TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

Mons itch?  I’m no doctor, but sounds like someone needs to get a syringe and some Yoplait.  And you might want to lay off the Cheesecake Factory.

Apologies for the recent delay in bullshit-spouting. It’s the end of my first immensely successful* year of graduate school and I’ve been uncommonly busy in the past five days due to the impressive lack of neurons I’ve fired over the previous four months. My final term paper (“In Yr Bed, On Yr Facebook: Queer Disclosure on Online Social Networks”**) will be done as soon as my intern gets her shit together, at which point I’ll resume lie-telling/compliment-fishing, but in the meantime, here’s what I’ve been thinking about:

Over Panzenella Scramble (good, but with that weird Mexican cheese that melts well but tastes like flavorless sno cones) on Sunday afternoon, the palsies made a list of summer goals (i.e. camping, beach trip, tennis tourney, tailgating, spray tans, and turning Carrboro into South Beach). In the spirit of Summertime Self-Improvement, I’m working on a personal list as well. All I’ve come up with is to make out sober-style at least once before September. Considering Operation Don’t Be A Douche 2009 entails yoga, patio gardening, and Netflix (aka near solitude), this is unlikely to happen.

Oh, and I want Kim Stolz to follow me on Twitter.

Three more days of fanger-tapping. Pray for me.

*Lie.
**See what I mean when I say school is gay?

I’m purging over-quizzers and people who were mean to me in high school (i.e. anyone who didn’t think baby dykes with dreadlocks/hemp necklaces/Doc Martins deserved to sit at their lunch table; i.e. everyone) and replacing them with Internet strangers (i.e. you).

My avatar wants to hang with your avatar.

This is not a goddamn ironic mustache. I am not one of those bearded fucks who bitch about being called a “hipster” even though all bearded fucks besides my Uncle Charlie in Minnesota get secret boners in their acid washed at being referred to as “hipster” by other bearded fucks. No, this is not an ironic mustache, you asshole, it’s mold, so stop asking if I’ve heard the latest German Love seven inch. I listen to Cold Play. Unlike you, I’ve NEVER been cool. I’ve NEVER had any friends. Ashton fucking Kutcher won’t let me follow his Twitter. The only numbers in my Nokia are my mom and the suicide hotline. And the Christmas sweater? Also not ironic. It’s the only thing that fits after pizza and Buffy night when I forget to take Lactaid and my crisper blows up like an Ethiopian belly. Goddamn, being fat makes me depressed. And not in a Donny Darko way. In a Alzheimer’s unit way.

Do you understand what it’s like to be alone, you iPhone fuck? You curled your bangs in high school and let your polo-wearing boyfriend stick his bio-ween in your ass because you wanted to “wait til marriage.” I bet you played soccer. And after the poofy bangs and belly tees filtered down to band geeks and white trash, you bought a $150 bong with your graduation money from Poppy and Nonny and started introducing yourself by saying, “Heyyy. I’m Indigo. I’ve seen Panic 563 times.” Now that sarongs are only for Indians and white dudes with un-ironic dreadlocks, you shop at Urban Outfitters despite knowing that the moneyed fuck who runs that shit sucked Bush Jr’s dunce cap on the ninth hole at Pebble Beach. How can you even fit your testes in that denim testes-pouch, you skinny jeans fuck?

Now you want to know why Angry Fridge is so angry, huh? Do you see my stature, leggy fuck? There’s nothing funny about being under-developed. The last time a girl touched me was at the Halloween party five years ago when that sexy kitten thought I might have a few wine coolers left. And, oh, did she touch me. She had her head in so deep I thought she’d either fallen in love or died, but the next thing I knew there was vomit all over me and a Ninja Turtle and Father Time carried her to the couch and completely fucking ignored me and my vomit hat.

