The personal pages of
Copyright © 1998–2010
“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”
About Me
[This was last edited some time in the summer or autumn of 1999. Much has changed since then. Maybe someday I'll update and finish this.]
Let's start with the basics. My name is Bruce Wilbur and I live on the cloudy North Coast of America in Rochester, NY. I'm a single gay man, age 43 going on 20.
| Obligatory Stats | |
| Birthday | June 19, 1957 |
| Height | 5'-10" |
| Weight | 160 lbs |
| Eyes | Two (brown, nearsighted) |
| Hair | Brown, thin on top, a bit of gray |
| Levis | 505s only please, W31 L34 |
| Nikes | 11 |
| Shirt | 16˝" neck, 34" sleeve |
| Package | Never had a complaint, maybe a gasp or two…  |
Quite a bit of my life is a study in contrasts. I like to travel but I'm a homebody. I tend to burn the midnight oil, but I'm an early riser. My favorite magazine is Car and Driver but I take the bus to work and don't own a car. I miss wearing a suit to work but I can't wait for jeans day on Friday. I tend to be organized but you wouldn't know it by the way clutter seems to erupt everywhere. I'm a romantic yet I'm single. I look to the future but I can't quite shed my past. I'm frugal until it's time to buy toys.
When I'm not at the PC, you'll generally find me reading a book or magazine. Although I own two TVs, it's an extremely rare occurrence to find one on. The stereo on the other hand is only off when I'm not home or I'm sleeping. I'm bit of an audiophile and I'm constantly tweaking and twiddling to get the perfect sound. I'm also an ex-club DJ, which explains why it's unusual to find something other than dance music playing. I can't stand commercials or yammering idiots with my music, so I subscribe to Music Choice, a 24-hour digital music service. Conveniently they have an all dance music channel.
About Work
In the past I've done everything from pump gas to run the computer department of an interstate trucking company. After over 25 years in the workforce, I finally found a job I loved, I was good at and pays well. Unfortunately, they let me go in early November. I worked the phones on the computer help desk at the University of Rochester Medical Center. I loved my job because I like to help people, I enjoy shooting the breeze on the phone all day, and there were no lingering responsibilities after 5:00 or on the weekend.
There are a couple of things that make me a good fit for that sort of job. I speak English instead of technogeek. I see my job as being 75% psychology, 25% technology. I figure no one really wants to call the computer help desk, so I make sure I get them to laugh a little, I don't condescend and I always thank them for calling.
About Home
I did the three-bedroom house in the suburbs thing with my last lover. And no matter what anyone says about tax advantages or equity, I just don't want to deal with all the crap that comes with owning a home. The reduced expenses of renting far outweigh the mortgage deduction on the taxes and the average mutual fund builds equity better than real estate ever hoped to.
I find the suburbs quite sterile and boring anyway. Didja ever notice suburban people are boring? Didja ever wonder why? Cookie cutter tract houses on cookie cutter cul-de-sacs in cookie cutter neighborhoods don't do much for the mind or spirit. Don't even get me started on strip malls. No wonder they watch so much TV.
I live in the fringe of what passes as the gay ghetto and in the heart of what once was called the Museum District until some consultant the city hired re-christened it "The Neighborhood of the Arts." How pretentious!
At one end of my block is the Rochester Museum and Science Center and the Strasenburg Planetarium. At the other end is the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester. I pass by The International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House (as in Eastman Kodak) is on the way to my favorite deli. The neighborhood is peppered with restaurants, cafes and nightclubs, and you can hardly turn a corner without running into some funky little shop or gallery.
In all my walks around my neighborhood I've never seen two identical houses. Because I once studied to be an architect, my eye isn't fooled by a bit of trim or molding. There just aren't any duplicates. There are twenty or so houses on my street and none of them even have the same color scheme. It's easy to tell people which one is mine. It's the only house on the street with dark green shutters.
Over Memorial Day weekend, I moved to a new apartment in a converted Victorian after living for 3˝ years in a high-rise. The living room here is almost the size of the entire last place, which was a one-room apartment smaller than most hotel rooms. And it has a realistic kitchen with a skylight over the table, a decent sized bedroom and huge walk-in closet. (I tend to be a clothes horse so a large closet is imperative.)
As far as décor goes, well, I have a plaque that sums it up perfectly. It reads, "If Martha Stewart saw this place she'd die. Let's invite her over!" Except for one piece, a handmade cherry credenza, the style is early Wal-Mart. I want to relocate, so real furniture would just be a burdensome problem. I positively hate "window treatments" so there's not a darned thing over any of the windows. And I actually like off-white walls. They show off the paintings better.
