TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

I started thinking about promiscuity after seeing a New Yorker profile of Anna Faris, who stars in the new comedy What’s Your Number? While I haven’t seen the film, I did watch the trailer and so this, along with skimming the review, makes me feel like I can confidentially speak as to the movie’s content, which is about a young woman who reads in Marie Clare that any lady who has slept with over twenty guys is a used up bag and will never find a man to marry her. The heroine, having slept with exactly twenty men, revisits ex-boyfriends in the hopes that she missed the right one the first time around, will recognize him with a second glance, and won’t have to attend a friend’s upcoming wedding without a date. The film-makers had a hard time choosing a number that was high enough to seem a plausible barrier to marriage yet not so high that women in the audience wouldn’t be able to relate to the story, and twenty it was. Their chosen figure doesn’t seem an especially large number of sexual partners to me, but I looked to the Kinsey Institute for statistics and it appears the average American heterosexual female has only four partners in her lifetime. Four. This floored me. I’m a lesbian, and yet I’ve had sex with more then four men. Even more shocking was the Kinsey Institutes’s data on heterosexual men, who apparently have an average of only seven sexual partners in their lifetimes, a number I surpassed approximately five minutes after coming out. (I’m certainly not alone in finding these numbers surprisingly low. When I ask a straight friend to guess the number of lovers heterosexual women typically have, she said, “Oh God. This is going to make me feel like a slag. Twelve?”)

The exact number of people I’ve slept with debatable. A couple of summers ago, some friends I tallied our numbers on an old flier that was folded up in someone’s purse, writing down names or initials or occasionally descriptions of former lays if details were fuzzy. Drummer. Green bike. The girl with the giant tattoo of Tori Amos as a fairy. As the summer went on, we added names and tally marks until the flier was covered. That was an especially busy time for me. It was hot and I drank a lot and threesomes really shoot your numbers up. The list in long gone–as are the girls who were with me as we wrote it, moved on to new cities or even monogamy and marriage–and it’s even harder now for me to remember the names and faces of the people I’ve slept with than it was then.

The exact number of sexual partners I’ve had varies because I change my definition of sex according to if I regret an encounter or not. One night stand with someone who looked remarkably similar to Pat Buchanan next morning? Well, your underwear never made it below the knees so you can take that one of the list. Drunken hookup with girl who who kept repeating, “Slap my vagine! Slap it!”? It only lasted for three minutes until you ran to the bathroom to vomit the tequila that got you in the situation in the first place. Subtract that one too. This is a benefit of lesbianism. While it’s difficult to argue that heterosexual intercourse is anything but, women-who-sleep-with-women really do have different definitions of what exactly constitutes sex. For some dykes, it’s not real until the toys come out from the box underneath the bed. For others, a hand outside panties counts, and for others, the only sex is oral sex. There is so little universal agreement that you occasionally find that someone you’ve slept doesn’t consider what you did sex. Take that one off the list too.

For the majority of my life as a sexually active person, I was happily promiscuous. If people wanted to sleep with me, I thought, I must have at least some appeal. I might be a shitty cook and have feet so small that I buy shoes a size too large so it doesn’t look like I’m about to tip over, but at least I could get laid. I didn’t pursue sex because I’m a hyper-sexual or even sexy person; it was always less about sex itself and more about getting a rare sense of accomplishment. My work lay unfinished on my desk, my laundry made it to the hamper but not the washing machine, my bills were always delinquent and I finished tasks so infrequently that my to-do-lists were filled with entries like, “wake up,” and “brush teeth,” just so I’d have something to cross off. But when I was slutting around, I would decide to get laid and then do it. Chasing sex was an excellent distraction from all the other things I wasn’t doing, and so at least after meeting someone at a bar and going back to her place or mine, I felt like I’d followed through with at least one thing.

I don’t feel this away anymore. The older I get, the more I employ my creative subtraction of lovers. While I’m not ashamed of my past, I wish I could take back roughly seventy percent of the people I’d slept with because most of it wasn’t just been meaningless, it also wasn’t that good. Much of the sex I’ve had has been orchestrated by ingesting large amounts of alcohol, and even if women don’t become impotent with too much booze, we get whiskey dick of the mind–an inability to concentrate on what’s happening, much less enjoy it. Drunken sex is rarely worth the hangover, and I no longer consider getting laid anything but a sign that I need to take my to-do lists more seriously.

Thankfully, even if I’m not proud of the notches on my bedpost, the community I’m in is largely non-judgemental about these things. There have been a couple of exceptions to this, when I’ve learned that my reputation as a slut has hurt my chances of being a slut, but in general, my people don’t judge. Despite the joke about lesbians bringing UHauls to the second date, queers get around. This is especially true of young urban homos, who seem to forgo monogamy in part because it’s the thing to do. For these folks, being in a relationship isn’t hip or progressive or queer, but being in lots of relationships–and sleeping with lots of people–is. Personally, the idea of a truly open relationship–where your girlfriend might have other girlfriends–is unappealing. Casual sex with multiple people is fine, but when you add the word relationship, there are state-of-the-union discussions to be had, which are about as interesting as the NPR fpledge drive when you can’t get any other stations. The one time I was in an open relationship–a last ditch effort to save something unsalvagable–we spent way more time talking about our feelings than actually sleeping with other people. Not worth it.

The actual girlfriend/girlfriend relationships I’ve had–the kind where you hold hands not just as you leave a bar together, but also during the day when you’re not even drunk–started out with sex. We met, we hooked up, and only later did we decide to get breakfast or watch movies or spend nights in bed not having sex at all, just spooning and sleeping. This is hardly rare. Hooking up the first step in contemporary courtships. I’ve never been friends or even acquaintances with any of my exes before we slept together. Perhaps this is why those relationships failed–because we were physically intimate before we even knew each other’s middle names or favorite foods beside pizza. And when those girlfriend/girlfriend relationships failed, I was always so very sad that I will do anything to avoid breakups. I have stuck with relationships far past their natural expiration dates just because I can’t the post-breakup depression, and so when I’m in a relationship, I’ll say with my girlfriend no matter what, even if it means weekly dinner with her great aunt who eats only soup and takes her teeth out before she slurps it down. The simple way to avoid this is to be single. Even a not-great relationship is better than a not-terrible breakup, and so I’d rather forgo relationships entirely than get sad for days days because I saw my ex holding hands with someone whose feet are a normal size. Or, at least, that’s how I used to feel.

