"What do you want to do to me?"

                                                                    

Some years ago, I happened to be

in a late evening gathering in a

public accommodation in the city

 of my longest residence, San Fran-

 cisco, when this question was dir-

 ected to me for, as it happened, 

                    the only time in my life.

                    It is not, in my hearing,

                    a question which levers a

                    verbal answer. And yet as

                    I heard it, my interloc-

                    utor's entire autobiogra-

                    phy seemed to tumble from

                    his whispering lips, to a

                    devastatingly despairing

                    effect - greatly contrary,

                    I certainly knew, to his

                    intent.

If this was, however, a singular
occurrence, the only occasion in
which an anomie of pervasive in-
cipience in an unliberated sub-
class articulated itself in dis-
tilled dependency to me, one did
still hear in its utterance an
edge of universal right of refus-
al. Detecting light years of dis-
tance between the questioner and
myself, I pressed a praising kiss
upon an arresting temple and let
go the delicate chain that des-
cended the silken length of his 
spine, only to be haunted by that 
nascent relationship in the rise
of Mitt Romney as a boy at Cran-
brook School - a place, I have to
add, where friends of mine have
been educated and would have de-
tested the conduct he now dismis-
ses as out of date: Do you wanna
cut my hair, Mitt, darling? is
the natural echo of the leather-
ite's inquiry to me, of so many
years and class distinctions ago.

This entry is a comment based on experience with Romneyism from the inside of homophobia and from the inside of buying low and selling dear - witty cheating, if you like, for unfair advantage. I have not lived so long to deny, now, that they are the same thing: a grab for exalta-tion inspired by anger and masked as a tour de force of wit. If anyone within hearing of Romney's merry cry of foul for dredging up an adolescent gang-bang against a classmate's head, is prepared to accept his claim of a lack of malice in the spree, he lacks the competence to cast a ballot.

Now Romney, running as the Biff Batman of the Invisible Hand, for the Party known for the most phobic abhorrence of risk since Sherman fumigated Atlanta, is actually Up There, ladies and gentlemen, in the costume of a wealth generator. It's a part he's implored the gods to lend to him since he led that sordid attack on his own fellow's manhood, littering the ground with five boys along the desperate path he's followed of making something known that he does not embody, himself. And this culture will buy that act, before it will endure the long, tepid lethargies of a reformer who refuses to offend. Mitt has claimed the mantle of the jock in this election.

But I stray. The underlying question, What do you want to do to me, is one our nature always tends to circumscribe with limits of acceptable means and effect. On this page's seasonal hiatus, the fallacy of that sweet assumption has hit home, once again, with the devastation with which I first heard the question. It is possible to do very good things to one, to no acceptable effect. Some 75 days ago, I underwent a surgery which finds me now savaged with pain and sleeplessness, to the extent that I cannot condone continuing this page without confiding the extremity of the strain upon the voice I wish it to present.

If it were not illegit-imate, I would repeal almost every entry posted in the last 30 days as flatly unrepresentative of that intention. I have decided, rather, to allow this page, probably the most worthy project in the long run, that I have undertaken since brushing teeth, to track the present arc as best it can, rather than to pop up at some unpredictable time, without context of its progress. Better to be a late arrival, than to arrive unknown.

We know very well (and if we do not, there will be a quiz in 2 seconds) that General Grant underwent a great deal more travail than you or I are likely to know, in the creation of memoirs of honest distinction without so much as a whisper, which was more than he could manage, of complaint. I think it's proper to fail such tests instantly, to head vanity off at the pass. But this is a journal, not a memoir, and it cannot be postponed without destroying itself. Therefore, sleeplessness, muddle, and pain count, and the toll they take on felicity they reimburse with revelation. This is a journal of love, and they may test if it can handle such things. It is now, that Mitt Romney is most 'roused to cut hair: when we are running on trust.

vii  Jeremy Young