Angel Headed Hipster Blog

All My Cares Just Drift Right Into Space

2006-05-25T03:18:00.000-04:00

OK. I lied. I can't go to bed just yet without cranking out another blog entry. I've been too negligent lately with the blogging. Sometimes there's so much I want to blog about - I've been re-re-re-revising my Grand Theory Of Female Bisexuality so much in my head that it's booklength at this point, and it's not going to get blogged about till I'm really in the mood for it.

But sometimes the best blog entries just happen. Greg moved out a couple days ago for the summer - off to internship 8 hours away. And the sublettor doesn't come for a couple more weeks. Which means that the attic - his gorgeous suite - is empty. And it means that any time I want to, I can crawl through the tiny-ass dormer window onto our gently sloping back roof of our DC rowhouse. I sunbathed nude a couple days ago while reading a novel. A couple people drove through the alley, and maybe someone saw me. Oh well.

I got to crawl out on the roof just now and be happy. (It's the place, Carole King's song tells us, where all your cares just drift right into space). I'd had a nice, albeit brief cry for John Lennon (see post below - he deserves one every once in awhile) and sometimes crying for sad things makes me tremendously happy for good things. I had to quit taking Adderall about 3 or 4 weeks ago. I was becoming tolerant, and upping the dose was upping my heart rate & blood pressure, and I didn't want a heart attack. But the Strattera my shrink switched me to is bullshit. It's an antidepressant, basically, that is supposed to help ADHD, but of course it doesn't really work. People who truly have ADHD need stimulant medication. I'm going to have to go back sooner than planned and try to get something Ritalin-based. It's supposed to not give people heart attacks, and it's known to work.

Going without the medication that changed my life irreparably for the better was a reminder of the dysfunction that my life can have when I'm in my non-medicated state. Yeah, I've had a lot of dysfunctional fun while medicated - drugs don't make you do everything "right" - but the type of unwanted dysfunction that you have when you are severely hyperactive and impulsive isn't fun. I need drugs (specific drugs, not the fun ones per se) to keep me regulated, and I'm A-OK with that. I took Adderall the last two days and it was like being fully myself - the real myself, really - again. But I can't stay on it, and I pray that some form of Ritalin will do it for me.

But being able to think again - to function again in a non-head-in-the-clouds way - makes me elated. I love having full mental powers. Anyone who's had successful pharmacotherapy for depression, bipolar, anxiety, ADHD, whatever - knows what I mean. Psychotherapy is soooo important for mental illness, but sometimes some people have general chemical issues that need general chemical cures in addition to psychotherapy. And it feels good when it works.

I miss Greg already - he's such a mellow, stable factor in our Real World house of madness - and above and beyond our friendship, I also feel like we have a lot to teach each other what it's like to be us. I've had a handful of straight black male friends over the years, but none that were terribly close. And I don't think he's had any close gay white male friends before. And we can all be loveydoveytouchyfeely liberals that are so enlightened into the pathos of other collective groups of The Oppressed, but how can you really understand what it's like to be a unique person in a labeled/pigeonholed group unless you actually have friends who are unique people within those groups?

I didn't understand Judaism for shit until I moved to DC. Being against the Holocaust/Inquisistion/Jerry Falwell is like being against pedophilia. Who's going to take the other side of that argument outside of debate class? But being against the Holocaust has very little to do with knowing Jack Shit about the lives of people who are Jewish.

You can intellectualize all you want to about same-sex sex, but if you don't know anyone who's gay, how do you have any idea what it's like to grow up with crushes on your canoeing merit badge counselor at scout camp and not being able to tell anyone because of the sex of who your crush is on? Or what it's like to go to third base with a girl to realize that despite what you've been told, not all men - for example, yourself - don't actually want to be there doing that? You have to know people, and love people, to understand where they've been and what they've been through.

And I can't say all this without thinking of the amazing woman who's been one of my best friends for almost a decade. She's had sooooo much in her life that she's fought through for the better. Such a strong - and fundamentally, phenomenally good person - who has taught me again and again the power of empathy for others. I can't think of a single other person on this planet who's taught me more through experience how important it is - and how good it feels in the long run - to really pick yourself up, put yourself in someone else's shoes, and get to work (to paraphrase Bob Dylan) knowing their world, knowing their kind, understanding their pain.

She'll laugh when she reads this. She knows that everything reminds me of song lyrics. It's the way my brain is wired. But I'm not listening to Dylan's "Is Your Love In Vain?" although I'm thinking of its truth-under-the-schmaltz. I had to put on yet another gorgeous gem of truth-under-schmaltz (don't wince) - The Hollies' "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother." True, they admitted in their name an embarrassing level of worship for Buddy Holly, and my boy Graham Nash had taken his credibility with him when he left for CSNand/orY a long time before they cranked that puppy out, but it's the kind of cheese that resonates with my worldview. We gotta be here for each other. Helping those in need never hurts, but it might make you cry.

I will get to bed in the near future, but as I'm going through a nostalgic cheese-music-scored journey through lovin' the world, I'll leave you with one last musical thought that sums up my mood right now. There's a bootleg recording (an amazing one) of buddies Carole King and James Taylor from 1971 where they run through a bunch of songs that Carole wrote for Doo-Wop groups in the Sixties. I'm not a fan, in general, of the music industry's semi-shameful history of forcing black groups to record music written by whites. This kept the money in white hands and stifled actual black voices in music. But Carole King wasn't responsible for larger sociological trends, and the anthem she gave Aretha screams sisterhood. Even if you need a man to make you feel inspired, at least he's inspiring you to be natural. If anyone told it straightforward time and time again that you needed to be yourself, it was Carole. So she and James are at some concert, and his guitar is unfortunately under-mic'd, but her piano is dead-on, and the two of them can really harmonize at the S&G/BeachBoys/CSNY level. And they start singing "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" which is one of my favorite songs ever. Anyone who hasn't felt that song, directly, personally, and immediately hasn't had the same human experience as the rest of us. But - Will - My - Heart - Be - Brooo-ken... when the night [when the night] meets the morning [meets the morning sun?]

But that's not the end of it. Really - get this mp3 from me if you don't have it. It's eight minutes long. They touch ever so lightly on "Some Kind Of Wonderful." Not the also-great Grand Funk song, but the one Carole wrote for the Drifters. And then they soar into drenched harmony for "Up On The Roof."

At night the stars put on a show for free / And darling, you can share it for me / I keep on telling you, right smack dab in the middle of town / I've found a paradise that's trouble-proof / So if this world starts getting you down, there's room enough for two.

Up on the roof.

Everything is all right, up on the roof. Come on baby, come on honey, come on now, come on now, darling, up on the roof. Everything is all right, Everything is all right, Everything is all right.

Up on the roof.

I Get Melodramatic About Dead Musicians

2006-05-25T02:37:00.000-04:00

You can ask my ex if you want. I cried when Nina Simone died.

It was kind of random tonight - I was digging through Wikipedia looking for some dates & cover art for some Paul McCartney singles from the '70s that were sitting around under-labeled in iTunes (a sin considering my anal-retentive devotion to iTunes), and wouldn't you know it, pretty soon I was reading up on Brian Epstein, Beatles manager and a minor personal hero of mine since high school, and of course before you know it you're re-reading the gory details of John Lennon's life.

You know that there was mamadrama going on, and that she (Julia) died young, and he knocked up Cynthia, named son Julian after dead mom, ignored wife & kid to tour with the Beatles, was the best straight buddy/unrequited love interest of genius manager Epstein, weathered the bigger-than-Jesus storm, became enmeshed with unattractive/bad singer-yet-provocative/intellectual-feminist/artist Ono, had painful public fights with Paul, was harassed by the Nixon administration, did the Elton John concert thingy, became a housedad to son #2, returned to music 5 years later & gave us the gorgeous "Watching the Wheels"... you know the history... and then you just have to read up on the details of 12/8/1980. It's a date that's been stuck in my head since high school. John Lennon was 40 years old. That's been stuck in my head for over a decade, too.

It is melodramatic, on some level, to really mourn the death of famous people that wrote music over the death of, I don't know, servicemen in Iraq that were 19 and died. Or crackheads who got hit by cars and died. John Lennon was himself a junkie (though technically only a junkie in the truest sense for a couple of years, but you knew that too). His life was hardly a model for greatness: flunking out of art school, knockin' up bitches, doing every drug available, writing petty (and yet terrific!) songs mocking McCartney, etc...

To sit around 25-1/2 years later and mourn the loss of someone who died when I was a toddler, whose death has been a fact of life for my entire walking life, is a little silly at 2 AM on a weeknight. Lennon didn't die yesterday, and when was the last time I actually sat around listening to a John Lennon record end-to-end? There's so much music to listen to out there. There are so many dead musicians to mourn.

I intentionally didn't write a eulogy for my man, Wilson Pickett, who wrote one of my 2-3 favorite songs of all time, a couple months back. In the pre-blog years I wrote lengthy eulogies for Nina Simone & Johnny Cash. By the time Ray Charles died, I felt like I'd eulogized enough. Then Wilson Pickett died a couple months back and I tore the shit out of "In The Midnight Hour" at karaoke a couple times that week. Mostly at gay bars where the two-to-three non-Aryans in the bar were surprised/impressed/embarrassed (take your pick) at the farmboy belting out Memphis soul, while being thoroughly ignored by the rest of the crowd who had no idea what was going on but knew it wasn't a Cher cover. But I just couldn't find the nerve to draft up my own from-memory-Wikipediaesque entry & send it out to the world. Pining for dead musicians is just so lame or something.

But it occupies a strong place in my psyche. People who have given me great music but suffered so much pain (and maybe it's not that shocking for the two to co-occur so often) get a lot of empathy from me. Sometimes when they die, I cry. I can't imAGine what it will be like for me when Bob Dylan dies (he almost went a few years back after breathing some bad airborne fungus at Bonnaroo). And fucking John Lennon. He died before I was toilet-trained. The dude's been dead longer than I've been sitting on the crapper pinching out turds, and yet I'm still capable of feeling profoundly sad about it, at 2 in the morning. Well, he gave us "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Imagine," not to mention countless other pieces of inexplicable beauty.

Oh fuck, "Mind Games" just came up on iTunes and now I'm crying. I have got to get to sleep.

My Love-Hate Feelings Re: My Own Writing

2006-05-03T22:46:00.000-04:00

I'm back to posting after about 3 weeks off.

Part of what drives my love/hate relationship with this blog is the public nature of blogging. There are a billion articles out there, if you Google for them, regarding the social changes effected by the internet. People like me get to rant and rave in our underwear from our home computers and the whole world (not that the whole world cares - but it's out there) gets to read our lunacy.

I guess if I always said polite, nice, appropriate things then I wouldn't get paranoid about my blog. But I don't, and I do. And the funny part is, I'll think "oh gee, I shouldn't say anything controversial because it could get back to me" and I hide from the blog for a couple weeks. And then I come back. And the blog didn't go anywhere - it was right here all along, and people could & might have been reading it anyway.

I don't know what the solution is: do I try to censor myself more, such that I don't say things I think could bite me in the ass? Or do I just suppress that little voice that says "watch yo'self!"? Attempt to find a middle ground?

"Oh, I Don't See Color"

2006-05-03T22:24:00.000-04:00

Don't you just love how it's become trendy in recent years for White people to "not be racist" by not ignoring racial issues? When Martin Luther King said that he wanted his children judged "not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character," I don't think he was giving White Americans carte blanche to ignore de facto racism.

I haven't read the actual news articles directly, but apparently there's a storm a-brewin' in Logan Circle. An almost-entirely Black church in what used to be an almost-entirely Black neighborhood is now in an almost-entirely White neighborhood. And its congregation hasn't run away; they just drive to church now on Sundays, and because parking is tight, they're double-parking on the block in front of the church. Apparently the people who now live in the pricey homes in the area don't like the people who have to drive to their church and double-park. However, the churchgoers probably used to walk to church - that, or they always drove but Logan Circle was less trendy and parking was easier back in the day. And now they have to double-park on Sundays.

This is the perfect moment for Whites to say "Oh, I don't see this as a race issue."

How the fuck would you see it as a race issue when you don't understand what de facto racism is? It's really great for Whites to not see issues of gentrification and church membership as race issues, even though housing and religious attendance are two of the three areas I can think of (the third being schooling, of course) in which we are most strongly segregated in America. If you don't notice that everyone at your religious institution is the same race, or that everyone you went to school with was the same race, or if you are especially cognizant of the fact that people in your neighborhood ARE of different races to the extent that you feel the need to tell everyone - you probably don't realize that gentrification is a race issue.

Greg (the roommate) recommends the following article on Whiteness (i.e. being White and "not seeing color"):

"The Boondocks vs. Jump Start"

It's pretty funny (if you are capable of finding academic articles "funny") to hear what Whites and Blacks had to say about the funniest, most racial Black comic strip ever vs. the tamest, lamest one. It's also pretty embarrassing if you're White and get embarrassed about how blind our people can be. It's probably terrifically un-shocking if you're Black and have lived in America for 7 days or longer.

Go read.

Fine, I Guess It's My Thumb

2006-04-11T16:40:00.000-04:00

I totally thought I was that much of a badass. I thought that maybe - just maybe, in my night of drunken polyamorous debauchery - I had actually whipped it out for the camera.

My package is average-sized. I've examined enough packages to know this. My thumb is far narrower than my package ever is. At full-on I-Was-In-The-Pool! mode - i.e. its most shrunken state, it's about 3.7" circumference, and my thumb at the knuckle is about 2.7" circumference. But I managed to get a really hot cameraphone shot (or rather, a certain voyeur I know managed to get a shot) of my arm snaking into my unzipped pants, with my thumb snaking out of the fly, and looking totally like a cock. Pubic hair above it, unbuttoned fly below it, you can see about 4" of thumblength and the way-down part of my thumb that is about 4" circumference - so it looks like a dick. Also, the lighting is poor, the shot's blurry, and it was taken with a cameraphone.

I was able to get a higher-res picture off of the T-Mobile website, and it's a keeper. And although I can admit freely that I am the type to potentially let a friend take a nudie shot of me in public, I don't think I can ever admit to anyone that hasn't seen the picture that I once thought my thumb was my johnson. It just sounds horribly embarrassing.

But it's a great shot. I have some good pictures from that night.

Fuck Mardi Gras, That's My D.C. Weekend

2006-04-11T00:44:00.000-04:00

I just got some blackmail pics sent to me tonight via the internet. Now, I've read a lot of gay erotica over the years and I know how it's supposed to work: first you get the blackmail pics of you whipping out your johnson at 4 AM; then pretty soon you're being dressed up in women's lingerie and photographed some more. From there, it's a short road till you're being urinated on by policemen while their K-9 "officer" is making you his bitch and someone's got it on video.

...er, or don't y'all read the same "literature" I do? Um, that was awkward...

At any rate, that won't be happening with me: you can't blackmail shameless exhibitionistic pervs. And the one picture - the only one that actually shows genitalia - is blurry enough in the right regions (i.e. both upstairs and downstairs) such that it's arguably some other random hipster whipping it out. Besides, it's blurry enough that you can't pinpoint my exact age. "I was young and I needed the money... sob sob" - you know how it works, you've seen Dr. Laura's nudie shots too.

I guess the advent of camera phones has created a world in which you just can't whip it out in public whenever you feel like it, because your so-called friends might take pictures of your cock. What has life in America come to? As for the rest of the "art collection," I'd say I can't believe such things occur on the street in the wee hours of the morning in the capital city of this fine nation, except that I was involved in them and it's captured in full color. And actually, I like some of the horrendously lascivious things I've done in public.

Mmmm, more stories to tell the grandkids.

It's All Kinda Starting To Make Sense Now

2006-03-26T22:56:00.000-05:00

I think that I'm a little bit crazy, but I'm equally convinced that things are getting better as time goes on.

I grew up with a highly active brain with an under-developed sense of self-control. That's probably as succinct as one could biographize my youth. From Kindergarten through Senior Year, I was the smartest boy in the class. There was a girl who was smarter than myself. By senior year we were both out, and that made me very smug. Ha ha, religious-right assholes on the school board, your biggest geniuses are into hot same-sex action. Neither of us, naturally, was even close to the top of the class in GPA. There's a point at which you're smart enough in the one sense to be offended by all of school itself, and yet foolish enough to go ahead and say "fuck it," even though doing well in school is a pretty fucking good idea. And yet, nonetheless, I've managed to make it to the point, where it would be difficult for me to not get my Ph.D. I've got a big head about my head.

The under-developed sense of control was always the yin to that yang, though. I could never really slow down my speech to the point where people could understand what I was saying. Not that they would have anyway, since I was reading graduate-level art history books at the age of 5. My first-grade gym teacher (I was 6 by that point) told my parents on open house night that he "had no idea that Chinese coffins were enclosed in something called sarcophagi."

"Well, Egyptian ones were too," I added.

But back to that whole pesky self-control thing. I've also never (until recent years, when I've been taking increasingly large doses of amphetamines) been able to walk at a normal pace, unless I actively think about it, and even then I get this amazing sense of frustration. This also plays out in other arenas. Don't ask me the number of cars I've owned in my lifetime. My poor parents. The first week I was on Adderall was in the winter, a little over a year ago. I was driving with some friends to go snowtubing (yawn - it sure as hell isn't snowboarding) and the journey took us through the state of Maryland. "WOW!" I shouted, "I don't feel an undying urge to ride these cars' bumpers at a single carlength!" There were parts of myself - aspects of my basic behavior that I had never thought about - that could actually occur at a reasonable pace. This was new to me at the age of 25.

And the reading. That was something I looooooooved as a kid. Started reading at age two, and by the time I was five I was reading adult books, though mostly just in art and geography. I read every issue of National Geographic that was published during the calendar years of 1974-1981 (those were the eight years that my parents had a subscription to). They got me my own subscription some time around '85, and I read the new ones, too. My dad also accumulated dozens of books on Egyptian art, and I read the kid, young-adult, popular press, and college-level ones. The only one that was actually graduate level I skimmed more than anything. It was a little dry for my taste. I also just read anythingthefuck that I could get my hands on. Didn't sleep much as a kid; just read all night, every night. I'd go to the public library and practically get armfuls at a time.

Something unfortunate happened though, and that's that around the age of 8 or 9, I just couldn't read anymore. After a paragraph or two, I'd just start drifting. Decided I didn't like to read. Now, I always liked computer and video games, but around 3rd or 4th grade, they started being about all I liked. Nothing else held my interest much. I played Tee-Ball one summer (the summer I turned 8, between 2nd and 3rd grade) and I loved it for the three-week season. Then my mom signed me up for a second three-week season and I hated it. Learning the game was fun, but once I knew the rules and I had done it for a little while, waiting to bat was boring! I was smart enough not to torture myself in outfield, and usually took 1st or 2nd base when we were fielding. But still, I just didn't want to be there. And I had loved it just days prior. That was really the summer when ADHD started to kick in. Basically, a good deal of recent research is starting to suggest that the hyperactivity and the impulsivity is there from preschool, but the inattention either doesn't kick in, or isn't noticed, until some time in elementary school. Well, it happened to me.

I try to avoid the maudlin approach to looking at it all. Oh, poor me. But in a sense, it's a mini-tragedy to be a bright kid who loved to read and, over the course of elementary school, turn into a videogame addict who got enough bus referrals, conduct slips in class, and in-school suspensions that I could still be wiping my ass with them if I didn't throw them away on the way home from school every day. Wasn't my "fault" (though I think if you wanted to analyze the semiotics of "fault" you could fill volumes, so let's move on) that I couldn't sit still, keep my goddamn mouth shut, do my homework, control myself when I disliked my peers. Really strict parenting, the absence of siblings, and a small private school probably would have reduced some of the problems. However, I had none of these. I also didn't have the parents who put their kids on Ritalin. I had the "my kid's smart and he's bored with the material in school" parents. If eight-year-old kids had insight into such things, I imagine I might have said, "No, mom, YOU were smart and bored with the material in school, yet you got straight As from K thru 12. Have you noticed that you're driving me to school every morning because I can't ride the bus anymore, because I've gotten five bus referrals this semester?" But kids - although they do say the darndest things - seldom actually state things in such a darndest way, and I was no exception. And I continued to do poorly in school.

Anyway, I'll try spare you the whole sappy book at this point in time. This post is getting awfully long and isn't even proving my point yet. My point is in regard to the big head. The only thing I had as a kid was the undying belief that I was an unqualified, and yet brutally oppressed, genius. There's a reason why A Confederacy of Dunces is one of my top 2 or 3 favorite books ever written.

What's funny is how my ego grew so completely enormous around the idea of "I Am The Smartest Thing Alive" and how it shriveled, like George Costanza in the pool, around most other aspects of my life. As my childhood chaos spiraled - I was just about the worst-behaved student in elementary & middle school - I was pretty convinced that I was a piece of shit in most areas. Depression grew in middle school, abated in high school, came back senior year of high school (and then came psychotherapy and pot smoking to bring me out of it). But by the time you're a smart-but-low-achieving college student, no one seems to realize that you might have that Hyper Child Disease or whatever it's called. You're just called a slacker. And as you grow older, you do get better at suppressing the external behavior - so instead of pacing around, you sit there with the miserable urge to jump on shit and you know you can't. So again, people don't really believe that you have a natural mental deficit to pace yourself and focus your attention. Plus, depressed people can't concentrate, so ADHD got missed by my senior year of high school-freshman year of college shrink. But anyone who talked to any of my teachers ever would have had a clear picture instantly. I'm sure even my college teachers found me too much to handle.

At any rate, I do believe that when I get neurotic as an adult, as I've been the last couple of weeks, it seems to come from the ego gap: I'm trying to believe, to understand, to remind myself that there are actually some things I don't know and some times when I'm wrong. And I'm desperately trying to believe, acknowledge, and grasp that I'm not a total outcast. It ain't middle school any more. It's just tough when you're a kid who develops such extreme beliefs in two directions - "I know everything" + "I can't do anything right." Because neither is true, but if you believe them both for long enough during your formative years, it's hard to remember all the time that they're both wrong.

So that's my deal. That's my tell-all open therapy session for today.

I'm Not The Only Tease Out There

2006-03-26T22:41:00.000-05:00

St. Patrick's Day, if you'll recall, was yet another night caught in the Bizarre Mack Triangle. A nice young lady asked me if I had a girlfriend, and a gentleman and I were flirting all night. (Meanwhile another intoxicated young man told both myself and the lady that he'd transcended sex. Does that just mean that he's really, really good at masturbating? Because that's what I think it means).

Anyway, the guy was flirty all night and then was a little odd at the end of the night, and was odd when I called him (he did give me his digits, after all, so it was odd that he was odd). Then I ran into his roommate at a 'mo bar later in the week. "Hey, Hipster!" he yelled and I turned around. "There's something I need to tell you. My roommate's not gay!"

"Why did he flirt with me all night then? Why did he give me his number?"

"Well, first off, he really liked what you were wearing and he really did wonder where you got it. And, he's a really nice guy and makes a lot of eye contact with everybody. Plus, by the time the dope finally realized you were (A) gay and (B) flirting back, he was probably flattered. And he said you two had a great conversation. Anyway, he told me the whole story and we had a good laugh about it and I was so hoping to run into you to tell you!"

I think I'm the luckiest guy on Earth. Even when Karma turns around to bite me in the ass, everyone still has a good laugh.

"You're 26. You Shouldn't Be Going Home Alone."

2006-03-26T01:59:00.000-05:00

That's what a friend of mine told me tonight as I was giving him & his BF a ride home to Adams Morgan from Halo. "Re-La-Shun-Ship." That's what a friend of mine told me two nights ago at Buffalo Billiards. What's the difference? The first friend is a gay guy; the second friend is a straight gal.

I guess I kind of feel like there only are two options, and I'm tired of thinking about both. The honest truth is that I can get good sex, and I can get a bad relationship. And the other, logically following and honest corollary, is that I'd love a good relationship with good sex.

Three friends and I got dinner tonight and then went to Halo (a non-smoking overly lit bar, for those of you not in the know) and had a couple drinks. I've had an aversion to Halo since it opened, and it's kind of silly. For someone who is good looking, well dressed, and confident (not to mention humble), the brightly-lit bar ought to be my home base. But I always feel like there's so much attitude there. A shrink might suggest that it all goes back to my teenage years, when other gay guys were so bitchy and nasty that I developed a sense of internalized homophobia that my leftist parents had made sure not to raise me with. My parents fostered a strong enough sense of gay pride in their children that their gay son came out in 11th grade, yet sadly I turned around to feel like gay men are all nasty, mean bitches. Let's be honest: in 11th grade in the mid-90s, there were two types of gay kids who came out: troublemakers who loved the fact that their innate selves pissed off those in power, and the superqueens who had been called fags since they were old enough to pick out their own clothing. Don't ask which group I was in, or I'll hit you with my purse.

I've never been into the drugs'n'dancin' scene, but its less skeezy variant - the gay bars that have drunkenness, low attitude, and lots of dancing - have always appealed to me because there's not a ton of room for attitude. Drunk people dancing is fun. And the well-lit, non-dancing places? I still have an aversion to them on some level. I have this innate assumption that the whole room is full of attitude, even though it usually isn't.

And so, when I go to Halo and I see people standing around and talking with cocktails in their hands, I instantly recoil. The funny thing is that there were about 10 attractive men whom I probably could have gone home with tonight, and I just wasn't interested. The most pressing factor was that I've been working on shit around the clock for grad school all week. Well, truthfully, I've been working all day and drinking all night this week. Not the kind of week that you want to end with having to perform for the new guy. And it's not like I wouldn't have gotten it up, gotten off, and repeated in the morning. That would have been fine. But I would have been tired, and I wouldn't have been feeling creative, and it would have ended with a digit exchange.

And that would lead to the next step: him calling me if he were more interested, or me calling him if I were more interested, or neither of us calling each other. Frankly, I'm tired of this game. I'm tired of sleeping with people and having to go through the ritual. Either it's terrible and we both bolt, or I'm interested and he's a flake, or he's interested and I am not. If the game usually worked out, there wouldn't be a lot of people on the singles scene.

Frankly, I'm a little sick of the singles scene. I was never really on the singles scene in its truest sense till the last couple years, and it's been hella exciting. But it's hard work holding out for something good, and it's hard work getting the sex you crave from randoms who are gone forever in the morning, and being called a slut by your friends if you admit that you've been getting it.

That's why I went home alone tonight.

Caught Over-Thinking Again

2006-03-23T01:54:00.000-05:00

I have this little problem where I don't always think before I act. It generally leads to delightfully comic results, and frankly, even when you don't think before you act, sometimes your actions come out just fine anyway. Which makes my day-to-day living somewhat like gambling.

Now, it's not so bad in recent years with my amphetamine prescription, but you can't always perfectly drug-away fundamental neurological shortcomings. And I've realized that I still have that other problem, the one I don't like to think about.

The other little problem is chronic re-hashing and obsessing over past events that have already occurred. I do a lot of past-tense agonizing. My theory on this is that, if you spend your whole life doing little regrettable things, all the time, you start feeling like you can't help doing regrettable things. It's inevitable that you will fuck up a lot of things in the future. (Everyone's gonna fuck shit up in the future, but when you're hyperactive and impulsive, with attention problems to boot - you know you're gonna fuck a lot more shit up). So maybe at some point, I stopped trying to worry about shit I'd do wrong in the future - because that's inevitable - and then I started overthinking every decision I made that led to something bad happening.

Cuz that's what I feel like happens with me. No worries for the future, no worries or pride over past achievements. Just obsessive re-re-re-analysis of something that I did that led to an outcome I disliked. Maybe, I think, just maybe I can train myself to automatically make the right choices all the time.

But that's not ever going to happen. If you make automatic choices, you can't control whether they are going to be the right ones. That's why they're called automatic. What one (i.e. myself) needs to do is to not be on autopilot all the time. Stimulant drugs really, really, really help with this.

At any rate, there's no need for someone who doesn't have autopilot issues to re-hash the past. It won't do them any good. And it don't do any good for this someone to re-hash the past either. When am I going to get to the point where I just stop beating myself up over spilt milk?

Albums Of Our Lives: New Order's Substance

2006-03-21T22:41:00.000-05:00

Welcome to part two of Albums Of Our Lives, a new series in this blog about safe-for-work topics. We now jump to the 1980s to another greatest-hits album. Some of my favorite albums are "best-of," although that's not a very hip thing to say.

Substance was a singles-y "greatest hits" album in the sense that it was all radio songs (as opposed to the "best-of" albums that have their fans' favorites). However, Substance included a second disc with the 12 best B-sides from those singles. As such, it was more like the Beatles' Past Masters albums from the same year: you got the A and B sides from the singles on the same disc, so you got all the songs that you didn't have already. I'm just going to go through the first disc, with the hits, although disc 2 is excellent as well.

1. Ceremony: This is a Joy Division song. So, after Joy Division's lead singer (Ian) offed himself, the new lead singer (Bernard) of the new Order tried to sound like him at first. He must have bottomed out his vocal chords. They got better, though.

2. Everything's Gone Green: I resisted electro-sounding music in high school, so I didn't even listen to New Order until college. And I didn't buy this CD until grad school. It's embarrassing, but we all make mistakes. I've caught up by listening to this CD a lot a lot in the last three years. This song was totally re-hashed for "Blue Monday" a couple years later, and I'm totally OK with both songs.

3. Temptation: OK, I lied. I listened to one (1) CD in high school that had electropoppy music on it, and that was the Trainspotting soundtrack. And I loved this song. It's funny that I never checked out the rest of their material, although I was clearly scared of music that sounds like a computer wrote it. Too bad I held this bias for so long. Temptation has a warm, familiar feel to me though, and I think it's because it's the song I listened to the most before I heard anything else.

4. Blue Monday: The first song on the CD that, when played in the car, your friends will sing along with. The chorus of "Temptation" can be sung, but "Blue Monday" begs to be belted out. Everyone wants to know, "How does it feel to treat me like you do?" Indeed. The instrumental music in this song is just depraved. If you haven't heard it, you don't know, but if you have, you know it just feels dirty somehow. I like that.

5. Confusion: I never remember the name for this song, and yet I always sing it. New Order is, of all groups I can readily think of, the one that tries the hardest to give their songs names that sound nothing like the songs. I think "State of the Nation" is the only song of theirs from this CD (and, of all time, "World In Motion" is the only other one), that actually uses the words of the hook in the title of the song. So tricky.

6. Thieves Like Us: Listening to this song is like breathing in the 1980s. To think that a complex melody (that sounds like it's supposed to sound like a violin but greatly missed the mark) could be played on a synthesizer. Ahh, but we were so much older then; we're younger than that now. This song could be the background to Beverly Hills Cop; it's not that off of Axel F, which came out three years later. At least New Order helped create this sound. Thieves Like Us is about love, and how it belongs to everyone but us. That's sad.

7. Perfect Kiss: One good thing about New Order is that they don't sing till they're damn well ready for it. And well, hell, Bernard Sumner might just stop for awhile too if he damn well feels like it. And let those synth-y things make some cool noises. (I'm a little dumb when it comes to describing electronic music)

8. Subculture: Close your eyes and imagine: what if J.S. Bach came back to life in the post-disco, post-jazz, post-punk 1980s? I think he definitely would have either written this song, or killed the guy from Skid Row who stole his name. Maybe both. Anyway, New Order was the first band since the Doors to really get baroque music. Fuck all those 1970s progressive rock bands: New Order made Bach rock as opposed to making rock Bach. OK, well, honestly, the only thing really Bach-y is the synth organ that starts the song strongly and then returns throughout to make the song cool. It's not really that stylistically old school. But I like to think so.

9. Shellshock: Love to sing along to this one. Fast beat, makes you want to dance to it. And that can't really happen much, except at U St. clubs, which is why I go places where I can dance to this shit.

10. State of the Nation: this has a maddeningly (in a good way, if that contradiction is possible) mid-tempo pace. It's not a fast song and it's not a slow song. And these songs are all long - most are between 4-1/2 and 8 minutes long. Yet they all remain compelling the whole way through. That's the sign of some good fuckin' musicianship.

11. Bizarre Love Triangle: This is another song that I will sometimes tell people is my favorite song. It's up there with "The Boxer" on the short list. This was the second New Order song I listened to, as it was on the soundtrack for (and this is really funny) - my favorite movie in high school, which happened to be Threesome with Lara Flynn Boyle, Stephen Baldwin, and Josh Eddy. The media was corrupting, corrupting, corrupting me from a young age. I take no part of the blame for my own decadence.

12. True Faith: There is a reason why gay dudes love indie music. All the whiny boys who end up being straight men write music that expresses the same whiny childhood neuroses as those held by the whiny boys who ended up being gay men. "When I was a very small boy, very small boys talked to me / Now that we've grown up together, they're afraid of what they see." How could I not relate to this song? "My morning sun is the drug that brings me here / to a childhood I lost, replaced by fear." The best song possible to have ended the CD with.

