"Oh what an adventure!"

I'm waltzing through a waterfall of recollections, reunions and personal inventory, set to a beautiful soundtrack that doesn't seem to end. The music jumps from iPhone to taxi radio to dance floor to elevator speaker to distant hum down the street to through the neighboring wall, and back to iPhone. Even in the silence it's there. And last night, I dreamed that "Sem Mentiras" by Fabio Goes was playing as I was about to dive off a mountain into the ocean, while wearing a Christian Lacroix suit in the summer sunshine and tears of joy in my eyes. (I woke up as I sailed downward.)

I'm back in São Paulo for the first time in eight months.

Just over halfway through this two week visit and I am already saturated. My senses, my curiosity. Only today, an ordinary Tuesday which happens to be the first day of austral winter, have I had a moment to collect it all. I can say that it is the usual combination of change and sameness here, in the world I used to inhabit. Pasta e Vino on Barão de Capanema closed and looks very starkly empty. Paris 6 on Haddock Lobo has expanded gloriously into the building next door and glimmers and shines late in the evening as ever. The Week has borne The Society, in Baixo Augusta, and the child is lovely - like a ravishing Rubenesque beauty born in a Kentucky village. Traffic is worse, if you can imagine. And the country seems to be hurdling toward some kind of mayhem -- either of the good or bad, or indifferent, sort. But mayhem nonetheless. And it's giddy here, linda poderosa, but still feels small against the world. Still the full-grown elephant chained to the tiny post since birth. Still corrupt and maddeningly bureaucratic. Increasingly expensive. The dollar is the lowest it's ever been with me on this soil. But São Paulo is even more sumptuous today. The amount of beauty on the streets, of many kinds, has swelled, all Brazilian. And the gentle smiles and graceful rebolação are at once ordinary and endlessly delightful.

But that's just the postcard. Deeper inside this visit, there is so much I can't even put my finger on yet.

I've been seeing so many people who are important to me. Claudia, who is perhaps the most significant touchstone in the whole expanse of my life and my oldest friend, is heading quickly for the exit. Not only because her children are now grown, and her career is calling in London, but because she has had a sharp whiff of something in the air and decided to get out, decamping from her perfect apartment on the perfect corner in Jardins and setting off diagonally away.

The meninos are all growing into such wonderful men, each in their own beautiful way. They all have this gloriously lovely look in their eyes that makes me so happy to see and experience. They all have better incomes, cool new gadgets, and a clearer sense of purpose in the chaos of life in this city where they've landed. Even the few that have the whiff of chaos and confusion around them are also giggling about how they're dealing with it, and every one of them is having adorable and thrilling little adventures behind the scenes. And the male friends closer to my own age have all - every single one - found love and contentment of one kind or another, some even within days of my arrival.

The actors and artists in my life here all continue to dream of New York. One has made the leap. The others are carrying the dream around like an identity card in their pockets and it has become a part of their DNA. I connect with it on a primal level, it's a blood relationship. It was me in 1985 and 1986, and it is roaring again in my veins like never before in more than 20 years, the pull of New York, and all it is.

And there, I have located 'me' on the map of the city. Me in the postcard snapshot.

They, the carnally young, yearn deeply, and I yearn still.

And aside the picture is my life as it stands today, the bedrocks of my husband, of Clancy, of my career. All three are stalwart, enduring fixtures that follow me wherever I go in the world, or who take my hand and waltz with me at all the right moments in this widening adventure that is my life. Our life together.

Transiting life in 3-D

It's impressive to me that even at my age, and after all that I've (allegedly) learned from experience, I still have to remind myself: life is complicated, life is not lived in a straight line.

Although, something stirred off in the corner of my eye this time, as I repeated the mantra. Normally, I find myself in this spot when I struggle to reconcile the enormous complexity of life with the normal human desire for a foundation of stability. That struggle will, undoubtedly, continue for some time. But suddenly, I realize that I need to kick my understanding of the entire framework up a notch.

It is far easier to choose a simple path from early on in life. It's simpler to say, from day one, this is who I will be and this is how I will live, and then proceed to never question it. Of course, that is not the life I chose. But even when we embrace the tougher paths, the more winding and exciting paths, we can often insist on retaining a very linear foundation to it all. We can often lose sight of how flat our blueprints are, even for the most adventurous journeys that we chart on them.

