And even my straight friends do. (Shew!)

But man. I thought I was done feeling fresh pain until the movie finally got here. Then came the theme songs. (I guess that's what they are. Apparently both play out in full over the closing credits.)

Gay.com got permission to post both to the web today. Not just snippets, the whole songs. (Thanks to them, and to Mark for the heads-up. Thanks for all the great comments on Brokeback from you guys, especially the steady supply of fresh links.)

First, there's Willie Nelson singing Bob Dylan's "He was a friend of mine." Listen here. Lyrics here. Good song, touching, seems appropriate. Didn't really move me that much.

Then there's Rufus Wainwright. Wow. You could say he's an acquired taste, so don't expect it to sound ordinary. And he's a bit of a mumbler, so the lyric sheet will help. Once you get used to his style, this song may haunt you for ages. (Listen.)

Made me cry. Half the afternoon.

Not just the song, of course. I'm sure it was powerful in its own right, but when that powerful connection of story and song comes together, watch out. I was crying for Jake. And especially for Ennis, that freaking little goofball (spoiler alert, one phrase only), too chicken to make his own life happen. And of course, for me.

No, I didn't have their problems with love. Got my own. Yeah, I bet you do too. But I've got my own. God, why couldn't you have made a few more gayboys?

That's my latest lament. My shrink told me 15 years ago I was a strange kinda guy and there was a woman out there for me, but I was prolly going to be searching ten times as long as the average guy, because it was going to be someone really unusual that would satisfy me, and vice versa. He said he had never told any of his patients that before; just wanted me to know what I was up against.

That was before I accepted the obvious, and crossed 95 percent of the population off my list. God. Like the odds weren't daunting enough already. Especially in a small city.

Oh lord won't you make me more gayboys, we're lonesome in ev-ery way . . . 

Hahaha. I was hearing that to the tune of Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys in my head. I know it's stupid, but it's sure what I'm feeling. Never claimed I could write song lyrics.

Hennyway, Rufus' song is "The Maker Makes." Wrote it and sang it. Apparently the Brokeback Mountain theme song. And he really captures my heart on its more troubled mornings.

Ready for the lyrics? Read 'em and weep. But listen along first:

IFC announced its Gotham award nominations today, honoring the best indie cinema of the year.

They only have a handful of categories, and Brokeback Mountain was nominated in both where it was eligible: Best Ensemble Cast, and Best Feature.

Cool. More evidence that they really did come through with something special. And that it may make a dent in the popular psyche.

Especially since one of my two favorite critics--Peter Travers, of Rolling Stone--was on the nominating panel. The full panel:

Karen Durbin, Film Critic, Elle magazine; Rajendra Roy, Director of Programming, Hamptons International Film Festival and Competition Selection Committee Member, Berlin International Film Festival; Lisa Schwarzbaum, Film Critic, Entertainment Weekly; Peter Travers, Film Critic, Rolling Stone.

I can't wait till Nov 19, when it plays the Denver Film Fest. Ang Lee, Annie Proulx, Larry McMurty and Diana Ossana are all coming. I'm not normally star struck, but sure would like to meet them.

I don't know who declared this sadness day. Finished up Joan Didion for breakfast, heard the (theme song?) from Brokeback Mountain over lunch, then this 60 Minutes story over dinner.

Yow. Not sure it should make me sad. Happy and sad. But . . . moved, in ways deeper than I can explain. (Or want to, actually. That almost never happens.)

So many people in the world. So many tragic cases, so many wonderful ones. And to see both so intensely in the same person. Not sure what to do with that. Or why some creator up there is doing that.

Or how I fit in.

I'm kind of a goofball myself. Lots and lots of parts that don't fit in. But something. I think. Just hoping it's enough.

I hope you caught Joan Didion on Charlie Rose last night.

I could not even hope to capture this woman.

I still have not gotten to any of her work, except Regarding Henry, for some reason, which moved me very deeply, brought to the surface all the things I loved about my late mentor, Lucia Berlin.

Just an extraordinary person to listen to.

Here's the Pub Weekly review of her book, The Year of Magical Thinking. (courtesy of Amazon):

Starred Review. Many will greet this taut, clear-eyed memoir of grief as a long-awaited return to the terrain of Didion's venerated, increasingly rare personal essays. The author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and 11 other works chronicles the year following the death of her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, from a massive heart attack on December 30, 2003, while the couple's only daughter, Quintana, lay unconscious in a nearby hospital suffering from pneumonia and septic shock. Dunne and Didion had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years, and Dunne's death propelled Didion into a state she calls "magical thinking." "We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss," she writes. "We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes." Didion's mourning follows a traditional arc—she describes just how precisely it cleaves to the medical descriptions of grief—but her elegant rendition of its stages leads to hard-won insight, particularly into the aftereffects of marriage. "Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age." In a sense, all of Didion's fiction, with its themes of loss and bereavement, served as preparation for the writing of this memoir, and there is occasionally a curious hint of repetition, despite the immediacy and intimacy of the subject matter. Still, this is an indispensable addition to Didion's body of work and a lyrical, disciplined entry in the annals of mourning literature.
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Gave me a bit of new/renewed understanding about all those poor Columbine victims I'm dealing with all the time. Good to remember.