basanos is sending me poetry. He's got me wanting him bad. He'll be in NYC on June 22nd and I hope we'll be able to meet up. That, of course, is the day of Folsom Street East. He's making something of a project of reading my blog. That's kind of interesting. I wonder how many people have had the opportunity to read a year's worth of a diary prior to meeting? It makes me nervous. Surely there's got to be a lot that I've written that would elicit a response along the lines of "Whoa--What a freak."

Interesting, also, that I find myself caring a lot. I'm pretty taken with him. He's sending me poems by Rupert Brooke and Wilfrid Owen. (Brooke I don't know so well. Owen I love. He was considered to be the most promising poet of his generation and died in the trenches of World War I.) From his pic, he is a very hot man. He knows who he is. He's someone that I feel I'd be honored to know. And the idea of him wearing my collar fills me with... what exactly? A profound satisfaction. Satisfied that I couldn't do any better. I'd work very hard to be a man he could serve with pride.

Am I a man he could serve with pride? A disconcerting question to ask. Makes me think of the Joan Didion essay, 'On Self-Respect.'

Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards-the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others-who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something people with courage can do without.

At this point in time, my self-respect is a small boat on a stormy sea. On the one hand, I feel myself to be living life with conviction and honesty. On the other hand, the world seems to be not throwing roses at my feet. That can be disheartening at times.

Ah well, if I learned anything from the severus episode, it would have to be that disappointment is indeed a fact of life. But, the thing to do is to persevere regardless, and continue to be open to what might possibly be the outcome.

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