Is the break over?

After over 4 years and 4 Christmas holidays not setting foot in Utah, I went back to Utah to visit this year, and become reacquainted with family and the changes that have taken place with everyone and myself.  That being said, I ended up at Starbucks for at least one day.   I actually like Starbucks, I was just hoping for something of a local flavor.  Fat chance it seemed in the northern suburbs of Salt Lake City.  

Five days in to my trip I still hadn't had any alcohol since the plane ride.  The family party, which was normally on the day after Christmas, had been moved to the following Saturday because my sister's family were still getting over their illness.

I wanted to get some alcohol for the party but I had no idea where these Utah state controlled liquor stores were and I had no GPS.  I ended up calling a friend in New York who talked me through it over the phone only to arrive and find out it didn't open until 11am and I wasn't going to wait around all morning for it to open.  So, I sent a text to my brother-in-law to pick up some Jack Daniel's Honey Whiskey on his way in later that day.  I was hoping for the single serve bottles but found out you couldn't get them in Utah.  So we had a large bottle that he and I drank from.  The other half my dad decided he wanted it, much to my surprise. 

Early in the week my mom and I went driving around the valley looking for a new winter coat as I badly needed one.  We tried REI, Cabalas, A.A. Callister, and I ended up finding some nice winter riding boots.  I had my eye on them for years.  It's hard not to buy tall boots when they are right there in front of me, and they fit.  My mom offered to pay for them but I declined as they were an impulse purchase we were there to buy a coat and we should stick to the plan no matter how much it costs us in the end.  You might get the impressing that I like shopping.  Nope.  I don't.  But having my mom there assisting, made it easier.

But one thing led to another and I realized I couldn't wear my new boots around unless I had some new Levi's to tuck into them.  I packed light this year and only brought basic pants and shirts, nothing more different than what I would normally wear to work.  So we went to look for pants.  I was quite surprised that the 501 button fly ones fit me really damn well, despite my fat thighs and butt and huge belly hanging over my belt. They made my boots look damn good on me.  I wore my new jeans and boots pretty much the entire week. I even wore them home on the plane.

I had hoped that I might get to meet up with some of my furry acquaintances in Utah whom I had gotten to know over Google+.  But they were all too busy with family which is understandable this time of year.  But I did have a chance to meet up with my friend Jen whom I had gotten to know through her blog and the Facebook ex-Mormon groups.  She has horses!  And it turns out that impulse boot purchase paid off as I got to go riding.  Well sort of, the horses were not in the mood, so we relented and let them eat.  But we didn't get off.  We sat on them while they ate.  We showed them. 

I'm so glad we sat there.  The smell, the touch, the movements, of these animals allowed me to dissipate my anxiety.  The anxiety that hit me when I pulled into her driveway.  It's hard for me to meet people I already know in person.  And this one hit me particularly hard and quickly.  In the 90 minute drive it took me to get to her house, I was feeling calm and joyful to be going.  But upon approaching the house and pulling into the driveway, it hit me hard.  I couldn't get out of the car.  All I could do was send a text and let her know I was here.  I'm sure she realized that without the text  but I sent it anyway.  Thankfully she had gotten past her anxiety of meeting me and came out to the car to get me.  And that is what I needed.  I think I had become consumed with the fear of rejection, and when she didn't reject me, I started to feel ok again.  Still, the anxiety still took time to dissipate, and I still found myself pulling back a bit, not really relaxing and letting myself be all there. 

My family hasn't been all that troublesome in my life since coming out.  They may be Mormon, but they take the religion on their own terms, which is what I wish the rest of the Utah Mormons would do.  I even found myself in a conversion with my dad and later with my brother-in-law about BDSM.  I had a brief moment when I felt awkward when my dad asked about MAL and what I did there.  But as with my mom, the conversation was challenging but never got awkward.  The conversation was friendly as I talked about what it meant to me and many people and that for many, its therapy.  Just like my mom, he gets it but doesn't get it at the same time.  Just like how I get why they remain Mormons but I don't get it at the same time.  And just like that, the conversation quickly moves to politics as we commiserate on the pathetic state of Teabagging Republican dumbasses or the embarrassment that is the Utah Governor and the stream of Attorney Generals.  There was little to no mention from anyone about the gay marriage drama happening at the time.  The few mentions were from a random nephew or my dad reading to us joke making fun of the Governor about in City Weekly.  