My avoidance of relationships is changing. I’m still terrified of breakups, but one-nights stands have lost their appeal. Like Anna Faris, I’m approaching thirty and going to other peoples’ weddings and watching my friends buy houses and start gardens and raise puppies with their partners. Unlike Anna Faris, I’m not afraid that my past as a slut will mean a future alone, but I am tired of getting drunk just to get laid, of exchanging phones numbers that I’ll never call, of repeating the same mistakes with different people. I don’t know if Anna Faris gets what she wants in the end, but I suspect that she finds someone to love, not just because it’s a movie, but because we all fall in love in the end. We’re human and we need each other and so we try out different people. We find new mates or go back to old ones until that final relationship comes along, until we find the person we will grow old and ugly with despite our shitty cooking and our tiny feet and a number we sometimes regret.

I grew up about five hours from here, in a town in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s not so much a town really as there’s a gas station and a Mexican restaurant with a constantly rotating name and ownership but not much else beyond its 3,500 residents. It’s beautiful and it’s quiet. Even though winters in the mountains see far more snow than we do here in the Peidmont, people are equally unable to deal with it there. The closest grocery store—which only started selling alcohol a few years ago because it’s across the street from the high school and the management thought it was morally wrong to sell booze in such close proximity to the fine young minds of Jackson County, North Carolina—sells out of eggs and bread and American cheese and plastic bottles of Diet Coke. Like here, the roads don’t get plowed because there aren’t any plows. And the power goes out. This happened often enough when I was a kid that our parents bought one of those big kerosene heaters that smell like brain damage and melt your new flannel pajamas if you get too close when trying to warm your butt.

The event precipitating this purchase was the Blizzard of ’93, also known as the Storm of the Century or the White Hurricane. This storm was huge, actually huge, and not just because I was kind of short for my age and could jump into snowdrifts and disappear. It stretched from Central America to Canada, and in places where it’s more likely for cocaine to fall from the sky than snow, people wrapped their hands in newspaper and learned to shape snowballs. The Florida Panhandle got four inches, Birmingham, Alabama got twelve, and Cullowhee, North Carolina got four-and-half feet. It was as white as the time when I worked at a bakery and my boss dumped a bag of flour on my head after I forgot to put sugar in a dozen batches of muffins. School was closed for so long that we forgot how to multiply and we had to start from the beginning, singing the alphabet and counting on our fingers. The whole town lost power. A neighbor’s house had a wood-burning stove, so my family stayed there. It was their family of four, the five of us, and our various pets, including a couple of dogs and my brother’s boa constrictor Sam, who stayed under the heater in a pillow case with the neck knotted shut, unbeknown to our hosts.

All we did was sled. We lived on a hill about a half-mile long. It’s steep—hard to ride your bike up, a pain to walk up when you’re not up to your knees in snow, and really, really fun to sled down. Because the roads were covered, we didn’t have compete with cars. We started from the top, often two or three kids on each plastic sled that soon cracked from abuse, and sped down, hitting ramps carefully manufactured out of ply wood by my brother and his friends–flying for a brief second, hitting the snow with a jarring thump, and then walking twenty minutes up the hill and doing it again. From the thinking-back years of adulthood, it was idyllic: drinking hot chocolate made on a camp stove, sleeping on the floor with all the blankets we could find and then towels thrown on top of them, sighing every time the sun came out, not ready for those inches to melt and for life to go back to what it was.

During the Blizzard of ’93, our six-month-old puppy Tsali disappeared. It was common for dogs in the neighborhood to wander off for a while. It was a sort of free-range zone for neighborhood pets. We didn’t take our dogs for walks because we didn’t have to. We just let them outside and expected they’d come home when they got hungry. We never owned leashes and never worried about the dogs getting lost. Tsali, however, did get lost during the blizzard. She was the same color as the snow, white like only puppies can be. She just disappeared. Her collar was where we left it, hanging off a closet doorknob. We hiked all over the neighborhood, calling her name even though she didn’t even know it yet. We saw her last when the snow started and didn’t think we ever would again. It was a traumatic glitch in our week of powder. About a week later, when the snow was turning dirty and the fun was wearing off, Tsali wandered into the yard. We found out later that another family had taken her in in storm and, when it was over, she simply walked home.

Snowstorms aren’t as fun when you’re grown. As comfortable as it is to hibernate every once in while, to really be at home, it reminds you of what it is to be young and also that you aren’t young. I hear the shouts of my neighbors’ children and the occasional adult reliving the easy joy of speeding down hills and I feel guilty for not joining, for sitting on my couch when I could be breathing hard with laughter. There are so many reasons to stay inside—you’ve got the day off so you might as well clean out those closets, and you’ve always wanted to make bread and there’s plenty of flour in the pantry so you should do that instead of blowing on your hands and getting snow in the cuffs of your pants. And there’s books to read and essays to write and endless episodes of Law & Order to catch up on. Besides, you don’t have the clothes for sledding and it’s too cold and you’re just so cozy. So you stay inside but still feel a little guilty for enjoying the quiet from the heated interior of home.

My parents are snowed in right now but their power is on, unlike most of the neighborhood. Their neighbor is staying at their house tonight, the same neighbor whose house we stayed at seventeen years ago. Things are different now, of course. None of the kids live at home. We’re dealing with power outages and cabin fever on our own or with new families and friends. Tsali is gone, and so is Sam, and, sadly, terribly, so is Malcolm, the father and husband of that family we stayed with seventeen years ago. And this, when the world is still but for snowball fights and sledding children, is what makes me miss the Blizzard of ’93. Not just because we were all there, but because the idea that someday we would not all be there hadn’t yet penetrated our little minds. Our world was snow and sledding and finding puppies and, we thought, it would it always be.