I love watercolors and they're everywhere, including the bathroom. My budget limits me to limited edition prints from local artists. I'm not picky about color. I don't buy a painting on the basis of it matching the couch. Nor do I have a favorite subject matter, but I do stay away from florals. I'm just not a floral kinda guy. A painting must say something to me and about me before I'll consider it. I also look for technique and complexity because I expect to own each one for many decades, so I don't want to get bored with them.
About My Past
I'm the oldest of three boys in a family that was destined to be fucked-up. Both of my parents were what I call "serial only-children" because there were 12-15 years between they and their older sibling. That's so much time there wasn't a real chance of bonding as in most families. They each saw their older sibling as a third parent.
This is the role they cast me in at a very early age. From their experience they learned that the older child assisted in parenting the younger ones. It didn't occur to them that it was the age difference, not the birth order that put their older brother and sister into that role.
Because they were raised as if they were only-children, my parents failed to learn one of the crucial lessons in love. Love is never divided, it's multiplied. What they learned instead was that the youngest child received all the love and attention and the oldest child was able to stand on their own.
And so, at the ripe old age of five, I was expected to be a responsible adult caring for my younger brothers while at the same time fending for myself. This was sheer folly. My memories of childhood are primarily ones of being punished for the actions of my brothers. It was always one of two issues. I had either failed in my responsibility as the third parent, or that I had taught them whatever it was they had done wrong. Naturally my brothers picked up on this from an early age and used it to their advantage.
Is it any wonder that what I learned was that I was supposed to be responsible yet responsibility leads to punishment, and that the inevitable outcome of love is punishment followed by abandonment?
Those two sets of conflicting messages haunt me to this day. I both try to avoid responsibility to avoid the punishment that follows and embrace it for that's what I'm supposed to do, it's my role. For years I never had anyone to delegate responsibility to so any responsibility becomes my sole burden. And by taking on responsibility beyond my capabilities, something I still haven't learned to recognize, I repeat the responsibility/punishment cycle over and over again.
Due to my over-responsibility, my career crashed and burned so badly seven years ago that I still seek out the lowest rung on the ladder in every job search. Yet everyone around me recognizes I have capabilities beyond that lowest rung and responsibility is shoveled on me, and I'm unable to say "no" to it. Eventually I crash and burn again, most recently in the month before I started this journal.
Love is a more difficult issue. I learned in my childhood that love is arbitrary. The same people who allege they love you punish you and subsequently abandon you for the new kid on the block. Then the cycle repeats for no apparent reason. I learned to survive by emotionally distancing myself from everyone around me. Where I'm unable to say "no" to responsibility, I'm unable to say "yes" to love.
My only other childhood memories are homoerotic. Before I even began school, I had discovered that it felt good and kinda tingly "down there" when I played with some of my friends, usually the cuter guys. Yet somehow I knew this was bad. It was no problem hiding this from others because I was hiding so much else from them as well.
I entered my adolescence knowing that responsibility, love and sex were only good for getting you in trouble. Yet strangely, I craved all three. Puberty threw a real wrench in the works. The raging hormones took the feelings I already craved and turned up the intensity by several orders of magnitude. I swooned for nearly every guy in school and although I hadn't consciously put two and two together, sub-consciously I had attached the childhood taunts of homo, fag, queer and the negative connotations of these words to what I was feeling. Since they were bad feelings, I locked them in a box, hoping no one would ever find them. The more I felt attracted to a guy, the further I kept my distance.
Halfway through high-school I discovered pot. And I discovered there was a special kind of bonding between druggies. An acceptance I'd never felt before. I was drawn in to the group because I was accepted. No one placed any demands on me, no one cared that I was awkward around other people. As long as I participated in the rituals, I was cool. Since I craved acceptance and most of the druggies were really cute guys, I learned the rituals, I participated in them, and I found friends.
I withdrew further from family, school and the one or two friends I'd had, and immersed myself in camaraderie of the other druggies. Whatever they were game for, I did with them. Whatever new buzz came around, I tried.
Things went well with my new friends for the next couple of years. I found a place where I fit in, even though I had to keep my secret. Outside of that, everything was okay. If you didn't look at my schoolwork or family.
Then with graduation, it all ended. Everyone went their own ways as happens at that time of life, and except for a small handful of friends who also seemed to have no plans for the future. By the end of that summer I'd found a job. I was taking my first steps to a career in radio. At 18, I was given the helm of a 50,000 watt FM station for five hours every weeknight and 12 hours on Sunday. Here was the responsibility I craved, and the fandom, such as it was, seemed like a reasonable substitute for friends. And strangely, that job led to my next discovery, gay men.
As I had before when I discovered druggies, I threw myself in to gay culture of the mid-70s. I became a fixture in the bars from midnight to closing every weeknight. And I went home with anyone who asked. There were plenty of them too.
