I went out tonight to meet Toshio and June to hang out for a little while and talk music for our upcoming gig in May. They weren't meeting until 11:30 which is something I have spent so long hating - not STARTING the night until so late - and I'm slowly getting better at adapting to it. So I went out, and I stopped at the 24 hour Kinko's to make copies of the flyers for Trivia Night, which I am so grossly behind on putting up.

This is the SECOND time I have gone to the "24 hour" Kinko's only to find it closed. They seem to have cut back their hours in the face of the economic disaster. It would be nice if the website reflected this. So I was already pissed off when I was on my way to the bar.

I got there and the night itself at the bar was rather fun. Good company, good convo, nice eye candy. I left around 1:30 and knew I needed to make a late night grocery run, which in this town is fucking IMPOSSIBLE.

So I went down into the subway - Broad Street Line, basically *THE* main line in town - and waited until 2:50 for a train. I finally went upstairs and looked desperately for any indication of human life or a poster showing hours, and I finally found one tiny brochure folded out and taped up that indicated that during late night hours you had to take a special "Night Owl" bus instead of the train.

If this is the case, why is there even fucking access to the train platforms to begin with? Why don't they just lock the shit down for the night?

Then when I got on the bus 20 minutes later, a COP CAR swerves in front of it and stops it. He gets on and gets into a screaming match with the bus driver. Apparently some girl got off the bus a few stops back and complained about some incident with another passenger, I dont' know the details, but this cop was RAGING with violence. Which he turned on us, the passengers, because naturally some of them were upset with the whole incident.

I know we're supposed to appreciate cops because they put their life on the line to protect us, but why is it that EVERY encounter I have *EVER* had with a cop involved the cop acting like an ignorant, violent piece of human shit? EXPLAIN TO ME.

When all was said and done, I didn't get home until almost 4AM.

Stay classy, Philadelphia...

I've spent so many years not really have any friends that I do things with, that now, as I get mentally healthy and start getting out of the house, I just get exhausted so easily. So yesterday morning at 5AM when my friend Kristin, who lives an hour away in Jersey, said she wanted to drive into town for practically the sole purpose of getting a cake from a bakery she saw on TV, I was excited as hell - but immediately exhausted by proxy.

She and her husband Kevin came into town around noon, and about ten minutes before they got here I finally got through to the bakery they wanted to visit only to discover they are closed for a week. Nice.

We managed to find another bakery, The Pink Rose, wherein we gorged ourselves on an eclair and a Macaroon that were each the size of a hat. Which we washed down with cheesesteaks. After that I was in a coma, but we made our way over to The Mutter Museum, which is basically just a bunch of rooms full of diseased body parts and fetuses in jars. ;) Very informative, but taxing on my fragile brain. Which is NOT in a jar.

Yet.

By that time it was after 5 and I felt like I had just finished a 2 hour aerobics class, so they dropped me off at home. It was SO much fun but it made me feel SO fucking old.

So thanks to Kristin and Kevin for a lovely afternoon on the town. Excuse me now, I have to go take my blood pressure...

 

..

Cops...ish...Suck





..

I
was watching some TV show a week or 2 ago about this guy who runs
around with a camera and verbally just lays into cops who break the
law. His primary focus is cops who park wherever the hell they want to
get their job done. Obviously not in situations of emergency, but just
like traffic cops who park in a no parking zone so they can get out and
issue tickets.

So today I was waiting for the bus and this City
Municipal car rolls on up and parks in the no parking zone next to the
bus stop sign. The guy gets out and, apparently this is his job (how
depressing,) he starts issuing tickets on the front doors of people on
that block who have trash or debris on the curb.

So I just got
kind of pissed off. Not because of his pathetic job or how idiotic it
is to think that because there is trash in front of someone's row house
you can automatically prove that they were the source of the trash. No,
I was pissed because he parked right in front of my bus stop, and now I
had to walk out partially into traffic in order to wait for the bus and
flag it down.

So I decided to take some pictures of his law breaking.

So tonight we performed at this big show called BhuddaFest in Phildelphia. It's a showcase put together by the owner of a small music shop/recording studio that we have used a few times to record stuff. The guy who runs it doesn't charge much for decent services, so it has always worked out, and the last time we recorded with him he mentioned they had a late slot open at the show. We agreed to perform from 11:30-12:30, the second to last act of the night.

It was at the Tritone which is a deecnt venue in terms of name-power. People in the area mostly know where it is, and although they are more well known for a punk/hard rock vibe, I figured our guy knew what he was doing.

As time came closer to the gig I was looking over the line-up of artists performing and it was a really weird mix. There was one chick who did somewhat comical piano-vocal numbers, there was a white reggae singer, there was a metal band, a country band, rappers - it seemed all over the place. But I just figured "Whatever, he's just giving slots to whomever wants them, fostering a musical community, so it's weird but it's cool."