What follows is a review of Julie Powell’s new book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession. Disclosure: what I have is the advance copy, so I’m actually reviewing a late draft of the book. Also, I have yet to and probably won’t finish it, so I’m actually reading a late draft of I book I’ve only skimmed.
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Julie Powell, author of Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, is really, really lucky. She started a blog, got a book deal, the resulting book was made into a (pretty good) movie, she met Meryl Streep, knows the answer to everyone’s favorite fantasy question (Who would play me in the movie of my life?) and got a Wikipeida entry. And why? Because the timing was right. Julie Powell started blogging before even technophobic grandparents with mild Alzheimers had a Blogspot. Her blog isn’t even that interesting. Let me paraphrase a recent post: “It’s New Year’s! I should lose ten pounds.” Compare this to my New Year’s post: “It’s New Year’s! I’m going to see if I can get to my low weight of six pounds, eight ounces by eating Capt’n Crunch until the insides of my cheeks are so torn up that the only food that doesn’t cause blood to pool in my mouth is distilled water. Also, work out more.” Who would you rather go to a strip club with? Someone whose dream is a dinner date with Julia Child or someone whose dream is a temp job as a census-taker? Bad example. Point is, her new book, Cleaving: A Story of Meat, Marriage, and Obsession, is less fun than accidentally swallowing beer with a cigarette butt at the bottom.

The fundamental problem with Cleaving is that, after the success of Julie and Julia, Little, Brown, & Co. tried to capitalize on Powell’s new found literary and cinematic fame too early. Not a year went by since the movie’s premier when Powell’s sophomore attempt hit the discount bin. What happened in that time? Well, a lot. Namely, Powell got rich and famous, which is a story we all want to read and hopefully emulate. But did Powell chose to write From Minimum Wage to Meryl Streep: The Julie Powell Story? No. She chose to write about her unpaid internship at a butcher shop.

The premise: Julie Powell throws away her marriage for a lover named D. (This itself annoyed me. Why not give the adulterer a better pseudonym? At least call him Dick or something.) Her husband of ten years—who not only put up with her “year of cooking dangerously” when he just wanted some Kung Pao Chicken and a back rub, but was also portrayed as somewhat of a wuss in the movie—finds out, cries a lot, and is generally treated like a bad ant infestation by his famous wife. They stay together, but Powell moves to upstate New York to apprentice as a butcher for six months, all the while ignoring her husband’s efforts towards reconciliation because she’s waiting for a text from her former lover even after he’s moved on. And while I know what it’s like to obsess over someone else to the point of callous unconcern for the person you’ve made a life with, Powell almost seems proud of her adultery. I don’t care if you think that your fuck puppet is the love or your life, cheating isn’t nice. Just cut the fucker lose before you buy a time-share with the new guy.

Speaking of Julie Powell and her fuck puppet, reading about the author’s trysts was as comfortable as introducing your parents to your former professor/current lover. Every time Powell laid down some detail about her affair, I pictured Amy Adams, who played Powell in Julie & Julia and is cute but not sexy and also has a gummy smile, doing the illicit. Besides, reading about sex generally makes me uncomfortable. Although Mazog recently said this blog is about “raunchy gay sex,” I’m actually part Mennonite and part vanilla ice cream and thinking about Amy Adams ‘opening up like a grinning harlot flower,’ when D slaps her across the face makes me feel like I did five minutes ago when I saw my landlord manscaping through the window. I admit that after Google Imaging Julie Powell and seeing that she looks human as opposed to preternaturally sexless and gummy, my discomfort lessened a bit, but the sex scenes still made me squirmy.

And so, why I will not finish Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, in bullets:

• Terrible pop culture references. Various epigraphs include quotes from a Decemberists’ song, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and from Veronica Mars, a show beloved by teens throughout the middle states. Perhaps it’s just a matter of taste as I’d rather have “Birthday Sex” stuck in my head for all of Spring 2010 than listen to a single Decemberists’ song, but why not use something that resonates with more than those still ruing the death of Buffy, a population composed solely of gay boys born between 1980 and 1985? While this may seem small, it speaks to a larger problem: this book is built with an expiration date. As much as I’d like to believe that the immediacy of blogs easily transitions to the printed page, it just doesn’t. Will a book that refers to Anya the Vengeance Demon, Little Feat, texting, and BlackBerries be anything but dated in 2011, when, instead of drunk dialing, we drunk time-travel? Yes, plenty of books are meant to be read right now (See: Sarah Palin’s American Rogue and Twitter for Dummies), but Cleaving was meant to last and it won’t.

• Product placement. I counted seventy-four references to Powell’s beloved BlackBerry, which is much like Season Two of Gossip Girl, in which even the cocktails are made with Vitamin Water. Even worse, I doubt BlackBerry ponied up any cash for this endorsement, which is free advertising I just can’t respect with the exception of the argyle sweater vest with a prominent Tommy Hilfiger patch that I’m wearing right now.

• It’s hard to read. I don’t mean Infinite Jest hard-to-read, I mean IKEA manual hard-to-read. Example: after reading a 476 word passage on Frenching rib ends, I know nothing about Frenching ribs or even what Frenching ribs is, but, even if I understood this passage, it seems like it’s only there to fulfill Powell’s minimum page requirement. I get that cutting meat is intense and dirty and maybe even sensual, but if I wanted to French a rib, I would Google that shit. Cleaving isn’t just full of “practical” information like this, it’s also full of recipes. Again, filler. No one reads memoirs for recipes. No one. Stop it. You’re lying. You read cookbooks.

• Terrible metaphors, especially for a book that is basically a 303-page-long metaphor (Butchering as catharsis? Redemption? Sex?). In the aforementioned 476 word paragraph, Powell writes, “The crown is about the same circumference a garbage can lid, the white rib bones splayed atop it, the eyes of the chops plumped out below like a muffin top over too-tight jeans, if muffin tops were to be considered lusciously attractive.” I mostly read this book in bed, making mental notes because the last time I tried to write in bed, I woke up with blue ink in my hair. Because of this, every time I found I passage that bothered me, I folded the page over, hoping I’d be able to identify the offending part the next morning. In this passage, it was obvious. Muffin top? Please.

• Julie Powell is dirty, and I’m not just talking about sex. Powell doesn’t shower after a shift up to her elbows in edible carcass. I’ve previously discussed my own tendency to be obsessive about cleanliness, but every time she mentions falling asleep splattered with the blood and juice and bits of bone, I can’t think of anything until I come across the sentence, “And then I took a shower.” It’s distracting.

