Venial Sin

About a million words, somewhere in the realm of ten thousand comments, four years, seventeen billion crying jags, thirty-eight distinct dramatic moments, a dozen-odd close new friends, twenty-nine “you said WHAT about me?” confrontations, a hundred and some rethinks, eleven panicky e-mails to support staff to undo changes, four botched backup attempts, six thousand agonised (and agonising) phone calls to some very patient friends, innumerable IM conversations, and just about as many telephone calls. Not to mention the week spent feeling phantom pain from closing this down.

We’re done here people.

But I may just get bored one day and come back on. Until then though, I don’t really have much else to say.

See you.

My hosting and domain name contract expire in about a week or two, and right now, I’m thinking of simply shutting down the blog. Votes aside, a number of things have contributed to this, and I’ve been struggling with the idea for the last year or so.

I don’t know if any of that conflict reflected in the blog itself, I’m too close to home as far as this issue goes to really address it with any accuracy, but there’s been a growing sense of disenchantment and other such fun experiences, and all of them basically lead me down the same garden-path: this blog should just come to an end. Protestations aside, that makes me really fucking sad. Four years is a pretty long time; it’s certainly longer than I’ve held any one job, and giving up Venial Sin is going to be a little bit like amputating a limb (if you’ll forgive the melodrama).

But at the risk of stretching the analogy just a wee bit too far, when something reaches a point at which it’s septic, you cut it off. I’m done with people presuming to know/judge/criticise me on the basis of this little portion of my life, I’m tired of actually thinking that I have to base what I write on what I assume people will think, and I’m really not happy with how strangers or acquaintances take what I’ve written–and without a shred of decency–spread it to the known universe, thereby leaving me stranded with awkward moments (an example would be back when someone who knew the Guy from back in January of this year went up to him and babbled on about how I’d been writing all about him–even more embarrassing if the person isn’t actually the object of my affection, but you get the drift–and the only plausible way for that to have happened would be through this site).

Like I said in the post before this one, I’m not going to stop writing. I am going to write something different, and what that different something is, I haven’t a clue yet. Maybe it’ll be my first attempts at a novel, or a collection of short stories, or just more “blog” stuff, I haven’t got the foggiest. I may well wind up spending hours on end composing passages about Ellen, her damn’ dog and Benazir Bhutto, that remains to be seen. But I think I would like to perhaps start writing that long-elusive novel, and see how it comes along.

This is probably pretty self-defeating, but I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have met a number of wonderful people via this site (there are more, but I’ve run out of words through which to link ‘em), both in real-life and “online” (which is pretty real in any case now), so for those of you who would like, drop me an e-mail at {sin} a.t. [venialsin]{.}com and I’ll most likely be happy to provide you with the link to the new site. This is probably not the most effective way to drop out of sight, but at the very least it’ll ensure that–to begin with–only the people I really want to, have access to what I do/say/feel.

I’ve dithered on long enough (I’ve been trying to write this for about a month so far). It’s been an…experience, certainly.

So yeah.

Bye.

I realised something a few nights ago when talking to a friend who bounces between continents the way most people commute to work.

I don’t much like blogging any more.

It’s not the comments (a lot of the hate-filled ones I delete anyway, because I’m just tired of getting into flame-wars with random prats), or that I’m looking for some sort of affirmation (“Oh do keep blogging, don’t ever stop!”). It’s that I’m not doing it for the same reasons that I originally began, which weren’t all too clear to begin with, and only got more complicated over time.

You’ve got to acknowledge you have an issue when your Technorati score is a prime mover of how your day is going to unfold (i.e. with a good attitude or a terrible one).
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That was when all the fun began. I realised about halfway through my dirty (dirty, dirty!) martini that I hadn’t arranged for a ride to the airport, and wound up calling the hotel to sort me out with a limo for the next afternoon.

“I’ll take you to the airport,” whispered Hopkins wistfully, eyes tearing up.