Then a few days before the gig I noticed that on the official web page our gig time had been shortened from 11:30-12. I was kind of pissed, so I gave the guy a call to find out WTF? His wife explained that he had been sick and it was probably an eff up, and that we would definitely have a full hour.

Then this morning Aaron asked me if there was a cover. I said no, and I said no because: A - the show website didn't mention a cover, B - The Tritone website didn't mention a cover, and C - the guy running the show didn't say there would be a cover.

Aaron said he would be very surprised if there was no cover, so I made some calls, and sure enough, it turns out that they were charging $3.00 at the door. In addition to that, I spoke to the wife again, and she said that all of that money was going to them, not to the artists. Her explaination was that they were providing the equipment and had organized the whole thing.

I got pissed the fuck off. First, the idea that because you are the organizer of an event means you should get to keep all of the money made at the event is super horrendously awful. No band/performer worth any salt would agree to such an arrangement unless somehow that performance offered them some other kind of major benefit like exposure or networking. Secondly, they hid that information from us. Look at it this way: they had 10-ish acts performing. If each one brought 10 people, then the guy who ran the show made $300.

In any other situation I would have bailed but since it was only six hours until the show when I found this out I just bit the bullet and we performed. Of course everything continued to be a disaster from there. We went on an hour late, and there was a series of incredibly shitty hip/hop/rap performers that went before us, and they literally cleared out the bar. It went from being full to being almost empty in the time between when we arrived and when we actually went on. And then the act that was supposed to go on AFTER us bailed, so that meant that we didn't have the benefit of another act's people coming in while we were on and enjoying our set.

So that meant we performed to just the people we already knew who came to see us (thanks Aaron, Jimi, Steve, Jason and Ben!) plus a few random other people. It just bummed me out because I really thought we would have a nice house to play to, and I'm so sick of playing to empty fucking venues. I hate it.

I hate it because we're so GOOD. Everyone knows we're good. People who *DO* hang out at our shows randomly always end up freaked out because they hadn't intended to pay attention, but they DO pay attention because it becomes so quickly evident that we're GOOD.

So anyway - I won't be doing business with this guy's recording studio anymore, mostly because of the money thing. And it was another great performance to a 10 people and a bunch of empty chairs.

The last few days have been a real eye opener for me, as well as an emotional rollercoaster. I am in a very difficult emotional place right now and I guess I should be glad for anti-depressants.

When I met my partner Aaron around 2 1/2 years ago, I had no intention of getting into a relationship. I had moved from New York City to Philadelphia shortly after "Can't Get a Date" started airing. I had less than $2000 in my pocket, a few boxes full of possessions - but a lot of baggage. I was not proud of the life I was living, and I was burdened down by mistakes of the past. My income was, for all practical points and purposes, as a prostitute.

Aaron and I disagree on how we met: I say on a website, he says at a bar. Regardless, we went on a date, and talked for several hours about ourselves. It was a decent date, but speaking strictly on my end of the date, my primary interest was getting laid. During our date I learned that Aaron was a recovering heroin addict and HIV+. This didn't bother me because A: condoms, and B: I was only interested in getting laid. so his baggage didn't effect me.

The next morning I really just wanted Aaron to go away and to get on with my life, but he really wanted to hang out. I made up several excuses to get away from him, something about a meeting downtown, but he wanted to take the bus up into town with me, hang around and meet afterwards. Ultimately I literally ditched him at the bus stop because he went into a store to get a drink, and then I ignored his cell phone calls.

Great beginning, right?

I honestly don't know how or why Aaron and I saw each other again, but we did, and the relationship became intense and serious very quickly. I was living in a room I had rented in a group house, and he was living in a house that had, for all practical points and purposes, been abandoned by some friends who moved away. He was supposed to be paying them a few hundred dollars to live there, but he wasn't really doing it.

Aaron got a call that one of the two guys wanted to sell the house and have him move out ASAP, so Aaron moved in with me in my tiny room. It was a mutually parasitic arrangement, because he needed somewhere to live, and I was behind on my rent. Aaron probably could have found another place fairly quickly, but (as I would later find out) he was too fucked up to really be that organized.

What would unfold over the next year was the truth of Aaron's situation: that he was not a RECOVERING addict, but in fact an actively using addict who had spent his entire adult life addicted to hard core drugs, and also weed. There would be lying, hiding, cheating and ongoing struggle as our relationship quickly turned into a full-on process of trying to get Aaron off of drugs. This lasted for over a year and a half, until finally in December 2007 Aaron went into rehab.

I am glad to say Aaron has been sober for over a year now.