Because of my hard-headedness and ratings, I lost my job at the radio station. The DJs in the bars took me in and taught me the difference between spinning disks on the radio and spinning disks in the clubs. Beat-matching, variable-speed turntables, what you could do with two and three copies of a disk, extending songs, echoes, flanging, ripping a disk apart and putting it back together in a completely different order.
My friend Mark gave me my first job spinning in a club. It was on his nights off in the middle of the week, but it gave me time to practice all the new skills I had to learn. Soon I was out on my own spinning in different clubs on other DJs nights off. After a couple of years I landed a plum position as the head DJ at a hetero club that was already legendary in Rochester, and that already knew that gay men made the best DJs. I held that one for nearly three years, five nights a week, Tuesday and Wednesday nights off through the heyday of disco in the 70s.
As the hets gave up dance music and turned to other diversions, I returned home, to the gay bars spinning on my friends' nights off. This was a significant dent in the wallet, so I started working day job part-time. I delivered flowers, I pumped gas, I working in an auto parts store, then in the parts department of a forklift and industrial equipment dealer. It was there that I was introduced to computers.
I didn't know how they worked or anything, but I knew the kind of information that we put in, and the kind of reports that came out. It was fascinating. And although I lost the job, I remembered what the computers could do.
I'd been living in a $25/week rooming house for a couple of years, DJing a night or two a week, and working weekends as the waiter at a gay piano bar. When I wasn't working, I drank, I smoked, I fucked anyone and everyone who asked. When that wasn't enough, I spent my nights in the baths. I had a standing reservation for the weeknights I played records. Hell the baths were right upstairs.
I'd burned through my first relationship, fallen head over heels for another guy who I couldn't pin down and I always returned to the bars and the baths. I was fucked-up 24x7 so I don't remember all the details of meeting Vince. I don't know what he saw in me or what I saw in him, other than safety. People had started dying of a strange new disease that was running through the community like wildfire. They thought it was sexually transmitted, I had a track record of getting the clap at least twice a year. It was time to get off the ride.
Vince took me in, helped me clean up my act and kept me out of the bars and baths. When he said he was going to buy a computer for his accounting business, I was all for it. Neither of us knew what we were doing, and when he purchased the latest and greatest, a Commodore 64 and half a dozen accounting programs, we figured we had it made.
None of the programs worked. No one would help us learn why. I was only working part-time, so I spent the rest of my time trying to figure out how the computer worked. I really got my start after a friend wrote a program for us. It was buggy but I knew what it was supposed to do given specific input and I learned to follow the logic. Within months I was writing my own programs for inventory and accounting. I got pretty good at it because I could spend hours at it.
Working part-time at a gas station was really starting to get old. I was 27 or 28 by that time and I just didn't see much future in it. When one of the local computer stores put a help-wanted sigh in the window, I applied and landed the job. Only after I started did I find I was in way over my head.
They sold primarily PC compatibles. There were some Apple and Commodore sales, but that was mostly to the games market. I'd never really done games. I learned from step one, how to boot a computer, everything I needed to know about PCs. Portables were just making it to the market, great big clunky things with 7 inch CRTs and dual floppy drives.
One of them, a Corona as I recall, tipped the scales at over 22 pounds, and it became the computer I carried back and forth to work. After I learned the hardware and DOS 1 and 2, I learned the big three business applications of the time, Lotus 123, dBase II and WordStar. I became fairly proficient in each in a rather short time.
The business acumen I'd absorbed over the years told me the store I worked for was going bust. I was looking for work at some more prosperous stores and had tentatively taken another job. One night I called a few of my best customers and asked it they would move their accounts if I moved to another store. One, a lawyer, told me that wasn't exactly ethical, but he was looking for a computer guy in one of his side businesses.
I took the job and began the biggest project of my life. I had to completely convert the manual dispatch, billing and accounting systems for an interstate trucking company from all manual systems. The closest thing they had to office automation was a few calculators, a copier and an IBM Selectric typewriter.
The company grew over ten-fold in six years and I grew with it. Rather, I felt that my work enabled the business to grow. I wrote every program we used in the sales, dispatch, accounting and management systems. We were doing some pretty sophisticated stuff on some pretty primitive equipment. I still remember our first really fast PC, and AST Premium 286 clocked at a blistering 10MHz. The fastest PC of it's day. Reports flew out of that thing.
I put in 70 to 80 hour work weeks and through those years, Vince and I drifted apart. I still had my old friends though, I'd come home, drink a few beers or scotch and waters or Manhattans, depending on how grueling the day, then I'd retire to our office in the attic, sit down at the desk with my bong and the PC, and write code. He would retire to the living room or his bedroom and watch TV. We became two strangers living in the same house.
This is a work in progress. Check back soon.
[Of course I haven't touched it in almost three years.]