For instance, you can be a very adventurous bachelor, someone who jets around the world on a whim and charts his life with an apparent fearless abandon. But invariably, that guy's movable environment is utterly dominated at the same time by his outsized personality: his career, his apartment, his fashion sense and his taste in everything is marked by a rigidly set foundation, broadcasting his identity in high-definition. The man who seems to transit life with such ease is, in turn, grounded in his ego so firmly that he will often fly off the handle if something contradicts or challenges who he thinks he is. He will bulldoze over anything that challenges him to reconsider anything he has defined himself by, as such challenges pose an almost primal threat to his whole operation. He has confected a grounding ego to tether his chaos to, and when you look at the scheme in two dimensions, it looks fabulously creative and enriching. But when you look at it in three dimensions, it is an utterly closed organism, and the bachelor in question has stopped growing as a person. (Curiously, he will also probably never change his style, or his tastes, and in time will look like a human relic.)

I use the bachelor not to make some indirect point about marriage, but I will say that the ego surrender it demands is inherently challenging to the linear blueprint of any life. You can't take a vow to love and support a whole other person, who has his own set of blueprints as he comes to the table, without declaring partial surrender. Nor can he. And right there begins the bonsai of living that grows from it. Something has to struggle against your overpowering ego, or you won't grow.

The key is to make that ''something" a dear thing, a loved thing. Not a straw man to rebel against, not a punching bag.

Here we are.

More than a year later, here we are. And here I am.

The blog stopped dead for a number of reasons, but life, of course, did not. Quite the opposite. The blog hit a wall because in February of last year, life took a very serious turn in a new direction.

All at once, it seems, the ground under me moved. My husband took a new job that would mean eventual relocation to the United States. My business faced new challenges - risks taken didn't pay off, while new opportunities had to be put aside as our move became a certainty. The lease on our classic seven apartment in Jardins ended acrimoniously with the fairly shameless owner, and we had to make a hasty move to a smaller apartment nearby. That led to a two-phase downsizing of our belongings - first to fit into the two bedroom apartment we would camp out in before the move, and then to make our move to New England. In the end, the container full of belongings I waited for in 2007, staring out at an uncertain horizon and clinging to my sense of security and identity in a new home back then, was almost completely dispensed with in São Paulo. I sold off, threw away or simply abandoned nearly all of it, holding onto about 40 books out of more than 200, the clothing I could fit in suitcases and a few boxes, my business records, and one box of keepsakes. The rest, gone.

The move was in October of last year. Then came the New England winter, another set of challenges and uncertainties for me -- rebuilding my business, reconnecting with the country I'd left behind, making new friends in a city I barely knew... All familiar ground now. All part and parcel of this life I have embraced.

And here I am. Life has, like so many times before, rebounded and restarted. My health is good, my business is on a new upswing, and my marriage is on some of the most solid ground it's ever been on.

Indeed, here we are. We have come through this year of tremendous change, of more creative destruction, of risk taking, of faith. In many ways, I feel we are closer than we've ever been. We know each other better than ever, and have come to embrace life's complexities with a greater sense of security within ourselves. And each other.

But most of all, I feel as if I myself have covered more personal ground than ever before. I read the stories of 2007, of my departure from Washington and my long year of adjustment in São Paulo. All of the elements around me that were infused with such emotion, such meaning, such blood of the soul at the time - it all has a sort of quaintness to it now. A tenderness, and a beauty, yes. But also a sort of remoteness. It isn't only that time has distanced me from who I was back then, nor just experience. I see the unsteady man in love, blindly devoting himself to a life grounded at its core in love, and yet I also see how he made that leap with a giant hole inside himself, one he'd been carrying for decades everywhere he went. It was the hole that longed for all that was still familiar -- the furniture, the kitchen wares, the photo albums and shelves and shelves of old books. All the connections to his past, his sense of who he was. It was devotion to love, but on his terms only. Move to Brazil, yes, but only with a house full of American belongings dating as far back as kindergarten, with all the trophies of the last decade of his success as an individual. Devote himself to his husband, yes, but only with an identity rigidly defined by the apex of his life as a single man. Be strong and capable in that new world, yes, but only if everything ran on a set of rules and a timetable from the old world.