In the meantime, I completely neglected myself and based all of my emotions and self-worth around making Aaron happy and getting Aaron healthy. That was my choice, but it was also my fuck-up. I think part of me felt like if I could help Aaron get better, I would be absolved for mistakes from my past. Over the last year, as Aaron recovered and got healthy, I got worse. All of my neurosis exploded - depression, anxiety, agoraphobia - I just wanted to sit at home and sleep all day.

One of the things that disappeared very early in our relationship was sex. In point of fact we very rarely had any actual sex, and all the times we had any kind of sex, Aaron was high. I couldn't even tell you at this point if we are sexually compatable. I have been very understanding of this; Aaron has not had sex while sober for a long time, and sex is very scary and confusing for him. But in the meantime, I have not had sex with my boyfriend for over a year and a half.

Somewhere along the way our therapist said that I should be able to have sex with other people as a "band-aid" on the relationship. Generally speaking I found that very hard to do, and to date I have only hooked up with 3 other people (five times total) in that 1 1/2 year long period. Of those 3 people I've only enjoyed 2 of them... But as our relationship has deteriorated, the idea of sleeping with other people has gotten more appealing and easier to consider.

The last six months have been really hard. As Aaron gets healthier, he starts considering the direction he wants his life to take. He thinks about what he hasn't done, what he wants to do, and what he screwed up and wants to fix. He is attending school and making spare income from walking dogs. (Our primary source of income for the last year has been from either diability or unemployment pay coming from Aaron, which makes him the breadwinner...in theory.)

Meanwhile as Aaron gets his life together, he has less time and energy to work on our relationship, which was already struggling. For the past few months I have felt less and less appreciated, to the point where I began feeling like he would rather not have me around. I spent so much time beating myself up, thinking that it was me who is the problem: I'm not doing things right, or I'm doing things in such a way as to make his life more difficult.

A few weeks ago, Aaron and I had a small argument/conversation. Aaron expressed some things to me that he isn't happy with. It's hard to get him to do this because he usually tends to bottle things up and then spew them all out at once, angrily. He said I was constantly complaining, among other things, and for the first time I really listened to him. I felt more objective than I ever had before, like I was really able to sort through what was a real issue for me, and what was his issues disguised as something he thought was my issue. I began to take stock, and for 2 weeks I have worked to improve those areas.

Then, about a week ago, I met a boy. He was a boy from another place, and he was in town. When I met this boy I fell into instant lust, but I put him into that category of "men who are just this incredibly combination of everything I long for but will never find, and if they do happen to cross my path, I could never have." But it turned out the attraction was mututal, and we ended up meeting for drinks.

We talked for hours, and it just felt...great. I felt like he was interested in me, and enjoying my company. I felt appreciated, and I felt desired. It was a feeling I haven't felt in so long, I didn't know what to do with myself. We ended up sleeping together, and I almost spent the night (except he had the most horrible snore!) The next morning he texted me, wanting to know if we could hang out; it was his last day in town, and it really meant a lot to me that he wanted to spend time together. It meant that he actually liked my company.

I texted him back an excuse saying my day was already full. I did this because I didn't want to spend more time with someone who was leaving that night for another place; someone I felt more for than I should considering the circumstances; someone I felt an attachment to that wasn't as real as my feelings made it out to be.

So boy-from-another-land went back home, and I spent 24 hours in euphoria. I fantasized what it would be like if his life wasn't his life, and my life wasn't my life; the alternate universe where we lived together happily ever after. But then I started thinking about how he made me feel, and how Aaron doesn't make me feel GOOD about myself or my life.

See, the way I see it, life is a fucking pain. It isn't always, and it doesn't have to be, but one of the things that makes life better is the people we bring into our lives. There are couples out there with 4 kids living in an efficiency, bringing in $1000 a month, and working 2 jobs each, and they still find a way to be happy with each other.

So I talked to Aaron tonight. I told him how unwanted I have felt, and how unhappy I have been. I needed to know if he really, truly wants to be in this relationship. And unfortunately I feel no better off now than I did before, other than that I've actually orated how I feel. Aaron isn't very good at expressing himself. He doesn't like to talk. He says that's just the way he is, but I think that the truth is talking means he can't avoid what's going on...

He said that school and life in general has been so stressful, and he has often felt for months now that our relationship is sort of the "one thing too many" to have to deal with. That he doesn't want to break up, but sometimes he thinks it would be eaiser on him if we did.

The problem is, with all of our talking, Aaron can't tell me what it is that he thinks will make things better; or what it is that will change the way he feels. I think that *HE* thinks that if the money situation were better...or if he had more free time...or this, or that, or whatever...then everything else would fall into place and get better, too.

That ain't it, kid.

The truth is that if you want something to work, you prioritize it. If you want something to get better, you figure out what isn't great, and you work to make it great. You can't just let the egg rest in the corner; if you want it to hatch, you have to sit on the fucker.