 Times have changed.  I would never have had the freedom to be who I am twenty years ago.  So it's good to know just how far, not only I've come along, but the rest of my family as well. And in many ways, they had passed me.  I hadn't been aware of it because I had moved out 20 years ago.

My main reasons for avoiding them was their general emotional dysfunction, co-dependency and the triggers from them and of being in Utah.  I needed the space to find and break those triggers.   And now gauging my experience over the week, it seems that many of those triggers have gone, mostly within the last year.   

But, I'm still not so sure that I'll ever move back there.  My last day there I spent the day with my brother-in-law.  We went to one of the local micro breweries in Layton and attempted to order some tasters for the beers they severed.  I sat in stunned silenced as the waiter tells me that I'm restricted to only two 4 oz tasters and then 1 beer per hour after that.  Only two tasters?  One beer per hour?  I wonder if Utah will ever legalize adulthood. 

What's next? Bestiality?

In paraphrase:

SG: "So if gay marriage is legal, what's next?  People are going to want to marry their horse?"
  
OG: "Why in the hell would I marry my horse?  I already own the god damn thing?"

 

Horseback Riding With Myself

I would love to say that my story with horses has come to a wonderful conclusion.  I dearly love them as I love all animals, but I haven't been able to reconcile my past experiences as well as my new found ones.  I still feel at times ignorant and undeserving of the knowledge and still a bit frustrated that I'm not as good of a horsemen that my fellow riders are.  I'm also insanely jealous of them as well.  Most of them are teenagers or younger and have the most uncanny, if I could say, natural ability to communicate with their equine companions that seem so unreal to me.  And the worst thing about all of this, is how out of place I feel as a 40+ salt and pepper hair, gay man, in a class of female teeny boppers, who can ride circles around me and jump fences, all the while I'm just trying to keep my horse from cutting the corners around the arena.

I'm currently not riding right now; I've had to stop in late 2010 because of health problems that have made it unsafe.   Problems with an untreatable, proximal positional vertigo being the main one as well as excessive weight gain, unpredictable heart fibrillations that cause dangerous lightheadedness, and a still as yet undiagnosed muscle atrophy, weakness, and neuropathy,  have made it difficult to make any progress on anything let alone dressage.  I don't really know if my riding days are over or not.  I hope that I can return to normal health.  But I just can't feel confidence in that happening as things seem to continue to slowly decline.  And to make it worse, other than the vertigo and heart issues, the doctors can't seem to find anything medically wrong with me. 

I've really been missing my time just being around those great creatures.  Grooming, hugging, leaning on, sitting on, smelling their sweat, picking their hooves, pulling their tails, giving them treats, whistling little songs to them while they crowd around me out in the paddock,  rubbing them on the brow and behind the ears until they practically fall asleep while their snotty snout is pressed into my stomach.  I've gotten so close to them now that I have gotten the point where I wish I could be one.  It's that way with all the animals I've ever made a connection to.   I see them as innocent, free spirits, always in the moment, with wonderful beauty and pure unconditional love.  Who wouldn't want to be them? 

Not to get too far off subject, as if there ever is a subject on a free-write post, but ever since I was 5 years old, I've spent much of my waking imagination in silent contemplation wondering what it would feel like to actually be one of the many animals that have occupied my waking sub-conscious.  I say 5 years old because that was how old I was when I had my first lucid dream that involved an animal.  It was a tiger. In that dream I also became a tiger and experienced an intimate and spiritually deep connection to the tiger that appeared to me.  I also felt a strong desire to never want to leave that dream and have pondered the experience off and on for decades since.  I don't know why I still remember that dream so vividly 35+ years later, but it was a life changing experience. One in which I don't really know how to explain, and it continues to be meaningful to me now, as well as many other similar experiences that I've had since, both in waking and non-waking dreams and meditations.  And aside from the apparent, if not superficial, similarity to the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes, it was nothing like Calvin & Hobbes, although I really do love that comic.