And let’s not even mention the time you brought home the freshman with the fake i.d and the fishnets. Not only did I hear you junk-bumping six inches from me, I had to listen to your fucking pillow talk about growing up poor when I know damn well you’re dad’s on the board at the Yacht Club and your mom says things like “I need a tall non-fat latte.” Cry me a salt flat you fucking liar. At least the nanny loved you.

And now you’re going to judge me??? You’re going to tell me I don’t need this vial of Xanax? That all I need is some omega-3s, a bong hit, and a little strange? Well, fuck you, happy guy. DO YOU SEE THE CIGARETTES ON MY DOOR??? I AM SLOWLY KILLING MYSELF!!!

Just throw that thing in the corner over my head. No, it is not a fucking Olson twin Keffiyah. It’s a fucking dirty blanket so you’ll stop staring at my mold.

@krherzog

I hope Samantha Ronson follows me soon.

I know that not all of you are family, but from the number of people who stumble upon this blog by Googling “dyke drama,” “dickthroat,” and/or “Lindsay Lohan,” a whole lot of you are at least distant cousins. The following is meant for the sinners among us.

———-

Dear Gays and Gayelles,

As some of you know, I am an ambitious and dedicated graduate student. Meaning, I have a project due in a week that I haven’t started yet because I’ve been too busy mourning the break-up of our model duo, Lindsay and Sam. However, it’s Spring and life starts anew, so I have decided to pull myself together and get this shit done. And I need your help.

Basically, I’m doing a project of the disclosure of queer identity on Facebook and I’m passing this here scientastic survey around to get some info. Just skip the next “What Peanut Butter Are You?” quiz and contribute to the repository of homo sapien/homosexual wisdom. You dig? Great.

Yes, please.

——

Thanks, peeps. Feel free to pass this on. Oh, and if you’re not queer, sorry for the mistake. It must be your haircut.

Despite my intricate knowledge of the heterosexual lifestyle gained from hours watching the Real World, I generally consider boy/girl drama more annoying than compelling, kind of like Car Talk. It’s okay as white noise, but not really something that dilates my peepers. Sometimes boy/girl stories even make me doze off as though I’m in my safely re-upholstered favorite chair with my bare tootsies on the heating grate reading Infinite Jest—a book I loving referencing but the mere heft of which makes me feel like I deserve a nap—but really I’m listening to my friends talk about how dudes have no feelings. That shit’s got nothing on dyke drama. Proof? Listen to three or more gayelles brunch it up on Sunday morning, AKA compare notes.

And then I met Amy D.

Amy D. is seemingly one of my more adult friends. She owns a house, has two masters degrees, works during daylight, teaches yoga, and eats whole grains. All of these things contribute to the illusion of grown-up-ed-ness.

Amy—who, by the way, gave me permission to write this because she is moving to an unnamed East Asian country that may or may not rhyme with “Bambodia” in two days—is not strictly hetero, but, rather, a dirty bi-sexual. Amy’s dyke drama, however, is pretty much non-existent. She’s a good, old fashioned, domestic gayelle. But before her taco truck days, Amy had some serious shit under her mantle. Shit that makes my business look like microwave oatmeal, and I do drama like Chuck Bass does date rape. The following Amy D. story had my mouth open like Britney’s legs around a venti Frappucino….

Amy D. is an interesting mix of smart and Southern. Girl’s got a good head but she’s seriously into football. For instance, she sent me the email below last fall:

i plan to start drinkin today at 3:30. today is the special special day of the Iron Bowl, when the undefeated Crimson Tide (my boyz) go head to head in the annual grudge match with the lame-ass Auburn Tigers.
i will sit my ass on the barstool at 3:30 and not come out until Alabama has claimed supreme victory.
ROLL fuckin TIDE~

And, because no one else west of the tracks gives a fuck about the most homoerotic of homoerotic games, Amy has to venture out of Carrboro to catch a Roll fuckin Tide game. On one such afternoon several years ago, Amy D. was at some douche-bar when she made the acquaintance of a fellow Roll fuckin Tide fan. He was buying, she was drinking. This combination has only two possible outcomes: vomming in the bathroom or fucking through it.

