My father advocated yearly hiking trips.  Not fun woodland jaunts, but reenactments of the Bataan Death March with his children as captured prisoners.  My father added five pounds of weight to our backpacks every year we grew older until the knees of his children bent outward and their spines deformed. 

Two weeks after the annual hike, my father summoned neighbors and friends to witness the grim journey documented by Kodak slides.  Why didn't these these neighbors understand the image of a skinny, sunburned boy holding a teeny rainbow trout was actually a desperate plea for them to call Child Protective Services?

On my twelfth birthday I refused to endure another trip to the woods laden like a African pack animal.  My father attempted to bribe me; I was unmovable.  "Would you rather stay home with the women?"  he exclaimed.  To avoid squatting over a hole to shit while fending off marauding bears with a stick?  Damn right I'm staying home with the women.

For decades proper gay men vacationed at resorts with showers, pools, and pool boys.  While we might venture into the dunes or the forest or the shrubs, we returned to the cabana in time for cocktails and something breezily cotton to wear to the after party.  So why now are gay men packing up their nifty cars with tents, sleeping bags and aluminum pots and heading off into the wild yonder?

Straight men camp to get away from nitpicking wives and to prove their bravado.  Until the conservative queers force us to marry each other, we gay men have no such worries and we can prove our masculinity at IMLor by driving renovated 70's muscle cars.

If gay men really loved nature, our biggest ghettos would be in Wyoming and Utah, not San Francisco and New York.  We don't live in these places because, for gay men, nature is just a place for companies to obtain ingredients for our varied shower gels and hair tonics.

My summer mail is filled with invitations to odd campgrounds in remote locations.  Don't expect my SUV to appear at the gate of your formerly lesbian-owned KOA Kampground anytime soon.  I trust this outdoors theme will wear off shortly and the second hand stores will be filled to the rafters with barely worn LL Bean Eddie Bauer Internal Lift Boots with Comfort Fit Soles and Crate & Barrel Hypoallergenic Brass Marshmallow Roasters.

11 July 2005 - (Link to this entry) (Comment)

"I'm sorry, those have no power here."

This summer I'm working as a bouncer for a local gay club in a nearby beach resort.  I don't need the money; the job provides a nice break from my everyday work of dispensing questionable advice to wealthy corporate clients.  Perhaps by the end of the summer I'll figure a way to meld the two into a new career.  Does anyone need their boss thrown out a window?

Gay men tend to be fairly docile patrons.  A gay man might whine and complain, but give a gay boy a stern look and he'll trot off down the street to look for penis elsewhere.  Straight women, however, are evil drunks.

In three months of tossing drunks, I have been spit on, slapped, bitten, insulted, had my clothes torn and my radio thrown - all by intoxicated straight girls.

Girls learn early on that boobs have power.  Politically correct folk will say I'm wrong, but you don't see flat chested women reading the evening news, do you?  Even modest breasts can get you a free meal or head of the line status.  Except in a gay bar. 

Can my breasts get me in without paying cover?  No.  Slap the bouncer.

Can my breasts get me out of waiting in line?  No.  Punch the bouncer.

Can my breasts save me from getting tossed out because I just vomited on another patron?  Nope.  Kick the bouncer.

My situation is worsened because everyone in Maine thinks I'm straight.  I don't know how this happened.  I am so gay I make Dame Edna look like a linebacker.  These straight girls aren't mad because their boobs don't have the desired effect; they're furious because they didn't have the desired result on a perceived straight guy.

If I were motivated and you were interested, I could make lofty statements about how this breast thing belittles women and so forth.  I could say that gay men with big penises get star treatment. I will not.  Why?  Because it is time for me to go to the gym and work on enlarging my own chest.  Bench presses, anyone?

14 July 2005 - (Link to this entry) (Comment)

I am bedridden this week with a high fever and no energy.  Thankfully I have a tiny laptop that can sit next to the bed.  Eye Guy took a day off work to look after me.  Perhaps love sometimes looks like a greeting card picture; real love is someone willing to cradle my sweaty, unwashed head in his lap and bring me cold drinks.

Crazy Helga is rampaging this week:

Tuesday:  An elderly man is walking down the street with his grandchild. Helga spies the two from her window, dashes outside and menaces the man with a brick.  Crazy Helga claims the child belongs to my tenant (she doesn't) and the old man is kidnapping her.  Helga is prepared to throw the brick at the man just before I intervene and disarm her.

Yesterday:  Annoyed by the joyful chatter of children playing basketball,Crazy Helga places an old television set on her doorstep.  She tunes the set to a channel of static and maximizes the volume.  White noise blankets the street at intervals as Helga switches the television on and off.