Only in recent years have I bothered to seriously look into these dreams to find out more about their possible significance and meaning.  And quite surprisingly, I've found many communities for that aspect of my life spanning from Therianopthy, to Native American spiritual traditions to the Furry Fandom.  So at this point, I can honestly claim I'm a furry and oddly enough, I actually couldn't care less about all the stigma and stereotypes associated with furries. They are my people, drama and all.

So what is the point of me saying all of this?  I don't know,
just to get it off my chest I suppose.  I haven't had a pet in my life for over 10 years.  That last one was a female tuxedo cat, who I still really miss.  We had a very special bond, as I've had with all the cats I've ever had.  She was always begging me to hold her up to the lights so that she could get at the moths.   I don't think I've ever gotten over her death.  She was suffering from an Alzheimer's like disease and it totally fucking sucked to see her go through the states of confusion she often went through.  She was only 12.

(1989-2001) picture taken circa 1994

Anyway, I wish I had the strength to just go down to the riding school again, but I also can't shake the feeling of being out of place there as if I don't belong.  It was easy for the most part to forget about that feeling when I could just jump on my horse and trot around the arena as it was just me, the instructor, and the horse.   But when I'm not riding, I become acutely aware of the dozen people there, and I am the only male.  And of course, the troublesome pink elephant in the arena that I wish wasn't there despite the common stereotype that all male dressage riders are gay.  I don't live in a gay friendly part of the country and there is always someone reminding me of that fact.

Some days I really hate my circumstances.  I really resent the shit my life has now.  And quite often I forget that in many other ways I have it really damn good!   It's as if one aspect of my life got amazingly better while others have reached their shelf life and are about to expire.  And it's those expiring parts that I never had the chance to make something of them.  For each day that passes, I find something new to regret.  

But, to avoid making this post a complete downer, I will include this cropped picture of me wearing my riding boots.  I'm on a horse.

Yeah, yeah, I know, toes forward! 

Horseback Riding With My Dad

My older brother affectionately called them Dumbass and Shithead.  Euphemistic terms of endearment I'm sure.  And in many ways, a direct reflection of how our dad thought of us as kids.  But the horses' real names were Stormy and Lancer.  Stormy was whitish in color. Lancer, a much younger sibling to Stormy, was black.  I wasn't a fan of most horse names.  I usually just referred to them as "The Black One" and "The White One" because I couldn't think of anything better.

They were, if I recall correctly, part Arabian and were rather feisty. They weren't the first horses my dad brought home though; the first one was a whitish mare named Lady Mary.  She died of something when she was around 8 years old.   She had only been with us for about a year when she developed some health problems, I thought, at the time it was probably from eating moldy hay, I didn't really know and wouldn't know until just a few months ago when talking to my mom about this story that I found out what really happened.   Lady Mary was pregnant and her uterus had detached.  I can imagine that she had suffering pretty badly.  She was not very old.  Shortly after she died, my dad got Stormy and Lancer.  But they were both sold about a year later so we could relocate to Northern Utah.

Growing up, I never knew much about horses despite the fact we spent a good number of years living in the southern Utah ranching country, where pretty much everyone was some sort of cowboy or ranch hand.  Not us though, we were somewhat city types even though we had never lived in a big city.  A few years before we had horses, when I was about age 9, my dad, on a few occasions, would disappear to help a friend from work setting up things for the local rodeo.  Occasionally my brother and I would go with him but we were too young to help.  I vaguely remember a scary incident with a raging bull that got loose, but I never saw my dad on any horses. 

