Every stone a story, like a rosary

I try to see clearly and speak honestly. That's much more complicated than it seems.

I love God and art and landforms. I have a two-year-old's delight in everyday miracles and the gloomy tenacity proper to a fourth-generation Phillies fan or an unsung minor author. Which caused the other, or if they both spring from some ancestral curse, has yet to be determined. Whatever the reason, my loyalties are focused and unswerving, although they can be expanded.

Nine Seventeen years ago I visited the San Francisco Bay Area and knew that this culture, these hills, these people are mine; this is where I belong. I maintain my love and loyalty to my native landscape, but I live here, and I'll stay here, because this is the only place this geeky queer compulsive reader has ever been even close to normal.

Closets give me claustrophobia. Sometimes I bow to economic and social reality and try to censor myself here. Other times I say the hell with it and go back to being open about my life.

I try to label my posts and remember that others might not be comfortable dealing with some of the things I take for granted. But the LJ is mine, your eyes and mind are yours, and we all need to take some responsibility here.


Feel free to respond to even my oldest entries; I have e-mail notification turned on.


Friends can discover one of my pen names here.

Here are 100 things that may surprise you about me.

Some autobiographical notes. Potentially triggering. So is this.

A list of my food allergies, plus useful information on anaphylactic shock.

Wish list.

Take the Amazing Undead Poll!


Oh, and for the curious: the journal's current title and friends-page title are all from the Joan Osborne song "Saint Teresa."






Some Favorite Quotations

It is immoral not to tell. – Camus

It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed. – Albert Einstein

The only way out is the way through. – Howard Nemerov

In dreams begin responsibilities. –Delmore Schwartz

Almost everything conspicuously great is great in defiance, has come into being in defiance of affliction and pain, poverty, destitution, bodily weakness, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstructions. Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.
–Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint.--Jane Austen

macs are love
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My Interests

Note to the Self-Righteous: I am not soliciting for any of these things, except possibly used book stores.