Invert(e)

Two Sides of Pride

I am a misanthrope.

This comes as no big surprise to anyone who knows me well. People, in general, simply piss me off. And large crowds of them piss me off exponentially. So why was I at Denver Pride yesterday, in the midst of a crowd large enough to pass for an emerging nation? Habit, I suppose. I always go to the parade despite my misgivings about assimilation and the increasingly corporate nature of the event.

At times, straight-run businesses and corporations seem to have overrun Pride - especially at the Festival in City Park at the end of the parade route - using our celebration as a tool for gathering that elusive and, in my case, mythical gay dollar. And I won't even go into my rant about the mixed message our GLBT Center sends when they spend big bucks all through the year on substance abuse programs for the queer population yet gladly accept sponsor dollars from Coors and Stoli for the beer and vodka tents.

That would be missing the point.

Nyuck, nyuck ... YUCK!

Hello again - sorry for being away from the blog for so long, but the ninety degree learning curve of my new job and the demands of finishing up a short story have kept me from posting. But like last night's onion-smothered enchiladas, I have returned.

Two recent events have conspired to drag me back to the blogosphere - the arrival of Volume Five of The Three Stooges Collection, the re-mastered chronological release of all 190 Three Stooges shorts, as well as the recent announcement that the Farrelly brothers (Dumb and Dumber, There's Something About Mary) will be shooting a Three Stooges movie starring Benicio Del Toro as Moe, Sean Penn as Larry and Jim Carrey as Curley.

I'll get back to that once my stomach settles.

Waaaay back when I was a little queerlet, the highlight of my day was right after school. Not only was the horrid school day over with, but there was the Poopdeck Paul show on channel 2 (WJBK in Detroit), hosted by Poopdeck Paul, a faux sailor/TV host. The Popeye cartoons he ran were only okay, but I thought the Three Stooges were the funniest thing I'd ever seen.

On the 100th Anniversary of the Futurist Manifesto: The No-More-Future Manifesto

God is not dead. We are. God has yet to be fully born, whereas humanity is like a bacteria that threatened the host and is about to suffer the consequences of a planetary equivalent of antibiotics.

Intelligence is a sexually transmitted disease. Life is infinitely more beautiful without thought. Not to mention peaceful. Blissful. Spend the day up a tree. This is an order. Honor your superiors.

Plants were, are, and always will be the dominant life form on Earth. Animal life only exists to suck up the excess oxygen out of the biosphere.

Demand queerness everywhere. The 10 to 1 ration of straight procreational sex to queer recreational sex must be reversed. Knowing that it is too late to matter, ultimately, we still need to encourage the human race to decrease its number in the fastest manner possible, not only for our souls, but in order to take pressure off the life forms that will survive us. Suck more cock. Eat more pussy. Bang more butt. The penetration of the vagina by a penis must be seen as the tragic mistake it has always been.

Since the failed experiment of homo sapiens is coming to a conclusion, we are free to do anything. Politeness must be rejected. Fear is irrelevant. Obeying laws is absurd. War is too ridiculous to continue. Murder is redundant. Starvation is noble. In the very near future, we will all starve. It must become our new religion.

Only two paragraphs of one book will be relevant once the Earth becomes serious about the removal of humankind: pages 125-126 of The Last Three Minutes, by Paul Davies. Nothing will be lost. No one will get left behind. Only unanswered questions will send us back into the Hell realm once we find ourselves in the End of Time. "What if I had done this, that, or the other?" Stop thinking. Do it now.

Hit with a 2x4

No, I wasn't gay-bashed - though that might have been preferable.

I was laid off yesterday.

Yeah, I know - along with 100,000 other people. But I don't have to worry about their households. It's one thing to get fired and know it's because you've done a lousy job, but I was great at my job. Both the managing editor and the editor-in-chief love my work - and they still want me to have a voice in the paper, doing freelancing and blogging for them. I'll be paid freelancer's wages, but I won't have the security of a steady job. And even though I know my situation's not unique, that's not a comfort.

I just applied for unemployment yesterday in the hopes I'll be able to get by with that and the freelancing money until they hire me back. The editor-in-chief swears this is only temporary and that he's going to hire me back when the page count goes back up, but he can't tell me when that will be. No one can. Our page count has gone from 60 to 48 to 30 in less than six months, and who knows if that's bottomed out or not? The Rocky Mountain News is shutting its doors, and even Westword (our Village Voice) says their arts section is only going to be every other issue for the forseeable future.

Hore on the Clock

I did have the most incredible weekend, but . . . God, that was already forty eight hours ago! If I tried to write about it now, the words would be Dead On Arrival. There would be no energy, no sense of urgency, no rush to share, as if I were an eight year old again dying to show this amazing thing—whatever it was—to my dad or a friend or whomever might be within range. The moment has passed. Sorry.

