A Sunny Day

It's a new year and many months since I last posted. Sorry blog. I've ignored you.

I have so much that i've been meaning to say, I just don't seem to have the time to say it. Well. OK. So I have the time, I just haven't got around to it. I've settled into a routine. And the blog just doesn't seem to fit in.

I tend to get settled. Very easily. It seems to be the way that I operate. I am nothing if not consistent. Well. OK. Boring. It's not that I ever set out to be boring. It just sort of happened. I hate change. I hate when things change. I hate that things must change. I always accept the change. But I hope that it never changes again.

Life is nothing but change. Yet here I sit hoping that it won't. We are only four days into the new year and already things are changing all around me. Things that i have no control over. And things that I wish would go back to the way they were.

I've lived in this building for 11 years now. And virtually every night for the last 11 years the security guard, Sunny, has been sitting at the concierge desk welcoming me home. We were never close—whatever that means—but every night for 11 years we talked about the weather. I liked it. Oh sure, some nights I wished that he wasn't there so that i didn't have to make small talk about the weather but really, I liked that we talked about the weather. Every night. Day in. Day out. For 11 years. We talked about the weather. Sometimes we talked about other things. But mostly we talked about the weather. It was comfortable. It was predictable. It was safe. it was my routine. I'd leave work and the first person that I would talk to (and usually the last person I talked to for the day) was Sunny. He rarely took a day off. He was there almost every day of the year.

"Beautiful day today wasn't it."

"Hope it doesn't snow."

"Glad i brought my umbrella today."

Virtually every day, for 11 years.

Then a couple of weeks ago there were a couple of break-ins in the building. Then his shift got moved to 11:00 p.m. Then last night I got a notice that a new security company has been hired. Then it hit me: I could quite probably never again see him. My nightly ritual for 11 years was broken. I don't know if he was fired. i don't know if he quit. I don't know if he is still working. I simply don't know. All I know for certain is that when I walk through the front door of the building after work, I no longer have someone to talk to.

In the grand scheme of things this is not a big deal. But to me. To me it feels like the rug has been pulled out from under me.

I am sad. I am angry. I am distraught. My routine is broken. Some consistency in my life was taken away from me. i liked Sunny, he was one of the nice ones. I miss him. And what I'll miss most of all is having someone to talk to about the weather.

"Cold today, isn't it."

One In A Million

On Pride weekend Sunday, the big day, my friends were out of town so I spent it with myself.

There were over one million people there and me. I wandered around. Saw the sights. I saw the parade. I saw some performances. I saw groups of people. I saw couples. I saw myself… alone.

I kept pondering how a person could feel so utterly alone in a crowd of over a million people. I could not come up with an answer.

It made me depressed.

I thought about how I find it relatively easy to meet good people on Twitter. How I can meet very nice people through work and yet how I find it very difficult meeting people "in real life". Or to put it more precisely I find it very difficult  to meet and to connect to people in real life.

To me, in real life, people are complicated. Relationships are complicated. I have never been very good at social interaction. I had one friend in grade school and only a handful in high school. And I felt I was never very good at it.

Today I have a very small circle of friends. And for them I am very grateful. But the whole meeting new people and getting to know them is downright complicated to me. I can run circles around a computer but put me in a room full of strangers and I'll sit in the corner of the room wondering why I'm sitting in the corner of the room.

Yes the answer is obvious. Get out of the corner and talk to people. But it fills me with such fear I am utterly incapable of doing it.

So there I was in a crowd of one million people… alone.

I got more depressed.

I started to look around. I started to look at the people. I started to look for people like me. I started looking for men. Gay men. Mid-forties looking gay men. Average build mid-forties aged gay men. The kind of man I would date. And I hardly saw any.

Now I'm not saying you can't be friends with people who aren't like you but if I was looking for someone who I could easily relate to I was not seeing them. My friends, both in real life and online, fit a certain demographic. And I was simply not seeing very many of them in this crowd. Where were they?

I theorized that many were "over" Pride and stayed home or went to the cottage or went anywhere but Pride. And then I thought about all of the people my age that died in the late 80s and 90s. People like me that didn't make it out of the century alive.

I went from being depressed to sad. To grateful. To happy. To sad. To depressed. And finally to bed.

Today, Monday, I sit with myself beside a quiet river. Just me. Not another person in sight. I am grateful to be here. I am grateful for life. And, surprisingly, I am not lonely.

Life is weird.

Before/After Animated

Below is an animated gif of the previous photos.  Why?

1. because I wanted to figure out how to do it in Photoshop (easy).
2. because, come on, an animated gif of oneself. Who doesn't want an animated gif of oneself?
3. because animated gifs are cool.
4. because I was really bored. 
5. because all of the hip kids are creating them. (They are still called "hip kids", right?) 
6. to show that animated gifs can be something other than cats or porn. 
7. because only one of these is an actual reason. OK maybe two.  Well…

Old Tom and New Tom, in animated gif format. Circa 2013. Gifs are cool.

Before/After

Still weird. Still getting used to it. Still don't recognize myself.

Presenting two photos a before and an after photo—an ever so subtle difference. Same glasses. Different angle.

The facial hair before the razoring.

The face post razoring.