...and that's two albums. Is this at all interesting? Should the exercise continue, or go away?

Albums Of Our Lives, Part One Of Many

2006-03-21T17:47:00.000-05:00

As a music snob and an obsessive-compulsive mp3 hoarder, I resist the urge to come up with lists of "best songs/albums ever." I happen to find the movie High Fidelity repugnant. John Cusack's character's repeated listing of "best breakup songs ever," etc., comes across as dull and self-important. I don't need to know what other people's exact rankings of the Best. Songs. Ever. are - but it's fun to talk about music. So I thought I'd give the whole thing a stab in terms of LPs/tapes/CDs that have been big influences for me at different points in my life. In fact, they're all still favorites. Let's start with one, and maybe I'll continue this later if y'all and I find it interesting.

Simon & Garfunkel's Greatest Hits (1972). This was the tape of my childhood that became the CD of my adulthood in high school. There are few things in this world that we like consistently from birth through the present, and never stop liking, and this album is one of them. The tracks:

1. Mrs Robinson: Actually my least favorite track on the whole CD. What I love about this song is that it cues me for the rest of the disc. No, it's true: in any other context, I'll totally skip this song, but when I put this CD in, I have to start here.

2. For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her: The live recordings of their older material is really what makes Greatest Hits such a gem in its own right. Art Garfunkel has a really, really high voice. It's almost creepy. This song has, on a number of occasions, made me cry for no good reason other than the fact that I (maybe not-so-secretly) love to cry. I especially love to cry to specific sappy types of music and gay cowboy movies.

3. The Boxer: I most frequently will tell people that this is my favorite song ever. I'm not a fan of picking any one song over any other song, but The Boxer really hit a chord with me some time around the age of 5 or 6, and it's stuck. I actually - and this is kind of embarrassing for one's favorite song - am still not sure exactly what that instrument is. It sounds like an oboe when it's at the forefront of the mix, but the same melody is played by what sounds like strings in the background. So, are there both strings and woodwinds in this song, or is it the same whatever-it-is in the front and back of the mix? Such an enigma. Oh, yes, and this song also introduced me to one of my favorite words, "whores." At age 5, I just assumed it meant manual laborers, and the "manual laborers" non-sexually-harassed the protagonist by yelling "come on buddy" or something to that effect. I was once innocent only a couple decades ago. Damn you, Simon!!!

4. The 59th Street Bridge Song: Again, the live tracks on this album are uniformly better than the originals. I would have loved loved loved to have seen my dad's favorite group for $3 as he did in college. Damn you, dad!

5. The Sound of Silence; 6. I Am A Rock; 7. Scarborough Fair/Canticle: Besides being my dad's favorite group, one of my mom's favorite groups, and the only non-classical tape that my parents ever listened to in the car, I think that Simon & Garfunkel resonated with me as a kid because they used a very childish rhetoric. There's really an "Emperor's New Clothes" logic behind a lot of their music. These three songs comprising the end of the A side of the LP/cassette are probably their best "gee whiz, why can't we all get along" tomes, hitting three different angles: first, the "everyone's yelling at each other but no one's listening;" second, "the reason I'm not listening is because I've been burned before and I'm sick of crying;" and third, "all most of us want to do is find love, so why are we fighting wars in foreign places for no purpose?" Scarborough Fair/Canticle really achieves, in much more gorgeous and poetic form, what the preacy "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" attempted. That's one of the great legacies, in my humble opinion, of the great Simon & Garfunkel: every urban left-winger in the '60s picked up a guitar and preached to the choir, but most of them were unsubtle and unmusical. Yet these guys figured out how to do both. Using a centuries-old English love song with a subtle background message to get the point across was genius, AND beautiful to listen to in a way that Pete Seeger/Phil Ochs/etc. never acheived.

8. Homeward Bound: You can really sing the songs on this CD. It's well known that S & G had some of the best harmonies out there, but when you think about it, they started with the best melodies. Even as a one-person unit, any of their songs would still be phenomenal. Although, once you've heard their tight harmonies, you'll never go back. And for the record, these guys were most strongly influenced by the Everly Brothers. Putting "Bye Bye Love" toward the end of their last CD wasn't a fluke or a throw-away. It was a shout-out to the guys who taught them how to do what they did best.

9. Bridge Over Troubled Water: Paul Simon has had some really, really, REALLY obnoxious attempts at multi-culti crap in his career. The horrendous wanna-be gospel of "Loves Me Like A Rock" makes me cringe; and true, "Graceland" was excellent - yet "Rhythm of the Saints" is slightly yawn-y. And the more recent albums - can anyone listen to them? Especially knowing what he's capable of? But let's backtrack to 1969, when a white urban folk duo made a fucking spiritual. A. Fucking. Spiritual. One more time: this is an honest-to-God spiritual written on a piano in a New York apartment. Is that even possible? I can't imagine anyone writing a spiritual today. Kanye West's "Jesus Walks" is definitely killer, and is as close as we'll probably see to a new spiritual. And "Bridge" isn't sung by a gospel choir or anything, either, but it's definitely inspirational. It might be the last pop song to cleverly bridge the love song/friend song/God song gap ever ("You've Got A Friend," which came out just a couple years later, is pretty safely on the secular side of things). And some might disagree with me that it's even really a spiritual at all, but I get the "God" feeling from this song that church sure as hell never did for me. At any rate, it's a spine-tingler.

10. America: My mom said, when I was in high school and a good 10 years into my S & G listening, that this song summed up her entire '60s generation. If there was one song that captured the Zeitgeist of '60s America, it was "America." Well-titled, boys, well titled.

11. Kathy's Song: This was one of the first songs I learned on the guitar, sophomore year of college. It really illustrates something about Paul Simon, and that's the fact that he's a conscious songwriter (up there with Willie Nelson and Carole King). You don't really imagine his contemporaries (the Beatles, Hendrix, Dylan) sitting down and plotting out a song: "well, I want three verses that start at the end of the measure, followed by three that start at the beginning of the measure" (Check it out between the 3rd and 4th verses: it's a conscious jump in the style of the song). And in no way does the songwritery-ness of the composition make "Kathy's Song" any less heartfelt or aching. I don't doubt for a minute that all he believes in is Kathy, and that he'd die like a raindrop if not for her. (Yeah, this one has made me cry on occasion, too)

12. El Condor Pasa (If I Could): This was my least favorite as a child, but it bumped ahead of "Mrs. Robinson" in high school when I got past the simplicity of the Andean arrangement (the oompah-ish beat has never been my favorite; I had neighbors a few years back who had a Tejano band that practiced next door at 10 AM on Saturdays, and this didn't help either). What really works for this song is the vocal track. I think the ornateness-yet-triteness of the instrumentation has a way of distracting you from the fact that the vocals are really yearning.

13. Bookends: As a child (I was perhaps 7 years old), I told my mom that this song was weird because it just kind of faded in and out for like a minute and didn't say much. This, of course, became precisely why I grew to love it. One of my favorites to play on guitar (all those double stops) and also possible to play on people's doorbell pipes if they have 3 or 4 (I've done this at parties and the melody is indeed recognizable. I'm an artist).

14. Cecilia: Simon and Garfunkel had a way of making songs that everyone can love. You don't have to be into the '60s (as I was raised to be) or a folk-music person (as I was raised to be) or a perv, or anything, to love this song. It's totally pervy (and helped warp me as a child, or so I like to believe), but it's totally cute. It's anachronistic, as Simon's best attempts at multi-culti songs are: you don't really feel like you're listening to a traditional Latin American folksong, but it doesn't sound like anything else that was released in 1969. All you know is that you want to clap your hands, stomp your feet, and sing along to what a silly hoe Cecilia is and how you don't care as long as she comes back. A metaphor for life, really.

I love music.

I Heart Threesomes

2006-03-19T22:20:00.000-05:00

M'Lah: "Hipster, how many threesomes have you had since your divorce?"

Hipster: "Oh, if you don't count the two different bisexual ones in '04, I've had three gay threesomes in the last 6 or 7 months. So really, not that many."

M'Lah: "You realize that five threesomes in two years - even forgetting your college days, mind you - is more than most people ever have in their entire lives?"

Hipster: "No, that can't be true. Really?"

===

Apparently, there are reasons why I scare people sometimes. But it's not like I tell strangers my sexual history when I meet them. Still, there would seem to be a general personality trait in there somewhere. Something in the disinhibited-thrillseeking realm? Perhaps.

Threesomes can be hard to coordinate, and they can spell doom for a couple-on-the-brink; further, they quite often involve a lot of drama between people. And, it's exponentially harder to repeat a threesome with the same cast than to repeat a one-night-stand between two people. You're looking at a one-time shot for that exact menage.

But damn, there are just things you can get out of a threesome that you can't get out of a deux-some:

(1) Oral sex - by - deux. Fun to go down on a stranger with a buddy. Fun to have two buddies go down on you together. Do both people lick the head? Or does one focus on the dick and the other on the balls? Not to mention the rimjobblowjob, also known as the "ohmyfuckinggodthatfeelssogoodicantbelieveitshappeningtome."

(2) Synchronized fucking. If you're lying on the bed, you get a phenomenon I like to call "The Double Earthquake." Imagine two different sine waves of thrust: the first is going in and out of you, but the second is a little more distant, and modulates the first. This is like being fucked by a Bootsy Collins LP when you're used to being fucked by Pat Boone.

Now, if you're in the middle of this one, you're feeling "The Night At The Roxbury." You somehow have the most and the least control at once. This could also be called the "How D'y'like THEM Apples" position. Slap on a jimmy hat, start goin' to town. "Oh, you like that? You like that?"... and then comes Mr. 3 from behind with a big ol' HowdyDoodyUpTheBungHole. This is definitely about the most involved one can be in a threesome. Hell, if this were the only thing that you did in a threesome, those in the first and third positions of the Funk Orchestra could plausibly (and Clintonianly) argue that they've never had sex.

Being the caboose in a synchronized fuck is a blessing and a curse. You don't always get the full-on-plow because you're working with weird angles. But this is totally made up for by the fact that you're drivin' this train, goddammit, and there's something really exciting about fucking the first person by remote. (Is it a bisexual threesome? Are you fucking the guy into the girl? HOT. Is it a gay threesome? Do you get to fuck your friend/BF/stranger with someone else's dick? Oh Hells Yes you do).

(3) Voyeurism. Some people (kinky couples?) like to have other people watch them fuck. But it's much more fun when you get to be really in on it, when you can move in and out of the action to watch (or just crane your neck from wherever and whatever you're doing). Yeah, you can see the basketball game a little better if you're a few rows up. But isn't the courtside experience just a little more exciting? You're damn right it is.

(4) Auteurism. We can't all go to film school and make movies, directing actors to bring our whims and fantasies to life. But we sure as hell can tell the two people in bed with us what they ought to be doing to each other. However, this can bring about the next perk...

(5) Triadic Power Dynamics. Did you ever think bullying and ganging up on people, and being bullied and ganged up on was hot? If you've read this far, you're probably in the percentage of the population that acknowledges this and not in the percentage who pretends it's a lie. Mmmmm, by the time you're having sex with two other people, the "easily persuaded" dynamic is in the air and real fun - real, hot fun - can occur. None of this "let's stare at each other in the eyes and intellectualize about everything" bullshit. More like, whatever two people can agree on is what the third is going to do. This frees you up to get what you want from them, and it frees them up to get what they want from you, and it frees all of you up from worrying about anything but pleasing each other.

(6) The Whole Silverware Drawer. Oh yeah? You like to spoon? Like to be the little spoon or the big spoon? Fuck that shit, when you got a fork, knife, and spoon you're having a picnic of sweet dreams. Just be sure you packed enough condoments for "breakfast"...

So, in summation, it has hereby been proven by one Mr. A.H. Hipster on this day that Threesomes Officially Rock. Put that in your pipe and smoke it... with two friends, of course...

14-Hour I.V. Beer Drip

2006-03-18T23:08:00.000-05:00

St. Patrick's Day fell on a Friday this year, at the very start of Spring Break week. It had been a long, long week for me and prior to Thursday night, I hadn't had a good night's sleep in God-knows-when. That meant I had to make good use of the holiday.

I woke up around 11 and hung out on the internet, downloading music for awhile before taking a nice, warm shower. Spied the green plaid shirt and knew I had to wear it. It's one of the coolest shirts ever in the collection of a man who only buys cool shirts. It's a little Vegas Cowboy, which I'm totally OK with. It had to be ironed, but that's a small price to pay for a drinkin' shirt for one of the Triumvirate Of Boozidays (viz., St. Green Stout Day, All Highballs Eve & New Beer's).

Rolled in ten minutes late to my 1:00 lunch date on the hill with Anne, the baby sister of one of my co-best-friends-from-far-away. I had suggested Tortilla Coast for lunch as she was over that direction already. I added the disclaimer that I've only ever gone there for margaritas and fajitas at night, so I don't know what the food's like sober. We remedied this by ordering a pitcher of Grand Marnier-spiked margaritas, which we were well into by the start of lunch. She told me so many things that I can't tell her brother. Fortunately for everyone, I probably killed off enough brain cells over the rest of the day to lose most of it anyway.

After wandering around the National Gallery East and ripping on classic Modernists, we found a couple great Picassos to stare at and discuss how much we love drinking.

Sobered up for the most part, we went back to my place, made some coffee and I played guitar while she talked. Her brother trained her well in that he always did something else when she talked, so I could play Nintendo in front of her if I wanted to (and maybe I have...). Anne had to meet her aunt and cousin for dinner, so around 6:30 I walked her to the metro, and headed over to my friend K's house four blocks away.

We started drinking Guinness and finding mp3s on K's roommate's computer. We listened to a lot of '80s pop and talked about nothing of importance, which is just how it ought to be. My friend Schmitty came over. He'd never met K and crew, but got along splendidly with all. Schmitty is a first-year graduate student whom I suspect actually just emerged from a Norman Rockwell portrait to come get a Ph.D. and then jump back into other portraits to solve problems with social-science solutions. Kind of a Weird Science-meets-Erin Brockovich postmodern superhero, really. Eerily nice for being neither Quaker nor Homosexual. He's so damn wholesome that I just want to corrupt him.

Finally, Irish Guy came over to bully us all up out of K's house to go see his cousin's Irish rock band at Staccato in Adams Morgan. Not a bad walk at all if you have 8-10 people in your posse and you've been drinking beer all evening. Staccato was packed, and we all had to wait in line for the bathroom. While in line, we could hear (but not see) the band's singer say, "we're the multi-ethnic Irish rock band!" and the audience cheered. "Really, everyone gets to be Irish on St. Patrick's Day," Schmitty said. Donning an Andy Rooney-in-Breakfast At Tiffany's Chinese accent, I replied with "I Rish!" - yet another moment when I realize I can never run for President.

The line for the bar was crazy, and I wanted to step next door to get a drink. Next door happens to be the Duplex Diner, which is for all intents and purposes an aggressively sexual gay bar for rich guys in their early thirties. Schmitty was at just the right moment in his corruption to be introduced unwittingly into such a scene. The bartender was impressed that I ordered two Maker's Mark-on-the-rocks, and the regular crowd was impressed that two mid-20s hunks walked into their mid-30s meat market. We ran into a guy our age that I had met at Wonderland's gay country night on Wednesday and whose advances I had pretended not to perceive. He gave Schmitty the evil eye - Man Thief.... ooohhh... - which made me glad that we had gone. Plus Schmitty and I got to people watch. I think it was fun corruption for him. He's asked to go along on a barnstorming-of-DC tour before, and I didn't want to disappoint. A good night in DC for me often involves the magic formula of (1) house party; (2) straight bar; (3) gay bar; (4) different house party. This was a good night. We went back to the Irish rock band till they finished their set, and then headed off to the next house party, pulling the sweetest guy ever from the crew with us.

The house party was fuckin' killer fun. Hosted by an ESPN-lovin' gay guy who was three sheets to the wind, in honor of his birthday and the birthday of one of my Fight Club neighbors. In the indie-rockin' U St./Columbia Heights/Mt. Pleasant world, the guys are always such a great mix of the probably straights and the probably gays. Who likes obviousness from either angle? I enjoy the mix. However, seeing as I wasn't aware of the gay potential of the party, both my straight-guy-friends-in-tow were reasonably impressed at the fact that we had shown up at this party and there were all these guys flirting with me. I turned to my two friends and started singing "All Bout U" by 2pac... "ev-ry-oth-er city we go, ev-ry-oth-er radiooo, no matter where I go..."

They finished the chorus for me: "I see the saaaame hoo-ooo-ooo-ooes..."

Not that the party was full of hoes. One gentleman was quite drunk, and out of nowhere - I wasn't hitting on him in the least - gave me the Morrissey speech. I didn't think it was going to go there, but it did. "You know," he told me, "I'm not in the habit of going home with people who charm me." I said, OK, and sliently wondered where this was even coming from. "Nor am I in the habit of going home with people whom I charm."

"You haven't charmed me yet, so you're OK. Are you trying to say that you like me but you don't get down on the first night and you'd like to take me to dinner first?"

"Look, you're a charming guy," he said, "You are. But I just feel like I've transcended sex, you know?"

"Sure," I said.

Morrissey Jr. was drunk, and frankly I've met a lot of people like him before. I met two a couple New Years' ago, at a party that was hosted by my friend's boyfriend - who happened to be roommates with my ex's baby brother. Said baby brother was not OK with me helping his friends (male and female) out of their shirts, and my collecting True Gay Confessions from his unbeknownst-to-him closeted friends. Then again, I've always wondered if said baby brother is gay himself anyway. Wouldn't surprise me.

Anyway, Morrissey Jr. went to go hit on a poor girl, who I had engaged in mutual clothing compliments with earlier. The poor girl was getting hit on by Mr. I've Transcended Sex and so I then followed him to her to save her. At some point, she and I stepped out on the front stoop, and she confessed her attraction to me and asked me if I had a girlfriend. (You know, that thing that I totally love but feel totally guilty about - yeah, that. Had one of those this St. Patty's Day).

She then asked me if our Smiths-frontman buddy was gay, and I told her the whole exchange that I'd had with him. Poor girl, she actually seems both cute and sane, and I feel bad for ladies who honestly get burned by two fags in one night. I was in drinking-all-day-suave-dude-Swingers-shirt mode, and I haven't pretended to be straight since Halloween. It's cruel and was totally unintentional in this case. I wasn't trying to fool her. Next time, I'll be more upfront about being a mo.

But of course, the funny part is that if you're too upfront about being a mo in such circles, you lose cred with the ambiguous indie-rock boys, who'd prefer you were a little lower-key. I don't always act the most mo-ish or the most het (last Halloween aside - OK, a lot of times aside), and that just has the potential of confusing people.

So aside from Morrissey Jr. and Poor Girl, I also had a good amount of back-and-forth with another gentleman. He was acting interested-yet-disinterested (which is really the smoothest way to act) and we impressed each other with our wits. Or rather, I think we did. He went to the Black Cat, or the 9:30 Club, or DC-9, or something, for some period of time, but eventually came back.

I love my Fight Club neighbors. Aside from having killer rapelling-into-keg-stands-mud-wrestling-doing-body-shots-off-of-18-year-old-straight-boys parties, they are also unafraid to be intellectual to the point of nerdiness even when three sheets to the wind.

Most self-centered alcoholics will tell you that they are intellectual when they drink, and even when you yourself are drunk, all you can hear is blahblahblahblah. Not so with these boys. We had an hourlong discussion of linguistics, a pet field of all of ours, bringing in some neuroscience, psychology, computer science, social theory, and other topics, while continuing to suck down Yuengling. A perfect way to spend a holiday, in my book.

The gentleman came back from the rock-or-dance-or-something event, and resumed talking to me. The sports-nut-birthday-boy-host broke out the weed, and about half of us smoked some. The gentleman passed, but if you go to parties at the houses of friends who smoke pot, on a Friday holiday, you probably aren't that worried about a guy you like smoking pot. We talked some more, but then everyone started to leave so I got his number. Me: "so, would you be interested in getting dinner or something this week?" Him: weird expressions. Me: "you don't have to be." Him: it's [number].

On the way out the door, the host pushed a small bag of weed into my hand. That's props. That says "you're cool, let's hang out again sometime." Could be sexy, could be chummy, leaves it up in the open. Nothin' says lovin' like a bag o' drugs.

It was pushing 5 AM and I got a ride home, where I slept like a baby. Saturday found me not really getting up till about 3 pm, but having absolutely zero hangover. No Advil at bedtime, none upon rising. You can have somewhere between 12 and 24 drinks and not get hungover with the I.V. beer drip* (*including tequila and bourbon drinks). And that's why St. Patrick's Day, when it lands on a Friday, is priceless.

Postscript: I think the gentleman is going to flake out, and that's fine. I didn't have my heart set on him; it just seemed like he was interested in something other than a hookup, and I could have been too. But Morrissey Jr. told me up front - even ahead of time - that he wasn't interested in anything, and I told Poor Girl directly that I wasn't interested in anything. So there's no point in his being flaky. However, I've been flaky before so I can't even complain. C'est la vie. But even better:

Postscript #2: Saturday night blew Friday night out of the water.

Maybe Everyone's Like That To Some Extent

2006-03-08T23:48:00.000-05:00

In my recent attempt to understand my romantic life by clustering men into categories, I wonder if I overlooked the fact that those categories of people really reflect general patterns in all of us (or at least all of us in the MSM dating pool). At least at some point in time. Then I wonder if I'm being too nice in trying to backpedal my own beliefs. To break it down: how am I like, or not like, the kind of guys I usually date?

I don't identify as much with the sweet-clingy-low-self-esteem kind of guys so much. There have been times when I built people up somewhat, or put them on pedestals, but I've never been much to throw myself at people. I'll push hard or flirt too heavily, but that's a little different than "go ahead an be an asshole, it won't change my love for you." Nonetheless - to a lesser extreme - it's not so bad to be able to fall madly, deeply in love with people and look past their faults - providing you're not a doormat. But "sweet" is a good thing - it shouldn't be a perjorative. I want guys who are sweet, as long as they don't want me to treat them like crap all the time.

I also can't totally identify with the hot slutty fratboy type. Being skanky can be kind of hot, but sometimes it's just pathetic or gross. It's hard for me to totally understand just wanting to have sex with everyone or everything. I saw a documentary the other night on gay sex in NYC in the 1970s. And those guys were doing it all day, every day, with everybody. But here's the hitch: they were all on drugs practically all the time. And one of them said outright that with every guy he had sex with in The St. Mark's Bathhouse, he kept the hope alive that that guy could be The Guy. It's human nature to keep such hopes alive, which is why I'm totally confused when someone really just wants to sleep with different people all the time. Now, I've had my share of one-night-stands, but rarely did I go out with the explicit intention of finding someone to sleep with. I've met cool people, hooked up with them, and maybe we decided in the morning to go our own ways. But if I thought ahead of time with every guy, "I really want to hook up with you once and move on" - I wouldn't be able to do it. Keep hope alive for some kind of romance - if you just want to get off, masturbate. It's not a bad idea. But still - who doesn't like to get face-fucked once in a while by someone that they aren't interested in settling down with? Sometimes everybody likes to be a little skeezy.

In terms of the self-loathing perfectionistic thing, let's be honest. I have more than a little of that myself. From my Halloween antics of "pretending to be straight" (although this was a fun social experiment, and I did conclude that the only way to really pretend to be straight is to pretend to like women, big duh to me) to my needing the best degree (doctoral), best body, best clothes... I might not be a clean freak, and I might be fairly low maintenance, but I want to be The Best. I don't think there are too many of us in the man-on-man world who are totally free from perfectionism or heterocentrism. The world would have to be a lot different for us not to develop these habits as teenagers, even if we can say as adults that they're wrong. But even with the perfectionism vs. homophobia thing: being able to say you're not a neat-freak gay guy (i.e. not perfectionistic) is one of the most socially sanctioned ways to be internally homophobic. So there you have it.

And the stable but squeamish type that tend to get freaked out by me? Well, I get freaked out by other people too. In fact, I won't date anyone who's freakier than me, so I can't really hate on people who set the bar slightly higher than I do and exclude me as part of the "freaky" category.

Alcoholism? Well, I have had times in my life (*cough cough* junior year of college) when I was well into the realm of alcoholic drinking (every night heavily before my 10PM - 3AM factory job - wow...) and these days I'm a fun social drinker. So it's hard to hate on people who are in that bad phase now. I just hope they'll pull out of it and not make it a lifetime habit.

So it's not that the guys I date are necessarily fucked-for-life-totally-undateable, nor totally different from me, nor totally different from most of us. Just cuz some are a little more in one direction doesn't make them the worst people ever.

And what do I want? What kinds of qualities do I *need* to look for in a guy? What will I put up with? Those will have to go in a future post. Good night...

MySpace Is Creepy Slash Everyone From Highschool Is A Redneck

2006-03-06T23:53:00.000-05:00

"Minnesotans aren't all sheltered rednecks," I like to tell people. "We're an educated, urbane wonderland, and if it weren't freezing, everyone would want to live there." Ever since I moved to the East Coast, I've been telling people this.

I have some friends (e.g. MintyFresh) who've been trying to get me onto MySpace for about a year now, and I finally bit the bullet when my friend's friend from the Southland was visiting, and extolled the virtues of MySpace. Well, actually, what really did it is that she sent me the URL so it was too easy to join. You gotta know that's how I operate. Put the URL in front of my face and I might actually do anything.

But God DAMN. There are just too many people on MySpace to find anyone. The best search I was able to do was people from my high school who actually admit to having gone to my high school.

They are now - pretty much every last one of them - fucking redneck hick inbred hillbillies.

Actually, I found my girls - those hot, budding lesbians who had great taste in rock music and leftist politics in high school - who were low-key enough that no one cared that they were lesbians. And I added them as friends. And there were a couple other friends that I found and added. But for the most part, people who (1) went to my high school, (2) admit to having gone there, and (3) use MySpace, are divorced with children. And trucks. And that's sad.

Then I went to my grad school and looked around, but grad students aren't on MySpace. However, undergrads are, and I found a few whose major is the same as the class that I TA for. I am deathly scared for the future. I also didn't need to see the abs of the retarded 18-year-old straight boy who sits in the back of the class. I don't have a ton of barely-legal fantasies; hell, most dudes under 23 are inept at sex anyway. And I didn't need to see his abs. I've licked so many nice ones that I don't want to see those of people that I have no patience/time/energy for.

Now that I think about it, everyone who has encouraged me to use MySpace is heterosexual (might have been one or two bisexuals in there). Maybe the 'mos are smart enough not to use a site where the words STRAIGHT, GAY, or NO ANSWER (which I think is the Latin term for CLOSET CASE) appear right next to your grinning picture. I don't care how out & proud you are, that's a little off-putting. Also, people get less and less interesting the more space & freedom you give them to prattle on about their pets, transportation devices, children, and ex-spouses - not to mention giving them the freedom to chintz out their background and add a MIDI file of bad pop music that plays at full volume the minute you click on their profile.

So if you're on MySpace and you read this blog and you know me (this is going to be, like, 2 people max), go add me, since I have no idea how to find people other than those who admit having gone to my high school. I'm hating on it, but I'll probably use it.

Too Many Men, Too Little Time

2006-03-06T00:23:00.000-05:00

...that title could be bragging, or it could be flogging. I hope to achieve both.

In the dating/fucking world - particularly the one involving hot man-on-man action - it's just too easy to always have someone around. And always having someone around can be both good and bad. It's good to have the charisma and the skills and the BP to be able to always find someone to have a date with, or sleep with, or both. But it's bad to have so many people around that you can't evalute what's going on, or the people you're with, because you are always jumping.

I think about the the dating/lickingfistingtribadism world - you know, the one involving hot woman-on-woman action - and how the constant criticism both inside and out of that world involves the jumping from relationship to relationship. Every lesbian relationship seems like a rebound from the last one. And yet, everyone seems to see the gay world as so different. Those gay men are just so independent and happily slutty. They can just jump from bed to bed without getting attached.

But maybe every gay one-to-three-night-stand is the short-term equivalent of those lesbian one-to-three-year relationships that run into each other. Just as problematic are those short "relationships" that occur when you meet someone, share a portion of your life story/goals/dreams/quirks with them over the course of a few dates/hookups, go to third base or maybe fuck, and move on because one or both of you want to.

Because when you keep jumping, you get good at sharing your life story/goals/dreams/quirks (e.g. from Minnesota; getting a Ph.D; love coffee and music; want an urban life) and you get good at having a fun time with guys (e.g. getting sushi; sucking their dick; getting your dick sucked; supplying Gatorade and Advil; driving them home in the morning), and you get good at figuring out how to move on (e.g. they stop calling; you get tired of their hairy moles/cocaine habit/whininess; you both are being too cool to open up to each other more; neither of you wants to bottom for the other)... but you never have time to sit back and analyze what's happening, who you are most compatible with, or what you really want.

So I think it's good to look back once in awhile - try to breathe, contemplate patterns in your dating/fucking life, and see what's working and what's not. Here are some trends among people I date, or rather, some archetypal patterns of people I've been with.

The Sweet Clingy Low-Self-Esteem Guy. He's intelligent, he's going somewhere in life, and he has no faith in his own good qualities. This is one of the most common types that I get with. I think this "guy" (really, guys in this category) is a good person and can go somewhere. He worships me because I am a good person (in a lot of ways - really!!!) and can go somewhere... but I realize this and therefore I'm seen as larger-than-life. This one never works because I only like to be on a pedestal if I'm making a week's salary as a TA in five minutes of dancing in my underwear. It's not comfortable for me to be with someone who thinks I'm better than him - for very long. Granted, the "rape by soccer captain in the locker room" fantasy is pretty hot to enact once or twice, but eventually I'm going to want someone who will tell me when I'm being a jackass. As my friends will.

The Hot Slutty Fratboy. Come to think about it, I don't get with this type nearly enough. It never works - but neither do any of my other relationships in recent history - so I might as well throw more of them in. This guy is great, but he is trying to taste all 31 flavors and you were blond/smooth-chested. He'll have a lot more before he settles down, because he's hot and he knows it, but he's not actually that smart or that interesting, so he knows better than to try to spend too many waking/sober hours with you, because he knows you're far better read than he is and he'll get bored of literature, politics, and social science if you make him go to brunch with you more than once. He knows it, you know it but you repress it because he's got the nicest eyes and likes to get face-fucked. You keep his number in your phone in case he texts you in the future at 1 AM. You both know that shit will be hot, because it will. Keep his [belt/shoes/t-shirt] in your car to give back that one time you do hook up in the future, because that's the last time you'll see him.

Self-Loathing Guy. God, this guy has "husband" written all over him! Smart, good job, phenommmmmmmenal abs, knows great restaurants to have dinner with, enjoys hanging out with your straight friends, has great taste in indie music. He's just totally perfect for you! But oops, there's one problem. This guy thinks that he has one unforgivable flaw, and that's the fact that he's a sodomite. If he can just be perfect in every other way, then maybe God and dead Grandma can forgive him for this terrible sin. This guy is detected by a few key markers: when you go to Blockbuster, the only new releases he'll skip over immediately are gay-themed movies; he'll look past all your 30+ Bob Dylan CDs and point at the two Madonna CDs and tell you he hates dance music; and he has a way of bolting for the door the minute after the morning's happy ending. SLG can't wait five minutes for the coffee to perk, and he doesn't need you to hand him a towel for the buddy shower. Because SLG hasn't realized yet that straights are no more moral or saner than gays. He's still convinced that God/Mother Nature intended for him to be straight and that some sort of mistake happened that wasn't his fault. Oh, yeah. and he'll be certain to tell you that he had a totally normal childhood where he played with G.I. Joe and didn't drop any hairpins ever. Whackwhackwhack, get over it. You'd be great if you didn't hate yourself (and the rest of us by association).

Stable Guy Who FInds You Freaky. This guy is kind of the best and worst all in one: the good news is that there's nothing wrong with him; the bad news is that he's shy and sweet and is creeped out by the fact that you've stripped on stage for cash and tried mushrooms & cocaine a couple times each, and had a couple bi-threesomes in college long after you came out. He'll be great for someone else and so will you, but because there's nothing wrong with him, it's still irkful that it can't work out. Gotta breathe and move on with this one.

Alky. You like to drink, you have gay friends, and you meet a lot of the guys you date-and-or-fuck at bars or parties. So it's hard to tell the alky apart from the rest of the crowd. Say you meet when you're drunk and go home to hook up. You pour some water and bring it to bed, where you have some satisfying drunken oral sex. But on date two, you notice he's getting drunk at dinner, and you go out with his friends and he's the one buying rounds of shots for everyone. By the time you get back to his place, he's poured himself a 20-oz. bourbon-on-the-rocks and tells you that he likes to sip on bourbon till he passes out. He also seems to really be into mutual masturbation while drinking himself to sleep. And frankly, it's not really any better than when you engaged in solo masturbation while drinking yourself to sleep when you were 19. And in that case, you always woke up in your own bed. Oh, alky, put the damn bottle down for a minute.

