Eager prey

Against you,
what defense?

That any mere mortal
breathe in air
charged by your presence
not exhale it, now your slave
No

To keep muscles engaged
thighs,
calves,
back,
neck
not fall to knees
and hands
but stand to meet
your deserving gaze

This, perhaps.

But so, while the heart
having any human quality
beats faster
dizzying
squeezing
a seething, wounded thing
its rhythm, permanently altered
suffused
conquered

No, no defense
but the only one afforded:
physical denial
circumstance
cruel, mean truth.


(I promise, I really will work on that other topic today. You know how it is sometimes--Jake just suddenly demanded some adoration from me this morning. He can be very intense and...imperative. Best to do as he commands.)

Photo: Esquire, via IHJ.

Let me in

I tremble with the need to touch you.

This ache, long savored,
swells, filling my being
at the sight of your photographed image.

That you don't understand what your pictures bring
is part of the uncanny grace that makes you worth looking at.

So much of what you are is reflected
in glimpses, snapped
like this one
capturing a moment
of shyness
of sweetness
of subtle, tantalizing mischief
as the photographer no doubt has directed this half-naked stance.

So far beyond the mere aesthetic,
your profound beauty,
and it radiates through every still frame,
every candid exposure;
your expression says you think this photo will be pure beefcake, silly.

I see it with my heart.

Not a man without his shirt
but a man, full of humility, and humor, and a desire to please.

That is the genius of this photograph: it captures the essence of you.

And that is why I tremble.

My aching, yes, to caress the dark swirls on golden skin
and in doing, touch the man inside. You.


Photo by Mario Testino, as featured in Let Me in, by way of jakegyllenhaalfan.com.

Sensory overload

Every single day, I tell myself I'm going to stop spending so much damn time on Jake, and every single day, I fail. Last night while I managed to catch up on House, MD (with that Rendition spot again, yay!) and Dexter, Jake Gyllenhaal was at a premiere for Rendition in Beverly Hills. As you can see, the beard lives. In fact, the beard is once again taking on a life of its own. I love you, you rebellious, furry man. Over 100 new photos up at IHJ.

Steph's also got us some caps from the HBO First Look: Rendition that aired last night. I attempted to transfer the show from my DVR, but the resulting file had audio, no video. Possibly a copy protection issue because it's a pay channel. I was too damn tired to figure out another way last night, and by the time I get around to it, I'm sure someone will have made it available elsewhere. For all I know, they already have. (Update: Silly me, of course they have. IHJ took care of you. Get it here.)

How will I survive Rendition Week if Jake keeps popping up at random in addition to all that's scheduled? As it is, most of my day is spent in contemplation of my goals and needs as inspired by Jake. There are not enough hours in a day, not enough time in the week to get a handle on what it is my brain is trying to tell me. Do I want to take a whack at being a writer? Or am I willing to keep working some job or other and just hope that my interests can be satisfied outside the nine-to-five routine? As it stands, my current job has become nothing more than a nuisance I endure to receive pay. That's pretty bad, and I'm not happy about it. But with Jake scrambling my brain, I'm having a hard time understanding what I do want. All I'm clear on is wanting him.

All photos: IHJ. Nod for post title to BirdGirl.

Fallen

I am still feeling strangely wired, as if I'd had too much caffeine, despite my relative lack of sleep in the past 72 hours. Twice this weekend I discovered well after midnight that I had forgotten to eat anything for dinner, engrossed as I had been in my Jake activities. This is not healthy, and I'm the first to admit it. I am coming apart.

But it's not new, either. I've done it before, will do it again, no doubt. So while it's mortifying and pathetic, I recognize that it is also completely self-indulgent. I wanted to be lost in him, on whatever level, so I let it happen. Now I just have to see if I can make a go of the rest of my waking life while I try to crawl back to the surface for air.

Anyway, the good news in all this is that I did successfully get video out of my DVR, so Rendition Week will be available to those who need it from me. Not that I'm your only source, but a promise is a promise.

I don't feel comfortable talking about what caused my strung-out weekend Jake-bender, but I feel like it would be dishonest to withhold it, too. So much has swirled through my mind, I know it will continue to affect me for quite some time, possibly until the day I forget Jake Gyllenhaal (it will happen, if I live long enough, experience tells me).