Most of the time, while dad was off doing whatever it was he did while helping with the rodeo, my brother and I would just play under the arena stands, searching for money that had fallen there during the last rodeo event.  Bonus when we actually found paper money.  But most of the time it was a few dollars in coins, which we would then go spend on candy.  In those days, a few dollars bought a few bags worth.   Dad really didn't pay much attention to where we would run off to.
 
Also, during those early years, I once got to sit on the back of a pony at a birthday party.  I was by myself and the pony was there for riding so I got on jerked the reins and kicked just like what I saw on TV, but he didn't move.  I felt stupid sitting there so I got off.  I felt even more stupid when another kid grabbed the reins from me, got right on and took off, riding around the side of the house as if there was nothing special about it. 

A few years later, we moved to another small town in south-central Utah.  Even though it was a small town, it was in a much larger ranching community.  In the previous town, the primary industry was the saw-mill, here it was farming and ranching.  Many of my school classmates were avid horsemen or horsewomen who would ride in drill or rodeo events. 

I was always made to feel like I should know about many things that I had never seen before growing up.  But no one really offered to teach me anything and oddly, I never feel it was my place to know. Although, I was rather envious that I wasn't given the opportunity to learn about horses or riding other than a token effort to get a Boy Scout merit badge, which I was never able to get because I didn't have a horse or, by the time we got some, I didn't get the support from my parents to get acquainted with them.   But at the same time, I was ok with it, because, again, I didn't think it was my place to know about horses, and also, I was somewhat scared of them anyway.

My older brother once attempted to ride with a friend but was bucked off and bruised up pretty badly.  My dad was always telling us about how they were easy to spook and that you should never stand behind them or they'll kick you and that they could be very dangerous and we should stay away from them!  And yet, I also had been led to believe from somewhere that horses would never purposely step on you.  I have since realized that even though they may not do it on purpose, they will still step on you!
 
We, as city types, didn't seem to fit in here even more than in the past town we lived in.  But, it was here that my dad decided that he wanted a horse.

We all thought at the time that his reason for getting a horse was mainly for show.  But perhaps he wanted something more out of it.  He was much more motivated to do things to keep up with the Jones's, as he was to satisfy some unknown want for something.  But perhaps it was practical.  After all, we had 2.5 acres of alfalfa that had to be cut and baled at least once during the summer.  More if we had actually watered it.    But with a horse, that field was turned into complete dirt in a matter of weeks.  We didn't have to cut and bale that damned hay anymore. The bad news was we had to buy hay.  Lots and lots of it.  I was very allergic to hay as a kid.  VERY!  Eyes swollen shut for days sort of allergic.

We were not equipped to handle horses.  We didn't have shelter for them; we didn't have any way to keep the stored hay from getting moldy.  We had no means to ride them, no halters or lead ropes, no saddles or bridles or even any grooming equipment.  We didn't even know how to ride them even though the first two had been "broken in".  But ultimately, they were just out there as pretty things to watch.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, they were wonderful to watch, but they were also a burden to take care of especially when we had no idea what we were doing. 

We didn't even have a proper fence to keep them from getting out.  The fence we made only had two wires and it was not electrified.  The lowest wire was high enough for a horse to slide under.  All it took was just one little roll in the dirt, in the right place next to the fence, and upon standing again, one of them would find  himself on the other side.  It was fine when only one horse got out because they hated being separated.  They would stay by the fence looking confused by their predicament until someone could help them back over.  It was this little fence trick that prompted my brother to start calling them Dumbass and Shithead.

My dad brought these animals home with no intention of doing anything to take care of them, that all fell on us.  Just like us kids -- brought into the world to be someone else's responsibility.

We were never instructed on what to do about anything.  Mowing the lawn, installing a sprinkling system, driving a car, or taking care of a horse, it didn't matter, we had no idea.  If we asked in any way what we were supposed to do, my dad would invariably say, "The fuck if I know.  Figure it out, I don't care."  Or on rare occasions he would try and be helpful by saying something like, "Just give them a little hay and make sure the thing is full of water."  The "thing" was a large plastic garbage can.