• When flipping through the final chapters of the book, I came across a few emails written between Powell and D. The final one was signed with an actual name!!! I won’t spoil it for you, but remember the penultimate scene in the Sex And The City series, when SJP is walking down the street and her phone rings and it is finally revealed that Big’s name is actually John? That worked in SATC because viewers had wondered what the man’s given name was for about a decade. But here? No one cares about D and no one cares about his name and it’s a stupid way to end a book. Maybe they took it out in the final draft. Hope so.

I will, however, admit that Cleaving wasn’t a total waste of time, although when your plan for the day involves taking an online aptitude test and cleaning the litter box, very little can be considered a waste of time. But I did learn a few important things from the text….

• Left-handed presidents include Obama, Clinton, Bush the Elder, Reagan, Ford, Truman, Hoover, and Garfield (159).

• Pig skulls are so thick that when shot in the head, the bullet merely stuns the unhappy animal and it can’t actually be rendered into breakfast until after you’ve shoved a pick into its coratid artery (87).

• Various recipes, including Valentine’s Day Liver for Two, Juan’s Mother’s Blood Sausage, A Nice, Simple Way to Make Short Ribs, Taking A Boning Knife To Your Spouse, and Trading Self-Worth for a Little Hotel Strange.

It’s not just facts and recipes, however, that I learned from Julie Powell. She also makes me feel better about myself. Why?

• Since I have recently taken real and positive steps to curb my own excessive drinking, I’ve taken up judging other peoples’ substance problems. And you, Julie Powell, are a sloppy drunk (i.e. “Meathead Holiday,” AKA the chapter about Christmas. Don’t barf in front of your parents. It’s tacky.).

• I have never spent fifteen semi-naked minutes against a hotel wall with a stranger who called me a “pretty little whore.”

• Given the accolades Powell received after J&J, I’d write a riveting memoir about what it’s like to go from sleeping on my mom’s couch to sleeping in your mom’s bed. Give the people what they want.

Let’s skip to the end. Actually, let’s not. I’m not going to finish Cleaving now, but I’ll pick it up again the next time I’m feeling jealous of anyone who has been able to make an actual living doing the things they want to do: those who publish in books and magazines, those who leave the butcher shop covered in blood but still smiling, those who would give it away even if they weren’t getting paid. It’ll remind me that there’s only so much work you can do: sometimes it’s just luck and timing that gets you the book deal and the movie and the second home and the frequent flier miles. I’m jealous of Julie Powell, yes, but I don’t want to be Julie Powell.

I wrote the following for the second in what I hope will be an on-going event here in Chapel Hill—a night of music provided by local and traveling bands and words provided solely by me at this point, but maybe someone else will read their shit in the future. That’d be cool. The theme was a sort of end of year/holiday thing and the first installment can be found here. Also, you may recognize some passages from previous blog posts, but time was short and I’m an avid recycler.

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I’ve never liked the holidays. I’m allergic to pine trees. Flashing red and green lights give me seizures. Carolers embarrass me. I’m not into Jesus either. Christmas in my childhood home was entirely secular. Our one nod to the holiday’s roots was a small manger my father had had since he was a boy, with figures of gnomes in the place of celestial beings. Like the biblical Mary, ours was sexless, with a beard hanging to her knees and a staff in one hand. The one year my family sent out greeting cards was after a nearby amusement park—a place called Ghost Town with a ski lift that you rode in a loop up and down a scrubby hill, and a place to pan for gold, and giant figurines of cowboys and Indians and mythological beings—shut down. Left with no one to care for them, the twenty-foot-tall statues gradually fell over: a cartoonish Cherokee warrior’s face broken in beside a cowboy with one arm resting a few yards from the rest of this body. My father gathered my brother, sister, and I in late November and took photos while we posed in front of Santa fallen on his back, unsmiling, our arms crossed. Instead of updates about our various scholastic and athletic achievements, the mass Christmas card we sent to extended family and friends said only, “Santa is Dead.”

Indeed, Santa was dead. I was nine years old when I found out the sleigh-driver doesn’t exist. I don’t know why my father chose the moment he did to drop the first real disillusionment bomb in his twin daughters’ lives, but he told Betsy and I on a summer day so hot and far removed from Christmas that the words coming out of his mouth hurt not just for the truth but for the shock. There’s no Santa!, our he yelled as we walked in the door after an afternoon at the pool. The tears were immediate and drenching, but our dad softened the blow with the caveat, And there’s no Jesus! which we already knew. A guy born in a barn to a woman so ashamed of her own sexuality that she told her husband she got knocked up by a dude with a heavenly zip code? Right. Her baby daddy was part human and part deity but obviously an above-average lover if he impregnated her from the moon. And Jesus’s step daddy was part fag if he was believed that Mary didn’t have a thing with the papyrus man. Not exactly plausible. But Santa? Now that was a shock. Maybe the death of Santa was the moment that holidays became a time to dread. Twenty years after finding out that Santa is no more real than Jesus, I have become a conscientious objector. When asked what my plans are for Christmas, I say that I don’t participate, which makes people uncomfortable, afraid they’ve offended me by assuming that I care about Jesus’s birthday, but I really just don’t like to shop.

A few years earlier, when Santa was as real as the boogieman or President Reagan or my second grade teacher, my siblings and I made a cinematic reenactment of the traditional Christmas story as a present for our mother. Our dad filmed us with an early ’80s camcorder so heavy that you had to rest it on your shoulder, and we recruited kids in the neighborhood to act as the extras—wisemen and shepherds and a couple of sheep on all fours with towels over their backs. My brother played Joesph, my sister played Mary, and I played the inn keeper whose prophet margin was more important than providing a sterile environment for the virgin birth. None of the neighbors would lend their babies for the starring role, so our six-month-old puppy played Jesus. But because puppies would rather play-tug-of-war then be swaddled in burlap, the video consisted of ten kids running through our house trying to grab the holy ghost and culminated in innocent voices singing Silent Night right before Jesus shit under the kitchen table. My mom was thrilled with the video, both because she encouraged any creativity displayed by her children and she knew it would piss off her Catholic mother-in-law, who told us that we would spend eternity in a Hell where your ice cream melted just before your first taste unless we convinced our parents to have us baptized.

