this little black diary! Sadly, a couple of really good things that belonged in here have been lost (to Twitter, I believe ... I can't be myself on Facebook).

Isn't it odd I can't write what I really feel in "public" ... within hearing of my friends?

Saturday, May 22, 12:03 a.m.

The worst fate is to play your life out to an empty house. No one came, no one heard your lines.

To press on knowing this ... takes a little bravery.

Thursday, May 13, 7:15 p.m.

A few drinks, and I can smell my mother's shoes as she kicked them off in the hall after her long work day. I see a few strands of hair across my first lover's face, kissing her on the college green - hating it! My short life flattens like a map, sagging into my lap like a worn, funky-smelling quilt. The warmth and familiarity, as it always does at this hour, floods and burns in my eye sockets. My life, my memories, are mine.

I pull the blanket up across my shoulders, again.

Tuesday, May 11, 8:47 a.m.

The longer I live, the more I become convinced there are two realities: what really happened, and what is perceived to have happened. Paul Child was an interesting man, a multifaceted artist, who essentially created "Julia Child" from out of the frustrated American socialite he married.

He died forgotten - cheated by the story-tellers.

Sunday, May 9, 11:33 a.m.

I'm afraid the truth is - my mother was not a very good parent at all. Yet I have written poems, essays, and created videos that analyse and celebrate her life. I wonder if I could simply be "cured" of it, this posthumous devotion to a parent who was at best ambivalent about me? She was so selfish and cold.

I miss her terribly!

Tuesday, May 4, 1:28 p.m.

I love sex! I like eating, and standing in the backyard with the full summer sun on my head. I crave the smell of my dog, and my heart flips inside my chest when I get an email from someone I adore - and there are several I adore.

But when it comes to art, if it doesn't make me cry - I don't waste my time.

Thursday, April 29, 11:23 a.m.

You can have the classes and groups and magazine articles. I'll take the paintings.

Wednesday, April 28, 5:05 a.m.

Nothing comes as slowly as dawn. It's a soul-crushing couple of hours, waiting for it, and invariably the mind busies itself with ultimatims: No more unguarded chatter to friends, no more drinking, no more bitchy remarks or skipping exercise.

Thankfully the sun rises. Nothing changes.

Sunday, April 25, 12:28 p.m.

When I'm working this hard, I have a mantra, which goes something like "You don't need recognition in order to be good."

I myself don't always buy it. Sometimes I think, look, if you were really worth anything people would be all over your ass. God I hope that's not true.

Thursday, April 22, 11:37 a.m.

As a child, swimming pools and grand pianos were my idea of glamour. I think they still are.

Wednesday, April 14, 11:58 a.m.

Only two or three times in adulthood have I felt hatred, or ill will - something stronger than just dismissal - from another person. Each time, oddly my first thought is to restore my health and take better care of myself. For to become sick and die hated by someone is a disgrace. In the presence of friendship and love, I can reveal my weakness, my poor health and melancholia ... my self-destructiveness.

It strikes me that this is the rule among dogs: Don't let them see you when you're down.

Thursday, April 8, 5:55 p.m.

Last year I was discovered. I'm still getting a few of the emails. But ... will I be able to make it alone, after my admirers have taken their brittle leave, offering a provision of good wishes, stale cookies on a plate? Can I tough it out?

It sure was fun. It felt like a drug.

Thursday, April 1, 11:02 p.m.

I never know whether to idolize or distrust those who fall asleep rapidly, forgetting the nighttime flat on their backs, awakening early and eager to begin life and work again. Those who are not easily moved to tears, who are moderate in their pleasures and overzealous in their work, impress me as steady and strong and deep as the quiet part of a river. They read widely and retain the knowledge - but they never write.

Tuesday, March 30, 12:38 p.m.

The chief characteristic of being older than 45 is that you sense the little loving boost you always got from other people, undetectable, under or behind you, is suddenly absent. Bemoan this fact, and you crowd a stage no longer your own.

Sunday, March 28, 12:54 p.m.

