Eric Forbes

[The following is an email I just sent to Governor Schwarzenegger regarding the passage of Harvey Milk Day in California. I wonder if he will read it? Namaste.]

Dear Governor Schwarzenegger,

I am an openly gay small business owner and resident of California. I moved to California in 1996 from Baltimore, Maryland in order to start a new career and gain new experiences in San Francisco after visiting it only weeks earlier. I literally “left my heart in San Francisco” and gave my notice at work, sold my new car, gave up my apartment without much deliberation. It didn’t matter that I had limited resources at the time: about $2,000 in the bank, $20,000 in credit card debt, and no job prospects lined up before I moved.

What lead me to San Francisco and California was a feeling. A feeling that I could finally be myself in a place where other like-minded men and women lived openly and with respect for one another. As a gay boy growing up in Baltimore, I didn’t have any role models besides those I saw portrayed stereotypically on television. I saw plenty of “gay people” acting effeminately in what was the only acceptable way at the time. I never heard of “successful” gay people. I never heard of “happy” gay people. It was an unspoken rule in our German-American household to never utter anything about gays. They might as well not exist at all, except that I was one of them.

Living in shadows wasn’t easy for me but I was fortunate to have some support from my teachers at school and managers at work. The support I received came late and the stories of others like me came intermittently if at all. I managed to make it work. But having known about someone “like me” at an early age would have been helpful and much healthier.

If I had learned about the life of Harvey Milk growing up as a young man, I would have felt a resonance to his life story. It would have given me a lifeline of sorts to hold on to in the midst of the name calling and derision I received for being “different.” I’m sure learning about the life of one particular openly gay political figure wouldn’t be of much significance to most people, but it would have sent a clear signal to me. Someone who lived his life openly, who lived it courageously, and who did what he felt was right in spite of what others said or did to bring him down.

Governor, please sign Harvey Milk Day into law this time. Please consider the impact that this day will have on a vital yet silent minority of Californians young and old who are still fighting for equal rights today.

On another note: I commend you for your support and excitement about the many solar energy initiatives taking place in our State. I am most excited about the Ausra site in Bakersfield and San Luis Obisbo. The application of concentrated solar collection to produce steam directly from the sun is pure genius. I’m glad you’re behind it!

Thank you for all you do.

Respectfully,

=Eric Forbes
San Rafael, California

I learned to write when I was a child. I scrawled the alphabet on yellow paper lined in faint blue ink, and I was proud of how clearly I learned to write. I never learned to type. I went straight to the computer lab instead without taking a typing class thinking that no one would be using typewriters in a few years (and I was right) and yet I missed the concept of touch typing as it related to the computer keyboard. How silly! I get by using my own system but it’s not optimal. I make lots of mistakes and have to go back to correct them. This is my process. While still happy with my penmanship, I stumble each time I begin to type. I have to slow down my thoughts to keep up with my manual technique. Doing this has some advantages (self-editing) but I am sure some words, some real gems get lost in the gap between thinking and typing. I’m OK with that.

If I wanted to be a comedian, how would I start?

Could I just start writing things that came to mind, funny things, stories about my life, some true, some completely fanciful, and see what people think? I’m pretty sure that being a good comedian requires other humans to see your work and laugh out loud. To be suddenly gripped by an emotion they weren’t expecting and to just go there with the laughter, the shock, the tears, the relief when it’s over. But I’m analyzing it now, am I not? I’m trying to figure it out so that I can feel confident that I’m doing it RIGHT. There is something behind this need I have and I’d like to change it.

Getting Everything RIGHT has its attraction, no doubt. But when I spend as much time and mental energy towards the goal of doing something correctly before allowing myself to do it, where does that lead me? With a head full of long thoughts and staccato ideas that don’t make sense. They don’t SING. They analyze. They tear things down to see the process. They open the back and watch the gears turn but never go any further than that. I think the answer lies in my CONFIDENCE. I’m going to begin with that and see where it takes me.

If I had more CONFIDENCE., what kind of person would I be?

If I had more CONFIDENCE, what kind of musician would I be?

If I had more CONFIDENCE, what kind of inventor would I be?