Christmas is the most boring day of the year when you’re grown. If you’re with family, you exchange civilized gifts, everyone taking turns and thanking each other. You say how perfect your new set of knives is, how thoughtful it was for your sister to notice that your knives were dull the last time she was at you house and how nice is was of her to buy you new ones even though your knives are dull because you don’t cook. And you really do appreciate the knives, but not as much as you would have appreciated a bag of weed and a vibrator. If you are alone on Christmas, if you can’t get off work or if you don’t want to get off work or plane tickets to your parents’ house back in Omaha are too expensive and you have no girlfriend or boyfriend and it’s not like your three a.m. fuck buddy is going to take you home to meet the family, Christmas is as fun as using a bathroom after someone has emptied his colostomy bag into the toilet. The only gifts to open are envelopes and the only surprise within them is the amount your grandmother sent, which is never quite quite enough for a bag of weed or a vibrator. Everything is closed. You smoke the last of your pot because even your dealer is out of town, eating ham with the parents who think he works in IT. You order Chinese takeout wonder if this is what Christmas is like for Jews.

And then it’s New Years and you reflect on another year gone. I woke up early this morning and was lying in bed listening to my girlfriend sleep, which is not something I generally do because she is the type of person who wakes up and goes to work in the morning and I am the type of person who dreams that Trader Joe’s sells pound bags of an organic cocaine with really low addictive properties for the price of brown rice and then wake up so happy and then gets so sad a second later when realizing that it was just a dream and there’s no such thing as cheap cocaine. But this morning she was sleeping beside me and her dog was sleeping by our feet and I started going back over 2009 in my head and feeling very proud of myself for this year and for waking up early while my girlfriend and her dog slept and NPR played white noise on the radio. I felt so wholesome. Granted, my thighs might have been a little sticky from sticky gay sex, but it was sober gay sex, and sober gay sex is a healthy thing and not at all painful like other healthy things; for example, getting your pap smeared.

Reflecting on the past twelve months this morning, I think about how exceptionally good I’ve been. See, until recently discovering the human joy in waking up without a brain mushy and wet and trembling with alcohol and shame, I have a history of bad behavior. In recent years, the bad things that I’ve done are heavily dependent on how close my relationship with alcohol is at the time. The better friends booze and I are, the more my conscience and reputation recede. But now look at me, I thought this morning. Look at the girl sleeping beside me, a snoring furnace with dimples and wooly socks and a really great ass. I’m sleeping beside a girl I talk to not just at night when I’m trying to persuade her out of her clothes and into my bed, but also during the day when I eat solid food and go for walks and make plans to do things like fly kites and buy islands and winter in the Maldives. It’s so different from a year ago, when I woke up Christmas morning when my professor’s eight-year-old son walked into her bedroom while we were both passed out naked after celebrating the birth of the baby Jesus with bottom shelf bourbon. The kid wanted his presents but instead learned about a new side of his mother’s life: the gay side. His mom yelled at him to get the fuck out and I felt like I killed Santa. And look at me now. What a year. What a very calm, very easy year.

And I keep glowing in this as I listen to my girlfriend’s breath move in and out. After years of bad decisions and misbehavior and doing things that may or may not have included infidelity, academic dishonestly, petty theft, and once giving my ex girlfriend’s name, address, and social security number as my own after ending up in the ER after a drunken bicycle accident, I am ending one decade and starting a new one with a day-time girlfriend and her puppy. I am so proud of myself for 2009. I have been so good. And then I start cataloging the events of the past year and realize that it hasn’t exactly been 365 days of sunflowers and pony rides and it’s maybe only been in the past few months that I’ve been acting more like an adult and less like someone with a drug problem in place of a conscience.

Example: Inauguration Day. This was a big one for all of us. You probably remember it as the day snow dropped on your hometown and your boss said you might as well take the morning off and watch the inauguration since the busses weren’t running. You cried that morning, sitting on your couch with your kids, who really just wanted to sled. You let them, of course, but you made them watch their new president speak first. And I cried too, not just because it was a beautiful day and a beautiful moment, but because the bars opened at eleven in the morning to broadcast the inauguration and I started drinking then and didn’t stop until later, much later, when the snow had cleared but the sidewalks were still icy and when I walked home, part drunk off collective joy but mostly just drunk, I slipped off the sidewalk and onto my face and then spit my front tooth onto North Greensboro Street. This not only made eating, drinking, and breathing problematic until I could get my tooth replaced, the accompanying scabs made it look like my face had become a winter home for a colony of herpes.

This morning, Inauguration Day seemed so long ago but it wasn’t actually my only night of unfortunate decision-making this year, or, rather, not making decisions at all but letting booze make them for me. I realized this as I looked down at my bed, which was given to me by a friend who moved across the country just after her girlfriend found out that we had slept together. So there was that, the cheating and then the revelation of the cheating, which culminated in a week long hide-out in which I turned off my phone and closed my blinds and waited for everyone to forget the thing that I had done. And toward the end of that self-imposed sabbatical, I woke up in the middle of the night to a loud and insistent banging, first on my door and then on my bedroom window, at which point I stopped breathing and hid under my covers, sure that the window-banger was the girl who deserved to restructure my guilty face. And when the banging stopped and the breathing started I was awake, very awake, and then I was karma-slapped again when my neighbor upstairs started having the kind of sex that isn’t just about speaking springs but is also about sounds, human sounds, the very thing I hate to hear above all the things I hate to hear, more even than grinding teeth or Kenny G. Things are different now, and I know this, but there are a few other memorable events of 2009, chief among them being the second threesome I participated in this year, in which I learned that female ejaculate can be surprisingly forceful and also smells like pee.

But here I am now, watching my girlfriend sleep. This is not the girl who shoved her fingers inside of me with so little grace that my junk swelled up like a baboon’s ass. This is also not the Italian American who was attracted to me because I cured a yeast infection by sticking whole cloves of garlic in my cervix. And it is also not my best friend or my best friend’s girlfriend or the mime just old enough to vote. What do all of those girls have in common? The teacher and the squirter and the friend? We all tangled our lives together in a puddle of booze. They are all people who would be friends or acquaintances or strangers but not one-time lovers without a high blood-alcohol content and a disregard for what is right and what is good.