Perhaps the most amazing thing is that, as if on cue, Jake has provided a strangely relevant quote to the media as part of his current Rendition promotion. Some Kentucky newspaper quotes him telling Fox News, "I don't hold it against people for wanting to know about our personal lives and reading all those magazines and what not."

Our world is in a very bad place at the moment, so I think it is only appropriate that people look to other things and have an interest in all the drama and happenings of celebrity lives, and I hope that at some point I can help the public sedate and escape what's really happening in the outside world.

Sedate is never a word I associate with my reactions to Jake, but I know he's talking about escapism, and of course that's something I can relate to, as my presence here makes obvious. The quote is probably from this interview, where Jake is asked again about extraordinary rendition, and also about working with actors and others from the varying nations that made up the cast and crew of that film.

His disarmingly benevolent attitude toward the public fascination with celebrity, and celebrity gossip, was neither predictable nor revelatory, though it was characteristic of his philosophical nature. Unfortunately, it also has triggered my protective instincts; I fear that every sleazy creep in the world will consider it an approbation, even an invitation to further probe, invade, stalk. I hope that beefy bald guy Jake tows around has at least one equally intimidating coworker. He's too fucking nice, and I'm so afraid for his safety and his privacy that I'm feeling invasive.

Babble, blather, I tend to run on when I have something on my mind that I don't necessarily feel good revealing. True confession time has come, and while most of the (30 or so) people who will ever read this may shrug or even laugh at the drama of my words, I think one or two will grok this.

I've made no secret of my opinion about fan fiction, and my own ambivalence when against my better judgment I found myself authoring some. Even less appealing than fanfic to me was the morally questionable subset known as RPS. I know in my rational mind that anyone reading these stories is aware it's fantasy, but the use of real people as characters seems abusive somehow.

How then do I explain my random decision last Friday, while bored out of my skull here at work, to seek out and indulge in the one thing I told myself I never would, the most salacious and egregious of fan manifestations? I don't. I can't. I've once again proved myself the queen of irony, my contradictions alive and well. I can tell you that I both regret it, and don't. I read the story that over the past year several friends had recommended to me, despite my protests, as the best. I read it, and I re-read it, and then I went and I found a sequel, and I read that, too. Then, hating myself already, depressed, and completely consumed, instead of moving on to find some distraction, I went and read another.

What the hell happened?

I can tell you it had nothing to do with the plots, which were fantastical, presumptive, and unoriginal--no offense to those authors, I don't mean their writing was bad. It was excellent, or I wouldn't be in this mess. Just that the tale they spun was not one in which I had any emotional investment. So why did I keep reading? And why do I feel raw?

In one word, Jake.

The growing realization that someone else's mental Jake was so completely identical to my own, so vivid, every conversation and action (apart from the plotline) ringing true despite the very fact that this was fiction, knocked all the wind out of me. Not just my Jake, anymore. This was evidence that the myth in my head is a bit more than that. I have spent hours digesting and analyzing this discovery. I can discuss the logical aspects, that we have all formed our image of him from the same sources, all that is publicly available, that I already knew this in large part from my interaction with the fandom. For whatever reason, that has not mitigated the impact of this weekend's reading. Holy shit, I tell myself, is it possible? Can anyone be this...everything that he is? The first author's Jake was funny, a tad immature at times, intelligent, but most of all, direct, and warm. I couldn't get enough. Later, as I tried to recover, I decided to read the comments on her journal by her readers, wanting to see how many other people had been sucker-punched by her Jake. I was perplexed to see only one or two comments that even remotely suggested the impact I had felt. What I did find, though, was her own revelation of her favorite story as a reader, and I'll be goddamned if I didn't go off immediately to find that one, too. Pathetic.

Both the first story and the last one shared a common point of view that certainly contributed to my vulnerability here; namely, that of the other person, the one completely enamored with Jake and feeling hopeless about it. This too was devastatingly authentic; perhaps my reaction is based in insane jealousy, the knowledge that someone else--no, fuck it, almost everyone else--has this longing, here translated into a story where it is embodied in another who would actually have access to Jake. The descriptions of that person's perceptions and responses to him, words I could have written or spoken, given the opportunity.

That's it, but that's enough. It makes no sense, that any of these things should be as an epiphany to me, but making sense is often overrated. I know these were stories, written by someone who no more knows the real Jake than I do. But he was so much my Jake, addictive, I could not stop. What have I done?

