Acquired Deficiency

"After it happened people stopped calling me the golden boy." -- Jude Law

The reason this Savage Garden song strikes a visceral chord, becoming such an end of the century hit, is actually due to the diving baritone of the lead vocal into the refrain, and I weep along with it for the passions and anticipations of unity never to be. Law's argument, as a sugared honey on whom women like to dote, is to put yourself out there, as per Jennifer Tilly's Nina, and perhaps I never made enough of an ass of myself, however many online follies abound. I used to ask ambulatory men out point blank in my just off North Philly campus days, and would not dream of it now, with the obvious poverty of my distressed lower jaw.

Jay Rosen's tweet about Andy's closure, however languishing, of his Daily Dish caught me by surprise. I remember my email to Sullivan about David Foster Wallace, and by that time did not expect a response, but my first email to acclimatized Briton was impassioned, and he sent me a screen shot of the Amtrak building I look at every day, drawing me in to his "view from your window" theme. Then I chucked civility to the wind, and it's too late now, as I gaze back over the hills and vales.

What I haven't seen said, which doesn't mean it hasn't been intimated, is Sullivan is battling a life consuming disease, that his blog has bounced from one media outlet to another, that very few pay money for blogs unless the blogs have a unique signature, and even before I washed my hands of homosexual equality, I saw no reason why I should pay to read Andy's analyses, despite the fact that he works harder for access in his posts than I do, and my reasons for this are economics. I'd source DIA if I had subscribers, but lacking those, I save my armor for articles I might sell, on spec or not.

Still, he is established, referenced by other established opinion writers, and if he is on the shoals, my fatigue and dramatic commode evacuations should portend dire warnings, yet I do not give it up, whatever that is, writing less and less offline, not out of blockage as much as stamina, chasing cat vomit and other forms of waste, I begin to fear my silence as much as the poet columnist Laurel Speer, sharing hers with me in raw draft. More than likely, I will not wrest myself out of poverty before my COPD puts me on oxygen, crossing my fingers that I can rely on a somewhat feckless woman like Karina. She is basically a sweet girl, 35 and in an arrested development, while I whittle away on aggression which my talent constrains. I can't really look on her relative youth as a source of hope for a declining dignity.

Part of the offense I cause, which liberals would ridicule if I had any legitimacy, is a personalized animosity toward homosexuals, since the majority I've known have been evasive and duplicitous, and Andy, arguably, has some of this in his interview responses-- yet there was a time, when David Brooks turned me onto this mercurial gay English Catholic, that I respected Andrew Sullivan, saw my viewpoints in tandem, if not my ruptured faith. He has burnt out from a relatively privileged platform. I've burnt out sinking in quicksand, too maniacal for an alternate route toward port.