On New Year’s Eve, Ecuadorians construct effigies of the bad things or people in their lives–the one night stand that left you with a fresh STD, the cousin who invested your savings in old Levis that he planned to sell to Russian teenagers, the husband who left you for a personal trainer named Jimmy. They make their effigies from old clothes stuffed with hay and light their bad luck and the past year in the streets. Maybe I’ll do that tomorrow. Maybe I’ll say goodbye to 2009 and walk home with my girlfriend, our fingers touching, to her treehouse or minem with our toothbrushes and sides-of-the-bed. Will it last forever? Will their be fewer mistakes to burn next year and fewer still after that? Maybe. But sangria in the summer and bourbon in the winter are so good, and so sometimes is a night of complete oblivion, when you achieve an almost Buddhist state, where there is no yesterday and no tomorrow and no consequence as long as the bottle is in your hand and in your head. Greater still, though, is this—watching this girl sleep, lying together in the last hours of the decade, our organs beating not as one, but beside each other in real and asymmetrical time. What is greater is that the year is turning over and, maybe, this time, so am I.

———-

On more thing. I want to thank everyone who has donated to my Keep The Domain fund. People have been very generous, but I still need to raise about sixty dollars by the fifteenth if I’m going to renew this domain for another year. Please donate! Also, to everyone who already has contributed, your postcards are forthcoming….

This year, Thanksgiving is at your house. You thought that your first time hosting a holiday less drink-oriented than Halloween would feel momentous, like buying your first dishwasher or pledging to NPR, but you haven’t actually bought a dishwasher or donated to NPR. Rather, your parents are renovating their kitchen and your brother is with his wife’s family and your sister winters in Des Moines, so your parents come to you. They not only bring the entire contents of their refrigerator—including two heads of past-date lettuce and an unopened jar of mayonnaise—they also bring a full-size charcoal grill and several rolls of toilet paper in case you ran out and were planning on going through the coffee filters first.

Holidays are about getting drunk with people you love either because you want to or because you have to. Over-pouring the Pinot that your parents bought and confessing that it was you who broke the Victrola ten years ago, not the Guatemalan exchange student, is the highlight of any holiday. It is also something you don’t take part in because you don’t drink around your parents. The reason for your familial sobriety is because you made a grand mistake two years ago after your girlfriend found out you cheated on her more than once and more than twice and more even than three times. She was white-washed when she found out, shocked, like the person shared ice cream and washed the dishes with her was a mirage, a stranger, a non-person. You decided then that you are either a fundamentally bad person or an alcoholic. Alcoholism seemed easier to cure than a black soul, so you called your parents in the midst of a metaphysical hangover and told them that you are a drunk, and, not only that, you have been since you were eighteen or maybe twelve or maybe even when you were still a parasite in the mobile home of your mother’s womb.

There are a lot of things you can take back. I no longer love you, I want to move out, Give me back favorite hoodie—who hasn’t said or heard these words? But, I’m an alcoholic is the pinkie swear of confessions, the nickname you can’t seem to shake. And because you never actually stopped drinking, you pretend that you’re comfortably saddled to the wagon around your parents. Your dry liver is an obvious counterfeit when your parents look at your recycling bins when they come up for Thanksgiving, but you attribute the empties to your roommate and they believe you because they want to believe you. The only time your father overtly asks about your drinking is when you’re picking up last minute cranberry sauce at the grocery store and a bartender picking up last minute stuffing yells, Dude! You have to stop walking out on your tab! when he sees you. You tell your dad you drink soda water and eat bar nuts and sometimes forget to pay.

It’s a lie, those glasses of water and handfuls of nuts. You actually spend a lot of time at one bar, your neighborhood bar, an everybody-knows-your-name bar, a bar where wet hounds look up when the door opens, wondering who new people are. Is this sad? Sometimes. Sometimes not. You’ve had exceptionally fun nights at this bar: nights when the shots melt your faceplate and you dance around the pool table and pour beer your head and stumble home, a walk you won’t remember in the morning but you will still wake up happy to be a part of this drunken family. There are also touching moments, like when a rainbow arcs over the sky and everyone walks outside and stands and blinks at the colorful yawn above. Or maybe there’s a hail storm and everyone turns on their stools to look out the windows at the ice splitting windshield and pavement. Despite the occasional monkey barrel nights, however, bar culture is measles for certain aspects of you life, like, for instance, your bank account, which you’ve stopped paying attention to because the daily bar charges make you feel like what you’ve decided that you’re not: an alcoholic.

But can you decide you aren’t an alcoholic? Maybe not. Maybe as soon as those words exit your mouth, they are always and forever true. After your mistaken announcement to your parents, you started thinking about drinking all the time. That is the worst part of thinking you’re an addict: it’s boring. You are always aware of the hour when you would usually go to the bar but are not going to go to the bar, definitely not, unless this coin lands heads up, in which case you will take it as a sign that you should drink. You attended a couple of AA meetings after your mistaken announcement but hearing people talk about booze made you thirsty. Some people say that they aren’t into AA because of the Jesus thing and you agree that putting your problems and fate and your glass in the hands of an invisible man who lives on a cloud pillow makes no sense. Why make yourself feel powerless when getting sober takes power? But you mostly hated the meetings because you didn’t want to be one of the those people. You didn’t want to see yourself in their stories and their sadness and their sobriety. So you kept drinking and if you didn’t drink one night, you woke up elated, not because you were clear-headed and pain-free, but because a sober night deserved a party, and what better way to party than to party?

Recovery programs talk about addiction as a disease, but you know it’s less the flu and more your inability to recognize your own humanness, to recognize that you are a living being who will someday be a dying being and then someday be a non-being, just scattered cells and quiet atoms. This is what addicts don’t accept: their own unshakable death. This surprising considering that they see the symptoms of physical demise when they wake up cloudy and heavy. It’s not just their hands that shake, it’s their brains, a Parksonian tremor that slows after the first fifteen minutes of happy hour and stops when happy hour has past but they’re still at the bar. This is why you don’t drink in front of your parents. You don’t have that tremor but you can’t take it back.