I want people to know everything about me except how much I eat, how much I drink, and how often I cry.

Monday, March 22, 9:10 a.m.

The rules change for every person. Trust me, it's all "personal."

Wednesday, March 10, 10:26 a.m.

Half the time I think, "I have to stop being so bad." The other half of the time I think "No, I need to be even worse than I am." I like Baudelaire. Now there's a guy who wasn't afraid to be himself.

Tuesday, March 9, 9:19 a.m.

Everything hits me right in the balls. But I'm powerless to change any prevailing status within my life. The only comfort is enjoying who I am: taking my sentences out for a walk, composing pictures with my eyes ... my mother's good taste, whispering into my ear from out of a fog of hairspray.

I had almost all the qualifications to live an extraordinary life; instead I pour my gifts out onto the ground unobserved - a camper emptying his coffee cup into the bushes with a single thoughtless gesture.

I am a well-kept secret. I am a lonely person.

Wednesday, March 3, 12:12 p.m.

Where do I see hope in life? It's not in marriage. You won't find it in your job or your relationship with your parents. It's in the small stuff that happens in the middle of an ordinary day. It's a crisp apple or an unexpected, early evening break in the clouds. Look for happiness not in a break from your life, but in the idiosyncratic thick of it.

Wednesday, February 24, 12:08 p.m.

Those who might be called "average" people tend to be annoyed by me, or feel sorry for me, or distrust me, or find me mildly ridiculous. This has been by far the bulk of my experience of others.

What's so incongruous is that some truly above-average people have felt empathy for me, have been amused and gratified by my sense of humor, and have felt the works by my hand showed great merit.

I'm never sure whether to be happy or sad about this. Mostly, I'm happy about it.

Saturday, February 20, 2:27 p.m.

My strongest connection to childhood is that almost everything I do still has to be kept secret.

Saturday, February 20, 2:18 p.m.

It's not surprising that alienated, unsuccessful people are attracted to cultural heros, the famous. Especially today, when the Internet puts their stories and pictures at your fingertips. And although it's sad that I may think myself Joan Crawford or Hart Crane, it does get me through the day.

I am responsible for living out my days. It takes a full tank of inspiration and fantasy.

Wednesday, February 17, 12:36 p.m.

Aging is a process of exchanging some of the ambitious desire to be "right" for a greater loyalty to yourself, even if it turns out you were sometimes dead wrong.

Friday, February 12, 6:36 a.m.

The individual is what is precious and beautiful in life. The more you cherish those memories no one else has, the more you grieve a loss that is only yours to grieve, the closer you come to understanding why we live, and, possibly, what sort of god might exist, if one does exist.

I am selfish, foolish, and unkind. But the story of my life is my treasure.

Friday, February 12, 6:07 a.m.

I wake up before dawn now. I kind of like it. It's not that I win the battle with my subconscious, but just getting up and making coffee seems to silence the frightening voices.

My heroine as a child was an octogenarian aunt who always rose at dawn, or just before. At 11 years old, I would set an old heavy "Big Ben" alarm clock for 6:00 so I could be up with her. Her narrow, ancient face would collapse in a surprised smile for me, and she would bring her knotty index finger to her lips to indicate silence. This code of behavior, this Quaker-like time together, thrilled me. Together, silently, we prepared oatmeal. The sun climbed through the kitchen door like car headlights.

I am obsessed with wondering what will be my last mental picture, the last memory I have before death. This one is high up in the queue.

Friday, February 12, 5:42 a.m.

I can't stand news, current events, trends. Yet I felt I wanted to know why this young designer, Alexander McQueen, killed himself. I didn't know a thing about it.

So, at age 40, gay man is devastated by death of mother and hangs himself? Do I have that right?

Sunday, February 7, 7:01 a.m.

On June 25, 2002, alone in her apartment, sitting at her table, I wrote my mother's eulogy. The next day I read it to the small group huddled beneath the sun like a black baseball team.

Since then, in everything I do, I've been writing my own.

Friday, February 5, 5:21 a.m.

