*

The general ambience of my life now is stress, and it's tainted so much of the things I have to do every day, so many of the people I have to work with. I've had to relent to using more again after trying so hard to avoid doing so. I feel so ugly on the inside, more and more angry, and it all makes getting lost in song less and less possible. I've had to settle for lower heights, and I hate that, but that doesn't help the ugliness in my head lessen any. So much just adds to it. It's so hard to see any of the guys as anything but their worst tendencies. Rory makes a stupid joke and I want to punch him. Jeffrey's little sweet-sad-boy act makes me want to be so nasty to him and I've only partially resisted this urge (I learned recently that he rides fucking HORSES like some fucking posh English private school prick). Nathan's immaturity and spoiled fucking obliviousness are... well, that's just how it always is (infuriating and yet never quite truly infuriating, almost lovable. Maybe that's how he gets away with so much with Walter, too). Sam's passivity grates on me to a lesser degree, but all in all I still feel like a terrible person around all of them and every moment is me trying to pretend that they're not driving me insane. Benny can tell I'm stressed, and it's so fucking terrible, he has SO much work to do, he absolutely should not spend any time worrying about me, but I must've been erratic enough for it to become a worry, at least in his opinion.

At least being around the crew lessens all this-- it's still there, but it's muted. I feel like a person again, willing and capable of kindness, able to care about more than just getting through the gig, able to feel. So I've been slipping away to be with them more often again. Sometimes I've had to bring Shann along, but that hasn't gone badly. I'm getting better at poker n' blackjack, but I'm still not very good. Winning a few games here and there, at least. Being around other ~men of my persuasion~ helps, too, admittedly. I told myself I wouldn't indulge myself so much and I haven't indulged myself in the same ways I used to, out of self-preservation (and Shann doesn't like it either if she knows, and it's strange, it shouldn't mean anything to her), but UGH... the one upside to looking more masculine right now is that guys are really digging it. And I need one fucking place I can be at least CLOSE to myself, and happy, where I don't have to think about everything making the world outside more and more of a hell. Being around the crew is nice but it's still work, or too adjacent to it for my liking. I need a little Julie Rajani time, you know?

One very funny but awkward thing, though... Nate's cologne? Very popular choice! I went with one guy wearing it and that was a mistake. But it's so hard to avoid... ugh.

*

Still quite stressed but not as melodramatic and dire as a few days ago. I actually got Nate to agree to space out the heavy songs in the sets! It is hard... you want people to hear as many songs as you can take. Everyone has a different favorite, even if there's the collection of BIG favorites. You're always letting someone down. But it's a better long-term decision, and I'm glad Nate could understand that. ...He really is almost a different person when Walt's not around. Or Jeff. Which makes me think he's a little too suggestible. I could try and be a good influence for him, I guess. But I'm not his fucking older brother, actually. It's not my job to babysit him. I'm his co-worker, and sometimes his friend. It's hard to balance that with the feeling of wanting him to understand... but then again, that gets into so much. Too much. And I don't trust him with much as long as Walt's around even on the periphery. It has been nice lately, though. Especially on stage. I think he's trying to cheer me up or something, though I've never asked him what he thinks he's cheering me up from. Either way, it feels good. It feels like how it was when things were simpler, again.

...Then again, if I've been so stressed that Ben's noticed it-- he's more perceptive than Nathan, naturally, but that doesn't mean I haven't been more obvious than I thought. And I guess it has been helping... there are times I feel like we might as well be on different planets and then other times where we're so close to the same wavelength I nearly do a double-take.

Whenever we do that one chorus, the one that had us floating together in rehearsals, I can tell we're there again, too. Every fucking time. What the fuck. Ugh. Things now remind me of when things were simpler, but there's always other reminders that it isn't. Like that place we reach together every so often on stage (thankful for that, at least, because it had been getting harder for me to reach it myself... did he notice that?). And he's still using that damn cologne[54] and it already has a sort of sweaty-musky thing going on but when actual sweat enters the equation... UGH fuck him. It's like if he had to keep a straight face while a super model was talking to him with her tits out, or something. I manage! But part of me still wants to find that bottle of Kouros and toss it over some overpass.

*

Thinking, lately, about how I look. Which sounds so silly, but it's not a selfish little prince sort of thing. I put a fair amount of thought into my ~tour wardrobe~ of sorts last time around, but this time, I realized I didn't really deviate much from whatever general looks Walt decided on. I couldn't think of anything that I'd be happy with, that the guys would like, that Walt would be okay with, that everyone else would be okay with... it was like wrapping my head into a worse and worse tangle of yarn. I made the shirts more interesting, at least. With scissors. --I packed good club clothes, too. Still nothing very femme at all. It wouldn't really work with the hair.