Your Thanksgiving might have been small—just you and your parents, equal parts Perrier and Pinot—and the turkey might have been grilled, but you still said your blessings and recited your thanks. To good friends and good health and good luck. Afterward, you wonder if you will toast with sparkling grape juice at every Thanksgiving. Will you never again get drunk at a family reunion, one aunt passed out in a lawn chair, another dancing a little too sexy, a grandfather lost in his glass? Or will you someday know, really know, that is wasn’t true, that you were never an alcoholic, the tremors were imaginary, that it wasn’t a disease, it was a mistake. Maybe after you buy the dishwasher and donate to NPR, you will be able to tell your parents this, and maybe the next time Thanksgiving is at your house you will hold your glass in your hand, lift it to your mouth, and toast to friends and to health and to luck and to parents who bring their grill and their toilet paper and their belief in you.

After my first real heart shiver, I went slightly nut nut for a month or two and made some very rash and ill-advised decisions. Actually, it was a lack of decision-making that got me in trouble. I didn’t exactly quit school, I just stopped attending. I didn’t actually quit work, I just stopped working. I didn’t exactly starve myself, I just stopped eating. I was failing out of college and broke and so thin I wore sweatpants under my jeans to keep them up when a belt wouldn’t do.

But I got over it, slowly. It took some conscience ignoring, but I started being proactive about breaking the feelings fever. Meaning, I seduced the dirty bisexual my girlfriend left me for in an effort to drive a stake in their beehive and woo my electric back, which, shockingly, worked. And even though after that there was more color in my cheeks and blood in my veins, I still had a lot of pieces to sew back. I had eaten nothing but dumpstered bagels for three months because I had money enough for booze or for food, and though booze filled both belly and mind, food only filled the stomach hole. I started with miso soup and eventually stopped with the pills and started with the protein. I got a job at a lezzie bookstore/cafe, a shop that, like many locally-owned businesses, had an idyllic vision but treated some of the lesser employees—like, for instance, me—like the rotten yogurt in the back of your fridge that you keep waiting for your roommate will deal with.

Still, things were looking skyward. I were recovering, my girlfriend was forgiving, and I was introduced as the new baby dyke on my first day of work. And that’s when the Biggest Lie I’ve Ever Told: Employment Addition escaped my tooth cage.

About a week after I started working, my mom  called me. My sister was studying in Mexico at the time, and after a unfortunate night drinking copa de nada with some local students, she woke up to Spanish phrases written all over her face in Sharpie (B—, don’t kill me. It’s funny!). Mazog thought it was time for her to see a friendly familial face and was willing to buy me a plane ticket to Guadalajara as long as I left the next day.

At this point, I was halfway in my bathing suit and was smearing cocoa butter on my legs, but I had to get out of work first. The vague “family emergency” thing seemed too obviously code for “I have a hangover and will not be attending work today,” so I told my new boss that my sister had gotten pregnant in Mexico, and, after Googling “Mexico + abortion” quickly realized that unless she wanted to scramble the fetus via coat-hanger and/or umbrella, she was fucked. So, I said, she swallowed a bottle of malaria pills.

As the supportive twin, it was my duty to go to Mexico, spring her from the psych ward, and drive her to Tejas for an American abortion. Because it’s hard to sound concerned when you’re trying to pack and thinking about drinking Sol on the beach, I looked at a few photos of those missing persons posters that people hung on telephone poles and fences after that big September thing and then hung upside down off my bed to give my nose that stuffy my-dog-just-died sound.

I returned a week later with an Irish neopolitan (a little red, a little brown, a lot of white) and a snakeskin belt.

How was it?, everyone asked.

Terrible, I said. Terrible.

I’m emotionally and mentally peach fuzz and cannot make decisions for myself beyond who to hit on, so it’s helpful to have a twin sister willing to advise me on such matters as What To Have For Lunch, Should I Wear My White Vee Or My Blue Vee, and Is It Cool To Lie On My Resume?  I’m generally willing to listen to her, but the resume thing, which she recommends against, just isn’t possible.  As I mentioned in a previous post, my resume is long and thin, like Tyra in 1996, but without a rib cage.  I’ve had 26 jobs since entering the work force ten years ago, which averages to 2.6 a year, and although this may be slightly higher than average, I don’t think it’s wholly unacceptable.

Unfortunately, the 23 jobs don’t account for the long periods of unemployment in between.  In Portland, for instance, I was hired to “manage” a coffee shack.—which actually was a shack, but a Range Rover and surgeon’s salary shack, with maple counters and track lighting and a $10,000 espresso machine.  The first sign that this might not have been the most busty business plan was that I wrecked my bike on the way to the interview and showed up with elbows and knees painted in fresh blood.  And they still hired me.  Also, the company was called Java Sutra and the main selling point was that the coffee was infused with an Andean aphrodisiac called maca, which, according to God-like Wikipedia, “was eaten by Inca imperial warriors before battles. Their legendary strength was allegedly imparted by the preparatory consumption of copious amounts of maca, fueling formidable warriors. After a city was conquered, the women had to be protected from the Inca warriors, as they became ambitiously virile from eating such quantities of maca.”  Good in theory, right?  But do you really want blue balls with your morning hotdish?  We were in business for three months.

Getting laid off didn’t really bother me both because I’d been fired from so many jobs already that it seemed like a backhanded compliment, and unemployment insurance left me time to do whatever I pleased.  What I pleased was ride my bike and do crosswords and invest the dole in liver damage.  At the end of happy hour, I would run home to shower off the smell of booze and smoke, clean my house like an Ecudorian line cook, and pull out job applications or my GRE study guide so it looked like I had a productive day when my girlfriend got home from actually having a productive day.

I eventually found a job scooping gelato for wailing, syrupy seven-year-olds and their attractive but totally un-fantasystic mothers, but this only lasted for a month or so before I some Real Bad Shit happened, which I’m not going to get into cause it’ll take the time I’d like to spend catching up on LiLo and Sam, but I will tell you that as soon as you are punched in the face by a partner, you become a victim, which is sort of like Catholics and their We’ll Forget About The Condoms For A Small Donation rule: convenient.