It's kinda sad that the majority of the men in my life end up in one of these categories. I ain't sayin' that I'm perfect or that all gay men are nutjobs. But whether I meet them at "unhealthy" locations like a bar at 1 AM, or "healthy" venues like internet dating or friendsoffriends, there's usually a legitimate reason why it doesn't work out. And I'd like something to work out. So do I keep dating at a frenetic pace so that I meet enough people? Because the right one will eventually sit on my lap? Or do I go into celibacy mode till I find the right man? Both get old...

Mr. BP

2006-03-05T15:03:00.000-05:00

Thursday night, I was coaxed out of my home office, where I was illegally downloading all 100 of the Best Indie Singles of All Time (1977-1992) on my new 20" iMac with the new Intel chips. "We're going to Cobalt," my friend K. said. "I thought you didn't like that queeny dive," was my response. "Come on, man, dollar beers." So I went.

By 11 PM, I had been bullied into entering the Best Package Contest, in which four young men with amateur-stripper inklings dance in fresh-out-of-the-box low-rise briefs - and nothing else - on boxes, get tips from the 200-person crowd (which is a lot of strangers critically evaluating your virtually-nude body), and ultimately are voted on by audience cheers and applause as to who has the Best Package. Although, really, it's less about the actual volume of the skimpy underwear and more about the overall package.

Now, to be totally fair, I actually entered the contest last summer - twice, I have to admit - and just didn't do it right. It would have been that much more exciting to win $200 plus tips on the first try - but the past is the past, and it's pretty fucking cool to go to Starbucks on Sunday afternoon and have people I barely know say, "hey, Mr. BP! How's it going!" Especially when it's people who weren't even there.

I think there are worse ways to be a local celebrity.

Being A Twattease, Being A Cocktease

2006-02-13T20:37:00.000-05:00

I went to JesusCamp for four years in the early-to-mid 1990s. It lasted a week each year, and was always right before my birthday. So my times at JesusCamp were pretty much my 14th, 15th, 16th, and 17th birthdays. The last year at JesusCamp was great because I had my first rockin' post-pubescent gay hookup. Thanks, Jesus! Jesus...Thanks! Jeeee-suuuuus! Oh Jeeez. Of course, by that point I was totally anti-Jesus and I went to hang out with my friends for a week and meet new people.

The years before I realized/accepted my gayness and came out (which occurred in very short sequence) found me meeting a lot of cool girls and talking to them about music and life and stuff, and they really gave me a lot of attention. And I had my first great kiss with one of them. Went to her homecoming dance a couple months later. She was a pro-lifer so we weren't planning on sex - just dating and kissing and enjoying ourselves. Now, naturally, it's easy to not plan on sex when you aren't driven to have sex with people of that gender, but I was naive to this at the time. Dating cute, fun girls was a good time that I don't regret.

The girls I went to high school with remembered me in middle school - glasses, braces, too smart/nerdy, crude - and still weren't excited about me with contacts and great teeth. So dating wasn't really an issue in the first half of high school. I dated a girl for a brief period* (*naturally, she later came out as a lesbian), so people "knew" I "liked girls." Hell, even I thought/assumed I did. But the girls at JesusCamp - they didn't remember me as a nerd. They thought I was cool. And I talked to them all week, and a couple kind-of stalked me. I didn't get it. I mean, I did get it and all - if a cute & cool girl liked me, I'd date her, and if a not cute/not cool girl liked me, sucks to be her. What I didn't get was the part where I was leading them on.

After having some of these summer flings and what-not, and getting older, I realized around the fall of 11th grade - when I was recently 16 - that I was really turned on by ripped, shirtless guys. So I made what was the "obvious" conclusion at the time. I must be bisexual. Bisexual people are cool and trendy. Even though he wasn't officially out, we all "knew" Michael Stipe from R.E.M. was bisexual* (*naturally, he later came out as gay after his career tanked and he was no longer in a place where he could be a positive role model for teens. Pussy.)

I had already been elected Junior Class President, so when I came out as bisexual I became one of the trendiest people in my high school. Yada yada yada, I dated three chicks, ate at the Y, yada yada yada, came out as gay the spring semester of junior year.

After I came out, I still got some girls stalking me. Usually they'd be not-cool/not-cute girls from work, or friends of friends, or something. And I didn't get it. I wasn't the only man around. Why were they stalking the gay guy? I had a healthy ego but I was pretty sure that I wasn't The. Biggest. Catch. On. Earth.

But I started seeing a shrink because I got depressed after coming out as gay. Large parts of this involved my getting alienated from my trendy social circle (though, ironically, homophobia wasn't really related) - and without girls to date, and without enough out and cool guys to date - I kind-of didn't feel like I had anybody. Yada yada yada, one time I brought up the whole "why do girls stalk me" thing with my shrink. Who was a cool old straight guy* (*less "cool" in the Fonzie sense, and more "cool" in the Bob Newhart-good shrink sense). He was like, "I wonder why they are so crazy about you. Do you act like you care about them as people? Do you stare at their faces instead of their chests when you're talking to them? Do you make time to hang out with them when they're having a bad day?"

Suddenly, it all made sense. There are ways in which one can behave innocently but still be a total tease. (I was reminded of this a couple years later when There's Something About Mary came out). And I really believe that It behooves one to not be a tease. You can't help people whom you're not interested in liking you, but you can help doing things that inadvertently lead them on more.

But these lessons faded over the years. During the time that I was domestically partnered I forgot lessons learned as a single man, and one that I had to re-learn was Don't Be A Twattease. I was at a Halloween party the first October I was single and, apparently, while drunk, I kissed a girl on the lips. She was the friend of a friend, and I thought we knew each other well enough to have it be funny. Hell, I was dressed as a cavemen and I had already felt up one dude's crotch through the tight pants of his costume. But apparently, this young lady - who has a boyfriend - didn't find it funny. Further, she wasn't convinced I was gay. She was convinced she'd been assaulted by a perv. Which, of course, is 1/4-true in terms of assault (it was totally innocent and no harm was intended, but clearly it was unwanted) and 3/4-true in terms of pervyness (I don't own any S&M props and I think they're totally cheesy, but I've been known to strangle and pull hair on demand). Halfway in my defense, I ought to point out that practically all of my straight and lesbian female friends encouraged me post-hoc by telling me they find it charming when I assault women. I love my enablers.

But the lesson was re-learned. Don't send the wrong signals, whether it's (1) acting too boyfriendy when you're not interested in being someone's boyfriend, or (2) being too forward with people of either gender regardless of your stated orientation. If you are acting romantically interested, or sexually aggressive, it sends the wrong signal, because actions speak louder than words. (This is like asking the guy in the all-male daisychain if he identifies as "gay" or not).

And as of the last couple of years, I am a single gay man with a lot of single gay men as friends. Which wasn't true in high school and college (few gay friends) or when I was coupled (clearly off-limits). And now I look at pictures that friends have taken at bars and parties, and I see myself in semi-innocent poses with a number of different friends - I'm not kissing anybody or grabbing anyone's ass - but I get the feeling that I act a little too chummy with people I'm not intending to sleep with. And I get the feeling that my actions are saying things that they shouldn't. Then I think, to whom am I being a cocktease these days? When will I f*cking learn?

Immigrant Minorites And U.S.-Born Minorities

2006-02-05T23:59:00.000-05:00

Steve from the liberal city on the ocean asked a good question in the comments a couple posts back, so I thought I'd address it with a new post. The question is, "why are so many immigrants doing so well and so many U.S.-born minorities doing poorly in many ways?"

It's always difficult to try to discuss minority issues when you are from the majority, because anything negative you say about minority groups has the potential to be really hurtful and do more harm than good. Plus, when you're in the minority, you're more likely (although not guaranteed) to have a better perspective on things. I don't think it's really the most appropriate place for White men to be in to tell people of color what we think others are doing wrong and doing right.

But in terms of the immigration issue there are some really, really obvious reasons why so many minority groups are doing so well as opposed to U.S.-born people of color.

1) if you choose to move to a country, you probably have some pretty good feelings about it. American movie stars who move to Paris love Paris and love France. Most Americans (even left-wingers like myself) wouldn't be happy if we were shipped off to France to deal with stinky armpits and hackneyed 19th-century socialism. No one asked anyone born here if we wanted to be born here. However, if you're born with a decent amount of privilege (as, for example, I was) then you're probably happy about it and are more motivated to perpetuate your privilege. If you are born into the lowest caste (surprise!) you might not exactly be all rah-rah-go-America about everything all the time. So, voluntary - as opposed to asylum-needing - immigrants are more likely than any of us to be excited to be here and working to get ahead.

2) we have some pretty heavy restrictions and quotas on immigration. Excluding Latin America (AKA all of America except the U.S. and Canada), you pretty much have to have a graduate degree to get here. The immigrants we get from most of the world are the doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, etc. and their kids are likely to continue the path. Thus, we have higher standards for who can come into the country than for those who are born here. Most Americans (including most White Americans) wouldn't be allowed to come here if they weren't born here. (The corollaries to this rule are that most people who have kids wouldn't be allowed to adopt, and most people who buy pets from the store wouldn't be allowed to adopt them from a shelter).

3) the one place where we turn our backs and whistle on immigration is the Mexican border, because left-wingers are immigrant-friendly, and right-wingers WANT CHEAP LABOR from people who can be easily deported. And, surprise, surprise, Mexican migrant strawberry pickers' kids aren't going to Stanford the way that Korean/Hungarian/Pakistani imimigants' kids are.

4) non-Black immigrants are highly likely to try to curry favor with Whites by shitting on Blacks. This makes me fucking sick. It really, really does. I can't tell you how many non-White-non-Black immigrants I've met over the years who have tried to actively engage me in a conversation about how lazy and criminal African Americans are. Fuck that shit. (To be fair, I've met a handful of African Americans who try to curry favor with Whites by bitching about illegals from Mexico and Arabs/Muslims being all terrorists, and this is equally nauseating). So it's not surprising that sometimes immigrants are actively comparing themselves in a horse-race to other people here and trying to win. That might well be their goal. Meanwhile, if you're already here and already dejected, your One Goal In Life isn't necessarily to do better than those moving here and working 80 hours a week.

5) OK, so a lot of first- and second-generation immigrants are working these 80-hour weeks and achieving the American dream. Well, let me remind you: The first 10 or 15 generations of "immigrants" from Africa were working 168-hour work weeks. And the paychecks had this funny way of never showing up.

What's the answer? I think it's best left up to the African American community what problems they want to identify, what goals they want to work for, and how they want to achieve them. Black poverty in America is a serious problem, and I think almost no one wants to see it perpetuated. But because low socioeconomic status perpetuates itself, and because being born into a problem has a way of making a lot of people dejected to begin with, it's going to take some creative Black leadership to solve some difficult problems, not the least of which are low motivation and low resources.

And now that I've thought of it...

6) There were a lot of great African American leaders, and J. Edgar Hoover stalked them all, documented every time they had an affair (as if that isn't typical of most leaders everywhere always), made their lives miserable, and failed to protect them from the crazy crackers that were successful in killing them. If you want to know why there haven't been a lot of larger-than-life Black leaders in our generation, I'd suspect it's because they don't want to be murdered.

The Answers, Right Here

2006-01-30T23:51:00.000-05:00

So what are the answers to all these questions I've been posing lately? Well, if I hadn't been studying around the clock - save some drinking binges here and there - for the last couple of weeks, then I probably would have thought about all of this and come back with something profound. Well, because that didn't happen, I'm just going to have to look at those topics and respond right now. Let's start with race and race-versus-class, and maybe I'll get to the other topics later this week.

Race, and Race vs. Class. Call me a Romanticist, but I do follow the notion that because the African American struggle for civil rights took centuries upon centuries, and because the oppression was completely and entirely incorrect and the extent to which science was bastardized and the U.S. Constitution and Christian Bible were blatantly and intentionally misread to justify the whole thing, and because the effects are faaaar from over, I think African Americans win the "most consistently and clearly oppressed for no good reason" label. Yeah, there have been longer-running off-and-on genocides, and I can think of White Christians trying to kill Jews and Muslims intermittently for millennia, and finally - with a stroke of evil genius - getting them to kill off each other in the last 60 years... but in the case of African Americans, you can't even say that here was this minority culture that the majority couldn't get along with and skirmishes occur and the level of oppression varies between places and times. You're talking about finding people who look nothing like you & your kids, bringing them halfway across the world, and using fakey science and immoral laws to make sure that you have an entire group of people considered their own "race" who could be identified on sight and treated like animals. And making sure that you set things up so that their kids will be born as second-class citizens WHO CAN NEVER HIDE OR CHANGE THEIR RACIAL STATUS. Yes, this is almost the same thing that has happened to other groups, but the consistency and the unambiguousness of the wrongs done to Blacks by Whites in this country has continued to make race The. Big. Issue. around.

The "good" news about race and class is that I do think we've made progress on race in the last few decades. It would be asinine to say that all the problems of racism are over, but it would be asinine to suggest that nothing has changed since the 1850s, 1920s, or 1960s. And I don't doubt that eventually - and this might take a couple hundred years - class will indeed trump race as the primary means of oppression in this country. Perhaps even now, we're already oppressing on class more than race. But that still means that when we've artificially put most African Americans in the lower social classes, we've found a way to fuck over a group of people twice, and besides, THE ISSUE OF RACISM IS UNAMBIGUOUSLY WRONG.

The distribution of wealth in this country leaves a lot to be desired, but - and my bourgeois roots come shining through here - I think we're in the upper 50% of post-bronze-age societies in terms of how the poor and middle-class live. There are probably those who are farther-left-wing than myself who would shreik out at my naivete here. But I don't think we're the most oppressive classist society on the face of the Earth. It's a weak argument logically and morally to say you're better than the worst. But Christ, you don't need to compare us to China or India or Russia. Just compare us to Mexico and the UK. Don't we beat both?

On top of all this, while the system IS unfair, it's not always clear what percentage of the poor and the working-class are where you'd expect them to be in a legitimate meritocracy. If you assume that some people WILL be poor, and you assume that those should be the people with neither good white-collar NOR blue-collar NOR musical NOR athletic skills (i.e. people who aren't going to be successful in many fields and/or don't have a lot of motivation)... what percentage of people in poverty are comprised of those people? Does low SES make people fit the description of that? Or do those people end up in the lower social classes because of that? Probably some of both. There's clearly wrongs occurring, but it's NOT clear exactly where, how, or how much. With the issue of racism, you know straight up that it's wrong and inexcusable at all costs. Classism is murkier.

Acting

2006-01-27T20:19:00.000-05:00

So there's this idea out there that there is such a thing as a "straight-acting" gay guy and a "gay-acting" gay guy, as well as a "gay-acting" straight guy (and the term "metrosexual" took off for this one a couple years back) and a "straight-acting" straight guy.

First off, the fact that the term "acting" is involved suggests that most of how we put ourselves out there is a persona we've created, and that the same person could shape his persona in a number of ways. The very terms suggest that there's no one inherent way to behave based on your sexuality, but that you can act more like the norm for your group, or you can act more like the norm for the other group.

And it seems like, historically, both gay and straight men have been encouraged to act like the norm for straight men.

Maybe(???) gay men have been more supportive of each other for acting like the gay norms, as a sign of pride and/or self-acceptance and/or community-building. Conversely, there's probably been a lot of support among groups of gay men to act like the straight norms to prove that everyone CAN act the same and there are no differences between straights and gays other than whom they're attracted to.

Lately, at least in bourgier circles, straight women have been supporting straight men acting more toward the middle ground. The whol metrosexuality thing seems to be a push for a lot of (straight) women to get their (straight) men to have the best of both worlds. They want some chivalry without all the sexism (which itself might not really be feasible, but we'll move on). They don't want their men to act completely gay outside of the sex-with-women thing, but they also don't want them acting so traditionally straight in that they discount their opinions and ignore their own figures while scrutinizing the female figure. Ladies want gents to look as good as gents want ladies to look. Reciprocity.

So where do the gays stand on all this? Well, first off, I think I'm safe saying that gay men have never functioned as a unitary group outside of, say, foam parties. Not every Latin American immigrant in America has the same opinions on bilingual education, Catholicism, and U.S. foreign policy, and it would be asinine to assume that all gay men in America - hell, even all out urban gay men in America - have the same goals, ideas, etc. about what we want for ourselves and each other. And I don't think it's necessary for the 'mos to sit down at a table and agree on what we want. Women didn't sit down and decide they wanted men to be more sensitive; but yet, these opinions emerged over time and in a sort of quasi-social-Darwinism, the men who had abs started landing the best women.

But with the gays, we have a lot of pressures on our ideas about ourselves and each other that the straights don't have. First off, our personae are somewhat linked to our civil rights. Straights are the ones who ultimately decide legal rights for gays. Should we all act in ways that are different from straights, but the same as each other? This might score us points in the "they can't help it" and the "it's an innate difference that deserves legal rights" categories. Should we all try to blend in, yet be vocal about our gayness and our requests for rights? This seems to be the opinion of most politically-conscious gays (middle-left to far-right).

Beyond legal rights, the vast majority of us have to work in straight-run environments. Do we "act gay" and risk ostracism? Do we"hide" and risk getting "caught"?

Straight men & women can act - to a fairly large extent - in whatever way they think will get them laid. Gay men & lesbians have to moderate our "straight-acting"/"gay-acting"-ness based on the pressure from the straight world AND in ways that we think will get us laid (and keep our brother- and sister-hood intact in the L-G-sometimesB-rarely,letsbehonest-T community). What does all this mean? Please explain in comments.

(P.S. more to come in the future on gay/straight-acting as opposed to masc./un-masc. and how they aren't really the same thing at all. But that's the future... I need answers on this part now)

Knockin' Each Other Down & Building Each Other Up

2006-01-25T19:20:00.000-05:00

'K kids, I need to take a momentary breather from the civil-rights blog-a-thon. More on race vs. class vs. race to come shortly. And if you're brave, comments are naturally welcome. I don't publicize this blog much and I tackle sensitive topics abrasively... so I understand that 0 comments doesn't mean 0 readers or 0 support. Comment if you want to and don't if you don't.

So let's switch topics to more of what I can churn out even more opinion on than race and class: gay men and our issues. Or at least my issues, and issues I see in people around me, that I think other gay men have too.

A couple years back, on the first (?) season of the Donald Trump reality show The Apprentice, one of the contestants, Omerossa (sp?) was a crazy bitch. Or at least she wanted attention and got a role on the show by acting like a crazy bitch. Or at the very least she acted like a crazy bitch enough for the show's editors to consistently portray her as one. So we'll take the risk of calling her a crazy bitch even though we don't know the crazy bitch. She was finally fired from the show, but in the final face-off (Bill vs. Kwame), all of the fired contestants came back to work on a project for the two final contenders. Kwame (who is Black) picked Omerossa (also Black) to be on his team, and she ended up sabotaging Kwame and catapulting Bill to his win and job with The Donald. My friend W., who went to a Historically Black College, told me that Omerossa had Lobster Syndrome. "When a bunch of lobsters are in a pot about to be cooked, and one tries to crawl out, the other lobsters will grab him by the tail and pull him back in. And they'll all die together. She's a lobster." I have no idea whether lobsters do this (since the nature channels bore me), or if this is even a common syndrome in minorities, but I do see lobster syndrome in my people.

Boys grow up being socialized into rigid gender roles. Whether you're Hemingway, and your mother dresses you like a girl till kindergarten, because that's what she wanted - or you're Ennis Del Mar from Brokeback Mountain and your dad shows you the gay guy he lynched to teach you how to be a man - you know what the roles are, and you don't need your parents to push them on you. Your peers will do that just fine, and the media won't hurt either. Frankly, I don't mind gender stereotyping per se as much as I think forcing people to act like the stereotypes is cruel and pointless. Transsexuals are a good case of Who Ought To Give A Fuck how other people prefer to live.

But as nice as it is to say that men (*and women... maybe that's its own post in the future) shouldn't have to live up to gender roles, when you're a gay man, you're told that you simply don't fit male gender roles, unless you're being told that you're a sexual predator who wants to rape straight men and boys. Or, conversely, if you do fit male gender roles, you're told you're not gay, or not really gay, or you're one of the good gays. And what's shocking is that gay men seem to do this AT LEAST as much as straights and lesbians. I think it's all the fucked-upness of feeling forced into gender roles (which sucks for all men) combined with the stress of being gay & coming out, and then on top of that being told that you either don't fit the roles or you don't fit your sexuality. God forbid you're comfortable with both.

So the lobsters who get on my nerves seem to cluster on both extremes of the spectrum: first, the hyper-effeminate types whose personae seem to be more about rebelling against gender roles than simply being themselves, who try to make you their girlfriend if they think you are "gay enough" OR praise you if they think you "act" "straight"... either pulling you back into the pot or pushing you out to worship you. Second, the hyper-macho guys who scrutinize every minute aspect of your behavior to try to tell you what a fag you are. It's really, really, really too bad in my book that (A) these guys are being at least as scrutinizing of themselves as they are of you, and they never enjoy being themselves because they want to be sure there's nothing "gay" about them (*cough* except the obvious fact that they sleep with men), and (B) that it's taken them till age 28 to act like the guys who beat them up when they were 14. It simply isn't impressive to me that, post-college, some gay men have finally learned how to act like junior-high bullies. Grow up. And honestly, some people's queeniness just isn't believably natural. I would assume that being a superqueen is a pre-emptive way to fend off being scrutinized for being gay - "you can't mock me, I mock myself! HA!" ...but that's just as annoying as the people who spend their whole lives trying to act super-male-gendered.

Let me clarify: it's not gay men acting super-masculine or super-un-masculine that bugs me. It's the fact that guys in both groups almost invariably want to use other gay men as props in their own bizarre reaction to gender roles. As a wise lady once told me, "you know, reacting extremely to conventions means you're still paying attention to those conventions, and it's still sad." She herself is delightfully unconventional in a non-cookie cutter way, and the point's a good one. Lobster syndrome needs to stop. And we can blame straights for creating gender roles, but I'm not even convinced that straight men created gender roles to oppress women, which is a point of near-orthodoxy for many feminists and liberals. Sometimes these things happen as a function of culture. Anthropology is filled with a number of such examples where things just happen and it's often not because of oppression. So let's not necessarily blame or not blame the majority for creating these roles; let's just try to relax them a little ourselves and REMEMBER THAT WE'RE NOT IN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL ANYMORE. If you run with urbanites or cosmopolitan suburbanites - if you are in many, many white-collar or service-sector professions - it's simply not cool anymore for straight guys to pick on gay guys. So let's fucking stop replicating that shit ourselves, OK? Can we just be ourselves, and know that we're gonna be all over the place from stereotypically male to un-stereotypically male, and stop worrying about other people? You don't have to be sexually attracted to everyone's personality to just not be a dick about their personalities. No one's making you fuck the people whose masculinity level you dislike. You just don't have to worry about it so much.

Who's The Most Oppressed? Who? Who?

2006-01-24T18:13:00.000-05:00

Clearly MTF (that's Male-To-Female, of course) transgenders & transsexuals, who often prefer to be called trans women. I can't state this for a fact, but I get the feeling that virtually all trans women experience extreme physical and verbal abuse - often starting with their own relatives - at the point of what should be considered hate crimes from childhood on. If you're born biologically male (or close enough to it), the minute you start acting like females in our culture act, everyone hates you for it. Not "doesn't understand" or "has issues with," but is physically disgusted with you. So chances are, if you make it through highschool, you go one of two routes: you become an oral/anal streetwalker and PRAY that no one realizes you were born male - or you'll probably be murdered by a john... or find a local coffeehouse to work at, since coffeehouses in liberal urban neighborhoods are just about the only businesses that seem to want to hire trans women. And let's not even talk about sex-change operations (AKA gender reassignment surgery). That shit is sooooooo expensive, and how are you going to pay for it when no one wants to hire you... OR they want to fire you if you start to do the live-as-a-woman thing that you're required to do before you start getting the surgeries? I really believe that the luckiest trans women are those that realize the cruelty of the world at an early age, marry women, save every penny they ever earn (and that's tough to do if you have a spouse), and get the surgery in their 30s. It's a better route to go than the living-in-fear-of-death high-HIV-risk streetwalker route. But sadly, it's a long way from perfect.

Until our society starts not giving a shit if a tiny percentage of our citizenry wants to be the other sex, trans women are going to have the most miserable, oppressed existences of any of us. Kind of makes all the issues of race, class, sex, sexual orientation, religion, culture, dis/ability, veteran status, etc. seem almost trivial in comparison.

But that's a cop-out too. It's easy for bleeding-heart liberals to go too far in one of two lines of thought: one is to over-assume that everyone is oppressed and it's those terrible majoritarian men (who probably make up what - 30% of our country, maybe) OR alternately, the enemy is the 1% of the country that holds a third of the wealth (which IS a huge problem) are to be hated, hated, hated, and the other 99% of us should whine all the time about everything.

The opposite way to go - which is also incorrect - is to go too far in trying to find the "most-oppressed" group and martyr-izing them. Oh, the most oppressed people are poor black transsexuals from X neighborhood who are also Jewish/Buddhist and are physically handicapped, blind, deaf, etc... and THAT"s whom we should defer everything to. Along the lines of this realm of thinking go Log Cabin Republicans and Black conservative-Christian pastors. People that have tunnel vision into their own group's oppression but relish fucking over other punching bags. Marco, the security guard at a job I used to have, was Afro-Brazilian, but he had all kinds of shit to talk about the Blacks. I'm sorry - I could try to apply a touchy-feely approach to understanding the pain and blaming the power structure for making him feel that he had to be like that, but on some level the guy was an opportunist and I greatly dislike his approach. What a dick.

So what, then? Does race trump class as the most-oppressed status? Does class trump race? To be honest, I can make an excellent case for each...

Race trumps class. It's tough, but if you are White trash, and you work your ass off (and have a little bit of luck), and have some seriously good parenting techniques, you can get your income up, get your kids' income up, and your grandkids can be born bourgeois. I'm not saying everyone can or should, or that those who don't are lazy. But it CAN physically be done, even if it's close to impossible. If you're Black, you might already be bourgeois, but a good number of White women will still clutch their purses when you walk by, and sadly, it's possible that your grandkids will experience the same thing, even if they are all brain surgeons. Money - and the trappings associated with it - pale when Whites (and some Blacks) assume the Black guy with the Mercedes is a coke dealer.

Class trumps race. Whether you are White or Black (or other races/combinations, etc.), you can buy shit online if you have money. Without money, and when you're living in a lead-filled house, you can't do shit and your kids will have all kinds of problems that rich people of all colors won't have. You'll be happier and live healthier. The problems associated with the African-American community (crack, teen pregnancy, unemployment, etc) are better statistically accounted for by poverty and near-poverty, across all races, than with racial status (White/Black). And as more Blacks move into the middle and upper classes (albeit slowly), everyone's going to notice this, and Blackophobia will drop as poverphobia increases. And of course, we'll blame the poor for their own problems.

Honestly, both problems are so huge that it's hard to put one over the other. AND AND AND let's not forget that putting race and class into a horse-race for our pity/attention is a good way to start fights between people who are already oppressed. As Bob Dylan pointed out in his 1964 song "Only A Pawn In Their Game," rich Southern Whites did an amazing job getting poor Whites to blame Blacks for all of their problems, when really everyone - Blacks and poor Whites together - should have turned on those plantation-owning whipcrackers and lynched 'em all. Well, Dylan didn't say that the rich Southern Whites of the time should be murdered with glee... he said that war profiteers should be lynched with glee and their deaths verified. But that was a whole different LP, and I'm digressing here.

So what are the solutions to all of this? Stay tuned...

"Mister X! What Can I Do? I Want To Help!"

2006-01-17T01:46:00.000-05:00

I love Spike Lee. I've loved Spike Lee since I got to freshman year of college and started watching his movies. And of all of his great movies, there's one scene that he delivered that (I think) really delivers the appropriate mindfuck to the Whites in the audience.

If you've seen X, and you're a White liberal, you definitely remember this scene. It's the one where the earnest White girl comes up to Malcolm X on the college campus and says she really wants to help in the civil rights movement. 'What can a non-prejudiced White person DO for the movement?" she asks. "Nothing," he replies. "There's nothing you can do."

What a jarring scene for the open-minded SPF45 wearers. If you're like me, and you grew up in a left-wing household where Martin Luther King Day was bigger than St. Patrick's Day - but you can also trace your ancestry back to four distinct European countries, and if people's names got changed on Ellis Island, you know what their old names WERE... then it just bugs you. You want to help. You want to right a wrong and clean up the mess that your people contributed to. But you're not African American, and somewhere deep down inside, you've probably got some level of patronizing ideas about what it means to be Black.

So what ARE we tortured bleeding-heart Whites to do? Well, I think there are things we can do for civil rights, but they sure as hell aren't about "helping" African Americans. What does the know-it-all hipster think we ought to do?

1. Stop code switching. Those of you who know linguistics know what I'm talking about. I was at Wonderland a couple months ago with my friends Matt (White) and Brian (Black). A White guy walks past us, and says "excuse me" to Matt and "excuse me, bro" to Brian. For fuck's sake, people, STOP DOING THIS!!! I know it's totally hard to believe, but Black folks are actually capable of understanding such obscure English phrases as "excuse me" without the addition of the term "bro." And if you really think about it, isn't it more likely that a member of a minority group would have more exposure to majority-group-speak than vice versa? Do you really think that Whites know Black speech better than Blacks know White speech? Fuckin' think about it.

2. Recognize that not everything that African Americans do is caused by their racial identification. Buying shea butter lotion is one thing that might be "caused" by being Black. But when you analyze people's food preferences and clothing tastes in a racial context, you're being daft. Yes, African-American is a cultural identification (as is being White, even though you pretend it's not) and there are, on a statistical level, cultural differences between Whites & Blacks (& Latinos, etc., etc...), you need to do a simple test: if you don't assume that your friend Tiffany likes That '70s Show specifically because she is White, you oughtn't assume that your friend Brandy likes Bernie Mac by virtue of her Nubian Genetics.

3. Stop being so proud of yourself for listening to rap. It's a free country and no one's controlling your musical tastes. Some White people like country, some like hip-hop, some like both, and some like neither. This is also true for Black people. It's music. If you like it, you like it. And I believe that you genuinely like it, because I like hip-hop too. But I don't wear it like a Goddamn badge. I'm equally proud of my snobbery in music regardless of whether I think it gives me street cred. Again, here's a simple home test you can do. Grab a copy of People and look in the mirror. If you look more like Ashton Kutcher or Demi Moore than you do like Mekhi Phifer or Angela Bassett, it's likely that people will identify you as White on the street. Artificially cranking Nelly on your car radio will not change this identification. For fuck's sake, crank Nelly if you want to crank Nelly, but it doesn't make you Black, and I can guarantee you that no carload of random African Americans will drive by, roll down their windows, and hand you a Friend Of Colored People badge. Listen to music by Black artists if you like it, don't if you don't, and stop worrying about it.

4. Understand that smiling twice as wide for the Black girl at the cash register is not Affirmative Action. Fakey over-politeness to Black strangers looks amazingly like what it is. And, P.S., it still means you're differentially treating people based on race, which means you're thinking too hard. Yeah, she is statistically much more likely than you to have had lead in her drinking water, and 40 students in her kindergarten class. But you don't know this for a fact, and showing her all 32 teeth at once isn't going to change a thing. Put your teeth back in your mouth. Thank you.

5. You don't need to apologize for your Whiteness. This is an awfully ironic suggestion, since I appear to be doing just that in this post. And I can fully appreciate that I'm largely doing that here. But the bigger picture, in terms of "what can Whites do for civil rights?" is simply that we don't need to run around flagellating ourselves or acting paternalistically towards African Americans. What would be great is if we could just work on treating people equally. If you scowl at every White person you pass, it's not any more or less OK to scowl at every Black person you pass. This rule also applies to cutting people off on the freeway and under-tipping at restaurants.

So thus ends my official MLK-Day civil rights blogging, and commences my 364.25-day quotidian civil rights blogging. It's a daily thing people; we don't just recycle on Earth Day, right?

Musings On Civil Rights, "Race," And Genetics

2006-01-16T23:00:00.000-05:00

In the words of Bob Marley, I've got so much things to say right now, I've got so much things to say. Civil rights is one of my favorite things to think about - and I'm not being self-serving here, I'm talking straight up about legal and factual rights in the African-American struggle for equality.