Oh, last week Crazy Helga said to my tenant (a charming single mother and elementary school teacher):  "You are a whore.  You dress like a whore.  You should cover up.  Your child is the daughter of a whore!  No parking for you!"

18 July 2005 - (Link to this entry) (Comment)

I rode my bicycle to the pet store every day the summer when I was eight years old.  Billy's Pet & Hobby sold dogs, cats, lizards and birds in cages next to stacks of model airplanes, rockets, plastic tanks and paint bottles the size of nail polish samples.  Billy, the proprietor, stood chain smoking behind the glass counter and watching her visitors didn't steal an extra tube of glue.

My parents, in a moment of inspiration or recognition, presented me with a pair of gerbils for Christmas.  The gerbils spent their days filling plastic cages with tiny, black excrement or escaping the cages and being chased through the house by hysterical children.  I grasped the tail of an escaped gerbil only to have the tail sever in my hand. "OH MY GOD!"  I screamed.  My father slapped me as hard as he ever did or would and yelled:  "Don't take the Name of the Lord in Vain!" 

The gerbils died months later and I buried them in elaborate graves marked with crosses.  Then I began my journeys to the pet store where I peered daily at my desired replacements:  teddy bear hamsters. 

Billy had no heart and the image of a grubby eight year old staring at two dollar hamsters moved her only to light another cigarette.  Month after month I visited the store.  Eventually someone with money gave in and I had my hamsters.

The hamsters died two months later and were placed in graves next to the gerbils.  Even at eight I knew the dramatic value of funerals. 

Other hamsters followed and were similarly entombed.  Neighborhood children stopped to gawk at the crosses bearing the names of deceased pets burned into the wood with a soldering iron. 

I tired of burying hamsters before my parents tired of buying them.  Someone removed the crosses and the gerbil graveyard vanished in the Arizona forest.

You may think this story is slightly sad, but it is not.  Gerbils and hamsters are dreadful pets.  They smell, they are not affectionate, they poop everywhere.  This story is really about Billy.  She died of lung cancer.  Which is what happens to everyone who sells small animals for the amusement of white trash children.  Spay, neuter and adopt from shelters.

25 July 2005 - (Link to this entry) (Comment)

I bought a satellite radio so I could avoid listening to NPR's semi-annual Beg-A-Thon.  I love public radio, but guilt motivated giving should remain the domain of repressive churches.  A receiver, a clear view of the southern sky, and I have limitless public radio from around the world and not a single announcer urging me to pledge.

The downside of unlimited public radio is that it consists almost entirely of bad news.  How much bad news can a single person absorb before realizing the world will shortly come to a crashing halt and we will all be ejected like partially chewed food from a choking victim? 

The globe is heating up, wars are everywhere, terrorists lurk at our local supermarkets, the dollar is nearly ready to collapse, children are starving (some next door), people are taking drugs (I cannot imagine why), gay people still want to get married, and celebrities are divorcing faster than they produce bad cinema.

I do not need all this news.  I need to know if a giant wave is heading toward my house, if a wildfire will shortly ruin my garden, or if the brand of cat litter I prefer is causing felines to cough up extra hairballs.  The rest of the news is just chatter which makes me feel small, powerless, and constantly anxious.

I know a number of Well Intended People who will tell me that things I do matter and that buying recycled paper and voting and marching in certain parades will change the world.  So, I buy recycled paper and generally vote but I gave up marching in parades and the world stays pretty much the same. 

If I had any religious friends, which, if I do, are too smart to admit to such, they might advise me to pray.  If a Higher Power exists, then THPD (That Higher Power Dude) probably gets free satellite radio and doesn't need another earthling complaining things are going a bit askew.  Of course, it might be THPD's plan that things are askew, which makes THPD mean and spiteful and not someone I really want to know. 

If you listen to satellite radio, you already know the world will run out of oil next year.  Unless we build lots of nuclear power plants (see also:  Radiationworks), then we will have no more power to make our radios chirp and our satellites beep.  There will be no more news and we will be too busy turning our lawns into vegetable gardens to listen if there was.  Nothing you or I can do will stop this.  (Unless you own an SUV, which makes you very, very bad and the entire reason we are running out of oil.)

I could tell you that I no longer listen to news and that my tuner now plays 24 hours of commercial free light jazz.  That would be a heroin addict claiming to be clean.  I still listen to the BBC but I'm also buying stock in Exelon.  Nothing says survival like owning shares in a reactor plant.

28 July 2005 - (Link to this entry) (Comment)

How cool!  Sister Betty's Stairways of San Francisco won a Best of the Bay Award. 

I'd like to thank my producer, my editor, the girl in makeup with the funny blue hair, the hot guy who is always showering in the locker room...

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