Chalk it up to another lesson learned: if I don’t blog about an event within twenty four hours, it’s probably too late.

Besides, we have a new President, and everything is going to be different now. Please, dear God, let everything be different. Looks like this administration’s first order of business is to get the timetable ready for pulling the troops out of Iraq. That’s a hell of a good start. President Obama:  wasn’t it just a few months ago that people were saying, well, Americans could possibly be ready to vote for a black man as President, but not one with a name like Barack Obama? I think the future has officially arrived.

Not coincidentally, in most movies and books and concept albums about the future, it usually occurs after Armageddon. That’s what the Bush administration delivered. There is not an enemy in the world that could have brought America as low as Bush managed to bring us. What outside force could have trashed our economy so thoroughly, or nibbled away at our Constitution so sneakily, or demoralized the citizenry so utterly with justifications for torture, with deficits on top of deficits, with bailouts after bailouts, and letting the poor people of a beloved city drown and starve and lose everything and not do anything about it . . .

But that was all yesterday. So yesterday.

Today, we’re in the shit, but the First Lady looked great, and it does feel like a brand new day. We’re going to have to do a million things right to make up for all the wrongs, but today, I am not ashamed to be an American. I’ll try to be better too; I will try to stay more current. I promise to be as filthy and funny as possible in this new era. I promise to be as subtle as possible with the spiritual stuff. I promise to break my own rules with all the panache I can muster.

The Lonesome Death of William Zantzinger

Some songs are with you forever. From the first moment you hear them, you recognize something. They speak to you insistently and intimately, in a language only you really understand, if understanding can be said to have a place in a connection so personal. And no matter where or when you hear them, they always take you back to the exact day and time you first met.

Bob Dylan's "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" is one (of many) of those songs for me. For those who don't know it, it's on Dylan's 1964 album The Times they Are A-Changin' (side 2, track 4) and tells the story of 24-year-old William Zantzinger, who assaulted and killed 51-year-old black barmaid Hattie Carroll in a fit of drunken rage at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore. His trial was moved to Hagerstown, where he was convicted of assault and manslaughter, receiving a six month sentence. Volumes have been written about the song by critics who have covered it far better than I could.

New Year's Void

There is always an unsettling aspect to the first day of the year for me. I know it's just an arbitrary spot on the calendar, but it feels rather like a blank page. As writers, we all have a different relationship with that entity. Some of us look on it as an opportunity. A challenge. A clear space in which we can practice magic, moving parts of our essence into its vacancy until we've constructed a reality separate from our own.

Others, including myself, look at it with dull dread. It's a space that I know has to - and will be - filled, but I have a tough time hanging that reality out into the void. It's not that I'm lazy. Well, maybe a little ... It's more that I don't have the self-confidence to think that what I have to offer is really worthwhile to anyone except me. Intellectually, I know that's crap. I've written stuff that's made people cry and laugh and think, and enough of them have told me that so I understand it's the truth. Emotionally, however, I always wonder if what I do is good enough to warrant attention.

Which brings us to the New Year's Void.

Good Shit, Wrong End (Part 2)

This is sex rearing up its filthy head
    Dirty and delicious
    Don’t look at me that way
    Connecting those two wasn’t my idea
This is the part of the movie
    Where some of us must cover our eyes
    Now, please, I’m not going down again
    Not that length of pasture
    Not him and all of his crisscross hatching
    I swear I won’t do that again
This is the last time I’m ever gonna suck that dick
This is what I tell myself all the time
This is why I can’t have nice things
    Don’t deserve ‘em, can’t afford ‘em, beyond them, beneath them
This is why I don’t leave the house
    If you think it’s complicated in here
    You should see me out there
This is why I have to suck seven cocks in a single night
    At least once a week
    To get outa my head
    To reconnect with my disconnect
    To get to the door beyond which is pure bright light
    Which keeps me from going through the door into the brilliant unblinking love
This is a vicious circle (learned that in college, y’all)

Home (stretch) for the Holidays

Congratulations.

If you made it this far, you're almost there. If you haven't killled those family members to whom you're still speaking, if you haven't been stranded (or worse) by some freakishly mutant weather pattern caused by the global warming our government insists isn't happening, if you can't look at anything sugar-glazed, frosted or iced without feeling a little bit nauseous, then you just might make it through the holiday season. But in the words of Han Solo, "don't get cocky, kid."

There's still New Year's to go. And that's the worst one of all. Not only are you expected to review what you have or haven't accomplished last year - a depressing enough accounting in and of itself - but you're also expected to resolve to do more in the year ahead. And you're expected to make these contracts with yourself while in the throes of a drunken celebration with friends who are doing the exact same thing as you are - resulting in an annual one-upmanship of inebriated promises.