There are so many things that are right and so many things that are wrong in the world. And it's easy to look at Martin Luther King's [observed] birthday as a chance to address them all. How great that there's a single day where we can just pile on the liberal issues and scream about them. But what a misguided way to think about it. There are 364-1/4 other days a year where we should be addressing classism, homophobia, xenophobia, immigration, sexism & misogyny, and racism against a myriad of groups. What this country really, truly needs is a day set aside to remember one specific chapter of our past, present, and future. And that's the centuries-running struggle of a African Americans to have equal opportunities as other Americans. If a person is African-American, it usually means that he or she has ancestors who were brought here in chains. It also often means that some of their ancestors were the people doing the chaining, and in some cases, it means that some of their ancestors were people of other backgrounds who found love or lust with an African-American person.

History is such an amazing and powerful thing. I'm sure others have written much more eloquently about this, but let me take a stab at it, since I run this blog. To what extent does our ancestry affect things? Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, one of the Godfathers of Modern theater and male feminism, examined the idea of sons paying for the sins of their fathers in Ghosts. In Ghosts, poor Torvald has syphilis because his dad was a philanderer. Born with a congenital and (at the time) untreatable disease. In a way, we're all paying for the sins of our fathers, of course, whether or not we should. But in a different way than people often think.

Those who know genetics (and actually know what they're talking about, not just having an axe to grind) can tell you a few important things about the sins of our fathers and mothers. First off, the vast majority of our genes are between 10,000 and 50,000 years old. Genetic mutation is one of the slowest processes that we can even describe. More so, even, than the line at the Motor Vehicle Administration.

So, whatever genes that, say, "black" (i.e. certain skin tones, facial features, hair) people living in America today, are pretty much the same set of genes that were floating around in "black" people in Africa 10,000 years ago. And the genes floating around in "white" people in America today were floatin' around in "white" people in Europe 10,000 years ago.

If you remember your history, you'll remember that 10,000 years ago, African societies and European societies were functioning at varying levels, but neither look like contemporary Western society. The idea that, I believe, most Whites in America implicitly maintain today, that Blacks have a grossly different set of genes that imply various strengths and weaknesses than Whites, is virtually-to-completely untenable the way that they maintain it. Our individual genetic makeup has a strong bearing on our behaviors, personalities, etc. But the idea that you can look at Ghanian society and Spanish society in AD 1500, determine that the Spanish were more civilized (which of course means totally fucking ignoring the Inquisition), and think to yourself, "yeah, Whites have more intellectual genes than Blacks," is wrong. Sorry. Go to the back of the class. And yet this soft belief sits around unquestioned in the mind of the born-after-1968 White American. It's so comfortable when you're White to pity those poor Black folks. Sure, the White college-educated folks can say, the first Universities were in Africa a couple thousand years ago. Then, of course, after the lips stop moving, the internal dialogue continues with "but that was an abnormality for the jungle folk. I just know it. They've never really been civilized, but we can help them."

We Whites have done well for ourselves in a lot of ways. The Greeks were legitimately one of the most brilliant societies ever, charges of Eurocentrism aside. They were fuckin' amazing. Although the Christian era was terrible for us. There was a good millenium or so when we achieved nothing - NOTHING - as a people because we were controlled by the Roman Catholic Church. From about AD 325 till, I dunno, the printing press in the 1400s, we didn't do jack shit. The Arabs, while "white" in the sense of having more proximal ancestors with us sunburners than either of us with the South-of-the-Saharans, were keeping the Greek tradition alive. But we don't get to count them, because we've been trying to kill them for a couple thousand years. And when a few of them killed 2000 of us in NYC five years ago, we had to go back and kill more. No, we don't have the right to pride ourselves on Arabic genius. We sure as hell haven't earned that. We're also a violently genocidal people, having repeatedly tried to murder off the Jews - also considered "white" when we aren't trying to perform "medical research" on them, and when they are making hugely disproportionate contribuitions to science, literature, and the arts. Of course, White Gentiles have done a lot of amazing things, like develop the printing press, vaccinations for polio, and build the Eiffel Tower.

But all of our evils, and all of our goods, CANNOT be explained by magical EuroGenes. And Blacks' evils and goods ALSO cannot be explained for by magical AfroGenes. Because our genes are just too old to have explained these types of events that have shown up in recent centuries.

When White Europeans came to America, killed off the Americans, enslaved Africans and brought them here to work in chains, it wasn't our genes that made us do that. It was some fucked-up-shit in our culture. And when African-Americans perform lower on the SATs than White Americans, it sure as hell isn't their genes, either. No matter what you want to attribute differences in African Americans and White Americans to (in the example of the SATs, class size and lead poisoning in major cities come to mind, but so does anxiousness about confirming stereotypes and apathy towards the educational system)... if you find differences across "races" (an arbitrary distinction to begin with), it ain't due to genes.

Which means, people, we have a long, long ways to go.

Awright Kids, Party's At My Place This Wednesday

2006-01-16T03:21:00.000-05:00

At Taint tonight, I found out that there will indeed be another Backroads this Wednesday. Backroads is smokin' hot. It's the alt-country queer event for 'mos who like music other than disco.

Best part is, Backroads will be at my neighborhood Compromise Bar, the Wonderland Ballroom. Wonderland is also smokin' hot. As mentioned in previous posts, it's the place to be if you want to mingle with people who aren't like yourself. We got it all in Da Heights - people of all ages, races, incomes, and sexual preferences get down at this joint. But Wednesday will be the night in which gay hipsters dance to Wilco and The Flying Burrito Brothers. Who ain't down wif dat, yo?

So, since I live two blocks from the venue, the pre-party's gonna be at my place on Wednesday. It's only a four-day workweek, and it'll be half over by then. So don't pretend like you need your beauty sleep. Show up at the house between 8 and 9, and we'll head over around 10 or so. You can shoot some pool here, and get a little booze-ahol in before we go somewhere that you'll have to pay for it.

You won't regret it, whether you're actually a fag, or you just hang out with us for the fashion advice. If you don't have an address, just shoot me an e-mail and I'll set you up. Be there, or be a derriere.

You Made The Right Choice, Buddy

2006-01-15T18:12:00.000-05:00

Buying frozen pizza for my dinner at Giant, I saw that the tabloids have confirmed it: Angelina Jolie is pregnant with Brad Pitt's kid. Of course, the media's going to be talking about how Jennifer Aniston refused to have his kids and he wanted to be a dad. I think there's more to it than that.

Jennifer Aniston was the star of Friends from the get-go. It was an ensemble cast, but she was the clear protagonist who left her million-dollar suburban wedding to be an urban Bohemian, and it was Rachel's discovery of the world of urban liberalism that fueled the show. Still, though, Friends appealed to people who weren't like me: heterosexuals who had led sheltered existences and were curious about life beyond marrying right out of college and having a cookie-cutter life. Being an urban snob from the get-go, Friends was still too bland for my taste. Jennifer Aniston - as Rachel or as herself - was still a pretty blonde with a perky haircut. Basically what straight American men are told they should have.

Brad Pitt started his movie career (to the best of my memory) playing dumb hunks, because that's what he looks like. However, after getting his foot in the door, he started playing institutionalized counter-culturists (like in Twelve Monkeys) and violent borderlines (like in Fight Club). Although these were just roles he played - like Jennifer Aniston's Rachel - I feel like most actors are character actors, and take roles that they are good at, because those roles are at least familiar enough to them that they can pull them off well. Or, perhaps they take roles that are exciting to them. Either way, you can probably tell something about an actor by their roles.

So Brad and Jennifer got together. They were two of the prettiest people in Hollywood and they had similar levels of fame and cash. Women wanted to have Jennifer's hair and men wanted to have Brad's torso.

But Brad had to have just gotten bored. It's nice to be banging one of the prettiest women* (*as traditionally defined by the media: attractive face, blonde, thin, White, under 35) in the country, but come on. After a while, you're just going to run out of things to do with Jennifer Aniston. You know Jen don't do the Cleveland Steamer, the Pink Enchillada, or the Dirty Sanchez, and she wouldn't let you toss her salad unless she hadn't eaten in a week and just got three enemas from a physician.

Angelina Jolie, on the other hand, has those dick' suckin' lips. She's made public statements about how woman-on-woman sex is smokin' hot, since women know how to please each other. The girl married her hottie costar from Hackers (Jonny Lee Miller, one of my biggest crushes of all time) and turned around a couple years later to marry a multiply-divorced redneck with issues. She kept a vial of his blood on a necklace-locket. The girl is kinky.

So Brad did what one of the hottest men in America was bound to do: got rid of that boring, pretty Barbie doll that he thought he was supposed to be with, and found him a nasty girl who knows what she likes. The kid thing is just icing on the cake.

After All This Time, I'm Finally In Love

2006-01-15T12:03:00.000-05:00

He's really sexy, and full of energy. He's German, which I've always thought is hot, and he's 7 years old, which is the perfect age for me. Good thing he's a Jetta or I'd be going to jail.

I've never had a supafly car before. My first two cars in high school were VW Rabbits, which were quirky/cool, but since then practical, sensible cars have been the order of the day. My friends who didn't go to college always had really fast sports cars that they pimped out, and apartments with new furniture. On the other hand, I cut my own hair, ate vegetarian burritos at home for dinner most nights, and drove things like an '85 Olds Cutlass Ciera and an '89 Ford Taurus wagon, charcoal exterior with harvest red interior. I think the Taurus had a hole in the muffler for the longest time. After I got the hole in the muffler fixed, some girl pulled out in front of me and I got a low insurance payout. Guess the Kelley Blue Book value just wasn't that high for station wagons. Most of my cars were cars that my parents or siblings were getting rid of, and were close to death (which always happened on my watch. I've more or less buried every car I've ever owned, which is pretty sad).

So it's time. My two-decades-early mid-life-crisis was screaming for a red sports car with a muffler and a sunroof. And now I finally know what it's like to be one of those Car People who spend the weekend pimping their ride and polishing the dashboard. I figure I've earned that right.

Oops, Thought I Turned That Off

2006-01-05T01:42:00.000-05:00

It's easy to sound awkward on the telephone. As a child, I think I was perfectly natural on the phone until middle school, at which point I started having to call friends on occasion for advice/clarification/etc. re: school assignments. One of those deals where it's the first time that you're calling peers who aren't your close friends, and you realize it, and maybe on top of it all, they have those obnoxious Midwestern Christian Overbearing Parents who have to screen your identity and announce it to the household before their Precious Baby Boy can pick up the phone. It can make you jumpy during those awkward years.

Anyway, that awkward phone phase passed and I think I was natural again by the time I started high school. But then, in college, I worked a job for a while where I had to phone-screen sick people for clinical trials of experimental medications, and when you ask people who are dying about their medical problems for 20 minutes on the phone, and then reject most of them for being too sick - they tend to scream at you. Worst of all, a number of frustrating people call in about medical studies anyway, and they are difficult to deal with from the get-go. So that was a job that taught me, for a second time in my life, to hate and fear the phone.

Well, I eventually got over that one too, because a couple years later I had a cell phone. So I was back to normal. Only, now I was becoming self-conscious on a new level, and realizing that I generally spoke too quickly on the phone (and otherwise) - and especially, a couple years later after that Big Gay Divorce... I decided that I had to sound hot on the phone. It's sad that this was decided upon consciously, but why have a blog if you can't admit your vanities in a semi-public sphere. Yes, I have a hot voice on the phone. Yes, it's probably not as hot as I think it is. Yes, it sounds more like Lauren Bacall pretending to be male. But leave it alone - it's my Hot Phone Voice.

The Hot Phone Voice has given me a level of confidence on the handy (as the EuroTrash like to call their cells) that goes above and beyond my normal level of confidence. With the H.P.V. (oh good GOD that's a bad acronym) I can cut ruthless business deals, get ballsy with service contractors, schedule appointments with important people, and seduce men to come over later. The only problem with the H.P.V. is when, say, my internet is down and I have to talk to the Landlord. I called him earlier and he called me back tonight. I answered his call like I was Barry White. "......heeeeeey, man."

After coughing, he just said, "Hello Hipster. I talked to Comcast and it should be up and running again."

Putting down the cell phone, I turned to Julia, who was cooking pasta on the stove. She goes "...heeeeeeey, man." All I could say was, "oops, I thought I turned that off."

It's Always One Or The Other

2006-01-05T01:26:00.000-05:00

At times I have wondered if the male-on-male dating/fucking experience could be condensed to one simple maxim: if two guys are dating/fucking, and one's more of a catch than the other, the one who's less of a catch wants a relationship and the other one doesn't. If the guys are equally "valuable" in the relationship sense, they'll probably end up in a relationship.

I don't think this is necessarily true, though.

At other times, I have thought that maybe the rule is: if two guys are dating/fucking, they are probably good (enough?) for each other, and whether or not either or both of them wants a relationship is based on how long they've been single or how tired they are of being on the dating/casual sex scene. It's all about how much they want to be in a relationship and it's not so much about the other person at all.

Don't know if that's always the case, either.

A third theory I've been bouncing around is that one's desire to have a relationship with the person he's dating/fucking is based on his own perceptions of the other guy's interest in him. Suppose the person you're dating/fucking seems like they're a little too good for you, and they don't seem to want to commit. Mmmmmmm, yeah, isn't that hot? Now suppose that he gives you doe eyes while you're telling a story to some friends about crimes you committed in your youth. Doesn't that boner just turn into a vagina right there? Yep, there's nothing hotter than those who will have sex with us but don't want to learn our parents' names.

But that's a little cynical and simplistic, too.

Maybe all three factors play important roles: it's crucial that we think a guy is at our level, it's crucial that we actually want and are ready for a relationship, and it's crucial that they not seem too eager to dive into one. But all I know is that it's a Royal Pain In The Ass that half the time I want more, half the time they want more, and it never seems to work out just right. And I would even go so far as to consider myself lucky that it's about 50/50 these days, because if it were all the one way, I'd feel evil, guilty and whorish - and if it were all the other way, I'd feel pathetic, lonely, and dejected. So as is, it's "only" a pain in the ass when I turn around from rejection to reject and back to be rejected, and so on...

Most of this is probably true for other types of couples, too, but I reserve the right to be homocentric here. At any rate, what is it with us? Why are we like this? What's wrong with men? Life would be so easy if we just whored, or just had relationships, or what-not. But when the same person (let's say, me, for example) is capable of such oscillation - trying to keep one fuckbuddy from becoming a boyfriend, longing for another to become a boyfriend, ending up with neither, and then repeating the pattern all over again with a couple more guys - it just is baffling. How can the same person be a committer and a commitmentphobe all in one, and sometimes all in the same week? Men are so fucking weird.

The Only Things You Truly Know About Yourself

2006-01-03T17:27:00.000-05:00

Hello all, I'm back. Sorry for the hiatus; I was busy finishing my master's degree, celebrating Christmas, and getting laid.

It's always hard to really "know" yourself the way that other people know you. You can think that you're funny, or shy, or cute, or fat, or whatever... but so often you have warped ideas about what you are really like, at least in the sense that the rest of the planet thinks. So how do you really know anything about yourself, unfiltered by your own distorted sense of self?

Perhaps the only things we really can trust about ourselves are the things that every random person we sleep with tells us. But let's ignore "oh baby," "give it to me daddy," "can you feel it? can you feel it?," the generic "you are cute" that seems obligatory to tell someone during afterplay, etc. We'll ignore such comments because they don't shed light into our characters, and because they are the kind of thing that people would just say.

So reducing the comments of our sex partners to the things that they wouldn't say for no reason, I can conclude that there are four facts about myself:

1. I have really smooth skin.
2. My eyes are beautiful.
3. I have a nice bubble butt.
4. I give incredible handjobs.

It's unfortunate not to have verification that you are the world's greatest lover, or have the best genitalia, or what have you, but if there are just a few things that everyone tells you, at least you can sleep in peace at night knowing that there are a handful of things that you do right. And that's comforting.

It's also not rocket science: I use lotion, I work out on the glute machine, and I've been practicing manual-to-penile action on myself since the age of seven. The eyes are the only thing that came naturally from the Aryan parents.

Now, if only people would just be honest enough to give criticism about the things that everyone agrees you do wrong. That would be most helpful. I bet there are at least four things that all my sex partners would tell me to fix. If I could just start sleeping with brutally honest jerks...

Questions You Don't Need To Ask

2005-12-11T04:15:00.000-05:00

Tonight I was quintuple-booked. Well, technically, I was only triple-booked until the early evening, when I became quadruple-booked. And then event #5 reared its head. Events #1-4 were free-booze house parties in MD and DC, and event #5 was "dude, we're all at Cobalt." Now, I've posted about Cobalt in the past. The music is too gay, as is the clientele. My friends C&Z even refer to it as "The C Word." But, after a little egg nog with a lot of rum, I can be convinced to bring some holiday spirit to the C word. So we danced, and when last call came, we hung out on the street. Trying to see if there were actually any good parties going on, and what-not.

Problem was, my friends and I wanted a cool party, but we were a little tired, and my friends' one friend kept hitting on me, and I wasn't interested. He kept asking the question "Are you gay or are you straight?" And of course I kept dodging it, just to be a dick. Because, really, if everyone you're with is gay, and you're hanging outside on the street in the middle of December outside of a gay bar, does it really matter? Can't you assume that there's some man-on-man love there?

This all brought me back to a threesome I had a few months ago. I'm at an ostensibly straight bar, and I find a couple 'mos dancing, and I decide to dance with them, being all cool and acting all Naive Midwestern Boy and all that. So we're all wasted and we stumble a few blocks to the one guy's apartment. Within a few minutes, the guy who lives there is sucking on my dick, and I'm sucking on the other guy's dick, and while my head is bobbing up and down on his cock, he goes,

"Are you gay?"

In between deep throatings, I'm like, "dude, um, I dunno" and keep chowing on his rod. But no, this isn't enough. So like five minutes later, he's like, "hey man, are you straight or gay?" and I release his member and turn to him, and I just say, (in my Dumb Minnesota Boy voice) "I guess I never really thought about it, man" and continued to give him one of the best hummers ever. After he came in my mouth, and I snowballed it to the other guy, whom I made swallow it, he went off to the sofa to sleep while I fucked the other guy really hard. It wasn't really till I was stumbling home that I said to myself, "what was that?" I really doubt that legitimately straight men go to bars where the girls are young, cute, and easy - but just choose to go home with two male strangers. And functionally, once you've got someone of the gender you want sucking on your dick, do you need to ask questions?

That's why I refused to swallow. It's just a matter of principle. Really.

I Tried...

2005-12-06T02:51:00.000-05:00

I have tried so hard to keep this blog from being serious in any way, shape or form. I've done everything possible: made fun of myself, made fun of broad swaths of the population, used the crudest, foulest language possible... and yet you people keep bringing me back to serious issues. So let's get down to business. Specifically, in the words of the immortal Salt and/or Pepa, Let's Talk About Sex.

I have serious issues with the way people treat HIV/AIDS.

Specifically, HIV transmission is perhaps one of the simplest things possible to understand. Here's a brief graphic of the complexity of things that could be understood (1 is the simplest; 5 is the least simple):

1. Scratching one's own ass
2. Using a doorknob
3. Understanding that HIV is spread when someone who has HIV in his/her blood, semen, juices [of the girl variety], or breast milk, puts one of those four fluids into the bloodstream of someone who doesn't have HIV
4. Opening mail
5. Applying sunblock to your friend's back

So why the double standards? Why is it that people are so scared to be around someone that they KNOW has HIV, but have no problem being around people that they believe don't have it - whether or not they do? It's not like knowing about someone else's HIV status gives their HIV magic superpowers that make it penetrate skin, fly through the air, and infect you. But somehow, KNOWING about other people's HIV is worse than pretending that they don't have it. Kinda strange.

You can get HIV, or not get HIV, from someone who has it, whether or not you KNOW they have it. Frankly, the virus doesn't really care what you know. It just replicates itself. And technically, being a virus, it's not even alive. It doesn't have a personality, or value judgements, or a stream of consciousness. It hijacks cells and makes copies of itself. And it eats the T-cells of people who have it.

The real trick to not getting HIV - and I know this is, like, the most complex thing in the WORLD - is not putting specific fluids of other people into your own bloodstream. And if you follow this practice, there's a good chance that you'll turn out like me*, and NOT have the virus. (*technically, me a couple months ago at the 99.99% certainty level. But I've continued to follow the fluid rules, and am extrapolating from that)

Now, wait - I know you think you know where this is going - and it's not going there. Nope, this post is definitely NOT about self-congratulation. It's really easy when you don't have a fatal viral infection to be so God Damn Proud of yourself. Shut The Fuck Up; I'm still talking here.

This post is about double standards when it comes to HIV. So here's another double standard people have: Blaming people who got HIV from not following the fluid rules, and TOTALLY FUCKING EXEMPTING THEMSELVES AND OTHERS who have broken the rules, and have been lucky enough not to get HIV. If you break the rules, and you don't get the virus, you're not special or so much better than people who broke the rules and got HIV. You're just lucky.

Encompassing both of these double standards is one general delusional maxim: the idea that if someone says they don't have HIV, they are safe to do anything with; and if someone says they have HIV, they aren't safe to breathe near. Get a clue; HIV transmission is identical whether or not you are aware of someone's status. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

I know I'm preaching to the choir here - but it's nice to weigh in on serious topics once in a while, even when you're not really saying anything new.

The Columbia Heights Kegger

2005-12-04T12:28:00.000-05:00

Recipe:

(1) take one neighborhood known for openness and diversity.

(2) move into the coolest house in that neighborhood, with a covered back deck and a billiard room.

(3) invite friends from other neighborhoods, and everyone who lives in group houses within 4 blocks. Plus randoms from The Compromise Bar.

(4) get a keg, and hope your hunky landlord shows up with a second keg.

(5) let people show up, find out there are two kegs, and invite everyone they know.

(6) laugh hysterically at the girls who can't tell which guys are available, and which guys like girls.

(7) keep people drinking all night till 4:30 AM.

(8) let a cute boy spend the night.

(9) be friends with the baristas at the local coffee shop, to get your free hangover coffee.

(10) promise to have a New Year's Eve party, and promise to do your damndest to rent a hot tub for it.

Defining A World That Didn't Really Exist, At Least Not Like That

2005-12-01T01:47:00.000-05:00

Such a brilliant idea. The downstairs dudes and my Real World roomies have decided to come together and throw a '90s party. Because, really, haven't there been enough '80s parties in the last few years? Aren't there enough '80s bars? That's for damn sure. So we've opened up four floors of nostalgia for The Slacker Decade. Now it's really a matter of deciding what cliches define the artificial world of '90s nostalgia.

Because '80s parties aren't about microwave french fries (which the Hipster family had WAY too many of in the '80s). '80s parties don't have footage of U.S.-funded tanks decimating Beirut, which is ALL I remember of TV news prior to the age of 6 or so. They aren't about the Dead Kennedys (too hip) or Huey Lewis (not actually enjoyable to listen to). The fictional world of '90s nostalgia needs to be boldly created by us between now and Saturday night. It's quite the responsibility.

So here are the ideas I've been bouncing around for this new nostalgic fictionalized '90s:

Clothing. Several distinct cliques are represented, primarily based on what music they listen to. (1) The grungers wear jeans with chain wallets, Doc Marten boots, rock band t-shirts (pref. black), and plaid flannel shirts, unbuttoned. Some gothyness is allowed, but not to the Robert Smith level. (2) The hip-hoppers wear Jamaican/Rasta colors (black, red, yellow, green) and/or those ugly Baja jackets that are just oversized Mexican hoodies that look like they were made from blankets. (The hip-hoppers who are White are also still derogatorily called Wiggers). (3) The preps wear Nautica and Tommy Hilfiger, but not Polo, because that was almost out for a few years there - right?

Important notes for the clothing: (1) Abercrombie & Fitch / American Eagle / Aeropostale do not exist in the Nostalgic '90s. They defined the late '90s, which somehow doesn't exist in this world. (2) The women look a lot like the men; pretty much no skirts or dresses period.

Music. This world is dominated by a few major musical styles, all of which fight on the party playlist: (1) grunge rock, including Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, Collective Soul, Live, Smashing Pumpkins, etc.... (2) hip hop as it's going gangsta: Dre's Chronic, Snoop's Doggystyle, Nate Dogg & Warren G regulatin' shit up, etc. (3) angry women with guitars, e.g. Alanis, Jewel, Ani, Shawn Colvin... (4) dance-party hip-hop: Salt N Pepa, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Wrecks-N-Effect, TLC, etc... (5) sensitive alternative rockers: Matthew Sweet, Paul Westerberg, etc. On top of all of this, there are random comeback singles from glammy '80s groups: Duran Duran's Ordinary World; Bon Jovi's Always, Def Leppard's Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad, etc., and a little bit of that obnoxious 3rd wave ska revival (Reel Big Fish, that bad cover of Come On Eileen)...

Important notes for the music: (1) it all pretty much came out between 1991 and 1996, because in this fictional world, we pretend that the president isn't actually spilling his post-hummer spooge out of his leaky cock on the tits of the dress of his chunky intern; teenagers aren't wearing $80 A&F sweaters; and genocide isn't occurring throughout Africa. The late '90s were just such a downer.

Movies. Goodbye, John Hughes. Hello, Quentin Tarantino. The three movies most acceptable to have playing in the background are Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Trainspotting. Also important are Bio-Dome/Son-In-Law/Encino Man (those are all the same movie, right?), Malcolm X, Boys 'N The Hood, and Friday. Titanic is acceptable, despite its release during the last three years of the decade.

Beverages. Keg beer is still OK, but bonus points go to guests who bring Zima. All points lost if Bartles & Jaymes is brought (WAY too '80s) or Mike's Hard Lemonade (totally 2000s, dude).

Etiquette. Guests who wish to maintain the '90s customs are obliged to not be terrifically polite, nor high-strung. Mellow & laid-back to problems is important; however, one should also not go out of one's way to help other people or actually give a shit about shit. In the post-letters/pre-email era, correspondence is a lost art, and RSVPs are unneccessary. Those running late oughtn't call, because no one has cell phones. Thus, people show up or don't, with hosts left in the lurch. Hosts, of course, don't go out of their way to actually provide food other than what's lying around.

So. Have I captured the Zeitgeist here? What's incorrect? What's missing?

i found compromise bar its wonderland 1101 kenyon

2005-11-27T19:46:00.000-05:00

...such was the contents of a text message I got about a year ago that changed my life.

Myself and a lady friend had been getting frustrated. We just needed a bar where I wouldn't be her fag but she wouldn't be my hag. There just aren't a lot of places in DC where a straight woman and a gay man, neither of whom with any baggage pre-empting it, who just like to hang out and drink together, might both get lucky. If you're a lady who doesn't want to get lucky, you can go with your boys to a gay bar, but even then you'll probably cock block him. And forget it if you're a gay guy who doesn't want to get laid and just wants to accompany your lady to a straight pickup bar. If you can get by in a straight bar, you're enough to cock block her. Don't even get me started on the trouble of finding a place where you could both actually get lucky.

This was our goal: finding The Compromise Bar. And one night, last fall, she found it.

Now, back in the day, Wonderland was known as an underground lesbian hangout. Which is very cool. People in the neighborhood were low-key, and ladies who wanted to meet in a non-forced atmosphere could meet up at Wonderland. And as the neighborhood got more diverse (yes, it's gentrifying, but not nearly as obnoxiously as, say, U Street) - Wonderland got more diverse.

Honestly, if you're like me and you dreamed up a magical Compromise Bar - let's say you never imagined that it could exist - here's what your pipe dream might look like:

-the crowd is totally mixed on sex, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, income, educational level

-however, everyone is 21-30, with people over 30 being extremely cool and young-at-heart

-they serve Guinness for $6 AND PBR for $3

-one floor is nonsmoking and one floor is smoking

-restrooms are unisex but not single-stall

-you can dress up OR down and fit in

-music is hip and segues smoothly between genres, from Rap to Punk to Ska to Southern Rock to New Wave

-full of people but not so packed you can't breathe

-no attitude; people are there to have fun

-no assumptions; people will strike up a conversation with anyone but won't push themselves on you

-no assumptions; people of any sex, race, sexuality will talk to you and not assume that you do OR don't want them

-most of the patrons live within 5 blocks, or came with friends who did, so you can go to afterparties or have an easy walk home/easy walk-of-shame in the morning

"Ha!" you'd say. "They'd never make a bar like that!" Well, ha ha to you. They made one, and I live a block and a half away from it. And it's awesome. I can go with my ladies and dance with them, and every type of person imaginable will still hit on us both. And that's exactly the kind of bar that I want to go to.

Assemble any group you want, and go to Wonderland, and you will get along just fine. And my GOD, the coolness level of a bar where anyone will hit on you but all of them will take "no" without the slightest attitude! There's something a little swingerish/hippie-ish about a place like that, but with a modern flavor. A place for the open-minded, free at heart types. And the yuppies think that hipsters are snobs. If they only knew the beauty of The 'Heights.

How Did You Get That?

2005-11-27T14:56:00.000-05:00

Last night I came home from my 72-hour barnstorming tour of the homes of my friends' parents in the NY-NJ region. And as we all move through our twenties, more and moore of our parents are cleaning out their attics and getting ready to move to warmer, sunnier climes. Myself being a mooch, I like to help myself to things that are being thrown out.

I got home around 11 PM and started emptying out the backseat of my Corolla, one item at a time, and bringing it into the house in front of the roomies as if these were perfectly normal things to bring out of one's car after Turkey Day:

---

oscillating fan

18" Coca-Cola wall clock

two 30-lb. barbells

snowboard w/bindings

12-cup Gevalia coffeemaker with built-in insulated carafe

---

The production of it all was well-played, but still, I would have liked to have had just a few more things to bring in casually:

---

two midgets (one male & one female; male midget must have a handlebar moustache)

8-track player

inflatable sex doll (gender/species open)

pogo stick

Dukakis/Bentsen '88 yard sign

brass hookah

---

It's just hard when you've set the bar so high on past attempts, ya know? Nowhere to go. Quite difficult to keep them laughing.

Hipster Magnetic Poetry

2005-11-20T22:39:00.000-05:00

Hey kids!!! Do you want your very own Angel Headed Hipster Magnetic Poetry Set? It's awesome!

All you need are a computer printer, a glue stick, a pair of scissors, and some crappy flimsy advertisement magnets. You can find these on your freezer or just steal them from other people's freezers.

Print out this blog post, glue it to some crappy magnets, and cut out all the phrases! With just this small set of words and phrases, you'll be able to construct your very own blog on the Frigidaire(TM) that looks just like everything I've ever written or will ever write! Knock yourselves out!
____________

by the time the clock hit 3 AM

saying stupid random shit

40% urban cowboy

calling people fags and cunts in a literary context

the hating of all things anal-retentive

lame-ass motherfuckers

total douchebag

(which was AWE-some, by the way)

obviously I'm a little bitter about

Midwest Farm Boy

my personal lifelong journey towards trying to be less fucked-in-the-head

or something equally vapid

straight out of Homophobia, U.S.A.

all kinds of shit that tells you what's wrong with them deep down inside

I've been procrasturbating

it's one thing to try to get people to assume that you're heterosexual

"scuzzy meth-dealing wife beater"

stupid "bisexual" whore

you act like a fucking retard

practically offer to suck your dick right then and there

between the thousands of men they fuck

dancing to '80s music at 1:30 AM for its cultural value

the offensive, nasty, rotten things inside my head

started to stroke off

my huge fucking boner for Brad Pitt

the things that I tend to obsess about

You know I just had to

Under-the-influence

Liaison To Heterostan

which is nice and Zen and all, but

mindless sex with different men every night

My countrytrash alter-ego

my brother and I played "doctor" with the neighbor boy

I got hammered and busted some moves on the dance floor

then we all had oral sex

Washington Post crossword

what do you put in your mouth

my triple-booked Saturday

excluding the male genitalia

to grossly paraphrase Sigmund Freud

sold into prostitution and be forced to suck Cantonese Cock With Special Sauce

Cunty McFaggotron

my issue of needing to be perceived as masculine

that's what people who didn't have fucked-up childhoods do

plunging my rod into

taking body shots of Jim Beam

Queen Fagorama starts bitching

ADHD meds

losing an amateur stripping contest

barely-legal 18-year-old hetero guy

meth-head trucker trash

the Hook-Up-Or-Leave hour

hot man-on-man action

oral sex

I was offended on behalf of people

I'd like to punch her in the ovaries

like a pigeon in a 1950s psychology experiment

Thomas Jefferson tried that one and it didn't work well that time either

although I'd only had 1.5 martinis

Evil Racist White Man

bored and/or sadistic

my anger and resentment

(e.g. bragging about beaver hunting)

the straights

the hets

even if all bisexual women were crazy

the heteros

Gross/Hot

the prime time to get laid is Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights

why you need a six-pack if you want to have sex

think that they're actually going to get to fuck

after ordering the first round of drinks

anyone who's going to go home with you at 3 AM on a weeknight

It's a scientific fact.

some sort of a gender-power sort of thing

it's not a politically correct thing to say, but it's true.

smoking weed in the bathroom of a bar

hey, I'm just saying

I Don't Feel A Strong Sense Of Community With These People

2005-11-18T14:18:00.000-05:00

Let's talk about the lame-ass academics in my field. Every conference I've ever gone to, I've felt like I was on Jupiter. These people have no social skills. They don't know how to dress so they wear Banana Republic anything and look like douchebags. You can't have a conversation with them because they are weird. They go to their little conferences and put up their little posters and they make their graduate students into little versions of them.