Another thing I think about, but never allow myself to think about for too long, except now I can't sleep: I really do dearly miss being able to dress up for shows. Like REALLY dress up. G-d, I was wearing eyeshadow and even a little shimmer on my cheeks when we did Germany n' England... obviously not full drag looks, but still something close to what I'd casually wear to LR (but exaggerated a bit for stage-viewing). And it was mostly just OKAY. Did I still get the occasional asshole calling me a fag? Yeah, but those types are there no matter how I dress, apparently. Hell, I just got called a fag yesterday. In passing. Shit I usually don't even think about anymore. Some things you think about even a little and it's like putting one too many cards in a house of cards. And I can't afford that kind of collapse right now.

But here I am anyway, thinking about how stifling it feels. At least last year I had my hair. I'll have it again. It'll get better once it grows out a little. I need something. --Cryssie thought that I might be like her when we met. I didn't even know exactly what she was when we first met. I wasn't worried about that. I needed a place to sleep that wasn't my fucking Beetle, and she'd offered it without me asking (I don't think I could've or would've asked). It could've been bad news, but I knew she wasn't worse news than Lorenzo. Very lucky for me, she was some of the best news of my life... G-d if she's sick I'll never forgive you.

Anyway. I would've never accepted I was gay without her and I would've never accepted my feminine side without her, either. And now I have to be so careful about the former and I nearly have to bury the latter (I still have the nose ring, though. So HA. At this point it's a signature! Which means I have to be careful with it in public... Cryssie has seen me with it and she loved it, which felt good). I thought that was a compromise I could live with. I could for awhile. I technically am now. But it's like I said-- if I think about how stifling it feels, I start to panic a little. It's an almost suffocating feeling. I'm not like Cryssie (that is, I'm not what she calls a "full time queen", I don't feel like a woman or anything like that), but at the same time, I guess being able to be queen*ish* isn't just a matter of preference. Gay masculinity can be more fun than straight masculinity (that's... G-d. There's a reason why Jeff is how he is), especially when it's firmly tongue-in-cheek, but even that lately is almost like... trying to imitate straight masculinity a little too much. There's an insecurity to it. But here I am, right? What can I say about it, right?? And what can I even do about that right now? And that's why I try not to think about it too much (really there's quite a bit I can't think about too much right now).

But I do miss it, even if it does help me blend in. That's not what I want, that's just unfortunately often what I NEED. Even in clubs!

*

A surreal thing about shows this time around: we got a giant video projection screen over us now-- ~state-of-the-art~, Walt says, but he is actually right, in his grandiose way. He also said, to me, that this was his way of making stadium shows more "intimate". I'm not sure if it quite accomplishes that, but it does at least help the people in the nosebleeds actually have something to come for, and that's nice. Funny looking up sometimes and seeing a giant Rory making silly faces or whatever. Reading reviews about it is funny, too. Some get a little philosophical with it, even! Always read in the most bad faith and cynical ways, but what can you do (and Jeff says I'M cynical! Career critics have me beat).

We've all hit that stride now, too, where we're all clicking together on stage. Everything's a machine in some ways, but so full of life and emotion that in other ways it's quite the opposite of a machine-- but that synergy is really something else. I'd been worried my troubles with my voice would make that synergy impossible to reach, but thankfully, I've figured enough out for this time that for now, at least, it's alright again.

Sometimes Nate and I reach that place together on the very last song, and that feeling is even more surreal than all the video screens and hi-tech cutting-edge blah-blah. Walking off-stage with him still feels like walking on clouds. I wasn't sure if it was the same for him, but tonight after everything he slung an arm around me, leaned into me while we walked, and I leaned back into him, allowed myself to breathe him in (like an idiot), and for awhile we just kept walking like that backstage. Rory laughed, thought one or both of us was drunk, and maybe we were, in a way, but not like that. We were just still a little in that place together.

PS: Went out. Found a guy that used his cologne-- of course, like I said earlier, that's easy enough. But I'd been avoiding it and this time I wasn't even thinking, obviously, or if I was it was a very tunnel-vision thinking. FUCK pits smell amazing with that stuff. We were both sitting up, him on top of me, just sort of making out and frotting, breathing each other in, feeling and tasting each other; he was riding me and I was fucking him and I was enveloped in his smell, blissed out on it, and I came so damn hard, and I lay in my hotel bed later thinking about how much of an idiot I am. Only time'll tell how much I regret it, though.

*

[54]Y'know what? Maybe I should tell him I've smelled that thing at every club I've been to so far. But that would still be telling him too much! Ahhh.