In the long and yet still chaotic year that passed, with the undoing of everything in my life besides me, my husband and Clancy, I stood at the railing of my life -- in all its expanse -- and finally saw that hole in its entirety. I saw it from side to side, and looked down into its depth. I shook, I sputtered, I wept. I smiled. I panicked. And I got on the plane, the door was shut, we took off and off I went.

And left behind, somewhere in the clouds maybe, was that hole.

And here we are.

Explaining Beauty: Cadu

What is your favorite word?
Cathedral.

What is your least favorite word?
Wednesday.

What turns you on, excites, or inspires you creatively, spiritually, or emotionally?
Friends, love, money, music. In fact, everything that makes a regular guy happy. Good thoughts of happiness I've felt like recalling a job I had in which we formed small orchestras with poor children and taught them how to play instruments. I remember a mother of a little girl who played violin saying how thankful she was because her daughter played for her father during the Christmas supper at night and he was so emotional he cried. Well, I felt very satisfied that day and cried.

What turns you off?
Lies.

What sound or noise do you love?
The sound of my beloved calling me 'babe'.

What sound or noise do you hate?
The sound of my neighbor cutting his lawn on Saturday mornings.





What is your favorite curse word?
I don't usually say those words.… Especially in English. Hmm..."…Inferno!" (Hell!)

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
You know that answer. I'm running after it.

What profession would you absolutely not like to participate in? Any of those which I'd have to use brute force.

If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?
I was always by your side.

(Cadu is 27 and lives in Riberão Pires, outside of São Paulo.
He is a pharmacist, studying to join the Brazilian foreign service.
He's one of my dearest, most intimate friends in the world.)

[KDI Photos: "Cadu" 2010, Riberão Pires, São Paulo]

The Well of Happiness

Some people are far too academic in their view of the world, in that they look at everything in life through a set of fixed glasses. They see everything from narrow views through "the black experience" or "the female experience" or "the gay experience." Everything in life is explained through a set of literalist basic facts (race or gender or sexuality defines everything in the world). They tend to frustrate the hell out of me, as they are invariably unhappy, restless, tense folks most of the time. No wonder. It's because they're wrong. Just as wrong as the fundamentalist Christians. All of them negate reality, and all of them seem to lose themselves eventually.

I can't figure out why people go down this path. Some of them seem to latch onto these narrow mentalities as a way to explain the overwhelming mysteries of life that can cause us such pain, such suffering. Why am I lonely? Why can't I stay happy in a relationship? Why am I so unlucky? When a consistent model explains everything, and allows them to shift their angst and anger against some perceived outer force of bad, of evil, that is acting against them, then life becomes more bearable day to day. But nothing is really explained. It's just trading one cloud for another, and ultimately it alienates us further from the world as it really is, limiting our opportunities for real happiness, self-awareness, and unlocking those mysteries that bedevil all of us about this life.

The gay experience, as it were, has been the one which has tried to envelope me many times already. I paid my dues in the 1980s with reading all the old books from the modernist era -- Gertrude Stein, Radclyffe Hall, Ian Forster, Oscar Wilde -- and the beats like William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac's Visions of Cody. This almost suffocating idea of homosexuality as something desperate, "inverted,"repressed, on the verge of explosion, more a yearning than something that could be fulfilled, always with dread and horrible reprisal awaiting around the corner. Any beauty that it would have was inevitably intertwined with tragedy or loss, or betrayal. I get pains in my chest just thinking about it. I found the whole exercise unhelpful to my growth as a gay man, until I realized I had to toss them all aside with the knowledge of what I didn't want my modern life to be.

I jumped into all sorts of things, especially politics and pop culture, both of which have yin-yang sensibilities of individuality and conformity at their core. You jump in to express and celebrate your uniqueness, perhaps even defend it -- but you advance only in how you manage to conform that celebration and defense to the zeitgeist. You can become lost in it. Or you can find a way to push the envelope a bit and help change the world and make it better. I experienced both, and feel like I gained a lot from the experience. Lessons on how to stay on track, to never give up, and to always remember who you really are.

This phase that I think I entered around when this blog began, though, was not one I planned or even one I saw coming. I fell in love, and it created a chain of events that unraveled my life completely as it was, and left me to re-ravel it into something totally new. I had no guidebooks, no philosophy, no lessons to draw on sufficiently. But true to form anyway, I jumped in.