Part of me has always been a little bitter that I have an old, out-of-touch advisor who treats me with benign neglect. It would be nice to have an advisor who actually networked me in right. But guess what. I know people with networking advisors who aren't getting anywhere, and it's not like I don't have better social skills than 95% of the people at these conferences. So I'm not really worried about that. And frankly, I get enough forced socialization from my department's faculty as a whole, that I definitely don't need any more from my advisor. Worse than being ignored (where I get to hang out at coffee shops, lift weights, go shopping during the workday) would be being totally molded into a little version of some pencil-pushing academic turd.

So it's nice to not feel like you're part of a bunch of losers, but it doesn't feel very good to be not part of the group you're in. It's tough either way. I should have been a male model or something, where I'd be sure to fit right in.

Regarding Date Rape, Vol. II

2005-11-18T14:04:00.000-05:00

I decided it's more interesting to write follow-ups as new posts instead of going on in the comments.

Miss Monkey brought up some good points in the comments to the date rape post. I knew if I blogged about things other than myself, I might actually get more comments from folks. So let's talk about date rape some more.

It sounds like I was comparing apples and oranges to some extent. Perhaps those who volunteer for campus organizations are doing the important work of educating victims that they are victims, and getting them to come forward. Whereas the prevention side is a different deal. I guess what weirds me out is the amount of time and energy spent on the "recovery" side compared to the amount of time and energy spent on the "prevention" side.

It totally makes sense that helping the victims is crucially important in its own sense - but I guess my point was that we could also use some energy in IDENTIFYING college women with (1) the worst self-esteem; (2) the highest need to please men; and (3) the worst radar for missing sketchiness in men. Because I definitely believe that there are college women at much higher risk of date rape than their peers, and that if we can find them, we can save them BEFORE the crime, instead of trying to rehabilitate them afterwards.

But even that might possibly represent more of a gender difference in energy. Perhaps college women are more likely to see victims and understand the importance of helping real people get better, whereas grad school men are more likely to see statistical future victims and want to implement a system to prevent possible victimization.

Neither focus is wrong. I think the common ground we can all agree on is that we need to decrease date rapes AND help the victims whose crimes we couldn't prevent.

One last thing, though: is it possible that the campus-date-rape-prevention people aren't putting enough responsibility on the rapists? Cuz here's the thing. When I break the law (oral sex on the beach at 4 AM; smoking weed in the bathroom at a bar; driving 72 in a 55), I know I'm breaking the law. I know that I'm a criminal (even if that word has connotations we wouldn't associate with speeding) and I don't need to be educated as to what a crime is. "Gee whiz, officer? Sex in public is illegal? I thought this was oregano in the pipe! I saw "495" on the sign and thought that was the speed limit!"

So, while I understand that maybe the kind of women most likely to be date raped are the women who don't always realize that they've been victimized - do we really need to educate rapist men that they are committing a crime? If a guy, in 2005, after twenty years of date-rape awareness, physically subdues a woman and violates her - does he really not know that what he's doing is wrong? Because filmstrips aren't going to stop me from public sex & drugs. High odds of getting caught might. I'm just saying - maybe we don't need to educate college men any more than we have. Maybe we need to catch them. (Which I do think the rape-prevention women are doing a good job of).

An Open Letter To Apple Computer, Inc.

2005-11-16T19:03:00.000-05:00

Dear Apple Computer, Inc:

I love iTunes. I think it's the greatest music database software in history. I find the search options insanely useful. Giving me the ability to control the interface by choosing which columns will be displayed, adjusting their width, and re-arranging them, was very kind of you.

I also especially like that I can re-label music by genre, and that AutoFill saves me a ton of time in managing my 13,000-song library, so I can type in "B" and get "Big Band/Swing" filled in automatically.

But FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, do you know how SICK I am of getting "New Age" every time I want to enter "New Wave?"

No one who uses iTunes likes New Age. OK, maybe there's one person who owns an Apple and listens to New Age music, but he probably calls it "Rock and/or Roll." Because it's Reverend Lovejoy.

Love,

Hipster

As I Try To Branch Out To Topics Not About Myself...

2005-11-14T21:51:00.000-05:00

I have to say it: the rape-prevention people have let their emotions render them stupid.

It's not a politically correct thing to say, but it's true.

Two young, highly intelligent, law- and grad-school bound women that I know are college seniors and volunteer for the campus rape-prevention group. And I think that's excellent. Rape is one of the most cruel, vicious, offensive crimes there is. After murder, rape is the one thing that's against the morality of basically anyone you'd ever want to associate with.

World cultures have also been, for the most part, male-dominated. The vast majority of rape is man-on-woman. (Straight) men have had a millennia-long history of ignoring, accepting, downplaying, and justifying rape. And that's sick.

Most rape is date rape. My college-senior friends cited the statistic of 85%. That sounds about right from an intuitive level.

(Straight) men, in their long history of rape justification, have loved to blame women ("it's what she was wearing"/"it's where she was that got herself raped") or pretend to blame themselves without accepting responsibility ("we are animals"/"it's in our genes"). And these are really idiotic excuses. Imagine if Martha Stewart had gotten up on the stand and said in her sultry alto, "well, I had the inside information, so you know I had to engage in insider trading to save .0000001% of my total wealth. I'm an animal when it comes to money. It's just in my genes." She would have been drawn and quartered, and she wouldn't have her own TV show now. Crime is the fault of the criminal.

But crime is also the responsibility of the victims.

I lock my house. I lock my car. I lock my office. I lock my lab.

I have passwords on my banking/finance accounts that are different than those on my e-mail and friend site accounts. And I've never given out my financial account passwords to parents, boyfriends, or roommates.

For every crime there is - EXCEPT (DATE) RAPE - we tell people to take care of their shit. Women take self-defense classes, carry mace, etc. etc. etc. to avoid being mugged, killed, or stranger-raped. Which is excellent.

But since most rape is date rape, and rape is one of the most heinous AND IRREVERSIBLE crimes there is, shouldn't we tell women to take care of their shit? You'd think we could save a lot of victims from (1) bodily harm, (2) psychological terror, (3) STDs, (4) conception-by-rape, etc. if we told women that there are ways that they can behave to NOT get raped.

But God knows we can't do that! That would be blaming the victim.

So let's keep doing what my otherwise intelligent friends do, and having outdoor spectacles on campus where anyone can walk up and puffy-paint a T-shirt to say TAKE BACK THE NIGHT, or something equally vapid, that won't actually keep women safe from rape. And have more little instructional workshops to tell men that NO MEANS NO! (Which is probably a good idea, but hardly the end of what we are capable of doing to reduce rape).

Can you imagine a world in which we REFUSED to tell auto-theft victims to lock their cars? Or suggest that if you own a decent car, don't park it on the street in a poor and highly populated neighborhood with a high crime rate?

Because that's what we do about rape - because you can't blame the victim! Or even educate her, other than to indoctrinate her into some preachy rhetoric about how women should dress like prostitutes, hang out with skeezy men, go to their dorm rooms at 3 in the morning, make out with them, and DEMAND that they respect their right to not be assaulted. It's the only crime where the victims' rights advocacy groups DON'T apparently believe that you should teach people to protect themselves to avoid the crime.

So if you're actually against rape (and I hope everyone reading this IS), consider actually turning to a young woman you know and sitting her down and talking about rape. We live in a somewhat-unpredictable world, but I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that there are a lot of things that women who don't get raped are doing to avoid it (including my rape-prevention group friends). And while it's not an excuse for a rapist that the woman was dressed like she wanted it, went to his room alone with him at night after flirting, went to second base, and THEN said no...

Wouldn't you rather NOT get raped? If you could do something to prevent it, wouldn't you do it? If you could avoid being alone with a criminal in a criminal environment, wouldn't you do it?

Apparently, not if it's rape. Just something to think about.

Midwestern Boy Stud Service: A How-To Guide

2005-11-09T17:59:00.000-05:00

Are you a man-oriented man living in the DC metro area? Here are some helpful tips to get laid.

Be from the Midwest. There are plenty of southerners and northeasterners here. They seem to have boredom for themselves and dislike for the other. Both groups greatly resent materialistic Californians who visit or move here and complain about everything. But there's one group that everyone seems to fetishize: The Farmboy. Not from a farm? That's A-OK. Just do some lat/trap exercises and build up them shoulder blades. You just have to *look* like you're from a farm. Don't forget to go about 40% urban cowboy in your clothing: people who grew up in Jersey can't tell the difference. Don't tell people that you're from Chicago; say "Illinois" instead. "Madison" is a college town, but "Southeastern Wisconsin" sounds like pretty much the most isolated place on Earth. For some reason, "Minneapolis" sounds like a silo and a couple dozen hogs, so that's a keeper. You may wish to experiment with slightly embellished lies, too. And it doesn't hurt to selectively tell the truth: telling a sales clerk that you've been in the area for 3 years makes you boring. But if you can get away with "I just moved to DC four months ago," followed by "...I'm from Minnesota," by God, he'll bring every item in the store to the dressing room and practically offer to suck your dick right there. Feel free to take him up on the offer, unless you want to play hard to get and fuck his manager next time you are shopping there.

Act stupid. Men want nothing more than to sleep with dumb people. It's a scientific fact. At some point, I actually thought this followed some sort of a gender-power sort of thing: male OR female gays & lesbians, if they're femmier, want smart butches, whereas butches want dumb femmes. This is patently untrue. The need for stupid sexual partners is directly linked to the Y chromosome. Geneticists have looked really carefully at sperm cells with magnifying glasses and proved this unconditionally. Women of all types want partners with brains, and men of all types want to have sex with rocks. This is one explanation for why you need a six-pack if you want to have sex with a man: they will get distracted by it and think that they're actually going to get fuck a sedimental formation. Go with this. One way to help further this progression is to dress in camouflage at a bar: yank a bush out of the planters on the way in, and after ordering your first drink, tuck your shirt into the back of your jeans like a tail, and carry the bush in front of your face. Wearing bluejeans with a wash that looks like a blue river can aid in the decoy process and create a "nature scene" that drives men crazy. In the event that a man realizes you are actually a person, it's still OK. You don't have to lie about your education or your job; just ACT dumb. It always works. Just say unquestioningly, "Oh, I'm a lawyer" or "I went to Princeton" or whatever. DON'T pretend to be coy about it!; this will backfire. If you say "I went to law school in Boston... at a place called Harvard" - THAT reeks of smugness. But you can say that you just got your M.D. from Georgetown, as long as you act like a fucking retard. This is the crucial part.

Start drinking on weeknights. If you need to sleep all day on Saturday and Sunday, and act like a nun when you go out, that's OK. You're not going to get laid on the weekend! So take being hungover at work like a man. It'll make you more chill anyway. The prime time to get laid is Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights, because that's when all the retail-employee/grad-student/journalist/other alcoholic professions go out and get hammered. People who drink on the weekends are far too responsible to go home with anyone. If you want to get some action, you have to go out on weekdays when there's little-to-no chance that people are dancing to '80s music at 1:30 AM for its cultural value.

Do not have erectile difficulties. Anyone who's going to go home with you at 3 AM on a weeknight will probably need you to have an erection for the better part of several hours. Do not underestimate this. Masturbation can occur Friday night through Sunday morning; this is the time when you are allowed to go to bars for social value, with your friends who would criticize your healthy sex life anyway. But save the blood for the middle of the week. Get your iron and don't smoke.

Deny all of this, and don't tell anyone it's your plan. Unless you publish the most self-effacing blog ever and find it much funnier to admit your bullshit than pretend you have no idea and you're a nice dumb kid from the farm.

Double Standards And All That, Vol. 642

2005-10-30T23:03:00.000-05:00

As long as I have an angry, resentful blog for my anger and resentment, I might as well air it all out. So here's another observation from the world of The Angry Homosexual: People make enormously different small talk with you when they assume you are a straight man vs. a gay man.

I've been running research subjects lately for a study. They are pretty much all 18- and 19-year-old guys. To make things easier, I've been toning down anything remotely gay when I'm around them. I'm generally a pretty outspoken gay activist, but I just want to get the stupid data collected with a minimum of drama, and I don't think I'm a sellout for "passing" to take the easy way out. So I've had a lot of experience lately with helping people assume I'm heterosexual without having to do anything I'm loathe to do (e.g. bragging about beaver hunting).

My redneck Halloween costume also helped me spy on the straights this year. My original intent a couple weeks back was to pick a costume that would be really gross yet irresistably hot. Last year was the first time in my life that I was neither a twink nor overweight, and I went for "caveman," which was funny but the pictures were not so hot. So I thought I'd try again for the "I'm pretending that I picked something that's repulsive but I want you to think that I'm hot in this costume" costume. I think I succeeded: a couple acquaintances who don't know me well enough to observe the neon sign that hovers over my head and reads "DON'T FEED THE EGO" said I was the Hottest Gross Trucker Ever and some girls who didn't know me commented that my costume needed a beer gut and noted my impressive lack of one. (I'm sure those of you who know me well enough to read the sign are groaning by now. There are always new tourists to feed me). Anyway, now that I've succeeded in my Gross/Hot costume, I can cross that off my list of goals for life, and maybe next year I'll even wear something that has sleeves. BUT that's not the point. The point is, long after making myself happy with the costume, I realized that an added benefit of the costume was Mingling As A Het.

The last few weeks of running subjects already had me in the groove of talking football. Last winter I had one football-watching roommate and this year I have two. So I've seen twice as many games as last year, which itself was more games than I'd probably ever seen in my life up to 2004. And I've accepted the fact that the fun of watching football, more than anything, is having something to talk about with strangers that isn't politics or religion. And that makes me genuinely like football. At any rate, watching football games allows you to even have small talk to make with 18-year-old straight guys, because it's the only thing in the world that they are capable of talking about.

Now, when I wore my redneck/trucker costume, I naturally assumed the redneck persona, because that's one of the reasons I love Halloween. If I didn't actually get to be a different person for one or more nights, it wouldn't be nearly as much fun. Last night was especially fun because the first party was with good friends out in the suburbs, and I had to drive, so I spent an hour and a half nursing a single beer. While totally sober, I honed my redneck act to a "T." My entrance alone fooled a couple good friends. Love wearing a trucker hat over my eyes. Kept up the country homophobe routine quite well, until I had a slip near the end of my time there: I started to stroke off the neck of an inflatable guitar of an '80s punker. So, with a large red phallus pointed my direction, I broke character. But otherwise it was impressive. So when I went to the next party, a few blocks from my place, my friends there were impressed with the act and I started to drink a little. Finally, I made it to the third party, also in the 'Heights, where I pretty much knew one person. He and I got good and stoned upstairs and then I was on stage. Under-the-influence redneck in a house packed with complete strangers. Coming downstairs, I ran into a couple girls who were like "who are you, like, a trucker?" - to which my instant response was "weeeell, no, technically, I didn't pass a little thing they had called a test-for-crystal-methamphetamine-use, so you can just say I'm-a-in-between jobs right about now." This with a Kansas City Royals trucker cap down over my face, with me cranking my neck 45 degrees back to expose wide blue eyes and a face full of stubble accentuated with French Roast coffee grounds. Priceless, if I may be allowed to pat myself on the back.

Generally, in social settings, I'm around friends and I really get pretty gay with people I know. Women friends can get me gossiping or talking about people's haircuts; straight male friends can get me to brag up exploits as they would theirs (and they often love this); and of course, around my people we always end up sharing news about who's doing whom, or who wants to do whom, etc. But here's the interesting thing to me: the small talk that gets made with me always makes me gayer. And that's OK, but it bears restating: strangers who assume I'm straight want to talk about sports, what state I'm from, and what books or movies I like. It makes sense that people who know I'm gay want to talk about gay shit, but Jeebus H., I think there's a self-fulfilling prophecy here. Little could make you gayer than being talked to about gay shit day in and day out. Now, I'm more than willing to do this, and in fact, I've often willingly taken on the role of Ambassador From Gayland among the hets, and Liaison To Heterostan among the moes. But it strikes me that the people who most like to pigeonhole me as a mo are the same people who always want to talk about the types of things that make me seem the gayest: hair, clothing, other people's business.

If people asked me about the weather, they'd hear about the weather. And that's what last night was all about. I can't REMEMBER the last time I was in a house of 125 people, and met probably 25 people, where not ONCE did I have to talk about, I dunno, when was the last time I had sex; do I like to swallow jizz; when was my last relationship; what do I think about men who wear popped collars on polo shirts; which bars do I like the best. Now, you might be saying to yourself, "but Hipster LOVES to talk about all those things." And you know I do. But there's a something to be said for talking about other topics. And I felt like for once I got to ONLY talk about those topics.

As I said a couple posts down, I think I had outed myself by the time the clock hit 3 AM for the second time. A couple of the straight guys had gotten so friendly and cool with me (believing me to be straight) that I ended up making too much eye contact, or following them instead of women; and there's only so long you can talk to girls without them realizing that you're just not into them. (My countrytrash alter-ego would tell you that womenfolk is smart like that). But prior to the Hook-Up-Or-Leave hour, I was doing a good job of fooling them all. And my rewards for living a lie? Getting to talk about Minnesota in terms completely unrelated to its sociopolitical climate. Getting to talk about football, baseball, and hockey in conversations that didn't assume that I'm a poseur who couldn't possibly understand them. Getting to hang out in a crowd where I didn't have to have gay drama BUT I didn't have to be an outsider either. Just getting to Not Be A Minority for one damn night in my life. I'll tell y'all, I am proud of who I am and I wouldn't change it ("it," of course meaning my longstanding boner for Brad Pitt) for the world. But for one night, to just escape the pigeonholing, was so damn cathartic.

Where In Sam Hill Is This Blog Going?

2005-10-30T21:04:00.000-05:00

The last few weeks have been so stressful that my blogging has been sporadic and more rant-ish than ever. I never intended this blog to be of (what I consider to be) the typical variety: the "here's what's going on in my life" type of journal. My conception of the AHHB is short essays on life, as skewed toward the things that I tend to obsess about. Obviously, these include:

1. Issues of diversity (sexuality, race, religion, gender, etc.)
2. Social interactions and social scenes, especially where issues of diversity come into play
3. Illlegally downloading music, exploring musical genres, listening to who influenced whom and whom they were influenced by
4. The social sciences and the humanities, and how their differing views clash, especially with regards to issues of diversity (e.g. social-constructionist views of sexuality vs. Biological Deterministic views)
5. The ups and downs of abusing alcohol and the joys of occasional non-abusive pot smoking
6. Other personal issues (stress of grad school, stress of being gay)
7. My personal lifelong journey towards trying to be less fucked-in-the-head (successes and failures of, naturally)

In terms of the audience, I of course am writing for myself. I find that blogging gives me the chance to go back and read what I was ruminating on at a specific time; rarely do I ever look back on something and feel that my opinion hasn't changed since when I wrote it. Pretty much every post here I would heavily edit, had I not promised to adhere to the "15-minute-read-once-correct-once" rule. And reading y'all's comments also helps me decide how close or far my grip on reality is at any given time. Yes, this is my little place on the internet to say all the wack shit in my head and get a little feedback on it.

Of course, I am also writing for your reading pleasure. I haven't aggressively marketed this blog other than getting it listed on the DC Metro Blog Map and e-mailing the URL to my least-squeamish friends. So know that you're here because I think you can handle the offensive, nasty, rotten things inside my head, and that in between the stuff you hate, some of it you might even love some of the nasty offensiveness. But also know that you're here because I love you and want to keep you in the loop of the madness in my head. And there would be no point in actually publishing a blog on the internet if there weren't entertained readers. So feel free to make suggestions as to where this blog should go. I'm open to making this as entertaining as possible. (The one exception would be airing other people's dirty laundry. There have been two posts now where I've ripped on people I know, and I hope that I haven't hurt the wrong people - i.e. those in the middle - and I hope that people will let me know if this is a problem). But in general, when it comes to things I'm authorized to say, I want you to like reading the AHHB. So keep the comments coming.

OK, on to another post that I've been procrasturbating writing for awhile.

The Power Of The Costume

2005-10-30T04:56:00.000-05:00

Tonight (AKA This Morning) we got an extra hour from Daylight Savings Time. And an extra hour of night means extra blogging. Oh baby.

I went to a costume party two weeks ago; then, another one last night, and three tonight. I wore the same costume to all five parties: a frightening redneck/hick/goodolboy straight out of Homophobia, U.S.A. Good times.

I love Halloween. I love any time that people select and create their own costumes to magnify their personalities on the big screen. The one night of the year when women all get to dress like HOOOO-OOOOes and the men are dressed up like all kinds of shit that tells you what's wrong with them deep down inside.

Wearing a redneck costume (which was AWE-some), I met a guy dressed as a hockey player, and he was all talking about how he's from Michigan, and he wondered if I'm from a hockey state, too, and I'm like "yeah, I'm from Minnesota," and soon we were talking all about the Midwest and life. A few other guys at parties said "you look like my cousin" or "you look like everyone from back home." Of course, the ladies were direct as well, telling me that I looked like their "friend from Ohio" or whatever.

It was funny that when I was designing the costume, I was thinking about being "trash" or "scuzzy meth-dealing wife beater" and yet somehow I inescapably said "Midwest." And people who were from the Midwest couldn't get enough of it.

As far as what kind of scary things it said about me, I think the most obvious interpretation is that I wanted to "play straight" for awhile and picked a costume where I just wouldn't look like a mo. And I couldn't believe how well I passed. Most of my friends would (and have) laughed in my face when I say that I can pass if I want to. But I showed up to parties and had good friends not recognize me. That's how into it I was. Now, clearly, this is a reflection of the massive chip on my shoulder that says that there's no difference in manliness between straight men and gay men and that I can single-handedly prove it. A little extreme to try to prove a case like that by myself, but I can be a little perfectionistic about things. So there was my journey.

Where I think it broke down was the part where the girls keep being interested in you, and people start to couple off male-female style. It's one thing to try to get people to assume that you're heterosexual, but then there's that point where you can't actually start to make the moves on someone whom you are categorically unattracted to. So that's as far as you can go. Now, in college, I would push this as far as possible by getting a guy and a girl in bed with me and trying to make things work. And that's pretty much as far as one could think of going. But these days that youthful curiosity is long, long gone. So I can try to secretly mack on the straight guys who have told me all of their life stories as revealed by their costumes, but it won't get me too far. They tell you everything, but then when they realize you're hitting on them, it all changes. So unfair for me. Again, there's a limit to which I've been able to hack into The Heterosexual Life. But I think it makes me a great advice-giver. Because in the costume, I was able to infiltrate enemy lines and see what happens. And now I have that much more to say about man-on-woman life, and I have that many more insights about the gay world by comparison.

I guess it was all a lot less about being about my costume and a lot more about my spywork in Heteroville. And I feel very enriched as a result of my spying.

I Hate Fake-Bisexual Cunts Who Toy With Actual Lesbians

2005-10-27T01:32:00.000-04:00

A few years back, a lesbian friend of mine inadvertently fell in love with a stupid "bisexual" whore. I put the word "bisexual" in quotes here because this individual fits into one of two categories, neither of which is really that bisexual:

1. Straight women who are never happy with anything, like to manipulate people, and want to pretend that they are persecuted and/or exotic, so they tell people that they are bisexual, but between the thousands of men they fuck, they never fuck a single woman, yet still claim they are bisexual even though they clearly aren't picky about the men they sleep with and thus it's questionable why there's never been a woman they've wanted to fuck.

2. Bisexual women who want to tell people how persecuted they are for being bisexual and live up all the drama of being a sexual minority, yet are too chickenshit to sleep with women, despite sucking half the dicks in the DC/Baltimore area in the past ten years. All the sociocultural drama of bisexuality without the muff diving.

Now, there are a lot more straight women than bisexual women in general (if you exclude the contention of those who call everyone bisexual), so it's statistically more likely that a given fucked-up psycho woman is straight than she is bisexual. Even if all bisexual women were crazy, and only a small percentage of straight women were crazy, there would probably be more crazy straight women than crazy bisexual women. So I'm going to assume she's straight and pretends to be bisexual, but I acknowledge that she could be bisexual and wanting the persecution without the sleeping-with-girls part. Anyway, to recap the facts: this chick got around in high school, college, and grad school. That's OK with me - I'm all about people being happy whores if they want to; what I'm not OK with is when a manipulative bitch who's had every guy she ever wanted decides to fuck around with a woman's heart because she's bored and/or sadistic.

But the fucking-over of my friend was a few years back, and my friend decided to stay friends with the person that hurt her, and I guess she's either a bigger person than me or she's a little bit masochistic, but I don't know which, and that's really her life and her decision. You can't get inside other people's heads, and you can't fight other people's battles for them.

Here's where my problem is: this wench hates me because she knows that I know that she's a manipulative and evil person who played psychological games on someone who was in love with her, whom she had no intentions of getting with, and whom she later accused of having invented everything in her head.

So this worthless waste of flesh hates me for knowing that she's a waste of flesh. But she has nothing negative of substance to say about me - the reason she hates me is that I know she's not really bisexual, and I know she was manipulative and nasty toward my friend. That's why she has decided to pretend that I'm an Evil Racist White Man. Now, I find this rather funny, since it's simply not true. But it still bothers me that I don't see this person in months and I show up at a happy hour event and there she is, and she's had three martinis, and she decides to start egging me on, saying stupid random shit about white people, about how "only white people wear shorts in winter, and I KNOW it's true because I was walking the other day behind these three teenage black girls and they said it, and I was like, yeah, that is so true!" ...because then when I tell her she's wrong, she can accuse me of being a Reactionary White Guy. Never mind that I'm gay and actually face persecution; she plays up her Pakistani heritage as if she were The Most Oppressed Person On Earth (despite being rich, suburban, and utterly not a victim).

Now, I love stereotypes. I think stereotypes about any majority or minority group are usually funny, but I don't like stupid prejudicial hate. This is specifically why stereotypes aren't politically correct: if you let people use them in a funny, non-hurtful context, you also have to allow bad people to use them in a malicious context. That's why I'm a fan of restricting excessive stereotyping to when you're around close friends and everyone has a pretty good idea of each other's actual opinions about things. And, of course, in my anonymous blog that uses extreme offensiveness - like calling people fags and cunts - in a literary context. I keep this blog anonymous to allow me to say all kinds of shit that I don't think should be said on the street.

But when this bitch says that stupid White-baiting shit, I just want to say, Shut up! You and I both know you're one of the least persecuted non-White people in U.S. history, and when you talk about the plight of The Brown People and pretend that you're being oppressed on a daily basis, it makes me want to put you in irons and sail you around the planet in a slave ship, then send you to a new segregated graduate school that has lead in the paint and water and asbestos on the heating pipes. Then you'll actually know what racism is, and you won't pretend that it's impacting every minute of your life when it's NOT, because you grew up rich, you married rich, you went to good schools, and the only time you've ever been race-baited that you've ever been able to articulate was one or two instances in middle school, when kids will pick on ANYTHING they can about you, and it has nothing to do with race per se...

But wait - you're aware that this is all bullshit and you're doing it because you want drama, and you want to fuck with me. Just like when you pretended you were bisexual and toyed with my woman friend for months, because mindless sex with different men every night made you bored like Sarah Michelle Gellar in Cruel Intentions, so fucking with people is the only thing that stimulates your gaping axe-wound.

Of course, the baiting worked this time. She wanted to piss me off and it worked. I hadn't seen her in months and I had forgotten how good she is at fucking with people. There's a reason she did such a number on my friend, and that's because she's a cunning, nasty, person. So although I'd only had 1.5 martinis, and she'd had 3.0, she got me to say some things that I don't even believe, like "you've never experienced racism" - and I'm sure she has on some level. And she got to rant about what an Evil White Man I am, and it's one of those charges that you just can't deny. What am I supposed to say? I can't say "I'm not racist, I have tons of friends of different races," because that one's been taken by actual White racists. I can't say "I'm not racist, I have sex with people of color," because Thomas Jefferson tried that one and it didn't work well that time either. "I have a Black roommate" is weak, and "I love Ray Charles" is pretty much the bottom of the barrel. There's really not a damn thing you can say when you're a White Guy - even when you're a gay guy who's combatted FAR more homophobia in your life than people of certain ethnic groups have encountered racism - to oppose the charge that you're an Evil White Man.

And this individual knows that. That's why she had to go there, and that's why I stewed about it all weekend. I should have laughed the whole thing off, because I know inside that she's full of crap. But it bugged me to hear her using the language of people who have actually experienced terrible oppression - I know she's been reading up on this subject - because I was offended on behalf of people who actually experience terrible racist persecution and don't just say that shit for drama. And it bugged me as someone who's fought uphill battles my whole life to hear this spoiled bratty bored cunt pretend that I'm the oppressor and she's the victim. Because from her rich husband to her would-be lesbian suitor, this bitch has always used other people. And I'd like to punch her in the ovaries.

A Week Without Blogs

2005-10-26T23:38:00.000-04:00

It always used to bug me when bloggers that I read went a week without posting. Like a pigeon in a 1950s psychology experiment, I'd keep pecking the "refresh" key and expecting birdseed, but get bupkes. I knew that people got busy or had no creative steam, but dammit, I wanted new posts!

So now I'm that angelheaded disappointer, and all I can say is, sorry. You know I got it in me to kick out some killer posts when the muses inspire me. So wait for them. They'll be precious and shit.

The World Of Pop Music Before 1963

2005-10-19T01:18:00.000-04:00

Dave Marsh, a famous postmodern music critic, wrote a gynormous book about rock (yeah, that one), back in '99, and his thesis was that soul music, was the true "heart and soul" of rock. Soul was Black and over-produced; Psychedelia was White and under-produced. Both came together into "classic rock," but soul was the better of the two (in his opinion).

Now, I generally agree with Dave. If you look at pre-British invasion White American music, it pretty much sucks. White music didn't get good in this country till we merged Black soul with British rock. (And Dylan, of course, brought the beat poetry into the lyrics and was the sole White American who actually contributed to the birth of real classic rock). But let's not get too down on ourselves: here's what Whites did right before '63 or '64:

-The Carter Family, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. The virtual invention of country music was a big jump from folk.

-Not exciting: Woody Guthrie. It probably offends certain music geeks when one suggests that Woody Guthrie sucked. But seriously, have you tried to listen to Woody Guthrie? He sounds like a shitty hillbilly version of Leadbelly. Now, Leadbelly is hard enough to listen to, and he's more or less single-handedly responsible for synthesising and promoting the entire history of African-American music. Whiteys John and Alan Lomax - albeit somewhat racist themselves - went around and recorded Black musicians, and the world owes them a great debt. But from what I've read over the years, it was pretty much Leadbelly who opened them up to all of this. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong. But back to Woody Guthrie: he, um, did............ ? Well, he wrote a "non-fascist national anthem" (This Land Is Your Land). That's nice - but it SUCKS. He inspired Bob Dylan.... to mire his otherwise gorgeous songs in God-awful hillbilly yodeling till he turned 21 and realized that intelligent music didn't have to sound like shit. Though I have to admit, Wilco & Billy Bragg did some nice work with his unpublished lyrics. Still, though, the lyrics themselves weren't that profound on all those songs. But my feelings for unlistenable preachy givin'-socialism-a-bad-name folk music aside - we had a small handful of really amazing country artists. That's a good thing.

-Sinatra and Elvis. These two occupy a conflicted place in your heart if you're a hugemusichipstersnob like myself. The tendency folks seem to have here is to worship them or abhor them. As a young child, I decided they were fake, cheesy, and gauche. As a college radical, I decided they were exactly what was wrong with my race. But these days, I try to use a little more "historicism" than "presentism" in listening to these guys. I mean, part of me feels like, yeah, a lot of Whites listened to these guys over, I dunno, Billie Holiday and Ray Charles - but a lot of Whites listened to Billie and Ray, too. Further, is it so much better for Whites to prefer Black music over White music? Does it necessarily make the world a better place? I'm not convinced that Snoop-listening White frat boys are any more likely to hire Blacks for jobs in ten years than are Phish-listening White frat boys. Wanting Shaq to make a three-point shot and wanting Shaq to be your brother-in-law don't exactly go hand-in-hand. So I'm not convinced it's any more or less virtuous for White people of our parents' and grandparents' generation to prefer James Brown, The Godfather of Soul, over Elvis Presley, The King of Rock & Roll.