So I don't know where we are now. We both agreed that we don't want to break up, but only one of us seems to be able to vocalize exactly what his specific issues are and what he would like to do to work on them.

I am so sad and feeling so scared and lonely, because I have no idea what to do next. And that, my friends, is where I'm at.

Why the fuck does my blog identify me as a female Capricorn, and how do I fix it?!

"The Love That You Had"

The love that you had in your heart has gone away
Any touch of sincerity, any trace of compassion
What hardened your heart?
What turned it to stone?
What made you forget that you were in love with someone?

Hands don't reach out, voice doesn't call on me
I know you stopped listening; it rises straight through me
When nights are like this
I'd rather be alone
Who said you could forget that you were in love with someone?

Tell me, what hardened your heart?
Tell me, what turned it to stone?
Tell me, what made you forget you were in love with someone?

Was I wrong to forgive your indiscretions?
Should I have been more hysterical, less understanding?
If you're looking for a villain
I'll assume the role
Don't say that it's my fault that you're not in love with someone.

Tell me, what hardened your heart?
Tell me, what turned it to stone?
Tell me, what made you forget you were in love with someone?
Tell me there's somebody in your life
I'll fight to keep you for my own
Tell me, 'cause I really want to know why you can't be in love with someone...

---------------------------
"That Guy"


skin jets blasting at full speed
best bet's on a healthy retreat
he'll get you revving like a jewel theif
but is it worth breaking up the real thing

'cause i don't wanna fly unless i'm over the controls
and i don't wanna buy something that I can never hold
no i could never break apart a pair that didn't fold
so many reasons why
i could never be that guy

Logo's The Big Gay Sketch Show is having an online competition to allow any old folks to audition for the show! Being an alum of LOGO TV, you'd think I have an edge, but us queers are fickle, right? So take a minute and go vote for me:

http://biggaycasting.com/people/JamesBradford

You may have to sign up on LOGO to vote, and if you do, I don't care - do it! :P I mean I'm already like 700 votes behind the #1 person, so this is gonna be some hard work...that being said, I may just very well put out for everyone that votes for me...so, you know...something to think about.

xoxoxo
JB

When I was filming "Can't Get a Date" they set up a whole segment at a bar where I sat down with four members of the bear community to talk about being accepted and chubby chasing and those scenes and all that they entail. It was a really miserable moment because though I like bears individually - as a concept and also in reality - I'm not a big fan of the community. I won't go on a rant, but there's too much hypocrisy and discrimination considering they're a sub-culture created to embrace and accept men who didn't fit in...

As far as the chubby chasing thing goes, there are two sides to that. In terms of purely sexual hook-ups, it doesn't bother me, because hooking-up is all about raw sexual attraction anyway. Whether it's blonde hair that you like, or a beard, or big tits, or fat guys, sexual stimulation is driven by physicality.

But when it comes to the idea of romance or having an actual relationship with a chubby chaser, it's something that kind of bothers me. The thing is, if someone is fixated on a specific part of your physicality, it's a very superficial bond. And people who have hard core fetishes like chubby chasing are not prone to letting it go. Which is to say, if someone falls in love with me, I need to know that I could make a physical change - such as losing weight - and they would still want to be with me. As weird as it my sound  to those who don't understand, you have to think of it like some dude who dumps his girlfriend because she gets fat, only backwards...

A lot of it is probably my own insecurities and unhappiness about my own body, but that doesn't negate the truth in what I'm saying.

Tonight while Toshio and I were out there was this incredibly muscular dude, way hot, who was hitting on me hard core. Lots of touching, rubbing, the whole nine yards. And he was commenting on how hot he thinks my belly is. That doesn't bother me; I live in this shell, for now, maybe forever, but definitely for right now, and if someone is hot and bothered by it...yay me.

But he was saying things that were irritating. Things that were meant to be complimentary but to my ears sounded all fucked up and bad. Like "It's so hot that you're so comfortable with your body." Which went through the crazy straw of low self esteem and into my ears as "Fat people are so disgusting generally speaking, but I think fat guys are hot, and it's great that you don't let it get to you how much people think you're hideous."

Of course as is often the case with chubby chasers, his fetish ran much deeper and this became obvious as the flirting continued. He's a feeder - literally someone who is turned on by feeding his fat partner tons of food to make the partner get bigger and bigger and bigger. And he's a belly worshiper, which literally means that he is sexually stimulated by a big round belly. Like, he wants to fuck big bellies. Seriously.

The bottom line is that my weight is a flaw, and for someone to think of it as a positive is unnerving. It's one thing if someone thinks my size is hot and they want to have sex with me, but if they go on and on about HOW HOT the fatness is, I feel ashamed and the guilt sets in and I just don't want to hear it. I wonder...if I was a muscular stud type, would I reject compliments the same way? Maybe I'm so insecure that any and all praise of my looks will set me off...

You figure it out.