Good questions, these be. Now how to answer them.

when fear comes into love
love doesn’t always prevail
no matter what you’ve heard
or read in books: I’m here to tell you.
love is one thing and fear is quite another

I thought that fear was an absence of love
that with enough love and enough time
fear would dissipate
that love would prevail
but I was wrong
it doesn’t always work out that way

fear gets stronger instead of weaker
fear gets bolder instead of quieter
it gets more established
it sets up boundaries
it speaks its mind and stays that way

I’ve had a lot of time experiencing it
I’ve had a lot of time exploring it
I’ve run from it, acted in spite of it,
and written so many words

in every case, fear is nothing
more or less
than not knowing

it’s an imagined horror leading to pain
that rarely comes to pass
harvesting precious attention
from the here and now
knowing what’s best

it cares for us
it knows us better
it wants us to be happy
reciting its lyrics
singing its song

fear, go fuck yourself!

FUCK OFF, FEAR! You hear me?
Leave me alone. Let me figure out my life without you and let’s see how that goes. I have a feeling that with enough time without you I’ll grow to become the man I’ve always dreamed of: confident, reliable, honest and true. Without you, I’ll be all those things and more. And you’ll fail to be present in my life anymore. You’ll be relegated to the world of memories, pasted into my scrapbook of fears, stored in the attic. Or why not burned right at once while I watch the words on the page burst into transformative flames?

You know, this idea of fear has really got me thinking. Maybe it’s a good thing that you can’t commit to me as your partner, your boyfriend, your man. Maybe this experience of being with you has lots of good aspects. Nothing really went wrong. When someone asks me “what happened to you two?” I’ll have a prepared statement ready for the occasion:

We had a difference of opinion about how we wanted to spend our lives together. What started out as soul-mates, turned into brothers, and became closer still. Then I asked ‘what are we?’ and the same answer came up: ‘not boyfriends.’ That seemed weird, since in my mind and heart, he was my #1 man in all the ways you could measure it and yet he didn’t feel the same way about me. So instead of hoping he would change in another 2 years time, I decided to get some space and find a man who wants to be fully present with me.

Fully present. Where did that come from? It might be the key to who I’m looking for. In order to be interesting to me now (vs. 2 years ago), he will be at least semi-enlightened and able to bitch-slap his fear of commitment and intimacy. His past affairs and relationships will have been just that: past-tense. His current reality will be a summation of his life experiences tempered by his powerful sense of presence in the here-and-now. How do I know this? Because I’m excited as I write this! I’m becoming more present. He will be present too. Fear will be what we used to imbibe before we knew better. Fear will be the stories we used to tell ourselves before we realized they were nothing more than ideas posing as facts. Yes. Indeed. Life is full of uncertainty and yet to fear the unknown is one of many responses one can take.

The Way of Fear

Live in fear. Worry about the past and what you did and what was done to you. Expect the same kinds of pain to happen again. Hang on to the totems of your life and worship them for the pleasure they gave you back then. Carve your memories into their infallible substance. Let your mind fill in and elaborate the details, providing for a rich multimedia experience inside your head. Let the matters of the day of this moment fall to the shoulder of the road, out of sight, unimportant. Convince yourself that avoiding the little things that present themselves to you each day is the best tack to take.

The Way of Now

I’m here. I’m here/now. Time still matters to me. It’s just not everything I think about all of the time. When it tries to dominate, I exhale my stale breath and take another while I hear myself doing it.

I exhale then I inhale deeply while paying attention to that. I can’t do it for more than a few minutes, but I never used to do it at all. With this new practice, I can see fear more clearly and it’s not all that bad.

At no time should fear enter love and win. Yet sometimes, in our case, it did. When one of the lovers moves on though, then what happens? An energetic shift occurs and what happens next is anyone’s guess. I’m anteing up, count me in. I want to see what materializes next! =E

You say you’re my brother and that makes me feel special and part of your family. A great thing, a word I hold higher than most other labels to describe love. We spend our days and nights together. We shop for food and cook meals together. I do the laundry and you plant the garden. We talk a lot about life and each other’s dreams, hopes and fears. We have sex. And yet, that closeness of brothers coupled with the kind of sex we have along with our intimate infallible interest in each other makes me think I’m more than just your brother. I’m your lover. I’m your man. Anyone watching would speak in similar terms to describe us if they saw us. Everyone that is but you.

It strikes me as nothing more or less than fear to keep me at a distance yet so close. What other things go on in your head that are hidden from view? As much as I thought I knew about you, there are things I cannot understand. Even after some time spending a large portion of our lives together. You keep me at a distance. Tell me you don’t want a boyfriend. That if you did, it would be me, but that… for whatever reason, it’s just not in the cards. The timing’s bad. It doesn’t feel right to you.