So at some point around the time that I realized I loved Buddy Holly, Bruce Springsteen, and the Beach Boys - I started listening to Elvis and Frank with slightly less jaded ears. I've got to say that the early Elvis - I think this would be about the first half of that 30 #1 Hits CD that everyone went batshit crazy buying a couple years back despite the fact that it's the same goddamn songs on every other fuckin Elvis CD ever made, but this time it's a NEW PACKAGE! And it's shiny and gold! - is good music. Sure, the guy was a Black-hating White racist who made zillions by making Black music a little bit Whiter, but Christ! It's a free country. He made money because he (well, really Sam Phillips, the genius who made him) figured out that other Whites were just as White as he was. Damn, do you gotta hate the guy's music for that? No, I take that back - it's OK to hate the guy's dozens and dozens of shitty LPs that he made from 1963 or so onward - but you gotta give the guy props for a lot of his early singles, because they're really good. (This is pretty much verbatim what my mom told me when I was about 11 and I didn't believe her till I was about 25. Mom, if this blog weren't so filthy that I actually gave you the URL, I'm sure you'd be proud).

As for Sinatra, it's easy to hate him as a cheesy douche who was installed as a musician based on his mob connections - but there's more to the guy than that. First off, he wasn't all about ripping off Black music, as Elvis was; the dude was an unapologetic Dago and I can appreciate that. Second, what other music really gives you the same feel as Sinatra? I love Nat King Cole, but he might have been one of the few Blacks to ever rip off White music. And he just sounds a little different. Good, but not the same. There's just that Italian-restaurant feel that you can only get from Frank. Even if his music didn't influence anything after him - I can't think of anyone good who built on him; only hacks like Harry Connick and Michael Buble whom I wouldn't waste my saliva to spit on - who just sang his songs with less panache. So Frank counts on the list of OK White American musicians prior to '63 or so.

-Buddy Holly, of course. The guy wrote cute, fun, pop rock for a period shorter than the time since my last dental checkup, and then his plane crashed and he burned up in flames in a Midwestern field in January. A couple dudes died with him - one of whom, if I remember this right, was named The Big Bopper, and I really doubt he was ever actually going to contribute anything to pop music. But Buddy did, and that's what counts.

So, anyway, Dave Marsh comes along, and he says, look, soul music is what really made rock boom (and I personally would date that boom to roughly 1963). But here's my problem with his 1001 best songs:

[If you're still reading this long-ass music post, you might want to check out the list]

Most of what he's listing isn't soul music! From my scanning of the list, about a third of it is Doo-Wop - that cringe-inducing genre of White-written, White-produced, White-owned music performed by Black artists who were forced to straighten their hair and wear argyle. Hang on, you're saying, I'm looking at the top of the list and it's great. But keep going down. It gets worse. Most of the groups on that list whose names are "The" followed by some benign plural noun - were probably singing cookie-cutter crap written by Carole King's first husband. If you don't know the name of the group and the name of the song, it's probably not the heart and soul of rock and roll. "Stop!" you might say. "Who wants a best-music list that's all Hotel California and American Pie?" I certainly don't - I look to music critics for offering critical opinions, not a summary of what the masses like. I could get that from Rolling Stone's "best song" lists, which are even more worthy of scorn and thus not even worth arguing about. But the fact that a White hipster would make the case that Black music is the foundation of rock, and then have half of his best-of list be the least Black Black music ever, is a little sad.

Dave Marsh's list isn't terrible. He has "...Grapevine" as #1, and I'd probably have it in the top 100. He's then got my most-likely-if-I-thought-about-it #1 choice (Johnny B. Goode) in #2, and my favorite funk song ever - also a top 100 choice for me - "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag," as #3. Lots of good songs up there. In general, a pretty good list.

But come on, Dave, Doo-Wop is not soul. Soul music is usually defined as being the subgenre of R&B that started when Ray Charles synthesized gospel and pop music in 1954. Soul just about died when Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. That's when the James-Brown-led funk revolution took over. So Ray was building steam during the doo-wop years and his soul music finally took over. Than, James was building steam during the soul years and his funk replaced soul. See, Ray was the only person doing soul in 1954. Motown records wasn't cranking out killer singles till about 1963. See, there's that number there. 1963ish. Because that's when pretty much ALL pop music got good, Black OR White.

I definitely believe that, for the most part, Black music was what it was all about prior to '63 - but I'm talking mostly jazz and blues here. A lot of the (chronologically) really good "soul music" on Dave's list starts about then. "One Fine Day" by The Chiffons (1963) gives me shivers sometimes. Maybe bigger soul fans can correct me here - but I'd put this song at just about the end of doo-wop before soul took over, and what a beautiful transition. Still, there was still a lot of pretty cheesy, cookie-cutter music of that era that hardly represents the pinnacle of African-American artistic genius. Sorry, I just don't think "Give Him A Great Big Kiss" (1964) by The Shangri-La's - #200 - is really that noteworthy at all, and I definitely don't think it represents the heart of rock - CERTAINLY not more than "In The Midnight Hour" (1965) by Wilson Pickett - placed at a shameful #209. I'd put "...Midnight Hour" in the top 10, because it's one of the best songs ever recorded, AND because it's actually soul music. And if you don't believe me, download the fucker right after you download "One Fine Day." And make love to your old lady ( /barely legal boytoy) to it.

Anyway, it's no fun picking apart other people's choices for the best songs ever. Best-song lists are always going to be arbitrary. But here's my point: Good pop music, for the most part, just wasn't around before the early 1960s. There was good Black music that wasn't really pop, and people like Ray Charles and Chuck Berry were expanding into pop, and there were a handful of good White musicians spread out across genres. But the early '60s - that's when it all took off. So don't use the fact that most of the music on the radio in the '50s was *sung* by Black musicians to suggest that this was the mechanism by which White music got its soul. And the music of The Drifters, The Platters, The Coasters, and The Five Royales should not collectively comprise 10% of the songs on your list of Best Music Ever.

Blah Blah Blah Another Music Geek Post

2005-10-15T04:26:00.000-04:00

Look, I know y'all people come here for rants and raves about sex and drugs, but I feel this desperate inner need to throw in some posts about my hobbies. Haven't played soccer in a few months, and the grad team this year might not coalesce. I've already thrown my chips into flag football for the fall in lieu of soccer, but the season hasn't started yet. My guitar still has a fucked jack port, so no amplification possible. Little chilly for biking lately. That leaves me with illegally downloading music as my current hobby. It works when you're in hermit mode.

So here's my music geek post to fill the "not about sex and drugs" quota for the week.

I'm curious if other people had music that they listened to with their parents as a child, that completely and totally defined music forever. Not this "well my mom listened to Randy Travis when I was a kid so I don't always hate country" shit, like my friend Wolfie told me once in high school. That's hardly a testament to the beauty of music. I'm looking for music that really defined your life as a child, like when one of my exes was in my car once, flipped through my iPod, found some tracks off of Born In The U.S.A., and cranked the volume. "This came out in the summer of '84," he said, "which was right in the middle of my parents' divorce. My mom and I listened to this record, like, every day that year." I think we even shed some tears together during "I'm On Fire," which about 98% of the guys I've dated can agree is pretty much the sexiest song ever recorded. And close to 2% of the guys I've dated have been deaf.

I'm talking about the music that your parents loved, that you loved, that set the bar for all other music ever.

When I was a kid, all we listened to was classical music and Simon & Garfunkel. That's what you heard when you grew up in the Hipster Household. We had the greatest hits tape in the car (Mom & Dad shared a car in urban Minnesota in the early 80's) and we had all 5 albums on tape at home. The classical music was good and all, and I watched MTV with my babysitters or at home. Loved the videos for Take On Me, Goonies R Good Enough, and The Boys Of Summer. Those are the only three that really stand out in my head, but I saw a lot of MTV in '84-'85. The Dancing In The Dark era, but I don't remember actually seeing that video at age 5. I'm sure I did, but that's neither here nor there.

But classical music and MTV aside - Simon & Garfunkel set the standard for all other music ever in my whole life. I listened to every goddamn song those Jews recorded and I loved it. The harmonies just make me want to cry. Tonight I was heading between events 2 and 3 (only a triple-booked night; a little light for me, of course) and I had selected my guilty pleasures mix on the iPod (whose name is "Little Buddy" and whom I've had since the summer of 2002). The guilty pleasures mix is about 10 Simon & Garfunkel songs, a couple Paul Simon songs, and about 10 Beach Boys songs. About one CD worth of harmonized, pussy-boy-tenor music that makes me want to cry. I can't really sing along with any of it; one or two octaves down, it sounds like crap; and my falsetto ain't pretty but you know it comes out for "HELLLP MEEEEEEEE RHOOONDA - yeah. Getheroutof my heart." But I digress. It's some beautiful music.

And when I listen to Simon and Garfunkel, there's some little executive voice inside of me who says "Yes. This is what Music is. I am satisfied." If you are part of the 99.9% of the planet that agrees they were one of the greatest groups of all time, then you know what I mean when I say they were great. But for me, it really clicks, because S&G was what I was raised to believe was the height of all music ever. And when I hear the Beach Boys or the Boss, I definitely get all into it. But it's especially with S&G that I can say, "YES." I'll have all kinds of memories - driving to grandma's house and we stopped at this one restaurant right when The Boxer ended. Or "We listened to Homeward Bound the day Dad bought the Audi in 1986." But it's not just the memories - on top of the memories, it's also that feeling inside that you're listening to the purest music available. That no matter what your adult self thinks is awesome (Depeche Mode, or Nina Simone, or Leonard Cohen, or whatever), there's this child self that was formed on one specific kind of music. That the neurons in the temporal lobe of your brain grew up wiring themselves to each other over Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel harmonizing like gods. That you hear Art Garfunkel singing "I wandered empty streets down / past the shop displays / I heard cathedral bells / tripping down the alleyways" and your eyes well up with tears, not because it's the most brilliant prose ever written - cuz it ain't - but because at that moment you are five years old again, and you're with your family, and to your little ears, this is what music IS.

I guess it's true. You never forget your first time.

Fuckin' Semiotics And Shit

2005-10-14T03:03:00.000-04:00

Christ AlFuckingMighty! Why does everything have to mean so goddamn much when you're gay?

Seven days ago, I decided to grow a beard. Now, I had a goatee and/or sideburns and/or a full beard and/or a chinstrap (AKA Amish beard) for most of the time from my 15th birthday to my 24th birthday. The ladyfolk always liked it; the straight guys appreciated my amazing hair growth for being such a smooth kid. My LT BF, Timster (who sometimes posts in comments), always liked it. So did Joe, my first serious BF when I was 18.

Joe was the guy I lost my virginity to. My Bi-Female roommate freshman year (off-campus apartment - I was too snobby for the dorms) was all offended and shit when I came home one morning and announced that I was no longer a virgin. "Hipster, you've had sex before!" I was like, "Feminazi bitch, please. Oral don't count unless you a lezzy and crap." Joe was a total bear cub, and me being a smooth non-tattooed blond dude was a little odd for both of us. He was sucking old ugly dudes' dicks in Ohio by the end of high school. But he came to Minnesota and met me, and knew he wanted to give it up to me. And I always had a good stash of kind bud around, because I had some serious straightboy pothead friends back home in the suburbs. So Joe would come over, and we'd watch Springer with my roommates, (which was still novel in April of '98), and I'd roll a fat doobie, and he and I would take a little walk around the block and get high. Then we'd go back to my place and 69. So after a month or so, Joe decided to take it up the ass. And it was a little painful for him, but fucking amazing for me. And a few nights later, we thought we'd switch it up. So he was fucking me for like 10 minutes and I was just in pain, and he wasn't getting much out of it himself. I think we ended up jerking each other off or something. But after that, he rode my cock a dozen or so more times before he flaked out because I wasn't going to be his life partner or something. Whatever. Point is, we knew that he was pretty much going to be a bottom for life, and I was going to be a top for life, and we were both totally cool with that. And Joe loved my beard.

I had a whole string of short-term BFs for the next few months, but in the fall of '98 I kind-of stopped dating the gay boys, I was tired of the bullshit drama that always ensued. From about November of '98 to about April of '00 (18 months?) I mostly messed around with straight or bi dudes, or had MMF threesomes, or whatever. The straight and bi dudes loved the facial hair. And Timster, my 4+ year BF, was cool with it. But in the last 18 months of being single (there's that number again), I have had nary a hair on my neck, chin, 'stache, or cheeks. So I thought it would be a nice change to have a little reddish squirrel on my chin.

What the fuck? I went to Cobalt by myself tonight, which is always a little bit of a stretch, because the guys there are so bitchy - but it always seems to work. And with the beard, it was like I was a different person. Mind you, this is a 7-day beard. My hair grows heavy on my face and ass, and pretty much nowhere else, but still. A reddish-brownish-blondish beard on a smooth blond white dude, after 7 days, hardly makes me look like Grizzly Adams. But after 20 minutes, I started noticing it.

First up were the not-OK-with-being-gay dudes. The "I Live In Adams Morgan And I'm Not Into The Gay Scene" guys were all talking to me, and I was thinking, "I'm a top. You seem very not OK with getting fucked, if I had to guess. What are you expecting?" But they saw the beard, and they decided I was safe to talk to because I must be self-loathing too. Then it was the curious guys. "Hey, I'm [Name]. Are you straight? Because you seem like it." Finally, it was the cute boys who already had BFs or were bored. They were talking to me, and I was interested, but they were talking to me like I was their fucking married cousin or some shit. None of the flirting - nothing. Nada. Because guys with beards must be fucking bears or some shit. Or we're into S&M.

Christ!!! Can you imagine straight women being like this? Only gay men read so fucking much into fucking everything. It's the semiotics of it all. Non-Gay-Men don't take college classes on postmodernism/skepticism/cynicism/critical theory and don't know what the fucking word semiotics means. But somehow, the gay boys are convinced that EveryFuckingThingThatYouDo has some DeeperGodDamnMeaning. If you have a beard, you want to move them to the country and tie them up.* If I go to Cobalt with a threadbare t-shirt and a smooth chin, I can't keep the boys off my cock. I bring 'em home in ones or twos practically every time these days. But ChristAlFuckingMighty, show up with a few hairs on your chin and they can't get farther away from you. I just can't imagine straight women standing around deciding on what a guy's facial hair says about him as a person, unless he looks like Kip Dynamite. I mean, really, I'm busy and stressed out with graduate school, it's fall and getting chilly, and I haven't had a beard in at least a year and a half. I just wanted to grow one.

*Granted, I have an insatiable urge to tie Jake Gyllenhaal up on the side of a mountain and plow his ass, but really... why am I "safe" when I'm smooth with a t-shirt and a scary bear when I show up with a beard and a button-down shirt? It's just fucking over-the-top bullshit is what it is.

So therein lies the rub. I could go to Remington's (the country bar) or the Eagle (the leather bar) and try to find a dude, but I'm thinking that I'd be Out-Top-Daddied by someone about 10 years older than me and with a handlebar moustache. There's just no options for a young smooth-chested guy who wants to grow a beard. The queeny bottoms are scared of you, and the bear cubs want a "real" daddy. Things would be so much easier if I were straight. I really don't think straight women overthink this shit the way gay men do. Hell, I don't think straight men care what a woman's purse says about her as a person, and I KNOW that lesbians don't care what a woman even looks like, which you know if you've met even one lesbian ever. So why the fuck are my people so hung up on this shit??? I look good with a beard, and that's all there is to that. No deeper bullshit, nothing. I spent 7 days not even thinking about it other than when I was shaving my neck and thinking, "this looks nice. I haven't had a beard for awhile." But GodFuckingDammit, I had to go to Cobalt tonight and be reminded of the everpresent hatred of the non-leather gay world for fucking facial hair. Christ.

(Now the question is... shave it and get laid, or keep whacking off? I know my choice for tonight, since it's already 3 AM, but I just can't decide what I want to do in the near future...)

Cannot Wait. Cannot Wait.

2005-10-11T13:44:00.000-04:00

Cannot wait. Cannot wait. I cannot wait for December 9.

Overworked, Overtired

2005-10-11T02:32:00.000-04:00

It seems like just weeks ago I was a nice young man having lots of charming coffee dates with female friends and going to all the bars with gentlemen, and being all groomed and shit.

Now I'm a hermit, desperately trying to complete a billion research projects, living with stubble because it takes too much time to shave. Haven't seen almost nobody lately. Can't afford the time to go out.

Although I haven't gone to bed yet, I can't wait for A.M. coffee. It seems like such a good idea. Then, after coffee, I will attempt to pay a fee to set a court date to argue an entrapped ticket in rural Maryland - because without paying the fee and setting the court date, my license will be revoked - and tomorrow is the last day I can do it; (2) write an entire academic book chapter in a single day. Ugh, why am I still up at 2:30?

Good Night,
The Overworked Hipster With The Melted Brain

P.S. The stubble is maybe a little bit sexy, but if you actually run into me this week, you'll have to decide for yourself.

Settling Into Small-Town Life

2005-10-09T13:49:00.000-04:00

OK, after 100 days in DC (and I still can't believe I lived in the suburbs for so long), I'm finally used to the idea that if you live in DC, you're white collar, you're male, and you date/screw males, you live in a big ol' glass house. I resisted this for awhile... trying to keep people out of my business, dating people who don't live in Greater Dupont, going alone to bars late at night if I wanted to trick out, intentionally avoiding dating friends of friends, etc. Anything I could to avoid the dreaded social incestuousness and gossip that accompanies Urban Gay Life.

Finally I said fuck it.

It's just going to happen that everyone in the young, white-collar, (mostly White), college-educated, sociable gay scene in the Dupont-Adams Morgan-U Street-Mt. Pleasant-Columbia Heights area knows each other or is two degrees apart. And I'll date people within this network, and I'll be having sex with people within this network, and I'll be friends with people in this network, and I'll reject people and be rejected myself and - yadayadayada - people I know are gonna see me doing the walk of shame sometimes. Or maybe they'll see me doing the less-shameful two-man breakfast at 9 AM on Sunday and they'll talk.

And this is something I'm going to have to live with. I would imagine that eventually everyone will have a general idea about a lot of private things about me, and I'll probably know too much about them. And that's just the way it's gonna be.

Small Town America, meet Big City America. We ain't too different, yo! Diners and interconnectedness and everyone knowing each other's business. Hell, we even have big belt buckles. There's a reason I love classic country music. Hank Williams and Patsy Cline had a lot to say about my life. Of course, they didn't speak specifically to bonobo-esque foam party jerkathons or drug-addled sleepless New York trips, but big-picture-wise, don't think we don't live the country life down here in the city.

Yet Another Great Moment In The Advisor-Advisee Relationship

2005-10-03T21:28:00.000-04:00

Graduate school provides a great opportunity for some of the best and brightest minds of a society to languish for years under the mentorship of those with questionable leadership skills. Here's a nice little vignette that occurred this afternoon and encapsulates so much of the Grad School Experience.

HIPSTER enters stage right, checking his watch, with a cup of coffee. ADVISOR is seated in a threadbare dress shirt from the 1970s. He is sporting a comb-over and has his own thermos of coffee on his desk.

Hipster: The grad student wedding I went to yesterday was great. Lots of ethnic food, so of course I had to eat a lot to represent The White Race because I knew the rest of my table wasn't going to eat any of it. Chuckles nervously. Must keep advisor laughing without saying anything substantive or regrettable.

Advisor: Heh, well, I couldn't do that! I'd gain 200 pounds!

HIPSTER winces very briefly towards the audience. His attempt at meaningless banter touched a nerve!

Hipster: Yeah, I did feel pretty full afterwards.

In a moment of physical humor not lost on the audience, HIPSTER attempts to re-position himself so that his six-pack resembles a gut. In doing so, he re-adjusts his foot such that he has an unconventionally-colored velcro-clasp Puma resting on his knee closest to ADVISOR. Then, realizing his shoes are a little, well, you-know, he attempts to sit on his feet while maintaining a distended fake belly. Finally, he fakes a cough while tearing off his shoes and shoving them under his shirt. In doing so, he spills his coffee everywhere. Looking up quickly, he realizes none of this routine has been noticed by ADVISOR, who is checking his e-mail.

ADVISOR turns back from the computer to HIPSTER, who is sucking coffee out of his shirt.

Advisor: I've always said it's a bad idea to get married during graduate school. You've got too much work to do, and it takes away from your duties. Now, granted, I got married during graduate school, and had two kids, but in general, one shouldn't do it...

ADVISOR pauses to sip on his coffee. While he is doing this, he lifts his eyebrows towards the audience. He has remembered something! This advisee is a homosexual - and there's nothing wrong with that! - but the passive-agressive warning lecture must be slightly adjusted.

...Really, one should avoid getting into serious relationships in general in graduate school. They never work out because graduate school is too stressful...

ADVISOR looks at gay-divorcee student with a condescending expression.

...Really, if one can focus on one's research duties, it's much better that way.

HIPSTER takes a deep breath, exhales, and sucks the coffee so vigorously from his shirt that it tears off his body, causing his buried shoes to fly out and revealing that he is tan!- a mortal sin in the world of academia and a sign of neglected research. He shoots a frightened look towards ADVISOR, who is back to checking his e-mail and continuing to explain why it was OK for him to get married and sire children in graduate school, but his advisees ought not to. HIPSTER gets his own light-bulb expression and spies a dozen neckties hanging on the back of ADVISOR's office door - presumably, left in the office to be resentfully worn when abolutely required at campus functions - and quickly weaves a tunic out of 30-year-old paisley ties, throwing it over his head just as ADVISOR turns back around.

Hipster: Well, about the research projects...

Advisor: Heh, well, there's nothing to really talk about this week. See you next week!

Undergrads: They May Not Be As Dumb As They Used To Be

2005-09-30T19:55:00.000-04:00

When you've been a TA for a certain number of years - let's say 0.001 - you start thinking that undergraduates are the dumbest group of mo-fos out there. These kids don't read the books for the classes they're taking; they don't know their own student ID number even if you tell them that they'll need it or they can't take a test; they ask questions that make you want to cry. But today, I ran a review session (that's Greek for "supplementary pre-test summary lecture because the professor can't convey points to save his life"), and I said a couple things that were wrong (it can happen in a two-hour period). And by God, if a couple of those kids didn't correct me. Unbelievable. I think some of them might have read the book and everything. Not that exciting if you've never been a TA, but I was shocked.

Any funny TA stories out there? Worst student questions ever? I wanna hear 'em in comments.

An Un-chaotic Day In The Life Of A Hipster

2005-09-28T23:59:00.000-04:00

9:00 woke up.

9:30 showered; didn't linger too long anywhere.

10:00 Dunkin Donuts.

10:15 find out a 10:30 meeting is canceled.

10:30 Washington Post crossword. Only 6 minutes today, perhaps a record for the Weds. puzzle. Decide to read the rest of what's interesting in the WaPo and CNN.com.

11:00 catch up with friends.

12:00 start writing chapter for book to be published. Love them authorships.

12:30 research assistant shows up to help.

12:45 Sbarro chicken & broccoli stromboli.

1:00 back to work writing.

3:30 decide I don't need to go to the gym for leg day; still look like an East German female speed skater from the hips down, excluding the male genitalia. No, wait: they probably had that, too.

3:45 Starbucks; decide to crack open textbook for first time this semester. Read about 12 pages; mostly half-sleep on comfychair.

5:30 home; watch some terrifically bad MTV show involving Andy Dick and wanna-be reality show hosts.

6:30 time for Chipotle. don't want to break my 500-day no-cooking streak.

8:00 friend's house in the suburbs to watch a mutual friend be a bit-part victim on yet another terrifically bad TV show on CBS involving sophomoric dialogue and pseudopsychology.

10:30 leave friend's.

11:00 home; Daily Show with roomies.

11:35 thank God Futurama is on, because I need to sleep! That show always sucked ass, whether compared to the Simpsons or standing alone. Bender can't carry a couple decent characters and about 10 more shitty characters that have no personality and random 20th-century ethnic accents.

11:45 fuck it. Might as well write a post proving that I can have a quotidian day just like anyone else. Fuck y'all; I can be like you people sometimes too.

Oh, Cry For Meeee-eeee!

2005-09-27T15:25:00.000-04:00

Sometimes your friends have problems that make you want to just fucking punch them really hard in the face. Then, when they fall to the ground you want to kick them in the balls. I think that lately, I'm one of those friends.

My "problem" - and I don't expect a lot of tears here - is that too many great guys like me and I feel like I'm in the longest cereal aisle in the biggest grocery store in the world. I recently read Blink, whose author describes a research finding I'm familiar with: when grocery stores offer three flavors of jam, people buy lots of jam. However, when they have 30 flavors of jam, almost no one buys jam. Too many choices; too hard to make a decision. That's how I feel about men right now.

I'm sorry to the straights & carpetmunchers who read this blog and hear me brag about how easy it is for me to get laid, and then turn around and complain about how I have too many potential BFs to choose from. Just offering my pathos up before you wind up and deck me.

Sixteen months ago, I thought I was a poor, fat, obnoxious, overeducated, underexperienced schmuck. So I took out more student loans, drastically cut back the calories, started taking ADHD meds, cavorting with other overeducated types, and getting more experience in the bedroom. Now my abysmal self-esteem has been converted to extreme egocentrism. Take, for example, my last post, which was one big brag session about my awesome life. I spend all this time telling the internet how great my life is, so it's a little obnoxious for me to turn around and seek pity for it.

And now my "problem" is that I'm meeting brilliant men and not being attracted to them and feeling like a grade-A asshole. And I'm meeting gorgeous men and getting frustrated that they aren't geniuses. So, do I keep trying to meet supermodel rocket scientists?

Here's my self-analysis of the situation: if I'd met some of these guys back in '04, I wouldn't necessarily been into them. BUT, they wouldn't have been interested in me, either. And everything would have been A-OK. The real issue here is that I spent so much time and energy making myself outwardly appealing that now I'm in a position of having to turn good people down. And it's no fun to turn good people down. It's WONDERFULLY fun to turn down bad people, but having to tell a really great guy that it's not going to work is a burden. Because it hurts to extend yourself and be rejected, and I don't want to hurt anyone. (See the post on the foam party - I want everyone to feel loved. Such an altruist). Further, I am a lot more self-conscious about rejecting someone on the "I'm better than you" basis than the "It's not you, it's me" basis. If this were a case where I weren't over an ex, or I were in a frustrating place in my career and needed to not date, than it would be easier. And if I hadn't thrown myself into the DC gay scene, then the social repercussions might be less. But here I am, in the center of a lot of interconnected friendships, stressing the fuck out whenever someone wants to date me but I don't want to date him, and hoping that we can all remain friends.

Somehow, writing this post, I get the feeling that I WANT to be an asshole, so that I can make this an "it's not you, it's me, because I'm an asshole" situation. I want to be able to say "It's not you. You're great. I'm just a picky arrogant fuck." Because somehow it would be psychologically easier for me to feel like I'm an asshole than to be the one who's too good for other people. Because I've long been resentful of the type of person that I think I've made myself into: people who think they're better than other people.

There's nothing more obnoxious than someone saying "please tell me I'm a jerk because I'm amazing and I have a big head about it!" The only thing that I can even try to tell myself to make sense of all this is that I'm a guy who's been depressed for major periods of my life; that for large parts of my life, I've been resentful of people who were happy and successful; and that I can't just let myself be happy and successful because I don't want to be the kind of person whom I hate. Maybe I just want to fit my long-held schema that People Who Are Catches Are Jerks. So when I wasn't a catch, I was able to be a good guy. But now that I'm a catch, I want to be a bad guy, because in my mind you can't be both.

I think I have the most fucked-up high-low self-esteem this side of Hollywood.

What Was The Highlight Of My Week?

2005-09-25T22:45:00.000-04:00

Was it taking body shots of Jim Beam off of a barely-legal 18-year-old hetero guy?

Was it rapelling down a three-story building directly into a 23-second keg stand? (No belayers or harnesses - just spotters)

Was it realizing that everybody save one person whom I've dated in the last eighteen months - and met through COMPLETELY different places and friends - is also connected to almost everybody in my social circle - and that they are so closely connected such that a diagram can be drawn of dating, sex, and crushes that looks like the Death Star? (Worse than the L Word. Geez.)

Was it losing an amateur stripping contest but having the winner pursue ME, and turning him down?

Was it marching in protest on the White House and realizing that, while disliking the label, I am essentially a socialist? And that by marching I was engaging in a people's movement that a large portion of the country would consider treasonous?

Was it going to an early morning meeting with my supervisors, expecting a scathing review but getting praised instead?

Was it telling off a little queen?

Was it meeting a guy that an acquaintance had a crush on, and becoming friends with him in spite of my acquaintance's hurt feelings?

Was it having so many threesomes and threesome offers that I've forgotten what mano a mano sex is all about?

Was it getting one step away from my Around The World In Eighty Days goal?

Was it reading four books - two fiction, two non-fiction - in the midst of all of this?

Was it going to three tiki parties in one night, starting in Annapolis and ending up literally across the street from my own home, at a party I was invited to by someone who didn't know the party was across the street from me?

Was it being the go-between for 10 female friends who had taken doctoral qualifying exams, passing on the good news between them, so that they could avoid awkwardness in case someone had failed?

How about being able to console a friend with a medical crisis, or driving a roommate to Dulles airport at 6:00 AM on my way (ha!) to College Park for a 9 AM class? Running into the best friend of someone who broke my heart a long time ago, and having him hug me on the street? Anticipating the fact that I'll be seeing someone else in two days who broke my heart a long time ago, and thinking about the mixed feelings of resolution?

Catching up with a friend at the neighborhood bar, drinking Guinness, and reflecting on the world?

Nah, I think the highlight of my week is sitting here on Sunday night, on my iBook, listening to iTunes and reflecting on the joys and sorrows of my life, and knowing that wherever life takes me in the future, I'm living it to the fullest and damn proud of who I am and where I've been. In my book, that's the best you can do.

I Hate Bitchy Little Fucks

2005-09-25T03:49:00.000-04:00

I try not to get into personal drama here at AHHB - the goal is levity and abstraction of deeper meanings from daily events. I live my ridiculously wild life of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll - then, instead of detailing it minute by minute, I try to pull some parts out of it and generate some analysis. Bragging and gossiping is far less fun than analyzing and discussing. Also, I don't want to create problems for friends by posting their issues to the world. But we're about to enter a realm of slamming people that just needs to happen right now in the wee hours of the morning.

I have a friend who's a really nice guy. Too nice, but that's one of his "good issues." He has an ex who is a bitchy little queen. Zsa Zsa Gabor re-made as an 80-pound boy. The ex has been cock-blocking my friend since their breakup over a year ago. Now, the friend being too nice is part of the problem. I wouldn't have dated such a queeny, insecure bitch for as long as he did, and I wouldn't hang out with the douche so often, but even so: I'm sorry. My friend is smarter and better looking than you, more emotionally stable, and more likeable. He's going to meet great guys and you're going to have to live, because he can do better than you. Even if he's too nice to say so.

Events of tonight, at my friend's party, captured everything I loathe about my friend's ex. Where should I start?

1. New guy is really into my friend. New guy is a total catch, meaning he reminds me of myself. Funny, loud, cute, brilliant. (Yes, I have high self-esteem).

2. Ex starts telling random people all about my friend and will only engage in conversations about my friend, even with people who don't know either of them.

3. My friend and new guy are hitting it off splendidly, while queeny bitchy ex is bending over the beer pong table and singing along to diva hip-hop from the iPod.

4. At 2 AM, my friend takes off with new guy and I am so happy for them both.

5. At 2:30, Queen Fagorama starts bitching to the entire party that my friend has left. Fuck you, dude! Y'all haven't been together since the fall of 2004.

This is when things go really downhill. Nice mutual friend agrees to drive us all home, though I could have walked the five blocks. Trying to get off the topic of my friend and new guy, nice friend mentions to bitchy ex that some Latino guy at the party was hot, and Cunty McFaggotron says, "I don't date minorities." The only response I could give was, "Really? I've dated them all, pretty much, and there are great guys of every color." Twat: "That's too bad!" Me, pushing things: "Actually, I've never been with an East Asian guy, but one of these days..." Zsa Zsa: "But why would you want to go there? Me: "Because I'd rather be with a great Asian guy than a bitchy little White queen."

I'd love to hear the shit that the little turdburger must have spewed about me after they dropped me off. Fuck that little petty, insecure, cock-blocking, racist bitch. If I didn't adhere strictly to the rule that I Don't Punch Gay Guys, I'd have kicked his scrawny little ass to China, where I could only hope he'd be sold into prostitution and be forced to suck Cantonese Cock With Special Sauce till he died of exhaustion. Little asshole.

*Whew!* I feel much better now. This hipster can now go to bed.

Around The World In Eighty Days

2005-09-24T04:44:00.000-04:00

I grew up in Minnesota. Everyone in Minnesota is White, with the exception of Prince, who is half Italian and half Black. But we don't know that he's Black. He's just Prince, a guy who lives in the suburbs, and I've been to his house.