I seem to be entering a period when even the novelty of my observations and poetic reflections doesn't amount to much.

I'm sure there are people who pack every breath, right up to the last one, with "life," but there are those for whom the motivation quits well before the last act. I'm bored.

Oh, is everything I have experienced simply to be chalked up as "depression"? Talk about dismissing richness ... flattening out a box full of words and sensations and tears. Don't throw it out! There's something inside!

No, I guess I've always been unwell, and the worst when I was very young ... in college. It's not true of me now, but it was then: I was desolate. Imagine being that young, that full of sex and life ... and feeling desolate! But I can remember it, I can feel it (what it felt like) even now. Panic. I think it arose from living among too many others. I do best alone, with just one other (unlucky!) soul as a sounding board.

What will I do when he's gone?

Thursday, February 4, 12:15 a.m.

To be a great artist you have to be really, really, really motivated. That usually translates into either ambition or suffering.

Friday, January 29, 11:20 a.m.

At 27, there was the illusion that my life, my body, belonged to me ... that my ideas, my enthusiasm for fedoras and Cecil Beaton's Garbo - my stylistic independence - would drive my fate. My superiority would keep me from becoming one of the casualties I so often observed during family holidays, or waiting for a bus.

At 50, I observe the results of my own hatred, and my neglect. The car is turning, accelerating, on its own. I might as well punch in the lighter, tap my cigarette on the dashboard, and stare out the window.

Thursday, January 21, 9:38 a.m.

I started my long essay about my mother by deciding to write it like a business letter (for which I am prized by my employer).

My aesthetic could be described as an alert, formal subjectivity. A kind of elegant restraint that masquerades the purely emotional motivation (I have no other motivation). Yet, I can't imagine the opposite would be very pretty: an overwhelmingly (and genuinely) logical personality trying to burst forth into poetry. But hell, anything's possible.

Wednesday, January 20, 6:02 a.m.

The majority of the work in my own life is constantly trying to calm down, so I can do my job, or go to sleep, or swallow food. At some point, this seems to be tantamount to seeking anesthesia. Perhaps it's just slowing down to enjoy the scenery, but it could also be trying to drug or distract myself long enough to - calmly, decorously - finish my life and die.

Quickly: What separates us from cattle?

Wednesday, January 20, 5:04 a.m.

A little worried; I've cut myself off from the harbor a bit too much. And the irony is I need other people more than most. I guess it comes down to need and anger. Usually my anger is stronger.

Monday, January 11, 6:53 a.m.

I have buried myself in temporal inconsequentiality. I've accepted the indifference of others as the truest assessment of my worth. What I think, what I want, isn't even important to me. In fact, I don't even know what they are.

I regret abandoning my mother, but I've abandoned myself in just the same way. I wonder who it is, or was, I did ever value. I can't recall that, either.

Sunday, January 10, 11:26 p.m.

Judy Garland had a special way of singing the word goodbye in her songs. Listen to the film voiceover of "The Man That Got Away" and her last appearance on the Johnny Carson show, in which she sang "After the Holidays." Like the pimiento in a cocktail olive, she stuffed just enough hopefulness within the hopelessness of it.

It's worth the study of a lifetime.

Wednesday, January 6, 11:09 p.m.

I seem to get the farthest by openly breaking my heart in front of people. By simply telling things as they actually happened, and letting my obsessive, nervous sadness, my undisguised yearning for understanding, come through.

Our life as we lived it, what happened to us and how jittery and unsure it made us, seems to contain both the material with which we can be ridiculed as well as our justification - our only glory.

Tuesday, January 5, 4:51 p.m.

Just beyond a few glasses of wine, there's a place of sadness and beauty I could exist in for good. A sunset that lasts forever.

~ ~ ~

Our mistake is in thinking this adult life is anything different from high school. If you think of your friends as either the goody-two-shoes straining to answer each of the teacher's questions, or the potheads blowing spitballs from the back of the room, it's incredibly clarifying. It still fits.

For what it's worth, I miss the potheads.