Inside My Skull

Me in 2000.

 

To write about the past is not as easy as opening your head and spilling it out onto the screen. If only it was that easy then I could write much faster. 

 

One of the techniques I use to remember the past is immersive. I visit places from that time, listen to music from then, watch videos if I have them, look at photos, read my journals or hold objects from the  time. Those actions are an attempt to reconstruct what it felt like in my life  and to coax out memories that may have been misplaced. Since my next novel is set in the second half of the 1990s and the early 2000s I still  have clothes from that period that did not end up in one those charity bins in a shopping center parking lot. Luckily the clothes still fit and I have put them on.

The year 2000 was a big year for me with many changes. I had come into my own, was successful, confident and was having a lot of fun. I was into trip hop, trance and jazz since rock music was going a direction that little interested my tastes. I was exposed to trip hop by a guy I dated in late 1999 that was Mr. Hip Designer, living-in-a-loft guy. It was a brief relationship, but it changed me for the better. I cannot listen to the sensual downtempo music of Massive Attack, Portishead, Alpha or Hooverphonic and not think of him. He left his fingerprints inside my skull.

A copy I still have of an XY Magazine from 2000.

I was rummaging through the bookcases in my office and came across this magazine. I remember buying it at a Borders bookstore near where I lived. I had grown up a magazine reader and in the early 2000s I often went to bookstores rifle through the magazine rack and read. Even a simple magazine from twenty-three years ago had memories attached to it that had little to do with what was printed on its pages.

 

To look at this XY Magazine from November 2000 is for me to remember how much I loved the television show Queer As Folk. I added Showtime to my Direct TV package just to watch and I cared little about television. The show debuted that December, but there was much buzz about it in gay circles beforehand about just how gay and sexy it was going to be. It turned out to be just as advertised and in those first couple of seasons I never missed an episode or taped it on the VCR if I could not watch it when it was scheduled.

Looking at this magazine also reminds me of a guy I met that fall and the deep red accent wall of my master bedroom. I remember him holding this very magazine in bed next to me after sex and asking who the guy on the cover was as he pointed at Justin played by Randy Harrison.
 

"He's hot. Who is this," he asked.

I agreed and explained that he had grown up in metro Atlanta and some of his family still lived here.

The guy I was in bed with was twenty-one, a twink, from the small Georgia town of Jefferson. I had aged out of my twink years and was twenty-seven. He was attractive, good in bed and a fling that lasted a few weeks. Our getting together was never meant to be anything more than temporary fun. I was on to the next guy and he probably was too.

I did write about this guy in the first draft of the next book, but whether he will make it through the further drafts remains to be seen. There are so many stories that could be told in every life, but never will and that is one of the more difficult parts of writing, knowing what to cut. A good memory does not always make for an entertaining one or one that fits within a larger story that is being told.

To the Jefferson twink, I still remember your name and if you are out there and you find this, I hope you are doing well.

It might not be trip hop, but that year I loved Macy Gray's I Try.