I've been a single man on the DC gay scene for about 18 months. But the first 9 months I was not really out and about. That leaves the last 9 months that I've been getting busy. But the first 6-7 months of that, I was still in Maryland and dating the suburban guys - the ones who are out but aren't really that OK with being gay and maybe have some Christian issues.

Soon, I'll have lived in DC proper for 80 days. It'll happen in the next couple of weeks. Here's the deal. After a lifetime of boning White guys, I've just recently started plunging my rod into men of color. Lately, I've hit the following: White, Black, Latino, Native American, Indian. I've realized that if I want to achieve my goal of going Around The World In Eighty Days, I need to fuck an East Asian guy in the next couple of weeks.

Any takers? I swear I'll be all about you as a person and not someone on my hyper-PC/very-un-PC quest. I promise. Scout's honor.

Oh, How Times Have Changed

2005-09-23T04:08:00.000-04:00

When I was in elementary school...
A threesome meant my brother and I played "doctor" with the neighbor boy.

When I was in middle school...
A threesome meant I shared a tent with two other boys on boy scout camping trips and we talked about hypotheticallly having sex with girls while each masturbating in our own sleeping bags.

When I was in high school...
A threesome meant that myself and the other "out" guy in high school mutually made out with a girl before jerking each other off.

When I was in college...
A threesome meant that I got an ambiguously-sexual guy and some random girl to play strip poker with me; then we all had oral sex.

When I was in graduate school...
A threesome meant I got hammered, made some moves on the dance floor, and got a dysfunctional gay couple to bring me home with them; as soon as I had sodomized one of them, I buttoned up my pants and stumbled home as quickly as I could.

Across every level of schooling... each of these happened a minimum of twice. I guess I am a creature of habit. Yes, I'm a naughty boy. But you read this blog, and you already know that.

Laugh Or Cry? I Gotta Flip A Coin

2005-09-20T23:58:00.000-04:00

Stopped at a stop sign today, a girl walked past my car. She looked about 19 years old, and she looked poor. She was pushing a stroller carrying whom I can only imagine is her own 18-month-old son. She wasn't terribly cute, and she was wearing a tight pink t-shirt, emblazoned with the words girls just wanna have fun.

What Do You Do When You Get Over Your Issues?

2005-09-18T18:54:00.000-04:00

I had a disturbed childhood. This doesn't make me a unique snowflake - I'm sure many readers here had equally, or more disturbed childhoods, and many probably had very happy, wonderful childhoods. Everyone comes from different places, and that's not what this post is about. What this post is about is the slightly empty part of you that comes from pretty much getting over all the shit that's bugged you for large parts of your life.

What everyone has is "issues." I like to put the word issue in scare quotes because I like scare quotes. The Angel Headed Hipster wouldn't be human if he didn't have issues. Issues drive us to produce literature and art; to succeed in careers; to raise families; and to make networks with other people. My drive to succeed and to be bourgeois led me to the pursuit of a doctoral degree. Without the issue of needing to be called Dr. Hipster, I might not be where I am. My issue of needing to be attractive leads me to spend money on clothing above and beyond my basic human needs, and my issue of needing to be perceived as masculine - combined with my need to be attractive - leads me to the gym three times a week. (My need to "compete" with my ex-hubby doesn't hurt here either, as he's recently joined a gym himself). And my need to promote my opinions and hear my own voice leads me to triple-book my Friday and Saturday nights, write a blog, TA for hundreds of undergraduates, et cetera, et cetera. These are what we at the AHHB like to call "the good kind of issues."

Then there's all the really fucked up shit that you have to deal with when growing up really sucked. The great joys and sorrows of children are part of what gives us character - but I think that leads to the type of character that I've discussed above. The fucked-up shit, to grossly paraphrase Sigmund Freud, makes you neurotic.

So I've had a few real neuroses in my life. Let's cover some of the basics: first off, I have a brother who is less than two years older than me. Our parents had us sharing a bedroom till I was about 14 and he was about 16. This is how my parents grew up in the fifties, but was pretty dysfunctional in the eighties. My mom had an "office" that should have been a bedroom, but it was used as her office, and my brother and I shared a bedroom. I wouldn't have been so resentful if she hadn't made the room a junk heap that she never used. Same goes for the billiard room, where we had a bumper pool table that we couldn't always use because my parents decided to recreate Tut's tomb in there. Anyway - back to me and my brother. We were just born with opposite temperaments. He was very introverted, meticulous, and needing of personal space. My nature is diametrically opposed to his, and the nurture of it all - being forced to share cramped, confined space together for fourteen years - made us loathe each other and develop personalities that were beyond diametric opposition. I'm not sure this is linguistically logical, but if you met the two of us, you'd agree on the spot.

So there's a massive neurosis - the hating of all things anal-retentive. Generalizing my hatred to other anal people wasn't really fair to them, but it's something I did for a couple of decades. Then there's the massive anti-authoritarian streak I developed. My parents were very laissez-faire in their child-rearing style, and my brother, from a very young age, decided he was going to pick up the slack. The cruel irony was that my parents, being laissez-faire to begin with, continued to be laissez-faire about letting him wail on me. He'd beat the crap out of me for not hanging the bathmat over the shower rod after taking a shower. I have scars on my forehead from getting my face smashed into a ceramic bowl for some perceived slight against the True Correct Way Things Ought To Be Done. Now, I've met other people who had tyrannical older siblings. One of my 500 Friends Mike had an older sister who was even worse than my bro. But still, you develop some pretty deep-seated resentment of power that leads you to instinctively challenge bosses and supervisors, teachers, and Anyone Who Makes Rules That You Don't Like, and this can fuck you up a bit.

There are other Major Childhood Issues that I've had, but let's leave it at that one for now - I know it's exhausting to read long posts - so we'll stop for the time being. Point is, I can speak pretty directly and un-emotionally about this one because it's one that I've acknowledged, talked about, and worked through to the point where I just have accepted that this is a major vector in my life. My brother and I have been trying to work on our own relationship, especially in the last year, and we're getting somewhere. With regard to the way that it's generalized in my life, I do things differently now. When I really hate someone who's in charge of me, try to breathe and acknowledge my own residual hatred of my brother, and accept the fact that maybe I just wasn't going to like a certain supervisor/boss/teacher/cop to begin with.

This is nice and Zen and all - but what do I do now? When I was in high school, I was Junior Class President, and later Student Body VP, positions I attained, in part, due to my positioning myself as the Che Guevara of my sleepy Minnesota suburb. The People against The Man. I turned around and did the same thing in grad school. But I don't need this anymore. I don't need to be The Voice Of Perceived Oppression. But being that voice - that's something that keeps you going from day to day. The "Bad Issues" probably drive you even more fervently than the "Good Issues." Hobbies are nice; sports and recreation are nice; but part of me misses all the Fucked-Up Childhood Shit that I spent so many years trying to solve.

I think that sometimes, people that go to psychoanalysts for years to delve into their shit, Freud-style, maybe are on to something. They don't want to get better - they want to keep talking about this shit because they'll be lonely when they get over their neuroses. Sometimes I envy them, because I miss some of my problems. And I don't want to be a drama queen and invent some more problems. So I try to keep busy, keep lifting weights, writing my thesis defense, fucking guys, looking for a boyfriend, etc. I guess that's what people who didn't have fucked-up childhoods do.

Why I Love My Mom

2005-09-17T18:38:00.000-04:00

On the phone today:

Hipster: Hey mom, just called because I got your letter yesterday and I love getting mail from you.
Mom: Thanks, hon.
Hipster: I'm reading The Poisonwood Bible right now.
Mom: I LOVE that book! Isn't it the best!
Hipster: Yeah, it's great... really compelling and she writes five voices really well. It's also got to be the best book to pick up feminist hotties with. Every time I read it at a coffee shop, I get cute feminist girls coming up to me to talk about it.
Mom: Then you're clearly reading the wrong book. I'm going to ask around... there's got to be a "perfect book" to pick up gay guys. I'm gonna ask around. When I find the perfect trolling book for you, I'll let you know, sweetie.
Hipster: Love you, mom.
Mom: Me too, sweetie. Have a great day.

Musicians That I Was Too Cool To Like As A Teen But That I'm Crazy About As An Adult

2005-09-17T02:44:00.000-04:00

Buddy Holly
Bruce Springsteen
The Beach Boys
Frank Sinatra
Gwen Stefani
Jackson Browne
Tom Waits
Michael Jackson
Rod Stewart
Sade

Why was I such a little hipster asshole? I can see with Tom Waits & Sade that they appeal to more of an adult audience. So that might just be an age thing. I did always love Al Green, Taj Mahal, Sting, and Nina Simone though (all "adult" artists), so it's still a bit odd.

The most significant musicians, to me, that illustrate my obnoxious teen hatred of all things mainstream, are Buddy Holly, The Boss, and the Beach Boys. Arguably, three of the greatest musical acts of all time. I literally think I hated them because they were popular, positive, mainstream, and not my generation. WTF? Why was I such a little asshole?

Nonetheless, I think my bizarre and selective hatred of some of the world's great music only makes me love it more now. I came home to iTunes tonight (after my triple-booked Saturday, which is pretty normal for me), sat down at the 'puter, and typed in "boys summer" on iTunes. I got to hear The Ataris' cover of "The Boys of Summer," followed by the Beach Boys' "All Summer Long," which in turn was followed by Don Henley's original "Boys of Summer." A song that perfectly represents what I loathed in high school and love in grad school. Good fuckin' pop music. Sing it with me in your head: "I can seeeeeeee youuuuu, your brown skin shining in the sun, you got your hair combed back [and your] sunglasses on, baby... I can tell you, my love for you will still be strong, after the boyyyys of summer have goooo-oone"

Good times. I think I'm going to listen to some Buddy Holly before I hit the sack. Maybe some "we-he-he-he-hell the little things you say & do, make me want to be with you..." or something equally poppy, catchy, mainstream, old-fashioned, and fucking brilliant.

I Just Need Something To Put In My Mouth

2005-09-16T16:59:00.000-04:00

Is that too much to ask?

When you're a gay ex-smoker in a straight bar, and you're having a good time, what do you put in your mouth but more alcohol? I don't want a killer hangover every time I go out drinking with the hets.

I take legal speed for my gross deficits in attention and impulse control. On days like this, when I have a hangover and wake up at noon, I take a med holiday which allows me to be groggy through the hangover instead of forcibly awake when I'm not going to be highly productive anyway. But nonetheless, it's a double whammy having your ADHD symptoms flaring and your liver & brain bloated and swelling. I just can't produce coherent thoughts with any kind of speed whatsoever, and it's already 5 P.M. So no brilliant blogging today. But I promise, soon, a post about my meds and how much I heart them. Until then, go do whatever it is you people do. I'll be watching TV because I can read a 450-page book in a day when I'm taking amphetamines, and can barely read a newspaper without them. Good thing there's a Game Show Network for all the people who can't think. :D

To Edit, Or Not To Edit?

2005-09-16T16:46:00.000-04:00

All of my posts are first drafts. For the most part, I don't extensively revise them before publishing. And there's something to be said for leaving posts well enough alone. But I feel like a little editing for clarity isn't the worst idea. Case in point is my last post, a Faulknerian rendering of my weekend that seemed to go on for miles. It was also intentionally written in a difficult voice. So, upon re-reading and hearing feedback, two themes emerged: (1) I wasn't as consistent with the voice I chose as I could have been - and editing could improve this; and (2) it was so goddamned long that few people finished reading it.

So, do I go back and edit it a tad to make it more fun to read? I get new readers every day and clearer posts would help those catching up on back entries. Or, do I leave all posts intact for some kind of "integrity" about it? And if I do edit, ought I to add little post-scripts indicating that the post was edited? So many choices.

Gimme some feedback, yo. And thanks for reading and thanks for helping me keep this blog salacious and anonymous.

Hipster

My Weekend In NYC, As Told By A Five-Year-Old

2005-09-12T18:08:00.000-04:00

It was a Friday and I was hung over and felt poopy and didn't want to pack for New York and finally I did and then I smoked a little weed and I metroed to Chinatown to leave at 5 and I didn't get to New York till 10 pm and it was dark.

I went to a bar and it was in Brooklyn and it was called Vegas and it wasn't really in Vegas because it was in Brooklyn. My college roommate was and so was his fiancee and they were getting married the next night and all of their friends were there. His parents paid for the drinks and they poured them strong and I only had two because I was tired and then I decided to have one more because my body can't tell when I've had less than three drinks because I drink too often and my liver is probably the size of Barney the Dinosaur and a cool bright purple too but my liver probably doesn't sing like Barney sings I think it just cries itself to sleep and it probably doesn't like early morning Advil.

My friend Chimmy was there and his name is Chimmy because he grew up in the middle of no where in Minnesota and red necks are dumb and think that Korean Americans are Mexican and that Mexican people eat chimichangas every day and instead of punching them in the balls he just made a funny about it and he is a Korean American and his name is Chimmy. And Chimmy and I rode the train back to So Hoe and that is a funny name too because I saw lots more hoes in Chinatown when I got off the bus than in So Hoe because all the hoes in So Hoe were really just girls who have sex with men who have money instead of just asking for the money and then lying on their backs while getting pennatrayted. But So Hoe was fun and Chimmy and I met up with four of my other friends on Broome Street and I thought that that was a funny name too because someone's mommy needs to really take a broom to that street to clean up the yucky syringes and rats and hoboes having sex in front of tourists and all the other things that grown-ups say make New York "edge-y." And after the bar we took a cab up to the Upper West Side and we had food even though it was past our bedtime and that was fun and we went to a hotel that was a walk up and we crashed and when we woke up we went and got Locks on our bagels but they weren't Padlocks they were smoked fish and they probably died from lung cancer and the bagles are yummy in New York and people in other places are retarded and need to have time-outs until they can learn to make bagls the ways they are suppost to taste and not like old tires with sessame seeds on them like the kind that I grudgeingley eat in DC.

And we took the train again but wait these trains go under the ground and they are subways just like in DC except that they have confusing names and weird numbers instead of fun color names like Red and Yellow and Green and Blue and Orange they have shapes and circles and numbers and all kinds of stuff but the streets are so easy to follow in New York that if you've been there for more than 17 minutes and cant' find where you are going then you are a retard too and need a time out. And we met our other friends and took a nother train to Little Italy. And we had food and the food was good but the mean waiter poured hot coffey over ice and we had water-ey ice coffey and that was O-K until the bad man tried to charge us three-fifty for "iced cappuchinos" and I got cranky with him and he took them off of the bill and then we tipped him a bunch of the money back because we are reasonable but really if we new he was gonna do that then we would have boughted real iced cappuchinos and gotten some real caffeine because we aren't retards. And I bought a belt on the street for three dollars from a nice lady and if it lasts a month that was the bestest money ever spent because my last belt costed sixty dollars and for that kind of money I could buy Barney The Purple Dinosaur and cut him open and steal his liver because he doesn't drink because he's a dinosaur and I could use his liver till I am extinct too. And the belt fitted me good. And I boughted a tiramisu for three dollars and had a hard time eating it from the way it was wrapped to go and then I losted it later so that was three dollars down the toilet but I will live and I didn't need the calories anyways.

And we ironeded our clothing at the hotel but this was a new hotel and this hotel was in mid-town which was the only name that isn't funny in New York and I was wearing my Calvin Klein pants and they are what grown-ups call hot and I got a funny feeling in my underoos looking at myself in the mirror and then I felt guilty and put some stuff in my hair and was ready to go to the wedding. And we went to the wedding and it was great and the bride and groom had a kiss that made me blush and feel funny again and I think I'll understand when I am a grown up. And the wedding didn't have any boring relligus stuff in it and the wedding was about as long as SpongeBob and the cocktail hour was as long as SpongeBob The Movie and I dranked a lot of whiskey and that was E.Z. becuase the bartender poured all dewwer's and a drop of ginger ale and I felt like a sailor on a big ship because I felt like I was rocking back and forth and having dirty thoughts about men in uniforms mopping a ship and then I got back to the conversation with the nice lady who was from Alabama and I played a fun game with her. And the game is called "The Pronoun Game." And in the pronoun game, you talk about your life but when you are talking about the men that you have gone steady with you don't say that they are men and the nice lady assumes that they are women and when the nice lady from Alabama says "she" when you are thinking "him" or "them" or "The New England Patriots 2004 lineup" then you smile and you don't tell her that you are playing the pronoun game and then you eat more or-derves and you meet the friends of the couple who aren't grownups and they share fun stories about smoking weed and other things that make you more comfortable and you don't have to play The Pronoun Game any more and then you go to the dinner and you realize you are sitting at the kids' table and you have fun and everyone makes freinds and drinks more and laughs and you are happy to be at the wedding.

And then there is a dance and I danced and had fun because I was drinking and the music was good and I loveded all of my new friends and my old friends and I harassseded my one friend because she is anddroginnus femminist and hates marriage even though she has been virtually married to my other friend for about a billion years, or maybe 7 years and marriage wouldn't make her do anything that she's not already doing but it would probide stability and leegal re-course. And my friend said that marriage is "offensive and patriarchal and hetero-centric" and I said that all the nice lezzbeans and gays wouldn't be fighting for marriage if it didn't confer a lot of rights that everyone should have and then you realize that the whole time she was talking to you she was avoiding the boo-kay toss and that femmi-knotsy won in her own way because she was the only girl who wasn't on the dance floor and anyway I had a fun time and I loved the wedding and we went back to the hotel.

And I decided to see Chelsea because I heard that was where the other nice boys were and I found the first restaurant I could that had a nice rain-bow and reminded me of Sesame Street but without most of the girls from Sesame Street and the nice mayter-dee told me to go to the Barracuda and I drank more whiskeys and I talked to some nice people and had a good time and was tired and didn't feel like being a So Hoe so I didn't hook up with anyone but I took a train part way back and then walked home about two miles and that's good exercise when you have been pouring Berrbon and Scotch down into your belly for the last eight hours and I slept like a baby.

And Sunday we went to a new bagle place and i had more locks and it was yummy and I drank coffee all day like it was my mommy's titties and I was two years old again and we went to Central Park and walked around Harlem and it was beautiful and we took a train all the way to Chinatown and I got on the bus and we watched Hitch and it was really funny and I laughed and then I remembered I had a little bit of funny mushrooms with me that were left over from my birthday party from a month ago and I ated them in the bathroom and then I started thinking funny thoughts and I started reading the Da Vinci Code and I read half of it on the bus because mushrooms made me love it and then I got home to DC and I went to Chipotle and it was good and I went home and read the entire rest of the 450-page book till I was doned at three in the morning and it was excciting and I was late to class in the morning and I came home in the afternoon and slept and played with myself and it was fun and now my hands are a little sticky and dirty but I am writing this post because when else was I going to write it and I hope that it was fun for you too and it's taken me fifty minutes to right but I love to blog and I hope you love my blog too.

ThE eND

When Bloggers Drink Together...

2005-09-09T04:20:00.000-04:00

Tonight I went out with Julia, the ultra-fabulous roommate and queen of the house, and fellow bloggers Seth and Schwellenpants. Heaven & Hell, the Adams Morgan club with nudie men & women on the wall, had their '80s night and a whole lotta bloggers felt the need to go represent the decade that brought us The Gipper and The Clapper - not to mention The Golden Girls and The Ronco Turnip Twaddler. (If you don't know all four references, you're too young to be reading this blog! Go back to the Lindsay Lohan fansite, or whatever it is you kids read these days).

After downing some drinks at Toledo Lounge, the bar I usually describe as "that place where you like everything on the jukebox but it's so goddamn predictable you might as well be at home listening to a mix CD that your ex made you in college," with the fabulous "Bunny," a second-grade teacher with a twelfth-grade liver - we headed to H&H to get our groove on. The cool thing about '80s night at H&H is that they play the original music videos with every song. Sweeeeet. I hadn't seen the entire, unedited video for "Take On Me" since '86 or so... though my memories of strong sexual urges for the lead singer of A-Ha have been replaced in the last 19 years by Swedes who are actually good-looking. Anyway, I digress.

Seth had warned me that it was so '80s that he could imagine people doing coke on the bar. Indeed, this was my first thought as I walked in the door - "Yo, Seth, I really feel like doing about 10 keys of coke and firing the nation's striking air traffic controllers!" - but instead I started sipping on the requisite whiskey sours (which I'm never without and never refuse) and dancing to the Belinda Carlisle. My next thoughts were, "I had no IDEA the Go-Gos had this many singles!" and "good GOD, Ric Ocasek from The Cars was so butt-ugly, I can't BELIEVE that supermodel married him! No matter HOW popular his music was!" These thoughts then segued into "Dude, I can totally dance like the Irish dudes in Dexy's Midnight Runners!" and "Julia is the best roommate EVER - how do these whiskey sours keep falling into my hands?"

At some point, my four friends (Nick, Seth, Julia, Bunny) pointed out that the majority of the guys at '80s night weren't so into girls. Once my whiskeyed-up mind realized this, there was no stopping me. Naughtiness ensued, and H&H became yet one more checkmark on my list of "straight" Adams Morgan bars where I have kissed men in the middle of the dance floor. Frankly, it's more satisfying than making out with dudes at a gay club - BEEN THERE! - and my quasi-straight-acting/provocative/hypermacho self gets so much gratification out of it. I really do, you know I do.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, I'll just draw a "curtain of modesty" over the rest of the night. And to paraphrase Vh1, I have a strong affinity for the '80s.

I Love My mp3s

2005-09-06T00:55:00.000-04:00

I don't know what I would do without iTunes. There is nothing I love more than coming home and having music playing in my office. I just leave iTunes on all day and come home to great music playing. It's great to not know where in my mp3 collection the computer will be at when I come home. Just now I walked into the Violent Femmes. I'd never bring my Femmes CDs into my car - did that for four years in high school. But I come home at 12:30 AM, watch TV for a bit with Julia, head up to my computer and there's Add It Up, followed by Gone Daddy Gone, and it's just perfect. Even if I only listen for five or ten minutes before turning the computer off for the night - after leaving it to play for twelve hours with no one listening - I can go to sleep happy.

Just one of those small pleasures in life.

Bonobo Sighting in SE DC

2005-09-04T18:15:00.000-04:00

This ain't no kiss-and-tell blog. I don't go out and get naughty and tell the world about it. I think it's gauche to tell the world everything about people you've been with. It's rude to them, even if they aren't identified, and it suggests that one is incapable of keeping secrets - especially when it comes to the most private and personal acts one can engage in. So for this reason, despite my being a sociable and attractive single in the DC gay scene - which might suggest I have a lot I could write about - you won't hear about it here.

Last night is a different story, though, because I had an awesome time at the foam party at Velvet Nation. And there ain't nothing personal or private about it.

The bonobos are one of two types of chimpanzees (the other being the Common Chimpanzee that we think of as the "chimp"), which are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom. The readership of this blog, being highly literate, surely is aware that the bonobos are a highly sexual species. But let's hear what Wikipedia has to say about them:

"Sexual intercourse plays a major role in Bonobo society, being used as a greeting, a means of conflict resolution and post-conflict reconciliation, and as favors traded by the females in exchange for food. Bonobos are the only non-human apes to have been observed engaging in all of the following sexual activities: tongue kissing, face-to-face vaginal intercourse, oral sex, genital rubbing between females, and "frottage" between males. This happens within the immediate family as well as outside of it. Bonobos do not form permanent relationships with partners."

Essentially, our closest relatives, who share 95-98% of our genes, live in sex-friendly bisexual paradise, working and playing together, and being freely sexual with no hurt feelings. Now, we have evolved differently, and our human culture stresses pair-bonding; further, we can be crushed when we have a mate who cheats, and attempts to have open relationships don't work very well and usually hurt everyone. So I'm not abdicating that we attempt to re-create their species' behaviors for ourselves. BUT...

The negative outcomes of sex, outside of broken hearts, are unwanted pregancies and STDs. So imagine that you could control for this by having a non-intercourse love fest, with no fluid exchange, where people just played around. Sexual contact with a couple dozen people in a way that no one got hurt, pregnant, or contracted a disease. Imagine a club, where people danced and drank alcohol within reasonable limits, and then - after midnight - went out on a back deck and danced around in a sea of foam, wearing bathing suits. Imagine there are 100 gay men, between the ages of 21 and 35, drunk and in good spirits, dancing and enjoying themselves. There's a lot of soapy, sudsy foam floating around and being dropped from the overhead rafters, and people are touching each other. And everyone who showed up to the bar in a swimsuit is pretty good-looking - or they would have been too shy to get to the foam - but the foam is thick enough that it obscures if someone is five pounds overweight, or has a weird birthmark on their ankle, or has funny-looking toenails. So there's none of the obsessive scrutiny that we engage in when looking at models: "his ribs stick out funny;" "his torso is too short and his legs are too long;" "i don't like his hairstyle." Foam is the great equalizer. In the foam, you see people's faces, unaltered by hairstyles, because everyone's hair is wet. You can tell if someone is ugly; but most of the people are attractive, and appear reasonably equal in attractiveness without the mediating factor of wearing the latest styles versus the "wrong" styles. People are socioculturally naked, and "better" than naked in the sense that you can't really judge them too holistically because you really can't stare at all of them at once.

Further, the foam decreases the orgy effect, because it's really impossible to have oral sex, anal sex, or whatever men and women would do (is that called vaginal sex? never had it) in the foam. All you can really do is touch. How liberating would it be to go into a situation where you knew that everyone was reasonably good-looking; everyone was a gay man; race, income, and hometown were irrelevant; no one expected love; no one expected commitment; no one expected oral sex; no one was trying to have an orgasm. What if no one expected anal sex? You wouldn't have to try to decide who was a "top" or a "bottom" - you weren't worried about how full or empty anyone's colon was, or what kind of power/gender role issues were at play, or what it would mean if you did or didn't put out. And if you knew that no one was expecting any specific performance from you - well, you wouldn't have to think about cleaning up bodily fluids, or worrying about getting any diseases from other people's fluids. And you wouldn't worry about the size of your penis, because no one's going to be hurt by a big one or disappointed by a small one. You wouldn't worry about maintaining an erection, or trying to get off, and you wouldn't worry about whether other people were hard, soft, or in the middle. Hell, you wouldn't worry about a thing.

Here's what you'd do. You'd dance, and you'd meet lots of other guys who were just like you: they're in their twenties and thirties, they like to dance, most of them are a little or a lot drunk, they are wearing swimsuits, and they like to be touched. You'd feel up their soapy chests and bellies. You couldn't really tell the exact firmness of their muscles, because your hand would slide. You couldn't pinch their nipples because your fingers would slide right off. No one's going to lick you because you're covered in foam. They're just going to dance in front of you, behind you, and to the side of you. Someone behind you might reach around and start stroking your member. Then someone from the side might help him. Maybe you'd play with their dicks - or maybe you'd have your hands around the dicks of two guys who are dancing like it's the prom. You'd feel different size fingers on your body and on your penis, and you'd grasp penises of all shapes, sizes, and colors. People that in the real world you might not be able to have a conversation with, or whose fashion sense you disagreed with, or whose sleep and work schedule was totally different from yours - well, here they would be stroking your dick, running their hands down your back and chest, and smiling, laughing, having a good time with you.

I tend to go to one foam party a year. This was my third year in a row. The first year, I went with a couple but not my BF at the time; I mostly just danced in my jeans near the edge of the foam. Last year, I mostly danced with one person in the middle of the foam. This year, I went for the full bonobo experience and just loved it. I don't think I've ever felt so close to so many gay men with none of the baggage I associate with our world. None of the attitude, none of the games, just sensual human touch. Maybe not everyone would agree with this; maybe not everyone in the foam even felt the way I did. It's possible that there are sketchy freaks who can't get laid that live for the foam to get their joint jerked on. But I don't believe that. I think that everyone in the middle of the foam - a good 50 people - just wanted to bond like bonobos. Sexuality without strings attached. I couldn't live like this forever - I need actual sex and desire the joy that comes from love and commitment - but for a once-a-year experience, it's really priceless.

I think the sex-club culture, seen most famously in Paris and Amsterdam, probably sucks. Because actual sex comes with actual logistics, and actual emotions, and actual disease risk, and actual game-playing. Even if everyone is pretending to be a NSA slut. But bonoboing in the foam - that's just too good as its own experience. I really can't proselytize the foam any more strongly. And it's the kind of experience that really makes me proud to be a gay man. We have so many issues in our world, not the least of which is male dominance and competitiveness. It's so hard to meet, date, and be intimate when you're both men, and both either bad at sharing emotions or socialized to repress them, and both competitive with other males. But when you take all of that away, and just PLAY with each other... it's paradise. I don't think that straight foam parties work this way - there is too much gender shit at work. But the foam levels the playing field like nothing else, and we can just bond as men who love men. And like getting our dicks played with by a couple dozen people while drunk and dancing to Gwen Stefani. I can't wait for next year.

Chips Off The Old Block

2005-08-28T23:59:00.000-04:00

I haven't posted in a week because my parents and baby sisters were in town. I got rid of them this morning, though I last saw them last night.

Of my two sisters, L. is the filthy, perverted, partying, sexed-up provocateur; J. is the sensitive, thoughtful baby of the family. L., of course, is the one that people always say is a little version of me, or a variant on the topic: "she's like you with tits," or "oh my GOD, she's the female you," "you two are SIBLINGS!," etc.

So I always expect L. to make crude suggestions as to what our waiter or waitress is probably like in the sack, or to start a joke/discussion about who in D.C. our mom will have to fuck for crack. Of the two sisters, she's the one who always wants to compare the numbers of threesomes she's had versus how many I've had, and of course she'll tell me if they were MMF or MFF. The first day of my sisters' vacation here, L. announced, "I'm starting to realize that I'm really a bit of a masochist. I like playing the sub."

All week, the two of them would walk around the 18th St. strip (which to them, good Minnesotans, probably looked like Vegas, as I've mentioned in a previous post) and L. had guys say the nastiest-slash-strangest shit to her. "Girl, I gots to axe you a question. Can I use your hair as a weapon? I ain't gonna hurt nobody. I just wants to use your hair as a weapon." J. would get annoyed at L.'s crude, unabashed, Samantha-Jonesness.

I had the two of them over playing pool and drinking at my house and L. was bragging to the roomies about her antics: what drugs she's done, whom she's fucked, etc. Baby J. told my roommates, "With siblings like these, how can I compete? I'm really a party animal in other settings, but around the two of them I clam up and look like a real prude. But I'm not." I kind-of believed her a little bit, but not really. Then, on their last night in town, I tucked our parents into bed at the hotel (the Hilton at Connecticut and Columbia... my dad seems to have some morbid fetish with the place since Reagan was shot there... it's a little disturbing), and took my sisters to a house party on 20th and Columbia, a block and a half away. It just was so perfect that my lady friend's boyfriend was having a house party right by their hotel, their last night in town. Especially because they are both underage. L. will be 20 in three months; J. was SIXTEEN only three weeks ago. So I thought L. could be in her natural environment and J. could get a peek at grown-up parties.

At my house before the party, I introduced the girls to single-malt scotch. Neither had tried it before, and eventually J. had to have hers mixed with hot chocolate to get it down. Frankly, I have a bit of a gag reflex with the single-malt myself. I got the girls to the party and realized that J. had a grey sweatshirt on. Not very sexy or twentysomething. I looked at her and saw a little kid. We entered the party and J. said, "boy, it's hot in here," and unzipped her sweatshirt to reveal a tight black top with spaghetti straps and very nice cleavage. I also noticed that her haircut made her look older than a high-school student. Kind of like a graduate student.

Myself, I was getting drunk on Jim Beam and Coke, and J. was doing nicely herself. She had no problem consuming at a moderate pace, enough to get a little drunk but not enough to get sick or make an ass of herself. I was talking to my friends; L. was talking to my friends, who noticed what a chip off the old block she is. But J. was the impressive one. God damn if that bitch didn't WORK the party. In five days of being in D.C., she had learned that living on a letter-street in NW DC is more impressive than living in two-syllable country, but that living on a three-syllable street means you are way out there. So when the different 28-to-35-year-old J.D.s and Ph.D.s at the party would hit on her, she'd find out where they lived as a litmus test for their coolness. "Hmm, you live on Cathedral? Ca-The-Dral? Is that way out there?? Gosh, that sounds like it's out in Tenleytown or something." [Him: no, I swear it's in Woodley Park! It's by Monroe and Quebec! Cathedral's not in the letter system!" Her: oh, fine, never mind, hee hee] There were a number of poor saps whose career paths, lifestyles, and neighborhoods she subtly questioned. J. never got cunty; she would just sip on her bourbon and ask questions that were generally innocuous but threw men off-guard. She'd giggle enough to get them to keep talking, but hit them with hardballs that they didn't normally get asked. The men drooled; the women were taken by her charm and poise and made a point of telling me how classy my baby sister was and how much they enjoyed talking to her. People were accurately guessing L.'s age at 19, but asking J. which bars she liked best in the neighborhood.

