Please Do Not Read This

Well, I see that you are here anyway.  I tried to warn you but it is as if the temptation was too great for you.  I was trying to spare you the ramblings of a madman.  It is not to late for you to leave or to stop reading.

Since you are still reading, I would like to invite you to my personal hell.  This weekend was Pride weekend in Santa Barbara.  A friend of mine asked me to go with him.  For him, he considered this to be a date.  To me, I was just hanging out with a friend.  You can see the tension is already building.  Everyone at the festival was filled with joy.  Everyone except me.  The crowd was celebrating the right for same sex marriages.  I, on the other hand, was in complete agony. 

First, I was stuck on the word Pride.  Pride is one of the deadly sins.  Second, I bounced back and forth about the word Gay.  Gay means happy.  I was anything but happy. 

As most of you know, I have been in many different denominations.  However, I found myself happiest in the catholic faith.  Catholicism does not believe in or support homosexuality.  This is perfect for me because I do not believe in or support homosexuality.  The problem is that I am tormented by same sex attraction.  Not wanting to be a hypocrite, I stopped going to the catholic church.  The catholic church does not believe in or support theft.  "Thou shall not steal." is one of the ten commandments.  Although I am a kleptomaniac, I know that stealing is wrong and therefore I do not steal.  Why is that I believe homosexuality is wrong yet I do not have the power or the capacity to not having same sex attractions?

Homosexuality makes me suicidal.  If I have told you this once, I have said this to you one hundred times.  As I am walking around with my friend, I am thinking about ways to commit suicide.  One of the main reasons that I went with my friend to the festival was that last year, the Santa Barbara zoo was here and they passed out FREE stuffed animals and FREE t-shirts.  Santa Barbara zoo was not at the festival this year.  I am a fifty-five year old man and I am upset and sad that I will not be getting a new stuffed animal and/or a t-shirt.  There is something very wrong about that.  However, that is another story for another time.

Before I had met up with my friend, I had fallen for the third time.  My pulse is at 40 and sometimes I get dizzy and faint and find myself on the ground.  However, this time when I fell I had broken my cell phone.  There was no way for me to contact my friend.  The stress and anxiety can become overwhelming for me.  One part of me believes with my whole heart that God is punishing me for even thinking about going to the festival.  Frantically, I try to locate my friend.  After three different attempts at three different locations, I decide to go to the festival to see if I can find my friend there.
I did.

I would have committed suicide many years ago had it not been for one preacher.  When I was in high school, one of the sweetest girls I have ever known committed suicide.  Everyone loved her and no one knew about the pain this girl was in.  However, the preacher who did not know her proclaimed that she would spend eternity in hell for committing suicide.  Suicide, according to this preacher, is the unpardonable sin.  I know and you know that this is not true.  How could a good and merciful God cast someone who was so tormented in pain to hell for all eternity?  Not possible.  However, I have not committed suicide for one reason and one reason only.  This preacher.  What if he is right?

Here is my dilemma.  If I pursue a same sex relationship, I believe I will go to hell.  Even if I did not go to hell, my life with another man would be hell for both of us as I would always be so conflicted.  If I commit suicide, I believe I will go to hell.  As I am walking with friend, my friend jokes that maybe we should get married.  Truly I am making this man's life hell as he has feelings for me that I do not have for him.  Now instead of defrauding women, I am defrauding this nice man.  My past is haunted by the women I defrauded.  How I hope and pray that Lisa, Marina, Carol, Angie, Emily, Susan, and especially Judy forgive me.  Had I married anyone of them, it would have been a lie.  God knows that liars go to hell.  I am a liar.  We all know who the Father of Lies is.  Sometimes I believe I would be a much better child of Satan than I make a child of God.

Turns out that the only man I am attracted to at the Pride festival is Shawn.  Shawn is a heterosexual man who was pretending to be gay for a day.  He used to stay at the Casa Esperanza while I was there.  He was celebrating his freedom as he was about to graduate a very conservative religious program at the Rescue Mission.  He has a body to die for and an incredible personality to boot.  My only concern is why would he do what he was doing?  Wait a minute.  Maybe my friend could say the same thing about me.

This is my agony.  This is my constant turmoil.  My pain is more than I can handle at times.  Although I am not a cutter, I understand why they do what they do.  They cut themselves because the external pain is much less than the internal pain.  For a moment, they can focus on the external pain which the body will heal itself.  However, the internal pain seems to last as long as the eternal fires of hell.

Please remember that I asked you to please not read this.  However, I shall love you forever for caring enough to try to understand my pain.

May God bless you always!