“You don’t have to do that,” I muttered into my drink, trying to avoid eye-contact for fear of outright sobbing taking place. “The company will pay for me to go back, it’s not a big deal.”

“No,” he said, gulping loudly, lips trembling. “It’ll be the last chance I have to see you, and…”

My phone beeped. It was Heartbreak, sending me a text. I’m at a concert with some friends. How are you and [Hopkins]?

Tae took one look at my face, at Hopkins’ woebegone expression, and immediately added another half-litre of vodka to my pitcher of (at this point far beyond dirty and well into utterly filthy) martinis. And at the same time, thereby earning himself yet another enormous tip, he surreptitiously filled the rest of Hopkins’ glass with a small mountain of ice-cubes. The latter, busily engaged in trying to restrain his heaving sobs, ignored the dilution of his drink entirely, opting instead to try and press my hand (with cigarette precariously held) in an effort to express his entirely justified inconsolable grief at my impending departure.
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So, while I work on finishing up the Bangkok story, from all of…good grief, two months ago now, there have been a number of other little things going on that I’ve been meaning to write about and never actually got around to. There were a couple of trips to Lahore, including a very strange one in which an acquaintance was convinced I was someone else on IRC, and another one in which a complete stranger asked me if I’d like him to “suck [my] dick” with about the same degree of casual interest as one would use when talking about the weather.

Ah, Lahore. If it weren’t for the fact that my office-car driver is exceptionally good-looking, I don’t really know what I’d look forward to there.
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By the time we made it to my room, past the members of the Super Junior Stalker Club and a couple of wary security people who alternated between glaring at me and just avoiding eye contact, Heartbreak definitely seemed to be fading fast. Either that or he just enjoyed stumbling and ricochetting off the corridor walls. Opening the door to my room was a little tricky, since he’d overcome his shyness of making physical contact in a public space (a non-gay public space, that is), and was pretty much draped over my shoulder. Fortunately for me, he turned out to be a lot leaner than he looked in his Gaydar pictures, and wasn’t that hard to support, even if he did have a tendency to sort of droop/fold over my shoulder.
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Dear Madeleine L’Engle,

You will be missed. For many reasons, but I think the best one is that you used to say things like this:

“Why does anybody tell a story?” Ms. L’Engle once asked, even though she knew the answer.

“It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

I still get tingles up and down my spine when I read A Swiftly Tilting Planet, even though I don’t necessarily subscribe to her faith. There’s just something wonderful about that adapted prayer:

In this fateful hour,
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness:
All these I place,
By God’s almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness

Bye.

It was at two in the morning, while Hopkins was asleep (and snoring lightly), that my cell phone started shuddering across the bed-side table. Trying to slide my arm out from under him so that I could reach across to the phone, I tunnelled and twisted my way through the bedsheets (the hotel bed was enormous, I could have had an orgy with sumo wrestlers on that thing and had enough room for a barbecue to be held on one side). When I clicked on the “new message” button, convinced that my friends in Karachi had lost all sense of time-zones and were going to be pestering me with odd messages, I was a little taken aback to discover a message from someone heretofore known as Heartbreak (can we see where this is going?).
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This article in The New Yorker is perhaps one of the single most disgusting, disturbing things I have ever read. At the end of the nine pages, I would cheerfully watch each and every one of the people involved in this travesty of human behaviour suffer. A lot.

And people wonder why there’s so much rage against the current U.S. administration. Perhaps because they seem to consider that they are–in some way, shape or form–inherently absolved from adhering to policies that were they to be on the receiving end of, would cause all sorts of screams of moral outrage. I really do wish sometimes–and this would be one of those moments–that my American friends weren’t American. It wouldn’t be so hard for me to reconcile what their country has turned into with the wonderful people I know them to be.

I just don’t understand the logic involved in giving me a double-promotion and knocking six years off my career-path but STILL waiting the remaining month of my probation period before making me permanent. Am I missing some essential logic here?