Finally, around 1 A.M., another group of friends called and invited me to an after-party from the party they were at. So I told the girls to say their goodbyes and I'd walk them back towards the hotel. J. told one 30-year-old that she was flying home in the morning. He asked her if she'd been in D.C. for business or leisure, and she replied, "oh, college search."

I've rarely seen an erection through a pair of khakis decrease at such a rapid speed.

I Got Schooled On 'Bourgie'

2005-08-22T10:42:00.000-04:00

A friend of a friend was in town this weekend, and he is hip to the lingo that kids use these days. We'll call him "Huggy Bear," which I guess is a reference to I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, which is one of the only Wayans Brothers movies I haven't seen. Huggy Bear schooled me on my use of bourgie (my new favorite ghetto-fabulous word).

"Bourgie" doesn't exactly mean bourgeois; it means desperately trying to be bourgeois in the most ghetto way, and it's always an insult. I kind of had it half-right - I've been using it to condemn people who actually are bourgeois.

Here's the funny part: I am bourgeois. It's the whole angelheadedhipster thing. The name isn't the most apt for my blog; focus group feedback has suggested it's obscure, sounds excessively effeminate, and is similar in name to a couple existing blogs. But the name attempts to convey, in a self-effacing manner, my inner conflict between the world of privilege and the world of keepin' it ruuuuuhl. (I've always assumed Ginsberg's angelheaded hipsters were pretty suburban boys who became junkies but still looked too cute to be slummin' it on the street corner... someone correct me if I'm wrong).

So I got to thinking... we LOVE to hate our own social class. African-American rappers, coming out of the hood (or pretending to, but in either case, attempting to be a voice for the hood), mock their own social class. How dare you try to act like you didn't grow up poor! How dare you attempt upward social mobility. You are poor and will never be classy! So fucking bourgie.

Then there's me. My parents grew up poor and made it to the bourgeoisie through higher education and hard work. In a way, they tried to raise us with the best of both classes. We also had fatter and leaner times throughout my childhood. There were the years when we vacationed in Hawaii annually; the years when dad drove a brand-new Audi (claim to fame: exact model, year, and color as Ferris Bueller's dad's car - no, not Cameron's dad's, Ferris's)... then there were the years where we did back-to-school shopping at K-Mart and I got teased mercilessly for it. So in general, I have some class issues. But nonetheless, I went to a bourgeois high school, grew up on a lake (and had a sailboat for a few years), etc. And I like to mercilessly mock the bourgeoisie. How dare you try to act real! You've never had to worry about anything in your boring, bland life. You are rich and can't be cool.

So I've been using "bourgie" to mock my own class, the bourgeoisie, whereas it's supposed to be used to mock the underprivileged people who desperately want to leave their own self-loathing class and join my self-loathing class. To all, I say this: The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. On your side, that's because you're growing cannabis. On my side of the fence - WHAT??? you can see over it???? This is unacceptable. I'm building a bigger fence. But thanks for noticing.... my landscaper has upped the potassium and lowered the phosphate levels lately and it looks lovely. Can't let the poodle out though, or she'll die from the toxins. Hey, speaking of cannabis, I'm going sailing this weekend and my friends and I could use a little of your grass...

Huggy Bear, if you're out there, thanks for a great weekend, and for linguistic clarification.

Some Patrons Are Nicer Than Others

2005-08-18T17:45:00.000-04:00

How is it that some bars/coffeeshops/diners/restaurants/public restrooms (kidding on that last one) have the nicest customers and some have the biggest assholes?

This week, I went out with friends to Cobalt on Tuesday night and Chaos on Wednesday night.

Cobalt and Chaos are located a couple blocks apart on the same strip (17th St. NW), have similar-sounding names and similar-priced drinks. Cobalt has a non-smoking lounge on the main level and a dance club upstairs; Chaos is just a dance club but there are loungey areas on both sides of the dance floor. Both attract young gay men. Cobalt looks a little more upscale, but still, the clubs appear to be peers in a lot of ways. However: the crowd at Cobalt tends to be snooty and the crowd at Chaos is really friendly.

Every time I go to Chaos, I make new friends and/or meet someone new of reasonably good caliber that I end up dating.

Every tenth time I go to Cobalt, I have a one-night-stand that is semi-regrettable. The other nine times I either dance with people who don't excite me enough to date OR go home with; or I just talk/dance with friends and leave; or become acquaintances with scene-sters whom I'll never be friends with.

So why does everybody I know seem to prefer Cobalt? Frankly, I've never been gay enough to like house music. I much prefer to dance to real dance music (pop, hip/hop, etc.) than shit made by computers. I guess my gay-ness manifests itself through hot, steamy, man-on-man action as opposed to crappy electro-techno-Eurotrash music. So what's the allure of going to a snobby bar with bad music? I don't think the people are prettier at Cobalt; I'm snobby enough as is, to think about 2-3 guys max in any bar are hot, and I tend to find 2 to 3 hot guys in either place, with the exception of Cobalt on my birthday, when there were zero bangable guys anywhere. Granted, Cobalt has hot bartenders, but I'd guess about half of them are straight, and all of them are completely egotistical regardless of their orientation and totally un-fuckable due to their narcissism.

I've noticed similar trends at coffeeshops: Cosi customers are snobby assholes; Starbucks folks are in the middle; and the hippies who go to mom-and-pop shops are really nice.

I think the common trend here is related neither to age or to money: it's the ability of an establishment to create a snobby, assholey, environment versus a friendly and cool one. All coffee shops charge $3 for coffee in order to stay in business, so it's not like people of varying SES go to different coffee shops on the price of the coffee alone. It's possible that there are class differences between people who frequent different shops based on the snobbiness factor, but I can't tell. It seems like a personality thing more than anything. Is it that certain establishments hire nice employees, and this draws the nice customers? And how does a place attract total assholes? Hire good-looking-but-stupid assholes to serve drinks and mean people start coming in droves? It just baffles me that two bars on the same street can sell the same booze for the same price to people of the same attractiveness, and have a totally different climate on friendliness.

How does this happen?

My Blogroll & Fond Memories of Years of Blog Reading

2005-08-16T15:57:00.000-04:00

Hey Readers (are we up to about six now?),

I don't know how many of you are regular readers of blogs, versus those who just come here to see how I'll use the words fuck, cunt, and cocksucker today. So for those of you who don't read a lot of blogs, I'd like to direct your attention to my blogroll, under "About Me" on the right side of the page.

Right now I've got links to five blogs that are favorites of mine and are somewhat relevant to this blog:

The Washington Monthly was the first blog that I read regularly, back in 2001 when it was called Calpundit. At the time, the blogosphere was a pretty pathetic place. I had been used to creepy personal web pages, which ALWAYS were forums for losers to share way too much information about themselves. You'd be surfing the internet and someone would have some kind of fan site for a book series or a musician, and then you'd end up clicking through to some creepy page full of pictures of their ugliness, their ugly S.O., their ugly pets, and a description of their neuroses and life in mom's basement. Then, there was Andrew Sullivan, a psycho gay Catholic Republican from old family money, who was a ticking time bomb of weirdness, fascism, and self-loathing. On top of being a gay Republican ("my financial greed and xenophobia are more important than the collective freedoms of my people"), he's an HIV-positive man who has been caught having anonymous unprotected sex off of internet websites, selfishly spreading the disease that has devastated the gay community ("my need to feel dick-on-rectum contact during sex is more important than the lives of the people I'm having sex with"). Yeah, what a winner. So he had this website that was like a journal of his own crazy bullshit. I didn't understand that [blogging] was a new format on the internet, and I mentally placed it in the category of "creepy personal webpages: they get updated now."

It's been a few years now since I started reading blogs, so my memory isn't perfect as to when I realized the blog format wasn't an accident. Nor do I remember what blogs I was reading when back in college. My general recollection is that Calpundit/The Washington Monthly was the first blog that I really looked forward to reading daily. It's generally a political blog, but Kevin Drum, who writes it, has an armchair interest in economics and has some great posts debunking conservative lies about economic trends. One of the best (and worst) parts about The Washington Monthly is that its readership, for the most part, is extremely well-read and seems to consist largely of 40-to-55-year-old J.D.'s and Ph.D.'s, who have excellent comments to make, but are also a pain in the ass to argue with. I used to post comments there 3 or 4 years ago, but I quit because I found others on there too argumentative. Nonetheless, it's still a great site if you like daily political musings.

The Rude Pundit is right up my alley. He's as crude as I ever get, consistently, serving up daily expletive-filled rants against the Right. I think the Rude Pundit and I went to the same school of potty humor because we seem to share the same voice and opinions.

Exceptional Mediocrity is my favorite local blog. It's written by Kia, a recent U-Md.-College Park graduate and self-professed fag hag. Kia offers up reviews of the newest downloadable music, pictures of the hottest new male models, and rants about being young and frustrated in the DC metro area. I actually met her once, and recognized her from her site. If I were savvy, I would have e-mailed her and asked if she wanted to link up to each other... but I just added her anyway. Maybe I'll get around to e-mailing her some time and seeing if she wants to link to me.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency is an online thingy that I can't quite describe. McSweeney's is a quarterly "alternative" literary journal published by Dave Eggers - best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoirs, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and for not being able to produce anything else, since it's the story of his life that is heartbreaking (he didn't make it up), and the genius of his storytelling style probably would only work once. Anyway, it's a great book and Dave was smart enough to move into editing and publishing other people's stuff. My favorite part of McSweeney's Internet Tendency are the reader-submitted lists; for this reason, I link directly to the lists page and not to the home page.

The DC Male's Perspective is another local blog. Seth is a cute straight guy that I know and his blog generally focuses on being a post-college-age single guy dating girls. Like me, Seth is also a new blogger in a blog-saturated world. So go show him some lovin'.

I'll be adding to the blogroll as time progresses... some will be blogs of friends of mine, which I won't talk up too much only because I truly wish to remain anonymous; others will be new blogs I've discovered along the way and mutual back-scratches with fellow bloggers where we like each others' work. Happy reading!

The Best Video Game Of All Time

2005-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

What was the best video game of all time?

No, it's not an open-ended question. It's either the original Metroid or the original Legend of Zelda. No other game can compare to these two. The real question is which of the two is the best video game ever, and which is the second best ever.

I sympathize with fans of earlier games, like Q*Bert and Donkey Kong - truly amazing, seminal games among the top ten of all time. And certainly, recent games like Grand Theft Auto 3 are right up there with them. But it's still clear what the two greatest games of all time are, and they both came out in 1986 for the Nin-frickin-tendo.

Vote for Metroid or the Legend of Zelda in the comments - which is #1 and which is #2? You're free to vote for other games too, but it will just expose your ignorance.

Down The Rabbit Hole: A Birthday Saga Of Epic Proportions

2005-08-15T01:08:00.000-04:00

I awoke at 11 AM on Saturday morning wearing my jeans, a sure sign that I had been wrecked the night before. I went next door to the bathroom, whipped out my meaty tool and started to urinate. Flowing from my pecker was piss of the deepest, richest amber color that would have looked so ungodly good sloshing into glasses in a beer commercial. I made sure to take my time shaking my member before tucking it back in my jeans and noticed that it was maybe 5% larger than before due to the shaking. Yes, I had truly had had an awesome time on my birthday.

Sitting around my house on Friday afternoon, my 26th birthday, I realized that I had planned a party for Saturday night but had neglected to make plans for my birthday night. Fortunately, my two best friends in Maryland and the person who's feeding one of them the sausage announced that they were taking me out to our favorite Mexican dive at 8:30.

At some point between 4 and 6 PM (this part is a tad hazy) I realized it was time for the mopeyness to end, and I remembered that my old roommate, Jimbo, had passed along some magical fungi that his friend had given him and he had never used. We were cleaning out the freezer at our old apartment and he handed me a Ziploc bag of shrooms. They had been sitting in the drawer of my nightstand for about six weeks. I started thinking, "should I call around and find someone to trip with me?" This train of thought lasted about 15 seconds till I just ate the whole damn bag of shrooms.

Tripping is like psychotherapy if you know how to do it. My perspective on the psychedelic drugs is that (1) yes, they make you psychotic for a few hours and help you understand the schizophrenic; but more importantly (2) they help you think out everything that's been on your mind. If I may be permitted to sound like a total dope fiend for a minute, let me proseletyze for the beauty of doing drugs:

When you trip, all the unconscious thoughts that you push to the back of your mind come out in full force, right into your internal monologue. All your unspeakable fears and dreams suddenly have words associated with them. The confusion and disorientation from being out of your mind on chemicals is balanced by the absolute mental clarity that your thoughts achieve. It's beautiful. I had this whole conversation with myself for several hours, including the entire time I was at dinner having an out-loud discussion with my three friends. Therapist Me and Patient Me just kept talking, reasoning out the pros and cons of aging and analyzing all my fears. Frankly, they are too numerous and too neurotic to get into here, but I verbalized all these unspoken worries that were on my mind and it was such a relief to get them out so I could debunk them. I was just starting to come down (mediated as it were by the sangria I was sipping like Kool-Aid for the three hours we were dining) when the waitstaff brought out ice cream and sang Happy Birthday to me. They had taken a large purple sombrero off the wall and placed it on my head so my friends could commemmorate the occasion with their camera phones. I can't wait to see what I look like eating ice cream in a sombrero while tripping balls.

Saying good bye to my friends, I went home and met up with Julia, and we walked towards the Adams Morgan strip. On the way, I saw a perfectly good - if "perfectly good" means dirt-caked and disgusting - carnival-sized stuffed rendition of Patrick the Starfish from SpongeBob SquarePants. Of course I picked him up and carried him to Adams Morgan, where all folks old and young shouted "Patrick!" and some Bar Whore-looking girls took a picture of me and Julia with our undersea friend. I danced with Patrick for awhile at Chief Ike's Mambo Room before abandoning him on top of the Ms. Pac Man machine. The Columbia girls were at Chief Ike's and I danced with them while their boyfriends bought me birthday drinks. Things were going very well. Eventually, we all split up and I decided the best course of action was to walk home, smoke a bowl, and head to Cobalt to look for hotties on the dance floor. I missed an ex who was leaving as I was arriving - apparently for a booty call. He must have either settled for fugly, lied outright, or taken home the last hottie (fucker) because it just was not a pretty crowd that night. Being totally whacked out of my mind on my three of my four favorite drugs (sorry, caffeine!), and seeing no one imminently fuckable, it seemed like the best birthday present to myself to dance with guys I had no intention of hooking up with. So, Gary and Javier, if you're out there, I'd like to apologize. Frankly, I'd hope that you noticed that despite my hot dance moves, my mind had checked out for the night. It gave the keys to my pecs, which decided that they'd like my T-shirt off so they could see the crowd better. But in case you weren't looking at my vacant, bloodshot eyes - I'm sorry for being such a cocktease.

I made it home in one piece, though apparently John did look into my eyes and I guess I can thank dance clubs for not being well-lit. Being well-lit myself, I excused myself to the first-floor powder room to vomit for a few minutes. Apparently I went upstairs to bed at some point, but I really don't have a lot of memories of the time between my praying to the porcelain god and waking up with a bladder full of rich, dark, birthday-flavored urine.

It's My Berfday

2005-08-12T14:24:00.000-04:00

I quit my semi-closeted nicotine abuse today.

I have, from time to time since my virtual divorce 15 months ago, smoked cigarettes here and there. Most of the time it's been occasional bumming one or two cigarettes at a bar, but there have been a couple periods where I lost my voice for a couple days. OK, that's probably happened 6 times in the last 15 months. Even if I only smoke about a pack in three days (7 cigs a day), that's enough to make me lose my voice and remind me not to smoke. My body doesn't want me smoking.

I'm more of an nicotine abuser than a nicotine addict. I know that if I'm stressed out & pissed off, a cigarette will make me feel much better. I know if I'm wasted that a cigarette will taste so good and make my head feel fantastic. So although I haven't really been at the point of addiction to cigarettes, I've had to "quit" from time to time because I know I can't do this to my body, despite the amazing psychotropic effects of nicotine. That's why I quit for spring break, only to start again three weeks later from school stress; I quit at the end of the semester but then started when I was dating a smoker; quit again after that relationship but started again when in Minneapolis because my best friend there smokes; quit again in DC but started up again when I had a scare that an ex might have had HIV; quit after knowing all was OK (I was never really in danger); and started up again when I had to help a friend with a train wreck of a move and would have killed somebody had I not been able to smoke.

So I quit again for my birthday, because I don't want to do this. I don't ever want to become a real smoker; I don't want to spend the money or have my car, hands, and breath smell like an ashtray. Because I've never been a "real" smoker in the daily necessity way, I've had a hard time taking quitting seriously. And because smoking serves an immediate need, It's always made more sense to me to just do it when I want to. But this can't go on. I just can't smoke, period.

My smoker friend back home is trying to quit. My smoker friend in DC had better be supportive of me. But the problem is that it's a two-way street. For as much as my two smoker friends peer pressure me to smoke (which they do), I also have a tendency to want to smoke with them. So that's tough too.

Anyway, I quit for my birthday because I owe it to myself. But it's hard when I know that a cigarette would lift my mood at the moment. And it's hard to not justify a 2-3 cig/day habit that will make me less pissed off when I know that "real" smokers are smoking 10-20 cigs/day. And it's hard to "quit" when no one (including myself) considers me a "real" smoker. But this has to happen for real. I smoked occasionally when I was single in college for a little under a year and quit for an LTR. This time I've been smoking for a little over a year and it's time to quit for me. I've "quit" twenty times this year and it's time to actually quit. I mean it. But I'm still pissed off.

What a way to spend your birthday.

A Conversation I Had Last Week

2005-08-10T00:20:00.000-04:00

J: there needs to be a word for people like [our friend] Nicole, who went to Smith, loves the Indigo Girls and Whole Foods, can box better than a man, and just overall exhibits lesbian chic despite being heterosexual and happily married to a man.

Me: Oh, you mean like a female equivalent to the term metrosexual?

J: Yeah. We gotta come up with a word for it.

Me: Lesbiain't?

Calling All Tokens, Calling All Tokens

2005-08-08T11:20:00.000-04:00

The roommate search is over. We found a fun, preppy young guy to move into the attic on September 1st. He's starting grad school at Howard, two stops down the metro from here. What strikes me as mildly amusing is that, after our White hetero able-bodied goy male roommate moves out, and the new guy moves in, our house will be composed of a gay, a Jew, a Black, and a woman. Or, as I've started to call us, The Democratic Party.

How NOT to Describe Yourself

2005-08-07T02:49:00.000-04:00

I'm sorry that I had to help a friend move today.

I'm sorry, because I missed a bunch of people coming over to look at roommate John's attic room. Apparently one person stood out in particular. He was a somewhat overweight baseball fan in a garish orange shirt. Apparently the guy was somewhat funny, but at some point he ended up just talking to my metrosexual roomie Alex for a minute. He said, "um, I should probably tell you something."

....

"I'm a fucking homo."

"I know it's funny and all, because I'm a Redskins fan, [blah, blah, blah]..."

Alex says that he thanked him for disclosing and told him it wouldn't be a problem. But still, the questions remain for all of us. How out is he? Would someone who was actually out disclose in such a way? Is he a loose cannon full of issues? I can say that it's not a lot of fun coming out to people. In fact, after nearly ten years of having to come out to co-workers, classmates, roommates, etc., I can say that I'm pretty much fatigued from the whole thing. In fact, re: this last move, I mentioned it ["it" meaning my predilection to sodomize young men] after a week or two, because John and I were discussing the military's DADT policy. As he had no idea I was gay, I realized that I might not have sent the signals strong enough around the house. Thus, I felt the need to un-enthusiastically mention it to my other roommates ["for the record, yeah, I'm gay"], who responded with a resounding "we know!"

But, um, yeah... I've never been compelled to refer to myself as "a fucking homo." What the hell does that mean, anyway? I understand that it's supposed to be humorous, but who (gay, straight, bi, whatever) is going to respond well to that? How does that make coming out less awkward???

Perspective

2005-08-06T01:45:00.000-04:00

When I first moved to DC from Minneapolis, the stretch of 18th St. NW between U St. and Columbia Road, commonly known as "The Adams Morgan Bars," seemed to stretch on for miles, like a strange combination of Bourbon Street, The Strip in Vegas, and Times Square. So many exciting bars and crazy people and things to see. It was like its own world to explore.

Jesus Fucking Christ. How fucking straight-off-the-farm *was* I?

(boorz-ee´) -adj.

2005-08-04T21:18:00.000-04:00

It was a source of pride to me as an incoming college freshman that I knew the meanings of the words bourgeois (boorz'hwä) and bourgeoisie (boorz'hwäz-ee´); which was an adjective and which was a noun; and when to use them. I'd always cringe, as visibly as possible, when people would say boor-gee-oyz or boor-geez, or refer to a class of people as "the bourgeois" or say "that's so bourgeoisie." Christ, couldn't these people learn one or two French words other than derriere? They're in common enough usage among the American bourgeoisie (which, Wikipedia tells me, prefers to be called "the citizenry").

You can understand, then, a few months back, when I started hearing people say "boozhee" instead of "boohz-wah," how I instantly branded them idiots in my mind. How could these people - all college educated, and many with postgraduate degrees - say such an ignorant thing? Well, the more I heard people use it, the more I realized that our culture had finally given in and modified the term to be more pronouncable. Still, though, I resisted using it myself. It sounded so Ebonic, or at least Yankeecentric. Had America become completely Freedom-Fried? I hate ballet as much as the next American, but if people started calling it "Anorexics in spandex breaking their toebones to the beat of Tchaikovsky," I'd resist that too. You know I just would.

But eventually I relaxed my snobbery a tad. I actually LIKE saying boozhee at least as much as I like saying bourgeois. So what the hell. Language evolves, which reading Chaucer (OK, I don't actually read Chaucer, let's be honest) reminds me is a good thing. My only questions for you, the miniscule readership of the blog, are thus:

1. How does one spell our li'l neologism? Booshie? Boozhee? Boogie? I think there's a DJ and/or electronic music group out there called Boogie Solitaire. Are they boozhee like bourgeois? Or *actually* the disco-related word "boogie" that has been uncool since 1979? I myself am a fan of bourgee, because it hints to the reader that it hails from bourgeois, and it allows for better Googling. But let me know in the comments how one's supposed to spell it.

2. Seriously, you can be straight with me: How behind the times am I? Have people been saying bourgee for years and I just realized it? Or am I correct in thinking that its usage has spiked in the last six months?

I can't believe I'm actually posting on my blog about this. I'm so fucking boorgee.

I Could Have Taken Over The World

2005-08-04T00:11:00.000-04:00

What my stoned ass is thinking about at the moment:

I was reminiscing about my days as an angry un-closeted teenager. I was a fiesty little guy and would pick fights with hetero people about LGBT issues. Any old, conservative, Republican, Christian Minnesotan that I'd come across, I'd breathe fire up their ass about homophobia. I even (and this is embarrassing), at the all-night post-graduation party at my high school, recorded a clip for the 10th-year-reunion video about what I'd be doing in 10 years, and I said I'd probably be living in New York in an unfurnished apartment, wearing black and shooting a lot of heroin, or else I'll have won the legal fight for gay marriage but still not have been successful enough to be married. This, mind you, was in 1997 when no one anywhere was even talking about gay marriage. I was an out-there kid. Out as bisexual at 15, out as gay at 16, out in angryville by the time I graduated high school.

In college I dated a lot of guys and I eventually settled down with one. Across the dating years (17-20) and the relationship years (20-24), I mellowed out a lot. All my anger at my rich-ass little suburb full of WASPy, homophobic (and racist) jerks faded in college because pretty much everyone I knew were gay-friendly straights. My anger at straight society faded as my then-partner and I got welcomed to all sorts of events, from office parties to family holidays, to academic functions (I started grad school three years ago).

The last year-and-a-half of my life has been really fucking awesome. I've been single/dating and grad school turned around from miserable to tolerable, which was like a 3000% improvement. But the point is, I'm living a content life and happy that I'll have some kind of job of some sort when I get the letters Ph.D. associated with my name, no matter what I decide to do. Still, though, cannabis and I can't help but think:

If I had known I was going to be gay when I was 3 years old, I could have taken over the world.

Comments Section Fixed

2005-08-03T09:38:00.000-04:00

Hello Dear Readers,

(and there must be at least 2 or 3 of you at this point)...

I fixed the comments section so that anyone can comment. In the extreme cases (e.g. un-funny mean-spirited racism/misogyny/religious intolerance, etc.) I might have to delete someone's comment, but in the name of free speech, pretty much everything is within limits. So feel free to comment!

The Angel Headed Hipster's alter ego also requests that you not use his actual name in the comments, for the primary reason that he doesn't want people to Google his name and get this site. It's not like my identity is a big secret; I just want to be able to provide you all with filth and not have it show up when people look for my name. Fair enough?

The Friend Date

2005-08-03T00:41:00.000-04:00

I have a lot of lady friends. If I were boning them, I'd be a pimp, but I'm not boning them. We go to dinner, talk about life, split the bill, maybe head home and watch a movie, have a nice long goodbye, and they take off, leaving me to take out my contacts and go to bed. All in all it's a nice experience, but I wonder if it's nicer for them than for me. The straight/bi ones, at least, get a date with a person of the "right" gender and I don't.

When I lived in Minneapolis, I had the converse experience: I knew a lot of straight guys whom I'd go grab some pizza with, maybe a beer or two, split the bill, catch a movie or watch one at home, say goodnight. A nice weeknight Man Date. (Props to the NYT for coining the term "Man Date").

Most of the time I don't feel used by my hetero lady dates. I love hanging out with friends. Sometimes, though, I wonder if I should feel cheated, like I'm giving away a date and not getting anything in return. But then I think about my man dates, and I realize that it's not about the sex or romance. If I get food with a straight guy and watch a movie, I don't feel gratified romantically. It's not like I'm pining after them... we are hanging out because we are friends who want to hang out.

A good case in point is Peter, an old friend with whom I have lost touch. No one ever called him Peter; we called him Sexy Pete, That Guy From The Fridge. He went to high school with a buddy of mine, whom I worked with while in high school, and in college, my buddy had a picture of him on the fridge (among pictures of other friends). Everyone that came over (at least the straight girls & gay guys) commented on how totally fucking hot Peter was. I think it was my friend Paul who gave him the actual moniker "SPTGFTF."

SPTGFTF and I would go clothes shopping sometimes, maybe sit down to dinner at an Italian restaurant, head somewhere for coffee afterwards or go used-CD shopping, and I'd drop him off at home. And although he was totally bone-able, looks-wise, it was never like I was delusional that we'd fall in love and get married. He was hotter than a lot of my other friends, but spending time with him wasn't necessarily better (or worse) than with un-hot friends. The enjoyment I got was the enjoyment that he got - spending time with a friend.

Now, granted, there are exceptions to all this: I have had one or two ladies (mostly in the teen years) who actually might have been crushing on me, and for whom the friend date may have had different expectations. And I had a straight guy friend in college whom I really liked way too much. By the time he and I hooked up, years later, the thrill had gone for me. Dude missed his window, but in a strange way managed to justify the year I wasted longing for him. All in all, it was satisfying that he wasn't *that* straight. But I wonder if there are any female friends of mine from the past who kept hoping that I would pull the same move on them. God knows there's some sense of gratification there.

But for the most part - the friend date isn't about anyone's gender or sexuality (unlike, say, the dynamics of multiple people living together, as noted previously). Granted, if there's a lesbian involved, there's probably caffeine; if there's a straight OR gay guy, alcohol must come into play to justify the occasion and to ease the "date" aspect of the friend date; and if there is a straight girl involved you might just end up watching a romantic comedy. But the important part of the friend date is spending time with a friend. And frankly, (assuming you're at least getting a little action once in a while), the fact that you *aren't* going to take your clothes off and do the horizontal mambo is pretty relaxing. Have that extra bite of pasta, even if you feel a little full. Don't obsess if sitting comfortably on the sofa to watch TV is going to mess up your hair. Don't worry about whether your pubes are trimmed too much or too little or what message your underwear sends about you as a person. Enjoy the friend and enjoy the friend date.

Betrayed by my knowledge of Mermaid Avenue

2005-08-02T06:50:00.000-04:00

I started this blog on a whim. Granted, I've been ranting, raving, and offending people since I could open my mouth as a toddler - and I'd been told in the past to start my own blog - but I finally just decided to do it. Having to pick a name on the spot should have been daunting, but the Allen Ginsburg quote "angelheaded hipster" from his signature poem, "Howl," jumped out at me. Recent events dictated this quote.

I was doing a weeknight (Tuesday, IIRC) tour of Mt. Pleasant, U Street, and Columbia Heights bars while catching up with an ex. He's a Guinness snob, as I used to be in college, and the good things about bars within walking distance of my place is that they serve Schlitz for $2 and Guinness for $6, so however you want to spend the money you don't have, they'll accomodate. Anyway (I say this word a lot because I get sidetracked a lot), at some point when we were dating, dude was confused because I exude this preppy, clean-cut Midwest image, yet say things that would make Caligula blush (props to my boy Morrissey in the closet). He also thought I had a bizarrely diverse selection going on my iPod (I thought everyone liked to hear Wilson Pickett between Hank Williams and The New Pornographers) for someone who wore non-threadbare shirts. Apparently I don't completely fit the image people have of urban snobs. I told him that I was a "total hipster in high school and college" but that I had mellowed out and changed my ways, and I didn't hate corporate America like I used to.

However, on Tuesday Guinness night, my inner self was exposed. Ex-dude and I sauntered into an establishment on U Street whose CD player was playing some strange folksy love song to Ingrid Bergman (the femme fatale from "The Maltese Falcon," not to be confused with Scandinavian artsy film auteur Ingmar Bergman, who was a guy). Him: "what the HELL is this music?" Me: "well, you see, Woody Guthrie had this degenerative disease and couldn't play guitar for the last 30 years of his life and wrote a bunch of songs he never recorded, and his daughter eventually decided to make money off of them by having an *English* folk singer, Billy Bragg, team up with an *American* roots-rock band, Wilco, to make these two records of his songs...." Him: "and you tell me you're no longer an urban hipster?" So, yeah. I have accepted the fact that I am an angelheaded hipster - looking downright Republican on the outside but full of Guinness suds and ethnic food on the inside.

"Dude, you're like Behind The Music for this shit!"

No Bitches n' Hoes

2005-08-02T00:22:00.000-04:00

I moved into the group house I live in off of Craig's List, the site with the best rep for matching dirty hipsters with dirty homes. I found a place with two guys staying, where a guy and a girl were moving out and they needed two people to replace them. Myself and a girl moved in. We'll call her "Julia," since that's her real name.

The other day, roommate John announced that he is moving out. (Found a place a block away for $190/mo!) Point is, we gotta find a new roommate. In my mind, I was assuming/hoping we'd find a fun metrosexual/hipster type straight guy to move in. I would settle for a low-maintenance hipsterdyke or a gay guy that I am not attracted to but has hot friends. But primarily.... I hoped we'd get the lowest-maintenance category of person available, which is the urban straight guy. He has a lot of hair styling products, but he still forgets his socks in the crack of the sofa and never buys Glade Plug-Ins.

Some in the fields of *cough cough* anthropology, sociology, critical theory, gender studies, etc. would be terribly offended at my classifying people by biological sex and presumed essential, dichotomous, immutable sexual orientation - and then attempting to infer non-sexual aspects of their life based on these categories. These people can suck my dick, because they have never lived in an apartment with three heterosexual women. To quote the movie Anchorman, "don't get me wrong... I LOOOOOOOVE the ladies..." but I spent about 4 months of my freshman year of college living with three straight girls (two of whom occasionally pretended to be bisexual). After about four lunar cycles, I promised to never again live in a household that was "synched," unless synchronization meant we had wireless internet to allow beating off to internet porn from any room in the house.

You can imagine my delight when I came home today to find the guys sitting on the couches and Julia bouncing up and down in the living room doorway, sucking on a fudgesicle, screaming "NO BITCHES N' HOES! That's what our Craig's List ad needs to say!" Apparently, there are some straight women out there who understand me completely. It's a fun house to live in.

Finally joined the blogging game

2005-08-01T23:31:00.000-04:00

After years of being a devoted blog reader, I've decided to finally start my own blog. And after years of being a devoted blog reader, I've also decided what I will and won't do. Here's the gist of it: I will post as often as I can. I will make this blog as safe-for-work as a blog written by a trashy, perverted provacateur can be. I will keep you laughing. I will not talk about people you don't know unless I explain them. The focus will be on rants, raves, and psychoanalysis of those around us. This blog will be personal to the point of being interesting, but not so self-absorbed as to be boring. You will like this blog. You will read this blog. Nonetheless, this blog will not suck your dick or wash your dirty dishes.