In Amy’s case, celebrating the victory of the Roll fuckin Tide did not end in expelling the contents of her digestive tract in the bathroom sink and flooding the lady’s room at Spanky’s. No, Amy D.’s night ended in bed with Attractive Near-Stranger. After the spins and subsequent man/woman nonsense had concluded, the fornicators started to get to know each other. ANS told Amy a little bit about his life. He’s married, he says, but he and his wife have an understanding. It’s a little d-bagish, sure, but an understanding’s an understanding, right? The human animal is as slap happy as our distant cousins the bonnobos. That part’s fine.

ANS then tells Amy he was adopted. His bio mom was really young when she got preggo and he was adopted by a kindly family in California.

Many years after the baby-swap, when ANS was a consenting adult, he was seduced by an older women in Santa Barbara. She was a cougar, he was a pup, and they did the man/woman thing for three years. And then one day the cougar reveals to lil pup that she didn’t randomly approach him in that bar three years ago after all; she sought him out, even moved from TX to CA specifically to find him. Why? Because she was his MOTHER.

At this point in the story, friends and fags, let us pause a moment to let your esophagus un-seize and your brain settle back into its bone helmet.

One.
Two.
Three.

Ready?

Amy, being sane, does not continue a relationship with the King of Pillow Talk. He calls, but Amy knows the answer to crazy is silence.

Months go by. Momma’s Boy stops calling. Amy D. thinks she has escaped a potentially very creepy situation with little worse than a headache and overall feelings of ick. It’s a small town, yes, but it’s easy not to cross paths with people if you dye your hair blond and get some Olson glasses and a spray tan.

Then one day, Amy is eating falafel with her ex-bf outside Med Deli when a woman approaches her.

“Amy,” she says. “Amy D.?”

“Yes,” Amy responds, wondering if the women is her yoga class or maybe one of the nursing students who peeped her junk a couple years ago when she volunteered her reproductive system for higher education and 50 bones an hour.

“Amy D. who fucked my husband?”

Assuming that at some point in your rich life you have been either cheater, cheatee, or cheetah, you can imagine Amy’s throat-in-the-soles feeling. A pissed-off wife approaching you on the street is like a momma bear/baby bear/you sando. Scary shit, ya’ll.

Turns out that Mr. and Mrs. Attractive Near-Strange didn’t actually have an agreement, and, in fact, ANS Sr., had recently told his unsuspecting wife the 13 names of the 13 women he had opened their relationship and his asshole to. Female ANS then tracked every one of those other women down for a little lady dramz.

Amy apologized profusely, told the women she knew it was wrong, that she thought they were a swinging happy couple, had she known it never would have happened, etc. The ladies hugged it out and eventually both man and woman moved, he to Mexico, she to the Midwest.

And Amy? Amy learned not to trust anyone who fucked his mother.

True story, ya’ll.

Wow.

Dear Pabst Blue Ribbon,

We’ve been together a long time, you and I. It’s been almost seven years since that first date but I remember it like it was lunch this afternoon—standing in a patch of sunlight in cut-offs and flip-flops, feeling so good, so right, and wondering why we’d never met before.

We’ve had some crazy times. Remember when we spent three hours in the ER last summer after falling off our bike on the way back from a birthday party? And how we gave the ambulance driver our ex’s name and address instead of our own and later called the nurse a cunt before stumbling out of the bright lights and into the heavy night air? And how we got lost on our way home in that vast and empty city they call a medical complex. We tried to hitch-hike back to town but no one would pick us up, maybe because it was three a.m. and there were leaves in our hair and our pants were ripped and we were wearing a neck brace. We cuddled on the sidewalk that night, sleeping soundly until a kindly bus driver picked us up drove us to our front door.

And remember a few months later when was climbed a tree and jumped over a barbed-wire fence and crossed a construction site the size of Ground Zero with a pretty girl to that most romantic of places: an eleven story crane? We climbed that crane, you and me and the pretty girl, ignoring the neurons firing in our brain, whispering, don’t do it, don’t do it, as cops circled the neighborhood below.