As you know from reading this blog, it's been a jumble of many experiences. I think everything that happens, even the worst things, have a positive result in some way. One of the big lessons I've learned from whatever this phase is called is that the only true path to happiness is a path without blinders. It's one where we spend less time getting our back up, and more time letting our guard down. I used to be frustrated and pained by all the challenges thrown at me in the last few years. I'll admit it very candidly -- I was scared. I was embarrassed at how unprepared I was. I felt stupid, out of my league, and that made me occasionally panic. There were some days I was completely out of my mind with fear and sadness at how far I'd traveled from my comfort zone, how irrevocably I'd left it behind.

But alas. This is real life. This is the kind of life you can't blame on racism or sexism, or this-ism or that-ism, or Satan or whoever. This is the life that is entirely your making. How else can I know what I'm capable of unless I really go out there and challenge myself this way, the way I always knew I had to live? And yes, for the first time in my life, I failed. Often. I failed badly. Outside that well-manicured comfort zone of the past, I often stumbled, embarrassed myself, made big, big mistakes, and didn't have the tools to comfort myself, to care for myself, that I had back in the comfort zone. I didn't have the necessary privacy or the enforced solitude: I wasn't single; I wasn't only responsible for myself. And I wasn't in my home country.

Today, though, I am feeling so much more circumspect. It's like the long, crazy train ride through the night, through the mountains, through the desert and through the endless chain of cities has reached its destination and I'm out on the platform, stretching my legs. Looking around. Sitting on a bench and taking out my journal and thinking.

I think of my dog, Clancy. That's his picture at the top. Since he was six months old, he has been entirely dependent on me for his happiness and well-being. I haven't been the perfect caregiver all the time. I travel too much, I ignore him too much during the work day. We bonded so intensely the first three years, though, that there is such a clear emotional understanding between us that I know, regardless of everything, he is happy. I look at him sometimes and he can muster up the happiest face you can imagine just from the simplest activities that we do. Perhaps it takes him back to those early years when we were inseparable, and we played endlessly and he used to follow me around into every room all day and all night. Or maybe it's just this deep, bottomless well of happiness inside him that can be dipped into at the wave of a hand, or the bouncing of a ball.

I don't think it's simply because he's a dog, or that his brain is not complex. It's not just because he's "simple" and therefore unburdened by a conscience of the "awful truths" of the world. I think it's because there is, indeed, a well of happiness in all of us. It's there. Improbably so -- it's even in me. We just don't feel it in us, perhaps because of how deeply it runs. We spend a lot of time in the shallow areas of ourselves, often grasping at momentary highs in those shallow waters, which are never fulfilling, which don't connect us to the bigger world in any lasting way. And which certainly don't explain the mysteries of life which frighten us, or make us sad or cynical. They often just make things even blurrier, and our disappointments more profound. Our actions flakier and less reliable. Alienating. Ultimately we can get lost.

I speak all this from personal experience. I've skipped in those easy, shallow waters many, many times. I spent years wading around in them, confusing idle pleasures with happiness, confusing total fantasies with real goals, self-indulgence with joy. It has shaded everything about me -- my self-image, my sexuality, my career, my friendships, my family relationships, and even my sense of morality. It has created a gigantic, monumental confusion that had to be untangled. I hurt people in the process. I ruined some good things. I hurt myself, too.

But on balance, I also know that I'm not a bad person. In fact, I'm no different than most everyone else in all of these respects. Whether we realize it or not, we all tumble through this experience some way or another. Many resist it with all their might -- they often become cartoon versions of themselves, oblivious to how pathetic they've become. Others don't survive the experience, and either fall into some sad pattern of living that never untangles their confusion, or they simply end it all.

I'm in the other category. Whatever that turns out to be. The people that get off the train at its destination, stretch their legs and walk into town. And if I have a pang of fear, I just think of Clancy's happy face. I think of my own, from all those many times when I felt those deep, warm waters of fulfillment and peace so many times in the past -- on the top of a mountain, or on a plane, in an old town square, on a dance floor or in the arms of a beloved on a lazy morning, looking into his eyes, and, without any words, seeing deeply into them that there was no end, no bottom, and knowing he was seeing the same in mine.