This isn’t to say that my entire life in Portland was full of booze and memory loss (although most of it was).  I also interned at a gay rights non-profit, where I spent most of my time taking walks along with river with the bear accountant with the rocket ship tattoo and testing my gaydar on the bike messengers who worked in the building.  The one time I went to Friday happy hour with the staff, I got so drunk that I told the outreach coordinator’s husband that he should get a manicure cause his hands were seriously calloused before realizing he was in a wheelchair and his hands were constantly pushing rubber.  Actually, I already knew he was in a wheelchair, but I said it anyway.  And when my girlfriend came to pick me up, I was like, “Babe.  You’re tired.  Just go home. I’ll get a ride in time for dinner. I love you.,” so I could smoke cigarettes without judgment.  I later rode home with my boss, who started crying in the car because she had gotten divorced approximately six minutes before, and I was all, “Hey, let’s party! I’ve got Adderall in my bag!”  The non-profit and I went our separate ways soon after—they to make political strides and me to another four internships, seven jobs, and zero references.

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.

Q: How do Women Who Sleep With Women (WWSWW) practice safe sex?

A: I don’t know about you, but when I was in high school, sex ed consisted of forcing students to carry around mechanical babies filled with sand for a weekend. The babies were programmed to cry at inopportune times, like when you inadvertently swallowed ecstasy when looking for Asprin because you (ironically) had cramps during your weekend with the plastic baby and the bottle of Aspirin at your friend’s house wasn’t Aspirin at all, which you probably should have figured by the little Buddha on the pill. And if you were too busy petting your friend’s linens to press the little Shut The Fuck Up button on your mechanical baby’s sand-filled ass, you were granted custody for an additional weekend, which might have been the weekend you were supposed to go camping with your new friends (seniors!) who liked to smoke grass out of apples and let you light their cigarettes. Point being, I barely know how to have safe boy/girl sex, much less that girls gone wild shit.

Thankfully, I happen to be good pals with some older, more experienced WWSWW, and they teach me things.  According to my mentors (friends), some women engage in this thing called “monogamy,” which is a euphemism for Lesbian Bed Death.

However, even monogamous couples sometimes have to deal with STIs. In this case, there are several ways to ensure you’re partner doesn’t throw a lamp at your head or post a libelous Myspace bulletin when she notices that her mons no longer has the healthy pink glow of the disease-free.

If you’re really concerned, here’s what to do: invest in latex gloves. Seriously. While much R&D has been devoted to safe boy/girl conjugal action (copper wire in your innards?  Good idea!), there just aren’t that many options for WWSWW. There are, of course, dental dams, but they look like fruit roll-ups and probably get more action from dentists than from the Sapphic set. Also, they taste like balloons.  Latex gloves, however, are apparently standard operating procedure for responsible fisher-women.  Use lube.

Ironically, WWSWW using sex toys often rubberize them the same way you would a bio-ween. This strikes me as unfortunate. Didn’t we choose to be gay because we think condoms smell funny? Yes, yes we did.

I, however, have devised a new method of safe sex. But before I explain, you should understand something….

After many years of unchecked hedonism leading to forced employment termination; the end of perfectly cute and/or meaningful relationships, romantic and otherwise; the desecration of what could have been an upstanding reputation in various towns and cities; and a constant state of insolvency, I have decided to grow up. That’s right. I’m going to pay my own phone bill. I’m also no longer sleeping with people just because I’m drunk and they’re willing. That said, I do plan on the occasional libated evening, and because there is a causal relationship betwixt booze and sex, I have come up with a method to ensure that even if I get jovial enough to make out with a straight girl in an alley, I will go absolutely no further.

How? By making myself so unappealing beneath my drawers that I’ll be too embarrassed to show my body to anyone, regardless of my BAC. I’m going to dye my pubes tangerine, get a $30 tramp stamp of Celine Dion holding a preemie, and shove garlic in my birth canal before I leave the house. Safe sex? No problem.

Now, I realize this won’t help those of you who actually want to have sex. For that, ask actual experts.

Have a good weekend, people.  Don’t catch anything.

I’m glad to report that 2008 was pretty fucking average.  A couple of big things happened: I’m finally living alone (LUVZ IT.  I have an entire room just for shit that creeps me out but I don’t want to get rid for superstitious reasons.  Also, ceiling fans.); I started grad school (Masters in Information Science. I’ll let you know exactly what that is just as soon as I figure it out.); we got a new president (more on this later); I got diagnosed with a mental illness (JUST KIDDING!  Sort of….); I went tubing with nine of my besties; I spent a couple hours in the Chapel Hill E.R.; I climbed a crane; I depleted my savings account several times; I served time as an elf; I quit Whole Foods from the bathroom of a bar (Actually, I can’t remember if that was this year or last year, which means I have an advanced case of wet brain, which is bad, but I’ll soon forget about it, which is good); and I cleanse my blessed temple of impurities. Also, I made some tight pals and learned three really good whale jokes.

All in all, a good year.  And by good, I mean sooo much better than last year.  No one died.  No one punched me (ok, one girl did, but without the same vitriol as last time.)  I didn’t get kicked out of any bars, though I did get cut off on a couple of occasions (Jenny, I still feel bad about July 4th.  Really.).  I peed in some sinks.  And best yet, my sister moved to Colorado, thus granting me the title of Most Popular Herzog Twin in Carrboro.

NOW, let’s talk about our President Elect.  I’ve been mulling over the whole Rick Warren thing for the past few weeks, and I must say, I’m not getting any happier about it.  I mean, seriously?  Rick Fucking Warren?  The dude who compared homosexuality to incest and pedophilia?  Nice going, Barack.  Remember how I marched with an Obama sign and beads at Pride this year?  Remember how I yelled and danced and forgot to pay my bar tab the night you won?  Remember how I saw Arcade Fire and Superchunk for free ALL FOR YOU???  No.  I guess you’ve forgotten these sacrifices that me and my people made for you. Even my Catholic grandmother is upset about this one, Barack. As she said the other day, “If you sign any petitions about this Rick Warren thing, you have permission to sign my name too.”

A choice quote from your friend Rick, Big O:

“By the way, my wife and I had dinner at a gay couple’s home two weeks ago. So I’m not a homophobic guy, okay?”  (AKA SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE GAY.)

So Rick says us queers should deny our natural (biological) impulses, but from the looks of this video, man ain’t got a problem with indulging his impulse to shove Twinkes down his damn throat.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2ZwhdgiBgc&hl=en&fs=1]

Barack, my friend, after brunch and Bloody Marys this Sunday, you should get to your neighborhood theatre and spend some time with Harvey Milk. See if you don’t cry almost as hard as you did when Big stood Carrie up on her wedding day.