Before anyone asks, no, I do not plan to continue reading RPS, or fanfic. I remember having said that there would be no going back, and I do fear its draw, but this has got to stop. I lost an entire weekend, minus a few family hours (in which Jake was with me all the way), to indulgence, and I can't maintain my basic functions this way. It's unhealthy, it's disgusting, it's ridiculous, but most of all, it's too easy.

Fortunately, we shall have more real Jake in the immediate future, which I think will go a long way to bringing me back to health. Watching him be all those things I know he is, witty, charming, thoughtful--it's going to hurt in the way it always does, but it will be real, and if nothing else, I may feel cleansed.


Photo: IHJ.

Affliction

This, I confess
that I have been so afflicted
by a thought of you
I have sat awake these hours
slaving not to exorcise it
but savoring, for all the torture it brings.

Longing like this
impelled not by your face
--an image unparalleled
--but only the surface
of a profound beauty, so deep
it is beyond mere words.

How can anyone be all that you are?
How can I be satisfied by any less?


(Lame, but you should have seen what I wrote before this. No, on second thought, no one should ever see that.)

Photo: IHJ.

Ode, Dear

Loot at you, mister Too Good to be True!
With each passing day grows the illusion that I know you.
What you are to me, the eye cannot see,
though you shall never hear me complain of the view.

Thus is my feeling for you misunderstood.

My movie star, to me you are
before all else, a man, and human, and imperfect and good.
You are no hero, nor would I wish you so.
Never would I demand more of you than I do of myself.

Worship and reverence are not part of who I am.

Your paradox is this, that you are
unreachable, and different, and too lovely
and pedestrian, and sensible, and silly.

And so what is wrong with writing odes to a man
who is not greater than the rest, but in the ways that matter to me?
Should I not adore you because you are human?

For I can think of no better reason to love a man.


Photo: IHJ.

Futile

futile

O glorious, guileless muse!
How you taunt and betray me, at once provoking action and holding firm my wrist that ink touch not paper.
From 'neath the jumbled piles of thought in my head speaks your voice,
More! Give me more!
If only that sentiment were truly yours and not my own wistful murmur.
Tis not your humility that I lament, but your indifference.
For the caress of your eyes upon my written words
would be as the touch of your hand upon my flesh.
Instead I am condemned to forever dream of both and achieve neither.


(previously posted to the JW forums)

I'll be adding things here from time to time, like this one, that I originally shared on the forums at Jake Watch, mostly because I'd like to have them all here. This is the first.

Photo: IHJ.

I'd do it for free

This vision, so graphic
growing more vivid with each visitation
until I am there, in her place
smelling your skin
tasting your breath
feeling the heat of your hands on my body
Dangerous, my reverie
threatens to supplant reality
but I
can't
stop




(Inspiration: this comment, which I think we've all heard about by now.)


Photo: IHJ.

Thank you, kind sir

I have written so many things over a relatively brief period (less than one year) about Jake that I have a considerable catalog of discarded thoughts and phrases I could dust off and offer up on any given day. A moment ago I reviewed a piece I wrote when my obsession began, and I honestly was surprised by the pain expressed therein. While I am still alone and full of free time to spend thinking about famous strangers, I have to argue that my outlook has really improved beyond measure.

Yes, sometimes when the knowledge that Jake will never be mine pops back up like a smirking weed in the unkempt sideyard of my mind, I ache. Let's face it, based on the available information, he couldn't be more perfect for me. But that's not actually him, and I know this. Intellectually, I know it. Emotionally, I sometimes forget, and my heart, well, my heart, as hearts do, takes no advice and makes its own choices.

Some folks scoff, and find such intense focus on a celebrity to be wasteful. Go do something with yourself, instead of pining away for some actor. Go be somebody, and you won't have time to think about the daily activities of people whose lives and yours will never intersect. To them, I offer only this: the concept of inspiration.

Inspiration to write, which I had not been doing for several years, and rarely in such quantity and, if I do say so myself, quality.

Inspiration to lose weight, because I am tired of hiding inside a body that acts as a shield between my inexperience and fear and the world at large.

Inspiration to move on, to plan and execute my departure from the family home at a much-delayed age, because it's way past time to go.

Because these things will make Jake notice me, like me, want to be with me?

No.

Because enjoying everything I get from Jake makes me feel so alive that I finally, truly want to go out and live.

Inspiration.
That, and really great fantasy material.

Photos: IHJ.