There have many nights as special as those, my friend: averted disaster, near arrest, decisions regretted. Was it a mistake to quit our job from the bathroom of a bar four hours before our shift started? No, no it was not. You’ve been always there for me, waiting patiently at five o’clock, in a way a job can never be. Chilled, that is, and in a can.

I stuck by you while everyone else cut carbs or switched to micro-brews or joined AA. I sat beside you on bar stools and listened, really listened, to you bitch about your inevitable dethroning. What would be the next beer of food-stamping hipsters around the country? Would it be Hamm’s, you worried, or maybe High Life? And when you ruined my chances with the graphic designer from Philly, the one who didn’t think it was a good idea to ride a shopping cart home, I didn’t mention that you haven’t won a blue ribbon since 1893. Friends don’t do that, no matter how annoyed we are that our last girlfriend left us because we make more money from bottle-deposits than from a paycheck.

The two of us have been through it all, can in hand.

We’ve only gotten closer with time. What started casually—on the weekends, maybe the occasional happy hour—has become a marriage of sorts. And, like all marriages, ours is not without its flaws. There was inauguration night, for instance, when you unintentionally tripped me on the way home from the bar. I know it wasn’t your fault—you were just fooling around, being silly—and I forgave you just as soon as I spit out my front tooth. So, yes, you’ve gotten me into a little trouble from time to time, but I know it’s not because you are devious, it’s because you love to have fun. There was Christmas morning, for example, when we woke up in our professor’s bed with her son knocking on the door to see what Santa brought. And there was that time we passed out in the neighbor’s yard and then told her that we were star-gazing and that she really didn’t need to call the cops but we would really appreciate bus fare. And years ago, there was that redheaded guy whose name we can’t remember but who taught us that men, even attractive men, can grow hair on their butts. That was a good lesson, wasn’t it? One that changed our life and sexual orientation forever.

The thing is, Pabst, we are growing apart. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. You no longer take up space in the fridge. And I can barely afford you anymore. It’s the recession. And my liver.

It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s that I’m afraid of you.

There. I said it. I know you didn’t mean to hurt me when you pushed me into the bushes after the  Michael Jackson dance party and when you woke me up in the middle of the night and made me stick my finger down my own esophagus—but it’s not funny anymore.

And it’s not just me—my friends are concerned. They think we’re spending too much time together. They say they miss the old me. The me who answered text messages that weren’t regarding happy hour. The me who could be trusted with keys, who didn’t need to be walked home, who paid her phone bill, who didn’t hit on their exes, the me who who didn’t call them crying in the middle of the night. In short, they miss the me who didn’t embarrass them. Sure, they’ll also miss that special category of stories called “You Won’t Believe What I Did Last Night,” but they won’t miss hearing those stories over and over. I’m sorry, but they don’t want me to take you to brunch anymore.

I’ve changed as well. I’ve been spending more time in our favorite chair with Netflix and hot tea. I’m been thinking about possibly getting a job someday. I bought running shoes. It’s not that I haven’t been thinking about you, because I have. But I need distance. We need a real break, not just like when we have a fever or when our parents visit.

I will never forget you, PBR. I will think of you every time I look at the boat tattoo on my left arm and the heart-shaped scar on my right shoulder. I will think of you every time I see the women we have loved and left. I will think of you at kickball in the Spring and at the pool in Summer and on Halloween night and Christmas morning and hot days and rainy days and snow days and every afternoon that the sun shines or that the sun doesn’t shine.

I’m not saying it’s forever. I might come crawling back in a month or a year or the next time it seems easier to be with you than to go running. But until then, please, stop calling and stop texting and stop dropping by just because you were in the neighborhood.

Yours always, but not right now.