But sometimes, if we did not execute the chores in the exact manner that he was expecting, never mind that we had no idea what he was expecting, we would get a Final Dismissal with him yelling, "What the hell are you doing?  I can tell you've never been around a horse before!" as if we should fee shamed for the truth.  At which point he would do it himself, swearing and screaming at us the entire time about how useless and stupid we were.  

It was like that with everything; just replace 'horse' with any other noun that is applicable to the situation.  And sprinkle in some choice profanities as adjective such as, "I can tell you've never driven a goddamn truck before." or "I can tell you've never installed a fucking sprinkling system before!"  It hurt because it was all true.  I had never done any of those things before.  I was only 13 years old.  You can't expect me to know all this stuff, can you? 

It was a late fall evening when dad decided that it was a good idea to try and saddle up Stormy and take him for a ride.  He had found someone who loaned him a saddle and bridle.  I was curious but scared that he would ask me to put them on thus making me go through the usual routine of disappointing him for being stupid.  I hadn't seen him do any of this before so I wasn't even sure if he knew how to ride the horse.

But apparently, as far as I could tell, he did know how. He slid the bridle bit in Stormy's mouth and mounted that confusing array of leather straps on to his head as if he had always known how it was done.  Once he had him saddled, he got on as if he had always been a rider and rode the horse around in a slow walk for a few hundred feet.  Even my younger sister had gotten to ride the horse as my dad led it around.  I was no longer envious, I was jealous.  This man was holding out on us.  Why wouldn't he teach us anything?  

I wanted to ride, so I went out there and asked. 

"Sure, just hop on."  He said.

Ok, How? I said to myself.  My nose was even with Stormy's shoulder.  I mustered up the courage, realizing the verbal abuse that would erupt if I were to ask, but in this case, I needed to know so I went ahead and asked.  Sure enough, the response used at least one 'fuck' word.  But he did explain which foot to put in the stirrup and where I could grasp to pull myself up.

Sadly, I had very weak upper arm strength, which caused me to struggle while climbing on.  The whole time I was scared I might accidentally kick his hind quarters and spook him.  But the worst thing about it, as I was getting on, was that I was feeling extremely embarrassed, exposed and vulnerable.  Not because someone took a picture of me, which I didn't appreciate, but because here I was on a live animal and I didn't know what I was doing.  And even then, it wasn't so much that I was afraid of the animal, but that I was afraid of doing something wrong that would elicit a verbal and abusive tirade from my dad.

Once I got situated, I sat there, looked around at my surroundings, everything looked different at this height. I looked down at the horse, his ears were focused on me and it felt like he was standing rigid, calm but not relaxed.  I wasn't sure really how to read the horse.  It all could have been more of how I was feeling.  I was definitely tense and unsettled and quickly growing impatient.  

The sun had just set a few minutes earlier; it was getting dark.  I finally asked him, "So, what do I do?"  

"The fuck if I know.  Just ride him, you should know."  He said.

"How do I go?  Or turn?"  I said.

"That's what the reins are for."  He said.

"I know, but how do you use them?" 

"Jesus Christ, I can tell you've never ridden a horse before."

And there it was, the Final Dismissal.

I was done.  Despite how often I would hear him say that, it would still sting every time.  I sat for a few more seconds until I could no longer stand the shame of the moment.  Then I decided that this would never be for me; carefully and clumsily I slid off the horse, walked in the house and never got back on another horse for 27 years.

Winter Beach

I love the ocean beach in the winter time.   The air is crisp, and fresh and not a chain smoker in sight.

The landscape is serene with clear blue skies, endless horizon, birds...

more birds...

my boots...

and a beautiful a Belgium draft horse... 

I could spend all weekend out here...

Which is exactly what I did.

All pictures: January 15-16, 2011: Ocean City, MD