balding angrily

Thanksgiving’s coming, and I have no butt hair or exposed cock stories to tell.

This is the first Thanksgiving that J and I will be spending away from family.  We have some friends that are doing the hosting thing this year.  We’re preparing ourselves for when our parents inevitably kick off.

I had this thought the other day.  J and I, most of the time, end our calls with mutual “I love you”s.  He does it because he’s a sap.  I do it because I think, “What if I get in a deadly car crash on the way home.  I want him to always remember that I loved him while he’s tricking with guys fifteen years his junior after I’m gone.”  Not really, but that is part of the reasoning…the car crash part, not the from-the-grave guilt part.  After four years of doing it, I realized that’s a pretty fucked up reason for saying “I love you.”

In the fall of 1993 I went to Italy with a bunch of fellow American architecture students. A lot of them were hippies, but I wasn’t. I was a closeted, scared introvert. Closeted might be too severe a word because I honestly didn’t know where I was sexuality speaking. I hadn’t been with another man, but I was very curious. The two stories I’ll share really don’t relate aside from happening in Italy. I suggest you try to divine some cosmic significance from their pairing. You know, for kicks.

Story 1:

We were in the architecture studio working on our final projects for the semester. The hippies were drinking coffee, listening to something college-y, talking about how much they learned about a different culture like the Real World housemates do on the last episode of a season. They say insightful things like, “I never knew I was a bigot! This experience has really opened my eyes! I never would have thought I could have a gay friend! I thought Aaron would be having ass sex every minute of every day! Wow! Gays are people now!” My American hippy classmates were slightly less caricature-esque in their debriefing of the semester.

One of the hippies asked me what I was going to do after graduation. I was only a semester away from graduation, where most of the other students were juniors. I told him that I would probably, you know, get a job…doing architecture. The guy who asked me said, “Have you ever listened to the lyrics to ‘Once in a Lifetime’? That’s going to be you… ‘This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. How did I get here?’ Man.” I imagine he said “man” like a stoner hippy, although that might be unfair. “You’re going to wake up one day and realize you sold your soul to Corporate America.” I was listening to a lot of Talking Heads then, so I knew the song. I hadn’t heard the meaning behind the song until then. That sentiment still hits me in the chest plate whenever I hear it.

Story 2:

We lived in a small town outside of Florence. If we wanted to take a day-trip, we took an hour-long train ride in. One Saturday I went by myself. I did a lot of traveling by myself that semester. I went to shop, to browse the Ufizzi, to go to the Duomo for the fifth or sixth time, to sit in a piazza sketching, and to just be in Florence. I sat in the piazza next to the Duomo watching the gypsies rob innocent passers-by thinking, “Whaddya know? It looks so obvious. Those gypsies are really good.” I sat on a concrete planter or bench. I felt a mild, lonely melancholy, the kind of melancholy a person feels on a sunny fall day where lawns have blankets of brown and red leaves and the bright sun gives no warmth, where the day is so quiet that a person might feel like if he listened hard enough he could hear ants crawling in the cracks in the cold sidewalks. A guy sat down next to me and pulled out his cock for me to look at. I got up and ran in to the Duomo.

I looked for that concrete planter or bench when Jerry and I went back last year, but I didn’t find it.

I spend more time than some people looking up the correct usage of a word or phrase. That’s not to say I’m all intellectually curious like John Cusack’s would-be girlfriend in Say Anything. It’s more like I’m a little obsessive/compulsive about being right. My favorite look-up concerns the Alanis Morisette/Irony debate. I typed in “irony +Alanis Morissette” to Google and I got directed to any number of message boards and essays that attempt to either call Alanis on her sloppy use of language or argue that Alanis’s writing is brilliant. Many people have tried to give me examples of what true irony is, but still I get lost, or at least I’m going to pretend to be lost for the purpose of this sentence. Irony is a slippery concept to me. Don’t try to explain it to me again; you will fail in the attempt, and I will hate you for it.

I got called out on some boards about my use of the word “morals.” The person said I should be using the word “ethics.” I’ve looked up the two words, and I’m still confused because they still seem more or less interchangeable to me. Again, please don’t explain it to me. You will fail; I will hate you.

Why is this important? I was trying to think through what Dr. Laura would call a “moral dilemma” the other day, and got caught at the semantics. Was what I was trying to work through really an “ethical dilemma?” Is Dr. Laura misspeaking when she continues to ask about callers’ “moral dilemmas?” Is this one more reason why I should hate Dr. Laura? If “ethics” are the rules that attempt to codify “morals,” is it “ethics” or “morals” that prevent me from exposing my bare ass to the nearest Republican?

Here’s the ethical or moral dilemma that started this whole messed-up, confused line of thinking. I’m having a hard time figuring out when forced castration becomes a “should.” This is what I’m thinking about while I’m walking to Tin Star for lunch.

Stealing from my Gay Pimp Daddy Jonny McGovern, I’d like to nominate Reichen Lehmkuhl for Bloody Tampon of the Week for a recent statement he made and his boyfriend Lance Bass as Honorary Tampon String of the Week for things he said while coming out. When Lance came out I was so excited because I thought JT might make some big public statement of support for the gays, which would hopefully change the mind of some cloistered Colorado teen girl who gets her public policy opinions through her MTV intravenous drip. It is my life’s dream to change the mind of one Colorado teen girl.

When I read Lance’s coming out story in People about he and his friends calling each other “SAG”s for “Straight Acting Gays,” and that the message he wants to give to the rest of the world is that “We are all just like you” or some such, I turned to hating him. I will repeat an oft-repeated sentiment. I don’t want my gays to act straight. You make yourself look like a douche when you say you are a straight-acting gay, not only because the obvious follow-up question is, “How ‘straight-acting’ is having your penis in the vicinity of another man’s naked buttocks/penis/mouth/hand/elbow/Chihuahua?” but also because you made up an acronym expecting it to be widely adopted, a feat that only military scientists and archaeologists accomplish.

Which brings me to why Reichen Lehmkuhl should be nominated Bloody Tampon of the Week. He tried to coin a new phrase, this time by using the name of his potato-headed boyfriend. Please Reichen, let go of that celebrity butt hair you’ve been clinging to and take a swan dive into the toilet water.

And finally, thank you Neil Patrick Harris for coming out. Welcome to the team. We need more like you. Please don’t fuck up.

I’m sitting here looking at the traffic on Jefferson into downtown. The lights are white, yellow, red, neon, fluorescent, halogen, and LED. They’re beautiful, unnatural, and man-made. The soccer ball flashes and turns with its red nipple blinking. Radio towers flash and blink. Different densities of air molecules make car headlights flicker, disappear, and reappear. Flash. Blink. The nations on the soccer ball dissolve, mix-up, shatter, and splinter. The ball shows more shattering atoms and molecules, but still there’s the red nipple. The WFAA tower beyond has another red nipple. It fades in and out, not from air densities, but of its own volition. It pulses like a contented heart. My reflection is pale, transparent without detail, but shows an ear and a serious look.

This is what happens when you follow the advice of a friend when you can’t think of anything to write. “Just write anything,” she said. “It worked in that movie where Sean Connery played J.D. Salinger,” I thought, so I tried it. I’m not sure I approve of the results. It looks affected, like the poetry of a 14-year-old in her journal.