Breathe

The first thing we have to do is declare a moratorium on building new coal burning plants and phase out the existing ones. Oh, don't roll your eyes at me, Mary Margaret Johnny John John. If we don't do this in the next fifty years, we might not survive much beyond the next one hundred.

The first thing we have to do is clean up the oceans and reforest the land, and save, well, everything there is left to save. Let's not even look at the numbers:  the exact amount of what we've lost will make you want to vomit. We need to put our heads down, get to work, start small, and grow. Anything can be a seed. Anyone can garden.

The first thing we have to do is get out of our cars. America is driving itself crazy. Gridlock on the ground; greenhouse gases in the air. Everyone clamoring for community. You know what community is? It's when people live, play, and work all in the same area. The car is what tore communities apart and broke families up by making it so easy to move. Drive. We do drive. We have drive. We will drive straight to our graves. How's that for a declension? Oh yeah, it looks great on TV, with four on the floor and no one else on the road, in a wilderness that appears to be your very own personal planet. In real life, it's almost never like that. And even if you do get one wonderful weekend like that a year, guess what, your husband is yelling nonstop about something, your wife is unhappy about something else, the kids won't stop fighting, or your friend turns out to be an asshole, or, oh yayyy, you're alone and then, oh crap, you're alone. It never ends. We got taken for a ride. And you know the real reason America is so in love with its cars? Because so many of us got laid for the first time in one. Or kissed. Or got to make out.  Whatever. We have to start asking ourselves:  Is it worth it?  The quickie in the car or life on Earth?  I know it's not an easy choice, but you know, take a minute, think it over.

Signs of the Season

It's snowing here in Denver today.

Okay, not much - only about 1-3 inches, but it's enough to drive the California and Texas drivers into fits and the Floridians ... well, into curbs. You can tell the influx of out-of-staters by the local news, which now breaks into programming for a Winter Storm alert breathlessly proclaiming that we could get up to four inches of snow. Those of us who have lived here for thirty-odd years know four inches of snow isn't worth cancelling a trip to the mall for, let alone interrupting Oprah.

The picture at right is a view of the neighborhood from our front door. Even if it's not snowing hard, it's frickin' cold outside and this is as far as I venture in my fuzzy pink mules, folks. That sun appearing on the horizon will soon melt what little snow there is, and by the time the temperature drops tonight, all that will be left is a skiff of black ice on the side roads to make your morning commute a shade more interesting. In Detroit, where I used to live, it would snow in October and you wouldn't see the street again until next March. Not here. Once those warm chinook (Indian for snow-eater) winds come blowing out of the west after a snowstorm, it disappears faster than a Mormon at a Prop 8 rally.

News You Can Use

Like every other informed American - which, hopefully, is not a contradiction in terms - I check out the headlines on a daily basis. I surf  the New York Times, Huffington Post, Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News (for local stuff) as well as alternative news sites like What Really Happened? and, of course, Towleroad, Dlisted and Datalounge for gossip and fun stuff I can blog for Out Front Colorado. I even used to read the Drudge Report  for laughs until someone told me that every time you click on that site, a demon gets its wings.

So what news story has captured my attention lately? Could it be the big 3 automaker bailout? Nope. Handouts large enough to qualify as Monopoly money don't impress me any more, sad to say. Is it the latest Obama cabinet member appointment? Not quite. But I do think Bill Richardson looks better without the beard. If only Hillary would shave hers. Is it Palin or Prop 8 or even Plaxico Burress shooting himself in the leg with an illegal firearm? Naaaah. Plaxico Burress shooting Michael Vick for dog abuse, however, would definitely get my attention.

Confessions of a Holiday Hater

Thanksgiving's not so bad. It's just a meal - one day of gluttony bookended by two days of travel for most people. Sure, it's been commercialized to within an inch of its life, but what in this country hasn't had its deeper meaning sacrificed for a buck? No, Thanksgiving itself is not the problem. The problem is that it kicks off the Holiday Season and every year I look forward to the advent of Christmas with as much enthusiasm as a progressive dystrophic nerve disease.

I try not to be too humbuggish about it. Other people have the right to celebrate whatever they want however they wish, so I suffer in silence the carols and novelty songs assaulting my ears while I'm picking up salad dressing at King Soopers, the endless pot-lucks at work (mmmm, give me some of that mayonnaise-based holiday macaroni salad sitting at room temperature for a few hours), the sight of lawn reindeer bobbing their heads amidst enough garish, tacked-up lights to take down the entire Western power grid and holiday shoppers at the Maul cutting me off in the parking lot and stepping on my feet to get to a cheap gift they can give their best friend or worst enemy in the name of good fellowship.

Now that's what I call a celebration.