How can I feel so close to you, so devoted and protective of you and watch your mouth udder words that are so far off-script they might as well be from another play? I hear myself speaking, I see my arms and legs moving, I feel my heart beating. All of these things I do with you and yet you must be missing something to come away with anything less than I’ve been giving.

How can I feel so committed, so clearly knowing it’s you and yet not be good enough? I guess that’s how things happen sometimes. That’s the way the game of love goes. It’s never easy and I’m not asking for that. I’m asking for a man to explore the rest of my life with. Someone I can look to, share with, laugh and cry with. A man who will learn all of my faults and fears and still hold me the highest regard: his. And as romantic as this must sound, I’m not ashamed of a single word of it. What is there to be afraid of? Living boldly in the ephemeral moment with your heart as the knowing guide or rehashing the past ad-infinitum so that it becomes who you were and who you’ll be today.

Replay the past or live here in this moment?

Obviously, I thought that time might have softened your aversion towards commitment, but I was wrong. Given enough time, many things change. Rocks crumble and become sand to the seas given enough time. But I can’t wait that long. I have stood by you in quasi-boyfriend mode for a while now. I have wondered what to call us for almost 2 years, and the words “brother” and “friend” don’t fully describe what we are to each other. So what happens next?

What to do with you, not-my-boyfriend?

I guess I’ll get some space and take a new trajectory towards someone else. I’ll find myself lost in a world of heterosexual homogeneity. I’ll endure the coming rainy season without you laying next to me. The world will be a worse place without us together. I’m taking us off the map, erasing all memories of the town without a name, and moving on. To where? I’m not sure. But your answer has been simple to decipher and I’ve been blissfully ignoring it. I’ve been happily ignoring the fact that we’re not seeing this relationship from the same set of eyes — how could we? And instead of learning something new, I’m instead acting in new ways towards something I’ve always known:

You’re not my boyfriend. I get it. At last!

The weather in Marin County California is pretty predictable. A few months of darker days and moisture (sometimes) with 9 months or so of spectacular blue skies tainted at times with wisps of fog or streaky crystalline white clouds. But lately, the weather has begun the Beguine waltzing frantically between moderate temperatures in the 70′s to days of 95 – 100°F temperatures and not the slightest hint of a breeze to cool things off in the shade.

What’s up with that?

Is global warming affecting the later Summer weather here too? Maybe. The cause of the this week’s sudden rise in temperature throughout the Bay Area has to do with an area of high-pressure forming above us which tends to keep things just as they are. No winds to move the air around during the day. Just the heat of the sun baking the earth all around town and sending the mercury rising until nightfall. Even then, it takes a few hours for things to cool down like they should. It’s a high-pressure ridge. And it’s great if you like really hot days sans a breeze. I can deal with the heat as long as I have to. What other choice do I have? I think about how much I love air conditioning on days like these.

Except, I really like the idea of freshly-moving air circulating through my house. As it stands, no one here has central air conditioning since the temperatures are usually at most moderately warm never Palm Springs incandescent. To keep things cool, I close the windows and doors before 10 AM and watch the temperature rise outside while the interior stays much cooler.

Where is this leading? I’m not sure. It’s just been awhile since I wrote a damned thing on my blog, and sometimes when I start writing, neat things come out that I wasn’t expecting. Could it be happening right now?

curious thing about the weather
with supercomputer models debating
the course of the winds and moisture
one still can’t be sure why things
happen as they do

I’d like to think it’s random
but it’s really chaotic
tending to do one thing more often
than something else
but when and for how long?
that’s anyone’s guess

curious thing about the weather
sometimes it just rains without warning
moisture comes from afar and drops itself
in rivulets against the sun-baked soil
unwelcome, unprepared for such a gift
parched clay pushes the water aside
refuses to absorb it even a little
for if it did
it might as well admit
it missed it all along

unexpected rain
showers came with thunder and lightning
an awesome spectacle rarely seen in these parts

droplets of water fell from the sky
moistened the air upon its descent
pebbled the sun-baked soil
like some kind of brutal punishment
an unwelcome change so quick
the water just slipped over the surface
never making it in between the cracks

not yet
not quite yet
in a few months
the kiln-baked clay will be ready
for heaven-sent moisture
darker days
a time to reflect and renew