In light of the recent developments in Iowa and Vermont—two hotboxes of leather, ribbed tank tops, syrup, and white people—we at the Federation for the Advancement of Gays and Gayelle (F.A.G.G.) are enlisting your help to end the debate over gay marriage.

It’s time for the faggotry to stand on their twinkle toes and refuse to be defeated!!! It’s time for the dykes to stamp their hiking boots and shout NO!!!

I know you got all teary at the People spread of Ellen and Portia cross-legged on velvet pillows surrounded by friends, family, and vegan fare, but if queer folks really thought about what marriage entails, we would run from the alter as fast as possible, fags piggy-backing Dykes on Bikes.

Here’s why:

Gays are cheaters. All of us. And while everyone knows fags have embraced this fundamental part of the gay DNA, the stereotype that dykes have U-Haul on speed-dial gives breeders the false impression that all we want is a girl who’ll refer to your dogs as your “kids”.

This is far from the truth. Yes, like all couples, we nest for the first part of new relationships—the part where we’re actually having sex. But then the novelty wears off and you realize your gay’s habit of pissing in the shower because it supposedly prevents athlete’s foot is not endearing, it’s fucking gross. At this point, your romance sags like Rick Warren’s tits, but you don’t move out or even talk about leaving because a) you’re a pussy and it’s easier to pretend that you don’t think her mom is ridiculous for calling her husband her “partner” just because her daughter’s queer, and b) where would you go? Potential housemates apparently aren’t into the Scorpio sun/Virgo rising combo, which you discovered after your last breakup and subsequent Craig’s List search. But when your g.f. eventually hears about that time in the bathroom with the girl from that band, say goodbye to the teddy bear you’ve had since you were three. Cozy is headed for the trash compactor.

When this happens, as it inevitably will, the dramz will commence. There is no drama like dyke drama. It doesn’t just effect the two or three or four people who are directly involved in the messy shit; it involves everyone. We immediately pick up the old tin can and spread the news far and wide. Shit is bi-coastal. Someone in Chicago spends a few hours tribading with the barista from down the street and Seattle knows it by happy hour. If it’s real bad, some Lohan/Ronson shit, we say things like, “Well, there’s always Austin,” and start packing. We change our names to something more gender-neutral and start the fuck over.

This cycle works for us—we cheat, we fight over the dog, we realize we don’t actually want the dog but we don’t want her to have the dog, we leave, we cheat, etc.—but it wouldn’t work if we could get married. Divorce is ugly and expensive and you have can’t just load the Subaru and move to Portland. You’re gay—you’re never going to change, no matter how long it’s been since you skinny-dipped with that very young but very cute baby d. Marriage will take all the fun out of taco-bumping. Isn’t this why we chose to be queer? So we could avoid legal entanglements like marriage?

The only reason breeders support marriage is because they want us to be more like them. They’re jelly that we will never get drafted and come out five years later with PTSD, a flat-top, and one less finger. Why the fuck would we want to be more like them?

Take, for instance, the stirred shit between one B. Palin and her ex-fiance Arctic White Trash. Did you see those knotted panties on Tyra? Talk about fierce. I can’t tell who’s more fucktardy, B. Palin or AWT. Shit makes Queer As Folk look like Bob Ross. You don’t want to get thrown in jail for a little cheek-spread, but you also don’t want to end up on Tyra’s stage.

We aren’t like them. We are special. We didn’t have friends in high school, so when we finally get to San Francisco, we bond like morning-after lube on the inside of your thighs. We talk about being gay ALL THE TIME. We have our own bars because straights get sick of talking about gaycism and don’t want to come near us, whereas we will never tire topics like homosexual undertones on The View or, another favorite,The L Word: Helena vs. Bette: Who Would Top? They only want us to get married so we stop talking about ourselves.

Do not give in, Family. We can defeat this if we throw our softball caps and our tiaras in the ring and FIGHT.

Sincerely,

President and Founder of F.A.G.G.
(Donations accepted via PayPal. Email kherzog@gmail.com for details.)